Thanks, Life – and I’m sending you the therapist’s bill

The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster. Not a huge, Disney-worthy one, but one of those little ones at the country fair, you know the kind. Shaped like a dragon, they rattle and shake your shrieking preschooler to what seems like a great height –uuup the learning curve, doooown the learning curve. And away we go again.

Losing out a dream job to a union guy only because of time served just stinks.  It sucks to be young and less experienced.  This would feel a lot less unjust if S were actually a) young, or b) inexperienced.  Boo. Unlike.  Down the rollercoaster.  So he’s home for good and slowly reintegrating into life with the family full time, but feeling sad and displaced.  Me, I ranted a bit to the grrl posse and invented a few new and elaborate curses to adequately express my indignation. I’d  like to say that I followed  my family motto – “Don’t get mad, get even” – but planning and  grudge-holding  just takes so much energy (sorry, Dad.) I’ve got better things to spend that energy on.

Like Hallowe’en! Yay! We had a lovely quick dinner and less-quick trick-or-treating session with our fantastic friends and their three lovely and rambunctious kids. Since they live pretty much all the way across the city, we all stayed over and had a grand ol’ time.  Did you know that there actually isn’t a weight or volume limit to the amount of candy that one small almost-four-year-old boy can carry? I swear, they're like the little Spanish grandmothers that can carry a cord of firewood and a burro up a mountain path.  Also,  a quick slice of pizza, some carrot sticks and whack of candy is not, in fact, a solid enough base on which to stack three glasses of wine and a cocktail.

On Sunday I did something that almost certainly puts me as frontrunner for this year’s award for Most Idiotic Error Resulting in Injury, which is saying quite a lot considering that my highly-distractible husband works with power tools all day.  We were just putting the finishing touches on a birthday dinner for Pickle. I was wiping down the counter and bumped a glass - I felt more than saw it start to fall. Of course I tried to catch it. One broken glass, a bucket of blood,  one visit to emergency, one  severed artery, one  damaged nerve,  five hours and five stitches later....  The doc told me to fast from midnight and come back to the hospital at seven in the morning for the plastic surgeon to repair the nerve damage. I waited there all day with no food, no water and no surgeon. Ain’t medicare grand? So now it is heal and wait for an appointment for surgery, where they get to cut my hand open again. Yay stitches. I guess I should invest in more band-aids.

So what did I learn this week? That you never count your chickens before they hatch, that candy is not a food group, and that housework is not only never-ending, but downright dangerous. That I need to take life as I find it and squeeze all the goodness out of it- hilarious, loving,  Halloween-obsessed friends; fantastic kids,  and a husband who washes the dishes and hands you a sippy cup of wine, because he says that everyone needs one whole hand to work with. Smartass.

I am pretty sure I knew all that at one point, but sometimes I need reminding. 

Everyone hail to the Pumpkin King!

Samhain. All Hallows Eve. Hallowe'en.  My favourite holiday of the year is nigh! Out come the candy (and the three extra pounds I get from scarfing it) and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Out come the paper ghosts, ghouls and mummies; the pumpkins, jack o lanterns, and cobwebs. And out comes the costume-angst, for all except Panda.

Panda is an odd one. Usually by January 1st,, she knows what she is going to be the next year. She'll be Queen Elsa from Frozen this time, and I gotta say, I'm kind of relieved. I know it is unusual celebrate that your child wants to be one more blue Disney princess in a sea of blue Disney princesses instead of say, Malala. But I see it as a turning point for her. Since she has been old enough to choose her own costumes, she has been Spiderman, Iron Man, and Captain America. Yay, girl power, claiming male spaces, right? Nope. Maybe... a young girl's confidence that sex and gender are irrelevant? Not at all.

See, her daycare group from babyhood to age five was predominantly boys. Active, energetic, sometimes aggressive boys, with the occasional girl in a corner with a tea set and a dolly for some variety. And since Panda is decidedly not of the tea set persuasion, her best friends were always boys. We have consciously not gender stereotyped in our home, but of course the world (and other parents) are always ready and willing to jump in fill the gap for us. Around the age of four , she started to separate colours along gender lines, then toys, then everything else. Nothing about girls was cool enough for her. Princesses were 'too kissy', and pink was totally out of the question - any attempt to explain that colours were for everyone was met with an incredulous stare and "Papa doesn't wear pink." (Technically true, but her papa won't wear any colour out of the neutral range. Ever.) She had a Transformers party for her fifth birthday. At five and a half she decided that men got all the cool jobs, and was heartbroken and sobbing that she couldn't be a boy when she grew up. Cue long rambling explanation of the why girls are awesome, the history of feminism and the struggle for equality. No go. Eventually I gave up and offered her a hug and a cookie instead.

The start of kindergarten and new (girl) friends ameliorated things somewhat, especially on the fashion front - although she got points from the boys for being the only Iron Man at Halloween whose chest plate thingy actually lit up (thanks, S!) Frozen did more, because here was a girl that Panda could really get behind, someone who could do cool magicky stuff and still look great in glitter.

So, I really, really never thought I'd say this, and believe me I am well aware of Disney's flaws, but in this one case, I gotta say- hat's off to you, Walt, for letting my little girl finally revel in her double xs. I hope it'll stick, and maybe her 2015 will start with the announcement that next year she's going as Amelia Earhart, or Ada Lovelace. But until then, I'll be the lady unabashedly belting out 'Let it Go' in the car on her morning commute. And yeah, I know you all can see me, and no, I don't care.



p.s. So....did Queen Elsa single-handedly put all those ice-miners out of business with power over ice and snow? I figure that pretty much the only people rich enough in those days to afford ice were the nobility, and she could easily take care of them with a sweep of her hand.