(and ohmygoodness if you're coming here from your RSS/blogfeed, I'm mortified because I spelled 'lieu' wrong in the title before I corrected it)
...I'd like you to humour me for a moment, if you will. I'll get to my phenomenal Mothers Day presents in the next installment.
The LGBB had a little friend over on Tuesday. They were so cute watching Monsters Inc together that I took this photo of them. Telly front and centre. My set of three new rectangle mirrors to the left.
Ummmm.... what do you see in that mirror? Bear in mind you are seeing the kitchen bench and the cupboards underneath in that shot. I have wracked my brains here for ages wondering what might have been on the bench at that time. Steve has already helpfully suggested, "It could have been a bag..." but I doubt he's certain it's just that at all. If it was a bag, well, to me it was a very coincidentally placed "bag", to make shadows in all the right places.
So. What do you see? (click on the photo to enlarge)
The food poisoning I got on the night of our anniversary, that is, which knocked me flat til... well, what time is it now? Yowzers.
But for now, please allow me to share with you the moment when Family Guy somehow plucked the facetious little voice that sits on my shoulder and whispers into my ear these very words, often and incessantly (and yes, the book is coming along verrrrry slowly, thanks for asking) - it's uncanny, even the number of years I've been working on this thing is the same. Damn that baby, Stewie for being so accurate!!! *shakes fist at ceiling*
And by the way, I dare you not to use the same annoying little sarcastic voice, creeping higher and higher, when you talk to your loved ones. Dare you.
You wanna... a cup of tea? Is that... is that what you want? Want me to, uh, put the kettle? On? Put the kettle on for you? Hmmmm?
• Woke in bed alone, at the age of twenty-three, for the first time in four years. Alone, that is, except for Pepper (I let her sleep on our bed with me..... just this once.... because I had spent the night at home alone). • Greeted my girlfriends and my sister at the door as they all slowly arrived. • Stepped into a dress I would wear this one special day. A memory to last the rest of my life. • Was choked with emotion that I was going to be making official, in front of our loved ones, the commitment I had already made, years before as a 17 year-old teenager really, to live out my days with my Stevie (aka Lemons.... aka McLemons.... the bells of St Clements... yes, I do call him that). • Felt like nothing, ever, anytime, was ever going to come close to being so special (forgive me, Lenny, but I was slightly incorrect on that one). • Was so excited because in two days' time, ten years ago, we were boarding a plane to London to take an eight week trip around Europe for our honeymoon. • Was just about the most happy and fulfilled I've ever felt in my life. • Had no idea the course our lives would change, virtually immediately from that day on, as we decided to have a family of our own. • Was told more than once by the wedding photographer that she'd "like to get some more serious, straight-faced shots now"... because I was grinning from sun up to sun down like a giddy, happy fool. Not that there's anything wrong with that, in my books! Hence, the "serious" shots are ridiculous and look forced because all I wanted to do was beam. • Also had no idea we would produce two most magnificent specimens of children, nor lose so very many more along the way. • Thought I was the most bootiful I would ever be in my life. I certainly felt as beautiful as I was ever gonna get! • Never once paused to reflect and give silent thanks for everything that I had in my life, a regrettable part of being a 20-something who feels "on top of the world". • Didn't see all that we had achieved, together as a couple, or that we even had each other in the manner in which we did. Basically, I took a lot for granted and as a "given". • Was thankful and relieved that my sister had thought of everything in regards to the smaller details of the day - right down to taking a disposable camera into the fitting room of a dress shop (something I would never have dreamed of doing, let alone think of!) to snap the detail on a halter neck dress that I adored, could never afford and eventually had a dressmaker masterfully replicate and tailor to me. • Had the day of my life. It was the day we got married, but we were already bound together long before then. From the moment I met Steve, I felt a sense of belonging. By the time we were together three weeks, I had the warm, fuzzy, safe, comfortable feeling (like a familiar old snuggly blanket to curl up under) of having known him much longer. We fit. We bunker down and get through. Everything. We are a team.
It's a soppy, overused saying but, oh, how it's true:
5. I love him more when he's not here. Steve, that is. Not the Grim Reaper. Although... him too. 6. If I am going to tie Jazz to the outdoor furniture, wearing my best friend, while the lawn mower guy is here - so that she doesn't force me into the foetal position with her incessant, excitable barking at the mower, I must must must remember to go get her again. Preferably sooner than two hours later.
Today was day one of a complete liver, gut and general blahness detox for me.
Oh the shame of it all. I've been hideous. Me n' sugar, we go a long way back. Well... me and sugar and coffee and wheat and....
I haven't detoxed like this since the three months prior to falling pregnant with Ella in 2003. The memory of that is weighing on me heavily as I do this. It's a different thing I'm doing, a different year, a different house, a different reason. But it's a trip down memory lane. The night I sat in folded-armed silence and hot, hellish anger directed towards my traitor of a husband because he'd sat at dinner and tucked in to a dessert of rich chocolate cake as I sat and watched him and my other friends (one of them 9 weeks pregnant and loudly protesting her morning sickness). I felt like he should have gone out in sympathy with me; that I was making the biggest sacrifice - the food one, for the sake of being as healthy as I could be for hopefully "this time" making a "perfect" baby - and he was to that date still not even popping one pill, sat bitterly with me.
This time, I am struggling with the fact that I am doing this simply... well, for me. I don't take care of myself well at ALL. I am fearful that the LGBB is watching me, all flawed and Tassie devil-like, and learning from me. Perhaps she's learning how not to be. Today, she's taken to watching me carefully with probing eyes (she has such probing, wise eyes!) when I come in to the room, as if to gauge the pressure in my head... "When is she going to blow her top?" ask those eyes.
Well. It turned out, the time for a top-blow was nigh, given the past two weeks of almost constant whinging, whining, unsettledness because of her teeth and an incessant cold*, this detox that feels like it's been started on a whim (it didn't last night - last night, it felt so empowering!), a period that's.... oh geez, I don't even KNOW how late now (no, I'm most definitely NOT, thangeweverymuch, but it's not helping the feeling of expectation and general "not rightness" in my body right now) and to top it off, the clanger:
She hit me. It would have been a clean slap to the face at close range, had it not been for the tentacles that are her fingers - how do toddlers digits get so STRONG!??? they dig into legs and arms and other fleshy body parts and leave little bruises, they're like bloody drill bits! - making contact with both of my eyeballs. That's right. Not only did the LGBB clock me in the face, she gouged my eyes. Both of them.
That was the final block that tumbled for me. I gasped in shock. I've had a horrendous headache since lunchtime (phew, nasty coffee withdrawals..... I'm terrible, Muriel)
And I snapped. But my reaction was not one of anger. I burst into tears, turned and walked out after telling a belligerant-looking little miss that "we don't hit people" and left her father to continue getting her ready for bed.
Down in her bedroom, I did the burnt-chop mother routine as I stood packing up today's toy explosion and rehanging her beautiful clothes. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and let all the little bastards that had been niggling at me with their sharp arrows have a good go and just stab me right in my heart. To twist it in a bit further, just as I would expect her to, the LGBB had forgotten her trespass by the time she'd finished brushing her teeth. I couldn't shake it off, so I couldn't read to her - Steve did it (he usually does, it's their "thing", but every so often when she wants that little bit more of me, she'll ask for me). And she didn't even care! Brushed me off, which compounded it all.
I just felt so downtrodden in that moment, after a day of noticing just how very effing much I'm asked questions - useless, lazy-driven questions that the other adult of this household ought to try and answer for himself - and then the spiral stopped. Right at the bottom. From there, one can only ever really start on the incline again. So I'm heading back up - slooooowly - now she's out of my sight and in bed.
Every family has their little traits, patterns, nuances. Mine is particularly tricky, marred as it is by a - well, to put it frankly, there are some elderly members of the large maternal side that call it the "sick gene" - and I am intrigued as much as I am angry about it. I have to look at it from all sides so that I don't head down the same path with my daughter. I constantly think, in these times when we're at "odds" (which sounds so silly, she's only a toddler yet, heaven help me), that I am stuffing up the ONE chance I've got left... and the insidious voice on my other shoulder sits in the darkness and snidely tells me Ellanor was lucky she got out when she could. It's dark, dark, dark where that voice comes from. Dark and cold. It is my mother's voice.
I'm licking my wounds and picking over the events of the day that got me to this state - I want very much to break the cycle, passed down from mother to daughter, who then became a mother and passed it to her daughter (and so on and so forth), and it is my life's promise to Lolly to crack it. To never turn a blind eye to it - that's impossible now, I'm on the look-out that I'm almost uni-vigilant, if that is indeed a way to be.
And boyo, is she keeping me on target with working it out. Deeeeep breaths.
Gawd, what a mess of a day it's been!
* Hey, I'm not complaining she's been sick... but... GAHHHHHH it gets verrrrry tedious caretaking for extended periods sometimes, doesn't it? This is the moment where the light switches on in my head and I slap myself as I consider what it might mean to have a child who is permanently dependent and I feel about 2 foot small for losing my cool...
The thing I really don't like, more than finding a piece of mouse poop on my bedside table (yes, folks that'd be right next to my HEAD!!), is when Mickey decides to eat so daintily from the jaws of death that it's not quite a clean snap across the back of his noggin. And he therefore pirouettes across the floor with a metal trap strapped to him, which shakes and clunks. And wakes me up.
Geez. How inconvenient. Being woken by the sounds of a maiming [cringe to self: It's got to be done, it's got to be done, keep telling yourself]
Apple iPhoto has an excellent new feature called Face Recognition. It scans through your photos and builds up a catalogue by face. You can teach it who's who by going through and telling it, when it's guessed at trying to find a face and sometimes gets it wrong, and eventually it guesses correctly more and more. It is a fan-tastic way to view your photo library. So convenient if you want to find photos of a particular person! It zooms right in on everyone's face and takes a little thumbnail and ferrets it away in the catalogue for that person. And it gets smarter and smarter at working it out, still finding the correct faces when only a smidgen of them is visible in the shot. Awesomeness.
Sometimes, as I said, it gets it wrong. Here it is, trying to learn who my little bro is. Erm... I think it's almost on the right track [whistles Sesame Street's One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other]...
And then, there's all the trips down memory lane you get when you see them all, of the same person. I nearly crumpled into a liquid puddle when I sauntered past this, taken of the LGBB in December '07 when we'd just bought this place and were there one day renovating. She would have been 17 months. And only just crawling and sitting up (typical, right when I started packing boxes and needed everything at the other place to be diplay-home-neat).
