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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.

At least I'm not usually naked

I know I hide it really well, but I'm a fairly anxious person. I think this has always been reflected in my dreams. When I was a kid, I frequently dreamed about being behind the steering wheel in a moving car on a busy road. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes my little sister was with me, and it wasn't always the same road, but otherwise it was the same thing -- the car going faster and faster, up and down hills, and I was in a complete panic with no idea what to do. Sometimes I think I'd like to take the kids -- Angus especially -- out to the car, sit them behind the wheel, and at the very least show them the brake, so if they ever have this dream they can think 'no problem, I'll just hit the brake'. But it seems just a little too weird, even for me, to give my kids driving lessons for their future possible dreams.
Once I learned to drive, I didn't have that dream any more, which was a relief. The other dreams had less of a physical danger aspect and more of a farcical, wrong-place-wrong-time tone. Usually I was either getting married or having a baby, always without the attendant planning, with everything going horribly wrong and accompanied by a feeling of doom. I'd be walking down the aisle and realize I hadn't washed my hair, or that I'd forgotten to invite my father, or that I didn't even know the groom. The baby dreams were even worse, of course. I'm a good Catholic girl (well, a bad Catholic girl), and I was having a baby without being married (or having sex, for that matter, but that was less of a problem). Once I had the baby I had no idea what the hell to do with it, and I would invariably misplace it or drop it. Once I washed it in the sink and it dissolved like an ice cube and slid down the drain.
You don't have to be Freud to see that these dreams were indicating a lifelong (and really tedious) fear of being inadequate or unprepared for certain milestones. It wasn't a big deal. I already knew I was neurotic -- if anything I was just slightly chagrined that my subconscious chose such a glaringly obvious tactic for highlighting it. I preferred the wacky, impenetrable dreams -- the ones where I organized Cambodian refugees into a kick-ass motorcycle taxi service but then we had to band together to fight some weird burning monster made out of forks and wire, or when I was guiding a group of people to jump off a cliff into a river, but first I wrapped up a biscuit and some toothpaste in a handkerchief for each of them.

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So now that I have a driver's licence, and I've had a great wedding followed by a mostly happy, occasionally exhilarating, periodically cranky marriage, and I've had two kids and managed not to lose either one for more than a few (very bad) minutes, I figured: what's left? My dreams should be pretty safe now, right?
I guess the lesson would be something like 'never underestimate the power of your neuroses'. Now that all that stuff is over and doesn't scare me any more (much), I have a recurring dream that some faceless academic body has found a problem in my transcripts and I have to go back and make up some credits. In undergrad. Or (wait for it) high school. In order to keep my master's degree. Which I don't use and probably never will. And the dreams consist of me racing around not being able to find the right classroom, or suddenly realizing I've accidentally missed every lecture in a course all term, or just realizing that there's no place in residence for my kids to live. In other words, my nightmares don't revolve around monsters. They revolve around grades.

My subconscious is a total fucking bitch.

What happens when you give a fruit to a nut?

I have a couple of reviews brewing. I'm reading The Maternal is Political and learning all about great mothers who move to India with their three-year-olds, engage their children in political debate and homeschool. I also need to review Sima's Undergarments for Women, by my friend-of-a-friend Ilana , who not only is younger than me and published her first novel before I've even finished one but delivers babies on the side. In the wake of all these inspiring women, what's been on my mind lately?
How much I hate my hair, mostly.
I know, I know. It's superficial. It's what's inside your head that matters. You don't change the world or get novels written by worrying about your looks. Still... why can't I just have normal hair? Even normal hair that doesn't look that good would be better. I swear, my hair spends all its time thinking up new and original ways to look dorky. Little bits appear from nowhere and stick out. One side flips out and gets frizzy and the other side turns under and sticks to my head like it's been glued there. Small sections sometimes turn purple. I'm certain that I would be accomplishing great things every day if I had better hair.

So today I went to the gym, stuck Eve in the playroom, worked out and then went down to get groceries. Our fruit bowl was empty, which for my apple-devouring oldest child is a disaster beyond bearing, so I was somewhere between apples and pears when I happened by a bin full of lychees. I stopped and looked down at the cartoonishly prickly little things and thought "I've never tasted a lychee. My children have never tasted a lychee. I'm a terrible mother and we don't go to museums often enough and they watch too much tv and clearly I'm not exposing them to enough exotic fruits!". Anyway. I bought a few lychees and after supper we gathered around the table for the Grand Lychee Experiment:
"What are those? They look like Pokemon."

"How are you supposed to peel this? Get me a knife."
"Ewwww! They look like brains!"
"I'm not eating that."
"Mmfffff"
"Bleaghhhh!"
"They're terrible! I hate this lychee!"
"Can I have some cocoa rice krispies?"
So then they had bland, processed, culturally bankrupt cereal for dessert and they were trying to steal each other's and it was all funny and cute and then they kept doing it and suddenly I was infuriated and I told them if they spilled cocoa rice krispies all over they would never ever have cocoa rice krispies again. Because they would be dead.
I blame my hair.

Dude, where's my backbone?

A man came into the little independent bookstore I worked in one Sunday in Toronto. He was pleasant and well-dressed. He wandered around the store for a while, asked a few questions about cookbooks by the Urban Peasant. When he went to pay for his purchases, he felt in the back pocket of his pants and got this horrified look on his face. He said he had thrown his jacket in the trunk of his car without realizing his wallet and car keys were in it. His two kids were playing in the park near his house and he was supposed to go pick them up. He tried to call his wife but couldn't reach her. He reached a locksmith but since it was Sunday it was going to cost a hundred dollars for him to come and unlock the trunk.

I'm sure most of you can see where this is going. I was young and nice and stupid. I lent him the hundred dollars. He gave me his name -- Brad Jacobson -- and the number where he worked, at the University of Toronto. He asked me if I liked homemade wine. Naturally, when I called the number a few days later the person at the switchboard immediately sounded weary and annoyed and said that no one named Brad Jacobson worked there.




Why didn't I go with him to the car to wait for the locksmith, or at least look out the store front window, since presumably he was parked nearby? Why didn't I ask him why he couldn't just pay the locksmith after he unlocked the trunk? Why didn't I just say, sorry buddy, not my problem? Because I am a people pleaser. I hate saying no to people, even people I've just met. Anyone with half a brain would have considered his story and found half-a-dozen weak points. But if I'd done that, it might have hurt his feelings. He might have thought I was unkind. He might have left not liking me. Since I was never going to see him again, you could be forgiven for wondering why the heck that matters to me, but apparently it does.

Not only is this not the only time I've ever been a number one resource for criminals -- it's not even the only time at that bookstore. A couple of teenage boys came in one afternoon, hung around in the back near the New Age books for a while. As they were getting ready to leave, one of them asked how late we were open. I said we closed at six, and he looked at his buddy and said "We've got lots of time". Turns out he meant they had lots of time to use the credit cards in my wallet which they had just stolen from the back room before I went to take the subway home and realized it was gone.

At least that time it was just stupidity on my part (I should have put my bag downstairs). I really really hate the idea of this 'Brad Jacobson' ass feeling smug and superior because he put one over on me. Don't you think there must be a special place in hell reserved for people like that? Because of him, I've never again been able to think about helping a stranger in distress without first wondering if they're just running a scam, if I even consider helping them at all.

Last summer while my husband was away, a young Israeli girl came to the door with some paintings. She said she was an art student that was trying to make money to keep on with her education by selling paintings she and her classmates had painted. I have tried and tried to strike the perfect tone with door-to-door salespeople or solicitors; if it's your job and you have to do it, I'm going to try not to look at you as if you're a tiresome inconvenience or a loathsome specimen, and I should just be able to say 'no' politely but firmly and go on with my life. Somehow it never works out that way. I get all flustered and either end up sounding like an idiot housewife who can't do anything without her husband's consent or I end up with chocolate-covered driveway sealer or something equally useless.

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So I told the Israeli girl to come back the next day and I would buy a painting. Then I went inside and freaked out. Money was a little tight and I needed some painting for over a hundred bucks like I needed a hole in the head. I was trying to figure out how to explain this to Matt when he got home and suddenly I thought, 'wait. I didn't sign anything. She didn't have a gun. She's not even very big. I don't actually have to buy the goddamned thing.' But of course now I was going to be a ball of anxiety until the next day when she showed up again and I had to say the no I should have said in the first stupid place. As I went over the whole thing in my mind, it started to seem more and more fishy. I went to the computer and googled 'Israeli art door-to-door sale'. Imagine my delight when a multitude of results popped up for a swindle involving young people passing off cheap art prints as their personal work.

Let's pause and savour the ludicrousness of this. I was happy because now that I knew it was a con, I could righteously and indignantly refuse to buy a painting (since politely and firmly had failed utterly). In order for me to say no when I really want to, the person has to be at the very least a misdemeanour fraudster, and an outright felon would clearly be preferable.

I still didn't have the guts to meet her at the door. I printed out a copy of the description of the scam, stuck it on the front door, took an Ativan and went to bed. Thinking once again that I am in dire need of some sort of help.

Sometimes a cute picture is just a f***ing cute picture

My friend Ilana posted a link on Facebook today to an article at http://www.doublex.com/ called Get Your Kid Off Your Facebook Page. Katie Roiphe feels that the "trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves" as profile pictures may be a "potent symbol for the new century", and questions what this phenomenon might be saying about "the construction of women's identity" today.

Roiphe goes on to lament the fact that women who work, belong to book clubs, wrote their thesis on Proust and stayed out drinking until five in the morning in college now go to dinner parties and talk about nothing but their children, boring their friends to death and raising worrisome questions about whether they are able to use their words to converse about anything beyond diaper rash and the politics of toddler-stomping and plastic vegetable distribution at playgroup. She goes on to posit that the world is too child-centred and women are letting their children erase their own identities -- Facebook, after all, is supposed to show the world "who you are" -- and finishes up by breathlessly forecasting that soon we mothers will substitute our children's pictures for ours on driver's licenses and passports. She laments for poor Betty Friedan lying unquiet in her grave.

I don't know if Katie Roiphe is really truly worried about this, or if she just thought it would make a good article, which, in all fairness, it does. At any rate, here's why I think it's mainly bunk.

To address the Facebook question: my profile picture on Facebook tends to reflect whatever's going on in my life at the time. Often it is a picture of me -- with a new haircut, in a costume, whatever. Sometimes it's a picture of me and my husband. Sometimes it's a picture of something I just planted. What's going on in my life right now is two kids playing baseball -- one in minor where he pitches for the first time, one in rookie for the first time ever. This is both exciting and time-consuming. Four games a week in total, every week. They look freaking adorable in their uniforms, dare you to say they don't. Therefore -- profile pic of two kids in baseball uniforms. It doesn't mean I think my only identity is that of a baseball-playing child.

Which brings me to my next point. The people Roiphe is complaining about are those who post pictures of babies and toddlers. People don't tend to use pictures of their teen-agers or young adult children, because those kids now have their own Facebook pages. Also, they're simply not around as much. However much you are determined that kids won't take over your life forever, when they are babies and toddlers? Face it -- pretty much taking over your life. I am careful not to talk about nothing but my children when I'm out with people who aren't close friends. When they are childless people, I rarely talk about my kids at all unless I'm specifically asked. I love my kids but I'm not an idiot; I'm perfectly aware that most childless people find that stories about other people's offspring induce a mind-numbing, soul-killing boredom. At this point, I'm perfectly happy to discuss a book or a film or a news story. When my kids were under three years old? Asking me to form a coherent thought about gender politics or visual lyricism or the post-modern use of narrative fragmentation would have been unrealistic, unrewarding, and just plain mean.

I don't have a full-time job outside the home right now because my daughter is still home most of the day and my husband frequently jets off to Europe and Asia and at this point going back to work would be much more trouble than it's worth. I do belong to a book club and I read a lot of books. Should I have a picture of a book as my profile picture? Should I have a picture of myself reading? I started blogging a few months ago. I blog about books and my life, which at this point largely consists of funny stories about my children and boring whiny rants about my morbid insecurity. I tend to think the stories about my kids are more fun to read, but what do I know? When I started reading blogs, I was mainly reading books solely dedicated to book reviews. Guess what? Blogs that only review books get boring sometimes. I look forward to the ones where people talk about their lives -- and their children -- more often.

Yesterday there were four of us at my friend's house, having lunch before we took our daughters to gymnastics. We discussed the movie The Reader while the kids played upstairs. We discussed the GM situation. Then we talked about the kindergarten collection fair. Eve is collecting pens. Rachel is collecting broken things. I think Rachel's is cooler.

I don't know if Ms. Roiphe has children. If she still wants to talk to her friends about their Proust thesis and how great going out drinking until five in the morning is, I suspect, indeed hope, not. One of the benefits of having children is that it doesn't let you take yourself too seriously. Several times a day my children highlight the general absurdity of things. But who knows? Maybe if you're exceptionally determined you can have children and still maintain your self-satisfied humourlessness.

When I picked Eve up off the school bus at the end of the street today it was pouring rain, and when we got home her pants were soaked, so she was running around in underwear and a t-shirt. She came and jumped on me before I started making lunch and I squished her and then patted her on the rump and said "I love this little bum". She said "yeah, but you love my tummy more, right? Because you always want to kiss my tummy, and you don't usually kiss my butt." For right now, I find this type of thing wholly delightful and fulfilling. If Ms. Roiphe thinks this means I'm giving up my identity, she can kiss my tummy.

Framed Shame

This post was inspired by Amber at Strocel (if I knew how to do the no-doubt-extremely-simple link thing those words would be a different colour and clicking on them would, you know, do stuff. But I don't) posting about her daughter's art.

By the time Eve was one and a half, according to various former teaching professionals she was holding a pencil 'correctly'. It should be noted that several of these former teaching professionals were related to her, and convinced that she was gifted, advanced and prodigiously talented in several areas, so bias should be assumed. Still, it was impressive -- she covered page after page with clouds of tiny circles, with single-minded fervour. My husband's uncle is an artist and teaches art students in B.C., and he took one to use as a teaching aid, to convince his students they didn't always have to draw 'horses, with pretty eyes'. Her second Christmas, Eve opened a huge pack of coloured pencils first, then lay on her tummy drawing for the rest of the day, ignoring the remaining pile of presents.

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It's been really fun watching her go through the developmental stages through her art. When she first started drawing people, everyone had to have belly buttons. She's gone through pencil stages and marker stages (never really took to crayons), and one stage where every drawing had to cover the entire page with no white showing. She draws mostly people or designs -- towering, elaborate, Seussical structures. Occasionally, for a birthday card or a bookmark, she makes these adorable tiny pictures of her and one other person -- the birthday child or Angus or me, usually. I love these tiny little gem-like pictures. So when I was making a framed scrapbook page for her friend Marianna's birthday, I thought it would be a great idea to get her to make one of her and Marianna and paste it on the scrapbook page. Charming, right? Involving her in the making of the gift! Her art would be hung on her best friend's wall forever! Or until the next redecoration! It was fabulous on so many levels.

Ugliest. Picture. Ever.

Apparently the stage she's going through right now is the Everyone Has Enormous Mutant Hands Stage. Also, she tries to draw her friends in the clothes they really like to wear, and Marianna often wears pants and a shirt. This caused problems straight away, as she came upstairs and lamented "I keep drawing the pants upside down!" The secondary effect was that she ended up drawing Marianna, a beautiful, delicate-featured little Greek girl, looking like a lumberjack with a serious glandular problem. AND enormous mutant hands.

Now if I was sticking to my parenting principles, I would have sucked it up and put the damned picture in the frame. I asked for the picture, she produced the picture, the picture was in play. Did I use the picture?

Like hell I did. This scrapbook page was a freaking work of art. It was all gorgeous little faces, heart-warming little girl embraces, beautiful patterned paper and meticulously scalloped edges. There was no place for enormous mutant hands.

We turned the drawing into a birthday card. I think I made the right call. But I feel a little dirty inside.

Blog Jeopardy

"My Mom got a speeding ticket because she was looking at garage sales."

"You don't have to poo on me!"

"This is what we do. That's the way we do it."
"What language is Jai Ho?"

"My Mom had to bring my Dad his shoes because he had a doctor's appointment for his feet because his toes are all weird."

"Una cerveza, por favor."

"You're so cool -- constipated over-rated (something I didn't hear) loser."

"For some reason I feel like some of the chocolate has nuts in it."

"I don't think there's enough room."

"I'm a tuna sandwich."

"I can burp the alphabet but I'll just do A since it's your birthday."

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What are: Things you will hear (whether you want to or not) while driving to the North Gower Bowling Alley for your son's ninth birthday party with five boys in the back of a minivan.