I am What Grown-Up Is

I am 50. My children are grown and my husband is retired. I have noticed, since this last birthday -- or perhaps it’s just coincidence -- that my sisters are emailing me more frequently with requests for what I can only characterize as matriarchal information and advice. It makes me ponder the question of being an elder. Not elderly -- not that, quite yet -- but if not yet a senior citizen, then entering into the grandparent age. Regardless whether one actually has grandchildren at this time, that is how the world begins to view you. The generation above me is dwindling in strength and numbers, and the eyes start turning to us as the seniors. Us, the freewheeling, hippie baby boomers.

Right through my thirties, I still occasionally wondered to myself when I would truly feel grown up. I don’t remember considering this much during my forties, but on the other hand, that entire decade pretty much passed in the blink of an eye. And now at 50, I know I’ve finally given up on wondering how much maturity I may have still to gain. I’m as grown up as I’m ever going to be. When you’re little, you wonder what ancient, grandparent-type people think about. For a long time in life you always think there are wiser, more mature people than you out there. But this, what I am now? -- this is as good as it gets. This is what grown-up is.

Huh. The emperor has no clothes.

My Children are All Grown Up

I sigh that kiss you,

For I must own

That I shall miss you

When you have grown.

W.B. Yeats

I saw my mom yesterday for Mother's Day, but didn't see much of my own kids. They're both so busy now with their own lives. And I'm not complaining about that one bit!

For some mothers, this time of beginning to let go of their children is very difficult. I haven't found it so, perhaps because neither of mine has actually left my house yet. I mourn the end of their childhoods for reasons to do with nostalgia, but I sure don't regret the passing of my days as their supervisor. You see, although all my life I had wanted to be Queen of the World, I found that sovereignity is, in fact, extremely tiresome when undertaken on a full-time basis. When your children are babies, you are essentially queen of their worlds. You continue to hold dominion for some years thereafter, although once they hit two or so they become intractably argumentative subjects. It turns out that it’s exhausting having subjects in a constant state of being too stupid to know what to do if you don’t tell them.

So I was quite happy to relinquish control in gradual stages as my progeny passed through adolescence and cheered and danced the day the younger one reached 18 and I was no longer the boss of anyone but myself again.

But yes, of course I miss dozens of chubby-armed hugs each day. I miss sloppy cheek kisses so deliciously wet I had to create a need to save them for later. “Ooh, that was a good one!” I’d exclaim to a delighted wee child as I rubbed saliva off my face, closed it into my fist, and slipped my hand into a pocket. “I need to keep that one!”

One of my dearest memories in life is of being at Long Beach the summer my kids were about seven and nine years old. I had gone for a long walk down the sand on my own after supper, and as I was approaching our end of the beach on my return trip, the sun beginning to set over the ocean, I saw two little figures running towards me. These soon distinguished themselves as my sweet babies, galloping as fast as they could, arms open, beaming gap-toothed grins on their faces, calling out, “We came to find you, Mommy!” Shortly thereafter, we crashed together in one big embrace.

I can’t think that I ever before or ever since felt a greater sense of loving welcome. As a much-wanted firstborn child myself, I’m sure I gloried in the adoration of my parents. Walking up the aisle to be married, I felt very much wanted by the man beaming at the altar. But neither of those circumstances could beat that one moment on a beach on Vancouver Island.

Mother's Day

Happy day to all you mothers out there! Isn't it a great club we belong to? No one can understand the Bizarro World of motherhood except another mother.

When you are preparing to have your first child, you believe you are ready. You want this child; you're the right age; you have a stable home, you've read all the parenting books. You're ready.

Except that you're not. Certainly, if a grenade has ever gone off in your hoo-hoo, you can be somewhat prepared for labour and delivery, but nothing can possibly prepare you for when they first place that baby -- your baby -- in your arms and a nuclear device detonates in your soul. BOOM. They call it bonding, as in you're in more or less involuntary bondage to this critter for the rest of your days.

At one moment, after your infant has shrieked non-stop for about eleventy-zillion hours, you are frantically looking up Gypsies* in the Yellow Pages hoping to find a band of the baby-purchasing variety in your neighbourhood. The next minute you have snatched up that soggy, stinky, snot-nosed bundle in your arms, weeping because he's so perfect and you're so lucky he's yours.

Previously, the phrase "I'd walk through fire for you, baby" is the sort of cheesy thing an inebriated boyfriend might say to you. The instant you become a mother, it's an absolute fact of life. Fire, anvils falling from the sky, unexpected trips to Myanmar. Whatever it takes, you will do it without question if that's what your child requires.

It's a weird, weird gig. And of course we would trade it for no other. Congratulations and condolences to all who share it with me.

* If this offends you as a slur on the fine Romany people, then just pretend I wrote White Slavers instead, okay? Does your mother know you complain this much?

Children Then and Now and a Plethora of Stylistic Capital Letters

A friend and I (hi, Karen!) were on the phone the other day having a good old rant about Kids These Days. It's difficult to rant too much on the subject, of course, because we're the parents of Kids These Days (depending on how you define kids, of course. Most of my peers have grown children but not yet grandchildren). And of course, we were talking about Everybody Else's Kids, anyway, not our own. We are a little nonplussed, in retrospect, by some of the choices we Baby Boomers made in raising our kids, but luckily most of them have turned out just fine despite us.

Back in The Day, we children had no rights and were treated in some ways like little animals. However, we were also credited with at least the same level of native instinct as is found in the rest of the animal kingdom, and that's something we overprotective Boomer parents may not have considered.

When I was six years old, I was invited for the first time to the home of a friend outside of my own neighbourhood. One day towards the end of Grade 1, my classmate Cheryl K invited me to visit her house after school. This was a big deal. She didn't live near me at all! But I followed her home, and phoned my mother when I got there, and she agreed that I could stay and play awhile. She said I should tell Cheryl's mommy to send me home by 4:30.

No, I would not be driven home or picked up by a parent. Despite the fact that Cheryl lived on a street I'd never been on before, on the far side of our school's catchment area, this six-year-old child would be sent out the door, pointed in the right direction, and expected to find her way home. Which of course I did.

Now, the safety issue is another matter. An obsession with child abduction, despite this being less likely than our child being hit by lighting, or even being hit by an anvil falling from the sky, was a defining feature of the Boomer parents when our children were small. It was primarily for this reason that we drove them everywhere. But even though I actually bucked this trend and made my children walk the ten minutes to school (uphill through the snow both ways), I did only start doing this when they were about eight years old, and I'm awfully afraid that it was because I thought that prior to that, they might get lost. Or unable to grasp the concept that cars travel on streets and are bigger and faster than people. Or distracted by shiny objects. I don't know. Why did I think my children were so stupid??

Anyway, back to the Cheryl story. We still have a bathing suit picture to explain.

After I called home, we went in search of Cheryl's mother, who inexplicably was not in the kitchen, which was where my mother lived. This was a first hint that foreign families might do things differently from us, but worse was to come. We headed out into the back yard on this sunny June day, and there was Mrs. K, reclining on a chaise, wearing a two-piece bathing suit.

I gaped at her and went puce with embarrassment for poor Cheryl. This was wrong on so many levels I was barely able to take it in. Firstly, mothers -- i.e. old ladies -- did not wear two-piece bathing suits. (Cheryl's mom was very likely still in her twenties.) My own mother's bathing costume was a substantial garment of the sort favoured by substantial women, although my mom was not overweight at the time. It was gathered and ruched and smocked the way they did to impart a sense of stretchiness before Lycra. There was a lot of fabric involved. I seldom saw this garment because my mother was a respectable woman who wouldn't dream of lolling about nearly nude when one's friends might drop by. Or any other time, either. Had I had any concept of the word "prostitute" at the time, that's what I was thinking of Cheryl's mother.

Secondly, the indolence of it appalled my pre-women's liberation little soul. My mother was never seen to be lying around, even fully clad. She was always busy doing mother things. Why was Mrs. K not? Would there be any dinner in the K house that evening? Would anyone's hair get washed? Would there be clean pajamas? Was there any toilet paper on the rolls? What if I fell down and cut my knee? Could a two-piece-bathing-suit-wearing hussy possibly know anything about putting Band Aids on? It was a frightening and disorienting scenario. I was quite happy to leave Cheryl's home at 4:30 and return to where things were done right. I felt exactly as I might feel today if I were coming home from Afghanistan or Myanmar. (I love the word Myanmar. I'll use it any chance I get.)

Well, off to clean up the kitchen, because Kids These Days think that plates just osmose through the counter into the dishwasher. Hey…maybe they are stupid!

Could a Virtual Office be This Much Fun?

This is an actual, genuine, unPhotoshopped picture of me at my place of employment when I was in my early twenties. (For what it's worth, I'm seated in the chair, second from the left.) This, then, is what we will be missing in the brave new world of virtual offices.

If I believed in reincarnation -- and I'm not entirely sure I don't -- then in the 17th century I was likely French grammarian Dominique Bonhours. This venerable gentleman proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used."

Grammar Moses is quite aware that she has totally set herself up for eagle-eyed readers to find solecisms in her blog. (If you don't know what solecism means, you've got no business trying to correct Grammar's grammar.) But be aware that even though "I meant to do that" is the standard excuse of embarrassed six-year-olds, I likely really did intend the things you may be flagging as errors. It's called stylistic choice and it's what makes casual writing sound different from formal writing. That said, of course Grammar is human and possibly even fallible. So have at me; it will be fun!

It's Your Biffy Day!

I have a degree in Linguistics. I have never really used it in any career sort of way, but the main reason I studied the subject was my love for words. Yes, I prefer them to be spelled correctly and used in grammatical contexts, with appropriate punctuation surrounding them. That's why I call my blog what I do. But however it's used, I just love language. And today, boys and girls, we are going to talk about the fascinating world of potty language.

In our house when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, going to the bathroom was referred to as going toidy. When you went toidy, you went tinkles and/or plops. (Plops were also known as a big job.) I don't know whether my mother totally invented these charming onomatopoeic terms herself or what, but I eventually discovered that no one else I knew used them. When I was in the hospital as a little girl, a nurse brought me a bedpan on one occasion and on returning later to collect it, asked, "Did you pee?" I was flummoxed by this question. I heard it as "pea", which to me was a small, round, green vegetable, and I had no idea what she meant. I have recently read a memoir by one of my favourite authors, Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, and was amazed to find that in his family in Iowa, they "went toity". Clearly my mother was not, as she had always claimed, from Toronto, but secretly in a witness protection program from Iowa. I knew there was something funny about that woman! (Love ya, Ma! Carrying on your weirdness genes as happily as if I were sane!)

There are a zillion remarkable little quirks in living languages that can make you ponder. These crop up all the time for people trying to learn to speak English. Things like you get in a car but on a bus. Why is that? Nothing to do with the relative size of the vehicle, because you’d get in a truck, no matter how huge it was. Or contemplate, if you will, because this is our subject today, the phrase go to the bathroom. The sentence “I need to go to the bathroom” is very commonly heard in North America. Its meaning is obvious and the sentence makes sense to anyone who speaks English. However, the phrase go to the bathroom has come to mean the actual act of elimination. At least, it has come to mean that to native English speakers, in particular North American English speakers.

Any of us who heard the sentence “He went to the bathroom in his pants” would know that meant he had made a mess of one sort or another and would require a change of trousers. Many of us might consider the wording just a bit silly and would be more likely to specify “He wet/peed/pooped/shit his pants”, but we wouldn’t think twice about what it meant. To a non-native speaker, however, it’s a bit of a puzzle. Why specify what clothing the fellow was wearing when he needed a visit to the toilet? It’s as if the sentence needs more to make sense. “He went to the bathroom in his pants as he was not comfortable in the pink dress”, say.

Years ago, I was watching one of those reality shows on TV called A Baby Story. (I was sick, okay? I had a fever. I had no idea how to change the channel.) The baby was duly born and the proud father went out to the waiting room to tell the new grandparents about it. One thing he said has stuck with me. “He’s so cute,” Daddy gushed. “He went to the bathroom as soon as he was born.” Now, again, as native speakers we know what he means, though we recognize it as being a little farther down the road of ridiculous euphemism. To a non-native speaker, it would be a truly bewildering statement. But I’m sure I’m not the only local who got a mental image of this infant jumping out of the doctor’s hands and trotting off down the hall, thinking to itself, “Thank God! I’ve been holding it for nine months! Where’s the john?”

Well, thanks for joining me in potty world today. Hope it's been as much fun for you as it has for me! Now, excuse me while I go see a man about a dog…

I'm not dead, just stupid!

Well, hello, all you person who reads my blog! I'm ba-a-a-a-a-ck! The main reason I was away was because I, um, forgot the password I chose for this site so I couldn't get in. My first try at trying to get the site to remind me of it was unsuccessful so I left in a rage. (I have a really, really short fuse, especially with household appliances, of which I consider my computer one. They should do what I say, when I say it, or they should just go away and die. Painfully, in horrible shame that they have disobeyed their master. Clearly I was born in the wrong time and place. I was meant to be Atilla the Hun. My children might say I actually am quite a reasonable facsimile.)
(What a long parenthetical aside!)
So, since I've been gone I have learned absolutely nothing about how to blog better. I still don't know how to download pictures. I don't know how to make links.
I have learned that the office I work for is shortly to become pretty much completely virtual; that is, I will pick up and return the work I do via computer. This is a good thing in that I will save gas money commuting (although it really wasn't very far). It is a bad thing in that it is something else I have to learn how to do on my computer, one more thing to go completely wrong through absolutely no fault of my own.
A few weeks ago, my computer deleted Word. Just that one program; everything else peacefully remained. I did not ask it to do that. I in no way wished it to do that. I am quite certain I did not inadvertently simultaneously click a combination of keys that would cause the computer to believe I wanted Word deleted. It just did it because a nasty, poopy-headed poltergeist lives inside it.
When I went to reinstall Word, it toyed with me. At first it pretended it would do it, and then suddenly it refused, told me it wasn't in the mood and left me engorged with frustrated hope. Hope-teasing, poopy-headed poltergeist.
Then, as I was sitting there fuming over this, it suddenly began deleting everything else, one program after another. Poof, poof, poof. Gone, gone, gone, until finally even Windows was gone and I was left with an empty shell of nothingness.
I made great haste to fetch my techie 21-year-old son, who thus far has always been able to fix everything the computer poltergeist throws at me. He took one look at this situation, however, went very pale, and told me I was on my own.
Anyway, before I start perseverating here, I'm out of amusing anthropomorphical metaphors, so the end of the story is simply that a Geek Squad person came and slew the poltergeist -- at least for now -- and retrieved all my stuff and was my best friend o day.
So I'm back, maybe. I don't know how often I'll blog, but from time to time I'll have something to say or feel particularly witty (if only in my own imagination) and I'll appear again.