Sunday, February 21, 2016

How to Survive Against a Lion



  
So, this is the hole in our ceiling. We're living with my dad in the suburbs, as my husband goes back to school to gain some Canadian credentials and some new skills to drive on forward in the grand old world of graphics and computers. We’re down in the basement, (sometimes), and share the rest of the house, too. And I’m at home with our 1.5 year-old son, most of the time, and blogging.

And this is what I’ve learned: no matter how fast your connections on LinkedIn grow once you’ve discover ‘People You May Know,’ no matter how advanced you become at programming the coffee pot the night before, and no matter how amazing it is that all your devices can be synced to let you know who emailed that pic of a zebra last weekend at 3 AM, a hole in the ceiling will never fix itself. 

Unless maybe it’s loaded into After Affects, and you digitize it’s healing. 

 But generally speaking, never, never. But maybe that’s OK. Because I think this hole somehow means something.

This is the house my mother developed dementia in. That means something. It's the house she lived in and left, going to live in a care facility worlds away. This is where she lost the ability to write, where we watched her handwriting slowly revert back to a child’s and slip away like a ghost. 

This is also where my dad’s new partner, who is still a partner but no longer able to visit, brought welcome, new life into vacant walls.

And for me, this is also where I practiced my flute, hours on end, where I started all those long, high school bicycle trips, where I dreamed of university life, and where I spent long, lonely afternoons playing solitaire in middle school summers while my friends were far away, with no one up the street and no camp booked to make new handy ones.

And so, maybe the hole means something about filling the gaps. I think it’s about combining the past with the present. Because my mom can’t see, and my dad lives in the present and can see but isn’t sure about anything around him, and while my wonderful husband and son are by my side, sometimes I'm still searching to make things right.

My son found an old rotary phone hanging around here the other day. (We still have a lot of  cleanup to do.) He loved it. I showed him how to ‘hang up’ and dial, tons of fun. 


He loves taking things apart and climbing. He can already say ‘hi’ and ‘bye’, and he’s learned so much watching my husband play guitar and drums that he now picks up sticks and pencils and bangs on any surface he can find, turning the world into an orchestra. Babies are so smart. I feel like we should be taking him on the hunt in Africa to show him how to survive against a lion, and buying old washing machines and radios from the Salvation Army to take apart and fix so he can learn about electricity and gravity and physics, and dragging him out to Mensa meetups, and enrolling him in language classes on Wednesday evenings, just to cover the bases. Do you have kids? You know what I mean, right? I mean, what if he’s the next Einstein??

I’m thinking of duct taping the phone to one of those old retro roller skates. I’d need to order some, or see if my niece has some I can ‘borrow.’ Or maybe I can use the skateboard we have hanging around. It would be kind of an homage to the Fisher Price rotary pull phone, and my way of pulling the past into the present.  

www.etsy.com
We’ll see if my son likes it. Or, maybe I could actually get one of those classic Fisher Price phones and do this and perform a little upgrade. I’m sure my husband would love to help- he’s studying app design, right? Perfect match.

Today, the little one climbed onto the dining room table and sat in the middle and reached for an apple, when I was busy in the kitchen. Smooth moves, son, smooth moves. You’ve gotta do what you gotta do when you’re teething