Growing Versions

My daughter is growing up.  She is funny and caring and she loves to write. Like many mother and daughters before us, our relationship is getting trickier.  Her job is to grow up and apart, my job is to help her doing that safely and steadily (isn't it?).  Those two job descriptions are, as you would expect, often at cross-purposes, or so it seems. I have come to expect that a certain level of conflict in our relationship is inevitable and normal and to back off when I get too sucked into its undertow.  However, at times, I miss those easy days when she looked to me first for ideas, suggestions and merrily (usually) went along with them. These days, she is exercising her birthright of controlling her own life by rolling her eyes at my harebrained schemes, feeble attempts at getting my children out of doors or socializing. I miss the discussions most of all where we had time to talk, not just about video games, but about things she thought were interesting....

When I was brought home from the hospital, I was brought home to a tiny but vibrant little part of the world. It was right next to a busy corner.  The church and a restaurant/store and very active neighbours. Going back to visiting the corner, felt like looking at a map of the world after only looking at a picture of one house.   The mountains, the sky, the terrain that knit together my early world.

Childhood is the place where we grow from.  Just like anyone who has gone to school feels like they are an expert on teaching school, I think we probably all feel like we are experts on childhood to some extent. For some, raising kids is an opportunity to re-visit the fun aspects of a happy childhood, for others it is a way to make peace with a troubled one. Still others don't have the option or decide that they would prefer to not return. As I see my eldest teetering on the edge between childhood and adolescence, I feel like there will be so many versions of the children I know and understand.  The baby she was is gone.  The toddler and pre-schooler also have disappeared, but she keeps being replaced by a richer concentration of herself. I cannot miss the her I know right now or last year too much because I know she will reappear as someone I will love even more. I look back at my childhood and think, I disappeared only to re-appear year after year.  Who wi...

When I started  Growing Versions , I had a head full of steam, I was a creatively starved office worker, looking for a place to pour my ideas. I was  ready  to finally buckle down and start writing. In the beginning,thoughts and ideas came flooding out in a torrent, tumbling out. For months, I posted almost every morning before I got the kids up to start their day. As time passed, the posts came further and further apart. And I do mean came .   I rarely go searching for them. I sit  or go for a walk and an idea comes seeping in. I came to see my blog as a little house that I can enter whenever I choose.  Some days I leave the door open all day, with the sun streaming in. Others I don't venture near it, but know it is there if I need or want it. The blog is something I built in a flurry, during an intense time when I was both starting a business and raising little kids. I also was a volunteer doula, often staying up all night with a labouring ...

We played school for the first time in ages. The curriculum has been updated since the last time. A drawing of the suitcase for camp.

This time of year reminds me of travelling, of train stations, and carting around bread and cheese in my back pack and sun drenched moments sitting on the edge of forests and rivers and city parks.  The combination of blue skies, wood smoke and diesel take me back to a stoop in Istanbul, a fruit vendor in Delhi and a canteen in Budapest. Yesterday, in my own city, without a passport, that feeling suffused the air. I was walking downtown on an errand and that wood smoke laced crisp air sent me on a different route than usual. I went left instead of right, up the hill, instead of down. I took the next street over when I usually never do. I ended up seeing the city through new eyes and the food trucks and market vendors could have been anywhere. I walked through the train station and I could have been going somewhere. I came home having travelled somewhere.

Last night, I went with friends to hear  the author Lynn Coady  speak.  I remember reading her book Strange Heaven just after university and not realizing just how impressive it was for her to have written a novel, especially a really good one,  at 23.  As a young adult I was under the illusion that writing novels, like learning to ride helicopters and becoming multi-lingual, was only a matter of time, a skill one would just naturally grow into being able to do as one grew.  Now that I have walked down two or three paths and not gone down untold millions of others, and have accepted defeat in many areas, I see with clearer eyes just what an achievement becoming a published writer is (and that no one should ever give me a helicopter license). I was delighted to hear her tell her stories about her work. She spoke about how a writer's version of a story might touch on a truth that is not factually true, but is more true than any fact ever could...

"The useless days will add up...these things are your becoming." Dear Sugar a.k.a. Cheryl Strayed Tonight, within the space of an hour, when I thought I had no more stretch to stretch, I ended up being stretched a little. My son gave advice on how to scrape the deck, played "corral the ball with the skipping rope" (just like a horse) and invented a version of badminton, meticulously soaked his head with the water in a coke can over the sink and planned in minute detail how to make a hanging spider out of a ball of string. He moved effortlessly between these   tasks . I thought, man, I sit all day at my desk.  I manage people and send emails and orchestrate things over the phone and pay bills and negotiate deals and I am not nearly as productive as he is being in this one short hour.  He is using muscles I never use.

If you want to have your mind blown just a little, ask a four year old for some examples of opposites. The official version is not yet cemented in their minds. The concept is still like gel. Opposite of work?  Bouncy Castles. Opposite of jumping? Flying. Opposite of parachuting?  Falling.

It's a restaurant. It's a tent. It's a fort. It's a house. It's missing something. It's perfect. It's going to hold me. The cat likes it. It has a shelf. It has a bed. It has lights. I'm going to eat my supper in here. I'm going to sleep in here. Don't move it Mama.

We are trying our best to be "hands off" on Saturdays.  We want our kids to benefit from the fertile ground of doing nothing and getting bored. We want also want to rest. We want them to dig deep out of boredom and create worlds in which they can inhabit for a little while, worlds that are very different from their own.  The trouble is I know staying uninvolved, save for preventing injuries and feeding them, is important to their development, but I keep getting roped in.   "Can you help me design a super hero costume?" " Can you make a parachute for me?" "Can you play school with me?"   I want to spend time with them, after a busy week of not having had that chance,  but I don't want to play with them.   There I said it.   I feel guilty saying it, but I don't think its my role to play with them all the time.  Honestly, I believe they are better off without me as a playmate. Yes, I can tie the cape around your ne...

If one were to measure growth of a little person based on their reaction to advent calendars (and I am going to), one would be able to chart significant growth and change from year 3 to year 4.   Last year's reaction to advent calendars  by my son spoke volumes about his concept of time.  "Tiny chocolates behind little doors?  That is all I need to know. Let's open all those doors, get those chocolates out of their little windows as soon as."  The idea that those little chocolate squares are behind little doors that have numbers on them was unimportant to him.  The idea that those same numbers indicated that  the doors were meant to be opened in a sequence  was also lost on him.  In fact, the idea that the shape of those numbers 3, 18, 23 ...were an amount of something or ordering something was also not quite in place yet.  If Christmas had come as fast as the chocolates counted down towards it, it would have been a very short season. ...