April is Awesome

Posted on 4/1/2011 by cheesefairy

I have decided that April is the month of sweetness and light. I mean, there’s already more light. There are mornings when I wake up and it’s light outside. Like today. I only slept until 6:40 and the sky was bright. Remember, a few weeks ago, when the sky was dark until 8 am? I DO.

Three Awesome things for April:

1. The First of April is a significant day for our house, because it’s the day we moved in, five years ago. I probably wouldn’t remember this except we signed a five year term on our mortgage so we had to sign another one last week. Here is the post about the day we moved in. BONUS: Photos of a pregnant me sitting in our bathtub. We have been homeowners for five years! Yay us! PS: No, that hoody I’m wearing in the picture is NOT the brown hoody I wore yesterday.

2. This morning the children were having the following conversation re: their breakfast, which was re-toasted pancakes.

Trombone: Oooh, a green plate!
Fresco: I want the green plate!
T: NO, I want the green plate.
F: Me! The green plate! Me!
T: My favourite colour is green. So I GET THE GREEN PLATE.
F: I Said It First.

You get the idea.

Yesterday, in March, I would have snapped, “You’ll get the plate you’re given and you’ll LIKE IT.” But today is April. Today I happened to be listening to Oldies Radio station, CISL 650 (Because, in Fresco’s words, The News Is Boring) and it was playing “You’re the Inspiration” by Peter Cetera and guess what? I still know all the words! So while they argued, I sang. Eventually they noticed.

F: Mommy stop singing that song.
Me: And I know – yes I know – yes I know that it’s meant to be-ahhhhh
F: STOP SINGING!
Me: Nope. Gotta keep singing. There’s only love when we’re togethaaaaaaa

I know, intellectually and from experience, that ignoring them when they bicker is the best way to get them to stop. But the ignoring part is so hard. Singing Peter Cetera works! It’s hard to think about anything else when you’re singing Peter Cetera. Unless, I guess, you’re Peter Cetera, in which case maybe you think about your laundry.

Then, one of them got a green plate. The other one didn’t. I didn’t give a damn.

3. Apologies if there is still eight feet of snow where you are. Here, we had some sunshine and some warm weather this week. Not much. Just a little. Just enough to make the Gorgeous Wonderful Magnolia Tree think about blooming. Wonderful! < /sarcasm > And so, new freaky spring-fevery photos from the porch.

Isn’t April going to be great? If you agree, tell me why!

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The Scottish Nation is Not Mean. It is Careful.

Posted on 3/30/2011 by cheesefairy

Fresco and I were browsing at Value Village today in between getting groceries and picking Trombone at school. Done with looking at toys, we meandered to the front of the store and a book caught my eye. “Brush Up Your English: Conversations of Real Use,” by Marie D. Hottinger. I picked it up and saw that it was not, actually, of real use, having been published in 1934 and revised in 1953, so I didn’t feel bad buying it for $0.99 and robbing some poor English-learner of the privilege.

The book is a cross between conversation guide and modern reality show. It follows a family through their daily lives: Charles and Mary and their children Billy and Biddy. Partway through the book, their Scottish friends James and Margaret (and their children Jimmy and Meg) come to visit. All the vocabulary is translated into French and German at the bottom of each page. Here is Charles, explaining:

Charles: We’ve all been put into a book.
James: A book? What book?
Charles: It’s called Brush Up Your English.
James: What’s it about?
Charles: It’s about us.
James: What kind of a book is it?
Charles: It’s a book of useful conversations for foreigners visiting England or learning English.
James: But Charles, I’m on holiday!
Charles: So am I. But wait a minute. The publisher says that if the book sells well, he’ll pay our expenses.
James: I don’t believe it.
Charles: I signed the agreement only the other day.
Margaret: But what do we have to do?
Charles: Do things foreigners do in England. Buy things in shops. Ask policemen the way —
Margaret: But what if I know it already?
Charles: That doesn’t matter. Ask. Hail taxis. See about passports.
James: But we don’t need passports.
Charles: Then talk about them. It isn’t difficult.

Charles and Mary and Margaret and James throw a dinner party, get colds, call the doctor and go to the dentist. The women do a lot of shopping while the men play golf. There are countless jokes at the expense of the so-called ‘dim-witted Scots’ and plenty of discussion around foreigners and their foreign ways. Near the end, everyone goes on vacation to the beach in Charles’s Austin.

Here, from Chapter 4, where Mary and Charles discuss the menu for their dinner party:

Mary: Charles, do you remember that dinner-party we gave in Paris when we had roast lamb and mint sauce, and nobody could eat the mint sauce?
Charles: Rather. I’ll never forget their faces. Why can’t foreigners eat mint sauce?
Mary: There are about a thousand kinds of German sausage, and we can’t eat nine hundred and ninety of them. It’s in the blood. Now for a sweet.
Charles: Stewed prunes and custard.
Mary: I shall take no further notice of you. I’d like to see the colonel’s face if you offered him stewed prunes and custard. We’ll have a fruit salad.

At the end of the book there is a section entitled “Correspondence” within which there are several letters from the various subjects of the book to the author and to each other. Here, James writes a letter to the book’s author, Marie D. Hottinger:

Dear Madam,
“A copy of your book…has just reached me and …I must protest against the picture you have given of me personally, and of my country…I sincerely trust that next time you write such a book, you will see that your facts are accurate. The Scottish nation is not mean. It is careful.
Believe me,
Yours faithfully,
James MacTavish. ”

Am I unique in finding this completely hysterical? I’m off to google Marie D. Hottinger now. And to look for another in the series called “Brush Up Your Wits” that I think I could really use.

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All The Things I’m Not Saying

Posted on 3/27/2011 by cheesefairy

Blog posts come. They come in the shower, I swear, one contained in each tiny pinprick of hot water. They come when I am nodding off in the recliner, ‘doing some reading’ while Fresco floats off to napland in his crib. They come when the second gulp of coffee tumbles over my tongue.

Once the keyboard is under my fingers, I notice crumbs beneath the keys. I notice that some of the keys are worn shiny and others are not. I consider and discard this as a blog post topic. I recall the ideas I had earlier but they feel half-formed and pointless, like dreams. I discard them, too.

I just keep letting these ideas beat their little wings against my brain. I never catch the butterfly and pin that fucker to a board.

Yesterday I had an idea for a blog post. Later, I spent an hour writing it down. It was funny and cranky and mean. 1300 words about how funny and cranky and mean I was. I finished it, I read it over, and I felt — terrible. It was actually more mean and less funny. Not as funny as it could have been. Not a kind of funny that I currently appreciate. So I killed it.

What I have always loved about blogging is: you type and type and type and then you hit publish and WALLA (you’re going to want to follow that link) it is done. People comment, or don’t, and you move on. It’s over. Unless it’s (for me) a post about sleep, sickness, shoe shopping, or America’s Next Top Model, I will never revisit the ideas within a particular post in exactly the same way.

It bears repeating that even on the Internet, where we can self-publish, not everything has to be published. Not everything has to be written down. Not everything needs to make it to the second or third or fourth draft. Kill your babies.

But – I made that. Why would I destroy it?

Because it sucks. And now that the idea has been fully fleshed and shown to suck, there is part of that idea that can be used somewhere else. That baby’s liver, this baby’s kidney.

Oh macabre.

When I write and type and type and write and then, at the end, decide to kill the baby, well it’s awful. I mean, that was an hour! and it’s gone! What are you thinking? Just trim it, revise it, take it in a different direction. Throw in a picture. Don’t kill it! Please!

(No, it’s dead.)

This, here is the kidney. This experience; that I took the step of evaluating something I wrote and decided it was not worthy of even self-publishing. (even!)

A wise man named Tom Cochrane said it best:

The secret is to know when to stop.

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Wearing Clean Underwear

Posted on 3/22/2011 by cheesefairy

It started with the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Anyone remember that one? It was a month ago. It was in the news and on the social media and everywhere, as always happens, there were stories about being prepared. Packing your emergency kit. Making a plan. Carrying cash. Granola bars, lots of them.

And I looked at the kids. And they looked back at me. And I thought, ‘Where do I want to be when the big one hits? Do I want to be in an old office building? On public transit? Or here, with my kids, so that at least three of us are together.’

Assuming the big earthquake doesn’t kill us on a Saturday. I mean if I could predict the day of the week I’d hardly be here yakkity yakking about it, would I. I’d be on CNN or dial-a-psychic or something.

Coincidentally, it was time to make important decisions about my working future. As you may know, I am on an unpaid, extended leave from my office job. I had pushed my going-back-to-work date from April to October, thinking it would be good to take September to get Trombone settled in school, and get the kids settled with their as-yet-unspecified-caregiver. I was, notably, not making any decisions. Not because I am lazy, but because I didn’t want to. People would ask me, ‘so – got a daycare lined up? Got a nanny?’ And I would shrug and put it off.

Many possibilities floated around in my head, like clouds of dust floating in sunlight. I liked watching the dust float. I liked that there were possibilities. I didn’t so much want to nail down those possibilities and make them happen. Kind of like, sure I could dust. But the motes in the sunlight, they are so pretty.

I didn’t want to go back to work but I was convinced it was time. Why?

1. We had budgeted and saved enough money to pay for two years of me being home, and that money was almost gone.
2. I owe my job 18 months worth of service to pay for my maternity leave, so I have to go back ‘at some point’ within five years of leaving.
3. Uh, I said I would?

When I made the decision in 2009 to stay home for two more years, it wasn’t to do with the kids. It was about me. I don’t like my office job. I liked being at home more than I liked my office job, but just barely. Mostly, I didn’t want to spend my days commuting, dropping and picking up children at daycare, stressing about peanut free lunches and paying through the nose for the privilege. Just so that I could go to a job that, see above, I don’t like.

But this time, the decision felt like it was about the kids. That was confusing. Obviously I don’t always love being at home. You can review my tweet stream for proof. Sometimes I hide in the bathroom with the door locked. Sometimes I let them watch extra television so that I can breathe. Sometimes when they’re red-faced and angry and bored to tears in our little living room and all I want to do is make supper that they probably won’t eat, I think, is this the right thing? Really? Wouldn’t they be happier in an environment where someone would enjoy being with them? Or at least be paid to pretend?

Something had definitely shifted. It is easier for me, these days, to be at home full time. The kids are more independent; they look at books and they draw and play together, sometimes. I have friends. I have carved out the space to write and be alone. This isn’t just survival parenting anymore, this is the good stuff. This is the day-to-day magic. We have found our groove. It doesn’t feel boring all the time anymore, it feels fleeting. It feels short term instead of dinosaur years. It feels manageable. (and yes, I waited a full month to write this, just to make sure it wasn’t an unnaturally good week that week/drugs in the water/what-have-you)

If I had a career I loved, then it might be a different decision, because if I had a career I loved I would feel torn between two things I love. Emotionally, I do not feel torn about this decision at all. Financially it is a different story.

(Oh and by the way, here is a pop quiz:
Q: What do I love to do?
A: Write!
Q: If I went back to work full time, thus adding a second full time job to my first, would I have more? or less? time to write?
A: Less! Sucker!)

The more I thought about it, the more sure I became. I really wanted to stay home. We had to re-negotiate our mortgage this year anyway (home owners for five years now!) and we got a lower interest rate. We borrowed some money and that lowered our mortgage payments even more. I found two tax returns in a bank account I never use. (I know. It is both ridiculous and true.) Saint Aardvark said, heck yeah. Go for it. The universe was lining up its stars to tell me that it would be OK.

What a relief! I enjoyed the decision for a week. Then we got sick.

The whole time we were sick (pretty much the whole month of March, on and off. March, you may go suck it now.) I tested myself. “How about now?” I would ask, “When you have to spend your last precious 45 minutes of naptime holding Fresco so he can breathe and sleep at the same time? And then spend the afternoons in the courtyard watching children be children, which is not so interesting. And arguing about whether or not toasted bread is toast. It’s just laundry and cereal, laundry and cereal. Your head hurts all the time. Fresco is throwing stuffed puppies at you. How about now?”

Yes. The answer has always been yes.

In September, Trombone will start school. He will be gone six hours a day, five days a week. Which is fine, actually, because he can be a real pain in the butt. In two years, Fresco will start school. He will be gone six hours a day, five days a week. Hopefully he will be using a toilet by then.

A wise woman with two older sons said to me, “When they’re gone, they’re gone.” No, not entirely. And yes, letting go is important. I’m not going to stand outside their school and howl at the windows like some deranged husky. But I want to do this now, while I can. Later, when I can’t anymore, I will do something else.

I have my entire life to work for money. I have my entire life to do menial paperwork and gossip about Mary. I have my entire life, which might be two or twenty or thousands of days long. I don’t have their entire lives. Realistically, I have the first five years of their lives.
Which doesn’t feel very long, all of a sudden, with the world warring and disintegrating along fault lines and causing nuclear reactors to leak. All I can do is put on clean underwear and hope for the best.

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Weed Whacking

Posted on 3/18/2011 by cheesefairy

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t write here for a week. It feels like a deserted back yard, all snarled with weeds and long grass. Here is a true story from yesterday.

***

In the Doctor’s Office Waiting Room,

A pretty, young thing is listening to her headphones and staring at her lap.
I am reading a book and sniffling while my face pulses with sinus pain.
A man sits between us. He wears a baseball cap and has several plastic bags full of groceries around his feet. He is staring at the cabinet full of Products to Fix your Excessive Perspiration Problem.

(Yes, this doctor’s office is also a beauty treatment / botoxing / laser facility. I had no idea there was more than one like this in the world but now I have been in two, so there you go.)

We are listening to QMFM, Vancouver’s lightest hits, playing a non-stop mix of Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey, Otis Redding and Nickelback. Yes, Nickelback. Yes, this pleases me because if they’re being playing on the easy listening station, THAT IS THE END OF THE ROAD for Nickelback.

Suddenly, the guy leans over to the pretty, young thing and says,

“What kind of juice is that?”

He has an accent. Also, he is about 60 years old. He is gesturing to her bottle of purple Gatorade.

“Grape,” she says.
“Grapefruit?” he says.
“GRAPE,” she says.
“Grape. Fruit?” he says.
“G-r-a-pe,” she says.
“Grape,” he says.
“Yeah.”

She turns away. Nice try, girlfriend. He is having none of that.

“You know,” he says, “that has too much sugar in it for you.”
“Mmm,” she says.
“You should eat grapefruit,” he says.
“Hmm,” she says.
“How much did that juice cost?” he says.
“About two bucks,” she says.
“Two dollars!”
“Yes.” She laughs self-consciously.

He moves to the seat right next to her and leans in, but does not speak as quietly as I wish he would.

“You know,” he says, “I buy FOUR GRAPEFRUIT for two dollars.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. Four. And I eat one every day. And I lost ten pounds in a month! Just eating grapefruit!”
“Wow.”
“For two dollars!”
“Wow.”
“Of course you don’t need to lose any weight,” he says, “you’re skinny.”

I remember the whole 20 minute conversation but I won’t write the whole thing down for you. He went from grapefruit to vitamins to exercise (never at night; only in the morning) to divorce to music being good for your soul to spirituality to his prostate. He used to pee several times a night. Now he pees only once!

I didn’t ask why he was at the doctor if he was so healthy. I thought maybe he was a shill for the grapefruit growers of North America.

I also didn’t ask if I could reproduce his conversation on the Internet because I think he wouldn’t mind. After all, he has important messages for the world! Grapefruit! Etc! If he wanted to keep it private, he could have not started talking to the pretty young thing in the first place OR kept his voice down so that I could have enjoyed listening to Nickelback et al in peace.

We waited patiently and he went in to see the doctor, and then he left. Then I got to see the doctor, who told me I had fluid in my ears, no polyps in my nose, and a probably sinus infection because of the flu, and I left.

***

Blogging unrelated to illness will recommence real soon now.

(Except for my play-by-play of Applying A Mustard Poultice, but I’m saving that one for a special occasion.)

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