May 26, 2011
This cake is for the party…
We decided that a six-layer cake needed a bit more height, so we put it on a pedestal and added cake bunting. It was delicious. Only problem was that one slice fed all our party guests, so now we’re looking for some other parties for this cake to be for.
(I stole this idea from here, just in case you’ve mistaken me for someone original. And her cake wasn’t crooked. But then her philosophy also probably isn’t, “Bake a cake, but bake it slant.”)
May 26, 2011
I think you'll be two now and forever
I’ve written posts before about Harriet being older than she’s ever been, like back when she was seven weeks old, and I was amazed at how far we’ve come. Or when she was three months old, and when she turned one, or six months ago when she was a year and a half–these signposts that have us take stock and realize that we’ve been moving forward all along, even when we spend mornings reading stories on the couch and it doesn’t much feel like it.
But this is different. My friends, never before has Harriet been two-years-old, one hundred and four weeks, an upstanding (most of the time), fast-running, fierce shrieking, word-speaking, unabashed hugger and devourer of tiny muffins, counter of cars, page-turning, tutu-wearing feral creature who reads the newspaper while she eats her lunch, looking for advertisements with pictures of cars. Cars with wheels.
The age of two is a bit like colic. It’s a dreaded thing that everybody warns you about, and some people say it doesn’t exist, but others spent nine months suicidal because of it. I thought that since Harriet has been annoying since birth, we might miss out on the terrible. Her tantrums started when she was about a year old, so I was well-versed in the child lying face-down, kicking and pounding the floor and crying until she pukes. I thought I knew what people were talking about when they were talking about two years old, but like everything to do with each new stage of parenthood, I had no idea.
Two is terrible in a brand new way. It’s the kid who is trekked all the way to swimming lessons then refuses to get into the pool, the kid who won’t say hello to her grandmother on the phone, who won’t eat unless she’s sitting on her mother’s lap, who wants her father to get out of the way and so stands with her hands on her hips and says, “Bye, Daddy. Bye, Daddy.” It’s the kid who knows she can climb up on a kitchen chair to turn the stereo on, but also knows she isn’t supposed to, and is in thrall to the tension between these ideas. She’s fascinated by her ability to provoke a reaction, and by her dawning awareness of being a free agent in the world. She also has the self-preservation instinct of a lemming.
But two is also happiness beyond the wildest dreams. It’s the kid who’s fascinated by prepositions, and lying in bed between her parents on Saturday morning looked at both of us and said, “Harriet in family.” It’s the kid who wants to go outside always, and never wants to come in. Who loves to talk about her friends, and never sees any of them (or does anything) without having to be pulled away shouting, “More!” She loves chocolate, ice cream, and this weekend decided that cupcakes were called “Happy Birthday Muffins”. She has just learned the word, “Nobody” and loves to play her guitar, and makes up songs in a combination of English and Harriet-ese. She loves car-rides, puppies, dancing, teapots, puddles, stickers, clocks, digging in dirt, watering cans, and dustpans. Her favourite author is Byron Barton, among others. If it’s close enough to bedtime, she will laugh hysterically about anything. She loves to help with everything we do, and sometimes she even manages to.
Harriet is two, which is the oldest she has ever been, but also not much older than seven weeks old, relatively speaking, (and still “nearly new” according to A.A. Milne). And it’s true what they say, though it wasn’t for a long time–I can’t imagine my life without her. I don’t know how I got along before, but now I’m so glad I don’t have to. She is everything I ever wanted her to be, and me because of her.
We love her, we love her, we do.
May 10, 2011
Spring Things
Spring things: first pie of the season (strawberry), High Park hanami beneath the sakura, and the flowers on Harriet and my matching aprons, which were a home-made (!) Mothers Day gift from my mom.
May 8, 2011
Mothers are people
Before I had a baby, I thought the song “Parents are People” from Free to be You and Me was about the wide range of employment opportunities available to men and women everywhere in this brave new world– that some mommies drive taxis and sing on TV, and daddies play cello or sail on the sea. And then I had a little baby and for a while (in retrospect, a very little while, but at the time I didn’t know this) my entire self was erased, and it dawned on me that the song was about how parenthood doesn’t have to constitute the entirety of a parent’s identity (though I’ve got no qualms about those for whom it does. Parenthood is a noble and worthwhile calling).
Lately I’ve been extending my thoughts on the song and imagining it in terms of a mathematical equation though. (This is the kind of thing that occupies my mind as I push a stroller down the sidewalk looking kind of vacant.) If Mommies=People [with children], therefore People=? The logical answer is that People are People, but even Depeche Mode didn’t manage to get to the bottom of that matter. Indeed, why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully? But it does clear up the matter of why mothers can’t seem to get it together and support each other. Because mothers are people, and people just don’t do that.
Case in point, the story in the Toronto Star this week: “These moms refuse to wear sweats”, which makes the argument that motherhood doesn’t mean we have to stop wearing skinny jeans and motorcycle boots. My initial response is “ugh” for many reasons, chief among them being that I never looked that nice even before I had a child, and also because I don’t have the money, figure or talent to ever look like the skinny jeans moms do.
But I realize that these women are fighting the same mommy stereotypes that I grapple with. “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean 
sweat pants, baggy tops and bad perms” so the article goes, which is analogous to my own crusade, which is “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean being an idiot”. I’m not sure who exactly are these mythical frumpy idiotic mothers we’re all running from, unless we’re all running from the very worst fears we harbour of ourselves. And these selves are so various, and we’re all running so hard that it starts to look like we’re running from each other, but we’re not.
Or perhaps what I mean is that we’re not mothers divided as much as people with children who never had all that much in common in the first place.
I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be out of the first year or so of motherhood. Those months when everything is so urgent, so terrifying, and so unsure that you just cling to something that may be true in order to make sense of a chaotic universe. On top of the practical matters of new motherhood was how threatened I was by other mothers and their choices. I was told that this would lessen as I became more assured, and it’s true. I think we all muddle through, and there’s no one way to do it, and that families are people as much as mommies are, and people are.
(I also think that that Tina Fey’s Fuck You to breastfeeding in her book Bossypants should be required reading for anyone who gets upset at the sight of formula fed babies. And I think that anyone who finds breastfeeding evangelicals offensive should consider the innumerable ways that breastfeeding mothers are only superficially supported in our society. And then should go read the Tina Fey chapter and feel better about everything.)
Lately I’ve noticed my failure to find my place in the mom dichotomy. Either I should be always putting my children’s need first (this rarely happens. Harriet is a fairly robust human being, and therefore under normal circumstances, her needs are pretty much on par with my own) or taking time for myself and having a manicure (which has never happened. Because it is very difficult to read and have a manicure, or so I imagine. See notes above about me being frumpy). The great thing about this lack of inclusion, however, is that I don’t have be involved in the mom dichotomy at all. Because, well, mommies are people with children, and people are…
And in such open endedness lies liberation and infinite possibility.
There is a book called The Happiest Mom that I’ve been eager to get my hands upon, most because, like all the best parenting books, it might validate all the choices I have already made. (Also, if you’re newish to this blog, read Dream Babies by Christine Hrdyment, which will teach you that all baby/parenting books are faddish fluff, and you are your own best parenting expert if only you have the confidence to believe it). I love the idea of a book suggesting that happy motherhood is possible (it is!) and that there’s a way to get there (and there are many!).
For me, the way to get there has involved a husband who’s as good a mother as I am, a life that gives me plenty of time to myself, and not having another child anytime soon because I think it would probably break me. An individual path, but it works for me, and so I feel so lucky to be celebrating my second Mothers’ Day (or my third, if we count the Mothers Day I spent having an external cephalic version).
First, because we had a lovely evening with own mom. And because my husband and daughter gave me a basil plant and license to run wild in the bookstore this afternoon (I got I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue, and The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk, whose novels I can’t get enough of). They also accompanied me on A Pro-Choice Jane’s Walk around downtown Toronto today in the glorious sunshine, which is fitting because my own reproductive freedom is part of why I get to be a happy mother.
I’m so grateful for the choices I’ve been able to make on the road to here.
April 18, 2011
I have lost control
Harriet has now mastered the art of climbing up onto a chair in order to turn on the kitchen stereo, to turn up its volume (if necessary), and mostly to turn off The Current and replace it with something musical. Which means, basically, that it’ s all “Hippo in the Bathtub” all the time around here lately. I think that this is going to become a problem…
February 13, 2011
Doubleness and Happiness
Oh, the things I could tell you about my daughter. Like how she strums her guitar and sings the song she wrote, which is the word “Bunny” over and over; how she learned to say “CN Tower” last week; how when I say, “Slow snow falling”, she says “Deep”, and when I say, “Cars dogs babies”, she says, “Sleep”. How she says “sleep” like “seep” and does a fair amount of it herself. How she’s totally into colouring these days, and she has learned to say her name, except she says, “Ohra” instead of Harriet. Her favourite colour is purple (thanks to Mable Murple), she has to have a sticker on her hand at all times (and best if it’s purple), she loves The Wheels on the Bus (in particular “Swish swish swish”) and Skinnamarink. She loves any book by Marisabina Russo, and Alfie and his sister Annie Rose. How much fun she has with her best friend Margaret, especially when they’re being silly together (and seriously, is it ever fun to wear playdough on your ears.
We love love love her (except when she is having a tantrum at the ROM, and arching her back as I try to put her into her stroller so that the stroller rolls across the atrium at top-speed and everybody is staring at me as she’s screaming, and then we go through the same routine later that afternoon in front of a packed waiting room at the doctor’s). Just as I loved loved loved Sarah Hampson’s wonderful piece in The Globe last week about parenthood and happiness. Which I read with Carol Shields on my mind, and it underlined the line I’d already actually underlined from the novel: “doubleness clarifie[s] the world.” Yes, that’s precisely what it is.
Having a child is very much like everything about being a person who is alive: it’s wonderful and it’s terrible. It’s also very much like being alive in the sense that I’d rather do it than not do it, even though sometimes it isn’t very fun.
I loved this, from Hampson: “I realized that while it was hard not to compare my efforts to those of other mothers, I should see my approach to parenthood as an investment in penny stocks no could predict the outcome of.”
These days, as things have come together in a way that makes sense to me, I spend much less time thinking about “parenting” than I did a year ago. I was obsessed with books then, trying to discover some kind of methodology, but lately we’ve been doing just fine at “making it up as we go along”. Though I have put a book called Toddler Taming on reserve at the library. I have a feeling now is just the calm before the storm.
February 2, 2011
Slow snow falling deep
My life at the moment offers such a richness of time, for which I am incredibly grateful. We are very rarely in a hurry, Harriet can walk down the street at her own stumbling pace, we can do the grocery shopping in the morning when the store is nearly empty, we get chores out of the way in the week so that weekends are devoted to pleasure, and when I call to make her doctor’s appointment, I’m able to say that pretty much any time is fine. (Except nap-time. Nap-time is sacred. There is never enough time in nap-time, or in the evenings after Harriet goes to bed, and I take care to use every second of this precious free time for writing and reading, and I do. When I’m not looking at photos of people I don’t know on Facebook.)
The best thing about this arrangement is that we can take pleasure in the little things, that there is no such thing as drudgery, because everything has its place. For instance, I clean the house on Friday mornings and don’t worry about my filthy kitchen floor for the rest of the week, and I have somehow come to love this ritual, that I’m not cleaning while I could be doing something better, but that I’m cleaning because it’s what we do then. And when we finish, there will be time for something else. So that I can enjoy the seven seconds in which the sun gleams from my just-mopped floor, and the stove-top is scrubbed (and I just don’t look in the bathtub, which is never, ever scrubbed). To clean my house is satisfying, and to be finished even more so.
I have also become a passionate snow shoveller. Snow shovelling is only such a chore, because it creeps up on you just when you’re late for work, but this is never the case with us. The storm that struck our city last night was not as powerful as predicted, but still, a man skiied by my house this morning, and snow had covered everything. And because Harriet and I were expecting a friend this morning, we went outside to shovel her way up to our door. (We shovel also for the postal service. If you clear it, they will come.) Harriet has a small shovel, and is impressed enough by it and by the snow that she is satisfied to watch me work. And it was the perfect snow to shovel to– there was so much of it, but it was light enough that I could lift big shovel-fulls of it, feel impressive, and not injure my back.
I get so so few opportunities to actually physically labour (which is a good thing. I once did a Habitat for Humanity Build, almost killed myself, and spent most of the build under a tent eating twinkies, and no one minded, because I was very bad at building houses). Which makes it entirely satisfying to work for once, to use my body, my strength, to clear the sidewalks and our driveway, creating mountains at the edges that are taller than Harriet. (A mountain taller than Harriet. I know. Can you imagine such immensity?). To know that snow-clearing is by-lawed as my obligation as a citizen of this city, that we have to work together to keep our sidewalks clear, and how many people fulfil their duty actually as opposed to those who don’t. It makes me hopeful. And to be out there in the fresh-snowed quiet of a Wednesday morning, everybody either gone to work or snow-dayed in bed, the snow still falling and me quite content knowing that I’m doing a job that will never be done.
January 18, 2011
This is Harriet, who
This is Harriet, who can say tutu. Today she said sun for the first time, as well as soap and snow. And while we were reading Madeline, she pooh-poohed to the tiger in the zoo on cue. When she reads Madeline, she goes and gets her Madeline doll, and then goes and puts the doll away when the story is finished. When she sings I’m a Little Teapot, she goes and gets her teapot. When we’re at toddler time at the library and sing Twinkle Twinkle, Harriet goes over and points to the star on the door. Similiar with the clock on the wall during Hickory Dickory. She says boom whenever anything falls on the floor, which is often, but she pronounces it bum. She demands that our radio be playing music at all times, and gets frustated when I won’t turn off CBC, so then I have to. She is totally into Skinnamarink, and alligators, and Dennis Lee’s poem Alligator Pie. Her interests include being flung through the air, and looking out the window. Last week, she learned to kiss properly (as opposed to slapping her mouth against my face and saying “mmmbah”) and I don’t know that I’ve ever loved anything as much as that tiny smack. She loves reading books as much as she loves throwing them on the floor, and she’ll sit reading stories for ages, so she’s the toddler of my dreams. She likes Olivia, and Shirley Hughes’ Alfie, and any book about babies, and Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie, which she laughs at as she leafs through it by herself. She loves If You’re Happy and You Know It because she likes any excuse to clap her hands. She puts her arms in the air and says, “Uppy” and there is no choice but to comply. Every day she has more hair, and her big brown beautiful eyes are unfathomably lovely. We really love her. Every night around 11:30, we mention her for the first time in three hours, and it’s obvious that we miss her. Conversations about what Harriet likes, and how Harriet is, because it’s Harriet, you know. But not that we miss her so much of course that we’d want to hear a peep out of her before morning, oh no. There’s what Harriet likes and how Harriet is, but we’re very content to meet her again with the sun.
