June 16, 2016

On Process, and Progress, and Living in the World

When Princess Diana died in 1997, I was on Weight Watchers and watched the funeral coverage for hours at a time whilst weeping and riding an exercise bike. I know that feeling things is very important, but will forever be grateful that I ended up married to an English person who taught me the value of composure. Remember how Joni Mitchell taught Emma Thompson in Love Actually how to feel? It was my cold hearted English husband who taught me the opposite, how not to spend weeks at a time weeping on an exercise bike over the death of a stranger. That drama comes around in time, and we don’t necessarily have to go out and court it. (While I am only being partly sardonic here, full disclosure necessitates that my husband’s is the warmest heart I know. I also know that learning to feel for many people is a ticket to sanity, but for me, some restraint was certainly in order. For most of us anyway, it ends up being a balance.)

Which doesn’t entirely relate to my next point, but alas. Which is that this has been the most distressing week I’ve encountered in a a long time, a cumulation of world events and my hormones, I’m sure, but I feel the weight of it all in a way I’m usually more adept at shouldering. Orlando, Stanford rapists, UofT’s lockdown, so much hatred and anger. Also, and this sounds shallow but it’s not, Instagram is ruined for me, changed in the last few days, and now full of ads and posts not in order, and I miss its goodness, the immediacy of the engagement. I really have found Instagram good for the soul, and feel like I’ve lost something. I’ve been driven back to Twitter, which is not good for the soul, although I actually had tears spring into my eyes this morning when I saw #OCanada trending and learned that MPs had in fact changed the lyrics to our national anthem, against the fervent efforts of many to uphold the supposed inclusiveness of the word “sons.” (Possibly yes, “sons” was a general term, back when women had no status, and the language reflected that. Further, “all our sons command” was not even the original lyric, so it’s not like historical preservation is order of the day. I taught my daughter to sing “in all of US” when she was very small, because she is a daughter and nobody’s son, and I think that if we continue to insist that things a national anthem matter, then at least we should make its lyrics meaningful.)

Anyway, when I clicked on the trending term, I found one woman declaring that she will never sing the gender inclusive Oh Canada. “Why not?” I asked her, because the resistance is baffling to me. She explained that she is “not one to bend or sway” (why is rigidity a virtue, I ask myself again and again. What kind of a person never entertains the notion of changing her mind?) when someone finds something offensive and also that the “son” in the lyric is actually Jesus, and we can’t “gender neutralize” him. And I just really didn’t know where to go from there. Her argument is founded on not only nonsense (surely we are not commanding “true patriot love” from Jesus; I’m not sure we’re meant to command anything from Jesus at all, never mind, why is Jesus in our national anthem anyway, except he’s not) but a rejected stand against empathy (refusing to try to understand when someone is bothered by something she’s okay with, to see that another point of view might be as worth considering as her own, even if it’s a different one). Anyway, it’s exhausting. She can sing her song and I’ll sing mine, but it’s worth noting that I was curious about understanding her point of view while she was categorizing the people calling for the lyric change as “wimps.” Which is pretty much where we left things.

And then I read that British MP Jo Cox had been critically injured by someone reportedly shouting slogans regarding the British referendum. And when I heard about that, it took me back to my post from Monday about politicians spouting divisive and dangerous rhetoric with so little regard about the license their words gives some unstable people in our society to go out and commit horrifying acts of violence. I also read Jia Tolentino’s interview with a woman who has recently had an abortion at 32 weeks, a really sad, hard read but an essential one, particular for those people who have no idea what the reality is behind “late term abortion.” As I tweeted afterwards, I am so grateful for these women who share their sad and terrible stories, and I am so sorry they have to and are not left alone to grieve their tragedies. That these woman must make themselves so incredibly vulnerable to prove a point to people who are completely ignorant and full of hatred. It is very easy for women like me to share our simple, painless and uncomplicated stories of abortion, and I only continue to do so because life is rarely so simple or complicated, as Tolentio’s piece makes clear. The most tremendous part of the interview is when the woman says: “Like it or not, all of our rights are intertwined. Maybe there’s some woman who has had four abortions and maybe that feels really wrong to you. But my rights are wrapped up with hers, so I have to fight like fuck for her to have as many as she wants—not just for her sake, but for mine, too.”

I hate that there are people making this, people’s pain, into a fight. We’ve all got better things to do than fight. We’ve got lives to live. And now Jo Cox has died, which is so devastating, all that it stands for, especially in terms of women in politics. I can’t stop making everything about gender, because everything is about gender.

There was a story in the news this morning about a Catholic school trustee who has finally around to the province’s new sec-ed curriculum after a revelation that her own son had been abused as a child, that perhaps it is necessary to reframe the way that sex and sexuality are discussed. While it is irritating once again to have somebody celebrated for realizing what seems blatantly obvious to many of us (see Tabatha Southey on Michael Coren), I think it’s good when a public figure is celebrated rather than denigrated for changing her mind (which is not to say that changing one’s mind puts one above scrutiny. I still think it’s rather too convenient when a politician rejects a previously controversial stance, and wonder why we’d want anybody in power who’d ever held those views).

This is, the changing of minds, is of course, the thing called progress, which is not as simple as I once thought it was—an arrow pointing forward, things getting better and better. The last fifteen years have certainly underlined that this is not the case, and that progress is not our inevitable direction. “Progressivism” isn’t even really a thing, as it is peopled by people who seems to understand themselves as its embodiment and are unaware that their own progress too has to be part of the process. It’s a process of self-examination, of being open to changing, to growing, to learning something new. It’s about bending and swaying, and learning from each other, learning how to work together. It’s collaborative, but it’s also not meaningful unless it’s intensely personal. The line that struck me from the Guardian’s Jo Cox editorial: “What nobler vision can there be than that of a society where people can be comfortable in their difference?”

I have learned so much about the world by thinking hard about blogging, and that last point makes me think about what May Friedman writes about the blogosphere(s) as a radical space “because of the implications of all these narratives coexisting, and the endless unspooling dialogue that therefore emerges.” Blogging too has taught me about how to embrace process rather than looking to an endpoint, because the complexity of the world means that progress is never fixed, that it’s not a place to arrive at. Instead it is the way that we figure out how to travel through.

June 13, 2016

On Violence, Power, Politics, and Faith

I dropped my children at their schools this morning, and then had a meeting at the bank that got cancelled at the last minute, and so I had a half hour to kill at Starbucks while I prepared for a presentation on blogging that I was giving downtown at 11. When I left and started walking down Bloor Street, I noticed that Queen’s Park Crescent was blocked off by police cars and that the museum was surrounded by crowds who should have been inside the building. As I walked towards the Yonge Subway and went into some shops, I overheard people talking and wondering what was happening at the ROM. I was able to use WiFi at the subway station, and found out that the ROM was under lockdown, and so was much of the university campus, and the parliament buildings south of there. I was thinking about these buildings and how I knew people inside many of them, and I was worried and scared. Thinking about what happened in Orlando yesterday, the person on Twitter who’d confessed she felt hurt by the people who’d been able to go about in the world yesterday as though it was an ordinary day. How I’d confessed last night that I just can’t be devastated every time there is a mass shooting anymore, not because it’s not devastating, but because a person can only fall apart at peripheral events so many times before it all becomes rote. Because it’s exhausting. And then now here it is, fear and paranoia knocking at my door. My ignorance at imagining any of can achieve a distance from such things. (Until we’re all safe, none of us are safe.)

Although in actuality, we are pretty safe. From all accounts, police are acting on suspicions and no violence has occurred, and everything will probably be totally all right. It reminds me of September 11, 2001 when the UofT Faculty of Law (where today’s situation seems to centre) was on lockdown because of a bomb threat. It’s true that nothing often happens here, but this doesn’t mean we can’t be melodramatic about the possibility. These lockdowns (which have affected my kids’ schools—which hurts my heart, but also means that their schools remain safe places in a  world that isn’t always so) are procedures that suggest there are systems here that are working, and I am sure that there are so many instances of people all over the place taking care of each other, as we do. People checking in with loved ones as I checked in with people this morning. (My husband’s office is also on lockdown, which means he picked a darn fine day to be working from home.)

I read a tweet shortly before my presentation that said someone had been arrested and I assumed from that that the situation had ended. (It hasn’t, but still…) Which was good, because I meant that I didn’t spend my presentation feeling like I was going to throw up. And then I switched on and talked about blogs and blogging, and the importance of room to wander and get lost in, and how the blogger must dare to be wrong sometimes, to even speak out of turn.

The group I was speaking to was political, and I knew that the stakes were different for them than they were for my own blog. But I think the same guidelines do apply, and that surely there is a possibility that a person can be human and political at once. Although I had an interesting question afterwards, about how blogs can be read out of context and used against someone for political reasons, as so many tweets were in the recent federal election, you know, the one with the guy who peed in a cup. I know I will never run for office, not just because I am short on charm, but also because somewhere in the depths of twitter archives, there lies a joke I made once…or twice..about a list of people I’d like to late-term abort. (Some people don’t think this is funny. What is the world coming to?) I did reply by stating that blogs at least offer the possibility of nuance that a 140 character limit does not. And that this question too is why we have to be really thoughtful in our blogging. There was a question too about the blog’s meta-narrative that gives the big picture, post after post, and how most readers don’t engage with blogs on that level anymore—and is the fault then with the reader who misses with the point or with the blogger who misunderstands how people are engaging her work, who is relying on archaic notions of what a blog reader is.

Interesting questions to which I don’t have answers…which is fine because this was a forum in which we were underlying the importance of asking questions without answers, of making process part of a product. But as I went home afterwards, and starting looking at newsfeed and twitter again and realizing that things were still fraught in my neighbourhood, it had me considering (and not for the first time) the nature of politics. It had me thinking about a man I walked past on an ordinary morning a few months ago, the type of person who is agitated and muttering into the air, and how what I heard him say that morning was, “I’m going to k*ll [our premier], that f*cking l*sbian.” And about how politicians practicing divisiveness and power-mongering via playing on people’s fears and anger don’t really understand the consequences of the game they’re playing. That they don’t exist in a vacuum and stoking those fires of fear and anger and injustice for short-term gain trickles down to influence the behaviour of people who are teetering on the edge of something dangerous. It’s the kind of thing that’s inevitable in a system in which elections have “war rooms” and parliamentary parties are literally regarded as being in opposition when in reality the project should be collaborative. The kind of system in which someone will spend days going through twitter archives in order to find something offensive a person tweeted in 2011 and use it to force them to resign. All the feigned outrage, as though there was really anything offensive about that. (Though it’s true that 2011 was not so long ago. The Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown still thought he could legislate the goings-on of my uterus AND thought it was his business to have an opinion on whether or not gay people should be able to marry.)

I think a lot about Patrick Finn’s book, Creative Condition: Replacing Critical Thinking With Creativity—you can read an excerpt from the chapter that’s applicable to politics here. From that passage:

The repercussions of critical thinking are visible everywhere. The financiers who nearly bankrupted the world economy were trained as critical thinkers. They were expert competitors who knew how to present their ideas in the most persuasive ways possible. They also knew how to fend off competing arguments when their practices were questioned. If community rather than rhetorical rivalry were at the centre of our education, perhaps they would have felt a greater need to respond directly to those who questioned the house of cards they were building.

Governments certainly do not need more critical thinkers. In Canada where I live, every year, big yellow school buses roll up to the parliament buildings in Ottawa. The children on the field trip step down with their backpacks and brown-bag lunches and are given an orientation session. Part of that session involves the teachers and organizers instructing the children to behave themselves while in the viewing area. Another involves a detailed explanation of why the people they see will be fighting, yelling, and insulting one another. The children are told that this is how high-level politics is conducted—that this is what civilized governance looks like.

The problem is not simply D*n*ld Tr*mp (although he is certainly a problem and a half in particular), and the problem isn’t even just America, but instead it’s a system that allows people to get ahead in politics by the virtues of building absolutely nothing except walls, and these on the backs of peoples’ fear and anger. We saw the very worst of it last fall during the election when the whole country seemed to go totally bonkers, and Conservatives rolled out their Barbaric Practices Hotline, and I still can’t fathom how the members of that government are able to look in the mirror these days let alone think themselves be accorded any moral high ground, that we’d actually feel good that these are people working to keep the current government in check. People so desperate to be in power that they’d lower themselves to ideas that start eroding who we are as a people, that take away the best parts of who we are. People so desperate for power that they’d rather rule a wasteland than rule nothing at all.

I have a lot of faith in the world, in people. I’m becoming better practiced at understanding the troublemakers and the shit-disturbers as the people who keep life “interesting.” And understanding that “interesting” is a good thing, a human thing. In my blog presentations, I talk a lot about imperfectionism and messiness and my understanding of the virtues of these ideas extends beyond the blog and into the world as well. Interesting is the best parts of the world along with the worst, and it’s our job to figure out how to live well in the midst of all that. The understand that we all have a role to play in creating a better us, a better world, and living consciously and thoughtfully—and that those with power have to be even more thoughtful than the rest of us. The stakes are so high.

It’s really easy to make fun of Justin Trudeau, to be exasperated by him. To roll your eyes at the idea of “Sunny Ways.” (I like Justin Trudeau, but I am still confused about why he opened his father’s eulogy with, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” He certainly does have a flair for the dramatic.) But the reason my world shifted on its axis last October 19 was not because all at once we had an effervescent personality leading our nation instead of a man with dead eyes and plastic hair, but because Canadians made a choice that day. Almost a year exactly before election day, a gunman entered our parliament buildings not only with the purpose of committing violence, stoking anger and unleashing his own personal demons, but with the objective of having us all respond within the limits of his harrowing vision of who we all are. Too many people were willing to underline that image for their own purposes, to have the rest of us living in fear and terror so that they could profit in their own ways—with power. Those who urged us to reelect our Conservative government because we live in a dangerous world and could only rely on people who come bearing barbaric practices hotlines to keep us safe. An idea that only makes the world more dangerous. The lunatic with a gun is a scary idea, but the people who are spouting rhetoric inciting these unhinged folks to take action is scarier times a million. A self-perpetuating cycle.

I haven’t been able to sing my national anthem in years and not just because its lyrics aren’t gender inclusive (and seriously people who are holding up legislation on that, I would like to call a hotline on you) but I have been singing it lately when called upon, and it’s because of what happened on October 19. Not simply that one political party was elected over another, but because Canadians made a choice that day between our living in a dangerous world, or our being part of something better than that. Do you know how easy it should have been for Canadians to have been manipulated with continuing with the status quo after what happened on Parliament Hill that day? That act of violence was the best thing that could have happened to those who are determined to convince us that we are constantly under threat because our fear is what they profit by—but it didn’t work. But hugely, and remarkably, and even courageously, one might say, we rejected that vision.

“I’ll pray that you’ll grow up a brave man in a brave country,” writes the father to his son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. A simple aspiration that also seems impossibly huge, but impossible things can happen, as October 19 demonstrated to me. So that even when fear comes to knock on our door, we need neither open it wide or peer timidly through keyholes. Underlining my faith, in goodness, in people, in what cannot be broken, that one way or another (but still, the right way) everything is going to be okay.

June 8, 2016

#TodaysTeacup Tragedy

#TodaysTeacup took a turn for the tragic on Monday when I dumped its contents onto my laptop. It took a few moments to process what had happened, and the computer still appeared to be functioning as I poured tea out of it—perhaps, I pondered, we could pretend this never happened? But then the trackpad stopped working, and the keyboard was messed up. I managed to turn the computer off finally, but I should have done it faster. And for two days now it’s been sitting on a drying rack, a fan blowing underneath it. We managed to boot it up this morning and at first it seemed I might be saved…but alas. The keyboard and mouse appear to be fried, the wireless wasn’t working. The computer seems well on its way to being kaput. Thankfully, I am now a devout user of Dropbox so most important things were saved….except for the few documents I slapped onto my desktop somehow imagining they were more accessible there. My enterprising husband grabbed a USB key and transferred a first draft of a new fiction project (that just hit 20,000 words last week) which I am glad has been saved, though rewriting it might have been a blessing in disguise. I’ll have to do it soon enough anyway. Nothing is lost then, except the money I will need to spend on a new laptop, which is annoying, but my accountant will be grateful actually, because I have so few business expenses it’s ridiculous. (This is what happens when your office is your couch.) And it’s a justified expense, because my computer is so essentially to almost everything I do. Being without it these last few days has felt very strange, and it’s reoriented my week, which was supposed to be very very busy as I got ahead of myself on a few bits before school lets out and I lose my childcare for the summer, and have to begin working in the evenings again. But instead, I’ve spent my evenings reading—last night I read Tell, by Soraya Peerbye, who I heard read at the Griffin Readings last week and whose incredible book I read in one sitting. I’m also reading The Naturalist, by Alissa York, and really enjoying it, plus I finished the third book in Steve Burrows’ Birder Murder series, A Cast of Falcons, the other day and it was fantastic. Coming up is Thirteen Shells, by Nadia Bozak, and We’re All In This Together, by Amy Jones. Must keep on reading these Spring 2016 books like a hurricane, because Fall 2016 (the literary one—it falls earlier than the seasonal one) will be here before we know it. And in the meantime, I’m grateful to Stuart who is letting me use his laptop (even with my track record—I am lucky, for sure) and who has only been kind and sympathetic about something that is entirely down to my own stupidity. Although everyone is stupid sometimes.

February 22, 2016

There will be cake—eventually

As a blog writer, I tend to think of the future in terms of posts. And this was supposed to be the one in which we celebrated Stuart becoming Canadian. He had new Hudson’s Bay mittens and everything, a citizenship gift from my mom. He passed his citizenship test a few weeks ago, and was called to take his oath this morning. He’d ironed his suit, located a tie (tricky business—most ties he ever had are now located in the children’s dress-up box and are used alternatively as head decorations and leashes for stuffed toys, irrevocably knotted) and we had a car booked to head out to Mississauga this morning for the eight o’clock appointment. We were so excited—I’ve been waiting years for this.

And then at two o’clock this morning, Iris woke up sick, and proceeded to be sick until she fell back asleep after five. It was not long before it was clear that us getting to Mississauga just wasn’t going to happen, and so we turned off the six o’clock alarm and I took Harriet to school this morning as usual (and she wasn’t so gutted about the whole thing—they’re celebrating their 100th day today and she was sorry to be missing that). Stuart has called immigration and has to write a letter requesting a rescheduling of his appointment, and so all should be well in time, but we’re disappointed. This was going to be a big deal. There should have been cake.

Alas. There will be cake—eventually. And in the meantime, Iris is sitting on the couch happily eating popsicles and watching Charlie and Lola, her stomach ailment causing her no trouble except, well, stomach related ones. We are consoling ourselves with the fact that we are leaving (without the children) for a trip to Barbados on Saturday.

December 31, 2015

New year, new books, new teapot, etc.

We have had a stupidly crummy holiday, mostly for non-monumental reasons. A year ago I wrote this post about our family’s talent for leisure and enjoying ourselves—we were skating, movie-going, relaxing, lunching, going offline for an actual week, etc.—but we were showing none of those tendencies this time around. Things got off to a good start, but Harriet came down with a stomach bug on Christmas Eve that stayed around for a few days. Iris stopped sleeping over Christmas, and was conspiring to kill me. Stuart was diagnosed with strep throat, and while I was pretty well post-pneumonia, I was so tired and crabby. We weren’t terribly ambitious then—some days our big outing was to the grocery store. Though there were a few highlights—before it all went wrong, we had a fun day downtown(er) and got to visit Ben McNally Books, where I picked up Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, which I’m about to begin as soon as I publish this post. We had nice visits with my parents, who braved our company. Lunch at Fanny Chadwicks yesterday, though Stuart is still unable to eat solids, so he didn’t have the greatest time. Tonight we’re going to our friends for a New Years get-together, though we won’t be staying too long (and I am sure nobody else at the party is too upset about that. We’ve become social pariahs).

I did, however, get a lot of reading done, mostly because my evening companion took to going to bed at 8pm, and I took a holiday from work things and read all through nap times (bliss!). My holiday reads were not at all disappointing, mercifully, and I look forward to writing a post about them this week. My final read of the year was a gift from Stuart (who got me so many excellent bookish things), The Magician’s Book, by Laura Miller (and we’re going to be starting Prince Caspian in a few days and I am so excited). My final read of 2015 then, followed by my first read of 2016—Birdie. I really want to keep a focus on reading First Nations women writers.

Anyway, a disappointing holiday is winding down on the right note. Iris’s weird rash (of course she has a weird rash!) is clearing up, if that’s any indication. Today I did receive the great joy of not only a pair of Hunter wellies in the post, but a brand new teapot. And why did I need a teapot, you might ask, seeing as I came into possession of the greatest teapot on earth just six months ago? Well, on Christmas Day, my teapot got smashed, which led to sulking and petulance on my part, and put a damper on our holiday on top of everything, because I am shallow and materialistic. (But it’s a teapot! Not just any ordinary material.) The bright side of your teapot smashing though is that you get to wait for a new one to come in the post. (I wanted a London Pottery teapot, you see.) There seemed to be no more white polka-dots to be had for love nor money, but I was able to order a plain red one from the shop I’d bought the last one from in Bobcaygeon. And it arrived quickly and intact, alongside my new wellies which replaced a) the wellies I’d got for Christmas that didn’t fit and b) the wellies my mother-in-law bought me for my 26th birthday a decade ago and whose image was for a time my blog header and can still be seen if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, and which finally started leaking after many years of service. So things are certainly on the up-and-up.

I’ve had a good year, even though it’s gone out with pneumonia (but then having pneumonia was terrific, from a reading point of view…). I am pleased that I sold my novel and am excited to turn it into an actually book over the course of this year, though I still can’t quite believe that’s going to happen. I read a lot of good books. I had a splendid trip to England, the land of teapots and wellies. I learned to write profiles, which was a new challenge—I wrote about Julie Morstad in Quill & Quire and have a cover story forthcoming in my alumni magazine. I’m pleased with my review of Marina Endicott’s new novel in The Globe and really, really proud of my essay on Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Adult Onset, which was another challenge and I’m so happy to have met it. I want to keep expanding my writerly horizons. Readerly ones too.

This fall has been exhausting. When I look back, it seems like getting pneumonia was inevitable. It doesn’t help that Iris’s sleep is so patchy, as it’s ever been. My resolution for 2016, if I had one, would probably involve getting more sleep, if that weren’t at the expense of so many things, but I will make an effort. It might also involve baking fewer cakes, but this kind of thing is why I don’t go in for resolutions in the first place.

Happy New Year to you, and thank you for reading!

November 29, 2015

Nothing restful

A photo like this suggests I’ve spent the day reading, which isn’t true. There was also all the time I spent staring at the ceiling, and when I slept from 1-4. The Long Secret is so good though. Yesterday I read The Westing Game. And things are progressing—yesterday I sat up in a chair for a few hours, but then I had to go and lie down. I’ve also started eating food, though less today than yesterday. Progress seems to be a trickly slow and very unsteady thing. So does my brain power. Basically I’ve had a fever for a week and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, my brain launches me into some bizarre narrative constructed of everything I’ve ever thought or seen, and there is nothing restful about it. It’s like playing a game whose rules are dictated by the whims of Harriet. Which is as close as I can come to putting these fever dreams into words.

November 26, 2015

Be. Sick.

I don’t think I knew the definition of giving in. Okay, now I really give in, getting in bed and staying in bed and someone else has to take the children to school, and never mind that I can’t even read, I can’t write, I can pretty much just take staring at the ceiling. This morning I laid in bed and experienced the bedsheets becoming drenched with my sweat. When I came home from the doctor, I was freezing and got tucked into bed whilst wearing a toque. The doctor says that I have is not the flu, and at least it’s not pneumonia or bronchitis, but instead a virus that will go in about 10 days from its start. Which is a while from now. Sometimes I feel better, but I mustn’t use this as an excuse to suppose I am better. I have to continue to stay in bed. And in a way, it’s a bit like pregnancy—everything is interesting. All the sweat, and shivers—new bodily functions—and I’ve become gaggingly sensitive to scents. But it’s terrible, which one is not really allowed to complain about because it’s temporary—there are people with worse lots. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but not tomorrow or the next day. Patience and faith. I need to relax. I need to be wait and be. Sick. Okay.

I tweeted this post yesterday, from the blogger Pip Lincolne: “Ten Things I Sort of Like About Being Sick.” I think some people thought I’d written it. I most definitely hadn’t, but I’d starting to think I could. Or something like it. So I will put my mind to it. Will proceed at a snail’s pace, of course,

November 24, 2015

I give in

Late Saturday night, illness arrived, packing a wallop. I was feverish, sore and achey, and my skin hurt. I felt better on Sunday, and put in a good show at the Draft Reading Series 10th Anniversary Celebration, reading from Mitzi Bytes for the first time and participating on a panel. But by the time we were home, I was sick again. So totally exhausted, and yet unable to sleep either, because my brain was totally loopy and not settled. Yesterday, I was too unwell to take the children to school. I was determined to fetch Iris at noon, which I did, but I was a terrible mess—hunched over because my stomach hurt, only able to take slow stilted steps. She ate Corn Pops for lunch out of a plastic cup.  I had a nap when she did though, and woke up finally feeling better, and for the first time, it seemed like not cancelling my class that evening was not a terrible mistake. I was even able to finish Stuart’s birthday cake, fetch Harriet from school, taught my class respectably enough (albeit in jogging pants), and bought NyQuil on the way home. So that last night I finally slept, but I awoke this morning still feeling terrible, and as it seems I’m unable to outrun this cold-fluey ailment of mine (and I don’t have to make a presentation in front of a group of people today—thank goodness), I’ve decided to submit and spend the day in bed. The rarest luxury for a mother, I realize. Crossing my fingers that rest brings recovery. Being sick is terrible.

May 18, 2015

Night and Day

Night

We are going through a difficult period. I like framing it this way because it suggests an ending, as opposed to, We are going through a difficult eternity. “It’s just a phase,” we keep saying. “Things will get better,” but we’re beginning to sound less sure of this. It has been so long. Nearly two years since I’ve had unbroken night’s sleep. And since we came back from England, things have been awful. Iris moved downstairs into Harriet’s room to sleep, but her nighttime wake-ups have continued, plus it’s started taking her sometimes up to an hour to fall asleep, she requires us lying down beside her to do so, and then she gets up again at 11, at 1. She won’t settle unless she’s in bed with us, which would be okay (and I’m certainly not going to fight a screaming nearly-two-year-old in the middle of the night) except that then she flops and kicks and pinches my upper arms. It is unpleasant. And last night we had a babysitter booked so we could go out to a movie, but Iris refused to go to sleep. Or she would be asleep until we dared to rise and leave the room, and then her eyes would snap open and there we’d be again. Eventually, I gave the babysitter $20 and told her to go home, because we’d missed the movie. And it seems like the baby is holding us hostage, when I dare to frame the whole thing like a power struggle (which I shouldn’t do—it only makes unpleasant realities worse). We can’t go out together to anything that starts before 9pm, because no one else but Stuart and I has the patience to put Iris to bed, and now that she’s only staying asleep for 2hrs after that (if she goes to sleep at all), the world seems to have shrunk to the size of an acorn. I know that there are far worse problems to have than this one, but perspective can be hard to come by when one is having melodramatic thoughts about being subject to tyranny. Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about baby sleep books called The Trajectory of a Downward Spiral, but the trajectory of this plot is more like a head smashing into a wall. Repeatedly.

Day

But. We have had the most wonderful weekend. A weekend whose wonderfulness is currently under threat as I spend this holiday Monday morose and bereft at the end of Mad Men. The children watched Annie and ate goldfish crackers in Harriet’s room while Stuart and I watched the final episode this morning. It was so absolutely perfect. Overwhelmingly good. I feel about this show like I’ve been immersed in the narrative for six years, swimming around inside it and examining from all angles. I can’t believe it’s over, but then it isn’t really. We rewatched an episode from Season 1 on Saturday night, and it occurred to me that I’ll never really be done with it. But still, I’m sad there is no more to look forward to. So many of my feelings were invested in these characters. It all mattered a lot to me.

On Saturday, we celebrated summer things with a trip to the Wychwood Barns Farmers’ Market and ate delicious food, and delighted in the fact that our children are old enough to play unattended (in mud puddles, no less) while we sit on a park bench. We also delighted in that our children were so thrilled to take the bus to the market, but were also cool with walking home. So many of my plans for this summer are inspired by Dan Rubinstein’s book, Born to Walk, and I appreciate that Harriet is big enough to be venturing further afield on foot, to be discovering her pedestrian legs without (too much) complaining. But there are also wheels, and so after Iris’s nap, she went on a bike-ride. We’re going to shed the training wheels this summer, we’ve resolved, but this is just one more thing we’re not sure about how to teach her to do—along with shoelace tying. After that, we did our planting, mostly flowers because the squirrels thwart our efforts to grow anything more substantial. Some kale and basil, but otherwise impatiens, and suddenly our deck is beautiful again. The silver maple that shades our house and yard in magnificent bloom. There is a hammock set up underneath it.

Yesterday, we went on our first ravine walk of what is to be many, as we’ve declared 2015 as #SummeroftheRavines. Once again, this is a plan born of Born to Walk—to explore these wild corners of our city. We didn’t have much of a plan and climbed down into the Rosedale Valley via the path behind Castle Frank Subway Station. Unfortunately, Bayview Avenue cuts off our access to the Don Valley, which we weren’t expecting, so we had to climb back out of the ravine in order to get to where we really wanted to be, and by this point, it was nearly time to quit.

But we had fun and the weather was beautiful, and once again, there are very little complaining. We’d compiled a Ravine Walk Bingo sheet, which gave our walk some incentive, as did the promise of lunch afterwards. We went to the House on Parliament and had the most delicious meal, our first patio of the season. And then back to the hammock. I’ve been reading H is for Hawk all weekend, which is not a great read for the emotionally fragile, I am realizing. But it’s really good, deep and layered, and totally weird. So intense. It is possible my whole family will be relieved when I’m finally completed it.

Which brings me to right now where I’ve just been delivered lunch. (“Um, if I’d known you were having lunch in bed, I might not have brought you breakfast there.”) And it’s up to me to save this day from my lugubriousness and histrionics. Iris has started being capable of having actual conversations (albeit stilted ones, usually about dogs), which is extraordinary, and clearly her brain is going wild these days. If I’m able to muster perspective, it would be that these development changes are responsible for our sleep woes. If I am able to focus less on the woe. In a few weeks she will be two. Harriet turns six next Tuesday. For our family, the next month and a bit is a season of happy birthdays and anniversaries and so so many reasons for cake. (Another? My sister is having a baby tomorrow.)

It all goes by so fast.

February 17, 2015

It’s probably fair that I tell you about Monday

Because you’ve had to suffer through many a post in which I tell you about my glorious weekends and fantastic holidays, it is probably fair that I tell you about Monday. We had been away for the weekend visiting my parents, and it was so cold outside that all our plans for winter adventures were abandoned and we never got more adventurous than ordering in a pizza. We arrived home on Sunday night to discover our cold water pipes were frozen. We had hot water—impossibly scalding hot—but no cold, which meant no showers, flushing toilets or drinking water. We went to bed far too late and woke up in the morning (a holiday Monday!) to the pipe problem not being miraculously fixed, which was the solution we’d been hoping for. Our next solution was to turn the thermostat up high and hope that the heated house would thaw the pipes. We should have gone out at this point, but it still seemed so impossibly cold out and we were so tired we couldn’t bother, but this only meant that the indoors became as unbearable as out. By noon, we were taking turns running outside in short sleeves and bare feet to cool off. I made a soup for lunch that nobody ate, and since it was a vegan recipe by Mayim Bialik, I should have seen that coming (although trying to be Blossom has never steered me so wrong before… only into unflattering hats. But I digress). Iris went down for her nap, and we were all miserable. Stuart and I were taking turns being horrible to each other, Harriet had cabin fever. We still had no running water, and nobody had showered. We finally went outside for a walk around the block, but it was boring, and we were all cranky. The one thing going for us is that the sauna in our house had allowed a frozen chicken to defrost in record time, if not the pipes, so we had that for dinner, and then it occurred to us as we were setting the table that beer would make everything better, and we should have started drinking hours ago—the grown-ups at least. So we made up for lost time, all said we were sorry, and sat down to a delicious roast chicken as the sun went down—the only good thing that had happened all day. This morning our landlord knocked a hole in the drywall in the basement to unfreeze the pipes behind it, we had water again—celebrations were had. And we decided not to rue February for all the trouble it had caused us so far—colds, stomach bugs, computer malfunction, froze pipes etc.—because all the trouble had come our way just two weeks into this wretched month, and there’s still another two weeks left. Fingers crossed.