Monthly Archives: August 2010

Sound and vision

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These days, Mabel’s opening gambit is “I wuv you too.” Which doesn’t leave me anywhere to go, really, except a big hug and a kiss.

Lately, sentences such as “Maybe Daddy can do it,” responses like “Because I need to,” and double-barrelled sentiments the like of “I want to open it so I can drink it” have become so commonplace that I’ve almost stopped noticing that my not-yet-2-year-old (22 months next Saturday, people) is conversing like an old hand. One day while we were away I offered her a pencil to draw with. She looked up at me calculatingly and said: “How…how…how…” I knew something new was on the way. “How about a pen?”

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Oh boy. I’ve just looked at the forecast and noticed that after a week of 90-somethings, Saturday’s forecast high is 77F. I will be all over that – especially as I’ll be (wo)manning the school’s booth at the Labor Day Festival from 1 to 3 that day. I really hope it’s still true by then.

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On Sunday morning, as we were being magically transported cafe-wards on the divine escalator of those who worship at IKEA, I noted that my glasses were so scratched (only from repeatedly cleaning them on my t-shirt, not putting them down face-first on tables or throwing them in with fighting cats) that I should probably just get laser surgery. I wasn’t entirely serious, but on the other hand it has to happen sometime. I’ve always thought I’d do it eventually, when the price came down and the procedure was better, and maybe we’re there.

At some point it becomes economical to spend the money in one fell swoop instead of replacing expensive glasses every few years, not to mention the incidental expense of contact lenses that I hardly ever wear. (Since moving to the US I’ve found it more and more difficult to wear my lenses, even when I have the wateriest kind available. Either the climate here is too dry, or maybe I’ve just worn them for too long. I did well out of contact lenses for all of my 20s, when my ego and I needed them most, but they don’t really work for me any more.)

And in a way, now that it’s no longer about vanity, I think maybe I could let myself do it. (Vanity is the wrong word there. It’s not that I spent hours in front of the mirror thinking about how great I looked. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying on everything I owned and going back to the one I’d started out with in an attempt to look reasonably nice. Just like every other girl does.) But nowadays there’s no time to look in the mirror. The door it hangs on swings wide before I’ve caught a glance, and I have other things to do. If I don’t have poppy seeds stuck between my teeth and if any visible stains on my t-shirt might plausibly have been made after I put it on this morning, then I’m probably good to go. I’m only going to the playground anyway. I almost like my glasses these days because they hide my wrinkles – at least from me. Without them my face feels a little naked.

Looking at our insurance, I might be able to do it for as little as $850 per eye. At this point, the longer I wait the less economical it gets, if I just keep buying new glasses instead. But part of me, though not usually icked out by medical things, can’t help being a tad ooged by the clockwork-oranginess of the idea of having my eyelids pronged open while they slice bits of my cornea open and fire lasers at me. (Fine: (a) I haven’t read the book, and (b) I know that they don’t have to slice the cornea, necessarily. Leave me to my literary hyperbole, please, even if it’s inaccurate.) And there can be side effects, and sometimes it just doesn’t work, and heck, I only have one pair of eyes, and they’re crap, but you know I can forget about that most of the time. Maybe it’s not worth it just to not have to look through a faint blur of scratches all day.

Anyone out there care to weigh in? Should I do it?

Timetables

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One summer night in 1993, I sat in a pub in Blackrock, Co. Dublin – a pub I don’t think I’d set foot in before or have since – as a friend asked me, “Where do you want to be in ten years?”

I was a bit embarrassed to admit that while career-wise I still didn’t have the faintest notion, I was pretty sure that by the time I was 30 I would like to be married with a kid or two. In the same way that some women know without a doubt that they are not cut out for having children, I’ve always known that given half a chance, I would be.

So much for long courtships: ours was almost like something out of Anne of Avonlea . (If I remember rightly, she described a couple who had been steppin’ out for 20 years.) That night in Blackrock I had been seeing B a couple of months and then he’d headed off to Boston for his summer o’ fun/hard work. I didn’t presume to think he might be the shadowy figure in the “husband” spot of that particular aspiration. (At least, not out loud. Not even out loud in my head. But I was pining quite badly that July.)

It’s not as if I spent my 20s wondering when I’d get my babies; I spent them alternately getting back together with and breaking up with B (usually for reasons of geographical incompatability rather than anything else) and flirting with the notion of going out with other people – mostly flirting and minimally going out – and getting my degree and my pointless postgrad and something that could pass for a career, not just a job. There was one day when I was 26 when I looked in the mirror and found a grey hair, and thought, “You’d better hurry up and marry me before I have to dye my hair for the wedding.”

But he’s a cautious man, my husband, and the time and place weren’t right yet. I thought it would be good to be married by 30. I was engaged when I was 30, so that was okay. I decided it would be nice to have had all my babies by the time I was 35. This was later amended to 37, if I wanted three.

It just occurred to me that to keep to my self-imposed and totally arbitrary timetable, I need to get pregnant again next month. I think that’s not very likely to happen. If I never get pregnant again I’ll actually have (almost) complied with the initial goal of 35. None of it matters in the slightest, except that as a child of older parents I would rather be younger. (I was a bit traumatized when I discovered at 14 or so that my dad was actually 57 already. But most of my friends’ parents had probably started in their 20s. These days most people I know are having babies in their 30s, so I’m right there in average-land, which is all a kid ever wants of his family.)

Maybe I should have some sort of new self-imposed deadline for something or other. Publish by 50, perhaps? That gives me a nice long time to figure out what else I want to do now that my erstwhile life’s ambition is, if not accomplished, at least under way.

Observations on the people of England, probably full of over-generalisations and not to be taken too seriously, no offence meant, honest, guv.

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1. They love roundabouts. Or at least their traffic planners do, and nobody seems to have complained. In one 20-minute stretch between the M25 and Berkhampsted, we must have hit ten roundabouts, some of which had just one entry and one exit, with all the traffic going the same way. A simple bend in the road would have sufficed, but apparently they forgot about that possibility.

2. Skinny jeans, and leggings, and – heaven help us – jeggings, are in. Everyone is wearing them, and most of them are people who shouldn’t. Maybe I’m just old and curmudgeonly and stuck in my bootlegged rut, but they look bad on about 85% of wearers, unless they’re under 25 in which case they’ve about a 40% chance of looking okay. The only people who can almost always carry them off cutely are the under-11 set, and then you’re teetering on the edge of children dressed as sexualised fashion plates, which looks wrong in a whole other way. Little girls seemed to be much more trendily dressed there in general.

3. Everyone is much more environmentally conscious than in the US. (By everyone, I mean the small sample of people we stayed with, so this might be biased by age, or class, or something; and by in the US I mean where I live and have lived, which is biased by not being in uber-hippy places like, um, Colorado or Seattle, to generalise some more, and in a non-z-using way at that.) In our stays at four different households, at least three compost as a matter of course, all carefully recycle a much bigger selection of things than we have the ability to here in our neighbourhood, and all grow some or a lot of their own food. One household even had actual chickens clucking and scratching around, much to the children’s delight. Everyone dried their laundry outside on the line and kept their dryers for the winter. I resolve once again to get a washing line and start a compost bin at the new house.

4. They drink lots of tea and have good biscuits. But we knew that.

5. They have smaller, more streamlined strollers/pushchairs/buggies. Our BOB Revolution, which I love, is obscenely big in any other country, and gets in the way on buses and tubes. Sorry, everyone.

6. The word “pushchair”, despite the fact that I used to sit and swing my legs in a stripy blue-and-white one of my very own, sounds extremely odd to me. As if it should be some sort of old-fashioned wheelchair device. Buggy sounds more or less the same, only with horses.

Away

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My almost favourite part of going away on a long trip is the week before. I like making the lists, fishing out the suitcases (and the packing cubes , the best things ever for packing four people in two cases and living out of them in assorted locations without properly unpacking), using up the contents of the fridge on increasingly egg-based meals. Even housework takes on a particular sheen as I think that I won’t have to do this again for several weeks, and how good I am to do it now when I’m not even going to reap the benefit of it as the dust inexorably falls again in our absence. I can put off all those niggling things that don’t absolutely have to be done before we go, and feel a wonderful sense of satisfaction as I do accomplish the ones that are important. Before the holiday has begun means before the countdown to when the holiday is over, which is always nice.

On the other hand, holidaying with kids brings with it a sense that even passing the halfway point and being on the downhill side is not unalloyed sadness: by day seven or so, part of me is thinking about how wonderful it will be to have them back in their own bedrooms, and have us back to our usual simple routine, unmolested by sights that must be seen, relations who must be visited, or late dinners with too much wine that must be eaten and drunk too soon before bedtime, leaving me with the unpleasant headache of the lightweight drinker who is woken several times a night by a demanding toddler with no idea where she is.

Which is all to say that we went away. We saw some iconic sights, met some long-neglected relatives and old friends, had some grandparental interaction, went on some long drives, and tried hard to find food Monkey would eat, with partial success. It was nice, and it’s nice to be back.

I spent the first week or so being mostly the conduit uniting my parents and my children for their twice-yearly intensive immersion, trying to document the meeting of the generations for posterity and trying to keep the kids from breaking other people’s china or over-loving the dog. (He was a great dog, very gentle and tolerant, but Monkey and Mabel became progressively less timid of him – which was good, except that by the end of the week Mabel was liable to adoringly poke him all over in a way that made me fear for the end of his tether. (Metaphorically. He was not tethered. Except when we went for a walk. Of course.))

Mabel and the dog, with a glass door interpolated between for safety. I kept trying to get a photo of her being affectionate, but then I’d have to drop the camera and go and separate them before she poked him in the eye.

[Aside: Maybe because I have no imagination, or else because I'm extraordinarily self-centred, I find it almost impossible to believe that other places really exist until I see them for myself. When I first visited America (Boston 1993), I found I was astounded by its very presence, as apparently my mind had placed the USA firmly in the realm of screen fiction. And yet, here it was with the clapboard siding, the picket fences, the fire hydrants in oppressive August heat, the artistic graffiti, the real live black people, the beers in the fridge - all as shown on TV. (Yes, I was under 21 (by 10 months). But I had been a perfectly legal and restrained drinker at home for two years, and didn't feel the need to comply with the laws of the country. Sorry.)

Anyway, whenever we go away I feel as if everything winds up neatly and hits the pause button on the one continent in order for us to leave, and starts on the other when we arrive. Thus, it's strange that all my cousins have aged in the almost 20 years since I (shockingly) saw them last, and now have teenagers of their own where formerly there were none.]

And then we returned. Coming back to the US is always veiled thinly (or not so thinly) by sleep-deprivation-induced depression. This time, as we drove back to the house from the metro station where we’d left the car for the bargain price of $4.25 plus two bus fares, our life over here felt two-dimensional and lacking. Our new house isn’t yet a home; it’s just a place with cheery colours on the wall and a lot of IKEA furniture. (Poor Mabel was confused when we said we were going home. “We going back to Maty?” she asked – Maty being her name for the aunt we stayed with at the start of our trip.) For all the tiny rootlets we’ve put down here over the past few years, spending all that time with family made me see a gaping hole in our day-to-day life: we have some friends, lots of acquaintances, plenty of other children the same age – but we don’t have grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Not on a regular, drop-in-for-a-cuppa, basis. Our interactions with those people who are elderly and unavoidable – and I mean that (mostly) in the nicest way possible – are limited to twice a year, and that’s not good for the kids. It’s not the village we need, in the Hilary Clinton sense.

But we went to the library for storytime today, saw some friends on Sunday, got in some comestibles, and it’s not so bad really. I’ll get used to it. Again.