January 31, 2022

To Hold This Falling-Apartness

“We are at a time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like, and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalist, then whatever do today will have a positive effect on the future.” —Pema Chodran, Welcoming the Unwelcome

In September I wrote about the end of (my own) political contempt, about the way my ideas had shifted in the last few years politically speaking, my awareness that responding to political polarization and enmity with more of the same was only serving to make a bad problem worse and definitely wasn’t making anything better. I don’t know what the answer is to our current political divide, but I definitely know that digging in my heels, and burning bridges, and dying on hills, etc. isn’t it.

I will not meet rage and fury with rage and fury, because I am absolutely finished playing such a self-defeating game.

Instead, I take a deep breath, summon my inner Pema, and breathe out a genuine wish that those furious and foolish-seeming people on Parliament Hill (the ones who seem to be comfortable standing in the company of extremists and hatemongers; I’m going to imagine there is a distinction) and all those keyboard warriors who are sympathetic toward those protesters will somehow find relief from their anger and start looking for more meaningful ways to engage with their neighbours and their communities.

I will continue to direct my attention and efforts towards connecting with real people in my own community, instead of playing the unwinnable game of online arguments. (The game is rigged, you know. Engaging with bad content just boosts bad content. And listen, I’ve had to learn this the hard way.)

I remind myself that one news story is not the whole world and while egregious behaviour was taking place this weekend, all across the country there were people doing great work to get people vaccinated, to support their neighbours in need, and others were meeting friends, immersing themselves in nature, supporting local businesses, that most truckers were out there doing their jobs and keeping things going, and first responders were showing up, and nurses and doctors were continuing to do their jobs under such harrowing conditions as they’ve done throughout the last two years (although I am so happy to hear that Covid hospitalization rates are continuing to fall) and that from coast to coast to coast, people were doing things like visiting the library, and planning their gardens (because spring is on the horizon) and roasting marshmallows around a campfire with friends (that was me!).

None of this is to minimize the harm of what’s going on, but it’s definitely an effort not to maximize it. Attention is a legitimizing force, and I’m not playing that game either.

January 28, 2022

All Is Well, by Katherine Walker

The premise of Katherine Walker’s debut novel, All is Well, hooked me immediately: Christine Wright, former special forces agent and a recovering alcoholic, is settling into her near career as church minister when things go wrong and she ends up with a body to dispose of.

There’s a novel I’ve certainly never read before.

There’s also the sentient candlestick with ties back to Julian of Norwich, the excellent women who do the behind-the-scenes work at the church, the deranged vegan nurse with a daughter named after pate, the military policeman who’s intent on bringing Christine down, and all of Christine’s own demons resulting from childhood trauma and a military operation in which three members of her team were killed.

I loved this book, which is heartfelt and hilarious. A little bit screwball, and more than a little mystical, kicking at the margins of plausibility, but it works, it’s so novel, and so cleverly executed. No matter how determined Christine is to be at a remove, to not let anybody glimpse her vulnerability, Walker writes her character’s way right into the reader’s heart and the emotion is real, if everything else becomes something of a farce as the church community begins to grow and change, manifesting into something extraordinary under Christine’s tenure, in spite of all her attempts to stay under the radar.

No doubt this is a novel wholly imagined but informed by its author’s experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy and as a graduate student in divinity, which results in a really thoughtful foundation to this comic novel. This is one of those “fasten your seat-belt and hold on” novels, because it all moves pretty fast, but All is Well is also a book that’s rich in meaning, about trauma, and healing, and the possibilities of redemption.

Don’t miss it.

January 28, 2022

The Present

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being in the present, on noticing what is happening without judgement or value. I went to a routine check-up on Wednesday and ended up getting (what is likely to be) a routine biopsy on my neck, and I really worked hard to lean into the moment. To consider what was interesting about being brutalized in such a physically uncomfortable fashion. I’ve been working very hard to exist in the present moment rather than my mind rushing me recklessly into a thoroughly unknown future, whether with dread or even just excited anticipation. Yes, I am looking forward to summer, but in the meantime, I want to be here right now. I even want to be okay here right now, instead of waiting for some hypothetical moment when everything is easier and different. I am tired of looking for light at the end of the tunnel instead of being present where I am.

And I’ve been thinking a lot too about perceptions. I just finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, which I loved, and which is about all this. How social media “systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things…” I was walking home from my medical appointment on a cold but very sunny Wednesday and feeling good, and wondering how that sense is informed by the fact that a month or so ago I was feel really bad, and just the relief of not being there anymore brings on a buzz that’s kind of like bliss. How much my picture of the world is influenced by things like that, and by hormones, and if I’m hungry, and the flow of traffic, and how happy my child might be at any specific moment. By the fact that I’m off Twitter, and I’ve muted anybody’s stories on Instagram who posts about Covid, and that the sun is out, oh my goodness, is there anything else that matters as much as the fact the sun is out?

January 26, 2022

Why I Talked to My Kids When I Was Struggling With Mental Health

In mid-December, when I hit my omicron wall and my mental health crumbled, it was important to me that my kids knew what was going on.

And not just because there was no hiding it. I’m not stoic at the best of times, but when the stakes are high, there’s no disguising my feelings. And I knew that any effort to keep from them what I was going through was only going to seem strange and mostly likely create far more alarm than merely acknowledging reality ever would.

So I told them. I said, “This isn’t your problem, but you need to know what I’m going through. I’m having a really hard time with my feelings and I need help and support to get better. And fixing me is not your job at all, but I need some understanding from you for that to happen.”

I told them I’d be calling the doctor and finding different ways to manage my stress. I told them, “This is what’s happening, and I’m telling you because you deserve to know and because I know you’re smart enough to get it.”

They were smart enough. And I was grateful too for the example I was setting for them, for de-stigmatizing mental health struggles and talking about these as I’d do with any other health issue. I was showing them what reaching out for support looks like, and I was also hoping that I’d eventually be able to show them that these things do get better. They would see that admitting that you need help can be what strength looks like, and I was also giving them the opportunity to rise to the occasion and be the kind and loving people that they are.

It’s a delicate balance. I am a parent and they are my children, but our relationships are still built on love and mutual respect, and these relationships are reciprocal. And yet at the same time, it’s not their job to take care of me. I don’t ever want them to feel the responsibility of that, or to worry that their own needs were being neglected as I was focusing on my own well-being. (I am fortunate too to have the support of their dad, and my family, and our community so that there is room for me to to focus on both.)

In order for me to be able to properly take care of them though, I had to take care of my own self first, and they understood that.

It helped that my fallibility was not news to them, and I was building on years of imperfection—my mental health crisis was really just more of the same!

I think some of the greatest lessons we teach our children involve showing them what it’s like to be human and to live with humans, for better or for worse.

January 25, 2022

J is for Junk Store

If you’ve been around here for a long time, you’ll know that I started a project in 2011 in which I took photos of my child reenacting scenes from Allan Moak’s Toronto ABC book, published as a big city abc in 1984 (on the occasion of Toronto’s sesquicentennial!) and A Big City Alphabet in 2009—I have both copies! But because the alphabet is just as big as the city is, the project remains incomplete. We went skating at Nathan Phillips Square over the holidays, which inspired me to pick the books off the shelf and revisit R is for Rink, and then we realized a few letters were still outstanding, J is for Junk Store among them. Mostly because junk stores are not exactly FLOURISHING in our current commercial real estate market…but then again we haven’t done W is for Winter either, and winter is sure going strong. The other day, however, we walked past this weird store on the corner of College and Lippincott which I don’t think has ever been open, and realized it fit the bill, so here we are. One more letter. At this rate, the project should be completed by the time my children are through their teens.

January 25, 2022

Gleanings

• And so I play to play. I ski to ski. It’s joy. I feel good doing it.
• Doing nothing, I have come to appreciate, is a pastime. And a worthy one, at that.
• At such times, she knew, you must just put on spiritual dungarees and remain in them until things are running smoothly again. 
• I am reading the last of Willis’ Time Travelling Historians series and it’s perfection and maybe while reading To Say Nothing of the Dog is when I got my idea….
• The Sargasso Sea is, unusually, bordered by four ocean currents and has no shores.
• Still, during a January that feels interminable, I decided to toy with adding a bit of color into our lives (and to finally fix a hinge that’s been broken for the past year and a half).
• What’s it like to live in long-term care during a Covid outbreak?
• the impossible, unreasonable, but inescapable feeling that I should have been able to comfort him, to hold him, to save him.
• After ignoring my body for so many years, I am not cued into the messages it sends me. I can feel aches, sore muscles, and even butterflies in my stomach, and yet remain clueless as to their origin.
• I’m delighted that more and more people are back blogging or have resumed ones they had abandoned.
• But I guess some of my river systems (the way I’m thinking of the quilting) have meandered and idled and I’ve finished my spools.
• Today I set my intention for 2022 – to be good enough.
• Does anyone else wonder whether the universe orchestrated this eclectic mix of departures?
• Look at it! It’s so intriguing. Published by a wartime reprint house, it’s small enough to tuck into a pocket, and warns that titles in this series may soon be out of print due to paper shortages – talk about stimulating demand. 
• But what might become possible if I choose a different story of needing others, of there being nothing to prove, of re-framing and reconsidering the narrative that has been created around the word “dependence” and “dependent.”
• Bones are big how exactly? And compared to what? Compared to the societal ideal that women should take up as little space as possible?
• Maybe it sounds morbid, but you know Fanny Howe was correct. I won’t be able to tell you what I love when I’m gone
• It can be moving without being perfect.
• We preferred if people called us intelligent or interesting. Or even cranky or cantankerous or grouchy. But never ‘nice’. 

January 24, 2022

Shooting Stars!

Just a fun round-up of Waiting for a Star to Fall out and about in the world—including a review in the latest issue of Herizons!

January 20, 2022

On Resting

I am not very busy right now, and I’m leaning into it. I spent the second half of December really struggling with mental health, and then picked up my first bad cold in nearly two years on January 3 (maybe Schrodinger’s Covid? Rapid test was negative, but who really knows, though it doesn’t matter oh so much since everything in the province had already shut down anyway), and now the entire city has been covered with 50cm of snow, followed by above freezing temps, and then freezing again, so that the world is a solid block of ice, and I’m going to take that as a message from the universe that I’m probably well served by staying close to home.

I’ve been easing back into my work with 49thShelf, but going slower than usual. I submitted a draft of my novel in December and so the “writing a novel” space in my schedule has opened right up, and I’m keeping it that way. I was pushing my MAKE THE LEAP blogging course for February, but not getting any response…which is not so surprising considering how everyone is entering this new year uncertain and depleted (what if I made ANOTHER course called LIE DOWN ON THE FLOOR instead?) And have just decided to take that space as a gift, spaciousness being a theme in my mindset these days. For there to be room to breathe, to think, to sleep, to do nothing. I’m reading Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chodran, which accords with these ideas. To create space for letting the world in instead of trying to fight it, to submit instead of resist. To open my heart and let life happen—because it was always going to happen anyway.

I spent the Christmas holidays not exercising at all, because just didn’t have the energy for it, and this not pushing myself was new to me, and it was neat because two weeks later I started exercising again and it was because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to. So giving myself space to rest, to be still, to not perpetually being driven to go go go. Which, counter-intuitively, gave me the space to want to go again.

I’m not a huge embracer of the idea of “rest” in theory (while I like it in practice), mostly because everyone who’s talking about it sounds very obnoxious and has jobs like “pet therapist” which means there’s not so much to rest from anyway, and I’m also wary of anything that people are talking about instead of just shutting up and doing. But oh, how excellent doing rest has been for me. Perhaps there’s something to it.

January 19, 2022

Book News!

I’m thrilled to share news that my third novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND, is coming Spring 2023 from Doubleday Canada. It’s a story of friendship over decades and how motherhood complicates that connection, at times drawing friends together,  other times pushing them apart, and how IMPOSSIBLE it seems sometimes to find other women making different choices from one’s own. This is a story that I’ve been working on for a very long time and I’m so thrilled for the opportunity to finally share it with you!

I’m grateful to Samantha Haywood and her team at Transatlantic for their work on the deal, and to the wonderful Bhavna Chauhan for having me back for another book.
 

January 19, 2022

Voices

In Autumn 2020, I had to quit twitter because its chatter about school reopening and politicization of such things had made ordinary life impossible for me. Too many voices, too many egos, and the issue had become a power struggle instead of a project our communities had to partake in together. (Twitter also works to undermine public trust—in public health, in each other. And that’s bad news.)

And now, all these months later, I’m very glad I was able to get those voices out of my head, to keep things simple, to follow public health advice and send my children back to school today without the decision being an agonizing one, which has been the case for parents in so many other jurisdictions all along.

Every time our children have returned to school in Ontario, the rhetoric has been over the top, but never more than now. And is it now that such a reaction is finally justified? As ever, I don’t know. But also no one does. And if things are different this time, I can’t help but think of how much real currency was wasted by politicization, by advocates failing to be measured and careful in their responses to what was actually happening on the ground over the last two years.

Social media is brutal, friends. Last week several super smart people I know shared a post about an edited/out of context quote by CDC’s Dr Walensky regarding the deaths of people with comorbidities as “good news”. While people were advocating against ableism, they were also spreading misinformation and furthering right wing propaganda. It’s so easy to be played.

Unless you are actually a public health official, it really might be a good idea to unplug from all this and often. Talk to the actual people in your life—your family doctor, even. Beware of stats and clips devoid of their context. Be thoughtful about what you share online. Be curious. Ask questions. But also do your best to trust the people who know things when they give you answers.

I’m wishing good things for all of us in the weeks ahead, ESPECIALLY our kids.