Objectification

I'm way too attached to things. I know this. I've never been good at throwing things out, not because of any intrinsic value but because of the memories attached to the artifacts. I feel a deep, yearning need to own books I love - just knowing that they exist in the world isn't good enough, even thought I tell myself I don't have enough time to reread them anyway. My house is crammed with souvenir mugs, old photographs, ticket stubs, wooden spoons from my mother's kitchen, and items I won't even admit to.Naturally it's only gotten worse since I had children. Some people keep the outfit they brought their baby home in. I have bins of baby and toddler clothes I can't bear to get rid of. Many people are able to keep one or two pictures their children have drawn and recycle the rest. I have teetering stacks of drawings and paintings: rudimentary people with only facial features and belly buttons; the picture Angus drew over and over of a house, a lawn, a giant flower and a rocket ship flying overhead; pages and pages of the tiny circles Eve drew when she was one and a half and could finally grasp a pencil; formless blobs and millions of rainbows.

It's a messy tangle, my reasons for being a near-hoarder. I've always had trouble with organization, so whenever I feel the impulse to get rid of something I always feel a vague fear that I just haven't remembered what I need it for, or that the day after I get rid of it I'll find the companion piece that makes it a vital part of my life. Also, despite my hard-bitten cynical exterior (shut up, I do so have a hard-bitten cynical exterior) on the inside I am a melting morass of sentimentality. I also tend not to sort events in my life into major and minor - for me, almost everything is a major event, and requires a careful curation of the accompanying objects.

When I cleaned out the kids' rooms last fall so my Dad could paint and lay down near flooring, I knew that keeping everything wasn't an option, so I employed my newest technique for easing the pain of separation, which is photographing the soon-to-be-gone things.

I still have trouble getting rid of things that hung in their rooms when they were babies.

Or examples of how they wrote.

Or things they made with their own little hands.

Or things they were passionate about.

Or things that seem bereft without their larger context.

Or things like whatever the hell this is.

 Sometimes we change a room around and then I feel a sudden lurching panic because I didn't photograph it how it was originally. It's like I can't orient myself properly if I don't have access to every successive iteration of any possible environment.

I know that part of it is my unwillingness to let things go - stages of my life, stages of my children's lives. And I know that there's no way to not let it go. Part of the beauty of having children - and, well, every other beautiful thing -  is the transitory nature of every change, every expression, every wrongly-pronounced word, every tiny starfish hand and gorgeously rounded belly, every daisy-strewn little dress and every tiny mitten. And keeping all the things won't change that. It just makes me feel drowned in things.

Also, I don't want to pass down the madness. Yesterday I was going through a bag of clothes we'd lent someone that they'd returned and found a pair of giraffe pajamas that Eve wore when she was three. I showed them to her and she clutched them to her chest and said "we CAN'T give these away! I'm going to use them for my daughter! If I have a daughter." So that was okay.

A little while later I was at the computer and I saw her looking down at something beside the stairs and saying "oh no! Are we getting rid of this? That's so sad!" I thought it was more baby clothes.

But no. We got a new fridge that dispenses water and ice, and even after much excitement over this development and constant clamouring for 'a glass of fridge-water', Eve was stricken that we were getting rid...

Of the ice cube tray.

Folks.... we may be in need of an intervention

An Angus post just to even things out

Angus has grown up exhibiting a lot of my anxiety-related traits. He sometimes obsesses over things. He needs to know what's happening next. He's not comfortable with uncertainty. Now since he's - unlike me - a boy, and - very unlike me - athletic, playing sports has helped with a lot of this. He's come extremely far in terms of confidence and self-esteem, which is nice. But he's still asked me every day this week if he's sleeping over at his friend Noah's on Thursday night and if I've talked to Noah's mother and learned any additional details of which he should be apprised immediately, if not sooner.

Today I got an email from his English teacher that the Scholastic order had come in and, though he said he pre-ordered the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, she didn't have a form for him.

I stared, aghast, at the computer screen. I remembered him attacking me with the form and demanding that we order the book two months ago so that he could get it on the first day it came out. I had visions of him melting down in the middle of the classroom. I emailed the teacher back that we had absolutely ordered the book and to let me know if she didn't have one for him so I could go to Indigo and pick one up.

Then I wondered if I should go before I picked him up from school, or if we could go after I picked him up. Then I thought, wait. I know I haven't been feeling totally right this week - Eve was sick and we were shut in last week and, well, it's November. I need to call someone and run this by them so I know if I'm overreacting.

No one was home.

So I called the school and got them to tell Angus to call home.

He was not upset in the least. I told him we could go to Indigo and get a copy and he said "we already ordered it, why would we buy another one? Just wait until they figure it out."

Angus is a hundred percent fine. I, on the other hand, am in dire need of something which clearly I have not yet been prescribed.

I usually let them hold the fork themselves, at least

I feel a little better. Although my stop at the Farm Boy deli counter didn't help -- every time I see macaroni and cheese loaf I just want to collapse on the glass and say "WHY?" beseechingly. And what in the name of encased meats is PLAIN head cheese? Less eyebrow? Cheek only?

Then there was the aggravation of trying to convince my son that he could make a sandwich by himself. When we were visiting friends in Edmonton over Easter, I suddenly froze and realized, to my total humiliation, that I was CUTTING MY TEN-YEAR-OLD'S MEAT. Not that this is in any way unusual - I didn't feed him pretzels when he was eighteen months because I was afraid he'd choke on them, and then I suddenly realized when he was six that it was probably long past the time he could have pretzels. I start doing stuff and I just keep doing the same stuff, which doesn't work that well when you have rapidly changing children, except that those children naturally find it expedient NOT to volunteer the fact that they can probably construct a simple meal, put away their own laundry and wipe their own asses (okay, that I did stop doing) when apparently I'm happy to just keep on doing it all.

Fortunately just as I was about to say "oh my goodness, what am I doing cutting Angus's meat, I must have just had a flashback to when he was four", I looked up and saw my friend cutting her ELEVEN-year-old's meat. Whew.

Part of the problem is that I'm a control freak and Angus is a perfectionist. I don't really want him spilling milk and smearing mustard everywhere, and he has a morbid fear of exactly the same thing, because the world might END. The problem is, waiting until he's seventeen isn't then going to make him magically able to pour and spread and cut without making a mess. He'll just look like an exceptionally stupid seventeen-year-old.

Also, there's the fridge. I would post a picture, but I don't want anyone fainting or hurling on my account. If I'm going to insist that he makes his own lunch, I probably need to be able to provide better instructions than "okay, open the fridge. Now hold the salsa bottle with one hand and tip it over, reach past it and grab the middle part of that leaning tower of lunch meat and wiggle it out. I think the mayo is under that upside-down jam jar. If you reach to the very back of the bottom shelf and bend your hand back towards your wrist you might be able to hook a package of cheese slices."

Farm Boy had two more containers of Eve's coconut yogurt yesterday. That's the only thing she's willing to get for herself, and she eats it six times a day so I don't have to feed her much else for the next little bit.

Right, then. I'm off to clean out the fridge and stop stunting my children's developmental advancement.

I'm SO sorry, Girl who was doing my pedicure!

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

There are certain things I've always been fastidious about. Some would say borderline obsessive-compulsive, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but I prefer to think of it as being fastidious. Actually I don't love the word fastidious. Actually the more I type it and think it, the more I dislike it. The t and the d are too close together, and there's something unseemly about those two i's. So let's call it... meticulous? ANYWAY... I've always washed my face several times a day, especially when I'm wearing glasses instead of contacts, because I hate feeling like my face is oily and my glasses are sliding down my nose. I take a shower in the morning and usually a quick one at night, sometimes to regulate my wonky body temperature before going to bed, sometimes just to rinse off the day. When I had Angus and was exhausted and insane for the first few weeks, I thought that might break the bedtime shower habit. It didn't. Sometimes I even got up and combed my hair and brushed my teeth before breastfeeding at 2 a.m. And 3 a.m. And 5:30 a.m. Yeah, okay, even I can see that that doesn't so much put me in the non-crazy column. The point is, even though I have two kids and no memory now, even though I'm often depressed and lacking in drive and unlacking in ass, I generally took enough time to make sure I still looked presentable. True, this may have taken the form of looking in every mirror in every room I passed just to ascertain that my chin was too fat and my eyebrows were too thick and my forehead was somehow just too THERE, or taking down and putting up my hair six times, sitting on the floor crying and then wondering where the last forty-six minutes went and why my scalp was a little warm, but everybody defines 'taking pride in your appearance' differently, okay?

Over the past few weeks, though, something weird has been happening. I run errands, pick Eve up from school, take her home, wait for Angus to show up and get homework and dinner started. Normally I would have to wash my face, change my clothes and maybe even shower again. Now sometimes I don't get back to my mirror until bedtime. Sometimes I look okay. Sometimes I look bad. Whatever.

And then today, I was getting a pedicure with my friend Pam and I rolled up my pant legs and looked down and almost died of embarrassment.......... the hair on my legs was like FOUR INCHES LONG!!!!! And I don't think I've ever gone more than a day or two without shaving my legs. When girls in my residence would joke about only shaving once a week or not shaving until exams were over or even just not shaving as a matter of principle I would smile insincerely and wonder what on EARTH was WRONG with them (hey, I have principles. I just prefer them not to snag on my tights). And now even when I concentrate, I... I... I can't remember the last time I shaved my legs. (whimper)

I honestly don't know if I should be glad that I'm getting less obsessive, or sad that, clearly, I've finally decided to just let myself go.

On the bright side, the other afternoon I dropped in on Pam and she had jam in her hair.

(Sorry Pammy, if I'm going down, I'm takin' everyone I can with me!)

Yes, I do get rather passionate about my tinned fruit

I've totally run dry. Empty. Echoing, with a little layer of dust in the bottom. I feel like I'm doing everything half-assed this week, with the one bright spot being that, for the most part, I'm at least still trying to do it. I dragged myself to the gym Monday and today. Today, amusingly enough, almost everybody I saw come into the gym looked half asleep. My friend Pam was on the treadmill next to me, in a similar state of brain-lock, and at one point she tried to say 'if you live in an apartment' but instead she said 'if you live in a hot tub', which resulted in twin bouts of hysterical laughter that earned us a few dirty looks and almost sent us flying off our treadmills.

Photo by Andrew Sardone

Monday after working out I went down to get groceries. The plan was to work out, get what I needed for meals for the week and for Eve's birthday party on Saturday, go home and shower and go into the school library for the afternoon. And I needed canned peaches. Do you think I could find canned peaches? I walked up and down every aisle, then I looked at all the signs hanging from the ceiling. I saw canned vegetables. Canned fish. Snack fruit, but no canned fruit. I asked one grocery store employee. She sent me to the snack fruit aisle. There was no canned fruit. I asked another one. She sent me to the canned vegetable aisle. Canned peas and asparagus (shudder), but no canned fruit. Finally someone looked at the floor plan and sent me to aisle 6. The sign hanging above aisle 6 listed canned fish, crackers and bread sticks. Crackers AND bread sticks. They couldn't forego listing bread sticks in order to list canned fruit?

This extra ten to fifteen minutes of increasingly frustrating and futile canned-peach-seeking totally pushed me over the line from Monday morning foggy-but-functioning to Monday morning ready-to-stuff-myself-in-a-corner-and-sing-songs-from-Moulin-Rouge-in-a-sad-little-voice-ing. And the thing about the library is that Bonnie's out for surgery and it was a substitute, and Bonnie said go ahead and come in still, but really, why would I go put away books for someone who's getting paid to be there for two weeks and that's practically all she has to do? And all the stuff I had to do for Eve's party was spinning around in my head because I'm wacky that way, and I still had to go into Eve's classroom to do the math bags before the library and...

then it occurred to me. I'm a volunteer.

Sometimes I'm really good at missing the obvious. At least now I know where Loblaws keeps the freaking canned peaches.

Yeah, this post? Half-assed, like everything else this week. If you lived in a hot tub, you'd get it.

Do You REALLY Want to Know?

Description of which areas of the brain are involved in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D.:

"We detect mistakes with our orbital frontal cortex, part of the frontal lobe, on the underside of the brain, just behind our eyes. Scans show that the more obsessive a person is, the more activated the orbital frontal cortex is.
Once the orbital frontal cortex has fired the 'mistake feeling,' it sends a signal to the cingulate gyrus, located in the deepest part of the cortex. The cingulate triggers the dreadful anxiety that something bad is going to happen unless we correct the mistake and sends signals to both the gut and the heart, causing the physical sensations we associate with dread.
The 'automatic gearshift,' the caudate nucleus, sits deep in the center of the brain and allows our thoughts to flow from one to the next unless, as happens in OCD, the caudate becomes extremely 'sticky'.
Brain scans of OCD patients show that all three brain areas are hyperactive. The orbital frontal cortex and the cingulate turn on and stay on as though locked in the 'on position' together -- one reason Schwartz calls OCD 'brain lock'."
So how am I feeling? Well, we have this new green bin for organic waste and kleenex, and I have this sinus thing, so I'm using a fair number of kleenex and technically I should open the theoretically clean little green bin every time I need to put in strawberry ends or banana peels or kleenex, but every time I have to touch it I feel a desperate need to wash my hands, so I either have to wash my hands until my skin looks like something that should be made into a purse, or I have to make little piles of peels and tissues until a future time when I have to wash my hands anyway, then I open the green bin and put in the stuff and THEN wash my hands.
In other words, my caudate nucleus is a little sticky, and I'm in brain lock. You?

A Few More Rungs up on the Crazy Ladder

I just wrote in an email that I've discovered over the past few days that blogging is one of those things that, once you start not doing, becomes easier and easier to not do. Having written that, it became apparent to me that I need to start blogging again very, very badly.
Christmas at my sister's was great. I love my sister. I love my sister's house. I love my sister's husband and children.
But sweet Baby Jesus I'm just getting weirder and weirder. I hate travelling. I hate having to worry about all the stuff I need to take with me. I hate realizing that it's a stupid thing to worry about -- I was only going to London, Ontario, what could I possibly forget that I couldn't borrow or buy at a twenty-four hour Shoppers' Drug Mart, which is where my pharmacist sister used to work so chances are she already has five of it kicking around her linen closet right behind the beautiful beautiful codeine anyway? I hate worrying about what clothes to bring -- I'm non-standard-sized and neurotic, so based on a wide, impossible-to-predict range of dopamine levels, atmospheric conditions and which episode of the Simpsons is playing, I need a wide range of yoga pants and enormous t-shirts to choose from. I hate what a different city's water does to my hair. Not that Barrhaven water does anything great to it, but I pretty much know by now what kind of not-great things it does, and how to compensate. London water might do some different not-great thing, and then what do I do?

photo credit
creative commons license

Yeah. All that even before breakfast. Add to that the fact that my sister is so goddamned super-competent that there's really nothing I needed to do in the way of cooking or cleaning (okay, cooking, nobody without a frontal lobotomy is ever going to ask for my help cleaning), and that the kids were pretty much perpetually off with their cousins playing unfathomable games involving electronics, top hats, dragons and British accents, and I was feeling sort of useless and restless a good portion of the time. I was also exhausted and had a bit of a sinus infection, so every time I tried to read I would fall asleep. Which I guess shouldn't have been that much of a problem. Christmas vacation, nothing to do, have a succession of naps. But it made me feel sort of embarrassed, as if I was sneaking off to drink vodka in my room. Which is stupid, because everyone else was both sleeping and drinking vodka right out in the open, and no one was pointing and laughing at them.
I went to my sister's computer a couple of times, thinking I might post, but it felt too weird. Apparently I can only blog with my ass in this particular chair, and my computer on this particular table, which is stupid because it's a laptop and theoretically I should be able to do it on a plane, on a train, in a box, with a fox. But when I wasn't looking I became a creature of place. One mediocre, messy, arbitrary place. I'm getting a little afraid that I might gradually lose the ability to travel anywhere. No trips to other cities, then no going downtown, eventually no grocery store or mailbox, and before you know it I'm Hugh Hefner without the smoking jacket and all the Viagra.
There were great parts of the trip, of course. I love seeing the kids with their cousins. I love sitting down at a big long table for dinner and not being able to eat for the first ten minutes because you're so busy passing stuff. I love sitting around in the evenings after the kids are in bed (and before the first one gets up) having a drink and talking with my Mom and Dad and sister and brother-in-law. Surely that's enough to balance the fact that I felt unbearably awkward, hysterically self-conscious and borderline traumatized by being there, with my own family, in an environment as alien and unnavigable as another house. For four whole days.
I'm so not a well woman.
We got back on Sunday. I haven't left the house in three days. I just got done playing Trouble and watching a Jonas marathon with Eve. I'm SO happy.