...a sketchy past.

I was listening to CBC... I start a lot of stories that way these days. I am addicted to Radio One. I know I am not the only one! I am often in the car on Wednesdays. I have a regular coffee date with my dear friend and her daughter so I listen on the way there and the way home for sure. On the way there it is the Debaters and I often laugh out loud. And on the way home I catch the tail end of Writers and Company, my new favourite show. The authors are just so fascinating and the way they speak is so eloquent and lyrical. This week Eleanor was talking to Eva Hoffman. I caught such a short bit but it was so good (actually the end of her interviews are usually the best part). Her latest book is called Time. So they were talking about time in general. And she said "the present reconstructs the past". I know that I have always known this but the way that she spoke about this really brought it into focus for me. It is truly amazing how our stories change. In so many ways and for so many reasons. Perhaps they change purely due to the fact that our memories fail us but often it is so much more than that. Ultimately it is because that person we are as each day passes is new. We are seeing our history from a new assemblage point with each passing minute. So with the veil I wear today I will see my history differently than with the veil I will wear tomorrow. Fascinating isn't it? Our stories are not static. They are as full of life today as the day that they played out. Shifting and changing as we need them to in some cases.

This last week I have been getting the email updates of a friend that has just had her tonsils removed. I had mine removed at the age of 7 or 8. She is in her thirties. When I heard that she was going in for this day surgery it immediately took me back to my memory of my tonsillectomy. It was a defining time for me. I remember it very well. Back then it was a few days stay in the hospital and I had to be overnight in a strange place without my mom. Of course a lot of what I remember is not clear. The passage of time has taken its toll on many of the details but there are a few things that have stayed with me. I remember that there was a girl a little older than me staying in the same room that had just under gone back surgery. She had a rod in her back and was unable to move. The nurses would come in and rotate her from one side to the other every few hours (or maybe it was twice a day). I talked to her from across the room but I wasn't really supposed to get out of my bed. I also remember promises of ice cream and jello leading up to the surgery. I recall that going down a hallway lying flat on my back was dreadful and that hospital porters should respect that and slow down. 100, 99, 98, 9...... I remember feeling ripped off by those promises of ice cream when afterward ice cream was not even close to enough to soothe my raw throat. And I really remember this one incident over a bowl of oatmeal.


My mom had come in for a visit on one of the evenings following my surgery and she had asked the nurse about my meals. She was very excited to tell me that the next morning I would get porridge. This was one of my favourite things. I loved being in the kitchen with my mom when she made the quick oats in a sauce pan on the stove. It would bubble and burst while she stirred them down with the wooden spoon. I loved the little volcanic eruptions in the pan as the oatmeal spewed a little lava with each bubble bursting. The sound, the smell and the anticipation. It was often served on particularly cold mornings and I would alternate between watching the oatmeal boil and sitting on a heat register at my mother's feet. The promise of a meal like this while I was in the hospital held the comforts of home and I was tickled at the idea of it. That night I literally fell asleep with thoughts of oatmeal dancing in my head. I dreamt of the warm, soft oatmeal mixed with the cold milk and brown sugar. How I loved the hot/cold and salty/sweet perfection in a bowl porridge. In the morning I silently and eagerly awaited the sound of that food cart coming up the hall. It arrived without much fanfare on the hospital gray tray and I lifted the lid to find a cold, solid ball of oats. And if that wasn't enough of a disappointment... I can clearly remember the lump forming in my raw throat at the realization that there was not a spec of brown sugar in sight. So I sadly poured the icky 2% milk (not the skim I was used to) over this gooey, grey sludge and tried to gag it down. I think as I was trying to stomach it my mother arrived for a morning visit. I could feel her disappointment too. I think we cried together.

But of course this story holds a whole new tenderness for me. I am a mother now. I feel my mothers heartache as well as my own. I imagine her rushing to park her car and run up to my room to steal a few minutes with me before having to rush off to tend to the needs of her other three children at home. I see my disappointment, fear and frustration as if they were the emotional mine field of my own school age child. This memory is somehow closer to me now then it was a few years ago even though chronologically it is further away. Time... In poems, plays and books time has been written about as a character. Sometimes even given a human form. Father Time, for instance. We joke about time playing tricks on us. We struggle with not being able to reconcile details of our history in the stories we tell of it. But perhaps it is just this. Our history is more akin to folklore and the oral tradition than it is to a factual account. And we are just once again caught up in this crazy media driven culture that has a quest for knowledge, facts and numbers. The Wikipedia Age.

I say screw it. Let the details blur and melt together. See your history as a watercolour landscape. Let your story be as rich and alive as you are. Allow yourself a chance to examine your life anew every once in awhile. It gives us a chance to feel as if we have lived more than one lifetime. The path behind us as mysterious as the one that lies ahead. In a few years when I think back to that porridge again I wonder what I will see...

Thank you, Laurel for sacrificing your tonsils last week so that I might take this journey again. To see my mom in another new and tender way, to see my girls through the eyes of my childhood. And thank you Eva Hoffman for reminding me that is what I was doing.

...someone that is shivering.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Today I got a phone call from the school... I hate it when I see that name on my call display. My heart always skips a beat and I try to answer with a calm sound in my voice. The secretary at our school is an angel. She has experience with my kind. "Hello, it's Bonnie calling...It's not an emergency." Bless her heart. Those are always the first words out of her mouth. I have never asked her but she must be a mother. I breathe again. She was calling to tell me that my big girl had a bathroom accident. She needed me to come with a change of clothes. My mind raced. Why? Why now? My girl with a bladder of steel. She potty trained at 2 and a half, in one weekend and we never looked back. So far I have only changed the sheets in the night because of vomit, never pee. We have had a handful of very minor accidents at home but that is it. I babbled something about how surprised I was and tried to form a coherent thought. She made it clear that my girl was standing in the office waiting for me. Right... "get moving" my brain said to my body. I looked down at the sleeping baby in my arms. Nappus Interuptus once again. I ran up to grab a new set of clothes. Funny what went through my head. "Must find something as similar as possible to what she was wearing", "What will I say to her?", "How did the other kids or her teacher react?" It is only now that I replay this process that I can see my big/little girl standing in that office, one shoe sloshing with pee, being offered a jelly bean, the seconds ticking by while I am looking for just the right clothes. I ran out the door with babe on my hip and a bag full of clothes. Sped to the school and ran in the door to find her standing there shivering with the cold and the wet of it all. Lately she has seemed so big to me. She is the big sister, the grade oner, the six year old... But today when I saw her standing there as I stood in that doorway, catching my breath... she seemed so small. So fragile. So... vulnerable. It is my job to protect her and I want to do that so completely.


We walked to the bathroom. I hadn't anticipated that she would be shuffling so awkwardly with that shoe full of pee. I was surprised at just how wet she was. I crouched down to look her in the eyes. I needed to see into her and find out how she really felt. I tried to be lighthearted about it but not just blow it off. I could see my reflection becoming more clear in her eyes as the tears began to pool. Her lip beginning that twisted downward curl of utter disappointment in herself. This is what I signed up for. The messy, scary, challenging trenches of parenting a school age child. I face it all as squarely as I can but I had no idea that my heart would lead and then ache so much in the process. I held her and she whimpered that she was scared. Scared seems right to me. I'm scared.... shitless sometimes. I realized that I couldn't help her out of her wet clothes and clean her up with a babe in my arms so I ran back to the office and handed the slobbering 5 month old off to that secretary. She willingly swept her up in her arms (I do think that woman needs a bouquet of flowers). When I got back to the bathroom I was able to get to the business of it. She told me more of what happened and that she was cold. She told me about the offer of a jelly bean and her polite refusal. She told me which friends helped her. She told me there had been a puddle and they had to call the custodian. Each detail making her seem more vulnerable. We quickly got her changed and while doing so she asked me if she could go home. There was only an hour left of school, I wanted nothing more than to take her home but I wanted her to decide what she needed, so I hadn't offered. I was glad she asked. When we headed for her classroom the other kids were just getting ready to go out for recess. So I asked if she wanted to join them before we headed home. I wanted her to go home feeling better about her day. It looked like business as usual on the playground.

And that was just one of the things I did today...

...an Argentine Tango.

I love that dance. Have you seen it? Argentine Tango

This dance requires complete connection with your partner. Feet so close and so intertwined at times that one wrong move would lead to a pile of body and limbs on the floor. It is breathtaking to watch.

Wikipedia says this, "Argentine tango is a new orientation of couple dancing. As most dances have a rational-pattern which can be predicted by the follower, the ballast of previous perceptions about strict rules has to be thrown overboard and replaced by a real communication contact, creating a direct non-verbal dialogue. A tango is a living act in the moment as it happens." I like this description. It is so much more than steps to follow. So much more than footprint diagrams showing you where to step next. It is not about "dancing". It is about being that act of dancing.

I have a new dance partner. She and I have only been dancing together for just over a year. At first we were all left feet and I, quite frankly, did not feel the least bit graceful. I was still enjoying very much the fluid and effortless footwork with my dance partner of 5 years. I wasn't sure if I was ready for another one. It had taken all of those 5 years to perfect some of the steps with her. We were starting to take on more challenging footwork some days or enjoying the ease of something familiar on others. Did I really want to start from square one again? But after a rough start and a lot of resistance on my part we just clicked one day. It took about 7 months before I found that I felt really beautiful as we swayed together in our nested embrace. We had shifted from "gestating" to "being the act of gestation". Together we were a whirling dervish of growth and creation. Culminating in the wildest, most frenetic dance of our lives on the day we met. Now with 5 months of face to face dancing under our belts I am happy to report that we are just as clumsy as ever some days and as skillful and agile as professionals on others. It helps when we both pick the same dance of course. Sometimes I am in the mood for a waltz or a foxtrot but Lola is all revved up for a quickstep or jitterbug. The roles reverse just as frequently too. But it truly does feel like one, long, seamless (or attempt at seamless) dance. Each move by one of us having a direct impact on the other. We ebb and flow, sway and shuffle... It isn't always pretty but it works. Now that we are a family of four it gets complicated. I guess on a good day we get quite the hoedown going. Our unconventional square dance is a sight to behold. But most days I think it looks like more of a mosh pit.

I find that at any given time I have a good groove going with one of my dance partners and the others are a bit awkward. One day maybe I will become skillful enough to dance with all three of my partners with grace and endurance, simultaneously. For now I will dance with wild abandon. I will feel the beat deep in my bones and create a rhythm that rocks our love-filled home.

...watery eyes, runny noses and fever.

The "sickness" entered my house this week. It came in like a speeding bullet and I thought we would all be hit by it and hard, but so far it just seems to have tiptoed around our house quite gently and we are hoping it has already taken it's leave of us. However, even this most gentle of bugs did completely consume our home while it was here. Meg might not agree that it was so gentle since she was the one that had fever, chills, aches and puking. Knocked her on her ass for 24 hours. But the rest of us were overtaken by constant hand washing, gargling, nasal hydrating and an awkward dance of avoidance. Poor Meg. No one wanted to snuggle the poor little sicky and she slept in a nest at the foot of our bed so that she was near but not near enough to sneeze on us. She handled the whole thing with absolute grace (and a puke bowl in her lap for most of Tuesday)... Lola handled it all the way only a four month old could, with total oblivion...
And I let it totally consume me. I spent Tuesday doing what my mom did for me when I was sick. I made a bed for Meg on the couch and turned on the tv. I catered to her every need. When she asked for banana bread, I made banana bread. When she puked on her pjs, I did laundry. When she wanted a snuggle... I rubbed her feet. We were a good team, all three of us. Today she was better. So as the dust settled this evening and I looked around my house I saw what a couple days of getting out of our rhythm causes. I missed the deadline to order school photos, I missed our parent teacher conference this afternoon, Meg's tell and show homework is not done, her lunch for school is not made, her outfit for the morning is not laid out and she got to bed a bit too late. When I put her to bed (in her nest at the foot of our bed)tonight I thought she would be back at school tomorrow. Her fever will have been gone for 24 hours and she is pretty much back to normal. But just now she woke up in a confused stupor and wandered around the room looking for something, anything to comfort her. When I couldn't help her she brought me the phone, then she went to the bathroom and looked for something that she couldn't find there.... Maybe school is a long shot. One more day of mama loving couldn't hurt in the big scheme of things could it?

...something that is urgent-ish.

Last week my midwife scared me. Normally not a sentence one utters. Midwives are not generally very scary people or people that raise undo concern. I love my midwife and I am quite certain that her induction of panic in me was completely unintentional. I have been watching the days tick by with painstaking sluggishness over the last 7 months. In some ways I have been wishing this time away. Hoping for the end to come into clear sight before I lost my mind with the feeling of being unwell all the time. But now the days seem to be slipping from my grasp at an alarming rate. So last week when my midwife reminded me that I was very nearly 33 weeks and wow, next visit I would be approaching the 5 week countdown... I kinda freaked out. So now I have been fitting as many appointments as possible into my weeks, trying to sort out as much as I can at work and making a list of the must-have-done things around the house. Thank goodness my energy level is up but now with any prolonged activity my belly is one big contraction ball. Oy! I think I will be hopelessly unprepared when this baby arrives but I gave over to the idea of unpreparedness over 5 years ago when we welcomed the first small soul into our lives.

I have been lamenting that I have "done nothing" for this baby. I have not spent a lot of time reflecting romantically on the miracle of life. I have not sought out soulful prenatal preparation, even though it is something that I offer to parents and highly recommend. I have not been to the chiropractor weekly and the massage therapist monthly to nurture my growing and shifting body. I have not made any physical preparation to my home to accommodate for our change in lifestyle. I haven't even begun to prepare my homebirth supplies or got a hold of a car seat. I wasn't feeling terribly guilty about any of this either but slightly apologetic. Now I have come to believe that this is the way that this baby is supposed to arrive. I have stopped doing what I think "should" be done in this time of gestating a new life for my family. Instead my lack of "focus" is allowing me to attend to what ever is coming through to me at any given time. I think this is why I have had no resistance to my changing and overwhelmingly beautiful relationship with my first born over the last few months. I may have missed this incredible time in our lives if I had been fully immersed in my pregnancy and preparations for birth. Perhaps this is the soulful preparation I needed to ignite my mother spirit once again...