Sympathy from the Little Devils

Mid-morning yesterday, my mother brought me a cup of tea, and my daughters brought their beaming smiles.  “Mummy! Mummy! We’ve made you a card!”

Ah, now, this is what you want when you’re not well — a nice cuppa, delivered to your bedside.  And this is what you envision when you become a mother — the glowing faces of your children as they bring you their home-made Get Well cards.

I looked down at my card, my mother-heart warmed with love.  I looked again.  Was… was this card threatening me?  This is what my children were giving me?!?

My mother chuckled a little under her breath and shrugged her shoulders.  “They told me what to write and I just wrote it…”

E2 had disappeared, but now I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Clomp clomp clomp. Her face was again that wide grin — so pleased to see her mummy after a whole morning without her — and she held in her little hands a plate of carefully laid-out, half-smooshed grapefruit pieces.  My breakfast, from my lovely daughter!

“Oh, thank you, sweetheart!  Is that for me?”

Her brow furrowed and she looked suddenly surprised.  “No! It’s for me!”  And she leaned onto the foot of the bed, setting the plate down heavily and spilling grapefruit juice onto the comforter.

I sighed.  She dug into her fruit.  And then looked up and beamed that grin — that grin that melts her mother’s heart — as juice ran down her chin.

And I remembered what all mothers learn quickly and must never forget:  children bring an abundance of love… but there is very, very little sympathy.

Read Full Post »

Early To Bed and Other Impossibilites

I will be in bed in seven minutes.

I need to go to bed in seven minutes because in seven minutes it will tomorrow, and tomorrow I need to start the day bright-eyed and raring to go.  Tomorrow I need to exercise first, maybe even before the children get up, have my shower, eat my breakfast, charge into the day as if it were the first day of the rest of my life.

I need to do this because I never do this.  I stay up late, late, late into the night, and then cling to my morning-sleep like a drowning man to a rope.  And I get up fairly late — well, very late by mummy-standards — when E1 calls me, and I put her on the toilet, and bring her back to bed with a nice cold cup of milk, and then tell/convince/cajole/beg her to let Mummy sleep a bit longer.  Please, please, let me sleep a bit longer…  I am soooo tired… I don’t tell her it’s my own fault.  It just is what is.  And we can all get up when the clock says…

She’s so good — she waits.  She sleeps, or she plays.  And she watches the clock.  And her sister make wake, but she reads a book to Pink Lamb — I hear her through the monitor, and smile sleepily.  And it’s all good — in our world, this is just how it works.

But I know that sounds wrong — deeply wrong — to most people.  Statistically, the world is mostly made of morning people, and they have set the ground-rules.  Early to bed, early to rise…  The early bird gets the worm… (Seriously, is that last one meant to inspire me?).  And that’s great — it works for them.  But nightowls are actually wired differently — our brains have been shown to be active in the evenings in a mirror of the way that morning people’s brains are active in the morning and, likewise, less active in the mornings the way others’ brains are winding down in the evening.  Oh, we swim against the tide, but it’s not by choice — it’s how we’re made.

And I wouldn’t have chosen it, if I could have.  Life is harder as a nightowl — it doesn’t go down well.  M doesn’t get it one bit — to him, it’s a crime against nature itself that I don’t have those girls up at 6am!  And my mother has commented a fair few times.  It looks like laziness to anyone who isn’t in the same boat.  My dad has no idea how late I stay up…  I dread to think what he’d make of it.

I want to change it.  I do want to claw those hours back on the clock, shift our days back by three hours so they end a bit earlier and so can start a bit earlier.  You know, at a decent hour, like decent folk do.  I’ve been trying for a year, and I haven’t managed it.  Foiled at every turn.

I explained to my mum, you can’t spend two-and-a-half years getting up with the baby once… twice… three times a night without it affecting your sleep patterns for a long time afterwards.  You can’t spend the first 14 months of that child’s life never getting to sleep before 4 or 5am without it having its impact.  Particularly when your body is already wired that way and goes ahead and happily sets the new pattern in stone.  “Hmmm,” my mum said, her disapproval softening a bit, “I’d never thought of it that way.”

So, I go to bed early.  I make myself do it even though I don’t want to, and even though there are books to read and websites to look at and bills to pay and yarns to spin.  And I put it all away and go to bed — and then I stare at the ceiling.  I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for an hour… for two hours… for two-and-a-half, until it finally rolls around to the time I would have gone to bed normally… and then I fall asleep.  It’s incredibly frustrating!  But I do it because I need to claw this body-clock back to something decent.  So night after night, I remain determined… and after three nights, it starts to get a bit better, like a clog in a pipe that slowly starts to break up, the sleep begins to come a bit easier…  And then, just like clockwork, on the fourth night, one of the girls has me up for some reason or another once, twice, maybe three times…  and I am shot away.  My body conspires against me and the whole cycle starts up again.  Please let Mummy sleep for another hour or two…  I’m so tired… We can get up when the clock says…

But now it’s time.  This time, I am going to do it.  I am going to get past this and get it to work!  When M went to bed, I promised him I’d be right up.  Just a couple of things to do, and I’ll be in bed before midnight.  I would!  Which is why I have to be in bed in seven minutes, before today becomes tomorrow and the cycle starts again.  Only seven more minutes.

Except that now it’s gone ten minutes to 1am.

Damn!

Read Full Post »

Dirty Like This

When we first moved into this house, we debated about ripping the carpets up and finishing the hardwood floors.  I knew they were diamonds in the rough.  I wanted to do it — really, really wanted to do it — but everyone else was against it.  M thought we didn’t have the money to spend (and, to be fair, he was right).  My dad couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to “just move into the house and enjoy it, as he would.  And my mum was adamant that hardwood floors are so much harder to keep clean than carpet (but the truth is she just doesn’t much like hardwood).

In the end, I listened to none of them, and I have never regretted it for a minute.  Not only because they are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.  And not only because I realised with hindsight that, with her allergies and asthma, E2 probably would have suffered a lot more with carpet in her room than she is with that nice clean hardwood.  And not only because there were quite notable decreases in M’s migraine and sinus problems first when we moved to the States and changed to forced air heat, and then yet again when we moved to this house with its hardwood throughout.

No… no… not just for all those reasons.  No, I was so glad that I had decided to go ahead and rip out the carpets, to listen to my gut and get the hardwood finished all though the house…  I was so glad today, as I followed a little trail from one room of the house to another…  A little trail of neat little brown plops of poo — one every few feet — which led me through three rooms and finally ended at a pair sagging, straining training pants, filled way beyond their capacity, employed far beyond their remit, by a little girl who had completely forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a nappy and is now supposed to use the toilet instead.

I lifted her in one swift motion and deposited her — clothes, socks, training pants, and all — straight into the bathtub, and ran downstairs to quickly collect the plops before someone else unknowingly squished them underfoot.  And, as I gathered them up easily with a damp cloth and some disinfectant — to the panicked howls of  “But Mummy I am still wearing my clothes!!!” — I thought back to my mum’s argument…

When she said carpet was easier to keep clean, she was never imagining this.

Read Full Post »

Bring It

We went out on Saturday night and I didn’t have much to drink at all — I didn’t! — but I got myself to bed so late again and so, the next morning, I was hung over from pure self-made exhaustion.

M came in the room, banging the door and waking me up with a start.  Sunlight streamed mercilessly through the blinds, and  I could hear the girls downstairs, playing with their breakfasts instead of eating.  “Good morning!” he called cheerily and very loudly.  “It’s a beautiful day, so warm again for November.  Come on, get up!  Time to get ready for church.”  I peeled one eye open, caught his huge grin and felt the throbbing in my head, and collapsed back into the pillow.  “Come on!” he bellowed encouragingly, shaking my shoulder.

I pulled the covers over my head.  “I aaaaaam!”  It came out as a groan and a whinge and was patently untrue.

Ten minutes later, he returned.  He is a the ultimate early riser, a consummate schedule-keeper, and me still face-down in the pillow did not fit in with his plans.  “Come on!  Get up.  It’s TIME!”

I am all about the sleeping, especially in the morning.  Bed is my best friend.  I shifted a bit… couldn’t open my eyes…

“If you don’t get up, I’m going to…”  He paused, trying to come up with a big enough threat to pry me from my warm cocoon.  “I’m going to… “  He paused again, and then he got it.  “I’m going to ring your mum and I’m going to tell her that she’s right and you’re wrong a-a-and… you really should be best friends with her and… um… you don’t share enough with her and you don’t really appreciate her they way you should and… um… if you were a good daughter you’d…”

Aw, hell!  I couldn’t take this!  He’d beat me.  I got up.

Read Full Post »

Lying, But for the Best of Reasons

When my mum stopped by today, I noticed her car was making a funny noise.  She agreed it didn’t sound right, and then described a few other odd things it had done today.  As I listened to the list of symptoms, it suddenly made sense to me and I knew, more or less, what was going wrong with her car.  I was pretty chuffed with myself for putting it all together because, really, I don’t know a thing about cars.

My pride aside, she rang my dad for instructions.  He’s been a mechanic ever since he built his first motorcycle back when he was still too young for his driver’s license.  He’d know what it was for sure and what needed to be done.

My mum described the symptoms again, and then relayed my diagnosis, with me feeding the words into her other ear.  There was a long silence as my dad spoke, and then she went back out to the car to give him a reading off of one dial or another.  I went back into the kitchen to finish making the tea.

When she came back in later and stood holding her steaming cup to warm her chilly fingers, I asked her if my dad had been impressed by my diagnosis.  I certainly was — it had turned out that I was right.  “Oh yes!” she enthused, her face lighting up.  “He was very impressed!”

It felt good to hear and I was pleased.  But…  no.  Something in the way she’d replied just hadn’t convinced me.  It is one of the biggest problems my mother and I have always had: she, so keen to make or keep everyone happy, often says what she thinks others want to hear, regardless of whether the facts or her own feelings agree.  And we all take that into account and so none of us ever take what she says fully at face-value.  And, because she does it so naturally — without even being conscious of it — I think she assumes we all do it as well, and so she never fully believes anything we say either.  It leads to a ludicrous situation in which everyone is second-guessing (upon second-guessing upon second-guessing) everyone else and no one ever knows if anyone is truly speaking their mind.  I find it exhausting, confusing… and so wasteful:  I have a closet full of clothes that she has given to me as gifts even though I told her in the shop that I didn’t like them, because she knew I “did want them really.”

I tackled this head on. “Mum, did he really say that?” I asked.

“Yes!“  Then, “Well… no.”  She looked sheepish, and I smiled at her.

“Did you just lie to me?  To make me feel better?”

“Well…  Well, only because he should have!  It was very clever of you!  And I’m sure he would have been impressed if he hadn’t been so worried about the car…  He was preoccupied…”

This was ridiculous.  I am staring down the barrel of 40 and she was protecting me from the perceived disappointment of an excited five year old.  I appreciate the kind intentions but…  please.  I gave her a kiss on the cheek.  “Mum, please don’t lie to me.”

“No…  Yes…  I mean, Ok.”

But I know she will.  She’s a hopeless case.  And more than anything on this earth, she just wants us all to be happy all the time.

Read Full Post »

Uncomfortable Truths

My husband is a pretty straightforward guy.  He gets up before the birds start singing, he is on time for everything and, if you ask him a question, he’ll answer you honestly.  And, as such, he has a habit of telling the truth when people ask how he likes living in the US.  Every time, he replies that it’s ok, it’s good, but that he’s left his two older kids in the UK and that’s been hard.  Just like that.  And it’s always more than the questioner was expecting — more detail than they wanted to know, more personal than they were expecting to hear.  And more than I wanted him to tell them.  They’re uncomfortable, I’m uncomfortable, he is… he’s just him, answering the question the only way he knows how.

“Oh!” they always say, a little shocked, a little concerned, but trying to hide it.  “How old are they?”  They’re expecting to hear that his other two children are in their early 20s and so it’s all ok, really.  When the reply comes that they’re in their early-mid teens, they are shocked all over again.  “OH!”, like clockwork.  And I feel all the accusations that I believe are suddenly running through their minds: He left his children!… How could anyone do that?!?… He left them for her!… Did she make him do it?!?…
The truth is that he didn’t leave them for me, and we tried everything we could think of to stay.  Neither one of us wanted to leave Britain, but we were between a financial rock and a hard place and we honestly couldn’t figure out how to make it work, no matter how we reworked the numbers.  Leaving Britain — leaving them — is something we both regretted at the time, and more and more with every day we’ve been here.  And we will put it right, just as soon as we possibly can.

But the people asking a casual question of two foreigners they’ve just met… they don’t know that.  They have too much information, but not enough information…  enough to condemn, but not enough to understand.  And in that moment — the moment after they say, “Oh!” and then nothing more — everything becomes very uncomfortable, everything slows down, and we all stand — hesitant, expectant — in the silence.  And then someone, us or them, breaks it with some lighthearted comment about how it will all surely turn out alright in the end and, gosh!, such a hard economy in which to make a move like that!  We all smile, tightly instead of genuinely, and carry on…

It happened again today, at a bagel shop we go to, with a Greek lady we’d just met.  We all followed the script perfectly.  But this time, when we smiled and carried on, I broke from the usual dialogue and mentioned that we’d been thinking of having M’s son maybe come and live with us for six months (or is it three months? however long a visa will allow…).  It’s not something we’ve shared with anyone before, let alone a complete stranger, but we’ve been talking about it for a while.  It’d give the two of them the kind of day-after-day time together that they haven’t had since his son was starting primary school, and it’d give his son a wonderful opportunity to experience America in a way most Brits never do.  I was surprised to hear myself speaking the words and giving life to the idea like that but, as soon as I did, it felt good.  And the Greek lady’s face lit up.

“Yes! YES!” — she grasped at the positive spin — “It would be so good for him!  And you could get him involved with something to do with kids his own age…  He could make friends!”  We were all smiling now.

I had already mentioned my parents — it’s my standard answer to why we’ve moved here: the grandparents, the grandchildren…! And they always emailed with so many opportunities…! I don’t mention the rock or the hard place — no one really wants to know that in casual conversation.  But the Greek lady began waxing on about the good of our situation — such a rare response given M’s unnerving honesty — and now she brought up my parents.  She said, “It is good for you to be able to be near your parents for a while,” and then looked right at me.  I could see that she meant it — this wasn’t some sugar-coated babble to smooth over the uncomfortableness.  She had lived abroad for twenty years, away from her family…  she got it, how tough it is for everyone, the balance needed on both sides.

It is good to be near my parents.  For as much as I complain that they drive me nuts, it is good.  And they won’t be around forever — they’re not young anymore — and even though I know they won’t be around forever, I don’t think I’d really thought about it that way until today, in that bagel shop.  My parents are here now, lively and young  enough to enjoy having us so nearby, to know and enjoy their grandchildren.

There is no relationship with as much responsibility as that of a parent to a child: M’s relationship with his kids trumps my need to see my parents or their need to see the girls — absolutely, hands down.  We need to go back to Britain for their sake, and we never should have left in the first place.  But I have family that I’ve been away from for 15 years, and I have missed them, and now I am getting the chance to have some little time to be near them, while I still can — and there’s a certain validity to that.   Talking to this Greek lady, I think she was the first person to hear the news of M’s children, to be shocked by it, and then to still go on and take the whole situation into consideration, to acknowledge that there are two people in this partnership and that we both have been away from the people we love.  No one can ever doubt that his kids have the higher priority but… well, it felt good to be part of the equation.

Read Full Post »

Rise and Fall

This time I spotted the signs much quicker — the belly breathing; the way the base of her neck caved in on the inhale; the listlessness, so much so that she was lying flattened on the floor and wouldn’t even lift her head — and I knew what to do.  My mother held her on her lap as I put the mask over my daughter’s face and turned on the nebuliser.  She would be fine, I knew.  I’d done my bit by spotting the signs and now her breathing treatment would open her airways again.  It would not go to croup this time.

And she did perk up for a time — the adrenaline rush to her system gave her a jolt of energy that spilled out in songs and giggles and, once she was eventually free of the mask and the machine, the kind of crazed dancing that only drugs can produce.  I watched her mania with waves of relief.

So the shock rocked me to the core when I realised only thirty minutes later that she was struggling to breath again.   Again, the belly-breathing.  Again, that horrible pulling at the base of her neck.  It was too soon to use the nebuliser — much too soon, it should have lasted four hours!  How could she have fallen back so badly in only thirty minutes?

A cursory call to the doctor’s office, only to confirm what I already knew — we were to go directly to the Emergency Room, by ambulance if necessary.  I calmed my racing heart, told it that those words came as no surprise — to no avail — and began to pack our bags.  We needed enough nappies to perhaps see us through the night, more wipes, and food.  We can go nowhere without bringing our own food — even the hospital struggles to cope E2′s extensive dietary restrictions.  Last time, it produced an apple and a bowl of plain rice noodles covered in canola oil.  She’s two years old: of course she turned up her nose.

But the timing was terrible and the cupboard was bare.  “I’ll make something,” my mother said, hastily shoving a pair sweet potatoes into the microwave.  “You…” she looked at me, still in my pajamas and with great globs of snot dried in my hair.  E1 had cried through the night with a sore throat so pitifully that I’d slept (or, rather, not) beside  her, contorting my too-long body into her toddler bed, where she’d sneezed repeatedly, violently, all over me.  My mother winced a little, “You have a quick shower — quick — and get dressed while I make the food.”

I looked at my daughter, judging her breath.  She was working at it for sure, much more than she should have been so soon after a treatment, but she was ok for the moment.  I could see that. There was time, I thought, and dashed to the bathroom.  My shower lasted two minutes — soap on, soap off — but  I kicked myself for it the whole time, stepped out onto the bathmat in a guilt-induced near-panic.

In the car as I drove, my mother kept her body turned around in the passenger seat, watching E2′s chest rise and fall, and periodically telling me to slow down.  My wet hair dripped down the back of my neck.  E2 kept breathing.

At the hospital, they issued us with masks first and read the registration paperwork.  “Breathing troubles”, I’d written and they waved us straight in.  Weight, blood pressure, stethoscope — ah yes, that wheeze and rattle — and they settled her down for another breathing treatment, this one lasting an hour.  She perked up again almost immediately and asked to take the mask off so she could dance with her fidgetting, bored sister.  “No, sweetheart.  You just breathe,” I told her.  She sang instead, which was just as good.

The treatment finished, they left us for a while to see how it took.  But when they returned at last, the rattle was still there, so she had another — shorter this time, a steroid.  And that one did the trick.   After another long observation period, made more difficult by one child who was now totally wired and the other who was bored beyond her tolerance, they declared her fit and released us, with a prescription for more steroids.

We drove home in the falling dusk.  E1 succumbed to sleep immediately and, as the adrenaline rush began to die away, her little sister followed suit.  I watched them both in the rear-view mirror: their faces relaxed and angelic, their mouths both hanging open, and their chests rising and falling …easily, rhythmically.  I counted my blessings.

And then I counted something else: four colds so far this year, and all four times, we’ve had to use the treatment to keep her breathing.  Four colds so far this year, and two have ended up in the Emergency Room.  What gave the rest of us sniffles and coughs brought E2 to the edge of disaster every time.

We pulled up to the pharmacy and I turned off the car.  It was dark now and I was exhausted, ready for bed but knowing it would be another long night with two sick little girls.  “Oh, Mum… I hope she outgrows this.”  I reached to open the car door when another, darker thought suddenly chilled me.  “But…”  I turned my head and looked at my mum.  “But if she doesn’t…  if she’s this susceptible to everything…  how will I ever be able to send her to school?!?”

Read Full Post »

And Our Insurance Premiums Rise by 350%

A letter came in the post last Friday and after I read it, all I could do for a few minutes was stare at it in shock.  I sat down and put my hand on the couch to steady myself, and then read it again.  It wasn’t so much the news that it brought — though that was bad enough — but the way it made me feel: vulnerable… so, so very vulnerable and out of control.  The letter was from the girls’ insurance company and it informed me that, due to “increasing [insurance company] financial losses”, the premiums for their cover will be increased from October by 350%.

The girls are covered by the state’s CHIP programme — the only long-term cover I could find that they qualified for when we lost our health insurance because M was suddenly laid off three months after we arrived in the US.  Because the girls are US citizens, they did not qualify for the insurance policies that are usually offered to incoming immigrants.  And because we had just moved from abroad, they did not qualify for most normal insurance policies which, I discovered to my utter bewilderment, all seemed to have “residency requirements” that disqualified anyone who had not lived in the US for the last 6 to 24 months.  My daughters had both been recently diagnosed with potentially life-threatening food allergies (my elder daughter to eggs, my younger daughter to no less than eight foods, which later rose to 12) which had had a huge impact on our daily lives, and I was desperate to get them onto a good, long-term policy that would give us some peace of mind.  We were still reeling from a string of devastating events that had begun almost as soon as we arrived and had consumed nearly all our mental, physical, and financial resources (besides M losing his job and our insurance, I suddenly developed incredible pain that debilitated me for months before we got on top of it, the medical bills started rolling in and  ate up half our moving fund, we found we had to pay the IRS a huge sum which wiped out the other half of our moving fund, the house we were renting was put the market, we were going through  all the stress, isolation, and disorientation that an international move almost always brings, and it felt like we were doing everything wrong).  Looking for insurance under these circumstances was turning into a nightmare and when I found out the girls qualified for CHIP, the relief  was so strong I burst into tears.

The coverage was excellent; the price surprisingly affordable.  The programme is funded by the state, but administered through a choice of several large insurance companies.  I picked the one that we’d been on with M’s previous job, out of sense of familiarity more than anything, and got the girls signed up as fast as possible.  Each month a bill arrived with bold letters telling me that one missed payment would result in permanent cancellation of the policy — I began sending the premiums in two months in advance just to make sure I never paid that price.  In a world that felt like it was falling apart, knowing the girls had such excellent coverage gave me a sense of stability that I clung to like a rock in a stormy sea.

So as I read that letter — and reread it, and then read it again — all that stability seemed to drain away and the horrid, terrifying, desperation of a year ago rushed in to fill its place.  Could they do this?!?  Could they just casually send me a one-page letter which matter-of-factly stated they were increasing the premiums not once, not twice, not three times, but a full three-and-a-half times what they were now?  No warning, no alternatives, no choice…  This is our only option, this is our salvation!..  Could they do this?!? I rang M up at work and he listened patiently while I told him the news, then began to cry, and then composed myself and told him I’d be alright and thanked him for listening.  My tears were more out of fear and uncertainty; we will  be able to make the new payments (just, and with sacrifices), but it’s what they represented — the lack of control — that put me over the edge.

When I told my mother, she was shocked, then horrified, and then began to rant.  Was this what Obama had in mind for the middle and lower classes?!? Or was it the Governor’s doing?!?  It didn’t seem ethical!  I pointed out that it wasn’t Obama’s doing — his reforms haven’t even taken shape yet, let alone been enacted — and it wasn’t the Governor’s either.  It wasn’t to do with the CHIP programme itself at all.  It was the insurance company’s doing: they take the money the state gives them and then set their price within an approved range — but times are harder now than were before, there are these “increasing financial losses”, and so they’ve raised their price.  And, no, I told her, it didn’t seem ethical… but I don’t know that I think ethics plays any part in this.

I have to admit to feeling rather annoyed with her, to harbouring some deep-set and mostly unjustified feelings of blame.  I had been concerned about healthcare before I moved back to the US… concerned… afraid… frightened…  But my mother and my father and my sister had all assured me that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.  It’s fine, they told me.  It’s a system!  It’s not the system you’re used to, but it’s a system.  As long as you work hard, you’ll be fine.  My husband, I thought to myself, does work very, very hard.  And I do too, in my own way.

My had mother added that she didn’t know anyone who had a healthcare problem.  What about my sister?, I asked, pointing out that she’d gone for years without health insurance, avoiding going to a doctor even when she needed one.  “Oh… yes… ” my mother’s voice trailed off, and then came back again with strength, “But she never had a problem!”  I felt misgivings at that, paused, and then… brushed them aside.  It would be fine.  It would be fine.  …And so if there is blame to laid, perhaps some goes to my mother for closing her eyes to the problem, but some goes to me too for choosing to believe.

There is series of ads for one of the largest insurance companies in the region which they run on television all the time.  It shows someone walking a dog, or jogging, or riding a bike.  At some point the camera closes in on the person, and they look directly into it, before raising a hand and pressing it with palm forward and fingers spread, so that it appears to be just on the other side of the glass of the television screen.  And as the person fades out of focus, the handprint remains, glowing blue and pulsing gently, and a warm and reassuring voiceover says, “Giving you a greater hand in your health.“

As I sat there staring at this letter, with its incredible, horrible news, I had to wonder: is that hand meant to be pulling us up… or pushing us away?

Read Full Post »

Falling into a Hole

We’d been happily talking for a few minutes before I spotted the huge chip in my mum’s tooth but, once I did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it.   It was a rectangular hole at the bottom of her front tooth, looking  jagged and black and so strangely incongruous that it seemed to change her whole face in an instant.

“Mum!” I interrupted her story, “What is that?  What did you do to your tooth?!?”  She instinctively stuck her tongue in the spot, which momentarily turned pink and then back to black again.

“Oh,” she laughed casually, “I chipped it years ago and Dr. Sams put a little cap in it.  He told me it might not last so I should be careful about biting into apples or carrots, but it’s stayed in all this time.”  I did a quick calculation: Dr. Sams had been our dentist when I was in grade school, so she must have had that cap for nearly thirty years.  I was impressed it lasted so long.

“So what happened?”  Not that there was any need to ask — it probably just fell out after all these years.  It was to be expected, really.

“Well, I’ve had these stains on my teeth lately,” she said, opening her mouth so I could have a look.  The ends of her front teeth, top and bottom, were a bit tea-stained.  Not badly though,  nothing that a trip to the dentist wouldn’t clean up.  “And I was cleaning the teacups,” she continued, “when I noticed how well the spray cleaned the stains away…”

For years, I’ve felt a certain wariness about my mother.  It’s not a wariness of her as a person — she’s a wonderful person — but of her judgment.  She has an  unfazable optimism that leads her to consider the craziest of things to be reasonable risks.  I was never quite able to put my finger on it before — living in the UK, I saw her for only a couple of weeks a year, not a long enough observation time to confirm what my gut was telling me.  But since moving back to the US, I’ve begun to realise something that I should have always known — a girl should always trust her gut.

I took a quick breath and tried to smile back just as casually before asking,  “What spray is that, Mum?”

“That mold and mildew spray…  You know, the kind you buy for the bath?  I use it to clean the stains out of my teacups.  It really works well!”

That spray is mostly just bleach, with a few other bits and bobs added in to justify the price.  I’m not surprised it gets the stains out –  I’ve used bleach to clean teacups before, when they’re really badly stained.  No harm in that as long as they’re well rinsed.

She continued.  “So I thought, if it gets the stains out of the cup so well…”

I knew what she was about to say and it wasn’t going to be a surprise,  but I was I so horrified that I couldn’t stop myself.  I jumped in, “You sprayed it in your mouth?!?“

She was immediately defensive, and annoyed, and I regretted my indiscretion.  “No! No, of course not!  I sprayed it on my toothbrush a few times.”  I’m sure my face was still aghast, so she ramped it up.  “I ran water over it!  It was well diluted!”  I was unconvinced.

“Mum!  That stuff is toxic!  You’re lucky you didn’t do yourself real damage!”  I was horrified at her obvious lack of judgment, and it showed.  “You could have ended up in hospital — you’re not supposed to put that stuff in your mouth!”  There, now I sounded like I was talking to a two-year-old.

“Well… well, I’m fine!” she replied, indignant now, annoyed with me for being so annoyed with her.  “Nothing happened to me!”

“But your cap fell out,” I prodded with the obvious.  I was glad she was ok, very glad, but I couldn’t let her try to paint all this as a perfectly normal thing to do.

“Two days later it did,” she said dismissively, as if the delay meant it might possibly not be related at all.  “And besides, it’s hardly noticeable!”  The irritation was thick now, tension heavy in the air, and someone needed to smooth things over.  I tried.

“Well, I’m sure a dentist can fix it…” I mumbled pathetically, and quickly changed the subject.

But it was noticeable, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  Like a bloke whose stare keeps falling unconsciously to a woman’s breasts, no matter how much I fought it, my gaze kept returning to the black hole in her teeth.  Even as I forced myself to look away, it called my eyes back.  It grew ever larger, ever blacker.  Her whole face became nothing more than a frame to the fascinating, hypnotic hole in her tooth.

She noticed my staring and grew quietly more annoyed.  It’s against our rules of engagement for me to criticise my mother, even if it is just by looking at the result of her folly.  A daughter is not meant to think her own mother a fool.  It goes against the hierarchy, against the natural order of things.  I was overstepping the bounds, and we both knew it.

Coming home today, I heard a small click from the back seat as I pulled the car into the driveway, and looked back to see E1 pulling her seatbelt off.  She’d never done that before — in fact, I’ve been very careful to avoid her noticing how the seatbelt works at all, slipping my hand around her discretely and deftly pressing the button before she’s even realised what’s happening.  A four-year-old who knows how to undo her seatbelt can get out of the car in a carpark while I’m struggling with her sister, she can undo her seatbelt while I’m driving, she’s not safe to leave in the car if I have to dash back into the house to grab something I’ve forgot.  She can (and will) teach her sister how to undo her straps as well.  And of course, she can undo her seatbelt before I’ve finished pulling into the driveway, as she’d just done.  This new development was bad news.  I’d been dreading the day she figured it out, and I was irritated that it had finally happened.

I put the car in park and turned round in my seat.  “How do you know how to do that?” I roared. “WHO taught you that?!?”

She was shocked at my reaction, but proud enough of her new achievement to be still beaming regardless.  “Grandma did!”

And…  I knew that already.  Even before she’d said it, I knew the answer.  Of course it had been my mother who had taught her how to undo her seatbelt.  Never for a moment would she have thought the better of doing it.

Read Full Post »

That’s No Moon…

But the thing with your daughters finally getting to eat cake — and your mother realising that she can be the source of this new joy to her granddaughters and so embracing the opportunity to make sure there is cake to be had every single day — is that you get used to them running around with chocolate crumbs all round their mouths.

So even though I did realise, after a few days of this chocolate-covered mayhem, that it isn’t necessary for them to have cake every day and I did ask my mum to perhaps scale it back a bit, it’s still been common enough to see those choccy-smiles gazing back at me.

And so I didn’t give it a thought the other day when E2 came running up with chocolate icing spread all over her face, covering her teeth, a bit streaked in her hair, and the ends of several fingers coated in the stuff and spreading it in little clumps on everything she touched.  Part of me sighed at the inevitable (and unenviable) clean-up job ahead, but there was another part of me — the part that worried so when she stopped gaining weight, the part that was so afraid when she dropped from the 98th percentile to the 1st percentile, the part that has struggled every day for the past year with her incredible dietary restrictions — that was just so happy to see her eating and enjoying and just being a regular kid.  It may not seem like much, but it is.  Oh, it is.  And I put aside all my healthy-food fanaticism to just soak up the joy of seeing my kid covered in chocolate-y goodness.

Until I remembered that I hadn’t given her any cake that day…  And then she turned around and toddled off, and I spotted ther was more chocolate — much more than was ever on her face or hair or hands — coming out of her nappy and spread down one leg.

And I realised, with sudden horror, that it was not chocolate.  And the clean up was a completely different job than I had thought…

Read Full Post »