April 12, 2013
Stick Figure Families and the Punch List
Photo by Helen Spitzer
When I was pregnant with Harriet and in my third trimester, I started creating something called a “punch list”. Let’s just say I was not the picture of serenity. And as I move toward the final month of this pregnancy, the same old rage is taking hold, and today I’ve channelled it into a post at Bunch about the inexplicable nature of stick figure family car stickers. And I really do think that “fucking Fido Dido” is the best line I’ve ever written. Dare to argue, and I’ll likely punch you.
March 16, 2013
March Break Delights
This week was our first March Break, which turned out to be legendarily good thanks to Stuart taking the week off too. It’s funny how spending a week with my child and another adult is a vastly superior prospect to just kid and me. We had a very wonderful time and were careful to never travel too far from home. We took care too to spend a lot of time hanging around doing nothing, which isn’t to say that we didn’t get up to some excellent adventures. We are also very pleased to have achieved our goal of going out for lunch every single day.
Sunday was our trip to the Maple Sugar Bush, which was sweet and sunshiney. Monday we decided to go crazy and visit the library (it’s true! I know we sound reckless and wild, but it’s just the way we are) which was fun because Stuart doesn’t usually get to come on our weekly visits. And then we had lunch at Caplansky’s Deli, because all the experts say that pregnant women should ingest giant mountains of smoked meat.
On Tuesday, we had lunch at the new Montreal-style bagel place in Kensington Market, which is so so delicious, and then we walked to the Allan Gardens Conservatory to see palm trees and cacti and other green things. Wednesday morning was devoted to having holes poked in my neck, but things got better afterwards. We had lunch at Fanny Chadwicks (our favourite local joint) and then spent the afternoon on the couch watching Pete’s Dragon.
On Thursday, we visited the Textile Museum of Canada (with our free MAP pass) to see the Marimekko Exhibit, whose designs are right up my alley. (I got a Marimekko scarf!). And then we had lunch at St. Lawrence Market, pure deliciousness. We also visited the Market Gallery and picked up a print of I is for Island Ferry to hang on our wall. And then Harriet had a meltdown because we wouldn’t buy her a painting of horses, and cried on the streetcar all the way home (which everyone else found absolutely charming). Later that afternoon, Harriet cheered up and we all visited the midwives, and were thrilled to hear our baby’s heartbeat and to have it confirmed that Baby is growing well.
And then there was Friday. We had a reservation for 3 for tea at the Windsor Arms Hotel. Afternoon tea is my favourite thing in the world, but we haven’t taken Harriet since my birthday 2 years ago when she kind of ruined it for everyone. But she’s bigger now, and more importantly, our March Break had been excellent training in dining out. And she was an absolute star. Staff looked a bit dubious when we confirmed that Harriet would be having her own tea, that we wouldn’t have her “nibble off our plates” as they advised. And we’re glad we didn’t, because then we wouldn’t have been able to eat anything. Harriet had her own pot of apple-mango tea, discovered that she LOVED tiny sandwiches (and even cucumbers), and was an absolutely delightful afternoon tea companion, consenting to have tiny cakes cut into three so we could all have a taste of each. The scones were wonderful, I was so so proud of Harriet, and we all three had a very good time. I think we might keep this kid around
December 13, 2012
Ten Years Ago
“It was ten years ago today that I met your Daddy,” I said. “And then you had a baby, right?” said Harriet, eager to get to her favourite part of the story. (Harriet cries if we look at photographs and she’s not in them. The Harriet-less world does not interest her one bit, and sometimes I see her point.) “No, not right away,” I said. “We lived in England for awhile and we were poor and bored, and we slept on an inflatable bed that slowly deflated every night. We were just out of school, barely employable, and we had no idea how we were going to do anything we wanted to do. So we decided to move to Japan, that old last resort. We had an apartment there that was smaller than our kitchen, and one day Daddy bought me a desk so I could write. He carried it home on his bicycle. We decided to get married, so we went back to England to have our wedding.” “And then you had a baby, right?” said Harriet. “Not yet,” I said. “We moved to Toronto, and I went to graduate school. Daddy had to wait a year before he was able to work in Canada, and we had to shop at the Dufferin Mall No-Frills. Our budget was $50 a week. And every month we had $20 to 
spend on fun, so we went to Riverdale Farm often and we went out a lot for ice cream. And it wasn’t really that bad. I don’t know how we did it, and I couldn’t ever go back, but we learned a lot. Like to how to subsist on chickpeas.” “When do I come?” Harriet asked. I told her not quite yet. But we knew we wanted to have a baby, and so we moved to a new apartment where there would be room for our baby when she came. Our apartment used to feel enormous, but now it is brimful of bookshelves and tiny socks are scattered throughout every room. No amount of picking up the socks ever changes this reality. Harriet gets her sock-discarding affliction from her dad. I tell her, “We had a baby. And we liked you so much, we want to have another one.” She likes the story now. Harriet is looking forward to being a big sister, and what lies in store. And so are we, the great unknown. Which is terrifying, but also wonderful, and who ever could have foretold ten years ago what this extraordinary decade together would hold?
November 19, 2012
Reading in the First Trimester
I have so much trouble reading when I’m 6-12 weeks pregnant. As I’ve done it twice now, I can say for a fact that I am the problem and it’s not necessarily the books I encounter, all of which seem to me to be absolutely intolerable. In my first trimester of pregnancy, I completely lack the patience required to overlook the (often obligatory) parts of any book that are intolerable, and understand its fundamental goodness. I can’t read a book that’s very long either, because eventually it becomes associated with nausea and even the thought of the book makes me want to puke. I have a similar relationship with Calgary– every time I go there, I’m 6 or 8 weeks pregnant, and I can’t even think about it anymore. And with Cloud Atlas, whose first pages I read in Calgary and therefore never again.
Another book I can’t handle is Cybele Young’s A Few Bites, which is so so good! But the book came into my life when I was six weeks pregnant and when Ferdie is presented with his lunch of broccoli, carrot sticks, and ravioli, my stomach heaves. I can no longer eat broccoli, which is bizarre because I’ve always loved it, but no longer, temporarily I hope. We’ve had to ask our organic food delivery to stop bringing it because every week I threw it out.
There is Nicola Barker’s The Yips, which I bought in Calgary but Calgary was not even the problem. The biggest problem I think is that it was not as good as Burley Cross Postbox Theft or Darkmans, and I was so unhappy (and feeling sick) while I was reading it. There were a few weeks where I hated everything, and not just books, but then I started reading A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence, and began to feel better. Correspondance and short stories were the trick I guess, fragments, and perhaps this was why I was so elated to discover Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories–finally a book to fall in love with. And the Susans anthology. And slowly, slowly, I was happy to find that I could love books again. (I am not sure that Calgary will recover so easily.)
So yes, this is a round-about way of saying that after being the first woman ever to have a baby three and a half years ago, I am going to pioneer the act of having a second at the end of May. Literary trauma aside, I’ve had a relatively easy first trimester and have been so grateful for Harriet’s mornings at school so that I’ve still been able to get my work done. Grateful too that we dragged out Harriet’s napping through the weeks when I needed it most. Also that emotionally, I’ve have a much easier time of it this time around–with a three year old running around, less apparent miracles are easier to believe in. I have faith this time, and it’s so refreshing not be crazy (though we’ll see how long the sanity lasts. In my experience, it comes in limited quantities only).
I am excited and terrified, and hoping that everyone who promised it would be easier second-time around wasn’t lying. I am really excited for Harriet to become a sister. And most of all, I just feel enormously lucky, that this decision whether or not to have a second child was one we had the freedom and good fortune to make for ourselves.
June 28, 2012
On Barbara Reid's The Party, and devilled eggs, Joan Didion and cousins
I was born into a family already stocked with aunts and uncles, lots of cousins. And while I was about two decades too late for the party-going as captured in Barbara Reid’s The Party (which has a ’50s/’60s vibe), I can tell you that my grandparents were still hauling around the same cooler, same chairs, bowls full of dip and tins full of squares by the time I came along. I know what it’s like to confront a backyard full of cousin/strangers who are so familiar by day’s end that saying goodbye is a tragedy. And that menu! One day I want to have a The Party party just so that I can serve all the staples: “There’s sausage roles, casseroles, pineapple rings. Devilled eggs, chicken legs, little cheese things. Salads with jelly, salads with beans. Enough? Let the dog lick your party plate clean.”
It makes me sad that Harriet is unlikely to know the abundance of cousins that I did (and any cousins she might have will live a 5 hour plane journey away from on either side of us), that Barbara Reid’s The Party is a foreign storybook land. Joan Didion’s wrote this about her daughter in “On Going Home”: “I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now.” And we do.
Though my beloved cousin, who is my oldest friend, has a little girl who is five months younger than Harriet. They see one another just a few times a year, which means they’ve probably met about six times in their lives, but every time, they’ve adored each other and that delights me. That Harriet will know the bonds of cousinship. And then two weekends ago, on the other side of the family, my aunt and uncle invited everybody in the family to spend a sunny afternoon at their farm. These days, we usually only meet at funerals, and the family tree has grown so many branches of its own and with our grandparents gone, it’s hard to get everyone together. But we did, and it was glorious, and Harriet met aunts, uncles and cousins for the very first time, all these people who are a part of who she is, and there was even devilled eggs and bean salads, and a sky that shone like plasticine.
June 18, 2012
7 Years
We’ve got a sitter! Looking forward to dinner out tonight to celebrate 7 years since “I do”, and the success of not being remotely itchy.
“They would talk of such questions among books, or out in the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort, but delight.” –Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
August 8, 2011
Going Home Again
“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience or returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.” –Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
I don’t get home very often, hardly ever. I’ve never lived in either of the houses where my parents live now, my grandparents’ houses were sold and gutted long ago, the woods behind the house I lived in until I was nine are now so grown-up that you can’t see the house from the road, and I rarely find myself on that road anyway. Wallace Stegner was right. Like Joan Didion, my parents may have wanted to promise me that I would “grow up with a sense of [my] cousins and of rivers and over my great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to [have pledged me] a picnic on a river with fried chicken and [my] hair uncombed, would like to [have given me] home for [my] birthday, but we live differently now.” Which I don’t think is an inconsolable loss, but it’s a loss still, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been awash is nostalgia this last while. I keep wanting to write essays about how I spent the night of September 11 2001 in Kos at College and Bathurst eating fries with my friends. This comes on because that night was ten years ago, a nice round number, and because I’ve been listening to Dar William’s The Honesty Room, which I bought around the same time. I keep wanting to write essays about riding our bikes in Japan, and our house in England with its dirty lace curtains and the park across the street, and these wouldn’t be essays, really. They would be diary entries, which, according to Sarah Leavitt, are differentiated from memoirs in that in memoirs, the role of the self is to serve the story. In my story, the role of the self would only be to serve the self, pure indulgence. Basically, I’d like to go home again. Which is as impossible as: Basically, I want a time machine.
I try. Sometimes I walk down Dundas Street between Bathurst and Manning, where I lived for a pivotal year at the turn of the century, except that the Chinese herb shop we lived over is now a store where you can buy a $2400 ottoman, and the restaurant at the end of our block burned down last summer. Sometimes I walk through the university campus where I lived when I thought that a push-up bra and blue eyeshadow were key accessories and where the snow fell so high once that the army came and shovelled us out, but it’s too altogether the same and different. We’ve been replaced by new students who sleep in our beds and imagine themselves to be the centre of the universe.
My family has a thing for nostalgia. A favourite pass-time has always been the Driving By Where We Used to Live game, or the Driving by Where We Lived Before You Were Born game. I sometimes still play this, except we don’t have a car, and so we settle for Pushing Your Stroller Past the Old Apartment whenever we’re in Little Italy. My husband thinks this is weird. Partly because he has lived in none of these locations save for one, and so the game to him is a little bit boring. I keep trying to take him home to places he’s never seen in his life which are inhabited by strangers who have painted the garage door and redone the siding. Besides, he grew up in a land so steeped in its history that he was eager to shed the concept entirely with his new life in Canada. He’s had enough of trodding on Roman ruins. He also thinks it’s funny that any Canadian building one hundred years old is worthy of a plaque.
Anyway, the point is that the cottage we’ve stayed at the last two summers is also where the summers of my childhood were spent. Or not the entire summers, but a few weeks of every one, which, interestingly, have gone all metonymic and become the only bits of those summers I remember. So that last week I did get to go home again, to a place so utterly unchanged, but then I am so changed that it’s a new place altogether and I am happy with that, because I certainly don’t want our summer vacation to be one of those drive-by games that makes Stuart exasperated. I want the cottage to be a place for Harriet to discover for herself, just like I did, and she doesn’t need to know that the dock used to be broken and sinking, so slippery that you couldn’t run, where our fort was, and that the beach was wider once upon a time, but the minnows are the same, and so are the leopard frogs. It is easier to walk barefoot on gravel than it used to be, or maybe it’s just that the soles of my feet are just hard.
No one needs to know about the two salient selves I remember from there. The seven year old girl with a side-ponytail performing a choreographed routine to the theme from Jem and the Holograms on top of a picnic table, and the other one even more awkward, if you can believe it. She’s sitting on a swing dreamily, listening to “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” on the yellow Sony Sports Walkman tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her baja jacket. She’s staring at the sunset sparkling on the lake, and she’s thinking of profound things, like boyfriends, and breasts, and one day being so far away that she’ll be able to refer to herself in the third person.
July 18, 2011
More Camilla than Kate
Many of you will no doubt recognize this dress as the dress I wore to *your* wedding!
With my usual knack for doing it wrong, I am more Camilla than Kate, but I like my hat anyway. It’s how I represent my English-ness (via marriage) at weddings. And this wedding was particularly extraordinary as we left Harriet at home and went away overnight (and then Stuart spent the wedding being barfed on by someone else’s baby, and I kept hiding in bushes in order to stalk another wedding guest who was exactly Harriet’s age, save for one week). We had criminal amounts of fun, the wedding was fantastic (with no actual wedding component, but with lobster, chicken wings, cupcakes, a live band and swimming), and Harriet had a time just as splendid with her grandmother. And in the twenty-four since we returned home, Harriet has appropriated my hat, clutch purse and high heels, and I don’t think she’ll be returning any of these items anytime soon. (And congratulations to our friends Erica and Alex who sure know how to throw a party!)
