Hair

I like my hair colour. It’s taken a while; I used to be convinced that God had made a mistake when He chose to give me not-quite-dark-enough hair, and I’d dye it regularly to make up for the error. While I was at school I experimented with various shades of red, and then later, at uni, I gave blonde a go, which was disastrous but probably a helpful lesson to learn. And then one day I realised how much money I could save if I didn’t have to buy dye every couple of months, and how much time I could save if I didn’t have to factor in hair-colouring to my getting-ready-for-an-event schedule, and I decided then and there to let the dyed parts grow out. I haven’t dyed my hair since. Because I’m a lazy tight-arse, pretty much. And also I’ve grown to like my natural colour. 

There are lots of parts of me I used to like but now, not so much; it‘s kinda nice that my feelings about my hair colour have headed in the opposite direction.

I used to cut Mo’s hair, until he got too squirmy and his hair started looking particularly hacked, when I decided to try out a barber. Unfortunately the one we chose was uncommunicative and rough, and so we decided to use our clippers in future and shave Mo’s head ourselves. He looked like a bogan with clippered hair, but it was free and quick, and so we’ve stuck with this system ever since. The one teeny tiny problem with this, though, is that Moses HATES having his hair clippered (he also hates having his nails cut; he basically just wants to hang onto everything his body has grown), and every time we do it he seems so devastated by the experience that I decide we’ll try out a new style that involves a kinder barber and less machinery against his head. 

But then after a month or so his hair grows over his ears and looks untidy and terrible, and then something big and important inevitably comes up (Nanna Parsons comes to visit/a friend has a birthday party/etc.) and I realise I can’t let him be seen or photographed with hair like that and there’s no time to go find a barber. So we pin him down and clipper it again (we do love you, Mo, I promise). We use the 3mm attachment so that it will take forever to grow and we won’t have to think about haircuts again for as long as possible, so Mo goes for a week or so around haircut time looking like he’s terminally ill, and then he goes for a few weeks after that looking like a regular (bogan) kid, and then he starts to move from regular kid to feral kid, and then the whole process starts again.

Kerry suggested we try putting his feet in a bucket of warm, salty water while cutting his hair to somehow ease the trauma, and it did seem to help last time; next time I plan to test whether or not the water working was purely a placebo effect and I could therefore use something else instead. And the time after that I’ll let him grow it longer and then find a barber.

Hazel has a mini dreadlock. We haven’t cut her hair yet because Alan doesn’t want us to, and also because I never have scissors close by when I spot her dreadlock. I have no idea how we’re supposed to decide how to style her hair as she gets older: Fringe or no fringe? Long or short? Pin her down and clipper it? There are too many choices, and too much time before she’ll care enough to make her own decisions about it. Also, is it fair that if Hazel hates having her hair cut in future she‘ll be able to get away with it staying long because she’s a girl, but poor Mo has been shorn far more times that he’d have liked just because he’s a boy? OF COURSE IT’S NOT. What to do?

And finally there’s Alan. His hair is completely his responsibility, fortunately.

(For the record, these cheap clippers were dodgy, so we returned them. But it was worth trying them out, just for this photo.) 

Obligatory whinging-about-my-essay post

My essay has been paused; I’ve been given an extension. I managed to battle on through our thirty-fourth cold (but worst one by far) for the month, thanks to which Moses missed three days of preschool and looked like this for the best part of a week:

[insert photo of Moses looking miserable and puffy]

And Hazel looked like this (only for a day or two):

[insert photo of Hazel looking miserable and snotty]

And I looked perhaps even more disconsolate because, unlike those two, I wasn’t allowed to sleep as much as I wanted to, nor did I have someone bringing me apple juice or stroking my forehead or caring at all how I was feeling. We were lethargic and had no appetite and spent a lot of time groaning at each other. But we survived it, leaving me free to turn all of my returning energy towards my essay! Finally! On Tuesday, Mo went off to preschool, I put Hazel down for her morning sleep, got my books out, turned on my laptop, entered my password, was given an error message, then repeated the previous two steps numerous times with the same result but increasing panic.

During the following 4 billion or so phone calls  to a few companies including Microsoft (who said they’d be helpful only if I paid them $80) and Hewlett Packard (who were very helpful for free), I found out the error message was a cryptic way of telling me I needed to take my laptop to a service centre to retrieve important non-backed-up files from my hard drive (such as my essay) and then install a new operating system on it, which, I was told, might be difficult for HP to find and send to me because the version of Windows I had was now completely out of date, being – HORROR OF HORRORS – three entire years old. (They found one. It’s on its way from Singapore now, apparently.)

So my computer, including my essay, is currently sitting in a repair shop in Beverly Hills (THAT’S where I want TO BE!) with a guy who’s told me that he’ll take a look at it in a couple of days and then let me know how long he thinks it will take him to actually fix it. Which, when I’d spoken to him earlier in the day, he’d said would take 48 hours, but then when I saw him later he said could take 3 or 4 days, and when I asked more questions to try to work out whether he meant 3 or 4 days from that exact moment, or 3 or 4 days after he’d figured out what the problem was in a couple of days, he told me he’d call me later in the week and we’d figure it out from there. “Everybody says it’s urgent,” he said not-actually-apologetically, even though I hadn’t.

Fortunately MST are also very helpful and three very kind staff (including the Dean of the college) let me cry at them for a bit before reassuring me that this happened to a student pretty much every semester and it would be fine, I could keep them updated, and we’d figure out a new deadline for my essay as soon as Computer Guy was less vague about actual dates.

Job roster

from here

Alan and I want one of us to stay at home full-time with Moses and Hazel when they’re young, and because Alan’s able to earn enough to support all of us, he’s the one who brings home the bacon, and I’m the one who stays home with the kids. This arrangement involves sacrifice for both of us: Alan only gets 2-3 hours each weekday with Mo and Hazel, whereas I get more like 12 hours (fewer with Mo when he’s at preschool). And for me, I spend most of my time thinking about kid stuff, which, a lot of the time, is “both too much and too little” (as Kim Brooks so perfectly describes it in this article): Overwhelming and challenging at the same time as being tedious and simple. It also involves good things for both of us: Alan gets to hang out with adults a lot, and I get to lie in the sun in a park on surprisingly warm winter days eating zaatar and scrolls with two adorable children (for just one example each).

At this stage of our lives his job is earning the money, my job is keeping the kids alive, and the housework is separate to both of these things and is therefore shared. Which is great, but it’s also hard: we have to communicate and negotiate far more than we would if all house things were assigned to only one person, for instance, and communicating and negotiating can be difficult. Also, Alan and I have different standards: I have a problem with things being dirty but I can handle things being messy; Alan has a problem with things being messy, but doesn’t seem to notice dirt. I want things to be done thoroughly, even if that means the mess gets worse before it gets better and it takes three hours to tidy up; Alan would happily shove piles of crap into a cupboard and close the door if that meant he could have an immediately uncluttered room. Not only that, but our circumstances have changed over the years, meaning we’ve needed to continually rethink who does what; we never had to worry about who’d mow the lawn before we moved into a place with a yard, for example. And, finally, how do you know if it’s shared fairly?

We’d had an okay system before Hazel was born/Alan changed jobs/we moved here, but since all of those changes there’d been no renegotiation, and after a particularly heated fight recently about the appropriate attachment needed to vacuum a tiled room (sadly, it’s not the first time we’ve had this argument. I say: the wide brush designed for tiled rooms; Alan says: the tiny non-brush designed for carpeted corners), it became clear that I’d become less okay with the current division of labour in our house than I’d previously thought I was. It was a helpful thing to discover, though it would have been nicer to notice this before I found myself waving a vacuum cleaner handle around at Alan and swearing a lot.

In this post (under Myth #8), Rachel Held Evans mentions a study which found that when two people were given exactly the same task, both (when asked afterwards) felt as though they’d done more than the other person. I feel like this is true of housework, and over the years I’ve tried to keep it in mind and ask myself whether we actually are doing different percentages of housework or whether it just feels as though we’re doing different percentages of housework. Our new system, though, requires none of this self-analysis because it’s all written down and then divided up so it’s clear each person is doing as much as the other.

I’d loved the idea of the Shulmans’ “marriage contract” when I heard about it (through this article), so that’s what we’ve done. I don’t think it should be called a marriage contract, though, as if us staying married depends on it (although I’m sure in many ways the health of our marriage does); I’m just calling ours a “job roster.” Also unlike the Shulmans, our roster doesn’t divide the work completely in half, but it’s close enough to 50-50 to keep Alan and me happy, and getting closer would require letting go of other things that work for us at the moment; I’d rather do all of the weekday cooking and keep our routine to what it is now than, say, cook only for the kids and then share the preparation of a later, after-the-kids-are-in-bed meal with Alan, for example.

(Now that the housework’s split, there are other things we have to figure out how to divvy up: time off is a big one we still have many unanswered questions about. If looking after the kids is counted as work for me, does it count as work when Alan does it on weekends and I have time off? And given that a break from workspace contributes to the feeling of rest, how do we balance it a little better given Alan gets two days away from his workplace, and for me it’s more often like two hours away from mine. Does it make any difference that he’s an extrovert and I’m not? And so on.)

We’re into our fifth week of the job roster, and thus far it’s working so well that I can’t believe we never implemented something like it before now. (Alan says he hasn’t noticed a difference, but he does remember that last week he took the bins out and cleaned the floor on a night when I was supposed to do it.) There are lots of benefits (consistently cleaner house, better relationship, etc.) but the one I like most is that because it’s clear which job belongs to whom each day/night, doing the other person’s job as well as your own means it’s clear you’re choosing to help the other person, whereas before you’d just do both jobs thinking, “I always do these jobs, and Alan/Annelise never does them. Life’s so unfair.” Or you wouldn’t do the jobs, and you’d think, “I’m not going to do those jobs because I’m always the one who does them. Life’s so unfair.” But now the jobs get done and each person has the same number of turns at them, so there’s no always- or never-ing. It’s very good. I highly recommend it. I give this housework system 100 out of 100 Magic Erasers.

Moses has a few jobs now too, like opening the blinds in the morning, watering the plants, and clearing and setting the table before dinner. He thinks he’s been wholly gypped by the new arrangement, and gives the roster 1 out of 100 Magic Erasers.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen Photoshop Troll’s Mirror Spots post, it’s worth a look. I give that post 100 out of 100 Magic Erasers too.

Anniversary

In honour of our anniversary, here’s a poem from B. J. Novak’s One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories:

The Literalist’s Love Poem

Roses are rose.

Violets are violet.

I love you.