New Work Monday #24

Celtic Tree
Watercolour and Ink on Paper

A silly little doodle. I rather like it.

New Work Monday #23

Kiki in the Clouds
Acrylic on Canvas

This painting was done AGES ago. 2004 I believe. My MIL emphatically disagrees that this looks like her grandson. I showed her the photo I was working from and she still disagreed. His nose was wrong. He was about four years old.

No matter. Kilian thinks it looks like himself. It's in his room and he loves the clouds. Brenna wonders when I'll do one of her with hearts.

Haven't the heart to tell her never.

Life is a Hella Crazy

Where to begin?

Is it just me, or does life get crazier as time goes on? I'm talking about all the responsabilities and running around but also, I'm talking about the holy shit, WTF?, "I cannot even believe that this is happening to me" surreal stuff.

The last week has been bizarre, though not as crazy as the distinctly remembered surreal moment when I was in the delivery room having Kilian. There I was, looking at the ceiling and feeling like I was watching a film because this was certainly too weird to be my life. A human being coming out of my lady parts?

ERROR! ERROR! Does. Not. Compute.

Maybe it's the heat. Maybe because my life knows that I have a blog and that fodder is needed.

I DON'T KNOW.

My life started to go haywire last Friday. Kilian was home from his trip to Guédelon (he brought a letter he had written home to us while there that said, in essence, "It took forever to get here") and since the kids were leaving the next day for Corsica with Mr C's parents, I was doing laundry. Suddenly Kilian came rushing up from the laundry room: "Maman, there's an enormous problem downstairs."

The basement? Flooded. Fuck.

Our bathroom, which is in the basement, is a cause of annoyance because after a year it is still not finished. Our enormous and ugly pink bathtub is sitting on bricks over a drain leading outside and since the washing machine hose goes into this drain, I figured that something on the bathroom side had blocked it up.

No.

Then I remembered the enormous storm of the night before and couldn't help but feel a shiver of trepidation...

I went outside and looked into the drain trap. It was full. I found me a bucket and started emptying it and got nowhere. This was looking like a job that I couldn't handle alone and no amount of trying with "ma bite et mon couteau" was going to help (vulgar alert: Figuratively it means doing things with the tools at hand. Literally it means: with my dick and my knife). I didn't have the tools at hand (ha ha!) and so I had to give up.

Saturday I popped the kids down to Lyon, came back to Paris, went to get a haircut and then left for the Depeche Mode concert.

If you follow my twitter or facebook, you'll have seen that a cock up of incredible proportions had taken place on the Paris East public transportation line. NO TRAINS! AT ALL! Thankfully, there was a bus that SORT OF got me to where I was going. That bus went through some of the hotter areas of the Paris burbs (Clichy Sous Bois! Aulnay Sous Bois!) and I saw a lot of humanity that I don't normally see. The hoodlum music added to the aura of weird.

But I got to the concert on time! And then, as per my tweets, you'll have seen that the concert left much to be desired. Phooey. All that work to get there probably added to the deception. I had no trouble getting home. Imagine that.

Sunday without the children clamouring for my attention with tales of woe on how one was trying to kill the other was weird. Mr C was off for a tennis meeting most of the day leaving me home alone to do many little though necessary works about the house and finishing off the shopping for our trip to Cuba.

The haywireness continued when Mr C called me on Monday night to tell me that I needed to take him to the doctor because he had messed up his foot while playing tennis. Six days before a hiking trip in Cuba.

He needed crutches...

...and had a doctor's note saying that he needed to be off that foot for a couple of weeks.

It took most of the evening for my anger to abate. Not anger at him and not even at the universe. Just that pukey feeling of losing control.

Tuesday, word of that plane falling out of the sky made me feel better about the possibility of not going to Cuba. After the Air France flight of June 1, I reminded myself that three's a charm after all.

Which brings us to Tuesday evening. A weird evening that had its ups and downs and when it was at its lowest, I was vacuuming poop off the floor of my basement.

I'm not even kidding. Chunks.

A friend of Mr C's had come over to help us with the backed up water drain with a borrowed plumbing snake. In French, I think it's called a furet (ferret). Anyway.

WE NOW KNOW, after trial and error (mostly error) that in case of a problem, poop can indeed flood the basement from outside because all the pipes join up before becoming the city's problem. Hurrah!

Fecking old house.

ALSO? Wherever you live, GET YE A WATER VACUUM! That thing SAVED MY LIFE. I'm sure I would have died if I had had to wring 2 inches of scuzzy poop juice off the floor, mop cloth by mop cloth.

The funniest part of the evening was when Mr C's friend was down the city's sewer trap for our house, he had managed to get the snake into the hole and then, after pushing it in and turning, all of a sudden, we heard an enormous GLOOP GLOOP GLOOP! Our friend turned around in TERROR, his eyes as big as saucers and if he hadn't been in a hole, he would have totally RAN AWAY into the night. We fell over ourselves laughing as we pulled him out.

Then we broke out the rum.

Fingers crossed that the weird streak is over.

New Work Monday #22

Siren's Song Beguiling a Stalemate Between Night and Day
Pen & Ink on Watercolour Paper
18 cm x 26 cm

I wanted to do a companion piece to The Mermaid's Dilemma and happily Ms No Regrets sparked the idea of the Siren.

Interestingly enough, in the French dictionary, la Sirène (which is typically thought to be a mermaid), isn't just. It also means a woman who has characteristics of a bird.

I'm not sure where the night and day thing came from. It just seemed right. Siren's are supposed to be seductresses. Night and day could be construed as metaphors for Evil and Good.

Though if you look closer, the moon is held up slightly higher.

Thoughts?

Here We Go Again

"So, Jennifer. Your kids are bilingual right?"

"Nope."

"Ohhhhh...... Jennifer......" And then I get that moo face that means that I have disappointed that person so much that it may well be permanent. It's sort of like the face that your parents gave you when they found out that you were no longer a virgin. It's the cop face when you've been caught shoplifting something dumb like sniffy stickers.

"What?"

"You have no idea how crippling it'll be for your children later on."

Fantastic. Another guilt trip. And from another source who doesn't even have children.

I am royally sick of these people.

I need a way to tell these people, delicately, what they can do with their disappointment. I am tired of explaining why I don't speak English to my children consistently enough for them to be bilingual because in a way, these gung-hoers cannot handle the truth. After all, I am a "mother tongue". It should be "natural" for me to speak English to them.

Natural? Really? Do these people even realise how children "naturally" learn to speak any language?

Take your kid for example (if you've got one). And in particular, swear words. Did you say those words to your kid? OF COURSE NOT! But they still picked those words up and if not their meaning, their connotation and when they should use those naughty words.

NEWS FLASH: Young children learn language by eavesdropping.

In other words, even if I did speak 100% English to my children, I really doubt that they would be bilingual with phrases like:

"Did you brush your teeth?"

"Did you clean your room?"

"There's a stain on that shirt, go change."

"Get moving or we're going to be late for school!"

"Leave your sister alone!"

Really. That's about the extent of my repertoire with these kids because surprise! I am not with them MOST OF THE TIME. Evenings and weekends. The children that are bilingual are generally the children who have a Stay at Home Parent who also happens to be the "expat". All my colleague "expats" with children? NOT ONE of them has bilingual children. UNLESS they spent their child's formative years at home (ie, they USED TO BE a SAH Parent).

What the people who think that my children should be bilingual forget is that it takes "a village" to raise a child. And when that village is 99.9% French and speaks French while in the kids' presence, how the heck do they even believe that I can make my kids bilingual all by myself?

Do I fucking look like Superwoman?

The only thing that we may possibly have in common is the hair and only if I let it grow out that long.

What these people also don't realise is that my kids were OPPOSED to speaking English when they were small.

And when I say OPPOSED, I mean HIROSHIMA.

Brenna, naturally truculent (and I know full well what that word means because I just looked it up AND IT IS PERFECT), would start SCREAMING, would throw her little body onto the ground and THRASH around while holding her hands OVER HER EARS if I even got partway through a sentence that was in English.

Dude. After having spent 7 hours in an office, and the better part of 2.5 hours in public transportation, I have to admit that I FOLDED.

I GAVE UP.

I CAPITULATED.

SO WHAT? I tried. They aren't bilingual. I really do not think that this means that their futures are washed up. I do not believe that this is the first step to misdemeanors and drug dealing.

After all, though they may technically be Canadian, they are also, primarily, French. They live in a French household. Where it is "natural" for their parents to speak French to each other.

That being said, my mom will be pleased to know that my children are learning English in school. In fact, it is no longer an embarrassment to them to have a foreigner for a mother. I am now cool. I give status. My daughter's teacher wants me to correct her English and when I made up a pronounciation chart of the alphabet for Brenna, Brenna's teacher photocopied it.

Brenna no longer rolls on the ground when I speak English to her. However, she still stomps away from me in a huff and yells at me for indignities against nature (meaning that I have no idea why) when I repeat words from her notebook to her (though pronounced correctly). I don't fight it. I close the book and leave the room. She generally follows me so that she can keep ranting.

I ignore her.

Adolescence should be a scream.

Now if only I could figure out how to ignore the people who are so concerned about the fact that my children might never become fully bilingual.

Because I am tired of justifying myself.

New Work Monday #21

Hi. Sorry for not posting. I sort of fell off the planet.

But I'm back now!

Last week was sort of hellish. I did about 20 hours of overtime in three days (one all-nighter) and I didn't even get a lousy t-shirt. Though I did get a "thank you for your implication in putting the tender offer together on time. If you like you can recuperate your hours by taking time off" (I said no. Show me the money.)

Also? When I was still a bit loupy on Friday from fatigue, I was told that I was a big baby.

I. Am. Not. Even. Kidding

So. When I think about how my uncomplaining "implication" (which saved their proverbial whatsits) will line the pockets of others and garner those others, who were completely condescending to me, praise for a job well done and possibly awards and stuff? I'll admit that that makes me a little crazy.

OK. Bitter.

Mr C was furious. Practically incandescent. I won't tell you what he insinuated but it sounded mighty uncomfortable.

All that to say that I didn't get any new work done this week. So HELLO ARCHIVES!

Here is the other piece that I did in Ravenna, Italy. You know. When I had a life:

Lady Bug
Mosaic
20cm x 20cm

Detail:

I rather think the polka dots on the frame were inspired...