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.

January 18, 2022

Gleanings

• Compare these two sentences: “My feelings are hurt.” versus “You hurt my feelings.”
• I stretch, starfished across the bed. What shall I do with this day, I wonder?
• We can’t turn off our fear of these unknowns. But here’s what I do know: It’s time to untangle morality from health. For our kids and for ourselves. 
• Why do I hate asking for help, SO MUCH?? And here’s where things get ugly. Because I think I know the answer, and I don’t like it.
• In my experience, the most dramatic of the mama bears are those with the least realistic threats—the White, privileged moms, like me, who are used to getting things our way.
• For years, she was a jumble sale of smocked Liberty dresses, stripy leggings, glittery shoes and some ridiculously large flower on her noggin.
• So I’m having my bubblebath, this little self-care ritual that is really just a drop in the bucket of self-care that we all need, but at least it’s something, and I’d been wondering about how one even goes about collectively or as a group thinking-things-through these day when we’re all so separate.
• Yes, people wax on about how rewarding parenting is, and it is, but sometimes you can’t see that until later. Sometimes you’re so much into the just doing and coping and wondering and worrying above all else if you’re getting it right.
• The amount of this time stretch right now is practically imperceptible—only about a minute or so on either side—but it’s enough.
• And so I leapt … And found myself right back where I was … here, with the full-bellied yes to write random blog posts for no apparent reason other than joy and desire, rather than academic papers with long bibliographies and MLA-style references, that will be evaluated and praised.
• I sew my irregular stitches, never improving, while the world is on fire, dark with war, shadowy figures conspiring to violence, rafts sinking, and my only effort this morning is to stack logs by the woodstove and hope for the best.

January 17, 2022

Snow Day

My intentions for the next while are all about open-heartedness, about meeting what the world delivers instead of imagining that I might manage to out-maneuvre it somehow. Especially since…I was never really in control of anything anyway and imagining that I was just made me crazy.

And I think that there is nothing better than a wild walloping of a snowstorm to drive that point home. To remind me that sometimes just submitting is beautiful, to call all bets off, the usual rules not applying, the landscape rearranged. No school today. There’s been not a lot of work getting done.

We walk on the road and periodically sit down on the sidewalks, and embrace what the day has handed us.

January 17, 2022

Forever Birchwood, by Danielle Daniel

I could not have loved Danielle Daniel’s Forever Birchwood any better, her middle grade debut following her success as an author/illustrator with picture books including the award-winning Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox. (Daniel also published a memoir The Dependent in 2016; her first novel for adults, Daughters of the Deer, is coming in March; Danielle Daniel is no slouch!).

Forever Birchwood is a dream of a book, the perfect pick for anybody who ever longed to start a babysitting club or is still thinking about Judy Blume’s Just as Long As We’re Together. A nice dose of nostalgia for those of us who grew up reading those books brand new, Daniel’s novel is set during the 1980s during the week of Wolf’s thirteenth birthday as she and her three best friends begin to contemplate the possibility of changes ahead. Wolf is also close to her grandmother, who educates her about her Indigenous ancestors’ ties to the natural world, which makes Wolf feel extra devastated at the prospect of Birchwood, her friends’ clubhouse and the nature around it, being torn down to make way for a new subdivision. Even worse, Wolf’s real-estate mom is pro-development and she and her new boyfriend Roger are spearheading the project.

The most delightful part of this story, which features all the hallmarks of middle grade goodness, is its specificity. Set in Sudbury, Ontario, where Daniel was born and raised, the story takes on the unique aspects of Sudbury’s culture and landscape. Wolf and her friends are passionate about Sudbury’s regreening plan, reforestation and clean-up to counter decades of industrial pollution, which makes their attachment to wild places and the trees and animals there so much more precious. Sudbury’s mining industry, obviously, plays a big role in their characters lives—Wolf keeps special possessions in her grandfather’s old miners’ lunchbox. Mining is dangerous, perilous work, but it’s also the foundation their town is built on.

I don’t read tons of middle grade fiction, but Forever Birchwood is the kind of title that makes me question why that is. The story and characters show emotional complexity, the story’s packed with emotional heft, and while part of the appeal was definitely nostalgia, this novel has a unique and creative richness that is entirely its own.

I’m going to be interviewing Danielle Daniel at her book launch this Saturday. If you’d like to join us and pick up a copy from Another Story Books (and you should!) registration and purchasing information can be found right here.