faulty vision

My mother came down to California for the Christmas holiday, on a short, 4 day stay that was probably less restful for her than she deserved. I admit to being astonished that we were able to convince her to take that much time off from her various activities: between cults of personality and cults of religion, the demands of her garden, her house, her psychological dependents and her sociological experiments, her healthy lifestyle and her fascination with natural disasters — to fit in a trip away from the hive seemed ludicrous and yet, Sako managed to convince her.

“Ask her,” I said, after I’d calculated the cost of flying husband, toddler and self up to Seattle for the holiday. “Because it would be a lot less expensive if she just came down here, and if you’re going to be down here anyway–”

“Okay,” she said agreeably, and wandered off. A few minutes later, she returned with another, “Okay.”

“What?”

“She says, ‘okay.’”

“Really?”

Funny thing. Turns out that if you ask for stuff, sometimes people will give them to you.

And how was Christmas, you ask?

It was like this:

And this:

And this:

Perhaps the best part of Christmas, tooth pain and root canal notwithstanding, was our first visit to the San Francisco Zoo. My mother was obsessed with the idea of taking Hobbes to the zoo, which she explained to me as being for his own good. If you take children to the zoo, she heard on Japan TV, they grow up without allergies to animals.

“I’m allergic to cats and dogs and anything with four feet,” I said, by way of rebuttal.

“Of course you are,” she said, which she seemed to think clinched her argument.

This is the same media source that informed her that eating frozen aloe vera and tying your toes together will make you thinner, so I took all this with a grain of salt. Scientific method is all well and good for Japanese scientists, but Japanese television hasn’t met a stupid idea it didn’t like, package, and distribute to the gullible Japanese people. For a people who has had two atomic bombs dropped on them, you’d think they’d be a little more cynical.

The Guy, claiming debilitating misery, stayed at home, so it was a Hirata trip: three grown women to one small toddler. The ratio was just about right, as it happened. Hobbes had a most excellent time.

I took the requisite pictures of bored animals going about their business while tourists gaped at them. They weren’t anything spectacular, so I won’t bother linking them. The biggest hit of the three hour trip was, as might be expected, the petting zoo.

And the biggest hit of the petting zoo, which I suppose we should have expected, was the little tractor that Hobbes could just about ride on.

I suppose the worldview on domesticated animals is different to a person who has to look up to go eye-to-eye with a sheep.

About four days ago, right around the time that the long holiday started, the Guy started to complain that his mouth hurt.

“This tooth,” he said. “This tooth,” as though I should have known exactly what he was talking about. Of course I did, being both an attentive wife and a concerned one.

“Refresh my memory,” I said, tactfully.

He did, but since I wasn’t listening the first few times, I’ll have to recap as best as I can piece together from subsequent fragments of conversation I actually paid attention to.

The Guy has a tooth, “This tooth,” which has been bothering him for about a year now. Intermittent pain, indicating (he thought) varying degrees of attention with the floss. He is British, and floss does not figure largely in his world view. Neither do dentists, for that matter. A few months back, the hygienist at his new dentist discovered a crack in the tooth, which was promptly filled.

“It hurts,” he mumbled.

“You should call the dentist,” I said.

He eyed me with disfavor.

That was on Thursday.

By Saturday, he was actually unable to sleep because of the pain. I caught him in the kitchen popping painkillers like tic-tacs. “Call the dentist,” I said again, which I had said repeatedly over the course of the last three days. The previous times, he had fobbed me off with various mutterings about it being a holiday, about the pain going away, about how he was handling it just fine with the ibuprofen. “You big baby,” I tacked on, because nothing motivates a man like being taunted.

“I’m pretty sure I need a root canal,” he said. “I did research online.”

The internet: qualifying nincompoops for dentistry since 1991.

It was Sunday before he finally made the call. He left a polite, albeit somewhat pathetic message on the dentist’s answering machine. Within ten minutes the dentist had called him back, had prescribed antibiotics, listened sympathetically to his assessment of his situation, and promised to start trying to contact a specialist for an immediate appointment.

One would not be stretching the truth to say that I felt both smug and full of self-satisfaction at this obvious proof of how right I was in saying he should have called three days ago. Far be it for me to say so in the face of the Guy’s obvious pain — but I was still right, and he was still wrong. “What a great dentist,” I said. “He called you right back, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“In, like, ten minutes. What a great dentist. Wow. I bet if you’d called him three days ago, he would’ve called you right back. Like, in ten minutes flat. Wish someone had thought to suggest it to you. Oh, wait.”

The Guy ground his teeth. Whatever he was going to say was lost to pain. He whimpered.

“Dork,” I said kindly.

As of 7 pm this evening, the Guy has had his first root canal. I dropped him off at the dentist’s office droopy and miserable; when I picked him up an hour later, he was happily sipping a disgusting mixture of tapioca pearls and powdered tea, happy as a schoolgirl at her first Hannah Montana concert.

It occurs to me that the last time we had a long holiday, we were flattened for two weeks by some viral bug. This time, we had a root canal. At the current rate of escalation, come New Year’s, one of us will be in surgery, having a limb grafted back on.

The Guy is currently huddled under the TV, hugging his face. “The pain’s back,” he muttered. “It’s surprising how irritable it makes me.”

“Not really,” I said.

What do you mean? I’m an awesome wife.

Look, Mr. Carpet Cleaner guy. I know it’s a craptastic carpet. I know it really needs to be burned or sent off to be recycled into something more pleasing to the eye, say, as compost or something. But this is what we’re going to be stuck with for a while because we’ve decided that the kitchen remodel should come first, because — have you seen my kitchen? Right? No, actually, we’re thinking about going to hardwood floors, but….

Uh, that stain. Let me explain that stain. There was this cup of coffee….

…oh. Okay. That stain. Right. Uh, that’s from my son. Yes, that one there. Thank you. We find him cute as well. (Hobbes, stop asking about the nice man’s crotch. I know the word, “Mo?” doesn’t mean anything to him, but the fact that you’re pointing at it is frankly suspect.) Yes, he’s very friendly. No, he’s our only one.

Um.

Well, that’s– see, we were playing one day and — no, not with toxic waste. We were just playing. I was chasing him around and saying, “I’m gonna gitchya,” which he finds hilarious because he has the IQ of your average carrot, and–

–no, not now, Hobbes. We’ll play that later.

Anyway, he was laughing so hard that he just sort of, uh, projectile vomited all over the floor. And then he giggled and dashed off because of the aforementioned carrot situation, (Hobbes, stop eating the nice man’s equipment) and I started cleaning it up with everything I could find and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t chasing him anymore, so he came back to investigate, all covered with vomit, you understand, because there was dribbling, and of course he walked right through it to get my attention, and when I tried to grab him he thought the game was on again so he dashed off again, just tracking vomit everywhere and–

–okay, but you asked, see, and I wanted to give you complete disclosure. In case that affected how you cleaned and stuff.

Yes, honey, you’re very funny. Please take that out of your nose and give it back to the nice man.

Oh. Uh, that stain?

Are you sure you want to know?

It’s no use pointing out that I haven’t updated my blog in almost a week. I’ve gone for years without posting. Years. I scoff at your arbitrary 7-day segmentation. Pfft.

Anyway, I’ve been sick.

With the croup.

So there.

So a few days ago, my sister, who has the bedside manner of your typical payment-on-delivery organ harvester, text messaged me the following.

Mom tripped and fell yesterday while walking back from the dentist. She has a fat lip now. I hate that pavement now.

I don’t want to imply that my mother is ancient, because she’s not. True, she hit her 70th birthday a couple of months ago, but she wears it lightly — and anyway, she’s got that Asian woman thing going for her. Asian women do not age so much as they … solidify, becoming a little more unstoppable, a little less distractable, a little more “force majeure,” a little less predictable, day by day. However, she’s certainly not at the age where hearing, ‘Mom fell’ is in any way productive of any emotion beyond, “Oh my GOD.”

A speedy text message in response got nothing from Sako beyond complete silence. It’s no use saying that if there had been more serious injury, Sako would have told me in the original text message. My family’s communication skills are not to be relied on. If one of the women in my family says, “I ran into Mrs. X the other day,” you cannot assume that they didn’t mean, “with my car.” The instinct for information prioritization is simply not there. I don’t know what it is — a genetic abnormality?

A Skype call later, I learned that the only victims of the fall were Mom’s upper lip, which had swollen up to elephantine proportions, and a couple of her braces. She’d fallen down on her way back from the dentist, knocking off some of the metal on her teeth in the process. An elderly couple had stopped to help her. That was nice of them.

End of story.

I was cautiously comforted by that. Sako is finishing up nursing school in Seattle, so she resides at home with Mom for the time being. Mom is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, true, but she doesn’t actually do so, which makes me think with some anxiety to the day when Sako graduates and moves on. The point for the moment is that if something more serious had happened, Sako would have been at hand with her nursing school learning to patch things up or escalate to a higher power, whichever.

When I called Mom a couple of days later over Skype, I saw that Sako wasn’t kidding about the fat lip. It seemed, to my slightly fevered imagination, to take up a good third of my computer screen. Really, I think Sako should’ve warned me ahead of time how bad it was, because my initial reaction was maybe not the most tactful in the world.

“Holy crap,” I blurted out. “What the hell is on your face?”

I think I might have made Mom a little self-conscious.

It’s been a couple of weeks now, and the swelling has died down to a manageable portion of Mom’s face. The blotch remains, a dark red watermark on her upper lip that doesn’t appear to be fading away. We’ve all gotten used to it enough that I’m no longer impelled to comment on it, either out loud or in the ongoing monologue that feeds through my brain. Really, the end of that adventure could have been so much worse; a little cosmetic difficulty is hardly worth mentioning, when you consider the various limbs and joints that could have been broken by a really bad fall at her age.

sun child

In other news, the camera on the Droid is actually a lot better than I really expected. It is still not the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty decent, all things considered. The Guy is infatuated with his, and uses it obsessively.

Well, maybe not obsessively. He has a ’shoot everything you can as often as you can and then maybe out of all that mess, one of them will work out’ approach to photography, which is as close to a real world application of the infinite monkeys with typewriters in a closed room will produce Hamlet theory as you can get.

(Now, how many ways could I have crafted a worse sentence than that?)

Did I mention that we bought Droids?

For the record, Hobbes is feeling much better and is now back in day care. Though the photo shows him in the full bloom of health, that’s because it was taken back in November one day, when we thought — naive parents that we were — that taking him on an actual walk would be a good idea. Apparently, toddlers do not go for walks. They go for starts and stops, picking ups and digging intos, pluckings and eatings, trippings and investigatings, dashing aways and sitting downs….

He’s not feeling like his old self yet, but he’s almost there.

In the meantime, his parents are feeling horrible.

Thanks, sweetheart.

For over a year now, we’ve tried to interest our son in toys and pacifiers, under the (apparently misguided) assumption that if he bonds to some object, it will make him easier to deal with during times of trouble. As it turns out, the only way my son could be more mellow in times of health is if he had an actual bong inserted into a vein, so this has mostly been a non-issue. This is just as well, since he’s categorically refused to grow attached to anything. He’s as likely to insert a pacifier the wrong way as he is to try to give it to complete strangers, and stuffed animals only entertain him as long as the price tag remains attached, that being the focal point of his interest.

Where other children suck their thumbs, he actually licks people when he is tired or stressed, which I find both hilarious and messy; it’s bad enough to get snotted on, but looking down to discover that he is busily applying his tongue to my shirt as though LL Bean embedded salt licks in their designs is something that needs to be experienced in order to be believed. I cannot explain what has brought him to this pass, or where he learned the habit. My primary concern is: how does one break a child of that habit in years to come? I have read solutions for thumb suckers and pacifiers, but painting jalepeno sauce on my blouse every day seems like a non-starter, while taking away the shirt altogether — frankly, he is perfectly happy to lick bare skin as well, and my coworkers might look askance at me walking into work every day wearing nothing but a tasteful bra.

Anyway, last night before bed he picked up a little board book and clutched it possessively through the majority of his pre-bedtime ritual. He held it while I was reading other books to him; he held it while I fed him his nightly bottle. He tussled with me over it in complete silence when I took him to his crib, and when I finally set him down in it, he carefully adjusted it under him so it would neither be uncomfortable, nor would I be able to reach it. And then he fell asleep.

This morning when he woke up, you would have thought that he was an illiterate, raised in a house of illiterates — books? what are those? — and instead became entranced with the idea of sowing cereal seeds in an uneven distribution across our living room carpet. He appears to be suffering the delusion that every piece of cereal he buries will eventually grow a cereal tree. Since he is equally enchanted with running the roomba on a daily basis, I can’t really object to this, although I draw the line at allowing him to try his seed-growing experiments with my belly button and my bra. I am a liberal woman, and my stomach and boobs may be used for many things. Agriculture is not one of them.

Personally, I blame video games.

It turns out (according to the nurse on the phone) that Hobbes has croup, which is somehow far less frightening than the flu. Not to say that people can’t and don’t die from the croup, but it certainly isn’t portrayed anywhere near as terrifying on the internet. The Internet is Truth, so that takes care of that little anxiety.

Which isn’t to say that Hobbes is in any way convinced that things are okay. He listened to the nurse on the speakerphone with a great deal of skepticism. Nothing you can say will convince me that a 14 month old can’t be skeptical. True, he regularly tries to shove corn kernels into his ear — and often succeeds; really, it’s astonishing what sorts of things an ear canal will willingly absorb — but the looks he gives me when I suggest something he considers of dubious merit are perfectly understandable. Meryl Streep couldn’t convey skepticism more clearly, and she’s a trained professional.

He’s been flopping around the house feeling mightily sorry for himself since Sunday evening. By association, so have we. Daycare won’t take him if his fever is too high, and even if it weren’t (which it wasn’t the last day or two) he’s been sick enough that letting him mix with other kids didn’t seem like an option. It’s difficult enough to entertain him when he’s healthy and happy; to do the same when he doesn’t feel well is a task beyond our powers. Out of sheer desperation this morning, I let him into the spice rack. This kept him engaged for a blissful ten minutes.

It’s the little things that give a parent joy. Not to mention a toddler. That boy really loves his paprika.

I have hopes that tomorrow will be good to see us all in our appropriate places: daycare for him, work for the husband and myself. Don’t get me wrong; I would be happy to be a stay-at-home mom for Hobbes if we could afford it and if I thought it would really be that much better for him. Frankly, since the first one isn’t true, it’s just as well that the second one isn’t, either.

He gave me a long-suffering look when I tried to entertain him with finger puppets tonight. “Really?” his look said. “Finger puppets? This is what we’re reduced to? This is your solution to my boredom? At day care, they have real toys. At day care, I have friends. At day care, they sing and do silly dances to entertain me. Where’s the love, here? Dance, woman. Caper to my whims, damn you.”

He really is incredibly communicative with those shiny dark eyes of his, I have to say.

In other news, he has added several more words to his vocabulary.

He now says, “Apple.” And “More.” In fact, he never stops saying the second word, which he seems to think means, alternately, “Give me,” “I want that,” “What is it,” and yes, “More.”

Oh. He also says, “I love you, Daddy.” As you can imagine, this is productive of a great deal of attempted bribery and complaint.

“Say Mommy, Hobbes! Say Mommy!”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“MOMMY, Hobbes. MO-MMY. I love you MO-MMY.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Pleeeeeeeeease? Say Mommy! I’ll give you this … this shiny dinner knife!”

“MORE.”

“Yes, you could say more, or you could say–?”

“I love you, Daddy!”

Kid takes after the wrong side of the family. I swear he’s messing with me.