cribchronicles.com

to the multitude who weighed in with ideas and experiences and just good wishes regarding milk and asthma and all that mad stuff…thank you.  so much.  we saw our family doctor (who’s not utterly opposed to the possibility of a dairy connection, btw, it’s just not his area of expertise in any way) on Thursday, and Oscar’s lungs are clear and good to go once again.  the doc too was strongly in support of putting O back on the rice milk for now and then trying cow’s milk again in a month or two once cold season is over and before allergy season begins, just to see if we can establish a pattern.  allergy tests will follow, but probably not until fall.

the rice milk O drinks is organic and fortified with vitamin D and calcium, so i feel pretty good about giving it to him.  while his diet isn’t heavily meat-reliant, he gets a lot of protein and actually gravitates more to protein foods than carbs, so i’m not over-worried about him having any protein deficiency.  we do give him soy milk occasionally too but don’t want to overload the soy in his diet as kids with dairy sensitivities often have the same reactions to soy.

and mostly, yep, i’m still just kinda hoping he’ll grow out of it.  so having all of you tell me stories of siblings and relatives and cousins’ pet dogs with terrible childhood asthma that magically went away in adulthood…that was like candy.  i love you.  i like to imagine myself a realist and i do prefer to see the details of what’s coming down the road at me, but clearly…when it comes to my kid, i’m all over the possibility of magical salvation, of having him snatched from the jaws of even very small, controllable, more irritant-than-life-threatening kinds of dragons.  and in the meantime, he gets tasty organics.  god, i am such a yuppie.

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and in the off chance that you spend your nights dreaming of rubbing elbows with my bourgeois self, some of us from eastern parts will be gathering May 16th-18th in bizarrely-picturesque Chester NS for our own highly-tongue-in-cheek version of BlogHer, since San Francisco is thousands of dollars away for us and July just…well…inconvenient for most.  Maritime BlogHer will involve absolutely no speeches, panels, or experts, but probably copious amounts of wine, beer, and chocolate.  i have first dibs on the chocolate, just so all are clear.  we’re numbering a cozy 8-10 strong, renting a B&B for the weekend, and…um…plan to hang out.  invitations are utterly open.

however, if you do plan to come and kiss fish (hey, it’s local custom, one has to be culturally sensitive) with us, we’ll need confirmation by the end of this month.  please join our facebook group (it’s the only one entitled Maritime BlogHer, easy to find) and let us know your travel plans so we can try to coordinate rooms and drives and all that good stuff.

and i can regale you with all the exciting things i learn about dairy and asthma in the interim.

sometimes running away from home for a few days is just the very best thing in the world.  except maybe for coming home again.

Dave & i took off from his parents’ place in the forenoon on Boxing Day and drove the six hours to Quebec City.  by ourselves, just the two of us.  Oscar stayed with his doting grandparents, who, in thus providing us with fifty-three hours of uninterrupted, non-working, non-nap-scheduled time, gave us the very best post-Christmas present ever.  we spent two nights and one whole wondrous day wandering around historical, atmospheric Vieux Quebec, which we’ve both been to but not for a decade and never together.  we checked out museums and architecture and boxing day sales and as many restaurants and cafes as we could humanly manage, all while gentle snow fell.  we even rode the Funiculaire, the almost 130-year-old elevator rail line that scales the old city walls.  we walked more than we’ve walked in months, cumulatively.  for that matter, we got a lot more exercise in a myriad of ways than we have in months, actually.  ahem.  i do love a king-size bed.

but the very most marvellous part of the whole trip for me, other than possibly the three ridiculously bone-chilling minutes i spent in the hotel’s not-nearly-heated-enough outdoor pool with snowdrifts blowing onto my nekkid neck while i dog-paddled around its circumference gawking at the city lights, was the drive.  the road trip.  the glorious adventure of being just two fools in a car with gas, coffee, and a pile of cds.  oh, and Grandpapa’s borrowed GPS, which admittedly took some of the terror out of my attempt to actually drive into the city myself without panicking and throwing myself into the Saint Lawrence when confronted with seventeen different off-ramps at once. 

in the nearly three years since Dave and i shed our expatriate backpacks and became settled, pregnant-and-or-parenting dwellers of my smallish hometown, we’ve driven a lot.  to exactly two destinations - his parents’ house in northern New Brunswick, about four and a half hours away, and his sister’s house and/or the IWK hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a shorter trip by about an hour.  the landscape on each road has become so familiar that new potholes are noteworthy, but overall, it’s monotonous, destination-focused travel, the stuff of survival.  we load the car with sippy cups and diapers and try to time our drives for optimum napping.  one of us usually ends up performing a puppet show from the front seat for part of the trip, whilst we debate whether the Velvet Underground really counts as lullaby music.  it’s family travel.  i love it, with all its labour-intensive cheer.  but it is not - i repeat, NOT - a road trip.

Quebec was a road trip.  we had a choice of routes to take, open road in front of us allowing options, freedom to flip a coin.  neither of us had been on either highway in nearly ten years, so the low mountains and snow-capped woods were all a discovery, a fresh landscape, dotted with cheese shops and gas stations selling pain au chocolat.  we could blast the stereo as loud as we liked, whenever we liked, or lapse into long, introspective silences just watching the expanse of forest wind away from the road.  we could stop when we wanted, or not at all, and not once did i feel bad for failing to entertain Dave with a lively chorus of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, complete with hand clapping and nose beeping.

it was good.  out on Highway 20 where the high road and the low road merge, i drove past ghosts of my younger self in different cars, spinning up and down the highway, a passenger in cars and lives that intersected with my own for a moment, or a season.  spring break 1991 i hitch a ride with friends to a ski hill even though i cannot ski, half an ounce of hash on us as we cross from Quebec into the US.  December 1992 and four girls in a beatup borrowed Volkswagen drive all night to a funeral for our roommate’s father, suddenly dead at fifty. summer 1993 and fall 1994 i take the train through these parts, running along the Saint Lawrence parallel to the highway, wild-hearted and broken here, riding the bar car to a new life in Vancouver there.  August 1997, my honeymoon, spent mostly camping or visiting in-laws, with one memorable night in a hotel so skanky the only furniture in the room other than the bed was a bench seat from a car, bolted into the concrete floor.

i saw Dave too, on his way to Neil Young concerts and the Lilith Fair and probably countless other trips i don’t know about or have forgotten the tales he once regaled me with.  i heard him, in the cds we played, the full collection of neglected oldies and burnt mixes from the Napster heyday.  i heard us laughing at 3 am, back in Korea in the early, early days of our romance, drunk on bad wine and each other, sharing tunes from our respective formative years, convinced that a mutual taste in Kris Kristofferson had to be some kinda sign.

the familiarity and yet the novelty of it, all this silly road trip freedom, made us giddy…and filled us, reaffirmed us, in a way that a hundred days at home couldn’t have.  i felt all those fragments of foundation and vagabond days as a gift, a reminder that life has not always been Elmo and organized overpacking.  i felt twenty, and twenty-five, and thirty all collapse in on me, rejuvenating this almost thirty-six.  i felt like a friend and partner, and like myself, all my selves, all carried within.  i put my feet up on the dash and revelled in the joy of selfishness, all the way there.

and most of the way home.  until we got about two hours away, at which point we two overgrown wish-we’d-been-Deadheads began to long aloud for the little boy we hadn’t seen in two days, and then the game was up.

Oscar’s smile met us at the door.  i saw nothing more beautiful in Quebec City, nor in all the years i rambled.

but his parents brought back deeper, more rested, connected smiles to him…and so the trip was a raging success.  tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way home from Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s, a family ride, fully stocked and carefully timed.   i think we will try to teach Oscar some Iggy Pop tunes along the way.

so, not tomorrow, but the next day, we launch the nifty and innovative and multi-tentacled Head of Medusa project into which i have channelled all the insanity mayhem anal retentiveness diligence of my organized yet befuddled little brain over the past three+ months.

okay, maybe not all.  but lots.

this launch - all four carefully scripted hours of it - will involve fifty-two grade seven students, four teachers, a celebrity-edublogger guest presenter, a celebrity-webcast-pioneer guest webcaster, some local media, the University President, archival and technological experts, a documentary filmmaker, and possibly a Minister of a federal department-that-must-remain-nameless until they get off their honourable fences and decide whether or not to grace us with their, erm, presences.

never mind that we still haven’t gotten word from Ottawa yet about whether we can fire off the press release…and the event is only 36 hours away.  i’m not nervous.

nope.  and not because of my mad skillz, or my overweening confidence.  no sir.  i’m not nervous because immediately after that four hour tightrope walk that will determine how these kids feel about this project for the rest of the six looming months they’re stuck with us actively and productively engaged in our learning fun, we up and hit the ground running for a teachers’ conference we’re running the very. next. day.

’cause we’re wild and crazy people.

wanna come?   think of it as BlogHer for the education profession, right here in humble PEI.  it shall rock.  especially if i remember to order lunch for everybody. 

of course, i will be at work by 8 am on Saturday morning.

withhold your jealousy.  just send drinks naps…and wish us luck.

…next week we return to your regularly scheduled parenthood.

i need to ask.

it has been pointed out to me in the past, by a certain someone who shall remain nameless but who lives in my house, is more than two feet tall, and is not a cat, that i sometimes overreact to petty bureaucratic irritations. this person attests that it was not necessary or helpful to shout obscenities at a customs official for charging a two hundred dollar duty on the forty-dollar sweater my mother sent one Christmas when we lived abroad, despite the fact that the charge was erroneous and due to Mr. Customs Official’s misinterpretation of the English on the packing slip, that he refused to listen to polite explanations of the distinction or grant us any access to a manager, and that he acted like an supercilious twerp from the moment we set foot in the office. this little voice of reason that lives and works with me also protested, quite forcefully, when i began to mutter threats on the life of the previously lamented skanky Easyjet agent, may her tanning bed burn her to a crisp, who brazenly - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - decided that the very same ticket that had gotten us from London to Prague this past spring suddenly didn’t allow for the very same three pieces of luggage that had been no problem four days before, and that would be $125 US fuck you very much.

yeh, okay, sorry…you tried to stop me, i know…it slipped out.

i don’t deal well with finding myself suddenly on the wrong side of rules i thought i’d been following along with reasonably nicely, particularly if random or irrational or fraudulent penalties are suddenly brought to bear upon me. i feel violated - more than is reasonable, i’m sure…or i’m told - by this type of encounter. but…i live with someone who keeps his cool, for the most part, in these situations of stupidness. who focuses on getting out them without international incident, and without focusing on the powerlessness they bring to boil in me.

so the fact that Dave this nameless soul of patience is pretty pissed right now too is completely messing with my head. what i need to ask is…how would you handle this tomorrow? because me…i want to bite people. and Dave seems amenable to this, in this particular instance. and that’s just weird.

we have a car. one small car. we have been insured by the same company - a Canadian company which advertises itself as the “people’s insurer,” having grown out of a cooperative insurance group started by some friendly farmers back, oh, you know, when the world was black and white - for the thirty-one months we’ve been back in Canada, and i was insured with them for the five years previous to my departure, too. we have our life and house insurance with this company as well as our auto insurance, though, irritatingly, they don’t seem to offer a method by which we could consolidate all our many payments. the life insurance comes out of our joint account monthly. the car and house are paid, by cheque or locally at the office, in biannual installments which come essentially quarterly because upon our return to this fair land we bought a car three months before we bought a house.

scintillating, no?

so, our car insurance comes due at the end of every January and July. this July, as you may remember, was a carnival of pestilence, guests, and work. the notice came to pay our car insurance, and we ignored it for a few days. then we went away for almost a week, spent some delightful vacation time in the hospital with O, and returned home, wretched and frazzled. when we got back, though, i noted that the car insurance came due the following Saturday, so i wrote a check. check made it into the mail using the company’s self-addressed envelope on Thursday…cutting it a little close…but the policy has a stated twelve day grace period. we’ve never used the grace period previously with this company, but their policy clearly states that it exists.

i was feeling quite proud of getting the damn thing sent and paid more or less on time, given the shape we’d all been in. ah, hubris.

fast forward eleven days. i had to bring Oscar to the doctor one Wednesday afternoon for a followup after his hospitalization the month before, so i swung home from work to pick up milk and some toys for my bag before going to his sitter’s to collect him. there was a message on the phone from the local office of the insurance company - a disembodied voice informed us that our insurance was about to run out, tomorrow, at the end of the aforementioned grace period. thinking how lucky it was that i’d happened home at an hour when their office was still open for business, i called back, thinking “oh, there must just be some mistake with the check.” i got a different agent than the one who’d called me, but no matter, she pulled our account up. no check. i said i’d sent it.

she said “when?” i said, Thursday, July 26th.

she said “where?” i said, to your Guelph, Ontario office, where the self-addressed envelope that came with my policy notice said to send it. duh.

she said “why?”

i started to think we were playing a very tiresome game of the five Ws, but explained that i’m in the habit of sending checks to the address that’s stamped on the envelopes that come soliciting them. she asked why i hadn’t dropped the check off at the local office. i explained that i work fulltime and hadn’t had the time off to take an hour off to drive to their office, wait in their foyer, and pay in person…plus they gave me that nice self-addressed envelope so i’d thought perhaps i should use it. she said something about it taking a really long time for things to get all the way to Guelph. i said nothing, but ruminated on the Christmas cards i sent my aunties in Guelph last year, which got sent a week before Christmas and were still in their hot little hands when i talked to them Christmas day, despite the holiday rush.

i started to think that perhaps this was not going so well, after all. i asked if i should call Guelph. the agent on the telephone assured me that she would follow up with a call, so they could “look for the check as it’s probably in their system somewhere” and would notify me if there appeared to be any problem or if our insurance for some reason was lining up to be interrupted. i decided that was great, as i had a baby to pick up and doctor’s appointment to take him to.

this was two weeks ago tomorrow. we came home tonight to a notice, from Guelph, dated ten days ago, telling us our car insurance has expired. or rather, it expired back on Saturday, July 28th. and that we can “apply for reinstatement”, but in the meantime, are shit out of luck in terms of any form of auto coverage. there has been no phone message, or even call display showing the number of the local agent. and that there will be an unspecified penalty.

thus, the residents of the crib, the tall and the small usually cranky about shit like this anyway, are pissed. because we sent the check and it had fourteen days to arrive and clearly local agent chick never called to follow up or notify them to look for it and now we’re out on our ear. despite the fact that we’ve never had a late payment. despite the fact that the envelope they sent was, erm, addressed to Guelph and if sending the frigging check to Guelph is not an effective system then for chrissake don’t stick their motherfucking address on the return envelope, people!

and we will apparently have to pay for the privilege of having them take us back, despite their rather inefficient system and its presumption that i’d be safer to take an hour off work to pay their damn bill because nothing actually clears their offices in normal postal delivery time.

we’re also grateful. that we haven’t backed into anyone while we unwittingly had, you know, no insurance.

i know this isn’t food, or anything. it’s car insurance, not a matter of foul injustice or life and death…much as i’d like to spit bubonic plague all over little miss “don’t call Guelph, we’ll call you,” i know what it is to be busy and work and let things slip. that’s where this all started. but…we cut the deadline close but follow their process with two weeks to spare, and we end up unable to drive, and having to pay a penalty to reapply to be insured, despite a perfect customer history? even though their agent and their offices’ disarray appear to be at least in part the reason that the insurance was cut off? i would have given the agent my credit card number for the damn payment while i had her on the phone, had she indicated in any way that this was a possibility. but nope. bah.

we live in a small enough city that we can walk Oscar to the sitter’s tomorrow and still likely walk into work on time. and it’s not January and brassmonkey cold out there. these are all precious blessings, yes…and i know it. people would give teeth for my problems.

but still, how would you handle this? what would you say, tomorrow, if you were walking my lazy ass to work and picking up the phone to call the insurance company?

should i try my best to kick their asses? or am i wrong to even think they’re being unreasonable in the first place?

i asked. i can take it. please reflect.

so, i live in a bubble.  an occasionally glamourous bubble, filled with plague and exciting hospital visits, true, but a bubble nonetheless.

i didn’t even know BlogHer existed until people started announcing they were going last March.

in my naivete, upon discovering this fascinating tidbit, i turned to my fellow bubble-dweller, and squeed, “there’s a conference!  a blog conference!  for hers who blog!”

and my beloved said, “yeh. BlogHer.  you going?”

i felt quite exposed for a few, brief seconds…horribly exposed and unwanted and hapless, like a flashback to that moment in junior high when you realize that not only is there a party you haven’t been informed of or invited to, but even your mom has been in on keeping it from you.  i shrank.  Dave knew about BlogHer.  was he going, for pete’s sake?  was i really the last person alive who didn’t know it existed?
turns out Mr. “I Livez on teh Internets” just has his finger on some weird pulses.  and in one of those odd glitches that occasionally occur in our house where two very close people have busy and extremely interconnected lives, he’d just assumed i knew.  (that or he was testing me to see if i track his online activity like a wife bloodhood…but…he knows how lazy i am, so i doubt it.)

so i got all squee-ish again (despite the usual self-doubt that comes with any consideration of actually stepping outside the safe confines of my bubble, but that’s a whole other narrative) and i leapt on the computer and googled BlogHer.  and gazed upon the conference date.

and my bubble burst.  or at least my delusion of venturing outside it did.  because the fine people at BlogHer - for some inscrutable reason which i cannot fathom - scheduled the damn conference for the last weekend in July.

clearly, no one consulted my social calendar.  which is reasonable, i suppose, given that it’s usually stark empty…and no one at BlogHer would know me if they tripped on me.  but people, i live in what is politely termed a “vacation destination.”  a tourist trap.  a mecca for summer holidayers.  barely anyone i know actually stays here year round…they’ve all fled for places with, like, work and stuff.   but they all come home to visit, every last one of them, these near and dear family and friends who connect me to places on the map i once went and now like to imagine from the pleasant vistas of bubble-hood.  they all come home, invariably, during the last week of freaking July.

so, while i  probably would have had serious trouble justifying the cost of the conference and the trip to myself, especially when i wasn’t earning any money, and i would be genuinely intimidated by meeting half the blogosphere face to face, however big i talk, the absolute, unavoidable reason i’m not in Chicago this weekend is that my great aunties arrived last night, and my childhood best friend the night before, and two of my dearest peeps from university are staying here tomorrow night, and then Sunday there’s a party for a friend who lives the rest of the year in Kuwait…and i’m not even sure when i’m going to hang with the lovely folks who’ve descended from London and Korea and Vancouver.

because by about the 9th of August, i shit you not, because that’s the official start of winter here in Canada, they’ll all have fled again for another year.  and i love them all (well, all the ones i’m actually trying to squeeze into my house and/or schedule) and it fills me up for all the dry months, this having company, this visiting with friends.

of course, that’s kinda what blogging does for me too.  so BlogHer, how about a November conference next year? nobody visits then, i can promise ya.

and you…you there reading, presumably NOT from a swank hotel in the Windy City.  you there, not sharing mojitos with fellow blogistas?  what’s your reason?   tell me your story.

i really want to know.  i got to have something to entertain Great Aunt Myrtle with.

so, that stomach bug? the one that dogged us for a week and made me tired and sad?

it’s left town.

but somebody else moved in to fill the void, just in case i was lonesome for my friendly neighbourhood pharmacist.

Oscar has pinkeye.

yeh, i’m waiting for the punchline too.

we’ve put our departure for Dave’s family reunion on hold for a night - we were supposed to leave today - and are busily squirting all our eyes with antibacterial polysporin. nothing says vacation like antibacterial polysporin, folks. that and the fact that i’m going in to work tomorrow morning to try to catch up on what i missed today.

but while O was home from the sitter’s with mommy, we had a very educational time.

he discovered letters, even with one eye half shut and runny.

and chanted magical incantations over them.

and pondered them, and their pointy edges.

and was proud. me too.

i figure even if this run of nasty poxplague continues, at least, hell…he’s reading! erm…well…noticing letters. whatever…details. my poor sick-ridden baboo can become a nice old-fashioned invalid, with a rug on his lap and his nose in a book.

to heck with the reunion…a sit-on-my-ass-with-a-book vacation?  i lust.  and i do secretly hope - for all i’d like him to be well-rounded in ways i ain’t - that O someday understands some of that love of letters and words.  then he can have red eyes all the time, if he likes.

nope, not at all. i was going to regale you with more of my deep thinky thoughts on the cheap methadone that is facebook, or make fun of Dave-who-is-now-my-coworker in order to cover the fact that i’m actually really kinda enjoying working alongside him and realize how lonely i’ve been for aspects of our adult, peer relationship (oh halt, gutter minds) all this past year while i’ve been at home.

but something’s come up.

i’ve spent a lot of the day cracking WhyMommy from Toddler Planet’s sitemeter wide open, clicking on it again and again, hoping for news about her breast cancer biopsy yesterday.

scratch that. i was hoping for good news. the “oh, whoops, gee all that alarm for nothing and who said anything about breast cancer? here’s a lollipop” kind of news.

but she didn’t get that kind of news.

Whymommy has breast cancer. she starts chemo in two weeks, the day her younger son turns six months old. she is 34.

we’re not old friends or anything, Whymommy and me. i don’t think i know her real name, though something at the back of my brain twigs and tells me i do and am just stunned into forgetfulness. but i have known her, out here in this world of words where all our most secret and mundane selves and hopes go on display, for awhile now. back on the first of March, when i was still slowly unpeeling the onion of this community and discovering - eleven months into blogging - that i wasn’t alone out here, i came across this gorgeous post, this song to her second son, her “last baby.” he was six weeks old then, product of a hard-won and brutal pregnancy and wailing with gas and pain from a milk allergy she was diligently working to accommodate her own diet to. i had been there myself, with O’s gastrointestinal misery of the summer before, and it had nearly eaten me alive…the sleeplessness and stress and cheese deprivation. but she wrote of joy, Whymommy did. of sitting with her Little Bear on her chest through the night, tender and unresenting, unpanicked, comforting him. because he was her last child.

her words have been with me since. i am not so good at taking the long view, much of the time…i flap and flounder, get overwhelmed by petty things. but Whymommy’s post about sitting tenderly with Little Bear stopped me short, made me really, fully realize how quickly Oscar’s babyhood was passing, how precious and fleeting and one-shot-only it is, how all the tedious little things i do with him daily - and did so much more of when it was just the two of us, at home - might be my last experience of this babyhood thing…this strange, hard, precious gift. i don’t know if O is my last baby. i hope for more, but know that hope is no guarantee of anything. so ever since, i have held Whymommy’s words close to me, a little private mantra. when i am tired, or impatient, i pull O a bit closer and i remember that he may be my last baby. that all of this parenting, even the roughest parts, will be over all too soon…and may never come again. that he is a gift. and then i rise to the occasion, not quite the beatific madonna but still…content. reminded.

for this, i owe Whymommy, big time. she is, in the odd but very real way of the blogosphere, my friend.

and i feel helpless to help my friend, except to send more of you over there to be her friend, too. she doesn’t want pity, or sadness. she has a plan, and the will to fight, and a tenacity that even through teh internets has always been plain as day. this is the woman who sat up all night with a colicky baby and smiled tenderly upon him, beaming. cancer, i expect, will cower in the face of her fearsome will, slink its ugly tail between its legs, and go the hell home.

i hope.

i know hope is no guarantee of anything. but hope is powerful nonetheless, and there is power in numbers. so go, wrap her up in love and positive focus and stand with her. don’t tell her she’s an inspiration or how sorry you are. just tell her she’s strong, and be there so she doesn’t have to be strong all the time.

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and if you’re in Canada, and you have the legs to waddle, the Run for the Cure is a damn fine way to spend an early fall afternoon raising money to beat breast cancer’s ass. last year i ran for my grandmother, and for Oscar. this coming year, i’m thinking Whymommy and her wee boys will be on my mind, too. breast cancer affects one in eight women. anybody want to join me?

in seventeen succinct syllables, my first day at work.

i can has whole day at desk?
yays! but no bloggingz?
oh noes! cruel joke, world.

clearly, my calling as a poet is clarion. but my calling to sit for eight largely unbroken hours in front of a computer with no diaper changing, no singing, no Richard Scarry books, no kissing, and no blogging? it’s going to take some adjustment.

back to my boy, whom i might have missed a little.

do you ever get the sense that i get just a little too much pleasure out of being, erm, disappointed by life?

that too much happiness might make me blotchy and damp…and if the world really coughed up sunbeams and roses all over my lawn, i’d move?

yeh, me too.

but maybe not right away. ’cause apparently, not getting rabies was just the start of a neat new turn of luck here in the crib. they called. yep, called. after days of the phone sitting limply in its cradle, taunting my tender, puny, shrivelled sense of usefulness to the outside world, they called. bless their crooked little hearts, they called.

i have a job.

of course, now i have to go to work. perhaps i shoulda thought this all through a little better?

nah.  i am grateful. very grateful. i feel validated. i feel relieved. i feel a pleasant, odd, unfamiliar sense of material security. this will be the very first time in the thirty months since we came back to Canada that Dave & i will both have full-time employment, at the same time. it’s been a long, hard slog, this past two-and-a-half years…and the respite from blatant uncertainty is something i think we need, for awhile. it’s only a term contract, my job, but it’s an interesting contract. and they called.

so we celebrated the turning of the worm in our apparent favour, our little family, by playing with some worms in the yard after dinner. with the sun dappling down, in the grass with my healthy, laughing child on an almost-warm, almost-summer evening, i too felt healthy. ‘normal’. unembittered, unwounded. like someone not weighed down by damage and loss and self-doubt, not crouched, warily, cynically, waiting for hurt and disappointment even in the midst of joy. for the first time in more than two years, i just felt…safe. and pleasantly, banally, hopeful.

now hell, it could all be an illusion. i know i could be hit by a bus on my way to my first day at work. more important, i know that Oscar and Dave, so precious to me, are mortal, and vulnerable. i know. but for a few minutes last evening, i remembered how to forget. and regaining that footing - just that simple sense of balance, the absence of agitation and fear - brought a peace i hadn’t remembered at all.

i have exhaled, finally.

the housecleaners came today, thank Jesus. since last November, they’ve been coming every four or five weeks, two women my own age, and scrubbing the floors and the bathroom and the windows, leaving our tidy but grubby little house grime-free for twelve whole minutes and bringing me great joy and a profound sense of freedom. the one hour they spend here every month releases me from a drudgery i particularly hate, and more important, from the fear that my child will die from eating off my floors. the $30 i spend in that one hour is my ticket out from under the burden of housewifely neglect and all the stereotypes of my sex role. both women tease me that if i don’t get a job soon i’ll have to come work for them. and if some month, freelancing fails to net me the $30 luxury of freedom from my own perfectionism, i’ll happily pick up a pail in someone else’s house rather than lose them cleaning my own. $30 is nothing, for what i get out of it.

i got a pedicure last week. it has been almost ten years since i first discovered the Nirvana that is the pedicure, and though i’ve only had perhaps twenty-five of them in the ensuing decade, i can tell you about each one, like rhyming off lovers in a rolling list of memories. the soak. the scrape. the tidy clipping, the smoothing and filing into pretty moons. the massage. the painting and polishing…my one nod to overt societal beauty conventions…me who never wears makeup feels naked without toe polish, usually matte red-brown, sometimes French, usually chipped and months old because i wait so long between visits to the aesthetician. but i go. last week, after months and months of scratchy, neglected feet scraping small holes in my socks, i went, hoping to usher in some sandal weather. the woman i go to talks too much, shares too much, but she has steady hands and i pretend to sleep and sometimes really do slip out of myself, into that suspended space where all i have to do is lie still and get my toes prettied. she is the cheapest in town…$30 for forty-five minutes of relaxation, turning my hooves into proverbial silk purses. and again, $30 is nothing, for what i get out of it.

Oscar goes back to his sitter’s house tomorrow, for the day, so i can get caught up on my freelance editing and my job searching and the housework that the cleaners don’t do and the errands i want to do, and all your blogs. he has been there three days so far…Tuesdays and Thursdays these past two weeks. he seems happy enough with the arrangement, squeaking with pleasure when we arrive, hugging the dog, greeting the little girls of the house like a mini-Elvis come to swagger for their pleasure. his sitter is kind, and engaging, and if she has the tv on too much for my liking she’s still using his cloth diapers without complaint and feeding him nutritious-ish lunches and setting limits gently but firmly so far as i can see, and it seems like a good home, a caring enough place. for eight hours a day, she is good to my child. my child. my beloved, my baby. for eight hours a day, for watching and wiping and feeding and laughing with him, teaching him, being there for him, she charges $30 total.

and $30 is nothing, for what i/he/freaking society as a whole gets out it…when you consider how many little children are in some form of childcare, how many of ‘tomorrow’s leaders’ are being shaped by someone who gets paid eight times less than the woman who does my feet, and still significantly less than the people cleaning my house. because that’s the market rate, because that’s apparently how we value that work. and i took all the feminist courses years ago, and i knew all this in theory, but still, when it works out this coldly, this cleanly, i’m stunned.

now, O’s sitter can make more. she can take in more babies, more children. right now, she only has her own daughters and himself in her care. but starting in June, there will be two more one-year-olds there, on a full-time basis. and she’s willing to take O full-time. and she mentioned another child who might be coming part-time, too. and i think “my stars, five babies, how will my preshus ever get the attention he deserves?’

but $30 is nothing, friends. and Dave & i can find different options, sure…hire someone we pay reasonably to Nanny for him at our place, instead…though i think he’s really ready for the interaction with other kids, ready to be out of the bubble of this house a few days a week…or i could pay the sitter more! except then i think i’d look like some weird white-liberal-guilt twit who doesn’t have a job but has to feel magnanimous so she won’t have to deal with her class issues. maybe it would offend the sitter’s dignity. maybe she’d be thrilled. maybe both. i dunno. chances are i won’t do it.

and even if i did, it wouldn’t be $30 an hour. i know that childcare is day-in, day-out - hence the reason i’m paying someone to do some of it - and i know that i only get, on average, four pedicures a year, if that. but still. but still. isn’t it weird? my pretty feet and my child being kept safe by someone else…both luxuries i choose to pay for right now, but i pay eight times as much for the former because that’s what my society deems a fair wage. because that’s the going rate.

tell me, friends, what the fuck is right about that? ’cause i cannot figure it out.