chicken pops

 

Life is hard, and then you get attacked by hundreds of little itchy blisters -- 264 to be exact -- and you can't get on the plane.

Which is of course, what happened to us two weeks ago. Actually, the chicken pox happened to us two weeks ago. I think it was two weeks ago. It was such a long, hard time that it could have been a year ago. It certainly felt like it lasted a year, and I wasn't the one with the pops! The day after the belle famille left for France, my King of Everything was invaded by hostile forces. They were deceptive, starting off innocuously enough, just a few on his shoulders. No problem, I thought, we can have this licked and still get on the plane to Washington on the 15th. But by the third day, I had to admit defeat and call in the heavy artillery. Camomile lotion everywhere. The doctor assured us that, while this was not a mild case of chicken pox, it was not cause for alarm. We cancelled our flight and booked a new one, sent a flurry of official looking doctor's notes to the airlines and kept our fingers crossed.

What I can't wrap my head around, even now, is the mind dulling boredom of being stuck inside the house with an active boy for ten days. Ten days.

I never want to be inside again. 

rain starts play

strange how odd the familiar becomes when you've left it behind for a while. The utter disconnect between sleeping and waking, confronted by father sky in all his unbridled passions, thunder crashing around the windows as though to ravish me in my sleep. Just a thunder storm, waking me in the dead of night, prickling skin and disquieting my bones. Thrilled and disturbed, an edge carved on my emotions that wasn't washed away with the morning's well-wrung skies. Leaving me raw and flayed for the day's journeys into paths at once familiar and entirely new. Unsettled. Rattled in my soul.

We don't have storms like this in Dubai. I miss them.

It has been raining nearly every day since then, thunder and lightning offering music to dance to, my child clamouring to go outside to play in the rain, as sky drenched and wrinkle pruny happens not at all where we live, scoured by sand and a sun in thrall to itself.

My son teaches me things i'd forgotten I'd ever known, like the unbridled joy of walking through a rainstorm, not caring for clothes or appointments or appearances.

I picture my lady friends in Dubai playing in this rain.

Family

 

I spent the afternoon at a friend's house. She and her girlfriend made me lunch, a huge affair of rice and potatoes and chicken and pasta and laban and salad and enough such and sundries as to render the table useless for eating, it was so laden with food. My friend is looking listless and sad these days, and I'm worried for her. Leaving for the summer is hard -- will my friends still love me when I come back, or will they have found some other, more constant companion to hold their hand?

It is so hard to live away from the safety net of family, childhood friends, the community in which you grew up. My friends and I constantly talk about our mothers, cousins, uncles, best friends 'back home'. So many of the women I know in the UAE can't go home. Think Palestine. Think Iran. Think Iraq. Think Somalia, think the Sudan. Interspersed with the contentment of day to day life with a nice home, a healthy child, a loving spouse, is the constant tug and ache of those we left behind.

These women I am getting to know miss their family. I miss my family. I hope, when I return from my international tour, that I can be family to these women whom I hold so dear.

And I hope they will become my family, my home away from home. 

Self Confidence

Even swathed in layers of black, you can tell which women have it. Even utterly unadorned, their presence is unmistakable. I'll find myself turning to admire, in passing, women who possess the space they inhabit. It's not about what they own. It's about what they've got. They've got it.

I can fake it. Perfect belly dance posture, the torso elongated, ribcage isolated, long neck, a deep breath taken and held. Walk that way. Move through the world that way, proud, tall, conscious of the flesh you inhabit, grateful for it, entirely present in the gifts you were given. If I walk that way, I can believe for a moment that i've got it.

But I've never had it. It was never taught to me. I learned other lessons. Obedience.Intelligence. Logic. But never self-confidence. Is it too late to learn? Can I become another woman in the second half of my life? I think about the women with whom I went to school, like Alex Kuczynski, Style writer for the New York Times, and marvel at her. It helps that she's a six foot tall goddess -- but Alex always had style and self-confidence; an easy wit, a sly sense of humour, a ribald and glittering disposition. She was always so perfectly there, in her school chair with that small attached writing table, singing "Don't Go Back to Rockville", loud and laughingly, on a late spring day before English class. And look at her now, New York Socialite, author, columnist, cause celebre in her own right, married to a smart, rich entrepreneur and able to ship her entire entourage to Idaho for a weekend retreat. Lesser mortals are actually disgusted that the Divine Mz. A. would actually raise her glass of Pinot Noir and gleefully declare, "Orgy! Orgy! ...oops, wrong weekend," I have to laugh... it's so quintessentially Alex, and anyone maligning her is simply in possession of a bunch of sour grapes. I marvel at the kind of woman she is and think, but of course. This is the life she was always meant to possess.

What life was I meant to possess? Bereft of confidence, it's hard to tell who I might have become. Singer, perhaps. Published writer, oh very fine. Artist? It could have been. But my reticence has won the day; I'm no go-getter. I should learn how to pretend to be that vivacious, outgoing, confident woman until I get the hang of it. Fake it til you make it, baybee.

I listen to my son say silly things like, "I don't know how" when I ask him to do something simple: put on his shoes, put away his toys. I hope it's because he doesn't want to do it, not because he lacks the confidence to do it. How do we teach children confidence? Especially our girl children? Too much of the 'good job, good kid' praise and you raise a child with a Pavlovian reflex for praise. Too little aknowledgement of a child's accomplishments, or worse, too much criticism of his or her actions, and you create an adult who is unwilling to try, terrified of failure. Confidence is a quiet lesson for parents to impart: recognize accomplishments with simple reinforcement, encourage efforts with simple faith, and commiserate failure with simple honesty.

What does this mean, in real life? Well, my son has a temper. We've been working to give him the skills to manage that temper, and one day, as I watched him play with another child, I noticed him getting angry. To my amazement, I saw him stop, take a deep breath, and the anger went away. Did I jump up and down and squeal about what a big boy he was? No. I gave him a big hug and said, "I saw what you did just now, sweetie. Do you know what you did? You took a deep breath and made the angries go away, all by yourself. What a wonderful thing to be able to do!" and he beamed like a headlight. I try to let him know I see his successes, sometimes with nothing more than a, "Wow, look at what you did!" -- allowing him to own his own success and share his joy in his accomplishments without looking to me for approval. I don't tell him I'm proud of him; I was always too dependent upon my parent's approval. I do, however, tell him how proud I am to be his mama, and how lucky I am that he chose me.

Harder still is to allow him to fail sometimes. We want the best for our children, we want to protect them from pain... but pain is necessary, in non-lethal doses. So my kid's allowed to try, allowed to fail, allowed to brush off his own knees, have a good cry, and try again. No "I told you so's!". No criticism. We do not call him a crybaby when he is unhappy and wails. We do not pressure him with the awful choice: "Are you a big boy or a little boy?" We do, however, sit down after the tears are dry and try to figure out what went wrong, what tools he has already in his possession to succeed the next time. We allow natural consequences to teach life lessons as much as possible. We give him love and comfort for life's disappointments, and then help him right himself for the next adventure. We honour his emotions. We have faith in him. I hope this teaches him to have faith in himself.

I am an adult

I recently hit a big number in birthdays. I'm much closer to 40 than I am to 30 now, and feeling a bit awkward as I survey the sum of my parts. In my heart I'm still 16, though my body's showing its wear and tear, through having a baby and quitting smoking and being a professional chef for a while. Spiritually I'm in my early 30's, with a new optimism on life and maturity, while there is an emotional 8 year old cowering in the corner at every loud noise and harsh word.

Well, the almost-40 me woke up on her birthday a few weeks ago and realized with some disgust: I'm too old to be this afraid of the dentist.

I haven't been to the dentist in 17 years. That last time, I had my two bottom wisdom teeth removed. I can remember a silent scream welling up and sticking in my throat for the hours (years, lifetimes) it took him to extract the two teeth, with the horrid noise and invasion of the whole process. I haven't been back since. Not for a cleaning, not for a filling, nothing. I let my two top wisdom teeth decay up there, rather than go get them removed. I was positive I had major damage all through my mouth, and would have to have root canals, and scalings, and all sorts of positively medieval tortures whenever pain drove me to the dentist.

Since we're about to go to America for six weeks and France for three, I was determined to get my wisdom teeth taken care of beforehand. I sent out an embarrassed email to the local mother's group and a flood of emails came back; so many women are, like me, terrified of going to the dentist. Many of them recommended various local dentists and some emails simply asked me to pass on the recommendations if I found one I could stand. Several recommendations came either from the dentist herself, or from a dentist's wife; I disregarded those as not objective enough for my terrified self. One dentist's name was recommended more than once, so I chose her.

It took me a week to gather up the courage to call her -- and of course, she was going on vacation and wouldn't be available until the 17th. I'd shot myself in the foot with my dilly-dallying. But lo and behold, yesterday afternoon her office called and asked if I could come around 6:30 that evening and in a fit of courage I agreed.

I warned her. She smiled and laughed and said she would not hurt me. But oh do I hate having my teeth cleaned. To my amazement, the trouble with my two front bottom teeth was tartar, not decay, and the frightening blackness between the two teeth was a filling, not a cavity. Talk about blocking out an experience, I don't remember getting a filling there. Considering I stopped going to the dentist when I was eight, went once when I was 16 and again when I was 21... you'd think I'd remember a filling. It must have been a horrible experience. My mind keeps trying to wrap itself around the memory, only to slide off, puzzled and perplexed.

My husband sat with me the whole time, he who is equally afraid of work done on his own mouth. My gums are in good shape, my teeth cleaned up nicely, albeit stained from coffee. My body ached from the strain and tension, tears leaked from my covered eyes, my Walkman valiantly tried to choose songs to keep my spirits up. It kept picking songs by Bowie and The Tears, my beloved Suede's newest incarnation. I have a new appreciation for the music. My hands clenched tight around tissues, slowly releasing tension whenever I remembered to breathe.

My greatest discomfort, besides novacaine, is the noise dentistry makes inside my head. Once the cleaning was done, I could relax and let her pull out the two teeth with incredible calm and surrender. She had listened to my horror stories of novacaine hurting more than the procedures did, and used something else to numb my mouth past the point of caring. She let me take a break whenever I needed to, and only once did I bite the suction thing. She spoke kindly, calmly to me, with the most wonderful brown eyes, dark enough that pupil and iris were one and the same, crinkling merrily most of the time, softening with concern whenever I expressed the tiniest bit of discomfort. She joked about my 'sexy mouth', such tiny lips! Apparently, whatever kind of mouth I have is shit for dentistry but much prized in the Filipino community. At once point I thought she was going to have to brace a foot against my ribcage to get the last root out, and started laughing when it was unwise to do so... She thought I was crying, poor thing, and I had to have them take all the equipment out of my mouth so I could explain.

She kept the use of the drill to a minimum, for which I am eternally grateful. I'm a new woman today. I am resolved to go back to her when we come back from our summer exodus, and have my cavities filled. I am resolved to having my teeth cleaned every six months. I'm looking forward to a healthy mouth that I will gift with white teeth sometime next year.

I'll be one year shy of 40. I think white, healthy teeth will be a fine birthday gift.

homesick?

In a week and a day I go to America for six weeks with my son. This summer is painfully hot, already breaking the mercury and sending us gasping from one side of the street to the other. It's the time to creep from shadow to shadow, shade to shade, sleep the day away and come alive at night.

When your kid is a morning person, this just isn't going to happen.

We all piled into the Jeep for a final adventure before the summer crushes down on us. We drove to Kalba, then to Fujairah, where we stopped at the lovely Hilton for lunch. The Pitame boy ran into the ocean fully clothed. We ate hot lunches and drank cool fruit juices and talked about tsunami aftershocks as we watched a pitiful, rogue wave make off with someone's abandonned shoes and socks. We took the new road (116) over to Kalba and the old road (88) back from Fujairah, oogling the fruit stalls as we went. Two positively beligerent vendors tried to charge us 40 dirhams for a couple of mangoes, so we laughed and made our way back to the Jeep. NO wait wait. Take. Take. Eat. And they were cutting fruits and shoving morsels into our hands, practically into our mouths. Eat. Eat.

 

Which is how I discovered Chikus, or Khakis, these little, indeterminate brown ovoids with a surprising taste of pear and fig and date all rolled around on the tongue. For 25 dirhams we left with our mangos and chikus, and had a nice ten minute respite from driving while we waited for the Jeep to cool down. And learned a timely lesson in patience, for if you try to eat a chiku before it's ripe, all the spit in your mouth will be sucked out, and you'll be left with a bitter, sere taste that's difficult to expel. Wait til they are soft, and gently yeilding.

Part of the rythmn of life is in the foods that we eat. I'm an avid watcher of the produce aisles, coming gleefully home with sacks of blood oranges, or pomegranates, or strawberries in their proper time. I look at what is on offer here in the UAE and though I'm sometimes tempted, I don't buy the peaches from Australia. They are always out of season here, and the flavourless rocks everyone's trying to sell me just don't compare to the sweet, juice down your cheeks peaches I used to buy in America.

So I am homesick for the ritual of food as I knew it when I grew up: watermelon chilled in a stream and eaten on newspapers during July's family reunion, pomegranates around the kitchen table, chatting with my mother,at the end of the year. Red plums so juicy you couldn't eat them in polite company, around the beginning of July, and peaches whose scent transported you to heaven from a kilometre away. Blood oranges to stave away the worst of February's bleak, longest of nights, and strawberries off the vine in early June. And mangos. When I was a kid, as soon as mangoes showed up at the supermarket, my mother and I would glut ourselves, joyfully sticky and laughing all the while. But then they started showing up all the time; rather than spoil them, we waited til their season was again upon us before digging in.

Good things are worth waiting for. Especially here, where almost all produce is imported, it's crucial to wait and choose with the seasons. Shop locally, or pick those fruits and vegetables that are imported from as nearby as possible.

Because really, everyone should have a home made peach cobbler. And cherry pie. And apple fritters. And... chikus. Dragon fruit. Longans and lychees. Mangosteens.