Pertinent to my Interests

I was with a friend and some acquaintances at the playground the other day, and my friend was mentioning that her sister had just chaperoned the French Club trip.

“Oh, where did they go?” I asked.

“Uh, to France,” one of my acquaintances chimed in with an amused tone that signaled the absurdity of my question. Where else would the French Club go?

Well, my high school didn’t have trips to France. We had field trips to fish hatcheries and the Pacific Science Center, and our big 8th grade trip was an overnight to Long Beach. I asked where the French Club had traveled because in my mind it was absurd to assume that they had gone to France. Who takes groups of high schoolers to France?

Later that weekend I was at an open house with my husband, looking at real estate in our neighborhood.

“Oh, is this the pantry?” I asked as I approached a big set of cabinet doors.

“No, that’s the refrigerator,” the realtor responded with eyebrows slightly raised. His tone let me know that he had now written me off as a potential buyer. How can someone who can’t even recognize a high-end refrigerator clad in cabinetry afford this nice home?

It’s weird living my adult life in a new location and new tax bracket. To some extent, I will always be a stranger in a strange land who can never quite master the cues of my foreign home.

Maybe my kids will go on a school trip to France. Maybe someday I will abandon my $10 cat earrings for something with large diamonds and the realtors will start offering me champagne and great interest rates.

I think deep down I’ll always be wowed by rich people refrigerators and high school trips to Europe.

I took my young cat to the vet on Tuesday, just for his annual exam and vaccines and such.

Have I mentioned that I’m pretty sure our veterinarian is a witch?

I love our veterinarian. She looks to be about 600 years old, is less than five feet tall, and has the high crackly voice that I associate with witches. All she needs is a gnarled stick for a cane and a house made of candy in the woods.

Clearly she is not the candy-house-in-the-woods sort of witch because I have looked at a lot of real estate in this city and never seen such a thing. Also, I don’t think that sort of a witch would go to veterinary school.

But what sort of a witch becomes a veterinarian? I like to picture her growing up on the outskirts of a village in some country where they use a Slavic alphabet, hands slightly twisted and gnarled even as a young girl. The village cats must have been her familiars, and she fed them and took care of them. She learned how to set a broken kitty cat bone and how to feed orphaned kittens. It’s not too far a leap to picture her coming to the United States at the age of 500 and deciding it was time to go to vet school.

I love our witch vet. The first time she met my older cat she took one look at his grey tail with the little white tip and exclaimed “Well, someone has been painting!” When she noted this week that my younger cat had gained a pound since his last visit I apologized and explained that “he really loves his tiger treats.”

“Well, that’s okay; he deserves it!” she said, petting his tiger stripes admiringly.

He does, and she would know since she’s been loving and caring for cats since before the Reformation.

I was sick all weekend and am just this morning feeling like I have turned the corner back to the world of health and accomplishments.

It’s amazing how overwhelming life is when you’re sick. I would lay on the couch and picture the healthy people of the world going about their day–loading groceries in their cars, making dinner for the family, shoveling snow–and wonder how they could possibly do these things. Only a superhero could accomplish such wonders! But yesterday I made the bed and did laundry, and today I see that a grocery store trip is not out of the question so I guess I’m basically a superhero now too.

I always see people talking on the Internet about the “man cold” and how their husbands turn into giant, nonfunctional babies when they get sick. In my house it is the opposite. When I am sick the world stops turning and my entire to do list gets ripped up and burned. I am unwilling to push myself at all. Meanwhile, my husband will still shovel snow with pneumonia. He’ll onboard large doses of Sudafed so that he can make it to happy hour with a client. I’m not sure I have ever seen him take a real sick day with the exception of when he was recovering from his various eye surgeries.

I do feel badly about being such a baby when I’m sick, but honestly I don’t see the point in pushing myself when I’m already miserable. The kids can eat cereal for dinner two nights in a row, literally nobody cares. Appointments can be rescheduled. There were many years when the kids were little that I could not opt out of the very physical work of caring for small children while I was ill. And someday I might have pneumonia but still be forced to flee a war zone or nuclear meltdown. And I bet then I’ll wish I had taken it easy when I could have! If I have the luxury of shutting down 99% of my life for three days while I’m sick, why shouldn’t I?

Of course, I am prone to sinus infections, so the end of the battle with the virus does not correlate with the end of the entire war. Yesterday I started up with Sinus Infection Avoidance Protocol Level 3. This is the lowest level of my sinus infection avoidance strategies and calls for twice-daily use of the neti pot and Flonase. Level 2 calls for regular dosing with NSAIDs, and Level 3 brings Mucinex to the table. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

I took my kids to the playground on a weekday afternoon last week. I sat on the bench in the cold air hoping the sun would warm me up a little and had a realization: I am no longer needed here.

This new phase of life has really snuck up on me. There were many years of my life where my days were a constant shuffle of playgrounds. I remember exulting in my freedom when the kids were both old enough to explore the playground on their own and I was able to supervise from the bench. At some point I started bringing a book, and that felt like the peak of luxury.

And now I’m just extraneous. The kids don’t even need me to walk them back and forth anymore.

Am I ready for this?

Two days later they wanted to go back to the playground. I was coming down with a cold. Ugh, I didn’t want to go to the damn playground. But I recalled that moment of clarity in the sun and I told them they could go together without me. I reminded myself that this wasn’t the end: I could still choose to go to the playground with them some days. If I want to.

They went to the playground. I sat on the couch for a while and then slowly made dinner. They came back safely in time for the family meal.

I think I will get used to this.

Did you know that nine- and eleven-year-old kids still expect to receive an Easter basket on Easter morning? This did not occur to me until recently. I get lulled into complacency by the fact that we’re done with indoor playgrounds and the constant supervision stage; I forget that some childhood embellishments last much longer than others. (But… how long does the Easter basket thing go on? Asking for a friend.)

Lest you think I’m a terrible mom for nearly forgetting Easter baskets, I did pull through with green pancakes for breakfast on Saint Patrick’s Day. And shamrock shakes earlier in the week! See, I do better when there is no sense of obligation or crushing weight of expectations.

I’m feeling proud of my fitness level lately, even though I still look like the “before” picture when I waddle into the gym. On two recent hikes I’ve barely felt the elevation gains when others (including my kids) were huffing and puffing and wishing for death. This is especially heartening because I joined the gym almost exactly a year ago and have been feeling badly about not accomplishing my main goal: to run three miles. But I am feeling good and strong despite my failure to achieve my running goal, and real world progress has been made.

I went wandering in a cemetery last week and was absolutely taken by the most gorgeous mausoleum I have ever seen. I started researching the family who is interred within and it turned out to be an even better story than I expected with lots of interesting twists and turns along the way. I am obsessed and hope to share more about this once I get the threads all neatly woven together.

Does anyone else still read and love Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse?

I’ve been reading For Better or For Worse since at least 1992. It was always one of my favorites, and I tended to relate most to the daughter Elizabeth, although she must be almost ten years older than me. She too was getting hassled by her mom about not getting dinner started on time while also navigating evolving friendships at school and dealing with annoying younger siblings.

For Better or For Worse concluded in 2008, but instead of dropping the series completely they decided to rerun it from the beginning again. I am still thrilled about this.

So now it’s the year 2024 and here I am forty years old and still reading For Better or For Worse every day. This second time around it’s the mom Elly who is resonating with me. She too is trying to manage all the kids’ activities, cook healthy meals for her family, and go for a run every once in a while. As a child, Elly’s storylines were boring and somewhat invisible to me. Now I’m the boring and invisible one.

Here is the downside of reading a comic strip you’ve already read: I know what’s coming.

In today’s strip it’s raining hard, Elizabeth comments to her mother that “the river is already past its banks!” The punchline has to do with college students and dirty laundry, but I hardly noticed. I was gritting my teeth as a major sense of dread passed through my body.

It’s 1995 all over again and Farley the dog is going to die soon.

I think I cried the first time Farley died, or at least got teary-eyed. I was just a kid; my sister and I were always extra sensitive to the suffering of animals. Of course I was going to cry.

But I think I’m going to cry this time too. Time has not hardened me like it was supposed to, if anything my emotional barriers crack more easily now than they did in the 1990s. And how is Elly going to feel? How does she manage her own emotions and the grief of her children? I’m going to watch her more closely this time around.

To all the other For Better or For Worse readers out there, good luck this week. It’s gonna be a rough one.

There was an article in the New York Times this weekend about how modern light bulbs are so energy efficient that we no longer have to turn the lights off when we leave a room.

I read this article with a sense of dread building in my belly, and I knew by the time I reached the last paragraph that this was it, this was the big day I’ve been dreading: I am officially An Old Person.

I am An Old Person because I can no longer change. The logic of this article is sound, the message reasonable, but the fact is I can no longer adapt to this evolving world and the New World Lightbulb Order. I can’t even pretend that I’m going to try to leave the lights on. I’m not going to try.

It’s disappointing. I had kind of hoped to be one of those flexible old people who is able to absorb new information in a meaningful way. I thought maybe I could be the one, that special unicorn among old people who can change my own behavior and update my moral code.

But I see now how engrained our mental habits become. If I have grandchildren, they will probably roll their eyes at me as I flip the light switch in the kitchen on my way out. They will mock me.

“Well, someday she’ll be dead and then we can just leave the lights on like civilized people,” they will whisper to each other.

And I won’t be able to hear them because my hearing will suck, and after I die they will just leave the lights on all the time and there will be nothing I can do about it. Ah, getting old is terrible!