Duck And Rabbit

Let me ask you a question, and please mull this over for a minute. Do you consider yourself to be a good person? I mean, I know you probably aren’t a conniving super-villain, petting your white fluffy cat in a black armchair somewhere, but are you good?

What is it that makes a person “good”? Are these some adjectives that spring to mind? Kind, generous, helpful, honest, selfless, ethical, thoughtful, lovely, or virtuous? And be honest, would you pick any of those to describe yourself?

If you had asked me if I wanted kids, at the age of 19, the answer would have been a big hell no. By 25, it had morphed to a yes, but in the far future. By 30, I was as mentally prepared as I’d ever be, and by 33 I’d given birth to my only child. (Who is quite unbelievably now 5.)

At NO time during any of those years would I have said that I wanted to be a stay-at-home mum. A SAHM. Ugh. Bad job title, no interest, no thank you. And yet, here I am, tapping away at my “mom blog”, folding little pants whilst stirring a bubbling pot on the stove. Sometimes the train of your life’s plans gets pretty thoroughly derailed, or at least shunted off onto a siding for a good long while. So no, I didn’t set out to be doing this with my days, but I accept and embrace with all the grace I can muster that this is where I am.

Like all the other neglected kids of the 70’s, I grew up glued to the TV for Saturday morning cartoons, getting my impressionable little brain blasted with ads for toys, sugary cereal and candy, in between episodes of The Smurfs and Menudo videos.

The jingles of my childhood are still rolling around in said brain, while other, much more important information consistently gets deleted. It’s highly irritating to remember all the words to the Big Red song and yet have difficulty committing a new phone number to memory.

My kiddo has been sporting orange nail polish off and on for the last couple of weeks. The reactions of the general public have ranged from: meh, to how cute, to downright horror.

Bean’s likes and interests are pretty firmly in the “boys” camp. Spider-Man, other super-heroes, blowing things up with explosive accompanying noises, Star Wars, pirates. He is covered in bruises from leaping off of furniture in high-speed reenactments of Kung-Fu Panda scenes. You get the picture. Playing Calico Critters with him has always inwardly annoyed me because he wants things to blow up and then flies the critters away on jet-packs. And I just want the kitties to sit down and have a nice piece of toast and marmalade. I don’t even know how he learned about jet-packs.

Almost every day, my four-year-old son comes up with some elaborate schematic for a machine he would like to build or project he has in mind. He wants his mum to help him make his vision a reality. He then becomes irate or choked with tears when I cannot make whatever it is “real.”

One of the most beautiful qualities of small children is their absolute faith that their parents are master engineers or rocket scientists, when in fact they almost failed Grade 10 Science. I love that Bean thinks I could ever, in this current incarnation, build a robot out of odds and ends we have lying around the house. But it’s also super frustrating to get him to understand why it is not physically possible, as he screams at me in rage.

Kids come with a lot of stuff. First-time parents believe, whole-heartedly, that precious Baby needs every new bouncy chair, ergonomic carrier, organic rubber squeaky giraffe and all-natural baby balm that hits the market. And so we frantically stock up on these items, reading Amazon reviews and weighing the pros and cons of disposable diapers vs. cloth.

The result is a veritable stuff explosion. By this I mean, like a bomb that goes off in your previously pristine adult abode. Half of this plastic junk is designed for large suburban homes, not narrow urban Victorians - so of course you have to sell the coffee table to make room for the Exersaucer. True story.

Ah, Fall.

The ice-cream-eating and jumping-in-lakes of summer are a distant memory now. Fall is Back to School, and beginning new projects, it’s crunchy coloured leaves. It’s shorter days. It’s tweed sweaters and running through an apple orchard with a golden retriever. It’s turkey, pumpkin pie and decorative gourds.

If Fall were an ex-boyfriend he’d be a bookish sort in glasses. He’s got elbow patches on his cardigan and prefers to be known by his proper name, Autumn. Whereas Summer is a tanned surfer dude that’s all like, Whoa. And then he takes off on his jet-ski.