The world is full of zanies and fools

Friday night, I drove to Camera City to see Drama Niece in a school play. She goes to a special school for the arts, and they take their plays very seriously. That means gorgeous costumes and set designs. It also means that they tend to actually stick to the script, which is most unfortunate, because they were performing Cinderella and the script could seriously use some tweaking to bring it up to date.

I couldn’t help but think of the changes I would have made if I were in charge of the play. For instance, when the king and queen were fretting over their son, wondering how they could find him a woman, planning the ball as a ritual of heterosexual pairing, I so wanted the Prince to walk in and announce that he was gay.

If I were Cinderella and I was trying to seduce a man, I think I would stick with the peasant outfit she wore in the first scene, with its tight-fitting bodice that showed the shape of her breasts, the lowcut white peasant blouse, and the brown skirt that kept hiking up to show bare nicely shaped legs. I mean, that whole outfit was just way sexier than the puffy princess dress, with all the frills, the heavy make-up, and her hair pulled severely back. That godmother sure as hell didn’t do her any favors.

The fairy godmother's dress was beautiful, pink and glittery, but she must get tired of always smiling sweetly. Even a fairy godmother ought to be able to have a bad day once in a while and throw a few lightning bolts around just for the heck of it, or tell the annoying whining Cinderella to fuck off. It is hard to believe that a woman would have all kinds of amazing magical powers and then use them simply to conjure up another princess costume.

Of course, I blame Cinderella for that. I mean, if you were a poor peasant girl and you had just one wish, would you use it to turn a plain yellow pumpkin into a golden carriage? Maybe she should have asked for college tuition instead.

The one good part of the play was that that it was not totally sexist. I mean, the male characters were pathetic too. The prince, who was not charming in the least and had not a single line that revealed any sort of intelligence, curiosity, or wit, had this pathetic scene in which he says he will never be complete unless he finds a woman. Specifically, he needed the woman in the princess costume he had known for ten minutes. It was all I could do not to leap from the audience screaming, "Honey, you need therapy!"

Of all the myths about romantic love that I detest, this idea that a person is incomplete without a spouse is perhaps the one I despise the most. Who would want to marry a pathetic Prince who thinks he is incomplete without a woman? Especially an arrogant Prince who just assumes that every woman would want to marry him. Who would want to marry the peasant woman who thinks her only route to happiness is to marry Old Money? Especially one who is as mild and meek as a mouse. Ugh. Fuck. I mean, fol-de rol and fiddle dee dee.

I think the fairy godmother was completely irresponsible. She not only listened to Cinderella’s pathetic plan to go to the ball, but went along with the plan. I would have had more respect for the fairy godmother if she’d slapped Cinderella upside the head. And clearly the king and queen should have swallowed their royal pride and sent the son to therapy before listening to one more sappy song about how he was lying in the loneliness of evening. Clearly, the prince needs to figure out who he is, and become complete and confident, a whole person himself, before he is ready for marriage. Sheesh.

The part with the glass slipper has never made any sense anyhow. We are expected to believe that Cinderella's feet are such an unusual size that no other woman in the entire kingdom could wear her shoes? Yeah, that is attractive. I thought the way to update that scene would be to make the item of clothing she left behind a bra. I mean, we all know that getting a bra to fit correctly is indeed difficult. And that would explain what the two were doing on the balcony during the musical interlude. If she'd left a bra behind at midnight, Prince's panting pursuit of her would make a bit more sense. The scene where all the village girls line up to be fitted, eagerly thrusting their bare feet at the royal guard, would be far livelier if it were a bra they were trying on. And unusually sized breasts seem somehow more appealing than unusually sized feet.

In the end, I guess I just had a hard time rallying enthusiasm for a heroine who acts the part of the helpless woman, sitting alone in her own little corner in her own little chair, waiting for a fairy godmother or rich man to rescue her. The only person in the whole damned play that I could admire was the evil stepmother. Okay, maybe she was a little bossy, but at least she had personality.

Recycling the love

Tonight's Christmas party will be with friends we've known for years. We gather at someone's house, everyone bringing food. One of the traditions for this party is the recycled gift exchange. To participate in the gift exchange, you take something from your house that you don't want any more – that ice bucket you got for your wedding, that weird clock your aunt gave you, that ugly mug you've always hated – and wrap it up. At the party, we draw numbers from a hat, and open gifts in turn. When it's your turn, you get to choose a gift from the pile and open it, or steal a gift from someone else. Some of the gifts are actually nice, but most are simply funny, and always people start fighting over some ridiculous item. Eventually, after a great deal of joking around, everyone ends up with something to bring home, although the couple who host the party always claim that they see people shoving unwanted gifts under the couch. I am looking around the house right now to see what we can bring this year.

Pa rum pa pum pum

I figured that holiday music was going to be the Friday meme this week, so here I offer you our drummer boy. If you notice, he is not merely playing the drums, he is studying the music carefully and practicing to get the rhythms exactly right. Boy in Black is the kind of kid who gets everything exactly right.

I remember the day that Boy in Black, who was a scrawny little kid at the time, decided to learn how to ride a bike. We didn’t have training wheels or anything like that, but we did have a small bike we’d picked up at a garage sale. Without help from anyone, Boy in Black took the bike out on my parents’ driveway and practiced going up and down, over and over again, his face red with exertion and his t-shirt soaked with sweat. By the end of the afternoon, he knew how to ride a bike.

Boy in Black is the most focused person I have ever met. When he begins a homework project, an essay for AP English or a lab for AP Physics, he begins at the beginning and does not stop until he is finished. And he is persistent, if nothing else. You will notice that he is still wearing the concert wristband that he got on September 24th. I think that might be his proudest accomplishment to date.

Stress relief

Every year, sandwiched in between the last day of classes and the first day of finals, we get an extra day. I think the administration calls this a reading day, but students think of it as stress relief day, a day to do crazy things to relieve the stress of the semester before beginning those final papers and studying for those final exams. We have a student group who plans activities for this day, and often other student groups will join in with fund-raisers for worthwhile causes.

One year students could pay money to throw a pie plate of whipped cream at a professor.

Naturally, students coerced me into participating. I'd like to think that they extended me the invitation because they think I’m a good sport, but I think it's more likely they chose the faculty member who could be counted on to wear jeans and an old sweatshirt to campus that day. Determined not to face the plates of whipped cream alone, I dragged my colleague PoetFriend from his office and made him come with me.

I thought the students might hesitate to toss whipped cream at the person who would be grading their portfolios but I could not have been more wrong. Within minutes, both PoetFriend and I were covered from head to toe with whipped cream. I had so much whipped cream in my hair that I could pull it up and arrange it into all kinds of weird sculptures on my head. Since I never wear my hair pulled up, students kept stopping to comment on the hairstyle. "Hey, your hair looks nice like that," they would say sincerely, before winging another plate of white stuff right at me.

Because a photographer from a local news station showed up at the event, many of the suits from the administration appeared, although they hung near the edge of the room, not wanting to get any whipped cream onto their clothes. Covered by then with layers and swirls of sticky whiteness, I kept walking over and threatening to hug people -- many of them people who do not normally get a friendly hug from me -- and they kept backing away nervously. It was such a feeling of power.

My students love whipped cream fights, snowball wars, dunking booths, water fights -- anything that is messy and fun, and gives them a chance to work off some of their pent-up stress. I admit that I love this kind of thing too. Up at camp in the summer, my extended family sometimes gets into playful battles in which we hurl water, mud, and weeds at each other. I am quite good at balancing on an inner tube while tossing a handful of weeds and muck at someone. Always, that kind of energy release feels good. I think we could all use more mudfights in our lives.

Winter morning

On winter mornings, the house is still dark and cold when the alarm clock rings. Spouse wakes up the kids, or at least tries to wake them up by calling their names in a series that gets more and more urgent, and then goes to the kitchen to put water on the stove for cocoa and tea. I'll drag myself out of the warm bed and stumble downstairs, pretending to be awake and cheerful, but not fooling anyone. Spouse has long been in charge of getting everyone up and out of the house in the morning; I am not to be relied upon at that hour of the day.

Always, one of the cats is at the back door, wanting to come in or go out. When I slide open the big glass door, the fresh cold air will hit my face and breeze right through my cotton shirt, waking me up, no matter how tired I am. Later in the day, sunlight will make the snow sparkle, and sunlight will fill my living room, creating patches of warmth for humans and cats. But early in the morning, the outside world glows with blue light, and the woods behind my house are a dark silhouette.

Deck the halls and dim the lights

Every year right before the holidays, I look around the house and think – gee, I should do some cleaning before we start having lots of company over. Even though the color of our carpeting, bought purposely to match mud, chocolate, and cat barf, does hide most stains, it would probably be a good idea to rent one of those carpet cleaner things. And the light-coloured walls are covered with fingerprints and scuff marks and all kinds of dents: I really should get out the paint and do some touch ups. Spouse will look at the walls and say things like, "Maybe we shouldn’t let the kids rollerblade in the house," but in our climate, thoughts like that are patently ridiculous. It is true that the wild games of Monster do take their toll on the interior of a house. I suppose I could wash or paint the white windowsills, too, to make them look more respectable.

Since Spouse will be at work and the kids at school next week, getting help from them is not an option. No, it will be all up to me, the person home with a stack of portfolios to grade. For a brief moment, I contemplate doing the work, with a fantasy in which I become Super Woman, able to tackle household chores in a single bound. After all, compared to grading papers, chores like painting and carpet cleaning sound like fun.

But then I remember the time-honored solution, the fastest way to make our house look nice for a holiday party: dim lighting. It's so much easier than cleaning. The windows of our house have deep sills, perfect for candles. A fire in the fireplace will light up one corner of the room and the old-fashioned coloured bulbs on the tree will light up the other. We have a red light bulb that fits into the lamp on the piano. And I will sometimes drape little white Christmas lights above the cupboards in the kitchen area to make it light enough while I am preparing food.

This solution is not without its drawbacks. When my house is crowded with people -- many of them women with long, silky hair -- all those candles can be dangerous. Blonde Niece was happily talking one year, gesturing with her hands, her hair swishing about, in the animated way that is characteristic of the women in my family, when someone noticed that her silky hair was brushing right through the flames of the candles behind her. Luckily, the smell of burning hair is strong enough that we usually stop those fires before they spread far.

Despite the risks, I love the look of candles burning steadily in the big dark windows that mirror back tiny flames. The smell of beeswax candles mixes nicely with the scent of freshly cut spruce, the spicey smell of veggie chili, and the sweet smell of cider mulling on the stove. Since we live in the country, we never pull the curtains shut, and anyone driving up to my home or walking up the long driveway through the snowbanks can see the candles burning in every window. I love the intimate light of a night time party, with friends and family standing in little clusters to talk and laugh, eating bowls of chili and drinking glasses of punch, with candlelight and firelight flickering over the whole scene, the soft colours of the Christmas lights glinting from the pine tree in the bay window.

Time to nap

Something happens this time of year, when days are short, the snow is deep, and the cold creeps in under the door. Everyone in my family begins to hibernate. Walk around my house on a Sunday afternoon, and you will find sleeping bodies strewn about everywhere. With-a-Why might be sprawled on the floor, face down, right in the middle of the room. FirstExtra likes to sleep in the comfy chair. Boy in Black takes a spot near the fire. Shaggy Hair Boy will roll up in a blanket so that you cannot even see him and slide under a piece of furniture. CoolKid always sleeps with a beach towel. And Skater Boy sometimes falls asleep sitting up, as if he never really intended to take a nap.

When my children were little, no power on earth could convince them to take naps, but now that they are teenagers and stay up all night playing poker, hurling pennies at each other, playing "Name that Tune" with the iPod, or duct taping strange objects to broomsticks, they love to nap. Here on the couch in our living room, Blonde Niece is sleeping.

Polar Bear in person

A snowstorm Friday night dumped about a foot of snow onto my front lawn, making it seem like winter at last. My gang of teenagers have been at work already with snow shovels, building a snow ramp in front of the house. A bad cold kept me home for the last three days, drinking hot tea and moping about the house in my most comfy clothes, brown fleece pants with a brown fleece hoodie. The next month will bring a surge of activity: many Christmas parties, several holiday concerts, and a constant stream of friends and relatives stopping by. So this weekend was the moment of calm before the holiday busyness of cooking and cleaning begins.

Saturday afternoon, I did leave the comfort of my warm house to venture to a small cafe in Snowstorm City to meet a blogger who was driving through. Even a bad cold could not make me miss the chance to meet someone whose writes so beautifully: PPB! We only had an hour to talk but it was just wonderful to see her in person and discover that she is just as warm and friendly and sparkly as she seems on her blog. I kept looking out the window hopefully for a storm that might snow her in. My family would have been thrilled if I had brought home an unexpected guest, but to my disappointment, the roads stayed dry and she was soon back on the highway.

One of the interesting things about meeting another blogger is that at first your conversation is simply filled with pseudonyms. I realized after a moment that it was ridiculous to be calling the city Snowstorm City; after all, she had read the real name of the city on the sign when she got off the highway. And I tend to switch back and forth between real names and pseudonyms when I talk about my own kids. It's a bit like being bilingual and having two words for everything.

Otherwise, though, I have to say that the most strange thing about a blogger meet-up is that it doesn't feel strange at all. Sitting and talking to PPB felt completely normal and comfortable. Her warm energy was just what I needed to brighten my cold winter weekend. Next time I will make sure she gets snowed in and has to stay for a week.

Freedom

The other day, I needed to leave the house to go pick up Boy in Black and Shaggy Hair Boy over at the high school. I yelled for With-a-Why and Neighbor Girl to get their coats and shoes on. With-a-Why looked at me and said, "I’m eleven now. I can babysit Neighbor Girl." That is when the realization hit me.

None of my children need babysitters any more.

I have been a parent for nineteen years. I have four children. I have a full-time job. When my children were small, Spouse worked a corporate job with very long hours and a rigid schedule. (He has since quit that job.) Like most academics married to non-academics, I shouldered the responsibility of childcare. So for the last nineteen years, every single time I've left the house, I've had to stop and figure out who was going to be watching my children. Every. Single. Time.

Not one of my four kids has ever been in any type of formal day care. Where I live, daycare options are fulltime, and you have to pay for 50 hours each week even if you don't need that much daycare. When my kids were small and I was teaching as an adjunct and editing for a non-profit, daycare would have cost far more than I was getting paid. So instead I've relied on family, friends, and neighbors.

I've brought children to class with me more times than I can count. I've carried a baby in a sling to meetings. I've memorized the locations of all the vending machines on campus so that I could bribe my kids into good behavior by giving them quarters. I've changed diapers in conference rooms. I've carried crayons and post-it notes in my teaching bag so that my kids could entertain themselves quietly. I've run meetings while breastfeeding a child.

None of my children need babysitters any more.

I've spent hours and hours on the telephone making arrangments for family members to babysit or pick up my kids. I've called my mother at 6:30 am to convince her to take a child who was vomiting. I spent years pumping breast milk so that I would always have bottles in the freezer to give to my mother or sister while they watched my child. I've carried a baby in a sling all day long at national conferences, nursing the baby during sessions. I've bribed committee chairs to schedule meetings that worked with my children’s schedules.

I used to drive all the way down to the valley to leave my two youngest kids with my sister in the days when she lived thirty minutes away. I have deliberately chosen to teach 8 am classes because the time slot worked with my kids' schedules.

I've spend very little time at my office on campus. I have always graded papers at home, done my reading at home, and planned my classes at home – in the midst of a chaotic noisy household. I've written conference presentations, book reviews, and poems while simultaneously caring for a houseful of children.

None of my children need babysitters any more.

I no longer have to call my friends and make rash promises about how well-behaved my children will be if they take them for the day. I can drive to the store to buy a ream of paper without strapping children into seatbelts or getting a struggling toddler into a car seat. I no longer have to make desperate phone calls when a virus or cold goes through the family.

None of my children need babysitters any more.

I thought this day would never come.

Holiday music

Bloggers have been complaining about listening to Christmas music at the mall or in any store they go in. Perhaps it is that I just don't get to the store very often or that I am oblivious, but I haven't really noticed this phenomenon. My own home, on the other hand, has been filled with Christmas music lately.

My son With-a-Why has been practicing like crazy this week. I think he wants to surprise his sister with some music when she comes home. The first song I keep hearing is a piece that his piano teacher chose for him, the Ukrainian Bell Carol. I find this music very soothing while I am grading papers, or procrastinating grading papers by staring mindlessly out the window at the snow-covered woods behind my house. The other thing I keep hearing is music that he picked out, music that his older siblings are helping him learn. It's the score to A Charlie Brown Christmas arranged by Vince Guaraldi. The piece that With-a-Why especially loves, and plays over and over again, is the piece that Schroeder plays on his piano that causes the whole Peanuts gang to dance like crazy. I admit that I never get tired of hearing it.

When With-a-Why gets home from school, he walks over to the piano and starts playing without even sitting down or taking his coat off. Neighbor Girl, who is younger and gets off the bus with him because her parents are both at work, stands at his elbow and gazes at him with adoration.

Of course, I have also to listen to Boy in Black's constant drum practice. If you are imagining something like the music the Little Drummer Boy plays for Baby Jesus, think again. He's got not some little tiny soft drum but a full set. And he plays them about ten feet away from the desk where I am grading papers. He does have SoundOff pads but he doesn't like to use them.

Yesterday, he told me his drum teacher recommended that he buy some ear protection.

"Like the kind of ear muffs your grandfather wears when he uses his chainsaw?" I asked.

"Yes. Exactly."

"What about the rest of us in the household?" I asked.

He paused. "Well, you can buy as many pairs as you like."