Bub and Pie

I Don't Mind

2009-11-24T19:38:00.003-05:00

Tuesday is my early morning these days. While the rest of my family is sleeping I am up, fully clothed, munching my Life cereal over the morning paper. Bub found me that way this morning and asked in astonishment, "Are you the only one here? Did you get up and come down here all by yourself?"

When I confirmed that this was, indeed, the case, Bub replied, "Well, you have me now. So you don't need to be alone anymore."

*****

Bub's new favourite expression is "I don't mind." He uses it in situations where he might be expected to mind a great deal: taking medicine, turning off the computer, letting Pie have a turn with the Leapster. It's as though the turn of phrase has revealed to him a whole new weapon in his arsenal of response. He could let out a shriek of rage OR ... he could simply choose not to mind.

Not minding has its advantages. It promotes serenity. There is a beatific quality to Bub these days, as he explores his newfound Zen. All around him may be chaos but at the centre is Bub, not minding.

"You know what it's called when you don't mind things very much?" I asked him the other day. "It's called being easy-going. And you know who else is easy-going? Your Dad."

"You mean Daddy's going easy-going, just like me?" Bub asked in delight. He seems to sense that in not minding he has found an unexpected form of power, a power that is not about getting but about letting go.

Our Hero

2009-09-24T08:09:00.003-04:00

Pie: We went for the Terry Fox Walk today!

Hubby: Do you know who Terry Fox is?

Pie: He runned and runned and runned and runned, but then his neck started hurting, and he had to take medicine ... and then he died.

Bub: I think it was from drinking the medicine!

Pie: Or maybe it was because of all that running he did.

Bub: But wait. He was running so that other people wouldn't have to get sick. That's why he's a hero.

Pie: Yeah. He's our hero.

Snippets

2009-09-21T16:12:00.003-04:00

...A bit too long for a tweet, not quite long enough for a post.

Pie came up to me on the weekend looking disgruntled. "I don't have anything I want to do," she said slowly, searching for the right words to capture this peculiar emotion, "and I want you to think of something for me to do." There is a word in the English language that we use for this situation. And I did not tell her what it was.
When I came downstairs for breakfast this morning, Bub had something to show me. "It's my loose tooth!" he announced, holding it out proudly. "But the tooth fairy didn't come." I exchanged glances with hubby, aghast, assuming that he had forgotten to tell me Bub's tooth had fallen out. In fact, it came out last night after Bub was in bed, so he popped it under the pillow and was a bit surprised (though not at all upset) to find it still there this morning.
I went out for coffee yesterday with a woman whose oldest son is one year behind Bub in school. She has two younger sons at home in addition to her kindergartener, and though I realized she was younger than I am, I was startled to find out that she is 22 years old. She had her first baby when she was seventeen and married his father two years later. The problem, she explained, is that she has absolutely no peer group. The other happily married moms of preschoolers are all in their thirties, or at least late twenties, and the other moms her age don't have husbands or three children. And it will always be this way. When she's 35 and her kids are in high-school, she still won't have any age peers in a similar situation. That would suck. And I can sympathize with her situation, but the fact remains that I was sixteen years old when she was born.

Pride and Joy

2009-09-11T12:46:00.004-04:00

I am acutely aware, sometimes, of just how much mental real estate is taken up by worry and anxiety over Bub. Before his first day of Grade One last week, I was counting down the days with equal parts excitement and dread. Pie's first day of junior kindergarten, on the other hand, snuck up on me, lost in the shuffle of her first days in her new day-care situation and my first day of classes. I actually had to remind myself last night that she would be going to kindergarten today, and I would have completely forgotten about her special apple dress if she hadn't remembered for me.

It's not entirely my fault. Friday is a silly day for a first day of school, and with Pie's first day falling a full ten days after Bub's, I just haven't been able to sustain the excitement. Those factors aside, though, the real issue here is that I know Pie is going to be fine. She's a shy girl, and in a new situation she is inclined to appear silent and morose. But she's not anxious or unhappy while in that state: she just prefers to keep a careful eye on things from the sidelines. I've never had a single complaint about her behaviour from other caregivers - she reserves her angry, controlling, bossy, and tantrum-throwing behaviour for me. She has had a year to watch her brother go off to kindergarten and she knows the drill. She is ready for this. She will be fine.

So it was almost an afterthought this morning when I snapped these few photos:

Portrait of a four-year-old who is TOTALLY READY for junior kindergarten.

Who is that matronly woman between a concerned Bub and a momentarily clingy Pie?

Portrait of a four-year-old who has located her best friend and is TOTALLY GOING TO BE FINE.

I don't have a portrait of that matronly woman SOBBING all the way home while singing along with Madonna's "Like a Prayer" on the radio. But I'm pretty sure she was crying because she's just so happy and proud.

The Technological Divide

2009-09-02T15:03:00.004-04:00

With university classes set to begin next week, I visited my new classroom yesterday, a soaring cathedral-like space with stained-glass windows and a balcony. For the first time in almost ten years, I will be teaching in a large lecture theatre, so I wanted to scope out the space ahead of time. I had Pie run to the back of the room to test out the acoustics, which were perfect: a four-year-old's murmur carries effortlessly. I'm hoping that will allow me to speak without a microphone - I hate using microphones almost as much as I hate PowerPoint, overhead projectors, and even whiteboards. My classroom, I noted with pleasure, comes equipped with a good old-fashioned chalkboard.

I have sound pedagogical reasons for avoiding technology in the classroom: the darkness alone has a soporific effect and although my students would love more movie clips, I have found that five minutes of video footage have the power to erase whatever impression the students' reading may have made on them. Even if the whole point of the movie clip is to show the profound alteration of meaning produced by a few apparently superficial changes, in the end, students always write about the movie on the exam, thinking they're writing about the book.

My defense of low-tech teaching is well worked-out, but the truth is, I avoid technology in the classroom because I'm afraid of it. I like the security of knowing that everything I need for my lecture is printed out in black and white, securely fastened to my clipboard. The idea of fumbling about with rewind buttons and remote controls in front of an impatient audience of 200 students is enough to make me panic. I got an email a few minutes ago letting me know that my classroom has a video-data projector and a USB port, and it's enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

Luckily for Bub, his Grade One teacher is a bit less technophobic. On the way home from his first day of school yesterday he actually volunteered the information that the board in his class is a computer board, and when you touch it, the pictures move, and when the teacher types into the computer, the words go up on the board! Bub is enchanted. They had math class yesterday with numbers floating down the screen and the kids had to decide whether they were even or odd. When quizzed, Bub demonstrated no ability whatsoever to distinguish between even and odd numbers (and how do you even explain that concept to children who don't yet know how to multiply or divide?), but he is more excited about school than I had dreamed possible based on my own recollection of Grade One as a lot of sitting around in desks and doing work. If there is one way to get Bub interested in school, it is turning the whole thing into a giant computer.

This boy loves to learn.

I have been imagining the first day of school for months now, picturing a cool, sunny September morning, with children and parents crowded around the class lists posted in the schoolyard and Bub kitted out in his running shoes and backpack, ready for his first day. For once, it all played out exactly as I had pictured it. Bub stood at the front of the line, following his new teacher into the school without hesitation or a backward glance. After the students filed in and the doors closed behind them, Pie and I stood there for a minute in the sudden quiet, as if waiting for something else to happen. Next week, it will be Pie's turn, but for now, the two of us are rattling around the house on our own, enjoying these last few days of relaxation, but asking every so often, in a burst of curiosity, "I wonder what Bub is doing?" He has stepped into a world that is his now. I can peek into his classroom and do my best to figure out what goes on in there, but from now on, most of what I know about his world will be what he chooses to tell me.

Weird

2009-08-24T07:11:00.004-04:00

The children stayed with their grandparents at the beach last night so that hubby and I could go out for a date. (Italian sausage ravioli followed by Inglourious Basterds, if you're interested. I recommend both.) When we returned home from the movie, almost everything felt just a little bit weird. Instead of getting an update from the babysitter and then tiptoeing to bed, we found the house in darkness. We turned on all the lights, and I kept catching myself whispering unnecessarily, the absence of sleeping children an alienating, strange condition, something that made my house just a little bit odd, almost like the Other Mother's world in Coraline. It was weird being able to talk about the movie in normal, audible tones before turning out the light. It felt strange to wake up to find curtains open in every room, beds already made.

It was not always so. When I brought Bub home from the hospital as a baby, one of the most daunting thoughts in my wound-up, sleep-deprived state was that he just wasn't ever going to go away. Day and night, the baby was always there, and I knew that even when he was old enough to sleep through the night he would still be there, breathing in the next room. I would never get a good night's sleep again. The kind of deep, unthinking sleep that had characterized my pre-baby life was gone forever, and gone with it was a certain feeling of home as a refuge from disturbance and stress. My home had turned into the epicentre of stress.

I slept well last night. But to sleep in a childless house no longer felt comfortable and safe the way it did before I had my babies. Part of me can remember a time when I was free to turn on any light in the house at eleven o'clock, when I could watch TV as loud as I wanted and sleep in late. But that's no longer a norm my children are disturbing - that seems like a weird, alien way of life. I actually set the alarm last night, but I didn't need it - I woke up to a sun-filled room at 6:56, and the deep stillness of the house felt not peaceful but empty.

Body Memory

2009-08-21T14:32:00.003-04:00

Wanna hear about the dream I had last night? (That has to be the worst opening for a conversation ever. The answer is universally "no," and yet people are usually too polite to say so.)

I was out shopping when I suddenly noticed that I was about to have a baby. How lucky! I thought. I haven't had a single contraction, and the baby is crowning already! The store clerks were somewhat alarmed when I pulled off my shorts, right there in the store, and announced that the baby was coming NOW, but I was as cool as a cucumber, confident that I could deliver this baby without complications, with or without medical assistance. Some panicked person called 911 while I relaxed on the carpeted floor, wondering how many pushes it would take.

I'm all done having babies, and that is a decision I made easily, happily, with virtually no trauma or conflict. I have no desire to be pregnant again; I don't miss the baby stage. But all day today, as I've been settling fights and picking up toys, I've flashed back to the intensity of that body memory. The pain of childbirth I can't recall, but the sensation of a baby's head pressing down urgently on my cervix ... My body remembers that.

Winning and Losing

2009-08-10T10:09:00.005-04:00

"I have to win!" Pie panted as we ran along the beach last weekend in an impromptu game of tag. "I have to win, or else I might ... lose!"

Winning and losing is a concept that dawns gradually for preschoolers, I find. Pie's first exposure to it was in our games of Dora Uno last summer. At first she was thrilled just to be playing with me, but gradually her expression started to turn sour whenever I happened to win. From there we built up some strategies - if you lose, I explained, just play again. Maybe you'll win next time. In recent months, Pie has become simultaneously more competitive and a slightly better loser: instead of sulking or refusing to play, she dives into the next round with a renewed determination to beat me.

Sore losing is like an allergic response - it doesn't flare up on one's first exposure, and each additional exposure prompts a more intense response. There is a stage in toddlerhood where games are pure activity; children are too young to understand the rules or even the object of the game, so instead of taking turns catching fish and then counting their catch to see who wins, they simply cooperate, arranging the fish into families and then taking everyone on a picnic.

Once children are able to play organized games, competitiveness begins to emerge, but it's still focused on process rather than the end result. Three-year-old soccer is a perfect demonstration of this principle. Not all the kids have grasped the concept yet: many of them are still wandering off to pick dandelions or enthusiastically kicking the ball into their own net. But even among the most competitive, the ones who consistently and skilfully score all the goals, there is no urge to keep score, no need to find out who won at the end of the game. By age five, though, the scorekeeping urge has begun to take over. "You guys are really good!" one of the parents said at Bub's last soccer game.

"Yeah," the goalie replied modestly, "the green team has all the best players."

One of the things I enjoy about Bub is his excellent sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is, perhaps, the wrong word, since it implies someone who is actually willing to participate rather than lying down in the middle of the field or gathering kids from the opposing team to show them the workings of his Ben Ten Omnitrix. But Bub has a genuine and disarming ability to rejoice in others' success. "You won!" he'll exclaim excitedly at the end of a game, adding as an afterthought, "I guess that means I lose!"

I was thus a bit surprised the other day when he was playing a game of roll-the-dice with Pie. It was Balderdash, actually, but without the cards or definitions, a simple game of moving pieces around the board to see who would reach the letter Z first. Bub won the first round and Pie, a veteran of numerous rounds of Dora Uno, cheerfully proposed a second game. When Pie won the second round, however, Bub melted down with startling rapidity and abandon.

Bub is a less experienced game-player than Pie, having until recently resisted activities that involve being told and/or shown what to do. He has yet to acquire the strategies that Pie has developed to cope with the agony of defeat. This was by no means his first experience of losing a game, however. I think what is new is his realization that the alternative to winning is losing, and that the person who loses is the loser.

All of this is developmentally normal and no cause for concern, but what I am struck by is the evidence of my own maternal naivete. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the autistic narrator explains, "I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can't tell lies."

It's a comical moment in the novel because Christopher's mother is such a cliche, crediting her son with virtues he does not really possess. This passage takes an attribute that sets Christopher apart from the norm and combines it with a maternal response that is nearly universal. What is more, readers almost universally share Christopher's mother's naivete. It doesn't matter how clearly Christopher explains his condition - readers are still willing to credit his innocence to him as righteousness.

It's something we do with our children as well, a biological imperative perhaps, an interpretive error with direct ties to the continuation of the species. We are charmed by the honesty of toddlers, even when technically we realize that they are not yet old enough to engage in deliberate deception. We delight in a two-year-old's capacity for living in the moment even though it merely reflects her inability to anticipate or conceptualize the future.

Bub has in some ways remained innocent longer than other children his age - longer, even, than Pie whose social awareness is acute. He hasn't learned yet to be jealous, to compare his possessions with those of his neighbour. He hasn't learned yet to temper his enthusiasm, to crack jokes at others' expense. He will learn these things, I know, just as he has already begun to learn the power of the words "I hate you" or "I don't want to be your friend." Like all other children, he has to learn to be worse before he can learn to be better. But in the meantime there is something shining and irresistible about his excitement when someone gives him candy - Bub hates candy, but he loves giving it to his sister. "Do you think Pie will like this?" he'll ask excitedly as he hurries over to give it to her, and I can't help admiring in him the purity of heart that so few adults are able to achieve.

Notes From the Beach

2009-08-04T11:29:00.003-04:00

My grandmother raised two sons in a house as big as this cottage: two bedrooms, one bathroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen just big enough to fit a table in the middle. It is, technically, all that a family of four needs, and both the best and worst thing about it is that you can hear one another all the time.
Taking a four- and five-year-old to the beach for the weekend is significantly easier than taking, say, a two- and three-year-old, mainly because they no longer want to be on the beach every single second of the day. They can dig in the sand beside the cottage while I wash up the breakfast dishes without succumbing all at once to the siren song of the lake and flying down the path down to the water, their pyjamas fluttering behind them.
Bub, while out for a sail with his grandfather on a windy day: "There's nothing in the Bakugan handbook about GIANT WAVES!" (Bub is capable now of original speech, but he still thoroughly enjoys the opportunity to pull an apt quote from a book or TV show when the opportunity arises.)
The children gave every evidence of enjoying themselves on our beach holiday, diving into their sand-digging, ice-cream-eating, and wave-jumping duties with gusto, but Bub nevertheless kept a careful eye on the schedule. "We're going home tomorrow, Mama!" he informed me Sunday morning, "and then we're never coming back here again." I half suspected him of missing his TV and computer, but when asked what was so great about home, the best he could do was to say, "We got a new house, and we pretended that it was our home, and we called it, 'The New House.'" This time last year, we sent the kids to the cottage with their grandparents while we unpacked from the move. I think Bub was enjoying himself this year, but he was anxious, wanting to check that his home was still here, the same as ever.
This is the first time since we moved that I've been away from home long enough for the house to feel a bit strange and new upon my return. I am enjoying afresh the softness of the carpets under my feet, the quantity of space and silence as we settle in today to a day of doing absolutely nothing.

Then and Now

2009-07-28T15:07:00.003-04:00

A year ago ...

Now:

A month ago ...

Now:

Four years ago ...

Now (well, two days ago, to be exact):

My house is a year old, my lawn is a week old, and my wee girl is four. All three are beautiful, high-maintenance, and a source of endless delight. Happy (belated) birthday, little Pie.

How My Son Asks For Breakfast

2009-07-22T09:21:00.004-04:00

Bub: Mama, click on the one you want! Cheerios...
Special K...
Or a glass of milk!
Me: Um, Cheerios?

Bub: (encouragingly) Try again. Click on another picture.

Me: A glass of milk.

Bub: Try again. Better luck next time!

Me: How about some Special K?

Bub: Correct! You got the right answer!

Intimations of Mortality

2009-07-07T11:33:00.004-04:00

Occasionally, I have that dream where suddenly my teeth start falling out. I clutch my mouth, trying to catch them and force them back in, horrified by the sudden, unexpected loss of so necessary and useful a part of my body. I've been told this is a common nightmare, and I've always assumed that it is a haunting reminder of our mortality, our sheer helplessness in the face of our bodies' slow and inevitable decay.

This, roughly, has been Bub's reaction to his first loose tooth. He was morose and subdued all day Sunday, but our first hint of the reason for his mood came during dinner, when he bit into a pickle and suddenly let out a wail of anguish. His bottom middle tooth was tilting wildly back and forth, and Bub was grief-stricken at the news that it was going to come out.

"I love my teeth!" he wailed. "I need my teeth! I just want them to go back to normal!"

Adult attempts at reassurance proved to make matters worse. "I lost my teeth when I was your age," hubby assured him. "And look what I've got now!" Bub took one look at his giant grin and let out another shriek of despair.

"You know what's worse than losing your teeth?" my father-in-law asked. "Losing your hair!" Bub quickly raised a hand to his head and tugged on his hair to make sure it was still firmly rooted, tears tumbling down his cheeks. It was a half hour at least before he could be calmed sufficiently to choke down a bit of applesauce for his supper.

Like everything about Bub, this reaction seems both unusual and eminently reasonable. He is concerned less about the pain or inconvenience of the missing tooth than about the broader implications. His comfortable, friendly body, so apparently stable and unchanging, has betrayed him. He does not fully grasp the meaning of death, but he is glimpsing its hideous visage every time he wobbles that tooth with his tongue. Mutability and change are his enemies already, but now they are hitting closer to home, an invasion that is deeply unsettling. When I look at his tear-stained face I find myself thinking of cultures without dentistry where the loss of one's teeth (in old age rather than youth) means bidding a final farewell to food.

This most ordinary childhood rite of passage would be comical and endearing if it weren't so sad. After one joyful week of summer vacation, Bub is depressed. "It's a no good, very bad day," he announced this morning before dragging his feet to the breakfast table.

At swimming lessons, though, we finally caught a break. Less than forty-eight hours after the first wobble, Bub's tooth came out in the pool. Bub was thrown but cheerful, especially when we explained that the tooth fairy will still come, even though the tooth itself is somewhere at the bottom of the pool. The wobbly tooth gone, Bub's spirit is rising to the task of embracing the new, big-boy reality that these bodies aren't ours for keeps.

The Power of No

2009-06-30T08:08:00.004-04:00

"Stop following me!"

"I'm playing by myself. You're not my friend."

"Go away. I don't want you."

These are the phrases that punctuate Bub's play lately. Every so often I have to barge in and mop up the Pie's heartbroken tears as Bub flexes his muscles, experimenting with the newly discovered power of rejection.

It's a skill he's learned the hard way, in the piranha pool of the McDonald's PlayPlace Friday afternoon, when he spent half an hour playing enthusiastically, happily, with a pair of slightly bigger boys who plotted strategies to get rid of him, like telling him there was pizza at the bottom of the slide. "Pizza?" Bub exclaimed delightedly, and then raced down to gobble up the imaginary snack before rejoining his "friends," who I could hear grumbling, "Does he have to keep following us all the time?"

I looked on, paralyzed by the tunnel-structures that make direct intervention difficult, if not impossible. The younger of the two boys seemed friendly enough, but the older boy scowled at Bub, shoving him out of the way whenever he tried to join in. Bub took all of this as playful roughhousing, reacting only when the older boy turned to him and said, in a serious tone, "Stop following us. We don't want you."

"Oh! Sorry!" Bub replied immediately, scampering off to the opposite end of the PlayPlace. Moments later a howl of pain went up from somewhere in the bowels of the tunnel structure. "You stay away from me, you dangerous boys!" Bub yelled. When he emerged, clutching his arm, the younger boy confirmed that the bigger one had hit him. It's hard to say how Bub would have reacted to the "Stop following us" remark by itself, but the physical attack left no doubt in his mind. He had been rejected, violently, by dangerous yet compellingly powerful adversaries.

The post I would have written on Friday about this incident would have focused on my bewildering realization that motherly love doesn't actually help all that much in the face of peer rejection. Bub and I had been having a wonderful morning. He had been putting on a clinic in cute remarks; I had spent the morning exchanging amused glances with other adults as Bub received his Ice Age II: Dawn of the Dinosaurs toy with the words, "I'm a lucky man!" or greeted the little girl at the next table with the words, "I'm so happy to meet you!" Bub is a happy, extraverted child. His teachers rave about how polite he is; adults are invariably charmed by his artless optimism. Unfortunately, what works with grown-ups does not necessarily work with peers. Perhaps I should be teaching him to greet new acquaintances by pretending to fart on them.

As traumatic as I found Friday's drive-by bullying, I couldn't quite shake the glow from the rest of the morning, my gratitude and pleasure in the companionable little chap my grouchy baby has grown into. And it seemed startling, somehow, to remember how little my own pangs of childhood rejection were relieved by the balm of motherly love.

After three days of watching Bub process his feelings by rejecting his sister, I'm less interested in my own trauma than in his mysterious learning processes. Learning to recognize when you're being rejected is an important social skill. Even more important, perhaps, is figuring out what to do with that experience. Before my very eyes, my son has become ever-so-slightly less trusting, visibly determined to do the rejecting before he can be rejected again. It strikes me that the most magical and unlikely moment in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is not the owl mail or Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, but rather Harry's decision, after a lifetime of being bullied, not to join Draco's incipient gang of bullies but to befriend the underdog Ron instead.

Grouch

2009-06-11T08:34:00.004-04:00

I am very cross right now. Here's why:

1) Several months ago, I signed my kids up for soccer, having been promised (a) that they would be on the same team, and (b) that Bub's friend Jake would also be on their team. I had visions of warm summer evenings, sitting around with Jake's mom on a blanket and eating the kids' watermelon while they ran around on the field. Instead, Pie and Bub were placed in entirely separate leagues, and although the two leagues play on the same night, they are in opposite corners of the high school field, so I sit by myself watching one team while hubby sits by himself watching the other team. Meanwhile, Jake's mom hangs out with all our other friends who signed up late but managed to be placed on the same team.

2) I have so had it with soccer already. The universal consensus (and by "universal" I mean "the consensus between my husband and my mother") is that this makes me a bad mother, unwilling to sacrifice an hour of my time once or twice a week so that my children can Get Exercise and Have Fun. What I see, on Monday and Wednesday nights, is not children having fun. It is children being miserable and being forced by parents to "get back on the field" with arguments like "we paid good money for this" and "if you don't get back out there we're not coming back" and "if you don't start playing right now we're not getting any ice cream!" Why, exactly, are we doing this again?

3) Several months ago, I signed Pie up for kindergarten, filling out multiple forms both at the school and at day-care so that Pie can be placed in a morning class, with on-site care after school. Then, a few weeks ago, with no warning or consultation with anyone, the principal decided to scrap the morning and afternoon classes and move all kindergarten classes to the alternate day system. Not Mondays, Wednesdays and alternate Fridays or anything like that - alternate day: Monday, Wednesday, Friday one week; Tuesday and Thursday the next. As far as I can tell, nobody except the principal actually likes this system, but as an added bonus, Pie has been assigned to a class that conflicts with the on-site day-care, so every other day we have to drop her off at the Catholic school on the other side of town, while all her friends from day-care this year remain together in the on-site class.

4) The courses I've been offered to teach for the fall are in conflicting time slots, and after two weeks I am still unable to get any clear information about whether the schedule can be modified. Textbook orders are due on Monday, and I still don't know for sure which courses I'm teaching or what my schedule will be.

Why must I continually be subjected to minor inconveniences? All I ask is for sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their heads!

Spring Fever

2009-05-24T09:05:00.004-04:00

I'm restless, lately. My days are busy, so much so that I've been finding it a bit overwhelming when the weekend, also, is filled with plans: a trip out of town to visit friends, an outing to "Family Camp" to toast marshmallows and watch fireworks while huddling around the fire to escape the freezing-cold temperatures. It's a relief, almost, when plans get cancelled due to the inevitable sickness of one of the children (in the last week and a half, for instance, there have been only two days when all four members of my family were healthy). But that relief is followed, almost instantly, by restlessness. I can smell other people's barbecues, hear their children playing on the lawn, and it feels like I'm missing something, that life is happening somewhere, out there, and I'm stuck inside reading magazines, grading essays, and stroking my children's feverish brows.

I never feel this way during the winter. Winter provides a splendid, blanket permission to do nothing. There is no pressure to seek excitement or fill the days with activity. I may be vaguely aware that other families are out there skiing or tobogganing, but mostly I'm content to shrug my shoulders at such madness. A cup of hot chocolate and a good round of Guitar Hero are all I need to keep me happy.

Spring, on the other hand, seems to transform me into a glum thirteen-year-old, cringing in embarrassment at the dullness of my life, even though there's no one around to see it except my inner audience of imaginary spectators, that group of old high-school frenemies who pop up in my consciousness now and then to pass judgment on the narrow predictability of my life.

Part of the problem, this year, is that we still have no grass. Our builder promised us sod and a paved driveway somewhere around the end of May, but as the end of May approaches with nothing but the occasional breeze to disturb the knee-high weeds surrounding our house, I'm becoming increasingly agitated. I can look out my windows at the outdoor world, but there's a sea of mud and weeds between me and it.

On the other side of that barrier lie the normal people: the ones whose children ride bikes up and down their paved driveways, whose backyards feature things like swingsets and decks. My children seem to share my own ineptitude for outdoor life: they can't quite seem to get the hang of their bicycles, preferring to squabble over whose turn it is to ride the toddler trike. They show up to the first soccer practice of the year, the only kids wearing plain runners instead of soccer cleats and shinpads. But oh wait, that's me again, the one for whom the world beyond my doorstep is a foreign land, one I visit from time to time, but without a map and not speaking the language.

Praise Junkie

2009-05-23T10:35:00.002-04:00

"You thrive on praise," my husband accused last night. It's true. There are few things I enjoy more than praise.

That's why I'm so fortunate to have a son who is not afraid to dish out a few wholehearted compliments now and then. After I helped him with something this morning he turned to me and said, "Thanks mom. You're really great."

I must have looked as pleased as I felt because he went on to elaborate: "You're really good at wiping bums!"

You Go to School to Learn, Not for a Fashion Show

2009-05-19T09:18:00.003-04:00

Incarnation

2009-05-11T09:04:00.003-04:00

My three-year-old daughter doesn't like God.

Thanks to my inept attempts at early-childhood religious education, she seems to regard him as a kind of creepy intruder who hangs around in her bedroom. "I don't want him here!" she scowled when I explained that God is everywhere, even right here in her room. Omnipresence, apparently, is not her favourite doctrine.

Invisibility is also a problem. We've been in the habit of nightly prayer for quite some time now, but only recently has Pie realized that "saying prayers" means "talking to God." She is not pleased.

"But what does God look like?" she demands. I am tempted to foster this instinct of idolatry and reply, "He is pink. And fluffy." Instead I embark upon an explanation of incorporeality. "But," I add, grasping at straws, "did you know that God invented pink? He invented pink knowing that you, Pie, would like it!" We're on stronger ground here, so I add some references to flowers, rainbows, and sunsets, all created by God especially for her. (I'm willing to permit a little egocentrism if it will foster her acceptance of theism.)

But we're moving onto shaky ground. I am impressed, in a way, with Pie's insistence that she will not love or pray to a God she doesn't know. Even peer pressure is of no avail: when all the kids in Sunday School made cards saying, "God loves me," I asked Pie if God loved her. She shook her head adamantly. She can't love God, she explains, because she still doesn't know who he is.

I can't recall having any such reservations as a child. I accepted that God loved me and was extremely useful at times when I was scared of big dogs. I never demanded proof of his nature before inviting him into my heart. Pie is of a much more suspicious nature. This God who creeps around people's rooms uninvited seems a bit of a shady character - someone who seems an awful lot like a stranger, and she knows better than to talk to strangers.

She has anticipated a key question all religious believers must face. Who is this God you worship? And what makes you think that he is worth worshipping?

God, the inventor of rainbows and butterflies, must also inevitably become God, inventor of cancer and tsunamis. The God we infer from the world as we know it is not the same God I worship. The central claim of my faith is that the world around us is a most imperfect reflection of the God who created it, that the touchstone for our knowledge of God must always be Christ's claim that "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

So we pulled out the children's Bible again last night, and I read Pie the story of Mary and Martha (she likes that one because there are women in it), and the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus she will grudgingly accept. He is a man and an adult, as alien to her as the first-century Galilean must in some ways be to us all. Sin and atonement are doctrines far beyond her reach, as are incarnation and immortality. She can begin only with a man who, when approached by an irate Martha, chose not to make Mary run along and do some housework.

Superpowers

2009-05-05T12:59:00.000-04:00

If you could read my mind, would you?

If you possessed the power of mind control, would you use it for the good of society, or would you consider such use to violate a fundamental human right?

Screenwriters and novelists seem to be of two minds about these important ethical questions. In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien displays a lively awareness of the moral dangers posed by superpowers. In The Hobbit, for instance, Bilbo's ring of invisibility must be handled with care. Almost as soon as it falls into his hands, Bilbo is tempted to take advantage of it. He resists the urge to kill Gollum under cover of invisibility, but he can't quite overcome the temptation to sneak up on his friends the dwarves and then take full credit for his amazing ability to evade detection.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, can be entrusted with an Invisibility Cloak with no real danger to his moral well-being. He uses it to circumvent Hogwarts' rules and regulations, especially those regarding curfew, but he is never seriously tempted to become a bully or a sneak.

Mind-reading must be an even more dangerous superpower, as mind-readers become accustomed to a routine violation of the most fundamental boundaries of personhood and privacy. On Heroes, Matt Parkman seems to have some ability to control his power: in order to get into the minds of his enemies (or girlfriend), he has to do a little squinty glance, jutting his chin out for emphasis. (Facial expressions are extremely important on that show: time-travel, for instance, is linked to squeezing your eyes shut and scrunching your nose.) It is taken for granted that Parkman is entitled to use his power. Certainly when bad guys are chasing him (as they generally are), he has to use whatever means are at his disposal to evade capture. Using mind control to get his ex-wife to remarry him, however, is taboo. There are some limits on the legitimate use of superpowers, but much more emphasis is placed in the show on the moral imperative of tolerance: the true ethical dilemma is not for the Heroes to use their powers responsibly but for the rest of society to accept and tolerate their presence. There is, of course, the standard choice between good guys and bad guys, but so long as you're not slicing people's skulls open, you're good.

If fantasy writers tend, as a group, to reject a wholesale ban on the use of superpowers, they also tend to avoid the opposite ethical position: that those with superpowers have an obligation to use them for the good of humanity. In the Twilight novels, for instance, Edward has both superhuman strength and the capacity to read minds. At one point in his life (or, rather, his undeath), he was a crimefighter, tracking down murderers and sucking their blood. Edward now rejects this uneasy compromise between appetite and conscience and leads a vegetarian lifestyle. Even when Bella is being stalked by would-be rapists, Edward recognizes a moral imperative to restrain his anger but does not consider himself bound to use his abilities to prevent similar crimes from being committed against other victims. In Meyer's Edward's-eye-view version of Twilight she makes it clear that Edward arranges for the would-be rapist to be conveniently arrested, but this brief foray into crimefighting is a sideline rather than a full-time vocation. Indeed, at no time in the original novel are readers asked to consider whether it is right for Edward to spend his time pretending to attend high school and spooning with Bella rather than eliminating the various horrific crimes that he is uniquely equipped to prevent.

That omission - both on Meyer's part and on most readers' - reflects, perhaps, the general principle that our moral obligations are influenced by proximity. My strongest moral duties are to my family; beyond that I have a duty to those with whom I have a relationship either personally or professionally. This circumscription of my moral duties reflects my own limitations of time and resources. But superpowers tilt the scales a bit. What if I have abilities that no one else has? Can I spend my time playing chess and composing piano pieces, acknowledging obligations only to my family? Or do I have a responsibility to do for the rest of humanity the things that only I am equipped to do?

What do you think are the ethical obligations of mind-readers? Would any use of such power be an unjustifiable violation of privacy? Would such a power incur an obligation to prevent crime? Or are mind-readers entitled to live their own lives just like the rest of us?

My Town

2009-04-27T19:07:00.002-04:00

I love it here.

All I Ever Wanted

2009-04-25T06:30:00.003-04:00

Hubby and I have signed up for a marriage course at our church for the next eight weeks. Our pastor's husband is a great cook, and each session includes a full meal, including non-alcoholic girly drinks when we arrive, main course, and dessert served to each couple on a tray with tea and coffee. Plus, I get to force my husband to talk about his feelings for three hours every Friday night until June.

One of the assignments last night was to think of a, quote, special time in our marriage. This wasn't a go-in-the-corner-and-talk assignment - it was just a sit-in-your-seats-and-talk-for-five-minutes bit. That's how I know that hubby and I were not the only ones totally unable to recall a special time in our marriage within a five-minute period.

Part of the problem was a lack of clarity about the purpose of the exercise. Is it an attempt to revitalize the marriage by hearkening back to our dating days? I am a big proponent of that - one of my biggest incentives for going was the news that each couple would begin by explaining how they met. John Gottman claims that one measure of the health of a marriage is how much pleasure a couple takes in telling their story. I adore reliving the courtship days - but it seemed a bit pathetic, somehow, that when asked to recall a special time in our marriage our first instinct was to think of a time before we were married.

If we focus only on the time since the wedding, the natural candidate for a, quote, special time in our marriage would be a vacation. Hubby and I are somewhat impaired here since we have haven't really had a vacation since our honeymoon. But again I object to the premise. Vacations are fun, and much more easily remembered than ordinary day-to-day life, but I have always found them to be ever so slightly empty. There is the sightseeing, the forced and expensive fun, but nothing you do on vacation has much long-term meaning. This is most evident when you're a teenager vacationing with your family. Even the most mind-numbingly boring day of ordinary high-school life is alive with certain possibilities; each action has a ripple effect on a whole network of social relationships. Vacations are detached from all that, unless you happen to go to Italy with your high-school travel club, in which case you get the statue of David and all the glee and anguish of adolescent social interaction, just in a more impressive European setting.

Vacations are all very well in their place, but to me the fabric of a marriage has to be at home, in the dailiness of ordinary life. Of course, I can't really call to mind a special time in our marriage if by that I mean a completely ordinary time in our marriage. Maybe it was the day I poured hubby a really big bowl of Rice Krispies. It was a bedtime snack, and the box was almost empty, so I poured the whole thing in until the bowl was full to the brim and overflowing, and when hubby saw it I laughed so hard that to this day I occasionally ask him, "Do you remember the time I gave you a really big bowl of Rice Krispies?" and start cracking up all over again.

In the play Our Town, Emily Webb has the chance to relive a single day in her life. All her fellow graveyard inhabitants urge her not to do it, and when she will not be persuaded, the play's Narrator tells her to pick the most ordinary, insignificant day she can come up with. The experience will be far more painful than she realizes; he's trying to shelter her from the pain of regaining, for a moment, everything she has lost. But their advice is misguided. From the grave, it's not my trips to Italy I will miss, or even my days at the beach. It's oatmeal for breakfast and reading the newspaper, sitting at the table doing the crossword while my children pester me for crayons and Play-Doh. It's grading exams at the dining room table and meeting hubby for lunch at Coffee Culture. If my life were suddenly snatched away from me and I could have only one day of it back, I'd choose the most ordinary day of all, not to spare myself the pangs of longing but to cling on to the part of my life that was the most real.

Teflon

2009-04-17T09:17:00.004-04:00

Since Good Friday, I've been brewing up a post on guilt - or lack thereof, perhaps, because guilt is something I very rarely feel. I've always been comforted by Mr. Bennet's conversation with Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice. Realizing that Lydia's elopement was caused primarily by his neglect, Mr. Bennet blames himself:

"You must not be too severe upon yourself," replied Elizabeth.

"You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."

That has been exactly my experience of guilt: though I may experience it from time to time, it is transitory. I don't necessarily have to talk myself out of it, or do something to dispel it - I can just wait awhile and I find that it evaporates of its own accord.

But in spite of Mr. Bennet's ironic reflections on how prone human nature is to excessive guilt, I know that there are people who are habitually too severe upon themselves. My mother is one of them. In fact, one theory I have about the origins of my mental Teflon is that a lifetime of listening to my mother beating herself up about things that are not actually her fault has made me skeptical about the usefulness of guilt. (My other theory is that guilt levels are purely hereditary, and I got mine from my father.)

Related to my ability to deflect guilt is my ability to convince myself that my character flaws are actually strengths. In this case, my inborn resistance to guilt has a number of positive side effects. I do not have to engage in destructive guilt-avoidance practices like blaming the victim. I am not traumatized by or resentful of the guilt trips inflicted upon me by others. (Well, okay, I am traumatized and resentful, but surely not AS traumatized and resentful as I would be if I were more guilt-prone.) Of course, I also do not have the life-changing remorse that would allow me to emerge as a much better person ... but you can't have everything, can you?

The mental Teflon that protects me against guilt also has other uses. It convinces me that my tummy roll is actually invisible to the naked eye when concealed by a long shirt. It allows me to ignore the students falling asleep during my lectures so that I remember only the alert, engaged faces of the two students who spent the class doing something other than catching up on Facebook.

A bit of amateur dabbling in psychology suggests that these are fairly widespread traits. Most people consider themselves to be above-average drivers. Men, at least, habitually overestimate how attractive they are to the opposite sex. Selective awareness seems to be the norm rather than the aberration.

Perhaps what makes this quality feel unusual to me is that it's not the norm among MY people: the bloggers, the book-readers, the introspectors. My mother, I think, is more typical of people like us. She's the kind of person who, when someone is rude to her, dwells for hours on what she did to provoke it. She lives with a general free-floating guilt about not doing enough, and not doing what she does well enough. She is one of the most beautiful 65-year-old women you will ever see, but when she looks in the mirror, all she sees are jowls.

Which kind are you? Guilt-proof or guilt-prone? And where do you think those traits come from? Is it in our DNA or the product of our upbringing?

Portents

2009-04-13T16:12:00.003-04:00

By the time I noticed the conversation, Bub was in what Bridget Jones would call full autowitter: "... and there's Guilmon, and Terriermon, and Renemon! And there's Kabuterimon and Megakabuterimon..." The recipient of this monologue about Digimon (digital monsters) was a girl who looked about nine or ten years old. As soon as she could, she extracted herself from the conversation and joined her brother on the swings, where moments later I heard the two of them trading "mons" back and forth. "That's so retarded!" the girl sneered.

"So, you spend your Saturday afternoons hanging around the park bullying five-year-olds," I said to her. "Wow, you're so cool!"

Actually, I said nothing, but I prepared sarcastic remarks so that I'd have them at the ready if her mockery came within Bub's notice.

*****

We were getting ready to leave church when Anna rushed out. "I have to say goodbye to Bub!" she cried, blonde curls bouncing as she leaned over Pie's carseat to tell him goodbye properly.

Anna is in Bub's class at school, a just-turned-five junior kindergartener, and when her mother asked her the other day about Marshall, another little boy in her class, Anna scornfully replied, "He's not my boyfriend! Bub is my boyfriend!"

*****

At kindergarten pick-up the other day, a little boy came over with a skinned knee. Bub was most solicitous. "Maybe you need a Band-Aid!" he suggested. (Though not addicted to Band-Aids anymore, Bub is still a firm believer in their efficacy.) Devin thought he'd be okay without a Band-Aid.

"Do you know what happens when you hurt your knee?" Bub asked. "It turns into a scab, and then the scab comes off and it's all better!" This is recently acquired knowledge, applicable to many life situations. I'm pleased to see my son tailoring his knowledge-sharing to the needs of the recipient.

*****

"High-five!" Derek hollers, running up to Bub as we exit the school lot. Bub slaps his upraised hand, and as we head toward the car we hear the thudding of running feet behind us. "Another high-five!" Derek shouts again, darting in front of us to get in one last farewell before we go.

*****

All the professionals at Bub's placement meeting agree: he should go on to Grade One. He should be with an E.A. (emphatically), but in a Grade One classroom. I know that he is ready academically, though perhaps not behaviorally or socially. What bothers me is that most of Bub's friendships are with the junior kindergarten kids, who hail him as one of their own. The SK kids are kind, but warier. They notice his quirks, whereas the younger grade is too young and inexperienced to care.

One rationale for moving Bub up a grade is that keeping him back only delays the inevitable: eventually, his peers will all be old enough to notice that he's different. A more optimistic rationale recognizes that Bub is rapidly closing the gap between himself and his peers: it would be senseless to hold him back because of a few mild quirks that he is rapidly overcoming. My concern is that he falls somewhere in between these two interpretations, that he is capable of fitting in but would do so much more easily if he were the oldest kid in the class rather than the youngest.

If I knew that another year of kindergarten were the right thing for Bub I would fight for it, even against the advice of his teacher, principal, and resource worker. But I don't know - so I signed on the dotted line, agreeing to a placement in a Grade One classroom. I even bought the official graduation t-shirt. The propaganda has already started in the classroom - the SKs are being groomed for next year, for the big leap up into the world of desks and worksheets. So far Bub thinks it sounds a lot like camp. I haven't yet told him otherwise.

Is This Thing Still On?

2009-04-09T14:26:00.003-04:00

For most of my adult life I've assumed that I have certain inherent personality traits: optimism, resilience, a degree of creativity. But it turns out that really all that time I was just healthy.

A month ago I was driving home from work with a bagful of spring clothes for myself and the Pie, and I was brewing up a post about the joy of wearing things that look like candy. I used to have these drop earrings that looked exactly like pieces of Gold Rush gum, only in pink, purple, and blue as well as yellow. (Where did those earrings go? I certainly never threw them out.) The half-hour country drive between work and home affords plenty of time for mental composition, so I wrote the post in my head: One of the joys of having a daughter, I reflected, is that I have a good excuse to wear candy-clothes. Pie likes to wear matching outfits (colours, really - I have not yet succumbed to the mother-daughter clothing vortex of doom), so when I'm buying her sets of 3T capris and t-shirts for the summer it's easy to throw in a raspberry-pink ruffly shirt for me. I didn't always appreciate the pink side of girls' clothing, but now I'm a convert. Especially in springtime I like to plunge myself into juicy shades of lime and berry.

Thus far had I gotten in my composition process when I arrived home, but then life took over: I had to pick up Bub from kindergarten, buy groceries and put them away, slice up chicken breasts for supper and stir-fry them with korma sauce. Then there was all the clean-up: rinse the dishes, wipe the counters, bathe the children and tuck them into bed. The fact that I casually do all these things every evening is not always as astonishing to me as it should be. Each day requires gargantuan amounts of energy, organization, and discipline. And at around 8:00 pm that night, my energy fell away from me, and it didn't come back for about three weeks.

It was only the flu, though I like to call it "the influenza" because it sounds much more impressive. It was all the usual stuff: fever, achiness, coughing. But what I wasn't prepared for was how totally it obliterated my personality.

The physical symptoms weren't that bad: they were not unpleasant enough, by themselves, to warrant much more than a few days in bed and a nightly mug of Neo Citron. But the psychological symptoms were terrible. It was as if all the beauty were drained from the world. I was not sad or depressed, but I was incapable of registering pleasure in anything from the sunny weather to the Saturday-morning crossword. When, two weeks later, I glanced at the yellow cowbell on my bedside table and felt that familiar flicker of pleasure at its colour I was jolted by the strangeness of the sensation. It was like sitting down to do a math assignment after a long summer holiday, that feeling of exercising mental muscles that had long been out of commission.

It's taken me awhile to come back to my blog because I needed to be myself again for awhile before I could slip back into that comfortable illusion of being me. It's easy to rationalize away that stolid, unimaginative sick person I was a few weeks ago as a temporary aberration, to identify my real self as the norm from which my sick self temporarily departed. But it's harder to shake the realization that much of what I think of as essential to who I am is really just a physiological side effect of a healthy state over which I have no control.

Hot Tip

2009-03-04T09:06:00.004-05:00

I found this great decorating tip in Canadian Home & Country magazine: decorate your bathroom by tucking paint chips into the mirror frame. Technically, this tip wasn't in the actual magazine: it was in the Febreze advertising insert. You might wonder if it's really a good idea to derive one's unique decor ideas from a product that's used primarily to eradicate the odour of barf from one's couch. On the other hand, if there's anyone who SHOULD be using paint chips as a decor statement, it's me.

So I picked out a few paint chips, mostly colours I had wanted to use in my home but didn't: Kennebunkport Green, Nacho Cheese, Roxbury Caramel. Not only do they add a festive splash of colour to a bathroom that's otherwise just a little bit dull, but the mirror is a perfect spot for them, a place where it's perfectly natural (irresistible, actually) to lean forward and read the names on the chips.

When hubby got home, he confirmed that my new decorating statement looks utterly ridiculous. Pie even got into the act, angrily pulling down all my chips the other morning after she finished washing her hands. But that's the beauty of it: you can swap out new paint chips all the time, recreating your colour scheme on the fly. The real question is not "Why do you have paint chips in your mirror?" but rather "Is there any limit to how far you can take this inspired design idea?"

So far, I've limited myself to a 5"x7" frame on the dresser in my bedroom (that's Moccasin, Brick Red, and Whitall Brown you see there). But I'm just getting started.