Growing Versions

"If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known." -Tim Kreider

She likes to think she's perfect. She knows the right things to say and the right time to say them. She likes to think she's just and even handed and neutral. She has a high tolerance for chaos and ambiguity and can heat sugar at a high temperature without letting it scorch.  She makes crafts and, conducts plays, holding together the whole thing with scotch tape. She's supple and endlessly patient even during the longest, most sluggish afternoons. The trouble is, she is the third person. The third person casts a shadow over the first. The first person gets beyond frustrated with the limits of scotch tape, gets weary with endless plays that have to end jaggedly because there is no more will to sit through them and she frets and sighs loudly over how the crafts gum up the grooves of the table.   First person moves too fast for slow afternoons. I am kicking out third person. She makes everything harder. I'll make my peace with scotch tape....

I have had the pleasure of hanging out with my son all week one-on-one.  I really thought I knew him last weekend.  By this weekend, my knowledge had deepened and compounded. Having all that extra, not filtered through sibling/father time has yielded me more knowledge about  when he will jump, when he will cry, when he will ask for milk, when he'll explain something. Now I know him a little better. I know that he does not like to be rushed. He likes to be cuddled a lot more than I realized. He really likes to plan how to build a lot of things. I was making so many assumptions based on partial and biased information before last weekend. "Perspective taking-  Perceiving physical, social or emotional situations from a point of view other than one's own." (education.com)

My grandmother was born in the early part of the century.  She had a baby in the mid-forties.  Jello was just getting solidified (so to speak) as a food of a new generation of parents and kids.  Multicoloured and moldable, jello became a symbol of the new food economy.  In her kitchen, there were 3 tall decanters that were filled with water stained with food colouring.  Those decanters stood as the epitome of modernity for the 21 years of my life that I knew her and likely well before those began.  They were simple see-through refractors of jello-coloured light.  I cannot help thinking of the bowls of jello in her fridge and those flutes of red and green water whenever I think about her.  They formed a wobbly bridge between my perception of her black and white tv memories and the technicoloured ones I could not think without. Jello is still with us, but we are well over the jello salad phenomenon of the 50's.  Now salad has come into ...

Cyril Blakeney died in 1973, 1 1/2 years before I was born and 25 years before his oldest grandchild got an email account. He was a family man, a business owner and a collector of treasures.  His dad died in the Halifax explosion and he worked hard from an early age to help support his mom while she raised three kids.  He was my grandfather and we never got to meet but he often enters my mind.  He lived his whole life in the same city I do.  I have lived in his home. My kids walk around his neighbourhood everyday.  I know people who go to his church.   I know the streets he walked like the back of my hand. I just don't have any memories of him directly. Up until recently, the house that he and my grandmother had raised my mom in from babyhood to university graduate was still in our family and I could get little glimpses of evidence even 36 years later that he had lived there, done the books at the kitchen table, stashed treasures in the basement, ...

My son came home from preschool last week to announce that he has a new best friend and he wears a yellow shirt.  When I asked what his name was, he said he did not know.  When I asked him to describe him, he went into great detail describing his shirt.  "He wears a yellow shirt with a soccer ball going into a net."  Over and over again over the weekend, my son referred to his friend as the boy with the yellow soccer ball going-in-the-net shirt.  Finally, he returned the other day from preschool to report that his friend wore a grey shirt that day.  "He was not wearing the yellow shirt with the soccer ball going in the net today."  This morning, he exclaimed brightly as soon as he saw his friend, "there he is Mama, can you see him? He has a squid (an octopus) on his shirt." So, my son has made a friend, which is wonderful.  What we know about him is that he has at least three shirts. My daughter is much more straightforward about such matters...

My daughter is a lucky girl.  She has someone in her life who is utterly devoted to her.  

Boy: Pizza Man! Pizza Man! Pizza Man!(hollering through an upstair window, seated on a stool) Pizza Man: You have some help up there.  (gesturing upwards). Mom: Yes, yes I do. Boy: We have bleeding hearts. Pizza Man: Oh yeah? Boy:Our cat Mulder looks like a skunk. He went up a tree. Pizza Man: Did you call the fire station? Boy: No, no, of course not, he jumped down by himself. Pizza Man: (smiling politely) Boy: I am going to be 4 and I am going to be able to climb trees very high...

Someone once told me, before I had kids, that if you ever have any doubts about whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, you'll figure it out pretty quickly once you have a kid who is the opposite.  If you are introverted like me and my husband, and probably my daughter, that means you get energy from within and from spending time alone with yourself (to re-fuel).  If you are extroverted, like my son, that means you tend to need other people to feel energized and re-fueled. It's a spectrum I'm sure, but in a nutshell that's what the terms  mean to me. For me, most of the time, parties daunt me.  If they don't daunt me, they tend to drain me. It is not that I don't like parties but I get what I want out of them faster than extroverts. I treasure my friendships but thrive when I nurture them one on one.  I used to really fight against this instinct in me.  I forced myself to be more social than was really comfortable.  Now, especially si...

I've noticed that whenever I have enough head space to keep up with my son's demands for more pushes on the swing, we end up having very good conversations.  Propelled, perhaps even regulated, by the momentum of the swinging action, he tells me things he "knows for sure" are true. As I prime the pump, he tells me things that he seems to have stored up for such a moment. As he surges forward on the swing,his body becomes syncopated with the rhythm of the swing and his thoughts come tumbling out. Today, as he swung up to the sky and back he declared: "I can do anything mama, I can milk a cow, I can chop down a tree, I can chop down that tree over there, I can ride a bike!"

Grandpa wants to play a game.... Grandpa asks 6 year old: “Do you want to have a game?" 6 year old begins: “Ahhh....!" 3 year old interrupts: "I do! ! I’ll pay! Can I play?" Grandpa (holding a small clear plastic box) asks: "Do you know how to play checkers" (flipping over the game) "or chess"? 6 year old interjects: "I, ahhh, think I know how checkers work." “Me too! “, jumps in 3 year old, "I wanna play . . .THIS GAME" (He tries to take the top off of the chess set) 6 year old moves away from the table. "I don’t want to play,"  she decides. 3 year old eagerly says ,"What‘s this?" Grandpa: "You get up in this chair, and I‘ll teach you!" Grandpa: "Maybe we should play checkers?" 3 year old: "No, I want to play with these things!" Grandpa tries to set up the board with the figures in their right places but 3 year old keeps moving them. "Okay, thi...