I've Fallen and I Still Can't Really Get Up

We're a mixed-bag of viruses over here. Eve has been stuffy and her eyes "are pretending to be waterfalls", Angus has the voice of one of Hell's lesser demons. He went to school this morning, and I picked him up at noon for an orthodontist appointment - when the receptionist heard him talk she suggested I not bring him back. I had a sore throat and bad sinuses on Tuesday morning, which suddenly morphed into the Barfing Plague on Tuesday afternoon. And my husband has somehow been dodging among the large-droplet-contagion without getting wet so far. He did have to put my socks on this morning so I could get Angus to the orthodontist, since I wrenched my back muscles so badly in the process of turning my gastrointestinal system inside-out that I could hardly move. Turns out it's almost as hard to put on someone else's socks as it is to put on someone else's glasses (if you've tried, you'll know what I mean). "What the hell are you doing? You can't just bunch them around my ankles, I'll never fit them in my boots. Okay, DON'T PULL THEM UP SO FAR, you're strangling my feet! Don't you WEAR socks? You SUCK at this!"

Yes, I am always exactly that gracious a patient.

As a result of all the germs and fatigue and shit, I haven't been able to get out to the CPAP place to get replacement filters for my machine, I haven't been able to feed my children and I haven't written anything OR read anything all week. All I've done is watch multiple, out-of-order episodes of Bones on Netflix, while undergoing this weird phenomenon that often takes place when I'm sick, whereby I develop acute feelings of loyalty and affection for a particular show that got me through some rough hours. "I have REALLY been undervaluing this show - the subtlety and lyricism! The gentle humour! The rendering of existential despair as it pertains to a traditional humanist value system! And wow, David Boreanaz has really maintained an admirable set of abs to this point in the series." I'm finding it a little hard to move on.

While I regain my strength, have a few pictures of Eve celebrating her 11th birthday and Matt's Nana's 91st (I baked the cake but forgot to buy candles, and I had a one but not a nine, so I had to turn a six upside-down). Eve was born one week before Nana's eightieth birthday, so we've always been able to figure out easily how old Nana is (Eve Plus Eighty.)

She has a cousin that lived to 98, and she figures she can top that.

I vote yes.

Book lists and being a little SAD

The charmingly-named Bunnyslippers asked if I would link to past year-end book review posts. Who are you, Bunnyslippers? I feel like I should know you. In any case, yes, yes I WILL link to past year-end book review posts.

Huh. There aren't as many as I thought.

Books read in 2010 post here.

Books read in 2011 first post here, second post here, third post here. (Last year was the first year I started dividing them into two-star, three-star and four-or-five-star posts).

So, it's February. Honestly, I think January wasn't the worst one ever. Which is mostly good, and a tiny bit bad, because since I wasn't absolutely mired in despair I was frustrated with myself for not doing more, but I didn't really fell well enough to do more, but I felt well enough to be pissed at myself for not doing more... yeah, it was a whole idiotic cycle. I joined Weight Watchers Online because my doctor said Weight Watchers is a worthwhile program but the thought of going to meetings made me want to kill myself with hot dogs sharpened into stakes. It does seem like a really sensible program, and I think the fact that it makes you aware of what you eat is great, because it's really easy to lose track, but I hate that it's made it all about numbers again. At the end of January I was briefly depressed that I hadn't lost very much weight, and then I stopped and slapped myself around and said, dude - you lost weight. In January. Quit being a putz. So then the day before my weigh-day I find myself either trying to shave points to maximize the likelihood that I'll get a lower weight the next morning, or downing half a wheel of brie out of spite. Yeah, no food issues here.

My husband is doing it with me, which opens up a whole other can of worms. It's nice to think it would be a mutually supportive thing, but honestly, all I want to do it stir heavy cream into all his food. Men lose weight faster anyway, and he's generally pretty thin, and that's NOT THE POINT, his father had a heart attack at sixty and he does need to be making healthy choices, but all I see when he eats a doughnut is him thinking "well, we'll do this together, but you're the only one who really needs to", and then I have to forcibly restrain myself from dripping turkey gravy into his mouth while he's asleep. I promise, I'm working on it.

I've hit a bit of a roadblock in CPAP usage. I usually wake up in the night and look at the clock and take off the mask if it's five a.m. or later, because then I know I've worn it for five or six hours. But for the past week or so I've woken up at three a.m. or so and realized I've already taken off the mask without realizing it. And getting up still feels like pulling myself out of quicksand, with weights on my ankles and carrying a basket of wet towels.

Then there's the fact that now it's February, and I think, yay! January's over! I will feel instantly better! Yes, NOW! No? Okay, NOW. Wait for it, wait for it...um, now? And then I remember that this always happens in February, because somehow my serotonin and dopamine levels don't respond to flipping a calendar page. Stupid neurochemicals.

Anyway. My husband reminds me periodically, and kindly, that January is to be survived, not conquered, and gives me permission to go to bed early and read or watch movies on my ipad. I started rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and after Eve watched part of one episode with me when she couldn't sleep one night she started watching it on her own. Except she was just flipping through Netflix and watching random episodes, which may or may not have resulted in me becoming unreasonably irate and hollering "you're watching Buffy ALL WRONG", but in any case she's watching it in order now.

Yeah. Whiny Wednesdays for the win.

ProphylAxis of Evil

************TMI ALERT*****************

So. I've been on the pill until recently even though I'm a couple years past forty. I always had crummy periods off the pill and, aside from the headaches which I hadn't connected with it, it worked well for me in a number of areas, so I just kept taking it. I had a doctor's appointment last week and my doctor said if I have headaches a lot (which I do), this was a good reason (in addition to being past forty) to stop taking it.

Most of the men in our circle of friends had their appointment with Dr. Weiss (yes, that is pronounced 'vice') years ago, shortly after the second or third child; all the couples felt confident that their families were complete. Matt and I remained stubbornly on the fence about a third kid for a long time. At this point, when I confess this, people ask me "are you off the fence now?", with a tone implying "if you aren't, our further friendship and your sanity might be in line for some evaluation". And yeah, we are pretty much off the fence now, although with an everlasting sense of regret, on my part at least.

But now here we are. There's no good reason this should be a big deal, and yet I can't help feeling like it's going to turn into a big deal. Should I make the appointment for him? I feel vaguely resentful when I have to make his medical appointments, but if I do at least he goes to medical appointments, whereas if I wait for him to make the appointment the appointment will not be made any time soon. Of course, I'm almost as bad at 1) remembering I need to make the appointment and 2) forcing myself to pick up the phone and make the appointment, so if I do it, it still won't be any time REALLY soon. Then there's the fact that we'll most likely have to tell our kids what's going on, which is fine, but... awkward? Oh wait - we let Eve watch the vasectomy episode of Modern Family the other day. Problem solved - I'll just tell Angus to ask her.

In the meantime, I told Matt he should pick up some condoms. We've pretty much never used condoms because of my aforementioned liking for the pill. So when he said "I think I have some" I gave him a look that contained equal amounts of "wtf?" and "Dude, you got some splainin' to do". He said "remember, after Eve was born you didn't want to go on that low estrogen birth control pill that makes you even more crazy?"

"Hon," I said gently, "Eve was born NINE AND A HALF YEARS AGO." He was dumbstruck at the notion that condoms might have an expiry date. Clearly, if I  left the responsibility for limiting this family to four in his hands, all bets were off.

So today I was in the drugstore anyway, so I figured I'd pick up some condoms.

I hate when we need toothpaste. I hate buying toothpaste. There is a ridiculously high number of kinds of toothpaste available - whitening, brightening, gel, paste, sensitivity-reducing, tartar control..... it makes me dizzy and gives me a headache and makes me think about the decay of civilization in a way I don't really want to in the oral hygiene aisle at Shoppers Drug Mart.

Condoms are worse.

In the end, I pretty much closed my eyes and grabbed a box at random and tossed it into my cart. I got to the checkout, and while I wasn't embarrassed the way I probably would have been twenty years ago, I wasn't looking to broadcast the fact that I was buying condoms. But of course, the goddamned box wouldn't scan, so the cashier slammed it over the scanner a few times and then realized it was open. She gave me a knowing look and said "I bet there aren't twenty in there anymore", which made me snort at some poor broke or bashful teenager's expense. But when I said "I'll just go grab another box" she said "well just let me check" and she pulled the ENTIRE STRIP of condoms out of the box and counted them one by one. And they were all there, so then she shoved them all back in and I paid for them. And then walked out of the store while the rest of the line applauded behind me. And came home and called Dr. Weiss.

Gratitude

Today I've decided to try channeling Harriet, whose gratitude posts I always admire and love reading. I know, I know, on my blog it should be probably be called Grattitude - I'm TRYING, people! Plus I'm only talking about drugs a little.

I am grateful for:

1) My whack-job of a daughter who turns everything into a laugh-fest. Today, after someone on YTV made a reference to helping 'old people', she said "a nicer way to say old people is 'elderlies'. It means they're wise. Well, no it doesn't, it still just means old. But it's a more sophisticated way to say it and sounds nicer."

2) My son, who is taller than me, but still wants me to tuck him in at night (which consists of holding on to the rail of his loft bed to pull myself onto the single bed under it, then leaning far enough over the rail to kiss his ear).

3) My husband, who has withstood a lot of bitching over the past week, including me asking him for Christmas present ideas for his family and then mocking, belittling and generally shooting down every single one of those ideas. Thank goodness The Oatmeal has a new book out.

4) That I had the option of choosing to stop taking the evil drug from hell, because I didn't need it to treat cancer or something else that's severe or life-threatening. People with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia often get chided for not taking their meds, and their reason is often that it makes them feel bad. After this past year, I have a deep and sympathetic (and empathetic) understanding of what they mean.

5) Pam, who is basically a happy-pill in person form, with very few adverse side effects (unless you count a little extra ass from the times we go to Suzy Q instead of the gym). We're going to the gym tomorrow. Straight to the gym. Honest.

6) Everyone who reads this blog and has been so kind and thoughtful in your comments over the past week, and every other time I fall into a drama pot-hole. You have all helped me more than I can say.

Okay, now something to cut the sweetness.

Does The Oatmeal not fucking rock so incredibly hard? I tried to make steel-cut oats today because everyone and their hairy aunt with the mole says steel-cut-oats are the freaking bomb, they don't get mushy! They give you energy! They soak up cholesterol! They never send you email chain letters! I kept waiting for all the water to be absorbed but I just got this big wet mess of oats with some burned to the bottom of the pot, with a layer of something disturbingly mucus-like on top. I stuck it in the fridge to throw out next week. The other Oatmeal is SO MUCH BETTER than steel-cut oatmeal

Grab Bag of Bad Memory Anecdotes

So clearly my sleep machine hasn't improved my memory yet. I just realized that I've been calling and emailing my husband thinking that he's still in Baltimore (where he was last week) and thinking it's weird when he doesn't get back to me right away (because after all it's in the same time zone). I realized five minutes ago that he's actually in Japan. When people ask me where he is and I can't immediately remember if it's, say, Tokyo or Shen Zen or Germany or Italy, I usually just say "who cares, he's equally useless to me in Ohio or Okinawa", but usually I'm at least on the right continent.

Then I almost pulled one of these again, thinking I had to get my assignment done before I left to visit Zarah next Thursday and then realizing I was a whole week ahead of myself again and next Wednesday is the seventeenth, not the twenty-fourth. I'm thinking I might need to write a letter to myself every morning and put the date at the top. I've gotten so much better at writing stuff on the calendar, which helps NOT AT ALL if I keep reading the effing calendar WRONG.

The people who worked at the Tim Horton's in the On Route we stopped at on the way home from London were not great on remembering people's orders either. While we were standing there waiting for our order two other people opened theirs and complained that it was wrong. When we got ours, we checked to make sure there was the right number of sandwiches, but we neglected to unwrap them all and inspect them until we were back on the road. Fortunately, they got the kids' stuff right, but Matt and I had ordered two smoked ham and cheese panini on multigrain and, despite the fact that you'd think it was easier to make two things exactly the same, they gave us two different things - a smoked ham on white and a cheese only on multigrain. Angus said "I think if people order stuff for there they make an effort to get it right because they know they'll come back and complain, but if you order it to go they just stick a bunch of stuff in a bag."

Yeah.

This post is about an entirely theoretical couple, NOT US

The Wife is having a fairly non-productive day, fooling around on the computer and trying to clean all the crap off the dining room table, which is really frustrating and depressing because there isn't a good place for all the crap to go, and it only highlights all the other things that still have crap on them, so she gives it up as completely futile and goes out to garden. She starts to put on sunscreen everywhere, then realizes it would make more sense to just put sunscreen on the ridiculous square sunburn she got while watching her daughter horseback riding, to perhaps marginally lessen the freaky embarrassing tan lines for when she goes out tonight.

The Wife is back inside and checking twitter, when The Husband comes home early from work because he was miserable at the office and thought a change of location might make him less ineffectual for the afternoon.

Since she needs to shower off the sunscreen at some point anyway and the husband being home makes watching Luther less fun, The Wife decides she might as well go for a power walk. She tells The Husband this, then walks upstairs to the bedroom and starts stripping to put on walking clothes.

She pauses and thinks, "wait. Need exercise. Husband is home. Kids not due for a couple of hours. Most of clothes already off. When was the last time we..." and yells down the stairs "Hey! Wanna have sex?"

The Husband (who has arrived on the bottom step with admirable speed) says "Uh...well if... are you... is it.... sure!" (which is smart, because sometimes he totally shoots himself in the foot by saying stuff like 'well I thought you were tired' or 'are you sure?' in which case The Wife says 'okay, you're right, never mind').

The Wife gets some exercise and the sunscreen gets showered off. The Husband doesn't get any work done for the afternoon, but is fairly satisfied with how things work out nonetheless.

Life with kids. All romance, all the time. Theoretically. Just what I hear.

So there was this song.....KIDDING.

Scintilla Day 3: What's the story of the most difficult challenge you've faced in a
relationship? Did you overcome it? What was the outcome?

Things I thought about and discarded:

1. My husband going bald

2. My husband liking the Three Stooges

3. That time my boyfriend said he didn't like that I smelled of woodsmoke.

4. The Lost finale. No wait, that was my friend Collette's relationship. Jury's still out on if their marriage will survive.

Okay. In all seriousness. We've been lucky. Very, very lucky. We haven't had to deal with terminal or serious illness, serious financial difficulties or horrible in-laws (on either side. My husband adores my parents and I love his mother. His father is a bit of a space cadet, but well-meaning). So I'd have to say that the major challenge to our marriage has been...

CHILDREN.

Before I had kids I totally bought into that whole "it's more selfish to have kids than not to have them" poppycock. I said those very words to validate people who said they didn't want to have children.  

I don't say them any more.

I think not wanting to have children is perfectly fine. I think it's admirable to know yourself that well and not to have kids just because people expect it of you. I think there are lifestyles and careers that it would be very difficult to incorporate parenting into, and good on you if you realize that. I'm sure it's very challenging and time-consuming to run a Fortune 500 company, or train for the Olympics, or split atoms or whatever.

But none of them are more challenging or time-consuming than trying to convince a sixteen-month-old that he should quit sticking his head into the space between the CD cabinet and the wall because it ALWAYS GETS STUCK. Or trying to get a spoonful of barley cereal into a nine-month-old's mouth when she's decided that said mouth will not be accepting barley cereal today, thank-you very much. Or...well you get the point, and this post is not about that.

We lived together before we got married. Marriage was not a huge transition for us. Before we had children, we were a case study in couples who communicated well, respected each other's feelings and generally made other people nauseous with the little hearts that floated up from our joined hands.

Children, on the other hand? Children were like a nuclear bomb. My husband always knew he would have children. My husband is fantastic with children. He had a brother born ten years after him so, when we had Angus, he taught ME how to change a diaper. I always thought I would probably had children, but I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would suck at it (positive thinking is not one of my strengths). 

If anyone disagrees that having small children is hard on a marriage, I look at them with extreme suspicion. Before we had kids, when my husband traveled for business it meant I got to use the car, watch scary movies and have popcorn for dinner. After we have kids, when my husband traveled for work it meant I cried a lot, slept even less than usual and flipped through the yellow pages looking for divorce lawyers. Before we had kids, I didn't care that my husband loved hockey. After we had kids, this meant that my kid was going to play hockey. Before we had kids, our conversations contained phrases like "would you mind if" and "is it okay with you that" and "could you please". After we had kids, our conversations contained phrases like "keep your fucking voice down if you don't want to" and "would it destroy your soul to move the goddamned" and "If you think that then you're a moronic excuse for a". 

I wasn't that great at parenting small children. I always felt like I was probably doing it wrong. On the other hand, I knew for sure that my husband was doing it wrong. I absolutely did that delightful thing that many, many mothers do - demanding that he help out more and then getting mad when he didn't do everything my way. Add to that the fact that I thought every sniffle and rash meant they had cancer, and that if he didn't react the same way he obviously loved them less, and .... yeah. Good times.

We got through it. The kids got older, and their needs became, if not less intense, less immediate and all-consuming. I learned to relax a little (shut up, I did so). My husband is a really great father. I am more hands-on in the day-to-day, but every once in a while he does something spontaneous and fabulous with them that they remember forever. He coaches them both in baseball, which I love to watch but can't understand, and he is fantastic at it. He helps with the math homework and I help with the reading and spelling. Everyone in the house is agreed that no matter what, Daddy never, never gets to pick anyone's clothes.

We're not back to being that sweet, harmonious, untested couple. We're something a little more battered and smudgy, and much, much stronger.

We are parents. 

In sickness and self-righteousness

My husband and I are about as far apart on the spectrum of believing our kids when they say or think they are sick as you can get. My instinct is always to believe them without question, keep them home from school, tuck them in bed and worry that they're suffering from bubonic plague or the like. His instinct is to declare that they're - maybe not faking, but certainly exaggerating, or just psyching themselves out, because Angus in particular has a very nervous stomach - and send them to school or make them play baseball or hockey and hope for the best. 

The general perversity of things being what they are, both of us turn out to be wrong at least half the time. I still maintain that my way is better, because would you rather feel like a bit of an ass when you keep the kid home and within two hours s/he is running circles around you, pulling down the curtains, demanding video game time and a tenth cookie, or LOOK like a giant ass when your kid barfs in the middle of the classroom/cruise ship dining room/bowling alley/birthday cake? 

Eve's been home from school for most of the week with my stomach bug, and I kept her home one last day yesterday because she was still pale and tired, but she hadn't thrown up for 48 hours so I said she could still go to her friend's house after school because the friend (and her mother) were desperate for her to come over and I was pretty sure she was no longer shedding virus (you're welcome Clara). 

Angus was supposed to go to an Ottawa 67s hockey game for a friend's party last night, and he stayed home from school because he was achy and wanted to go back to bed, which he did, which is not normal for him, but he thought he'd be able to go to the party and I was okay with that because I didn't want the friend to be disappointed and again, no vomit was forthcoming - I thought maybe he just needed a day of rest. 

So of course, twenty minutes before they're both supposed to leave, they both get all weepy and think they feel nauseous and things head rapidly down hill. I was utterly unable to decide what the right course of action was, and if I had still been solo parenting all three of us might have remained frozen in this miserable tableau for the next five to seven hours. 

Fortunately, Matt got home from the airport just in time to pronounce them neurotic and ridiculous, stomp on their objections, harass them into the truck and drop them off at their various destinations. Eve had a great time at Marianna's, Angus had a great time at the hockey game (at which he consumed two pieces of pizza, two Pepsis and two pieces of cake), and Matt and I caught up on a huge backlog of Modern Family.

Sometimes it's good to be wrong.

At Least He's Still Trying

So Saturday night we were hanging out with our neighbours - gotta love living next to a man who has a big green egg and is not afraid to use it. The women were talking about how we wanted to see Bridesmaids, but in that vague, no-specific-plan, it-probably-won't-happen way. But Sunday night we had just gotten back from dinner with friends and my neighbour came over and said her friend was over and they'd decided on the spur of the moment to go to the ten o'clock show and she wanted me to come. 

To a movie. 

That started at ten o'clock. 

At night.

Naturally, I waffled. It's who I am, it's what I do. But Matt said "you should go". The kids said "no, no, I want Mommy to stay!" even though they were already supposed to be in bed, and Matt told them that Mommies get to have a good time too.

I thought, how sweet.

I thought, how thoughtful.

I thought... HEY, he's totally angling for sex when I get home. 

I went to the movie. I laughed until my stomach hurt. I came home happily exhausted and expressed my gratitude to my sweet, thoughtful, transparent husband.

*********************

Tonight he took Angus out to test bats and then they had a baseball game. He called at eight-thirty and said he was taking Angus to McDonald's on the way home and was wondering if Eve wanted anything. I put in her order for a small McFlurry and then he said: "What about you? Did you remember to eat?"

Did I REMEMBER... to EAT? So now we're pretending that I'm some daydreamy waif who wanders around forgetting to eat? Gracious, I might just waste away to nothing if my big strong man didn't offer to bring me some french fries with a half life equivalent to nuclear waste. THAT's how we're playing it tonight?

I'm willing to give in to consideration with an ulterior motive, outright pleading, even a little shameless flattery... But THAT was laying it on a little thick.

In which I state the blindingly obvious, with GREAT EMPHASIS

So I've come to the conclusion that I was REALLY DEPRESSED for most of February and March! That sleeping until eleven or twelve after the kids were off to school and not being able to get off the couch and telling myself comforting things like "oh well, so I'm lazy and worthless and probably not entitled to really take up space in the world - it's okay, my kids might amount to something" was NOT actually a moment of insight, but an indication that I was SEVERELY MELANCHOLIC and probably needed some help.

Upon coming to this realization, I marched upstairs to where my husband was innocently watching some kind of event in which overpaid sweaty mercenaries throw stuff or hit stuff with sticks or run around like idiots, and ambushed him with "EXCUSE ME. Did it not occur to you at any time in the last few weeks that I might be SEVERELY DEPRESSED?" I was all ready to club him with the time when Eve was a baby and I was going back on a low-estrogen birth control pill which had made me kind of loony with Angus, and I asked my husband to keep an eye on me for evidence of looniness, and then I became convinced that a woman from his preschool program who really liked him and offered to babysit was going to kidnap my children, and I reverse-directoried her phone number and drove by her house and copied down her license plate number and then one morning I woke him up and said "You know how I've been convinced that Maggie was going to kidnap the kids and I drove by her house and copied down her license plate number? Did you not think that was LOONY ENOUGH to maybe raise some concerns?"

So that occasion, on which he acquitted himself LESS THAN ADMIRABLY was on my mind. But at this point, he just said calmly "well, seeing as how you've been sicker than you've been in years and coughed until you broke all the blood vessels in your eyes and chest and shoulders, and the one inhaler that worked made you throw up for three days straight, and we weren't sure the antibiotics they gave you were approved for human usage, it seemed like maybe depression was a REASONABLE REACTION."

So I said "Fine. Shut up. I hate you." Because now I've totally turned the corner, and I'm back to my logical sweet self.

Maybe he accidentally packed my principles in his suitcase

Angus's hockey team has been in playoffs for a few weeks. Three weeks ago his good friend Noah showed up with a red stripe down the middle of his head -- 'playoff hair'.



My husband soundly mocked the mother, whose younger son was similarly flamboyantly coiffed. On the way home, Angus asked if he could dye his hair too. My husband said "How can I put this nicely? NO."



My husband and I have a general policy of trying not to undermine each other with the kids, even if we're in disagreement. I don't remember articulating it to myself, but I'm pretty sure I thought that if Angus tried to do an end-run and asked me if he could dye his hair I would say no.



You may recall that my husband then decamped for California -- a week-long trade show where he shows off testing equipment and switches and wavelength division multiplexing (yes, I TOTALLY know what all of this means and I'm TOTALLY using it correctly), and at night gets wined and dined by various customers and salespeople. In California. You may further recall that we had a blizzard that week, followed by freezing rain and then plain old soul-sucking basement-flooding un-frozen rain. Two solid days of it. Here -- not in California. So when Angus asked me if he could get playoff hair, I thought for a moment, then said...


"Sure. It'll be a nice surprise for your father."


Right now? As a mother, I could not rock any harder. As a wife? Maybe not so much.

Wordless Wednesday: Reasons I'm Glad I Married Him #176

He comes home from the grocery store seven days before Christmas, when all the decorations are deeply discounted,





Unloads the groceries, then wanders around the house with an enormous plastic tube, saying



WHERE CAN I HANG MY GIANT BALLS?

Quote of the Day

My husband: "You cooked. I'll clean up."

(cleaning up noises)

"This used to hold a grasshopper. Can I put food in it?"

Expletive deleted

So Eve started coughing last Monday. Last Monday, when Matt was still home and would be for a week. She was coughing, but nothing else. She wasn't stuffed up or feverish or lethargic. She went to school every day and played with her friend next door most nights and it was all good. I went away for the week-end -- still good. But coughing. When did that nagging but basically unassuming cough turn into something a little more sinister? I'll tell you when: the minute -- probably the goddamned mother-cursed bugger-freaking SECOND -- my husband's plane passed out of Canadian airspace. On Monday, a WEEK after the original cough began. Seriously -- it's like a switch flips once he's gone and all manner of mishaps, catastrophes and incidents of mayhem (MAYHEM I say) descend upon us. Stairs cannot be traversed without falls. Fingers bend in strange and unintended-by-nature ways. Maggots infest the green bin. The clocks run backward and blood streams from the taps. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But the huge days-long power blackout in 2003? He was in Boston. And the only time Eve has ever had an ear infection immediately followed by a stomach virus, he was in goddamned Switzerland. True story.

So I took Eve to the doctor today. I'm a stay at home Mom and she was home from school so we could have gone at any time they could squeeze us in. Naturally the time they could squeeze us in was the exact time when I would have to be picking Angus up from school (I got him to go home with a friend) which then resulted in us getting onto the highway at the exact hour we like to call Rush. WITHOUT a prescription, because the doctor would like her to get a chest x-ray just to make sure it's pneumonia. Sure. Great. Hate antibiotic overuse. WAHHHHHHH!!!

Oh well. She did get a puffer. She's still feeling well enough to be a smartass. And Angus just took her upstairs to run her bath.

God, let the hot water tank be working.

Absence makes the heart unable to take out the garbage

There's a perception that a lot of husbands don't cope very well when their wives are away from home and they're left to manage with the kids alone. There are tales of wild junk-food fests, failure to bathe, horrifying wardrobe combinations, and general chaos and disaster. Some wives fill the refrigerator with meals and lay out clothes for each day they will be absent. Some wives write out a schedule of events and staple it to their husbands' shirts. Some wives just don't go away for fear of the carnage they will find when they return.

I am not one of those wives.

I have a friend whose husband's memory is extremely bad. He has received a phone call from his mother reminding him to bring a certain item to dinner, agreed to bring the item, hung up the phone, ignored the item which is sitting right beside him, and left for dinner. Once when we were on the way to a friend's cottage, she realized she had forgotten to remind her husband to bring her son to soccer. She immediately called him, ascertained that he had indeed forgotten to go to soccer, made sounds of exasperation, and hung up. Her sister, unmarried and childless, said "why on earth did you call him? It was already too late to remind him to go. The only purpose you served by calling him was to make him feel bad". All the mothers in the car looked around at each other thinking 'well duh, that's why she called him."

I actually sort of yearn for the day when I come home from a couple of days away and find a smoking pile of french fries, unfinished homework and stripes and polka dots. When my husband is here he can't remember his own name without my help. "So remember how I'm having that heart transplant tomorrow?" "What? Heart? When? Do I know you?" I leave movies for him to return where he'll have to step over them to go out the door and I still have to chase him down the driveway with them. He routinely loses his wallet, keys and work badge. I go away? He instantly becomes a super-efficient child-minding machine with a flawless grasp of the appointments and events on the calendar. This past week-end while I was in Toronto he got the kids to make homemade pizza (crust and all), got Eve to two birthday parties and Angus to a hockey game and a practice plus team pictures. The kitchen's usually spotless when I get home. I went to Halifax when Eve was three and he REPAINTED HER BEDROOM! Honestly, is that not just a tiny bit obnoxious? When I'm home I'm lucky if I can get a picture hung inside of six months.

I don't really wish he would fall apart without me. I don't need things to fall to crap when I'm gone to feel needed (do I? I don't think I do). I'm glad he takes the opportunity to do something fun and different with the kids when he has them to himself. And in my defense, if the kitchen isn't spotless when he gets home, it's usually because he's been away a week or two and not a day or two, and at some point something's gotta give -- and it usually involves the green bin.

And if I really want to feel like I've been missed? There's always the laundry room.

March Break, day one

My friend Margot is working mornings Monday Wednesday and Friday this week, so our friend Collette was watching her kids this morning and I'm watching them Wednesday morning (I don't know about Friday -- maybe's she's dropping them off at the pool hall with twenty bucks and their health cards). Collette came over with her three and Margot's two, so we had three girls and four boys. The girls drew little pictures and broke food into tiny pieces for the fairy that lives in Eve's room. The boys were engaged in various intellectual pursuits in the basement. Collette and I were bettering ourselves with a physics program in the family room. We fed the kids some healthy organic fare for lunch.

It was arduous. It was exhausting. Margot owes us big.

Tonight Matt and I are going on a date -- dinner and the symphony. I got him tickets for his birthday, which really is a gift, because he loves the symphony and I...well, I love classical music. I don't so much get the concept of watchcing people play it. My mind wanders, or I get fixated on the second violin's moustache, or I wonder if the piccolo player and the bassoonist are doing it, and then I realize I've missed the whole second movement and I feel guilty because we spent good money to be here. Then I think about last week's episode of Lost and wonder about Jacob's inherent goodness or evil, then I pinch my arm to focus myself. It'll be fine. He'll be happy. I'll have lovely background music for my inane musings. I suppose there are worse ways to spend the evening.

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Satisfactory Combinations

I love my husband. He's a great partner, a fantastic father, and a hard worker. He's good at stuff I'm not good at. When Angus was born, he showed me how to change diapers. He's really bad with names, but he can always figure out who the voice is behind cartoon characters (of course, he can't remember the person's name so then he has to say 'you know, that guy from the movie with the junk yard and the flower pot' until I figure out who he means (because I'm the one who's good with names, but I never know who the voice is).

But I wouldn't say we're soulmates. We're less Heloise and Abelard than Jamie and Paul from Mad About You. We often don't get each other. He tries to explain a problem he has with Angus's hockey or baseball coach and I'm going 'huh? Leave the poor guy alone, he's a volunteer!'. I try to explain why we don't need to get all bent out of shape over one bad mark Angus gets and he's all 'homework is important! He needs to learn he can't just get lazy when things get difficult!' He comes home and I try to describe something totally infuriating or incandescently transportingly wonderful that happened that day and I end up sort of wanting to hit him over the head with a wooden spoon because he doesn't automatically get it.

This is all okay. Soulmates are over-rated, largely fictional, and often doomed in very unpleasant ways. I was never under the impression that marriage wasn't supposed to take work, so I consider this sort of thing a minor irritation and not a sign that we're not really meant to be together.

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Yesterday I was trying to bake something called Chocolate Macadamia Cream Satin for our dinner party tomorrow. We have potluck gourmet-ish dinner parties every couple of months or so with a group of friends, and this time I'm doing dessert. I had to bake a buttermilk chocolate cake and then slice it in half and put cream cheese white chocolate gelatin filling in it and put the top back on and then cover it in whipped cream and macadamia nuts and chocolate shavings. I was careful to read the entire recipe over a few times, because I've been burned before by starting something and realizing I've missed the part where you have to chill it for two hours or use a different bowl or read to it in Japanese or whatever. I still somehow managed to add the final ingredient to the cake batter, set the stand mixer going, then walk back to read in the recipe 'beat only until combined', before swearing and rushing back to turn off the mixer. I thought I might have to do the entire cake part again, but it did eventually set without burning. But the outside set quite a bit before the inside, which meant when I sliced off the top layer and tried to move it to a plate, it sort of fell apart. I put the filling on and stuck the top back on in pieces, figuring I could hide the damage with whipped cream and chocolate shavings, so I wasn't devastated, just irritated.

When Matt walked in and asked how it went, I said "oh fine, except the cake was a little hard to work with because I overbeat it a little..." and he immediately said "oh, I HATE when recipes say that! Don't tell me not to overbeat! I'm an overachiever! I always overbeat!".

And a thousand butterflies took wing. Apparently, in matters of baking, he's totally my soulmate.

Sometimes I put dishes in the dishwasher too!

My husband is a good guy. The complaints I have (because I am a person filled with bitterness and bile and people, it has to go somewhere) are by and large fairly trivial (which is not to say I can't work up a good vituperative rant on any one of them at any given moment). I don't know whether he's done any random coveting of our neighbours' wives (hey, hasn't everyone?), but he's good on the basics, and the big things.
But sometimes? I just don't get him. He overthinks things, he overcomplicates things, and it's like he thinks it will cause him physical pain to just agree with me about something. A few months ago one of the shelves in the kitchen started giving way and he had to reinforce the supporting posts. Whatever -- crappy mass builder stuff. A couple of weeks ago one of the drawers in Angus's dresser came off the rails and wouldn't go back on. The dresser belonged to Matt's younger brother, making it roughly thirty years old -- not terribly surprising that it's falling apart. But my husband looks at it differently. He looked at the shelves and said "well, you have a lot of stuff in there". Yeah -- plates, cups, the odd bowl. It's a shelf. In the kitchen. He looked at the drawer and said "wow, you've got a lot of t-shirts packed in there". Yeah, and boys' t-shirts are made really heavy these days....?
So basically he's accusing me of wrecking the house. By treating furniture (wait for it) as furniture.
Sweet, loyal, dependable, great father, funny, considerate, dynamite in the sack. But about some things he really has his head stuck up his butt.

On second thought

He's a good husband, really. He was just trying to get the partially-assembled basketball net off of the driveway for the night. He didn't realize I wouldn't be able to drag the hose around it. And last night he didn't realize that when he wound the hose up in the hose box it would be incredibly difficult for me to unwind it enough to reach all the flowers in the front yard without extremely taxing bodily contortions and said hose box being dragged about six feet down the paved path as I hoped I could just pull on the goddamned hose hard enough that it would unwind itself. It's not his fault that my feet are made wrong which makes my back hurt most of the time and I was hot and getting bug-bitten.

I probably shouldn't have opened with "WHY do you hate my plants?".

You Are Here

I turned thirty-nine on Monday. Really thirty-nine, as in next year I will, in fact, turn forty. I've spent the last couple of days in some cursory stock-taking. It would have been more in-depth stock-taking, but my husband's been in Tokyo for two weeks and we're in baseball playoffs, so instead of stock-taking I've been mostly not sleeping, stumbling through the day with Eve, weeping over grade three math homework in French, making dinner for four o'clock and rushing off to rookie baseball or minor baseball or baseball practice every. freaking. night.

Anyway. I'm pretty sure there are things I thought I would have done by the time I was thirty-nine. At one point I thought I would have finished my first novel by the time I was thirty. I know what it's supposed to be about, I can see certain scenes in my mind, I've made a few starts, but I'm lazy and easily distractable and prone to fits of despair, and therefore I have a few stranded chunks of text floating around in the ether and a few short stories. I have plucked up enough courage to send away a story a couple of times. Mostly it resulted in a nice letter saying thanks for coming out, but our journal has folded for lack of funding in the time it took you to mail us your submission. Once I sent a story to Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Gordon Van Gelder said my prose style was interesting, but the subject matter just didn't capture his attention ('alas', he said. I don't think I've ever used the word 'alas' in a letter. Nice touch, I thought). So I tried. A few times, twelve years ago, and never again.
I have a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature. I honestly can't say for sure whether I ever thought I would really use it. The dry-heaves and palpitations every time I had to walk into a new seminar room, never mind when I actually had to deliver a paper -- did I really think I could ever walk into a room of students and pretend I was going to teach them? Comparative Literature has a language requirement -- you need to be able to speak and write in two languages, plus demonstrate reading knowledge of a third. Well, we all know how confident and comfortable I am just in English -- imagine my delight at going head to head with the mean lesbian French professor every Tuesday.
So I don't know if I really believed I would be teaching in a university, but I know I thought I would have more years of full-time work under my belt by this point. As it is, I'm pushing forty and I've merely dabbled. Some special needs work... some audio publisher editing under fairly bizarre conditions (office full of people who were even crazier than me)... some bookselling... then I got pregnant. And my husband didn't exactly say 'you should probably just concentrate on not being the looniest mother on the block for a while', but it was definitely implied. I don't feel as bad about this as I thought I might. Up until a couple of years ago, it was freaking hard work. It's much easier at this point, but I still feel like I'm earning my keep. Next year Eve is in school full days, and then I'll have to figure something out. A few years ago I would have found this terrifying. Now I find it kind of exhilarating.
I would give full marks for the husband and kids category -- not that I think any of the credit is mine. What kind of kids you get may not be solely a matter of luck, but I have to think that luck is involved, because I know some great people that have some really challenging kids. You can say that you chose your husband for good qualities and because you were in love, but I think what kind of marriage you have relies in some part on luck as well. My husband is great -- thoughtful, hard-working, great father, funny, finally remembers that I don't like iced tea after fifteen years of living with me -- but it's down to luck that we haven't had to face anything horrible enough to really test our marriage. Other than the fact that he still leaves chewed gum stuck to tables and chair-arms -- we may be looking at counselling (or an assault charge) on that one.
I still have some basic personality flaws that I hoped I would have ironed out by now. It's one of life's great unfairnesses, I think, that sometimes you can see what's wrong with you so clearly, and yet be unable to fix it. Some things I have worked on and improved in, although it's still a struggle. I think that's good, in a way. Sometimes it's nice to be aware that you're doing something against your nature, that the wise little voice in your head has actually spoken up soon enough and loudly enough for you to be able to hear, and act accordingly.
I think I would have to say, on the whole, that I am happy. Joyful, even. There are things in the world that are horrible beyond horror, and things that are merely dreadful, and things that are just a real pain in the ass. Some of these things I doubt I can change, some I do tiny little ant-sized things towards, and some I am trying to learn to bear. I know that I'm my own worst enemy sometimes, and I'm working to loathe myself less. Because some really great people think that I don't suck. I think this is the first year I was on Facebook for my birthday. Facebook is really great for not making you feel like everybody you know forgot your birthday. For sure this is the first year I was blogging on my birthday. So there's that, too -- I'm writing more, and I'm sharing it with more people (twos of them!)

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So given my advantages and circumstances, it probably is true that I should have accomplished more by this point. But what's the point in lamenting that? All I can do is keep trying to be braver, more patient, more grateful, and more awake (on so many levels). But first, I'm going to make pear and parsnip soup for a bunch of friends and drink a lot of wine.

Cheers.