Ironic Mom

This parenting thing baffles me. Generally I’m so lost in a labyrinth of fuzz that I don’t even bother to think about it. But today, I’ll wander back in.

A recent MRI of my brain (post-childbirth). Yes, my head is rectangular.

In many ways, I don’t have high expectations for my twins. I don’t expect (or want) them to be the top of the class, famous actors, or even Olympic athletes, although I have fleeting moments when I feel like pushing them down an icy luge track, with or without the sled. More than anything I want them to be normal, or (do I dare say it?) average.

This won't be one of my kids, unless I lose it and push them down the track

I think my own perfectionist tendencies fell off the cliff when I was pregnant. It was not an easy pregnancy – two bouts of mandatory bedrest in a foreign country, far from my own mom. After the first crisis (bleeding at nine weeks), I panicked. When our Thai doctor did the scan, I just wanted him to say the word “normal.” Or, as he said in his accented English, “Nor-MAALL” (to get the approximate punctuation, it rhymes with “Sore-GAL”).

Every appointment from that point on, I would come armed with a paranoid woman’s list of concerns and he would gratefully answer, “Nor-MAALL, completely Nor-MAALL”.

Later, my husband would imitate me, “Doctor, I’ve grown a third eye and there are mushrooms sprouting from my ears.” “No worries,” my husband would continue his impression, “it’s Nor-MAALL.”

It was then, during those stressful months, that my husband and I hung up our Going-for-Gold armchair parenting mentality and switched to something more lackluster. We weren’t planning to Own the Podium; we were hoping to cross the finish line.

Thankfully, we did. William and Vivian were born with Apgar scores that were good enough.

Now, nearly six years later, I still try to retain this Ode to Nor-MAALL. It’s hard, though. The current parenting culture seems to pressure parents to schedule their kids with activities that would rival the agenda of a CEO. It’s confusing, though, because in striving for Nor-MAALL I don’t want to raise underachieving kids who don’t have the confidence to push themselves.

What do you think? How hard do you push your children?

There are stories that become part of a family’s lore. These are the stories that are pulled out at dinner parties like an old, time-tested joke. Even if people know the punchline, it’s a guaranteed laugh.

The story of my husband taking our five-week-old twins for a stroll in our Bangkok neighbourhood may be one such story. I wasn’t present, but somehow it’s become my story too.

*             *             *

August 2004 — To give me an hour alone in our apartment, my husband decides to take our twins out in the stroller. After he ferries them down in an elevator smaller than our refrigerator, he deposits Thing 1 and Thing 2 into the limousine stroller (which is too long to fit in the elevator).

It is important to note that Bangkok is not stroller – or wheelchair – accessible; it’s barely even pedestrian accessible. If you’re on a fairly quiet street (relative to Bangkok traffic, that is), you push the stroller on the actual street. If you’re on a busy street, you brave the sidewalk and steer around street stall vendors and over two-foot curbs.

On this fateful day, my husband opted for the middle-of-the-road approach, literally.

Deep-Fried Duck, anyone?

So they’re off, bypassing the Chinese-duck-soup woman, the fruit guy, the truck with the squawky loud speaker selling vegetables, the traffic, the elevated sewer grates. You get the idea. It’s mid afternoon which means, like most other times of the day, the sun is relentless and the air is heavy. Breathing can cause you to perspire. If you do the push-the-twins-in-a-stroller obstacle course, a full-scale tourist sweat is guaranteed.

Now my husband is generously proportioned. Plus, he’s in Thailand. To put this in context, I generally wear a medium shirt at any Gap. Plop me in Thailand and I can’t even fit into an XXL top from any Bangkok department store. So, my husband, being big, is supersized in Thailand. This is our fifth year in Bangkok, and –nice as the Thais ares — we’re both more than a little sick of looking out of place.

It’s minute forty of the stroll. My husband’s dodging another tuk tuk and turning the corner, which is as easy as trying to steer an overloaded supermarket cart that has two locked wheels. His shirt is stuck to his back, he’s squinting in the sun, and he’s trying to ignore the jingle of the ice cream bike that’s never quite out of hearing distance.

He’s approaching the motorcycle taxi drivers. On this corner, there’s about twelve of them, outfitted in matching vests, joking with each other, playing the odd game of checkers with bottle caps. They’re doing what they do: entertaining each other while waiting for customers.

Bangkok Motorcycle Taxi Drivers

Smiles on, they watch as my husband heaves the twins past them. They look at the stroller, and chat to each other in Thai.

Then, as my husband trudges further along, one says, “Hey, farang! Fat!”

My husband pauses. He knows farang means foreigner. And he’s sick of the fat jokes.

“Ya,” chimes another, “fat!”

My husband stops and looks back. “What did you say?”

“Fat!” one repeats.

My husband yells obscenities at them. I would exceed the word limit of this blog if I bothered to list them all.

He takes a short cut home.

Later that day, we share the story with a Thai friend. She proceeds to tell us that “fat” (or something very near to that pronunciation) means twins in Thai.

Cultural confusion 1, Cultural harmony 0.

For our remaining months in Bangkok, my husband avoids the motorcycle drivers…especially when he’s pushing our fat.

Birthday cards are a problem for me. I can never find the one which contains a balance of humour and intimacy, magically revealing the personalities of the recipient and myself. I’m a competitive card giver, and someone else always finds a funnier, better one.

I also despise spending $3.95 on something that’ll be history in two weeks – though that doesn’t deter me from purchasing other items that render themselves useless in even less time, like lattes, gasoline, bridal wear. My cheapness aside, I seem to be incapable of going to a store and buying a card in advance, especially if it has to be mailed. So even if I do purchase a card, the task of posting it necessitates a scavenger hunt, where I search for the address, stamps, a pen, a mailbox. By the time I find those items, the bloody card has disappeared and remains in hiding for weeks, making it even more useless.

And then there are e-cards. I despise them. They may even be worse than sub-literate Christmas card letters. They are far too public: I always seem to open them at work when my volume is maxed out on a level guaranteed to damage hearing. And they’re impersonal. And goofy. And seem to contain jokes aimed at a preschool audience.

My husband has tried to help me. He buys cards at thrift stores. Most of them haven’t even been used. I’m pretty sure they are cards that were in the possession of elderly people who died. I can almost picture dutiful daughters-in-law finding these card collections in shoeboxes found in the hall closets, then putting them in the pile marked “Goodwill.”

Our Collection of Dead People's Cards

Our card collection has helped my go-to-the-store organizational problem. But while we seem to have many cards, the ratio of usable to useless cards is shrinking. Take last Friday. My daughter had to go to a birthday party for a five-year-old. So I look through our cards, bypassing the “For My Son on His Graduation” and the twenty-two “Get Well Soon” cards, and I settle on something semi-benign: a card with red birds on it…Because everyone knows that Kindergartners list “orioles” as their favourite animal. I think the card supported the Lung Association (or the person who bought it and then died did years ago).

Try selecting one of these for a kid...or even an adult

This lengthy rant is a preamble to an apology. I’m sorry I don’t send birthday cards to my friends. I’m sorry I give pathetic cards. And I’m even sorrier I haven’t sent one to my mom, whose birthday is tomorrow. Now she’s not expecting one – I’ve probably mailed her two in the past eighteen years – hence she’s conditioned, but I still feel bad. So mom, I’m sorry. Though we’ll talk on the phone, there’s nothing in your Arizona mailbox. There’s nothing in your Manitoba mailbox either in case you think I forgot which country you’re in.

But here, publicly, I can at least say, Happy Birthday, Mom.

December 15th is Cat Herders Day. This invent-a-holiday recognizes people who have kids whose lives are so out of control it’s like they’re herding cats.

Try herding these kitties into a single photo

When I first heard of this “holiday”, my brain twisted the word herding into hoarding, a word association that would cause psychologists to scribble something into their notebooks. Of course, a reasonable association would have been remembering my five-year-old twins run opposite directions in the parking lot on Saturday, but my mind is not logical. I thought of hoarding, which made me think of the clutter in my house.

My husband collects cheap things. I’m not sure if I should include myself in this categorization.  If something’s cheap, he’ll take ten. Or more.  Even if we don’t need any.

Last week, he came home with one of his deals.

“I got you something,” he said. Visions of a one-night-solo-stay in a boutique hotel danced in my head.

I looked up from Twitter as he dropped the box in front of me. I peeked through the flap and spied hundreds of individually-packaged marmalade jams, enough to power Denny’s through a month of burnt toast servings.

“Marmalade? What are we going to do with this?”

“Eat it,” he said. “On toast.”

“I hate marmalade.”

“But it was only five bucks.”

And therein lies his theory of accumulating things. If it’s a good deal, we need lots.

My daughter seems to have inherited this penchant for low-grade hoarding. She covets her “collections.” They range from rocks and leaves, to stuffed animals and cut-out paper hearts. Last year she even tried to collect snow. She’s like a magpie; anything shiny is slated to a lifetime in a plastic container. Half of our Tupperware containers have gone AWOL because they’re housing her collection du jour.

I seem to have a thing for collectors. Maybe it’s because I’m a failed collector.

I tried it once myself. During one long week of my childhood, I collected nail clippings. Then someone wisely told me it was gross, so I threw out my collection in a fit of embarrassment.  After that, the only things I saved were letters. And a few years ago, I gave those back to the writers. I figured it was a nice flashback to all the guys my pen pals had crushes on.  Nothing like a window into your life at the age of thirteen to realize how far you’ve come. Or not.

To complete the mom metaphor, add rollerskates and stir

(cc) Richard, Creative Commons, used under a ShareAlike License

Maybe most collections are embarrassing. Or should be.  But maybe they’re our security too. Our way of exerting control in a world where we feel not only like we’re herding cats on a daily basis, but also like we’re blindfolded and on rollerskates.

There are things that scare me more than pregnancy, such as raising children or having a camera crew chase me around as I attempt to parent. But even after disasters such as lying face down on a golf course amidst a spectacular lightning storm (and I don’t even golf), pregnancy still ranks up there on my list of things-that-freak-me-out. It’s not so much the pregnancy itself, but my memory of being eight months pregnant with twins during the hottest season. In Thailand.

While Bangkok might be called the City of Angels, it sometimes feels more like the City of Smells. Waste disposal techniques include dumping sewage in the local canal so pedestrians (also known as targets) can smell it. Especially if you’re pregnant, the variety of stenches presents a multitude of problems, not the least of which is eating without upchucking. Imagine walking along Sukhumvit Road, one of Bangkok’s main arteries. The sidewalks themselves are an obstacle course. Not only does the congestion necessitate having to step over two-foot curbs, but also requires dodging vendors who are selling a range of goods, from pirated Shania Twain CDs and pineapple with chillies, to deep-fried bugs and sex.

If she were pregnant in Bangkok, she wouldn't be smiling this much

(cc) Roger Price, used under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License

If the partially decomposed bat clinging to an overhead wire doesn’t make me puke my Green Curry, maybe it’s the stench of rotting garbage or the sight of a Chihuahua-sized rat. And if my lunch hasn’t climbed all the way up my esophagus yet, then it surely will after seeing a seventy-year-old Westerner lip-locked with a sixteen-year-old Thai from upcountry.

Indeed, as I continue my waddle up the street, ignoring tailors who salivate over how many yards of fabric it’d take to clothe me, I feel a slimy connection to those tourists.

A Bangkok scene: Pregnant expat vs. Western tourist

(cc) baby-gaga.com, used under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License

Let’s face it, in Bangkok, pregnant women have a lot in common with tourists.

We both sweat a lot.

We’re both overweight.

We’re repulsed by Bangkok’s street smells.

We’re drawn to wearing ill-fitting clothes, perhaps to further tempt the tailors.

We trip on uneven sidewalks.

We long for a foot rub.

We’ll walk miles off course to search for a clean, Western-style toilet.

We look bad in a bathing suit.

We struggle to carry our extra baggage.

We realize the anticipation of an event is often better than the reality.

We both crave an ice cold beer.

And I didn’t even say anything about sex.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Bangkok, especially now that I no longer live there. Everything people say about Thai people is true. Heck, they’re even nicer than Canadians. And now that I’m  back in Canada with -40 winters, Bangkok is smelling pretty good.

So yesterday was Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day. Apparently it’s an annual holiday. I don’t know who celebrates it, but I’m guessing their friend-count on Facebook might be in the single digits.

As I alluded to in an earlier post, one of my useless claims-to-fame is that I can sneeze like Donald Duck, a “talent” that not only stops conversations, but also sends people to wash their hands in our H1N1, whose-saliva-is-on-me world. If that isn’t bizarre enough, I can sing Amazing Grace to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight as well as to the theme song from Gilligan’s Island, both perfectly off-key. Nothing I’m going to add to a resume, that’s for sure.

When I was a six, my sister dragged out a tape player the size of a poodle and recorded me hosting a Gong-Show style program. (We were farm kids with little to do in the winter).  If you’ve blocked out memories of The Gong Show, you can watch the clip below, featuring The Unknown Comic . It’s worth it to see a young Steve Martin on the judging panel, or to see the show whose “sardonic outlook continues to influence many unsympathetic talent and reality shows,” according to my research assistant, Wikipedia. If that’s not reason enough, then check out The Unknown Comic’s shoes.

In my own six-year-old version of The Gong Show, I gave talents to my family members and rated them. My dad’s skill was hammering and he pounded his way to a score of 7 out of 10. My brother’s talent was “blowing stinks” (you guessed it: farting); he got gonged, as in big time, wind-up, hit-the-gong-as-hard-as-you-can gonged. Not sure what my sister’s skill was, but it was no doubt pretty good. My mom’s special talent was curling, as in the sport, and she received a 10. And there you have it, my worldview at age six. (By the way, if you’re not suitably bored at this point, watch this video on curling; if you’re still not bored enough, go curl).

In honour of Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day, I asked my five-year-old twins to share what they believe are the unique talents of each of us. According to Vivian, her talent is drawing cats and flowers, William’s good at silly dancing, and Mommy excels at loving and cuddling (I believe this was a thinly-disguised attempt at kissing-up since she desperately wanted a treat). Daddy, according to Viv, is really good at watching basketball on TV. And she’s right, he’s is really good at it.

William then weighed in on the debate. He declared that he was good at playing computer games (insert bad-parenting-guilt here). Vivian, he claimed, was great at playing blocks. He confirmed that watching TV was Daddy’s specialty. As for me? William says my talent is sitting. Freaking great…sitting…I can hear the gong already, while I’m seated on the chair sneezing like Donald Duck. Voted off the island.

Happy Belated Unique Talent Day. If you don’t have one, perhaps you can practice for November 24, 2010.