dynamic elf

If ever I had any doubt about whether switching schools this year was the right move for my kid, I no longer do.

Last night, at bedtime, she whispered to me about a plan she had. This happens a lot. But last night's plan was a SECRET FRENCH PROJECT! Here's what she reported:

"I want to write a letter to my teacher last year - in French - and say that I am going to New York this weekend on a trip and I hope she's happy. And I would like to put another smaller envelope in that envelope for her class, for all the students in her class, and it will be filled with pieces of paper that say in ENGLISH: 'I love you, and you are great in school.' Or maybe just 'XOXOXO You're great.' Then I want to sneak into the school and leave it in front of her door and sneak away."

This breaks my heart, basically. She continues to work through her difficult experience last year with bursts of insight and grace -- this step is clearly her trying to think about what would have made life better for her, and trying to fix the problem for other people.

That kid. I hope she changes the whole world.

SCENE: Two five-year-old girls are walking barefoot and hand-in-hand down a forest path. Natalie is holding a big foam sword in her other hand. I am walking by and eavesdropping from another path.

N: You don't need to be scared! I have THIS! *brandishes sword mightily*
S: ...Is that sword made of plastic?

I love this combination of adventure and skepticism. Neither seemed fazed; it's not like the fact that the sword was a toy stopped it from being their weapon against, you know, whatever they might find.


Later, S (who is not the usual five-year-old S, but rather concrete and entrope's little one) was locked in EPIC MUD BATTLE with N. They were in bathing suits and underwear and covered in splotches of mud and smiling almost-unbearably-huge smiles. It is a tragedy that my camera is still not working, because this might have been the most wonderful thing I've seen in months.


They're all growing up. It's wonderful and difficult and strange; five years ago, I was nursing a baby. Five years from now, she probably won't clamor to sleep in bed with me all night. Right now, I think that she loves nothing so much as independence and adventure, as long as she can still give her mom and dad big muddy hugs while she's doing it.

Putting on makeup recently - even the crazy over-the-top stage makeup I was doing - has made me more aware of my facial features than I usually am. For all that I'm an unapologetically broad strong woman, my face is actually... pretty. I don't think about this very often, but it doesn't take much makeup to make me look in the mirror and say, "Whoa, hey, check it out! My appearance conforms to many classical and contemporary standards of beauty!"

Which makes me a little uncomfortable.

I mean, it's almost as if it's one more area where I've never bothered to live up to my potential, you know? "She could accomplish so much, if only she would apply herself." I feel as if I rarely bother to take my appearance beyond the raw materials. And it's not as if I even have a principled stance against it! I love modifying my appearance, but it seems as if I have a block against a kind of simple daily femininity. Why does shaping my eyebrows feel different from getting a haircut? What am I afraid of losing, in there?

I realized I had a lot of baggage around this when I had the following conversation:

Me: "That's a pretty dress, but please go put on some pants."
N: "Why?"
Me: "Because you can't play on the playground as well in a dress and tights, and I know you love playing on the playground."
N: "I can play in a dress!"

...and I realized: of course she can play in a dress. She sees no conflict between wearing a dress and doing the monkey bars or climbing up the slide. She doesn't care if she gets a hole in her tights. Only *I* see that conflict and want to save her from it. So I've tried to just let her wear a dress any time she wants and vow to buy lots of tights. I will buy a subscription to cute tights if it means she gets to grow up and feel pretty and strong at the same time whenever she wants.

Me, I don't think they're incompatible, but I have difficulty wanting to inhabit them at the same time. Maybe I also fear that if I present as pretty, that I will come off as less interesting or valuable in other ways. Being a disco queen is all well and good, but I could never wear eyeliner to work.

Clearly I don't have a well-formed set of thoughts here, but I am very interested in exploring this territory. How about you? Do you find yourself attracted to people who are conventionally feminine, or distanced/put off? How do you relate to the sort of neat-makeup-and-appearance femininity that is not superglam or freaky (because those, of course, are way easier for me to relate to)?

What I want: an avocado and a hug.

What I have: the tail end of a migraine.

Not the same.

--

I've mostly gotten out of the habit of having migraines. When I was younger, I had them frequently; for a while in high school, I was even on a daily medication to keep them away. And it worked! For as long as I kept taking that pill every day, I NEVER got migraines. Here's the catch, though: Every time I missed a day, I got one.

Me? Not so good at the daily pill-taking. I got a lot of migraines during that experiment.

My mom got migraines, and her mom -- well, her mom was just crazy, but she got migraines, too. I remember my mother trying to soldier through and make us breakfast, downing coffee and tylenol and aspirin ("the magic cocktail", she said, and she had done her homework). It didn't look magic to me - mostly we tried to not make her talk. She hated taking ergomar, since she said it made her feel stupid, and at that time you had only two choices: an extremely bitter tablet that you had to dissolve under your tongue, or intramuscular self-injection. The pill tasted bad enough that she tried the injection a few times before swearing and going back.

My mother was not a caretaker. As kids, if we weren't throwing up and didn't have a fever over 100, we went to school. Her basic philosophy: tough it out until you collapse, and then sleep it off. So when I had to call her from the principal's office one morning and say I couldn't stay in programming class because I was having trouble reading things and suddenly got a stabbing headache, I did not expect the soft middle-of-the-night voice: "Oh, honey. I'm so sorry. Ask them if you can lie down in a dark room. I'll be right there." The next week, I was sitting in the neurologist's office being taken Very Seriously. There are some benefits to being a doctor's kid -- everyone knows to take you seriously, even when you're 13.

They got worse. I would wake up at 5 AM, hands tingling like they belonged to someone else, and run to the bathroom to throw up and nearly pass out. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. Sometimes they didn't set in until breakfast, when it would slowly dawn on me that I couldn't read the comics page not because my attention was wandering, but because I literally could not read. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. My hands would still belong to someone else, but if I caught the migraine early like that I could usually skip most of the nausea and stabbing pain.

If you have never had a migraine with aura, it is a genuinely interesting experience, right up until the part where you wish you'd never heard of trepanation because it suddenly sounds like a good idea. Everyone has a different set of symptoms, but here's how it goes for me:

First I notice I can't read. I'm not sure how to describe this, exactly -- I don't consciously notice it as visual, at first, because let's be honest: my attention is sometimes bad enough that I can't read the chalkboard menu at the cafe because I just can't concentrate on reading words. Usually with a few minutes' effort I can make the shapes become letters again, but if I can't, I will begin to realize that at the very center of my visual field, there is a small blurry area and I can't focus on anything. I can still see everything, I just can't see details.

Once I've found the blurry dot, it gets a little bigger and squigglier and becomes a thing I can see, a splotch in the middle of the world. It's a little like the persistent afterimage of staring at a bright light, but squoodgy and wriggly. Over the course of a half-hour or so, the wriggly splotch slowly floats over to the right side of my field of vision, and grows and grows until I can't see anything but a field of glowing, writhing red and gold snakes in a big crescent over most of my right side.

At this point, it doesn't hurt yet. My hands and arms get tingly and numb, and I get some nausea. (Before I figured out what foods to avoid, I used to get a LOT of nausea; let me tell you, I don't miss that one single goddamn bit.) So I can't really see, and I've misplaced my hands, but it's not that bad yet, because once the aura goes away, THEN it feels like a spike is being SHOVED backwards through my brain, starting from my right temple. And it throbs. And light makes me want to throw up.

At which point of that process am I supposed to feel competent to inject something into myself? Yeah, I didn't think so. I tried the sublingual Ergomar exactly once before begging to be put on a different drug, and the nasal spray wasn't a lot better. If you've ever had MDMA on your tongue, imagine trying to keep that feeling in your mouth for 20 minutes while simultaneously anticipating intense pain if you fail and swallow it. Luckily, when I was in high school, Imitrex (sumatriptan) was approved, and it was like a revolution. It came in tablets, and it could treat headaches that were already underway. Sure, I still had to sleep it off, and sure, I still felt wrecked for the rest of the day, but I could actually sleep! And not feel sick! And then when I woke up afterwards, I could read a book until it finished going away.

We never figured out what caused my migraines. They aren't tied to my menstrual cycle, or anything I eat, nor are they obviously tied to stress factors. During college, they died down significantly; these days, I'd say I get a SERIOUS migraine once or twice a year, at most. I often have smaller headaches with no aura that I can identify as migraine-like because of the pain pattern and the way I feel in my body, and usually, a couple of Excedrin Migraine and a nap will take the edge off. Even the bad ones I usually get in the afternoon or evening, so I can manage to get some medication into my system during the prodrome/aura phase which will significantly lessen the intensity of the pain. So this morning, when I stumbled out of bed at 5 AM to find the migraine pill bottle and woke up 90 minutes later and it wasn't any better, it took a little while to piece together what was happening to me and cancel my breakfast date with veek.

Now it's 1 PM. I'm in my office, nursing a cup of truly foul office coffee and trying to figure out what food my body will be willing to keep down, and wondering what I will say when one day Natalie calls me from school because she can't read and she doesn't know why.

I have a bunch of little Natalie anecdotes I've been meaning to post, because I've been thinking about her intellectual development, but this one takes the cake so much that it gets its own post.

[Late at night]
N: Mama! Mama!
Me: What's up, sweetie?
N: I'm scared.
Me: Did you have a bad dream?
N: Yes. [*snuggling*]
Me: That's hard. I'm sorry. It's OK, you're here now, and so am I, and it wasn't real.
N: *snuggles more*
Me: What's a nice thing that you'd rather dream about?
N: I want to dream about... NOTHING. I don't want ANY dreams.
Me: What about something nice we did today? Like swimming in the lake or seeing the chickens?
N: OK. .....No. I want to dream about astronauts.
Me: OK.

[She falls asleep and snores soundly all night. In the morning, she crawls into my bed.]

Me: Good morning. How are you?
N: Good.
Me: I'm glad. No more scary dreams?
N: No.
Me: Good.
N: But my dream was so scary! In it, the ONLY THING I could do to SAVE a person from DYING was to get a globe and turn it into a wolf and make it CHASE someone!
Me: Wow! That's complicated, and scary!
N: And it had to chase YOU!
Me: Wow.

*pause while I try to figure out what on earth to say to this*

Me: You know, if the only way you could save someone from dying was to make a wolf chase me, I would want you to do that and it would be okay. And it's still a really scary thing to think about.
N: Yeah.
Me: Yeah.

*another pause*

N: And then it chased ME!!!
Me: Oh no!
N: Yes. And then I put my nose up to its nose and looked at it and then we made friends and it was okay.


To be honest, I think that last part was her rewriting the ending after waking up, and maybe also remembering this picture:



And that's okay with me. Rewriting endings to bad stories in your head can be a powerful tool.

But really? Weighing certain death for someone else against having to inflict frightening possible death on your mommy? That's a complex philosophical problem and I'm honestly not certain I'm equipped to tackle it at 7 in the morning.

It remains true: raising this kid is going to be very interesting.

Looking over school photo packages in preparation for picture day tomorrow, I discovered the following items I could get my kid's mug on:

• Fake magazine covers (fashion, sports, science, art)
  
• Strange thematic cardboard items
  
• temporary tattoos (I bet those are a really unpleasant hit in middle school)
  
• Fake IDs
  
• ...as well as magnets, wall decals, doorhangers (?!), and more! (though not, in fact, a mug)
  
  Seriously, temporary tattoos? Who does that?

As pointed out by Language Log, this facebook video of a ranting toddler is completely excellent. The kid furiously gesticulates and speaks a very intense gibberish for several minutes. So soulful! The subtitles are also entertaining. I remember that when N babbled like that, I also used to wonder what she was thinking...

Always go to the funeral. Give it a listen: four minutes well spent. Read it, if you can't listen.

I couldn't agree with it more.