I’ve been trying and failing to write and instead I’m playing endless games of online Boggle: finding words when word won’t find me. Getting schooled by Nana_of_9 and Wanda_Granny because I’m not actually good at Boggle. I don’t care about strategy and just like to follow the thread of letters until it unspools into a long word. ‘UNBELIEVABLE!’ the game cheers me on. ‘INCREDIBLE!’ Some days, you need to take compliments in whatever form they arrive.
Today, I tried to make myself a Mother’s Day present. Daycare is closed and I don’t have the appetite for the old “you’re not MY mom so why do I have to buy you a gift?” discussion. I know that Mother’s Day is a thing I shouldn’t care about. It’s heteronormative and capitalistic etc. etc. But some days, you’re whiny, and you’re trying to balance work with parenting in a global pandemic, and you could use a present.
So, I wanted to make one of those salt dough handprints. In my parents’ house, our pre-school handprints are framed along with a poem that goes something to the effect of:
Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls
But everyday I’m growing up
And soon I’ll be so tall
That all my little fingerprints
You never will recall
So here’s a little handprint
Just so you can say
Exactly how my fingers looked
In Tiny Tots this May.
Tiny Tots was my preschool. I remember looking at that tiny handprint when I was 9 or 10 years old, sighing with wistful melancholy over my fleeting youth. (I was both dramatic and also have perpetually looked like a 40-year-old, in part due to my childhood penchant for sweater vests and permed hair). Who am I to deny my own toddler the pleasure of waxing nostalgic when she grows older, though my hope is that, unlike me, she won’t base her personality around The Phantom of the Opera and spend most of her childhood lurking around, wearing capes and punishing her enemies by composing satirical songs about their shortcomings.
Anyway. Make a salt dough handprint, I said.
It will be fun, I said.
It will surely go better than the last 8 – 10 crafts you attempted, I said.
Dear reader, I submit to you the fruits of our labour:
Majestic.
As I write this, I have paint on my neck, somehow. And on my pants. Still, I baked our greyish lumps into hard greyish lumps, and I cut a few into hearts, and they are charming in their own way. And because Mother’s Day is so fraught, and because I am tired, and because I have run out of words, I will resist the urge to turn the failed craft into a life lesson — Maybe the real salt dough handprint was the friends we made along the way — and simply return to playing Boggle: tracing my fingers along letters until a word appears and someone tells me I’m INCREDIBLE! UNBELIEVABLE! EXCELLENT!
Leave a Reply