10 Things I Love About Trombone

Posted on 6/30/2009 by cheesefairy

I abandoned the weekly letter thing to Trombone a long time ago. Was it week 22 or something? I think I gave it up because I was lazy but in the past year, I have noticed it has been more difficult to exalt new developments in Trombone’s life. With every great development in life – for everyone, me included – comes a stage of pain-in-the-assness and where I’m at, my eyes are trained on minimizing the pain-in-the-assness rather than maximizing the incredible developments that emerge once the pain-in-the-assness is done.

When he was a baby, he developed skills like any baby. Rolling over! Sitting up! Talking! But since he turned (er, let’s fudge and say) 2 years old he’s been developing his personality, his *self* as well as his gross and small motor skills. That is the interesting part, the becoming a person part, the figuring out who he is part. But it is much harder to capture because it’s subtle and slow and when I stop to think about it, well, when *wasn’t* he the person he is now?

Three years ago right now I was starting to contract, watching Working Girl on the hospital TV, too nervous to finish my hospital meatloaf. It had been a sunny, warm day, much like today. Unlike today, I had nothing to do all day but stare at my huge belly and wish for it to pop out a baby.

Here are 10 things I love about Trombone, who turns 3! years! old! tomorrow.

1. He loves to pretend. We pretend to be animals, people other than ourselves, such as the little girl down the road that he loves a lot and very often we pretend to be restaurant owners and their customers. We sometimes travel to London by train, where we buy things like cookies and eye drops and chocolate.

2. He always says good morning to the people we pass on the street.

3. His contrary, independent spirit, which is still, for the most part, tempered by politeness.

The kid has been so polite and good natured that I am still guilty of saying, “Would you like to come and do this thing right now?” expecting obedience and then am surprised when he considers my request carefully and then says, “No thank you Mummy, I don’t think I would.”

Um. OK. Let me rephrase.

I don’t love this characteristic on a daily (or hourly) basis, but I love the mind spasms that go along with it. The sheer thrill of defiance is contagious. And watching him flex his muscles is pretty fun.

4. He loves music. When you play something he likes, he gets up on the couch and presses his head against the stereo speaker and listens intently, occasionally turning around to say, “Did you hear that? The man said, “helooooooo bayyyyybeeeee!” in his best Big Bopper voice. He has even come around to the awesome practice of making up different lyrics for songs. For a while he would accept no lyrical improvisation from me, which was sad because I love me some lyrical improvisation. But now, he’s all over it.

I joke about going crazy listening to the same album (or song) 8 (or 800) times a day but really, I am the same way with music that I love and I can’t begrudge him. I will play Barbara-Ann as many times as he asks me to because he needs to hear it that many times. Plus, now Fresco can say “ba ba ba!” along with us.

5. He has the memory of an elephant. Which is great if you are entertaining passers-by with your child singing “Barbara-Ann” but not so great if you are walking by a street that one time last year you went down and at the end you took out a package of cookies from a bag and gave him one and maybe you should just *check* your bag right now, just in case there are cookies in it because there were that one time.

Which is still pretty great.

6. The kid loves books. That hasn’t changed. All books, all the time. He keeps one on his spare pillow at night. Yes he has a spare pillow. He will only sleep on the mouse pillow but he keeps the elephant pillow next to the mouse pillow just in case.

7. He will eat a peanut butter, egg, and ketchup sandwich but will entertain no cheese other than parmesan. For his own reasons. Which we will never know.

8. I love his big, blue eyes and his straight, blond hair and his beautiful smile.

9. He is not quite on side with the idea of having a little brother, especially one who is so loud and who requires so much minding, but he is starting to act in a very brotherly, sweetly protective way. Sometimes when I am out of the room I hear him say something like, “Here you go, here’s a book, Fresco,” and Fresco says, “DAT!” and Trombone says, “That’s right, that’s a truck!”

10. A few months ago his nightly habit was to stop halfway up the stairs on his way to bed and holler down to me, “Enjoy the day, Mummy!” It came out of nowhere and was so sweet and randomly beautiful.

Happy Birthday, my sweet boy. Enjoy the day.

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When You’re Gone

Posted on 6/24/2009 by cheesefairy

You know when you take a vacation and it’s so complete – so separate from your regular life – that you forget what happened before it, even how long it has been since you were home? It sounds, when I write that, like I had the kind of Awesome Vacation that frat boys take to Vegas, the kind where you take your own karaoke machine and drink gin and tonics in your hotel room till noon the next day but really I am speaking of our small, four-day vacation to Burnaby and subsequent return to our house in the Mizzle yesterday.

I came back and I looked at my last post here and it was 9 days ago! 9 days. I mean. I’m not on *hiatus* or anything.

Saint Aardvark’s parents are in town. They like to stay with us because we house their grandchildren, but at the time of flight bookings many months ago we were desperately tired and not optimistic about sleep training so we didn’t think moving our two children into the same bedroom to free up the guest room would be a best interests kind of thing.

My parents went to Scotland almost two weeks ago. They come back today. Their house in Burnaby is big enough for all of us to spend time in and also has a yard and also a strawberry patch.

Oh it’s fine, stay here, said my parents to SA’s parents. They get along. It is so convenient.

On Friday, the children and I packed everything into the car and drove the 20 minutes to my parents’ house. Grandma and Grandad arrived. And we all stayed there, together, until yesterday morning, eating pancakes and strawberries and bread and spaghetti and generally enjoying ourselves immensely.

My parents’ house is my old house, the house where I lived from age 2 – 19. So I am comfortable there, and happy and familiar. But usually I am there with my parents around. I know where the scotch tape is but I don’t go digging for it, I ask about it first. And we always, unless it is Christmas Eve, leave at the end of the day.

It is a strange thing to be in your mother’s house * when she is not there. To touch all the cutlery and the tea towels and look out the window over the sink and feel the history in the gaze, how she must have looked out over the yard when I was small, bigger, biggest, and now when we arrive with our two kids in tow. Washing clothes in her machine and hanging them on the line in the basement to dry. Wiping the kitchen table with a damp cloth. Waking up in that house again, hearing the birds chattering and the slap of running shoes on the sidewalk.

It was eerie, in a way. It was like she was gone. You know. Dead.**

And when you think things like that in your mother’s house while she is who-knows-where on another continent, it’s easy to get into a loop. This is what it will look like one day. One day she will be gone and he will be gone and all of this will be left exactly as it was that day, the day before they were gone. Thanks, creepy brain! That’s what I need to think about at 2 am while I lie in the most uncomfortable bed in the universe! (except for the hideabed at that old house where all those guys used to live. Yes, the Iron Maiden, that’s what I’m thinking of.)

In the dark of nightmorning, panic rising in my throat. But she can’t ever die. I need her. Followed by the devastating: but she will. And someday I will be the mom. And someday after that I will die. And my children will stand as adults in my kitchen, wondering what I saw when I looked out the window.

Believe it or not, these kinds of things don’t occur to me very often.

But. It’s just as easy to push those thoughts aside when you are surrounded by family and strawberries and the occasional sunbeam. Cross that bridge when we come to it, won’t we, says the soothing, sensible, Mary Poppins-like voice in my head. I suppose we will.

– – – – –

* Yes it is my father’s house too, but I specify my mother here because my father’s domain is the garage (and the garden) and I don’t spend much time there at all. I went in a couple of weeks ago looking for a scrub brush and actually got lost for about 10 minutes. A very organized filing system I’m sure.

** Because doesn’t everyone want to come home from a vacation and read about her eventual demise on her daughter’s blog? Definitely. ***

*** I mean, not that it will be a surprise to my mom that she will die someday but it’s not something we mention in polite company, is it? ****

**** Does the Internet still count as polite company? A topic for a different day.

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I Really Enjoyed This Comment

Posted on 6/15/2009 by cheesefairy

Well, I enjoy *all* my comments. You spark my engines, you do. But this one was caught in the spam filter this morning:

“Your judgment pertaining to Aquarius Rules the Ankles is super gripping! Delighted studying it now and observed a few of the inputs evenly gripping.”

I love that my judgment is super gripping. And that the spammers took the time to put the title of the post they were spamming in the spam! They are so committed these days!

Another spammer actually found an old post, pretended to be a person researching things found in that post, sent me an email to tell me that the link in the old post was broken and wouldn’t I rather use [her spammy link] instead. Wow. Imagine what would get done is a spammer was the prime minister!

Speaking of commitment, Trombone is so committed to enjoying his treats that he just painstakingly ate the wafer from around his ice cream sandwich and is now delicately picking at the delicious ice cream part.

I just washed my kitchen floor for the first time since Fresco started crawling. Yes, he can run now. He is a fast runner, in fact, and a prolific climber. In development terms, the last time I washed my kitchen floor was a long time ago. I am a filthy person. But in other news, it only took 15 minutes to wash! Why don’t I do it more often?

I think in part because the floor is stone tile and the tiles are of a pattern that conceals dirt. They have swirls of grey built right in. Now yes, there was a giant splotch of brown in one corner that was from a coffee spill. And there were chunks of various rejected cuisine welded to another corner that were obviously courtesy of one child or another. But the rest of it, for the longest time, looked mostly all right.

One giant bucket of discoloured water later.

Now to hide the bucket before Fresco drinks it. Fantastik is not so good for the esophagus, I hear.

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Becoming

Posted on 6/13/2009 by cheesefairy

The year I was 10 years old, my world fell apart.

We spent the summer between Grades 5 and 6 in Italy, in the sun-bleached fields near my father’s home town. Every few days we drove an hour to the Adriatic Sea and dove in the waves and let ourselves dry in the sun. We would eat lunch at seaside restaurants where my parents would have the fish and I, the pickiest eater alive, always chose the pasta. Even though I was not fluent in Italian, I managed to spend quality time with my grandmother and cousins. There were barn cats and wild, runabout puppies that belonged to the farmer down the road and lots of brown children who never wore pants. My grandmother’s farm housed a couple of ornery chickens and a mean rooster, all of whom would end up cooked tender in a pot of tomato sauce before the end of the summer.

The blazing sun must have lasered my pituitary gland because puberty started stretching its fingers through my body while I lay blissfully unaware, flat on my back in the scratchy wheat fields, staring at the clouds through the boughs of an old tree. Paying no attention, I grew at least two inches that summer, straight up, as they say. The beautiful shoes we had bought in Italy didn’t fit when we got them home.

I missed the first week of school in September. Everyone stared at me when I walked in the classroom. I had left for summer vacation a cute, regular-looking Grade 5 student with slightly crooked teeth but I was returning a scarecrow of a girl, all feet and hands and loose limbs and pimples, oh the pimples, straddling my two worlds without a hint of grace.

Yesterday some of my facebook friends from elementary school found our Grade 6 teacher and then emailed me: OMG she messaged me back OMG she’s looking so good for 50+ OMG wasn’t she totally the best teacher ever! and I felt suddenly delusional, like, where was I? Where were they? Was it all in my head? Grade 6 sucked. Didn’t it suck for everyone?

You guys. Grade 6 was the worst year of my life.

I was in a different class than my best friend. She wrote me a letter while I was in Italy, telling me we probably wouldn’t be friends that year because it was too hard to be friends and be in different classes. True enough; she rallied the girls in her class behind her (and she had a week’s head start!) and I attempted a rally of the girls in mine (Nerd Army: represent!) and we spent the year fighting the useless fights of young girls.

Then: sometime after my 11th birthday, I got my period for the first time. All those pads and tampons and horseback riding to worry about.

Then: before the school year could fucking end already, I got chicken pox and missed two weeks of school, coming back with rashes and scars on top of my pimples. Come on. Really?

I remember all of that with a dull, familiar ache from having turned the memories from hand to hand so many times. What I remember with clear, sharp pain is my Grade 6 teacher.

She was a Very Attractive Woman. And she was disgusted by me, by my sweatiness, by my greasiness, by my inability to walk without tripping, by my slouch as I tried to shrink myself to a normal height again.

But wait, is that true? I felt ugly and I felt like she treated me unfairly because I was ugly and I hated her because she was beautiful and because she was nicer to the cute girls and boys in the class. But I also know that I was becoming a difficult kid, trying to process all that puberty. Maybe she was just being a teacher.

Except: she plucked her eyebrows bare and drew in new ones. And I remember thinking that she was psychotic for doing so. I might even had written something on the chalkboard about it. Or maybe not.

I hated her because I thought she hated me. I thought she was out-of-control mean to me because I was less than perfect. I thought she over-valued cleanliness and adorability. At a time when I was the starkest contrast imaginable to those values.

I reacted by becoming a (slightly) bad kid; by swearing a lot, by becoming more sarcastic than an 11-year-old had any right to be, by passing a lot of notes in class that said terrible things about people; things I didn’t even believe but wrote down for the shock value.

Ugly is as ugly does.

She reacted by giving me detention, telling other teachers about me, treating me like a bad kid.

I just wanted to know if I could still be loved, still be respected, still be treated fairly, if I was this different person, this mutant, pubescent asshole. And from her, the answer was ‘no.’ Why should it have been ‘yes’? She was my teacher, after all, not my mother.

(My mother. Who was not a talker, but a normalizer and not in the “don’t worry, everything will be fine” way but in the “let’s get on with things and pretend that never happened” way.

And of course my father, who was definitely not prepared to talk to his daughter about becoming a woman.)

It was unfortunate timing. My teacher was in front of me every day being well groomed and attractive just as it was dawning on me that there *were* pretty girls and that I was *not* one of them and that there *would* be people who would judge me based on my appearance, who had, in fact, been doing it for years, while I had been happily unaware because until then I had passed. I had met the standards, been one of the cute ones.

I was consumed by my new physical imperfection, emotional confusion and then rejection by people I had felt certain were trustworthy. Parents. Best friends. Teachers. The principal of the school who had loved me the previous year and now shook his head when he saw me in the halls. I wasn’t naughty, I was just ugly, awkward. Did that mean ugly and awkward were naughty?

Everything was all fucked up. And I was only 11. According to Judy Blume I had YEARS left of adolescence.

Somehow, my parents kept me around even though I know they were completely flabbergasted and annoyed by me.

And eventually Grade 6 ended.

My Grade 7 teacher was the best antidote to Grade 6. Among many other things – including a teaching style that just went well with my learning style – he gave me something to hold and look at and turn over in the light when I felt most dark. He wrote on my report card, “[she] has a wonderful sense of humour and I greatly enjoyed teaching her this year. And PS: cheesefairy – math is beautiful.”

This sustained me for many years. Oh thank god, someone saw through it, someone saw past my pimples and my bad attitude and found something to like about me and even threw in a good-natured jibe because I am OK, I am normal (in the good sense of the word) I can take a good-natured jibe and I am going to come out the other side of this. Beautiful or not. Popular or not. Someone I like thinks something I hate is beautiful. Anything is possible.

* * * * * *

We are in the last leg of toilet training with Trombone right now and I finally made the connection tonight between his terrible behavior this week and the fact that he is wearing underpants all day. And my own terrible 11th year. He is in that same awkward, in-between place where I was; he is becoming a boy, not still a baby, reaching out, testing, being as bad as he knows how. Will we still love him, especially when there is another baby right behind him, one who can step into his shoes and his pants and his shirts? What does it *mean* to be a big boy, anyway? Is there really no going back? Do I not have a choice? Why are your faces so eager when you look at me? What do you know that I don’t?

* * * * *

It makes me afraid for adolescence with my boys, remembering how scared and scary I was for those years. I wince thinking about my kids as teenagers. But I want them not to see the wince. I want them only to see the occasional hug at night, the porch light left on, the silent breakfasts. The unfaltering support.

Which I had, but did not see until just now.

I guess you don’t have to see something if it’s helping hold you up. The fact that you’re not flat on the ground is evidence enough.

* * * *

To sum up: Glad to have survived Grade 6. Glad to have two loving parents, no matter how I might have liked them to be different. Glad to have the time to sit and ponder these things, even if a deadline might be a good thing, in that I would stop writing and just post, already. Whether or not I think I have achieved salience.

…

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I Am Not A Jerk After All!

Posted on 6/10/2009 by cheesefairy

I had the strangest experience today. I was dealing with my almost-3-year-old, who is a bit of a pain lately, what with the constant questions and ornery behavior. He was begging me for cookies or milk or attention or something and he tripped over my foot and fell on the floor, forcing that whiny cry that means he’s had enough cookies for one day and needs some protein to balance out the sugar, stat.

I said, “Oh, that must have hurt.”
He said, “Yeah!”
I said, “Here, have a drink of milk.”
He said, “Thank you.”

Then I went into the kitchen and gave my head a shake. I felt no anger, no boiling rage, no frustration, even, besides the low level of frustration that is always present. I felt only sympathy. Poor kid. He’s all wound up because we haven’t gone outside yet today and my feet are huge, he trips over them all the time and how embarrassing for him.

Let’s be kind and just say that this is not my typical response.

I had to wonder for a few minutes if I was experiencing some kind of stroke. An epiphany? Or maybe an angel had just flown up my ass? Then I remembered. I have had five nights of full sleep in a row.

Now before the Internet gets all “oh, she thinks she can just ANNOUNCE that and we’re not gonna smack her DOWN?” on me, let me state my case. I do not come here, to this shared parent space to rub it in anybody’s nose that my 13 month old is sleeping through the night for the first time since the night he was born, that is to say, for the first time in 13 months. I come here with words of hope, to say to anyone who is currently feeling overstretched, underslept, impatient, downright nasty,

…you are not an incurable asshole. It’s just the sleep deprivation.

Part of me knew it. But that part of me was not able to come to the phone. It was too weak from lack of sleep. I tried to put it out of my mind because it depressed me to think about how much sleep I wasn’t getting. I didn’t really want to talk about it either because suck it up, buttercup, nobody at the playground has had enough sleep and nobody wants to hear your tale of woe. With my kids I was quick to turn into Nasty Mom and, worse, I believed there was nothing I could do about it. It’s just who I am, I guess. I guess two kids is too much for me, I guess I should have just had one, obviously I am not capable of handling two with any degree of respect. Woe. Is. Me.

I still have my Nasty Mom threshold, of course. It’s just about 5 feet higher than it was at this time last week. I can now use actual strategy with my older son, try things like empathy, jokes, and distractions instead of going from “please do this” to “DO IT RIGHT NOW” in my barky, drill sergeant voice. I can get us out of the house in less than an hour without having to stop 6 times and rub my forehead, without forgetting things like diapers, snacks or the coffee I was drinking. I don’t doze off on the toilet anymore.

So, because this is something I would have been relieved to read in the past few months, I will say it again. If you have non-sleeping children in your house and you are strung so tight the mosquitoes can play Stairway To Heaven on you when you go outside, please remember. This is NOT the real you. It is the sleep-deprived you. The bad mood you are in almost all the time is not a reflection of your parenting skills. The attitude you cop has nothing to do with your fitness as a mother or father.

You are not irrevocably more mean, impatient or sadistic than you used to be.

(Even if you just want to smack me in the face for this pep talk.)

You just need more sleep. And someday, you will have some.

(Originally posted to the Canada Moms Blog)

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