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Remake

I have a mole on my chin. One day, many (probably twenty) years ago, it grew one hair, which I plucked when it was long enough to pluck. A few months later, I noticed it was back and pulled it again. Eventually there were two hairs together, then four. A cluster! I remember the day I pulled one of the hairs out and was thrilled to realize it was silver. Silver chin hairs! I like silver hairs.

It has recently come to my attention that my chin hairs are growing at an increased rate of speed. It used to be months between pluckings and now it is weeks. Possibly I have plucked more than once in two weeks. I don’t know what this means and I don’t really want to know. I do enough late-night googling as it is.

When I get right up close and look at my chin hairs to pluck them–the lovely pressure and strain of the hair coming out of its follicle is so satisfying–I see other hairs on my face. A few of the other moles grow hairs as well. There is a place on my neck, just under the jawline, where a hair grows quite inobtrusively for [x amount of time] until one day it is long enough to curl up over my chin. Hi. I’m your neck hair. I am what stands between you and a career as a supermodel. What is it doing that whole time I don’t see it, I wonder. I have looked for it before and not found it. It’s only found when it’s exactly the right length to be found, at which point I dutifully yank it and marvel at its length. How does something get that long without me noticing.

***

When I came to parenting, I was not a physical nurturer. I cared about people, but not enough to go out of my way and sacrifice my own comfort for theirs. Dirty, sick, grouchy people, those are not my people. Sad, anguished, angry people, I am good with those. I will be your emotional rescue. I do not want to clean up your vomit. I would rather listen to you talk about your ex-whoever for a week than clean up your vomit.

The thing about parenting is: against the limits of your own comfort level, nurturing is how you pass the day. Like any skill, the more you do it, the better you get.

I remember the tragedy of the first snotty nose, the first shoulder barf, the first moaning, feverish face against mine, coughing in my nostrils, me thinking, “OH GOD I CAN’T MOVE AWAY BECAUSE SO PRECIOUS BUT I SO WANT TO MOVE AWAY DON’T COUGH ON ME SICK BABY.” They were all these walls I had to climb and get over, this “taking care of people” “whether you want to, or not” thing. Not to roll over and put a pillow on my head when I hear someone crying in the hallway, but to get out of bed and deal with it.

You do it every day and you don’t notice that you’re getting better at it until you are doing it without thinking. It gradually gets less hard, then easy, then subconscious.

After a nice, calm holiday season, we spent half of January ill with something or other, something else in February and the past week in the house with the ‘flu. Arlo (and later, Eli) was weak and feverish and coughing and I turned into robot mom: here’s a tissue, here’s medicine, here’s the TV remote, here’s a book, here’s more tissues. With little of the old panic or dread, I gave myself fully to caregiving, became The Mom Who Cares.

Every day. In the house. With sick children.

And I know that people do worse, do more, do more with worse. Other than the whole no-school thing, I didn’t even notice that a week had passed until the first morning we walked Arlo to school and the air felt like a beautiful salve against my skin. Being outside and walking down the street was such a gift and I realized that I hadn’t had that gift in so long.

Was this why my head had ached all week, why I had felt as though I might be getting sick but maybe not after all, why I was so tired, despite not doing anything. Because I hadn’t been..outside? Because no, I hadn’t done anything, except look after other people for a week, with the occasional break to stare at the Internet, waiting patiently for it to yield something wonderful or even just less annoying because everything was annoying and no, it wasn’t me, it was everyone and everything else. In the world. Everywhere.

I was surprised to realize I had forgotten about myself. In a way it’s good to know that I can step up and nurture if needed. In another way it’s scary that I could morph so quickly into someone for whom self-care becomes news. If I was a nurse I would be the chain-smoking, tequila-drinking kind. The pill-popping kind who is fine, fine, until she isn’t. What happened?

***

My chin hairs are invisible, until they are not. They appear, as if by magic, under my fingers as I write with my right hand or read things. They grow quietly and appear fully fledged when they are ready, a surprise, though not an unwelcome one.

Seventeen Truths

Almost nothing makes me madder than being mad and having no one notice how mad I am.

I also get really mad when people treat other people like garbage.

I hate cleaning out empty yogurt containers.

Sinks full of dirty dishes can never touch my bare hands.

But I will pick up cat poop from the floor using only a tissue.

I can’t burp. So when I get gassy in the upper register, I gurgle a lot and then get uncomfortable.

This is why I am picky about what beer I drink: if it’s mostly carbonation, I can only have one. Sometimes half of one.

This is also why I drink approximately one soda pop per year.

My mouth is crooked.

Once I heard a song on the dance radio station that I just loved. I am ashamed to admit it was by some ugly dude named Pitbull whose video displayed more tits than a field full of milking cows and now I can’t love that song anymore.

I have almost no knowledge of grammar rules. I really think I was away from my desk that day in grade seven.

Sometimes I get this panicked feeling that I have been spelling everything wrong forever and no one has told me.

I like the look of boy short style underwear, but all that fabric bunching up in my business! I would rather wear bikini briefs.

I enjoy creating analogies about the creative process more than I enjoy engaging in the creative process, unless one counts creating analogies as part of the creative process.

Sometimes I forget how tall I am.

With a couple of notable exceptions, I just really don’t like most small dogs. Their constant excitement makes me nervous.

I love Cher, mostly because she’s an alto so I can sing along.

Part Two: Less Complaining, More Getting On With It

After I wrote yesterday’s post I wanted to punch myself in the teeth. There is nothing more irritating than a person who whines about writing and time management. Unless it’s a person who does that, like clockwork, three times a year. So, this post is both a part two and not. Same sort of topic, but no grand epiphanies about time wastage because guess what: I already knew I waste time every day.

This morning, Trombone (age 6) and I had an argument.

In the morning, after breakfast, the children are allowed to watch some TV before it’s time to go to school. Usually this ends up being about half an hour of TV, sometimes more if they get up earlier. We used to do it this way: we would eat, they would watch TV while I showered & got dressed, then they would get dressed and then we would leave for school. Except it started to be this way: they would watch TV while I showered and got dressed, then they would ignore me and dawdle and not get dressed and we would be late.

Also there would be much sterness of tone and sometimes shouting. All of which would lead to me getting him to the school door, saying goodbye and instantly regretting the entire morning because what if there was an earthquake? What if the school burned down? What if the last thing he remembered of me was my horrible witch face hollering, “GET YOUR BOOOOOTS ON FOR THE LOVE OF SAM.” That would be unfortunate.

I had a brilliant idea. I would ask the children to get dressed after breakfast but before the TV time! This way, they would have an incentive to get dressed more quickly AND when the TV went off we would all be ready to go. How brilliant am I, I asked myself, and myself answered, very brilliant!, and so I explained the plan to Trombone and Fresco. At first they were reluctant, then they did it for a few days, and it worked brilliantly.

One day last week, when Trombone reached for the remote control right after breakfast, and I reminded him that he would need to get dressed first, he turned on me. He started sighing and moaning about how unfair it was and how he liked the old way better and WHY did we have to do it this way, WHY? No really, WHY? WHY? WHY?

I explained why. But he didn’t really want to know. He just wanted to complain. I told him I understood why he was complaining but I thought the new way was working. He said it wasn’t working, that he hated it, that it was the worst way ever.

Meanwhile, Fresco arrived back downstairs, out of breath, completely dressed and ready to watch TV, in the unassuming yet totally calculated way only a younger brother can pull off.

“I like this way,” he said brightly.
Trombone shot him the stink eye and stomped upstairs to get dressed.

This morning Trombone started the argument again but since I knew how it was going to end I didn’t participate. I left the remote on the table and told them they could watch TV when they were dressed and then went upstairs to write in my morning journal. For ten minutes, Trombone ranted and raved at his brother, the walls, God, and everyone about how unfair how mean, how it was the worst idea ever and someday SHE will KNOW how bad an idea it is, really. Really! Ten minutes. And I was sitting upstairs, half listening to this, thinking: if you had put your pants on five minutes ago you’d be well involved in a Power Rangers episode right now. Dude. Why are you wasting your energy fighting when you could be watching TV?

Aha! I thought. Wait!

If I didn’t waste my energy fighting myself (and blogging about it,) I could be writing. And if I spend my time writing, I will have written stuff to show for it.

So I am going to try getting out of my own way. Don’t fight it. Just do it. Because if there’s an earthquake today, do I want my last image of myself to be me going, “Whyyyyyy do I never have any tiiiiiime?” in my horrid whiny voice? No I do not!

(These children can hang upside down from rings because they didn’t give up after the first try.)

The Contents of My Head: Now Chewable and Strawberry Flavoured

When I first considered a return to blogging I talked myself out of it. After all, I stopped blogging in February because I wanted to, in politician’s parlance, “spend more time with my family” ie: I wanted to focus on what kind of writing was more important to me (not actually spend more time with my family at all) and that kind of writing was the kind that was long form, fiction or non, published, paid? maybe? and you know. Serious. Serious writing. About serious things.

Yeah. Well.

One thing I do well, when I am not blogging, is write serious things. Not serious in the “be taken seriously” way but in the “wait, I thought she had a sense of humour?” way. When I take myself seriously I take myself too seriously.

Serious serious serious. Is there a word for where you say a word too much and it loses its shape like it’s butter melting on the sidewalk in the hot sun? Yes, for verbal use anyway, the term is Semantic Satiation which is a pretty wicked term. Also, I got that by google searching for “when you use a word so many times it loses its meaning” and that was the FIRST result. I love living in the Future.

Aside from writing things that didn’t so much zing as plop, I was not getting very much work done. I wanted to dedicate my previous blogging time to fiction writing and editing time and for some reason after the first couple of months, that time just got surplussed and given to other things. Twitter, mostly. Reading articles online. Other stuff.

I realized recently that the reason I don’t want to write my “serious” stuff is because I believe no one will ever see it. And without the potential of an audience I am not much interested in working on it. Does this make me honest, or a hack? Idiot, also an option. Because of course no one will see it if I never work on it, duh. Before I had a blog I had an audience of 0 and I still wrote my stories and poems and waited patiently for them to mature into lovely butterflies so I could share them with the world. Then I had a blog, and my little worms were getting attention and who the hell cares about those butterflies anyway. In sum: I have been spoiled by the instant gratification of writing on the Internet. And when I took away the blog gratification, I went to the twitter gratification because why write if no one is going to see it? RIGHT? Exactly.

What I should be doing is working (the phrase “toiling in obscurity” springs to mind and refuses to be quashed) and getting things ready to show to other, real, live people and their magazines, editorial boards, publishing houses, while there still are any. But all I want to do is dash off 500 words that are half-clever and have people see them and then go to bed happy because I am A WRITER WHO WROTE STUFF.

Wah.

After much soul searching and talking to myself in the rain, I convinced myself that blogging again would be a good idea because it would get me a little bit of gratification (methadone?) and that little bit would be enough to get me to sit my ass in the chair and work on the serious-but-not-too-serious-you’re-killing-us-here stuff.

Only problem is, I haven’t managed to find the time yet to blog AND write. Within the word choice lies the key: finding the time. That means it’s around here somewhere, I’ve just misplaced it, not that it doesn’t even exist. This is a positive thing. Today I kept a time log so see where my time is hiding and I will tell you tomorrow what I found out. Bwahaha, cliffhanger.

Five Things* I Would Do With Unlimited Money (*That I can Think of Right Now)

1. Pay my taxes so other people could have roads and whatnot. And give freely to good causes. But not the ones that sell my information to other charities, resulting in my receiving tonnes of crappy admail that I then return to sender or recycle or shred in a fit of pique. Those good causes I would purchase with my unlimited money and then hire someone with a brain to run properly.

2. I like our house a lot and I like its relatively small footprint but I would love an adventure yard full of mysterious trees and dark corners and friendly squirrels and a fence so I could open the door, say ‘go play’ and then shut the door after the children left. And they wouldn’t complain because: adventure yard!

3. Every year in October we would re-locate to a sunny, warm climate and we would stay there until cold/flu/strep throat/bronchitis/vomiting/Hand Foot Mouth/general malaise/sinusitis season is goddamn over. It would be like those books when rich people in England got consumption and went to Spain to recover. I want to lie on the beach in Spain right now. I want to eat olives and drink thick red wine and not feel like crap.

Yes, this whole “five things” is just an excuse for me to complain about how I feel like crap. I have been sick forEVER and no amount of vitamins, soup, garlic, sleep, hot water and lemon, decongestant, nasal irrigation, steaming, fruit eating or ibuprofen has yet cured me and I am MAD about it also. Very mad. Today we found out that Trombone has strep throat. My throat also hurts. I keep waking up and expecting to feel better and feeling worse in new and different ways. On Thursday morning I woke up and my scar was inflamed. I have a scar where I had a cyst removed in August and the scar wasn’t pretty to start with and now it’s glowing red for some reason. Is it a sign? A glowing red sign that is saying “figure out a way to have unlimited money so you can have all your blood replaced”? Maybe.

4. I would have all my blood replaced. Maybe annually.

5. I would buy a chip factory.

What would you do with unlimited money?

I Promised Patio Lanterns

Can you see them, all stretched across the front of this page? Blue, orange, purple, red, blowing slightly in the OH GOD IT’S NOVEMBER WHO HAS PATIO LANTERNS OUT ON THEIR BLOG IN NOVEMBER.

Patio Lanterns. Kim Mitchell Styleee.

Hi!

Last week I was sitting around thinking about myself, as I do, and I thought, “It might be fun to blog again for November. November is traditional pulling-out-all-the-stops-and-hair month as concerns blogging and writing and I could do it. Just one month.”

The next day, totally unpredictably, my laptop computer died. Of course I took this as a sign that I should definitely blog every day in November, despite not having blogged since February, and I would just write up the blog posts in my (handy dandy) notebook with my pen and then type them up into Saint Aardvark’s computer, which I was borrowing, later in the evening and walla! Blogging! Again!

After day two of using SA’s computer, which is like an old VW Bug being held together — barely — with tape and spit and good wishes, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would not be typing anything on that machine at the end of the day because a) the trackpad is slow and wonky b) the lid just kind of..lies down periodically (backwards) and c) come on. Really? I have enough time to draft a post BY HAND in the morning and then rewrite it in the evening? Have I met me?

Have I met me? Wow. Good question.

Not only all of that, above, there, but SA’s computer is located in the living room portion of our open plan living room dining room kitchen area, and the living room is traditionally the Zone of the Children, so when I sat down in their Zone to do some important Tweeting, it was kind of like walking into a monkey cage at the zoo and bringing your statistics homework for something to read.

“Whatcha doing?” asked Fresco, now 4.5 years old, perched on my shoulder, I am not even kidding, “Can I see? Can I type? Can I play SuperTux?” (that’s Open Source version of Supermario and it’s pretty cool but NO you can’t play it all the time whenever this computer is awake.)

The next day or something, we decided to buy a new laptop so we went to Future Shop because they had the best prices and selection, and picked this one out. It’s pretty nice.  If we stay on the car spectrum, it’s a hatchback Kia. But it has working wipers and stereo and it’s clean and doesn’t need much gas.

With a pine-scented air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.

I am going to try out blogging again for a month and see what happens. As it turns out, it’s hard to choose a new name and title for a blog when you’re at the end of the blogging timeline … all the clever stuff has been done and the stuff you think is clever is not, on reflection, and you just want to get something up dammit because it’s November 1st, so I guess what I’m saying is: forgive the title, it might change, or it might not, all is fluid, kind of like the cold November Rain.