Monthly Archives: September 2012

Rituals

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There was a white bowl that was perfectly round, with no flat bottom to stand it on, with blue edges. I imagine it was enamel, though maybe that only sounds as if it might be right. It clearly hailed from the days before plastic bowls, when if something unbreakable was needed, this clanky item was the thing. When I fell off my bike and came into the house with a face red and ugly with tears and wails, it was filled with warm water mixed from the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. Then the bottle of Dettol – squat, with rounded shoulders – or the taller bottle of TCP with the ridged cap, came down from the high shelf above the loo, and a dash of it – no, that sounds too casual: maybe a capful carefully measured – was added, the golden liquid clouding briefly in the water before it dispersed.

A chunk of rough cotton wool was torn from the big roll, kept for no other purpose, it seemed, though it was singularly unsuited to this one, with all the little fibres to stick and be left behind; dunked, and used to wash the grit of tarmac out of the grazed knees, the skinned elbow. The warm water was soothing, but the Dettol stung like mad. “It’ll hurt a little,” she’d say, and I’d grit my teeth and wait for it. Or maybe I’d scrunch up my eyes in defence, but I always let her do it, because it was part of the ritual. This is what would make it heal, make it dry up nicely under the dusky-pink fabric plaster that was never the tone of anyone’s flesh, least of all my pale white freckle-dusted red-head hue.

Then came a gentle dab of the violently pink antiseptic ointment, applied with the tip of the ring finger, the selection of the right size bandage from what remained of the assortment in the box, the pulling of the tiny red thread to remove the outer wrapper. Next, the careful lining up of the pad over the affected area, and the neat pulling off of the thin paper tabs, to make the sticky arms embrace my skin in perfect symmetry.

My father would advise, always, that the plaster should come off at night to let the wound dry out, even though the ads on telly proved, with one half of the little boy’s neat cut covered and the other half exposed, that scrapes healed faster with Band-Aid. I still believed my Dad, though, because he knew everything.

————————————

Much of this is the same, even here, even now. The canny symmetry of the band-aid and the magical way the sticky parts are uncovered and covering almost at the same moment never fails to provide solace. The fiddly red thread has gone, the pink ointment is still in my parents’ house in Dublin, probably never to be used up, and I don’t even know what Americans use in place of Dettol or TCP. I’ve heard tell of putting hydrogen peroxide on cuts, but that sounds unsafe to my still-Irish ears.

The plasters have to be called band-aids here or nobody understands you, and nowadays they’re more often than not adorned with Dora or Buzz Lightyear or Spider-Man. My children are not so willing to let me wash their cuts as I was, and then they grab the band-aid and demand to do it themselves. It stays in place until it falls off in the pool or the bath, and I tell them, “There, that means it’s better.”

But the kiss, the final seal, the kiss-it-better: that never changes.

My drawers (fnar, fnar)

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A few bad nights for Mabel meant I mostly fell off the exercise and housework wagon this week, but I’m proud to announce that our winter clothes are more or less sorted out. (Not B’s; he’s not included. He wears the same thing all year, minus some shorts and plus some sweaters in the winter. And if he wants them organized he can do his own.)

But my closet looks like this now:

The box holds bags/purses, and the tops/sweaters are organized thus: short sleeved, 3/4 sleeved, long sleeved, wool. The chunky wool ones are on top or hanging. Three pairs of boots are to the right of the box. I don’t use a lot of hanging space because it’s mostly dresses, skirts, and jackets, and I don’t have a lot of any of those. You can see from this that I will be wearing a palate of mostly greens and dark reds/purples this season. Just like every season, because that’s what I like.

I didn’t take a before picture of the closet, but this is what my pyjamas/stuff drawer still looks like, so you can extrapolate from that:

I’m not saying this is all I have: most of my days are spent in jeans (stuffed-full jeans/chinos drawer not pictured), and I have another of yoga pants and one of underwear and one of nicer clothes I might wear once in a blue moon, and a whole suitcase full of things that don’t fit but I’m not ready to give up on, and some more odds and ends in an under-the-bed storage thingy; but the important part is this – this is all the stuff I’m getting rid of:

Pile of sweaters, tops, pants, and trash bag full of shoes
See? Even the stuff I’m getting rid of is greens and dark reds.

The trash bag holds six pairs of shoes, one of which dates from pre-emigration – that is, more than 10 years ago. The toppling pile has about twenty t-shirts, tops and sweaters, and one pair of jeans that I never liked much. This has now been joined by some summer clothes Dash and Mabel have grown out of (that aren’t nice enough to pass on to friends), and a few shirts B is discarding. All this will go to the next yard sale we’re involved in, or the thrift store.

I got Dash to try on about twenty pairs of trousers, took away a few, and ascertained that my six-and-a-half-year-old still has 5T-length legs, just about, though his hips have grown out of the slimmest-fitting pants. Since he also refuses to wear any shirts that come below about mid-fly (because they might look like dresses and people might think he’s a girl, yaknow), he doesn’t need anything new.

(No photo because his room is dark like a man-cave, and his stuff is all stashed in drawers that don’t make nice pictures.)

And then, I sorted out my box of things that might fit Mabel this season and reorganized her shelves. She can’t reach everything herself, but she’s getting more inclined to choose her own clothes, and I’m trying hard to hold my tongue if her choice is reasonable. At least I’ve put away the high-summer stuff so she’ll be less tempted to try to wear a sundress or short shorts on a morning when it’s 49 degrees outside. (That’s about 9 celcius.)

Her clothes are in IKEA dividers (like this ) that are supposed to separate things within drawers. When we moved in here, I had no dresser for Mabel and wasn’t using these metal shelves for anything, so we stuck them in her closet and I found the dividers handy (since her clothes were still practically baby things that took up so little space). But her clothes still don’t take up much space individually, and though I’m always on the lookout for a small white chest of drawers for her room, this system works fine for now. From the top, L-R, they hold pyjamas, socks, leggings, long-sleeved tops, capris/long shorts, t-shirts, underpants, bottoms/pants, and skirts/dresses that aren’t hanging up. There are some chunky sweaters in the basket at the very bottom. The top shelf is a mess of hand-me-down shoes that don’t fit yet and summer clothes awaiting sorting.

I could do with another box for the tights stashed on the top left, and I should think about bringing all the upper stuff down so that she can reach it more easily. She needs more dresses, especially since she’s lately become very partial to them; I’m working on that and have enlisted e-Bay. I was very disappointed to miss a really good local used-children’s-clothing sale last weekend, and I’ll miss our local clothing swap next weekend, so my opportunities for snagging the perfect thing are reduced to the thrift store (always there) and the nursery-school yard sale in a few more weeks’ time. And the clearance racks at Old Navy, Target, and Gap, of course.

In case you were wondering, this is what the other side of Mabel’s closet looks like:

I wouldn’t bother showing you, except for my genius sorting system comprising those two boxes. The brown one says “Too big; next season” and now holds summer things from this year that might still fit next, and any summer age 4 stuff I have. The Pampers box says: “Too big; distant future” and contains everything else I’ve amassed for her that will fit at some point when she’s bigger That way I don’t have to re-mark the boxes every year when they’re no longer holding 4s but now 5s and 6s (Mabel, fitting age 6 clothes? Inconceivable!), and so on. 

Personally, I’m just pleased that I’m the sort of person who uses a semicolon when labelling a box of clothes. I think it says something about me, don’t you? Yes. Well.

Nocturnal emotions (sorry)

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I have that slightly dizzy feeling that no amount of coffee can remove. My eyes ache a tiny bit and there’s a noise, or a pressure, or something, just behind my ears. I’m going to go right ahead and blame Mabel.

Ironically, she didn’t have a bad night. The problem is that she didn’t have it – the okay night – in her own bed, she had it in mine. When B and I were still downstairs last night, having caught up on both How I Met Your Mother and Doctor Who , and I was starting to think I should go to bed – around 10.15, then – we heard a little thump thump thump and thought, ‘Oh-ho! What goings on are these?’ I went upstairs and found Mabel prone on our bed, wailing and telling me that she was never going to sleep in her own bed again.

I suppose I could have put up a fight, but much the easiest thing seemed to be to go with the flow at that point. I started telling her Cinderella, and by the second sentence she was out for the count. (It’s basically an automatic response now. And probably the only fairy tale I know.) So that was all well and good but now there was a three-year-old taking up a lot of space in our bed.

B decided to take Mabel’s bed for the night. I suppose that made sense, but I still think he got off lightly. I got ready for bed and assessed my options. She was right in the middle, but I decided there was slightly more room on my usual side, so that’s where I got in, with Mabel’s back to me. She wiggled backwards to get closer. After five minutes, I got out and walked around to the other side of the bed and lay down there instead. She moved towards me. I left her head where it was and pushed the rest of her body away from me, diagonally across the bed. Her head nudged closer to me.  She was on top of the covers and I was trying to be underneath them. And so it continued for at least half the night.

At some later point I realised that she was actually sleeping on the other side like a normal human in a queen-size bed, but by then the damage was done. I’ll take back her father any day. I won’t even complain about the snoring.

Days

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Some days, it all seems too fragile to possibly hold together. Everything could spin off its axis at any moment, and we’d all go flying into the great beyond, scattered like seeds, inconsequential tiny parts no longer of a whole. We’ve shored things up here and there, piecemeal, against slings and arrows, but fortune is outrageous and doesn’t care much. One gust of wind, a wrong turn, a decision made by someone else, might throw it all off.

(I don’t know how people who don’t have all that I have stay in the game at all. I would just sit in a corner and cry. No, I wouldn’t. I’d do what I had to, but I wouldn’t have time to think fancy thoughts and write them down.)

Other days, everything hums along nicely, and life is easy. (A little too easy. Nemesis must be waiting to clobber me.) Time stretches out to include the things we want to include; a trip to the playground can last as long as everyone’s happy. Then, snap. The lack of a snack makes one turn on a dime and casts a long, shouting, crying, kicking shadow over the rest of the day.

As ‘s wise mother said, some days are just like that.

Seasonal produce

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I am here to tell you that if you didn’t think you liked eggplant (or aubergine, because we’re fancy like that in Ireland) it’s because you were doing it wrong. Specifically, like me, you may have never bothered to salt and drain it, because who has time for that sort of thing? People who know how delicious it makes eggplant, that’s who. I just recently bothered, for the first time, to take my eggplant out a bit ahead of time – an hour is good, in the morning is great – slice it thickly, and spread the slices out on some kitchen paper. Then I shake salt all over them, both sides, top with more kitchen paper (paper towels, whatever you call ‘em), and weigh it all down with a few hefty cookbooks. I just did it now while my waffle popped out of the toaster, and the butter still melted by the time I was done.

Later on, when you put the eggplant into whatever you want – this , perhaps, or just ratatouille, or vegetarian lasagne, which is what I’m planning today – it will turn out to be both chewy and creamy, and a most wonderful vehicle for the garlic that I exhort you to use liberally. If I was Nigella Lawson, the word unctuous would be bursting forth right about now, but I’m not, so I won’t go quite that far.

The other thing I’ve been doing lately is massaging my kale. (I told Facebook about it and got a few entertainingly salacious comments. My work there is done.) From being a person who never even thought about kale to one who decided she didn’t like it, I have lately come down heavily in favour of the curly dark-green leaves. It started with this recipe for quinoa salad with kale and cranberries , which I ate for most of the summer. A little fiddly what with the roasting of the walnuts, but totally addictive. You can leave out the shallot (or even the onion) if that’s too much trouble, and you won’t miss it.

But then I got even lazier, and decided cooking the kale was too much trouble for a salad. And I remembered something a friend had said once, in my pre-kale-eating days (when I was offloading a bunch of donated kale onto her, actually, because I didn’t think I’d use it) about massaging kale. How ridiculous, I thought. Maybe you and your kale are on those sort of terms, but I prefer to keep mine at fork’s length, thank you. But about a week ago, I googled “massaged kale” and came up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable suggestions. Basically, you put your (washed and de-stemmed) leaves in a bowl with a shake of salt and a sprinkle of oil, and you work it with your hands until the fibres break down, turning this tough saute-only veg into a perfectly nice wilted salad leaf. (I have been told that you can also just leave it alone for an hour or so and the dressing will do the work on its own, but I like instant gratification.)

Then you can put a bit of what you fancy on top and call it salad. Some dried cranberries and a shake of roasted sunflower seeds with a drizzle of red wine vinegar or avocado and lemon juice are two versions I tried last week, but there are a ton of options. I think you need something a little sweet to counterbalance the leaves, but probably just a pinch of sugar or a drop of honey in your dressing would do the trick quite well.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to stop getting hungry again at 2pm when I’ve had a big bowl of kale salad for lunch at midday. When I find out, I’ll let you know, because otherwise it seems like an ideal way to counteract the effects of the muffins.

Green Card (and other movies)

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Sometimes I think that blogging is exactly what’s wrong with the economy.

Okay, maybe that’s not quite it, but it seems that the free time needed to read about the minutae of other people’s lives, and maybe even write about your own, could be better used doing other things. Especially when many people who read blogs read them at work, when they are actually being paid to do other things, or should be, except that maybe they haven’t any other things to do.

Let me clarify. If you’re reading this at work, I don’t mean you, and please don’t go away. You are a boon to the economy, I’m sure. But I first started to read blogs when I was chronically bored at work, and I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason I ever read through all the archives of Amy , Kristen *, and Julia , to name a few. There I was at a desk with a computer and literally nothing to do, so my self-assigned project for the next few days became to read through someone else’s backstory. If I did have something to do, I needed to string it out, so I’d read blogs in between short bursts of work.

I’m not the only overeducated underused employee that ever existed, so I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who ever did this. I’m not the only person with a degree in English to find herself sitting behind the receptionist’s desk or waiting for someone else to schedule a meeting so that she could update a handbook that nobody would read anyway. On a global-economy scale, that’s a lot of unharnessed energy.

It occurred to me today that if I had been driven enough, lucky enough, and interested enough in something, I could perhaps be somewhere very different today, with a big fancy career and a big fancy life. (I’m very lucky and interested in various things, but I’m the first to admit that I’m not very driven.) But then, I thought, would I be any happier than I am right now?

Nope. I’m pretty much as happy as whoever Larry was. There are niggly things that I’d like to have more money to spend on – outsourcing housework, getting my hair professionally coloured, buying all my clothes from J Crew – but in the big picture, this is where I want to be. There’s the tiny issue of that hypothetical third baby, but I think in order for that to happen I’d have to go back in time and have got married a few years earlier.

Which would have required me to win the visa lottery the first year I applied instead of the third, let’s say. (You note that marrying someone else is not an option. He’s my lobster.) And maybe B and I needed those years apart to make it work now, anyway.

And then I thought, what if I’d never got the visa? The Diversity Visa Lottery is something many Americans have never heard of: the government offers a number of resident alien visas every year to countries whose emigrants have been under a certain number for the previous five years. If you’re lucky enough to be picked, once you can show that you’re reasonably employable and enough money to not be on the streets straight away (and not a communist), you get your very own green card. My chances of winning the year I did were about 1 in 100, and you’re no more likely to get picked the tenth year you enter than the first. I was lucky.

If I hadn’t got my green card when I did, I don’t know what we’d have done. B could have come home after his PhD, but to no job. I could have gone over illegally, but it’s very unlikely I would have. We could have got married straight away and I would have been legal but not eligible to work (I think), which would have made me feel that we began things on an uneven keel and under some level of duress.

It’s all very Sliding Doors -y to peer down the wrong end of the telescope at what you might have done if your life had turned a different way. And while Gwynneth Paltrow’s haircut was cute and John Hannah’s accent was dead sexy, it wasn’t a very good film, and the ending left us all feeling pretty frustrated.

It’s probably better to just work with what you’ve got and move forward as you are. As I am, damn lucky. For one thing, if anything had been even a tiny bit different, I probably wouldn’t have this to entertain you with:

*Not there; at her old, and sadly currently defunct, blogs, “Debaucherous and Dishevelled” and “Better Now”.

No muffins

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Mabel is at a playdate across the road, and I have an extra hour and a half to mess around with this morning. Except for the part where I had to go down to school to get her anyway, find that she’d re-changed her mind (it’s her prerogative) about going home with her friend, install her carseat into my friend’s car even though she had a perfectly good brand-new one there for Mabel to use, and kiss her goodbye. Then we both drove back up the hill home and got out of our cars on either side of the road. She unloaded three happy children into her house, and I unloaded nobody at all into mine.

Tomorrow, I’ll return the favor, but hopefully with 100% less redundant driving around, since Mabel’s friend fits perfectly in Dash’s (otherwise empty on this trip) carseat and is not nearly as fussy as she is.

Meanwhile, I’m slowly trying to use my free time – now that my “two children, two schools, five mornings” fantasy is actually coming true – to impose some sort of order on this place and my mentality. There’s a very gradual hint of meal planning, winter-clothes sorting, and even house-cleaning starting to make its way into the way things are being done. I’ve even gone running again and started back at my old pilates class.

Which is just as well, because sorting winter clothes has led me to discover that I have far more pairs of jeans than anyone needs, and that too many of them are too small, because I seem to be taking up more space than I was at the start of the summer. Since Mabel is now nursing a lot less and I didn’t exercise when the weather was warm – so much for those good intentions – this is not rocket science, but it’s still disappointing. I’ll probably never again be as skinny as I was when I had an 18-month-old nursing every five minutes (or so it seemed) and I know there are good things about that, but it’s a pity that now I have more freedom to go out (a) shopping and (b) socializing, it’s harder to look in the mirror and be thrilled with what I see.

So I have two options: I can stop looking in the mirror and tell myself that it’s not important; or I can try to take a little exercise a little more often, stop giving myself the same size portions as the marathon runner in the family, and lay off the cookies.

One of these things will probably happen, but I’m not making any promises. (Because I function best on reverse psychology, so vowing to become thin and waif-like would lead instantly to telling myself to go take a short walk off a long pier and find some muffins wherever I land.)

Defying the patriarchy of language

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Mabel and I went to get Dash from school yesterday afternoon as the storm continued to threaten. It was warm and very windy, but not yet as dark as I’d expect if the rain was on the way any minute. (Still, we drove the half mile there just in case.)

It seemed like we weren’t the only people to arrive early. Everyone wanted to get their kids and get them home before whatever tornadoes we were in store might come. The kindergarteners came out first, as they do. After a few minutes, the teachers started herding the ones who hadn’t immediately been retrieved back into the building. Then they called everyone else in too. We scuttled in as the first drops began to fall.

“Did it turn into a warning?” I asked, meaning the hurricane watch. “Yes,” they said. I eyed the roof of the gym we were standing in and decided it looked just like those metal roofs you see mangled and twisted off buildings that have been hit by hurricanes. I also eyed my very pregnant friend and asked her if she felt like going into labor right this moment. She thought she might hang on a bit. All of a sudden the rain hit the roof with a thunderous noise. I wondered if we’d all become like one big grumpy family as we bedded down in the school for the night.

Mabel and I moved into the hallway where the roof looked more solid, and milled around some more. They told us we could go down to the classrooms and find our children, so we went to pick up Dash from the computer room. He and Mabel were getting a bit high spirited (let’s say), so I herded them over to a corner where I felt they wouldn’t be in anyone’s way if they ran around in circles for a minute.

The minute was up, and I decided things were crazy enough without having my children ricocheting into the walls. I stopped Dash and tried to talk some sobriety into Mabel by invoking the power of authority.

- Stop running around. See that lady over there? That’s the principal. She’ll send us out in the rain if you keep running like that.
- That’s the principal? But she’s a girl.
- Yes, ladies can be principals too.
- But she shouldn’t be called a principal then.
…
- Oh, you think she should be a princess ipal?
- Yes!

Or a queenipal, she said later.

Then the tornado warning was called off, the rain eased a bit, and we all went home. 

Storm’s a-comin’

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Nobody dies in Ireland from tornadoes, or earthquakes, or hurricanes. Nobody dies there because some guy decides to kill a bunch of people at the cinema and has an assualt rifle to do it with either. Ireland is a calm, if more often overcast, place to live.

Today here we are under a tornado watch until 7pm. That doesn’t mean there is a tornado, or that there will be a tornado, but just that conditions will be conducive to tornadoes and we should pay attention in case it turns into a tornado warning, which is when you go down to the basement for as long as you can stand to keep the kids entertained in the room where broken and unwanted things go to be kept from the children.

We live on the Eastern Seaboard, as they call it, which is not really prone to tornadoes the way the mid-west is. Which is good, because they scare the bejaysus out of me, but in a way it would be nice because at least there they have sirens that go off all over town when there’s a tornado warning. Here, you have to happen to tune into the TV or radio at the right time, or see an alert on your computer, or you might miss it altogether. There has been more than one day when I’ve been told after the fact that we were under a tornado warning for half the morning and I never even realised that I could have been swept up like Dorothy and deposited under a house like the Wicked Witch of the West.

There are big trees right behind our house, and though they’ve been inspected (a year ago, I think) to make sure none were in imminent danger of toppling, it’s always a possibility. I know people who know people who were just missed by a huge branch coming through their roof in the middle of the night, who happened to have gone to the bathroom or they would have been skewered in their beds. Not everyone gets to be lucky.

I have an ominous feeling and I wish it would go away. I had a dream just before I woke up that someone I only know second-hand on the Internet had died. I’m pretty sure dreams are just random firings of synapses, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to start the day. I’ve spent all morning accomplishing nothing, and mooching.

I prefer Irish weather, is what I’m saying.

Blame it on

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Dash and Mabel are both doing dance classes again this term. Mabel’s is called “Pre-Dance,” a step up from last Spring’s “Creative Movement” but with much the same group of children and much the same activities. Dash’s is called “Pre-Jazz” and he’s one of two boys among a bevy of girls. He loves it, and I hope the girls realise how sought-after a boy is in a dance class. (They probably don’t.) He took his umbrella to the farmer’s market on Sunday morning, hoping for rain so he could do a spot of Gene Kelly. It was only very slightly overcast, but he wouldn’t leave it in the car and I spotted him twirling it later on.

On Saturday there was a blues festival in our local downtown. We went down, town, to see the goings-on and get Dash a haircut. While the boys went to the barber’s, Mabel and I procured some bread and an apple and sat on a step watching the band. They were pretty good.

The sound of a saxophone always does something to my tummy. The good sort of something, like you used to get remembering a particularly good kiss the night before with your new boyfriend. Jazzy bluesy saxophoney electric-base-guitary music is probably my favourite sort of sound, especially when it makes your hips wiggle and your toes twitch. But children have no respect for art, and once Dash emerged – with the side parting he’d requested making him look like a quintessential English schoolboy of the 1940s – they both wanted to be climbing trees rather than sitting around watching old men in Hawaiian shirts plunk and plink and croon and badum-tssshhhh.

We moved on, up to a playground for a while, and then back down past the music again towards the car in the hopes of finding some holy barbeque for dinner. (Local Catholic church fundraiser.) On the way we met some friends and there was some more delay. We were behind the stage now, but the music was still loud and clear in the area where we were. Dash, in a dark-blue t-shirt and tan shorts, was at the top of a flight of fire-escape steps. His father (as it happened, wearing a mid-blue t-shirt and brownish chinos) was at the bottom. They boogied towards, and away from, and back towards each other again, one going up and the other down, to meet in the middle; and if a jealous Mabel hadn’t been physically turning my head away so that I couldn’t enjoy the spectacle, I would have been very much enjoying it.

Another of those moments to capture , really, only this time I needed a video camera and I didn’t have a thing. It’s enough to make one covet an iPhone, really. I love a man who can dance.