...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.

...sliding doors.

It's funny how the mind works isn't it. I'm sure we all have our quirky little way of partitioning and filing our thoughts and beliefs. More specifically about time and space. For example I have a very graphic picture of how I lay out the year in my head. I can't describe it really but I can see it perfectly in my own mind. There aren't really starts and finishes so much as there are turning points and there are months that are grouped together for some reason and parts that go up and other parts that go down and some that are static. Does this all sound a little weird? I presume that everyone has these little quirky ways. For that matter there are ways we must be doing this with our lives as well. Grouping certain years together or imagining certain steps that might serve as a marker for a shift in our psyche or a rite of passage. I may be way off here but I bet if I asked you to draw the timeline of your life the way you see it in your head it would not be dots on a line. OK so where am I going with this? Well in my life "timeline" I have a few points where I have little nubs.... Like the starts of paths I chose not to take...or the impossible dreams that I kinda knew would never happen but I wasn't willing to close the door on so I just drag them along with me... They kinda feel like my "sliding door". Like there is another dimension where I am living out those dreams or walking those paths. But over the course of the last couple of years I have come to view all of that a little differently. Call it maturity, enlightenment, maybe even cynicism.... But I have decided that I don't have to leave those nubs in my timeline unanswered. Because the truth is that this is the "dimension" I am living in and I only get one kick at the can so I might as well kick the living daylights out of it.

Last week I turned one of those unanswered, silly, little dreams into a reality of minuscule proportions! I went to an edge. It was uncomfortable and exciting. But the opportunity was there and I took it. I have a dear, dear friend (more of a sister really) that makes me feel cooler than I am. She is like Audrey Hepburn, Nigella Lawson and Georgia O'Keefe all rolled into one skinny-jean-wearing, red-lipsticked, groovy, artist mama. And I adore her! She makes me think I can do anything. Her husband is a musician. He is in the middle of recording a new album and I have been teasing him for months that he can call me when he is laying down the background vocals. Last week he told me to be at the studio at 10 am on Thursday morning. I thought I was calling his bluff when I agreed. But the truth is that he called mine.

He has heard me sing a hand full of times. Happy Birthday at our kid's parties, a bunch of children's songs while bouncing around a kindermusik class and maybe I have squeaked out a melody or lyric when trying to pick his brain about an artist or song title. None of these would qualify as an audition and yet he was quite serious about giving me this chance. Was he crazy? Tone deaf? Really, really polite?

I don't really know how to describe the experience. I couldn't shake the image of all the bad American Idol auditions I have seen. All those people that really, truly think they have the voice of an angel. They genuinely do not know they suck, do they? All I could think of was how much work he was going to have to put in to make me sound half decent. But he kept encouraging me and telling me that it sounded good... It still makes me feel a little queasy thinking about it all. But I did it! And I would do it again if given the chance... Because maybe in one of those "sliding doors" dimensions I am a smooth and sultry lounge singer or a bad ass rock and roll diva or my personal favourite, a long haired, barefoot, acoustically inclined folk singer with flowers in my hair.....

Thanks Chris.

...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...