April 6, 2020
We’ve Still Got Weekends
I wrote about “observing the weekend” on Instagram the other day, about the ways that doing so has helped to frame our lives in what is now the fourth week of quarantine during the time of Covid-19. Though it’s probably a good thing to do even at the best of times, and something that I didn’t do enough as I scrambled to finish my work during the brief hours my children’s school day provided and then had to fit in an extra shift or two on Sunday afternoons. And while my time to work is no more plentiful than it ever was (and now steeped in distraction, and anxieties, and I keep insisting on making elaborate lunches), the weekend has become a sacred thing.
On Friday afternoon, I turned my laptop off and didn’t turn it back on until Monday morning. All the weekday rules thrown out the window—dressed and breakfasted by 9am? Pshaw. If you’re not still in your pyjamas on Sunday, 1:30 pm, then you’re doing it wrong. All the breakfasts should be photogenic and totally delicious, and you’re only allowed to read the news if you’re reading an actual NEWSpaper, though you have to read the comics first. The last two Saturdays, we’ve ordered takeout, because a person should only have to orchestrate one photogenic meal a day. There has been a whole lot of sloth, and togetherness, and video games, and reading, which is a pleasure and a break, and makes you even want to pull yourself together once Monday morning rolls around.
Even better than observing the weekend though? Adding a little bit of weekend to the week. A few weeks back, Harriet was having a pretty tough time with our new arrangement of hiding in our house for the foreseeable future in fear of a deadly contagion (kids these days!) and decided that special breakfasts on Wednesday would add a little bit of the magic and delight that has retreated from our lives. We’ve also curled up for a family movie on Monday nights the last two weeks, which would never have happened in any other universe, and seems like a lovely kind of indulgence in this upside-down world.
April 1, 2020
There will be school again, but in the meantime…
I love the things that my children learn at school, like how to read and write their names, do long division, and the geography of the Great Lake St. Lawrence Lowlands. Back before my children went to school, I had tried to teach them things, but none of it ever took. We received a letter before my eldest started kindergarten that suggested her knowing how to write her name before September might be an academic advantage, but she was having none of it. She’d already learned to write an H, and was quite adamant that this was sufficient, and her attitude toward this had me a little bit concerned as her academic career began, but it turned out that what she’d needed was a teacher, someone trained to educate (who knew!) and she eventually learned to write her name in its entirety, and then the whole alphabet, and the last time I checked, she was writing Warriors fan fiction, so it all turned out okay in the end.
Which is not to say that I’ve taught my children nothing. I’ve taught them to separate eggs, how to blow their noses, to sing the words to “Livin’ On A Prayer” and just what circumstances necessitate us to rue the patriarchy. I’ve done my best to teach them to be kind and decent people, to clean up their own messes, to care for others, and to stand up on the side of justice. I’ve taught them the name of birds and flowers and trees (often learning myself in the process) and to love hammocks, sunshine, and digging deep holes on the beach.
It’s the non-academic stuff they’ve learned at school, though, that’s been more important than all of this, even the holes and hammocks, and definitely the long division. I send my kids to school, and deliberately to public school, so they learn that they’re part of a wider community made up of all kinds of people. Going to school teaches them to be punctual, accountable, responsible, respectful. They have teachers they love, and teachers they love…a little less, and they learn that grown-ups, just like their peers, are all kinds of people. They learn how to get along with groups, they learn how to get along with people they don’t get along with, they learn that sometimes you’ve got to do things you don’t want to do, and that sometimes people are disruptive, and others are needy, and others are just totally obnoxious and will never get their comeuppance ever. They learn to return their library books, and not to forget their lunch boxes, and to do required reading, and to help out when assistance is asked of them. They learn that some kids have a little, and others have a lot, and that there is always going to be someone smarter than you are, and also people for whom things like school are a little harder. They learn to be patient. They learn to wait their turn. They learn to stand up for themselves, and for others, and when to let things go, and that there are rules, but not everybody is going to follow them, and sometimes you don’t have to either. The trick is when to know the difference.
And now school is out, for the foreseeable future, and everybody is going to have their own way of filling the gap. Some parents will relish the chance to introduce at-home learning, one’s “playing school” fantasies come to life, but with actual pupils instead of teddy bears. Others will be overwhelmed by the idea of keeping their children occupied, especially while balancing full-time work and other tasks, particularly in spaces that were not designed as daycare centres/offices. Some parents will rise to the challenge. Others will cry on the floor. And here’s my two cents: it doesn’t matter. Do whatever it takes to get you (all) through.
I am not a teacher. If I were a teacher, I’d be immediately de-certified, as attested to by the time I tried to teach my kids to ride a bike by screaming expletives at them. I learned my limits back when I tried and failed to teach my daughter how to write her name, and while my recollection is foggy, I was probably swearing then too. I am not patient. I am not nice. I am not remotely trained in how learning works and skills and knowledge are delivered. Teaching is hard. This is why I am not a teacher. If we tried to replicate the school environment right now, it would go very badly. And not just because of my character flaws even, or that I have work deadlines coming up, but also because everything in our current situation is so far from school that it’s sad, and maybe Zoom lessons have their purpose (my children are doing piano lessons via Skype that are going well so far!) but I can think of a million better ways for my children to spend their time.
Going to school is an opportunity for so much learning beyond the academic, as I’ve already noted. But so too is this moment in which school and everything has been suspended. To learn about science, and public health, and geography, and sociology, and leadership (an also its absence). To think about the different ways that this virus is affecting everybody so differently, from us who are cozy in our apartment to children who are precariously housed and who might not be safe at home. To think about community, and connection, and what it means to have to isolate ourselves from the people around us. What kind of society do we want to build when all this is over? (We had a conversation the other day about how so many things that would make the virus less dangerous—wider sidewalks, say!—would make things better for everyone.) Right now is an opportunity to cook meals together, and eat them properly at the table, and bake banana bread, and draw on the sidewalk with chalk. To read that book that’s been lingering on the shelf for years. To use all the art and science kits you’ve received for birthdays through the ages, but never had the time for. For puzzles, and YouTube karaoke, and reading comics, and having your mother tell you that “Only boring people get bored.” For observing the weather, and watching crocuses sprout in front of neighbours houses, and watching snails on the garden wall. For writing Warriors fan fiction, even, or reading poetry, or starting a blog. For building blanket forts, and Lego towers, and I’d even say learning to knit, but then I’d have to teach them, and you know how that is going to go.
For spending afternoons in the bathtub in your bathing suit (this was my husband’s idea—he called it a “bathternoon”), and planting seeds in egg carton soil, and reading random entries in the encyclopedia, and making collages out of old magazines, and drawing comics on the back of scrap paper, and learning about tarsiers (which apparently are nasty), and playing UNO, and Pokemon, and drawing city blocks on kraft paper, and watching clouds, and drawing trees, and making disappointing bath bombs from a kit. For watching movies, and TV, and riding scooters in circles on concrete pads which are far too limited for such things.
For learning about courage, and resilience, and sacrifice, and gratitude. For counting blessings, and thinking about how maybe we can distribute these more widely.
We will get through this. There will be school again. But in the meantime, there will be something different, and let’s not discount the educational value in what we’re all going through. As my perpetual fave Ann Douglas wrote the other day, “If our kids emerge from this crisis (a) feeling loved and supported by their parents; and (b) mastering some all-important coping skills, the truly important learning—the life learning—will be massive.”
February 4, 2020
Discovering Emily
“Everybody loves Anne, but I like Emily. She’s dark.” —Russian Doll
It was a year ago now that I was swept along in the enthusiasm for the Netflix series Russian Doll, starring Natasha Lyonne, a strange and enigmatic show in which the novel Emily of New Moon featured as a major plot point. Which was just as weird and curious as everything about the show, and it put Emily on my radar for the first time in years. Emily, a second-tier Anne of Green Gables, I’d always supposed, the case not helped by the cover of the Seal paperback that featured prominently in my childhood, which is basically just Anne with different coloured braids.
This specific copy is stolen from the library of the school where I attended Grade 7 and 8. I am not sure exactly if I was the thief, but somehow this ended up in a box in my mom’s basement and I brought it home not long ago, because of Russian Doll.
In childhood, Emily was wasted on me. I know that I read the whole series because I’m now just one chapter away from rereading Emily of New Moon (have been reading it aloud to my family for the past couple of months) and remember parts of the story from when Emily is a bit older, which is mainly her totally gross relationship with the much-older Dean Priest. I know I read the whole series, because I was an L.M. Montgomery completist, but it mostly just left me with questions. Like what was up with Dean Priest? (Upon reread, I still don’t know the answer to this.) Where exactly was Stovepipe Town? And “the flash.” I didn’t understand “the flash.” Emily of New Moon was Anne of Green Gables, but weirder. Emily is dark—Russian Doll was right. And as a young reader, I didn’t have the understanding to appreciate that, or to appreciate the novel properly at all.
But it’s so good. The takeaway from our family read is this. The number of times I’ve come to the end of a paragraph and stopped reading, and everybody starts yelling at me, “No, no. Come on! Keep going! What happens next?” The story itself a bit overwrought and melodramatic, but not to the detriment of the reader’s enjoyment. And not without a sense of humour either—when Emily eats the poisoned apple! The ghost in the walls at Nancy Priest’s house! A cast of characters so firmly realized that when the narrative notes that Perry Miler would be the leader of Canada one day, my children asked me if this had actually transpired. And I don’t want to knock Anne, but Emily’s friends are so much more interesting that Diana. Foul-mouthed Ilse Burnley (and the mystery of her runaway mother), and Perry (who in one scene hangs naked from the kitchen ceiling), and Teddy Kent with his suffocating mother who drowns his cats because she can’t bear that he loves anything but her.
Emily is a fantastic character, up there with Harriet M. Welch as a person whose boldness and will I’d like to channel. Where Anne Shirley was desperate for love and to be liked, Emily has spent most of her childhood in the care of a doting father who gave her a remarkable inheritance, an indelible sense of herself. She knows her worth and her value, and when others don’t, she sees it more as a reflection on them than on her. Even when she arrives at New Moon, where she is an outsider (her mother years ago had run away from her family there to marry her father), she is able to draw on the traditions of her mother’s family and their heritage to further shape her own identity. She knows who she is, and where she came from, which gives her an impressively strong foundation to build her self upon.
Her steadfastness is so admirable, and curious in a child. There is an uncannyness to her character that makes even the most sensible grown-ups uncomfortable, and this tension makes for fascinating reading. And so does the action—Montgomery channels the same gothic darkness here that made her The Blue Castle so delicious, but the novel is also filled with light and the pleasures of everyday. I love the chatty and mundane letters Emily has written to her late father, which reminded me of my favourite parts of another Montgomery novel I loved, The Road to Yesterday (in fact The Golden Road! The LM Montgomery Society kindly corrected me on Twitter) in which a group of cousins put together a newspaper. And I think Aunt Elizabeth might be my favourite Montgomery character since Marilla Cuthbert.
January 27, 2020
Free. But Haunted.
Farewell to our garage-sale acquired breadbox, which has been part of our family for the last decade. And never actually had bread in it very often, but was mostly used as a storage cupboard for odds and ends, and crackers, and coffee filters. And whose most salient feature was its tendency to have its door fall open just after something had been placed on the counter in front of it—last week, I lost a Pyrex bowl of egg-whites. (The bowl, mercifully, survived.) Several wine glasses being used by visiting friends also met their demise in such a fashion, and caused considerable embarrassment for all involved. I took to taping the breadbox shut when we had people over, which worked, but it still managed to catch us unaware. A poltergeist? (Or an ineffective bolt? But that’s boring…) And then yesterday, or next-door neighbour brought us over her breadbox, which is of a similar vintage (albeit without those delightful flowers). They’ve given up gluten and just had their kitchen remodelled, so the breadbox was redundant, so they passed it on, and now ours is the redundant one. We’ve put it out on the curb, but with a warning post-it. There are have been no takers. YET.
January 23, 2020
Ten Years
I had some strange feelings about reflecting on the 2010s, mostly because I didn’t. There was a meme going around Instagram stories on New Year’s Eve in which we were supposed to list a highlight from each year, and I even tried to post it, but couldn’t figure out how to get the text to fit, which maybe means that the 2010s were the decade in which I stopped being technologically savvy.
But also, the years all blend together, and so much stayed the same. The decade before was much more filled with upheaval and revolution (they were my 20s after all) but in the 2010s were where the pieces started to fit. I stopped having babies, I began to have something like a career, I finally started publishing books, I made some wonderful new friendships, and maintained old ones. It’s been good, but the decade itself, its distinction, just seems particularly arbitrary. Like—even more than a decade should.
Or do I only think that because when the decade started, I was sitting in the very same place that I’m sitting right now?
Okay. not the exact same place. (We finally bought a new couch, remember?) But the same address, our apartment, which we moved into twelve years ago this April, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. I moved in as half of a young married couple, and now I’ve got two kids and I’m forty, and have been married almost 15 years. The little kids who lived next door moved out and went to university, and then moved back in again, although it didn’t do me much good when they did, because now they’re too old to babysit. But, as the middle section of To the Lighthouse, so astutely put it: Time Passes.
Imagining our own story as told from the perspective of the house as Woolf does in her novel (except with less war and death). The people coming and going, coats and jackets hung up on hooks and taken down again, early morning alarm clocks and dinners, and house guests, and holidays, and the quiet weeks where we’ve all gone away, and coming home again, an explosion of luggage, and the babies arriving, and late nights with the lights on while the world sleeps, and the babies grow, and all the books that come in and those that go back out again (returned to the library, or left on the garden walls for any takers), and the birthday parties, play dates, first day of schools, pencilled lines in the door-frame measuring from small to tall, and boots and shoes and sandals in a pile at the door, and the triumphs and disappointments, throughout anxiety and contentment, and these walls have contained it all. Even as spare rooms turned into nurseries and cribs turned into bunk-beds, and empty space turned into clutter—Lego, puzzles, and play-doh—and that ring on the carpet from where I put down a teapot and it melted. How places seem to hold us, even more than time does, and how a single place can hold so much, and so can a life.
October 31, 2019
How to Organize a Literary Event in 48 Hours
More than a month ago, I emailed my friend Nathalie and asked her if she’d attend the Toronto Public Library event with Christy Ann Conlin, Megan Gail Coles and Elisabeth de Mariaffi, and she replied with an enthusiastic YES, as you would, with a lineup like that. But then the event was cancelled after the Toronto Library was called on to cancel its provision of space to a speaker whose hate-speech about trans people is just one of the many awful things about her, and they refused. And so many authors and artists have cancelled their Toronto Library event in solidarity with the trans community, which is important and the right thing to do—but it also means that Christy Ann Conlin was coming to Toronto all the way from Nova Scotia for her very first reading in the city, and she had no event booked. So what to do?
I hadn’t properly understood the situation until Monday, or else I would have stepped up sooner, but once I’d figured it out, it wasn’t long before I had my inspiration. Right in the middle of dinner, in fact. “What would you think” I asked my husband, “about us having twenty people over for a literary event in our living room?” And my husband was so excited about me having a wild inspiration for which he would not be obligated to build a website that he agreed without hesitation. And so I sent an email to Christy Ann in Nova Scotia, and once she said she was in, there was just one more email to set the wheels in motion.
I had to email Nathalie and ask if she would be up for some custom mixology—and she agreed. Thank heavens, because everybody knows you can’t have a party without an official cocktail… (Nathalie invented three different cocktails, all with Nova Scotia spirits: “Minas Basin,” “It All Went Pear-Shaped,” and “Juniper and Apple Shrub.”)
And next, we needed people to fill my living room in 48 hours notice, but they came, a wonderful collection of generous, book loving people who were happy to welcome Christy Ann to Toronto. They filled my home with the most wonderful bookish spirit (and all got to take home custom Watermark soap from Hen of the Woods—what a treat!).
It was wonderful! Friends and neighbours came, a literary community of amazing readers and writers, including Christy Ann fans who I got to meet for the first time, plus a very exciting guest—Amy Spurway, of Crow fame, who was in town for the author’s festival. We ate food, sipped delicious drinks, made great conversation, listened to Christy Ann read from Watermark, and I got to ask her questions about her career and her book, and she was just so kind, and gracious and terrific. Throughly entertaining and delightful, and we were all so lucky to be part of it together, but me most of all, because I got to experience it without leaving the house.
September 17, 2019
Waffles, Waffles, Waffles
One of the things I am most proud of and amazed at having accomplished in my life is a Baby Book for my second-born child. I was never going to be a perfect mother, and being a second child definitely would inevitably suck in all kinds of ways (secondhand snowsuits, no one appreciating the miraculousness of things like you knowing how to roll over, and basically not being bathed for two years) but at least she was going to have a Baby Book, a record of those precious blurry days. Though it was less of a burden for me to assemble than it might have been for other mothers of two—her elder sister was all the way to four by then, and I also spent the first three months of her life on co-parenting duty instead of struggling alone because my husband had taken parental leave, which meant time for naps, and books, and writing down all the things that we’d never remember.
When Iris was two, I added a whole page of notes to the Baby Book, though she was not a baby anymore. But it seemed like there were more things worth remembering then, once she was able to speak, and her remarkable personality had formed. “Things Iris Says,” was how I’d titled this page, along with the date, and I turned to this page just the other day when Iris had brought her Baby Book down from the shelf (and how glad I am that she has a Baby Book, that I bothered to put the effort in. Both my children are so fascinated with their baby selves, and will look at all records of their early periods in a way that’s inexhaustible).
“Things Iris Says,” I read aloud, excited to see what forgotten treasures might emerge from this time capsule, but then. Oh. Almost everything that Iris said when she was two had basically found its way into our family vernacular, and it’s how we all talk all the time now. (Perhaps when I say “we all,” I just mean me.) “Atcheam,” for ice-cream, and “fuff-eye” instead of “butterfly.” And “ra-see-see-wah” for rice krispie square. But then Iris is a little bit like this, in our family as well as in her own peer group. Totally weird, completely absurd, and at first, we’re like, “What are you doing?” And then it doesn’t take long before we’re doing it too.
But really, I want to talk about Teen Titans and waffles. Not that I have actually ever watched Teen Titans Go, but it’s Iris’s favourite show, and somehow without me ever having actually watched it, it’s seeped into my DNA, and I think it’s also the inspiration behind what became our family’s new year’s resolution for 2019, which was Get a Waffle Maker. Part of our pattern of Keep the Stakes Low to Avoid Disappointment. If you package up all your dreaming in the hopes of picking up a secondhand waffle maker from Value Village for $6, things are probably going to work out fine.
Get a Waffle Maker became our family dream because there is a song from Teen Titans Go about waffles—like most things about Teen Titans Go, it’s catchy and also extremely annoying. I am also very impressionable, particularly when it comes to glutinous goods, and so eventually, I had waffles on the brain, perpetually. We got our waffle maker sometime in January, which means our annual goal was achieved, and as a family we could just sit back and relax and be delighted by having accomplished what we set out to do. And make waffles every Sunday.
The waffle maker has been a game changer. I used to make pancakes every Sunday, and they were good, but lots of work, and also results would vary. But now the waffle maker does all the work for me, in way less time, and all I need to do is pour the batter in and then read the newspaper and drink my tea while waiting for the light to turn green—so simple. I am partial to Smitten Kitchen’s Buttermilk Waffle recipe. I am also partial to adding poppyseeds and millet to everything. Waffles, waffles, waffles, indeed. I love them, their taste, and neat geometry, and how leftovers could be turned into cream cheese jam sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunches, and all the places where our children’s preoccupations take us.
Even if just to the appliance section at the secondhand store. Hooray for being goal-oriented.
August 19, 2019
I Found an Egg Beater
Of all the machines in a kitchen, the egg beater has always been my favourite, and while the electric version has its advantages (the beaters detach for optimum licking), it’s the manual (or “rotary”, like a phone dial, both rotating around an axis) that has long been an object of my fascination, even though I’d be wary of getting my tongue stuck in a thing like that. Probably I wasn’t, however, when I was a child.
But my children have never seen an egg beater, which a) explains some of the trouble they’ve had in swimming lessons and b) was confirmed to me when Iris and I were reading a book in which an egg beater featured, and Iris only shrugged. I’d had an electric egg beater once upon a time, but I got rid of it when I got my first stand mixer over ten years ago, and back then the children were not yet in existence.
And then we were at Value Village on Saturday, exploring kitchenware, which is one of my favourite things to do. And it had occurred to me that I like exploring kitchenware at Value Village just as much when I don’t discover any treasure as I do when the search yields a new Pyrex bowl or midcentury crockery (I am mad for midcentury crockery) because when I don’t find anything, it means I don’t have go about locating a place to put it in my very crowded kitchen.
But I found an egg beater, in fact there were two—in additional to so many cocktail utensil sets. There are too many cocktail utensil sets in the world, and also George Forman grills, but we’re not yet overrun with rotary egg beaters, so I chose the one that wasn’t rusty, even if there were pieces missing from the plastic handles on the other. (Why corrupt such a wonderful object with plastic anyway?)
Iris was overjoyed to recognize the object, and then everybody started fighting over who gets to turn the handle and make the wheel turn, and we hadn’t even paid for it at this point. But it is so satisfying, the whir of the blades, the smoothness of the motion, the perpetualness of it. How I use my own energy to turn the handle, which makes the big wheel spin, whose grooves connect with the two little gears atop the beaters, and what genius thought of such a perfect machine? (Willis Johnson, according to the BBC, in 1884.)
“It’s an amazing thing,” I told my kids. “It doesn’t use any energy, and you can even make a cake when the power’s gone out.”
And then Iris came up to me hours later, as though she’d been thinking about this throwaway comment. “How do you see when you’re baking in the dark?” she asked me. “When the lights are out.”
But how do we even turn the oven on at that point? (We have a gas oven. Perhaps it might work?) I imagine us making a soufflé by candlelight.
In 48 hours, we’ve used the egg beater twice, to whip egg-whites for the Sunday waffles, and Iris got to do that because Harriet was playing Nintendo. And then yesterday evening I was making muffins for the week’s lunches, and Harriet wanted a turn, and then the two of them started fighting because Harriet was going too fast and all the eggs were getting beaten, and it really is such a clever little gadget, no matter that it’s disrupted family harmony.
Better than a fidget spinner—I could run that thing all day.
June 20, 2019
It’s Pretty Easy, Being Green
The following is a list of changes our family has made to our purchase habits and lifestyle over the past couple of years in order to live a greener life. I write them down here to inspire other people to follow suit, and hope you will leave a note with any other green habits of your own that I might be able to put into practice.
- Soapberries instead of laundry soap, available for sale at Bulk Barn. (I also air dry most of my laundry to conserve energy.) For stains, I have a bar of old-fashioned laundry soap (also from Bulk Barn) and it’s really effective.
- Using baking soda for washing dishes (we don’t have a dishwasher). We still buy dish-soap but it’s used for approximately 1/4 of dishwashings, and a single bottle lasts for ages.
- Buying bar soap (which we always did anyway because liquid hand-soap is for millionaires!)
- Buying glass jars instead of plastic food containers, when possible—we get Pinebridge Yogurt now and it’s also delicious. Buying cream cheese in the cardboard packet instead of plastic container, etc. Would love to find a non-plastic way to buy cottage cheese though!
- Buying ice cream in biodegradable containers (and bonus: Chapmans and Kawartha Dairy are sold in these and are both pretty local!)
- We bring water bottles everywhere instead of buying juice or water in plastic bottles
- Reusable cups for hot beverages! We bought Keep Cups a few years ago, and bring them everywhere we go. When I lost my lid, I was able to order a replacement.
- I don’t use the plastic produce bags from the grocery store, and have reusable mesh bags instead. When I don’t remember to bring them, I just let my sweet potatoes roll around naked.
- We stopped buying paper towels and napkins, and instead bought up a boat load of secondhand reusable cloth napkins. We also have cloth diapers left over from long long ago that double as paper towels, except that they may outlive us all.
- Bringing our own food containers for take-out. We thought they’d think we were weird, but if they did they didn’t mention it…
- Reusing bread bags and other such things for freezing food and for lining our kitchen compost bin
- We banned plastic wrap! I thought I would miss it as I used it for zesting lemons and it was really useful in this way, but zesting is all right without it, and there are plenty of less plastic ways to cover food for storage.
- I replaced our shower curtain with a polyester machine-washable one and didn’t buy a liner. The shower curtain still keeps water from going all over the floor, and dries quickly.
What to work on? I tried bar shampoo, but it did my hair no favours, and so I went back to bottled—I only wash my hair twice a week anyway—but would like to find a non-plastic solution. Deodorant and dental products remain a huge source of plastics waste in our house. And several kinds of fruit and veg arrive in those non-recyclable black plastic containers, or the plastic tubs that mushrooms come in and we need less of that. Finally, I would love to do more shopping at one of those no-packaging stores (shampoo! Vegetable oil!) but we don’t have one nearby.
Further Problems: The burden of solutions to environmental problems cannot fall on individuals alone. In addition to cutting down on waste, we also need to be electing politicians who are willing to tackle this issue and stop putting corporate interests first—and then holding our leaders to account.
January 16, 2019
This is Not a Metaphor
I understood it as a metaphor: it is okay to fall. It is okay to fall, to flail, to plummet. As much as can be expected from an ordinary human, I know this. I have lived it. Accepting, and even embracing, imperfection and failure has been key to any success I’ve managed to achieve along the way. But I have never managed to embrace this idea on a concrete level, concrete being the word, which is a hard and painful surface to have one’s body strike even at a moderate velocity. And it doesn’t even have to be concrete—for a few winters midway through my childhood, I used to go skiing, and I hated it, the terror. Where is the pleasure of sending one’s fragile physical self down a steep icy hill? I used to weave my way down slowly, slowly, repeated the mantra: Please don’t let me die. And then one day I occurred to me that I didn’t actually have to endure this anymore, so I didn’t. Why would I?
I took up ice skating four years ago with my daughter, who was five at the time. The task of teaching her to skate would fall to me, because it turned out I was the best skater in the family, even though I hadn’t skated in 25 years and never really enjoyed it as a child. Winter sports are not my thing. Sports in general even really aren’t, but at least in summer it’s not cold. I have memories of skating on canals when I was little, and these are mostly memories of freezing. And sore ankles. I mean, at least with skating you aren’t sending yourself down the edges of icy mountains, and the fall is never going to be so far. But still, there is falling. Even worse, there is fear of falling.
But for the last four years, I’ve been trying to commit to enjoying the winter outdoors, and skating has been part of that. It’s fun. Of course, I don’t enjoy skating as much as I enjoy having skated, which is my favourite part of the process, followed by hot chocolate. But I like it, and it’s free, and it’s been interesting to relearn an old trick, and to be learning alongside my daughter. I think it sets a good example for her too to see that acquiring new skills is not just the jurisdiction of children, and is important to keep doing this throughout one’s life. Her father and her sister have since joined in our skating life, all of us learning together. Harriet now gives me a run for my money as the best skater in the family, and last night Iris skated around the rink multiple times without holding onto my hand at all.
But we are slow. We are slow, and we skate in terror of those fast skaters who weave in and out among us slowpokes, or else the little kids who are skating haphazardly in the wrong direction and moving right into our path without consideration for the fact that none of us actually knows how to stop. None of us skate with ease, although my children have a bit more ease than I do because they’re more comfortable with falling. They’re closer to the ground anyway, and they’re fundamentally bouncy and less breakable, and with all the padding from their snowsuits they’re well protected. Neither of them likes falling, but it happens, and that’s okay.
I, however, have never fallen. Hardly something to brag about, because I’ve only never fallen because I’ve never being moving fast enough. From the metaphor, I know that the only people who never fall are people who’ve never been high enough to do so. As a skater, I am so cautious, nervous. I have been skating for four years with so much fear of falling—and then last night it finally happened.
I skated over a leaf, a dead leaf that had blown onto the ice, and I don’t know why it so destabilized me, but I felt it, the ground no longer steady beneath my feet. “It’s finally happening,” I realized, and there was so much time to think as it did. A brief attempt at re-finding my balance, but then then it was all over, and down I went. Landing with a spectacular crash on my bottom, which was better than my head taking the impact, or my wrists. “And it’s actually okay,” is what I was thinking as I lay there on my ice, except it wasn’t entirely because I’d knocked my littlest daughter over in the process (let’s not make a metaphor out of that, okay?) and she was screaming. Attracting the attention of the ice skating attendant, who came over to see if she was okay, and, “She’s fine, she’s fine,” I said, dismissing her pain. (But she was fine. Walk it off.) And then he helped me up, and I was almost euphoric, so much so that I forgot to even be humiliated.
Because the very worst thing had happened: I had fallen. And I hadn’t fractured my elbow or even sprained my wrist, or received a concussion. I didn’t break or shatter, which is what I’d always imagined. That I was fragile—but it turns out my body is stronger than I thought. And there really isn’t even a lesson beyond that—I’m still going to skate slowly, I’m not thirsting for opportunities to fall down again. It wasn’t like one of those Instagram memes where I thought I was falling, but it turned out to be flight, because it definitely wasn’t flight as I lay there on the Dufferin Grove Ice Rink staring up at the glow of the artificial lights. It was falling, but it was fine.
