mercoledì, agosto 01, 2012

Thinking big thoughts


I wonder a lot too, baby. But not about you. I don't have any doubts about you at all.

One of the things I wonder: where are you going to live, my dear little creature? The F-word has just been conditionally accepted for the awesome new job he applied for. His ultimate acceptance depends on student numbers next year. That makes it still very, very conditional. Being one of those awful people who think adult education courses are fun, I've signed up for several here, just to get knocked back when no one else signs up for them. So still very conditional for the F-word. But much less conditional than it was earlier this week. 

And if it's only for one year, by Christmas of 2013 we'll probably be looking for a new home, somewhere in Asia. Singapore, Taiwan, one of those clean places that won't give my child asthma or melamine poisoning. (Sorry, China. I like you a lot, but I've spoken to too many of your worried parents to trust you with my kid.)

So another thing I wonder: baby, how am I going to give you stability? How am I going to stop you from turning into the bourgeois equivalent of an army brat?

The only answer I keep coming back to is that I'll need to keep spending long trips in Canada. I would need to do that anyways; if we do stay in Australia four more years and I rip the kid from this, its incubator of a country, probably not to return for years if ever (it's really fucking far), the kid needs to feel some sort of base in Canada, and its extended family there. My memories of childhood are memories of love, of people AND of place, and in a sense of some people who were place. Looks like, however far I've run from north Ontario, that will be the best I can give my baby. Helpless, helpless, helpless. I didn't mean to still be shifting around like this in my mid-thirties. And since the F-word only gets a couple of weeks of holiday at a time, the price of that is gaps in Daddytime. He says he understands. I'll understand if he doesn't understand later. But what then?

What a mess. Sorry, baby. But there are benefits. I don't know what sort of mother I'm going to be to you, but I do know I've set things up so you get three passports waiting for you as soon as you're out of me. And they're good passports, too. Not the sort where you need a visa to go fucking everywhere. I do know that, whether you end up wanting it or not, I seem to be in a position that only a tiny percentage of the world's parents are in - and an even tinier percentage who aren't in the classes of the parasitically rich: I can give you the world, or something close to it.

4 commenti:

e.f. bartlam ha detto...

That is precious.

Whatever her identity turns out to be she won't want it to have been anything else...people are funny like that.

The child's gonna swear a lot...we know that. It could get her into trouble from time to time...except that she'll probably, normally, be in some place where nobody can understand her. That's planning that only a mother could pull off.

:)

Mistress La Spliffe ha detto...

And normally people don't mind swearing as much as us nordamericanos do. Maybe that's why I'm so peripatetic.

e.f. bartlam ha detto...

I think it's just a mechanism for keeping things mischievous and not wringing all the fun out of it.

Mistress La Spliffe ha detto...

You're actually right about that. Living among Australian pottymouths is starting to make swearing boring, which is something I never thought it would be.