Basement

Posted on 3/29/2010 by cheesefairy

We don’t need a bigger house. Our house is 1300 square feet on three levels. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms. We have two parking spots for one car and we have a storage room that is bigger than the main floor bathroom so it holds a lot of beer making supplies and children’s clothing. We have a patio to hold the barbeque and the worm composter and the 4,533 bubble wands from the many lost bottles of bubbles.

Yes, our house has enough room for us. What it does not have is corners and doors. The kitchen, living room and dining room are all one big room on the ground floor. The staircase just keeps winding up until you get to our bedroom, which is loft-style. The children’s rooms and the bathrooms have doors, that’s it.

This is the thing you don’t consider when you look at real estate and the real estate ad says “Open plan.” Doesn’t that sound nice? It’s open; like the plains, like your liberal mind, like your favourite store on Boxing Day. Open also means: in plain view. Within earshot. You are looking at the people in your house all the time, unless they are sleeping, in which case you are probably sleeping too; what a waste!

When we visit my parents in their old house, the children vanish for minutes at a time. They go around corners, into other rooms, up and down hallways. They close doors and open them again. Sometimes, as many as fifteen minutes will go by before I see them. I firmly believe this is good for the soul. I know they are safe. I can hear them pattering away on the wood floors and of course I can hear them bickering. But I do not need to see any one person for 13 hours straight a day, even if I am related by blood and chose to stay home with them full time.

Yesterday, SA and I had a lengthy conversation in the bathroom on the main floor. It was not the first time. Neither of us was using the bathroom for a bathroom-like purpose. It is just the only place we can go to have. a. fucking. conversation. (Other than the door that goes outside and if we went outside, they would come after us. [You know, the children.])

It is possible to feel quite trapped within an open plan, if it is one of Those days.

We make our phone calls from this bathroom. We hide in there. I have considered – but never done it – taking my laptop in there. Sometimes I feel like I should put in shelves and books and snacks and a sign on the door that says “No Children Allowed.” But they can’t read yet.

I do have a solution, though not the energy to execute it just now: clean out Fresco’s room, move both boys in there, have Trombone’s room be the playroom / guestroom. Yes! I am going to do this by last Christmas!

I also have a fantasy. It is a basement. This basement has old, roughed-up gold carpeting and an old tape player and soft soccer balls and sheets to make tent forts and pillows to toss around and a bookcase full of toys and books and a table with pens and paper and the walls are covered in nasty wallpaper that no one cares about. There is a bathroom down there with a toilet, a sink, some soap and a towel.

Here’s the best part of my fantasy:

“OK, you boys go play in the basement until suppertime.”

Oh god. Isn’t it amazing?

Someday. Not soon, but someday. Hopefully before the children are 6 feet tall and can’t fit in a basement anymore.
two

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Notes From Mother’s Journal: List Edition

Posted on 3/24/2010 by cheesefairy

I’m all about the lists lately. I like reading them, I like writing them. They appeal to my hyper-organized half, or the half that likes to think she’s organized. Or maybe I am just missing office work. Yes! That’s it!

For a few weeks I have been keeping a daily to-do list. Partly it inflates my sense of self-worth. Partly because, at the end of the day, I can reflect that I did accomplish something, even if everything looks the same as it did 24 hours earlier.

That is my biggest advice to you. Write it all down. I know – you didn’t come here for administrative advice. You came here for angst-filled, humourous, anecdotey type stuff. Sorry.

My daily to-do list usually looks like this:

– shower
– email So-N-So
– groceries
– tidy toy basket X
– work on Short Story Y
– laundry
– stretch
– make supper
– mail X thing to Y person
– change cat litter
– sweep floor

yesterday it included:

– don’t kill the children
– breathe

and that was surprisingly helpful. I was exaggerating of course, I always remember to breathe! But writing it down made it real, made my stress and anxiety touchable and viewable and cross-off-able.

(Well I didn’t actually cross it off because I was in quite a state right up till bedtime and today, after a good night’s sleep, I couldn’t be bothered. But you get the idea.)

Here’s a list that’s been floating around my head lately.

Pros and Cons: Two Children

Pro: Built-in, daily lessons in SHARING. So important for civic minded youth who are to grow up as not-assholes!
Con: One always wants what the other one has. No matter what it is. Daily lessons in SHARING make primary caregiver weak and cantankerous and prone to saying, “HERE: TWO IDENTICAL THINGS. PLEASE BE QUIET.”

Pro: Learning that there is lots of love to go around! More family, more love.
Con: See point above. Always wants what the other one has. Is one getting a hug from me? Other one wants it too. Everyone emphasizes preserving one-on-one time between parents and children and I agree, it is so important, but hard to schedule. Especially when there is little enough one-on-one time with a) myself and b) my partner.

Random Pro: Learning at an early age to love and respect someone smaller than you.

Random Con: Noise. If you are noise-averse, stick to one kid. Holy crap.

Pro: Younger child might learn things faster because older child does them. IE: Potty training, application of clothing, walking, running, talking.
Con: Great, now you have two verbal children. Have you ever heard a 2 year old argue with a 4 year old? It sounds exactly like this:

“I eat yogurt!”
“I’m eating yogurt too!”
“No, I EAT YOGURT!”
“Well, I’m eating yogurt too!”
“I EAT YOGURT! ME ME ME!”
“I can say it too! I can say that I’m eating yogurt too! I’M EATING YOGURT TOO!”

With one child? You never have to hear that argument. The kid says he’s eating yogurt, you nod and smile and keep reading the paper.

Pro: Send one off in one direction, the other will follow. Mostly to see what he’s missing but the effect is the same: two children in the same place. So much easier to manage.
Con: Unless you are in public, in which case they run in opposite directions and you just got your shoulder pulled out of its socket and the old ladies are tutting.

Pro: Extra set of hands around the house.
Con: Extra set of hands that are at one end of the house dismantling a bag of bread while you are at the other end of the house explaining why We Don’t Climb the TV Stand.

Pro: Built in audience for rock n roll shows.
Con: One always wants the guitar the other is playing, even if there are four (4)(!) other guitars.

Con: Sibling doesn’t do things the way you want him to.
Pro: Dude, no one ever will, so the sooner you learn this, the better.

Pro: A second chance to relax, enjoy the baby, use all those receiving blankets, marvel at the miracle of those tiny toes without stressing about whether the toes are evenly spaced or not.
Con: You could say that you have less time to relax because you’re already chasing the first one, but really, there is time if you look for it.
Pro: Trust me, you will get very good at ferreting out time where you thought there was none.

Pro: The younger one has someone closer to his size to idolize.
Con: The heartbreak of rejection.
Pro: Again, gotta learn sometime. Will help when he starts dating.

Biggest con, for me? Managing time. I am still jealous of my former self and her ability to sit and look out the window and lollygag.
Biggest pro: watching them love each other.

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Collisions

Posted on 3/21/2010 by cheesefairy

I can’t remember how old I was the last time I traveled to Italy, but I do remember: being desperately bored, listening to my Sony Walkman, scribbling in my journal, eyeing the cute Italian boys. Wishing I could talk to them, but more, wishing I was home. I guess I must have been 16. It was my fourth trip to my dad’s home town and the last time I would see my grandmother and all my cousins, second cousins, honourary uncles and aunts.

My dad’s home town is an Italian village called Ripabottoni. It is home to fewer than 700 people and probably as many cats. Last night I found myself walking its streets using the “street view” function of google maps and I scrolled and strolled through the town, delighting when each turn revealed something I remembered. It was as if I had just been there. (yes, it is a very old town, and despite an earthquake a few years ago, it looks mostly the same as it has since the beginning.) There was the pharmacy, there was the tobacconist, there was the bar that had the jukebox that played that song I was obsessed with. I took a turn on a random road and sure enough it was the road that led up the steep hill to the cemetery. I wandered up the main street out of town where every night, starting at dusk, the young people in town would form a kind of procession, walking slowly to the edge of town and back again. They would smoke cigarettes and gossip and laugh. Sometimes they got ice cream. Sometimes they got cold drinks. This nightly walking back and forth, I remember thinking it was strange, stupid, pointless. Like small, caged rodents, they just went to their boundary and then back again. I went with my cousins, my mom, trailing behind, not getting the jokes and stories told in the local dialect.

I came to be looking at my dad’s town on the Internet because yesterday I encountered a writer, Eufemia Fantetti, who is an Italian-Canadian and whose family is from a town very close to my dad’s town. I was reading a piece of hers – last year’s winning entry in Event Magazine’s creative non-fiction contest – this brilliant piece of writing that opened with mention of her family’s regional dialect, their way of saying, “let’s go” and the words were familiar, it was my regional dialect too. I came home to search for her little town and discovered it is only a few miles from my little town and I felt proud by association and then sad because it is not my little town at all, it is only a place I’ve been. A place I claim affiliation with because it is more interesting than here, now that I am here.

Which is, probably, part of the reason my dad left; to go somewhere more interesting than “here.” He is one of the ones who walked to the end of the road and kept going.

Here I am, a born and bred Metro Vancouverite, rooted and blooming and wishing I could go back to see that place. I thought I remembered it so hazily. That I can navigate its streets 20 years later makes me feel closer to it, as though it is not as forgotten as I had thought, not merely a place where I spent some time as a child. It feels like there is something there for me; secrets under its cobbled streets, tucked between the stone walls. My history, or maybe just another version of home.

I used to think I needed my father as a guide, to go back with me and my family and show us things, interpret for us. He does not want to go, though. There are things he does not want to see and feel again. I might have to go alone. Or with my own kids, boring them with my own memories while they sit, headphones on, wondering why this history, this home, is so important to me.

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A Jerk is A Jerk, No Matter How Famous

Posted on 3/19/2010 by cheesefairy

People who hold positions of power are assholes. They may hold those positions for many reasons: merit, cheating, nepotism, luck. But it is rare to see a person in power who deserves the power and associated privileges he or she has at his disposal. I have met a couple of those deserving people. I love them and remember their birthdays but they are the exception.

You don’t have to be an asshole to become powerful. But you do increase your chances of becoming an asshole as you accumulate more power. People tell you you’re important, you’re special, you’re pulling the strings. Only the very strong of character could resist becoming an asshole, given all that unconditional approval.

At my last job, I worked for a few different bosses. I was an assistant, so I was in charge of booking flights, hotels, doing expense claims. The bosses used to get a little hinky about their travel. They had the hotel chains they preferred, the seats they liked (business class, always business class) and the times of day they preferred to fly. I tried to accommodate these preferences but you know, I don’t have a lot of pull at Air Canada (and these guys refused to fly Westjet) so sometimes I had to brush the bullshit off my hands and say, hey, guess what, I did my best, now SUCK IT.

One time, the really high-maintenance boss was on a business trip in Ottawa. He was booked on a return flight through Toronto and when he got to the airport he called me and asked me to reschedule the second leg of the flight. He wanted to get home sooner. I tried explaining there was no way for him to get back sooner – he was already in transit and he was waiting for a connecting flight and there are those pesky time zones to consider, not to mention that he could have just gone up to the counter in the airport and asked them his own damn self instead of calling me in BC – but he kept calling me and harassing me and I kept calling and harassing the airline and then finally we got him on a flight that left sooner. But because it had to stop in Calgary, he actually got home LATER than he would have.

Then there was the time I – and all his peers – heard about it for weeks afterward because I booked a “ghetto” hotel.

And do we all remember Mr. I’mma take that charity banner right off your wall and put it in my suitcase and take it back to head office?

In light of this, I’m having a little trouble with all the news items about the misbehaving members of our government. We’ve got a former MP with cocaine in the car, we’ve got Ms. Airport Hissy Fit, (more interesting: those two people are boinking each other!) and now we’ve got Mr. Just Coming Back From Mexico Hey! Don’t Take my Tequila.

If I take my cue from the newspaper articles and their associated commentary I think I am supposed to care about these jerks being jerks, supposed to be outraged and um, then what? Next steps please? Moving forward? Why should I waste my (admittedly, unlimited, so: unwastable) outrage on people who are not going to get fired? Premier Gordon Campbell drove drunk in 2003. He’s been re-elected as Premier of BC. Twice. During the Olympics, an MLA got caught driving drunk. She’s still an MLA. (but she’s really sorry) Clearly the people who need to be outraged, namely a) these peoples’ bosses and b) the citizens of the country / province who are voting for them, are incapable of outrage so why is it news?

People break the law all the time. People act like jerks all the time. If people in power break the law and act like jerks and get more attention for it, they’ll just continue to believe they’re better than the no-name jerks. And they’re not. So if we’re not going to fire them, I say we ignore them and hope they get bored and go away.

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Nobody Loves Me / Like Caillou Do

Posted on 3/18/2010 by cheesefairy

I use empathy as a tool with my kids. I use it because it works, sometimes shockingly well. But sometimes, I just can’t do it. Not even halfway. I am not interested in trying. I just want you to go. Anywhere. Out of my sight.

(Oh no, not you. You can stay.)

The disconnect for me is at the point where the child starts acting less like a human (“You are scared of that shouting kid. How awful”) and more like a child. (“You are angry because…I peeled your banana? Seriously?”) It is the stupid (to me) little things that irritate me the most, which is ultra-reasonable, I know, after all, I am the adult, but there it is. I am more childish than a child because I hate when my children act their age.

Caillou is a small, fictional French-Canadian child. He claims to be 4 years old but I think he is actually 3.5. He has a TV show and some books about him. I believe the books came first? The books are fine. They impart morals and lessons and reflect the child’s current experience back at them so that the child feels heard, understood, motivated. They are not my favourite kind of book because I am not 3 – 4 years old, however, as discussed in my last post, my kids read what they want and because they can’t actually READ yet, I read them what they want.

Caillou the TV show came to reside in our house on a videotape donated to me via a giant box of crap my former co-worker didn’t want anymore. (Also in giant box of crap: potty, 17,000 Happy Meal toys, various sizes of childrens’ socks, talking toy piano, etc. But she also gave me a crib so I’m not complaining. Much.) Trombone wanted to watch Caillou when he was almost 2 but he was bored within seconds, so I put it away.

Since turning 3, he has asked to watch the video a handful of times. And I oblige because it is easier than arguing. “Because I hates that show, I hates it bad,” is not a good enough reason, in my books.

The thing about Caillou as he is portrayed in the video is: he is the whiniest little bastard you ever hope never to meet. He is a nightmare. He clings to his parents, trashes his baby sister’s doll with his mom’s lipstick, asks his dad questions that have obvious answers and says “Whyyyyyyyy?” a lot. A lot. A lot. None of this is so bad in the books, because I’m reading the books and I don’t use a whiny voice because whining hurts my ears. (And also, truth be told, I sometimes think about other things while I am reading boring stories aloud so I forget to add much in the way of act-ing.)

That Caillou, he so whiny, I used to say. And then, one day, Trombone said something. And he sounded Just. Like. Caillou. My head whipped around.
“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat,” I roared.
“Whhhhyyyyyy do I have to eat my crusts?” he repeated.
“Buh buh buh,” I said.

It’s not that Trombone is excessively whiny. It’s that at his worst, he is just like Caillou at HIS worst and a 3.5 year old at his worst is bad. Bad like sour milk in your first cup of morning coffee. Christine L’Heureux, who wrote the books, evidently knew a 3.5 year old. Possibly several.

To me, on those rare occasions when we put on the Caillou video (very rare, trust me) it is like having two 3.5 year olds in the house. Which is crazier than a cat with a sticker on his tail.

But for Trombone, it is sweet, sweet understanding. It’s like me talking to another mom about momming or another writer about writing. I am grateful to Caillou for playing this role. After all, it’s not like a kid Trombone’s age can go to one of his preschool friends and say, “Dude, I just don’t GET why they have to make me go to the goddamn BATHROOM all the time,” and have his friend say, “Dude, I KNOW.” Sometimes, shit goes down and you need someone who understands. Caillou is sometimes that someone.

I am grateful for Caillou in one other respect: he allows me a safe way to let out my frustration with my own perfectly normal, perfectly irritating 3.5 year old. Instead or yelling or stomping my feet or letting steam escape from my ears, I can grit my teeth and say to another adult (or to myself, if it’s an emergency), “If Caillou came into my room and woke me up by jumping on my bed just so he could show me that he was clever enough to tie a string around a stuffed dog and pretend it was his real dog, CAILLOU WOULD HAVE A NEW MOMMY.”

(I also think Caillou’s slightly slouchy, always smiling, never yelling parents just might be smoking a lot of pot, but don’t quote me.)

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