My daughter was a little easier to deal with. We walked down to Kmart one day and went wandering around. Its not my favorite store. Its a bit grimy inside and the typical clientel is not of the most upstanding of people,but we bought some Red Vines and some Sour Patch kids, and walked back home. That was the height of our Spring Break excitement. It has rained quite a bit, but at least it starting to warm up a little. Daughter enjoyed seeing the rainbows that formed outside our windows and watching her try to draw them before they vanished, while her cat attacked her was pretty entertaining.
She asked me over a million questions this week. I swear, a million questions. I had to look up facts about the Eiffel Tower, and French translations for a bunch of phrases like, "Sit down, be quiet, where is the money?" and so on. I asked her why she needed to know all of those phrases, and with her best,"Oh my gosh you are soo old and dumb" exasperated eye roll and sigh, she told me that when she marries Jackson they are going to France for 6 months and since he is a boy and a rock star, she really doesn't think that he knows how to speak French, so she is going to be prepared. I keep telling folks that the lil chick is scary. I just hope that boy realizes he has about a 10-12 year head start on finding a place to hide. I have her convinced for now, that she has to have a Masters degree because his career choice isn't that stable, and she has to be the responsible one. Shes ball parking that to take her 10-12 years, and let me tell you, I dont doubt her.
She was contemplating her hair after a shower the other day and debating having it cut,(it now reached the top of her jeans)and as she was combing it out she noticed the mole on her scalp. "What the hell is this! Why do I have a huge brown mark on my head! Have the monkeys been coloring on my head? Do I have a tick? Just what is this!?" She was really offended that there was a mark on her head and when I explained to her that it was just a large freckle, she then started looking for more freckles and demanding to know what could be done about them and who was to blame for them in her background. I had to laugh because that is all her fathers fault, much like the curly hair. She really doesn't have that many freckles, her brother Sticky(nickname) has waaay more and he has his fathers olive skin tone to match, but daughter and my son Stubby,(also nickname) both have my skin tone of cave-dwelling vampire white, with a few freckles here and there.
She was eye-balling me pretty closely and she started pointing out little skin flaws and asking questions that I tend to dodge most of the time, but I figured what the heck, she is getting to the age where she is more careful about her appearance , maybe I can get her to be more careful about taking care of her body than I was. A few words from her wonder boy already have her brushing her teeth,(the few that she hasn't pulled for the tooth fairy) 3 times a day like it is a religious rite. So when she asked about the scar on my throat I said,"Got that from walking into a power drill when I was your age." Seeing her speechless for the first time in a week was pretty impressive, but it didn't last. I explained to her that when I was 6 or 7 years old, I actually lived in a very nice neighborhood in a small town in East Texas. My friends were the kids of surgeons and bankers and minor politicians and I went swimming at the Country Club and was well on my way to becoming a upper-middle class snobby kid. My folks decided to have a huge chain link fence installed around our property in this neighborhood because they decided that they wanted to have horses. The guys from the fence company were hanging the gates which meant drilling through the large brick entry ways, and being a nosy kid, I wanted to see what was going on. I was playing around and I guess I came running up behind the guy doing the drilling just as he pulled the drill out of the column. He didn't see me standing beside him and as he flipped the drill out to the side, it went in the base of my throat. Having a thoracic surgeon as a neighbor was in my favor. That poor guy who was doing the drilling screamed like a girl, I remember that. I didn't go to the emergency room, in fact, many of my scars and injuries never saw the inside of an emergency room, and I dont know why. My parents didn't stay in that property for very long. They found out that horses weren't allowed in that area so instead of leasing land out in the country or stabling them, they decided to move us out into the middle of nowhere and I went from Country Club brat to Poor White trash reject in one short summer. Back then it was that easy, you were judged by your neighborhood.
I pointed out the scars that run across that one from being slid under barbed wire fence after getting sling shotted while sledding behind a 3 wheeler, the other scars that she saw on my neck I didn't tell her about came from her father, but she doesn't need to know about those right now.
She noticed I have a few freckles, and I explained that you dont live a life in the sun without getting a few of them. I spent all told 20 years in the Arizona sun working outside in a variety of capacities including as a cop in Western Arizona where I got sunburned so bad that the tops of my ears turned purple, though that might be an after effect of them being burned when I was a firefighter in Southern Arizona and flame front caught me at the peak of a ridge in the Nogales Mountains. I showed her the neatly aligned scars on my back where I have had 5 sets of facet injections to control the pain in my back, the scar on my shoulder from where I had surgery to rebuild it, the scar on my knee from the botched surgery to fix it, the scar on my head from my mother, the scars on my hands from my temper when I was younger, the scars on my arms that just are. I explained that scars, marks and freckles all tell a story about who we are and where we come from.The tattoos I have are my attempt to tell my story in my way, and they work in a small way to give me some control over my story. She seemed to grasp that concept, and that turned into a conversation about why she cant get a tattoo until she is older because she doesn't have enough of a story to warrant one. It was quite a long an involved conversation to have with a 7 year old, but conversations with her are never typical. We had a debate the other night about Harry Potter that had even my son looking at her like she was some kind of mutant child. She has watched the movies with me and we have talked about them quite a bit, and she wants to read the books, and as my son and I were sitting there talking, she piped up and said,"Harry is like Jesus, he was willing to sacrifice himself to save everyone even though being evil would have been easier." Son and I just looked at each other with our mouths hanging open, nodding at her as she hopped up, grabbed her monkey and skipped into my room so she could watch cartoons. He looked me and said,"You know, shes kinda annoying at times. Its bad enough I have I have an older sister that is a freaking genius that I have to try to measure up to, but now I have a little sister that is kicking my ass all over the place as well? What the hell mom?" I have to wonder.
No comments:
Post a Comment