Baby's First

Baby's first rhetorical question, with hands on hips and brow deeply furrowed: "Do I look happy, Mom? No. I don't. I am very angry with you."

The context was perfect--she was trying to get my attention, and I was resolutely emptying the dishwasher despite her entreaties to play Dora. The tone was perfect--a kind of self-aware broadcast declarative designed to 'hook' the audience.

Is there a page for that in the commemorative album? Is there a tickbox for that on the developmental charts? What kinds of figures of speech ought children acquire competence in, and at what age?

Rhetorical questions. Huh.

I'm always shocked at the sophistication of Munchkin's language, her capacity with metaphor and analogy ("I eat blueberries for my blue eyes, and you can eat apples and have red eyes!), her use of book-style narration, with adverbs ("And the pony said, happily, 'I will help you, Boots!'), and her ability to use language to express strong feelings ("I don't want to cry softly, Mom, I want to cry loudly, because I am very frustrated and not happy! I want to be sad for a little while.")

A lot of her fancy talk comes from books--"my belly is the colour of a sunset!" she tells me, quoting Pinkalicious, or "I was so mad, I was FURIOUS," she cribs from Fancy Nancy. Some of her most-used play speech comes from Dora, or Diego, or the Wonder Pets: "There's an animal in trouble, Mom! Come on! Vamanos!" she implores, as we crawl under the dining room table with a paper clip in hand, to save a plastic dinosaur stuck on a Cheerio.

I kind of like these echoes we hear from her, because it makes me feel we've done the right thing being careful about the media she's exposed to. Her books push her to more syntactically challenging sentence forms, a richer vocabulary in a thematic context appropriate to three year olds--fantastical worlds, maybe, but ones where whimsy and kindess set the tone. Her TV shows are semantically benign: cooperation, sharing, problem solving, talking trains and singing animal that offer her scripts that she needs in order to get along in the world. It is amazing how she soaks it all up, how these texts structure her interactions when the book is shut and the TV is turned off.

By contrast, I see a lot of little kids quoting chapter and verse from Tropic Thunder or Anchorman or The Simpsons, parroting sarcasms they do not understand, and engaging in backtalk, defiance, and many other kinds of verbal and behavioural rudeness. And why not? That's what they see. It really, really bothers me.

Of course, Munchkin picks up a lot of her cues about the world--and her language--from me and Pynchon too. Her first rhetorical question, I blush to own, is one she has heard many times from me. She is a tiny mirror reflecting back our conduct to us, as much as she parrots the television and books she's exposed to. At least once this has come out, in perfect context, as "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ALREADY!" (part of our family frustration routine) but more often we hear, "Let's get your doudou, Baby Bear, and Mama Bear will tuck you in nice and cosy for your snug!" (part of our family good-night routine).

Isn't it funny, how when our kids use their burgeoning language skills, they express us almost as much as they express themselves?

Rattle and Hum

In the timeless rivalry betwee side-of-fork versus not-quite-softened red pepper contested in the epic battle to Separate a Bite-Sized-piece from the Omelette, red pepper held firm and Pynchon's fork slipped from his grasp, shot up in the air, and landed with a jangling crash back on his plate, an explosion of noise and movement in the middle of supper.

Naturally, I burst into tears.

Pynchon looked at me, a little shocked, but I couldn't quite hear what he was saying as the whooshing blood in my ears, the knocking of my racing heart, and the distracting sharp prickle of primal fear under my arms blocked him out.

My nerves are shot.

The root of the problem is that I'm not sleeping. Again. Whereas I used to fall asleep within minutes, only to wake up in the middle of the night for hours at a time, now I don't even get that first bit of rest. My new trick is to toss and turn for an hour or two, fall alseep, and wake up, heart pounding and mind racing, ten minutes later. I fall asleep somewhat easier if I attempt a midday nap, but still, ten minutes later--boom boom ack--it's all over.

There are other things. For example, massive road reconstruction 50 feet away from my house means that between 7am and 7pm my house is literally shaking. Glasses rattle, fixture hum, windows vibrate noisily in their frames. The plaster cracks. Nothing can stop the noise from intruding either, the whine and drone of many heavy machines rumble forwards, beep backwards, and bang up and down. I'm desperate to leave in the morning.

Munchkin has been waking up at night, not for long, but enough to rip me up from the depths.

And last night, oh last night! The student five houses down had a party that escalated into a raucous 11:30pm march down the middle of the street, tearing up one neighbour's rock garden to throw into another neighbour's driveway, before moving on to demolishing the barricades meant to keep people and cars from plunging into the excavated roadway. They came back and repeated their nonsense at 2pm.

It's amazing to me how even a couple of nights of broken or insufficient sleep can reduce me to hysteria and desperation. I actually wanted to physically harm those morons last night, an itch in my arms that wanted to claw someone's eyes out.

But I'm not talking about a couple of nights of broken sleep--this is becoming an intensifying pattern of persistent insomnia. It's like mental illness, really: I'm a different person, not able to enjoy the things I normally enjoy, not able to concentrate or focus, restless and anxious, depressed of mood and listless. Irritable and weepy. Unable to cope with the normal stresses of life, noisy neighbours or road repairs, say.

I've severly cut my caffeine and alcohol intake, been rigorous with my sleep hygience, practiced yoga, and avoided tv and computer time (glowing screens) too close to bedtime. I do yoga nightly. I take long walks during the day. And yet, still, ten minutes of sleep, a terrified wakeup, and hours of tossing and turning.

Insomnia, Dr. Google tells me, is not itself an illness but a symptom of some other condition--medical pharmaceutical treatments, then, address the distressing but secondary fact of sleeplessness by forcing the body to abandon consciousness with any number of powerful depressants all of which bring as much ill as good, and none of which are to be used any more than very infrequently or for a very short period of time. So the root of the problem is not, after all, that I'm not sleeping. It's something else, something else that manifests as insomnia.

My mother tells me that women in their 30s are the primary sufferers of insomnia. She surmises that having it all and doing it all is at the bottom of it all: it's anxiety and burnout. And truly, I have it all and do it all: demanding career, a beautiful home under constant improvement, a preschooler who has decided to 'marry' me, a husband with his own career and its demands, a drive to be healthy, to do the most for myself and my family. It's overwhelming me, maybe. No, it is overwhelming me, totally. Why else would I wake up in a sweaty panic to find myself worrying, absurdly, that Munchkin doesn't currently like vegetables and is doomed to adult obesity as a result of my failing to sufficiently entice her to eat green things? That three library books are overdue? That I forgot to email a colleague about something completely not pressing? That I forgot to put out our vitamin pills this morning?

Internet, do you suffer from insomnia? Why? And what do you do about it? I am losing this battle, and I am more than a little anxious that bursting into tears over dropped cutlery is more the rule than the exception at my house lately. Advice?

WW: What summer is supposed to look like

Excellent advice from my mother

So I guess it's going to summer now, huh? Muggy and stifling, with nightly thunderstorms that knock the power out just long enough so that you have to reset 12 clocks or face perpetual blinking midnight everywhere you turn.

Are you hot yet? We turned the air conditioner on for the first time since mid-June yesterday. With a click and whirr it softly brought itself to life and just like that soothing little puffs out cool air started billowing around our overheated rooms.

I came to air conditioning fairly late, with my parents installing the central air unit when I was halfway through high school, so most of my memories of summer interiors involve closely drawn shades and the ritual opening and shutting of windows, ceiling fans, and popsicles. So I am always vaguely in awe that I can command the cold with some fairly minor pressing of buttons on my own thermostat.

Our air conditioner is new, and it's the first 'climatised air' I've lived with since I left home for university. And because of my strong preference for loads of natural light and a monastic noise level, I have tended, over the decade of my single, apartment-dwelling life, to choose south-facing apartments near the tops of buildings. This has meant that my summers have always been very, very warm.

In Edmonton, near the end of my PhD, we suffered a real scorcher of a summer and my apartment at the time was a glorified bachelor with both eastern and southern exposure, at the very top of a red brick building with flat tar roof. Basically, if you imagine my apartment as a cube (four walls and a floor and a roof) three of the six sides were exposed to 15 hours of unremitting sun. It was like living in a pizza oven. My thermostat was one of those vertical-slider types to set the heat level, but a circular mechanism to mark the temparature on that vertical axis, and it got so hot in the apartment that the temperature needle spun right off the top of the scale and disappeared back into the mechanism.

I took a polaroid, which scorched in the heat, and distorted beyond recognition.

I was dying from the heat, listless and doing not much besides drink fizzy water with a splash of lime. I called my mom. She cut my rambling complaints short and gave me the best, craziest piece of advice that I'm now going to share with you.

"Put your bathing suit on and have a shower," she told me.

"Um, I'm quite comfortable showering naked, actually."

"No, Mimi, the point is to damp-dry yourself when you come out, and keep the bathing suit on."

"???"

"Think: have you ever in your life been too hot while wearing a wet bathing suit?"

No, actually, no I haven't. And I bet you haven't either. Take a moment. Cast back in your mind. Getting anything? Too hot in a bathing suit, yes, but in a wet bathing suit? No.

So I did it. You can't really sit on the upholstered furniture, but you can wash dishes, make the bed, tidy up, run the vacuum, sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper, dye your hair. And you won't be too hot.

Moms. Sometimes, their advice is excellent, if unorthodox.

And ... we're back

Well, that was a long drive, another 413 km worth of Toyota-seat reshaping my butt.

Mercifully, it was a a quiet ride, mostly:


(I took this when I pulled off the road, obviously.)

Suddenly, my kid likes to read her 'newspapers' (kiddie nature magazines) and her 'tape stories' (readalong WonderPets books with a CD narration) and play pretend with her 50 My Little Ponies and assorted McDonald's-loot Teeny Beanie Babies. She just hangs out in the back by herself, keeping herself occupied.

Miracle!

Only now, I'm going to hear that WonderPets CD in my nightmares. Are you ready? Let's begin! The tin can began to rattle and ring ...

GAH!