And then you shift your priorities.

This blog has been pretty quiet for the past month. Sometimes I get busy and I post a lot, and then sometimes I get busy and I don't post at all. Most of the time it's because life has gotten hectic with small things - rarely with One Big Thing.

But this time it was One Big Thing. My daughter Avery, whose real name I'm using here for the first time, got very sick on the last weekend of April, with what I thought was a stomach bug. On the third night, when the vomiting started again and she had been hyperventilating for several hours and the bad feeling I had just wouldn't go away, I took her to emergency.

Within about 3 minutes the triage nurse had it figured out. At first he thought she was hyperventilating from anxiety after all the vomiting. You could see, too, that she was badly dehydrated. She breathed into a paper bag for about 45 seconds while he was asking me her date of birth and so on, and suddenly she took the bag off her face and gasped, "I might throw up." He smelled her breath and reached for a glucometer.

Do mothers go into denial sometimes? Absolutely we do. I had noticed the frequent urination over the past couple of weeks, but I had put all my anxiety into the kidney disease basket...in fact I had decided to ask her doctor to order a 24-hour urine collection.

But as soon as I saw what he had in his hand, I knew what the bad feeling was. Once or twice over the past month I thought "She's been up to pee twice tonight. Diabetes? No, don't be silly. Don't overreact."

Her blood sugar was 23.5.

It's a surreal feeling to see an entire emergency room unit scramble into action at 3 AM, because your daughter has a stomach bug. It's a surreal feeling to sit next to your 9 year old - whose eyelids are barely visible, her eyes are so sunken - biting your tongue because all you can think to say to the doctor is "You must be mistaken." It's a surreal feeling to watch them, when they can finally get a line in to her shrunken and dehydrated threads of veins, put insulin into her IV.

And then to watch the colour and the life come back into your daughter, and to know it's not just the saline, the phosphorus and the potassium, but because she is getting dextrose and insulin.

Insulin. "But - but -" I think to myself stupidly, "Insulin is only for diabetics."

It can't be. It can't be. She's perfectly well. She has always wasted away when she has a virus - all her life whenever she gets a cold she shrinks down to a wisp, and then within a few days she plumps back up. You must be wrong. There's some other explanation, I know it.

Can't we talk about this?

I want what's behind door number two.

But what we got was Type 1 Diabetes. And what nearly killed Avery that night was diabetic ketoacidosis. She had every one of the symptoms on that linked page, except for coma and, thankfully, some of the symptoms listed under 'cerebral edema'.

We spent five days in hospital while they slowly brought her blood sugar down and her electrolytes up. I only realized how close she had been to fatal complications when the doctors and specialists who visited her every day would mention small things: things like "I haven't seen a child that sick from diabetes for a very long time." (That was from the pediatrician - himself a Type 1 diabetic.) "Avery, today is the sickest you will ever be in your life, I promise. You will never be this sick again."

And "She was very sick," said one nurse to another, then the diabetes nurse educator added to both of them, "She was incredibly sick."

I can't even describe how much better she looks in this photo. 

I wish I had taken one 12 hours earlier - you wouldn't think it was the same child.

We have been home now for 12 days. Our whole life has changed. From a household that would lie reading books in bed until 10.30 in the morning, shuffle into the kitchen and throw a few pieces of bread into the toaster, we have become a family who does sugar checks every four hours at minimum, and schedules (unbelievably balanced) meals for 9:00, 1:00, 6:00 and 9:00. Nothing gets in the way of mealtimes anymore - because I can't manage it all, in my own mind, unless there is some predictability built into the system. I have to know exactly what is going in to her body, and administer insulin within a certain timeframe around her meals.

My crappy little entry-level Samsung Galaxy smart-phone has become my bestest, best buddy. I have alarms set for 2 AM, 5 AM, and 8 AM. I have an app that links to a website where I log every single thing Avery eats, with a carb count for all of it, as well as the result of every finger-stick blood sugar test she does (we're averaging about 8 or 9 a day), and every injection she gets of both kinds of insulin. I had to get a text plan so that I could contact the pediatrician four times a day with her pre-meal blood sugar numbers, and he could text me back with the dosage.

Will we be okay? Yes. We will be okay.

Will this settle down so that I don't need to keep such obsessive records of her food? Yes. I'll get used to it.

Will I eventually know the insulin dosage myself, so that I don't need to text the pediatrician? Yes. In fact they're giving me "the math" tomorrow, and then I'll be doing my own insulin calculations.

Will I ever, ever get used to the fact that my daughter has Type 1 Diabetes?

I'm sure I will. The disease is manageable, if not controllable. The daily grind of it will be exhausting, but we are willing and able for it...after all, we still have Avery with us. The tests, the injections, the careful juggling of food and exercise and meds...all of that is cake compared to my child nearly dying.

The question is, will I ever forgive myself for not seeing the signs of it, and therefore allowing her illness to progress long past the point of danger. Will I ever forgive myself for all the ginger ale and popsicles I fed her, thinking her blood sugar was low after all that vomiting?



I'm not holding my breath.

Eminem is for next year

My six year old is walking around, snapping her fingers on the backbeat and singing:

"Ra ra ra-ah-ah
Roma, Ro-ma-mah
Gaga, ooh la la
Want your bad ro-mance!"

This reminds me of a dreadful afternoon when we were fifteen and my best friend was babysitting the pastor's three year-old. We were at our wits' end trying to stop her from singing something she had picked up (from us) during the course of the afternoon but, try as we might, the girl insisted on belting this out at the top of her lungs:

"If you're gonna do it
Do it right
Right, do it with me!"*

You would have thought that day would have taught me prudence, would have taught me to be careful what music I played when kids were present, but apparently not. It wasn't even two years later when my little four year old cousin, whose family I was rooming with during university, left my bedroom and wandered down the hall warbling

"Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight
won't somebody help me chase these shadows away!"

Children will hang you, for sure.

Some people might think it's strange that I don't let my children watch Disney movies, but they sing Lady Gaga songs. I think it a bit odd, myself, but I'm willing to live with it.

I might also be counting on them finding Lady Gaga incomprehensible.

Plus I always clear my throat loudly if they happen to be in the room when she says "And baby when it's love if it's not rough it isn't fun."

I'm up for the 2010 Parent-of-the-Year award, didn't I tell you?

Wow, I'm old. And this photo is
pretty dodgy for a promo shot.
See the optical illusion, there?

-----------------------------
* I'm not sure what's worse: the horrible lip-synching or the weird pre-show-show with the - what is he, Italian? - cinema employee. No, wait: I have it. The worst part of this whole video is when George Michael plays the tambourine on his crotch.

Dear Santa

Six months from now, you better not bring any more stuffies to this house, you fat bastard.

They're in here.

Spoiler Warning: this is a heavy review of an emotionally huge movie.

I went to a movie the other day. I had high hopes for it, and was certainly prepared to have a good time.

I didn't have a good time, though.

I got punched in the gut. Where The Wild Things Are put a whammy on me.

It got released on my birthday, and I thought we might take the kids to it after dinner. I checked parent previews and got the idea it wouldn't be appropriate - I asked a friend and she said this:
Where the Wild Things Are is a dark and disturbing movie. I wished I hadn't seen it...the movie should carry a warning label: for people with happy carefree perfect childhoods only...I am still disturbed, four days later.

I was interested. And I thought, I pretty much had a happy carefree childhood, I should be golden.

Wrong.

Because I am a human...because I was a child, and have come full-circle to parenthood, Wild Things was a sucker punch.

The Maurice Sendak book, which of course everyone has read, is a terse and symbolic story of a child's defiance, punishment, and capitulation. During his punishment (sent to his room), a jungle grows up around him and he sets sail across an ocean, in a private boat. He arrives at a strange land full of strange creatures: Wild Things. They threaten to eat him, but he tames them with magic, and they crown him king.

There are several pages, in the middle of the book, with no words on them. Max's adventure is barely narrated at all - and his emotions are only named in one tiny line - "Max was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all." Aside from that line, the reader is left to infer what she will about what's going on in Max's head.

The movie is, on the surface, significantly different from the book. (Which - okay, the book has, what, 8 pages? and the movie takes nearly two hours, so you'd expect some fleshing-out.) In reality, though, it is not different at all. Every event, every extra character, every change made by the writers, seems perfectly natural to the original text.

Max's journey to the place where the wild things are is, like in the book, a turning inward. The place where the wild things are is a manifestation of his internal landscape as, in fact, the wild things themselves are manifestations of Max, his family members, his habits, his fears, his longings. Their characters are not static - they keep shifting as power dynamics change, as Max's will first unites, then divides them. The wild things are often children - they submit to his kingship, relieved to have an authority figure again.

This theme surfaces again and again throughout the movie, as characters admit their need for "a king". They need guidance, they want someone to look after them and make everything all right. (It's significant that Max, in his real life, doesn't live with his father - the reason is never made clear. We don't know whether the father is dead, or just gone.)

For a while Max becomes that authority they need (while at the same time, one of the wild things has become Max's father figure), but soon the wild things discover, as Max once did, that nobody has enough power to make everything all right.

Parents and children, and the hurt they inflict on one another, is a huge theme in this movie. There is one scene that cut me right to the bone. Judith, a wild thing who has always been more or less skeptical about this upstart king, has a jeering match with Max. No words are said, but she and Max just mock and roar more and more loudly at each other, him imitating her with a look of contempt on his face. She is in a trench, looking up at him (the only way he would be taller than she is), and after she screams at him for the last time she cries out, before he has a chance to answer her, "YOU CAN'T DO THAT BACK TO ME!"

He stops, taken aback.

"YOU CAN'T BE UPSET!" she yells. "We can be upset but you can't get upset! You're the king! If we say 'I'll eat you up', you have to say [gently] 'oh no! what'll I do! don't eat me!'"

Max stares at her. You can see the realisation of what he's done - the same thing that has been done to him - on his face. Then he turns around and walks away.

It is gut-wrenching.

I am a parent who has anger problems. Thank God I am not a hitter, but sometimes things escalate. I push, they push back, and then - well, I am ashamed to say that I, too, have imitated my daughter's words or voice, which she has used to me out of hurt and impotent anger. I have turned it around on her and have wounded her, deliberately, by using my position of power to subdue her, demean her.

It seemed harmless at the time. It seemed like a way to show her how it made me feel when she said that - how it felt to have someone talk to you that way. But what she needed from me...what she always needs from me...is for me to be the parent, the adult, the mother - the one in control. It's a paradox, because she's trying to hurt me...but she doesn't want to succeed.

When I saw Max and Judith behaving like parent and child, I sobbed. I felt such a conviction of guilt for the few - thankfully - times in our lives when I have done this to my own child. I had heard those exact words from her. "You can't get upset! You shouldn't imitate me!" And once, heartbreakingly, "I'm just a child Mummy!" Watching this movie, I remembered what I had forgotten. I knew it as a child, knew it right at the core of my soul. I remembered that fear I felt when I pushed her, hoping against hope that she would react with love and not anger. That she would reach out instead of lashing out.

It's not too much to say that Where the Wild Things Are changed my life. It absolutely wounded me. It reached out of the screen, tore me out of my Now, and shoved me back into my Then. It reminded me what it was like to be powerless, to trust out of necessity. It reminded me what it was like to burn with rage and helplessness, to lash out in pain, needing to smash and destroy. And it reminded me what it was like to want, so badly, to be treated with gentleness, to be treasured above all else - even just to be given the gift of my mother's gaze. Without anger, without distraction.

If you had told me a week ago that a movie could make me feel this way, could double me over in pain, make me run home to my children, make me change the way I am with them, I'd have laughed out loud. A movie, though, is just a vehicle for a voice. The message can be a teeny little folded up thing that flies inside you disguised as laughter, disguised as fantasy, imagination, nonsense.....and then when you've lowered your defenses, taken it in and given it a place to Be, it unfolds itself. You look at it differently. It's a part of you. You understand what you've really been seeing.

That moment of comprehension can be devastating.

I don't know whether you, in particular, should go see it, or not. I will say that it's the best movie I've seen in probably a decade. I'll also say that I'm buying the soundtrack, and I'm buying the DVD, and then the special edition DVD, and then the ten-year anniversary director's cut DVD box set, and then....you get the idea.

A lot of people don't like this movie. It's painful - no doubt about it. And a lot of people probably don't understand this movie - you should have heard some of the people in the theatre. They were mystified, and slightly resentful. "That wasn't in the book!" But, for my part, I came away changed - and for the better. As I said to my sister, "Run, don't walk."


Photo from IMdb, used totally without the permission of WarnerBros.

The Voice of Reason is Ridiculously Young.

I have spent much of the day in verbal negotiations with my youngest daughter. She is at the foot-stamping, hands-on-hips age of 3.5, wherein she desires nothing more than to escape the totalitarian state under whose oppression she currently languishes, and set up a new utopian society called "The Wuhlud Wheya Kids Can Do WHATEVAH THEY WANT TO WIF NO. MUMMIES!!!!" (You have to shriek that last part.)

By 11.30 I was extremely cross. I had a raging headache, my womb was cramping (because it can't quite believe it produced this viper) and I was literally biting my lips to keep from screaming. As I stood there slowly counting to ten twenty, the six-year-old raised her head from the book she was reading and calmly observed, "Something tells me she's not going to do what you want."

I'm thinking of renting her out for interventions.

Sadly, Almost Completely True.

The other day Mr. HalfSoledBoots wanted to exchange the sweater I bought him for Christmas* and asked me to find the receipt while he was at work. I was feeling a little emotional that day. ("What? Surely not.")

I thought I knew where it was, so I breezed into the bedroom, swept the 18" of junk off the top of my cedar chest, and propped it open. I rummaged around inside, surprised to not see the plastic bag I had expected, containing the receipts from all the Christmas presents I bought. I frowned and dug deeper, piling beside me such things as:

• the ten thank-you cards I wrote after Emily's baby shower in 2004. They are in sealed envelopes, with the recipients' names written clearly on the front so I could later add the addresses and mail them.
• a plastic grocery bag full of paper hats, streamers, and napkins from three differently-themed children's birthday parties.
• a picture frame with the glass broken in two places. Still perfectly good, waiting for me to get around to buying replacement glass for the frame WHICH I BOUGHT FOR 75% OFF AT PIER ONE IN 1999.
• 10 years' worth of negatives in slippery plastic sleeves, which slithered all over the floor.

No sign of the receipt. And what did I do, at this juncture? This is what I did. I threw myself on my bed and burst into stormy tears, sobbing bitter invective against myself as follows: "Oh, why am I such a fucking loser? Oh, why do I suck so bad? Oh, I'm a terrible wife, can't even think what to buy my husband for Christmas and when I do it's the wrong thing, then I throw away the receipt so he can't even return it. Woe is me, the world is at an end."

Actually, it's all true except that last line.

So, my children heard me crying (though I was trying to be quiet about it) and came in with concerned looks on their sweet faces, to see what was wrong. They crawled up beside me and put their smooth little arms around my neck and kissed me. Their voices were very anxious when they asked me what was wrong. I cried, "Daddy wants to take back the sweater I bought him for Christmas and I can't find the receipt. Oh I'm sorry I'm such a terrible mother, I can't do anything right."

Luckily they have experience with this type of situation and they were very kind. At first they were inclined to be indignant that Daddy didn't like the sweater, then they asked me what the receipt looked like, so they could search for it.

At that point, Em leaned over to her sister and whispered something in her ear. She sat back on her heels and said "Should we bring it? That would cheer her up." Charlotte nodded and Emily ran out of the room. Charlotte patted my hair and kissed my cheek, murmuring "you're a good mummy", just as Emily came back at a run from the living room........

.....carrying yarn.

___________________________

* Yes, I bought a sweater. Believe me, it's better this way.

I Learned Seven Things Today

1. If you live on Vancouver Island and it looks like it's going to rain, It Is.
2. When your instinct tells you to bring two pairs of mitts, don't settle for one just because the other pair isn't right on top of the drawer. Likewise, no matter how much your daughter is convinced that all she will need is her black sweatshirt, bring the coat. BRING THE COAT.
3. Two little children trudging through the mud in the pouring rain, with their scarves over their heads as makeshift hats and sharing one pair of mitts, can only be held off for a certain amount of time by the promise of hot chocolate. Once that time is up, you'd better be ready to do some piggybacking.
4. It is possible though inconveniently pinchy to piggyback one 65 pound 6 year old while carrying one 28 pound 3 year old in your arms.
5. It is wise to check the opening hours of a store you need to visit before dragging two children onto first a bus, then a ferry, then on foot up the purgatorially long hill to the closed and locked door of the shop. In the pouring rain.
6. Cappuccino huts at ferry terminals on small islands don't take Interac.
7. If you accidentally use all your bus change buying hot chocolate at the cappuccino hut at the ferry terminal, you will have quite a walk ahead of you. The children will be exhausted. Be prepared to do some piggybacking. See item #4, above.

A show of hands, please.

Do all mothers have desertion fantasies, or is it just me?

"I have learned my lesson and I swear, Lord, if you just take them back I'll never have sex again. I'm SORRY, okay?"