Dear Josephine
Dear Josephine:
Happy second birthday. We are smitten.
Love,
The Flurfels
(18 X 2) + 1 = 37
This is the birthday that I turn 37.
It is the age at which one has officially been an adult longer than a child.
This is the birthday that, while I was in the shower, somebody removed the cups from my Bravado Body Silk Bra, and relocated them. I found one in the dolls’ cradle, supporting a tiny, plastic head. The other has yet to turn up.
This is the birthday I took many self-indulgent photos of fall foliage with my Hipstamatic and then posted them on my blog.
This is the birthday that Hazel figured out how to Google things on her own. She looked up facts about cats. Then about dogs. Then she showed the Wikipedia article on dogs to the dog. He was unimpressed, but I was.
This is the birthday that Josephine pointed out every coil of dog poop she could find at the dog park to me, brightly exclaiming, “Poooooop! Poop!”
Presuming, I think, that cleaning up poo is a hobby of mine.
It isn’t.
This is the birthday that I have one in diapers instead of two.
This is the birthday I spent taking the kids back and forth to school, walking the dog, then going to a yoga class.
This is the birthday I found myself hollering at a passing car to “Slow down! This is a neighbourhood!”
Last week, a shiny nice new friend of mine told me that her favourite thing to do on her birthday is to have a nice, long dinner out with 3 or 4 of her best girlfriends and no kids. Since she told me that, this is the birthday I’ve been aching for exactly that. This is the birthday I miss the company of all the women who have known me for a long time — the ones who know my middle name, and my hometown, and my mother. I miss my big sister out East and my junior high friend out even easter. I miss my friend in the Koots. And my other big sister up North.
This is the birthday I stepped out my front door to discover construction crews tearing up the sidewalk in front of our house with a giant claw.
Then we read this:
This is the birthday I’m expecting the adult thing will stick. Mostly.
Where the Sidewalk Ends
by Shel Silverstein
is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson
bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the
peppermint wind.Let us leave this place where the smoke blows
black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt
flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And
watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk
ends.Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll
go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the
children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.”
Some Summer Snaps
The auto-adjust everything and take the picture properly for me motor on my camera broke. But all the manual stuff works. So… I have to learn how to use my camera instead of just, you know, pointing and shooting.
And you know how it is when you’re learning something. You make mistakes.
I haven’t at all figured out the part where you adjust how much light you let into a photo.
But I kind of like the mistakes.
There’s something nice and literal about how awash in sunshine these snaps are.
Hope you are having a lovely summer.
XOX
The Flurfels
Here’s a moment:
It irks me ever so much.
It is well-meaning but terrible advice. What makes it particularly vile, thanks for asking, is that it often comes from people who have held a very unreasonable newborn at 2 a.m. and should know better. And it’s often directed at a mommy who is in a cloud of postnatal hormones that makes her feel… let’s just say, a little raw, and who is quite overwhelmed by the everythingness of motherhood and whose body is so bone tired and sore because she hasn’t put the baby down for hours and hours and hours and she just really needs a hot meal, a cold drink, and for someone to tell her she’s not terrible at everything.
Better advice would be this: “Do enjoy your babies as much as your are able — try to relax, try to forget about your to-do list, and never fight the sappy bliss. Give in to the sappy — when you want to drop everything to hug and kiss your babies, DO IT. They seriously grow so fast. But in those moments when you’re not enjoying yourself, in those moments that make you want to crawl out of your skin to scuttle up the wall and hide in a dark corner, in which time appears to be standing still and you fear that gritchy little infant will NEVER let go of your tit — forgive yourself. It’s okay. You’re not terrible. IT’S HARD!”
There’s something so frazzling about enforced peacefulness. It’s a special kind of awful.
Wee ones need us to be active sometimes when we’re dead tired and need us to be still at times when we want to be active. It requires a sort of submissiveness that certainly doesn’t come naturally to me — I doubt it comes naturally to anyone.
Everyone gets why 2 a.m. feedings are stressful. It’s the 2 p.m. feedings, drenched in sunlight in a cozy chair that inspire lookers-on to assume you must be steeping in maternal bliss and to give you a knowing nod and smile and to tell you to enjoy every little moment of it. It’s that assumption that you are and should be at all times revelling in motherhood like a relaxing bubble-bath that adds an extra level of “AAAAAggggghhhhhh” to the experience.
Bet you can’t tell that cold glass of lemonade on the table is just 15cm beyond that woman’s reach and that her throat is so very parched from keeping another human hydrated in the summer heat with nothing but fluids from her own body and that she desperately, desperately wants to reach over and grab that frosty glass but fears that if she leans over she’ll wake the baby, and if that happens, oh! It will certainly be enough to make a grown woman cry.
Enjoy every single moment of it? BAH. Terrible advice. It’s a ridiculous thing to ask of a woman. If you are one of those people who say that, please stop it right now. And if you are a mama who keeps getting told to enjoy every single moment with your babies, please ignore that advice. Never ever ever let yourself feel a creeping sense of failure for not achieving such an impossible thing.
Human babies do come, after all, from human mommies and we can’t enjoy every moment of it. We just can’t. It’s because we’re people who have been transformed into mothers and not into earthly projections of enlightened selflessness.
Sometime you are steeping in bliss. Sometimes you’re not. Every parent has visited both sides of that coin.
Excepting, perhaps, Siddhartha Gautama who did transform into an earthly projection of enlightened selflessness after, mind you, leaving his wife and baby behind at the palace to embark on his spiritual journey.
Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s day. I like to celebrate by telling my children that there is a newborn baby monkey at the zoo and that their Daddy really, really wants to go see it. I wish I could go see the baby monkey with them, but alas! It is Mother’s Day and so I have to paint my toenails. My hands, really, are tied on that one. On their way out I tell Daddy that they better be gone for AT LEAST two hours.
It’s become a tradition. A little something from the gift store at the zoo, for me please, and take your time picking it out, or else!
My kids are still young enough that all I really want is to spend just a little bit of time without them.
No whining, no wailing, no pleading, no flinging, no crashing, no fighting, no hurling, no yanking, no losing it, no trundling about, no crumpling, no inquisitiveness, no racing, no heaving, no toppling, no extirpating, no gumming, no throwing anything down the stairs, no disassembling, no scribbling, no ripping, no scotch-taping, no unspooling, no why-asking, no crises-having, no furniture-climbing, and of course, and this really should go without saying, no crapping your pants. Take it to the zoo, people.
If you know me at all, you may be wondering why I have a blog with none of my mouthy opinions spouting from it. Well. It has a lot to do with spending the last few years in, under, enmeshed with, and inseparable from a pile of babies. A pile of babies is a remarkably effective way to render oneself unable to string together a coherent sentence, never mind a paragraph or, gasp! a personal essay on, say, what’s so hard about raising a pile of babies anyway?
One of the topics I’ve been meaning to write about, but haven’t quite been able to get to, is the work of mothering. There’s something so so hard about parenting infants and babies and toddlers. It gets much less hard as they grow into preschoolers and school-aged kids. It gets much harder again, I’ve heard, when they turn into teenagers. It’s difficult to put your finger on because, I think, we lack the right vocabulary to talk about it. I’m not referring to the sleep-deprivation and the drudgery — that’s obvious enough. There’s something else. There’s emotional and psychological work that mothers do that isn’t really quantified or perhaps quantifiable. It kicks our asses, though, all the same.
I recall watching Josephine (our youngest) learning to scoot around on the living room floor. It was a big departure because it meant she was able to engage herself with the world, to do what she wanted to do, without my assistance. It meant she could engage with something that wasn’t me. It meant that I might find all three of my children happily occupied for minutes at a time, thereby leaving me free to do as I pleased for minutes at a time. The first thing I did was burn my mouth on a cup of hot tea. I wasn’t accustomed, you see, to being able to get to a cup of tea before it had cooled. I also wasn’t accustomed to being able to sit down for five minutes to string together a coherent thought. When I was able, the thought I strung together was this: “HOLY CRAP I HAD TWO BABIES IN TWO YEARS! NO WONDER I’M TIRED.”
Now that my kids have been growing steadily more able and independent, I’m well accustomed, again, to hot beverages. And also to hot showers. In fact, it’s kind of hard to remember why, this time one year ago, taking showers was such an insurmountable thing. But it was. Now I can have a shower. Nothing terrible will happen and if it does, somebody will come get me and to either kiss it better or clean it up.
I’ve felt a bit like a foreign war correspondent might — take it all in, get as many pictures as you can, get the hell out, and think about it later when the bombs stop dropping.
Now, some photos:
Awwww… they got me flowers and bonbons!
Tensions arise.
Violence outbreaks.
Fleeing the scene.
The spoils of war.
Hello Spring
Well, Hello, Spring. Don’t mean to be surly, but it’s about damn time. We thought you’d NEVER come.
We’re sure glad you’re here.
Even if you are a bit soupy.
Yup.
A little on the soupy side.
You’re still a big improvement on lung-scorchingly cold, though.
We’re okay with the fact that you vanquished our baby snowman.
We can make do with puddles.
We’re undaunted.
Coming home from Kindergarten (above)
Picking pussywillows East of Elk Island (below)
Bring it, Spring!
XOXOX
The Flurfels
Winter Update
Wow. I totally started this post in January but now it’s February. The end of February! What’s been keeping me so busy?
Snowsuits. Taking them off, putting them on, taking them off, putting them on. Looking for mitts. Looking for boots. Putting hats back on that came off while I was looking for that one boot and then wondering where the other boot went while I was looking for the boot we just had. That kind of thing.
I drag the kids to school every day via toboggan attached to our very good dog, Gus. And we’ve gotten so used to it that the other day someone told me in passing how cool our rig was and I had no idea what he could possibly be referring to. Doesn’t everyone get around in a one-dog-open sleigh?
Remember all that fluffy snow in January? That sure was something wasn’t it?
My intention when I began this blog was to write a monthly update of where the kids are at and what they are up to and that way I could keep a record of the headlong, high-speed trajectory of their growth and development. But things being as they are, all headlong, high-speed, and trajectorial, a quarterly report is going to have to do.
We are all tip-top. Here’s what we look like:
Notice how everyone is upright on their own two feet? That is our big news this winter. Our baby Jo is officially a toddler. She toddles in the morning, she toddles in the evening, she toddles all over this laaaaaaaaand. So we are the proud parents of two toddlers and a school girl. But they seem like more toddlers than that. Think not of the sum of two toddlers so much as an exponential factor of toddlerism. Which is why I call them the toddler squadron. And also why Brent (see above) only has 5 hairs left on his head.
Perhaps you’re wonder why it says “Go” at the top of the picture. Hazel is learning to read and write beautifully in Kindergarten but sometimes mixes up jays and gees. It’s supposed to say “Jo.”
Perhaps you’re also wondering why I am so finely decked out head to toe in pink since, you may have noticed, I rarely wear anything that isn’t a black yoga suit that I’ve purchased at the grocery store. I don’t know. It seems important to Hazel to colour everything that is female pink be it a horse or a parasaurolophus or me.
You may be scrutinizing the picture and thinking I really haven’t changed much over the years. But really, I have. Only a few years back, when Hazel first started drawing, she’d always depict me as this enormous, hulking, globular thing with huge eyes and tremendous hair. I read somewhere that toddlers and preschoolers often draw their moms this way because they are the biggest, most important people on Earth. Like planets. Like the Sun the Moon and the stars.
Well, I’ve shrunk to merely human proportions. And she’s grown. She really has.
Oliver too. In fact, he periodically announces to me, “Mama, I tink I’d all growed up now.”
But it’s not true. Don’t lend him your car or hire him to do odd jobs around the house. Oh, he’d be all, “Good idea! Yay! Wow!” or “I can do it! Oliver do it all by myself!” but I suggest taking it with a grain of salt.
We all speak a new language. It’s called Oliverese. That’s our other big winter news. I love listening to the things my boy has to say now that we’re all fluent in Oliverese.
I remember this fall one of his first sentences was “I’m a sea turtle.” But he said it, like, “I’m a hee-to” and it took me a good while to figure out what he could possibly be trying to tell me (you know, there wasn’t much context because I had no idea that he was, in fact, a sea turtle) and he got pretty pissed about it. But now he can say “sea torto” and we know just what he means. It makes him happy. He’s a gentler, sweeter boy now that he can express himself to his family. Never mind that a waiter asked us the other day what language our son was speaking. “Is it European?” he asked.
“It’s Oliverese,” we said. He said he’d never heard of it and so we had to explain that it was a dialect of English and that he was still learning.
The most widely used phrases in Oliverese include:
“Ooooh, I have a good idea!”
“Ooooh, maybe it’s a mystery…”
and, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, “Go buffalo hunting today, Mommy?”
When he’s mad he says, “I like NOT you!”
The other day I watched him re-enact the mass extinction of the dinosaurs by hurling orbs of red playdough at toys. Little known factoid about this moment in prehistory — the comet first shouted “I like NOT you!” at the dinosaurs before crashing into the Earth.
This next photo was snapped during the Christmas holidays at a local playgroup. It may look like a fairly unextraordinary moment but if you ask me, it’s the HUGEST thing since the tertiary extinction.
This is a photo of my three children P
LAYING TOGETHER. That’s right, they are playing TOGETHER. With each other. Not a one of them is begging for my attention. Nope, they are quite oblivious as to the fact that I’m having a conversation with another mom about how amazing it is and none of them feel duty-bound to interrupt it. All are happily engaged in play AT THE SAME TIME. This marks the turning of a corner indeed.
“And they are even dressed up!” I whispered to my mom friend in awe.
“It’s your Christmas present,” she said. “Get your camera.”
Indeed.
In other Flurfelly news, it’s the end of the pigtails era. I used to always put Josephine’s hair in the cuttest little pig tails in the world with the tiniest little baby elastics in the world. And the way those pigtails framed her face was kind of like air quotes. And to me it looked kind of like she was perpetually saying “cute”.
But now she’s wise to me and she removes them just as quickly as I can install them. She’s still wicked cute, I think, she just doesn’t always appear to be explicitly stating “cute”.
Love and well-wishes,
XOXOX
The Flurfels
Nice Try Hazel
Baby Steps
There isn’t a word, at least in English, for that anguish you feel as your babies grow and turn into not-babies. There should be a word for it. I know I’m not the only one who stews around in it. I think I would help to have a word for it.
Oliver's First Birthday, June 2009
I’ve heard so many mother’s describing their babies’ transition to childhood as “heartbreaking.”
It does feel achey-breaky but it isn’t straight up heartbreak per se, because of course your heart is also bursting with pride and relief as your children become more able and independent. It’s not like a sudden trauma to the heart — nothing like a punch or a stab or a blast. It’s not so terrible as all that. It’s not a falling or a sinking or a shattering kind of heartbreak. It’s more of a heart-burstingness. It is a slow, throbbing type of pain and has something to do with welling up, spilling-over and with leakiness.
Waiting for Oliver - June 2008
It’s a mourning of sorts, but there’s no tragedy to point to, except for the obvious fact that every day since our birth brings us closer to our graves.
Nothing has ever made me feel so deeply how precious and fragile life is then holding a newborn.
And nothing has ever brought into sharper relief how short life is than watching an infant grow into and out of a 0-3 month-sized sleeper. Chez Flurfel, I reach into a drawer almost every day and pull some cute thing out that somebody has grown out of.
The very day Josephine turned one my email subscription to “Your Baby This Week” dot com started sending me “Your Toddler This Week” emails. Ouch! My heart!
And sure enough, it’s like she checked her calendar and said, “Oh, today’s the day I turn into a toddler. She hoisted herself up on her shaky little pudgy baby legs, she put her arms out for balance, and began laughing at her clever little standy trick. Now she spends her days looking for opportunities to climb the treacherous stairs, teetering around the edges of furniture, and having little temper tantrums that sound more and more like a skilled performance by a wee diva and less and less like the helpless mewling of an infant.
Hazel pulling herself up out of babyhood into toddlerdom - Fall 2006
It’s all enough to make me want to shout, “Just stop it, Josephine! You’re supposed to be our baby! It’s obvious you’ve set your mind on taking your first steps just as soon as you can gain enough motor control in your little legs and I’ve got to say, I really don’t think it’s a good idea! I think you should stay just like you are with the scooting around on the floor, and the giggling, and the pigtails, and the tiny pairs of blue jeans, and such and such. We love you, Baby Josephine! Just like you are! So this unmitigated drive of yours to grow and change every single day is a bit much. It just might break our hearts. Especially mine. Because my heart is a mommy heart now, and it’s all mooshy.”
Oliver's Last Scoot - he'd learned how to walk but for an occasion this exciting, fell back on the old scoot
I know I’m not the only one who suffers this affliction. I know I’m not the only one who has to actively avoid steeping in it. The thing I don’t get is why isn’t there a word for this mommy-ache?
Sentiment can mean a self-indulgent wallowing in sadness or nostalgia. But anyone can be sentimental. What I’m getting at is an emotion I simply didn’t experience before I became a mother.
Seriously, how can this baby be 1 already?
It’s kind of like nostalgia, but then again, it’s not, because it’s not a yearning for the past, per se. To be honest, babies have always struck me as a bit tedious. Nursing them from squalling infancy into toddlerhood is really, really hard. It’s not that I want to turn back the clock to say, a year ago when I was a much more raw and exhausted person without a hope in hell of a night out or even an uninterrupted shower. I don’t. But I would like things to slow down a bit. I mean, come on!
Daphne De Marneffe* says mothers suffer from a “nostalgia for the present.” This is apt, I think. So many moments of seering adorableness occur when you have children. And you can’t help but be aware of how ephemeral these moments are. This baby or kid that you love so entirely completely utterly fiercely is going to be a little bit different tomorrow and in a month quite different and in a year entirely transformed. How can you not mourn the fleetingness of these moments even as they are occurring?
De Marneffe gives mothers credit for a lot of “emotional work” like this. It’s true. It’s hard work to love children. They are in a constant state of transition. You love them just as they are and they keep changing. It steamrolls you.
My sense is that the ache is a permanent thing. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. If you’re thinking another baby might fix it, I’d like to caution you that I think it actually gets worse with subsequent children.
I like what Anne Lamott says:
“New parents grieve as their babies get bigger, because they cannot imagine the child will ever be so heartbreakingly cute and needy again. Same is a swirl of every age he’s ever been, and all the new ones, like cotton candy, like the Milky Way. I can see the stoned wonder of the toddler, the watchfulness of the young child sopping stuff up, the busy purpose and workmanship of the nine-year-old.”
I can think of no personal tragedy worse than not watching my children grow up. So I’m not complaining, not really. I just wish there was a word for that mommy-choly, for that achey-space babies create as they careen into childhood.
And I know, nobody feels sorry for us. Nor should they. after all, we did do this to our own mother’s, didn’t we?
Hello Oliver, nice to meet you. Go ahead and break my heart... June 2008
works cited
Lamott, Anne. “Diamond Heart.” Plan B: Further thoughts on faith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. 155-156. (Have you read Anne Lamott? She is wonderful. Please read anything by her. If you are a writer, read “Bird by Bird.” If you are a mom, read “Operating Instructions.” Otherwise, just read anything by Anne Lamott.)
De Marneffe, Daphne. Maternal Desire: On children, love and the inner life.
(This is an amazing book if you’re the type to enjoy an academic discourse on motherhood.)
Happy 1st Birthday Josephine
Guess what?
Yup.
We’re awfully proud.
Seems like such a wee blip since she was just like this though:
I guess she’s filled in a bit.
And perked up.
Once I dressed her up like this and put a thing on her head.
Then she started shoveling in the solid foods, crawling, and now she says “Hi!” to everyone she meets and is furniture surfing.
You’ve come a long way baby.
It’s flabbergasting. It’s astounding. It’s amazing how much a human changes in their first year of life.
Some of you may have heard me yaking about a photo-a-day project we’ve been doing with Jo.
We’ve taken a photograph of her every single day of her life since she was born.
And we’re posting them here:
http://dailyjosephine.wordpress.com/
at THE DAILY JO.
I’m going to make a time-lapse movie with them. But first I have to figure out how. And I have to find and organize all of the photos.
There’s 364 of them.
And it’s been a busy year.
Happy Birthday Josephine, we love you madly.
XOXOX
The Flurfels
House of Flurfel 