The True Hallmark of Mother’s Day: Taking What We Can Get

Tags

beach, five year old, holidays, mother's day, one year old, parenthood, reality

Every year we are flooded by media about Mother’s Day from all of the retailers hoping to sell stuff to us. Radio ads urge husbands and sons to buy diamonds. Chocolates and flowers grace the most prominent areas of the grocery store, and everyone posts old photos of their mother or pictures of their own children with glowing social media boasts about love and being blessed and that sort of crap.

But under that, there is a current of disappointment. The people whose mothers have died and hurt to be reminded, the people whose mothers were just… really terrible at being a mother, and not really worthy of being honored, the people who wish they were mothers, or were ALMOST mothers, but aren’t…

…and the mothers of young children who face a day like any other – but with the added bitterness that comes from the contrast between their lives and the Mother’s Day commercials.

I am sure that some mothers out there got the Hallmark Card Mother’s Day – they got breakfast in bed and spent the day with guilt-free leisure while their usual jobs were done by others.

But I don’t know any of those mothers.

Every mother I spoke to – mothers of small children like I am – said that they had a good Mother’s Day… really… I mean, yeah, it was mostly the same as any other day, but there was something good about it.

A friend of mine got breakfast in bed. I mean, she had to buy the bacon and hashbrowns the day before, and she had to poke her husband and tell him to go make them for her, and he didn’t actually cook the hashbrowns, but she got bacon and eggs in bed and she figured that was good enough, really.

Another friend of mine had a nice barbecue at the house of a good friend of hers. And sure, her husband didn’t want to go at all and complained loudly about having to go – or maybe he didn’t go at all in the end, I don’t remember. Anyway, she went because she wanted to and she had a nice time, although she was annoyed about having to have a relationship fight in the process.

And as for me, well the baby slept until 9 am and PH dealt with Owl before that, so I got the best sleep in I have had in months, and then after the kids were in bed at night I sent PH to get me some pasta from my favourite restaurant, and some wine, and then I ate it at 9:30 pm while watching Mythbusters. So that was good.

During the day, I met up with another friend of mine (who had all three of her small children with her all day because her recently separated ex had decided to spend Mother’s Day cooking breakfast for other mothers at a Kinsman event and so was not available to help or do anything for the mother of his own kids) and we went to the beach.

The beach was nice, in a visiting-it-with-ungrateful-children sort of way. First they complained that they were cold. They refused to go near the water. They didn’t want to play in the sand. They wanted to go home and play video games.

But we, being experienced mothers, informed them that we didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass (not our actual words) how they felt, and we settled down on the sand anyway.

Fritter loved the beach. She ate sand and then when I carried her down to the water she happily splashed in the surf. She got covered in sand and thought it was fantastic.

The boys eventually warmed up to the beach. When they stopped whining about video games and claiming to be hungry despite having JUST eaten lunch, and when we put an end to their stick-based warfare, they finally started discovering crabs and sea shells and sand castles.

So our last hour there was quite peaceful, watching the kids dump sand into a puddle on a rock while Fritter followed them and tried to help, grabbing handfuls of sand in her tiny fists. We listened to the surf and smelled the sea air and looked at the mountains and enjoyed the sunshine and it was lovely.

At least until the boys started hitting each other with sticks again.

Of course, no Mother’s Day would be complete without a child asking the annual littany of  “why isn’t there a BOY’S day?” to which all of the present adults must answer in chorus, “EVERY DAY is BOY’S DAY.”

I’ll give this to Owl – he accepted the point of Mother’s Day very well. When I pointed out to my friend’s son that he got breakfast made for him every day, and that he got taken care of every day, he just argued that he couldn’t do those things yet. And of course I agreed but told him that that is why it is nice if, once a year, someone does those things in return for the mother who normally has to work at caring for other people and rarely for herself.

My friend’s son looked unconvinced but Owl took my side. Lord knows the poor kid hears me complain all the time about how much work I do looking after him.

In fact, he reiterated it today on the way to school. “Mother’s Day is when you get people to take care of you, instead of taking care of other people, right? But you did take care of me yesterday.”

And I told him that yes. While he is small, I don’t really get a day off. He can’t cook me breakfast, and he still needs me to make him dinner, and put him to bed. Daddy helped with some of it, so I got a break, but not the full Mother’s Day that you see in commercials. No woman with small children that I know got that. When the kids are this age, we take what we can get, because we know that Mother’s Day or not, they still need their diapers changed, and they still need to be entertained, and they still want dinner, and they don’t really give a damn how we feel about any of that.

But I do think that in a few years Owl will bring me breakfast in bed.

And in a few years, Fritter won’t need diapers changed.

And in a few years, things will be even better.

And I think that, considering the age of my kids, and life being what it is, yesterday was a darn good day.

 

The Time Draws Nigh (In Which I Agonize About Going Back To Work And Am Both Successful And In Deep Trouble Simultaneously)

Tags

anxiety, depression, dog training, maternity leave, parenthood, Perfect Husband, work, working mother

How has it been nearly a year since Fritter was born? Where did the time go?

  
I have spent the last month or two slowly gearing back up to work mode, because in a month I am going to have to go back into the world of unmet expectations and absolutely no down time which is the life of the working mother.

I don’t wanna.

I don’t want my cuddly baby to get bigger.

I don’t want to leave her at daycare because she has some stranger issues (which I will discuss at some point).

I don’t want the stress of having to meet people’s expectations, avoid judgement, etc.

I don’t want to lose the hour and a half of down time I get every day during Fritter’s morning nap while Owl is at school.

I don’t want any of it. I LIKE maternity leave.

 
But, since it isn’t a choice, what I really want is to get my dog training business going, and going HARD. Because training dogs pays between 40 and 70 dollars an hour and working at the vet clinic… doesn’t. Also because it’s one of my life dreams, along with being an author.

Thank You, 2015

Tags

depression, family, life, maternity leave, new years, parenthood, parents, pregnancy

I have mixed feelings about the passing of 2015.

Some parts of 2015 really sucked. My husband nearly killed himself, I ended up heavily pregnant, with a bacterial infection, working and caring for our four year old who also had a bacterial infection, while he was stuck in the hospital and unable to help.

My father broke his hip and overall has deteriorated markedly in his health.

My relationship with my son deteriorated, as my capacity to tolerate his extroverted highjinks hit a new low.

I spent a significant amount of this year coughing, exhausted, diabetic, extremely stressed, half-expecting to become a widow at any moment, researching the potential cost of burying my husband, and wearing Depends because I kept wetting myself.

On the other hand…

This year also brought me the generosity and love of the friends and relations who came streaming in to help during these difficult times. There were friends who picked Owl up at daycare when I was stuck at the hospital, and friends who brought Chinese food so that I wouldn’t have to cook, or took Owl for play dates so I could nap.

There was my mother in law, who is terrified of flying and financially limited, flying in TWICE to spend a grand total of three months sleeping on our couch, just to help.

On the first visit she made me diabetes-friendly meals and arranged snacks for me at a time when I was working and exhausted and could never have kept up the dietary management that was expected of me on my own. She put my son to bed at night and made him breakfast in the morning, she read to him and joked with him and brought some humor and pleasantry to a home that was seething in stress.

On her return she cooked and cleaned, entertained Owl and then held the baby so I could shower, get dressed, eat meals, and spend some quality time with my son.

And in between those visits, my parents flew in for four months. They took money from their nest egg to rent a place nearby, and my mother drove back and forth making meals and snacks, cleaning, and reading Owl bedtime stories.

Not only did it bring me much needed aid, but I got to spend time with my father while he still knows who I am.

And this year brought me Fritter, who made a safe landing on the shores of time and gave us the gift of a colic-free fourth trimester. She brings me joy every day with her grins and chortles, and I wouldn’t change a thing about her.

And with all of those months of support from our family, PH was able to retreat and rest and begin healing. While he is still very ill, I have seen more of the old Perfect Husband in the last three months than I have in the past two years. There are mornings when I come downstairs to find breakfast laid out for me, afternoons when he greets me at the door to take my coat and offer me a drink, and evenings when he rubs my feet and offers to run me a bath.

Whenever he has a good day, I feel like I could suffer another two years just for a chance at more days like that.

I feel like I could kiss 2015 for bringing me even one day like that, let alone as many as I have been gifted with these last few months.

2015 also brought me maternity leave, which I love because I am a lazy slob. I love being home with my baby and watching The Walking Dead or writing during her naps. It’s way better than working. I’m sad that there are only a few more months left. I have a lot of writing to get down in that time.

Yes, over all I am very grateful to 2015. I feel like it got handed a terrible set of cards but it played them all right.

2015 for me was a year of defeat and renewal, of family and love.

We survived it, and maybe it has made us stronger.

If 2016 can keep up with this upward trend, I think I can look forward to the coming year.

And if it can’t… well… Bring it, 2016.

Thankful Enough. I Think.

Tags

depression, gratitude, laughter, parenthood, Thanksgiving

It’s Canadian thanksgiving, so we cooked a turkey and were all thankful and stuff.

I’m thankful for a lot.

In fact, I think thankfulness has replaced other positive emotions, like joy or pleasure, in my life.

I’m thankful that my husband is still alive. I’m thankful for the fact that most days, lately, he has been able to help significantly around the house, cooking dinner and or doing laundry and such. Once or twice lately he has even extended signs of affection to me and I get extra thankful about things like that.

I’m thankful that my baby is alive and healthy and that I have bonded strongly with her. I’m thankful for her chubby little cheeks and her goofy chortle when I snorgle her. I’m thankful that my son is so bright and curious and so loving to his sister.

I’m thankful for my immense support network, for all the friends who helped me when things were in crisis, and that so many of my friends have kids Owl’s age.

I’m thankful that Owl loves school.

I’m thankful for the mountains and the incredible views that I get to enjoy every day taking Owl to school and back.

I’m so thankful for everything that I’m just bleeding out with it.

That’s right. I’m ungrateful about gratitude.

It’s odd. I’m not depressed. But I’m somehow… jaded. I feel like my sense of humor has deteriorated. I always used to be looking for the funny side of things.

Somehow I have lost that. You notice that I’m posting less? It’s because I have fewer funny stories. It can’t be that less funny stuff is happening. I’m just not seeing the humor.

When Owl tries to dick around with his general five year old silliness, I’m more likely to shut him down than join in. When I try to make jokes it feels forced and stupid. I’m like a cranky old lady.

I don’t like it.

But I don’t know where my sense of humor has gone. I want to see the funny side of things again.

I think PH has noticed. He keeps telling me bad jokes. “What does a pirate octogenarian say?” “I’m eighty.”

But in the meantime, there is turkey. I love turkey dinner, it’s my favourite thing, and when I smell the good turkey dinner smells and listen to the sounds of music from our ipod playing in the kitchen, football whistles from the living room, and cuddle my snuggly six month old, and enjoy the peace that comes from Owl being invited out by a friend on a playdate, I feel content and very grateful.

So why do I still feel like there’s something wrong?

A Letter To Parents of Colicky Babies

Tags

babyhood, colic, inconsolable crying, infant, newborn, normal, one month old, parenthood, second baby, second child, sleep

Dear Parent Of A Colicky Baby,

I know your pain.

I know how it feels to walk the floors for hours and hours every day, and night. I know how it feels when you read the definition of colic – crying for more than three hours a day, more than three days a week – and think, “there are babies out there who cry THAT LITTLE?”

I know how it feels to look jealously at couples in restaurants who are casually eating their dinner while their tiny baby slumbers peacefully in a car seat next to their table.

Meanwhile, YOU left your baby with a selfless friend or relative and you are trying to have a brief meal together to salvage your relationship even though you know that at this moment that your friend/relative is walking back and forth while your baby screams and screams.

Maybe you have said to each other “never again”.

Maybe you have already decided that your first born must be an only child because there is no way you can survive this a second time.

I know how that feels, too.

But.

Let me tell you about a different kind of baby.

Meet Fritter.

She just turned a month old, and almost all of my photos of her feature her doing something very strange…

In Which My Birthdaycation Is Somewhat Interrupted By Motherhood

Tags

birthdays, motherhood, mothers, parenthood

My mother is down visiting for our birthdays (I was born the day before her birthday, possible the only time in my life I have evinced great timing) and it’s been nice.

Owl is completely enthralled with her/her Samsung tablet, and demands her constantly, leaving me free to move about the house unencumbered in a way that I have not experienced in two and a half years.

I took a couple of days off of work, which was nice because I’m just SO TIRED. Now that I am working five days a week AND the post-Christmas puppy season is at its height, I had been really scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy lately.

I’m not feeling overly rested, because Owl has taken to waking up at five forty five in the morning lately, but I have at least had time to sit and not work and not train. It’s a really nice change.

My birthday itself was not all it could have been, though.

After three straight days of Owl in the house, even my mother was beginning to get her fill of “MORE PUZZLE, NANA. WATCH DAT VIDEO, NANA!”

We planned to drop him off at daycare and have a mother daughter day shopping.

It’s not that I didn’t want Owl around on my birthday. I love him and his company. But motherhood and fun birthday celebrations don’t really go together well.

Yeah, about that…

Twenty minutes after I dropped him off, Daycare Lady called and said that Owl was crying for me and she thought he might have a fever. Since Owl NEVER cries for me at daycare and since Daycare Lady hardly ever calls to ask me to come get him, I went right out there.

So we lugged Owl to the mall with us. He seemed perfectly fine, if clingy, and the thermometer didn’t register a fever. But anyone who has tried shopping with a toddler will agree with me that it is not the same experience.

Twice I had to leave my mother in a store to guard the things we had set aside in a change room for me and carry Owl halfway across the mall to one of the TWO restrooms.

We had to interrupt our shopping for his midday nap, and then wrestle him back into coat and shoes to continue it once he woke up.

The simplest exchange between my mother and me sounded like this:

“Oh, dear, I think that looks, Owl, don’t do that, come over here please, thank you. Yes, dear, I think that it looks, Owl, don’t pull on your mother like that.”

“Yeah, it feels comfortable but the material is, no, Owl, honey, I can’t pick you up right now, Mommy needs to take this shirt off. Here, do you think I should try the, no, honey, fingers aren’t for eating.”

“Do you want me to get a larger Owl, stop that, you’re going to knock me over.”

and so on.

By the time we got home, I had a new outfit and an ottoman that would double as a toy chest for Owl, so it was ultimately a successful day, but we were so wiped that PH and I cancelled our plans to go to a movie.

Taking my exhausted mother and saying “Okay, can you put him to bed for us, thanks, bye!” seemed a little too cruel.

So instead we stayed home and went to bed early.

That’s a MOTHERHOOD birthday, that is!

The next day was my mother’s birthday, and it went better. I dropped Owl off at daycare again and he was just fine. Mum and I registered my business license at the town hall, went to Chapters, went to lunch, downloaded and played my cousin’s game Diamond Find (a fun little speed-reading choose-your-own-adventure which is filled with his quirky humour).

We organized Owl’s toy chest, and put on a load of laundry.

It was a good day.

I like this not working thing. Yes, it’s exhausting dealing with Owl all day, but it beats trying to meet people’s expectations in the real world.

Mum leaves tomorrow. Next… Disneyland!

The real world can suck it for ONE MORE WEEK.

A Moment In The Life Of An Almost-Two Year Old

Tags

babies, humor, parenthood, toddlers

Me: “Owl, I have to use the potty. Do you want to come upstairs with me, or stay here and play with your cars?”

Owl: “Play with cars!”

Me: “Okay, I’ll be back in a minute”.

Just as I flush the toilet, I hear an outburst of wailing from downstairs. I rush down expecting to find him hurt. He is waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, still wailing miserably.

Me: “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Owl: “No…”

Me: “What happened?”

Owl: “THIS happened!”

He gestures dramatically to his pyjamas, and as I approach I see that an epic sneeze has sent a long string of snot across his face and all down his pyjamas, right down to his navel. 

I got him a Kleenex and peace was restored.

I wonder what it’s like to be so helpless you can’t even reach the Kleenex when you need it.

Parenting An Extrovert

Tags

babies, introvert, parenthood, personality

I am an introvert.

We know this. 

And I ended up with an extroverted child.

I don’t know how this happened.

I never expected to have an extrovert, because PH and I are both total introverts.

We get exhausted by stimulation and need time alone to recharge. We process social interactions slowly and find interacting with humans to be really difficult and often unpleasant. Introverts are the universal energy donors of the universe. Extroverts extract energy from the environment, but the environment leeches energy from us. So we hide from it.

We were both sedate, easy-to-handle children. I, as an only child, hung out in my room much of the day either reading or concocting elaborate imaginary worlds starring myself as some kind of animal. PH spend his childhood creating the perfect fantasy baseball team by examining the statistics on his baseball cards.

Perfect husband was, according to his parents, also the perfect baby

If you had asked me how I pictured my future son I would have described a blond, round-faced boy with a serious expression who needed time to warm up in strange situations. When Owl was in the womb I even thought he was showing introverted characteristics.

Hahahahahahahahaha!

Owl is not an introvert. 

I have suspected it for a long time, but there is no longer any room for reasonable doubt. He loves new situations, loves doing new things, doesn’t care if his schedule is disrupted, remains cheerful so long as there is something new to stimulate him, and gets cranky if we hang around the house too much.

In a way, it makes him really easy. I can take him out in public without tantrums, and I’m not a slave to his schedule.

BUT.

It does not mesh well with my needs.

The Farm Fairy, whose son is more of an ambivert (like his mother) noticed a difference when she was babysitting Owl the other day. While her own son was happy to sit and play if she left the room, my kid would follow her from room to room, demanding interactions.

It’s wearing me down.

It’s not that I don’t like interacting with him, because I do. He’s frigging hilarious, this kid. He makes me laugh so hard with all his clowning and he says and does the cutest things.

But I’m SO. TIRED.

He eats all of my energy, like the world’s cutest little vampire, except he drinks mana instead of blood. Oh, and milk. Mana and milk.

It’s difficult enough to be an introvert in the working world.

When hour after hour of interacting with humans is required of you, you get drained fast. I had ways of dealing with it. I spent an hour in front of the computer in the morning, or reading in the bath, or both, just gearing up for work. Then, at lunch (which was an hour long), I would hide in a corner with a book. When I got home I’d spend some time with PH and then go on the internet and/or read and/or take another bath.

Not any more!

From 4 or 5 in the morning onward, Owl is on me. I am dragged out of bed by him, feed him breakfast, dress him, bring him with me on the dog walk, put him in the car, take him to daycare… and then I work. I work 9 hour days and I don’t get a lunch break.

In vet clinics, there really is no such thing as lunch break. It’s a medical environment. No one who will willingly say “yeah, that sick cat has to wait for me to finish reading this chapter” lasts long in the field. My last boss insisted on people taking lunch breaks, but then when days got too busy to make such a thing possible, you just didn’t eat at all. My new boss takes a more practical tack. She pays us for the whole day, with no lunch break, but IF there’s time, we are welcome to eat and take a break – paid. It works. But it means that I can snatch a few minutes to eat or run next door to buy a brownie, but I can’t hide in the corner and read for an hour. I can’t even check Facebook.

PH doesn’t have it any better. Since I need the car to take Owl to and from Daycare, PH has to transit to work. That means that in order to make it to work for 8 AM, he has to be out of the house at 6:45 AM. He doesn’t return to the house until 6:15 PM. So he’s gone for 11 and a half hours of the day just to work an 8 hour day.

On the bright side, he has time on the bus/train/ferry to read. On the downside,  he is surrounded by humans and I tend to get texts from him saying things like this:

The person next to me is playing “Angels We Have Heard On High” on the recorder over and over again… VERY BADLY.

Then PH and I feed Owl, bathe him and put him to bed. By then it’s 9 at night and we’re wiped. We can spend time with each other, or time alone, and since we both want to spend time with each other but NEED time alone we take compromises where he watches TV and I blog. Occasionally one of us just orders the other into bed.

We’re so exhausted. 

One thing I’ll say about having an extrovert: it gets you out of the house. Now, on weekends, we actively seek out activities to entertain Owl, because keeping him home all day is a recipe for misery.

Suddenly, extroverted locations like playgrounds, indoor play gyms, farmer’s markets, community events, and Canada Day on Granville Island are the most desirable thing to us, because they entertain Owl so we don’t have to.

When Owl is outside, or somewhere new, he is easy. He explores everything, chatters about everything, and is just… happy. He isn’t clinging or demanding milk or begging us to read Hippos Go Berserk for the umpteenth time. He’s just being cute and happy.

Yeah, extroverted locations are better for us introverts, nowadays.

So we’re taking Owl to Vegas, which is basically extrovertland.

We expect to find it very restful.

A Little Child Should Seriously Lead Us

Tags

bad days, forgiveness, love, motherhood, parenthood, patience, toddlers

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. No real reason for it. I mean, yes, I had started the morning at 5 am when a little hand smacked me excitedly and a tiny voice announced insistantly (and proudly) “PEE! PEE! PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! PEE!” until I eventually mumbled,

“Didjoupee?”

“Yes!”

“Goo’feryou. Thanksfor tellin’ me.”

I rolled over. The same small hand grabbed my nipple, and the teeny voice said “mush? MUSH? PEASE?” and a needle-teethed lamprey re-attached itself to my breast at a bizarre angle.

It was my usual start to the day.

If anything, it was a slightly better start than some other mornings, because after forty five minutes of:

• sitting on my head
• running around the room
• trying to open the door to the dog’s crate
• demanding help to get back up on the bed with me
• and insisting on “mush” whenever I tried to roll over

…Owl actually went back to sleep and I got an extra half hour shut eye.

But I still woke up with a big black cloud over my head. I blame the rain, because there was a lot of it, and I really didn’t want to walk in it.

Every morning I offer Owl the chance to choose his footwear and coat for the day.

It usually goes like this:

“Go get your shoes.”

“No!”

“Do you want to go for our walk?”

“…Yes.”

“Then you need to put on either your boots or your shoes.”

This simple logic always convinces him and he grabs one pair or the other. We have the same conversation over his coat.

“Which coat do you want to wear?”

He invariable chooses his raincoat, but then resists when I try to put it on him.

“Okay, we’ll stay in,” I always say, and start to hang up his coat. This makes him change his mind instantly and he cooperatively holds out his arms for the coat. Then we leash the dog and go outside for our walk.

 

Today, though, it was pissing rain, I was running a little late due to the sleep-in, and I was not loving the idea of trying to convince the dog to poop in the rain while Owl soaked his pants in the puddles.

Everything went wonky today.

I told Owl to get his boots. He didn’t budge. I set out his boots and he said “no.”

“Well, pick either your shoes or your boots,” I said, laying out the options for him. He stared at them and dithered and dithered while the time and my patience began to run out. So I made an executive decision.

“Okay, you’re wearing your boots.”

“NO!”

“Yes.”

“NOOOOOOOOO!”

I pulled his boots on him against his will while he flailed and wailed. When I finished he sat on the floor crying and pulling desperately at his boots. Within seconds he had them off again. Rather than re-enter that battle, I moved on to coats.

“Which coat to you want to wear?”

“SOOS!”

“Owl, which coat?”

“SOOS!!”

Most mornings I would have dealt with the shoe issue and then revisited the coats afterwards. But for some reason, today, my patience was still upstairs in bed, cuddled under the duvet.

“Okay, fine, no walk today.”

I put the dog out in the yard while a horrified and protesting wail went up behind me. Owl spent a couple of minutes throwing his “soos” at me, but quickly allowed himself to be distracted by his toys while I took a moment of deep breathing.

Skipping the walk put us back on schedule for time, if Owl didn’t dawdle too much on our walk to the car. I contemplated just carrying him to the car, but that didn’t seem fair – he should get at least part of his walk. I brought the dog in, put on Owl’s “soos” (pick your battles) and he cooperatively chose his raincoat and put it on without a fuss.

When he saw that we were leaving the dog behind, though, he realized that he had missed the morning walk, and that we were now headed right to school. He immediately began to whine.

“Nooooo! Da! Wa? Mama!!”

“Well, we couldn’t go on our walk because you wouldn’t leave your boots on and you wouldn’t pick your coat,” I snapped. “That’s what happens.”

I waited irritably and self-righteously for the tantrum. To my surprise, he just held up his arms and said “up!”

So I picked him up, and when his face was level with mine he studied me carefully. Then, gently, with a little smile, he leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then he let me carry him out of the house, to the car, and into his car seat without a single complaint.

My son is 24 pounds and 30 inches tall, and he is a bigger person than I am. 

Go take a nap, Mama.

In Which Carol Takes Fiction Way Too Seriously

Tags

children, empathy, love, motherhood, movie scenes, movies, pain, parenthood, Sophie's choice, tears

So, there we are, having a nice evening together watching a documentary on Hollywood and the way it has presented the Holocaust. We found it on Netflix, which has a wealth of fascinating documentaries which we are slowly going through, because we are GIANT DORKS.

Anyway, we’re watching and it’s all well and good until they go and spring this on me:

A scene from Sophie’s Choice. Specifically, THE scene from Sophie’s Choice.

YES. THAT SCENE. Come on, even people like me, who have never seen Sophie’s Choice, have an idea about what her choice is. I wish to all things holy I still only had a vague idea.

I didn’t know details. Friends had told me not to watch the movie, and I listened to them. And then they went and sprang it on me anyway and now I feel like I can never get my brain clean again.

Have you ever watched a movie scene like that? Something that makes you wish with your whole heart and soul that you could do a complete Eternal Sunlight Of The Spotless Mind on yourself so you would no longer have that memory adding pain to your existence?

When I was a kid, most of those moments were to do with death and gore:

The dead body from Stand By Me, who shocked me with his open eyes.

A tv movie about Jack The Ripper, which only showed blood-spattered walls and a vomiting policeman, but which played on my imagination with all of the sinister genius of Hitchcock.

A shot of a dead soldier from the Gulf War, burned beyond recognition, who haunted me (especially in dark stairwells, where my imagination always placed him walking up behind me) for years afterwards.

Thankfully, I am getting better about my dead body phobia. I went through the Catacombs in Paris (terrified, but I did it). I only shudder slightly when I open the freezer at work. PH still can’t convince me to attend a Bodies exhibition, but that movie last night did spring a charred body in a crematorium oven and while I screamed, it did not haunt me.

But there is another kind of scene that has always tended to bother me, and that usually has to do with the death or a parent or the death of a parent’s child. You’d think it would be the death of animals, and it’s true that I will cry over Old Yeller far more than I will cry over Jack Dawson, and that the inevitable death of a German Shepherd is often the most bothersome scene in your standard thriller movie. But my real soft spot is children.

There’s something about the parent-child bond which has always triggered my emotions strongly.

I consider the parent-child relationship to be the “romance” of children’s literature, and I will weep over a child’s reunion with his parent in a way that I rarely do in adult romances.

I sobbed when I watched Juno and heard the words “would you like to meet your son?”

I burst into tears reading a For Better of For Worse compendium, when April is drowning and John is reaching for his daughter and thinks “if I do one more thing in life, please let me do this”.

Tears like that – they’re good. They’re healing.

But there are other scenes…

Like the scene from The Pianist, where the woman sobs over a baby she accidentally smothered when hiding from the Nazis. That one tormented me, and came flooding back years later when Owl was a newborn Babby.

Like the part of Schindler’s List (the book, not the movie) where a baby is dashed against a wall.

And just recently, a scene from a documentary on Hiroshima (yes, I know, I should probably stop watching war documentaries) where a woman retells the death of her child, and how she wasn’t brave enough to stay with her as she died. That scene broke both PH and me, and for days afterwards one of us would shout “OH, NO! THAT SCENE IS IN MY HEAD” and the other would come swooping in with a distraction as quickly as possible.

Well. I thought that Hiroshima scene was the ultimate in empathetic suffering. For a bit I felt as though my heart could never be whole again. That kind of scene tortures me in a way that a hundred charred soldiers never could. But thankfully time is kind, and the memory has faded a bit.

And then they went and sprang that AWFUL SCENE FROM SOPHIE’S CHOICE on me.

Guys, I know it sounds stupid, because it’s just a movie and it’s fiction, but I am in a lot of mental anguish right now. I can’t really explain why I find it SO BAD. I can’t blame motherhood, either, because I know it would have hurt me every bit as much if I had seen this years ago.

I keep alternately suffering the unspeakable horror of the moral dilemma, the unendurable guilt of the choice, and the heartbroken and terrified betrayal of the child as she is given to death and carried from the person whom we trust above all others to cherish and protect us – Mother.

To try and keep myself from falling into the mother’s place and then the child’s again and again and again, I read last night until I started falling asleep over my book (which NEVER happens). I spent all night dreaming up reunions between mother and child in which I was both the overjoyed mother and the unforgiving and traumatised daughter. I spent hours of dream time trying to inject a dog with morphine who, in my dream, was the little girl – I needed to numb her pain.

The pain of it is messing up my mind.

In driving between dog training appointments today, I ended up on the wrong road – and have NO MEMORY of how I got there. I WAS on the correct road, but I must have turned right at a stop light and continued up a totally different street COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHAT I HAD DONE. I didn’t realize my mistake for a good 2 kilometres, and how the mistake even happened will forever be a mystery. I can see making a wrong turn, but how do you make a completely unnecessary turn and not even know about it?

Then, during the appointment, I was supposed to go out, get something from my car, and then knock and ring the doorbell, to help accustom the dog to people coming and going from the house. I just walked right back in again, with no knock. I had totally forgotten the purpose of my being outside at all.

When I got home and reported all of this, PH took away my right to drive for the day. He’s a little concerned about me.

I’m pretty my reaction to the scene is not normal, otherwise there would be big disclaimers on the scene warning people not to operate heavy machinery after watching.

I mean, it’s a famous scene and it won Streep an Oscar, but when I google it, it is casually mentioned as a powerful and moving scene by people who rate the movie highly and “love” it. It is a powerful scene. Streep deserved her award. But I wish the movie had never been made, because then I wouldn’t be hurting so much right now.

I told you that PH has been trying to convince me to go to the Bodies exhibition in Vegas on our summer vacation, and my attitude has been HELL NO. But if I could wipe my mind clean of that scene… if Meryl Streep’s words and if that little girl’s scream of hurt and fear could be wiped from my brain… I would attend that exhibition joyfully.

What movie scene has affected you the most? What’s your achilles heel?