March 20, 2023
March Break
I loved our March Break holiday this year, a March Break so normal that I even forgot to find “normal” remarkable. Our kids brought their indoor shoes home, but not because we weren’t sure they might ever go to school again, and that Friday was a blizzard, and if I’m talking about it like it was 187 years ago, it’s because it feels like it, because our holiday was relaxing, a proper reset, but also because a week after that blizzard (which we weathered while eating pizza and watching Newsies [omg, so good, first time I’ve seen it in 30 years!]) there were crocuses in bloom, and it feels like spring. No doubt winter still has a few wallops in store, but spring feels possible now, and getting here feels like an achievement.
I handed in edits for my book just before the holiday and so I had the luxury of working half days in the mornings (after 8 am swims!) and spending the afternoons with my children on local adventures. They loved it too because it was just the right balance of lazing around playing video games until their eyes glazed over, and fun being out in the world (with friends!). And I liked that I genuinely had less to do, so it wasn’t me scrambling to fit everything into a smaller time-frame (which would make me very grumpy). It was a holiday for all of us, even Stuart, who still had to work while we were gadding about, but having no weekday activities in the evening was a break for everybody.
We went swimming at the community centre; went to see Winter Stations at Woodbine beach and went out to lunch with friends; our kids had friends over to help us eat our chocolate pie; we went to Leslieville to meet our pals and for cookies, book buying, and thrifting; our kids got awesome new haircuts; on Friday we went to see The Parent Trap at Paradise Theatre; more community centre swimming; and then we closed off the holiday yesterday with the T. rex Exhibit at the ROM, where I learned why it’s T. rex and not T-Rex, ie why T. rex isn’t J-Lo.
We had lots of time to laze, to rest, to read, to sleep, to visit, to sing, to whiz across town on transit, to snack, to wonder, to climb, to dance, to build, to spin, to dream, to be. I even got my taxes done! It was a very good week.
March 15, 2023
Mitzi Bytes Turns 6!
It’s March Break this week (low key staycation edition) and yesterday we celebrated Pi Day AND the sixth birthday of my very first novel with a chocolate pudding cake. It’s especially exciting to be celebrating this milestone as I’m hatching plans to bring my THIRD novel into the world on September 5. (Cover reveal is coming next week!! Stay tuned!).
March 9, 2023
Ordinary
A year ago, my mental health was terrible—a sentence that will be evergreen for me until the end of June—but early March was a particular low point, my anxiety ramped up again and me still so far from understanding how it played such a dominant role in my mindset and how much of my worldview was informed by a catastrophic thinking I’d just accepted as normal. I remember one of our first dinners out in a restaurant and not being able to enjoy it at all, because I spent the entire meal quite sure that we were all going to die quite shortly, and it was almost a little bit fascinating to look around me and see how everybody else was just taking it on the chin.
It was not a good time. And yet, there was sweetness. We were moving through March and the first one in three years that didn’t come with absolute dread. When my children brought their indoor shoes home for March Break, it wasn’t because I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t see the inside of a school again until September. We were eagerly anticipating our long awaiting trip to England, but Covid was also still surging, the idea of travelling was stressing me out, and I wasn’t sure that every March until the end of time would not take the shape of a spiral toward doom. I was incredibly moved last year to have our first ordinary March Break in such a long time, and so have my kids return to class as normal afterwards—but it also still felt precarious. Those convoy people had broken my soul. It felt so good for things to finally be okay again, but I still felt so far from okay.
And then this morning, 365 days from then. Another day of sunshine and blue skies, and there is this way the sunbeams appear in my kitchen around 8:30 in the morning from the southeast, making their way around my neighbour’s house and onto the counter, my cupboards, so golden, and my children were happy. We were putting lunches in their backpacks. They’ve stopped wearing masks to school. Iris had a school trip to the art gallery yesterday. Harriet’s school had an open house today so we could visit and see the zoo exhibits she and her classmates had built. Yesterday I had a meeting with my publishing team to hatch plans for my upcoming book. I spent the afternoon in a cafe finishing edits and eavesdropping on idiots, and then attended an event for International Women’s Day with wine and cheese, the first event held in the PRH office since March 4, 2020, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces out of an abundance of caution.
And this. The sun. This week. Today. In the deepest pit of pandemic despair, this ordinariness was everything I longed for, everything I missed to my very marrow. Backpacks, and laughter, and learning, and growing, and walking the route to school that I’ve been walking now for a decade. Things to look forward to. Moments to steep in. I am so so grateful, and so very happy, and tomorrow’s the last day of school before March Break and it feels like, instead of being stuck or in a spiral, we’re marching forward, forging new paths. Finally, finally. What a long, long road it’s been.
February 14, 2023
Swimming in Pee
We had the kind of weekend this weekend that hasn’t been possible in such a long time, the kind of weekend that we were wondering if we’d ever have again, even just a year ago, and it felt really good, to be so full of joy, our time full of fun, everything carefree. And something I can write on my blog that I would be less comfortable posting to social media, which is so much more amplified and devoid of context, is that we thoroughly forgot about Covid this weekend. 24 hours in Niagara Falls, staying in a hotel, visiting an indoor water park, and eating in restaurants—the object was enjoying ourselves and beyond packing hand sanitizer, we were going to not worry so much, leave our masks in our pocket for once.
Which I know is something we’re very lucky to be able to experience, but anyone who reads here often also knows what a terrible time I’ve had with anxiety over the last few years and how Covid absolutely fucked with my brain, made me think that keeping our health system functioning was my personal responsibility, and that every single one of my actions was so gravely consequential that I eventually was unable to do anything except walk around weeping at the sadness of it all, crumbling under the weight of this imagined burden of personal responsibility and my own catastrophic thinking. It was really bad, and terribly debilitating, and also really freaking hard for my family, and no doubt my kids will be talking about this in therapy for decades to come.
(I really really hate the way that bad actors hijacked the conversation around the pandemic and mental health right out of the gate so that it became impossible to have good faith conversations about any of this, to acknowledge that Covid is real and threatening, but also that there are dire consequences of having an entire society living under a perpetual emergency for literally years.)
And so it was actually really important, and even healthy, to have this little holiday away from it all, a bit like tearing off a band aid, pushing myself out of a strange uncomfortable comfort zone. If we got sick this weekend, we reasoned, so be it. Which is the kind of gamble that’s always been necessary for a trip to an indoor water park anyway, right? We were pretending that there was no circulating respiratory viruses, just as we were pretending that the wave pool wasn’t populated by people (hopefully mostly just the small ones, which is somehow less disgusting!) who were freely urinating without compunction.
So naturally, my youngest child woke up this morning puking—an inevitable water park aftermath. (She has been well since mid-morning, however, and will likely be returning to school tomorrow.) And then I headed to the hospital for my annual thyroid check, where it was found that one of my nodules had grown larger and so I had to have a biopsy (which I have had fairly often, and they’ve always been benign, thankfully), cystic liquid being sucked out through a needle in my neck.
And in the lab where I was sent for routine bloodwork, the technician was dressed in red for Valentines Day, just like I was, and we remarked on how we matched my blood, which filled four small vials for testing, and it somehow seemed fitting on Valentines Day, it being about hearts and all, my heart and your heart doing the amazing work of keeping our remarkable blood pumping through our gross and awesome bodies, and how all of us are connected, for better or for worse, most irrevocably.
I took the subway to the hospital for my appointment this morning, the first time I can recall riding transit at rush hour in such a long time, and the subway cars were packed, and more people than not with masks on, including me, and far more people with masks on than I ever see at off-peak hours (which makes a lot of sense!), and the subway was also so audibly quiet, people possibly on alert and good behaviour due to recent acts of violence on transit, and maybe that calm and quiet was what made it a little extra easy to feel in love with everybody today. All these people who’d woken up and had their breakfast and gotten dressed, and maybe nursed sick kids, or walked their dogs, or watched the sunrise with a cup of coffee, and now they’re out in the world, surrounded by strangers, following the rules, going through the motions, minding the gap.
It isn’t necessarily how badly our society functions that is remarkable, all of its faults and flaws, as I’ve written many times before, but instead that it functions at all. That most days in this city hundreds of trains take people places, and those people make room for each other, and move over on the stairs to let others pass, and help somebody up who has stumbled and fallen. That lab techs who dress up in red to make someone’s day a little brighter, going to work to poke needles, drawing blood, performing work that just might mean the difference between life or death. The miracle of socialized medicine and that I get the care I need to stay healthy. The miracle of ultrasound. The mask I continue to wear, when it makes sense, in my day-to-day life, and the knowledge that all of us, always, are swimming in pee.
And somehow, this is love.
This is life.
Happy Valentines Day.
January 20, 2023
Fifteen Minutes
I have fifteen minutes before I head to the pool, but I wanted to check in here and write something, to write something without even knowing what I’m going to write, which is the advice I give to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know where to start. Start where you are and see where it takes you, and so here I am at the end of a busy week, but not too busy, because I don’t do too busy anymore. I used to go swimming before breakfast so my workday would not be interrupted but now I interrupt my workday all the day (I don’t have a full time job! Let’s act like it!) and it’s the precious hours outside it that are untouchable, time for decompressing, for relaxing, for reading. I got a new phone in November, my first iPhone and I really like it but the way in which it’s most improved my quality of life is that it didn’t come with an electrical plug so I charge it through my computer downstairs, instead of at the plug in my bedroom where it was still accessible even though I mostly never looked at it after 9pm. Now I never look at my phone in the evening, and in the morning where I’d once spend the first twenty or thirty minutes of my day scrolling Instagram and checking my email (time that went by in a flash) I now pick up the book on my bedside and start reading, and I’ve been reading so much more since this shift. My mind is also in a better place, and I think that’s no coincidence.
Along those lines, I finished a big project today (actually the first quarter of an even bigger project) which I feel really good about because last spring’s edition came out so much later because I’d struggling so much from November 2021 onward. Getting it finally finished today is a sign of what a much better place I’m in that I was a year ago, a fact I’m still marvelling at, how much better something can be that once felt absolutely impossible. And I’m wondering about this, about gauging my well-being by my productivity, but I don’t think that’s actually it. My productivity is a symptom of my well-being, rather than the opposite. And it’s such a relief.
This week I also achieved a professional goal I’ve been working toward for a really long time, and I’m taking the time to really steep in this moment. As much as I’ve come to understand the way I’ve avoided feeling difficult feelings (an act from which my anxiety has stemmed), I think I’m also not very good at feeling good ones either. And so I’m trying to do that, which is harder than you’d think, but also really such a pleasure, and I’m looking forward to sharing my news with you as soon as I am able.
November 23, 2022
Postcards to the Future
A few weeks ago, we received a postcard from our friends Paul and Kate who live in Vancouver. I will admit that I did not read the note on it very carefully (the image on the front was a diagram of the respiratory system?), but it read something along the lines of that they’d written the card at a street festival “where they mail postcards to the future.”
Which was kind of remarkable, I guess, but then aren’t all postcards letters to the future after all?
The salient part for me, however, was the way the postcard concluded: “…and we will eventually be there, in the future with you!” Because we haven’t seen Kate and Paul since 2019, but this month they’ve finally returned to Ontario for a whirlwind visit, and we’ve been lucky enough to be part of it, which is what I’d so been looking forward to when I received this postcard at the beginning of November.
Tonight we all sat together in my living room eating Thai food, celebrating Stuart’s birthday, Kate and Paul, and our friend Erin, and 3 year-old Clara whom we last saw as a baby, and her little brother Gabriel, who has just learned to climb stairs, and who we’ve been overjoyed to be meeting for the very first time.
“Oh, I got your postcard!” I exclaimed suddenly, remembering. Kate and Paul were both confused. They hadn’t sent us a postcard. “No, you know. The one from the street festival? Where you were sending a message into the future.” They had no idea what I was talking about. “It’s on my fridge!” I insisted. “Here, I’ll show you.”
I went to get it…and realized the most important thing I’d missed when looking at it before. The date at the top: June 23, 2018. The people at the street festival really weren’t kidding about the future thing. I realized too that the note was only signed from Kate and Paul, because Clara and Gabriel didn’t exist then. We hadn’t had a pandemic then. None of us had had any idea of what was coming. And yet.
“…and we will eventually be there in the future with you.” A line that might have hit very differently if this letter had arrived at any other moment during the last few years. But it was a promise.
What are the odds of this very postcard to the future arriving on the cusp of the first time we’ve all been together in so long?
But here we are. I feel so lucky. And looking forward to what other wondrous things the future has in store.
November 14, 2022
Palmerston
On Saturday we didn’t have a lot going on (a treat in itself), but I had to buy some berries (in preparation for guests on Sunday for whom we would be making breakfast, a friend and her beautiful family who we haven’t seen since 2019!) so we all walked over to Gold Leaf Market at Palmerston and Bloor (which is always the first place in the neighbourhood to get fresh rhubarb in the spring), and we decided to also stop by at the library. All these parenthesis, I hope you’ll understand, underlining the resonance of what I’m talking about, these local streets we’ve been circling through these difficult years as we’ve walked our way toward better times. No trip down the street is ever a straight line.
There are places we walked in the Covid times where we can’t bear to walk anymore—the small patch of woods at the university, the grubby little ravine just south of St. Clair and the ravine proper, any back alleyway and don’t even care about the garage door murals, nope. We walked those walks to save our insanity, and only managed it, JUST, or maybe we really didn’t, which is why we refuse to do it now. Nobody in our family can stand ice skating anymore, not that we really liked it very much in the first place.
Palmerston Library, however, is very different. A Covid destination for sure—our home branch was closed for a very long time beginning in 2020 and when the library reopened for circulation that summer, our holds were routed to Palmerston, which was the next closest—but it represented something different than walking in sad circles and feeling hopeless. I remember going to pick up a stack of books we’d requested and getting rhubarb on the way that spring and thinking what a miracle were both these things, how we were truly lucky.
“Remember when we had to put our cards on a tray?” I asked Stuart, and there was fondness to these memories, instead of despair. When the library opened again, we’d go pick up our books at the front door where plastic barriers were set up, and we’d hand over our library cards on a plastic tray that was slid back to us at the end, all of it slightly illicit, like a speakeasy, except books instead of booze. There were some weeks where going to pick up our library holds was the only item on our agenda, and so it was a big deal, and the librarians inside found even more ways to bring the books to us—there were grab bags geared to different age groups and genres, and also new releases in the window, each one numbered, so you could request the numbers you wanted, and somehow I ended up getting my hands on all kinds of new releases, like Beach Read, by Emily Henry, and The Girls Are All So Nice Here, by Laurie Flynn, and Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls, which I only chose because I liked the cover but I really really liked it.
I love to think about all this, about the treat of these wonderful novels in such a difficult time, about how much it meant to have a destination and not be aimless, and also about adaptation and ingenuity and the amazing ways that library staff found ways to make things work. (Remember when all circulating materials had to quarantine for a week before going out again, which meant it took SO LONG to get a book in demand, and also how we eventually determined that Covid was not being spread by library books, which was wonderful news?) I love to think about all this because it’s a story of trying things, daring to be different, of how much libraries and books meant to our communities, of being brave and taking chances, and how some of those chances work out exponentially (by which I mean that I am probably FAR from one of the only people you’re going to meet who think the library helped save her life).
Eventually, we could go inside again. I recall that we weren’t permitted to browse, but could pick up our own holds, and that computer terminals were available for those who needed them. I remember the first time I walked into a library again after so so long, and how I could have cried, and maybe I even did, because I was moved a lot in those days. And then when we could go back again and select our own books from the shelves, a little further down the line, and masks were required, though there would often be someone who didn’t have one (usually a person who was having other kinds of trouble), and we learned to be okay with that, which wasn’t easy, but it became easier, an essential lesson in sharing space with other people and how we can’t always (ever?) be in control of what other people do.
Our home branch opened again, and what a thing, and I can’t even remember when that happened, because it was just so ordinary, to stop in and pick up our books on the walk home from school, the kind of luxury I’d never thought twice about before, but it felt so wonderful after so long, and of course, things were not so straightforward. There was a while when our branch closed, and we were back to Palmerston, two steps back—albeit without the book quarantine and speakeasy card slide, so this was progress. But not every setback is a total disaster (something I often have to remind myself about after what we’ve all been through), and our branch reopened, and it had been such a long time since I’d been to Palmerston Library until this weekend.
And—unlike so many other things—it felt good to remember.
September 1, 2022
Sweet Spot
I’ve written before about the too-muchness of summer, and also about what the last two summers of less than optimal circumstances have taught me about “enough,”and somehow, miraculously, summer 2022 has found that sweet spot right in the middle, a perfect balance. Some of which I deserve credit for, because staying within my limits has been important for me this season (in June I didn’t, and it was not a great time), and so I’ve been seeking so much rest and moderation, healthy things to restore me after the first six months of this year during which I’d periodically compare my mental health to a fraying thread. I feel so much stronger now, and grateful for this reprieve from struggling, and grateful to summer for being such a gift, for being so soft and gentle when I needed it most.
I’m still not about to say goodbye to summer—we haven’t even been to the CNE yet. But I’m still afloat on the memories of our camping trips, days on the beach, drives up north, leaps into lakes, the card games and the board games, and the books I read, and the tarts we ate, and the friends we saw, and patio meals, and ice cream cones, Shakespeare in the park, tending my garden, farmers’ markets, bike rides, campfires, and the songs we sang, and the times I laughed until I cried.
Oh, how I’m satisfied. So very satisfied.
August 3, 2022
Happy Anniversary
I’ve never observed my abortion anniversary before. I didn’t even know the date, had to look it up (20 years ago on August 1) but when the Supreme Court overthrows Roe Vs Wade on your birthday it’s not the time for business as usual. And so I’m so grateful for my woman friends who showed up in short notice on a holiday weekend to gather with me and commemorate the milestone of twenty years since this pivotal event that gave me my beautiful life. (I’m also grateful for the friends who would have been there and sent their love and support.) I asked my friends to come and bring flowers to add to a bouquet I’d started myself. Gorgeously, my vase overfloweth—and what a thing that my husband did the flower arranging. Twenty years ago, I was so lost and sad, but I am so grateful for the courage and conviction of that young woman who set me on the route to here, and what would I be without the friends who were there for me then and who are there for now (and my family too). What an extraordinary blessing, to get to own your own soul. I’ve said it before, abortion is unfathomable mercy. If that doesn’t resonate with you, I’d love you to get more curious. Happy anniversary to me.
