Isolation 1: Location. 4 pictures

This is too big a theme for just one blog.  I am sure I will write more on it in the future, but it has been on my mind all week.   I have to get it out there. 

I was going to start out with a quote from a Beatles song, but I thought that is too easy and populist, just tag it on at the end.  So the obvious second runner up is to have a picture of Joy Division who wrote the song "Isolation".  It has been going through my head also.

I have been coming across the topic a lot in readings of Stay at Home Fathers, and to tell you the truth I couldn't really get my mind around it.  Why isolation?  Why should you feel isolated bringing up your bubbling, full of life kids and all the life around you?  It just didn't cross MY mind.  By far that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  It just doesn't exist for me right now.  It does exist in a big way.  I looked out my window where I live now  and think back to where I used to live and realize back then I HAD been living in isolation TOO.  No such sights would have lighted my eyes in my last abode.  And I thought, that's it!  That is the isolation.  Isolation Is location, physical location.  Let me demonstrate with some quick drawings.

We used to live on a quiet street remarkably even closer to the middle of our bustling city and remarkably even more quiet than any rural dirt road.  It was canyoned in by 5 story apartment buildings. Other car ways connected points A to B in a much better, efficient manner than our street.  There was no reason to travel on our concrete.  It was one of those types of street where you could lie down in the middle and take a nap and not be bothered.  There were no trees on it nor any kids on the street either.

My Daughter did have a good friend who lived a couple houses down, but they would get together by going to the playground and being with a lot of kids.

When I took care of my first daughter from 0 to 2 years old at that location, I would look out the window and see nothing but the cars parked on each side.  There was not anything to look at, and it made me sad. It was quite a bit boring too.  In fact it was better NOT to look out the window and stay centered on being with my daughter.   A good thing.

I don't think we saw anybody the whole day through in winter.  When my daughter was learning to walk, I would bundle her up and take her downstairs and walk down the street where there was a little tiny park a the end.  The trudge back went very slowly as she couldn't go on two legs well and I would have to carry her.  The whole process took an hour. We never saw anybody else.  I was always so happy when my wife called around 7pm that she would be home soon, and a new body, another soul to see when she came through the door, not because I was tired from being with my daughter, but because I was eager to see somebody else.     

When I visited my childhood neighborhood back in 2005, I walked all around the streets by myself one sunny, summer weekday around lunchtime and I was terribly saddened by the whole experience.  Because I was remembering the happy years of my early childhood and it made me sad (and they were very happy pre teen years)?  No.  But because there was absolutely nobody on the streets in all my walking.  Nobody.  Really.  I walked along one busy street with a continual stream of cars and that was even worse.  I couldn't see any people in the cars.  They could have been robotic vehicles which were just driving themselves around doing all the errands their masters had commanded them to do with nobody inside them.  Besides the fact that there was no damage anywhere, I could have sworn a nuclear bomb had exploded in my neighborhood and all the people lay dead INSIDE and could not come out.   Where was all the life of people that had been here when I was a child?  Is this the current state of American suburbs?  (Yes, it was an American suburb I had grown up in).  If I had lived there when I was taking care of my daughter when she was 0 to 2 years old, I would have been VERY depressed.  I surely would have experienced the full pressure of ISOLATION.  I have to ask my Mother if it had been like this when she had been raising us.

The wheeling, whirring, circular bass of the opening of song Isolation spins incessantly in my head.

I love our cottage.  The summers there are unforgettable and like the weather in July, are a bright sunny spot in my memory and even my whole personality.  The lake sparkles and there is continual traffic of boats and boaters on the water and people everywhere having fun and living.    

But when the weather turns cold and the leaves start to fall I think the summer life is sucked out.  There are fewer people there and it becomes more desolate.  I don't think I could bring up kids there.  A car driving through the dirt road because he is lost, the post man, the garbage man, the gravel grader are a cause celebre that someone has deemed it necessary to come to this little out in the woods.  It`s possible that the deer outnumber the people.  In fact the thought of bringing up kids there during the rest of the year after August scares me.  I think alone with my child I would have the TV on all day or be calling people continually, just to reassure myself that there was life beyond.  Not a type who organizes trips so well or willingly, I would quickly change that habit and organize lots of day trips and activities.

I imagine there are millions, countless places like this in the whole world.  In many parts of America where your nearest neighbors are not within seeing or shouting distance.  In Russia, the "rurality" (this is not a word, I know, but I like it) of Gogol's "Dead Souls" still exists and I wonder how they manage it.  In Scandinavia even below the Arctic circle where seeing a reindeer or caribou is more probable than seeing a person.  Throughout the world in communities where the people empty the village, town or suburb during the day to go work someplace else and only come back in the evening even after the dark so they still won`t be seen.  The isolation bordering on desolation would certainly dampen my ability to be a stay at home dad and contribute to my possible depression.

Isolation occurs through Location.  What are you going to do about that cat?  Turn the TV on?

Back in my new apartment, it`s a Sunday afternoon in October.  Kind of grey and cold outside.  There is no one home today while I have been writing.  I look out the window to the cross streets below.  Oh there is a homeless man looking through the recycle containers while another person throws the remains of Saturday evening bottles in the glass bin.  Crash.  There is a slacker teenager with a ponytail and black tights on under shorts jay walking.  There are two Japanese tourists wheeling their suitcases up the street looking for their rental apartment. There is a 20 ish couple walking on the street under the trees which still have yellow and even green leaves on them, heading in the direction of the park which overlooks the big monument.  Oh, there is a mother with two very small kids both under five and one of them... oh that looks like the mother of a girl who is a good friend of my younger daughter in pre school.  Should I call out to her?  In the next apartment to mine the young couple`s washing machine is whirring away through the not very thick walls between us and.. yes, it sounds like they are going to have some afternoon sex after their lunch meal.  That`s OK, I don't mind. It`s the sound of life being created.  It reminds me that where I live I DON'T live in a bubble, I don't live in isolation.

Strawberry Fields where living is easy with eyes closed turns into Penny Lane where the barber shaves another customer.  They are on the flipsides.  As a stay at home father I would choose Penny Lane to bring my kids up, rather than Strawberry Field, and definitely not Blue Jay Way.  Maybe that is why they tore Strawberry Field down in 2005.

Part 2 coming sometime. 

Listening material that went in my ears and churned in my brain why concocting this blog:

Joy Division - Isolation   

Alek S - It's All Good | made of CONCRETE

  

 

  collectorsmusicreviews.com

THE BEATLES - Strawberry Fields Forever -

  

Patience Training

Since my yearly bronchitis came four months early this year (no I don't smoke and I never have) and I hinted at this joke in another post, I wanted to get the correct joke off my chest:

Some archaeologists were

poking around a well known graveyard when they found a secret door that got them into a hidden cavern.  There to their surprise they saw one of the greatest music writers of all history sitting at a makeshift desk.  They knew who it was.  `Beethoven`, they exclaimed,  `what are you doing?`  `Huh`, answered Beethoven, and then, `Leave me alone.  Cant you see I`m decomposing?`

OK, I got that off my chest.   I wonder how the installed translator is going to write that joke?
Now back to our program.

I have advocated prospective Stay at home Dads and all Dads to work on their patience.  Patience patience and more patience is pivotal and often a problem for Dads with their children.  Lack of patience is one problem I read over and over that Dads wish they had more of.  This last week I have discovered a method to test your patience and strengthen it.

Find someone who you have problems with on occasion and even might get into an argument with, someone who you would rather not take orders from.  Have them assign you some work that they know better than you and that they have to guide you through.  For the plan to work, they have to be a bit nasty to you, you know, call you a dummy when you don't get things right and make fun of you on your lack of skills.  You, my friend, for your part, can not yell back at them, call them names and have to be subservient and accepting of any abuse that comes your way and get the project done.  The most you are allowed is a bit of sarcasm or purposely trying to exasperate them with your incompetence.  But you have to smile through the whole ordeal.  Give yourself points plus or minus when you either hold your patience or lose it and lose your temper. 

Here is the concrete blueprint for the test I am talking about.

Last weekend from this writing our family went to my Mother in laws cottage.  My wife has been going there pretty much every weekend since spring to work in the extensive garden my Mother in law has in the back of the house.  My wife has done all the work from seeding the garden to harvesting and winterizing it.  I put in one weekend a month, if that, of work on the garden and fruit trees.

The garden, the house

Understandably, my Mother in law often is in bad spirits as she has a bad back and more than often has trouble walking and doing work.  Sometimes when she is in a lot of pain it gets her angry.

Also, as I have mentioned in a past post, I think she doesn't like me so much these days as I probably haven't lived up to her picture of a successful caretaker son in law for her daughter.  In other words, her only daughter could have done better.

So needless to say, when I make it to these weekend workouts and she is in pain, the full wrath of her frustrations is directed at me.  As it was this last Sunday.

I thought I was safe on Sunday from her wrath as I had done an extensive, good job on Saturday and gotten all the trees cleaned of fruit and basically done a lot.  So I thought I could sleep in a bit on Sunday and have a nice breakfast whereas usually I just get up and get to work right away.  Bad move space cadet.

It was getting on toward 10.30am and she yelled at me hard that I was a worthless lounge about and I should expect to work hard both days when I come out to help in the garden like a student worker.  She complained that I wouldn't get all the work done that I still had to do.  I was walking behind her and it was all  I could do not to make some expletive deletive sign language with my arm and hand or just my fingers.  Or even just to mouth some curse word.  I did neither.  Perhaps because I didn't have my balance walking on a small path near a wall in the back of the house.  Or perhaps just because I didn't think of it in time.  Still, a point in my favor for holding my temper.

I had to transfer all the rotted compost from the heap to boxes and bags for the professional gardener to put in the garden in two weeks.  In the process of doing this she yelled at me for stepping into the compost and then trying to mix the wet compost with the dry compost.  "Just take it in layers whether it is wet or dry.  It doesn't matter.  What sort of idiot gardener are you?", she exclaimed.  I think that statement was made two or three more times.  And then she noticed that in fact I hadn't cleaned off all the apples from one of the trees.  That brought on a spasm of bile.  "Why did you leave those apples?", she fermented.  I said they were bad and would just rot on the tree trying to defend myself.  "Uch, you idiot gardener, all the apples have to be taken off otherwise they will just drop on the ground and we will have to pick them up anyway.  That is one more thing you will have to do.  You are really an amateur gardener."  Nobody likes to be called an amateur, even when they really are an amateur, or worse.  It is just an all around negative connotation which makes you bristle.  

I smiled and went to pick the apples off the tree. " Finish the compost first!", she screamed.  "Oh yes yes of course", I said getting into the big box to try to get better leverage on the dirt left there on the bottom.  "Stupid, you will really get your shoes dirty.  You don't have to do that.  You

look like a cat about to do its duty in its litter box."   I just ignored this, kept smiling and kept shovelling the compost into the bag she was holding open.  A bit of the compost missed the bag and got onto her garden dress.  Whoops, now how did that happen?  (Half point against me on my patience test.)

I finished the compost transferal and getting all the rest of the apples from the tree by 1.30pm and I was awarded a rest for lunch.  But I asked my Mother in law, what work left was there to do, so I could plan my lunch time and still get it all done before we had to leave on Sunday evening.  "Never you mind, enough of it that it will take quite a while, now go eat your lunch".  I stepped back inside with no comment whatsoever and a poker face.  (Extra point for me.)

After the break, I had to climb into the raspberry patch which went along the back of the yard with the neighbors and cut the branches of the NEIGHBOR`S evergreen trees because "they were blocking sunlight from the raspberry patch".  I was a bit hesitant to cut the neighbors trees as I was worried someone would see me and come out and say, "Hey WTF?  What do you think you are doing to our trees?"  From there I could either take the consequences myself, or I could say, "hey, it was her.  My mother in law, she told me I had to do it, it wasn't my idea."   Self preservation

As it was, no neighbors came out and I proceeded to bare the trees pretty much of all branches on this side, just to make sure.  The trees looked like a girl I used to know in college who shaved her head completely on one side but kept long hair on the other side.

Although I wasn't accosted by the neighbors, I was certainly accosted by the raspberry brambles.  They scratched me up and down my arms and it felt like I was in a patch of poison ivy it burnt so.  My Mother in law condescended and gave me, "that's enough", a positive comment for her.

Hindsight on that job.  My wife chopped down the raspberry bushes the next weekend, one week later, so that was kind of busy work torture work my Mother in law had put me through.  I let out a little growl when my wife told me this, but only enough to lose half a point on the patience test.

But sadly, I lost all my points in the last minute of the scrimmage.

I had brought up a box of jars of jelly preserves and pickled beets which we were going to take back with us to the city.  She yelled at me, "Why did you take the box upstairs?  We are going to put it in the car anyway which is right next to where you got the box from.  What a waste. now you have to take the box back downstairs again and put it to the car. You should have asked me first."  I broke.  "Yes, but I wanted you to see the box and make sure it was the correct box and that I should take all the jars to the car."  "Of course it was the right box and of course we are going to take all the jars. What were you thinking?  Idiot."  "I just wanted to make sure it was the correct box and wanted to bring it up to show you.   I really don't care if I have to take the box back down, its really no big deal. Don`t yell at me, stop yelling at me."  I yelled at her.

This is the same point when you are taking care of your kid(s) where you lose it with a child and something bad happens.  The temper explodes, the patience is gone and you commit a felony of bad dadism of which you are very sorry about afterwards.  The point is to never come to this point in your fathering duties.

But...

Patience all gone.  Lost all my points.  Failed my test.  Bzzzzzzzz.  Next player.  Come back in two weeks and take the test again.

Crap.

Still need to work on my patience so I can be an A class Dad.

Listened to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVeoynvRJ3c over and over while writing this post.