November 21, 2023

Gleanings

• I do love to inject a bit of novelty into our Advent. And I’ve loved creating a new Yule Log for ELEVEN out of the past THIRTEEN years I’ve been posting here on SSJ (and, before that, on The Lunchbox Season). That’s a top-ten list and a bonus! But I hereby proclaim, “Eleven yule logs is enough.” My work is done in the tree-like cake department. They’re all my babies and they’re all my favourites. And I don’t need to build my catalogue up to a dozen log-cakes, let alone a baker’s dozen.
• This is one of my favourite things about the novella form: the way that worlds are created with just enough carefully crafted elements and strong imagery to bring them alive and to gain your trust, and the rest is on you. Novellas just don’t have the time or the space to hold your hand. I find myself loving that.
• That what we must do is awaken our own creativity, generosity, and create small islands of sanity when we cannot stop the insanity that is occurring elsewhere.
• My Significant Other tends to get depressed around his birthday. And he’s had a hard year. Last year’s birthday was spent in the hospital and this year is a significant milestone so I decided that we needed to celebrate. Really celebrate.
• I did have a minute of thinking, “hmmm, I never even tried this on before today, it would be terrible if I were allergic to yak hair and found out during a six-hour meeting.” But if the yak hair did give me a terrible rash at least I would be sitting with fifty dermatologists, and maybe some of them have cutting-edge creams in their carry-ons. (The denouement: no issues! Me and yak hair sweaters are best friends.)
• I quilted rivers all over the quilt, trying to echo the routes, the oxbows, the chaotic systems of those days. I listened to the news and quilted, hoping to find a way to see something positive in what had happened.
• I read that Bening trained relentlessly for a year to hone her stroke, and averaged four to eight hours in the water, day and night, in all kinds of weather conditions. She was adamant that she would swim every stroke in the film. Nyad was obsessive and single-minded in her pursuit of her goal, and Bening was obsessive and single minded in pursuit of hers. “We build these cages for ourselves in our brains about what we can and can’t do,” Bening says. “We get so used to that, that we sort of even forget that they’re there.”
• It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough.
• There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.
• i feel that veil is thin, yes, and it is the grey boundaries between past and future in which i feel myself becoming a flock of birds. the neither here nor there, an inability to be present for it.
• Start with the darkness, the unknown hour. Roll over. Squint to see if the glimmer of light could possibly be the beginning of the sun rise. Notice the well-worn thoughts about not getting enough sleep and the old stories from days gone by that still want to dictate how this day with little sleep will go.

November 8, 2023

Gleanings

• It used to be that I could envelop her with my love; now I have to wrap it around her, more like I do with her dad or a dear friend. The physicality mirrors the emotionality—that she is still able to find solace in my love, but that it is slowly, slowly becoming more like accompaniment than absorption.
• Is “take a penny, leave a penny” my Roman Empire?
• Now more than ever, living ubuntu challenges us to search for our similitudes, to find and preserve humanity –  that common thread that is woven into the fabric of each of our lives, connecting us. 
• There was a time (yesterday, and a century ago) that all three of them were attached to me like barnacles and the local playground was an extension of our home. Every mother thinks (read: hopes/dreads) that life might stay that way forever, that one day a plaque will go up next to the swings that reads, “she was a good Mum and she swung really high.” Lucky for all of us, it doesn’t
• And yet, for me, this is the allure of eavesdropping – not knowing the whole story and crafting my own version of the interaction I am witnessing.
• My goals for my career have changed, and the deflation is far less than it once was. I have a strategy of having extremely low expectations for my work’s success in the world while having all the hope and optimism that writing requires. I think it’s some kind of detachment I’ve cultivated to survive all this pain. I’ll always write. I love to write.
• The lifeguards laughed at something. Outside the leaves were falling. I turned at the deep end and pushed my way through the blue water. Each song a palimpsest, the empty pool a reminder.
• Later that day, maybe it was the heat from the water thawing me a little but I became aware I was sobbing incoherently standing under the shower-head, shaking, close to falling down. Instead of calling 911, I called a friend.
• Why do I get to live in such abundant peace while others are burying their children? There are days when I could be entirely sunk by that thought alone, feeling sick with the privilege of my safe, warm little house with its overflowing cupboards and soft beds. It is bitterly unfair.
• When mostly, I am coming to embody and realize that life, life is what is always happening right here, right now. And that life is often slow, quiet … boring, ordinary.
• So I’m reading. And the one thing I can do is share what I’m reading. Things that have helped me think things through, make sense of what can’t be made sense of. Here we go.

September 25, 2023

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

I first found out about the Naomi problem in 2019 when I read No is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, and my best friend was horrified, and I was confused about why she was horrified, and then when she figured it out, she told me to google “Naomi Wolf” and “chemtrails,” so I did, and finally understood, or at least kind of, because what actually explains what happened to Naomi Wolf?

And so that question, “Whatever happened to Naomi Wolf?” is something I have periodically wondered about ever since then, the question becoming more and more relevant as Wolf’s own influence grew and the stakes got higher, as she spouted Covid misinformation through 2021 and onward. A question that seemed also relevant as so many apparently intelligent and curious people disappeared down conspiracy rabbit holes (ie the UK book blogger DoveGreyReader who went full QAnon before disappearing from the internet altogether, or the bestselling Canadian historical fiction writer who, as of Saturday but not thereafter [once someone had flagged it in their Stories], was following something called Gays Against Groomers on Instagram).

Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Naomi Klein’s latest, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which is a consideration of “No Logo” Klein’s own personal branding problem as she has frequently been confused with Wolf over the last decade or so, but also an investigation of how the trajectory of liberal-darling turned far-right poster-child Wolf has a lot to teach us about radicalization, misinformation, political stratification, and the failures of political systems of countries like Canada and the US whose vacuums bad actors like Wolf and her comrade Steve Bannon, and so many others have rushed to fill. [Please note that I called referred to Wolf as “Klein” throughout this whole paragraph, and just had to go back and change it. The struggle is…weird?]

Last week was a fascinating time to be reading Doppelganger because the Mirror World of conspiratorial thinking was front and centre after supposed “parents rights”/anti-LGBT protests across the country on Wednesday that really were Convoy 2.0 with the same PPC signs and Fuck Trudeau flags (and I fear that well meaning people responding to these ding dongs with sincerity and heart are letting conspiracy nutjobs set the rules of engagement, like, it’s only a “culture war” if the other side mobilizes right back, playing right into their hands, which is exactly what they want, especially *play,* it all being just a game to these people anyway, rather than any of their ideas being worth responding to with consideration and logic. It is not irrelevant that, as Klein notes in her book, Steve Bannon dreamed up his ideas for world domination during a period in which he was working for an online gaming company)

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein comes as closer as I’ve ever seen anyone come to explaining just what the heck is going on here, connecting the dots on a vast canvas, making sense of the nonsensical, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Klein’s work before, but also weaving in elements of memoir that are new to her work and which add a real sense of humanity to these stories in which so many of our fellow humans have come to seem almost alien.

Because of this book, I think I know finally (kinda, sorta) understand what was happening at the house I drove by in Norfolk County during the summer of 2022 that was flying a swastika out front, apparently a protest of the federal government. An anti-authoritarian protest that has one running authoritarian propaganda on one’s flag pole, the guy who hates Nazis so much that he’s appropriated their symbols, which is how it happens in the mirror world.

Doppelganger is a study of doubleness, and doubles—Klein and Wolf; left and right; self and avatar; who Wolf was and who she’s become; of how each “side” in this situation is imagining the other is living in a crazy dreamworld; of Israel and Palestine; of foundlings and how some parents of autistic children describe their offspring in similar terms, seemingly “normal” children replaced by another; about how so much far-right rhetoric employs language and ideas from progressive causes and can also thereby render language as meaningless. She writes about buffoonish monsters like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and even Putin, and describes “pipikism”—a term borrowed from a Philip Roth novel—”the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.” She writes, “It doesn’t just farcicalize what they say; it farcecalizes what many of us are willing and able to say afterward.”

But of course any mirror is not just about its reflection, but also about what it tells us about ourselves, and Doppelganger is also a fascinating self-examination, as well as an actually kind and sympathetic study of what might have happened to Wolf and what particular aspects of her character make Klein a bit uncomfortable for what they suggest about Klein herself (and the last chapter, in which Klein describes them meeting in the early 1990s when Klein was a reporter for the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, The Varsity, is generous, weird and extraordinary). She also makes clear that social movements are the way out of this mirror world nightmare we find ourselves in, acknowledging that some conspiracies are indeed quite real (ie disproportionate power in the hands of a few unelected dudes who have too much money, for example) and showing that collective efforts are the only way to meet the pressing challenges of future (ie climate change, fear of which is provoking all this terror in the first place, such refusal to look reality in the face).

“Calm is resistance,” Klein writes in Doppelganger, quoting John Berger’s response to her earlier book, The Shock Doctrine, and I thought about that line too in the context of last week’s hateful demonstrations, how responding to panic and terror with panic and terror is simply a perpetuation of a narrative I don’t want to be a part of.

“The effect of conspiracy culture,” writes Klein in her new book, is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.” In Doppelganger, Klein suggests a deeper, more thoughtful way of acting (and thinking) in response.

September 20, 2023

The Long Game

In late 2009, a pregnant friend of mine purchased a baby carrier that was a different brand and model than the one I’d recommended—I’d had a baby for five months at the time, and knew everything—and I was devastated. And not just because my hard-won advice had been passed over either, but because I knew that my friend and her child would suffer the consequences of this choice, and the stakes were just so high. Which is ridiculous, but also it wasn’t, because becoming a mother had blown my universe to tiny pieces and there were these certainties I had to cling to in the chaos, or else I’d have nothing to hold onto and be wholly lost in space.

I thought of this last week as I watched the inevitable online furor in response to a cover story in New York Magazine with the headline “Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?” I actually wasn’t very interested in the article, because I’ve been so bored for so long by how women with children and women without them are pitted against each that I edited an entire anthology about it (The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, published by Goose Lane Editions in 2014), but the friendship angle was interesting to me because I’d just the week before published my fourth book, Asking for a Friend, which is all about how experiences of motherhood (and pregnancy, and abortion, and miscarriage, and infertility) can make friendships so fraught.

And not least because new mothers can be more than a little nuts (and I’m speaking for myself here—but I know I’m not the only one). It all can seem so personal. Case in point, my upset about the baby carrier (Team Baby Trekker for the win!), but also any debate over breast versus bottle, sleep training or attachment parenting, cry it out or (you, personally) crying it out. The best thing about my kids being older now is that we’re beyond most of all that (and guess what?! Almost none of matters!), though there are new tensions—what age do we let our kids have phones, for example. Or that I am relatively comfortable with my low-stress approach to my children’s education, but sometimes when I see the cars lined for pickup at the intensive after-school math program in my neighbourhood, I wonder how we’ll ever know for sure if we’re doing it right.

One of the epigraphs to Asking for a Friend comes from Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy, a line that, when I read it, articulated something I’ve been struggling with for always. “Is it to hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously? …Is that why some friendships between women crash into each other, noses pressed against glass, waving with wild recognition at the person on the other side, and then recede with the same force? Too much, too close, too similar, too uncanny?” (The other epigraph comes from a poem from Erin Noteboom’s new collection A knife so sharp its edges can’t be seen, that poem beginning with “What things are lost? / Many. Most. And those that make it,/ spared by chance…”)

I think that what I’m trying to say is that it’s amazing that any friendship survives at all, and that there are sometimes gulfs among friends who have children that are just as insurmountable as those between people with kids and those without them.

Ann Friedman phrased this so beautifully in her newsletter last week where she wrote:

“The kids question” is not a binary choice, but a complex and personal orientation that is also fluid—likely to shift over the course of a lifetime.

The term also helps me understand why phases of life when many of us are in the throes of working out our reproductive identities (um, our entire 30s?) can feel so stressful between friends. It’s rare for any two reproductive identities to be identical, even when the surface-level choice appears the same. Calling it an “identity” really captures how deep the feelings go, and how tectonic the shifts feel. How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.

“How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.” That’s the crux of it, right? That female friendship isn’t easy, regardless of whatever a particular friend happens to be going through, though there are some women who find it easier just to opt out altogether (“It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men,” was the line in How Should a Person Be? where Sheila Heti lost me altogether). But behind that hard work, all the doing, the fraughtness and the tension, there lies the richness, in being seen and known and understood, especially by people who themselves have made different choices and live in different circumstances.

From Ann Friedman again:

Or maybe I’ve always known…that friendship is a long game. That sometimes one friend is going to require more generosity and understanding than the other. That you can’t grade a lifelong friendship based on one year’s performance. That it is deeply rewarding to have friends who lead very different lives than you do.

One of the infinite number of wonderful things about being in my forties now is finally beginning to see how the long game is going to play out, realizing just how much staying the course is actually worth it, and how much all those early tensions—as we were becoming ourselves—would really cease to matter at all. And yes, being seen and known can be as agonizing as it is rewarding, but the true reward—of course—lies in the company we get to keep.

April 12, 2023

The Burgess Boys

Running away on my own personal reading projects is perhaps my favourite fascination, the time I spent rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series in 2019 a case in point. (I talk about it all the time, like some people’s version of where they were when JFK was shot. Where were you when I was reading A Ring of Endless Light? Omg, remember when I was reading A Severed Wasp in New York City? Somebody ought to put up a monument!) And the best thing about these sprees, like most things I do, is that they’re never planned, they just have to happen, and when they do the moment is so absolutely perfect, serendipitous, infusing my life with light and meaning, spiritual, an epiphany. I am not being facetious or hyperbolic in the slightest.

And lately, it’s been the Lucy Barton books, which I’ve been rereading these last few months and wrote about here. These books not blowing my mind quite like the L’Engles did (“every single one of them words rang true and glowed burning coal/ pouring off of every page like it was was written in my soul…”) but rearranging my thinking in a more subtle way, a quieter way. How I’d dismissed them at first, and then going back to see what I’d been (dis)missing, and how exploring Elizabeth Strout’s books is a bit like being handed a key to a literary universe where the reader is omniscient, making connections the characters themselves don’t understand—though it seems like the inverse when one encounters the Lucy Barton books, it’s true, where the connections are elusive, and it’s hard to understand just how she (both Lucy and her author) got from there to here.

But I think that Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys might just be the bridge.

I first encountered Bob Burgess as a secondary character in Lucy By the Sea, and had the same response to him that Lucy did, which was that I loved Bob Burgess. And so, when I realized that Bob Burgess had his own book (albeit one shared eponymously with his asshole brother Jim) I placed a library hold immediately. (The best thing about becoming obsessed with the Elizabeth Strout books in 2023 is that most of the library holds come in pretty quickly…)

And so Bob Burgess came away with me last weekend, and the coals were glowing again. Oh my gosh, I loved this novel.

The most remarkable thing I can say about it is that I knew its big twist, that Bob had revealed his story to Lucy during their time in Maine, and still the story was not spoiled in the slightest. The other thing I particularly loved was that I got to see Bob (Oh, Bobby!) meeting his second wife for the very first time, and neither of them had any idea!

The Burgess Boys is the first conventionally-structured Strout novel I’ve ever read (the Lucy Barton books are a study in interiority, while her Olive Kitteridge books are the same but with…exteriority [is that a thing?]). And The Burgess Boys really is the bridge between the two, all the scenes of the Lucy Barton books just planted in its soil. Parts of the novel are narrated by Bob’s ex-wife Pam (whom we’ve also met in the Lucy Barton books) and her feelings about her first husband are a quiet preview of what Lucy will feel for William. (There is also, indeed, a line from her perspective: “Oh, Bobby!”

And the scenes in which Bob is looking out the window in his New York City apartment, wondering at all those different lives going on, lighted windows offering just the smallest glimpses of other people’s private worlds—a preoccupation of the Olive and the Lucy books alike. The mystery of other people’s experiences and understandings.

The Burgess Boys is also deeply concerned with the fabric of American society, as the Lucy Barton books are against the backdrop of the 45th President, Covid lockdowns, and the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But so unbelievably presciently considering how much I hadn’t seen coming in 2013. The novel is set around 2007, the shadow of the Iraq War and torture in prison camps still very present, and a major part of the plot involves an act of violence on the property of a mosque in small town Maine, where the Burgess boys hail from, where the locals in this dying town are decrying the arrival of Somali immigrants whose culture seems to represent a threat to their way of life. As with the Lucy Barton books, as with, well, everything, the challenge: how do we learn to live with difference? How do we learn to live with each other? Strout refusing to look away from class, either, and how poverty can come to define one’s experience. The ways in which all of our experiences make us either harder or softer. How it’s never not complicated.

February 2, 2023

Brotherless Night, by V.V. Ganeshanathan

In her novel Brotherless Night, V.V. Ganeshananthan writes about the way that Tamil fighters would take over ordinary homes in 1980s’ Sri Lanka, during that country’s brutal, decades-long civil war, and how, when they were finished with these spaces, they’d leave them laden with traps and mines, which seems like an appropriate metaphor for what such tumult, violence and devastation from civil war does to the notion of home in general. Though I suspect Ganeshananthan’s protagonist, Sashi, would have something to say about my employment of metaphor at all, about my liberty to have one thing stand for another, war being, for me, an abstract concept, which is something Sashi doesn’t take for granted in her telling: “Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.”

I learned so much from Brotherless Night, a story whose title comes from Sashi’s loss of her revered elder brothers to violence and also from how even those with loyalty to the cause of Tamil freedom were used and made to suffer in its name. And while the specifics of the political events, between 1980 and 1989, were new to me, the overall narrative is a familiar one—of people yearning for liberation, about noble causes hijacked by ego and violence, and how women are always collateral damage in war, the ways in which their suffering, by some, is simply expected.

When the story begins, Sashi is dreaming of becoming a doctor, following her elder brother in this dream, and her greatest hardship is that her father has forbidden her and her brothers to ride their bicycles against the backdrop of political tension. And as the tension builds and violence and ensuing traumas begin to rob Sashi of her innocence and her youth, ordinary life proceeds as best it can—when most electricity is no longer functioning in Jaffna, Sashi and her medical school colleagues gather by the hospital with their school books to study under the outdoor lights there.

Eventually Sashi takes a job working in a Tigers field hospital, dismayed by what their cause has done to the boys she’s grown up with, including her own brothers, but also feeling obligated to offer care to any person who needs it. All the while, however, she works with her charismatic feminist professor to keep an apolitical record of atrocities committed by all sides in this complicated conflict, which means that eventually her protection by the Tigers is compromised.

As much as Sashi’s story itself was fascinating and illuminating for me, however, it’s the way she tells it that is the most compelling aspect of the narrative, instances of direct address (such as the passage about the burning library above), her evasions, her unwillingness to choose definitiveness, and also her acknowledge of how language and translation complicates and obscures—the nuances of Tamil that cannot be conveyed in English, all those parts of this story that those of us reading from a distance will never actually understand.

Beautiful, devastating, brutal and meticulous at once, Brotherless Night is a read that’s unforgettable.

December 19, 2022

Awesome

Once they started coming for positivity, I got defensive. *Who are you calling “toxic”?* I thought. Looking on the bright side, for me, is like a reflex. It’s how I make it through, and while I think all of us learned something from conversations around positive thinking (guys, don’t tell a person with terminal cancer, “You got this”) “toxic positivity” became one of those internet ideas thoroughly drained of its meaning, lugubrious people using it justify their worst impulses in a world that seemed more doom-laden than ever, and I was having none of it. That light at the end of the tunnel was my lodestar and, without it, I’d be a heap on the floor.

And then the light went out, and I lost my way, robbed of tool that had always served me to keep going, one day at a time, and it was at this point that I learned two things about my relationship to positivity. One, that I suffer from anxiety, and so what might look like toxic positivity from the outside is actually me recalibrating from the fact that I was convinced we were all going to die and then we didn’t and oh my god how amazing is that. And two, that while finally learning to feel sad hard and difficult feelings is my path away from anxiety, positivity has a role to play too on this awfully bumpy journey. In March I was really struggling, and actually started a gratitude journal, walking cliche that I’m becoming, and oh my gosh, it’s been a wonderful tool. Along with therapy, and reading, and learning how to dig down deep into painful emotions I’d been avoiding my whole life, and learn how to really feel them. As with all things, it’s not one or the other, but both. The pleasure and the pain, the darkness and the light.

And to that end, Our Book of Awesome, Neil Pasricha’s first “Awesome” book in a decade, has made for a most enjoyable year-end read. Pasricha’s career as a bestselling author began years ago at a remarkably low point from which he started climbing out of the darkness one awesome idea at a time, illuminating miraculous aspects of ordinary life (warm clothes out of the dryer!), which he’d post on a blog that became a book…and here we are. This latest collection includes Pasricha’s own mini-essays, as well as contributions from members of his online community, teachers who’d used the book in their classrooms, and more.

Seeing someone in an online meeting smile as they read the direct message you’ve just sent them in the chat. When a human answers the phone. Actual newspapers. Good hand sanitizer. Library holds. “When the cake pops flawlessly out of the pan.”

Yup. It’s awesome.

November 15, 2022

Gleanings

• Every morning I ask — how do I find acceptance, let alone joy in the midst of it all?
• This is my advice to ten-year-old me: Sing it, little sister! You keep doing what you’re doing even when other people think it’s weird.
• It was always on my mind to do it. I had to gather the skills as a cartoonist and storyteller to do it well, and the distance to look at it with new eyes in a way — but not be so far removed from events that I couldn’t remember things anymore. So when it was time to make the book, it was now or never.
• When was the last time you were truly amazed? Astonished? Thunderstruck?
• Washi tape is pretty, am I right? And colourful. But in the quest to believe in your own ideas — those ideas that want to come into the world through you – washi tape is SO MUCH MORE!
• Back to the woman in my group who is reluctant to admit to reading (or writing) memoir. Let’s call her A. Unsurprisingly, A’s view on memoir as ‘cringe worthy’ was formed by remarks made by a man….
• The glory of a cottage bookshelf! Decades of mass-market paperbacks with their cracked spines and dog-eared pages. Put me in a cabin and the first place I’ll head is for the books.
• I feel as if I keep picking the wrong books, as if my reading radar is malfunctioning.
• It feels downright unfair that I figured out how to make the best molasses cookie — thick, tender, but also one-bowl, no hand-mixer required, the kind that makes your whole home smell like the holidays — and you’re only finding out about it today.
• becoming… more resilient by the day. It’s been such a turbulent few years for my family but each day I surprise myself and find ways to endure the rough days.
• It all got managed. Work, warmth, kids, food, laundry, creative thinking, all of it. Like a frosting swirl that is just the perfect amount and not too sweet. Perfect.
• And at last, I see how, through the years, I have been not just making my novel different—I’ve been making it better. The process has been circuitous, and I’ve learned a lot. 
• I am not alone in my tears. Every Iranian-Canadian/America/European you know is crying. We are filled with hope, fear, despair, anger, and love for the people, the very young people, who are being killed every day. We are not doing well and we are also doing great. I have never experienced such unity in the collective pain of the Iranian diaspora community, such determination to help, and a sense of closeness with one another.
• I stop today to consider the word family and what it really means. The way life circumstances can turn a family upside down and then add people to it and put it back together anew
• There is a certain tree-falls-in-a-forest-quality of being an only parent. In having these moments of reconciliation with time. I often wonder if what I’m feeling is something other than what it is.
• Writer is a capacious carry-all for my spirit.

November 2, 2022

10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, Aaron W. Hughes

Reading 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, it occurred to me that too many of us take for granted what a huge and ambitious project Canada is (and society at all, for that matter). I never properly knew what the stakes were as I lived through many of the historic moments Hughes documents in this accessible, engaging book, though this is usually the way with history, and also I was too young to properly understand—the 1995 Quebec Referendum, for example. It’s stunning to read Hughes’ chapter on that now in light of Brexit and the disasters it’s brought and to think that could have happened here, how perilous is our arrangement of French and English cultures, to the exclusion of the Indigenous peoples who were here from the start, not to mention the immigrant groups who’ve settled in Canada over the years, becoming part of Canada’s cultural fabric. I never knew that Canada’s multiculturalism act was inspired by groups such as Ukrainian-Canadians who felt Canada’s endless focus on French/English relations was unfair to other cultural groups. I never knew what the Meech Lake Accord was at all. Or that the real story of the 1972 Summit hockey series was not as heroic as we’ve been taught it was (and I hadn’t thought about Igor Gouzenko in years!). How Pierre Trudeau’s “Just watch me” relates to this year’s “freedom” convoy, and how the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique murders changed conversations about violence against women and gun control, and how—no matter what political party was in power‚ the project of federalism was such a challenging one, different means toward the very same ends, tension and conflict baked right into the recipe.

I loved this book, its breadth and thoughtfulness, the way that Hughes made politics and legal history understandable, and how the pop culture references were just as resonant and interesting. I also appreciate how the book is no definitive, but instead the beginning of a conversation about where we are and how we got here. I learned so much, and definitely recommend it.

PS If you’re my dad, you’re getting a signed copy for Christmas.

November 1, 2022

Muffins

It goes without saying that I support CUPE school staff in their fight for a fair deal.

When the world fell apart in March 2020, the centrality of schools to our communities and families was made more apparent than it had ever been, and of course I stand with the incredible people who care for my children every day and help them learn and grow and have kept them safe in their classrooms during the last two and a half years, which has been no small feat in a global health emergency.

It amazes me that, after all our schools have done for us since 2020 and now that we know how truly essential they are, Ontario voters would once again deliver a majority to a government with so little respect for what teachers and school staff do.

I’m still pretty disgusted that this government is offering families $200 a child to pay for education catch-up after learning loss over the last three years, which is barely going to cover two sessions of tutoring. Because do you know what would actually help to make up those gaps? Investing that money in our school system. Giving education workers the pay they’re asking for (especially since this government has currently bagged a surplus) so our kids can finally have a year without learning disruptions.

Oh, but I’m also super struggling with all this. Part of it is that it’s a reminder of the labour disruptions of 2019/2020 that turned out to be a harbinger of such an “unprecedented” time of upheaval and hardship all over the world. When staff and teachers were taking job action in those days, I went all-in with support, baking muffins for the picketers and marching in the freezing cold, organizing walk-ins and rallies, overestimating the impact of my actions, my ability to make a difference, my obligation in the matter, and also whose political ends I was serving. I’ve got to say that becoming so deeply invested, from 2017-2020, in situations that were actually outside of my control, imagining that the free world and the future of democracy (and public education) was riding on my specific shoulders, completely fucked with my mental health.

Perhaps there are people who can engage in politics without losing their minds, but I might not be one of them.

It’s something on the theme of everything I’ve been talking to my therapist about over the past ten months, which is that there are people who are actually being paid to be at that bargaining table, and I’m not one of them, and so maybe I could chill out a bit? That this (among many things) isn’t my problem to fix, and maybe muffins aren’t the answer?

(Muffins were my way to imagine I had any control at all.)

It’s been a hard three years. My littlest daughter had a field trip to the science centre on Friday that’s been cancelled and I’m more devastated about it than really makes sense, except that for me (whose mental health has been precarious, and whose main triggers are those moments where I can’t make the world alright for my kids) it stands for bigger and harder things than that.

I’m fed up with the political scripts from both sides. I resent the way that both are trying to manipulate my anxiety and emotions for their own purposes. I, like so many of us, feel incredibly fragile after these three very hard years.

It’s just difficult. Of course I support school staff, but I’m so tired.