Monday, November 30, 2009
Without You: The lay of the landscape for a tempor...
Day what is it now? since mama went away; day not long now before her arguably triumphant return.Some say that I haven't spent enough time updating this blog. She's observant, I must say. However, since I've spent much time with our daughter Natalie--crowning myself her father protector, and all that--I can only finally retort: okay, okay, I'm updating. What's sleep to me? It's something my daughter had better get to at least 5 times a night before she actually does; a vacation I promise myself I'll take someday.
When I started this venture I got us all into, I thought Korea was the vacation I'd promised myself. But this bit of advice I've learned, and I emphasize: If you're going to work, work; if take a vacation, then do that, because 'working vacation' is the most expansive oxymoron I've encountered since I learned the meaning of that word. Truly. Note my sentiments in the November 14 entry.
And Now, here in Korea, time has swept on to this first day of December 2009. Many things have happened to us--to our family--and to us--Natalie and me, in the past, let me see, 23 days.--, the latter being reassuringly routine and not out of the ordinary. Except that every day is a wonder and a whirl as my daughter grows up. I must admit that she is an attention grabber. Just ask any Korean, child or adult, who's encountered her. I have a hard time dragging her away from the attention she gets. Even after almost a year, when she herself has become a bit jaded by all the fawning, the Korean penchant for fair-skinned Western little girls has lost none of its luster. Just recently, when we entered an LG Electronics store, she was given 2tootsie roll pops at the door, and, by leaving time, had 5. It's hard to keep her off candy at that rate. Koreans seem to feel that candy is the ultimate way to introduce oneself to a young child of Western extraction. Anyway, she sure receives lots of it, to my chagrin. How can I decline it all and stay polite, especially when Natalie never wants to decline. By now, she's learned that whatever she has going is a key to whatever anyone has for her. At LG, as she was standing by waiting for me, suddenly she yowled and showed me blood on the tip of her index finger, a small nonlife-threatening cut. The clerk raced to get her a tissue, which made everything all better for her, as I hugged her and asked what might have happened. She wouldn't tell me at the time: despite the attention, she still is light on the conversation among people she doesn't know. Later, she admitted that "I might have got a cut from that paper", whatever paper there was there. When we got home, she simply had to have a bandaid on it, as awkward as it was to secure. By the, of course, she'd devoured her fourth bandaid, even with no visible reason to have used so many.
She's played with clay that was given to her in the past week, and that's for the first time I can remember since we bought her three canisters of it when she was still too young to use it. This stuff, called Angel Clay, has a different feel. I'll likely invest in more of it. She flattened out the pink molding clay, made it round, and called it a lollipop. To decorate, she stuck all kinds of small beads and colored paper clips into it, until it looks now like a flat, beaded, paper clip-covered. . .thing. A lollipop, if you will. I told her she can't eat it, and the look I got said, "Oh, and I didn't know that?"
I've been using my new computer to high capacity. A whopping 596 gigabytes are available on one of two hard drives, and I sit before a 22-inch monitor that can double as a TV screen. All the typicals of the wired world are here, and yet, I've communicated comparatively little with my wife since she left on November 8, a stunning--to my mind--and too-long--to Natalie's, I feel sure--24 days ago. Yet, that's the hallmark and point of the modern age of communication: the capacity to be close to someone's action from anywhere in the world breeds an air of familiarity unsuited to thinking about how really gone that someone might be. So, my main concern has been to get the webcam up and running, so that Natalie can actually see her mother during their time of separation. The visual is so important, enough that there's a way in which I could view the webcam as the single most important human-to-human technological development of the entire computer age.
More than that, however, Natalie has reached such an age--she'll be 4 in December--that she's quite able to wrest from me much more than just webcam time before the computer screen. She has a favorite site, www.starfall.com. There, she's really enjoyably learning the visuals and vocals of the alphabet. She seems daily to need her time 'doing my alphabet'. beyond that, she's getting lots of video time, since we don't plan to invest in a DVD player here. Why should we? Mainly, I've had the chance to introduce her to Schoolhouse Rock: all the classic '70's cartoon shorts dealing with government, grammar, and, so far primarily, the multiplication tables; all that 'education on TV' that I grew up with, and that still seems to mesmerize, if she is any indicator. Yesterday, she watched My Hero Zero fourteen times in a row, and in the process learned how to click the icon and press enter to replay it to her heart's content, along with ably recounting the dialogue and lyrics. By now, she's seen all the multiplication videos and a couple of the government ones (by watching them again, I can tell that there was a time when our government, as the citizens, still had a vision and a sense of its heritage and of the humorous in itself). The ideals in those videos, if simplistic, are what I want her to hold to, and not the pompous overweight that today's government feels is its own manifest to heave upon us. End of soapbox.
She now knows and has experienced that a series about policemen on motorcycles in California was one of my favorite shows growing up; that there was time in American cartoon history when Anime wasn't king and that Canada has produced some passably fine and possibly humorous viewing for the man who likes the great outdoors and the life of a handyman (don't panic, mama: she's only seen one episode, but I must tell you that she's taken in a little of the native version: Hee Haw. A very little. So far.). Also, simply put, she's had the opposite ultimate out-of-country experience: the British historical fantasy ideal of temporal displacement and alien life exploration. For those who know, that's Dr. Who. For those who don't, feel free to retort 'Dr. Who?'.
Natalie has found the joy of hamsters and of puppies, and especially the latter. We visited a household which had a small white puppy, very furry, and she and it just seemed to fall together. It chased her, she chased it, the rest is little girl history. Later that night, she revealed that "I miss those guys (the family)". I asked her if she meant the puppy. "Yeah. I wish we had a puppy." I knew it. But we won't, I've determined. So far, her years are far too few to be ready for that responsibility, and mine at any age are too many to do it all for her. Pets are, for us, much better experienced randomly, briefly and in memory. Some don't feel that way, but I've known pets to be the family's equivalent of a spouse, in terms of care and responsibility. They are, anyway, an elective attachment.
My daughter's drawing has been focusing. Circles and lines are becoming more distinct, and she's recently actually put together on her chalkboard, and immediately again on her white board on the opposite side, a physically discernible 'person': A large circle represents the head and body, and two line legs and two line arms complete the man. And there's curly hair. She drew them this morning as we were getting ready to be on our ways for the day, and I captured them and her comments about them on video, which I would post here if I only knew how.
Finally, for now, this update: after 22 days of not even one reference to the nursing she is going without while my wife is gone (I have referenced it briefly in talking about the new baby needing mama in that way, as well), she finally broke her silence Saturday night, lying in bed and on her way to sleep: " I guess I don't want booboos anymore". Not a word since, and I haven't discussed it with her, afraid to break what may just be a thin and temporary resolve. Just before we go to the airport on December 8th, I may re-emphasize to her what she said. However, I have to say that she sounded to me as if the time spent without it has brought a realization of how to not nurse and still survive. Guilt and hope, hope and guilt. But achieving separation of the parental module is the goal. Now if she would only begin eating the breadcrusts.
The foregoing accounts for our time together. The time Natalie and I spend apart remains the more complicated, in that she longs to get on her way upstairs on weekday mornings, yet still is that little bit reluctant to go in and leave me behind. However, the time spent getting inside is considerably less than it has been, and she is nights a lot happier to greet my return. With the babysitter, her sister and her 18-month old daughter, Natalie went last week to the conservation museum, located close to us, in Yangjae. I'm told that afterward, they went to a Korean restaurant, where Natalie proceeded not to eat the noodles she was given. A lot of things that are difficult for her to do with her parents, like going to a restaurant, seem that much harder to do without us around. Aside from that outing, she hasn't been to a sit-down restaurant since November 8th, because I know how disinterested and distracted she gets when she has to go. A restaurant without a play area is a quick pass on her list. The babysitter says that her daughter and Natalie are getting along better, 'not so much struggling', as she says. I've seen, though, that once in a while Natalie still likes to overhug the baby and call it 'the baby'. The sitter has also begun putting a white cloth square around Natalie's neck for keeping her very slight cold and cough in check, which she always has on when I arrive, but refuses to wear after she leaves the apartment. I ask her to wear nothing of that sort in the apartment, but make her wear a scarf when we go out, though the weather has been no worse than rainy and the temperatures stay between forty and fifty degrees around the clock. They'll worsen, though, and it's just good practice for her.
| posted by John at 12:36 PM
