“it hurts”

“It hurts!” BoyGenius is holding his head, crying, sitting in front of the toilet, and between sobs he’s wailing “it hurts.” In his wretched, pitiful little voice I hear myself at the same age and I feel as helpless as my mother must have felt back then.

BoyGenius went up to bed at 9pm and awakes around 12:30am, the night leading up to Mothers’ Day, with a migraine. I can’t actually do anything to help him. Oh, I try. I give him a gravol and an ibuprofen even though I know it’s too late for them to help. I give him a cold washcloth and do most of the holding of it as it rests on his forehead. I tie his hair back into a loose ponytail so it doesn’t get covered in the vomit that will inevitably come. I murmur “I know, baby, I know,” as if hearing that between his own “it hurts” will be of some comfort.

And it’s true. I know. I have migraines. They started when I was about 7 or 8. BoyGenius’ started when he was 6 or 7. He got them from me. I got them from my dad. Dad got them from his mother. I don’t know which of her parents my grandmother got them from. My brothers were mostly spared, SkinnyGuy not really having any and BlueEyes suffering only once or twice. My cousins from my dad’s side got off scott-free, but their kids managed to keep the generational hand-me-down going.

But I digress. I manage to convince my little bundle of misery that we should move to the bed; it’ll be much more comfortable than the bathroom floor and I’ll have a bucket handy for the vomit that will inevitably come. I try to get him to lay still but he keeps twisting back and forth holding his head tight and sobbing. “It hurts. Oh. Owwwww. It hurts.” At one point he’s knocking on his head with his knuckles and I’m almost ready to take him to the ER. Then the inevitable happens. It comes in waves, with head pounding the whole time, 5 minute breaks in between, head still pounding for the most part. About half an hour into it the ibuprofen comes up, still a perfect little caplet form. I try to give him the benefit of my 40 years of experience with this beast and get some ginger ale into him. He doesn’t yet understand that the throwing up doesn’t stop just because your stomach’s empty. Doesn’t yet know that ginger ale coming up and out tastes infinitely better than bile. He also doesn’t know that those little breaks in the throwing up are a particularly cruel joke. You just about manage to doze off. There seems to be a lull in the pounding, even. Maybe it’s over. You open your eyes or move a toe or just blink. BLAM! Jackhammer starts and you better sit up quick ’cause here it comes again.

At about 1:15am he bolts up and heads to the bathroom. I take off after him and see that he’s sitting on the toilet. I put the bucket beside him and rewet the facecloth so it’s nice and cold. I notice he’s falling asleep, trying to rest his head against the seat lid behind him. He drifts off for a few seconds but that heavy-head-jerk (you know the one) wakes him back up. He takes the washcloth and wedges it between the base of his skull and toilet seat lid as a kind of pillow and catches a few winks. I ask every once in awhile if he’s ready to go back to bed but he keeps saying no. I talk him into believing he’s done on the toilet and direct him back to the bedroom. The bucket is still handy but I know that if he’s been able to get off the bed and into the bathroom and back to bed without having to throw up then that part’s over.

His little body is exhausted. He says his head still hurts but I can tell that even that is subsiding. He’s no longer rocking back and forth in agony. He’s able to close his eyes peacefully, no longer squeezing them shut against the pain. For this I am thankful. I breathe a little easier. I have been through this all before, from both sides, and I know that I will be here again. I know that I will feel just as helpless the next time a migraine makes itself at home in my house; less so if it’s my turn.

As I sit beside BoyGenius in the wee early hours of Mothers’ Day, watching over him, waiting to hear deep, even breaths replace the ragged, raspy ones from earlier I can’t help but think of Sheila and Kate, two moms whose blogs I read/follow, who have known much greater anguish than what I have gone through tonight. I don’t know them personally, face to face, but I know their stories. I send love and strength out through the universe to both of them.

It’s Mothers’ Day. BoyGenius gets up at about 7:30am. He tells me he’s fine, heads downstairs and lets me sleep. Life is good. I am thankful. Again. And again.

Donna Day … wanna help?

Last year around this time a few of my bloggity friends gathered from far and wide for an event that was being held in Chicago. I Want a Dumpster Baby, From the Bungalow, Pinwheels and Poppies, The Monster in Your Closet, Mary Tyler Mom … they were all there. Trade show, bloggers convention? Nope. A St. Baldrick’s event. “What’s that?” you ask. ”Some religious gathering?” Nope. A shave. A fundraiser. An event. This particular one was being held in Chicago, put together by Donna’s Good Things in memory of and to

Donna’s Good Things event is being held at the Candlelite in Chicago

honour Donna Quirke Hornik, to raise much needed money to fund research in the hopes that one day children won’t have to fight cancer. I couldn’t attend but I was there in spirit and I did donate some cash. Donna was an amazing little girl and you can read her story here. It’s not my story to tell so I won’t do that, but it is my story to share and it is up to all of us to do the same. If you know of anyone who has fought cancer then you know how horrible it is … if you know of any child who has had to fight cancer then you know how much worse that is. If you haven’t got a clue (and even if you do), then please read Donna’s story,  her family’s story, her mother’s story. It ain’t pretty … but it’s beautiful.

So, Mary Tyler Mom (Donna’s mother) asked some people to blog today, Donna Day, about this year’s event. You can find out more about it and make a donation here (in case you didn’t see that last link). I wasn’t actually specifically asked, but you know, I didn’t need to be. Research into pediatric cancer is a big deal. It needs to be funded. We need to do this; we can make a difference. Sure, it takes scientists and money and stuff .. but we’ve got those things. Donate.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, you don’t actually have to attend an event in order to make a donation. You don’t even have to be in the same state, province or country. You can donate to Donna’s event just by clicking through. Also thanks to this here internet, you can check to see if there might be any events in your area, if you would be more comfortable donating to or attending something like that. And by doing just that, checking for local events, I came across this little gem: a group of Tau Kappa Epsilon students from UOIT is holding an event on March 8th, 2013 at the Campus Ice Centre in Oshawa, Ontario. These young men are standing together to try to keep cancer from bullying more and more children. How can you help? Donate! You can click through and pick a certain participant to support or you can donate to the event. These guys are hoping to raise $1500 to help fund childhood cancer research. That’s not too much. I’m sure we can push them over the top. St. Baldrick’s partners with Childhood Cancer Canada Foundation so if you’re a Canuck and want your funds to go towards a Canadian organization, not to worry, they will.

Honestly, I’m not too concerned as to which St. Baldrick’s event you donate to, I just want to get you to donate. St. Baldrick’s is a good organization and like I said above, research into pediatric cancer is a big deal.

Please help.

yep, death sucks

My cousin died last night. She had been fighting cancer for 7 years.

We weren’t close, either in proximity or in familial feelings. Matter of fact, I probably hadn’t seen her in over 40 years. It doesn’t matter. She’s still my cousin. She was family. She suffered. She has a son. He suffered; still is suffering, as are her mother, her sister, her niece. Cancer sucks.

You know, sometimes when we lose someone suddenly, tragically, accidentally, we say “at least if they were ill we would have had a chance to say goodbye.” Saying goodbye ain’t always all it’s cracked up to be. My cousin was in the hospital for the last week, had been in and out of the hospital a number of times over the last 6 months at least, had been suffering through chemo for endless periods before that. I don’t think her prognosis had been anywhere near ‘good’ for at least the last 2 years. That’s way too much time to say goodbye.

My dad died suddenly, and that sucked. Sudden isn’t great. My brother died with time for us to say goodbye, but I don’t think I ever really did. He knew I would miss him, he knew I loved him, he knew I didn’t want to say goodbye. So he tugged on my sleeve to make sure I stayed that night he drew his last breath. That sucked, too.

Losing someone you love hurts. Whether it’s sudden or tragic or you’re forewarned doesn’t change that. The fact that my cousin is finally at peace and without pain is a good thing, but the fact that she died … well, it sucks.

Hug the people you love.

Monday’s words – I

The year is drawing to a close much more rapidly than I would like ..  November’s almost over. I find it hard to believe how fast a year goes by. I’m almost getting used to the speed of indiviual weeks but months and years still leave me spun out trying to figure out how they passed with such great velocity. I think “oh I just wrote something the other day” and then realize it was a month ago. I think “I’ll get that typed up today” and then it’s time to head back to school to pick BoyGenius up for lunch or it’s already 3:20 and school’s almost done for the day … then it’s homework and dinner and laundry and bedtime and Coronation Street and all of a sudden it’s the next day already and Monday’s words aren’t getting out until Tuesday … or Wednesday … and my tea is getting cold … and it’s bed time again … and it’s been seven hours and fifteen days, since you took your love away …

But I digress. I words are funny. Many of them are “im-” or “in-” words and mean they’re NOT something or other. These are often confusing (I think so, anyway) as those suffixes sometimes mean ‘not’ or ‘non-’ something but not always. And when they do illustrate a negation, the “root” word is not always able to be used as a word with the opposite meaning of the ”in-” or “im-” word. Think about it … some more .. try it out on some words … again .. there you go. See?

i

Here are some of my favourite I words: impromptu, infidel, ilk, imbibe, infer, iota, intrepid, idiom and integrity.

impromptu ~ prompted by the occasion rather than being planned in advance. I think we’ve all experienced an impromptu night out with friends or an impromptu dinner party … some of us have been put on the spot and had to give an impromptu speech, maybe.  Sometimes these turn out to be the most fun and memorable occasions of all. And it’s a fun word to say, too.

infidel ~ a person who has no religious beliefs; an unbeliever, with respect to a particular religion, especially Christianity or Islam. It originates from Latin (surprised?) and its meaning in that language was disloyal or NOT (in-) faithful (-fidel). So can you be fidel? Not in English. In Spanish you can, especially in Cuba. In German to be fidel means to be in the best of moods, merry or jolly. Here you can only be an infidel.

ilk ~ type or kind — you know, people of THAT ilk. The first time I ever came across this word was on All My Children, way back in the 70s. It was uttered by none other than Erica Kane and I loved it from that moment on, endeavouring to use it whenever possible. It’s not a word that is easily voiced in everyday conversation. It’s one of the ‘cattiest’ words I know.

imbibe ~ to drink; to receive and absorb into the mind; to absorb or take in as if by drinking. I always feel better about imbibing a few libations than I do about downing a few drinks. And, if I’m with friends, I can imbibe information and ideas at the same time I’m imbibing red wine or Weissbier! How cool is that!!?!?

infer ~ to deduce or conclude (information) from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements; to surmise; to lead to as a consequence or conclusion. [Infer is often confused with imply. Don't do it. If you are speaking or writing, you might imply something ... if you are listening or watching or reading, you might infer something.] “I inferred that those girls were making fun of me because they kept looking over at me and giggling.” The last little snippet of definition above means that if you see a finished Lego set at my house you infer that there must have been a Lego builder; if you see thick black smoke, you infer there is a fire.

iota ~ it’s the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet and when used as an English word it means a very small amount or a bit. I love it for the way it sounds, the way it looks and the way it’s spelled (which means that when you’re playing Scrabble or Words With Friends and you’ve got 7 effen vowels you might be able to find an open T and make a real live word!).

intrepid ~ resolutely courageous; fearless. I like this word. I like the idea of this word. “He was an intrepid explorer!” could be said about many a 3 or 4 year old checking out all the climbing equipment at the playground. I would like to be thought of as intrepid. I would like to live my life intrepidly. I enjoy the fact that this is an “in-” word whose root word can actually be used and does mean what it should: to be trepid is to be anxious or timid.

idiom/idiomatic ~ a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements; the specific grammatical, syntactic, and structural character of a given language; regional speech or dialect. If all of that just confused you, think of it this way: slang; common usage; the way a native speaker of a given language speaks; phrases we use that don’t actually mean what the individual words would have you believe (eg.: the lights are on but nobody’s home; to come into your own; as dumb as a sack of hammers). Idioms are fun and if you can speak a language at least somewhat idiomatically you will get much more out of foreign travels than if you are pulling sentences out of a phrase book.

integrity ~ I think when we hear this word we often jump right to the meaning that points at adherance to a strict moral or ethical code. I like ”the state of being unimpaired; soundness and the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness” just as well, if not even better. I like to hear talk about preserving the integrity of an old building, maintaining the integrity of a plan or idea.

So there you have it. I haven’t forgotten you, dear readers. I haven’t given up. I haven’t stopped thinking. I’m still here. Hope you are as well.

conversations?

Conversations in my head
Discussing things we’ve never said

Do you have conversations in your head? Are they conversations with yourself? Mine aren’t. Not usually anyway. They are actual conversations with other, real, people. People that I never seem to find the time to actually talk to. Sometimes they are rehashing snippets of conversations we have had, or started and didn’t finish. Sometimes I like them, sometimes I don’t. I get to say the things I want to say, without worrying about time constraints or little ears listening in from around the corner. The other half of the discussion doesn’t always go as I would hope. Truly. I don’t have them just say the things I want to hear. Well, okay, sometimes I do, but sometimes I am my own worst enemy playing devil’s advocate.

My biggest problem with conversations in my head is that when I actually see the person I’ve been “talking” to I can’t remember if we’ve already discussed something or not. It drives me nuts .. more nuts than I already am. The conversations in my head aren’t helpful and are a huge waste of time. Sometimes I write in my head as well. And that doesn’t work out either. Not really. There are always things that pop into my head and I know I should write it down or type it out because when I try to do it later I won’t remember what it was or exactly how I worded it. But the problem with that, of course, is that I’d be jotting stuff down all day and be getting nowhere at all with my list of chores.

How do people with children, with families, ever get to have real conversations with other people? It’s not the idle chit-chat at the grocery store or in the drive-thru. I don’t mean about what to make for dinner or how many bags of yard waste you gathered and put to the curb on the weekend. I mean a real, heart-to-heart, “these are my hopes and dreams” conversation. The kind of thing you have a best friend (or maybe a spouse) for. If  you can’t even find the time, let alone the right time, to talk to the one person that you can talk to about this stuff — then what?

Conversations in my head
Discussing things we’ve never said

writing — or not

So I haven’t been writing much lately and it’s annoying me. To be fair, I have a number of pieces that I’ve started and they seem to be fine and then — bam — I just can’t find the finish. In some it’s like I’ve lost my train of thought and can’t get back to it. In some it just seems that I’ve said enough but I can’t find the right way to wrap it up. I haven’t really had that “feeling” in the last little while, that overpowering urge to put something down, that surge of energy that needs to come out through my fingers.

Of course, I have had other things to do: laundry, cooking, gardening, raccoon catching, clothes sorting, recycling, composting, etc. I’ve already written about laundry. Cooking is having a hard time keeping me interested lately, mainly because I no longer know what the other two members of my family will eat with any semblance of regularity; it’s very hard to be excited about cooking something when you know you’re the only one who’s going to enjoy it. Gardening — there’s too much of it that needs doing for it to feel good, it mostly feels overwhelming. Raccoon catching, now there’s something I could tell you a thing or two about. Okay, maybe. Clothes sorting is something that needs to be done but like gardening can get to feeling overwhelming. It’s a separate category from laundry although much of it stems from laundry. Recycling and composting, how exciting! We have a bit of an issue on those two fronts because it all piles up in our small kitchen and gets on everybody’s nerves — mainly because I’ve only got two hands and so many hours in a day.

This is how they got into my kitchen ceiling.

Okay. Raccoon families. Are you familiar with these rascally bandits? Sure they’re cute. Right up until they’ve pulled your soffit and fascia apart and decided to make their home in the bulkheads on either side of your kitchen. That’s right, in the walls and/or ceiling of your kitchen. My kitchen. I heard scratching, a little bit of movement. No chattering. If we banged on the ceiling you could hear movement from one area to another. It wasn’t until I was up on the ladder pruning a tree that stands right next to the house that I saw where it (at this point I really thought it was just one) had gotten in. I remembered my neighbour once telling me that the bulkheads in the kitchen ceiling were open to the front of the house, and I remembered not really being able to picture it as he described it. There’s an overhang at the front of the house, over the kitchen, it’s closed off, I couldn’t figure out what he meant. Once I realized that Rocky Raccoon was in my kitchen ceiling it started to make sense. The bulkheads are open/accessible from insidethe overhang so once they got in it was a nice snuggly place for raccoons to overwinter, what with all the yummy smells coming from the kitchen as an added bonus. What to do, what to do? Enter Grandpa. I e-mailed him photos of the point of entry and he designed a one-way door, came over and installed it, complete with a ramp so the little rascals wouldn’t fall when they were trying desperately to get back in. (To me it seemed like a balcony and I was sure I’d come home one day and see little raccoon deck chairs out front of their new storm door.) I set a trap in front of the kitchen window. Caught me a raccoon on the third day after the door installation. YAY! Took it to the conservation area and prepared for a quiet night. HAH! Still heard the pitter-patter of little feet. Set the trap again. Caught me another one two days later. Took it to the conservation area. All was quiet for about a day and a half …. then … scratching in the ceiling again. Caught me a third one. I could not believe that there had been three raccoons up there; seriously, there was no chatter, no arguing, no excessive noise. No normal raccoon interaction. Three was it. After another week or so with no movement, no noise of any kind, Grandpa came back and removed the one-way door (and the balcony) and threw up some extra flashing to ensure that the soffit and fascia could not be breached again. This was a year ago last December and we haven’t been bothered since.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are still raccoons staring in my bedroom window every once in awhile, there were two up on the roof in the fall and when BoyGenius and I went out to throw tennis balls at them to scare them off the roof they decided it would be fun to keep throwing them back at us. I have an opening under my deck (where a family of raccoons has been known to nest previously) that I never seem to get around to closing off. Well let’s be honest, you can’t really be sure the critters are out until it’s the middle of the night and then the neighbours have been known to complain about the hammering or drilling. But you know, if they aren’t in my kitchen, I’m not too bothered by them. They need somewhere to live, right? So it’s all good until a week ago last Thursday when a raccoon came crawling over my fence just as I was about to leave to pick BoyGenius up from school. That’s right, at about 3:15 in the afternoon. I told it in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t supposed to out at this time and that this didn’t bode well for its future. In the schoolyard I asked my friend if I could borrow his trap again. He said sure, he had just gotten it back from someone else and it was available. I picked it up that evening, set it just before I took BoyGenius up to bed and while I was singing to him, SNAP! It had been sprung within 20 minutes of being set out. Yep. Caught me a raccoon. Closed up the hole under the deck as best I could without having lattice or fenceboard or anything similar around. Four days later I noticed it had been reopened — with a vengeance. That same evening there was a mama and baby out on my deck, with the mama standing on her hind legs, brazenly taunting me while the baby played with BoyGenius’ toys. The trap went back out. I caught the mama; no sign of the baby. Mama took a trip to the conservation area (but I blindfolded her and drove her around a while first). I figured the baby had to come out sometime so I put the trap right in front of the opening under the deck and waited. The next morning there was indeed another raccoon in the trap, just kind of laying there like the lazy adolescent he was; no sign of the baby. When I told this teenager that I was taking him up to see his mama he wasn’t happy about it. I think he knew he was going to get in trouble. There is still no sign of the baby. I have spent quite a bit of time looking under the deck with a spotlight, both day and night and there isn’t anything under there anymore. The trap is still at the deck opening, just in case. I’m thinking I’ll close that hole up this weekend.

childhood revisited

As I watch my son roll down a 50-60 degree decline, onto the tarmac at the bottom, I am reminded of the games we used to play when I was a child. Things were different then. Or were they??

True, we didn’t have video game systems – but we did spend time at the arcade. True, we only got 3 channels on the television up until I was in about grade 4 – but once mom went to work so she could pay for cable, well then we got 13 channels! True, cartoons were only shown early on Saturday or Sunday mornings – except for The Flintstones; they were on every day at lunch. True, there weren’t any “kids’ networks” to monopolize our viewing time – but we did schedule our homework around the ABC After School Special on Wednesday afternoons, The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and Sonny & Cher, The Hudson Brothers and Carol Burnett.

children at play

We played tag, both the frozen and regular varieties. We played hide & seek. We played Cowboys & Indians. We played badminton, frisbee and touch football. We played marbles (we usually called them alleys). We played Red Rover and British Bulldog. We played baseball or 21-up. We played on snow-hills and in vacant lots, we hiked across town to “Duck’s Pond,” we climbed trees and tried to swing on vines and once we discovered that those vines weren’t the same kind Tarzan swung from we brought rope with us. We hung upside down from the swings and walked from one end of the teeter-totter to the other. We tried desperately to swing so high and fast that we’d be able to go all the way around the top bar (someone had seen someone else do it one time, don’t you know). We rode our bikes, no hands, with the front wheel turned backwards. Standing. Downhill. We rode double and triple (and we didn’t have helmets). We skipped rope, although I never did manage to get more than two jumps in on double-dutch. We swam every day as soon as the weather permitted.

I grew up in a small town, huge backyard, empty fields across the street and next to us, trees for climbing right outside my door, pathways from the edge of our property right down to the lake. The lake was home to the main town park, complete with climbing apparatuses, swings, teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds and fast metal slides. BoyGenius is growing up in a “town” with roughly 80,000 more inhabitants than mine had. There are no vacant lots or empty fields nearby, unless you count the baseball or soccer fields at his school. We have pathways from almost the edge of our property right down to the lake. There are playgrounds along the way but these days you are hard-pressed to find a merry-go-round or a teeter-totter. The school playground is bordered by a small forested area – most of the neighbourhood kids play in there on a daily basis. BG loves to climb trees and the baseball backstop; heck, he’ll climb walls if he can get a foothold. He’ll swim in any body of water that holds enough volume to cover him. He hasn’t quite mastered my technique when jumping off the swings (the one that totally gives you the feeling of flying), but he’s trying. He brings vines home from the forest, hoping to find a way to attach them to trees so he can swing from one to another, like Indiana Jones.

So it would seem that our childhood pastimes are not completely divergent although there are some marked differences. BoyGenius and his friends play tag; sometimes it’s just like what we played and sometimes it’s just a little bit different in that they play it in the forest, combine it with hide & seek and call it manhunt or mantracker. They will play regular hide & seek as well.  The frozen tag they play can be a bit different as well – one version is called graveyard and doesn’t involve any running around  … no movement at all, actually. Cowboys & Indians – well, you’re not allowed to play that anymore are you? I haven’t seen anyone playing marbles in at least 20 years. Neither Red Rover nor British Bulldog are allowed in schoolyards anymore so none of the kids today even know about them. If there are ever snow-hills in the schoolyard the children are not allowed on them. Pick-up football or baseball games have been replaced by organized soccer and t-ball. We don’t let our kids bike all over town or slosh around in duck ponds in hopes of catching tadpoles or snapping turtles. That’s if you could even find a duck pond these days.

As I watch my son roll down that steep hill, I remember doing the same. I remember the feeling and I remember that I loved it. I know that I will have to work with him to perfect his mid-swing takeoff, and work on his landing so he doesn’t break his arm again. And I know that he shares my love of that completely dizzy feeling you get from turning and spinning, arms straight out, in a wide-open field until you can’t even keep yourself upright and fall flat to stare up at the cloud-spinning sky above.

Do you see memories of your own youth in the games your children play?

Monday’s words — C

Today I am full of love. That is not to say that I am not full of love on any other day, but just that it is something that should be known and proclaimed: today I am full of love. Love is an exceptional thing. It is bubbling inside of me and making me bounce and laugh and cry and grin. It is making me both tense and loose; rigid and flowing. All in all, today has been an exceptional day.

It is Monday, and today that means it is a word day. Today’s words will start with the letter C. I quite enjoy the letter C. It is so changeable. On its own it can sound like a K or an S or a SH or a CH. It can be paired with other letters to create some of those same sounds. Quite versatile.

today’s post is brought to you by the letter C

Some of my favourite C words are cerulean, conundrum, cloister and chameleon. I also like communal and commune (with commune being either a noun or a verb). These of course branch off into community and communication. I like how the CH in chimera is a K sound while the CH in chiropodist can be a K sound or a SH sound or the guttural german combination of the two. Certain. Certainly. Certainty. I wonder if  don’t think  there could be a better word for a large, angry, destructive fire than conflagration. I love how the word caress can sound and feel just like a caress if you say it the right way. I totally love how the word cleave can mean two completely opposite things: to divide or split and to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly.

I also have a favourite C anecdote. It comes from a show called Mad About You and goes a little something like this:

PAUL
Clamenza! Clamenza! (in a high pitched voice)
Clamenza? Clamenza? Helloooo Clamenza’s!
Clams. Clamenza Clams. Clamenza Clams. Ah,
Clamenza. (a la Brando as Godfather) Clamenza,
how about some clams? Clamenza, try the clams.
We have clams. Where’d you get your clams?
Clamenza brought clams. (back to Paul) I’m done
with the Clamenza thing.

LONG PAUSE

JAMIE
Alright, one more.

PAUL
CLAMENZA!

C words. Not always a bad thing.

have I told you lately?

I recently read a post over at Hands Free Mama titled Six Words You Should Say Today and it really got me thinking. Not that I don’t think anyway, but Rachel often gets me looking at and thinking about things I tend to gloss over. Things we all often take for granted. This particular post gave some good advice for interacting and encouraging our children. I loved it. I tried it. I didn’t wait for an opportunity to arise involving my own child, I used it when volunteering in Kindergarten the day after I read it. It was beautiful to see the effect of “I love watching you write letters” on a little one.

What else happened was that this led me to think of all the times we, as parents, use “I love you” as a precursor for some lesson or reprimand. I say “we” because I’m pretty sure I am not alone in this.

• I love you but could you please remember to flush the toilet?
• I love you but if you had done what I asked you to do you in the first place you wouldn’t be stuck behind the couch.
• I love you but can’t you read quietly for awhile?

I realised that I have a tendency to do this. I think my belief was that starting with “I love you” somehow made the reprimand easier to tolerate. Having given it some thought, I no longer believe that. I now think it actually takes away from the “I love you” and makes the bad stuff even worse. The simple act of removing the “but” and making two separate statements changes the whole thing.

• I love you. Please remember to flush the toilet.
• I love you. Let me help you out from behind the couch. Next time try to do what I ask.
• I love you. Could you please read quietly for awhile?
  

  … just love …

Don’t get me wrong, I often tell BoyGenius that I love him — without any qualifiers at all. But I also do this other thing. And I’m going to stop. Because my loving him isn’t contingent upon him flushing the toilet or eating his vegetables. It just is.

a woman of a certain age

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard this term before: “a woman of a certain age.” You may have been hearing that you shouldn’t be doing something or wearing something.  You know, “a woman of a certain age shouldn’t dress like that!” You may even have been the one saying it! I’m here to offer an entirely new spin on that phrase.

I was at the grocery store the other day, just pulling into a parking spot and trying to remember what I was there to purchase when I spotted “a woman of a certain age” get out of her vehicle and start making her way across the parking lot. She was about 3 steps away from her SUV when she stopped in the middle of the oncoming traffic lane and started back towards her spot. She stopped again; turned back towards the store, took a look back at the hatch of her truck, opened it, took out a shopping bag. She took one more step in the direction of the store, stopped, turned back, re-opened her hatch, put the bag back, closed the hatch and marched off to the entrance doors, giving her head a little shake as she went. I laughed. I’ve done the exact same thing many times. And let me tell you, once you’re inside the store it’s often worse.

I walk BoyGenius to school every morning, hustling him up off the couch, away from the laptop, into the bathroom to brush teeth and hair, towards the door to get shoes on, check the weather and argue about a jacket, snack, homework, backpack. Same thing every morning. I push him and struggle internally about whether I should put socks on or not, which jacket and which shoes I should don. We are in a rush. We are not in a rush. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Day after day. Guess how often we are at the foot of the driveway before I realize that neither one of us has his knapsack? I’d hazard 3 out of 5 days.

I drive around with library books or dvds in my car. They come with me wherever I go. They are in there for one reason, and one reason only: to be returned to the library. They get moved from the front seat to the back seat, wind up hidden for a couple of days under some fast-food napkins and two or three jackets, then get re-discovered and replaced in the front seat. I pass the library at least twice a week … and then I get home, remember I have them and hope that I can also remember to log in to the library’s system and renew my items before midnight of their due date.

I have, on occasion over the last 8 years, stepped out of the shower, having turned the water off and draped a towel over myself, only to realize that I still had shampoo or conditioner in my hair. Yes, that’s right. I have also, on occasion over the last 8 years, stepped out of the shower, draped a towel over myself, grabbed another one to dry my hair and realized that my hair was hardly even wet, since I didn’t remember to wash it. The winning move, I think, is that I have even, on occasion over the last 8 years, stepped out of the shower and begun to dry myself only to realize that my underarms were sticking together … uh huh. I didn’t rinse the soap off.

I’ve done it all. I have left the dishwasher door open all day effectively keeping the cat from her food bowl. I have left my heated seat pad plugged in all night so that my car has no battery power in the morning. I have gone to get that one last thing to throw into the washer … only to return four hours later to find that I never did come back so the washer lid has remained open for all that time and the water is cold and the laundry is just sitting there in a tub full of water. I have boiled eggs until they pop — did you know that eggs pop just like popcorn? It’s not a pretty sight … or smell.

In the midst of all of this chaos, I have had an epiphany: being “a woman of a certain age” has absolutely nothing to do with your chronological age. You may have 23 years behind you, you may have 43 years behind you. Nowadays, in my humble opinion, being “a woman of a certain age” puts you squarely in the centre of the age of motherhood. People often speak of “baby brain” and attribute many quirks and bouts of forgetfulness to just that. My son is 8 years old. He’s no baby. It’s not “baby brain.” I am simply, and proudly, “a woman of a certain age.”