Sugar high

A friend of mine used to have a Labrador retriever who was, as Labrador retrievers are wont to be, somewhat food obsessed. This friend spent a great deal of time fielding the dog’s requests for (animal and human) food as well as (often unsuccessfully) preventing her from rolling in and then scarfing down the festering remains of old bologna sandwiches in the dog park. “I sometimes wonder what would happen if we let her eat as much as she wanted,” my friend once mused. “I mean, if we just opened the bag of dog food and said, ‘Here! Go nuts!’ Would she eat the whole bag? Would she throw up and just keep eating anyway? Would she ever stop?”

I think about that friend — and that dog — sometimes when Isaac ropes me into a discussion of just exactly how much brown sugar constitutes “lots” of brown sugar on his morning oatmeal. My version of “lots” is, apparently, quite miserly compared to his. And I wonder, sometimes, what it would take to win his approval. How long would I stand there, spooning sugar into his bowl, before he was happy? And how much would he eat before stopping, satisfied, or, more likely, winding himself into a glucose-fueled frenzy of dictatorial hyperactivity followed up by a tearful meltdown?

Or, maybe he’d be just fine.

Maybe, one morning, we’ll try it and see what happens. It would be a morning on which we had childcare, so that we could drop him off like a grenade with the pin pulled and then run, run, to take cover before the explosion.

Or maybe we won’t.

This is the budgie we are NOT adopting

 

Meet Fiona. Found in the babysitter’s driveway yesterday afternoon. Scooped up with a butterfly net by the babysitter’s intrepid sister-in-law, who also happened to have a spare cage in her attic.

Here are the reasons we are not, under any circumstances, adopting Fiona, why we are not even going to foster him over the weekend: 

  • His owners will definitely notice the “Found: Budgie” posters that Rowan and Isaac are currently making to staple to streetlight posts on the block, and so we shouldn’t let the boys get too attached. This, after Rowan has already named the bird — after one of his senior kindergarten teacher’s daughters, no less, in honour of the last day of school. He also considered, he told me, the names Alice and Charlotte.
  • We have two cats. They will, as Isaac might say, “make the bird get deaded.”
  • Someone who shall remain name Rachel has a bird phobia.
  • And then our neighbour said, “And can't you get that disease from birds? My aunt got it.”
  • Having another living creature in this house makes things more complicated, and I am not looking for more complicated. I am looking for simpler. I am looking for less complicated. I am not looking to find someone to budgie-sit each time we go away. I am not looking to add (feh) “Clean cage” to the list of unfinished chores that constantly haunts me.
  • Budgie = gateway drug to dog.

But, dammit, he’s cute. Even as I know exactly why we will NOT adopt this budgie, I can’t resist making big blinky eyes at Rachel whenever the subject comes up. I could tip so easily. So, so easily. Like, easily enough that you might consider creating a betting pool on this very subject. And, if I did, Fiona could sit just over here on my left shoulder while I typed during the day, and I could teach him to talk. And then Rachel would leave me. And I would get deaded from the exhaustion of raising two children, two cats, and a budgie all by myself.

Nudge

In the late 1970s, my mother bought herself a dress made out of — you know it — Ultrasuede. It was fantastic. Not because of the styling, which I vaguely remember as light tan in colour, perforated with a pattern of tiny holes. Because of the way it felt. Sometimes I snuck into her closet just to touch that dress, to run my fingers back and forth across the nap of the fabric, which was softer than anything else I knew. She wore it to synagogue services one year, and spent the better part of three hours in a silent, futile battle with me, trying to get me to stop stroking her sleeve.

She called it “nudging,” (pronounced noodje, like book) a Yiddish term that translates to “pestering” or “badgering” or “annoying” — as in, “Mom, can we have ice cream? Can we? Can we? Can we have ice cream? Can we have some now? Ice cream? Can we? Have some? From the freezer? Now? Ice cream?”

Or, “Have you emptied the dishwasher?”

But nudging to me is always physical, not verbal, a form of silent intimacy that falls somewhere on the continuum between bliss and torture. My six-year-old compulsion to touch my mother's softsoftsoft sleeve. A small foot pushing against my thigh underneath the dining room table. Isaac stroking my hair: “Nice! Nice!” The way Rowan does up and undoes the buttons on my cardigan as he talks to me, or picks the lint off my sweater. A baby asleep on your chest, clutching your T-shirt in his tiny fist. Isaac’s thumb in his mouth, his fingers working the satin and fuzzy fabrics of his blankie. The way a cat pushes her head underneath your hand, the way a child creates a lap by falling into it, the way a bedmate turns her back to you for spooning, ready or not.

There are the large intimacies of parenting, those surrounding conception and pregnancy, birthing and nursing and feeding and cleaning and such. There are the children sticking their fingers into your yogurt and then into your nose. But, I think sometimes, that families are made just as much by the tiny intimacies, the nudges that only they can — just barely — get away with.