October 21, 2013
Excellent Mail Haul
Today
was a very good day for the mail haul. Iris’s passport finally arrived, which is a good thing as we’re off to England in a few weeks. We also received a pair of orange socks for Iris, on the occasion of her first Halloween (thanks, Mom!). And then two books, one the latest collection by Karen Connelly, whose work I’ve admired for a long time now. And then Jennica Harper’s new book Wood, which is oh so exciting, because it’s not every day that you get a new book by one of your favourite writers ever. Very excited about this. Oh, what treasures a mailbox can hold!
August 24, 2013
Buy hardback fiction and poetry.
“Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don’t buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.”– Annie Dillard, “Notes for Young Writers”
August 20, 2013
On a bookish coincidence, and long-time friends
It has been fifteen years since I met my friend Katie, as we walked across Queens Park at the end of Vic’s Frosh Week. From the moment I first encountered her, in the midst of that disorientating, overwhelming time of enormous upheaval, I knew I’d found someone remarkable, someone who would be a real friend, and so she has been ever since. We supported one another through dating woes (or, in my case, woes that came from lack of dates–I used to drink too much and then come over to her house and cry). We both partook in university activities, and each graduated with the Golden V awards. We kept in touch during the years I was abroad, and she was establishing a school at Ronald McDonald House. After I moved back to Canada, we were bridesmaids in each others’ wedding, and have lived within walking distance ever since. And now the fun continues as we find ourselves each the mother of two girls, Katie with her twin daughters who were born in December.
Last week, we got The Twins’ Blanket out of the library, and I knew immediately that I’d have to buy a copy for Katie, because I’d never read another book about twin Asian girls like hers. So I felt very clever today as we met up at the museum for the afternoon and I had a copy of the book in tow. There was no occasion for gift-giving, which made it all the more strange when Katie presented us with our own copy of The Twins’ Blanket, which she’d bought for Harriet. The strangest and most wonderful coincidence, to go home with the gift we came with. Not to mention the goodness of the rest of our afternoon.
August 13, 2013
Going Out With Harriet
During the last weeks of my pregnancy and in the six weeks after Iris’s birth, I wasn’t able to pick up Harriet, and when I was finally permitted to pluck her up again, there was no plucking about it–she’d become enormous. Part of this is actually true–I think a growth spurt took place somewhere around her fourth birthday. And the rest of it is that I spend my time carrying about someone who weighs just ten lbs, and so Harriet at four times the size really is quite large. Once in a while I become struck by her massive nostrils and monstrous thighs, a logical consequence of spending much of my time staring at parts that are baby-sized.
We have been lucky this summer that we’ve had as many parents as kids around all day so that Harriet has not had to suffer too much of a dearth of attention. Though her need for attention has certainly ramped up since her sister arrived, but I am getting the sense that things are settling down and in a few weeks, our whole lives are going to be constructed around Harriet’s school day as much as the presence Iris anyway.
But I have missed Harriet. This I wasn’t conscious of until our week at the cottage when Harriet was often at loose ends, and we ended up spending more time together than we had since the baby came. “Oh, this!” I thought as we worked on her sticker book, when we played “Motor Boat” in the water, had a rainy day picnic on our cottage floor. While I would never say that Harriet and I have a special bond that does not include her father, it is true that we spent most of her entire life together from 9-5, Monday to Friday. And it was very nice to spend that time together again. Nice for her, sure, but nice for me too. It had been awhile.
Yesterday, Iris was asleep in Stuart’s arms and I was suddenly compelled to visit the bookstore. “Come with me!” I asked, and she agreed once I’d promised to buy her a book to make the journey worthwhile. And so off we went, her hand in mine (which remains the greatest privilege of my life), her new purple boots on. We tramped up Brunswick to Bloor, and along the street to Book City, whose staff are some of the loveliest people around. Harriet walks around the store as if she owns it, marching right up to the carousel of paperback books she continually lusts after. The carousel of paperback books I usually never buy, because they’re not real books, I tell her. Not like the picture books proper on the shelf. Commercial tie-ins, I tell her. These books are only toys.
But while Harriet appreciates a good hardback as much as anybody, she is just as devoted to toys, so this argument doesn’t sway her. We buy books from the carousel from time to time, rooting past the Doras (which, thankfully, Harriet has never shown any interest in) and Thomas’s in search of something really good. But this time her attention was caught by a Superman I Can Read book–she is currently very much into Superheros, thanks to The Incredibles and her Daddy’s collection of Spiderman t-shirts. We looked through the Superhero books and I was ecstatic to find Wonder Woman. Harriet leafed through the book and was excited to see an illustration of her carrying a shield. “A shield!” she said. “They have those in How to Train Your Dragon.” There was even a dragon in it, plus the book was $5.
Wonder Woman is iconic in a way that Dora the Explorer will never quite manage to be, plus hers is the ultimate princess story: a princess who didn’t want to be a princess but chose to fight for justice instead. My distaste for commercial tie-ins is fickle. I was happy to buy Harriet that book, and picked up the book I had arrived for: How to Get Along with Women by Elisabeth De Mariaffi. I am also happy because Harriet is now obsessed with Wonder Woman–at 2:30am, Stuart went downstairs to her room and had to ask her to stop “reading” her new books, and go to sleep, please– which means that this morning’s outing will be to our local comic book store in search of a Wonder Woman comic. Two bookstore visits in two days! Harriet has also asked if she could please be Wonder Woman for Halloween, which is the best thing ever. And even better: Harriet asking if might it be more convenient if Wonder Woman fought the forces of evil whilst wearing pants. “Why does she have to wear her underwear?” she wonders, which is a very good question.
But the point of all this is not even books or bookstores, or Wonder Woman. It’s about the joy of walking down the street with my big girl, just the two of us. With all the changes in our lives, what stays constant is that she is excellent company.
August 9, 2013
How the Reading Stacked Up
Thankfully, the black clouds that hung over our vacation at the cottage were literal rather than metaphorical. I’m also glad I didn’t have to be on vacation with a newborn in a heat-wave. It was a funny week, each of wearing the one sweater we’d brought with us every single day. Harriet didn’t have as many playmates as in recent summers, and it was also strange to be on vacation when nobody in the family is working. We didn’t get that same sense of glorious reprieve, but we did get a lot of ice cream, Harriet rode a pony, and I got a lot of reading done. We had to settle for a week away that was good rather than miraculously brilliant, and so we did. We are quite heroic.
I read the short stories in the Barbara Pym book in the days before we left. Upon arrival, Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary was first up, which Jared Bland writes about in the Globe this week. It’s a difficult, funny and terribly sad novel, just the kind of novel you’d think the man who wrote Frances would author. Though I found the ending strangely uplifting, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. I reread Joan Didion’s Where I Was From next, my first reread, and I adored it. It was fascinating to see it in the context of Blue Nights and Magical Thinking, in the context of a trilogy. Her California is my land of dreams. I read The City is a Rising Tide next, the novel by Rebecca Lee whose Bobcat and Other Stories has so enchanted me. Truth was this was really a very long short story instead of a novel, but I loved it because I’ve become quite fond of Rebecca Lee’s writing and there it was. An ARC of Ann Patchett’s essay collection next, and you’ll be hearing more from me on that in the future. And then Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which seems to be the book of the summer in my circles. I really don’t do fantasy, and any exposure I have to fantasy underlines this (A Wrinkle in Time notwithstanding, curiously), but the Gaiman book was short and its realist elements were so compelling. I loved it. Perhaps my problem with fantasy is that all the novels are 800 pages long.
We’d already made our annual pilgrimmage to Bob Burns Books in Fenelon Falls, Stuart picking up a stack of Terry Pratchetts, Harriet getting a couple of picture books as well as a Vinyl Cafe story collection (Stuart remarks that we’re trying to save her from nerdom by trying to undermine her dragon obsession. I suggest her obsession with Stuart McLean is just another kind of nerdom), and I got The Round House by Louise Erdrich, which I’m going to be reading in the next few weeks. And then on Wednesday, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to function unless I got my mitts on a Louise Penny book, and so we went back to Bob Burns (just before we had Afternoon Tea at the Fenelon Museum) and I got The Cruellest Month, which was so scary and wonderful. I have become a Louise Penny fanatic, and seem to have overcome my initial aversion to her weird sentence fragments.
I finished The Cruellest Month at home, and then read Pym’s Civil to Strangers. And now all week I’ve been reading The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, as instructed by Ann Patchett, actually. I’ve also been busily writing, which the Paley has aided, I think.
And now we’re into August, which makes September seem almost inevitable. And the truth is, I am pretty excited. This summer has been the sweetest gift, the most wonderful dream. Iris is nine weeks old, growing so fast, and I am so grateful that we’ve had this time in which to enjoy her, her brand new babyhood, and each other. But the transition to September is going to come about naturally, I think, with Harriet beginning Junior Kindergarten, Stuart returning to work and also taking on some pretty cool new opportunities, and me returning to work at 49th Shelf. I’m actually really looking forward to it, and other exciting projects and events I’ll be involved in this Fall. Um, not to mention that I have a book coming out in the spring, which has not been so much at the forefront and I nearly forget it is really happening.
Posting here will remain irregular over the next few weeks as our family works to get the most out of summer (and as I vow to read as many books as possible before Real Life sets in again). We’ve got a trip to Toronto Island still before us, as well as a visit to the zoo, get-togethers with friends, afternoons in the park, patio lunches, the CNE, and a long weekend trip to Grand Bend with our friends. I also have a doctor’s appointment to determine just what exactly what we’re going to do about my enormous thyroid, which I am looking forward to being done with.
But why am I even telling you this? You’re not reading anyway. I know you’re outside drinking up the goodness of summer, or at least if you’re not, you should be.
July 25, 2013
Ellen’s Lion by Crockett Johnson
We go to the library every week or so, and I wander the stacks plucking books off the shelves with never an idea of which will “take”. Most of them are good or okay, some of them we read once and never read again, and then once in a while (and we never know when) there is a book we fall in love with. Ellen’s Lion by Crockett Johnson was such a book, though we came close to missing it altogether. It was small, old battered, and text-heavy, so Harriet never picked it up from the pile. We only started reading it when we learned that someone else had requested the book and therefore we couldn’t renew it, but it quickly became apparent that Ellen’s Lion is a book we had to own.
Published in 1959 and written and illustrated by Johnson (of Harold and the Purple Crayon fame), Ellen’s Lion is a book it is impossible to imagine that Mo Willems hadn’t been thinking about when he created his wonderful Amanda and her Alligator. The books are so similar in approach and tone, the story of a sparky girl and her strangely animated stuffed toy, dealing with the peculiar power dynamics between them. Though Johnson’s book is a little bit darker, Ellen’s stuffed lion a more complex character than Amanda’s alligator (and not always altogether kind). Johnson also plays interestingly with the fact that the lion’s animatedness is fuelled by Ellen’s imagination only (or is it?). There is a marvelous depth here that recalls what I love best about Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
There are few illustrations in the book, so it’s not going to appeal to everybody, but we were drawn in by the remarkable character of Ellen herself (who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Harold). The book begins with the story “Conversation and Song”, whose opening is:
Ellen sat on the footstool and looked down thoughtfully at the lion. He lay on his stomach on the floor at her feet.
“Whenever you and I have a conversation I do all the talking, don’t I?” she said.
The lion remained silent.
“I never let you say a single word,” Ellen said.
The lion did not say a word…
Finally, the lion talks, and Ellen tries to persuade him to join her in singing a round. Oddly, it doesn’t work. It seems that Ellen and her lion are incapable to singing two different parts at once.
In the other stories, Lion rides on Ellen’s train set all the way to Arabia. Ellen phones the police to report a lion in her room, and then must hide her lion when the (imaginary?) policeman arrives. In “Two Pairs of Eyes”, Ellen uses her lion’s button eyes to look for the things in the dark she can’t see behind her. In “Doctor’s Orders”, Ellen plays doctor and tries to convince Lion that he’s a poor, ill little lion who just can’t stop smoking. Ellen tries to convince the lion that he should be a tiger when he grows up. Ellen’s acting in a play in “Five Pointed Star”, and Lion must resist her efforts to involve him in the performance. In “Sad Interlude”, Ellen tries to project great melancholy onto her lion, but he’s not playing. In “Fairy Tale”, Ellen goes from game to game, imagining she’s a fairy, then a knight, then a princess, without transitions even, all the while she is eating a muffin with raspberry jam. Her imagination is inexhaustible. And in the final story “The Last Squirrel”, a new toy threatens to displace Ellen’s Lion, but the history between girl and plush creature proves a bond too strong to sever.
There is one moment, or one word, only when this book shows its datedness. “I’m going to be a lady fireman,” Ellen shouts as she explains to lion that he’s going to be a tiger when he grows up, not her. But even the sentiment of this demonstrates the kind of book that Ellen’s Lion is, that Ellen is a strong, feisty and spirited heroine whose gender is incidental to her character (and that’s why I loved Willems’ Amanda too). I might declare that Ellen was ahead of her time, though the fact of the matter is merely that contemporary female picture book characters in general are undergoing a bit of a regression.
I love this book. We bought a used copy from Amazon for a very low price, though it’s also currently in “print” as an e-book. The really cool news, which we discovered yesterday, is that Johnson wrote a sequel to Ellen’s Lion, called The Lion’s Own Story. However this cool news takes a tragic turn–the book is not available at the library and used copies sell for $300. Has anybody read it?
June 8, 2013
How Iris arrived
It really was a very gentle time, the weeks we spent waiting for Iris to come. I spent last Friday evening bouncing on a ball to induce labour, made absolutely miserable, and then my husband discovered that if you bounced on a birthing ball to terrible hiphop ballads, the whole experience was made more fun. Though looking back, I realize it was probably for the best that my labour was not brought on by bouncing to Usher singing Love in this Club. And I absolutely adore the photo of me in my bathing suit from last week, the gloriousness of it all, though it’s all sort of bittersweet when I compare that image to my poor ravaged body today.
Here it is: I am so so happy. I know I am only four days postpartum, and probably hormones have something to do with the happiness as well, but they’re supposed to. “I never imagined it could be like this,” but this means something very different now. And I know the experience of my birth, although it was far from ideal, really has something to do with this. Oh, how much it matters how the baby arrives. I know this for sure now, but in a more nuanced way than when I was ranting a few weeks back.
My labour began on Sunday night after we’d eaten much of Barbara Pym’s Victoria Sponge, although it was not apparent to me that it was labour until Monday around noon. I spent Monday night awake every ten minutes with contractions, but then by morning they were gone. A visit to the midwives on Tuesday showed that things had been progressing, even without the contractions. They started again Tuesday night with a great deal of trouble on my behalf, and we were up all night again, sure that this was it. The midwives arrived with birthing supplies and found me dilated to 6 cm. But the contractions never got stronger and once again were gone in the morning. The midwives came later that morning with the intention of breaking my water, but then the baby’s heart-rate was troubling–she was not responsive enough. And while she was stable, it was scary, and there was no longer very much natural about my “natural” birth. I just wanted the baby out.
We took a cab to the hospital, both of us crying–partly because we knew our birth plans were out the window, because we were scared for the baby, and also because we knew we were leaving Harriet without having prepared her for this. (She was at school at the time, would be cared for by our wonderful friend Erin until my mom arrived to stay with her here.) It was cold and grey outside, and as we drove past a high school, a group of boys threw rocks at our car. The world seemed quite horrible and we kept crying–I have never seen a taxi driver more concerned about his fares (and so maybe the world was not so horrible after all).
En-route to the hospital, I started having contractions again, which continued as we waited in triage. The OB on-call found it odd that someone dilated 6cm was not progressing, and give me the option of induction, which I had no intention of taking. (“It’s going to need a lot of drugs to work,” she said, again, a far cry from natural.) But still, that she give me a choice made the decision to do a repeat c-section one that I could own, and I am grateful for that. Which is not to say that I wasn’t weeping in the OR, so much so that the staff was confused–never had a sadder woman been about to give birth. Situation compounded by an anaesthesiologist who I think forgot I was a human being as she handled my body pre-surgery. The student midwife came over to comfort me with casual conversation though–I think she said, “So what’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you can eat again?” And obviously, the answer was chocolate croissants, and seriously, that woman changed my world around. By the time Stuart was brought in in his scrubs, I was comforted and ready, and knew we had made the best and only choice.
Iris means rainbow, and Malala is a hero. The midwives knew how troubled I’d been having never seen Harriet until she was wrapped and hatted when she was born, and so when they pulled her out and brought her to the warming bed, I knew just where to look and Stuart snapped a photo. She was amazing, purple, and she was mine, ours. I knew it instantly. Because of Harriet, there is a part of my heart that is mother-love now, and Iris resided there immediately. I cried and cried, like I’ve cried just one time before, at the birth of Iris’s sister. Our girl was finally here. Our family was complete. It meant something that we’d been waiting so hard for her, that I had been supported so much in my intentions for VBAC, and that Iris herself had been trying as hard to come to us–they discovered the cord was wrapped around her neck four times and there was no way she would have made it out on her own, and an induction would have been a disaster.
They didn’t lie, all those people who told me it would be different the second time around. That first night as Iris fed all night long, Stuart having to deliver her from one side to another as I was unable to move, I didn’t sit there wishing we could leave her and run away. I knew already that the objective to such a night wasn’t getting the baby to sleep, that the baby was doing nothing but simply being a baby. The goal of the night, I knew, was to get through it as best we could, which we did, aided by the fact that Iris has breastfed like a champion since being 40 minutes old.
We left the hospital yesterday–turns out they can boot you out after 2 days now, which is kind of unbelievable, but we were good to go, and eager to get home to Harriet. The surgery has left me brutalized–I think my surgeon 4 years ago was a master of the art, because I was out for walks last time and today I can barely move. Midwives have assured me that my previous experience was the exception to the rule. And I hate that, feeling so badly, but it’s also not so bad being confined to my bed. I’m reading Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which I love. Stuart is bringing me snacks and meals. We prepared for all of this by buying a queen-sized bed last winter, which is so comfortable, and I also got a smart phone a few weeks ago, knowing it would make this kind of thing easier, still being connected to the world. The postpartum crazies also have yet to arrive–they were knocking at the door last night, but then were followed by the woman I’ve paid to make capsules of my placenta, which are meant to help balance hormones. She dropped off the pills, I started taking them, and I’ve been feeling cool ever since. No weeping even! Maybe it will all kick in tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’m happy to take good days where I find them.
Iris, as we know her so far, is marvellous. She arrived and looked like an elderly frog, the next day like a dinosaur, but now she just looks like Harriet did, but with fairer colouring. She practices smiling in her sleep, and midwives reported today that she’s doing great. Her mood could be assisted by the fact that her mother is not a lunatic. She’s just three ounces down from birth weight and we no longer need to wake to feed! Because of my previous experience, when Harriet lost so much weight, I’ve been breastfeeding with great persistence (which is not so heroic–Iris is content to let me read while doing this) and it seems to have paid off. It’s so good to be home and Stuart is taking such good care of me. Harriet is the big sister beyond my wildest dreams, her bond with Iris already making us swoon, and she is displaying such annoying and atrocious behaviour in addition to this that we know she is in fact fully processing the change in our family and we won’t have to wait for another shoe to drop.
So there it is. Everything is wonderful. Just four days in, and I know you have to take good times one day at a time just like the trying ones, but it really means something. Four days postpartum with Harriet I was in pieces already. I was so scared to go through all this over again, and I am so relieved and grateful that this is different. That the gentle times continue. Knock wood, of course, and there will be challenges ahead, but I’m pleased that there really is a chance that I’ll be strong enough to meet them.
And thank you to so many friends for support and best wishes. We are a very lucky family.
May 6, 2013
Yard Sale Finds
Yard sale season has begun in downtown Toronto! On Saturday, we picked up these three fine volumes, along with Michele Landsberg’s Guide to Children’s Books and Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, for a remarkable $1.25. The Apple by Dick Bruna is as strange and visually appealing as anything Dick Bruna ever published; we love Sunshine by Jan Ormerod, which we’ve had out of the library a number of times (and I am particularly fond of the mother who sleeps/reads in bed until the last possible second, and then runs around the house getting ready in a frenzy. I feel as though I know her very well…); and The Little Steamroller by (the!) Graham Greene is amazing! A picture book this might be, but it’s absolutely Graham Greene, complete with a criminal gang smuggling gold from Africa and terrible English weather. Totally weird, but Harriet is so accustomed to weird picture books that she doesn’t bat an eye.
April 11, 2013
A Book for Baby's Library
I bought a book for the new baby this week, the very first book of this baby’s own. It’s Welcome, Baby, a gorgeous new board book by Barbara Reid that I’m sort of thinking was written just for our new baby. If you know Barbara Reid’s illustrations, then you already know the book is beautiful–I’m in love with the quilt on the title page. “Welcome, baby, welcome!/ All the world is new,/ And all the world is waiting/ To be introduced to you…” the book begins, with a picture of a couple holding their new little one, a tree and robin just outside the window. And what I really love is that older siblings are a part of this welcome too, and so Harriet gets to point to the picture of Big Kid and Baby playing trucks, and saying, “That’s me!” of the former, and so too with the picture of the siblings splashing in the paddling pool. It ends, “We’ll hold you close,/ And let you fly.” which is just perfect, and the whole trick of being a parent really. I look forward to reading this one over and over, and in delighting as new tiny hands learn to grasp its pages.
