Old dog, new trick

My dad is 84. I remember when his office got its first computer - I must have been around eight or ten. He would come home with tales of how the secretary - whom everyone loved and who, despite her glamorous blonde hair, was far from an airhead - had lost some file or other again, thanks to the silly machine. He had no time for this new technology. He kept his files, his records, his drawings, his specifications, his letters, safely and securely on paper, in filing cabinets, where they were swiftly to hand when the need arose.

About six years later the recession (the other recession, the one in the 80s) hit the building trade hard (history repeats itself) and with it, the architectural firms. His company was reduced to two men - himself and his partner, now the senior members - who retreated to their respective homes and worked from there, renting out the floor that used to be a workspace for thirty employees.

Luckily, we had a basement room that he could use as an office, and I remember the day all his huge hanging files of blueprints and plans were moved in, in giant cabinets that took up most of the space, leaving a thin passage for him to walk between, and of course a place for a tall stool at the angled drawing board. It may have been then that we acquired our first home computer - an Amstrad with a nice green screen and square type that functioned mostly as a word processor. It also had two games, which I played to death. It never occurred to us to get any more games for it, though I suppose they were available.

Luckily for us, my dad's partner is a couple of decades younger and an early adopter of new technology, so every time he upgraded his computer we would be the happy recipients of the hand-me-down. Thus we progressed, eventually, from the Amstrad to an Apple, and a newer Apple, and finally even one with a colour screen. I learned to type from Mavis Beacon on one of those Apples, for which I will be eternally grateful. There was even a modem attached by this time - a phone-line modem, the sort that crackled and screeched and cost as much as a local phone call - which in Ireland is not free. But nobody ever used it, because it was too much of a hassle, and the Internet was not very interesting yet, and it took a long time to work.

My dad only ever used the computer as a word processor, and continued to print out, photocopy, and file all his paperwork just as he had always done. He never saved anything, except by accident, so that every now and then I'd go home and try to clean up the desktop, littered with things nobody wanted any more. My mum used it too, for her official correspondence, in the same way. I set them up with an e-mail account, but they never used it. "I'm too old for that," my dad would say, self-deprecatingly, when I suggested that it might be nice to have. He couldn't really see the point. He continued to do his drawing work by hand, faxing things through to people who couldn't wait, sending letters by snail mail, talking on the phone. He was past retirement age, but he kept going as long as he had clients who would work with him in spite of his Ludditeism.

In only the last few years, things have changed. He really has retired now, the office downstairs is mostly disused, he and my mother face health problems of varying types. They have mobile phones, which stay nicely charged in their cradles, and are never used. I doubt either of them could figure them out at this point. Texting would be way beyond them.

But then. This is not a sad story of how technology that seems peripheral can become so central to life that people have difficulty interacting with you when you don't use it. This is a story of hope and new beginnings. Of old dogs who do, after all, learn new tricks.

Because my dad's partner, a good man without parallel, refused to give up on the idea of setting my father up with technology that could improve his life. He upgraded his iPad and gave Dad the old one. Dad got the house wired for broadband (though Eircom seemed to sit on that particular challenge for about six months). My dad mastered the art of the touchscreen, figured out that this one was pretty hard to mess up, kept at it, and now sends me an e-mail most days. I can send him little tidbits from our day, a photo embedded in an e-mail so he doesn't even have to click away to see it, and he and my mother can see into our lives over here, so very far away, from a new angle.

My dad doesn't like the phone. He's the sort of father who says "I'll get your mother," at the first opportunity when I ring home. If trapped, because she's not home, he'll talk about the weather, or current affairs. (He gets his news from the radio at 9am and 1pm and the television at 9pm promptly. Missing the headlines is a bad, bad thing. I put a shortcut on the iPad to The Irish Times website when I was at home, but I'm not sure if he's using that yet.) Anyway. I've inherited his dislike of phones, to some extent, so e-mail is the perfect medium for both of us. I don't think he'll be on Facebook any time soon, but baby steps are fine with me.

It's a tiny thing, but it's a great thing. If Steve Jobs is to thank for this, then I'm thanking Steve Jobs. I'm also thanking my Dad, who's not been feeling so great lately but has powered through and made himself keep at this, picking up the iPad every day and trying to send me a message, even though sometimes it doesn't seem to work, or the router has a red light and isn't doing what it should, or he might think he has nothing to say. I'm proud of him for finally admitting that he's not too old a dog after all.

Family car

As the only child of tidy-minded parents, I always found that other people's cars had an air of messy family-ness that ours lacked. I loved it. I loved the casualness and the randomness and the disorganization. It seemed to be the hallmark of a real family to me, and I loved being subsumed into the families of my more-siblinged friends, whether for a whole week in the summer or just an after-school playdate.

At my house, when we got home, whatever had come with us came out of the car and back into the house, to be thrown away or put away as appropriate. The glove compartment contained one pair of gloves, one pair of sunglasses (in their case), an orange chamois to de-mist the windows with, and the car's owner's manual. (Of course, this was before you needed twelve different adaptors for all the things you might conceivably charge in your car, and also before cars were littered with broken CD cases, defunct cassette tapes, and album inserts that didn't match the contents. We didn't even have a car with a radio until I was 14.)

Other families' cars, though, had cyclinders of wet wipes on the back window and crumbs between the cushions, lost hair bobbins on the floor and abandoned liquorish allsorts under the seats. There was a fine line, of course, between the endearing and the disgusting - used tissues proliferating on the passenger seat, mysterious stickiness on the door handle, half-eaten packets of Tayto scattering as we rounded every corner were definitely out of the grey zone and into the gross.

More often than I could understand, there was a hairbrush in someone's car. My hairbrush never travelled more than a foot from my dressing table, where I picked it up, brushed, and set it down again. My mother's was the same. I always puzzled over the migratory hairbrushes.

------------

Well, I'm happy to report that I've achieved nirvana, where nirvana is the perfectly messy family car. Art projects on the passenger seat? Check. Discarded toy parts and litter and tissues liberally spread around the floor? Check. Crumbs in every crevice? Check. Hairbrush on the back seat? More often than my former self would believe.

Oral tradition

There are things I say just because my parents said them. If it's foggy outside, I'll announce that it's a mishty moishty morning, as my father would if he saw it. Any mention of Delaware will have me humming "What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?" even though I've no idea how the rest of the song goes, because I know that if you say Delaware to my mother, that's what she'll do. (The state of Delaware doesn't come up much in Irish conversation.)

Sometimes I wonder which of my parents' sayings came from their parents. There must be some. I'd like it if I knew, so I could make a point of passing those ones in particular on to my own children. An oral history family-tree, we'd have.

When my parents came to visit us in Texas we took them to the zoo. When I rounded a corner and saw a bison ahead of us, I whispered to B that if he asked my Dad what that was, he'd say it was a biffalo buffalo bison. Sure enough, those were the first words out of my father's mouth when he saw the hulking shaggy brown creature.

My parents regularly employ the following words without irony: wireless, slacks, plimsolls, the mail boat*, hanky, cardi, serviette. I don't say any of these words, even ironically, because they're not things I need to say, or sometimes because I decided I didn't want to be someone who says "cardi." 

Ireland is another country, and so is the past. My children will be at two removes from these words, and since they don't see their grandparents more than once a year, they're unlikely to remember them unless I do it for them. (My granny would offer me a chocolate from her ubiquitous box - people were always bringing her boxes of chocolates, because old ladies don't need anything - and say "Would a duck swim?" That's the only phrase I have that's uniquely hers in my mind. I wish there were more.)

I always feel that my syntax becomes more mobile when I'm in Ireland, my vocabulary a little more vernacular, my pronouncements more colourful. In America I bland it down, even it out, try not to confuse. I'm sure my friends and neighbours here will tell you that I still sound Irish, that I still say things that leave them scratching their heads on occasion, that I'll never just blend in: nor would I want to. But I feel a certain richness - if I ever had it, and I'm a very mild sort of Irishwoman really, from well inside the Pale - is lost, and maybe my new melting-pot land is the poorer for it. 



*The ferry into Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead; it hasn't brought the mail along with its passengers for many a year, and why it's mail not post I don't know, now I come to think about it. Maybe it was used by the Royal Mail, back in the day.

Weird

Someone said a very reassuring thing to me a while ago; something so helpful that I return to it almost daily and take a deep breath and get over myself.

"Your children cannot possibly be weirder than my children."

I know, at first glance it doesn't sound all that comforting. But it was my sister-in-law, mother of three who are older than mine and are all turning out just fine, becoming upstanding young adults I'm proud to have call me Aunty. (Except they don't, of course, because I'm not that old.)

So partly there was the comfort of thinking that any weirdness is genetic (and not from my side of the family, to boot), but mostly it was just nice to hear another mother admit that kids are weird. Kids have their little quirks and things and requirements and desires and demands and individualities, and they all end up being pretty much on the normal side of weird, so there's no need to worry. I like that.

Another thing I liked happened when I was explaining, in slightly embarrassed terms, the limited nature of Dash's diet to my aunt and uncle. They totally took it in their stride, and reminisced about a certain niece (not me) who always came to visit with her box of Corn Flakes in tow, because that was what she ate. (I was the niece who ate everything with a side of cranberry sauce for several years.)

It's quite possible that we were all deeply weird as children, but we got over it.  Or at least, we grew up and learned the coping techniques that everyone uses to hide their internal weirdness from the outside world, to the appropriate degree.

 They probably will too.

Words per minute

More times than I should admit to, I sit down here and have no idea what I'm going to end up saying. Sometimes it works out, other times not so much. Sometimes just sitting and typing will trigger a thought that turns into a decent post, and then I go back and delete all the drivel at the top that got me to it, and ta-da! it looks as if I had a plan all along.

If you don't know what to blog about, but you're fairly good at typing, I recommend it. (I'm not sure how it would work if I had to hunt and peck for each letter - my brain-to-finger motion is pretty seamless at this point.)

Though really. My mother had 60 words per minute on an old-fashioned typewriter, not even an electric one at first; probably with a sheet of carbon paper underneath and working from shorthand dictation. If I didn't have a Delete key up there within easy reach of my right little finger, this would be a whole 'nother ballgame. She was a proper secretary, like the sort they had in Mad Men. (I wonder if she's ever seen Mad Men? Must ask her. I bet she'd love the clothes but she'd spend her whole time telling me how it wasn't like that in The Bank.) (There is more than one bank in the country, but apparently not when you worked there. Everyone, according to my mother - that is, all the unmarried ladies in Dublin - either worked in The Bank or Guinness's. That's just how it was in the 60s. They were also all in either the tennis club or the golf club.)

I've used one of those old typewriters - my mum still has one at home in its own lovely wooden case. You have to bash down each key with the force of a concert pianist going for broke on Beethoven's Ninth, and you have to sit up straight and hold up your wrists too. None of this slouching over the kitchen table with my elbows all noodly, like I'm doing now. And I imagine it would be pretty hard to take your typewriter to bed with you and type on your knees, cosily wrapped up in a dressing gown, as I have been known to do. The people who habitually blog while on the loo would have a bit of a problem too, even leaving aside the problem of how to connect your manual typewriter to the Internet and how you might insert a hotlink.

I suppose what I'm getting to is that blogging is so much a product of this time, and I imagine it will be superseded by something new and improved in a few years, so that our children will read about it in the footnote of a history book and say "Oh yes, my mother used to do that," and they'll wonder how we managed when life was so hard and laptops were so unwieldy and you had to use all the fingers of all your hands to put words on a screen. Maybe they'll all be vlogging, or they'll attach electrodes to their brains and mind meld, and the whole Internet will be In Your Mind all the time...

If I had lived in any other century - or other few decades, I suppose - I might have filled diaries with my blathering, but I'd more likely just not have bothered. Blogging gives me a tiny, supportive audience - just enough to keep me writing, not so much that they become critical and put me off. The fact that I'm just one of bazillions of bloggers means that if someone doesn't want to read what I'm saying, they can easily go elsewhere. No harm, no foul; no money or time wasted; no skin off my nose. I get the validation that keeps me writing, I get the creative outlet and outside connection I need in these years when former at-home mothers would be isolated and inward-looking (back to Mad Men, and I've only seen the first season so don't go spoiling me). I get to feel like a writer, without all that character-building, soul-destroying rejection that "real" writers have to go through.

Because if you write, you're a writer. If you write for an audience, you're a writer. If you write a blog, or a book, or on the back of a napkin, you're a writer. If you write because there are words inside and you want to get them out, on paper or on a screen, or somewhere in between, you're a writer.

I blog because I want to write, and this is where I get to do it.

God Save Our Socks

Times were hard in Dublin in 1979. I wore hand-me-downs from my cousins most of the time. I didn't really care, as I was a bit of a tomboy and not interested in clothes, but it was a far cry from today's "If it's not pink I'm not wearing it" tutu-splosion in my own daughter's closet. (Though a large proportion of her stuff is also pre-loved.)

Anyway. I remember a particular pair of knee socks that came from my cousins in England. They had Union Jacks all over them. My mother, aware that this might not be the most politically correct statement to be making, made me wear them inside-out.

I'm really not sure how much of an effect that had. These weren't little Union Jacks randomly arrayed over white socks, that might be taken for purple dots from a distance. No, these socks were overwhelmingly red-white-and-blue, with a repeating unbroken pattern of inch by inch-and-a-half flags, one after another with no spaces in between. Add some sequins and Ginger Spice would have loved them. Even inside-out, any casual viewer over the age of seven would probably have known what it was.

I was five. So that was fine.

You'd think, in hindsight though, that perhaps we could have done without that one pair of socks. I mean, from my point of view, the murders and kneecappings and car bombs I heard about every morning on the radio might as well have been taking place in another country, as they never involved places I'd been to or people I knew; but Dublin had been bombed by the IRA the year after I was born, and murders and bombings continued in the UK and the North of Ireland until as late as 1996 (and beyond, from various factions). The late seventies were the height of The Troubles, as they were known. While nobody I knew in Dublin was a rabid Republican, almost everyone I knew was Catholic. In general, it would not have been the done thing to fly the British flag (metaphorically; literally would be totally inconceivable), even if my father happened to have been born there. (Which he was.)

(I'm trying to think how to explain this to Americans. It might be a bit like wearing the Confederate flag to school in New York. You know the way over here people fly the flag of the country of their forebears with pride, and paint themselves those colours and enthusiastically support the teams in the world cup? Well, you don't do that in Ireland if you're English. You certainly didn't do it then, and I'm really not sure how loudly you would want to do it even now.)

But, in my family in 1979 at least, a perfectly good pair of socks was not to be turned down on the grounds of political correctness - not when you could just pull them the other way out and pretend nobody could tell. I suppose I should be glad it wasn't a Union Jack woolly jumper.

That which is not happening

Yesterday I thought for a while that I might have to fly home to Ireland for a few days as soon as this weekend, to sort out some family stuff.

This morning, I found that wouldn't be necessary, and took myself off high alert. So that's all right then.

A lot flew through my mind in a very short space of time, though. I've never left the children overnight, not even for one night, not even when giving birth to the second one - we were only at the birthing center for five hours or so before we came back again with a brand new baby. I've flown with my children plenty of times, but I've never flown without them. That would be a totally new experience.

My initial reaction, of course, when the possibility was raised, was "Noooo! I can't! It's impossible!" Because I am a planner who fears change, especially change that comes quickly. I don't much like surprises, either. All the reasons why I couldn't crowded down on me: Mabel can't get to sleep without me; everyone has a cough and might be getting sick; Halloween; Mabel's birthday; B can't cook; B doesn't know that they have to go to the bathroom before dance class and I might forget to tell him; I'm tired...

In the brief periods last night in between Mabel-waking no.1 (quick and easy), Dash needing to be shepherded to the bathroom because he'd had three last drinks of water, and Mabel-waking no. 2 (prolonged and terrible), I couldn't fall asleep because my brain was busy outlining all the things that would need to be done, all the things that would make it impossible, and all the things I would need to remember; as well as all the things I wasn't looking forward to or didn't know about once I would get there.

But I cannot tell a lie: some of my thoughts drifted in other directions. What would it be like to catch a plane on my own? Could I just bring a carry-on? Should I invest in a decent pair of black trousers to look respectable and not like a harried mother of two caterwaulers? Should I bring my black boots? Might I, perhaps, pick up a neat little backpack with a padded section that would hold my laptop in REI before I left?

Would I be able to steal wi-fi from my parents' neighbours if I asked them very nicely, assuming there was some signal I could pick up from the house, if I was staying there? Should I actually put some books on my under-employed Kindle, because I'd have a lot of time on my hands in airports? How would I cope with all that free time compounding the guilt of leaving B to cope with everyone for four whole days? And four whole bedtimes and four whole (long, long) nights?

Of course, B would be fine. He's known these children just as long as I have, and loves them just as much, and if his culinary skills are lacking it's only due to my own orneryness in not wanting to share my kitchen, and he's perfectly capable of making pasta and opening a tin of baked beans, and he scrambles a mean egg to boot.

What's more, when I floated the idea to the children yesterday afternoon, Dash was fine with it straight away. Mabel was resistant at first, but after an hour or so mulling it over she was already telling me how she'd draw me a picture to take with me and how she'd go to bed nicely for Daddy. It would probably be a huge turning point in her sleeping/weaning.

So this morning when it turned out I didn't need to go at all, my feelings were just a tiny bit mixed.

Mostly I was relieved, of course. Relieved that the emergency was not really an emergency after all, that the sky hasn't fallen just yet. Happy that I didn't have to run round like a headless chicken booking a ridiculously expensive last-minute flight and trying to stock up the fridge with easily prepared food and writing excessive lists of information. Very pleased not to be trying to predict when exactly this incoming hurricane of ours would be making transAtlantic flights at best unpleasant or else totally unviable.

Suddenly, my life looked laughably easy. I could think about Halloween costumes! I could continue to plan Mabel's birthday party! I could clean the toilets! (Yes, really, for one fleeting moment I almost thought that.)

But then, I would quite like a cute little backpack with a padded space for my laptop. Maybe for Christmas.

A brief note to my children re the (distant) future

Right now, you two have grand plans to invent an immortality machine when you're grown up. I'm not sure whether it will be kept for only immediate family members or whether you'll be generous enough to go public with it, but the idea of it has been very helpful in allowing you to accept the difficult truth that one day we will all die.

I'd like it, too, if you could invent an anti-aging machine, because frankly I'm much happier with the notion that one day I'll be entirely gone than that before that happens I might be short of breath and aching of joints and perhaps even completely gaga in the mental faculty department.

But it's possible that you won't, and I'll have to take my lumps like the rest of the human race, and probably, for the most part, getting older is, as advertised, preferable to the alternative.

Notes from a funeral

My father slept with his trousers under his mattress every night. Not for him the trouser press of upscale hotel rooms; a quick lift of the mattress, a quick smoothing out of the folded trousers, and they'd be good as new the next morning. It never struck me as odd. I don't even know how I know he did it, except from long-ago Saturday mornings when I would see the reverse procedure while snuggling beside my mother in the comfy warmth of the big bed, and the odd night spent in a B&B on holidays when we'd all three share a room.

That has nothing to do with this, but the memory just came back to me.

---------------------------------------

Many's the Sunday morning my boyfriend and I would walk down to the big church at the end of his road, nursing a hangover and sore feet (on my part at least) from walking most of the way home in impractical footwear late on Saturday night. We'd go in the side door and line up in the pew beside his more punctual mother, already in situ and a lot more bushy-tailed than I. I've stood in the same spot with her at midnight mass on Christmas Eve too, after we were married, but before children made such things impractical.

Last Monday I stood in a pew in the center of the same church, just a few steps away and 90-degrees rotated from those seats, and tried to keep my children amused with small toys purloined from their cousins for the novelty value, and tried to pay attention to her funeral service, and tried to keep my mind off the reality of the long wooden box in front of the altar.

Then we stood in the rain - of course, the rain - in the cemetery, and it was stark. Even the wriggling, fractious child in my arms competing with the heavy funeral-home-provided umbrella couldn't prevent tears from welling every time I looked at my husband and watched him put an arm in comfort around his sister. How can we do this to the ones we love? How can we take them and put them away, far from sight and mind, in the cold hard ground, to moulder and rot? Who decided this was the best way? Surely in this year of our lord 2012, there's a more sanitary, more gentle method.  Or do we need to see this most elemental of disposals, the age-old sod and shovel, territory of Yorrik himself, to have it finally hammered home in our unwilling minds?

We have flying cars. (I do. I was assured I would by now, at least, so I presume it will be here any day.) Why do we not have the facility to download the brain and personality of those who have passed on, or to at least access their memory banks and find out where they left the car keys or what their grandmother's maiden name was or how it felt on their first day of school? How can it be so sudden and so over?

-------------------------

My own mother, on the other hand, is erasing herself from the present backwards, reversing ever so slowly out of consciousness. Her brain is full, there is no room at the inn for new information. You can try to pile it on top, but it just wobbles and slips off again, and no matter how hard you try to cram it in, five minutes later you find yourself beginning anew with a fresh slate. She can still tell you who married whom in the halcyon days of Hollywood, and compute her times tables with a couple of muttered phrases in Irish, but if you ask her who that lady she just met was, she'll profess surprise that she just met a lady at all.

She's like one of those monks who brushes clear the path in front of them before they walk; but she's brushing clear the path behind her as she moves on, oblivious. Brings living in the present to a whole new level.

---------------------

Somebody, somewhere, needs to rage against all this dying of the light. Why are they all taking it so peacefully?

Bereave

Only a tiny part of this grief is my grief. This grief belongs to her children, her brother and sister, her multitudinous friends, her grandchildren - both those who saw her often, who were watched daily by her as infants, who were picked up from school by her three times a week as recently as last month; and those others who will have missed almost all of her, whose memories will be entirely or mostly limited to photographs of themselves as toddlers and young children with a woman whose light shone out so brightly that it cannot be dimmed.

I'm sitting in her kitchen, drinking her tea.

We are in that no-man's-land before the funeral. That time considerately orchestrated by society where there are things the bereaved must do, things to be organized and decided and planned, whereby the people who deal in death - the funeral home, the priests, the lawyers - tell you what you must do, and you obediently go and do it. And with every phone call that must be made and every repetition of the unconscionable news that she has died, you come to believe it a tiny bit more, though it cuts like a dull knife every time. But it leaves mercifully little time to sit and dwell, so you cry in the car on the way, and wipe your tears away when you arrive.

It is not my grief, mostly; so I observe, and help where I can, and stay quiet and keep the children amused, or fed, or clothed, as appropriate.

I am so glad that my husband has brothers and sisters to do this hard thing with. The day will come, inevitably, when I have to do it alone. (Although the alternative, it not coming, would be worse; for that would mean that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.)

We are finding things to be thankful for. We are hearing lovely stories, and learning things we never knew, and everyone wants to help and it's good to accept it. My sister-in-law says thanking people is good karma, and she will be well stocked with it when she has acknowledged every message of kindness she has received.

We will come out the other side, eventually.

In Memoriam

She was the matriarch.

She was the lynchpin. She was amazing: loving, strong, gracious, energetic, generous. She thought the best of everyone and was always looking forward to the next adventure. She loved to host a party, to read a story to her grandchildren, to travel the world, to cook a Sunday dinner for the family. She could almost always best me at Scrabble.

She was the sort of houseguest who never stayed long enough, and she always had sausages and rashers on the grill when we got in from a red-eye flight to Ireland, and it was the best food in the world. She was fearless, and she always said the right thing. She swam in the sea whenever she could. We thought she'd be around for ever; it's impossible to imagine that she's gone.

Saying she's at rest sounds ridiculous. She didn't want to rest. She was up with the lark and always on the move. Her diary filled up months in advance, but she always had time to sit and talk.

My children have her genes, and you couldn't ask for better ones. It was a pleasure and a privilege to call myself her daughter-in-law. And it was over far too soon.

November 2011, the last time we saw her

Spice of

The existence of lesbians is giving my mother a crisis of faith. Apparently.

She said that the news at lunchtime today was all about lesbian weddings in Ireland.
"Where were all the lesbians when I was growing up?" she asked me. "None of the girls at school were, or in the bank [where she worked before she got married], or on the road where I lived. Where did they all come from?"
"Well, they weren't invented in the last five years, Mother. They've always been around. People just didn't talk about it in those days."
"But I don't understand what God was thinking about. Why did he make them?"
I decided not to tell her that I can't answer that because I tripped and fell into a vat of atheism.
"Maybe he just likes variety."

Wordation

I would love to record Mabel playing by herself and play back it for you (or, you know, for someone who would hear it and declare her a genius), because it's very entertaining. She not only does the voices, she also narrates the whole story. So she might be holding a Strawberry Shortcake doll and a dinosaur, or a small pony and a squishy frog, who will be each other's sisters, or mother and daughter, or some such relationship, and I'll hear:

...[Squeaky voice] No, you can't do that. You're not allowed to. Becuase it's naw-dy [American accent coming out there] and dangewous.
- [Other squeaky voice] But mother, I want to do it. I'll be vewy careful.
- [Normal voice, a bit sing-song] And then she went upstairs and climbed on the shelves and she fell off and hit her head. And she said [Squeaky II] Ow, my head.
- [Narrator] And her mother came upstairs to see what was going on and said [Squeaky I] Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?...

And on and on and on, only much funnier than that. If I listen carefully I hear her go over things we've been talking about, or things she wants to do, or things that are on her mind - going to sleep on your own, the ever-present little sister role, working out the concept of death, even. It's also a little unnerving to hear your own words coming out of someone else's mouth, and makes me very happy that I've managed to excise swearwords from my vocabulary, because I know she'd be using them right now if she'd heard them.

Speaking of which. Dash has taken to saying "Aw, nuts," when something frustrates him. After listening to this for a while I decided it was probably not the most gentlemanly of expressions, and I asked him to say something else instead. More importantly, I thought he should know what it was he was saying, so I told him what it was a slang expression for, so that he didn't think he was just talking innocently about squirrel dinner. He said he'd say "Oh, brother" instead, which I can't find any objection to. So now Mabel is saying "Aw, nuts," and I'm a little afraid to stop her for fear she'll decide to say it all the more.

As I may have mentioned before, I grew up convinced that rude words had been invented in the 1980s and my parents had never heard any of them. My father's worst expletives were Damn and Blast, and I got into a fair amount of trouble with my mother the day I tried to say either of those. When I was about 13, the word of choice at school seemed to be "crappy," and one day I used it at the dinner table. To immediate and shocking effect. I had no idea it meant anything other than, well, you know, crappy. Bad. Not nice.

Which is why I would rather Dash knew what he was saying. Then it can be his own decision, though of course I can let him know that some words are not for use around his elders and betters, or his youngers and more impressionables either.

Mabel has also taken to exclaiming "Good Lawd!" if she needs to express dismay. I suppose I need to start saying Good Gravy instead. Maybe with a side of Heavens to Betsy or Holy Mackeral. It would, after all, be amusing to hear her come out with those while sorting out the members of the dollhouse at school some day.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps fudge and fiddlesticks and sugar are things people say not because they're granny-types who never said anything stronger in their lives, but from many years of not-in-front-of-the-children last-second adjustments.

Daughters

I sat opposite Mabel in the food court of the mall last week, watching her chow down happily on a slice of pizza and hoping for many more pleasant outings like this as she gets older.

She's three. It's easy for her to delight me. All she has to do is eat the food I just bought her, not throw a tantrum, sit on her chair without knocking over her drink, grin her big grin, and I'm suckered, hook, line, and sinker. As she gets older, I suppose I'll expect a little more from her, and there'll be disagreements over jeans, or shoes, or Bieber, or whatever it is the young people will be wanting when she's a tweeny bopper; but I can't help thinking that I'll always be delighted if my daughter - my beautiful, hilarious, vivacious daughter - is happy to be out in public with her mum.

And then I thought of the gulf between mothers and daughters and saw it from a new angle; this gulf that can be miles wide and unbroachable, or small enough to step across with a shared joke and a smile.

Perhaps I see what I expect to see, but I feel as if her relationship with me, mine with her, is already more complex than the other one, the mother-son bond of simple mutual affection. (And frustration, infuriation, impatience, all those other things.) But because I've been there, because I know Girl from the inside, the weight of all the things I want to teach her - tell her, advise her, show her, avoid for her - is mighty.

Did my mother think these things when she looked at me? Did I barge ahead, embarassed, tolerant, amused, or superior, according to my age or mood at the time? As she sat there, smiling calmly and knowing that some day I'd get my comeuppance? Or was she thinking that my hair was too long and my shoes were too clumpy and my table manners were lacking? It's not a gulf, then; it's a finely balanced scale that is tipped in one direction and then the other by the merest glance or a throwaway comment.

Do Mabel and I still have plenty of time for just enjoying each other's company before all that hits?  

Second-hand memories

I'm at that point where I'm starting to feel like I can get rid of some of the stuff in the basement. You know the stuff I'm talking about. The baby stuff. The booster seats and the baby bjorn and the fleecy carseat covers and the ginormous body pillow I treated myself to for my second pregnancy - because I remembered all too well the feeling in my hips that my mattress had been replaced by bare planks of wood - and then somehow I hardly ever used it. I've advertised them all, and little by little I'm replacing them with nice slim green strips of paper that go into my wallet and don't take up any space in the basement at all. (Soon they won't take up space in my wallet either. Oh well. Them's the breaks.)

I'm keeping the pack'n'play (travel cot) and the simple high chair in case of visitors, and a couple of other things are earmarked for friends. I still have a box or three of tiny baby clothes, and a box of maternity gear, but as the children get older it's becoming easier and easier - not to mention a lot more practical - to give things away as soon as they're grown out of. I keep a few things of Monkey's that might be gender-neutral enough for Mabel in a year or two's time, but otherwise, every time I have a grown-out-of pile, I run through my mental list of people whose children are a year or two younger and don't have an older same-sex sibling, and I ask them if they'd like some stuff.

I don't know if it's an American thing, or something more peculiar to the area I live in, or just a parenting thing, but I'm growing to love hand-me-downs. I love putting a sweater on my daughter that belonged to her brother before her, and maybe even her two cousins in Ireland before that. I love that her favourite blue raincoat came from her cousins in California but somehow originated in Dunnes Stores (the Irish version of Target, sort of). I love bringing a bag of clothes to our neighborhood clothing swap and seeing friends pull out some of my favourite things to fit their own children, and picking up some finds of my own. Thrift stores are great resources, clothing co-ops have wonderful bargains, yard sales are fab, but nothing beats free kids' clothes.

Here's Monkey, aged almost three, wearing a hand-me-down from his Irish cousins. (Who is that brown-haired, grey-eyed baby with him? Surely not his blonde, green-eyed little sister?)

And lookit, there's Mabel, this July in Cardiff, wearing the same thing. Isn't that nice? (I know that looks like a sausage on a stick that she's eating, but it's actually a Mini-Moo icecream, which is basically chocolate milk in frozen pop form, and the ideal size for small children. Wish they had them here.

I may have said this before, but as a child I was clothed almost entirely in hand-me-downs, as I had the (mis)fortune to have five older girl cousins all geographically close to us. I was a bit of a tomboy, and didn't care much until I was about 13, when I finally demanded some clothes of my own. Before that, my memory of new clothes is limited to Christmas-present pyjamas, duffle coats that would be the envy of Paddington Bear, and bargain-basement jeans.

One day I went shopping with my dad, under orders to get new jeans. We went to Cornelscourt, site of the largest Dunnes in the country (it still is; back then it wasn't nearly so fancy, and was very reminiscent of a school building, with grey floor tiles and strip lighting). My father had no idea what size I was - what, did they not put ages on the sizes then? Maybe I was at that awkward in-betweeny stage of 12 or so - and I remember him producing his architect's tape measure from his anorak pocket and professionally stretching it down the length of my leg as if I was a piece of plywood in Chadwick's. I was probably mortified, but it's a nice memory now.

Every so often a bag of clothes would arrive from the cousins, and I'd eagerly riffle through it. On one occassion a lovely soft green wool turtleneck appeared that looked familiar to my mother. Yes, she had donated it to the cousins, five girls or so ago, and here it was, perfectly good, now back in our house for another round. It was my favourite jumper that year.

By cost-per-wear calculations, it probably should have been paying me by then.

Freedom to change

I think everyone should take their small children on a trans-Atlantic trip (and back) twice a year. It's very good for getting yourself out of a rut.

See, the thing is, most of the time I'm a bit bound to The Schedule. Not the one where lunch is at 12.30 and dinner is at 6.00 and nothing can come between the whole family and a properly laid table twice if not three times a day, because we don't really have that one. But sleeping is a bit of a sacred cow, because I'm always afraid that if we do anything to nudge Mabel's patterns (I use the word lightly) off course, it'll all blow up in my face in the middle of the night. Which is silly, really, because for one thing, the patterns are all in my head and definitely not in hers, and for another, it can't really get much worse. (No, Fate, I'm not looking at you. I know it could be worse. I didn't mean it. Go away and read someone else's blog, okay? Julia's updating daily at the moment, and she's a great read.)

Anyway. Once you mess up everyone's sleeping by going five hours out of your time zone for two and a half weeks, and then coming back again, you suddenly have a huge amount of freedom to just keep messing, if you want to. Or make changes, even.

While we were gone, since naps were late and bedtime was later thanks to the time difference, we had a babysitter not once but three times. The first time, I rushed back alone from the conference dinner where I was being regaled with tales of Physicists Gone Bad (not too great a loss there, then) before 10.00, thinking that Mabel would still be wide awake and possibly screeching - in fact, she was balled up asleep on the sofa; though she jumped up with a squawk as soon as she heard my voice, and it took a good hour to get her down again.

The second time, we left them with their granny and went to a grown-up party, full of grown-ups, and wine, and not a child in sight. At 10.00 I was ready to call it quits, not yet having recieved a text message to tell me that Mabel was asleep. (And this was a week later, so she was that much more acclimatised to the time difference, so that much more tired.) A quick enquiry elicited that she had just yawned, would no doubt be out in a minute, and to stay where we were. One hour later (oops), I was definitely on my way out the door when the phone rang and I was greeted with the happy news that she was finally out for the count. I had a large glass of wine and we stayed another hour.

The third time we just went out to dinner locally, and Mabel stayed up with Granny till we came home at 10pm, when I put her to bed. She was just fine.

Monkey, you will note, does not even appear in this discussion because he went to bed with no trouble and fell promptly asleep each time. Henceforth I am not going to worry about him and babysitters.

So now I know that Mabel, if left with someone she likes, will be perfectly fine without me for an evening. She'll either stay up and play or watch DVDs, or she'll fall asleep where she sits. She won't be put to bed, but that's okay.

Last night, I went out as soon as she fell asleep, to drive across the city and pick up a tiny pink pedal-less bike that I'd found on Craigslist. She woke up on the dot of 40 minutes after I'd gone. B said she almost went back to sleep when he lay down with her, but then woke up insead. She was awake when I got home, but went back down easily for me.

So I think my lesson here is not so much that the children are ready for babysitters, but that I'm ready to trust that they'll be, if not asleep, fairly content with someone else at night if I'm not Right There.

At the next moms' night out, I might just stay till closing.

Blood will out

The transformation is complete. Fate is dusting off her hands in satisfaction at another one off the list, and Oscar Wilde is nodding sagely from his comfy seat at the great dinner party in the sky, because I have finally, categorically and without question, turned into my mother.

My mother and I share some physical characteristics - body type, facial features (increasingly), a disinclination to housework - but in other ways we're not very similar: I have my father's feet, eyes, and skin tone, and my paternal grandmother's hair.  My mother is a blue-eyed blonde who tans easily: I'm a wavy-haired, green-eyed, freckled brunette who prefers to say auburn. Additionally, my mum has stick-straight hair - or so she claims; she's had a perm all her life since the day she turned 16, so I can't really attest to the veracity of this, but she's adamant that nobody else in the world has hair as straight as hers. Two of my achievements that gave her the most contentment have been surpassing 5'2 and having a natural curve to my hair. (She was probably also happy when I got my degree, but I think the hair thing was more exciting for her.)

For as long as I can remember, my dad has had black and white and grey hair, except that now it's snowy white all over and the grey is confined to his somewhat impressively beetling eyebrows. He says he started going grey quite early: since his nickname in the RAF was "Badger", and that was during his compulsory military service (post-WW2 Britain) when he can't have been more than 25, I believe him. When I was 26 I remember plucking a single grey hair from my head and thinking I'd better get married pretty soon if I didn't want to have to dye the whole lot for the wedding. Since then, I've been dying it on and off and more or less, and the grey hairs they are a-marching in, but I don't think I'm quite badger-like yet, even au naturale.

Anyway, my mother almost always dyed her hair at home, at least in between perms or whatever magic it was they performed on her at the salon. When I think of this ceremony, I see her with a ratty towel around her shoulders, hair wet, a bottle of Fanci-Full hair dye on the edge of the sink, and a small bowl with a brown-bristled toothbrush completing the vista. (Fanci-Full, if you're not familiar with it, comes in a grey plastic bottle with curly pink writing on it. I believe her shade is called Frivolous Fawn, but really they're all some version of Pink Rinse and Blue Rinse and Violently Violet Rinse and Not Quite So Pink Rinse. The target market is definitely in the over-75 bracket, at least in my imagination.)

When I dye my hair, on the other hand, I use something from a box with a picture of an attractive young woman with shiny reddish-brown locks on it. It's an entirely modern and 21st-century procedure, you understand, and nothing like the Fanci-Full experience. I did it last weekend, as a matter of fact, to have my hair all nice for our upcoming holiday. But then I looked in the mirror and found I'd missed a spot at my hairline, and a few silvery threads behind my ears where my glasses had been anchored.

I'm meeting two people tomorrow I haven't seen since we all left school, more or less, so I wanted my hair, at least, to look decent. It's about the only thing I have control over - that and my toenail colour. And my eyebrows and the length of my leg hairs, I suppose. And my children. No, wait, I have no control over them, though sometimes they do let me pick out their clothes. And then they change into Halloween costumes and snowboots on 95-degree days. I digress.

So I was musing that I could mix up a tiny amount of my colour in a bowl (since I only use half a box at a time, thanks to a tip from my hairdresser) and apply it with a comb, say, just to the vital areas. A comb... or something smaller, brushier... a discarded toothbrush would be perfect...

Boom! I am my mother. Be warned. Somewhere, some day, without warning, it will come upon you too.

Spitting image

Monkey is the image of his father, in many ways. People have been telling me that ever since he was born, but it's taken me a long time to see it. (Apart from their hairlines, which were clearly similar, one coming and one going.)

As a baby, Monkey looked to me the very picture of generic baby, with no particular identifying features. When I look in the mirror myself, I have always seen two eyes neither far apart nor close together, a nose in the middle that is not button-like, and a mouth that opens and closes as directed, under some brown hair. Beyond the fact that the skin is pale and the eyes are green, I can't tell you what I look like. So of course I can't see it if my children look like me, but you'd think I would recognise my husband in them.

And yet. Finally, now, when I look at photos of baby Monkey, I can fleetingly see what they were all talking about. It's the brow, the eyes, the slightly anxious expression in the few photos where he's not grinning delightfully for the camera.

 

I've just gone through all his baby photos twice, and this is the best example I can find. Please excuse the prison-issue pyjamas and escaping foot. (He's about seven months old here.) It's all but impossible to see the boy he is now in these pictures, too; now and then I catch a glimpse of a still-familiar expression in the eyes, but his face shape is so different, now that he's a pixie-chinned imp, that it's hard to reconcile the two.

See? Can you even tell it's the same child? Or is it just me who fails to see the obvious resemblance? (I, even.) (What does it mean when I can't even tell that my own firstborn looks like himself?)


But then. There's the matter of accents. One reason I could never countenance staying in America for long enough to have children here (way back when I thought I had a choice about this sort of thing) was that they would have American accents. How could I love a child with an American accent as my own? Wouldn't they seem like little, twangy, aliens? But life works in mysterious ways, and that's not how it has turned out.

For a long time I allowed myself to believe that my children didn't have any accents. (This is exactly the same delusion that many people have about themselves, or all denizens of the place they grew up in. They think, "We [Californians/Dubliners/Glaswegians] sound totally neutral and speak pure, correct English. Everyone else sounds all funny because they're saying it wrong.") Even last summer, when I overheard some mothers in a playground in England remark of my son, "Oh, he's a little American boy," I thought they might have it wrong. English people don't really understand Irish accents, you know. (Seriously. I spent a summer waitressing in London after college, and more than once had local customers ask me if I was American.)

But yes, they do both have American accents, though an American would probably detect a twinge of other in there. Mabel still says zed (and zebbra), but Monkey is fully assimilated and goes with zee and zeebra. Luckily for me, that's about as much regional specificity as I can detect in them, so as far as I'm concerned my children are the only totally accentless English speakers on the planet.

Documenting the generation gap

There are, I think, two photos in existence of me with my grandparents. One is on my kitchen wall, in a collage of photo-album rejects, and the other is in my parents' album at home. In the first I'm about 18 months old, and in the second I'm about 4, maybe. My grandfather died when I was 7, and though my granny was hale and hearty (if increasingly petite) till I was 17, I don't think we have a lot of photos of her.

(These are my maternal grandparents I'm talking about. My father's parents both died before he even met my mother.)

I never really appreciated those photos, but now that I have my own kids, I find that one of my main aims in life is to document the times when the generation above me intersects with the one below me. I don't really know why this should be: what is it that's so fascinating about the juxtaposition of age with youth, especially when genes are shared? I don't know that these pictures will be particularly precious to my children later on - perhaps they'll just be meaningful to me as the middleman.

[I am often reminded of a quote of Nigella Lawson's (which I will have to paraphrase because I can't find it just now, but it's something like this): "When I was a child I lived in a totalitarian state run by my parents. Now I live in a totalitarian state run by my children. It is never, it seems, my turn, but maybe that's just as well." (If you're ever looking for a recipe book that's also a good read, by the way, I highly recommend Nigella, especially How to Eat.)]

So here we are with a grandmotherly visit, and I picked up the camera the other day and got a few nice shots.


Here's Mabel discussing something important with Granny K. Mabel has taken to commenting "Hmm. Interesting," when she sees something that intrigues.


And Monkey looking for hungry ducks with Granny D. We took some bread to feed the ducks at the lake, but they were all singularly uninterested. The way Monkey yelled excitedly at them to come over here at once for some delicious bread may have had something to do with the hasty retreat they kept beating.

And one from our UK trip in the summer, because I wouldn't want to leave out Grandad. Maybe at Christmas I'll manage to get one decent photo containing both my parents and both my children at once.

Visitation

Have I mentioned, by any chance, that my mother and my mother-in-law are coming to stay? Tomorrow. Simultaneously, together, and at the same time. In unison, even. Please allow me to let a small "aargh" escape my fingers, just here, between you and me.

I mean, it's a great idea and it will be fine. It's just. You know.

My mother-in-law is a seasoned traveller and was last here in May, just before we moved into the house. She saw it all newly painted and lovely (except the kitchen, which wasn't quite finished), but didn't get to stay in it. My mum, on the other hand, hasn't been here since Monkey was 18 months old, or thereabouts. This is not because she doesn't love us as much, but rather because my Dad has bad circulation so can't make the long flight, and she's nervous about travelling on her own - I think last time she got caught up in some seventh circle of customs and couldn't find the exit for a while; and she's a good bit more vague and fluffy (let's say) now than she was three years ago.

So when my husband's mother offered to bring Mum over this autumn so she could see us in situ in the new house, she jumped at the chance, and has been looking forward to it (and probably planning what to pack - she is related to me, after all) for a good five months now.

The two grannies get on very well, and my mother-in-law is actually going to head off up to Boston to see her other US-dwelling son and grandsons for the weekend, so we won't have them both here for the whole week. But it does involve a certain amount of meal planning, house cleaning, and bed arranging to be able to put them both up with the dignity they're due.

I think we'll be moving the futon (which used to be Monkey's bed) up to Mabel's room for Granny K, while Granny D (who will be here the whole time, and is after all the senior granny) gets the actual guest room. Which now has curtains on one window (yay) but not the other (boo). Mabel will sleep (with/without me) on the airbed in our room.

Daytimes will be a mixture of doing the same as usual with Granny/ies in tow - because they've both seen the sights before and honestly want to just hang out and get an idea of what we do - my mum will happily come along to the supermarket and goggle at the enormous aisle of cereal boxes or what have you - and a few nice outings, maybe to the National Arboretum and the National Harbour, both of which are close, easy, and attractive.

We've moved Mabel's car seat over to the middle, forward facing because it didn't work the other way, and Monkey's booster just fits beside it, leaving one rear seat and the front passenger seat available for a granny each. (If all six of us are going somewhere, we'll take both cars.) Mabel was concerned, when I explained this plan, that Granny would be sitting in her car seat. I haven't yet broached the fact with her that there will be two Grannies at once. I think that will be much too confusing until they're both here. (Mabel was also concerned yesterday that Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall. I had to reassure her that he was okay, despite the reported failure of every last one of the king's horses and men.)

Anyway, if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm busy being the hostess with the mostess, or alternatively escaping to hyperventilate in my room for a few minutes.