Make a wish, and let…

it…

go.

(Way, way up, to soar and soar and soar and dance and touch and kiss the clouds.)

(This is how we navigated, with our children, the sometimes difficult truth that balloons – and especially Disney balloons, which cannot be transported home on airplanes to live out their natural lives in Emilia’s bedroom – are not forever: we told them that if you set a balloon free, you get a wish.

And wish they did.)

(On location at Disney World, Disney Social Media Moms event, where many wishes danced.)

I love Disney. I’ve been pretty outspoken about this. I love the parks, I love the movies, I love their pirates, I love – yes – their princesses (especially Emilia’s interpretations of them, because, really, wouldn’t Snow White been more awesome – and had a better run through the dark woods – if she’d worn skate shoes?) I love that whole wishing on a star thing. I love the animated short, Destino, that Walt Disney created with Salvador Dali. I love Maleficent, and all the glorious female villians of the Disney canon. I also love Pixar, and Marvel Comics, and the Muppets, and Modern Family, and Lost – none of which come immediately to mind when you think ‘Disney’, but all of which are part of the Disney storytelling matrix.

Why am I telling you this? Because Disney just became a very, very big part of my future. Of our future. You’ll have to click over to Bad Mother Confidential to find out more, because that’s where the news is, and it wouldn’t have been cool to scoop myself or the Wall Street Journal, so.

We spent a lot of time, last week, talking about science. Which is maybe not what you would expect children to talk about during a week at Disney World, but there it is. Much of the initial discussion was provoked, of course, by Emilia’s very interesting hypothesis concerning the function and character of wishes in the Disney universe – a hypothesis that Tanner appreciated deeply, but that he felt raised further questions about wishes and about the nature of all things existing within that universe. Would all wishes come true at Disney World? A quick test – a declared wish to have ice cream for all meals – quickly confirmed that hypothesis false. And if that hypothesis was false, what did that mean for other Disney hypotheses?

Emilia agreed with him and took his line of questioning even further: if certain other Disney hypotheses were false, how might we distinguish between the false hypotheses and the unverifiable ones (or in Emilia’s language: ‘the ones that aren’t true and the ones we can’t know’)? And further to that: were pixies real? Could mice and ducks really talk? If they did talk shouldn’t we be able to hear them and ask them questions? Is that house really haunted? Do ghosts really sing? Why are dolphins? These were difficult questions that demanded answers.

As were these:

Is that a real castle?

Is that really Cinderella, or just a lady dressed up to look like her?

Is the Epcot ball really a spaceship?

Is this Mickey drivers’ license a real drivers’ license?

If I wish for a Mickey car, will I get one, and can I drive it at home?

Are mermaids real? Can they really get legs if they make a wish, or is that wish like an ice cream wish, where they can be told no?

If we wish to come back here, can we?

I had answers for all of those questions, except for the last.

Questions about what’s real and what’s not real are easy to answer: you just go postmodernist – children are the perfect audience for lectures on postmodernism – and introduce the problem of figuring out the nature of reality and the importance of interrogating claims of objective truth. How do we know that something is real or not real? What is truth? If we believe that castle to be real, and if we declare that castle to be real, who is to say that it’s not real? If somebody insists that that statement – that Cinderella’s castle at Disney World is a real castle – is not true, can we not question their understanding and use of the term ‘true’? And is Disney World not, in fact, the perfect place to fully explore Marx’s claim that in the condition of late capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air’? Or at least consider how that statement pertains to the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion?

The nature of truth and reality is easy to discuss. The science and economy of wishes, however, not so much. Because although some wishes can be fulfilled – our family trip to Disney World was a wish fulfilled – many wishes and dreams simply can’t be made to come true, no matter how cleverly we finesse questions concerning the nature of truth. Most wishes and dreams, maybe, and most for reasons that range from dull to sharply painful: we’d get sick if we ate ice cream for every meal; there are laws against children driving cars; we can’t afford to do another trip like this, or any trip, really, not in the time that Tanner has left. And the reality – a reality as real as real can be, no matter how many poststructuralist interrogations one lobs at it – of impossible wishes is a harsh one, a cold one, one that one usually wishes – ha! – to avoid having to confront with one’s children. Well, maybe the impossibility of unlimited ice cream and kindergarteners with driving privileges aren’t so difficult – I fully intend to leave driving wishes unfulfilled as long as I possibly can – but the impossibility of other kinds of wishes – can we come back here together, can we see each other again soon and do more magical things, can we do this again, can we do this again and again and again? – are difficult to confront. In our case, especially, because the limitations on the possibility of those wishes are due, in large part, to the reality – again, an undeniable reality – of Tanner’s condition. To the reality of the limitations on time.

And yet.

A lesson that we all learned on this trip – one among many, but probably the most important – was that the limited probability of fulfilled wishes is precisely what makes them fascinating, and precious. Like talking mice and aggressively social ducks and haunted houses and visits with princesses and pixies and mermaids, fulfilled wishes are only a sometime thing and usually occur only under certain very specific and, more often than not, magical conditions. It’s the very fact – yes, fact – wishes don’t submit to poststructuralist interrogations of the scientific binary – that wishes are rare that makes them special. And it’s why when you are lucky enough to find yourself in the middle of a fulfilled wish that you must take the time to really consider it closely and to ask it all sorts of questions and to think about it and to talk about it and to take notes – literally or figuratively – so that you can always remember it and so that you can file it in your Big Scientific File Of Things That Are Rare And Wonderful And Difficult To Explain. And so that you can enjoy it, of course. We learned that this week, too: that with anything that is Rare And Wonderful And Difficult To Explain, you sometimes need to set aside the questions and just experience it and be joyful. Because joy is beyond science.

Because joy is magic.

Joyologists.

Well, theme park of cousinly love. Same-same.

Shiny, happy, smudgy-faced baby, all jacked up on Disney’s Animal Kingdom safari. Kinda hard to be angsty and sad, looking at that face. This is, I suppose, the function and purpose of angels.

*More shiny happy faces can be found over at Happy Face Central.

**And also here, where maple syrup and skateboards collided to create an alternate parallel Tennessean universe of awesome.

***Not here, though, because it’s a discussion about parenting and judgment and nasty things like spanking, and I might have been called “disgusting” in the comments, so. Fill up on angel faces at the other links first, maybe.

This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

This was the week that I let my Bad Mother flag really fly, I think. I mean, sure, I have, in the past, covered such established bad ground as spanking my preschooler and nursing another woman’s child and dressing my kid up as a Droog, but that ground is pretty well-trodden – doesn’t everybody use A Clockwork Orange as a reference when costuming their kids for Halloween? – and in any case,  I don’t think that you can really call yourself a bad parent until you start blaspheming Santa. Which I totally did.

How bad have I been? Let’s crunch the numbers:

1) I blasphemed Santa, if calling out Saint Nicolas as a vampire can be considered blaspheming, which I’m pretty sure it can.

2) And even if it can’t, using him as a disciplinary tool doesn’t exactly count as good.

3) Nor does comparing snowflakes to penises and guns.

4) Or admiring weaponized strollers.

HOWEVER:

1) I aided and abetted my daughter in totally drag-ifying the Christmas tree that she had to decorate for school, and that’s good, right?

2.) Also, I laughed at her jokes.

3.) And I let Jasper puke in my hair.

4.) And I decided that I had to draw the line somewhere. I drew it here.

I think that I’m probably running evensies on the bad/good thing, although if you consider that I also missed Emilia’s school Christmas concert this morning that probably tips the scale. HOWEVER I am taking her to see Disney-Does-NHL tonight, and we all know that anything Disney is automatic WIN. Then again: PRINCESSES.

And I don’t know how to factor in the fact that I hit my head, or my attempt (good!) and failure (bad!) to produce home-baked goods for my daughter’s school Christmas party which, did I mention, included a concert component that I failed to attend.

So: 4g – 4b – 1mc +1d – (x)p +/- fba /head injury  [where g is good, b is bad, mc is missed concert, d is disney, p is princesses, fba is failed baking attempt and head injury is head injury] =LIQUOR. I think.

Math is hard.