Wordless Wednesdays: "Sorry, I'll have to call you back, I'm stuck in a bucket right now."

Contemplative de-cluttering

Yesterday and today were good days. Yesterday I overhauled the living room and dining room -- packed up one bin of stuff to get rid of and one to put downstairs, moved some stuff around, cleaned off a bunch of surfaces -- God help you if you're a reasonably level surface that's been empty for more than three and a half minutes in my house. We have a terminal surfeit of crap in this house. The biggest problem is probably all the damned books, which require damned book shelves, which take up space where other stuff should go, which results in a chronic plague of... other stuff. You can't look anywhere and not see stuff -- books, papers, art stuff, dishes, vases, baking supplies, toys... I know I'm never going to live in a show house. I know at heart we're basically messy, creative, glitter-loving pack rats. But there's a limit. At some point your eyes get tired -- they need a quieter place to rest. So I need to get more ruthless about tossing and donating stuff, less lazy about moving stuff and putting it away, and I might not be able to keep every picture Eve makes. Maybe I should even get rid of some books (Oh yeah! I went there!).

Last night was Irish dancing. Today I worked in the library and did some more cleaning in the family room, then took the kids to piano and dumped a load of stuff with the consignment store next door. Ah -- two solid days as a productive citizen. Which got me thinking about the time we get in life to 'move ahead' -- assuming we know what we want to do, the time we get to put energy and work into that, as opposed to the time we spend sort of treading water -- trying to get comfortable with who we are, healing from setbacks, dealing with the necessities of simply existing, etc. There's sort of a sense (at least I often have a sense) that only the first is worthwhile. Every time I get sick and have to spend a few days out of commission, when my kids were small and most of my time and energy was focused on keeping them alive, I feel like I'm going backwards, or standing still. And think of people who are suddenly hit with a cancer diagnosis, or people who have to work multiple jobs just to keep their families fed and clothed. I have to stop privileging one type of experience over the other so much. Sometimes time alone, reading and thinking and healing, is beneficial. Sometimes you have to look closely at the life you're living and the work you're doing instead of mindlessly charging ahead with it.

Sometimes you have to walk over to your friend's house to watch Lost and listen to the Hairspray soundtrack on the way. It's good for the soul.

I know it's wrong to exploit my kids when I'm out of post ideas but...

Today Angus was scraping some labels off of miniature plant pots for me in a sink of warm soapy water, so Eve could paint the plant pots in Easter colours. A propos of nothing, he suddenly said, "You can't bury her at sea, because her bosoms will float".

That's what you get when you try to share treasured childhood memories with your kids.

The first thing you need to know is that everything turned out fine.

On Angus's first day of Junior Kindergarten, we put him on the bus in the morning, took a few pictures, then watched the bus drive off. Matt went to work and I did who knows what for two and a half hours, then walked back down the street to wait for him to come home on another bus. Instead, a car drove up, and his teacher got out. She had parked on the other side of the street because of the direction she was driving, and as she walked across the street she was saying: "He's fine, there's a problem with paperwork with the bus company, he's fine, so he couldn't get on the bus and I'm not allowed to drive him because of insurance, he's fine, he's waiting in the office." Was it not brilliant of her to open with 'he's fine'? Anyway, I walked home with Eve, stuck her in the car seat and went to pick up my completely unperturbed son who was charming the office staff, then went home and called the bus company and tore a strip off some hapless employee. The next day he came home on the bus.

When I was in University, my sister and one of our high school friends were driving from Sudbury to Toronto and they hit a bear. They were unhurt, but both the car and the bear sustained some fairly serious damage. The OPP called my Mom in the middle of the night and said "Your daughter has been in an accident". They then provided some more details, and as the phone was being passed from one person to another my mother heard a women say "I think I just gave some poor lady a heart attack.". So my sister talked to my mother and then Rachelle asked my Mom to call her parents. So my Mom calls her Mom and what's the first thing she says? "The girls have been in an accident!" They really should give lessons on this kind of thing.

Angus has been walking to my Mom and Dad's house after school since October, because Eve was given a spot on the bus but he wasn't, and she loves taking the bus so much. A few weeks ago Eve observed that Angus was getting an inequitable amount of Grandma-time, so we decided that she would go to my Mom and Dad's after school on Wednesdays. I asked her if she wanted my Mom to come and get her, and she said she'd like to walk by herself. I said let's call Grandma and see what she thinks, thinking my mother would stomp decisively on that little notion and I wouldn't have to be the bad guy. Silly me. My Mom said sure, that sounds fine. And okay, it's only two blocks, and there's a crossing guard that can see her practically the whole time, and you have to let them be independent at some point, and it's school dismissal time so there are so many people around (many that know her) that really, what could go wrong? So I said okay, somewhat reluctantly.

The first two times it went off without a hitch. Actually, the first time my Mom started walking out to meet her and ended up walking her almost the whole way and Eve was not impressed. The second time she walked by herself and she was terribly proud. Today my Mom called at 3:02 (dismissal is at 2:45) and said she wasn't there yet. My Dad had gone out to check for her. I called the school (and yes, I was worrying that they were going to judge me for letting my seven-year-old walk two blocks on her own )and the secretary tracked down her teacher. The teacher said she had seen written in her agenda that she was walking to my Mom's, and she'd reminded her. She said she'd go outside and check and call me back. I hung up and my Dad drove into my driveway. I went out and we basically just stared at each other. My chest felt like a burning sheet of metal. My mind was crowded with horrors. My Dad said he was going to drive back to the school. I called my Mom back and there was no answer.

My Mom called maybe four minutes later. Eve was playing at the park. My Mom explained that this wasn't a good thing to do when anxious people were counting on her prompt arrival to forestall heart attacks and cerebro-vascular incidents. Eve understands this now.

Maybe six minutes or so I didn't know where she was or what had happened to her. For some people, this six minutes is the rest of their life. I am so profoundly grateful that today I am not one of those people.

The Breakwater House

I'm sick of working on my electronic periodical indexes assignment so I'm reviewing The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger.

This book is beautifully written, and the translation is flawless. I mention this because whenever I see that I'm reading something in translation, I tend to wince; nothing interferes with a reading experience like a bad translation.

I was a little wary after the first few pages, which describe a woman finding and buying a house and then mysteriously being unable to photograph it properly, or track down the previous owner, or give directions that allow other people to visit her. In my experience, this type of non-linear plotting is sometimes an excuse for an author to indulge her poetic urges without regard for logic or story. And I like a story. Happily, there is one, or several, and they are all quite captivating, despite a certain non-linearity. The characters, mostly women, are wonderful: Lucie and Claire, two little girls who meet in infancy and grow into a fiercely close friendship: Aurore, Lucie's mother, colourful, bohemian, passionate: Suzanne, Claire's mother, stoically proper and affluent: and various ancestors that lead to Lucie's present story, wherein the confusion and fragmentation is actually a completely understandable response to a crippling, logic-destroying grief.

The writing is densely textured with striking images: a woman's stomach after childbirth "retreats slowly, like a tide, without making a sound. It looks like an unmade bed, a deserted backstage, a painting under restoration...A shawl for the long winter nights." A mother holds her child, the "imponderable mass of her sated sleep." There are sad, cock-eyed moments of humour -- Aurore gives Claire a black doll, which she adores, dresses in pink and sleeps with every night, whereupon her discomfited mother suggests that "Mélanie ought to become the other dolls' cleaning lady." When her husband's grandmother thrice survives the night when doctor's have declared her death imminent, Suzanne keeps calling priest and Claire "questions her about the risk of overdosing on last rites."

A slight magical mist surrounds much of the narrative, yet the depiction of female friendships is letter-perfect. The hyperbolic and mythic nature of some of the events does not mute or negate the emotions of the characters. The narrative is threaded through with grief, but the overall tone is of healing. This is an intriguing book by a wonderful writer.

March Broken

I've decided to give myself a little mental bitch-slap before I precipitously give up blogging forever. I'm in a prickly, unfriendly place. Does anybody else find that a virus seems to infect your mind as well as your body? Other than the obvious 'it's gorgeous outside and I'm too sick to go anywhere', or abandoning my husband with the kids for the last couple of days when he's leaving for a week tomorrow, or that he took off Friday so we could do something as a family and I was stuck in bed so he took the kids bowling and mini-golfing, it's like I've stayed in one place too long and my immune system is too low to evade or mount a defense against the mean little thoughts with sharp little teeth.

It seemed that visiting some friendly blogs and then following their blogs to some unfamiliar blogs was a good way to spend some fevery headachey rib-cracking coughy time. In retrospect, I probably should have stuck to vampire movies and the last few episodes of Dollhouse.

I don't remember how I stumbled upon the blogging world of the mothers who have lost children. I think I saw the blog name dead baby jokes and thought gah! THAT's in poor taste. Except it wasn't. And then it was like hours wandering in a dark thundery forest. These women are going through something unimaginable that they have to find a way to imagine. A lot of it is very powerful writing. Some of them are impossibly funny and witty and articulate about it, which almost seems unfair to the ones who are still flailing around almost wordlessly in grief. I don't comment on these, because it's so not my place -- this is a country that is foreign to me, and I have no helpful or valuable or relevant words to offer. They seem so queenly and unassailable in their grief, and I'm glad that they have their community of people who understand, even if there is no way to make it better. I do visit them periodically to bear witness, and because sometimes they talk about what people can do to be helpful -- or at least not doubly hurtful -- and what people do that makes them angry or increases their pain, and these are things that I think it is good to know.

There is a whole other world of blogs written by parents of medically fragile children, and again, a whole new language to be learned. I don't look at them out of any kind of purely voyeuristic curiosity, but again, I visit because it's a way to be less ignorant. Sometimes what these people ask seems impossible -- they don't want people to be insensitive, but they don't want pity. They say a lot of their lives are normal, but they resent people who underestimate how hard it is. Sometimes it seems impossible for those of us on the other side to strike the right tone. That's okay -- I get that sometimes the actions of people not in your situation must all be sandpapery and wrong. It also highlights the important fact that these people, contrary to what they are often told, are NOT saints. They are people, and mothers -- fiercely loving, angry, sad, joyful, tired and bitchy by turns, like the rest of us.

In short, I have come up for air (what air I can drag through my clogged and wheezy passages) feeling like my blog is the flakiest, most insubstantial confection ever, like I've never written a post on anything of any real substance, like I should pack it all in and pull the covers back over my head. But I'm not going to. I'm going to remind myself that there are blogs I love that have nothing to do with dead or disabled children, and that no matter how vital one community is to some people, the internet is vast and there is room for an infinite number of communities. I might try to focus my energies on more weighty subjects from time to time (and no, I'm not referring to my ass), but I can't be someone I'm not, and negating my own experience doesn't help the people who have a more unkind path to follow right now.

Take that, mean little thoughts. Which I will now attempt to drown in pistachio ice cream, if Eve hasn't eaten it all. And she doesn't even like nuts. Hmmph.

March Break day four

I'm sick. Angus is sick. Good thing I front-loaded the week. Last night Eve and I watched Where the Wild Things Are. I thought it was amazing, but she said "there aren't a whole lot of happy parts in this movie", and she wasn't wrong. Angus had a friend sleep over last night and I was watching a friend of Eve's this morning, and Angus and I started trading coughs around 4 a.m. so the morning was Angus and Nathan playing basketball and hockey outside and Eve and Laura making little books, and the afternoon was Angus lying on his futon watching The Mighty Ducks on the little DVD player while insisting he wasn't tired and Eve trying to make exercise equipment for a fairy (more on this later). And I hid in my room and read something hard-boiled and not too taxing. Also, I gave Eve a bath. For an hour and a half. With Barbie Mermaids. This is one section of ninety minutes of singing, yarn-spinning and general commentary:

"You have to go back to your Dad."
"Mom, I'm not going back. I have to save you. It's in the legend."
"Actually the legend says your Mom dies."
"Go with the legend. Go with the legend, girl."
"I'm not listening to some stupid legend! I'm doing what my heart says."
"Are you sure it's not what your stomach says?"
"Save the Mom! Save the Mom! Save the Mom! Save the Mom!"
"Okay stomach, you can stop. We get it."

How can you not love this kid?