June 10, 2014
In which we encounter The Book Bike
The neatest thing I’ve come across lately is the Meatlocker Editions Book Bike, which was at the Bloor Street Festival on Sunday. It’s true that if you put up a red sign that says “Books”, I will be on of the many curious people who come flocking, and my curiosity was more than satiated by what I found. The Book Bike is a community library on wheels, a very mobile way celebrate books and reading. The Book Bike turns up at community events and flocking readers are invited to take a book or leave one (and they are interested in larger book donations too–just drop them a line).
In addition to pedalling books around the city, Meatlocker Editions are also in the business of inspiring readers and writers through various projects, including workshops and publications. Their focus is supporting young women writers, a most inspiring response to the under-represenation of women’s voices in literary spheres.
There were some very cool small press gems on display on the Book Bike. I was quite thrilled to get a copy of Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, which Karen Hofmann recently included on her “Barefoot Girls and Wild Women” list.
All in all, a most spectacular encounter. Go MLE!
March 18, 2014
On Omens and the Dangers of Reading Too Much
One of the most wonderful things I’ve read lately is “Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF” by Terri Vlassopoulos, not least of all because it is an M Word kind of story, the kind of tale that gets told and makes so many women feel less alone. And even those of us who’ve not struggled with fertility can identify with what she’s writing about, because anybody who’s ever tried to get pregnant knows what tricks mind and body can play on one another during the two weeks or so before a pregnancy can be detected. I wonder sometimes if it’s a problem particular to those us who read too much, who imagine the world can be interpreted through signs and symbols just like a book.
Terri’s essay also meant something to me, as I’ve been waiting for test results on my thyroid lump for the past two weeks. The good news, we learned this morning, is that the lump is still benign, which always comes as a relief. This is my third round of this, and I am definitely getting used to it. I didn’t really go insane with anxiety (though I am also not pregnant this time, and can drink!), and all the sleep I lost last night (which was plenty) is on account of my evil children. When I did it last August, I didn’t do too badly either, though the night before my results was this extraordinary evening so golden that I was quite sure I’d receive a fatal diagnosis in the morn, just for the sake of juxtaposition.
The morning of my biopsy appointment two weeks ago, in which I learned that my lump is ever-changing, I’d happened upon three accounts of women with terminal cancer diagnoses. That evening, with my biopsy much on my mind, I checked Facebook to inquire after an old friend of mine who has been living with metastatic breast cancer for the past three years, and discovered that she’d died the day before. Which was perspective, of course, a sign for me to suck it up because I’ve got it lucky in oh so many ways, but also pretty devastating and incredibly sad. Odds and omens indeed.
In some ways, I’m learning how to live with uncertainty. I no longer imagine “biopsy” to be a synonym for “death sentence”. I’ve had so many, and I just call them “tests” now. I have much cause to be optimistic that everything will be fine, and I very nearly am, and then. “What if it’s a trick? What if the universe is screwing with me, getting me all complacent so that when the bad news finally comes, I am so far from ready?” (Though who is ever ready? Sometimes I imagine that worrying is preparation of a kind, though I think I’m fooling myself.)
This is the point at which my husband reminds me that I am not the centre of the universe, that the world has not specifically arranged itself with my interests in mind. That if I’m in fact a character in a book, as I seem to think I am, it’s a book I haven’t finished reading yet, and that there’s no way really to ever know what comes next except to turn the page and see what happens.
January 14, 2014
On Seven Months Part 2: I Want My Hat Back
Things started disappearing a few weeks after Iris was born.
First was our picnic blanket, which is a strange thing to lose. Last seen when the baby was two weeks old, the afternoon we ate cheese and bread on the grass by Robarts Library while the baby slept in the stroller. The outing had been an exercise in normalcy, and one at which we succeeded marvellously. But when it came time for Harriet’s play school picnic a week and a half later, our picnic blanket–actually an king-size sheet with a green leaf print that I’d bought at Walmart for a dollar back when I still bought things at Walmart–was nowhere to be found. We ate our lunch that day on a table cloth. “It will turn up,” was the thing we said, because we always say this and often it’s true. But our picnic blanket never did. We soon replaced it with a waterproof outdoor mat that we bought with a gift certificate our friends had given us when Iris was born. It was an upgrade. The loss of our picnic blanket was mysterious, but not a tragedy.
In November, we lost Iris’s snowsuit. Well, not a snowsuit exactly, but this blue fleece suit with a hood that was perfect for autumn, one that was worn and pilly because Harriet had worn it four years before. Iris had worn it to swimming lessons, but I’d carried her home without it under my coat because she was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb her. She was warm enough. But we got home to find that the blue suit was nowhere, and though I enquired at the community centre’s Lost and Found a few times over the next week, it didn’t turn up there either. But then the season was changing, we had a real snowsuit waiting. The blue suit had been coming to the end of its life anyway.
You already know how in November, I also lost our passports. Mid-journey in Amsterdam airport, resulting in a missed flight, so much panic, plans for emergency visits to consulates in farflungdom. Passports did turn up, but only after airline staff had unpacked our baggage three times, and then finally we unpacked them once more under the instructions of the immigration police. Perhaps if we’d tried this technique with the first disappearance, we might have found the picnic blanket.
And then somehow I have lost my pink fleece sweater, one that is old and worn, so farewell, I suppose, but it is cold in my house, and moreover, the sweater wasn’t entirely frumpy. I thought maybe it had gotten mixed in with the three garbage bags of stuff we’d assembled to be donated to charity, but searches turned up nothing. This loss has left a sizeable hole in my already meagre wardrobe.
None of this makes any sense. I am meticulously organized. I have known to have fits of anxiety when Harriet’s puzzles are missing a piece and scour the house until we find it. For me, the definition of “laid-back” is when I put away her toy eggs without the full dozen in the plastic carton, and I always feel sort of proud of myself when this happens. I lost my quarter-teaspoon a few years ago, and this was such an odd occurrence that it stands out. I have been mis-measuring my salt ever since. It must have fallen down behind the cupboards.
This is why when the immigration police told me to unpack our bags just one more time, I protested. “Really,” I said. “They couldn’t be there. I never would have put them–” But there they were. How odd not to know one’s own mind, let alone one’s own bag. Since Iris arrived, it is as though the fabric of our daily life has been stretched so thin and enormous things keep falling through the fibres. The metaphor is simply too perfect, and sometimes I suspect I’ve walked into a short story plot. This kind of confusion is what happens when you read far more than you sleep.
On Sunday afternoon, I lost my hat. And then I kind of lost my mind, because I was just so tired of losing things. And it wasn’t like the blanket or the blue suit, things we could get along without, things with which I could follow my dictum that things are just things and not worth getting upset over. Because I love my hat. It is a red felted cloche with a fuchsia flower, a one-of-a-kind that I bought at a craft fair last winter. It cost $45, which is a lot for a hat, but it was a beautiful hat, and it covered my ears. I have a big head, so such hats are hard to come by.
I had been writing this blog post in my head for a few days before the hat actually got lost, and it had begun to seem really disturbing, like my life had taken on the blog post’s trajectory rather than the other way around.
With the loss of the hat, I had officially had enough. I am a fervent unbeliever in Mommy-Brain, which offends me first because it’s this self-perpetuated myth that motherhood makes us stupid, which does us no favours, and also because my brain has never been as sharp as its been since my girls were born, the world suddenly full of brilliant and surprising connections and I really do find the experience of being a mother absolutely inspiring like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. But yes, I am tired. And I keep losing things. I was imagining a place (beneath the floorboards, perhaps?) where all the missing things were gathered. It was the violation of the laws of physics that was my main concern with this troubling string of events, never mind Mommy Brain—how can an object simply disappear?
(We flirted with a hypothesis: Iris was the obvious suspect. Nothing had gone missing before she arrived in our household. What if Iris was a thief?)
Then we found my hat. I couldn’t believe it. The first time I retraced my steps, I’d come up with nothing, as with all the other missing things. It was all part of the same plot, and it was beginning to be infuriating, not to mention boring. But yes, the surprise twist. I present once again at another Lost and Found, and the attendant comes back with precisely what I am looking for held in his very hand. And suddenly it didn’t matter anymore that on the way to the Lost and Found, my purse strap had snapped in two and it was beginning to seem that my whole life was unravelling. Because it wasn’t. I had my hat back, and everything terrible seemed a little less inevitable after that.
We walked home and I didn’t even need my hat. The temperature was above zero, something spring-like in the air, and the sun was out. For the first time in a long time, we held hands without mittens, and our mittens were either tucked safely in our pockets or tied to our coat with string.
March 25, 2013
Harriet Street.
Many thanks to Matilda Magtree for sending me this wonderful photo. I will show it to Harriet tomorrow and she’ll be delighted because she is able to read every word found within it, and because it also includes her favourite word in the entire universe (which is Harriet, of course).
March 12, 2013
A Message for Vickie from Reality Bites, with information she’ll already have been made aware of if she’s had children of her own.
Dear Vickie,
When I was fourteen, I wanted to be you. I wanted your bangs, your vintage clothing, your string of sexual partners, and friendship with Winona Ryder. I wanted every one of my words to be so laced with irony, to be that cool. You made me want to smoke.
But what I longed for most was your talent for disdain. “My mother,” you told your friend, Winona, while she was filming that documentary about you and your rumpled slacker peers, “goes to the bathroom with the door open.” And I knew exactly what you were talking about. It wasn’t even about doors and mothers and bathrooms, though these certainly stood for something concrete and disgusting, but instead, it was about an entire way of life, the kind of person neither you nor I ever wanted to be.
Vickie, I thought about this again years later, a few weeks before I turned thirty, which is a good half decade older than you’ve ever been. It was three days after the birth of my first child, born by caesarean-section due to her stubborn insistence upon lying sideways across my uterus. She was perfect, my daughter, pink and swaddled in a Perspex box, and I was already going to the bathroom with the door open. And oh, Vickie, that’s not even the half of it.
That I was going to the bathroom at all was a significant milestone, open door notwithstanding. It meant not only had they taken my catheter out (and yes, Vickie, motherhood is really this transcendental), but I’d walked the eleven steps to the bathroom by myself, even though my abdomen had been sliced in two just 36 hours before. I felt like a superwoman, until it came time to pull up my underwear; Vickie, I just couldn’t do it. To bend over so far in this strange new world had become anatomically impossible.
This was, of course, the official moment when the magic died. I had to call for my husband, who’d been gazing dreamily at our sleeping daughter, and summon him to my aid. He would come in to discover me sitting on the toilet, crying with embarrassment and pain. I needed him to pull up my underwear, which was not only a beige mesh hospital-issued pair, but had a diaper-sized sanitary napkin cradled in its crotch, soaked with the kind of blood that only comes post-partum. Dear Vickie, it’s like no period you’ve seen.
There was no mystery between us after that. How could there have been? And in the months that followed, when I got into the habit of going to the bathroom with the door open because if the door was closed, my daughter cried, I thought of you again Vickie, how I’d let us both down, but also of how much I hadn’t known about life and love when I was fourteen years, and you neither, even though you’d been so much older.
See, it was you, Vickie, all along. How you broke your mother, then resented the damage. Turns out it’s not marriage and habit that are passion-killers after all, but instead it’s children. And it turns out also, which is such a revelation, that your mother doesn’t care what you think.
Love, Kerry
February 28, 2013
Brain, Child is back!
February is almost quit, and while the great outdoors buried in snow and slush, I awoke to a fantastic email in my inbox this morning that is surely a sign of spring: it is time for me to renew my subscription to Brain, Child Magazine. This news all the more remarkable because the magazine folded last year, but it has since received new life with a new owner and editor. And so I was overjoyed to renew, and am excited to have Brain, Child return to my life. It’s such a smart, insightful magazine, and yet you’d not be remiss to read it in the bathtub. It’s the only parenting magazine out there that doesn’t fundamentally exist in order to make you buy stuff and feel bad about the condition of the cake-pops at your kid’s birthday party. According to Brain, Child, there’s no such thing as cake-pops at all. Which isn’t bad, in fact, it’s fine.
So subscribe. You won’t be sorry.
Further, please read this article about the woman who makes a living from mediating between parents and Nannies. You will kill yourself laughing. It begins with James van der Beek’s wife, and goes on spout amazing lines like, ““I just don’t know if she has passion about Olivia.” Then, “I don’t feel safe when you throw a Lego at my head.” And features a woman who made a mission statement for how she wanted to raise her child. It is truly the best newspaper article that I have ever, ever read.
February 25, 2013
Eloise Wilkin's The New Baby (or, "The Blog Post That Cost Me $50")
In November of 1981, my sister was born, when I was 2. The month before, according to to the note my mom made on the inside cover, I received from family friends a copy of The New Baby by Ruth and Harold Shane, illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. The New Baby became quite famous in our family as I memorized it entirely, and I’d amaze guests with my precocious “reading” skills. I have quite a vivid recollection of engaging with this book when I was very small, and when I read it now with Harriet, it’s not surprising that I loved it.
It’s something about Eloise Wilkin’s illustrations, I think. One of my other favourite childhood books was We Help Mommy, written by Jean Cushman, whose pictures still intrigue me now as much as they did 30 years ago. They intrigue Harriet too. It’s funny, because the illustrations were dated when I was small, and by now they’re probably about 70 years off, but it doesn’t make them any less engaging. Perhaps even more so? Because time has made these simple domestic tales become full of tiny mysteries (ie why do they clean the floor with a dust mop and not a vacuum?). These stories also show how the most essential parts of childhood never change.
Anyway, I wanted to write about The New Baby, which my mom saved for many years and passed along to Harriet not long ago. Harriet is now absolutely obsessed with it too as we await the arrival of our own new baby a few months down the road. I like the book too, but the pictures fascinate me for different reasons, the uber-’70s fashions in particular. Check out the kitchen, with the cookbooks and lentils in jars up on the shelf, and whatever they’re eating out of a tagine. The copper pots! Mom’s billowy dress. On other pages, we encounter dad’s indescribably nasty suit (yellow with a blue and red print) and Aunt Pat’s brilliant red plaid pants and pink collegiate sweater at the end of the book. It turns out some things do change, and thank goodness…
While I was googling to find images of the illustrations, however, I discovered that there was another version of The New Baby by Eloise Wilkin, and Ruth and Harold Shane. Turns out my book was a revised edition published in 1975, with updated illustrations. The original was published in 1948, and Wilkin’s drawings have a more-than-slightly-terrifying Norman Rockwell thing going on. Aunt Pat in this one is a hideous spinster with a crooked back, and in the kitchen there is not a lentil to be found. I was much intrigued by this, and really wanted to find out more about the original version of this book which was basically my literary foundation. It’s not in the library system but I tracked down a copy on AbeBooks, which should be coming my way in the next few weeks. I’m really looking forward to finding out the differences between the two.
All this googling also directed me to the book Golden Legacy by Leonard Marcus, about the history of the Golden Books. (Apparently, I wrote about this book five years ago, though children’s books meant less to me then, which was probably why I never followed through so far as to actually read it.) As there is not a circulating copy of this book in the Toronto Public Library system, I was left with no choice but to order a copy for myself, which should arrive sometime this week. Very excited to encounter this one. Deirdre Baker’s 2008 review in the Toronto Star heightens my expectations.
Anyway, all this is how the quest to write this blog post ended up costing me 50 bucks. It’s going to lead to more blog posts though, and to new literary discoveries, and so I’m willing to bet that it all will be worth every penny in the end.
February 6, 2013
Pennies Saved
I hate change of all sorts, except the monetary kind, and so I naturally am very unhappy about the demise of the penny. And so, in my efforts to render the penny eternal, I’ve decided to keep a glass jar full of them until the end of time (or at least until we decide to move, and I wonder if it’s really necessary to preserve a jar of pennies). I’ll display the jar high on a shelf, and one day I’ll show it to my grandchildren who will barely be able to fathom that there was ever such a thing as a one cent coin.
But while all that is still in the future, my little daughter and I sat down this afternoon to sort through the coins in our family’s change jar and take the pennies out. And really, there is no better companion than a three-year-old for such a project. We had a very good time picking out the pennies and guessing if they were old or new based upon their shininess or tarnish. 2009 pennies we decided were Harriet pennies, “from the year you were born!” and pennies from the years after amazing because Harriet was older than they were. We were quite excited to find 1979 pennies too, as old as Dad and Mom. Lots of 1984, and 1992, commemorating Canada’s 125th. And then we found a 1969, which was exciting, and a 1967, which was the most exciting year of all. The oldest penny we found was from 1958, when the Queen looked remarkably young.
Our little jar isn’t filled yet, which means we’ll have to be keeping an eye out for pennies even as they become increasingly rare. In their rarity too, I think, they’re only going to become a little more magic, and really, haven’t they ever been?
January 30, 2013
On yarn, yarns and Extra Yarn
I’ve been knitting a baby blanket this last while, its colour yellow as selected by Harriet for whom yellowness is a sacred thing. And perhaps it was my current knitting project that got me thinking about the CanLit/Knitting Connection recently, about knitting in books and knitting about books. Then I thought about it more yesterday when we took out Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen from the library. What a spectacular book, about a little girl whose magical yarn stash never seems to run-0ut (and I know a lot of knitters, actually, with a similar affliction). I don’t know that Jon Klassen has ever gone wrong, and we loved this story with its splashes of colour, amusing prose, and sinister archduke (plus, SPOILERS, happy ending). Of course, you probably know all about this book already, especially since it was selected as a Caldecott Honour Book on Monday. Which was a particularly good day for Jon Klassen who also won the Caldecott Medal proper for the wonderful This is Not My Hat. I imagine this exciting news has changed Klassen’s whole life a little bit, but it’s changed mine too, because now I get to say that my website features an interview with a Caldecott winner.
