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A Spoonful of Sugar

We collect Turn Of The Last Century children’s activity books, and some of the activities – taxidermy, anyone? – are a bit questionable now, while some of them – making candy and kites, “nutting parties” – are sadly rather lost. And that’s the way time goes, I guess, sweetness getting left behind along with all of the long-gone horrors. You can still do these things with your kids, but there’s an odd-element of playacting as you do, since we can only raise our children in the time we’re living in now…. I mean, I could wear a corset and a Victorian gown as day-wear but I don’t, and my children would look at me equally strangely were I to suggest we take up our baskets and gather nuts in the woods.  Time passes and we change.

I read a quote a few days ago that said, more or less, that anyone born after 1914 would never know what a truly happy childhood was. – which I think is hogwash, really. One great-great grandmother in our family tree lost three of her four children in a week to some illness that children are now immunized against, and I think that she would likely have much rather have raised her children now. But that’s talking about mothers and not children, I guess.

The Baby seems to be having a happy enough childhood so far, but lately her siblings seem just miserable. Perhaps in our house it’s still 1909 or whatever the Magical Happy Childhood Year was, but step outside and it’s 2009 and they must deal with it. There’s nothing quite as misery-inducing as having unhappy kids, I find. And then there’s the medicine – The Girl alone takes four different kinds in the morning, some for her poorly-controlled asthma (speaking of stress, there’s that) and another for her anaemia and a fourth odd vitamin mixture that her doctor insisted on, and the medicine tastes awful and it’s just a horrible way to start her day, although she doesn’t complain.

“You need to make dessert more often,” The Girl’s doctor said at her last visit, which made me crack up. At MY last visit, the doctor told me that I should eat dessert far less frequently than I do, so apparently I’m going to be sentenced to a tragic fate – making custards and bread puddings and puddings and cakes that are never destined to be eaten by me. But I’m not the one who weighs 50 meagre pounds and so ever since, I’ve been making eggy, milky, buttery desserts in the kitchen – and eating celery. In fact, this dessert is bubbling away in the slow cooker right now, getting ready for a rapturous response this evening after supper.

“You should be glad you live now,” the doctor told me. “One hundred years ago, she’s just the sort of child who would have had tuberculosis.” 

And with that, the image of long-ago nutting parties comes to my mind, autumn woods filled with laughing children carrying baskets and the aching spaces where some of the children should have been, a time that would be remembered – by those who survived – as happy.

At Least He's Smiling

 

So we threw a birthday party for our middle kid this weekend and even though our birthday parties are reasonably modest affairs, at one point during the post-party lull, my husband added up the tab and we both just about fainted. But it was WORTH it, even though we've spent our grocery money for the next two weeks and will have to live on the canned stuff deemed unworthy in other, wealthier weeks. What is having dusty bamboo shoots for dinner compared to the joy of one's child?

My husband made that awesome Spongebob cake, of course. "I want to eat his fingers!" one of the guests said, yearningly. After the party, all that was left were Spongebob's feet. The Spongebob pinata also had a distressing fate - it had ribbons trailing from Spongebob's seat that supposedly would create a cascade of candy and junky toys when pulled, but instead resulted in a big fat nothing. So my husband went off in search of some sturdy scissors to do pinata surgery and while he was gone, the kids snapped off the pinata's arms and legs and started hitting Spongebob wildly with his own limbs, which sounds JUST like a scene in Lord of the Flies. My husband bravely waded into the sea of shrieking, flailing kids and lifted the pinata over their heads, thus ending the carnage.

I suspect this will be one of The Boy's last full-fledged birthday parties - already, several little boys sat out of some of the games, too cool to want to participate. Next year might see us just taking The Boy and a friend out to the movies, maybe, which is bittersweet in a way but also comes with a substantially lower risk of me getting hit in the head with a papier-mache leg. And just like that - whoosh - another part of childhood is over.

It happens fast, childhood and things ending. Later today, The Baby and I are going to a pre-kindergarten open house at the school, and even as she's blithely playing with play dough beside me right now, another huge part of childhood is quietly ending and it's poignant and somewhat rough on me, truthfully. But time does its job and my job is to be tough about it, I guess.

The Girl spent Saturday night at a sleepover and came home groggy and completely irritable and I made our St. Brigid's Day bread in the kitchen rather amused by her sullen crabbing. What is fun about parenthood is the way that kids stay so much the same, even as they get older - her personality now is very much her personality at ten months old, the way she can't handle being tired, her kind heart, a certain wary watchfulness in her - all of this is known to me and I can picture her easily as an adult, as a mother to her own children, the way she will both change and remain at once her true self, this person she has always been.

Today is Groundhog's Day - or Candlemas - and we're due for more winter, which doesn't surprise me. "Are you making manicotti tonight?" The Girl called out to me as she left this morning, and when I called back that I was, she and The Boy hurrahed and rushed off. And then The Baby and I went back inside, back into our house where the decorations from the weekend's birthday party - one of the last, maybe - were still hanging festively, celebrating time that has already passed and moved on.

Things That Sometimes Happen

So something very bad almost happened to us last night.

We were at my parent's house for dinner, and I was sitting beside The Girl. My husband had little kid duty and I was squabbling with my dad and taking an extra-large helping of mashed turnips - seriously, they're delicious - when The Girl decided that the food was moving around the table too slowly and upended a LARGE bowl  of gravy (still steaming from the stove) onto herself - her arms, her torso, her legs.

She started screaming, and I yanked her to her feet and pulled her sodden, burning clothes off of her - time slowed to an agonizing crawl as her damp clothes stuck to her and I had to make the instant (and AWFUL) decision about what to take off first. Shirt? Pants? "Protect her torso" something in me said, and I told her to pull off her burning sweater while I yanked off her pants and tights and by the time I got her heavy sweater off ("It hurt so much I couldn't think," she told me later.) she was - at first glance - obviously burned on her arm and chest. I ran her burns under cold water while still keeping a calm eye on how badly burned she was - would she need an ambulance? was someone calling 911?

She is pretty much totally okay - she even insisted on finishing her supper last night - and she headed off to school today with big plans to show everyone in class her gaudy wrist for show and tell in the morning (or whatever they call "show and tell" in grade four. "Discussing Our Upcoming Puberty And Our Transformer Collections", perhaps.). And as for me, it wasn't until it was very obvious that she only had one burn - on her wrist - and that it was only a first degree burn that I was able to start crying myself. BECAUSE THAT WAS REALLY REALLY TRAUMATIZING. I mean, the only burns I was expecting this week were going to be on me tonight when I make my yearly eggrolls and get my annual Chinese New Year burns, which goes to show that you really can't plan these things, I guess.

I often think that the best thing that ever, ever could have possibly happened to me as a parent was my coming so close to dying that time I was so sick - although I certainly didn't enjoy it, it DID show me with a desperate clarity that my children, my husband are the only things in my whole life that really matter to me - that everything else was utterly trivial compared to them. And this might sound extreme, but I still remember the piercing terror that I felt when it looked like I was going to die - not a terror for me, but an animal terror for my children that they would be without a mother. That has stuck with me, and although I'm still not some patient Zen mother now, I'm more patient, more content, but I'm also deeply scarred in a way that's hard to explain.

We've been trying to eat healthier - more whole wheat (well, not The Baby), fewer cookies - but I'm throwing that out the window tonight and making these cookies, timing them so that they'll be still warm from the oven when my kids get home from school tonight. "I am glad you're my kid," the cookies will say (in cookie language), I hope, this gift I give them from my hands.

Speaking of my hands - at bedtime, I realized that my hands hurt and that is how I discovered for the first time that they were spotted with scarlet burns. I'd burned myself quite badly helping my child escape from being seriously burned and I hadn't even noticed until hours later, in the sudden panic and the later monitoring and the slow waves of relief.  My hands ache today, sore in their wounded places, and I think that later on they will scar - these marks that motherhood leave, the scars you never think you'll have.