Monthly Archives: March 2011

The birds, the bees, and the giraffes

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Sorry about the radio silence yesterday: I was busy tagging all my old entries and fixing the paragraph breaks so that my new tag cloud – look! over there! – would be more representative of the blog as a whole, and to perhaps entice people to read entries that have never before seen the light of day.

So now it turns out that an awful lot of my entries are about pregnancy -  but that’s just because it was seemed like an interesting thing to talk about at the time. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of others are about sleep. I’m still trying to refine the tags to make it a more useful tool, so it’s still a work in progress, but at least every entry has some sort of tag now. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions on the tag cloud – if you think it’s useful/interesting/a waste of space, whatever.

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When I brought Monkey to school this morning his classroom was sorely depleted – almost half the class were out with a rampaging stomach bug, and I can hear the ominous strings of the Jaws music creeping up behind me as I type, sure that he’ll come down with it sooner or later. We’ve had a good run of luck not getting puking things recently, and it’s bound to end eventually. It’s not so much the illness I dread, as the cleanup.

Usually when we arrive at Monkey’s school, Mabel doffs her coat, I wash her hands, and she dives straight into the playdough or heads off to the kitchen area to whisk up a nice little something for the babies, before it’s time to leave the big kids to their activities unmolested by two-year-olds. Today Miss B (who is her new favourite person, having looked after her on Saturday evening while we went to a fundraiser) headed her off at the pass with the lure of plastic animals rampaging among wood blocks, and Mabel was soon holding forth on what exactly was going on between the lion, the panda, and the wild boar. Then she looked underneath the giraffe, and commented: “He has a penis, like a boy baby.”

Miss B looked startled, as she gamely agreed. In the universal signal of pride, I breathed rapidly on the kuckles of my right hand – hah – and polished them on my chest. That’s my girl, letting no penis go uncommented upon.

Incidentally, if anyone knows where this gesture originated, I’d love to hear it.

Early days: a retrospective

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Maybe it’s the upcoming milestone birthday (five years!) or maybe it’s because we visited friends with a newborn recently, or maybe it’s reading Erin Shea ‘s blog posts about her new baby, but I was thinking about the early days of life as parents, and all the things I never wrote down because when you’re in the thick of it there’s just too much everything and nothing going on to manage to parse it into paragraphs. (And I applaud Erin for doing just that. She’s amazing.) So, on the better late than never principle, let me try to remember…

I remember sitting in the pediatrician’s office looking down at my tiny pink-skinned baby in his blue blanket in his gender-neutral green carseat, thinking that he’d never be two days old again.

I remember going to another doctor’s appointment with a slightly jaundiced baby who had a tiny, tiny hint of nappy rash. I was a little teary.
  “We’ve only had him three days, and he was so perfect, and I feel like we’ve broken him,” I said to B; my rock, my compass.
  “He’s not broken. He’s just getting a little lived-in.”
That made me feel better.

I remember taking him to show him off to my erstwhile office. My female co-workers oohed and aahed and dandled. “How’s nursing going?” they asked. “It hurts ,” I said, unabashedly rubbing my nipples through my shirt. They laughed, but not in a mean way. More in an “I’ve been there” way. Funny, I had assumed that everyone in southmost Texas would think I was crazy to breastfeed – the numbers there are pretty bad, after all – but they didn’t.

I remember sitting up in bed, nipples throbbing, seeing the days and weeks stretch out before me – days and weeks when I was going to have to keep doing this every two hours, no matter how much it hurt – and feeling hopeless.

Our apartment was tiny and filled with summer light. We sat on the floor a lot, because a changing table seemed like an extravagance, and I was paranoid about him rolling off the bed, even from day one. (In retrospect not a bad stance. He was a very active baby.) I gave him a sponge bath sitting on the floor in the living room, in the sunlight by the window where it was warmest. He screamed his head off and turned purple. After washing his top half, I had to stop and nurse him to calm him down, before proceeding with the bottom half. Later I realised that the UPS man had come to the door, and hoped I hadn’t given him an eyeful as he passed the window.

I discovered daytime TV, watching all the birth stories and bringing-home-baby shows that I had never seen, nor wanted to see, while pregnant. I tutted at all the mothers labouring flat on their backs, and eating ice chips, and having the inevitable complications that turned into emergency c-sections, and I teared up and wept copiously at the birth every single time.

I remember lying on the bed trying to play sleep chicken with the baby: I’d close my eyes in the hopes that he would imitate me, and whoever fell asleep first was the loser. He won a lot. When I discovered that I could nurse him while talking on the phone, I felt like such a pro; when I found I could nurse him while standing up and swaying vigorously, to get him to sleep, I felt as if I’d invented electricity.

The days went slowly, because we had nothing to do. We were far from family members and didn’t have friends with babies, but we muddled through and made it up as we went along, the three of us. It was a strange time, measured in three-hour chunks, full of resting but often not restful. Everything was new, but I was oddly comforted by the feeling that I was doing what women have done since time began: lying beside my baby and feeding him and marvelling at his very existence.

 

The witching hour

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We have a lovely children’s book called The Shrinking of Treehorn . B had enjoyed it in his youth, and we weren’t long into our career as parents before he went out and procured a copy for Monkey. Or “for Monkey”. It’s written by Florence Parry Heide, of whom I had never heard, and illustrated by Edward Gorey, of whom even I had. (And according to Amazon, it has two sequels. This is wonderful. Must find immediately.) Maybe it’s a children’s classic, or maybe it’s better known in the US, but I had never encountered it until I read it as an adult.

Anyway, it’s a slim volume in bile-green paperback and that awkard wider-than-long shape that doesn’t fit properly on bookshelves. The liny pen-and-ink drawings are delightfully 70′s, from the principal’s sideburns to the kitchen floor tiles; and the story of Treehorn, who gets smaller and smaller until he figures out why, is amusing to children – but the humour for the adult reader is all in the beautifully understated writing. It’s not so much what she says, as the spaces between the words that convey the story of the jaded adults who so totally fail to notice what’s happening to poor Treehorn, and it’s deliciously awful.

[Tangent: I've just read the following line and had an epiphany: "He always liked to finish things, even if they were boring." Oh my God, I married Treehorn.]

Anyway, sometimes I feel like Treehorn’s mother. Unlike Treehorn’s mother, my cakes almost always do rise, but when I read this, I feel a certain sympathy for the poor woman:

His mother was cleaning the refrigerator. “You know how I hate to have you climb up on the chairs, dear,” she said. She went into the living room to dust.

She’s just so resigned to his going ahead and doing it anyway that her comment is no more than a formal protest lodged to have the paperwork in order in case some day she’s audited. As Monkey leaps repeatedly from chair to coffee table to sofa around 5.30 every evening in yet another bid to concuss himself, and I ask him, wearily and pointlessly, to stop, I know exactly how she feels.

Of course, since I rarely dust and never clean the fridge, the similarity ends there.

Administrative issues

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[ Update: Okay, so it might take a couple of tries to get this to work the way I want it to. If you already clicked the button, but it looks as if you didn't, go ahead and click it again. If you like. Not that I want to pressure you into anything. But I had to reinstall it and it's gone back from 15 lovely people to 0 and I'm a bit sad about that...]

I am, I admit, a teensy bit addicted to Facebook. It began innocently enough, a couple of Novembers ago when we were trying to catch up with people we might see at home over Christmas, and a friend who is somewhat more on the cutting edge of technology than we are – I’m more trailing-after-the-bandwagon-still-considering-things than early-adopter – said thst B and I should get on Facebook to make it easier to keep up with friends. Before then I had assumed that FB was much like MySpace – something for the Young People and the Music People and People Who Were Not Me.

But then it turned out that Facebook was full of people who were me, or at least very like me in many respects. Since that time, of course, it’s all gone to hell in a handbasket and people like my aged uncles and uncles-in-law are on it too, which I think might be going a bit too far when I remember who may have just read my thrilling update about an underwire having gone bendy in the dryer again. I try to maintain a respectful division of generations and I don’t go round searching for nieces and nephews to befriend, but if one extends an invitation to me, I won’t be rude and refuse. (Although I reserve the right to hide their updates, especially if they’re overwhelmingly about Manchester United.)

Anyway, these days I spend far too much time obsessively refreshing to see if anyone has done anything interesting, or refining my bons mots and aphorisms (and petits fours and whatnot) in the hopes of igniting empathetic comment and witty discourse among my followers. I mean, friends. I mean, friends and “friends”.

So, you might observe, if you’re a particularly noticing sort of person, a new button over there on the right. I hope you’re not offended by it. (If you are, look away again. Just pretend it’s not there.) I just thought it might be nice to have a quick way for people to interact without having to comment, and a handy method of sending a link straight to anyone who might be interested in reading a new update. If you “like” the blog but don’t want the updates, you can always hide them and I’ll be none the wiser.

So go on, have a wee click there.

Post-pancakes

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I am in no way suggesting that you should forbear from eating your Pancake Tuesday pancakes just so that you can make this delicious dinner, but if it should happen that you have heinous ingrates for children who scorn the pancakes you made, and you can’t manage to eat them all yourself, this might turn out to be a good thing to do. At least, that’s how it was for me.

First we have Mabel, helping me to make the pancakes way back a few Tuesdays ago. (If you didn’t know, one is supposed to have pancakes the day before Lent begins, to use up all the eggs. Because eggs were verboten during Lent, don’t you know. Same concept as Fat Tuesday, just no parade.)
Sieve one cup of flour and a pinch of salt into a large bowl. Beat an egg with 10 oz of milk and then mix all of that into the flour. Melt a tablespoon of butter, let cool a little, and mix that in too. That’s it: no leavening agents, no sugar, nothing else. Let it stand, covered, in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, or even overnight. I mixed these up at breakfast time and cooked them for lunch. It made about 14, but my pan was quite small. (You could, of course, double the recipe.)

These are not puffy American pancakes, though I do like to make those at other times. These are thin pancakes, closer to crepes but not that thin because I am not a magic French person with magic crepe-making equipment. Just as thin as I could get by ladling enough onto the pan and swirling it around quickly to coat the bottom. If you use a good non-stick pan (or even a bad one; I’m sure mine was cheap), you’ll know when it’s ready to flip because it will come up easily when you try to slide a fish slice or other flat non-metal object underneath, or even move when you give the pan a vigorous (but not too vigorous lest it end up on the floor) shake. Whether to safely flip or devil-may-care toss I leave to the conscience of the individual.
 
The good specimens look like this. (The bad specimens are discarded, unless you have a dog.) You may gobble as many as you can with fresh lemon squeezed over and plenty of sugar. Unless you are my children, this is delicious. 
However, you might have some left over. In this case, freeze them with a layer of cling wrap (cling film) between each pancake. They freeze well and reheat very quickly in the microwave. Or you can make dinner with them, as I did the other night.

Take your pancakes out of the freezer. Look, they’re still lovely.

Defrost a packet of frozen spinach in the microwave. Squeeze it out in a clean teatowel to get rid of the excess water. Chop a small onion (or half a large one) as finely as you have the patience for, and sautee it until it’s very soft. Add a crushed clove (or two) of garlic for the final couple of minutes. Now break up the spinach in a bowl using a fork, add the onion and garlic, and mix in about a cup of ricotta cheese. (I think it was a cup. About the same amount as there is spinach, anyway.) Season with salt, pepper, and a good grating of fresh nutmeg.

Take your defrosted pancakes and roll them up around the spinach mixture in a lasagne dish. Thusly.

Then I took a jar of pasta sauce – look, there’s mine, it was Classico Tomato and Basil – and pour about half of it over your plump and lovingly rolled babies. Five pancakes, in my case, gave us enough dinner to fill two people and still have leftovers for lunch.

Top with lots of parmesan – I should have used more than this, but we ran out. And bake at 350F for half an hour or until it’s bubbling.

It was delicious, even if the parmesan did all disappear.

The pancakes worked perfectly here, but of course you don’t have to go to all that trouble. You could use manicotti or giant pasta shells (but then you have to cook them before stuffing them, which is still a nuisance). You could make an inside-out lasagne. You could probably even use tortillas and call it Italian enchiladas. Or you could just make pancakes for breakfast and plan to have enough left over to make tomorrow’s dinner.

Old-Hat Reviews: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

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In our continuing quest to educate ourselves in popular culture and movies we may have missed, we found Fast Times at Ridgemont High appearing in our mailbox courtesy of Netflix last week. This 1982 oeuvre was the seminal high-school movie for a lot of people a few years older than me – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was probably the nearest equivalent American-high-school movie that I saw when I was actually the age of the protagonists.

Although this turns up on TV all the time, I’d only ever seen a small part of it. And the real thing is R-rated, so the TV version is pretty sanitized, which would make for a somewhat different experience.

It’s notable for being the first big movie of a ton of famous-later actors: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Phoebe Cates are the big names, but there are also small roles here for Anthony Edwards (that’s Dr Greene from ER), Forest Whittaker, and Nicolas Cage, rolling pizza dough. I have decided that Sean Penn has spent the rest of his career choosing worthy, overwrought, thinky roles because this one, as the ultimate stoner surfer dude, was so embarrassing. But maybe that was just the hair.

When you didn’t go to high-school in America, viewing these movies – and shows we watched like Beverly Hills 90210 or even Degrassi Junior High (I have to admit that I didn’t really understand that Canada was a different country) – was somewhat confusing. Not having experienced the real thing, we had (and still have, to be honest) no understanding of where fact ended and fiction began. Those rows of tall lockers in the corridors, talk of hall passes, free periods, and study hall, boys and girls in all manner and means of clothes – these too were things of fiction as far as I was concerned: my school was filled with green-and-grey-clad girls, and lockers were small and square and mostly in our classrooms. As for sex, I have very little idea who was doing it and who wasn’t (apart from me: I was very much on the wasn’t side, and found it hard to believe that anyone really was). I tended to assume that teenagers in America were all straight out of Judy Blume novels, and was very relieved not to have to be one.

I had no idea, before watching this, that that its writer was Cameron Crowe – the guy portrayed in Almost Famous . He went back to high school masquerading as a pupil, and took notes. (Very Never Been Kissed , though if Almost Famous is to be believed, that wasn’t a problem he had.) So I have to assume that it was quite true to life.

Which is damn scary, what with all the sex going on. And the complete disregard for STDs or pregnancy. Poor 15-year-old Stacy is pressured into Doing It because her friend Linda says that’s what all the guys want: she ends up with an abortion – which is totally glossed over; makes it look like a visit to the dentist, with no more psychological impact than having a tooth out – and finally – duh! – discovers that the nice guy who actually likes her is happier to wait. Evidently condoms weren’t invented till after the AIDS crisis.

I suppose I still don’t know who represents the norm: Linda, who had all the sex – or at least said she did; or Stacy, who did, but didn’t really want to? Then again, I could reassure myself that maybe this is what goes on in Californian high schools, but not in the rest of the country (lie!) or that this sort of thing may have been prevalent in the early 80s, but everyone’s much better informed now and girls don’t think they have to put out just to get a boyfriend (maybe?). What I can’t tell myself any more is that this sort of thing only happens in America, and I’m safely in good old Catholic (ahem) Ireland, where the grass is green and the girls are virgins and the boys only want to hold hands and you have to keep a phone-directory’s distance apart at all times until marriage, because whether I’m coming from the point-of-view of a shy teenager or the mother of a daughter, that’s not true any more. It’s probably not true in Ireland either.

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Parental involvement

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I keep trying to write amusingly about Mabel’s latest sleep regression (let’s call it; it involves a nighttime cough and at least one molar), but it just turns into a long-winded whine. I should probably take a different tack.

I attended a nursery school meeting last night and found myself volunteering for a board position for next year. It’s a co-op school, which means it’s run by the parents, and the ultra-sexy position of housekeeping chair has been vacant for all of this year. It’s not so much that I decided the school could do with my firm hand and expert sweeping motion, but more that I have an idea what this entails, it’s pretty simple, and I felt it was about time for me to step up and help out a bit more than we’ve done to date.

Every family has to take on a role every year, but some are more time-consuming than others. Last year I volunteered to be librarian, which I thought had a nice literary ring to it. I imagined myself cataloguing books during quiet evenings, perhaps taking home a few well-loved volumes to mend, carefully re-shelving and tidying. It sounded ideal. In the event, it was less so, as my small and increasingly mobile appendage (Mabel) made it very hard to spend even a few minutes every week re-shelving books without having them all pulled out again at the bottom of the stack. The catalogue belonged to a teacher who was reluctant to give it up, and nobody really explained things to me, with the result that I spent ten minutes blithely distributing school library books in the bins containing the public library books, and then a fraught half hour trying to fish them out again.

Before I set off for this September’s member meeting, I asked B what he thought we should sign up for this year, since being librarian had turned out to be such a bust. He was disappointed – evidently he has literary aspirations too – and said that if I took on the same job again, he ‘d be responsible for the tasks. So I happily and pointedly put his name down against Librarian instead of mine, to the confusion of the director, and to date he’s done more or less as much for the job as I did.

So I felt we were due. After three years as a member, I understand the basics of the housekeeping position – helping to organise the twice-yearly cleaning workshops, showing up for most or some of those days, and arranging and reminding parents of their commitments (everyone signs up for one housekeeping job during the year – you might be laundering dress-up clothes in March, or cleaning toys in October, or organizing the medical kit twice a year – it’s pretty simple). And I’ll get to – I mean, have to – attend monthly board meetings. I think I can manage that. So long as nobody wants to see the state of my house before giving me the job.

When Monkey started at the school three years ago, the August cleaning workshop was actually the first time I interacted as a member of the co-op. (There’s a new-member meeting in June, but we’d been away.) I was seven months pregnant and really quite enjoyed a two-hour window of something totally different: being toddler-free and chatting to another incoming parent while we wrestled with sticky green paper and a bookshelf. This August, I’ll be able to welcome new members and give them their introduction to the nitty gritty of some of the things that joining the school entails: messing around with duct tape, cleaning paintbrushes, and sorting out boxes of tiny foam shapes, to name a few.

Don’t panic

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It’s still me. I’m just experimenting with a different template, that’s all. It might stay like this for another year, or it might look subtly (or totally) different over the next few days. But nothing else has changed. I still love you.

So long as you know where your towel is, you’ll be fine.

Welcome to the dollhouse

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Monkey’s pinkeye was noncontagious (and totally cured, for that matter) just in time to attend a classmate’s birthday party on Saturday. On Friday afternoon it occurred to me that I should procure a present.

Me: What should we give A____ for her birthday, Monkey?
Him: Ummm. Something with princesses.
Me: Oh, is she into princesses?
Him: Or something pink. Because she’s a girl. And girls like … girly things.

I think it’s possible he just formed that adjective off his own bat, because I try not to refer to particular things as girly (or boyly, which is of course the alternative). But he managed to insert exactly the expected amount of scorn for all things pink and princessy into it that you would expect from an almost-five-year-old boy.

So off I went to Target the next morning with a special dispensation to shop alone so long as I didn’t take too long about it, to trawl the aisles for something suitable and pick up milk and bananas and maybe a couple of other things (tra la laa… I tripped and fell into this dressing room and I just happened to find a t-shirt in my hand) on the way. But seriously, it took a lot of thought just to get the darned present.

Because the choice of a birthday present for someone else’s child is rife with potential hazards. Especially when you’re shopping in Target instead of some adorable independent toystore full of overpriced German wooden toys and also plenty of cute stuff you’d actually like your children to receive (cough Franklins cough). You don’t want to be That Parent who started the child on a year(s)-long obsession with something unsuitable – ever, or just at this early age – like, say, Bratz dolls, or Barbies, or even Disney princesses, unless you know that they already like and own some of it already (and you have the parent’s blessing).

I stomped around the store getting all het up about how, as soon as you’ve passed the baby and toddler toys, everything is strictly segregated by gender: two aisles of unmitigated pink pink pink, followed by three aisles of cars, guns, and lego. Even outside the toy department, I was assailed by licenced characters on most of the kids’ items: you’d be hard pressed to buy so much as a pair of underpants (not that I think Monkey should go round giving the girls in his class new underpants for their birthdays) or an insulated water bottle without encountering the damn princesses or some other my-little-pony-esqe design.

In the end, I was pleased to find an oversized pearl necklace and matching crown for dressing up, with no branding beyond that of the basic Target toys. Admittedly, it was pink and girly, but I’m pretty sure A___ enjoys dressing up (if my stints in the classroom are anything to go by), and I thought it would pass muster with her mum too. (And I managed to remember to get a gift receipt for once, despite the rookie employee on the register who had no idea what I was asking for, let alone how to make one come out of the machine.)

Anyway, the whole experience made me realise that for some reason, I have much more scorn for the princesses, and a great desire to keep Mabel away from them and all things Barbie for as long as possible, than I do for the boyly (see?) obsessions like Spider-Man and Batman that we have running rampant in the house already. But is this just because I’ve been worn down by two years of superheroes, or is there something innately worse about the girly stuff? For instance, I was very close to buying Mabel a pink Batman t-shirt the other day (but they didn’t have her size), but I would never ever spontaneously buy her a princess t-shirt – at least not until that point in the future when I’m worn down by nagging and whining and I see a cute one.

Thinking back, this is how Spider-Man started with us. It crept in insidiously, a found action figure here, a pack of bribery underpants there, a comic-strip t-shirt on the sale rail. In each instance, I weighed the attractiveness of the item in question (I’m mostly talking about clothes here) against the delight I knew would follow its reception. (The underpants were unmitigatedly hideous, but they were hidden. And in a good cause. I just bought him Lego Batman ones to replace them with the other day. Also ugly, but I don’t care so much any more. See? Beaten down.)

At a yard sale a few months ago, I paused for a moment at a box of old Barbies, and then decided that there’s no rush: she loves her dolls for now, and at some point someone will give her a Barbie (or a Sindy: I had two Sindys and loved them hard for many years) and that will be okay. I’m not going to be all “nothing but anatomically correct dolls made of biodegradable materials dyed in earth tones and fashioned by authentic Nepalese peasants for my precious snowflake” about it, and I don’t have moral and feminist objections to the princesses (as some people, perhaps very sensibly, do). Since we already own The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast , I’d be a bit late on this front, though Mabel hasn’t seen either of them yet. (The reason we have them is a long story. Let me just say that where other people’s husbands see their children as the perfect excuse to pick up on (or, let’s be honest, continue with) their Star Wars obessions, my husband is not only a comic-book geek but is also rather fond of some Disney soundtracks. So certain movies get added to the “kids’” collection much as my father bought “me” a fishing rod for my tenth birthday. Anyhoo. Moving on. Not bitter at all.)

I think it’s kind of cool that Mabel likes Batman and plays with the action figures just as much as she does with her dolls. (Wolverine and Aquaman can be babies too, you know.) We have one Tinkerbell book (at Monkey’s request, actually, a year or two ago), but that’s as much Disney fairy dust as has been sprinkled on our household so far, and I’m not eager to add more before I have to.

Today it was raining and Mabel pulled out Monkey’s old, broken Scooby-Doo umbrella. They both fought over it all the way to school, and I ended up promising Mabel that we’d go and buy her an umbrella of her own soon. She was delighted to hear it. And then she asked, “Can it be pink?”

You can take the girl out of the pretty, but you can’t take the pretty out of the girl, it seems.

In my head, it’s 2004

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Hang on. I think I blinked or something.

I’m okay with the idea that my firstborn is turning five in a month’s time – in fact, I’ve already made the mental switch, and was quite offended yesterday when somebody mentioned that I had a four-year-old. But I’m still in my early thirties.

Aren’t I? I was, just a minute ago, before I had all those babies. (All both of them. I wouldn’t want you to think you’d missed one or anything.) And I don’t feel any older, or wiser. I know a bit more about the contraptions and vocabulary of baby-wrangling, that’s all. My basic child-rearing tenets haven’t changed since I was 30: love your babies and teach them good manners. I still think that’s pretty much what it comes down to, it’s just that now it takes up more real estate in my head, along with phrases and names like babywearing, attachment parenting, CIO, Dr Sears (good), and Ezzo (bad). I can discuss induction methods and nipple confusion with the best of them, and I even have strong feelings about some of it and a soapbox I cart out and dust off every now and then.

Of course back then I was a career girl, or at least a woman with a full-time job outside the house that paid actual money, and I slept all night every night, and I went out for dinner sometimes and watched rental movies all the way through in one go. Now, I haven’t slept all night for five years. Maybe that’s what happened to my sense of time passing: it fell through the gaps in the nights and floated away. Nights like a folded circle of paper with holes snipped out with a child’s scissors: some big, when I wandered around the quiet house on hyperalert, or sleepwalked a crying baby for eternity; some tiny, when all I had to do was roll over and produce the other side, over and over. Open up the paper and the strong American sunlight shines through the holes and leaves behind a hundred baby photos scattered on the wooden floor.

The older I get, the thicker my metaphorical skin is – I care less and less what other people think so long as I’m comfortable with what I’m doing. But when I get three minutes at a time to look in the mirror nowadays, for the first time in a long time, it seems my real skin has got thinner. In repose I look mostly the same as I always did, with one short vertical line dug out between my brows – coincidentally enough, just in the place where my boyfriend used to say I got a cute wrinkle when I frowned. But if I animate my face, smile or talk at the mirror, I am shocked by the way it crinkles – crinkles! – at the eyes and around my mouth, and I am unnerved to see my mother’s face appear fleetingly under my hair. So I quite like to hide behind my glasses , with their defensive coating of tiny scratches that make the world a little blurrier. If I can’t see it, neither can you, right?

I suppose this is all part of the ongoing process of clambering out of the pleasant marshmallow of baby brain I’ve been enveloped in for the past several years. I need to re-embrace the world beyond, or something. And get a better haircut.