Like sands through the hourglass
Tissues, toddler disease and I love you, baby reindeer
Thank you for reading The Middle. I hope you enjoy this selection of my thoughts, feelings, etc. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a single sentence. Sian x
Thoughts
Could talk about the Met Gala fashion for months but I’ll spare you. Best dressed was Tyla (the sand!!) and worst was Lea Michelle (it’s giving 2005 prom). Please come and discuss this with me extensively in the comments.
To the three people that care and who I complain to: my kitchen install has finallyyyyyyyy begun. Don’t worry, I’m gonna flog this dead horse for content for as long as I can.
Feeling personally offended that the internet is calling animal print ‘a new trend’. I can already feel my grandmother rolling her eyes. It’s never not been in but if it gets you on board, then welcome, my leopard print lovelies.
How does my son spontaneously fall over, barely cry, somehow have a bleeding lip and now I’m the one getting looked at sideways by the child care educator at drop off???
Had an espresso martini for the first time in about two years. It was so strong but so delicious and I followed it up with about 14 wines and almost walking to the pub for a pack of ciggies like the responsible adult that I am. My body is a temple etc etc.
Delighted by a New York Times article on birth order describing how research has shown eldest siblings have the highest IQ and emotional maturity. And because I’m the eldest of three and when it comes to shit stirring my brothers, petty as fuck, I’ve sent them a highlighted excerpt of the article.
My toddler got Hand Foot and Mouth a couple of weeks ago, so we were confined to the apartment while the plague ran it’s course (do not recommend). Aside from my husband wondering if he was going to catch HFM like it was some venereal disease with devastating consequences (namely, a certain part falling off), the most annoying thing about it was that said toddler celebrated his recovery by falling face first off of a dining chair and thus christened himself with a new black eye, which would suggest a high level of parental incompetence. Highly offensive considering the amount of truck videos I had to watch on repeat for days while we were detained. I do love him.
Feelings
Since writing about my grandfather and his pot, my thoughts inevitably turned to my Baba, my grandmother. She is even harder to talk and write about. This isn’t due to a difficult relationship or a lack of love and affection but because she has been slipping away from us for over a decade because of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been brutal and relentless and we are in a constant state of grief while she still lives.
This is especially cruel for my mum and aunty. They watch their mother, once so vivacious and sparkling with joy, slowly being torn away from this awareness, this life.
It’s difficult to see her now, the heartache piercing me anew with every visit. The wound gaped open again last week at my Teta’s (Baba’s sister) 90th birthday party. My eyes burning at her admission, “I wish my sister was here. I miss her.” All I could do was rub circles on her back, over her immaculate red jacket, and tell her that Baba knows how much she is loved by her sister. Teta started blinking rapidly then, the tears approaching. I looked away to avoid spilling over with my own, only to meet my mothers eyes across the table and find another partner in the pain.
I could fill pages and pages with this brand of agony but it does a disservice to Baba to show the end stage of her life as all of her life, when she is so much more than this horrible illness.
My Baba is the most glamorous and feminine person I know. She still teaches me so much about joy and love and generosity and family. She drove us insane in her heyday but we loved her all the same. She was the chaos to my Dide’s calm, the cackling laugh to his dry chuckle; the centre of us all.
I want you to know her, too.
Let’s start here:
2004
My grandmother told me that if I grew up to become a doctor, she would buy me a convertible. A Mercedes. But only if I would fix her grišpe, her wrinkles. She laughed then, the sound cracking against the deep, walled garden. A cackle of delight.
It was late afternoon, and she was wandering along the pavement, patrolling for fallen leaves, despised almost as much as whoever the current villain was on Days of Our Lives. They ruined the immaculate expanse of her herringbone-paved driveway, the yellow cream bricks edged in a deep rust red. They also marred the dark red gravel of the garden beds that housed the birds of paradise and my grandfather’s mandarin trees. The offensive little splotches of yellow and green contrasting sharply against the eighties redness of it all. I often trailed aimlessly behind Baba as she fossicked in the beds. Sometimes I helped clear the leaves, her chances of aid always improved if she had bribed me with cash beforehand.
She performed the Leaf Patrol daily, in the early morning or late afternoon. Or when she came out of the house to farewell us as our car backed out of the driveway, waving and blowing kisses and shouting, I love you!, until we reached the road and turned towards home. She was always scanning, her eyes shooting to the repeat offenders (the mandarin trees), searching for the mutinous foliage that dared to succumb to gravity and taint her yard.
In Summer, she wore a red and black polka dot shirt dress and slides. Strictly outdoor slides. One does not mix indoor and outdoor slides in a European household. In winter, she wore black fleece track pants with one of my grandfather’s checked flannelette fishing shirts, sleeves rolled up, and thick socks with feet rammed into the outdoor slides. But no matter the season, there was always lots of tissues.
Tissues were as staple a wardrobe item as underwear to my grandmother (and every other Croatian lady that I knew). They were always stuffed into the pockets of handbags, jackets, up sleeves and inside bras. They were most often found jammed up the cuff of a shirt, the telltale bulge highly visible under fitted garments. There was an endless supply of tissues to accompany the myriad situations that would require one. A snotty grandchild, accidental spillages, setting one’s lipstick and not insignificantly, stuffing them into one’s ears.
The day I saw Baba with tissues stuffed into her ears, was when I first became cognizant of her obsession with health and wellness. I was fourteen and Mum had driven myself and my two younger brothers to Baba’s house to collect the food that Dide had made us for dinner. Baba was on Leaf Patrol, in the winter uniform, pawing at the gravel, a pink plastic bowl by her side. We fling ourselves out of the car and as Mum approaches to say hello, Baba reaches up and removes the tissues she has poked into her ears. Mum abruptly halts at the sight. “Why do you have tissues in your ears?” She asks, exasperation immediate in her voice.
“Because Dr. Oz say you must protect your brain from the cancer, dali.” Baba replies, as if she’s explaining something completely normal. “And my brain get cold being outside.” Evidently there is a new addition to the winter uniform. Mum hesitates a beat before rolling her eyes, a movement that will incite her anger every time she catches me doing it to her. My brothers and I watch on, unsure how the situation is going to play out, trying to read Mum’s emotional reaction to this new information.
I’m not sure what we all made of it when the white tufts started appearing regularly in the colder months. Sometimes Baba shoved them so far into her ears, she couldn’t hear my Dide calling for her from inside the house, his annoyance growing with every step closer he bellowed, only to have her yell at him for yelling at her so aggressively behind her. This was the first of many maddening moments for my family, as my grandmother interpreted the health advice dispensed by Dr. Oz, Oprah’s TV prodigy, among other individuals in the health and wellness field.
“So go inside where it’s warm if your head is cold.” Mum says, louder now, her patience already spent. She gesticulates aggressively at the offending wisps, “You’re going to damage your ears if you shove tissues into them!” Baba shrugs and it’s evident to all of us she fully intends to ignore this. Mum turns to us, wide eyed and bewildered. “Come kiss your Baba and go inside!” She orders. I can see her processing this latest fad, almost unbelieving that such an inane and previously useful object has somehow crossed into the realm of medical conspiracy.
Maybe having a doctor in the family wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.
Etc
Lots of good reads incoming; prepare thy eyeballs.
Sorry, this article is going to make you cry but I really need you to read it. Lauren Bensted was one month post-partum when she had to have major abdominal surgery to save her life. She talks so openly about the self-critique of early motherhood and then having to navigate being separated from your newborn while trying to advocate for yourself in a health care system that is broken. I could not imagine being separated from my baby that early, when you are so dependent on each other: you for the learning and them for literal survival. It has made me reflect back on those hazy mornings of early motherhood with so much gratitude, when I used to cuddle my son for just a little bit longer after a 5:00am feed, his body sated and warm against mine, swollen and sore but healthy. Whole.
I couldn’t tell you where my mild obsession with the TradWife phenomenon has come from but I’m reading anything that crosses my path about it. I don’t consume #tradwife content on social media but I’m very interested in reading about it and how it’s perceived by others. Is it simply curiosity? Is the whole phenomenon anti-feminist? Does it say something about my own life and the division of labour in my own household? I still don’t know but it’s highly entertaining. Dip your toe in here with this little piece from British Vogue, before moving onto the queen of culture analysis,
(below). Finish with this critical piece from The Cut, where the author weighs the potential harm of the trend against the frivolity of an Instagram aesthetic.
The older I get, the more I find myself wondering about how much I share of myself on social media and how my personal data is mined by various companies. I’m not a closed person by nature, I wrote about my leaky bowels in China last year. I oscillate between ambivalence in acknowledging that I’m one of billions of insignificant people that Google mines for data and fiercely protective of who and what is tracking my spending on Amazon. Now that I’m a parent, I have a newfound protectiveness over what I share of my son and who that goes to. I’ve never considered how a pregnant woman could be data gold for different companies until I read this essay by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker. She writes about how data mining by big corporations leads to government surveillance and with the multitude of abortion rights repeals occurring across the US, how will our personal information be used to control us next?
Have you watched Baby Reindeer on Netflix yet? You should because it’s one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen and I’m not even certain I’d watch it again. The series is based on the true story of Richard Gadd, his relentless stalker and the unravelling of his life. Baby Reindeer does not pull punches and made me feel some form of discomfort in every single episode. There were times that I was physically turning away from the screen because the content was so awkward or hard to watch. At one point my husband had to remove himself to watch from the safety of the dining table, leaving me stranded alone on the couch, cringing into a cushion. I felt so many emotions for so many characters, they were all written with a duality that was intoxicating on screen. And if Jessica Gunning doesn’t win a BAFTA for her portrayal of Martha, the stalker, I’m gonna riot.
This last one is for the girlies (like, 97% of my readers). I recently ran out of my go-to Charlotte Tilbury foundation, to the point where I had to cut open the bottle and dig out the dregs of the stuff, the little shaker balls falling out onto my palm with it. I was avoiding moving onto my replacement, a new Charlotte Tilbury product as my old, beloved one had been discontinued. I’m here to admit that I was wrong and I should not have waited so long. My new foundation is the shit. It’s the Charlotte Tilbury Beautiful Skin Foundation and you can buy it from Mecca. Gone were the nights in the late aughts where I slapped on an inch of the stuff and embellished my eyelids with stacks of eyeliner and a highly contrasting swish of bronzer. Now, I want a light and clean-feeling foundation that makes me look like I’ve slept more than six hours a night and that my reno hasn’t taken years off my life and I think I’ve found it.
Not a doctor,
Sian x
P.s I want to watch baby reindeer, getting up the courage to stick it out. Seems worth the eye covering and hiding at the kitchen table.
I forgot about the tissues Sian, thanks for the reminder and the laugh after crying about Baba and the dreaded Dementia. She loves you so, so much xxxxx