- the right distance between person and horse when said horse has its back towards aforementioned person
- a mysterious noise coming from the vacuum cleaner
- Chinese or Italian
If you are married or live with someone, you might know what I mean. When I was single I never squandered a thought on equino-homo distance, mysterious vacuum noises, or took time deciding between Chinese or Italian. Life was much easier. When something went wrong I could chalk up the frustration on an uncooperative ATM machine, the wrong moisturizer, obtuse office protocol - THINGS. H says I never blame myself for anything - which is wrong in so many levels. I am very hard on myself when I know I am at fault, and I admit it too... it's just that I'm hardly ever wrong about anything! Which is why, on the very rare occasion that I am wrong, I apologize big time. (If you know me well, you would know this to be true.) This brings me to what happened recently, something I'm inclined to only half blame myself for.
Paris' streets are lined by poles of different sizes ranging from about 3 to 4 feet high, irregularly spaced and painted brown so that, if you are walking in the dark or carrying something that obscures vision from 3 feet and below, you just might bang into one... square on the crotch. But we'll get back on this later.
One day, I got a call from a neighbor who asked if I could s'il tu plaît pick up his children from school because his wife is just on her way back from Tunisia and he is organizing a play at the Theatre de la Ville. Friendly neighborhood couch potato that I am, I went to pick the two little girls up.
First I went to get four year-old Ä, who ran straight at me when she saw me entering the crèche maternelle. Then I took six year-old Ś, who initially beamed about a magic box she made dans l'ecole, then wailed about something she misplaced 5 minutes later. And I mean WAIL in the original sense of the word. Her yowling and caterwauling could have rivaled any in Greek tragedy, and it took me a while to understand what it was about. Trying to solve the crisis, we traced the places she'd been, but the marron sac was nowhere to be found. Tired of carrying little Ä up and down the crèche I told Ś it was time to give up, and perhaps she could have a better chance of finding it if she asks around school the next day. Here my own tragedy begins...
Getting the two girls outside school grounds was chaos. Little Ä, who had been in good spirits while her big sister cried, began crying when I got her big sister to stop. So I let the little one walk on the pavement cracks like she wanted, until some cars started coming by and I realized it would take us forever to get home if I had to pull her back each time a car passed by. I snatched her up despite her theatrical protestations and got her to laugh in a few seconds. This small victory was undone a few seconds later when, jealous of her big sister's consolatory juice box, she started throwing another hissy fit.
Meanwhile Ś, who was usually in a contrary mood, was finally in good spirits and was gamely repeating the English words I was teaching her (and if you know French children, this is a mean feat). To my relief, Ä noticed her tears amounted to diddly-squat and stopped crying. It was at around this time when we were shouting some random English word and both girls were laughing that yours truly's nether regions crashed into a certain vicious, and practically invisible, Parisian street pole.
It was a good thing that Ä's feet were not in the way, but maaaaaannn there are no words to describe the pain. My initial reaction, which I think is quite Pinoy, was to laugh hysterically. Oddly, the girls laughed with me without knowing why. It took me a few seconds to wrap my head around the pain, then we kept walking. The rest of the march home was a battle of wills between me and Ä who kept wanting to run. I couldn't let her loose on these streets full of crazy, stressed-out Parisian drivers, so in between sidewalks I would let her run wild, and then run after her when she strayed too close to the curb. On the last pedestrian crossing I carried off struggling four year-old while my lower body throbbed in pain.
When I finally got them home and in their rooms I heard the doorbell, it was their mom. They were out of my sight for 15 seconds, and when I came back, Ś had given Ä a full makeover. The little tyke was in a princess gown with crooked gray eye shadow, lipstick, and red stripes all over her face that I believe were supposed to be blushers. It reminded me of my crash course in makeup 9 months ago.
But going back, those metal poles are dangerous! I ached for a full week after that. And though I may be at fault for having avoided the ones that came before the killer blow, it's impossible to see if you are carrying something that can obscure your vision, and hard to calculate if there's a next one since they are irregularly spaced. Damn you, pole!
This foray into the world of babysitting had me thinking hard about my ability to raise children. Can I handle tantrums? Can I be patient 24/7? I am living with a full-grown man and my patience grows thin with him sometimes; so what does that portend? Of course I love the two girls to bits, they can be very sweet. But they can also be difficult to handle, especially with the language barrier.
Leaving the girls that evening, I was surprised that Ś had begun using English on me. Their mom told me the two girls really like me and hope I could come by more often. They are very sweet girls when they are not being drama queens (which their parents have accused them of many, many times), but for now I think I have my hands full with the little boy pretending to be my husband. And I bet if you asked him, he would say the same.
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| Two rings from the princesses - which cut my circulation so I gave them back. |
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