Costumes

Finally! you say, she writes! Yes, it's true. I know it's been a while, and I'm sorry. Lots going on around here, including virus, and not much worth writing about. Let's say I've been busy, sick, and under-inspired. But tonight, I am back in the saddle. So to speak.

I have redeemed, somewhat, my reputation as Bad Parent (also known as Chopped Liver). I made my children's Hallowe'en costumes. Yup, sewed them with my own two hands. They are adorable, too. Aimee wanted to be a black cat, and so I scored a piece of fun fur from the remnant bin and made her a little fuzzy hoodie with ears. I didn't have enough for the bottoms, so I got a chunk of black fleece (for $3!!) and made some pants, to which I attached a tail. So she will be cute and warm. Now all she needs is some whiskers and a treat bag. She has an indoor version for the school party, and an outdoor version, for trick-or-treating. Our Hallowe'ens are usually pretty chilly.

Jack is going to be a Jedi. He actually looks a lot like Annikin in his get-up. He has a little jerkin-type rag which belts around his waist ($1.50 for a remnant of off-white linen and two snips with the scissors) that he wears with a t-shirt, regular pants and rubber boots. I also made him a billowy brown cloak which looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi's. Overall, the whole thing makes him look like Frodo from Lord of the Rings, but he is pleased as punch. And I rock, as mom of the month.

It is especially remarkable, because I have never been particularly creative about the costumes. Usually I cop out and buy something, or Gramma (who is a remarkable seamstress) comes up with something adorable and complex and way beyond my meagre skills. But this year, I did it myself. Ha Ha!!

I guess these days I feel like I need redeeming because I feel like a Bad Parent more often than I feel like a Good Parent. I abandon my children at school so I can work full time. I leave the parenting to their father too often. My goodness but if he ever got hit by a bus, those poor kids might as well be orphans. Last week, I sent Aimee to school even though I was pretty sure she had pinkeye. She was getting drops and not likely to be contagious, she was not feeling poorly at all, and she had hand sanitizer and strict instructions to wash her hands frequently, and immediately if she needed to touch her eye. The daycare worker called me. "If it was my child," she said, "I would come and pick her up." But Aimee wanted to stay so I let her and now I am a Bad Parent. Even though she ended up being fine.

Jack is another story. I fear for this child's employability. His behaviour is so miserable lately, that he's been in time-out more than he's been out of it. He tests. He missed swimming lessons this week, because he said I was an idiot (possibly true, but you don't tell someone that). I told him to go sit in the corner and that if I heard one more of the forbidden phrases (the list is growing hourly), he was staying home. "I hate you, mommy," he said. He stayed home. Too bad for him, too, because it was Parents' Week and I was going swimming with them. I felt sorry for him. I felt more sorry for Trevor, though, because he was counting on the hour of peace and quiet to study. When Jack's like that, though, there is no reasoning. No ability to grasp logic. I know we need to be patient and persistent and consistent but some days it really sucks and I wonder what would happen if we just let him run wild.

Another night this week, Aimee was rolling around in her bed, whining and crying. She was able to tell us her throat hurt. We woke her up and told her she needed medicine. Henceforth, an hour-long battle of wills commenced, wherein she whined and cried and screamed and nearly made herself puke, while we bribed and threatened and reasoned. She had a choice, one tiny adult pill, swallowed whole, or two chewable children's ones. She licked both and gagged and cried some more. After an hour, she took them and fell asleep and had a great night. I couldn't take the sheer frustration and left embarasingly early in the fight. Trevor took over, possessed as he is of much greater patience. Bless his soul, Trevor got her to take the pills. If I were left to my own defenses, I am sure I would have held her down and plugged her nose until she opened up. Not a good prospect. Not a warm, caring, nurturing environment to grow up in. I went to bed and cried. Aren't parents supposed to display endless patience? Some days, I feel like an impostor, not a real parent.

I know they will grow out of these and my Aimee gives me hope that Jack will turn out ok. She used to be a holy terror, and has, generally, grown into a really nice little kid. Jack shows signs of being ok, too but he still has a long way to go. I watched two drunken teenagers get arrested on the street right in front of work the other day and thought how easily that could be Jack in 10 years. We as parents have a moral duty to keep trying to mold him into a likeable, productive adult who won't tell his boss to fuck off if he doesn't feel like doing something. But holy crap, it is hard. By far the hardest work I've ever done. My hat is off to Trevor, because he logs more hours of waking Responsible Person time than I do in a week. And not only is it hard, it has huge implications for the future. The kind of man he becomes will affect all the people he encounters in his life: potential and actual employers, love interests, his children, his neighbours, the people driving beside him down the road. It's an ominous responsibility, and one not enough parents take seriously (editorial comment, yes).

I love him, and I always will, but there are days when I really don't want to spend time with him. Weekends feel long sometimes. I worry he will turn out to be like Dr. Smarmy at work, a genuinely unlikeable man. I wonder if Dr. Smarmy's mother knew he was a jerk or if she was blinded by maternal instinct? Do you think she ever disciplined him for acting like a prick? Maybe I should take hope in the fact that I recognize that the kid has some shitty behaviour patterns right now and I still do my best, in concert with my co-parent, to squash them and metamorphose them into acceptable ones. I have to believe that the parents of truly awful people just never recognized their awfulness on time. I can't believe they were beyond redemption from the start. I don't want to be the parent of another Dr. Smarmy. Major responsibility. I'm tired just thinking about it.

In any case, I have redeemed myself with the Hallowe'en costumes, so even if I end up being considered a Bad Parent at the end of the childhood (when I'm dead, I guess, really, and maybe not even then), I think I may have saved myself from being a Horrible Parent. Because regardless of what happens from here on in, even if I let go and Jack ends up being an organized crime denizen running wild with a bad crowd and getting his 12-year-old girlfriend pregnant when he's 13 (dared I even write that down?), there will always be the Hallowe'en costumes.

PS. I think this is my opening to thank my parents, just as they always said I would, someday (which was right before they wished a child "just like yourself" on me under their breath). Yes, I am thankful to them, and now do have an appreciation for their skills and restraint. I turned out to be a law-abiding, tax-paying, educated, (re)productive citizen. I had a happy, comfortable childhood, oblivious to the frustrations I must have caused them (hopefully my kids are oblivious to all this frustration, although it is so volatile and prevalent, how could they be?). Of course, I was an angel, so I never challenged them like these two challenge me. Right? Em? Moe? Right?

Gramma

October 9 is my Gramma's birthday.

I was thinking about when I was a kid and we spent almost every Saturday night at her house. They had a storey-and-a-half and we slept in a room on the top floor with sloping ceilings. She always had some kind of toothpaste that we never got at home and soap shaped like little lemons. Her bathroom had stripey carpet and I remember finding my favourite stripe whenever I was in there. I also remember one time when I locked myself in the bathroom because I had no idea that the tiny knob next to the regular doorknob was to lock the door and not a kid's knob. They had to talk me out of the bathroom. Their house had a closet under the stairs where coats were hung and behind the coats there were shelves with all sorts of interesting things: ancient pencils, a stack of colouring paper, a measuring tape, Gramma and Grampa's walking sticks (he made them out of old hockey sticks, stripped and stained nicely, used mainly to beat off aggressive dogs). We played in there for hours, by the light of a bare bulb that Gramma had to turn on because the pull string was too high for us. The smell always made me think of freshly sharpened pencils. In the basement there was a root cellar that smelled earthy and damp. They put carrots and potatoes from the garden in there and ate them all winter. Up in the bedrooms, there were little half-height doors into the eaves where Gramma stored all sorts of treasures. It was cold in there, and it always smelled dusty and neglected. The Christmas decorations lived there 11 months of the year, as did bags of scrap fabric which gave us endless hours of creative occupation, sewing clothes for our dolls with clumsy stitches and liberal use of scissors (and frequently tape).

Gramma's house had different rules than home. We always ate a bedtime snack, usually potato chips in a little bowl, eaten on a tv table in the living room while we watched hockey or Love Boat or Lawrence Welk, none of which we would ever watch at home. Lunch would be Alphaghettis and Libby's orange juice in a tin, which never tasted good at home. She bought puddings in individual serving size, the ones with the metal ring and pull-off top that I could never quite do. She would tell us to "go to the store" and we would go to the pantry shelf in the basement to choose what we wanted to eat. For breakfast, I always had All Bran, layered with Harvest Crunch and Special K. In that order. Gramma always had good cereal. I remember a corner china cabinet that Grampa made (there was a telephone book through which he drilled a hole and threaded a wire so it could hang from a nail behind the cabinet). There was a radio on top of it and I remember we were eating breakfast in that kitchen when I heard on that radio that Terry Fox had died (I was about 10). The kitchen was lit by a circular fluourescent light and I remember lying on the floor and looking at my distorted reflection in the metal fixture of the light. That was also the kitchen where my dad exploded the mustard, trying to squeeze through a blocked outlet. There was mustard everywhere; she still talks about finding flecks of mustard on the wallpaper weeks and months later.

They had a garage, and I remember the day we came over and saw a new car in the garage. It was a Dodge Dart, kind of a beige colour with a dark green interior adn a bit of a bend at the edge of the rear window that made it look like the world was being rolled out as we drove by. One time, my grampa spray painted a toilet seat, I think, in the garage, and forever after, there was a white outline of a toilet seat on the wall. There was a little patch of dirt right near the garage where the grass wouldn't grow, but otherwise, their yard seemed huge and green. I remember doing cartwheels on the lawn, and I remember planting seeds in the garden Grampa planted every year. The raspberry canes in the back yard were prolific; the taste of raspberries still brings me back there instantly. In that back yard was where I learned, first-hand not to lick cold metal. One day, I touched the very tip of my tongue to the decorative swirly screen guard on her back door. I pulled it off instantly, but it hurt for days.

Gramma always wanted us to go for a walk after supper when we were at her house, so we walked to a school playground nearby. We had to walk through a back lane and there was a driveway made of crushed amethyst. We loved that driveways, but we were never allowed to take home a rock unless it was in the middle of the lane, nowhere near the driveway. I remember singing "I'm the king of the castle and you're a dirty rascal" from the top of the monkey bars at Gramma and she would pretend her feelings were hurt. We always came home from that park with our hands stained rusty and smelling metallic from the ancient jungle gym.

The beds in Gramma's house were always made and the sheets were crisp and flat and cool and smelled clean. She had a line outside for laundry with a little door in the back porch so you could hang the laundry without going outside. In the morning, probably ridiculously early, we would go into her room, across the hall from ours, and snuggle in her bed. She never told us to go back to bed.

Gramma made us the best cakes. There were cakes shaped like bunnies, like beautiful princesses, and one year, at my request, she made me a birthday apple pie. Her clown cupcakes were always the hit of any classroom party. She indulged us incessantly, but without spoiling us. There were always cookies in the cookie jar and jelly beans in the candy jar. I wonder how many times Gramma read us "The Tawny Scrawny Lion"? She herself was always reading whodunits with bloody daggers on the covers, and I used to take her bookmark out (sorry, Gram, I thought it was clever and funny at the time). They always looked thrilling and forbiddenly grown-up. She had a peanutbutter jar full of buttons that we spent almost as much time with as we did with the fabric scraps. She knit us a new sweater every year for the first day of school. Oh, and Gramma made me my gigi, my pink gingham quilt that lived on my bed until I moved in with Trevor. I loved it so much that the satin ribbon binding needed to be replaced several times before I retired it. Which, of course, she did.

Gramma is the reason I was able to go back to school for this degree; she funded my education. She also took Aimee, my sister, and I to South Africa in 1999 for three weeks, the trip of a lifetime. She typed my stories when I was a fledgling writer. She kept my little letters and drawings, too. I should find the letter she scanned in and post it. Without Gramma, I would never have known about The Moms and Dads (a singing group sharing space in the Lawrence Welk genre). She also taught me of the flavour adventure that is a warm peanutbutter and baloney sandwich (let me tell you, not all adventures are good). I swear it is true, but she refuses to believe me. Gramma also took me to buy my first hamster. He was a baby one, the cutest little thing. I named him Cupcake. We slept at their house that night, and of course he escaped. Grampa, who apparently had a thing about rodents, had to catch him. When I woke up in the morning, his cage was wired shut, with a piece of cardboard reinforcing the door, placed in a box, and the whole thing was in the bathtub, with the bathroom door closed. He went home the next day, and I don't think any rodent ever dared to set a paw in her house again.

I could go on and on about my fond childhood memories of Gramma. We had such fun at her house. Even now, she keeps a little box of toys at her place for when my kids visit. She is a dedicate pet owner (she saved her cat from the needle... little Kleo was not a happy kitty until Gramma and her tuna came along). She mastered a computer and email when she was well into her 80s. She is a card shark and the main contributor of dessert for Sunday dinners. She watches baseball and hockey and men's curling (but not women's, they shriek too much). She volunteers at a nursing home once a week, calling bingo or transporting the inmates to and fro. Since Tim Horton's opened across the street, we know where to find her on Sunday mornings, after her walk. In fact, she still walks at least once a day, except when it's too cold or icy, and then she rides the exercycle that she hauled up from the dumpster one day. As a result, she looks 20 years younger than she should.

Anyway, this was to be a little happy birthday trip down memory lane. It's been fun. I hope you enjoyed it too, Gram. Thank you for all the memories, all your nurturing and love. I wish you a wonderful day.

Bus

I love my bus ride home. It's 45 minutes to relax, stop thinking about work, read a good book and listen to music of my choice. Time to wind down from one job and wind up for the next (mom, wife). And, most of all, to not speak to anyone.

I find myself sorely disappointed when I know someone on the bus, and I have to talk to them. I have no interest in conversation. I do it to be polite but I really don't care. In my head, I am telling my co-conversant that they are an annoying thief of my time. I have actually started avoiding certain times because I know I am more likely to meet someone I know. Today was the worst bus ride I have had in a while.

I got on just outside of the hospital, as usual, and saw a colleague. We chatted, because it would be impolite not to. My transfer, though, luckily, I thought, had no familiar faces on it so I happily plugged my headphones in and looked for a seat.

The only seat on the bus was beside a man who was turned sideways and taking up two spots. As this is generally obnoxious behaviour, I stood beside him and stared pointedly until he moved. Dumb move. I should have waited. I sat. He said a few words over his shoulder to the man behind me, something about the new MRI machine at the hospital near my house. Not 30 seconds later, he started talking to me.

Creep (pointing at my music thingy): Is than an Ipod?
Me: Yes, a Shuffle.
C: You like it?
M (noncommitally): Sure.
C: How many songs does it hold?
M: I think about 200.
C: Well, that's pretty good. Who needs more than 200 songs, anyway? I have about 120 CDs at home, myself.
M: That's a nice collection.
C: Yeah. So how do you get the songs on there, with the computer?
M: Yes.
C: What kind of music do you listen to?
M (offer no personal information): Oh, this and that. It puts the songs on randomly, so you never know what you are going to hear next.
C: Cool, that's like the radio only better.
M (when oh when is my stop going to come?)

In the fifteen minute bus ride, I learned that this man is 35, his birthday was last weekend, and he didn't even get a cake. He recently broke his ankle, and expects it will never fully heal. It happened at work, which he goes to 8-4:30, Monday to Friday, downtown. He gets along with everyone, even his boss. He always wanted to be a health care aide, and even took the course, but got kicked out during the practicum (I offered no comment). He wasn't good under pressure, he said. He also told me he lives near the Y that we go to and he used to go to the one downtown, but he switched to the new one as soon as it opened, but he hasn't been there in a long time because of his ankle. I learned all about his little radio that he used when he worked out at the Y. He told me exactly where he lives (near the Y), where he hangs out (nearby restaurant) and what he likes to do with his spare time (drink coffee with his buddies). He told me he always thought he would be married with kids by the time he was 35, but he had some health problems (I refused to bite). He told me that the week after he turned 21, he had a brain aneurysm that ruptured (although he also called it a stroke) and he spent a week in a coma and six more weeks in the hospital, and then 2 years at a rehab hospital that we happened to pass at that moment. He was paralyzed on one side but now he is back to normal. He told me, though, that he does have some short term memory loss. Go figure. This explains a lot.

Not once did I say anything that would invite conversation. I didn't even turn my music off. I did, however, answer his questions politely and relinquish no personal information whatsoever. I gave vague answers to personal questions. I was most relieved to get off the bus.

I wasn't afraid, or even creeped out, I was just intensely irritated that someone was interrupting my alone time. Never did I offer verbal or body language that anyone would construe as the least bit inviting, but this man was singularly unwilling to take a hint. I practically turned my back on him but he kept on talking. I stared furiously at the freshly coiffed head of the lady in front of me, who was reading a paperback, oblivious to my predicament, allowed by circumstance to escape into her book while I had to endure this lonely man.

Last night it was little better... I sat next to someone who wanted to bitch about the weather. Granted, it was snowing in the first week of October, but still. I don't care. I also heard all about his family life, his kid's ages, and where he lives and works. Don't you see buddy? I don't care! Maybe I look too friendly. Maybe it's that component of my personality that attracted me to nursing, that I (appear to) care. I really only care about people and things I have some connection to. A shared seat on the bus does not count as a connection. Hey, maybe I am missing out on something, maybe I am forgoing my great Opportunity, but if it is coming at me at 5:00 pm on a weekday, I think I'll give it a miss. This life isn't so bad... who needs Opportunity? I don't want it if I need to make nice with a stranger to get it.

I tell ya, I am on my own tomorrow night. I have done my socializing for the week. It's someone else's turn to chat with the freaks.