Category Archives: When I grow up

The Elderly and the Fireplace Channel

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So no one died or was dismembered from the swim lessons yesterday, happily enough.  They froze, because our lovely city seems to be practicing the utmost frugality when it comes to heating municipal swimming pools, and also it is December, but they are still in one piece.  So that’s a win.

To warm ourselves up, apparently, we have been watching the holiday fireplace channel.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the channel that plays festive music; it is JUST a fireplace, making crackling fire noises.  It’s actually quite relaxing, or would be if the boys didn’t go insane whenever the guy’s arm appears to poke the fire or add another log.  “HE’S POKING THE FIRE!  THERE’S THE NEW LOG!  AAAAHHHHHHH!”  They also like to wonder aloud what would happen if he poked the fire with his bare hands?  Or wouldn’t it be neat if his sleeve caught on fire?  Ah, the warmth and love of the holidays. 

Speaking of festive music, I cannot help myself – I always sing along.  Even, evidently, while shopping at Superstore, like I did today, realizing only when a woman smiled at me that I was singing audibly.  The question arises: what am I going to be like when I am old and crazy?  I read an article in this month’s O magazine that was truly disturbing.  I always thought of my eventual foray into the home for the elderly with fondness: I would be surrounded by other women wearing support hose and feathery lipstick, I would eat lots of soft foods, I would sexually harass the male orderlies.  Maybe I would even learn how to knit or play shuffleboard.  Who knows?  The world will be my aged oyster.  However, according to this article, the foray into the home is riddled with high-school-like hierarchies, depending on one’s level of mobility and ability to match one’s socks with one’s cardigan.  I read that article and felt strangely out of sorts.  Could it be that senior’s residences are not all they are cracked up to be?  Will I really be unable to choose what table to eat my 4:30 dinner at if I have a walker?  Disturbing on many levels.

And what, you may ask, was I doing at Superstore on this fine day?  Shopping for the holiday necessities, of course: booze and cheese.  So I’m all ready for the holidays; if only I hadn’t mentioned to some girlfriends yesterday that we hadn’t been sick for a while…because today it seems I have a sore throat and the tendency to snap at minor issues like my children saying “Mom!  Mom!  Mom!  Mom!” followed with “Um, I forget”.  But I’m sure it’s nothing a little booze and cheese can’t solve!  And maybe an early bedtime.  Good night!

I just want to eat my COOKIE!

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How was your weekend?  It has been painfully cold around here – so cold that I gave the boys the warm fleece pajamas that I was saving for Christmas – and so I spent a large part of the weekend pleasantly bustling around the house, baking things and making batch after batch of cookie dough in preparation for holiday baking.
Speaking of cookies, have you seen this video of the CEO of Alberta Health Services, refusing to answer media questions on the grounds that he was too busy eating a cookie?  You can’t make this stuff up.  I think the funniest part is how shrill his voice is when he says “I am interested in eating my COOKIE.”  Good times.  I think I’m going to start responding like that whenever anyone asks me anything.  “I am STILL eating my COOKIE.”  Maybe I’ll shove the cookie in the questioner’s face, just for fun.  Actually, since most people who ask me for things are my children, they probably would appreciate that.  To a kid, eating cookies is serious business.
While I was baking things and running errands and discovering that Lindor now makes PEPPERMINT CHOCOLATES – Mother of God, it is the most amazing discovery since frozen After-Eights – my husband continued his painting rampage that has been going on for the past few months.  This weekend he started painting Mark’s room a deep blue, a nice change from the dull brown colour it has been since before we had kids and that room was an office.  Anyway, he took everything out of Mark’s closet, which is apparently a catch-all for all kinds of things that we forgot we had.  Like a 1980’s version of Trivial Pursuit.
And this is where I say I don’t know why I bought the children any toys for Christmas, because if you give them an extremely outdated version of Trivial Pursuit, they will be occupied for hours.  And no, I am not boasting about my precocious children and their intimate knowledge of Arts and Literature and Geography and how they somehow knew who Phyllis Diller was in the Entertainment category.  No.  I just mean that Jake opened up his very own bakery and made pies all day long.



He made pies like a samurai!  While using the Chutes and Ladders board.

 While Jake was busy force-feeding the rest of the family pie, Mark set up the actual game board and started a complex game using wooly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, and pirates.

If that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, they also found a giant foam finger from my days as a working girl, as opposed to my days as a household drudge/ bon-bon eating housewife.

This picture is absolutely hilarious to me.  Worth a thousand words, I tell you.

And for those of you in more moderate climes, here is a view out my back door:

It looks pretty, anyway.  Check out one of my gardens!

There are leaves still on the shrubs!  Poor things.

So tell me, how was your weekend?  And do cookies trump serious conversation?  Discuss.

Inch by inch, row by row

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On Friday I went to a neighbourhood volunteer appreciation dinner with a friend who is a lot of fun and excellent company. I have to admit that I was a bit leery to go at first; it was to take place in our local sportsplex, and I had visions of a potluck meal on long tables in a cold, florescent-lit room festively decorated with tin foil on the wall, but it was nothing like that at all. It was very fun and I won a door prize: a ten piece French white corningware set! I was excited about that, even more excited when I saw what some of the other prizes were; a friend of mine won a large plaster lawn ornament in the shape of a bear cub lying on a log, so I felt like I won the door prize lottery.

My neighbourhood was established in the early 1960s, and there are many people here who are original house owners. My street, in particular, is chock-full of seniors. There are very few children, as evidenced by our annual lack of trick-or-treaters and the plethora of grandparent-style lawn ornaments and swan-shaped flower pots. The boys were playing in the sprinkler a few weeks ago, shrieking and laughing, and I asked my elderly next-door-neighbour if they were bothering her. She responded sarcastically “Yes. I hate the sound of children’s laughter.” Then she told me about the years when the street teemed with children, and a summer’s day would be filled with noise and chaos and now it’s just my two, at the end of our long, senior-filled street.

Walking my dog through the neighbourhood during the day has given me occasion to meet a lot of my retired neighbours: generally the people I see are the husbands, relegated to the front yard to get out from underfoot, working on their immaculate lawns and always happy to stop and chat and pet my dog and ask about the boys. Those yards are always maintained, the walks are shovelled in the winter and swept in the summer, the grass is thick and green and the gardens are filled with perennials and also annuals I associate with old people: marigolds and petunias, evenly spaced and orderly. Then there are the yards of the people who have grown too old and infirm to keep up with them, overgrown and weedy, the gardens that were once nicely shaped and are now shaggy looking, a few perennials valiantly peeking through the crab grass and dandelions that are choking them out. These are the people who won’t leave their homes, despite interventions from family members they are determined to stay put.

A man on our street died recently, in such a gruesome and horrible way that I once again promised myself that if I am ever elderly and alone, I will hightail it to the nearest old folk’s home where I will take up shuffleboard and cards and eat soft, sweet desserts every night and flirt with the male orderlies. I will grow African violets in little ceramic pots and hope that someone is digging the weeds out of my beloved flower gardens.

Did you hate junior high? I did.

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I was talking to a couple of moms whose sons are slated to start junior high in the fall, and, being the optimistic ray of sunshine that I am, I sighed for them. Junior high is the worst, I said, it’s horrible and I have virtually no good memories of that time. Then I realized that perhaps such comments are not exactly supportive and positive, so I amended them with a comment that junior high is probably better for boys, anyway.

I think that’s true. Junior high boys are ensconced in pubescent idiocy: farting on each other and hitting each other in the testicles during dodge ball and just being jackasses in general. However, that idiocy is easy to take compared with girls that age and their secretive cruelties, their struggles with body image and their emotional bullying. I mostly remember feeling awful about myself and crying a lot.

A few years ago I was talking to a woman about Facebook, which was fairly new to me at the time. She was very much against a Facebook account because, as she said, if she wanted to be in touch with anyone from her past, she would be, but essentially she didn’t want to connect with any of those jerks. The thing I have found is that, just as I have changed, so has everyone else. I was holding on to negative memories for a long time and I found that those bad memories just don’t matter anymore, that people from my past can be an enriching and supportive part of my present, and I’m grateful to have them in my life.

In my twenties, it was all about proving myself. I needed to prove myself in university, I needed to prove myself in my career, I needed to prove myself as a mother. Then I got tired. I don’t feel the need to prove myself anymore, I’m just me, the person I want to be, even if that person is a bit lame and boring.

Recently I came across a picture of myself on the first day of junior high. It’s quite hilarious, what with my gigantically teased bangs, denim skirt, white Keds, and, inexplicably, a button down shirt tied in a knot a la Daisy Duke. If I knew how to work my scanner I would show you, if only for comic relief. I am smiling hugely in that photo, like every door in the world was suddenly opened for me, on my first day of junior high, not realizing then that my smiles would largely disappear for the next three years.

Will I be pretty, will I be rich?

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One thing I find very entertaining about children – especially small children – are their career goals. Very small children have somewhat abstract ideas about what they will be when they grow up; I clearly remember wishing to be a flower. And now I have a flower profile picture on my blog! Profound. Anyway, both of my boys went through a prolonged period in which their burning ambition was to drive a garbage truck; I don’t want to sound snobbish here, we all know the importance of sanitation workers and the difficult job that they do, but I was kind of glad when that phase passed. As of today, Jake’s career ambition, strangely, is to be a mountain climber. Does that mean he wants to be a vagabond? Or maybe he will be a mountain climber and write books, like that guy who wrote Into Thin Air. If so, cool. Mark alternates between a path of paleontology and being a “business man”. We went to visit my husband at the office one day, and Mark stretched out on his swivel chair and said luxuriantly, “Is this where you make all the money, Dad?”. I could just imagine what he thought the world of work was like. I guess it was not unlike my experience in grad school, where I thought that with my economics degrees I would somehow change the world for the better, and then I ended up working as a quantitative analyst in natural gas option trading. Totally NOT changing the world for the better, but an interesting job nonetheless.

Anyway, the kindergarten is doing a Community Helpers unit at school, better known in my day as “What will I do when I grow up?”, and I was helping in the classroom. I had a group of four to cycle through the various work centers and in a slow moment at the dentist center (an awesome craft of painting a yellow paper tooth white with the help of toothbrushes and a mixture of corn syrup and white paint) I asked my group what they wanted to be when they grew up. The group consisted of two sweet and well-behaved girls, a disruptive and somewhat hyper boy, and a boy who the teacher euphemistically informed me “requires extra assistance with the activities”. One girl, predictably, wanted to be a ballerina, the other wanted to be a mom. I was a little surprised; I didn’t know girls said they wanted to be moms anymore. Nonetheless, I praised their decisions with enthusiasm. Disruptive and Somewhat Hyper Boy told me he wanted to be a cop and shoot all the bad guys! Bang bang bang! I answered that police officers are very important Community Helpers. Then I asked the Boy Who Requires Extra Assistance what he wanted to be. His answer: a princess. I was, momentarily, speechless. He looked up at me, smiling, waiting for the positive commentary I had given his classmates. One of the girls said “He can’t be a princess! He’s a boy!” – to which I rallied, and said that anyone can be anything they want to be when they grow up, if they work at it.

It’s something I tell the boys all the time, but I don’t entirely believe it. I mean, if you work really hard at something AND you have some degree of aptitude, then yes, you can be what you want to be. But really, no matter what amount of effort I put into it, no matter how hard I work, there are some career options that are forever closed to me: becoming a supermodel, say, or an Olympic shotputter, or a NASA scientist, or anything at all requiring artistic ability. I could, as the hockey players say, give it 110%, and I would still achieve minimal, if any, success in those fields.

But who wants to quash the kindergartener spirit? Certainly not me. Even if the Boy Who Requires Extra Assistance wants to be a princess, well, it’s probably only marginally less likely to occur than his classmate becoming a ballerina. So I guess we all can dream.