I’m not entirely convinced about celebrating Mother’s Day though my beloved males did prepare a mammy breakfast like no other for me. Champagne! Rice flour pancakes (with a bit of grumbling) and a participatory card. The sausage looked a bit out of place on the pancake. It should have been a more ovarian shape. This is the trouble with sausages. They’re so uncooperative.
In many ways these are not good times to be a mother. There’s so much division around motherhood and people tend to blame mothers and have ludicrous expectations of them. In someways Mother’s Day is a collective pretending to like mothers while burying your hostility in flowers and pancakes. It’s more like a 24 hr fast than a celebration.
Molly Bloom should have had a line to sum this up. She has one that comes close and could be adapted to the task. You’ve been tasked!
In something of an unfortunate co-incidence I found myself today reading Norman O Brown’s revised take on Freud’s Oedipal Project and anality and castration (via Ernest Becker). It pretty much hosed the happy days effect of the champagne and pancakes. To reward my epic mothering (disputed this month by some twat, who is about as knowledgeable on the topic as the effects of wearing clogs on Mars, but when it comes to mothering everyone has an opinion for you…) I went to a very high tech car wash that terrified the life out of me because it was so science fiction in its instruments. I’d almost take friends on a tour to this thing it’s so nuts.
On that note I have to go bring supper to the mama with the new baby … his absolute divineness … he is marvellous the new boyo … and his mama is beyond marvellous. She’s mighty.
We will surely swear and laugh a lot and compare notes on banjaxed hips.
What have I learnt about being a mother after 10 years at it? Books, chips, tickles, rockin’ out, big love and comedy are your only mam. All other provisions and instructions result in the gravest protests and disappointments. (brush your teeth, eat your dinner, mind your brain there and so on).
Two friends with 140 years of age between them came yesterday and dug my garden plot because of incapacity due to falling over. I sat in the chair, tugged a few clumps and massaged the strawberry plants.
After they’d dug and manured and all the other things people who know about gardening do in these circumstances, my hip began to feel better! Over 3 years there must have been 10 people who’ve tried to dig that plot with me and it was finally tamed by yesterday’s epic gardening duo.
I took my hip to the hot tub again and afterwards the hip and I gazed admirably at the synchronized swimming team whose hair was glazed with gelatin. There was rather a Moscow State Circus circa 1980’s feel to the garish, bright costumes.
plumbed
I have just had my first plumbing success and fixed up my toilet. The matter that it was the most basic plumbing calamity that can occur should not detract from the venture inside the cistern.
Co-incidentally a moment ago I caught a headline that read Roger Federer loses … Roger Federer rarely loses and we must conclude his tennis sacrifice was necessary due to the serious plumbing progress that was happening simultaneously in another part of the world.
The fellas in the plumbing shop (Hillcrest Discount something off Main) were so helpful and we enjoyed a great conversation about farming difficulties that I may have to invent plumbing calamties just to have a reason to venture back over there for another exchange with them.
Array
Today I met an interesting array of women:
I met a woman who fell off a ladder while cleaning the ceiling. Curiously I met her in a place where we were both below in water, so when she pointed up you really had the precise feeling of how far she fell. We both agreed there’s much to be said about falling down, once you’ve fallen down.
I met another woman who never went to a funeral until she was 40. That seemed extraordinary to me. She seemed to have no real conception of people dying. What an extraordinary thing to have 40 years.
There were more women, but I don’t know where they’ve disappeared to. They’ll return and I’ll add them.
Yesterday a man told me he was “in love”. This was another astonishing thing to hear as usually people say they’re tired, then they’re busy, often they tell you where they have been if they’ve left the confines of the city, they might tell you their mother was visiting from x place and finally they tell you what they’re upto. I don’t object to being told any of that list, but I was struck that it could be useful if people expanded the adjectives and got more specific emotionally.
“I’m as hammered as a hard hatted hedgehog”
“My left pupil is destroyed by red hairy lights.”
“I am in love”
“I am not in love”
“I am unlikely to ever be in love.”
“Any chance of a kidney?”
*
From now on I am firmly committed to inquiring over the health of peoples hips. And how exactly is your hip health I shall ask at a poignant moment? I shall especially commit to this when I am approached by religious recruiters.
Driving to New West via the #1 highway, a new route for me, since I only drove Kingsway previous, it being a straight (diagonal) line convenient for not needing to turn left which I despise, and SW Marine which is a moon shaped approach … anyway via #1 as a passenger it occurred to me that we were sandhogs. The entire stretch of highway and wires and posts and dugout and boards and all else reminded me so much of sandhogs in novels I’ve read and yet we were arriving to the oldest city. No? We were tunneling out into the old spot. Odd that, somehow odd.
On the return it was the ribbon again at Boundary and Grandview. That stretch you experience sat at a traffic light. Not one you see necessarily from the bus unless you’re an over the shoulder viewer.
Incroyable
I’ve just learnt that a woman who works at the bakery fell over in exactly the same spot as me, except she was walking with her bike and that broke her fall somewhat.
Still that means three witnesses to the wanton disregard for public safety.
“The white board,” her friend said “Oh my God, I know that board… she fell over there too.”
While we were exchanging high octane on the trauma of falling over, some grumpy older bloke started giving out and rudely interrupted because he wanted her to hurry up. I shot a look at his left hip and wondered.
The stats on who falls over are alarming.
“About a third of people over 65 years of age that live alone will experience a fall this year. For those over 85, it will be half.” (Vancouver Coastal Health website)
Note the reference to home as danger. There’s no mention in the blurb on preventing falls on the lacing of our streets with debris or tripping over kerbs.
**
There are approximately 4,000 hip fractures in British Columbia each year.
- For seniors, falls are the most frequent cause of injury-related hospitalization (from hip health centre website)