By awesome, I mean, awe inspiring. I mean that to stand at the foot of her accomplishments can do nothing but cause an individual to gasp at the sheer magnitude of her amazing and wonderful achievements. This morning I will discuss only two of these most amazing feats that my mother has had the wisdom to effect, balls and shoes. Any other outstanding feats will simply be mentioned in an offhand purely tangential manner.
I suspect that my mother had her own personal reasons for us to not wear shoes in the house or play with balls such as keeping the house somewhat cleaner and not having fragile items in the house that we could not afford to continually replace be broken every day. However, our upstairs neighbors have not yet implemented this rule. Not only does this increase the risk of broken items and dirty carpets it also artificially increases the risk that their children will be evolutionarily deselected by their downstairs neighbors. Specifically, when a shod child proceeds to wander about a 900 sq foot apartment with what sounds like a pool ball that bounces. This is one of the arguments in favor of dedicated stay at home mothers (parents, really) because curiosity is a double edged survival sword. A bland uninterested child is less likely to spread rat poison all over their face and feel jaded when anxious parents (rightly so) require them to vomit. Well, I don't really know about the relationship between curiosity and jadedness. Nevertheless, a curious child is much more likely to wonder how close to a ledge that he or she can get, how much noise can be made at 8 am on Sunday morning with a ball while wearing shoes. A vigilant parent is able rapidly identify such life threatening behavior and eliminate this.
If certain upstairs neighbors are listening to this I would like to ask you to do a few considerate things for your downstairs neighbors' sanity. Please, hog tie, gag, and suspend your children from the cieling of your apartment in order that their noise making capacity might be somewhat mitigated. Some other strategies, as outlined in the Apartment Noise Reduction Act 1995, are as follows; leave your children at grandma's and don't go back to pick them up or inform grandma of where you live, have you considered placing your children in foster care?, and boarding shool has been shown to effectively prevent neighborly headaches by reducing grouchiness and the swelling of anger.
Posted by Mendon at January 22, 2006 8:56 AMJust a note: I have a hunch Maman might balk at being referred to so blatantly in the past tense [see my blog].
Of course, now that I've said it she'll tell me exactly why she isn't offended here and was on my blog. No matter.
Posted by: Mara at January 22, 2006 10:39 AMWell, Mendon is talking about me in the past tense for things I have done in the past. Mara, I still cook. Some, not much. I finally finished making the turkey soup from our turkey dinner with Rae and Eric. Anyway, you were talking about my whole life in the past tense.
Mensch. You will have children. They will walk around with their shoes on, and even with them off, will make noise. Children are noisy. It just goes with the territory. And most apartments (in the US) are not built to keep that noise out. One reason we favored being upstairs when we rented. But I did try to keep the noise to a minimum for our neighbors. Here is an opportunity for you to resolve some conflict. The parents may not be aware of how loud it is on your heads. How can you nicely approach them and . . . well, this is where you get to figure it out.
Posted by: Ma at January 22, 2006 11:01 AMI did not eat the rat poison. I did not eat it. I told Papa I didn't eat it, but he didn't believe me.
It was totally unfair for Mommy and Daddy to make me throw up. I didn't feel bad until they were making me throw up and I lost my candy, which was heartbreaking. I can still remember Daddy giving me the candy. Usually, he didn't give me candy, and it was so nice for him to give it to me and it was brown and I think it tasted like root beer and then I went upstairs and I knew I shouldn't eat the rat poison because Daddy told me not to eat it and I did what I was told and nobody told me not to play in it and it was so pretty and blue and shiny and then my hands got sticky because it was oatmeal mixed with rat poison and then I needed to wipe my hands and my face was just convenient.
I didn't eat any.
And then Mommy gave me syrup of ipecac and it was so horrible, so horrible, and they asked me over and over again: "Did you eat any? Did you eat any of the blue stuff?" and I knew it was bad for me and that's why they told me not to eat any and that's why I didn't. But it didn't matter. No matter how many times I told them I didn't eat any, they didn't believe me. It didn't matter if I'd been good or not, only what they believed.
It was horrible. It is still, to this day, the single worst memory I have.
Maman and Papa, I love you both and I want you to understand that. I'd probably do the same if I had a three year old who I'd found playing in rat poison. If it comforts you any, I vaguely remember thinking that if I wiped my hands near my mouth that you might think I'd eaten some and this strange malevolance took hold of me and made me think that this might be funny or clever, the same feeling that made me want to play with the wild horses near the sewer out in front of the house or stick thistles up the cow's butt or tend sheep at five in the morning in my slippers or climb underneath the combine harvester when I knew that the harvester would drive off with combine up and I'd be fine but that you'd feel scared if you saw it. I knew I was being bad, but not really bad. Just sort of fake bad.
Anyway, I still remember that brown candy, half digested, coming up from my tiny stomach in the tub at Waterbury Lane, and just thinking it was so unfair, that my Daddy gave that to me, that it was mine, and that it was so cruel that a sign of his love was taken from me because he didn't believe me when I was telling the truth.
Posted by: Nathan Dornbrook at January 22, 2006 8:07 PMAnd we wonder why Nathan is such a raging atheist to the point of ill logic. Freudian's and Neo-Freudians and Object-Relations theorists would suggest that Nathan's early relationships modeled his later development of his relationship with God. This probably isn't so far from the truth. It seems more likely that the repetetive questioning of Nathan established the traumatic experience. The whole memory itself is similar to that related by trauma survivors. In Nathan's case he was a helpless child. Despite the well-meaning of his parents, understanding motives later does not alleviate the suffering of trauma nor the accompanying shattering of beliefs and understandings about the world and the self. What happened was perceived as a violation because his only strngth as a small child was that he expected his parents to believe him and act in his best interest and not only did they not do so they repetitively emphasized the point that they did not believe him by continuing to question him.
Furthermore, Nathan had received a reward or a present which, for small children, is an affirmation of who they are. A gift to a small child informs them that they are good and well liked. Arbitrary punishment and rapid destructurization of an established social order is very confusing to small children because they are only just beginning to understand the basic workings of that system. In other words, what Nathan reports, is a fundamental shattering of his understanding of the world as a place where love, intimacy, fairness, and justice are possible.
I love you Nathan. I love you Maman and Papa. I mostly want to give you all a hug and forget the qualtitative perspective that I just shared with you. The world is too full of misunderstandings to worry about what anything means (and by the way Nae, I have no freakin' idea if this is actually the case for you, everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer). Essentially, the psychology that I am studying openly admits that emotionally supportive non-trained stay at home mothers are equally effective in helping anyone overcome their problems. Therapy has a better cure rate than meds because most people just have a bad situation and need a friend who actually cares about them.
Posted by: Mendon at January 22, 2006 11:59 PMI fully commit to making any child of mine who looks like they MIGHT have eaten rat poison vomit. Maybe I won't ask them whether they ate any, because that will be irrelevant. If it looks like they might have, I will make them vomit.
Posted by: Mara at January 23, 2006 1:03 AMOnce Nathan vomited, I knew he hadn't eaten the oatmeal. I just wanted to be on the safe side. But the plane was already on the way. And it was at Hill Cove, not Waterbury. That was Lakewood.
Posted by: MA at January 23, 2006 8:53 AM