Upon being 8

So as of a few days ago, my baby is 8 years old. We celebrated by touring a Liberty Ship in the San Francisco Harbor. My Canadian child knows this much about Americans: one salutes the flag.

"Mommy, why is a salute hitting your eyebrow with the side of your hand?"

I explained to him about the whole Roman thing, demonstrating that your right hand is free of weapons, and that it's also a mark of respect. One ought to stand about three feet from the superior being addressed and maintain an upright posture.

So for the next three hours, I am tailed at three feet by a small boy in a white sailor's hat, barking orders to himself, his hand glued to his new sailor's cap,  marching around as though his life depended upon the force with which his sneakers hit the ground.

The volunteers aboard the Jeremiah O'Brien were duly impressed. The man running the gift shop made hima birthday present, as did the sage 91-year-old Anglican vicar who sailed the O'Brien to Normandy and back twice, some 50 years apart.  Kid was told by this wise old man to listen to his mother and not to put anything in his body that he didn't know for sure would make him healthier and stronger. The chocolate chip cookie in his hand hit the dust. The long-held dream of cotton candy did the same.

So now I'm parenting an 8-year-old Canadian health-nut who wants to be an American navy officer when he grows up, and who has already memorized the lines to "Anchors Aweigh." He also criticized my consumption of chips, beer, and guacamole, which is completely irritating.


Next year I'm taking him to a law office so he can check out the Hugo Boss suits and the BlackBerries. It's either Freedome 85 or Nudge Kid into Extremely Lucrative Line of Work. Although it will, I confess, be hard to give up the salute. I quite like the salute.

Bye, sweetie

At first, they don't leave your arms. Then they're attached to your leg at the knee. Then they want to hold hands all the time. Then they're just within arm's length. And then they get bikes and learn to swim and you just stand there, watching them get a little farther away with every minute. This was an exciting week for Kid: he finally got the hang of that bike and something in his body/brain happened so that he started to swim. I stood clutching my Kindle poolside, watching his small perfect face framed by the water, as he demonstrated his new ability to float. And then he minnowed his way down to the other end of the pool in a non-too-straight line, taking all of my heart with him.

I Say Hello, You Refuse to Say Goodbye

It goes like this: two boys have been playing together like short human beings for a number of hours. Sure, there are shrieks, there are arguments, there are--shall we say--differences of opinion settled through the judicious use of fruit peels and saucy verbal jousting. But in general all is civilized. One grows proud.

And then comes the moment when the parents of the other boy arrive. And you know what happens?

Oh, not much. Only complete and utter savagery.

Wedgies are inflicted. There is hair pulling. One small boy topples the other small boy into a curio cabinet. A WEAPON IS PRODUCED even though they both know that we are trying hard around here to maintain the  impression that we are a stable suburban bungalow staffed by responsible, well-educated (if terminally dishevelled), pacifist grown-ups. One of the midgets cries. Someone swears--just yesterday I heard the dread phrase "by cracky." Motherly arms clutch futilely for squirmy bodies, motherly voices squeak ineffectually beneath the mayhem.

And two nice women experience that stomach-churning churning of stomachs that indicates that you've failed publicly, again, at this raising children thing. Yeah, okay, sure--the kids don't have hooks for hands (Jenny's yardstick for successful parenting)--BUT they are not a credit to the family. They're not a credit to the RACE. THE PEOPLE RACE. And then the wheels well and truly come off: you re-re-re-re-re-notice the ancient smashed corpse of the mosquito of 2005 on the wall just above the door. The dog-chewed shoe in the hall that was fashionable in 1999 and which bears the grimy marks of your very own five apparently not-so-clean toes. The one-lightbulb-short hall fixture that even your mother shudders at, it's so hideous. The guacamole on your shirt. You see the thought bubble above the other mom's head: "Oh, SHE'S the mother of that child who wore ONE PAIR OF SOCKS the entire week he was away at camp."

The threshold is supposed to be a magical and hotly contested place of ghosts and angels, vengeful gods of the forest demanding entrance and determined gods of the hearth saying "No way, not on my watch you don't, you filthy beast." Guess what? It's true.

Code for Shoot Me

There are certain things that I say every single day of life. For many of them, I am grateful. Things like "Thanks, that was nice." Or "I love you, too." But there's one soul-dulling little ritual that I go through around about this time--just after dinner--365 days a year. It feels like 365 days a week. When it's happening, my mind goes to a pale stretch of beach in Belgium or The Netherlands--the Wat in Northern Germany--someplace with a vast horizon and nothing much to look at but some squirming mud fish temporarily discomfited. I can literally feel my eyes rolling back in my head as though they were suspended in a tupperware dish full of water.

It goes like this:

Me: Put on your pyjamas, please.
Kid: Why.
Me: I would prefer "Okay" to "Why." Try again.
Kid: Do I Have To.
Me: Put on your pyjamas, please.
(And here it comes:)
Kid: CAN I KEEP THIS SHIRT ON?

(Can he keep this shirt on....Sure, why not? It's only encrusted with breakfastlunchdinnersnacks, texturized by paintgluespitbloodotherpeoplesartprojects, and dusted lightly with gravelchalkdoghair. Sure, what the hell, sleep in that thing. It would only mean fumigating your bedroom and boiling your sheets for a day and a half.)

Me: No, it's filthy.Take it off.

And much complaining ensues. The words "unfair" and "revolutionary" are uttered. Furious little hand gestures and Churchillian grimaces.

This evening as my eyes were rolling back in my head and my thoughts turned to miles of empty Belgian coastlines with no obvious beauty, I had a brainwave. It goes like this:

Kid: CIKTSO?
Me: NIFTIO.

An entire 15-minute battle, reduced to four syllables. Imagine the time, the gin, the therapy that we will save. You got any short cuts to bedtime? Besides firing them out of a cannon and into their little trundle beds?

Love = poached halibut

Husband was off on a boondoggle in Ottawa the last few days, leaving me to negotiate the Children's Festival, a birthday party, dinners, dog walks and school attendance. At some things I failed spectacularly (the last three things, actually). The first two weren't great either. Looking around frantically for a win here. . . I did recognize the need for Kid to have underwear that actually fits, and made that purchase. So: check! Yay me! I bought superhero gaunch.

When DH is away, I fall into a sort of fog. It's not, despite my obvious affection for the darling man, that I can't live without him, it's just that I can't seem to live well without him. Watching DH prepare the first decent meal we would eat since last Thursday, Kid and I have decided that love tastes like poached halibut.

Rocking the Norm

So, yesterday I left another woman's small boy outside the school in the rain on his birthday because I am, well, me. This morning, I slept in and so Kid is not in school. (Attention, any potential CBE employees out there: sometimes I write fiction on this blog. You just never know.) (But this is true.) ("True.") (You'll never take me alive, coppers.) The last time Kid had socks that matched was last year on his birthday when he received a pair of them from his scandalized grandmother. They've never been seen since. The dog was walked yesterday. Twice, around the back yard. That way, when Husband phones from his Ottawa Valley boondoggle, I won't have to lie about whether Elvis got some exercise. I made frozen burritos for dinner; they were stil frozen in the middle after 30 minutes in the oven, so we chipped away at the sad corn and did our best. My son greeted the pacifist mother of his friend at the front door not with a polite "hello" but with a loaded cap gun. That same kid cannot spell "Tuesday" but can spell "thermonuclear detonator" and "hydrogen fission." Also: "diarrhea."

This is what a friend calls, with affection, my "parenting style." She like how I "rock the norm."

I think I've done waaay more than rock the norm. I think I've taken the norm down to its subatomic core and applied dancing filaments of energy thereupon. What happens next is anyone's guess at this point--but tomorrow? It involves a birthday party, the military museum, the Children's Festival and a dinner date with some Hogwart's Lego and a princess.

I just glanced in the mirror I keep by the desk for detecting and eliminating chin hairs by daylight. I have crazy eyes.

Pic St-Loup

So I took May off from this blog. I didn't mean to, but the life! The life got in the way!
I now know much more about Osler-Weber-Rendu than I ever expected to, purchased some custom beryl earrings from Wexford Jewelers because that's the sort of thing I do in the middle of the wide-awake night when no one's around on Facebook to play Scrabble with--I think about what jewelry I have to leave to my neices in my will and decide that none of it is good enough so I really ought to have myself fashioned some raw beryl earrings and avoid post-mortem embarrassment, I saw one of my closest friends run naked across a stage while hundreds of the blue-rinse set howled with laughter and all I could think was "Wow, she's been working out," clipped a foxhound's dewclaws, was assailed by cauliflower left too long to its own devices, put my hand in a bucket of aquatic insects while four Grade 2s squealed in horror, purchased inappropriately above-the-knee clothing for a woman of my advanced years, told a bird to fuck off, listened as the doctor diagnosed my gorgeous blue-eyed baby with some kind of serious myopia perhaps requiring the insertion of hard glass disks into his poor blind eyes, and yelled at a really mean person who phoned me up at 4.30 in the morning and then wouldn't believe that I was not, in fact, the owner of an architectural supplies firm named DAVE.  And now my friends are going to Italy to join other friends already there, a friend's baby has been born and her brother has died, one of my sisters and two of my brothers-in-law are in Ottawa, as is my husband, and the woman whose birthday-boy son I just left standing in front of the school in the rain for 20 minutes brought me a bottle of wine to thank me for helping her out.

It's a huge swirling world of joy and pain and rain and Italy and medicine and airports and those green plastic perfumed dog poo bags, and sometimes there is no room for blogging about it.

BUT! So far no scrapes, no bruises, no sad undergarments making a break for it. And Pic St-Loup at the end of A Day.

Cheers.