Other People’s Pie

Sugar just might be the ruination of me and my much beleaguered parenting skills.  This Halloween marked the second one in which the boys have discovered a great love and desire for candy.  I want them to have the experience of getting dressed up and running amok after dark, but the candy I could frankly do without.   Sugar now seems to be their reason for existence.

Much like candy, pies and cakes, take center stage over the meaningful and festivity-driven holidays/special occasions.   Birthdays are for what?  They are solely for the purpose of cake ingestion.   Thanksgiving?  Well, that’s for mashed potatoes and pies (of which, my three-year olds must have at least three slices…topped with ice cream).

That’s fine, so long as I am not the only one saddled with the responsibility of watching them demonstrate their parkour skills.  In fact, eating a holiday meal at another family member, or friend’s home is ideal even if one may not have leftovers for weeks to come.  Thanks to the in-laws doing all of the work, I not only have a relatively clean…er…no filthier than normal kitchen, I also don’t have to deal with the screaming demands for pie.  Nope.  You can’t have any, because we don’t have any pie in the house!  No chocolate or sugary frosted coma drops either!  Don’t even ask for them after dinner, because they simply do not exist.

This also makes me look much more adult, and saves me the awkward moments of being caught by my children, hunched over Gollum-style, in the kitchen, with a mouthful of pie.  No pie in my home means no explanation/justification as to what’s really in my mouth, or why I get to eat pie for breakfast, but nobody else does. 

Really though, pie baked by someone else is simply far more appealing than one that I created.  I just wish I had one now…

Now that I think about it, beer and pie might not be that bad for breakfast tomorrow…I’m gonna go bake a pie.

Of Lumps and Authority

Yesterday was likely the most astonishing display of someone else’s authoritative power over my being that I had yet experienced.

My surgeon yelled at me. Not pretend yelling, like “you non-wealthy kids and your bad insurance…” but real anger and curse-words kinds of yelling!

Don’t get me wrong, I am really super elated and blessed, and enormously thankful to have had this woman as my doctor, it’s just that I am equally as elated, and blessed and thankful not to have to work with, under, around, or near her. I am grateful that our relationship remains solely in the bounds of patient and physician. As terrifying as she is, I know that when I am under her care my life/well being is THE top priority, and everyone else had better hop too and do exactly as she orders them, with skill and precision.

I had been dreading the last week’s appointments, especially with the whole rigmarole that I have to go through to convince the doctor that I cannot afford her hospital’s MRIs, and that I need to have them done elsewhere. On top of that, I also have to put up with the imaging center that my insurance covers (somewhat covers).

It was supposed to be the best imaging center outside of Mayo, but since I can’t afford great healthcare, the technicians can never find good veins (or any…I’ve even wondered if they are trained to know what a vein looks like), and I get asked to come back repeatedly because they f*&%k up my images…Which is how all the yelling began.

After waiting for far too long, and getting stabbed only twice (things were starting to look up for this imaging center), I couldn’t tell if it was the contrast dye, or my nerves that were making me feel so icky. They say to drink lots of fluid to flush that contrast out, so I did—I hydrated with alcohol. I figure that it covered two needs in one dose! It flushed out the dye, and it has a calming, sleep-inducing effect.

Two days later, the husband picked up the radiology report, and snuck a peek at it before taking it and the CD of images to Mayo. This helped the Thursday appointment greatly, as the good news of “no sign of recurrence” made the two hour wait bearable.

Only, I wasn’t expecting to be screeched at by an enraged deity of health. I don’t know what the imaging center did to the CD, or how they loaded the images, but It wasn’t good (and that isn’t a surprise). It took the Doctor 45 minutes to pull the images off of the CD. It was 45 minutes to her, but it was two hours for us. I became a target for having wasted her time because I am poor, and my insurance company and her hospital don’t belong to the same club, and the imaging place never does a good enough job.

It was strange. She looked up at me as she was yelling and pushing on my belly, and said, “You know I’m not mad at you!…yell, yell, yell…” And just like the beta I am, all I could do was lower my eyes and apologize for something I didn’t have control over…just like a child.

If anything, it makes me feel worse for children. How often do they get treated like that and we don’t even recognize it?

The good part is, that I am lump free, and don’t have to go through this again for another six months! Woohoo!

Not a Lumpy Space Princess,

Pru

Incidentals

Fighting is just a lifestyle in our house these days.  I’ve given in to the idea that the boys will inevitably maim or contuse one another, or perhaps dislodge somebody’s eye.  Until today, I was pretty much the sole audience for this sort of beastly entertainment.  I keep thinking that it’s because they are three, and as all three-year olds do, they get rather frustrated when they can’t express themselves properly.  However, I am changing my mind.  I mean, really, effective expression has nothing to do with it.  By the time they were 2 they could both speak like news anchors, albeit drunken ones.  They spoke clearly, and better than most five-year olds we know (not to mention their vocabulary exceeds that of many adults…though, not always in an acceptable way).  

I realized, today, upon receiving an “Incident Report” from the school, that it really is just brutality over not being able to force one’s will upon another body.  That people have an often violent aversion to doing what others tell them to do.  It’s like sharing.  Nobody likes to share, and I don’t care how old you are.  Human beings are simply NOT GOOD at sharing. 

Today, as always, I was greeted at the boys’ school by the ever-friendly girl at the front office.  However, she seemed particularly jovial, if not trying to hold in some giggles.  As I signed the boys out, she handed me the “Incident Report,” and then let go of the laughter that had been building. 

They aren’t supposed to name names, when it comes to “Incidents,” but she exploded with laughter, telling me that it was a bit of brother-on-brother violence…She laughed even harder when I read the report, which also made me laugh.  “Liam bit Finn?!”  I asked in stymied confusion.  “Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”  She assured me that Liam was the biter, and Finn was the victim.  Turns out, Finn was taking too long to wash his hands, and Liam wanted to wash his, so, he chomped Finn on the back. 

I guess Liam learned from the best, and the best got some of his own. 

I am feeling the strain and pull of the world upon my children, and I don’t like it.  The first day at school wasn’t so bad, but as they encounter others, I feel like a little of their own personalities are disappearing…little by little.  For the first time, the world at large has possession of my children.  It can tell them what to do, how to think, and what to feel, and without even knowing it is doing so.  Other children and their annoying habits seem to be rubbing off on mine.  Granted, I only hear the “catch phrases” that are constantly repeated (to their delight at being cool, and my sinus-infected disagreeable self), but I realize that this is now my world. 

I want them to be comfortable enough to be a part of the world, but I don’t want them to lose themselves to the memes, like so many others.  They are odd, and I want them to embrace that, not be ashamed of it.

Nostos algos,

Pru

Expectations

It occurred to me that maybe I ought to lower everyone’s expectations of me…and then I thought, perhaps nobody really expects anything from me anyway, and that is totally liberating.