Primping the Nest

A few home improvements have been pending since we bought our first house four years ago and realized we didn't have a landlord to take care of us anymore. The jobs had accumulated—badly-needed wallpaper removal, some proper light fixtures, some curtains and blinds, and a coat of fresh paint.

My husband and I are not home reno types. We're proud of ourselves if we manage to vacuum the carpet or rake leaves.

We weren't always so negligent. When my husband and I met 10 years ago, he had built a rooftop deck for his apartment and I had just finished painting my whole apartment—in two days, ceilings included. We thought we were capable people.

Then the kids came along.

Now we can barely keep one room tidy, let alone make time for home improvements. At almost any hour, you will find dishes in our kitchen sink. The main floor dining table is a repository for bills. On the coffee table, books and the week's newspapers pile up. I keep collecting them, in denial of the fact that I don't actually read anymore. In the basement, toys lay strewn about like shrapnel after a mess explosion.

I never thought anyone but us would care, but I was wrong.

“I love you guys,” one of our neighbors said dryly. She's renovating her three-storey from top to bottom. “You moved in and didn't do a thing.”

Hers wasn't the only back-handed compliment. Friends who visited often remarked, “Nice place! There's so much potential!”

When our mailman confessed he was concerned he might step on the wrong spot of our front steps and end up with a two-by-four in the face, we finally got the message. Time to suffer through renos like all the other grown-ups we know.

I'm sure what those other grown-ups wanted was for me to taste that bitter regret you have when you can only access your house from the back door, your furniture is pulled away from the walls, your house is covered in the fine, powdery dust leftover after drywall repair and painting, your bank account is dwindling, you and your spouse aren't speaking to each other anymore, and all the stuff that's usually kept in cupboards and on shelves is sitting in the middle of your living room.

The inconvenience of it all makes you wonder: What was so wrong with some peeling wallpaper in the first place? And couldn't the mailman figure out how to get around that bad stair? Couldn't he see the slapstick hilarity of getting a two-by-four in the face?

By the standards of middle-class Toronto housewives, last month was only mildly trying. We did not, as many do, relocate our family to a cramped apartment and learn how most of Toronto actually lives, all while borrowing the equivalent of our life savings to finance a gut job. We merely had our deck fixed, painted the walls, pulled up a bit of carpet, and installed some new light fixtures.

It did render us semi-homeless for a while though, and momentarily broke, as we paid out tradespeople. And it wasn't fun keeping the kids out from morning to night, dragging them from to one time-killing activity after another as we tried to avoid things like our son getting naked and leaning against freshly-painted trim or our daughter finger-painting on the floor with a mixture of drywall dust and milk (both of which did eventually happen). 

Though it is dusty and in disarray, our house does look a little better.

More importantly, however, I lost weight. Just a little bit but a couple of people noticed. Turns out even minor renovations are terrible for keeping regular meal times and eating in general. I missed breakfast every day for two weeks, and was running about so much that I forgot to do my usual furtive eating between meals. I lost a pound-and-a-half without even trying.

As the Italians say: Since the house is on fire, at least we can warm ourselves.

A Positive She-Male Role Model

I didn't post last week; it's been that special kind of busy that happens when your spouse is away.

It's not just the lack of another pair of grown-up hands. What's particularly trying is the emotional toll on the kids, who miss their dad and have an upset routine.

My kids seem to sit in a persistent malaise when their dad is away for long. They inevitably become fascinated with other guys around them—usually manly guys doing manly things. Guys doing construction work, stocking product at the local grocery store, fixing the road, pruning trees.

This time, they slouched around watching a carpenter we've hired to fix our front porch. They asked him questions about his circular saw, how many kids he has, and whether he had built them a tree house.

When a painter came over to do an estimate, my son, who is three, hugged his leg and wouldn't let go.

But it wasn't until one particular morning that I really understood, in the most visceral way, a boy's need for a male role model.

After I saw my girls onto their school bus, I had about 45 minutes to kill with my son until his preschool began.

Let's be ambulance drivers,” he said. This is a game we sometimes play when we're walking somewhere, just to pass the time. He pretends to turn on flashing lights and drives me, the other ambulance driver, as we try to figure out what to do about--as my son puts it-- “the guy in the back with his leg broke off.”

When playing the ambulance driver game, my son finds it necessary for both of us to speak in deep, masculine, ambulance-driver voices.

This time, we played for a bit but soon I got bored. Plus, my vocal chords were feeling a little strained with all the man-talk. I decided we'd go for a coffee.

It was crowded in the coffee shop, and my son was getting a little restless. We got to the front of the line and I ordered a coffee for me and hot chocolate for him—in my normal voice, of course.

“NO!” shouted my son. “We're AM-bulance drivers!”

“It's a game we play,” I said apologetically to the cashier, who smiled weakly, then lifted her eyes to the next customer. We moved down the counter to wait for our drinks.

“You know,” I said to my son. “There are lots of girl ambulance drivers.”

“No!” he said. He seemed to be gathering steam, but then our order came.

I now had two hot drinks to pick up, one in either hand.

“Thank you,” I said politely to the barista. Then I turned to my son and offered him his drink.

"Here's your hot chocolate," I said in that saccharine, placating voice that panicked moms get when they're trying to ward off a meltdown.

“No!” shouted my son. “It's COFFEE!" 

"Ambulance drivers drink hot chocolate," I said, completely missing the point. 

"Say AM-bulance driver words!” commanded the mini dictator.

Crying and totally frustrated, he dropped to the floor.

Here was my choice. In a packed coffee shop, I could speak to my son in a deep, macho voice, or I could let him continue to scream and go floppy, put down the coffees, pick him up and leave.

I think it's testament to just how badly I wanted that coffee: I chose the voice.

“Come on,” I boomed gruffly. “Let's go check on our truck.” I think I even spoke out of the corner of my mouth.

“Yeah,” said my son, smiling through tears. And we swaggered out of there together as ambulance drivers—one of them a pint-sized coffee drinker and the other a sort of confused man-mom.

Hallowe'en

We have been blessed with a daughter who has always loved simple costumes. Princess, vampire, spider, zombie. Her little sister is even easier—she always wants to be what big sister was the previous year.

Then there's our son.

“I want to be a school bus,” he declared when I asked him, two weeks ago, what his costume would be. My reaction: despair. Though I did look forward to getting mildly high again from the spray paint, I still had nerve damage and Popeye forearms from cutting cardboard boxes last year, when he was a monster truck. (With scissors, of course. Finding the X-acto knife? Needle in a haystack.)

“Maybe he'll change his mind,” I thought. A couple days later, he did.

“Merman,” he said that morning. He had put two feet into one pant leg, a makeshift fish tail. “I want to be a merman.”

Unconventional, perhaps, but doable. No boxes, no paint fumes. I was optimistic. It wouldn't take much to make our lavender-and-turquoise sequined Ariel costume a little more boyish. If not, we'd do it up—a wig, full makeup. A three-year-old boy in mermaid drag would be adorable. The grownups would shower him with candy—half of which I would later stash for myself, of course. It could be a banner year.

But that night, all hope was lost.

“I want to be a streetcar,” he said, and before I could confuse or distract him out of it, he flashed a wide, sparkly-eyed, “you-can-do-it, Mom” grin. Who was I to crush his dreams? He only got one Hallowe'en as a three-and-a-half-year-old.

I set to work making a fucking streetcar costume. 

I cut thick cardboard with dull scissors. I spray painted boxes. I actually did this two days in advance, to allow the paint to dry. In my distracted rush I painted the boxes on our deck, and got red spray paint on it. I made a towering, unwieldy box costume that my son—bless him—thought was awesome. My girls also got into it and painted him a steering wheel and dashboard radio--so he could drive while listening to top 40 hits.

The costume sat in our dining room for two days, during which time I constantly fended off my son for fear of my own shoddy construction.

"Stay away!" I shouted. "The sides need more duct tape!"

"Don't touch it!" I said. "The roof will come off!"

In the end, he didn't want to wear it to school, for fear the other kids might want a turn in it and break it. On Hallowe'en night, the cumbersome ensemble barely allowed him to walk, let alone to make it up the stairs to a neighbor's house, without teetering over. He lasted about 15 minutes. Once back in our yard he left his meager loot on the ground and proceeded to do what he had wanted all along: to play in the damn thing.

Surviving Parental Abuse

My husband and I, like most parents, have been the recipients of mouth-smacks, blows to the stomach, vicious shin and groin kicks, bites, headbutts, running headbutts, and whatever that WWF wrestling move is where the one guy brings his knee down on the back of the other guy who is already lying helpless on the floor. Can't remember the name of that move, but it was big in the '80s.

“Broken noses are a very common injury for parents,” my doctor once told me flatly, while she was checking the corneal damage I had after my adorable then-12-month-old daughter had poked me in the eye. "You know, if you try to carry a toddler having a tantrum and they fling their head back? Yeah. I've seen lots of parents come in here with broken noses from that."

“Make sure you keep her fingernails trimmed,” my doc offered, hinting that my eye damage could have been prevented had I properly groomed my kids. I left with the understanding that parental abuse was one of the few types of abuse where no matter what happened to you, it was always your fault.

Case in point.

A while ago, when my husband was hiding from us in the mountains of Peru on another seemingly interminable business trip, I was near my breaking point one night at dinner time. All three children—then aged 6, 3.5 and 2—had begun their nightly caterwauling when faced with their meal. The littlest, my son, was being particularly bothersome to the other two, so I decided it would be a good idea to have him eat his meal on my lap.

He began waving his arms around in an attempt to entertain the table. It was cute, and seemed to diffuse the negative mood, and I was brain-jammed from the caterwauling.

I didn't notice that in his right hand he was tightly gripping his fork like a switchblade. After one particularly erratic movement, he flung his arm backward and stabbed me in the eye with the utensil. The pain was dreadful, and when I took my hand away from my eye, there was blood seeping from the corner.

I felt terribly sorry for myself, because there was no one else there to do it, and I began to cry.

“Eeeew!” said the girls, looking at the bloodstained tears coursing down my face. I went into full breakdown mode and began to weep openly.

“Are you ok, mom?” said one of the girls, though I quickly realized from the expression in her eyes that it wasn't a question about my injury, but about my sanity.

“It's just really hard being a mom sometimes,” I said between sobs.

“Uh-oh...” the girls said in unison, giving each other a look before breaking into a fit of conspiratorial giggles.

They began to eat finally, and in the end the eye stab was a plus, since it distracted them long enough to forget about hating their dinner.

As I finally tucked into my meal, holding a napkin to my still seeping eye. I thought, “I should never have put him on my lap to eat. He's too big for that now. Really, it was all my fault.”

Field Trip

Today I went on a field trip with my daughter's kindergarten class. Fall is upon us and the time has come once again to visit a “real, working farm”--which apparently means the kids can't touch anything--including vegetables or animals--as yellow-vested retirees mumble into walkie-talkies and herd the kids from station to station: caged rabbits, caged chickens, and a vegetable patch where they "stand on the hay, please! And don't trample the carrots!"

“This is so boring,” my daughter declared, and I had to agree. The whole point of visiting the “country” is to feel free, to run with the chickens, get your hands dirty, pull a carrot out of the ground, hold rabbits, maybe even get nipped by a pig without fear of a lawsuit.

I tried to explain that farmers have to eke out a living somehow, and with their livelihood at stake, cramming as many busloads of five-year-olds as possible into their hay maze and overpriced market makes a lot of sense.

But it was lost on her.

What my daughter did notice was her best friend's beautiful little bento lunch. Her best friend's mom happens to be Japanese—as in, recently moved here from Tokyo, and her mothering skills put me to shame. I'd thought the lunch I had carefully made the night before for my kids – delicious chicken salad sandwiches featuring grapes, walnuts and no mayo, which they hate (instead, Greek yogurt, a brilliant fix!) now looked totally blah next to the carrot slices cut into jack-o'-lantern shapes and Hello Kitty-shaped nori stuck onto perfect little rice balls dyed pink with food coloring. This was some hardcore housewifery -- not even those Stepford bitches could touch that shit.

But in the end, no one ate, as we were in a barn that was overtaken with flies (turned out we were seated near cat litter.) But the perfectionism battle really went out the window when one little boy declared he had no lunch. Several moms and the teacher quickly scrambled to give him some food, and the first thing that reached his hands was a giant apple.

"Apples are my favorite!" he said, bursting with enthusiasm, and took a big, juicy bite.

The Self-hating Mother

Many of us bourgeois moms--me at the top of the list--are spoiled, emotionally immature complainers who become far too easily overwhelmed. Part of this is because those seemingly small decisions in life apparently have far-reaching consequences.

That Hallowe'en candy you binged on? It might have been made with the help of child slaves! The six-pack of beer you bought your husband so he'd grumble less when you went out with your friends? Make sure to cut the plastic rings or you will be strangling a seagull!

And never buy supermarket meat, as you will be riddling your children with hormones that will make them obese and force them into early puberty!

I have noticed a startling lack of enthusiasm for causes since I became a mother. I went from a vegetarian lover of impromptu street theatre, poetry slams and political protests to a carnivorous, gas-guzzling minivan driver too tired to give a shit. I think my low point was loading an obscene amount of ground beef and diapers into my minivan at the Costco parking lot on voting day. (And yes, I forgot to vote.)

Being a mother didn't turn me into some giving, community-oriented Mother Theresa. (She had the *time*! She had no actual children?) Being a mother made me just another guilt-ridden, arrogant, self-absorbed pursuer of "me-time," who "does what she can" --mostly making appropriate consumer choices and disposing of garbage correctly.

Is it just me, or is the obvious solution to bring back drinking, smoking, Valium, pressure-cooking everything, denial and bridge as appropriate pass-times for moms?

Duty Day

If you often find yourself thinking “the kids are growing up so quickly” and “there aren't enough hours in the day,” then be sure to volunteer for Duty Day at your child's preschool.

There is nothing like a duty day to connect with your child.

And to truly make. time. stand. still.

Chances are your child's pleasant-yet-iron-willed teachers have found a way to make you help in some way, whether it be by washing a load of art smocks, saving and cleaning out yogurt containers for crafts, or combing your local grocery aisles for a bag of organic fruit.

Or you can help in the classroom, and find the zen in cutting tiny cheese cubes, watching kids sneeze into the cookie dough on baking day, or the singing circle, full of three-to-five-year-olds squirming on the floor. 

What makes it entertaining are those nuggets only children can come up with. For example—said in a loud voice by a three-year-old pointing to a sweet, quiet granny of a teacher having a bad hair day,“Did you know that all the teachers here are girls, even *her*?”