Monthly Archives: February 2014

To my children

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Kids , as that old-y time-y TV program, How I Met Your Mothe r likes to begin:

I am so damn proud of you. Whoever you are, whatever you do, already and in the future, I am proud of you. Because, heck, you came out of nowhere and took over my life, and it takes a lot to manage that because I’m inherently both lazy and hidebound and I like my little ways and I like my stuff just the way I like it.

But aside from my dislike for change, which you have challenged every morning, noon, and night (especially night) of your lives, you are amazing people. You are so much yourselves, and nobody else. You listen even when I think you don’t, you take on board information I have trouble processing myself, you know what you should be doing even if, even as, you make an informed decision not to abide by it. You stand up for yourselves, you demand attention, you shout, dammit. (Shhh. My ears.)

Don’t ever lose the self-assurance you have now, in your pre-tween years. It may be damped down a little in adolescence, when you strive for acceptance among your peers by trying to fit in or by keeping quiet when something inside you would rather sing and dance. But bring it back as you emerge from your chrysalis, shedding one skin after another as we do in our teens, trying on one persona and then the next like so many pairs of jeans, until we are finally left with ourselves, whether we like it or not – and then we have to learn to love what we are, or be miserable ever after.

Take your parents’ love for you, our delight in you, our trust and belief and our assurance that you’re beautiful and that you’re worth all of it and more, and keep all those things in your heart, so that you demand that worth from the people you encounter, the ones you love whom you want to love you back. And from yourselves.

I’m proud of you, because you are you.

Life, apparently

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Life, apparently, is about bringing the person I am closer to the person I want to be, or accepting the chasm between those two things.

For instance, I want to be a person who plans the week’s meals before she goes shopping, who makes family dinners in the crockpot, who runs or otherwise exercises regularly, and who damn well writes a few hundred words in That Other Thing when she sits down to do it.

Instead, I am a person who builds some sort of half-assed plan for dinner as she roams the supermarket, who casts about for inspiration an hour before dinner time, who runs (ahem) once every two weeks or so, and who comes over here and writes a blog post instead.

These are all things that are within my control. I can change them. Sure I can.

If I actually want to.

Geese in a blue sky

Thin skin

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I think I’ve lost a layer of skin since I had children. Or maybe having children had nothing to do with it; maybe I just got more empathetic as I got older. But when I listen to the news these days it’s as if someone has taken a potato peeler and removed whatever defences I used to have when I heard all the terrible things: “It’s not here.” “It’s not me.” It’s not my family.” “It’s nobody I know.” “It couldn’t happen to us.” They don’t work so well any more.

Maybe it’s just that things keep on happening, and my radius increases as time goes on, so that “here” spans a lot more than just the town I grew up in, and “us” includes a lot more people than just me and my parents. Maybe it’s that the law of averages indicates that some day it could just as easily be me, or us, or here, as anywhere else. Some parts of the earth may be less prone to natural disasters, and some parts of the state may see less crime than others, but as my mother would tell you, you could leave the house tomorrow and walk under a bus. There are no guarantees.

But even when I’m not appreciating how lucky I am, and wondering how long I can reasonably expect that luck to hold, those other people whose luck has run out seem closer now. I don’t want to hear about them; I certainly can’t let myself think about them. Imagining my way into their skin is not something I’m going to begin to try to do.

The news is more real, maybe: when I was a child it may as well have been fiction. I wasn’t sheltered from the news as a child. I remember earthquakes and hijackings, shootings and bombings and stories about terrible things happening to children. I remember being more upset about stories of mistreatment of animals than of people. My mother was shocked when I mentioned this, but my rationale was that animals can’t ever speak up for themselves. I suppose I didn’t know about all those people who can’t either, for so many more complex reasons. I was scared of the house burning down, mostly, or random robbers coming to steal – I don’t know what, we had an eight-inch black-and-white television and my mother had costume jewellery. I didn’t know about all the other things there were to be scared of.

Mabel looks at my face sometimes and asks me why I have lines on my forehead. She thinks they’re funny. She wonders why she doesn’t have any. I pretend not to mind them, and tell her matter-of-factly that as you get older your skin doesn’t bounce back so much, and so the lines show that I’ve been smiling and frowning and making other funny faces for lots of years now. I make her some funny faces and she laughs.

My skin got thinner because I used some of it up, making two amazing people and smiling and frowning and wondering and worrying about them. So I suppose it’s not going to stop any time soon.

Maud and Mabel making faces

Little house, big woods

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Mabel is just at that point where some nights she’ll enjoy a chapter book, but other times she wants to stick to something old and familiar with lots of pictures. We read the first two Narnia books and got stuck on the third; we read Charlie but she got bored with the Great Glass Elevator . I follow her lead for bedtime reading. There’s plenty of time to get to the good stuff.

Last week in the thrift store I happened to briefly browse the books, wondering if I could pick up the first Harry Potter to have on the shelf for Dash, whenever we deem him ready or he decides to read it himself (I own them all, in hardback, of course, but it seems volumes 1-5 are in Dublin just now). I didn’t find it, but I did spot a copy of Little House in the Big Woods . I checked the inside to make sure it was the first of the series, and then I bought it.

I remember Little House on the Prairie very well. One of the strongest TV memories of my childhood is the way the little girls ran and rolled down the hill in the opening credits; I’m pretty sure I spent years scrutinizing them and deciding which one was the same size as I was at that particular moment. I remember Pa Ingalls with his fine head of hair, and the girls’ petticoats, and mean Nancy with her blue dress and her preposterous golden ringlets. (Those characters set the stage for my interpretation of the Anne books, I realise now, even though the landscape must have been vastly different. The clothes might have been roughly right.)

However, I’ve never read the books. They didn’t seem to be Irish staples the way they are here, though I know some, maybe many, people there will have read them. I don’t think they were on the bookshelves when I was spending my book tokens or browsing the library, because I’m sure I would have picked them up. Maybe they were under biography rather than fiction, where I would not have looked.

So Mabel and I are just about to finish this first of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, and I must say it’s been an education. Mabel likes it because the little girl is five, like her, and has a doll, like her. But she listens intently to the long descriptions of a life I can only begin to imagine, and examines the pictures, and takes it all in even as I’m trying hard to understand what particular part of pioneer life is being described now. We’ve learned about slaughtering pigs, and how to make sausages, and how to make straw hats, and that you have to kill a calf for the rennet to make cheese, and tonight we learned about the threshing machine that literally harnessed eight horses for the “horsepower.” At least, I learned that. I think Mabel may have dropped off before I got to that bit.

I almost feel as if reading this should have been a requirement of my naturalization ceremony. It’s given me an appreciation and understanding of life for the country’s earlier inhabitants that was a total blank slate for me before. And of course, this is a very happy memoir that barely scratches the surface of what things were really like; I know the books get harder and darker, and I don’t think we’ll be rushing headlong through the rest of the series as soon as we’re done with this one.

For one thing, I think I want to pre-screen them for myself.

Our copy of Little House in the Big Woods

Banana butterscotch muffins with a healthier twist

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One of my favourite recipes is banana butterscotch muffins from Nigella Express . I don’t make it often because Dash doesn’t like banana, but if I’m bringing a treat along somewhere, it’s a handy one.

I wanted to bake some of these for the nursery school open house on Saturday, but I thought it would be nice to make the recipe a little healthier, considering all those delightful teeny toddley people who would no doubt be cruising by the food table and swiping everything they could grab before a parent stopped admiring the classroom decorations and noticed.

So I used brown sugar instead of white and reduced the quantity, because the butterscotch chips give plenty of sweetness. I added oatmeal too. I didn’t dare tweak the recipe further since I was baking against the clock and for an audience (I mean, the results would be eaten by an audience; I wasn’t actually baking in front of a live studio audience), but I have suggestions for next time…

Helper

This is the recipe as I made it this time :

3 ripe bananas (if your bananas are not very ripe, 30 seconds in the microwave will soften them up nicely)
1/2 cup (100g) light brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup (125ml) vegetable oil
1.5 cups (150g) AP (white) flour
1/2 teaspoon baking (bread) soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 cup (50g) oatmeal (old-fashioned, not quick)
1/2 cup (75g) butterscotch chips

1. Mash the bananas with the brown sugar and set aside.

2. Stir together the flour, oatmeal, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.

3. Beat the eggs with the oil in a measuring jug.

4. Add the egg and oil mixture to the dry ingredients and mix to moisten.

5. Add the mashed bananas (and sugar) and mix well. (Not too well. Lumps are fine, so long as the flour is all mixed in.) It’s quite a wet mixture.

6. Mix in the butterscotch chips.

7. Spoon into well-greased muffin tins. I made mini muffins, the better to be grabbed by little hands, and the mixture made 24 minis plus 3 regular-sized ones for taste testing. If you use paper cases, the oatmeal often sticks, so even though greasing is a pain it’s better for the final product.

8. Bake at 400 F (200 C) for 15 minutes for mini muffins or 20 for regular-sized ones.

9. Cool a little and remove carefully from the tin so as not to leave bits behind. If you can take them out of the tin before they’re totally cooled, the bottoms will be as deliciously crunchy as the tops.

They’re a little bumpy-looking, but that’s the artisanal touch, y’know.

Other healthy things you could try:

Substitute plain yogurt for one (or both) of the eggs.
Use part wholemeal flour instead of all AP flour.
Substitute applesauce for part or all of the vegetable oil.

They all disappeared in record time, so I think I can safely say this particular version passed the adult-and-toddler taste test.

Saturday night

Dinner music

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An unforeseen side-effect of dinner-at-the-table has been dinner conversation. I had vaguely wondered if I’d need to make a list of topics to discuss or something, but I had banked without the rest of my family members, who of course are far less reticent than I.

Mabel has taken it upon herself to play gameshow host at dinnertime, and plies us each with a question. Sometimes it’s “What’s your favourite colour?” but last night it was a real doozie: “What’s your favourite song?”

To a five-year-old, that’s a pretty easy one. Hers is “ ,” a lesser-known imaginary-response version of the song from Frozen , sung from Elsa’s point of view. Her brother didn’t have much trouble deciding that his (right now) is “Beat it.” Can’t fault Michael Jackson, I suppose. Better than One Direction.

But her father and I were stumped. We spent the rest of the evening taking turns to play our contenders, just a few of them, on the iPod. If you could break it down to favourite song by a certain artist, or in a genre, or in one period of your life … but favourite song? Just one? Ever? Impossible. I’m still trying to come up with my definitive list.

Do you have one? What’s your favourite song?

Choonz

Assertiveness training

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Every year, I go to parent-teacher conferences. Every year, I look forward to being told that the child in question, whichever one, is a genius, startling in their intellect and destined to go far. Increasingly, every year, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might hear something else instead, because my children are children, just like everyone else’s.

This morning I went along hoping to hear that Mabel has a prodigious vocabulary; that her teachers have noticed her propensity for metaphor, her facility with rhyming words, and her endearing imaginative play. I was slightly terrified that they’d tell me she was a horribly spoilt prima donna who couldn’t take no for an answer and that it was all my fault. (Obviously.)

They told me she needs to be more assertive.

I really wasn’t expecting that. I mean, I don’t know if you can tell from the blog, but Mabel isn’t exactly backward in coming forward, as my mother might say, when she’s at home. She tells us how she feels, loud and proud and repeatedly, often with emphatic gestures (let’s say) to drive home her point.

On the days when I help at school, she tends to act up, getting clingy or defiant sometimes, but I disregard that because I know the children often behave differently when a parent is there – it’s hard for them to have their two worlds clash. But I hadn’t realised just how different Mabel’s school persona is from her home one. At school when I’m not there, she is quiet and reserved, shy and compliant – and sometimes she lets other kids boss her around so much that her teachers have noticed it and want her to stand up for herself.

It feels strange to have to coach Mabel in standing up for herself when I see her do it so effectively every day with her brother. But that’s family, at home, and that’s different. I know she’s shy out in the world; she sometimes takes refuge in bad manners to shock away a stranger who makes an unwelcome friendly comment. She’s five, and five is not old, though it’s old enough to be very aware of who you are and how you’re different from everyone else, just because you’re you. I need to remember that my daughter’s confidence needs bolstering even though – maybe exactly because – she makes me think it doesn’t. I need to remember that it’s not enough for me to think she’s awesome: I have to tell her, early and often, just like the little girl in The Help , that she’s important.

Because she is smart and good and delightful and full of amazing potential and nobody should ever make her think that she is anything less than just as important as everyone else in the room. If I have to put up with a few tantrums in the post office and a few offended strangers while she figures out how to be herself in public, I’ll do that.

Mabel happy outdoors

Information overload

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There was a tour of the elementary school for parents of prospective new students. Even though I also have an current student at the school, I went on it. Partly because I could, partly because I thought I might learn something new (I did), and mostly, I think, because once I have a little knowledge of a subject, any extra information has somewhere to stick and I assimilate it better. I have somewhere to hang it. You need somewhere to hang your knowledge, which is why learning things when you’re a child and have no experience is in many ways such a terrible idea. I mean, once you’ve travelled a bit, it’s much more interesting to learn more about geography and history, for example.

But I digress.

I went on the tour so that, with my existing knowledge of how things were, I could glean a better understanding. But in so doing I did feel a little guilty about my son’s experience at the same juncture. If they’d been giving the tour three years ago I would have done it, of course, but they didn’t start to offer it till last year. But I went to very little effort to find out the things they were telling us through any other means either. I just accepted that he was going to the school and filled in the forms and dragged him along for the first two weeks until he finally conceded that it wasn’t so bad and very soon thereafter began to love it. But I didn’t really know anything about how long recess was and how often he’d have PE and whether the whole school had lunch at the same time or not, and it didn’t occur to me to find out. We found out as we went along.

I think part of it was the overwhelming nature of becoming part of the American public school system when we had never really planned to do that. It was such a new thing for us not just as parents but as participants, that we had to close our eyes and just jump, really. A trust exercise, if you will. We knew the school was fine (not great, but fine, with an involved PTA), we knew enough sensible, good, educated neighbourhood people who sent their kids there to believe this was not going to be a decision that Ruined His Life, and I spent a lot of time that year saying, “It’s just elementary school,” and nodding vigorously as my friends said the same thing back to me.

But I am concerned that it might look like I put more thought into decisions when I make them for my daughter than when I make them for my son. I think it’s a preservation instinct, actually, that makes me shut down in the face of information overload and purposely make a swift decision based on a few key factors. I don’t want to know everything because I can’t process everything. Later on, when we’ve been softened a bit by exposure and more knowledge of the situation, the environment, the way things work, I can take in more information and make the decision anew, or differently, for the second child.

Does that make any sense to anyone? Do you do this too?

2011: First day of K

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun