Mrs Chemobrain Obama-head lives to fight another day

Monday morning last week was a low spot. At breakfast, I was reading 9-yo’s weekly Friday newsletter. I learned that he was to take to school a cardboard box covered in brown paper, with doors cut in the front to make it into a wardrobe, for a fun class activity about the book they’ve just finished (guess which book). I decided I had just enough time to cover the Cheerios box with a piece of brown paper, and set to. I had realized that the decision meant that 12-yo would be the teensiest weensiest bit late (middle school starts 15 minutes earlier than the lower school), but I thought punctuality should be sacrificed to wardrobe creation. 12-yo was getting more and more agitated, and finally revealed that he’d been given a nickname on the basis of his repeated late morning arrivals. If you get three tardies, you get detention. I pointed out that he can’t have had three, as he’d never had a detention, and I said I didn’t feel two tardies in a term was all that bad.

“I’m late the whole time”, he said. “It’s just that the teachers feel sorry for us because you’ve had cancer so they turn a blind eye.”

“Good. Well, tell them I’ve had a relapse. No, don’t. That’s awful. I’m teaching you to lie. No. Don’t tell them I’ve had a relapse. Tell them… Oh, just smile at them and hope for the best. It’s nearly the end of term.”

And with that, I bundled them out of the door, 9-yo flapping behind him a carrier bag containing the wardrobe, soggy with enthusiastic amounts of fresh glue.

It’s at times like this when I start self-flagellating, and hating chemobrain with a passion. I didn’t used to forget to read the Friday newsletter. I used to read it, and remember what was in it. I didn't used to get my children to school late all the time (well, actually, I did, but self-flagellation is no respecter of facts). Husband is very reassuring, of course, and tells me that I just have higher standards than lesser mortals like him, and that I should stop being so hard on myself. He’s right, and I am trying. Honest. But as you know, chemobrain lapses frustrate me, and the combination of the wardrobe malfunction along with the revelation of my firstborn's cruel and tormenting nickname, the result of parental incompetence, made Monday morning feel bad.

From Monday morning’s nadir, the week got better and better. First, I had coffee with a couple of friends. One of them had knitted me a lovely hat (that sounds so horrid, but it’s really nice), and wanted to take a photo of me in it for her blog. I had to whip off my cap to put it on, revealing my Obama cut. Both friends’ jaws dropped, and I was about to pass quickly over an embarrassing moment (“yes, I look pretty bad without hair, ha ha ha”), but I had misinterpreted their reaction. They were absolutely adamant that it was “too cute” and that I should definitely be brave and ditch the hats and caps altogether. I could tell from their faces that they weren’t just being kind in a “no, honestly, it really doesn’t make your bottom look big at all” way, but that they really meant it. One of them told me that when she’d lived in Chicago and worked in an art gallery, there was a very successful art dealer who had hair just like mine, and who looked fabulous all the time.

So there you are. One week I’m blogging about the miserable Obama doormat on my head, and the next week, I’m told I look like the trendiest art dealer in Chicago. Life, huh? So now I’m tossing up whether to keep my hair covered until it’s long enough to dye and style, or whether to be really gutsy and sport the trendy art dealer Obama look. What do you think?

Then, I made a curtain. I’ve never made a curtain before. In our guest room in the basement, there is an ugly window. It’s at ceiling level, and therefore useless as a window, even before someone painted it over. The paint is half peeled off, the space between the two panes is filthy, and it’s an eyesore. Every time we’ve had visitors, I’ve intended to make a curtain to put in front of it, and haven’t got around to it. Last week, the day before my parents-in-law arrived for Christmas, I finally did. I don’t have a sewing machine, so I had to stitch by hand, and it involved lots of chemobrain moments, like standing in the fabric shop trying to calculate how much material I needed, and feeling that the synapses were firing very slowly, and wanting to say “but the whole point of choosing out of your remnant box was so that you’d give me the whole piece for the price, and I wouldn’t have to do any calculations in public”.

It’s amazing how much satisfaction you can get out of making a curtain. I have now joined the ranks of those impressive-sounding people who say “oh, I just bought the fabric yesterday, and then I ran it up this afternoon, no, it didn’t take long at all, terribly easy, nothing to it, really very simple”. The curtain doesn’t draw, or anything clever like that. It just hangs there. It's 32" by 13". Here is a picture (and no, the burgundy woodwork wasn’t our choice).



So, my hair is a potential asset, I’ve made a curtain, and then I discovered that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t read the Friday newsletter. Out of 18 children, guess how many took in a wardrobe. Go on. Guess.

ONE.

Ha! Turns out 9-yo was the only child to take in a wardrobe, which means that 17 parents (none of whom, as far as I know, have the excuse of chemobrain) either forgot to read the Friday newsletter, or read it and over the course of the week-end, forgot to make a wardrobe.

I don’t mean to sound smug, but… Oh alright then, I DO mean to sound smug. Let the self-flagellation cease.

Onwards and upwards. Mrs Chemobrain Obama-head lives to fight another day.

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Hair

Well, the good news after my previous post is that apparently chemobrain isn’t always permanent. It might only be with me for a year or so. Personally, my guess is that people just get very good at dealing with it, so that when a year has gone by, and a research scientist asks them if it has got better, they say “yes” and don’t mention that their house is littered with post-it notes of things to remember, and that they have stopped using sentences containing those long words that are liable to fall into that tricky gap between brain and lips. And the ones who don’t say “yes” say “chemobrain? What’s chemobrain? No, we definitely didn’t discuss it at my last appointment.“ Which could lead me into a whole reflection about the validity of empirical scientific research, but stay with me, because I’m not going down that path. No, today I’m talking HAIR.

The good news about hair is that it DOES grow back. Boobs - no, brain cells – maybe, hair – definitely yes. Hurrah for hair. And mine has started. But oooow, it is soooo sloooow. Think how patient you have to be to grow out a fringe or layers. Then imagine that your fringe is starting from zero, and that actually, your whole mop is starting from zero. We’re talking a loooong tiiiime.

They do warn you that it might grow back different to how it has been, but that over time, it will revert. Over time? How much time? What if the forces of reversion encounter the forces of aging moving in the opposite direction? Which is what might well happen in my case. For my hair (and this was a dark fear of mine) is growing in grey. It started off when I was a child as white blond, and has just got darker gradually throughout my life. From blond in my childhood, through fair in my 20s, through mid brown in my 30s, it had got as far as dark brown with a little grey in it. The half inch or so that I now have is black and grey together, but probably more grey than black. Like the brain cells, it’s as if chemo just skipped my body along a couple of decades. I hate that. By the time my hair has decided to revert to brown, it will be time for it to be grey anyway. I used to dye my hair to cover up the grey in a rather lackadaisical fashion, every now and again picking up a colour from Boots and seeing what it came out as. I foresee a future where I will have to be much more organized, pick a colour, stick with it, and get it done professionally every few weeks. Bother.

And here’s a cautionary tale. Be careful what you wish for. I’ve always had very fine hair (we thin-haired people use that word ‘fine’). I’ve always hated that, so I hoped that it might grow back a bit thicker, and I’d noticed that the grey hairs I did have were a bit thicker than their brown friends, so I thought it was a possibility. Well, it is growing back thicker, and guess what. I don't like it. It’s like having a doormat on my head. What happened to my lovely flyaway wispy fine stuff? I want to be ME again. ME, with the hair I complain about.

Last night, we were watching the last few minutes of Oprah at the White House, and I said to Husband “I look like Obama”. He is a patient man, and with a slightly puzzled expression, he replied “Erm, I don’t think you do look very like him”. “His hair! His hair!” I explained, “I have Obama’s hair!” Husband, who is as honest as he is patient, had to confess that yes, I do have Obama’s hair.

What’s a girl to do? Well, apart from sticking with the hats for a while, which I’ve become rather fond of actually, I’ve decided that I’m going to hope that an Obama cut becomes 2010’s top look for women. I mean, he’s got himself elected to the most powerful job in the world, he’s won the Nobel peace prize – surely it can only be a matter of time before his hairstyle catches on? Galloping quickly through the decades, we’ve had the Purdey cut (remember that one?), the Diana cut, the Rachel cut. Surely the time is ripe for the Obama cut?

Meanwhile, looking for a voice of sanity in a mad world, I was talking to 5-yo on the subject. “I’m a bit sad about my hair”, I said. “It’s not growing back the same as it used to be.” She thought about it for a few seconds, and replied “It’s ok”. Then thought a bit longer and repeated “It’s ok”.

I didn’t know whether she meant the hair was ok, or whether it was ok to be sad, but I found it comforting anyway. They know a thing or two about life, do 5 year olds.

“And,” she added, “now you match Daddy!”

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Obama and Santa

Did you all catch President Obama's speech on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize? I like the man. I'd love to invite him round for dinner, him and his good lady wife. They could bring the kids too. I expect he's too busy though.

One of the exciting things in his speech was a very fine example of what I was talking about here. Don't bother to click. I'll remind you. I was talking about how in England we say

"the baby wants to be fed",

but in both Scotland and America, that would be

"the baby wants fed".

In his Nobel speech, Obama was talking about the US being a moral standard bearer in the conduct of war, and he said:

"That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed."

See? If he'd been brought up in leafy Buckinghamshire, England, he'd have said

"That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay to be closed".

I was listening to NPR, and they gave a pretty good broad-brush examination of the ideas in the speech, but honestly, for in-depth word by word analysis like this, you have to turn to 'Not wrong, just different'. Oh you must be so glad you read my blog.

Incidentally, since I know that you are on the edge of your seats with this post, I'm going to tell you about another of those items where Americans have followed the Scots rather than the English. Santa. Yes, jolly old Santa Claus. In England, he is quite definitely Father Christmas. When I lived in England I knew that the Americans called him Santa Claus, but I had no idea that the Scots did too.

And if you have any other questions on England, Scotland, America, Obama or world peace, then just drop me a line. I'll help if I can.

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Cell buy date

I went shopping last night with 12-yo and bought him a cell phone (mobile phone) for Christmas. It’s been one of those issues over which I’ve felt such a parent. You know the kind of thing. He just wants one, wants one, wants one, and Husband and I are thinking “he only wants one because his friends all have one, he’ll probably lose it at school, what is he going to DO with it for heaven’s sake? why will he need to text his friends when he’s going to see them the next morning and what can they possibly have to say to each other anyway? and they’re so expensive, is he really going to want to spend ALL his pocket money on phone calls? Is he going to have enough money, or are WE going to pay for them?” I tried fishing back into my childhood, to find something equivalent, to try and remember what it felt like to be 12 years old and wanting something so badly, but I drew a blank. Maybe it was a different era.

Getting your first cell phone is something of a rite of passage. These days, young men can't really head out with their spears to kill their first animal, and I suppose it is fitting that in a society dominated by consumerism and technology, the purchase of a cell phone has come to represent a significant moment on the journey to adulthood. 12-yo had done his research: Verizon, T-mobile, AT&T. He’d collected leaflets, printed out pages from websites, compared tariffs. He persuaded me that AT&T was the best, because the two friends who he’ll be calling most have AT&T, and so he would get free calls to them. Conclusive argument, I had to agree.

It’s a bit like buying what 13 years ago was called a 'pram' or a 'pushchair', in the days when a 'travel system' was the Chicago El or the London Underground. The shop assistant said to you “what you need depends on your lifestyle”, and you were thinking “I don’t KNOW what my lifestyle is going to be like when I have a baby”. In the same way, the very helpful AT&T man was describing the 8,000 different plans to choose between, and was saying “what you need depends on how you’re going to use the phone”, and I was thinking “he doesn’t KNOW how he’s going to use the phone”.

We ended up with a compromise. I didn’t buy him the $300 (on special offer at $200) touch screen latest model, which is flying off the shelves so fast that I was going to have to leave my name and number and he was going to contact me the moment the next consignment came in. But I also didn’t buy him the $30 clunky model that makes even my aged phone look impressive. There was a fortunate half-way house that just happened to be on special offer (was it really, or do the sales assistants have the flexibility to invent a story at the last minute when the sniff of a sale is getting stronger?) It was a phone with a keyboard – which 12-yo assured me was vital, though I couldn’t really see how anyone except an elf would have small enough fingers to use it. The usual price was $100, but I paid $80, and $50 of that was given as credit to 12-yo for calls, bringing the ‘real’ price down to the same as the clunky $30. So everyone was happy. The sales assistant made a sale, 12-yo got a phone and $50 to spend on calls and texts, and I came away feeling I'd managed to avoid paying a complete fortune whilst also avoiding being as hopelessly luddite as I'm sure my son feared I would be.

In the middle of the purchase, 12-yo was looking at the phone and asked “how do you get to use the camera?” and I cringed inside and steeled myself, for I knew that the phone didn’t have a camera, and that being told so would be both a disappointment and a humiliation. I wanted to whisk him out of the store in the blink of an eye, explain the no-camera situation, and then run back in, and say to the assistant “let’s just rewind 45 seconds and pretend he didn’t ask that question, shall we?” But as I was cringing and steeling, a most strange thing happened. The assistant was taking the phone in his own hand and saying “you go down to Tools on this menu, and press OK, and then see, it says Camera, so you press OK, and there you are… Good to go”. Sometimes not being omniscient has its upside.

As we left, 12-you said to me “you were looking a bit sad in there. Were you ok? Or were you just thinking how I’m growing up?” I’m glad he displays such pinpoint precision in locating maternal feelings, because pinpoint precision is what he's going to need when it comes to the elf keyboard. I assured him that yes, I was thinking about how he’s growing up, but that no, I wasn’t sad. And I really wasn’t. It’s just the next thing.

So far, he has two contacts in his phone. Mum (“Shall I call you Mum or Iota?” “Call me Mum, I think”) and Tiny, the AT&T sales assistant (“if you’re having any problems, you can just text me and I’ll try and help”). And here’s the difference. I am Mum. It’s my name for 3 people in this world, and it’s also what I am. Whereas Tiny…

Yesterday was a big day for 12-yo. He also had an eye test that revealed what he suspected, ie that he needs glasses (it’s in the genes, poor kid had no chance). So tonight we’re going to go and choose frames. Phones and frames. It’s all happening at once. I can’t keep up.

And here’s one more little Mum moment. What 12-yo doesn’t remember, or maybe never knew, is that before the other two came along, I used to sign off missives to family “A,T&T”, because at that time, that’s who we were (Iota’s not my real name, you know). So secretly, I’m quite pleased he’s with them, though come to think of it, T-mobile would be very appropriate too.

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Rats!

I would not make a very good laboratory rat. I wouldn't. I'm not very good at learning basic repetitive tasks on the basis of their consequences. And even when I have learned them, I'm not very good at remembering them.

I forget to stand back when I open the oven door, so that I'm met by a rush of hot air in my face, and my glasses steam up. I then can't see whether the food is cooked or not. Every time I do it, I think "oh bother, I ALWAYS do that"

In the summer, I think to myself "oh, I'm sure I can just nip outside and hang the washing out without getting bitten by mosquitoes, if I'm quick". I always return back inside with 2 or 3 mosquito bites, and I think "oh bother, that ALWAYS happens".

I have finally cracked the car keys one. I have learned that if I don't put the car keys in the same place, every time, as soon as I walk into the house, then I will have a stressful few minutes looking for them when I am wanting to leave the house again. That's quite a complicated one, because it involves delayed negative consequences. Rather more advanced than avoiding the hot air rush and the mosquito bites. But it did take me a long time to exhibit consistent behaviour. I think the scientists would have given up on me long before I'd achieved it, and moved on to the next batch of rats. I'd have been patted on my ratty back, and let loose in a remote and beautiful woodland location where there were plentiful supplies for all my ratty needs, and other ex-working rats to make friends with. That's what they do when they retire laboratory rats, you know.

So come on people. Let's give the laboratory rats a little more credit for their achievements. It's not as easy as it looks.

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Thanksgiving: yes, I'm still on about it

OK. Time to reveal what is behind all this ‘shadow cast over the sunshine that was Thanksgiving’ blurb.

We don't have a return ticket. It must be nice to be sent abroad by a company, for a fixed period of time, 2 or 3 years say, safe in the knowledge that they'll bring you home again to the corporate fold. But we're free-lancers. We sold our house and bought one here. We don't have jobs to go back to. We don't have an obvious community to go back to. In sum, we don't have a life to go back to. Just lots of loose strands. Lovely, important, crucial, life-enhancing loose strands, but all the same, they're not a firm enough rope to pull us back. Not a job and an income, is what it boils down to.

What do you do, as free-lancers, if you've been looking hard for a year for opportunities to return to the UK, have found none, and then out of the blue, get an offer, which is great in pretty much every detail, except for the location. Wrong side of the Atlantic. It'll involve moving job, city, state, home, schools, leaving friends, undoing all that hard work we've put into settling here, and still not get us back to Britain. It would be a good stepping stone (both career-wise, and geographically), but dang it, I didn’t ask Santa for a stepping stone.

I’m sure there were moments, as a child, when I screwed up my eyes and wailed “I want to go home now. Can’t we just go home?”. Forty years on, and deep down that’s what I’m doing today. I could write out the pros and cons of this new opportunity. The pros would be a great long list, and the cons would be “Iota wants to go home*, and can’t face moving unless it’s to achieve that”. Does that count for anything?

And that is why, dear Bloggy Friends, writing about the Expat’s Paradox is so scary at the moment. Moving within the US now, with the kids at the ages they are (oldest will be 13 by next summer, which is when the move would happen), feels like we are making the decision to stay for the duration. I know it’s not, or it doesn’t have to be, but it feels like it is. And I really don’t want to. I really don’t. Had you spotted that already? I really don’t.

Which is why I felt almost resentful, as well as happy and grateful, when we had such a nice Thanksgiving. As I said to a friend here, I was excited to move to America, and embraced it as an adventure. But I didn't really mean it.


* and remember, I haven't let myself use that word to refer to Britain for three years now, but have religiously attached it to my current abode. But this morning I'm allowing myself to peel it off and reposition it.

Thanksgiving: the shadow side

Okay, okay, so that Thanksgiving post was a bit Pollyanna. I admit it. Truth is, I chopped the last bit off the first draft. That was partly in line with my policy of trying to write shorter posts these days, partly because I thought it spoiled the Thanksgiving jollity, and partly because I thought it was an idea that merited a post of its own. Here is that last thought…

There's a line in the film Father of the Bride when Steve Martin is reflecting on how it feels to bring up a daughter. He says:

"There comes a day when you quit worrying about her meeting the wrong guy, and you worry about her meeting the right guy, and that's the biggest fear of all, because then you lose her".

The Parent's Paradox. I suggest that there’s an Expat’s Paradox which parallels it. It goes like this:

“There comes a time when you quit worrying about this being the wrong place, and you worry about this being the right place, and that's the biggest fear of all, because then you lose something important of yourself”.

I'm not there myself yet, not by a long chalk, but perhaps my idyllic Thanksgiving break gave me a glimpse (maybe it was the redemptive green bean casserole that did it).

Blimey, these thoughts look a lot scarier typed out in black and white than I imagined they would.

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