I often wonder what Sahsez' memories of childhood will be. Will they be primarily happy ones, or will the sad and angry times stand out more in her mind? Will she remember the three hours spent together, happily cutting and pasting together thirty elaborate Valentines, or will it be the three minutes at the end when she had reached her limit and I made her finish printing her name on the last handful of cards, despite wailing protests?
And what will she think of me? What parts of my character will she admire and emulate, and what little habits do I have that will drive her crazy, especially when, forty years later, I haven't changed them? I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, partly because of my constant low-level concern about her happiness, partly because I now share a house with my own mother. I also started reading Sheila Munro's Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro this weekend, and my ponderings on the mother/daughter relationship are echoed in this book.
I often consciously finding myself doing something in some way, specifically because my mother did it another way, and I don't want to be like her. One of those things is "running late". Although I am often "running late", I try not to let Sahsez know it. Most of the time, I fail, and "Hurry up, Sahsez, we're late" slips out more often than I care to admit.
Why do I think this is so bad? I don't know, really, it just seems wrong to me to a) make the child feel that it's in any way her problem or her fault that we're running late, and b) normalize lateness by talking about it all the time. I want Sahsez to be the kind of person that gets places on time. I think that the way to achieve this is first of all to stop being late myself, which is coming along very well, actually, I'm not late very often anymore (running late is different from being late), and second of all, when we are late, to not make a big deal of it.
So that's one of those things that I hope will not drive her crazy. I hope she will not, as a teenager or adult, sigh, and say "My mother is always late."
I said that I'm rarely late anymore, and this is true, but one thing I seem to be consistently late for, no matter what, is birthday parties. Sahsez attends an insane number of birthday parties -- we're thinking of taking out a second mortgage to finance the gift-buying -- and I can't remember the last time I got her to one on time. We are always coasting slowly down some unknown road, looking for the balloons on the door, at least ten minutes after the party has started and sometimes as much as half an hour after the other kids have arrived.
Why do I do this? The parties are always on a weekend afternoon, so I can't blame work. Tae kwon-do starts at five-thirty on weekday evenings, and it's tough to get there on time, with a full water bottle and two clean doboks with properly-tied belts. Yet we've only been late for TKD once in five months. We're late for every birthday party.
Part of the problem is the gift. Actually, maybe the whole problem is the gift. I never buy it prior to the day of the party. I never buy it on the morning of the party. I buy it on the way to the party. I don't mean to, but I always do.
I really, truly, buy into the whole idea of Sahsez picking out her friend's gift carefully and thoughfully, wrapping it herself, lovingly, and making the birthday card out of construction paper and writing her friend's name on it, accompanied by a thoughful message. I really think this if the way it should be. But somehow, it's never that way. It's always like this: we dash into The Cadboro Bay Book Company, I rush to the counter, say "Boy! Six! Twenty dollars!" to whoever's on duty that day, she helps us carefully, thoughfully, quickly choose two books, I borrow the Scotch tape and wrap it with some of the free wrapping paper that my mom gets in her Scholastic book orders, we dash back to the car (or bike, if it's not December, January, or February) and rush off to the party, where things are already well underway.
There are so many problems here I don't know where to begin. First off, Sahsez does not like getting her friends books for their birthdays. When she was very young, I got into the habit of picking out nice books for every birthday. I still feel strongly that this is the best gift that you can give a child, one that won't break or get forgotten in a Rubbermaid Rough Tote full of plastic gadgets, or, if it does, will eventually one day be hauled out and rescued, and read, and loved. I consider most of the kids I know to be woefully undersupplied in the book department, and I try to remedy that every chance I get.
However. I do realize that buying a child's birthday present is not really about what I think is best for the child. Neither is it about what that child thinks is best for him/herself. It's really about what Sahsez thinks her friend will like, what she can feel happy about giving to her friend, and what will help her to feel the joy of giving. And books, sadly, ain't it.
Around the time that she turned four, Sahsez told me that she hated giving books as presents. Okay, I thought, so, we won't do books. At that time, there was a lovely toystore in Cadboro Bay Village called Timeless Toys. They carried outrageously expensive, but oh-so-cute finger puppets in a variety of species, including dinosaurs, butterflies, princesses, parrots, and apples with worms. Sahsez liked them, I liked them, and they became our new default gift solution. Just as there is a book for every child, there seemed to be a puppet for every child. The kids liked them and so did their parents.
Too bad for us Timeless Toys closed down, leaving Cadboro Bay Books as the only place in the village where you could buy something a child would want. Never mind that as a child I would have loved Kraft Singles and Pot of Gold for a gift, items which are readily available at two separate locations in the village.
We travelled to the Timeless Toys in Oak Bay a couple times, and these excursions were successful. The store is smaller but the finger-puppet collection is even more eclectic, so it's worth the trip. The problem is, when you are physically incapable of leaving for a birthday party more than fifteen minutes before that birthday party is scheduled to begin, going to Oak Bay on the way is not really feasible, unless the party happens to be in Oak Bay. So, for all intents and purposes, the departure of Timeless Toys - Cadboro Bay marked a return to books for all of Sahsez' lucky little friends.
The result is that Sahsez is not excited about giving. She never pushes her present to the front of the pile, never yells "Mine next! Mine next!" like all the other kids do. In fact, she often doesn't care whether her friend opens her gift or not. Sometimes, like the time she picked out the perfect dinosaur storybook with accompanying CD for Keenan, she's right in there jostling to have her gift be opened first, but generally this is not the case. I tell myself that she is simply more polite than these other rude hooligans, but this is unlikely. If her gifts contained exactly what she thought her friend would love, I don't doubt she'd outjostle them all.
I need to fix this. If I don't, it's destined to become one of those things that drives her crazy about me. I look at her on these occasions and I know she is thinking "We're late again. Mommy didn't plan well. We're going to get a book. Again."
What fixing it will cost, I fear, is time, that thing I am the least willing to part with these days, but which seems to be the cure-all solution to every problem I face. I need to take the time, on some day before the actual day of the party, to take Sahsez to some store -- which one I do not know, since I try my best to never leave my neighbourhood, some store where there are toys but which does not have an instore McDonald's and a greeter -- and I need to slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully, pick out, no, allow her to pick out whatever toy she feels will best suit her friend, and costs no more than twenty dollars. Even typing that out is difficult for my inner control freak. There is a voice inside my head that is screaming "NOoooo! She is not capable of making that choice! She will pick BARBIE! SHe WILL! You will be the parent that brings the shitty plastic Barbie/Dora the Explorer/Spongebob Squarepants MGM studios movie spinoff trash! Don't leave this in her hands!"
Okay, so maybe not just time, maybe time and pride. The spending of the former, the swallowing of the latter. The whole idea is loathsome to me. But the alternative is to go on with the way things are, with Sahsez not liking the gift, not feeling the joy of giving, and me being stressed, and us being late, and generally creating an environment of unpleasantness around the whole birthday party experience. What I fear is that in her memory (I typed that first as momory, which is perhaps a good term for what I'm talking about here), under the heading of "Birthday Parties", the moments listed won't include the thrill of seeing her friends on the weekends, running and screaming in someone else's house or yard, and getting a goody bag. Instead, her associations will be with the mad dash, her total non-involvement in the gift-wrapping, mommy snapping "get your shoes on before we're even later!", and the embarrassment of being late. Man, I so do not want that for her.
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to relegate the birthday party task to her father. Yeah, that might work. He's not crazy about the inevitable sit-around-and-chat-with-the-other-parents part of the whole thing, but he could deal. I'd have to help him out a bit with names and faces, but he would definitely handle the gift-buying with more grace than I do. Actually, he wouldn't care much what Sahsez picked out for the gift, provided it didn't cost too much. Hmm. That's true. He wouldn't care at all. He would be completely relaxed about the whole thing. He would let her pick out anything. He probably would let her wear anything she wanted, too. Hmm. Yeah, scratch that.
And what will she think of me? What parts of my character will she admire and emulate, and what little habits do I have that will drive her crazy, especially when, forty years later, I haven't changed them? I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, partly because of my constant low-level concern about her happiness, partly because I now share a house with my own mother. I also started reading Sheila Munro's Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro this weekend, and my ponderings on the mother/daughter relationship are echoed in this book.
I often consciously finding myself doing something in some way, specifically because my mother did it another way, and I don't want to be like her. One of those things is "running late". Although I am often "running late", I try not to let Sahsez know it. Most of the time, I fail, and "Hurry up, Sahsez, we're late" slips out more often than I care to admit.
Why do I think this is so bad? I don't know, really, it just seems wrong to me to a) make the child feel that it's in any way her problem or her fault that we're running late, and b) normalize lateness by talking about it all the time. I want Sahsez to be the kind of person that gets places on time. I think that the way to achieve this is first of all to stop being late myself, which is coming along very well, actually, I'm not late very often anymore (running late is different from being late), and second of all, when we are late, to not make a big deal of it.
So that's one of those things that I hope will not drive her crazy. I hope she will not, as a teenager or adult, sigh, and say "My mother is always late."
I said that I'm rarely late anymore, and this is true, but one thing I seem to be consistently late for, no matter what, is birthday parties. Sahsez attends an insane number of birthday parties -- we're thinking of taking out a second mortgage to finance the gift-buying -- and I can't remember the last time I got her to one on time. We are always coasting slowly down some unknown road, looking for the balloons on the door, at least ten minutes after the party has started and sometimes as much as half an hour after the other kids have arrived.
Why do I do this? The parties are always on a weekend afternoon, so I can't blame work. Tae kwon-do starts at five-thirty on weekday evenings, and it's tough to get there on time, with a full water bottle and two clean doboks with properly-tied belts. Yet we've only been late for TKD once in five months. We're late for every birthday party.
Part of the problem is the gift. Actually, maybe the whole problem is the gift. I never buy it prior to the day of the party. I never buy it on the morning of the party. I buy it on the way to the party. I don't mean to, but I always do.
I really, truly, buy into the whole idea of Sahsez picking out her friend's gift carefully and thoughfully, wrapping it herself, lovingly, and making the birthday card out of construction paper and writing her friend's name on it, accompanied by a thoughful message. I really think this if the way it should be. But somehow, it's never that way. It's always like this: we dash into The Cadboro Bay Book Company, I rush to the counter, say "Boy! Six! Twenty dollars!" to whoever's on duty that day, she helps us carefully, thoughfully, quickly choose two books, I borrow the Scotch tape and wrap it with some of the free wrapping paper that my mom gets in her Scholastic book orders, we dash back to the car (or bike, if it's not December, January, or February) and rush off to the party, where things are already well underway.
There are so many problems here I don't know where to begin. First off, Sahsez does not like getting her friends books for their birthdays. When she was very young, I got into the habit of picking out nice books for every birthday. I still feel strongly that this is the best gift that you can give a child, one that won't break or get forgotten in a Rubbermaid Rough Tote full of plastic gadgets, or, if it does, will eventually one day be hauled out and rescued, and read, and loved. I consider most of the kids I know to be woefully undersupplied in the book department, and I try to remedy that every chance I get.
However. I do realize that buying a child's birthday present is not really about what I think is best for the child. Neither is it about what that child thinks is best for him/herself. It's really about what Sahsez thinks her friend will like, what she can feel happy about giving to her friend, and what will help her to feel the joy of giving. And books, sadly, ain't it.
Around the time that she turned four, Sahsez told me that she hated giving books as presents. Okay, I thought, so, we won't do books. At that time, there was a lovely toystore in Cadboro Bay Village called Timeless Toys. They carried outrageously expensive, but oh-so-cute finger puppets in a variety of species, including dinosaurs, butterflies, princesses, parrots, and apples with worms. Sahsez liked them, I liked them, and they became our new default gift solution. Just as there is a book for every child, there seemed to be a puppet for every child. The kids liked them and so did their parents.
Too bad for us Timeless Toys closed down, leaving Cadboro Bay Books as the only place in the village where you could buy something a child would want. Never mind that as a child I would have loved Kraft Singles and Pot of Gold for a gift, items which are readily available at two separate locations in the village.
We travelled to the Timeless Toys in Oak Bay a couple times, and these excursions were successful. The store is smaller but the finger-puppet collection is even more eclectic, so it's worth the trip. The problem is, when you are physically incapable of leaving for a birthday party more than fifteen minutes before that birthday party is scheduled to begin, going to Oak Bay on the way is not really feasible, unless the party happens to be in Oak Bay. So, for all intents and purposes, the departure of Timeless Toys - Cadboro Bay marked a return to books for all of Sahsez' lucky little friends.
The result is that Sahsez is not excited about giving. She never pushes her present to the front of the pile, never yells "Mine next! Mine next!" like all the other kids do. In fact, she often doesn't care whether her friend opens her gift or not. Sometimes, like the time she picked out the perfect dinosaur storybook with accompanying CD for Keenan, she's right in there jostling to have her gift be opened first, but generally this is not the case. I tell myself that she is simply more polite than these other rude hooligans, but this is unlikely. If her gifts contained exactly what she thought her friend would love, I don't doubt she'd outjostle them all.
I need to fix this. If I don't, it's destined to become one of those things that drives her crazy about me. I look at her on these occasions and I know she is thinking "We're late again. Mommy didn't plan well. We're going to get a book. Again."
What fixing it will cost, I fear, is time, that thing I am the least willing to part with these days, but which seems to be the cure-all solution to every problem I face. I need to take the time, on some day before the actual day of the party, to take Sahsez to some store -- which one I do not know, since I try my best to never leave my neighbourhood, some store where there are toys but which does not have an instore McDonald's and a greeter -- and I need to slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully, pick out, no, allow her to pick out whatever toy she feels will best suit her friend, and costs no more than twenty dollars. Even typing that out is difficult for my inner control freak. There is a voice inside my head that is screaming "NOoooo! She is not capable of making that choice! She will pick BARBIE! SHe WILL! You will be the parent that brings the shitty plastic Barbie/Dora the Explorer/Spongebob Squarepants MGM studios movie spinoff trash! Don't leave this in her hands!"
Okay, so maybe not just time, maybe time and pride. The spending of the former, the swallowing of the latter. The whole idea is loathsome to me. But the alternative is to go on with the way things are, with Sahsez not liking the gift, not feeling the joy of giving, and me being stressed, and us being late, and generally creating an environment of unpleasantness around the whole birthday party experience. What I fear is that in her memory (I typed that first as momory, which is perhaps a good term for what I'm talking about here), under the heading of "Birthday Parties", the moments listed won't include the thrill of seeing her friends on the weekends, running and screaming in someone else's house or yard, and getting a goody bag. Instead, her associations will be with the mad dash, her total non-involvement in the gift-wrapping, mommy snapping "get your shoes on before we're even later!", and the embarrassment of being late. Man, I so do not want that for her.
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to relegate the birthday party task to her father. Yeah, that might work. He's not crazy about the inevitable sit-around-and-chat-with-the-other-parents part of the whole thing, but he could deal. I'd have to help him out a bit with names and faces, but he would definitely handle the gift-buying with more grace than I do. Actually, he wouldn't care much what Sahsez picked out for the gift, provided it didn't cost too much. Hmm. That's true. He wouldn't care at all. He would be completely relaxed about the whole thing. He would let her pick out anything. He probably would let her wear anything she wanted, too. Hmm. Yeah, scratch that.
