This is what 6am looks like at our house: saggy diapers and ukeleles and big, snot-smeared hugs.
It’s also what 8pm, 11pm, and 3am look like. Yes, he sleeps in those cowboy boots. No, not for any longer than two or three hours at a time.
I don’t believe in petitionary or intercessory prayer. I’ve written about my reasons for this at length, but it boils down to this: I don’t believe in, can’t believe in, a God who responds to such prayer. As I said some months ago, ‘why should God help us find a cure for cancer, and not for muscular dystrophy? Find one lost child, and not another? Help the Red Wings win while leaving children dying in sub-Saharan Africa? If God is a god who lets bad things happen, the only way that I can understand that is if the point of letting bad things happen is to compel us to cope with pain and heartbreak and evil ourselves, alone, to better understand those things. And that idea of a didactic God doesn’t square with a picture of God as a moody patriarch who dispenses favors to his children on the basis of who supplicates most fervently.’
New Moon – the second film in the series based upon the Twilight novels (which I will not explain to you here, because, seriously, have you been living under a rock?) – opened last night and I did not go see it. Oh, I’ll get around to seeing it, eventually, but I’m not in any great hurry because a) if I happen to find spare hours in any given day sufficient to the purpose of going to the movies, I will be using them to catch up on sleep, and b) I actually really kind of didn’t so much like New Moon the book (more on that below), and will only be seeing the movie to see the parts that actually involve a plot – which is to say, the end – and that can wait until I’ve caught up on my sleep. But the flurry of discussion about the Twilight novels and the movies deriving from those novels, much of which repeats last year’s canards about aren’t these books actually kind of bad? and a good feminist would never, ever let her daughter anywhere near these books, has got me thinking about the stuff I was thinking about last year when the first movie was released. So I thought I’d repost (what follows was originally posted at MamaPop), with some minor addenda and amendments, some of my thoughts on the subject.
So there’s this vampire movie? And, like, it’s based on this book that’s like part of a four-book series and it’s about this vampire? Who’s like a nice vampire? And he falls in love with this girl and she falls in love with him and it’s, like, SO AWESOME.
Seriously.
I’m not going to claim to anybody that the Twilight series is high literature. It’s not high literature, by any stretch, unless you happen to consider the works of Dan Brown high literature, in which case you’ve probably already read Twilight sixteen times and made notes in the margins with your National Treasure commemorative ballpoint pen, and, also, could I interest you in a library of leather-bound works by Ken Follet?
Dear Emilia,
This weekend, you turned four years old. You were so excited to turn four years old. For months you asked how many weeks it would be before you turned four, and for weeks you asked that we count down the days until you turned four, and for days you insisted that we tick off the hours until you turned four, and when the day finally came you said “Guess what, Mommy? Today, I am FOUR.”
And I smiled and hugged you and said “yes, yes, I know.”
Emilia’s birthday is this weekend. She will be four years old. Four year olds, she informs me, always have birthday parties.
“So do five year olds. And sixes. I don’t what happens when you get really old, but I hope you still get cake.”
I didn’t tell her that when you’re really old, like, thirty-something, you’re lucky if someone fixes you a bowl of cereal and washes the dishes. No point in rushing the disillusionment.
I wrote this poem for Remembrance Day (Canada’s Veteran’s Day) when I was in third grade. I was very proud of it: I was asked to read it at that year’s Remembrance Day assembly in my elementary school, and I was the youngest of the students up on stage. I can’t remember much about the reading, only that my heart was pounding and that when everyone bowed their heads for the moment of silence I peeked out from under my bangs and watched to see who in the gymnasium full of kids was picking their nose or poking their neighbor and from my vantage point on the stage felt giddy with the sort of puffed-up childish superiority that only small children on gymnasium stages and politicians can muster. Which is not the point of Remembrance Day, but still. It was a silly poem, I thought once I’d grown and moved on to the angst-ridden tumult of free verse, a silly poem full of all the earnestness and dryness and commitment to basic rhyme schemes that is characteristic of small children with literary ambitions.
When my father died a few months ago, my daughter drew this picture:
‘This,’ she announced as we huddled over it together at my mother’s kitchen table, filling in the details, “is Grandpa’s Death House. It’s where he lives now.”
“I’m sure that he’s so happy that you made him such a wonderful Death House, sweetie. So happy.”
“He IS so happy. I made it so that every part of it is happy” – she pointed to the clouds made of hearts, the pink motorcycle balancing on the Christmas tree, the friendly shark (“because he needs pets”), the flowers nestled under the window through which the tiny shadow figures of her and her grandpa can be seen standing arm in arm – “so that he will be happy there. It’s where he lives now.” She pulled her crayon back from the picture and studied the finer detailing around the friendly ridgebacked shark. “Can we go visit him?”
So we’ve been trying to get Jasper to attach himself to a lovey. Emilia offered the use of hers, but – noting the fact that Toady is, essentially, a giant plush phallus – my husband suggested, in the interest of not setting Jasper up for future discouragement, that she perhaps keep Toady to herself. Instead, we tried bears, penguins, squeaky giraffes, musical clowns, vibrating sheep, and a beaver.
He liked the beaver.
We realized our mistake too late.
Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.
I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.
The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.