The Hardest Part of Love...

I read once that "making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." The website thinkexist.com attributes the quote to Elizabeth Stone. I can't quite figure out who Elizabeth Stone is for sure -- she's probably Elizabeth Stone the author, but who knows? Maybe Elizabeth Stone the photographer, Elizabeth Stone the archaeologist (concentrating on the Mesopotamian) or Elizabeth Stone the marathon runner cut loose with a great bon mot one day. At any rate...

This week-end, my heart was in a bit of a batting slump. It's hard when your heart gets up to bat and everyone says "Whoa, it's Allison's heart -- back up! Home run!". It makes my heart tense up and forget to rely on its muscle memory and suddenly what usually happens smoothly and gracefully turns all choppy and awkward. My heart struck out for one entire game. Fortunately, my heart then pitched a shut-out inning, and by the next day my heart was back in fine form, pitching like a badass, cracking balls into the outfield and tearing up its knee sliding into third.

My heart is a ten-year-old boy who adores baseball and has really great instincts for it. He was in a tournament this week-end, and his pitching was great, but he was psyching himself out badly every time he got up to bat, and the more it happened the more it kept happening. It's so hard to watch when you know there's really nothing you can do. After the second game on Saturday, I sat with him in the bleachers for a bit and told him about when I used to do high-level piano exams and recitals, and if I started to think about it too much, I wouldn't let my fingers just do their job and everything would go horribly wrong. I told him that his muscles know how to hit a baseball with a bat, and he just had to relax and remember why he loves baseball. His next game was on Sunday, and he got a hit every at-bat -- but I don't take any credit for that.

One thing that's kind of saved me from a vast number of cerebro-vascular incidents is that at one point I had to sit myself down and give myself a bit of a talking-to. Angus was in grade one and he had forgotten to take a book to school that he needed for a story-telling thing he was doing that we'd been practicing for weeks. I had put it in his bag the night before, but my husband took it out for a quick run-through in the morning and then forgotten to put it back in (notice how smoothly and unobtrusively I blame the husband?). When I saw it lying on the table, I felt faint. I immediately saw myself in grade one, realizing I didn't have what I needed and feeling that great wave of doom close over me. I didn't know what to do -- call his teacher, drive immediately to the school with the book, call my husband and scream expletives at him? Then, in a hot revelatory rush of insight, I realized I couldn't do this. I couldn't live all of his mistakes and humiliations and failures as if they were my own. I could do my best to help and guide and commiserate, but if I kept on like this, not only was it not any good to him, I might literally not survive his elementary school years.

The world didn't end that day, for either of us. His teacher said he could do it the next day. The next day I put a note in his agenda saying "Angus's Daddy took out the book yesterday so they could practice and forgot to put it back in. Angus's Daddy wants you to know that he's very, very sorry." I meant it as a joke, but at our first parent-teacher interview she mentioned that I seemed quite anxious about things and I should probably try to relax. I blamed it on the fact that English wasn't her first language, but really -- she's not wrong. And I'm working on it.

Fortunately, my heart is also a seven-year-old girl who loves to leap out into the sunshine waving her freshly-sunscreened limbs around yelling "ha HA sun! I have foiled your diabolical plan!" So there's that.

Wordless Wednesdays: Take Me Out to the...

Really looks like she knows what she's doing, huh? (For the most part, she doesn't have a clue).



Sitting on the bench somehow turned into lolling in the shade (over 30 degrees and humid).



Well THAT was refreshing.



For once she runs home without clutching the batting helmet to her head.



Did we mention she got FOUR runs in this game? AND we beat the team that creamed us last time? Still not sure how. But yay.

Brain Fry

It's hot.

 It's hot as hell, and my husband isn't here, which means I'm the designated parent for baseball every night, in the blistering sweltering life-sapping heat, hurling water at my kid every ten minutes and hoping none of them keel over from heat stroke, while wishing fervently that I didn't have to be wearing a bra because no bra is anything but a well-wrought instrument of torture in thirty-plus heat and humidity.

 That said, Eve got four runs and some brilliant man brought a spray bottle, and we won 18-8 (VERY unusual), so really I have no cause to complain, or to throw my other kid to the wolves in a blatant sop to the blog gods because I have no time left before reading Eve a story and then reading in bed beside her because she can't POSSIBLY fall asleep without me. And it's really unforgivable and if he ever finds out I'm toast. So I'm absolutely categorically NOT going to tell you about going upstairs and seeing through the half-open bathroom door Angus sitting buck naked on the toilet and Eve in there wrapped in a towel, and opening my mouth to yell at her to leave him alone while he's, um, passing a motion, and then realizing that, in fact, he summoned her in to kill an ant that he couldn't reach from his present position. And then they both asked me pointedly what was so funny.

Friday Sorta Funny

For sad, twisted, hormone-induced bitchy funny, see yesterday's post.

Or there's this. From my Mom, and therefore not a patch on the aneurysm-inducing filth over at Crazy Town.



A Home Depot Story !

Charlie was installing a new door and found that one of the hinges was missing.


He asked his wife Mary if she would go to Home Depot and pick up a hinge.


Mary agreed to go. While she was waiting for the manager to finish serving a customer, her eye caught a beautiful bathroom faucet.

When the manager was finished, Mary asked him, "How much is that faucet?"

The manager replied, "That's a gold plated faucet and the price is $500.00.

Mary exclaimed, "My goodness, that is a very expensive faucet. It's certainly out of my price bracket."

She then proceeded to describe the hinge that Charlie had sent her to buy.

The manager said that he had them in stock and went into the storeroom to get one.

From the storeroom the manager yelled. "Ma'am, do you wanna screw for the hinge?"

Mary paused for a moment and then shouted back, "No, but I will for the faucet."

This is why you can't send a woman to Home Depot!

Knowing Me Knowing You OR Why Are You Looking at Me Like That? F*** Off!

Anyone who read my last post and thought 'go away and have a freakin' frozen yogurt or something and come back when you're in a better mood' is going to be disappointed. Although it turns out my yawning existential Nietzchean crisis is probably just PMS, which is equally as annoying but somewhat less glamorous. I've eaten my body weight in salted cashews in the last four days. I walk around cooking or cleaning the kitchen and eating cashews every time I pass the container, then I put the lid on the container so I won't eat any more, than ten seconds later my hand hits the lid and I wonder who the asshole is who put the lid on the cashew container because the cashews are the only thing keeping me from ripping my face off and throwing it in the dishwasher that never washes anything. I took Eve to baseball last night and narrowly managed to restrain myself from bludgeoning the kid that spent every moment on the bench kicking at the gravel until a solid wall of dust enveloped the spectators, and tried to make some stupid fancy catch every goddamned time the ball came at him and then missed and had to chase the fucking ball across the outfield while the other team took two or three bases.

Yesterday there was a letter in the paper from a seventy-year-old woman complaining about an incident at a community centre where a woman was asked to cover up while nursing and then the management apologized and said it was just a single employee who made a mistake in asking the woman to cover up. The seventy-year-old woman was upset that they apologized. She said "nursing may be natural, but so is modesty" and questioned why one person would feel justified in embarrassing dozens of people.

Normally I would just write a snippy reply letter to the paper. Yeah, breastfeeding is natural. Modesty? More like a totally artificial social construction, originally meant to protect our bodies from the elements and later to protect the hysterically prudish tendencies of some. Embarrassing dozens of people? Oh, did I miss the part where the woman whipped off her shirt and danced around thrusting her breasts in people's faces? A woman uncovering one breast and sticking a baby on it shouldn't be embarrassing unless you're repressed beyond belief and/or going out of your way to examine the proceedings in minute detail, in which case I'm pretty sure YOU'RE THE ONE WITH THE FUCKING PROBLEM!!!!! But just the thought of writing a letter and having no effect whatsoever because all the people who don't agree with me are so irretrievably irredeemably incontrovertibly STUPID was exhausting. I wished I knew where the seventy-year-old woman lived so I could festoon her lawn with seventy pink boobs on spikes. I know, not nice. I am just a hot spiky ball of irascibility. I hate mirrors and labels in clothes and heat and I'm not entirely okay with the way the air is touching my skin.

1.Coffee or tea?

I hate coffee. I hate the smell of coffee. Once I was driving my husband's car and it reeked of coffee and I saw that there was spilled coffee sloshing around in the cup holder and I threw up and drove the car off the road and killed four cows and a chicken. Tea is okay.

2. Are you watching Glee?

Yes, and usually I love it but for some reason right now I want to bitch-slap all the characters and jump on their heads.

3. Do you sing?

I used to be an awesome singer. I was in the McMaster University Choir and when we moved here I was in the Carleton University choir with a bunch of skinny snotty little university students and some old people. We did Mozart's Requiem. You know, for dead people. I took singing lessons with my friend who was always just a little bit better at everything than me, but I was a better singer than her so suck it up, beeyotch. Then I started taking asthma medication and had a couple of kids and one or both of those have kind of toasted my voice. I still sing, but I'm not as good, which sometimes makes me murderously angry and I have to jump up and down on a Simon and Garfunkel CD.

4. What's your favourite John Cusack movie?

I love most of them, but Pushing Tin? Good thing there's no death penalty for disastrously bad movie choices, John. How the hell could the guy from Say Anything and the guy from Sling Blade turn out that abomination?

5. Burger or hot dog?

I usually think hot dogs are from the devil, until I'm putting together some elaborate five-course Cordon Bleu-class meal for our friends and making hot dogs for the kids, and then I want to throw the veal with pomegranate sauce under a car and eat hot dogs until I die of eating hot dogs.

Sincere apologies to Shan for abusing her meme like this. I promise to come back and be nice tomorrow, even if I have to perform a DIY frontal lobotomy first.

Ack

Things are bad. Things are really bad. Oh, that's inaccurate. Things are fine. Things are great. I'm bad though. I feel like I've slipped sideways just enough to not fit properly in my life. I can look down on it from the outside and see that it's a good life, but when I'm back inside it I can't feel it on my skin. I went for a great walk today. Eve was home sick but Matt was working from home so I walked over to the drug store and grocery store for inhalers and lettuce and salad dressing and berries and kleenex. It was warm but not sweltering, I didn't think of it as manadatory exercise so I walked at a comfortable pace and looked at people's flowers. I left my ipod behind and looked around at stuff (there are stores in that plaza I never knew were there). I came home and looked over the first part of my new course, which is another point I'm not terribly impressed with myself on. I always thought if I went back to school I would just purely enjoy the learning, and not worry about the marks, not get that twisty achy worry that I won't be a star pupil every time, not worry four years before I'm even close to getting the goddamned diploma that I won't be good enough to get a job. Low self-esteem is, like, so twenty years ago.

It's not self-loathing. I don't loathe myself. I'm not a horrible person. I have some nice qualities. I just need a little tweaking. And goddamn if I don't turn out to be stubbornly tweak-resistant at every damn turn. And I'm tired of all the fruitless tweak attempts. On the upside, the word 'tweak' is provoking some faint amusement at the moment.

This is where I wish strange things, like that I was an alcoholic or drug addict, because then I would have a clear problem set to work with. Also, since I'm not a drug addict or alcoholic, it seems like it wouldn't be all that hard to kick drugs or alcohol. This wouldn't be the case if I was, in fact, a drug addict or alcoholic. I'm sure you see that the general tenor of my current musing is unproductive at best. But they don't seem to have twelve-step groups for vagely disaffected existentially displaced compulsive readers -- at least none that are well-advertised.

Whatever. For lack of any tested therapy, I'm going to go with a liberal application of cashews and zombie stories.

Tune in next week for a hilarious malignant brain tumour!

Flipping through the TV listings on Digital Cable I come across:

Rules of Engagement: Audrey is falsely accused of sexual harassment. Comedy.

Riiight. Cause nothing says a laugh a minute like a hostile workplace environment and having your reputation ruined by trumped-up allegations. Gimme a W. Gimme a T. Gimme a F. ????