Monday, Oct 26, 2009 | Chores |
Attempting routine after a decidedly not-normal week, with ambivalent results. Three children returned to school, one jolly (the smallest) and excited about sub day, one with well-brushed hair, and one feeling queasy about entering school after a week off. I suggested coming to pick him up early, but he thought that would just be weird. I contemplated calling the school mid-way through the day to ask his teacher how he’s getting on, then realized that would be even weirder. From his point of view.
After a week of excitement and mealtimes askew and late nights and visitors we all feel unmoored, rattling about, dithering, sleepy. I am staring at a handscrawled list of to-dos, on which “blog” does not appear. This is what CJ’s doing on the floor beside me, chatting quietly to himself. Just noticed I’ve left a package of frozen hamburger thawing on the counter in a puddle of bacteria-laden mush. Sheesh.
And now the kid is throwing things. This is my cue to depart for the out-in-the-world errands that need doing, while it’s just the two of us, and we have a vehicle at our disposal.
Monday, Oct 19, 2009 | Chores, Sick |
The pink pajama-ed “little” ones. Relaxing post-breakfast, before school. Block building morning: three-stories tall. Food-spilling CJ. This was followed by much vacuuming. And then by more spilling. Eldest now back in bed feeling crummy. He took care to destroy his own creation before CJ could wreck it first.
Friday, Oct 16, 2009 | Big Thoughts, Chores, Work |
Thought of the day: obligation and responsibility make us who we are, and by living up to these, we are molded and changed by the things we choose to do. This may explain why children respond so well to routines and (small) responsibilities. Kevin and I held an impromptu, late-night parenting meeting on the weekend–initiated by Kevin, which I appreciated–and we made a master list of all the things we’d like our children to do. Such as: practice piano, set the table, clear their plates after supper, use manners, better behavior in the car, help tidy the house, clean their rooms once a week, brush teeth, wash hands. Very simple, basic stuff. The table setting routine was easily put into play: a simple rotation, one child each evening in charge of helping mama. I remind them in advance that it’s their evening, and so far the response has been cheerful. Fooey is especially pleased to be my helper. We’ve also returned to holding hands and singing a prayer before we begin serving food, as a way of pulling all of us together. And this is a very basic parenting tip, but just reminding the kids of the plan, well in advance, and repeatedly, makes everyone more open to it. Nobody likes to be told, cold, while in the middle of building a gigantic Lego ship, get your boots on we’re leaving Right Now! Much better to call out a five-minute warning … even if it means you’ll be five minutes late.
Anyway.
No photos, because I’m upstairs.
Obligation also works for grownups, too, I think. I’m terrified by the concept of retirement. Sometimes I wonder why I’m so driven, why I layer my life with extra reponsibilities away and beyond what is already required of me, and wonder what exactly I’m hoping to achieve, or even what achievement means to me, and worry I’m hiding from something inside myself–hiding by working so hard and being so busy. Um, that sentence was way too long. But conceptually, it encapsulates the inner trackings of my brain, when I get a spare moment to think Too Damn Much. Which perhaps is why I appreciate being busy, being active, doing rather than thinking. I question less, when I’m doing.
Life isn’t all about action, of course. It needs to be about contemplation, too. And even about rest. And occasionally, leisure. I’m always trying to make use of everything, every scrap of experience. I want it to be useful, somehow … educational, or fulfilling, or meaningful, or something that brings pleasure. I hope this makes me more open to experiences; but maybe it just makes me more introspective. Like, alright already, just enjoy the moment, Obscure Canlit Mama, don’t try to make it into something else!
Part of growing up has been accepting, with humour, who I am. Even while trying to alter in many minute ways, and hopefully for the better, my public and private self.
Listen, as penance for this blah-g entry, my next is going to be brief, maybe even glib, and accompanied by cute photos of my offspring.
Saturday, Sep 26, 2009 | Birth, Chores, Organizing, Reading, Writing |
I’m writing again. And that means that most spare scraps of the day are poured into that work … and not into, say, doing the dishes, prepping supper, photographing my adorable children, or blogging. Gee, I still dislike that term. But can’t think of a better one.
Saturday, so we arose late, hoping CJ would sleep in (he did, a bit, following a just-before-seven nurse), and that the other children would go downstairs and play together (they did), and that they would FEED themselves. They didn’t. Inevitably, hunger arrived, wasn’t addressed, and led to an argument between Fooey (age four) and Albus (age eight). Over Duplo. Apple-Apple, meantime, has been in the position pictured above since waking this morning, save for a brief breakfast out of bed. It is now almost eleven. She’s reading the Harry Potter series at a rate of about a book per week, and is already on book three. Surely there is poetic justice in me having a daughter who cannot remove herself from a book–I get to understand first-hand how difficult that can be to watch. I fight the urge to jump up and down waving my arms while telling her: look at this wonderful world; don’t you want to go play road hockey with your brother?; wouldn’t you like to chat or something? But she’s lost in this other place. She doesn’t even blink.
“When you’re reading, it’s like you’re almost in another world, isn’t it, Mom? It’s almost like you’re a character in the book. And then when you close the book, the world disappears.”
Yup, like magic. I get it. I hope I’ll get there again, myself. I read all day long, but not in the same way. I skim the newspaper, dash through emails, scan other people’s blogs, troll through recipe books, I read aloud to the kids, process the endless stream of info that arrives in backpacks from school, lie in bed and savour a chapter or two in a personally chosen book before sleep arrives. Much of life revolves around text. Reading isn’t dead. But falling so deeply inside a book … that feels beyond my capacity to manage right now. There isn’t enough room, enough space in the day.
:::
This morning began like most Saturday mornings. I didn’t get downstairs till almost 10, though I’d been up for several hours. I changed the sheets on four out of five beds (couldn’t budge Apple-Apple), put away bales of laundry, tidied. Experience tells me that, when working on a project, it is unwise to move to another section of the house, even for a brief errand, because another project/child/need will suck me in. Last night, Kevin and I spent about two hours, post-supper and post-dishwashing PUTTING AWAY TOYS. We worked in tandem, sorting, organizing, throwing away, moving methodically through drawers and bins and across swathes of strewn carpet. Maybe we have too many toys. Or too many toys with tiny bits. Because we have places to put everything; that’s not the problem. It’s just that everything seems to migrate, up and down, piled into baby buggies and baskets, dumped and dragged, carted and reorganized for the sake of some marvelous imaginary game that it would seem cruel and foolish not to allow. Their methods of cleaning up, though sometimes quite enthusiastically practiced, don’t match up with mine. Albus, for example, would happily organize his room according to his own ideas, and it would look “perfect” to him: there would be multiple piles stacked on dresser tops and in the middle of the floor; there would be a forest of containers, each with three or four items rattling about within. “But I like it this way, Mom!”
:::
Made it downstairs. Have now breakfasted and self-caffeinated. Laundry is on the list, as is vacuuming. Unless I get called to doula at a birth! My friend is due–was due–this Thursday past. Every time the phone rings, Kevin looks at me and I look at him–is this it?
:::
Do any of you have Sigg water bottles? If so, the company is doing a voluntary recall due to tests that showed their old liners were leaching a nasty chemical. This week, we replaced a family’s worth of rather battered bottles for pretty new ones, which have a different liner. Which will leach heaven knows what, but hey. Better than disposable.
Blue Skies Yoga and Eco-Store will exchange your bottles, no questions asked. That’s Apple-Apple’s brand-new ladybug bottle behind her in bed. Always hydrate while reading.
Thursday, Aug 13, 2009 | Backyard, Chores, Play, Summer, Swimming |
Here’s what’s happening in our yard this morning. Add in the sounds of the children yelling over the chipper, and you get the full picture.
Below, our Monday evening activity. Also better than television. Add in a popsicle and a scrounged-up frozen chocolate chip cookie or two, and Kevin’s soccer-playing night looks a whole lot more fun for this Mama.
Sunday, Aug 2, 2009 | Bicycles, Chores, Writing |
Weekends are chore times, and four busy summery weekends had passed without us being here to do the picking up. The kids’ rooms were particularly disastrous. I made several mid-week attempts, with children helping, to tidy their rooms, without getting much of anywhere. Finally, yesterday, we awoke with the gleeful knowledge that we had nowhere to go and nothing much to do. Can one clean gleefully? If you’re Obscure Canlit Mama, yes, yes, you can. There’s something so satisfying about cleaning when it’s really beyond dirty: moving furniture, organizing, purging (don’t tell the kids). Under the couch in the girls’ room I found: fuzz, fabric, dead bugs, a spider’s web with large unhatched egg, crayons, pencils, hair bands, toy cars, Little People figures, several bouncy balls, a nightgown (!), a bath toy, and that’s just what I can recall. Didn’t take any before pictures, but see above … the rooms: floors cleared, shelves tidied, everything in its place and a place for everything. It took hours. And the kids didn’t help (which was helpful in and of itself; thanks, Kevin).
After supper, we hitched up the new bike stroller–yes, we did! After contacting the manufacturer directly, Kevin discovered that the necessary parts were living in our basement (we’d had them all along). So we went for a family ride, all the way to TCBY for frozen yogurt, and then a bit further, too. After jogging with the stroller these many weeks, biking with the stroller didn’t even feel like real exercise. Which was pretty nice.
:: :: ::
Obscure Canlit Mama has news. It’s kind of good news/bad news, except I can’t separate the two. My agent called on Friday afternoon. To set the stage, we’d just gotten home from Nina’s buying club, CJ was pounding on a wok with a barbeque tong he’d dragged out of a bottom drawer, and I was preparing a baked mac-and-cheese for the kids’ supper so that Kevin and I could go out to celebrate our anniversary, so my hands were kept busy during the conversation. My agent hates to give bad news (who doesn’t?). Listen, there’s bad news and then there’s bad news. Along that spectrum, this was disappointing but not unexpected. She doesn’t think the stories will sell (to a publisher). She’s read the earlier novel version, and feels the stories leave too much out, all sorts of research and context; besides, she says, it’s grim out there and publishers aren’t buying novels these days let alone a difficult-to-sell, almost-certainly money-losing dreaded short story collection. But. She said, Let me just toss an idea out there … have you considered writing this material as a memoir?
Um. No.
She said she’d give me a few weeks to mull it over, and call back.
So, let me ask you: if you could choose, would you rather read a short story collection or, hmmm, let’s call it “creative non-fiction,” set in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, during the contra war, told from the perspective of an American child living in Managua, whose parents are peaceworkers? In other words, would you rather read what could have happened, or what really did? Be honest.
Here is the other thing my agent said (to paraphrase): You are meant to be writing, this is what you’re supposed to do.
It’s a tough thing for me to believe, sometimes. I know the work that will be involved, maybe. But I also know I could write what she’s suggesting. I could do it. And it wouldn’t have to mean giving up on the collection of stories, because the two would be quite different beasts.
The real problem is that contemplating taking on this project would be like moving that couch. What awaits beneath? Do I really want to know? And the things I’d choose to purge or to arrange on the shelf: are they even mine, or do they belong to too many other people, too?
