June 13, 2014
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th is a lucky day for me, for it was a Friday exactly eleven and a half years ago that I happened upon the person who, of all the billions of humans on the earth, would become my most beloved. Truly, no one has ever been luckier than I was that day.
And since then, two has become four. We’re still a bit blown away by this. It is possible that we always will be.
March 16, 2014
Spring Break
I totally get March Break now. I never really did before. But the weeks leading up to it were threatening to destroy me. Compared to others, we didn’t have it so bad, but we’d had three straight weeks of sick kids, too much going on on the weekends, and the mad scramble that is every day. This year, February didn’t really seem so bad, but I think it was just saving itself for March, which hit with such a wallop. And oh, this long winter. We’ve really had enough, and so, this was the week that came along to save us. Stuart took the week off too, and we did what we do best: a few splendid things, plenty of lunch, a whole lot of nothing, and precious precious time.
Monday was lunch at Caplansky’s, which never ever fails, followed by a visit to the Lillian H. Smith Library for a brand new stack of books. On Tuesday, we took a road trip to the McMichael Gallery to see the Mary Pratt Exhibit, which was oh, so extraordinary, definitely worth a visit. We felt a bit guilty (not really) as we drove past the sign for Legoland, but luckily Harriet can’t read yet, and the Mary Pratt exhibit was engaging for her as well, with all its bright colours and familiar objects. (She likes the hot dog one the best). On Tuesday, we actually wore shoes instead of boots, but any indication that spring was in the air was packed away with Wednesday’s snowstorm, which we walked through to get to lunch at Fanny Chadwick’s and it was totally worth it, even with the snow so wet and awful that my face was burning with cold and so soaked I had to be mopped off when we arrived. Thursday, the sun came out, and we went to the AGO, which was no crowded and had totally excellent stuff on for kids (so I felt better about Legoland), though I have no photos of any of it because I smashed my phone on the streetcar floor (which is made of rubber. How is that possible?). And then on Friday, we had afternoon tea at the Windsor Arms Hotel, and Harriet and Iris were both so totally good—with the former, this is due to her being excellent, the latter is pure luck. It was Iris’s first afternoon tea, and we threw scone pieces her way to keep her happy, and it worked. As ever, it was nice to do something so special.
And now with tomorrow, we’re back to reality, though it will be reality with extra crazy because The M Word is in the world! Which will bring me out of my hermetic existence, which I am slightly dreading, but which I’m also committing to enjoying, because this is such a dream come true.
January 31, 2014
Solid
There is a segment of the population that won’t understand this at all, but sometimes I get bothered because I’m not famous on twitter. (Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about though.) I have never once gone viral. BoingBoing pays me no attention at all, and neither does Reddit, except for the time that I reviewed a Harlequin Romance novel about the mayor of Toronto. And sometime I worry that my lack of twitter fame means that I fundamentally don’t exist, which of course is everything turned inside-out. I know this. It doesn’t take much to remember the truth, which is that if the whole internet disappeared tomorrow, taking my writing career along with it, and I was left with just my little family in the world, I would still have everything. This—our friends and our family—is what really matters. Of everything I ever make, this life we have together is more important than anything else.
And so I focus on the domestic. Not terribly fashionable, I know, but quite timeless (and celebrated, in all its raw complexity). I love my home, my kitchen at is centre (complete with the obligatory red teapot and bunting). We’ve lived in our apartment for 5 years now, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was 19 years old. We are committed to renting, and committed to this place, which may not be “a house”, but it is home. And in order to make this home work for the next few years, especially now that we’re a family of four, we had to do something about the kitchen. A kitchen which wasn’t big enough for our round oak table (which had been my childhood table; my mom bought it at an auction years ago), or at least the table was the wrong shape, it took up too much room, and it was far too crowded when everybody was sat at it. And I wanted to be able to have dinner parties. Dinner parties, to me, are integral to home.
So we had a new kitchen table built. Our friend Nigel Wilson, of Red Lion Workshop, took our measurements and plans (for a rectangular table with benches that could be tucked underneath when not in use) and this morning, with his excellent family, delivered the most important piece of furniture we’ll ever buy. Made of reclaimed oak, it is as solid as it is beautiful. It is everything we dreamed of.
I think that materials are important. I like to think in the long-term. I used to buy furniture in flat packs made out of particle board, and then one day I realized I didn’t want a life made out of such things after all. It is quite likely that I will never buy a kitchen table ever again, and so the extra investment we’ve made now will pay off in the long term, and then to be able to sit down together at a piece of furniture that’s made so well–what a magnificent foundation to build a family life upon.
To contemplate a kitchen table is a loaded thing. It’s still tied up in philosophy for me, because I’m thinking of Woolf and To the Lighthouse, and Mr. Ramsay thinking about a kitchen table when one isn’t there. For me, that kitchen table always looked a lot like this one. But to contemplate a kitchen table is also thinking about the future, about our children sitting on these benches, their little legs growing longer until they one day reach the floor. All the breakfasts and dinners we’ll eat here together, glasses of milk spilled and angry toddlers sent to their room, but the harmonious meals too, the conversations we’ll share. Homework also, once the dinner is cleared away. And birthday parties, play-dough, cookie-baking, hide-and-seek underneath it. Breaking out our portable ping-pong set. The friends who’ll sit around this table with us, friends we might not have even met yet. That we might move one day, and be able to replace the benches with chairs. The amazing privilege of possibility, the assurances of a future, or our faith in such a thing. Which is what a solid kitchen table signifies to me.
The table is pristine for the moment. I was talking to Nigel about this when he was here for lunch. I said, “How do we take care of it?” He said, “You have to use it. The first few rings on the wood, he said, will be painful to see, but you’ll get used to it. Then one day, maybe 20 years now, you’ll look back and you’ll see that mark, and that mark. And you’ll remember everything.”
December 23, 2013
Holiday Hiatus
Last night, I finished knitting Iris’s Christmas stocking, and I am pretty happy with the symmetry of four stockings hanging by the (unworking) fire. I’ve knit these four stockings over the last eight years and hanging this last one underlines the completeness of our family now. I like this.
There has been something very different about this Christmas season. Mostly it was that December 1 represented the end of a very, very busy few months, and so instead of Advent being about the mad rush, it’s been a slow, easy time with lots of space for being together, reflecting on the season, visiting friends, cooking good food, reading books and listening to music. Stuart finished work early last week and we aren’t going anywhere for the holiday, so this time and space continues, which is such an enormous luxury. (Though as we became housebound due to ice storm, there was something of the prison about this luxury. I discovered that I actually have the capacity to be bored.) In order to create even more space, I’m taking a break from here until the new year–if you need me, I will be visiting the art gallery, spending time with family and friends, listening to Darlene Love sing “Please Come Home for Christmas”, eating from our three-tin high tower of biscuits, and reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald (which I have just begun–it is already astonishing, and I hope broadens my understanding of this writer whose work, to me, stubbornly remains enigmatic). I hope you have an excellent holiday and read many wonderful books. Or even just one that’s incredible.
Thank you for reading here.
December 12, 2013
This is my nephew.
Because I have a nephew! At least I do as of 12:07 (mountain time) this morning. My sister and brother-in-law have done some excellent work here, I think. He’s adorable, and the world is a whole other place now for his arrival. Life will never be the same. Amazing…
He is getting his first Sheree Fitch book for Christmas. And now I am an Aunt. Which is an intimidating prospect, because my own children’s aunts have set the bar really, really high.
December 5, 2013
Iris is Six Months-Old Today!
That Iris has reached her half-year milestone means that everybody lied when they told me that feeling would return to my abdomen within six months. I mean, I know that nobody really needs feeling in their abdomen, but it’s the principle of the thing, you know?Anyway, I’ve got a lot of feeling in most other parts of my body, perhaps too much, so perhaps it all just evens out. And Iris is absolutely adored, this obscenely bald person who was born with a tooth. I like her less in the evenings when she refuses to be put to bed, but the odd time she actually makes it there, I start reminiscing about her goodness in about 45 minutes. And then last night she slept from 10:30 to 2:15, which was a monumental occasion. Also, she has finally dropped for 5:30 pm nap, which makes getting dinner on a whole lot easier.
Who is Iris at six months? Truth be told, we don’t wholly know, because she’s still unfolding. In the last few days, she’s started prattling on incessantly in baby mumbo-jumbo and we love it. She’s been eating solids for a week, and pureed peas and zucchini is her favourite so far. She likes to smear egg yolk in her eyes and then cry (as you do). She delights in her older sister, and while Harriet’s ego is a bit too big, it’s true when she says that she is Iris’s favourite person in the world. Her favourite book is Mr. Brown Can Moo, but she also listens to all kinds of stories and is really quite patient about the whole thing, even though sometimes she spends story time screaming. Her favourite way to engage with books is by eating them. Her favourite toys are the rice paddle, a pie plate, and Harriet’s stuffed giraffe. She thinks it’s funny when you blow on her tummy, she is happiest when being dangled upside down by her feet. She is never, ever wearing socks because I can never ever find a pair, and if you have a problem with that, then you can go and look for them yourself. She has become an upright person, eating dinner with us in her high chair and nearly sitting up by herself. It makes her so human-seeming! She is always being schlepped about in her Baby Trekker and she’s happy there, so everyone thinks that she is a well-contented baby, which isn’t technically true. She can scream unrelentingly like nobody we have ever met.
Six months is so much harder than the newborn days, when we bounced along in a blissful bubble of summertime, but then at six months we can (pretty much) handle it whereas we were all quite fragile then. These days, we are very, very tired, plus people who are 4.5 years old also come with their own very specific and complex needs. It’s a tricky business, and sometimes it all goes very wrong, but then there are these other moments when it’s oh so very right, and we know that a family of four was who we were always meant to be.
November 26, 2013
Disaster Series: Our Trip to England
We were already quite sure that travelling to England with two children was going to come with its challenges, and when Harriet threw up the night before we left, it was almost funny. Almost. Like how bad can things really get? It was sort of an amusing way to top off the whole experience, but then vomit turned out not to be the top, no, but instead just the beginning of the experience. She woke up in the morning even sicker, her eyes rolling back into her head. A couple more hours of sleep transformed her back into someone human-seeming, but we knew that we still had trouble on our hands.
The flight itself turned out not to be so bad, and Harriet threw up again just once. Iris was fine, and doesn’t sleep for long periods anyway, so her short naps in the carrier were to be expected. Neither Stuart nor I slept at all that night, but we arrived in Amsterdam pretty proud of ourselves for having survived the longest part of our haul. We had breakfast in the airport, bought Holland souvenirs, and arrived to board our connecting flight in plenty of time… when we realized that we were missing our passports.
It was all very curious. I’d kept all our travel documents together, and we still had the children’s passports. We couldn’t understand where ours had gone. Operating on sheer panic (and completely no sleep, remember?) I raced through the airport to see if we’d left our passports in one of the shops we’d visited. At the gate, Stuart and the very kind airline staff unpacked our carry-on baggage three times. They were as desperate as we were that we get on the flight, but when the passports failed to turn up anywhere–no dice.
We missed the flight and were sent to file police reports for our missing passports. With the police reports, we’d be able to leave the airport in order to go to our respective consulates and obtain emergency passports. To make things even more complicated, our respective consulates are in different cities. This was the point at which we thought perhaps we’d have to live in the airport forever, which seemed so much easier than running after consular officials. We were totally exhausted, and then had to call our family in England to let them know we wouldn’t be arriving that afternoon.
We had to wait for the real police to arrive after the immigration police called them about our predicament. They were kind but a bit incredulous, which we understood because the story of our missing passports made absolutely no sense. “I”m going to have to ask you to unpack your things one more time,” the officer told me, which I thought was completely ridiculous. There is only one place where our passports could have been due to my impeccable organizations skills, plus we’d unpacked our stuff three times already.
Or rather, the airline staff and Stuart had unpacked our stuff three times already. I hadn’t unpacked them once, and when I did, the first place I looked was inside the pocket of my new computer bag, and there are passports were. “Thank fucking God!” exclaimed my husband. “I knew they were there,” said Harriet the Horrible. “Every time,” the police officer said to me, “they’re somewhere in the luggage.” Me, I was relieved, but now a bit disappointed that the ending to this story had been so incredibly stupid, that I’d never be able to write an essay about the time I wandered around Amsterdam without a passport like Theo Decker in The Goldfinch, that our passports hadn’t been pick pocketed by a Russian thief called Boris, but instead, I’d just packed them somewhere dumb.
With the problem solved and no one having thrown up in ages, we raced to the flight counter to get on the next flight to Manchester. On the basis of our looking exhausted, and schlepping two small children, airline staff took pity on us and booked the next flight, charging us for administrative costs only. We had breakfast again, and within a few hours, we were in the air again, flying to where we were supposed be. And we even got there!
Only problem was that our luggage didn’t, which would have fine, except that our luggage included the carseats without which we couldn’t leave the airport. And so we had no choice but to wait for our stuff to arrive on the 5pm flight from Amsterdam, sitting in the Arrivals area at Manchester Airport, whose sliding doors open and open and it’s so cold in there. And because this is the north of England in November, it wasn’t long before the sun went down. We hadn’t slept in oh so very long, and when the luggage arrived, we still had an hour’s journey by car ahead of us. I drove while the children cried, and my eyes ached.
We arrived though, and fortunately we were in a land where I wouldn’t have to cook or do laundry for the duration of our stay. The next morning I even got to sleep all morning without a single child in my bed while wee Iris was held by her grandmother. I ate Dairy Milks for breakfast, drank strong strong proper Northern tea, had a full English breakfast and afternoon tea in a single day, bought too many books, was terrified while driving down oh-so-narrow windy roads at 50 miles per hour but never once crashed into anything, breathed in the sea air, walked on cobblestones, had fun with family, celebrated Stuart’s birthday, read lots of books, and decided that chocolate-covered digestives are the food I love most in the world.
It was exhausting though. Harriet continued to be ill, and then passed her cold onto Iris who is far too little for such a plague and now she’s still sick with the most agonizing cough. Iris also refused to sleep in her own bed at all, and so she was basically on me for most of the week, and one gets tired of such things quickly. Halfway through our stay (and mostly because of jet-lag, I think) Harriet started coming into our room in the middle of the night and crying that nobody loved her, which had the effect of making nobody love her. I was crabby, and nobody loved me either.
It was a very good week though, and so wonderful for our English family to meet wee Iris for the very first time, and for Harriet to have her first English visit that she will remember. Fun to be by the seaside and exciting to imagine our next trip back when Iris is a bit bigger, and how much further we’ll all be along by then. (Gulp. This is wonderful and terrible. Six months ago today, we were celebrating Harriet’s fourth birthday and Iris was just over a week away from being born. How very far we’ve come since then. How much road ahead there is to travel, but how quickly it all speeds by…)
I do love England. Land of green, rolling hills, unceasing cups of tea and tiny cars. And of bookshops, oh yes. I’d purchased Love Nina by Nina Stibbe, and it delighted me during my first few days of vacation. (I’d been hooked by a description of the book as “Mary Poppins meets Adrian Mole…”). After hitting the bookshop in Waterstones, I’d bought Mutton by India Knight, whose novels are always such a pleasure. I read that book for the rest of the trip, and will get through the rest of my English stack in the next few weeks. I did make the mistake of reading the Guardian’s Books of the Year piece after visiting the bookshop, and now I mustn’t rest until I have a copy of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald biography for myself.
We were owed something for our flight home, I think, and fate delivered. Harriet watched movies and Iris went in and out of sleep, enough in for me to read an entire novel. A short novel, Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Other Side of the Fire, but a whole novel still. Amazing! And they gave us ice cream en-route. It was great. Our luggage arrived back in Toronto with us, and we took at a cab home and nobody had a meltdown. It was a miracle, probably because our journey the week before had been such a disaster. It all comes out even in the end, I guess. And all and all, it was a very good time away.
October 6, 2013
The Things I Want to Keep
In our house, there is now a big plastic bin full of clothing that will never fit anyone in our family ever again. “Should we keep any of it?” I wondered yesterday, only because I thought I had an obligation to wonder. In actuality, we don’t have the room to keep anything and I’m so happy about that because it makes answering such questions much easier. But I wonder too if I will always feel this way, feel the urge to discard pieces of our history, like jetsam.
I haven’t always felt this way. Twenty years ago, I saved everything, any flower I’d ever received hung and dried on a line strung across my dusty, cluttered bedroom. Like most teenagers, I took great care to completely paper my room walls with ticket stubs, magazine cuttings, and photos. When the Blue Jays won the World Series, I saved that day’s newspaper in a cardboard box. I was born afflicted with nostalgia. (I imagine that I am quite human-seeming in this regard.) I remember listening to Meat Loaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” when I was six, and telling my dad how it reminded of me of the old days (when I was three). Everything I ever did from age 16-23 was carefully mucilaged into scrapbooks. But enough time passed and so much was accumulated that eventually I could see the futility of my attempts to save everything that mattered, and also that the consequence of it all was stuff stuff stuff and necessarily room enough to put it in.
So we don’t keep much anymore. I only kept a few of the scrapbooks. I am aided in all this by living in an apartment and not having a basement, and also in that so much stuff now exists online, thereby not requiring room enough at all. My blog is perhaps my most precious repository. But I become overwhelmed even by a large number photos on my phone, deleting all those but the essential because I fear being carried away by too muchness. I hate that there are 18,000 messages in my inbox. Books aside, I feel so much lighter living my life without freight. I have decided to retrieve from that plastic bin the stripy sleeper that both my girls wore home from the hospital when they were born, and the rest will go to charity.
“In fact I no longer value this kind of memento./ I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted./ There was a period… when I thought I did./ A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep things with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things”, their totems… In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment./ In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” –Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Nostalgia, I have learned with time, is an affliction that can’t be cured, or fixed with a totem. I will keep that sleeper with me, but it won’t bring the past any less faraway. Already, I cannot believe that anybody that I love was ever small enough to wear it.
We went out for posh sushi for dinner last night, our first time having it since our post-partum sashimi party when Iris was 5 days old. I’ve been awash lately in nostalgia for June, as Iris turns 4 months old and leaves her newborn self behind. June, not so long ago, of course, but forever irretrievable, a time like no other before or since for our family. Such a gentle time indeed, just like I knew it was while it was happening. I have no need to keep anything from that bin full of clothes, but oh, how I want to preserve those memories, those moments. That week I spent lying in bed recovering my c-section, when Stuart brought me all my meals and there were only four people in the world. I can no longer remember what it was like to not be able to get out of bed unassisted, or not to be able to turn over without a great deal of pain. All those memories gone, and I just remember the sashimi party in our room, that posh sushi. That was the night Harriet hung up the laundry, and played with her sticker book we’d just received from my friend Kate. How summer always is, the way you want to bottle it.
I remember Stuart taking Harriet to school in the morning, and then coming home to collapse into bed with Iris and I. I remember this one evening when Iris and Harriet were both asleep, and I sat down and wrote a review of a picture book. I remember reading The Flamethrowers, and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I remember Harriet scampering up the stairs to crawl into bed with us every morning, and there would be all of us there, everyone I love best on a single mattress, an island in the universe. Stuart ensuring I was stocked with snacks, reading Harriet stories while I breastfed, how I was annoyed to once again be mobile because then I couldn’t read so much any more.
In June, Harriet watched the Winnie the Pooh movie with Zooey Deschanel over and over again, and we floated around our house like sleep-deprived lunatics, singing the “honey honey honey” song and “It’s Pooh! It’s Pooh! Pooh wins the honeypot,” whenever we changed Iris’s diaper and the situation called for it. How we’d be up at 4am laughing hysterically about Vladimir Putin’s relationship with rhythmic gymnast, and saying, “His virile persona….” which was alway hilarious. The afternoons when Stuart would strap on the baby and take the children away, and I’d be blessed with an hour or so of precious aloneness. I remembering leaving the house even–hobbling to the farmer’s market clutching my incision, going out for ice cream, walking to the playground to fetch Harriet from school. Her class’s end of the year picnic and glorious sunshine. The first time we took the baby out for a meal, for lunch on Father’s Day and she didn’t explode. Tremendous kindness from everyone: cards and presents in the post, meals dropped off, baked goods and visits. All this proof that we were connected to the world and that the world is good.
None of this particularly monumental, of significance to no one but me, though I suspect that it might remind you of your own precious memories, you own very best times. These are those memories that don’t dissolve into the blur of every day, though dissolve they someday will, all the same. And so to counter that, I write them down here, preserve them in my way. These are the things that I want to keep.
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
