TO tells me a lot of stuff but he doesn’t always share stuff I want to know about…how he’s doing in school, something new on his radar or just things he’s thinking about.
Now that we’re in the vacay mode, he’s sharing stuff from his school backpack. His drawing book came out today and he came and showed me stuff he’s made all year long. All 3 pages of it.
So here’s a glimpse of the “mindscapes” of a child-
Every now and then I use slangs with TO and often it comes back to me in a very amusing way. He was using selective audition with me today when I was asking him to do a couple of things around the house. I rolled my eyes at him and told him not to be a doofus. And bang comes back the reply, “You’re a doofus!”
I walk off and mentally tell myself to wait for it and sure enough comes the query,”Ayu, what’s a doofus?” I tell him it’s a silly person and he mulls it over and says, “Ok..you’re a doofus Ayu”.
Ah..summer holidays..such a joy!
I have an almost-10 year old. He’s lazy like his father and me. We aren’t the gung ho types who jump to it and proactively clean and get shit done. We get to it when we can’t find things and usually at the last minute. Sort of defeats the purpose of being a housewife I guess but my parents’ cleaning gene escaped me but I wasn’t about to let it escape my kid. Not entirely.
We’ve made a deal; once he gets up in the morning he has to make the bed. Properly. Of course that’s when hands start to hurt and the bedspread seems to be made of cement rather than cotton but I’ve decided to be firm. What am also being firm about is the extent of halfheartedness I’ll allow in the task.
Today he went around the bed like a puppy chasing its tail in trying to get the bedspread to stay on the bed evenly. To say it looked like one of those asymmetrical dresses that seem to be the rage, would be downplaying it. Half the bedspread was covering the floor and the throw pillows were thrown on the floor and living up to their name and there was a little man brushing his hands with accomplishment saying, “Done!”
But I have learnt one thing from my father if nothing else…’The Stare’. My father is the master of ‘The Stare’. His stare is so potent that I could feel it burning through a crowded room, aimed right at me like a smack on the head. Btw, the beauty of this is that you don’t have to actually smack or even raise your hands…you frown and let your face settle in its most disapproving pattern and let it rest. The victim…erm the target is drawn by the vibes given off said face and is browbeaten into doing your bidding. It’s magic at its best. It’s a thing of beauty that I hadn’t appreciated while it was being leveled at me.
Over the years the stare as been leveled at others found to be lacking, an errant boyfriend here and there, friends who’ve been dressed inappropriately or when he thought I was dressed like a hobo (aka too casually for college and the sobriety of Chaucer and Matthew Arnold). And the stare burns into you…it’s like a Dark Mark that hovers till you’ve ceded to its commands.
Today, after TO kept playing tag with the bedspread I leveled my stare at him and after a few studied shrugs of nonchalance and innocence, he said, “OK FINE!!!” and made the bed. It could still do with a few tugs here and there but at least the bed’s covered and not the floor.
See, they don’t tell you these things in the parenting books. This stuff’s invaluable! Of course the stare’s something every married man is familiar with. They are also more familiar with the menacing tones of the phrase, “We need to talk”…
I think I’ll just dole out the evilness today…mwaaahaaa
My day started a bit sluggishly. Alexa was chirping her annoying wake-up alarm that Red sets up but rarely wakes up to. I wanted to pretend that I had no To-Dos on my list and woke Red up and told him to get TO ready for school. And he did. TO even brought me a cuppa and gave me a kiss before leaving for school…ah the luxuries of life!
Certain days I am charged up to tackle things and tick stuff off lists to an extent that it surprises me. Red calls it my “caffeinated” state. I imagine it’s a bit more annoying to him than my usual levels of caffeine infestation (?) but it is what it is.
I washed my hair, fueled up the car, got groceries and am halfway down the Must-Do list#1 and looking to make a solid dent in the Must-Do list #2.
Being a SAHM isn’t a chore. We run the place. We have more leisure than people realize, especially if we have the run of the house to ourselves entirely. But that can also lead to complacency. You could start streaming stuff while you do dishes, or sort laundry and some days you’ve binged watched an entire season of Bones before realizing that 2 laundry hampers are not empty and your husband doesn’t have clean shirts for the next day.
But I have something egging me on…this week ends with the last day of school for TO. And then it’s a mini-vacay at my folks’ and back home before we figure out what to do with our time.
Things will eventually fall into a more sedate pattern and more often than not, I’m going to be sprawled out on the floor next to him, licking the business end of a spoon while we snort down ice cream and watch some inane movie for the 99th time.
So before that state of languid bliss (pshaw!) descends for the next 2 months, I’d like to get a feeling of accomplishment under my belt..however minor. Otherwise my days usually are exactly like this; on loop!
Happy Humps To You!
The Offspring (TO) has been introduced to the world of peer pressure. He has met the “popular” kids, met the jocks, met the goody two-shoes and is trying to fit into the whole ecosystem as we speak…erm type.
Being of a slightly more touchy disposition, TO is at times inclined to want to change schools if he doesn’t have a good day or have a bad experience. Of course the very next moment he can be on top of the world as well. Am told such is the world of children.
This morning his reason for not wanting to get up and go to school was due to the kids he had a falling out with. He gave us more details while having his milk. The conversation went something like this- TO: ” So I’m not friends with X anymore. Me: Why? TO: She doesn’t want to be friends with ME. Me: (making sympathetic face) Whhhhyyy? What happened? TO: She says stop following me around. Me: Well…do you follow her around? TO: (looking sheepish)..only a little bit. Me: Well then, don’t follow her. TO: (huffily) ok fine!
The rest of the conversation consisted of words irritating, annoying, irritated and annoyed and why the middle finger is *not* to be shown and at least a 1000 reminders to finish his milk and go for his bath.
Turbulent Thursdays anyone? And to think that we have yet to navigate through the choppy waters of puberty. God help us.
Red and I impose parental controls on TO’s digital media views and mainly their content.
It’s not so much to keep him away from profanity (he gets a dose of that when I drive) but also to keep him away from concepts that he may not be able to understand and end up getting freaked out about stuff in the process.
A while back he and 2 of his cute little friends let it slip how they’d sneaked a peek at The Conjuring while playing unsupervised at another friend’s house. I was able to correlate that with a period of being kicked out of my own bed because someone was afraid to sleep alone in their own room. Or even when they did sleep alone, they wrapped themselves up like a mummy and gave me sleepless nights about suffocation and what not!
This morning I was telling Red over coffee that I had weird dreams last night from seeing clips from The Shining and being partly sleep-deprived and suddenly pipes up a voice from behind me, “Oh yeah, that boy with his cycle and those 2 girls who meet him in the hallway and that old guy who gives him icecream and tells him not to go in a room…that movie, right, with all the blood?”
After internally WTFing with myself liberally I turned around to ask him how he knew about the movie which he did not have the clearance to watch. He told me very casually that he’d watched it at another friend’s house but only a little bit and he wasn’t scared of it at all!
A part of me is happy that he’s choosing good stuff to watch and not getting messed up in his head by watching things like Evil Dead or the Saw movies, but almost 10 may not be the best age to watch someone’s spiral into insanity and attacking their family with an axe. Just saying.
And while my mother let me watch horror movies when I was his age, I can honestly say I was in it for the blood and gore and she was ok with it because she knew it was a phase and I’d outgrow it. She steadily kept her hand over my eyes during the scenes with nudity though. Come to think of it, most Hollywood undead serial killers are such perverts! They wait till a person is “otherwise occupied” and choose that time to cut their heart out. But those days of cozying up with my mom on the couch, hogging on Hershey’s chocolate pudding cups and watching Jason slash through teenage bodies with his chainsaw…oh the nostalgia. Am almost choked up.
But if this kid thinks he’s going to watch gore before he’s 35 he’s got another thing coming!
P.S: This blog post and the others like it have been brought to you courtesy of a Macbook Pro that I was given so very thoughtfully for my birthday this year and about which I have not waxed on eloquently enough.
Disclaimer: This is not an Apple sponsored advertisement. More like Red-sponsored.
I don’t always deal well with extended weekends where my kid’s a part of the equation and Red isn’t around or not going to be around to be a buffer. We, TO and I, get along well for a few hours and then I feel like asking his school principal to keep the school going all days of the week for the sake of my sanity. And just a day back I wrote this rather sentimental blog post. Oh well, lunacy in all its forms is also par for course in parenting!
Anyhow after a whole day of playing the 5Ws and 1H series of questions I was looking for divine or devilish intervention when the skies opened up and the rains fell and whole petrichor experience did its bit to soothe the savage beast aka Moi. And then the offspring asked Alexa to play my favorite Def Leppard songs and sat next to me, semi head banging.
Bliss. Oh bliss bliss bliss. Oh damn…I spoke to soon. The queries about all the icons in the Macbook’s dock have started up while I wind up this post. I know when I’ve been bested.
Offspring-100, Me- 1
