I Don’t Want to Yell, I Say

Posted on 11/13/2010 by cheesefairy

“I don’t want to yell.”

I take a deep breath and look into his eyes. They are blue, bright blue, and red, bloodshot red, from the crying.

“It’s just that…”

…are you apologizing or not?
…yes, but I want to explain
…he knows why you’re mad. He wants you to stop.
…then he should stop doing things that make me mad!
…he wants to see how far he can push you, whether you’ll still love him, whether you’ll lose control.
…obviously!
…so who cares why you’re mad? It’s irrelevant.
…I have to explain myself. I have to explain why!
…no you don’t. You don’t. He is not an adult. He is a child. The information he needs is simple. He doesn’t need to know any of this. You talk too much. You think too much. You talk about what you think and think about what you say, too much.

“I’m sorry.
I know you’re scared.
I will try to yell less.
I love you.”

He smiles.
“OK.”

We start again.

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So This is November. And What Have You Done?

Posted on 11/10/2010 by cheesefairy

Today is day six of ME PARENTING CHILDREN MOSTLY ALONE except for friends and family and preschool and my reliable automobile and my cat. Your cat helps you parent? you are saying.

Yes.

How? you are asking.

By letting me know with insistent meowing that it’s time to get up in the morning. Get up. Get up. Why aren’t you up yet. That’s what my cat does in the morning. At 5 am. 5:30. Whatever. Whenever he thinks it’s a good time. If he hears the kids. If he doesn’t hear the kids. He is like an early warning system for any possible problem.

He just wants food, you are thinking. Why doesn’t she understand that. He is a cat.

No, that’s not it. He has food in his dish. We give him little servings of food all day because if we put a whole serving in his bowl he eats it all right away and throws up immediately. And then meows to let you know he has thrown up. Which is nice.

So how is that helpful to the parenting?
Oh, it isn’t? I see.

I just wanted to bitch about the cat. Usually I bitch about the cat to saint aardvark but he’s not here, you see, and if I bitch about the cat to the children, they will think it’s okay to bitch about the cat and they will use the word “bitch” and that just isn’t appropriate.

Yesterday I had to implement a time out policy w/r/t the word “bully.” You see, somewhere, from the ether I guess, Trombone learned the word bully. He likes it because it sounds like BULLET which is a word that means POWER to a 4 year old and they are power mad, I tell ya. Of course little myna birdie, I mean Fresco, says bully too and now we’ve got two kids who are calling each other, me, strangers at Safeway and random assholes in the park who really are bullies, well, bullies.

Yesterday: not my most shining of days and the rain it did piss down and we got up before the sun – damn you time change, damn you to hell – oh wait except there was no sun, moot point, and there was much angst in the house and so, at 7 am, I did say, There is no more BULLY in this house. NO ONE says bully. No one.

Trombone, being 4, remembered. I saw him. He said, “You’re just a bull a bull a BULLET!” which I guess I should mind, too, but is not as loaded a word, pardon the pun.

But Fresco, bless him, is young and has the attention span of a malnourished ladybug so he had 8 time outs over the course of the day over his use of the word BULLY. Which, then you’re thinking, is it working? And I’m thinking, yeah, maybe not but I just have to get through the day. At the end of each 2 minute time out, when the timer on the stove went, he would say, “Yay, I’m ALIVE!”

Maybe he thinks a time out is like death? Maybe death is the ultimate time out? And God has his finger on the kitchen timer, upping your time to ETERNITY and he’s like,”I WARNED YOU,” booming from the sky.

Today was a better day: we all slept in and the kids were in good moods and the sun was out. Trombone went to school and Fresco and I went to the Burnaby Library and then we played outside in the sunshine after school was out and then I lost Fresco.

Yeah, I lost him. Actually, he ran away. He wanted to play hide and seek. Except he didn’t tell anyone. He just left.

Holy shit.

So I’m standing there, chatting with another preschool mom about what sweethearts my boys are and all the kids are running and playing, and all the moms are watching and we do this three times a week weather permitting so there is nothing unusual about the scene at all except wait a second I am missing one child. Fresco is gone.

Thankfully, the other moms are there and we fan out – one behind the school, one in the field, I take the path above the school. See there is an elementary school and it has a road and a huge field bordering it and then there’s the school itself, which is where he was, it turned out. Little bastard snuck into the gym, past a class of grade 6 kids, and was in the storage room where they keep the balls and chairs and stuff.

Skookum hiding spot! NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!

Seriously. I just lost a handful of hair. I guess I could weave a wig from all the cat hair in this house but I won’t. I have to go make some cheese cookies.

What? I didn’t tell you about the cheese cookies? Well, I told *facebook* about the cheese cookies.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about these little cheesy crackers that I used to buy at the Dutch store. And also I was looking for a savoury, pumpkinish-shaped treat for a halloween playdate. Yes, sometimes I do use my time very abstractly. So I googled cheese cookies to see what would happen and lo, behold, presto magnifico, cheese cookies. They are like shortbread. But with cheese and sundried tomatoes in them. I can not say this loud enough. WIN.

Funnily, last week I decided to make a double batch and use half the dough as a crust for a quiche. That worked all right but I forgot to put the cheese in the half that was going to be cookies. I forgot! The cheese! In the cheese cookies! I suck!

In sum: don’t forget the cheese. Don’t look away from your toddler for a minute. And don’t forget to feed your cat.

The end.

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ControverSunday: Digital Privacy

Posted on 11/7/2010 by cheesefairy

Our new mistress of Controversy, Kathleen, gave us weeks to work on this one – the topic of digital privacy. Just like in high school and university, I left it to the last minute. Suck it, 36-year-old maturity!

Anyone can participate in the write-around! Check Kathleen’s blog for details of the next topic. And thank you to Our Lady of Perpetual Breadcrumbs and Accidents for the concept and the badge, respectively.

badges

My position on digital privacy is: there is no such thing. Or, more accurately, it is a different thing than real-life privacy. A lot of the ballyhoo about Your Privacy Online stems, I think, from peoples’ idea that we must be as private online as we are in real life. Well, if you have no email accounts and never surf the web, then yes, you can achieve that goal, but any little poke at the Internet leaves a fingerprint, right?

Everything I write on this blog I assume will be read by an audience of millions. (Over my lifetime, right?) I have made my peace with everything I put on Facebook and everything I put on Twitter and basically everything I say in an electronic format.

I don’t use my kids’ real names because they haven’t made the choice to be Digital Citizens. I don’t want them googleable, just yet, even though they are second-tier googleable, if that makes sense. In other words, an extra-smart koala could figure out our names and addresses from the lazy trail we’ve left on the web, and make us googleable in no time flat. If that koala had nothing better to do, and often they don’t, especially the ones in captivity.

But outside of the digital realm, I have social insurance cards for the kids, and birth certificates. They have bank accounts. They exist, on paper, in the world and at least a few hundred people know about it. So I can’t say with a straight face “One should not use one’s children’s real names on the Internet” because should one write one’s child’s name on a government form? What is the difference between a digital existence and a paper one? Are social insurance numbers sacred, because to that I say Ha.

When they are old enough (I don’t know what age that is) (old enough to not click on the things that blink at them, I guess) they will have digital presences of their own. They will probably want Facebook profiles, if Facebook still exists and hasn’t been totally taken over by old people, and I will tell them to go ahead but to remember that it is a bulletin board in the middle of a small town. That everything they say there can be copied, remembered and held against them (or for them, if they are GENIUSES) forever and ever amen.

There are two major arguments I have heard against children having digital presence:

1. Pedophiles.
2. Ruining their futures because they say stupid things and get drunk and post pictures of themselves drunk and no one wants to hire a drunk person who posts pictures of himself drunk on the Internet.

To refute:

1. Pedophiles don’t scare me. I know they are supposed to, because I have heard the DOOM PANIC about them and seen the Oprah shows but frankly, they’re sneaky by nature and I can’t prevent a sneaky person from being sneaky. Abuse happens to children in school, in church, on the street and more importantly, in their own houses, at the hands of people they trust. If you can go ahead and negate all those real-life presences too, I will worry about online predators.

And the kinds of pedophiles that steal photos of children from the Internet and DO THINGS to the pictures or with the pictures or whatever? That, also, does not scare me. It’s icky, yes. But it’s just an image. Until you print it, it’s not even a tangible image. Maybe it’s because as a woman I know that one out of every hundred (oh sigh, used to be one of ten) guys (possibly girls too) who looks at me is making a mental note for later, you know what I mean. So you learn to shake it off and not suspect everyone you pass on the street of being a creepy voyeur.

There are so many things that happen on the Internet that I don’t want to know about. Furries, for example. Someone might find a picture of my cat on the Internet and fall in love with him. It doesn’t change how I feel about my cat. It doesn’t change, more importantly, how my cat thinks about himself, because he is completely unaware of any wrongdoing.

2. By the time my kids are of an age to be looking for jobs, I suspect there won’t be anyone without a digital presence. By then, we will all have learned to keep our drunk photos to ourselves and to keep our rabid political views and fantasies about cats out of the public arena. Sort of like when people first started using telephones and had to learn what they could and could not say on a party line. That’s refutation number a).

Number b) is everyone has skeletons. And in The Future, my skeletons will be as public as your skeletons. That means that if my son is one of ten candidates and the boss or his assistant, more likely, is googling all ten candidates, if that were to happen TODAY, maybe two people would be googleable. And one of them would be a drunk creep with a cat fetish. But in The Future, they will ALL be googleable and thus perhaps googling won’t even be relevant. Perhaps they will take DNA samples instead. Perhaps drunk idiots will be all the rage. Who knows! I don’t! I can’t worry about it; there is plenty of other stuff to worry about.

We think about The Future in caps like that, because we are straddling two worlds – the world we grew up in and the world our kids are growing up in. Think of a resume from 20 years ago; 3 or more pages of boring stuff, down to your high school diploma, with your volunteer experience and hopes and dreams tucked in at the end. Now, resumes are short, to the point, driven by ambition. We want the connection of the web but we are nervous about the transparency and to that I say tough. If you have real, live secrets, keep them tucked in an envelope under your mattress.

Rather than spending time covering our tracks and ensuring that our children are invisible to the digital eye, I think our time would be better spent teaching them (and ourselves) how to be good, responsible, community-driven people, on and off line.

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Gone Daddy Gone

Posted on 11/5/2010 by cheesefairy

On the second to last day of our great road trip adventure this summer, we were driving to Enderby, a small community in the Okanagan. It was a very hot summer day and we had stopped for lunch and water and running-around time. We piled back into the car and everyone closed their eyes for some sleep.

Everyone except me, because I was driving.

It was a pretty, winding road close to the lake, through canopies of heavy, green trees. I had the window rolled down and my arm hanging out, collecting its Vitamin D in advance of the rainy seasons to come.

I remember it so clearly because at the time, I felt like superwoman. I was piloting a several tonne vehicle down a highway, a vehicle that was filled with my entire world. I felt incredibly responsible and in awe of the trust they put in me that would let them sleep while I drove.

It’s a compelling thought, that of giving yourself to sleep and so, to the person in charge of the car. It was like having a baby fall asleep on my shoulder.

It was also so incredibly, blessedly silent for that 45 minutes. I smiled the whole way.

I am now piloting a different ship; the home ship. Saint Aardvark is gone for 10 days (actually you have to say it like this: TEN DAYS?!) and I totally support him going and developing in a career-like fashion, he is, after all, the Uber and the Leet, and the bread and bacon winner of the household, but the airy hand-wave of “of *course* you should go” that I did in March is quite different from the frantic hand-flap of two days before he leaves: “oh god what am I going to DO.”

I did it last year, too. The first thing I thought, last year, was, how do single parents do it? Then, I thought about it some more and realized what an insult that is, to imply that what I am doing is at all comparable to what a single parent does.

I am not doing what single parents are doing. I am not also working outside the home to pay for my mortgage, phone bills, groceries, and clothes. I am not completely fucking exhausted because I am doing two jobs, at least one of which requires me to be present, emotionally. I am not completely responsible for everyone in the house, even when I can’t move a muscle because I have already worked a full 8 hours plus commuting plus daycare pick up and drop off plus dinner plus plus plus.

Just as Motherhood is not, I submit, the Hardest Job in the World (executioner? army general? Toys R Us employee on Boxing Day?), a person who is looking after her kids without a partner for 10 days has no idea what it is like to be a single parent.

Case in point: when my partner goes away, I pretend I am on holiday. I don’t go out of my way to make supper, let alone have it ready for when he gets home.* I don’t bathe the children every night. I use the same plate over and over and over again. I save a lot of money – on dishwasher detergent / water, on coffee definitely, and because I don’t have to grocery shop for four people with a varied, interesting diet. I only have to shop for me because the kids will happily eat noodles and butter and peanut butter sandwiches and apples until they resemble those items – and we already have all of those things.

* I am compelled to add here that I am under no obligation to “have supper ready for when he gets home,” which reads like a phrase from a ’50s magazine article, thus offending my eyes, but if we don’t eat at 6:00 when he gets home, then we eat at 8:00 after the kids are in bed and that cuts into our valuable drinking time.

I get the bed to myself.

I get to watch horrible shows on The Learning Channel (for learning!) without having to justify myself.

And I can enjoy all of this freedom (and with it, endure the ache of missing him) because I know that in ten days (TEN DAYS!?) – fates willing there is no train derailment or earthquake – it will end and my love will return and I will be glad to make him food he enjoys eating and let him steal the covers. I have that privilege and security.

Until then, though, I might just eat mozzarella sticks and not change my underwear.

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Remembering the Strip Mall, Now Fenced For Destruction

Posted on 11/1/2010 by cheesefairy

There used to be a children’s consignment store there, all wooden animals and spinning tops made of tin and racks of clothes at the back and I would go in with you, when there was only one of you, and finger through the clothes and be glad I had friends who gave me their boxes of hand-me-downs because $8.99 is too much for second hand, 12 month old sized pants, even if they are Baby Gap. The used toys were overpriced, too, and mostly it was a good place to shop twice a year when they were clearing out a season and everything was half price.

Next door was the yarn store, open from 10 – 5, where the little older lady sat and knitted with her dog at her feet and every time the door opened and let customers in she was surprised and genuinely happy to see them. Your grandmother bought wool there and yarn, too, for hats and scarves and various other projects. It was a warm store, with huge windows and a comprehensive selection of knitting materials.

There was a hair salon, an old hair salon with yellowed posters in the windows of smiling women with their hair set in curls. I peered in a few times but never entered because there were always fifteen women getting their hair set in curls.

And the doctor’s office, its own story, is long gone, as the doctor is long gone, retired that is, not dead I don’t think, though I suspect for him they would be the same thing.

The place where we sometimes shopped for Dutch goods like stroopwaffel and those little cheese cookies and cinnamon twists and I would have bought black licorice in bulk, if I liked black licorice, but I don’t. It has moved to another part of town and I am sure all its loyal clientele followed it because stroopwaffel is worth finding.

A doorway next to the doctor’s led to a restaurant or greasy spoon, I think, though I never saw it open for customers. I only ever saw people go in with waxed cardboard boxes full of cabbages or potatoes. And I did smell the smell of a greasy spoon cafe, that is, the back door odour of same, which doesn’t make a person want to eat there, necessarily.

There was a pharmacy, too, where I went once to see if they sold those little suction bulbs that one can use, ostensibly, to suck snot out of the noses of babies, but which has never worked for me or for you guys. They didn’t have one, but they did have a big bin of discounted Tylenol and a variety of douches. Real douches, not the people I call douches.

Once, a long time ago, there was even a tiny dollar store wedged in between the cafe and the vacuum/sewing machine shop at the corner. The dollar store was so tiny I couldn’t get the stroller inside and hold the door open at the same time. I remember using every appendage available to me to get us in that store while the shop keeper watched us from his desk at the back of the store. I might have bought something that day but then, guess what, I didn’t. It took me just as long to get out as in, the guy watching all the time.

Before or after it was a dollar store, that dollar store was a costume and party supply store. Helium balloons shaped like monkeys used to float from the windows.

The vacuum store had a big sign out front declaring “Dyson Vacuums On Sale” which meant, actually, “for” sale not “on” sale, which is just as well because we bought ours at Canadian Tire, I think.

Speaking of Canadian Tire, when we first moved to our house, the anchor tenant at that strip mall was the world’s oldest Canadian Tire store. It smelled of rubber and oil and the isles were no bigger than my thumb and I found a wonderful shower head there, shortly before they closed for good. Now it is a motorcycle parts shop and the best part of this, for you, is that there is a Michelin man, a “tire” man who sits at the front door to the store and whenever we go by, you yell “TIRE MAN!” or “NO TIRE MAN!” as events warrant.

Soon the entire block will be destroyed to make way for a multi-level multi-function higher class strip mall with apartments on top – I think – and I am in no way mourning the loss of this very strange block of retail establishments but as I drove by today and saw the fence surrounding it I realized that if I never wrote it down, you would never know what was there before. And so much of your wee-hood to date has consisted of walks around our neighbourhood, being slightly bored and seeing the various sights and I’d hate for you to think in a few years that those apartments above those stores have always been there, because they haven’t.

Once, there was something else.

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