January 9, 2013
Baby With a Heartbeat
There are so many things I’ve forgotten to worry about this time around: dwarfism, hermaphroditism, whether my baby would be born entirely covered with one big hairy mole like someone I saw once on Jerry Springer. My pregnancy was confirmed in September with the faintest double line on a home test (albeit the fifth test I’d taken that week. My un-neurotic behaviour only ever extends so far. But I’d known I was pregnant, even if the four negative tests had been oblivious). And after that, I didn’t even get a blood test. I made very few pregnancy-related google queries. One the odd day that I felt well, I didn’t panic and start to think that something was wrong. I was having the rare experience of living life as a normal person does, and it was a really, really nice way to be.
This was entirely different from my previous pregnancy, which tied me up in such knots that my midwife had worried about my blood pressure. Having never had a baby before, I’d found it impossible to believe it was possible, that my body would know how to perform this miraculous thing. It made me crazy to know that that here I was with this enormous responsibility, the creation of a person, and no control over the process. The no control thing was the worst of it, and it seemed really irresponsible to me. This time though, it was easy to accept it, to understand that being pregnant is fundamentally a passive exercise. Part of my ease with this was because it was easier to accept passivity, and with work, a small child and a first-trimester to contend with, any shortcut is welcome. The other part, I think, was because I already am a mother, and spend a large number of my waking (and sometimes non-waking) hours doing “mothering things”. I didn’t feel the need I’d felt before to enact pregnancy (worry about soft cheese and abdominal twinges) in order to stake a claim on motherhood. I had my claim. I also know that this baby is never going to be so easy to take care of as during its time in the womb–let’s enjoy the silence while we can.
(Note: As I say, my un-neurotic behaviour only extends so far. Don’t think that I haven’t supposed that my complacency will inevitably result in calamity. That just when I start to take security for granted, the whole thing will fall to pieces. That I will publish this post, and then find out tomorrow that baby forgot to grow internal organs. But I haven’t supposed so much. I can pack up these thoughts away in a box, which is really something significant.)
When I was pregnant with Harriet, I didn’t know her name or sex, or anything about her, but I spent a lot of time imagining. I wrote her letters, played her music, read her stories every night. I understood that bonding with this tiny being was a really important process, so I worked at this. From fetal kicks, we determined that she loved Motown, we read her Teddy Jam’s Night Cars on repeat so that apparently she’d recognize it, she knew my voice, she knew her daddy’s. Life the soft cheese aversion and anxiety, I think what I was really doing was staking a claim on motherhood. But then she was born, and she was a total stranger. I’d never imagined her face, she didn’t seem to like Motown at all, she was more amphibian than human. It occurred to me that my “bonding” had been 100% projection. The disparity between who she was and the baby I’d imagined (who, to be fair, was at least six months old) made those early days all the more difficult to navigate.
Which is probably part of the reason I’ve not really started using our new baby’s name or proper pronoun, though I’m aware of both. I tell myself that this baby hears more stories in utero than Harriet ever did, because I read stories to Harriet all day long (and most are of far superior quality to the children’s literature I had access to four years ago. Indeed, motherhood has opened up whole literary worlds). Perhaps the strongest bond that I feel to my new baby as a person is that this is Harriet’s sibling, which is a wondrous thing for me to behold. Any sibling of Harriet is someone I’d really like to meet, even if I have no idea what its favourite song is. Yet.
Baby has been kicking away all along as I’ve been sitting here writing this, and I don’t mean to convey that this feeling doesn’t fill me with overwhelming joy. But it’s more a harbinger than a direct message. The sight of tiny feet on my ultrasound two weeks ago, the galloping heartbeat at my last pre-natal appointment. When I went in for my first ultrasound at 11 weeks, and the technician who was blessed with people-skills said to me as soon as she’d started, confirming: “Baby with a heartbeat.” The first outside indication of fetal life since that faint double line six weeks before. That phrase was a kind of music, a song I have such faith in, and I love to play it over and over again inside my mind.
January 8, 2013
Stymied already
It’s stymied already, my one reading goal this year to read more outside the CanLit bubble. I’ve spent the last while putting together the 49thShelf Spring Books Preview, and there is so much to look forward to. The whole list is more than a little coloured by my bias anyway, but in particular, I am excited for Marita Dachsel’s Glossolalia, Belinda’s Rings by Corinna Chong (because who can resist a book with a squid on its cover?), Helen Humphreys’ Nocturne, Bone and Bread by the excellent Saleema Nawaz, Claire Wilkshire’s Maxine, Every Happy Family by Dede Crane, Nancy Jo Cullen’s Canary, Studio St. Ex. by Ania Szado, Tish Cohen’s The Search Angel, and new Chevy Stevens!
January 6, 2013
Whitetail Shooting Gallery by Annette Lapointe
Imagine Alissa York’s Fauna but in rural Saskatchewan and with all the sentimentality stripped away. Imagine lots of sex, kissing cousins, a gunshot to the face, and a set of teeth that get kicked in over and over again. Imagine a family farmhouse, country roads, the kind of place you might want to move to raise your kids if you don’t look too closely. The hockey player, the pastor’s daughter, how he’s giving blow jobs to his teammates, and she’s having sex with her best friend. All those things that go on down in teenage caves in the basement, the kinds of people who live in holes in the ground, poring over pornography, vampire novels, Flowers in the Attic, scarcely coming up for light.
Oh, and horse books. “It’s those damn fillies again. They’re everywhere. That particular shade of sun-drenched blond hair spontaneously generates short fiction for girls when nobody’s looking.” And in a sense, this is a horse book, but not in the way you think. Jen is big, not at all graceful as she scrambles up on her horse’s back. The book begins with gunfire, buckshot in her horse’s neck, and Jen’s own body is full of holes. The shooter was her cousin Jason, the circumstances behind the incident quite unclear, and clarity never really comes, the plot circling around the mystery over and over, as two decades pass.
“Clarity never really comes.” I think this sentence is important, actually, as Whitetail Shooting Gallery baffled me thoughtout, disturbed and troubled me, but it also intrigued me, continually surprised me, never stopped me wondering what would happen next. It’s an anti-pastoral, a complicated portrayal of rural life. It’s the story of Jen and Jason, two cousins whose relationship was always strangely tangled or predatory, who drift apart in their teenage years. Jason is troubled by his shattered family, and while Jen’s family remains strong, her parents don’t really know her. She struggles to reconcile her feelings, her yearnings, her body, with expectations of womanhood. (Significantly, at the arena where Jen teaches figure-skating and Jason plays hockey, the girls’ change room is labelled “Visitors”). She runs around with a pack of wild girls, girls with fleshy bodies, hair, nails and teeths. They’re all a bit feral, and they long for lairs, the kind boys get:
“If Jenn were a boy, she’d have claimed the family basement for her cave. It would be her birthright, She’d have crawled underground and lined her cement cave with clothes and animal hair, and she’d plot how to capture her chosen other-person, how to drag them down into the dark and chew on them.”
The narrative follows Jen and Jascon through their teens, twenties and into their thirties, and demonstrates how each is shaped by their early years, by the peculiarities of the land that bore them, what is possible to be overcome and what isn’t. Both continue to have their closest relationships with animals, Jason with the ferrets and lizards he keeps as pets, and Jen ending up working in a zoo. The line between humans and their fellow-creatures remains ever-blurred, which is one of the most interesting parts of the novel, of so many.
Annette Lapointe’s literary reputation was established with Stolen, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. And here in her second book, she’s turning Can-Lit on its head, challenging not only her readers’ sensibilities, but also ideas about what a novel should be. And the latter seems to be a requirement for the kind of book that I like best.
January 3, 2013
Our Favourite Kids' Books Lately
Lumpito by Monica Kulling: The evening Lumpito arrived in our lives, Harriet wanted to read it over and over. She’s a sucker for dog books, and Lump became beloved right away. In vivid illustrations by Dean Griffiths, we discover how a little dachshund finds his way into the heart (and home!) of Pablo Picasso. Neither Picasso nor his art are really the focal point of book, but I love that through Lumpito, Picasso becomes a point of reference and part of Harriet’s world.
This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen: I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know–Jon Klassen is amazing. We were so excited for his new book, which is beautiful and just as subtly sinister as I Want My Hat Back. Harriet loves it, and enjoys it every time she imagines she’s outsmarted the story again.
Goldilocks and the 3 Dinosaurs by Mo Willems: Once again, Willems is no undiscovered gem, but we love everything he does. And for our girl who is especially partial to dinos, we thought this one would be perfect. The book is geared for someone a bit older than three, and much of the humour is lost on Harriet, but we love it, and she gets off on the silliness. It’s the Three Bears turned inside out with a useful moral: if you find yourself in the wrong story, get out.
A Good Trade by Alma Fullerton: In gorgeous illustrations by Karen Patkau, readers follow Kato, a small boy on his morning route to get water for his family in his small village in Uganda. We notice the vivid colours of his clothing and his friends’, the community spirit, and in the background are soldiers on guard, the fact that the children are shoeless. When an aid truck rolls into the village, Kato is intrigued by what’s inside, and imagines what he might give the aid worker in exchange.
The Stone Hatchlings by Sarah Tsiang: We loved this one, a follow-up to Tsiang’s A Flock of Shoes. Abby is back, and she’s found two little eggs. They’re just stones, says her mother, but then we already know that Abby’s mother is often full of nonsense. In Abby’s vivid imagination (and with a great deal of care), the stones hatch into beautiful birds that become her companions. And when it’s time for the game to finally end, Abby’s ready when it does. (I interviewed Sarah Tsiang about the book last fall.)
LMNO Peas by Keith Baker: Not just another alphabet book (plus, it urges on Harriet when peas are on her plate. “Look,” I say. “They’re peas and they’re unique!”). This book is a triumph of design, written in jaunty verse and I love that this alphabet is astronauts, explorers, gigglers, investigators, outlaws, readers, voters vets and volunteers. Also that it has introduced, “Can you dig it?” into Harriet’s vernacular, and at one teaching point (“Kings”) features Elvis. We all love this one.
This Moose Belongs to Me by Oliver Jeffers: Jeffers is another underground kidlit sensation that only I have ever heard of or loved (ha). His new book is a bit of a departure visually, employing the collage technique he’s used in other books but this time using backdrops from old fashioned landscape paintings. It’s a funny little story about a boy who thinks he owns a moose, but the moose is most determined to own itself (and is partial to anyone giving away apples).
January 2, 2013
My Christmas with Caitlin Moran
It is never Christmas properly for me unless I get to spend most of the day curled up on my mother’s sofa reading a book. This year’s book was Caitlin Moran’s Moranthology, which I received in hardback from my sister-in-law, which was only fair because I turned her onto How to Be a Woman last year. It’s a collection of Moran’s columns from the Times from over the years, interviews with characters from Paul McCartney to Lady Gaga, synopses of episodes of Sherlock and Downtown Abbey, celebrity gossip notes, and columns of wider social significance–on poverty, feminism, activism, and more. Moranthology is clearly more a collection of newspaper columns than a book proper, but for those of us who have fallen in love with Caitlin Moran, it makes a fabulous read.
The other book I got for Christmas was Astray by Emma Donoghue, from Stuart who was determined to buy me a book I hadn’t asked for, a surprise book. He went through my 2012 Books Read list, examined my shelves (to-be-read and otherwise), and had my Book City account checked to ensure I hadn’t bought the book and hidden it. As Harriet ended up telling me what all my other presents were (a cast-iron enamel pot and a tea towel), the book turned up to be my only surprise at all, and it was a lovely one.
I have also just realized that ten years ago, I never would have imagined that receiving a cast-iron enamel pot and a tea towel for Christmas would thrill me as it did, but it did! Though mostly because the tea towel is of the Barbara Pym variety. My husband is wonderful man indeed. And I guess a decade is a long time to change in.
