Wherefore art thou, Sam? Why the protracted silence over here at problemchildbride? …
a person might ask if they were truly bored.
Well I art right hereish and amn’t hanging up my blogging apron (starched and spotless, naturally) yet.
Reasons range widely for the dearth of posts lately. I could wish they ranged a bit more wildly perhaps but, really, only widely is how they ranged and I guess that’s OK too.
Making Excuses for Laxity In Blogging (start the year as you mean to go on, I say):
Excuse 1: We’ve had guests coming and going constantly since November. For a few days one week there were 10 adults and 2 children staying under the Problem roof.
2. 2007-odd years ago a carpenter was born in a far off land under an evergreen tree and, as his mother laid him gently in a manger of tinsel, reindeer snuffling gently in the musty warmth of the stable, the Adoration of The Magi happened and there was that bit about shepherds, and the traditions of both giving gifts and eating as many barnyard animals as one can stuff into each other was born. Planning His various birthday bashes plays merry hell with one’s blogging time.
3. The Problem Husband vomited for a week requiring diligent nursing and laundry services. I felt heart-sorry for him because he was really, really ill and wished I could take some of the sickness in his stead. As these things go, that is exactly what happened, although my dose was much milder. This was good but extra good because I needed to plan for #4.
4. We had a Hogmanay party. Both 4-year-olds began to vomit at 12:30 am on January the 1st despite not having had nearly as much to drink as everyone else. Spectacularly and ballistically they vomited, in defiance of dry-clean only garments and all local galactic ordinances about having to obey therules of physics in this arm of the Milky Way – apart from the one that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. (That’s the most delicate way I can put it…). 4 weary days later my poor little milky whey-faced ghosts beat the thing off finally and were soon ruddy-faced and cheeky again. There was a brief flurry of calm, whereupon ProblemChild 1 broke out in monstrous hives in an allergic reaction to a mystery foodstuff.
5. Family pressures arrived for 5 weeks too. Family pressures of the sort that come with suitcases and require plenty of silent screaming and much rolling of one’s inner eyes, wildly (often widely) in the manner of a lab-traumatized monkey. My back molars are ground down to mere stumps and a rictus of crazed merriment has frozen my face, just as if somebody had Botoxed the whole thing right at the horrific moment I realize I’ve come to Parents’ Evening dressed only in a tiara and bumble-bee slippers with “Skool Suks!” tattooed across my bare bum.
This waxing and waning of immense geofamilial pressure and heat could cause me to become either a cold, hard diamond glittering icily for the rest of my life, or explode me wildly wide, mingling me with pollution and settling me as a thin layer of dust over the land, rendering me a convenient geological marker for this great age of presidential apologies in the passive voice : “Mistakes were made. Responsibility for that rests with me.”
Still, it’s the closest he’s come to a mea culpa and we’ll always have the good times with W – Guantanamo, Katrina, Abu Ghraib. Gotta cut the guy some slack, and besides it was his advisors, wasn’t it? His hand-picked Cheney and Rummy and HeckuvaJob Brownie and his loyal-to-my-buddies refusal to fire any of them even when it became clear thousands of young soldiers had died for nothing – for worse than nothing, for regression.
But I won’t become a bitter old pear-cut, or a dust layer, because my private pressures are as old as families and I have a choice in how to regard them. This “I have a choice” thing is a throwaway line it has taken me years to properly assimilate because I am bit dim and always have to learn things the hard way etc.
America has helped to learn me it although that particular stew of wisdom has a tendency to boil over here, leaving stubborn, cooked on stains called things like “The Reiki Cure for Cancer” and “Better Living Through navel-Gazing” (I learned from fatmammycat (see sidebar) about how reiki is alive and well and fleecing the sick in Ireland. I’d never heard of the word before – although I knew mistily what it was about – an ignorance that could very well get me thrown out of California. Hope the Authorities aren’t reading this; you’re not, are you, Authorities?.)
The other wisdom pot that bubbles in America is the “What ain’t killing you is making you stronger” oleo. Ipso facto, there’s nothing wrong with that either (aside from being a bit salty) but it often boils over into the stubborn stain left by the crueller sort of social conservatives peddling “personal responsiblility” to people like homeless Vietnam veterans. Not getting killed didn’t exactly inject their poor broken minds and bodies with the resolve and secret wisdom to live productive (gotta be producing, gotta be consuming! ka-ching!) and happy lives.
Strangely, when left together, unattended on the back-burner, these two stews will sometimes boil over together, leaving the burned-on stain on the hob know as “Dr. Phil”. He is impossible to remove, but you should still try.
Well this has all gone in an unexpected direction. I didn’t even feel all that impassioned and self-righteous when I started writing this. I really just wanted to say “HappyNewYearLetsHopeIt’sAGoodOne” to me blog chums and to get back in the old blogging saddle again; I note that the leather’s getting creaky – needs a bit of polishing. The kind of polish where your paragraphs have points and the post stays roughly on topic perhaps. Ah well, give me time, folks!
