Tag Archives: Frozen

the frozen one

“Do we have any more toothpaste?” yells the younger.

 “Why? The tube is mostly full,” I say, walking into the bathroom.

“But that one’s soooooo disgusting,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

I pick up the shiny red tube of Colgate Optic White Advanced and inspect it as if doing so will disclose something to me.*

“Huh, so, you don’t like that one? I didn’t realize you still didn’t like adult toothpaste. Hold on, I think I have some of the kind you like in the closet.”

I root around in the chest of drawers in the hallway and hand her a lurid green and purple tube.

“Ewww … No!”

She reacts as if I’ve just handed her a tube of poo.

“Berry bubble???!” she continues, reading the description on the tube. “That’s so gross. That’s some kind of baby toothpaste that probably expired, like 5 years ago!”

I’m mildly surprised to discover that we concur that berry bubblegum flavored toothpaste is a revolting concept.

I peer at the tube, which is adorned with trolls. I vaguely recall buying multiple tubes in bulk some time ago, and it must have been when one of those similarly luridly colored movies came out so, to be fair, it probably is pretty old. But also surely chemically imperishable, no?

“Wait, so you think the minty one is gross and also this one is gross. What have you even been using??”

To me, we have pretty much covered the toothpaste spectrum: there’s sickly-sweet pink goo for babies or laceratingly minty enamel-scouring white for the advanced. Pick your poison.

“I like the frozen one,” she says tentatively.

The frozen one.

I’m frowning, puzzled, as I open the bathroom trash can and fish out the old tube.

I start laughing.

“OK, I’m sorry, you won’t even try the Trolls toothpaste because it’s for babies, but you like the Frozen one???”

Elsa and Ana’s sparkling blue eyes peer out at me from the scrunched-up tube, which I now hold aloft.**

“I looooove Elsa, so I only use Frooooozen toothpaste!!” I trill in a sing-song voice.

The younger is now laughing hysterically.

“Noooooooo!” she gasps, between giggles.

 “I looooooove Elsa, even though I’m really more of an Ahhhhhhhhna, and I only use Froooooozen toothpaste!” I sing even more flamboyantly, and the younger is laughing so hard I think she might expire.

Notes

* Optic White is a strange name. The brand that came up with the name, Lexicon, says that “in our review of more than 300 products in several countries, the word optic did not surface. Our research showed that, for consumers, the combination of optic and white triggered strikingly positive associations.” Surely their research also revealed that Optic White is the name of the paint color made by Liberty Paints (“If It’s Optic White, it’s The Right White”) in Invisible Man?

** Note that it is their eyes that sparkle, not their teeth, which are barely visible. It strikes me that a better avatar for toothpaste would be a Big Bad Wolf (“Grandmother, what white teeth you have!”).

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Day 105: Cry it out

Sometimes I am unsure what to do about feelings. I suppose the mental health establishment is unsure too: should feelings be drawn out or left in? Should they be lanced and bled? Should they be swaddled in cotton, and bound very tightly? What is it that they need?

When I saw Dr. F yesterday and she asked why I was crying I said because it was hard to talk about my Dad. I went on to observe, and there was an edge in my voice that surprised myself, that when she makes me talk about my father, it feels like she’s poking a tender wound. It is painful and wearying.

She understood, I think. She lost her father at the same age as I lost mine. In fact, she was a little younger, I believe. She explained that she thought that I had never let myself grieve sufficiently for his death. She observed, indisputably, that there would be—indeed, there were already—many more endings to be grieved during my life, whether the end of a marriage, of a friendship, or some other loss. If I didn’t learn to grieve now, she explained, all those wounds would remain raw; they would never heal.

The duck believes her but the rabbit doesn’t. The duck’s motto is “let it go,” like the song from Frozen. [1] The rabbit’s motto is: repress, repress, and, if in doubt, repress.

I believe that I have gained a lot from therapy including the ability to recognize ongoing and endlessly repeated behavioral patterns, and the ability to carefully tease out (odd that a literature professor has to be taught this) and hold up to the light the various stories I’ve told myself over the years about who I am. But have I been healing myself or dissecting myself like an anatomist? I am not sure.

Last night I wanted to cry and cry. While the children ate their dessert and watched television, I shut myself in the bathroom and sobbed. I didn’t want to be like this in front of them; in fact I told myself that I really shouldn’t be like this in front of them. It would upset them, I thought. So I took a Lorazepam, prescribed by Dr. F for moments such as these. And slowly it worked its magic, a feeling of calmness seeping slowly across my body.

Later I talked to several friends, all women, all parents, about my fear of crying in front of my children. They all suggested to me, gently, kindly, that perhaps it was all right to cry in front of them.

I realized that this had truly not occurred to me as an option. I wondered why and thought back to times I remembered my parents crying.

I could only remember two. The first time was a few months before my father’s death. We were on holiday in Spain. A family dinner turned dark quickly and unexpectedly. I had made some silly joke when my father had said something about my mother; my joke was along the lines of, “Oh, I think you must be thinking of your other wife, ha ha”; ha ha because my mother was my father’s first and only wife, or so I thought. “Well I was married before!” my father said jovially, laughing. I actually laughed out loud, the idea was so preposterous – not the idea that he had been married before, but the idea that he had been married before and never mentioned it in all the eighteen years I’d been alive. My mother wasn’t laughing. She said my father’s name gently, sadly, as if saying, “are you sure you want to do this?”

The details don’t matter and it’s not my story to tell. The point is that I remember, as my father told me the details, that he was crying. And I remember feeling angry that he was crying because I was already angry with him and seeing him cry made me feel sorry for him too but I didn’t want to have to feel sorry for him.

The memory of my mother crying is from just two months later, after my father died. What I remember most clearly is that I felt not grief or compassion but anger that I had to be the one to comfort and look after her, combined with deep shame at my anger.

When I reflect on these memories today, something comes into focus that wasn’t there yesterday. I thought, yesterday, that I couldn’t cry in front of my children because I remembered how angry I’d been when I saw my parents crying. But I think, now, that I was mistaken about why I was angry. It wasn’t witnessing my parents crying that made me angry: I was angry that my father had kept a secret from me; I was angry that my mother’s grief was so overwhelming that there was no room for my own.

This morning when I woke up my left eyelid felt heavy. It was a blocked tear duct; I’ve had it before. Treat it with warm compresses, the internet says, and the blockage should right itself.

Is a blocked tear duct the universe’s way of telling me that God is a Freudian, I wondered? You know, if you repress the feelings, you’ll create a blockage, geddit?

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if God were a Freudian. There have been signs.

But if that IS what it means, if God IS trying to tell me not to bottle up my feelings, all I have to say is, why are you such a fucking literalist, God? I mean, think of some of the other options that were available to you: perhaps a clogged pipe? Well, frankly, I’m thankful you didn’t go that route. A wine bottle that wouldn’t open? Actually, I’m also grateful you didn’t go that route. But what about a nice swollen cloud pregnant with rain? That would have been pretty at least.

But no. You give me a blocked tear duct as a heavy-handed way of telling me that I’ve just gotta cry, cry, cry, cry, cry, I’ve gotta cry it out, cry it out, as either Taylor Swift or Dr. Richard Ferber, or possibly both will surely put it one of these days.

Notes

[1] The duck loves that film. It makes him cry. The rabbit just rolls her eyes and murmurs, “I don’t get what the big deal is, it’s just Sense and Sensibility with snow,” and, I must say, I think she has a point.

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Day 92: Beware the vegimal.

Last week the younger and I were walking home from preschool. She was talking about Phineas, as usual.

“Are you friends with anyone else?” I asked. “Are you friends with any of the girls?”

She stopped walking and looked at me, perching herself on a wall thoughtfully and shrugging her shoulders up to her ears.

“Well, it’s like, I’m kind of a serious person?” she stated, her intonation rising with a perfect SoCal inflection while her hands simultaneously rose in a what-can-you-do? shrug.

“The girls aren’t serious,” she continued.

“What about Phineas?”

“Yeah,” she said in a tone that said “duh, Mom.” “Yeah, we are both serious.”

“What do you mean ‘serious’?” I asked.

She looked at me impatiently, “well, you know, like, if someone falls down, we’ll go over and see if they need help … maybe we’ll tell the teachers …” she says, making a spiraling “and so on and so forth” gesture with her hand.

“And what about the girls, wouldn’t they do that too?”

“No,” she declared flatly.

“Well, what would they be doing?”

“Oh, you know—” and here she broke spontaneously into a dialogue by way of explanation, a dialogue she performed in two high-pitched voices:

“‘I wanna be a fairy-princess!’

‘And I wanna be a brave knight!’

‘Well, you can’t be a brave knight because you’re a girl!’

‘Girls can be brave knights too!’

‘No they can’t—’

Here she broke off and shot me a look that said “so unbelievably tedious, right?”

“Don’t you ever play those games too?” I asked. “You like pretending too ….”

“No, because I wanna do serious stuff.” She paused. “She’s right though that girls can be brave knights,” she observed. “That part’s actually true.”

As we were crossing the road she turned to me.

“Mom, what was in the spell apart from the mouse droppings?”

“What was in the what?” I asked.

“The spell!”

I was at a loss. “What spell?”

“The spell from last night! To stop things turning into ice!” She looked at me incredulously. “Remember????”

“Oh, right, I remember!” I said finally.

It was from the last story I’d told her in bed last night. I remembered it only vaguely now.

The origins of the current iteration of the bedtime ritual are now lost in the misty sands of spring 2015, but at some point in the last few months it became Established Protocol at Mom’s House that after reading the regulation three bedtime stories, I would then, in addition, make up four stories that I would tell after turning the lights out.

I dread this every night. I don’t know why I ever agreed to it. It’s a kind of mental torture to generate narratives when you’re already knackered. And yet resistance is futile. The prospect of proposing some alteration to the current regime seems infinitely more exhausting than simply submitting to it.

I have a limited range of stories. Most fall into two categories: animal stories and knight stories. The knight stories always center on a quest; I’m not reinventing the wheel here. The animal stories typically involve a peripeteia in which the child-protagonist suddenly discovers that its seemingly ordinary animal companion is in fact a creature with magical powers including the power of human speech. Oh, la! Or else, it’s about an animal with a counter-intuitive learning deficiency. The pigeon who didn’t learn to fly. The giraffe who was afraid of heights. I do a nice line in those.

But last night the younger had had enough.

Not. Another. Fucking. Animal Story. She said. OK, well, she didn’t say it like that, but that was what she meant.

“Fine,” I said. “once upon a time there was a knight.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said. She didn’t literally say that either, but that was what she meant.

“All right, all right,” I said.

I dug deep and came up with a story about a princess who has a curse put on her that means everything she touches turns to ice. I didn’t say it wasn’t derivative. In all honesty, I haven’t actually seen “Frozen,” but evidently its cultural saturation is such that I can spin a variation on it without even consciously knowing the plot of the original.

Anyway, in my version, the princess wants rid of the spell, and so she asks her wise mother for help. Her mother isn’t a witch, but she does have a lavish library, and she’s amazing at tracking down obscure books, so she speedily locates the book containing the spell that will break the curse.

So they cast the spell and the curse is broken and they live happily every after.

Towards the end of the final story I typically start nodding off. This sometimes leads to non-sequiturs and surreal particulars. When it came to the casting of the spell, without really knowing what I was saying I found myself declaring that one of the necessary ingredients in the magical potion was “mouse droppings.”

“Mouse droppings!” repeated the younger. “What’s ‘mouse droppings!’”

“Oh, it’s … it’s just mouse poo,” I explained.

“Why did the spell to break the freezing curse need mouse droppings?” the younger asked.

“That’s just what it said in the spell book,” I snapped.

“Well OK,” said the younger doubtfully.

I thought that was that. But then, today, in the clear light of day, the younger confronted me. What else was in the spell, she demanded to know.

I couldn’t remember.

Well how did they do the spell, she pressed me.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d said the night before, so I improvised.

“Well, they put all the ingredients in a cauldron … and then they stirred it with the magic wand and said the magic words and then ta-da, the curse lifted.”

“Who stirred it?”

“The princess?” I suggested, hopefully.

She shook her head.

“That wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?” I asked, a little testily.

“Because,” she said, “when the princess picked up the wand it would have turned into a brine-icle.”

“A barnacle,” I repeated, completely flummoxed, “why would it turn into a barnacle?”

“No no, not a barnacle,” she said, “a brine-icle.”

I smiled a little condescendingly.

“I think you mean a barnacle,” I said. “There’s no such word as brine-icle. But, in any case, I don’t see why it would have turned into a barnacle. That makes no sense.”

“It is a word,” she said stoutly.

“Fine, what does it mean?” I asked.

“It’s an icicle that grows underwater,” she explained. “And when the princess touched the wand it would have turned to ice in the cauldron. Like a brinicle. Because they hadn’t done the spell yet.”

I considered her hypothesis.

“Well, that’s a good point about the wand turning to ice when she touched it,” I conceded. “I didn’t think of that. I suppose you’re right,” I admitted.

“But,” I continued (and here I contemplated the word “brine-icle”; it was clearly a portmanteau of brine and icicle … clever … too clever for a four year old to come up with, yes? But also … fake sounding, right?), “I still don’t think ‘brinicle’ is a real word, but I’ll look it up later.”

“It IS real,” insisted the younger. “Because it was on Octonauts, and everything on Octonauts is real.”

“OK, that is not true,” I said, feeling on surer ground.

“Yes it is!” she said.

“Not it’s not!” I exclaimed. “The vegimals! The vegimals are not real. That is not a real thing, a ‘vegimal,’ half vegetable, half animal.”

“Vegimal,” indeed! Bloody Octonauts and its cute portmanteaus deceiving preschoolers everywhere into believing in the existence of these hybrid abominations of nature. Like “vegimals.” And “brinicles.”

Later, I typed “brinicle” into Google.

bri·ni·cle

/ˈbrīnikəl/

noun

“a long, tapering vertical tube of ice formed in the sea around a plume of very cold seawater produced by a developing ice sheet.”

Huh.

I have only one more thing to say. Beware the manxome vegimal, my friends. Beware the vegimal.

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