Honestly. Who knew that Volvos could be so contrary? I had just unlocked the door and cleared off the passenger seat so that Laura could have a seat. Laura’s daughter was babysitting my girls while I was working and it only made sense that Laura ride home with me. We took a moment…Laura to admire my car, and me to nod, smile and gush about how I loved it. It happened just after I opened the sunroof so that we could get some air. One moment, the car was happily humming away and the next, seemingly in response to Laura’s comment on the general fanciness of the car, it chugged quietly and…shit the bed. Totally. But not before we had gotten to the end of the lane and nosed our way into the street. And it is in this way that my Volvo is exactly like my six year old: There is no more efficient way to ensure that Calla will wear the orange shirt with the purple pants than to compliment her on how nice the pink shirt looks with those purple pants.

There are many unfathomable things in this world. Number one would be baseball. Nearly everything about it, but most specifically, the sign language between catcher and pitcher (I would personally find the game more watchable if they subtitled the signs…) and why, when some of the most elite athletes are involved, sportswear companies cannot make a more comfortable cup/jock strap combination for the poor boys. Anything to stop the snatch and grab show.

Number two would then be why EVENTS always take place when the guys go fishing. One year, Dean’s grandmother died while they were away on the fishing trip. Another year, my brother’s house flooded while my sister was babysitting. And this year, the car died on me. With it’s nose out into the street, in a business area that was post-5pm quiet, with two women who could neither determine and fix the problem nor push it to a safer place by themselves, the car died.
Number three in my list of Unfathomable Things is a new addition and is linked to number two. It is unfathomable to me why the hood on my car requires two people to lift it. Unfathomable, but true…Laura had to release the latch inside the car while I released the latch under the grill. We went to all this trouble even though I knew full well that once I lifted the hood I would only be able to determine two things…whether the car had oil and whether it had windshield wiper fluid. I was pretty sure that low wiper fluid would not cause the ‘check engine’ light to flash, but I knew that if there were no oil in the car, I would be writing ‘Free to a Good Home’ in lipstick on the windshield.

Now, I always feel slightly silly lifting the hood of a car, considering how little I can actually do with what is under that hood, but I feel even sillier when I can’t even get the hood lifted. Yesterday evening, anybody passing would have seen two women standing in the street, struggling to lift the hood of a car so that they could stand around and pretend to look like they knew what they were doing. We couldn’t fix the problem, we couldn’t push the car by ourselves, we couldn’t get the hood up… Really, the only thing that would have embarrassed me more is if a mechanic had happened by and looked at me with that look they get while I told him that my car ga-ga-cha-chugged and died because Laura called it fancy. And I am fairly certain this is exactly what I would have told the mechanic because (a) that is just how my mind works, (b) I have no other explanation and (c) I truly do find the timing curious and it just works for me to think that cars can be contrary.

So…my fancy, contrary car is sitting in exile over in that end of town, having a time out, if you will, just like my six year old did today when she refused to share her Polly Pocket just because she could. On Monday, Dean will take the car to the mechanic and the two of them will stand around and discuss, in real, mechanical terms, what is actually wrong with the car. In the meantime, I will be spending the next hour looking to see if Dr. and Martha Sears ever wrote a book on recalcitrant cars…

Soph was singing Patience to me from the backseat today. I don’t even know when she heard it, but it was probably on my media player loop. It was like a foreshadowing. At that particular moment, I had Patience seeping out of my pores, I had Serenity shining from my eyes, I had Love draping itself over my shoulders. Looking into my own eyes in the mirror this morning while brushing my teeth, I pep-talked myself into this state as I was about to spend the day with a Very Difficult Person.

The Patience seeping was to be a defence, the Serenity shining was to be a glamour and the Love draping was a shield (a la water off a duck’s back). It almost worked, too. I didn’t know that I had left something undefended until the girls and I were alone again and it was bedtime. See, bedtime is a tricky time on a good day as it throws into relief one of the great discrepancies between children and parents: we as parents spend half an hour trying to coax our children into a state that we most want to be in and they have no use for…namely, sleep.

As it turns out, my inflated sense of Patience, Serenity and Love (from here on out to be referred to as PS&L) must have had a slow leak because when the girls dropped to their hands and knees and performed a rousing rendition of their very own, self-choreographed “Wiggle My Butt-y” song and dance instead of putting on their pajamas like I had asked, all I heard was the ‘pffffffftttt’ of my deflating PS&L balloon. Sadly, bedtime would once again degenerate into a knock-down, jaw-clenching, oath-stifling, shouting match.

Half and hour after the kids finally fell asleep, I sat down and pressed play on my media player. It wasn’t until I heard Patience that I remembered that Sophia had been singing it to me in the car this morning. And it wasn’t until the end of the song that I saw how much my day mirrored the song. Begin the day with some trance-like whistling…the ego lulling the id into believing that a day spent with the super-ego is just the thing. All is fine, the lullaby continues for a time until…there is a change in tempo (in my case, a chorus of ‘Wiggle My Butt-y’) and the id wakes up. Ego (or Slash, Izzy and the boys) trying, desperately now, humming the lullaby… but id starts screeching and carrying on, realizing now that it was forced to spend a day in the company of the Super Ego. And that’s never a good thing.

All I am saying is that some days start like a gentle PS&L ballad and, despite your best efforts, end in an GN’R screech.

Kate’s new home is a crone of a house…the kind of frail that has withstood one hundred years of winds and storms and wears the scars of them where we can all see them. Her joints are a bit rickety and parts of her plaster are cracked and bubbled, her floors smile to think of a time when they didn’t slope into the corners. But we are all giving her a bit of a makeover and I think it tickles her to fell pretty again.

Kate’s house has seen so much…welcomed newlyweds and babies, stood between them and cold winds and summer rains, was the safe place for a family to retreat to. I can only think that with a lifetime of experience, she will deal gently with Kate as she tries on house-ownership for the first time. Really, Kate and her house are a perfect match…it is always wise to be guided by somebody with more experience, and not even a house can resist the charm of a makeover and it’s ability to make one feel young again.