"na na we do, is he talking Spanish, mama?"

As I zone out and prepare supper, I always flip the radio on and listen to the drive home show or the news. I find it really relaxing to let someone else do the talking. I've had to re-evaluate this practise a bit since I've had kids for two very different reasons. For my son, he seems to have a knack for picking up little snippets that he hears and launching into surprising lines of questioning. The other day, he exclaimed, "I just heard him say "they cannot find his head"".

In my daughter's case, she not only tunes out the radio, but also, ever since she was little, me turning the radio on, was like a challenge to her to begin speaking or to speak louder. When we are driving she prefers that if someone is going to talk, it should be us doing it not someone on the radio.

My son, on the other hand, will exclaim with delight, "Canada day! Mama, they just said Canada day on the radio" or incredulousness, "sell-off-vacations????" Occasionally, there is a brief lull in the conversation and the radio, which has been quietly playing in the background, is suddenly the loudest thing in the room. "The plane was shot down" echoes out into the room. My daughter proceeds to begin loudly planning our next lemonade stand and my son starts down another path. "The plane was shot down!?" "With a gun mama? Why would they shoot down a plane? I want to fly a helicopter."

Comments

I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

Shake your Bummy

In recent weeks, two things have come to my attention, this article by Mary Beth Williams, T he real key to good health and the viral hit created by Dr. Mike Evans, 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health? Both coincided with when I was turning my attention to new years resolutions and reflecting on the year that was. Thanks to both, a reckoning came to be. Mary Beth Williams' candid advice was to get your heart stronger because you never know when you are going to need it. She herself has been receiving treatment for lung cancer. Dr Mike Evans' way of putting the exact same thing? "Try to limit your sitting time to 23 1/2 hours a day". In my day job, I sit a lot. I occasionally rise to retrieve something from the photocopier or to make a coffee, but an awful lot of the time, I'm on my bum. This is in steep contrast to my night job. At the end of the work day, occasionally in the middle, I h...

Growing Versions

Search This Blog