Being and Nothingness

by Mothership on February 10, 2009

Today we did nothing.

It was a day of such spectacular underachievement that I felt it had to be recorded for posterity.

We failed to return the eighteen overdue library books that are busy racking up costly fines and inciting menacing emails from the newly computerised and automated Chief Librarian (did that hurt when they did it, I wonder?).
In our defence, some of the books are in a nice cloth bag waiting by the door for a responsible person to drive them back to their orderly, quiet home.  Others, less fortunate, can be found sitting dejectedly in a pile on my desk, desolately hoping that they might still be taped back together in the places where One found them particularly gripping (or vice versa).

 

 We did not go to the supermarket, working our way down the carefully crafted list that we haven’t ever written – not once in the history of our entire family – and purchase nutritious foodstuffs that will then combine to make delicious yet thrifty meals.
On the bright side, though, we didn’t steal any sweeties, read any checkout magazines that are beneath our dignity to show an interest in, nor did we throw tantrums in the aisles upon being denied items we know full well we are not permitted.  So perhaps that is, on balance, a positive result?

 

Tomorrow is my father’s 65th birthday. This is a momentous occasion.
If I could, I would give him a OAP bus pass although he would probably not find this quite as side-splittingly hilarious as me. He has not been on a bus, insofar as I know, for at least thirty years. He prefers to fly first class for his various meetings around the globe and phone me from airport lounges to tell me that he is very busy.   I, of course, am also very busy with extremely important meetings such as the-convening-of-the-baby-tigers-and-crocodiles-under-the-table-which-is-really-a-swamp after breakfast. It is because of sundry pressing engagements such as these over the last 365 days that we didn’t quite make it to the post office to mail this year’s present in time.  It’s currently resting patiently in the same bag as the unmolested library books. Slightly unfortunate timing, I agree, but I will attend to it when a gap in my schedule opens up.

 

Given my slatternly attitude to the gathering of comestibles, we did not have the ingredients, nor the will, to eat a proper lunch.

Instead I drove us to the bakery, let my children share a  $3 ‘raisin snail’ which probably has less nutritional value than the ones we have in abundance for free in the back garden, but it is not as slimy and probably tastes nicer. 
I wore a black turtleneck, drank coffee and pretended I was an existentialist.
I would have smoked a Gaulois but this is California and you are not allowed.  I think you’re not allowed to be an existentialist here either, you’re only allowed to have a nice day, but I didn’t get busted.

 

After “lunch” One didn’t nap, Four didn’t do anything educational, and I didn’t do anything about the previous two items.

I also didn’t do any washing up, laundry, write any emails or answer the phone.

We just hung out, played around the house and made an enormous mess.

It was fantastic.

I am busy planning another intense day of absolutely bugger all for tomorrow.

 

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Don’t Be Callin’ Her No Dummy Mummy

by Mothership on February 8, 2009

I read an article in The Guardian Online today called “Are You A Dummy Mummy” which was nearly enough to prevent me from reading it in the first place because of course the answer to that question is DUH

However, I do vaguely recall that if you put a string of alphabets (as Four calls them) together, they make words, and those in turn make sentences and enough of those in sequence might make up something intelligible.

Or not.

Rachel Cooke, who is the 39 year old childless-by-choice author of this somewhat dubious piece of op-ed,  rambled over a good few of her own personal prejudices (some more risible than others) but ultimately the people who came under the hammer with the harshest judgement are women who have chosen to focus primarily on child rearing (her personal friends carefully excluded).

Her main beef, apart from the fact that she finds these women excruciatingly boring, was the premise that these mothers are somehow single-handedly responsible for the downfall of feminism and society’s retrenchment to the 1950’s because they want to focus on their family rather than trying to juggle it with a job.

That’s funny. I am around the same age as her and would consider myself a card carrying feminist, but I was under the impression that it was all about choice for women, not an obligation to go back to work as soon as possible so as not to let the side down.

She’s free to choose to stay child-free, stay at her job, read lots of books (I am so very curious as to know what she regards as a great read), watch lots of films and continue to feel superior to those people who have been taken by surprise by the usurpment of their lives by small personages.
And women who want to stay at home and nurture their infants and toddlers (I note no mention of Dummy Daddies though I know loads of blokes who love a good chat about nap routines) are also free to do so, and if they want to chat online about how cute their toddler is, so fucking what? Is it really any less edifying than a bunch of middle aged people talking about Slumdog Millionaire?

She particularly focuses on the older, middle-class affluent SAHM mother as a point of dislike and contempt and it’s pretty obvious, whatever her protests (and there are many, too many) that these are women from her precise social demographic – just like her, only with really small kids who are currently in the baby and toddler all-consuming stage of parenthood.
It must be disconcerting and somewhat painful to realise that you are being slowly left behind, even if it is your choice to be left there.

What she must sense, but can never truly understand is that there exists a club that she will never belong to. It’s the club that levels the playing field in a way that politics and policies never will. It transcends all nationalities, religions, races, ages, political persuasions, parenting styles, menu selections and zip codes.

Membership requirement: Child.

Dues: Love helplessly for the rest of your life

She is, of course, perfectly free not to join. I do not judge her for her choice of lifestyle.

I can see that it’s too much to ask that she not judge any of us for ours. Tolerance is not something that improves with age, I note, unless (choke, gasp, snigger) you are forced into it by having a child.

One last point, though, that will console Rachel in her rage: She did mention, somewhat heroically, that she did not mind taking on more workload than those with children in the workplace (even as she said she would not list the ways that this happens.)

It will be our kids who are paying for and delivering her meals on wheels when she’s too decrepit to look after herself in lonely old age, so there’s some kind of karma there, isn’t there?

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Open Letter to all Husbands

by Mothership on February 6, 2009

 

Gentlemen,

We would like to introduce you to a number of amazing new inventions that you may not have heard of. They are rumoured to expedite some of those tedious and time consuming processes in which you might find yourself pressed to participate upon occasion.

Now don’t be afraid, we’re not asking you for your hard-earned cash – we’re not out to take a single penny out of your wallet! In fact, many of these incredible items may already be in your home! You can just use what you already have without spending another dime!

Save time! Save money! Amaze your wife! Astound your friends!

Demonstrate skills you never dreamed you’d have as you casually prove you are not only head of the household but heads up in the domestic domain too.

 

Number 1: The Dishwasher

This nifty contraption is often white in colour, but will occasionally, cunningly, disguise itself to match other more familiar appliances, such as the refrigerator. The big clue to finding it is that your wife can often be found putting dirty dishes* in it, and taking clean ones out an hour or so later. It is almost like magic! And you thought it was just another cabinet.. 

Please Note: There is one snag. You do have to put the plates into it. We haven’t quite yet figured out how to get them to migrate from the counter above into the machine itself (working on it though, promise!), so we’re banking on your brute strength and superior intelligence to get those plates in, boys!

If you really want to get the little lady in your life to think you’re swell, you can take the ‘magicked’ plates out and put them back in the “cupboards”. Sure to earn you that extra smile!

 

*These are the ones that have already had food on them.

 

Number 2: The Towel Rail


This crafty little number is for hanging up- you guessed it! – TOWELS!

 

Here’s the deal: When you go into the bathroom, you find a clean, dry towel hanging on the rail. When you’re done with it, put it back. Now guess what?

Next time you need one it is dry again!!

How about that?! No more soggy, cold, wet bacteria-ridden cloths for you!  It even works for the bath mat!

How do they think these things up? That’s what I want to know..

 

Number 3: The Toilet Brush

 

Ever wonder what that thing that looks like a giant, bristly Q-tip-in-a-bucket next to the commode is for?

No, it’s not a tool for grooming giants’ eyebrows, nor is it a safety sword for fencing practice.

It’s a toilet brush!

Here’s how it works:

After a bountiful session on the throne, a king, such as yourself, might find that his mighty harvest leaves a little windfall on the bowl, even after flushing. 

Now some rulers might consider it downright selfish to deny testimony of the fruits of his labour from loyal subjects who may follow him into the bathroom. However we can assure you that olfactory evidence is proof enough for anyone, and getting rid of the unsightly smears is just plain, old-fashioned good manners.

It’s pretty simple when you get the hang of it. No harder than, say, nuclear physics or brushing your teeth.

First and foremost, make sure that the bowl is empty of matter. This can be achieved by flushing the chain. Lift the lid, then pick up the brush from its receptacle, swish and scrub around the bowl across the offending stain (several times for a stubborn one) and Voila! It’s as if it had never been there!

If you’re feeling extremely daring you can even pair this with a squirt of Toilet Duck (not for human consumption), but we only recommend this for advanced users.

 

Number Four: The Laundry Basket

 

We get a lot of letters about this one from anxious women all over the planet. They are worried about your failing eyesight and cognitive abilities. Is it something they did? Are they not feeding you the correct balance of vitamins and minerals?

The laundry basket can be a little harder to spot than some of the previous numbers. This is because it is, sadly, not a standardised shape or colour and is not always clearly marked. Some of them live in bedrooms, others in bathrooms, and many are in places that seem downright illogical. 
A lot of men find it hard to place items in these task-specific receptacles and we believe that the chief cause is due to them being hard to identify. Indeed there is growing research which indicates most dirty clothes are deposited on the floor within a 3′ radius of the laundry bin and this fact alone is contributing to a sharp national upswing in antidepressant use for married/cohabiting women between the ages of 19 and 72.

Fellas, it’s time to put the ladies out of their misery and show them that you know your balls from your baskets. You’ll bring cheer to everyone’s heart and along the way some of those strange piles of cloth on the floor will cease to appear and trip you up on your way to the fridge for that ever-elusive beverage..

Finding the basket is a cinch:

Get a raincoat, a pair of dark glasses and a pork-pie hat. A newspaper with holes cut out for your eyes to look through is a plus, but not strictly necessary. You may need to follow your partner around for up to a week but eventually she will be forced to take some clothes to the washing machine. This is when you need to pay attention.

The dirty clothes will have been stored in the laundry basket before they are moved to the machine!! 

The rest is basic stuff:  When you have dirty clothes, you put them in the laundry basket! If it is not right where you are standing, you can walk to it, it’s okay!
It’s also okay if you want to walk over to it before you start undressing.
We don’t mind! It’s all good!!

 

*For advanced users there is an additional light/dark sorting option, but make sure you can walk before you run, boys!

 

 

 

Now, we know that you are Very Busy and Important, so we’re not going to overwhelm you with Too Much Information at this time.

We believe that it’s best to understand a little thing in a big way, not a big thing in a little way and we know you feel the same.

We will be back with more Amazing Inventions you May Already Own, and we’d love to hear your success stories with the ones we have brought to you so far.

 

Good luck and Happy Householding!

 

Mothership

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Guest Blogger

by Mothership on January 31, 2009

Today I have invited a guest blogger to post. This is largely because I have spent the last two days wrestling with incredibly tedious technical issues that I’m not at all sure I have solved – indeed I may have made them far worse.
I have come to regard myself as a sort of immigrant from the Olde Country of Pen and Ink trying to establish herself in the Brave New World of Blog. I don’t speak the language. I don’t understand the customs, I stumble around, confused, afraid, hungry (well, not literally but work with me here) hoping to find a place where I can raise my little family of words…

I haven’t had the time or energy to write anything interesting myself so I’m passing the buck.

Allow me to introduce my guest: One (aged 19 months) 

Bang bang!

I get up. I like sun! See sun peep over horizon! Only me see! All others quiet. Why? When there is light me like to jump big noise bang bang bang bang bye bye teddy bang bang.
Wake up girl you there sister bottle me throw bottle. I take off nappy myself I clever boy throw bang bang shriek louder shriek! Shriek!
Good. You all hear me. Joy! Joy! Happy for the day is sun! Shriek! Whoop!
Oh good, there is dadman. Whoop! Jump! Bangbangbangbang. I get bottle now cry just in case.
He bring me to mumlady in warm bed she nice and cuddly I drink bottle then jump on her head and smack in face hard ha ha ha ha very funny shriek whoop bang bang bang bang she love me tell me so a lot. I happy boy joy joy shriek whoop!

Girl get up. Pinch me. I cry boohoo sad hit her take her teddy run away put in toilet hide with mumlady she protect me. Oh look! Breakfast. Me like food eat toast fruit eggy strawberries good to throw at dadman. Spoon good to throw at dadman. Drink throw on floor ha ha whoop shriek! Bangbangbang.
Mumlady says word at me. I no say back. She say word again. I no say back. She say come on darling, say word. I no say back. I throw strawberry. Whoop shriek! She say to dadman he never going to talk, he have to work at supermarket.
I say “supermarket”
They look me did he say that? clap clap well done oh you clever boy say oh say again please clever boy
I no say back.
All done.

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Doctor Doctor!

by Mothership on January 28, 2009

I was just settling in to a peaceful afternoon of writing the other day – essential emails answered, internet perused, pointless pottering about the kitchen all successfully completed – when the phone rang and it was One’s nursery calling to say he had woken up from his nap with a red, gooey eye, please would I come and fetch him.
I was immediately overcome by a wilting sense of gloom. Not only did this mean that my precious and rare day alone was cancelled, but I knew the rest of the day would be spent in the incredibly tiresome, awkward pursuit of a small bottle of eye drops that I would then struggle to torture my child with for the rest of the week.

I reluctantly shut down the computer, pulled on my proper clothes (I usually find pyjamas to be the most productive work-wear) and phoned the doctor.

“Thank you for calling the Children’s Medical Clinic, we are located at blah blah. If you want medical records, call blah blah, to fax us call blah blah……if you are a physician, press 1…”

 Of course I’m not a bloody physician! If I was, I wouldn’t need to phone you, would I? I’d just write my own prescription.

After wading through the endless voice menu I finally managed to speak to a human being who, while she seemed unable to spell or locate my child’s medical chart, was quite adamant that a possible case of conjunctivitis did not warrant an immediate appointment. This is where being British comes in handy.

“Young lady” I said, imperiously

“I will be the judge of whether my son needs to see a doctor or not today. That is my job. It is the doctor’s job to ascertain how serious his illness is. It is your job to give me a convenient appointment and if you cannot find one in your calendar today I shall take my business and my children elsewhere. Do we understand each other?”

There was a silence on the other end for a moment

“Is Four o’clock okay?”

“Perfect” I said sweetly, hanging up.

Sometimes I terrify even myself.

 

Four and One were surprised and not altogether delighted to see me so soon after I had dropped them off (so unflattering). However I bribed them with a trip to the ice-cream parlor prior to the doctor’s office and we set off after collecting our various odds and ends.

We arrived at the doctor’s at four on the dot and were greeted with the sight of a heaving-full waiting room. Children from newborns to teenagers were wriggling all over the show, accompanied by their tired looking parents. I didn’t hold out much hope for being seen on time, but I certainly didn’t expect to be kept waiting for an hour and a half which is how long it took to see the doctor.

Yes, you read right, an hour and a half.

I just want to flag here for my British readers that this is not the National Health Service.
We do not expect to be kept waiting here for services that we are paying large amounts of money for (or our insurance is).  And on top of that, the nurse who took us into an examination room where we spent the last half hour of wait time had the cheek to tell me I shouldn’t have given the kids a lollipop from the jar until after the doctor had seen them.

Oh really? You can just stick that….       On my bill, lady.

 

When the Doc finally turned up he had a look at One and said condescendingly.

“Well let’s just have a lookee here…Oh, I think he might have a little pinkeye!”

Duh.

“Maybe we should wait and see if it goes away. If it’s still bad in a few days, come back and we’ll give you a little sump’n for it”
With that said he started gathering his files and papers and made as if to leave.

I took a few deep breaths, counted to ten internally and reminded myself that it would not benefit anyone if I poked the doctor in the eye with a tongue depressor.

“Why don’t you give me a prescription for the drops that I can fill if it doesn’t go away to save me waiting for you for another hour and a half?”

He looked as if he wanted to argue with me for a moment but then, wisely, decided it would be better just to give me what I wanted and get away from us as quickly as he could

Needless to say I took the prescription straight to the pharmacy who, in their very Soviet way, took over an hour to dispense a tiny bottle of drops. Why remains a mystery as there was nobody else before me in the queue.

Finally we had the damn things and then the real fun began: Administration.

I had cleverly stolen a few more lollipops from the doctor’s office. I gave One one and instructed him to lie down on his back and open his eyes which he did, trustingly. I was hoping that the association between sweet and drops would be enough to persuade him that he would like the ocular intrusion 3xper day.

This hope was ill founded.

By this morning, One had found where the drops are kept, removed the top and thrown the rest in the toilet.

So now I’ve had to phone the doctor’s office, listen to the interminable voice menu, speak to the passive-aggressive receptionist and leave a message for the doctor to please phone in my prescription to the drugstore because I ‘lost’ the paper version. Oh, and Four’s eyes looked suspiciously red and crusty this morning, and now, as I write I am beginning to feel one of my eyes itch a bit.
I’m not sure if that is the beginning of virulent contagion or just massive irritation at reliving the entire episode.  It’s times like these that I wish I had not been a singer or a writer, but had instead trained as a doctor. Then I could always diagnose myself, write my own prescriptions, give myself Botox (!!!) never have to wait for simple things like routine antibiotics and refer grandly to the entire medical profession as ‘We’ as if they were all my friends.

Next time I ring the doctor I’m going to “Press 1 if you are a physician” and see what happens. I’m sure it will work, and I won’t have to bother with any of those details like med school or internships..

Then when you come to see me I will tell you to go home and see if you feel any better in a few days, if not, come back and I will look up your symptoms on the internet and write you a prescription based on guesswork. If you get better you can pay me, and if you die, you don’t have to.

Sound fair?

 

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Written all over my face

by Mothership on January 26, 2009

I’ve decided to write a book.

This will make a nice change from just reading them and will also give Amazon and the local library a much deserved rest. I had an absolutely cracking idea for a novel the other day which I can’t tell you about in any great detail in case you steal it or point out that it sounds like the one you just finished over the Christmas break which would be very discouraging and force me to spend several weeks in bed with a bottle of gin and a bag of sweeties. I will tell you, though, that it isn’t about a school for wizards, and it doesn’t feature my personal triumph over hard drugs (I could take them up now, though if it would help sales or make the school run more interesting). It also isn’t a tale of war-torn lovers and it most definitely isn’t any type of chick-lit because my novel will actually be a proper book, not an extended issue of Cosmo.

I say all these things with firm conviction.

However, that’s with the caveat that

  1. I actually write the damn thing      and 
  2. Someone actually publishes it.

 

But these are merely trifling details…

 

I got off to a roaring start, writing pages of notes and scrawling down relevant phrases late into the night, thus thwarting Husband’s attempts to be intimate or have meaningful conversation (what for? We’re already married, aren’t we?).  Later, I found myself plunged into a very pensive and dislocated space as I started to remember some things that had been buried so deeply I didn’t know they were part of me –like a splinter you can hardly feel or see anymore, but when you dig beneath the surface it starts to poke you again and hurts like hell. It is cathartic in a way, and valuable literary material– call it personal psychological research – but it’s not really making for jolly japes and pranks.

 

Four asked me today when we were out on one of our mother-daughter-girls-only afternoons, why I seemed sad. I told her I was remembering things that made me feel a little bit low, but I was actually very happy to be with her, to have time to be just with her.

She said

“How can the sad from the olden days still make you feel so sad now when really there are only happy things happening today, like having ice cream with me?“

 

That was a very profound piece of wisdom from someone who really knows how to live each moment in the present, who feels and expresses her emotions to the full, right as they come. Why should I let the sad from then stop me from being happy now? I’d already done that sad. It was crap. No particular need to do it again, at least not right then while I had a chance to be joyous and spend time with such an astonishing person.

 

We ate ice-cream and had a lovely time giggling inappropriately at pictures in the art museum.

The only down side to my day is that I have not been able to muster any more deep thoughts to write for my book, only shallow ones, so I may end up writing that 300 page Cosmo-style book after all.

Either that or more blog posts like this.

 

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I’m not your FRIEND anymore

by Mothership on January 25, 2009

Four has reached the stage where children, quite effectively, threaten one another with that age-old epithet
“You’re not my friend anymore”.

Who can forget hearing this at some time or other during childhood?

They are powerful words, and an essential weapon for any aspiring young playground Machiavelli.

Of course, they are not confined merely to school and other kids. Husband and I are sometimes quite bitterly told that we are not Four’s friends. Usually this comes directly after the denial of, say, chocolate for breakfast or a pet orang-utan. One is still not talking much, at least not in a language that we can translate, so I was taken somewhat by surprise yesterday to hear this from another person. From someone that I assumed was more or less a grown-up, at least chronologically.

About a year ago a friend of mine invited me to join Facebook so I could keep up with pictures of her and her offspring. I was slightly reluctant to do so – I had thought it more a tool for school and college kids and couldn’t really see the point. However I did sign up and to my surprise was very quickly ‘found’ by lots of people that I had known over the years including, very flatteringly, a number of ex-boyfriends who were rather keen to chat and be in touch.  Time went by and more and more folks turned up from different parts of the world which was rather wonderful, and gave me the opportunity to be in daily contact with people that I thought I might never see again, like a giant study hall where people you know hang out and leave notes for each other. We’d chat, comment, debate, leave photos, articles, videos etc. You know the drill – you’re on there yourself, no doubt.

Recently, though, one of my FB friends has been persistently getting up my nose.

It has always been clear that we’d been on opposite sides of the political spectrum. I’m pretty liberal – dare I say it – left-wing, and he is slightly to the right of Genghis Khan, but I am a tolerant sort of person and I didn’t really hold that against him personally. Hey – some of my best friends are Republicans! However, he has a very annoying habit of making pompous, illogical, dogmatic and polemic commentary on anything I post. I usually don’t mind too much – I usually reply once or twice and then get bored but it is a little irritating. He is one of those types who is all dogma for dogma’s sake. Sort of like my old-school communist Granny – glued to the TV and weeping as she watched the Berlin Wall come down saying it was the most terrible day she had ever seen. I pointed out that the people coming through looked pretty happy, but she insisted it was a tragedy. Anyway, back to my FBfriend.

Yesterday I posted a story on my Facebook page that had really touched me. It was about a young Palestinian father, a civilian, who was grieving over his 6 month old baby boy who had been shot in the head in front of him by an Israeli soldier. There was a photo too. This is just one of the atrocities that have been reported by the United Nations and the Associated Press and Reuters and the International Red Cross and all those other non-partisan organisations. I was pretty gutted by it, and it would be fairly hard, whatever your position is not to feel moved by the simple human suffering that war brings. 
That was the point of the story. Human suffering by innocent civilians.

My FB friend decided to ignore the dead baby, the grieving father, the pain, suffering etc. and instead air his oft repeated views that the Israeli offensive, and all subsequent war crimes (even the Israeli ones) were the sole responsibility of Hamas. 

I don’t actually give a flying fuck anymore who is right, who is wrong, who fired more rockets, who is the axis of evil, who has read more history or who subscribes to what doctrine.

When a baby is dead, executed by gunshot, that is just plain wrong.

The correct response, the only possible moral response is

“Oh my God. That poor child, that poor man. What can we do to alleviate the suffering?” 

So that is what I told him. 

And the pompous git gave back more gobshite (this is a British term for bullshit, my American readers) about how Israel could not be guilty of anything because it was all Hamas’ fault blah blah blah…

Whatever.

Baby is dead. Baby is dead. That is the story. Shut Up.

I said, admittedly in no uncertain terms, that I was frankly disturbed by his lack of empathy, his terrifying unshakeable, blinkered convictions of dogma over humanity and that I was unnerved that he was (and he is!) readying himself for a tour of duty as an army reservist.  (You know, where they give them guns and let them go overseas to shoot ‘the baddies’)
 

His response?

I’m not your FRIEND anymore.

Yes, folks, he UNFRIENDED me. Pressed the delete button and sent me off into Facebook Oblivion.

But you know what?  It’s okay.

I’m not his friend either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Little and often

by Mothership on January 23, 2009

This is how one is supposed to eat if one wants to lose weight.

I don’t particularly want to lose any weight, in fact I’d like to gain it, but not on my arse, just in people’s estimation of my brilliance and also in the numbers of visitors to this blog so when I go and look, obsessively, at the stats, I have gazillions of visitors, not just me and my mum.

I have bored myself silly reading ‘tips on driving traffic to your blog’ this morning which include leaving interesting comments on other people’s blogs (I did that, it was quite fun actually although I suspect you’re not supposed to be rude about the writing) and I have made a list of things to do which will probably end up in the pile of my other lists of things to do, untouched since Christmas. 

However, I can plainly see that it is going to be important to try and post frequently, even if it’s just a little bit, and this I am going to try to commit to, so you can check back more often, and if you can’t be bothered to do that, then you will, at least, have a few more things to read.
I’m also going to take some photos – I got a camera, it’s a bit of a fancy one so you can expect some completely blank, dark spaces for a few weeks while I get the hang of it before there are any beautiful, Cecil B De Mille style portraits or fabulous avant-garde shots in here – but I will be letting you all in on the visuals of my fabulous and amazing lifestyle and you will be frothing at the mouth with envy.
Or not.

Ok, that’s enough now.  Any more and I might get fat.

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Mind Your Language!

by Mothership on January 21, 2009

Yesterday we will not soon forget: That beastly Texan went off in his helicopter and Obama took the presidential oath.

We had our very own neighbourhood ball, which was not attended by the first couple, Mary J. Blige or Beyonce, but it did feature Husband and at least twelve small children doing the chicken dance which was in and of itself a memorable and historic sight.

In honour of the occasion, and as our contribution to dinner, Four and I had decided to make an American flag entirely out of chocolate cupcakes with stars and stripes frosting. This demanded a trip to the grocery store for the requisite ingredients so I bundled the children into the car and we trundled down the road to buy provisions. As we perused the aisles, hunting for food colouring, icing sugar etc. I told Four and One what an important day this was, and why we were celebrating. I was overheard by a young store employee and she stopped me eagerly to ask where I was from.

 I told her I was from England, but the children were born in California.

 “Oh yes, I could tell you were from there by the accent”.

I smiled, somewhat stiffly. I have heard this approximately a billion trillion times before, and if you are a regular reader, so have you. Feel my pain.

Then I waited for her to tell me about the time she had been to London, or her aunt in Hampshire, or that she just loved the Beatles, or whatever other scintillating gem of information she felt compelled to share with me.

Instead she said (oh yes, she did!)

“Are you going to teach the kids to speak your language?”

???!!???!

Several gaping seconds passed while I searched for any words at all – I seemed to have lost the capacity to formulate them – until I finally replied as graciously as I could muster

 “They already speak my language. We speak English in England. It’s where your language comes from.”

“Oh”, she said vaguely, looking slightly, but not nearly embarrassed enough.

“I’m having a hard time waking up this morning”

It was 2.30 in the afternoon.

 

Four is starting Kindergarten at the local public school this September, and will have thirteen years of schooling ahead of her including, one would hope, homework, essays, standardised tests, book reports, science projects, spelling bees et al.
Might she still come out not knowing what language they speak in England? Or France? Might she not know the capital of India? Or be able to do mental arithmetic? (Perhaps I shouldn’t press that last point not being so very strong on it myself). I know that there have been cutbacks in education in the last few years (thank you, Beastly Texan, clearly our kids isn’t learning), but this is a worrying indication of what lies ahead for this country. And if there are great gaps in every child’s knowledge, just what are they doing in those school buildings for all those hours? Watching porn on the school computers? Eating lunch (is that why we have an obesity epidemic)? Picking their noses? Can’t they do that and algebra at the same time? I know I did!

I’m beginning to feel anxious that the children are not going to learn the proper things that they will need to know in school and beyond. Clearly it’s not very realistic to expect me to be able to supplement the missing parts. I do have some very strong convictions about grammar (such as the correct use of adverbs, writing in complete sentences, when to use there, their and they’re etc.), but what on earth am I going to be able to tell them about the Ottoman Empire, calculus and all the other subjects that I missed due to pressing engagements at Roy Rogers Hamburger Emporium where I smoked cigarettes and exchanged critical gossip with a group of kids united by their passion for hardcore punk and bad hair?

Perhaps Husband will step in here. He was very good at school and was extremely happy there. Maybe that is why he is a university professor and I am a failed degenerate. I mean that quite literally – I didn’t even succeed properly at being a degenerate because despite my best efforts at focusing my life on sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, I seem to have morphed into a nicely-spoken married lady who gets called ma’am by the kinds of surly, leather-clad young men I used to go home with after the clubs closed and I bake patriotic cupcakes with preschoolers (baffled, completely baffled by this).

 I am not quite ready to take on the entire school system, particularly as Four is not even enrolled yet, so I have decided to start with helping to improve the things I can around me, beginning with the grocery store. I went down there again today with Four and One in tow and spoke to the manager about changing the signs over the express checkout that read ‘10 items or less’. It drives me BANANAS that they don’t say ’10items or fewer’ For those of you so accustomed to this mistake that you have forgotten why it’s wrong, you can only have less of one amount, such as “Less mashed potato, please”, but you do have fewer of a number of items, such as “Fewer carrots, please”.  Ergo you cannot have “Less potatoes, please” or “10 items or less”. It just isn’t right.

The manager was extremely polite in his American-customer-service-oriented way but clearly thought I was a nut job.  The more stringently I explained my position, the less he cared. I did consider bringing up the fact that  English was not a strong suit for this store given my earlier experience but I didn’t want to incriminate that poor, feckless girl. Besides, One was looking decidedly shifty. It later emerged he was quietly eating M&M’s he had filched from a low shelf, undetected by me. Four had spotted the misdemeanor but took a bribe to stay silent.

Unfortunately, this little act of thievery rather undermined the high ground of my grammatical principles, and after paying for the candy and telling both of them off we left rather quickly.

Four turned to me and said

“Do you think he will change the sign?”

I said I didn’t know, but it didn’t sound like he was very interested in doing so.

“But it’s your language, Mom” she said.

“If he doesn’t do what you say,  just take it back!”

Just take it back! An interesting thought. If the language really belonged to me and I could just remove it at will, what would people do?  Would they switch to another language if they could? Sign or signal? Scream and cry? 
Or would they just be quiet?

Then the really interesting question becomes:

Who would I silence?


 

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Write On, the Revolution!

by Mothership on January 16, 2009

Four is bored.

She tells me she is considering resigning her position at preschool and wants to take some personal time to explore her options. From there she will be seeking a new challenge.

I can see her point – there is a limit to how much a mature person who will be five in just a few short months wants to play with Lego, sing songs about fishies in the ocean and lie around during the mind-numbingly boring mandatory naptime unable to sleep. A lot of the activities she sees as being more geared towards the threes-turning-four and she thinks her teacher isn’t interested in changing the curriculum to suit her and the other slightly older children.
“Toddlers” she says, dismissively with a snort
“Don’t they realise I’m a big kid now?”
She’s gagging to go to Kindergarten, still eight months away. She wants to learn the three R’s.

At her age I was at ‘big school’ already.
I very clearly remember the first day; being taken by my parents in my uncomfortable and unfamiliar uniform that would soon become a second skin to a room full of other nervous children and a teacher called Mrs. Grimm.
That really was her name. Need I say more?
We little ones were sat around diminutive desks and told to sit absolutely still and not wriggle or speak until we were called upon. I remember initially having a slight academic advantage in that I could already read by the time I went to school, but I had not really been introduced to numbers much beyond counting. One awful day I came into the classroom and found myself face to face with a blackboard chalked with ten math problems that had to be completed during the morning period.
I felt my heart sink rapidly with an overwhelming sense of panicky, hopeless doom.
I tried, faithfully, to answer the first two or three sums, doing the requisite addition by counting on my fingers, albeit surreptitiously under the table as we were not really supposed to do that for reasons that were not fully outlined (explaining things to children being unfashionable at the time).
So 2+3 turned out to be 5, 4+2 ended up, after much deliberation to be 6 and so forth. Then the sums got a bit harder, not to mention more boring, and I started to fidget, grow restless and unable to concentrate. I stared out the window and watched leaves whirl around in the autumn wind on the empty playground and wished I could be outside with them.

That’s when I had my epiphany. 

It had a strange kind of logic to it, and if it had happened today I probably would have been given extra credit and a young economist’s prize or some such, (that or a free pass to Gamblers Anon).

I decided that I would not bother working out the answer to all the remaining problems; I would just pick (in my four year old’s estimation) the most important, special, and commonly thought of number (which is, of course, 100 as every fool knows) and put that down instead. Statistically, I reasoned, it would have to be right at least once, probably more, and the time and stress I would save on working out the answers to the boring questions would more than offset the pain of having a few red crosses against the ones I might get wrong.
It was pure genius.
Really, with that kind of thinking and the right set of teachers/parents/conditions I could have gone on to a stellar career on Wall Street and right now instead of wondering how it will be possible to pay for our children’s college education and also retire before age 93, I would be in the Bahamas with your children’s college education fund which I would have managed to cream off in Bernard Madoff style Ponzi Scheme and scarper before the Feds found me..

 Anyway, Mrs. Grimm, for better or worse, was not impressed with my statistical analysis and in addition to my red crosses I got a parental conference and a big COULD DO BETTER tag which has dogged every report card, both physical and psychic ever since. I even do it to myself now. She would be so proud!
Unfortunately that was the first of many similar experiences that put me completely off school and formal learning. This has had huge implications across all areas of my life, and definitely drew me on a somewhat unconventional and autodidactical path which posed its own pains as well as pleasures. I have had a most interesting journey so far – no regrets – but I question now whether it had to be quite so obstacle ridden, even if many of the obstacles were placed there myself.
Poor Husband has heard many a woeful tale of my disenchanted and disjointed education, the ten different schools I attended, not including nursery school and Art College and the miracle of how I managed to graduate from high school without doing a single piece of homework. Not one. I felt it was tantamount to a violation of human rights to make me think about school when I wasn’t even there, so I skipped that part of the curriculum, deciding it didn’t really apply to me. This, mind you, is not homage to my own brilliance. It is more illustrative of the apathy that I must have fostered in my teachers. I think they didn’t give a monkey’s fart whether I turned anything in or not – at a DC public school in the 80’s they were probably relieved that I turned up, spoke with correct grammar and didn’t shoot them.

Hmm. I meant to write about Four, and really this is ultimately about her and not about me.

At her request I have been keeping her at home more often to practice her reading and writing, and we are even doing some rudimentary math at which she is proving startlingly adept – I think she takes after Husband in this area. Her handwriting is fairly appalling – clearly my genes – but we are working on this and she is very proud and excited about our mutual improvement.
It’s odd, but can feel some kind of huge healing happening for myself as I watch this wondrous little person filling her brain with knowledge, enjoy struggling with problems, and even laugh when she makes mistakes and say to me;

“It doesn’t matter! I’ll just try again.”

If only I could have said that to myself instead of

“It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to be part of this”

I wonder how different life would have been?
This morning as I took her to preschool, she insisted on taking her exercise book in which we practice her letters with her, and she told me she is going to teach the other children to write.

“I’m bored of being bored there,” she said.
“I’m going to change things up a bit”

So rather than resigning, it looks like Four has decided instead to lead a revolution inside the classroom, armed only with her pencil and a sheet of lined paper.  I’m not sure what her teacher will say about her new career as a literary agitator, but I couldn’t be more proud. 

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