Growing Versions

Here we go. Hold my hand, let's go ahead. We know we cannot go back. My heart still lurches when I wait for the speeding cars to stop at the crosswalk with my kids, even now, when they are old enough to remember.  I reach down, hold their hands, and tell them. "I do not trust the drivers. Look the driver in the eye, and wait for them to stop." Let's cross now.

In the past few weeks, we have been in the throes of a brewing labour dispute between our province's teacher's union and the government.  The simmering pot boiled over last weekend when the government unexpectedly shut down the schools on Monday, citing safety concerns during the planned work to rule actions that the union was set to start on that day. Parents were thrown into chaos as we all tried to figure out what the heck to do with our kids. Those who could afford it, signed up for hastily created day camps.  People teamed up and took turns parenting each other's kids and some were in the unfortunate situation of having to give up work for what turned out, thankfully, to be only one day out of school. Luckily one of us could be home with the kids, but to our great surprise, they took a lot of time setting up a curriculum for Monday.  Most of the tasks were internet based, but classes in "structures" and cooking also got thrown into the mix. They a...

I live in a four season climate. Some seasons are portioned out more liberally than others. We hanker for more than our fair share of the summer one.  Others prefer the winter for all the fun activities they bring, some swear by the shortening fall days with the shimmering colours and tendrils of woodsmoke, grounding us once more. I think about the seasons like a series of corners around which we turn and where we are given a new chance to pivot, to turn a corner.

Write down your thoughts. Write down your dreams, even if you only remember half of them. Write down your fears. Write down the books you want to read. Write down the books you want to write. Write down the movies you want to see again. Write down every detail of that room that used to be yours. Write down what he said. Write down what you said. Write down what you should have said. Write down your passwords, no matter what they say. Write down your demands. Write down the license plate number, just in case. Write down the thing you heard on the radio. Write down the cost. Write down your needs. Write down your extravagant wants. Write down the weather that day. Write down what you ate. Write down his name. Write down to the ground.

I love laughing. I love laughing a lot. It is such a deceptively simple statement, but for someone who loves laughing so much, I don't do it nearly as much as I sigh, cry and glower. Last night, I went to a live taping of  This Hour has 22 Minutes .  For anyone who hasn't seen their brilliant work, they are pioneers in modern political satire.  Long before The Daily Show started impaling the powerful, the talented crew at 22 Minutes were cooking it old school.  There were years when that is where I got my most accurate (and scathing) news. What was so exciting about last night's show was that one of the original 4 cast members was in the house playing one of her more famous characters live. She plays this mouthy American pundit periodically and last night, she did not disappoint. The character was declaring her intention to move to Canada in light of the recent election results. What was so great to observe was a veteran master of her craft getting into c...

  "Homoeostasis, any self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. If homoeostasis is successful, life continues; if unsuccessful, disaster or death ensues.  The stability attained is actually a dynamic equilibrium, in which continuous change occurs yet relatively uniform conditions prevail." -Encyclopedia Brittanica For some reason I thought I was in charge of my equilibrium. Turns out,  I was wrong.  I was leaking air, but so slowly and subtly that I scarcely noticed.   When I finally noticed, I reached out, some people reached back, they helped me inflate again. I hover, just above the ground, awaiting a gust of wind to send me aloft again.

The other morning, on a particularly lazy one, I did not quite get around to formally feeding my son breakfast.  He would not have gone hungry, for a while now, he has helped himself to cereal, everything is within easy reach, there is fruit in the bowl. He's 8.  However, on this particular morning, he was having none of this self-serve breakfast.  No way. He kept repeating how hungry he was.  I kept telling him to serve himself. Finally, he put his head into his hands and wailed, "I'm just so hungry." I reluctantly gave up on the book I was reading and ventured over to him. I held him in my arms and whispered into his ear.  "I could make you an egg, or kale chips or a sandwich. What would you like me to make you?  We could roast that squash we got?" And just like that he calmed down, he wiped his eyes and apologized for "going all crazy".  "I am just hungry ", he explained.  That is when I realized, food alone does not a...

I was stopped in my tracks the other morning by a tiny person who had just learned to walk. He lurched towards something. Something neither his father nor I could see or appreciate. He seemed to walk towards nothing, but there was a smirk of delight on his sweet face, he was heading toward something that previously had been out of his reach, unimaginable in those dimensions.  " I can walk towards that now, " he was thinking, "I am capable of that now." Finally, his father picked him up and head in the opposite direction, away from whatever it was that had caught his attention.  His day had begun, he would walk towards many more things and exmaine many things before the day would be over.

Lately, my son has been responding to my sighs more strongly than the words coming out of my mouth. He'll ask me for a snack or attention or something from the book order (blasted toy order more like) and I'll sigh (breathe a little too audibly) before (or while) I answer and he'll in turn react with either:  "Never mind." or  "What's wrong?" He's like a teeny tiny  barometer  and has been for a while. He picks up on the most subtle tone drop of my voice and responds by changing tack, like a little sailor seeking a headwind. Part of me loves being known so well, the other part, of course, wishes I were not so scrutable. However, sigh language is a form of communication, like any other non-verbal language, which is gradually learned and is responsible for conveying way more than our words do.

We are born with a way of seeing the world. It is partly shaped by where we are born, to whom, who we are raised by and who educates us, but it is also the product of our unique circuitry--an alchemy of all the dust that has produced us. We can decide to see things other ways for the good of others or for our own reasons, but we have to remember how we see things too. Our way of seeing is a fingerprint, proof that we were at the scene of our lives.

I was in a nasty mood the other day.  Really brutally nasty.  I ended up always feeling this way I guess when fall begins which is a result  of thinking out of time. I keep thinking let's go to the beach soon, it is almost that time of the year....oh yeah... Let's shop for christmas presents, woah, hang on a minute. My body clock gets out of sinc and it makes me cranky. I have a hard time being right here in early fall. I lost my cool with my nearest and dearest and they rallied. My husband held my hand. My kids and I went swimming and we dove and ducked and made up games and we came out fresh. The pacing changes, the clock has not yet been set back. Let's tell time with light and fingers.

In the summer I am barraged by images, that if it were any other time, I would be lunging for my camera. Sparkling water...abandoned houses...candid shots of my kids playing, picnic food...and on and on. But somehow I hold back.  These moments are precious, these times are not to be interrupted. Kids will protest, the wind will shift. Now it is fall, I am camera less at the moment. Again, the itch is there, the flicker, the inkling that something will be a good photograph. The shaft of light falling on yellowing leaves, the stack of cardboard boxes sitting next to farm produce. But for now, these images are going to have to come and go. I let their rich possibility steep for a moment and then walk away. I try to focus on this time as an incubation period. (One of the last photos with my now defunct camera phone. I had to try three times because it kept losing power...)

I am not good at details.  I like them to take care of themselves. And sometimes they do.  Details, when we have a chance to look, get bigger with examination.  Flaws become information. Overlooked details morph into mistakes.  Some details get bigger and make other details smaller. The liner notes can be lyrics. That's the thing about details.

Decisions don't just make themselves. Sometimes they take a long time to make, others are made in a snap. Sometimes they are made for us, others, hopefully more often than not, they get made by us. Informed decisions, uninformed decisions. Reckless, calculated. No matter. They do not make themselves. They are made.

I have often come to new understandings of parenting during my down time. It is understandable that at times when I am at rest, I have a little time to put things in perspective.  The beach and ocean are special places of reflection for me. The kids and I love the water. Getting them out of the ocean after an afternoon of swimming is always difficult, mostly because I hate getting out too. A few times last week, when the hurricane warmed waters allowed, we started a new habit of swimming at night. The first night, it was pitch black. Foggy and dark, there was no moon to illuminate things.  We jumped in and were delighted to discover plankton can be seen when it is that dark, we emerged from the water, with neon dots all over us, the fairy lights spread out from our ripples.  But the waves were dark and unpredictable. Out of nowhere a big wave would suddenly loom in the darkness.  At first this was thrilling, but one by one, it spooked each of us until we eve...

The lego figures had a staycation this weekend. As you can see, one of them was having the time of their life, and the other had a lot on his/her mind. I am uncertain what the problem was, but my guess it it was too much cotton candy or too far outside his/her comfort zone.

  In the early years of parenting, I was almost overcome by the potential of there now being  24 hours in a day , instead of the pre-parenting 12.  There always were 24 hours, but now, due to unpredictable sleep schedules, work demands and a need to be alone once in a while, almost all of these 24 hours were now known to me.It was like double the chance to do stuff and time and time again I sacrificed a whole night of sleep to watch back to back Netflix episodes, to complete a proposal for work or to catch up on housework.Now of course, I realize that instead of stealing time, time was stealing from me.  Four years after writing this post, I am scrambling to tidy my life back into 12 hours again.  The chances of a kid needing me overnight are considerably less.  Insomnia is plaguing me by times and preventing me from having quality time not just with myself , but also with my husband. I blame smart phones and my dependence on them. I blame self-employme...

Writing a vacation email is the first exsquisite tiny morsel of holiday time, even if the vacation is only one day.

"For whatever we lose (a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea." -e.e.cummings, 100 Selected Poems

Looking at things close up sometimes makes things unrecognizable. My tendency is to zoom in when I take pictures, and afterwards, I sometimes have trouble believing that what I am seeing is the same thing I took a picture of. I guess I do that in my life too. I tend to thrive in one on one relationships and focus how to make what is right in front of me work, but lately, I have begun to realize that I need to zoom out so I can properly see things. Zooming in with the lens is soothing, and I guess it makes things more manageable in life too, but an aerial view has its role. I don't know how to operate a drone but I can find some people who can. I can learn.

For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth. -n.t.

Before travelling, us adults make a big to do list to ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible. Vacationing with kids can be fun, but it is a lot different than vacation without them.  I didn't exactly rest on the most recent one, but I still forgot about my real life for a precious 5 days and that is good enough for now. When I wrote my to do list, I had no idea what I actually had to do.  The unexpected portions of my to do list are bolded for emphasis. -get passports -get American money -pack beach bag -be served a variety of ice creams at the beach, which morphed into a treasure hunt for Pokemon Cards to the untrained eye were "just rocks". (flavours included root beer, marshmallow (which can be picked from a garden) and cheesie flavoured) - make sure cats get fed while we are away -make sure kids dash as fast possible away from the expensive educational experience you researched and ensured that they went to so that they can frolic fo...

Kid: "Do you want to play a game?" Me: "Sure." Kid: "I have a shrink ray and a grappling hook.  What do you want? Tell me what you want and I'll shrink it and get it for you." Me: "Okay.  How about that lobster trap?" Kid: "Sure, here you go." Me: "I want that house and that man jogging over there.  Actually, every person you see on the road." Kid: "Here you go. It's a replica." I like this game. A lot.

Facebook has been a game changer. That is overstating the obvious, I realize. It has brought back people into my life that in previous generations would have been lost to me forever.  Now I get regular updates from friends who live around the world. Some I only knew for a few days in the first place, others I knew for an intense 6 months, many more I knew for a lot longer, but now know in different, more interesting ways.  I have discovered I have more in common with some people than I ever realized when I was a kid. While I enjoy having this tenuous connection with kids I started grade one with by way of knowing what they ate for breakfast, one or two real life friends have escaped my grasp.  They have drifted from me.  They don't use Facebook, they likely have more scrupulous adherence to privacy than I.  I only have a tiny fragment of information to go on about their whereabouts.  I have made a few half-hearted attempts to reach out, but in the fi...

Sometimes I  just need to stare for a while to get back on track. I need to re-set by staring vacantly;  it is the equivalent of turning off a computer and turning it back on. Today was a staring day.

Is the pilot light lit? Or has it gone out?

Every once in a while, one should stay up late and look at stars if you are a morning person. Or get up early if you are night person.

We have art in order not to die of truth.-Friedrich Nietzsche

Last year on my birthday, a young friend gave me the jar on top (it contains  glitter, and lots of it, food colouring and eye shadow).  I was instructed to shake it whenever I felt stressed.  I keep it on my desk and I have shaken it a lot this past year and it has really helped. When I came home from work the other day, my son presented me with a jar full of beach stones. It is meant to help me calm down and remember the beach.  It works! I intend on building my collection.  What could be next?

It is still winter coat weather some days, despite what the calendar says. When the sunny days come, we convert that sunshine immediately (greedily) and store it deep inside for use later on the less sunny ones. Now that I am in my 40s, when summer comes, I  just drop everything.  My need for food/eating goes down, my tolerance for drama expires and as long as I have toast or bananas every once in a while, the summer light and heat is enough to keep me going.  It boils down to needing less when there is heat.  I need less all year round, I realize, but the winter has me confused since I still need heating oil and insulation. Sitting on a beach eating an apple and emptying my mind.  Playing a board game until I cannot play it anymore. Chatting by a fire. That's it.

I was reading the book What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg  with my son recently.  It tells kids about the nuts and bolts, sperm and eggs make babies, but it intentionally leaves out how the sperm and the egg meet to open the conversation for each kid to discuss the facts in the context of their own lives. If they were adopted or conceived by IVF or through their parents, the story will naturally be different.  It impressed me because it didn't shy away from terminology but also left some space for different stories about how babies come into the world into the loving arms of different kinds of families. Afterwards, I thought about the literary device you encounter in some books that involves leaving some stuff out, letting the reader fill in the blanks. Instead of applying themselves to detailing every piece of glitter on the emperor's new clothes, a writer chooses to focus on characters and plot and leaves details roughly sketched, letting me do that work. I mi...

I came home last night and my son insisted I sit down with him that very minute to label the pictures from the "baby to 2" photo book, containing pictures of him. It was half-heartedly put together in the half light, half conscious days of his early life and it is the last of "the printed from a camera" pictures that I put together. He did not care about the quality or lack thereof of the photos. He just had lots of questions about what kind of baby he was (my answer, an always awake one ) He was born just around the time early adopters were acquiring smart phones. If he had been born even one year later, I might have had his baby hood photoshopped and stored (not printed) on my desk top. The likelihood that those images would have made it into a book like this, sitting on the shelf, eagerly pulled down and scrutinized would have been very low. I have photographed every square inch of their walk to and from school. My parents did not even walk with me to...

 This weekend, my dad showed me one of my grandmother's paintings.  My grandmother was famous for a lot of things in our family and one of them were her handpainted cards and framed pictures. Each of the grandkids has one, as far as I know.  Long after she has passed away, the paintings are still here. This one, as far as I can tell, is of the second to last house she lived in.  I would recognize it anywhere because that house shows up when I am picturing a place when I read novels sometimes. The memory is sketchy and not necessarily accurate, it stretches to fit the new stories I am reading and the same goes for this painting.  Off in the distance, you can see a row of little houses that were never there in the first place. She leaves part document, part fancy for us to remember her, but also her imagination. That is what I want my pictures to be for my kids.  Part documentation of what our lives are like right now, part artistic li...

Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas one long chunk of type can discourage the reader from even starting to read. -William Zinsser

Scene from Vicar of Dibley, Season 1, Episode 1 Members of the Parish Council discuss the prospect of having a female vicar. Mrs. Cropley: ...things have to change, don't they? Jim: That's right. I mean look at traffic lights, well, if they didn't change there'd be terrible congestion, wouldn't there? Owen: On the other hand, there's gravity. Jim: What about it? Owen: If gravity change, we'd all go floating up into space. Some changes are instant and irreversible. Some changes are contemplated for ages before even one minute movement can be detected. Some of us need agents of change. The other day, a friend took me to see this beautiful property. We have been in the midst of a change for a while now, but this was just the little push I needed to speed up the process. The question when contemplating a change is will this relieve congestion or cause me to float up to space? Now I see a clearer road ahead, the sky i...