Bibliomama

Oh, the burning shame and humiliation. I'd rather confess to pinching babies or tipping pregnant women. Everybody I knew was doing it, but I was so smug, so sure that I was immune. I didn't make fun of them (everybody has their weaknesses) but I felt quietly superior. Come on... a girl and a vampire? And there was a werewolf? What else... she gets into a four-way with the vampire, the wolf and a mime? (hey, mimes are scary). I have mentioned that I do like my junk-food lit. I like mysteries. I like science fiction and fantasy and sometimes horror. But I'm generally impervious to romances. Even if a mystery looks good, if the jacket copy mentions some ruggedly handsome detective solving the crime while fighting a dangerous attraction to the beautiful but wounded sister of the deceased, I'm out. I know there are only supposed to be seven stories and all the books in the world are only variations on those themes, but it seems to me that romances have an even more limited...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for most people, an appointment with an appliance repairman is a mild pain in the ass, not a life-rearranging event, right? I suspect that I'm really quite ill. I always pray that they'll show up the first five minutes in that four-hour window because otherwise it's four hours of feeling like I'm about to be photographed and interviewed for Freaks and Losers Magazine. What's he going to think of my hair? Is he going to think I'm fat? I have to vacuum and dust the laundry room plus everything in the path from the door to the laundry room. I have to make sure Eve isn't watching television because I don't want him to think I'm one of those mothers who lets her kids watch television during the day (I totally am one of those mothers). I have to look busy while he's here, like I'm cleaning or teaching my kid Chinese or brokering some kind of major real estate transaction. Don't most people just let the ...

What kind of swimsuit do you wear to wallow in the self-pity pool? Who was that silly optimistic woman who blathered on about her and the kids being a quiet, contained island of mutual adoration and contentment? We're sinking into a slum of despair. There are footprints on the wall, the powder room smells like pee and I have a creeping rash on my torso (overshare? -- sorry). Today Eve told me the soap in the powder room was empty and she had to change it, in much the same tone she might use to tell me there was no food in the house and she had to go out and slaughter a moose for dinner. Angus and I tried to practice his book talk for tomorrow and I made him cry. How much do I suck? Let me count the ways. To top it off, now I'm watching the end of House before I put the kids to bed when it's already ten minutes past their bedtime -- I'm a monster. I will now give a bitchy, mean-spirited book review to match my mood. A person I dislike quite strongly recommended this boo...

I do not love mankind. That's the first line of a book I really like ( The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken). I've always thought of myself as a nice person -- to my family and friends, but also to humanity at large. I let other drivers in front of me, I try not to block the aisle with my grocery cart, I pick things up when pregnant women drop them. I like to be helpful, for its own sake as well as for the "oh, you're so sweet" element, which I do also enjoy. I try not to be overly judgemental. I look for the best in people. Until they piss me off. A few years back I realized something sort of unpleasant about myself. I was working at Chapters (no, that's not it, although it was very unpleasant at times). We had just moved to Ottawa and I had just left a job in audio publishing where I was advancing quite quickly due to the fact that the boss was crazy and threw books at people and employees kept objecting to this and leaving. As attractive as this si...

My mother just forwarded me this email about some woman who drank out of a can of pop without washing it and had a seizure or something and died and it turned out the can had dried rat urine on it, which begs the question.... has my mother freakin' MET me? My husband is AWOL (well, with begrudging leave), it's minus a million out, it's like mounting the goddamned Franklin expedition getting Angus to hockey in the morning, and she wants me to spend the few hours I have to sleep washing cans and obsessing about rat urine. Thanks, Mom. Did I mention that one of the manifestations of my anxiety is massive hypochondria? Every few months I'm absolutely for sure this time dying of something. It sounds funny, which it kind of is, except for that part of the experience where I really believe it. The internet is not a thing the stay-at-home hypochondriac should be allowed access to. Pretty much across the board, you look something up and the symptoms include joint pain, fatigue a...

Today at lunch (Broadway's Diner), Eve turned to me and announced definitively that she had learned what twins are called when they're not 'hi-dentical': 'eternal'.  Hunger by Elise Blackwell I have a weakness for small, beautiful, matte-papered hardback books. While I'm reading I'm often unconsciously smoothing my fingers over the cover papers. My husband sometimes asks if the book and I would like to be alone. The prose is spare and somehow cold in this book. Reading it feels somehow akin to walking through the frigid, snow-dusted squares of a Russian city. It makes you feel cold and sad and hungry. The unnamed narrator is a scientist who collects plants and seeds to be stored safely and kept for posterity at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. His wife and mistress both work at the Institute as well. The novel concerns the siege of Leningrad by German troops in 1941, when food becomes so scarce that people are reduced to unthinkab...

I'm feeling uninspired today so I'm just changing the colours and fonts and hoping that will enhance your reading experience to the point where you won't really notice the quality of the writing. photo credit Day two husbandless: the already-read newspapers are piling up, the kitchen garbage doesn't magically empty itself every morning any more, and Angus needs glasses. Okay, I probably can't blame that last one on Matt being off skiing in the French Alps. Took the kids to the eye doctor. Eve was very nervous and unhappy on the way there -- I couldn't seem to convince her that they were just going to look at her eyes, not stick needles in them or remove them or anything. Naturally once we got there she climbed up and sat in the chair like it was her personal throne and kept saying "my eyes are great, really, I just want to see what kind of things you have here" and giggling like a sorority girl on ecstasy. Angus was calm on the way there, but took th...

My husband just left last night for the next week and a half. Up until a couple of years ago, this would have been cause for much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I still do love a good teeth-gnashing, but adding those couple of years onto my kids has made a world of difference. When Angus was smaller, every time Matt went away he would wake up yelling for me in the middle of the night, generating a really unpleasant adrenaline jolt that would turn me into a really unpleasant mother trying to appear pleasant. It would take me hours to fall asleep, then he would wake me up, then it would take me hours to fall asleep again, usually about four minutes before he woke up for the day. Three nights was my absolute limit before I turned into that kid from the exorcist before the exorcism. Lifting kids in and out of the bath would kill my back, usually one or both would get sick or break a finger or something, plus there was no one around to yell at for leaving the milk out of the fri...

I have a friend that I hung out with constantly from the time we met when our first kids were about two (almost seven years ago) until she had the nerve to go back to work a little over a year ago (I think -- time flies when you're being bitter and unreasonable).  The stay-at-home Mom experience from a companionship point of view is all about timing. My friend Collette was totally screwed -- she had the first kid in our group. The rest of us were totally clueless and thus about as useful as a bag of hammers. We didn't know they didn't have time to cut open a bag of milk, let alone cook dinner. We bought them sleepers with thirty-four snaps instead of zippers. We called and asked if we could come and visit after seven o'clock at night (idiots! We were complete idiots!). I had the second kid, so I was almost equally screwed, except I called Collette. She came over and picked up me and Angus and took us out of the house for two or three hours when he was six weeks old,...

In case you were wondering, I am in fact aware of the irony that the thing I picked to challenge myself and shake up my life is something I can do sitting at my kitchen table in my pajamas. Baby steps, right? I'm not doing terribly well on my New Year's resolution to read through the three piles of books on my bedside table before adding any new ones. I'm not sure why I have the compulsion to go on borrowing books from the library and buying books and stealing books off my friends' bookshelves (I usually ask first) when at any given time I can easily find thirty to fifty books I haven't read in my immediate vicinity. Do I think I might get snowed in for six months at some point? Am I subconsciously planning to build a big book fort in my bedroom? Is it just good old-fashioned mental illness? It's especially bad if I'm depressed. Sometimes I look up and realize I'm spending more time scouring newspaper book reviews and doing library searches for books...

The other day we were having lunch at my friend's house before taking our girls to gymnastics. One of the other Moms had brought cookies and the kids kept asking for them and we kept saying after you finish your lunch. Eve (my five-year-old) said "there's something I don't really understand", and when I asked her what that was, she said "well, when we reach for something and you say stop, we stop. But there's nothing really stopping us". Crap. She's discovered that the Parental Prohibition is completely based on the child's unthinking acceptance of said parent's authority. Dude, we are so screwed. We were just putting her to bed and she informed us that she just had "the worst day ever" BECAUSE: Angus got to have a friend over and she didn't (because that friend walked over from down the street and Eve has a bit of a cold); she has a cold; she got the hiccups two times; and when she tried to have fun with Jon (the frie...

Don't you love how on TV shows, when people get into an elevator, they always end up alone in it with the person they're about to start sleeping with or just broke up with? When I broke up with my boyfriend in university, we lived in the same residence, and I rode in the elevator for four hours at a time -- the son of a bitch never got in once. The last time I was at the library, I did what I frequently do, which is pick up my reserved book from the holds shelf and then wander back to check them out while scanning the shelves to see if anything else leaps out at me. I grabbed a thin paperback because of the title: "When I Was Five, I Killed Myself". I read the whole thing in bed last night, and by about the second chapter I realized I had read it already, years ago, probably when I was ten or twelve (I got it from the Lively Public Library.) I must have read it under the alternate title ("Burt"); I'm pretty sure I would have remembered this title. I lo...

I was working in the school library this morning. I do the basic library stuff -- check books in and out, catalogue new books, fix hurt books, but mostly I shelve. it's sort of tedious and repetitive and back-breaking, especially the lower shelves, but after a while it becomes sort of a Zen exercise. It's kind of interesting seeing the books that go out and come back on a regular basis (Harry Potter and Geronimo Stilton in fiction, fast vehicles and puppy and kitten books in non-fiction), or putting back one that I haven't seen get any play before (in which case I kind of root for it -- is that weird?). Oddly, I find the numbers of the Dewey Decimal System taking on resonances, personalities almost. Not just that I don't like the numbers on the bottom shelf, although that's true. For some reason, some numbers are appealing and some are unsavoury. 398.2 is fairy tales -- three shelves of them, it takes up more room than any other number. 001.9 is a couple of UFO ...

I have trouble with transitions. When I say "I", I mean some small centre or formation in my brain, because I, the rational, forebrain, thinking, reasoning part of me, am fine with transitions. I relish them, in fact. I like getting back from a trip and getting reacquainted with my personal space. I like Christmas and summer when things are relaxed and unpredictable and we can do what we want, and I like getting the kids back to school and settling back into the routine afterwards. In theory, anyway. I look forward to it... and then, for no good reason that I can ever ascertain, I implode. It takes a tremendous effort of will to get to the gym, or out of bed. I get a kid to the dentist or the doctor and I feel like I've climbed Everest. At the moment it seems almost inconceivable that February is ever going to get here without this house seeing way too many fish sticks and episodes of Hannah Montana. At least if I'm blogging, I can't be watching TV or eating cooki...

I read. I mother. (Did I put that in the wrong order?). I obsess. Therefore..... I will blog. So my sister-in-law Sarah (lovely woman. Lovely) has this friend. Who studied creative writing and went to writing retreats and actually submitted stories and had them published and now has a book coming out in February. I found this out while reading Sarah's Facebook profile, and then had to pause briefly for a small interval of self-loathing, insecurity and nausea-inducing envy. And then a little session of "why the hell didn't I just study creative writing? I had to stick to something that I could conceivably make a career out of some day (which I didn't) and convince myself that I would write fiction on my own time (also didn't). I tried to convince myself that since she a) is Jewish, b) grew up in Brooklyn and c) has fantastic hair, clearly she had a natural edge I was never going to overcome anyway. It didn't really work, but at least it got me away from the ta...