Category Archives: At Least Mildly Sappy

journeys, birthdays, gratitude

The next Postcard From Cuba comes tomorrow; today, my eldest son turns 14; today, it is 14 years since I was first called mother by the world.

14 years since I learned how to love.

14 years on this journey, my little love…

…little boy with a man’s voice, a man’s shoulders—already taller than me, and he’s only just started growing…

Happiest of birthdays, son.

CinderCollageFinal

*

In the photographs I take of my children, while I’m documenting their journey, our journey, I often take this angle, have you noticed:

JourneyStripGrunge

This is very, very important.

Walk on, my son.

Every step you take is your journey, not mine.

Every step I take is mine, not yours.

*

A few days before my son turned 14, I turned 42. Compared to 14, 42 is insignificant—it’s just a number. But, of course, if you are a Douglas Adams’ fan, you know 42 is the answer. I can’t wait…

Flora: “Congratulations, Mom, you’re one year closer to death.”

Jane: “Thank you, babe. I cannot wait.”

Not true, of course—I say that to tease. But this, this is true: I cannot wait for the next year, for the next decade. Do you remember, it wasn’t raining but it felt like it should have been, and you were so unhappy, and he was dying, and you said that thing you sometimes say about us getting older and closer to the end and I shook my head, “Fuck no, me, I’m just getting started.”

That’s tied into that motherhood thing, 14 years of.

You sent me so many birthday wishes.

I sent you gratitude:

BirthdayThankYou

*

You know, do you not, that everything I write is a love letter to my children? To you? On the days when I am feeling particularly human, the world?

Today’s love letter, though, is just for my son.

Happiest of birthdays, you incredible human.

xoxo

“Jane”

*

So you know the spiel that follows & if you’re reading and you haven’t yet  put a PayPal click where your heart is, it was just my birthday last week, d’ya wanna buy me a birthday coffee?

Trio on benches at laundry park3

The best things in life and on the Internet are free, but content creators need to pay for groceries with money. If you enjoy the Postcards project, please express your delight and support by making a donation via PayPal:

PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!

You: “But how much should I give?”

Jane: “I get $1 each time a sell a traditionally published book, so my bar’s set really low, love. Want to buy me a cup of coffee? That’s $4.75 if you’ll spring for a mocha or latte. Bottle of wine? My palate’s unsophisticated: $19.95 will more than cover it.”

If you’d like to make a contribution but have PayPal issues, email me at nothingbythebook@ gmail.com and we’ll work something out.

Or, ya know. Just hang out with us and enjoy. That be cool too.

xoxo

“Jane”

NothingByTheBook.com / Tweet tweet @NothingBTBook / Instagram NothingByTheBook

*

#postcardsfromcuba catch up

I was in Cuba before Obama. And I want to tell you all about it… in pictures… in words… through sound:

PfC: introduction

So, I introduce the project, and then…
…I shower you with pictures:

PfC: I haven’t found a post office yet… (image)
PfC: what are you looking at? (image)
PfC: Acuario Nacional de Cuba (image)
PfC: zombie Fiat (image)
PfC: sharp edges & powerlines (image)

Then (drum roll, please) release the first listening postcard:

PfC: blame it on Hemingway (post + photographs + podcast)

It’s not really about Hemingway, but you know, #hemingway is a good hashtag.

Next I show you:

PfC: the ugliest building in Havana (image)

& then I teach you some

PfC: Cuban math (post + photographs + podcast) & I also pick up / get picked up by a 25 year old Cuban boy. Seriously. Check it out, and then check out

PfC: this is also Havana (image)

& find out why I’m going to hell:

PfC: Necropolis (images + riffs)

after which you can watch how the entire country of Cuba is trying to prevent me from buying eggs:

PfC: egg hunt (post + photographs + podcast)

then try to figure out what this photo’s all about:

PfC: the view from here (image)

& then pray for me. Just pray:

PfC: we will survive (post + photographs + podcast)

Thank you. Now come with me to a beach. No, not that kind of the beach. The kind of beach that isn’t kept pristine for tourists:

PfC: but you’re not going to make us swim there, are you? (image)

& now you’ve got to meet Jack Gilbert, and understand what having children (in Cuba, anywhere) really means:

PfC: and she asks, is being childless good for a poet (post + photographs + podcast)

Now, have a look at a haunted house:

PfC: haunted house (image)

& then cringe as I explain to Flora the relationship between poverty and crime:

PfC: but is it safe? (post + photographs + podcast)

Then meditate on this photo

PfC: through bent bars (image)

& listen to me try to buy matches:

PfC: matches (post + totally unrelated photographs + podcast)

then take on a hustler:

PfC: get out of my dreams get into my car & pay me 2.5X the going rate pls (images + riff)

& then fall in love:

PfC: Lazaro’s farm (post + photographs + podcast)

and then decompress with:

PfC: a splash of orange, three versions (images)

Now get ready to get all political and cultural with:

PfC: flora, fauna + waiting (post+ images + podcast)

then look at pretty things:

PfC: behind closed eyelids (images)

& take a ride…

PfC: on the bus (short podcast + post + images)

to explore a castle: PfC: castillo means castle (slideshow + postcard images)

& look at some boats.

And how you’re caught up.

Until next tomorrow.

indulgent interlude

I.

The north end of Fort McMurray is still burning; in my neighbourhood, pop-up bake sales, drop-off centers on front yards, people who know loss too well coordinating delivery of strollers, car seats, clothes, toys. They remember—they feel lucky—they feel re-traumatized—they feel they need to be doing something, and so they do.

I feel not too much, am working quite hard to keep it academic, just-over-there, make a donation, spread the word, move on, don’t get too involved—suddenly, it becomes a little too personal, but he’ll be safe, we’ll help you, it’s what needs to be done, routine, & don’t think too much about the dislocated, politicians’ photo-ops…

Life goes on. Life goes on and other joys and other tragedies go on too—I’m so sorry about your loss—and you’re still making art—and you got your grant, but it’s not enough—don’t worry, that much, we can help you raise, give me five minutes and I will start knocking on doors, life has to go.

Then, self-indulgent moments. I wrap myself in them, cherish them, they are my life-preserver, are they not yours?

Interlude4

II.

On Friday, if you were skulking about in my alley, you would have heard:

Jane: “Ender, for fuck’s sake child, I love you. I love you more than life itself, but if you do not give me a little bit of physical space right now, only one of us will live.”

Cinder: “I think Mom needs a hug.”

Jane: “Get. Away. From. Me. And. Stop. Touching. Me!”

But I laughed. And they all lived. Then, I took them into the woods to run, with you, her, your kids, and hers. They took one wrong turn and got lost for a while, an exciting adventure, yet utterly safe.

It was good.

Interlude3

III.

On Tuesday, we ended up with a crèche of nine children, and then 10, how did that happen? I am not so good at math, but that seems two, three more than yours and mine combined…

…that’s a village, that is good.

In a few weeks, I will send you a postcard from Cuba about community—how I didn’t have it at all in Havana, how shocked and grateful I was when it rose around me in Boca—what I learned from it all. Shorthand: I am so grateful for you, her, him; I am never alone.

Interlude1

IV.

On Wednesday, Thursday, all I really want is to be alone, totally completely alone, can you all stop asking me to do shit for you?

Then I feel selfish.

Then, I embrace my self and take her into the places that fill her.

Do you know what that means?

On Saturday… I write.

 

xoxo

self-indulgently yours,

“Jane”

PS: If you are in yyc, here are some things to keep an eye on:

  • Calgary artist Amy Dryer’s new show, Algonquin, is on at the Masters Gallery May 12 to 21st. Go. 2115 4th St SW (Combine with a visit to Yann’s Patisserie, and bring me back one of those pistachio-cherry things, K?)

Interlude2

  • On July 22 & 23, Calgary hosts the first ever Canadian International Fashion Film Festival (#canifff) (that’s three fff’s) (not two). I was fortunate enough to be at the media launch (on Thursday) and it is going to be uber-cool. Film submissions are still open AND they’re looking for volunteers: check it out: CANIFF.com
  • Fairy Tales, Canada’s third largest queer film festival, runs May 20-28, with most of the action in my fabulous neighbourhood of Kensington / Sunnyside. In addition to the films, I think you need to check out the Calgary Men’s Choir Grease Sing Along—because, well, Grease Lightening! Also, the Queer Youth Media Gala is very much worth supporting.

*

Postcards From Cuba, at least partially fueled by rum and cigars, resume Monday.

Slideshow: Chasing Lung Cancer, Unedited Series

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

*

If you enjoy the Postcards project, you can  be a content patron by making a donation via PayPal:

PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!

smooches,

J.

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise, and a re-run #11

Biking in Waterton Lakes National Park

A conversation:

Sean: You know what a good job for Flora would be? Designing coins for the Canadian mint.

Flora: Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I bet I’d be good at that.

Cinder: Please, please, please, if you do get that job, please, please, please design a coin with a penis on it.

Flora: Um… how about if I design a coin with your face on it?

Cinder: No, do one with a penis.

Flora: You’d be more famous if I designed a coin with your face on it.

Cinder: I’d rather be famous for my penis.

Zeus help me.

July 29, 2012

 

A reading assignment that will change your life:

Hafiz. But not just any rendition of Hafiz. Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafiz. Start with Ladinksy’s The Gift.

A taste:

Those kisses you sent, I found them wandering
around the house. They were acting a little
lost, not knowing exactly where I was.

I was busy upstairs. But now we are all having
tea and talking about you, and wishing you
were here.

And they imparted all you intended. They did
well.

One more thing: I have seen you at your best
and at your worst; still you are always welcome
near me.

 

A writing exercise to do instead of being cynical:

Hafiz makes me fall in love with the world, and so, while you’re reading Hafiz this week, I want you to write about loving the world. Through the week, carry a handful of index cards and a pen with you, and whenever you see something you love, whip out a card and write about it.

And when you see someone you love, tell them you love them. And then, write about what it felt like.

(I know, I’m totally going soft. It’s Hafiz…)

 

An explanation:

This is the eleventh week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

 

A re-run:

Biking as a metaphor for life

first published on June 5, 2012

We’re out on our bikes all the time again, and we’re a bit of a gong-show―Ender, Maggie the rat, er, runt Terrier in the biggest bicycle ever (this one), Cinder on his snake bike, Flora on a bike she can barely lift―but needs to ride instead of the little one she can handle because that’s the only way she can keep up with her big brother. Cinder’s usually up ahead, Flora chases him for a while then falls back to ride with me. Ender squeals with delight and Maggie squeals with terror. And I get all sappy, watching them ride, and remembering that it wasn’t that long ago that I had both Cinder and Flora in a trailer behind me… and then Cinder on training wheels… and then Cinder on a little bike…

When Cinder dropped his training wheels and we started going for longer bike rides, I noticed one day how we were usually riding–he in front, setting the pace, going like a madman at first, then slower and slower, and me behind, pulling his sister in the trailer, keeping an eye on the path and possible obstacles, the two of us occasionally stopping to talk, then moving on…

And I was earnestly, sappily, struck with how we biked was so reflective of how I saw parenting and learning and living and all of that.

 And I got so in love with this metaphor, and started writing it out in more detail in my head and developing it into a huge life-changing thesis that I was going to write up for one of my yahoo groups or an article or maybe an entire book … that I stopped paying attention to the path and the real universe around me and I rode right into a post.

Lesson learned?

Nope. I’m cycling hard, chasing Cinder, keeping an eye on Flora, restraining Maggie, chatting to Ender, but my mind again turns the moment into a metaphor and a story―and bam!

It might even have been the same lightpost.

Biking in Waterton Lakes National Park

Here we are after conquering a hill in Waterton Lakes National Park. Ender’s napping in the baby seat and missing the view.

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise, and a re-run #10

A conversation:

Jane: I don’t understand. I don’t understand how two people who love each other as much as I know you two do can fight so much!

Flora: Oh, Mom. Don’t worry. We’re just like Sadie and Carter. (Sadie and Carter Kane, from The Kane Chronicles.)

Cinder: Yeah, we fight all the time…

Flora: … but we cooperate when it matters.

Cinder: Yeah, we’d totally work together to save the world. Right, Flora?

Flora: Right… Ouch! Why’d you punch me?

Cinder: The world is not in peril right now.

June 15, 2012

A reading assignment that will change your life:

On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor.

Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 7.08.45 PM

Preview the book’s insights on BrainPickings: How kindness became our guilty pleasure.

 

A writing exercise (that is also a secret discipline tool) to do instead of breaking up the latest fight between your kids:

Script the next fight between your kids. Then have them act it out. Present the play to your partner when s/he gets home.

Variant: the next time your kids are fighting, whip out your notebook or laptop and start transcribing…

 

An explanation:

This is the tenth week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

 

A re-run:

The 2 a.m. phone call: why sleeping through the night is irrelevant

First published July 30, 2013

It’s 2 a.m. The telephone rings. It’s dark and I’m groggy as I race through the house for the telephone. I don’t get there in a time and I’m in a brief moment of panic as I crouch beside it and wait for it to ring again. My Flora’s sleeping out of the house this night and this phone call can only be about her.

The phone rings again; I pick up; the panic subsides. Yes, it’s Flora. Sleep over fail. She woke up in a strange place, a strange bed and is frightened. Wants to come home.

Sean runs over to get her—and we’re both briefly grateful about the place we live, where sleepovers take place a couple of doors down instead of across the city—and a short two minutes later, she’s in my arms, face pressed against my chest. She’s whispering “the whole story”: how it was so fun, and they had a great time, and she had no trouble at all falling asleep, and then she woke up, and it was dark and strange and she didn’t want to stay…

I listen and then shush her, tell her to go back to sleep. She presses tight against me. Now that she feels perfectly safe and secure, she also feels embarrassed that she bailed. I reassure her in a sleepy voice… and shush her again. “Now sleep, Flora, sleep.”

She presses against me. On the other side of me, Ender flips over, rolls. But doesn’t wake. It’s doesn’t happen very often these days that I find myself squished between two little bodies and I take a sleepy minute to savour the moment.

And I think about how much parenting takes place in these dark hours—when, really, we’re at our worst. Exhausted. Unconscious. Still on duty, but too tired to perform.

None of that ends when the baby (toddler, preschooler, kindergartener!) “sleeps through the night.” Our Cinder actually reached that milestone relatively quickly—sometime around two years. And so what? A few weeks of blissfully uninterrupted sleep followed. Then came the night terrors. When the first wave of those subsided, he got out of diapers—and had to get up to pee in the night. Six times a night, it seemed (probably just once or twice). Then Flora arrived and being awake for Cinder became irrelevant because I was waking up for Flora. When she nightweaned, she started waking up at 3 a.m., raring to go for the day. When she’d sleep late (aka, until 5 a.m.), Cinder would have night terrors. Inevitably, on the nights both kids slept soundly, the dog would have diarrhea… Or, naturally, I would have insomnia.

As I’m cataloging the different stages of post-child sleep deprivation, Flora presses her closer against me. “I’m going to roll over; you can hug my back,” I whisper. “Can’t I roll over with you?” she whimpers. “No, stay there—Ender’s on the other side.” I readjust, so does she. “I like your soft side better,” she sighs. Her head is between my shoulder blades. But her breathing is winding down—sleep is almost there.

“Mom?”

“Sleep, Flora.”

“Does Monday come after Sunday?”

“Yes. Sleep, Flora.”

“Is tomorrow Sunday?”

“Yes. Sleep, baby.”

“And then Monday?”

“Mmmm.”

“Good. I have plans on Monday.”

And she’s asleep. Ender does another flip. But doesn’t wake up. I send a prayer to Morpheus—or should I be petitioning Ra?–that neither of them wakes up with the sunrise. It’ll probably be a four pot, not four cup, coffee day, tomorrow, I think as I feel my breathing reach the sleep rhythm. And I’m out.

I don’t  belittle or dismiss sleep deprivation. It’s tough. There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a form of torture. And each family needs to find its own unique solution to ensuring all members—especially the primary caretaker—gets enough sleep. But “sleeping through the night”? That’s irrelevant. Because kids keep on needing their parents at night, long after they wean. Sometimes just for a minute, for a quick squeeze and reassurance. Sometimes for longer. But if not exactly forever—for a long, long time.

Ender wakes up that morning, by the way, at 5:30 a.m. I curse Morpheus and tell off Ra. Then we tiptoe downstairs. I make coffee. Pull the electronic babysitter—aka Backyardiggans on Netflix—onto duty. Cuddle the Ender. Write most of this post.

Flora streaks downstairs at 7 a.m. “Hi, Mom, I’m going to Meghan’s!” she calls. “Hug? Kiss?” I holler. She backtracks. Hug. Kiss. And for Ender. And for Maggie the runt terrier. And she’s off.

I look at Ender. Hug. Kiss. Soon, I’ll roll off the couch and make the second pot of coffee. By the third pot, I’ll be ready to face the day.

Pot number four, I decide to save for the inevitable afternoon crash.

Koala sleeping on a tree top

 (N.B. For those concerned about my caffeine intake, I should clarify they’re pretty small coffee pots. It was a purchasing mistake. We thought the small press would make us drink less coffee. Nope. It just makes coffee drinking a more labour-intensive process. Live and learn. On the plus side, the cafe is always fresh.)

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise, and a re-run #9

A conversation:

Cinder: I like being nine. Halfway to 18.

Jane: Excited about being able to vote?

Cinder: What? No–excited about being able to own a gun!

(I might have gone horribly wrong somewhere here…)

May 24, 2011

A reading assignment that will change your life:

Louise De Salvo’s The Art of Slow Writing.

It’s a slow read… not exciting… but. Useful.

 

A writing exercise to do instead of doing the laundry:

What are you wearing? What do you wish you were wearing? What does that sanctimonious woman standing behind you on the subway platform think about each outfit? Is she just thinking this… or is she one of those people who’s gonna tell you what she thinks, good or bad?

Use lots of mind-dialogue.

 

An explanation:

This is the ninth week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

 

A re-run:

 Mittens

first published January 1, 2014

We come out of the warm YMCA building, the chlorine scent of the swimming pool still clinging to us. Ender, with the determination only a four-year-old possesses, drags his sled down the stairs. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Slam! It lands on the bottom. He looks over his shoulder. Scowls at me. He’s tired. Hungry. Probably, despite the snowpants, sleeping-bag-jacket, and over-the-face toque, cold, because it’s the coldest, snowiest December YYC has seen in 112 years.

He plops down on the sled in a Buddha pose.

“Mittens?”

I ask, kneeling down beside him.

“No! My hands are NOT cold!”

He’s tired. Hungry. Contrary. It’s at least -15 Celsius.

I shrug. Get up. Start pulling the sled.

It’s a beautiful, clear night. The air feels clean—sparkling—even as it hurts my lungs, bites at my exposed cheeks. I pull the sled on the cleared-of-snow-but-there’s-so-much-of-it-everywhere-I-kind-of-want-a-snowmobile paths. Look at the twinkling lights. The sleeping-bag-parka-engulfed people. Turn my head.

“Mittens?”

“No.”

I shrug. Start walking again, my hands warm in my mittens. I think of what 2013 was, and what 2014 might be. I think of milestones, real and artificial. I think of hope-despair-desire-acceptance-creation-destruction-reconstruction. A plot line emerges from all those thoughts, a fascinating one, and I hear a conversation in my head that sets it up, and I fall in love with it, but it doesn’t really fit into what I want to do, ultimately, with that piece of work, and then my thoughts leap to the unBloggers Manifesto I want to write for Nothing By The Book for January, a polemic that in its current form is not doing quite what I need it to do, and I know it’s because I’m pulling too much into it, going off on too many tangents, and for a piece of writing to work, it needs to be focused, and a polemic piece of writing needs to be brutally so, digressions and tangents only work if you pull them back, at just the right time, to the central idea, the theme… or the chorus…

I turn around.

“Mittens?”

“No. Not cold.”

Mittens Pin

I cross the bridge. The lights are beautiful and almost make me forgive Christmas its existence. And I think about… beauty, definitions of, abstraction of, and that thought takes me to my daughter-who’s-about-to-turn-nine, so beautiful in mind-soul-body that it makes me ache, so full of potential and wonder that it’s that thought, and not the cold air, that stops the breath in my throat for a second… and I think about all the ways that I think fail her as a mother, all the ways that I am not what she needs, and tears swirl in my eyes—but maybe I am what she needs? And, really, what a silly question, because I am what she has and she is what I must learn—and, tears still dancing in the corners of my eyes, I turn my head…

“Mittens?”

He shakes his head. I never imagined motherhood to be this—so full of such intense joy and such paralyzing pain. So full of summits and valleys. So glorious, so rewarding—so fucking heart-wrenching. And that thought takes me to twelve different places at once, and I’m not sure how much self-awareness I want to chase in this moment, so I choose to chase the idea that self-awareness, for all the pain it brings, is also a source of power and that takes me to such very, very interesting places…

“Mittens?”

His hands are folded in his lap, and he’s bent over them. Head bopping. Falling asleep. He bops up. Scowls at me.

“Mittens?” I repeat.

“No.”

I walk faster. Over another bridge. Through the steam rising from the cracks in the ice of the river. I look at the water, ice, snow, steam and feel a shot of resentment and fear. I try to see beauty… and not next year’s flood waters. And I grit my teeth and don’t chase that thought. Find another. Oh, this one I like… I smile—my nose runs, because it’s so cold—my mouth opens and I almost stop moving because all I want is that thought and, irreverently and irrelevantly, I also glory in the fact that it came to me in this moment when I am alone… except I am not, because I am MOTHER and I am never alone, even when I am.

I look over my shoulder…

“Mittens?”

“Not! Cold!”

I can’t really run in my boots and on the snow, but I walk as quickly as I can. Home, home. I cannot wait to be home, and not just because it’s cold, and I love that thought, that feeling. I want to get home.

“Mom? My hands are cold.”

I’m about… what? 200 meters away. Maybe less. I kneel down beside the four-year-old. His hands are pulled into the sleeves of his sleeping-bag coat. I blow on his fingers and slip on his mittens. Kiss the tip of his nose.

Do not lecture, and so, enjoy the brief victory of mind over impulse. Pull the sled the last 200 meters home.

…

I wish I could tell you that the next time we go out in the cold, he says “Yes” the first time I try to put on his mittens. But he won’t.

I wish I could tell you I will never again doubt that I am what my daughter needs or let my thoughts go to all those other unproductive, painful places.

I wish I could tell you that, somewhere between the YMCA and home, I found the answer to EVERYTHING. Because how awesome would that be?

But, I just want to tell you this: You can fight over the mittens. Cajole, badger, plead. Force.

Or you can wait for those little hands to get cold.

And when they do—put on the mittens. Silently. Without the “I told you so’s.” Or too many expectations for the next time.

Fuck, yeah, it’s a metaphor.

“Jane”

P.S. Happy New Year, beloveds. I am torn what to ask of 2014. In the closing weeks and months of 2013, I rather wanted a less eventful year. But now that it’s here… eventlessness is so boring. And unfulfilling. So, 2014—be eventful. Be FULL. I’ve got plans for you. And you’d better be prepared to rise to the occasion.

P.P.S. “Jane, why are you anthropomorphizing a calendar construct?”
“Because… Metaphors. So useful.”

Coming sometime this month: the unBlogger’s Manifesto. Minus all of its digressions. Or maybe not. Focus is key. But it is digressions that make life and thought interesting…

P.P.P.S. “I love this! I want more!”
“I am so pleased. Connect with Nothing By The Book on Twitter @nothingbythebook, Facebook, and Google+. Or, for a not-in-front-of-the-entire-Internet-please exchange, email  nothingbythebook@gmail.com.”

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise guru, and a re-run #6

A conversation:

I walk into the living room to see Ender and Cinder sitting around my old non-functioning Mac Book, its keyboard in pieces, and Cinder wedging one of the panels on the body open.

Cinder: Hi Mom.
Jane: What are you doing?
Cinder: Ender and I wanted to see what the inside of a computer looked like. Don’t worry–this is the broken old one. … Um… was this one of those things I should have asked permission for?
Jane: Um… yeah, probably.
Cinder: Would you have said yes?
Jane: Um… well…
Cinder: See, when I think you might say no, I don’t want to ask permission.

May 27, 2012

 A reading assignment that will change your life:

Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnets. Especially Sonnet XII.

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

Delicious… Now… is he talking about a woman… or Chile?  And does it matter?

A writing exercise (guru):

I want to introduce you to Sarah Selecky and her writing exercises at SarahSelecky.com. One of the favourite prompts of hers was “write four scenes involving walnuts.” So. Do that today, right now: four scenes involving walnuts. And then, check out Sarah’s various offerings—maybe sign up for her daily writing prompts?

P.S. You’re still doing Morning Pages, right? Right?

An explanation:

This is the sixth week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

A re-run:

Ferocious Five

For all the mothers of five-year-old girls, current and coming-up-on-five, in my life.

From Life’s Archives, January 27, 2007

Flora is five years and three weeks old today—the three weeks is important, as important as the “half” was when she was four and a half. She’s just come off a very long—for our healthy, active girl—illness, almost two weeks of intermittent fever, sore throat and cough, sniffles and overall body aches, with two days of puking thrown in at the start just for fun. She’s physically well now, but weak. And fragile. Each of her nerves and emotions is exposed to the harsh air of every day life, and the smallest of life’s trials rub her raw and send her spiraling into misery.

It’s driving us mad.

We’ve been here before with her. She celebrated turning two by being sad for three weeks, non-stop. (Funny thing about time: at the time, we thought it was months. Perhaps an entire year. Fortunately, I keep records. It was three weeks on the dot, 21 days of almost incessant crying, over everything.) Between three and four—and especially on either side of three and a half—life thwarted her at every step and she barely survived (us too). At four and a half there was a brief—six days, but oh dear god what a six days—reprisal.

So this is Take Four of Flora being uber-fragile, and I’m trying very hard to approach it as a yet another opportunity handed to me by the universe to crack the Flora code. (We successfully cracked the Cinder code when he was two [this post is coming to the blog Archives soon!] and haven’t been significantly challenged in our interpretation of it since then; Flora is proving to be more complex. Perhaps we women really are.) However hard, each take has offered amazing insights and lessons. The first time around, when she was two and in tears, the lesson to us was simple. Happiness comes from within. We cannot make her happy or peaceful—it is not, indeed, our responsibility to make her happy. The best we can do is provide a certain type of environment, some coping tools—but the only one who can make Flora happy (or not) is Flora.

The lesson of Take Two was more nebulous, and it wasn’t really about Flora. It was about me and you (yes, you, the reading you, the you walking past my yard, the you I pass on the park path, the you paying a visit to my house while she’s having a meltdown). In a nutshell, it was: you don’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter, your reaction to Flora or to my reaction to Flora or to anything else that’s happening right now in Flora’s world doesn’t matter. Sorry. You don’t want to hear that, but I need to remind myself of it, throw you out of my mind, and focus on me and Flora. Then, I need to put me to the side—I’ll come back to me later, recharge, re-examine, ponder exactly why I was feeling the way I was and wanting to react the way I was, I’ll do all that, but later.

Right now, with you and me out of the way, I need to focus on Flora, I need to help her cope, work out some tools that she can use to help find herself, work through whatever inner turmoil she’s experiencing right now, and come back to a place of balance. This moment is all about her, and I need to surrender to that first. Only then can I help her… and maybe helping her just means being there while she can’t help herself. And then, when there is a moment when she wants and needs and is open to help—then, I step in. Without my baggage, without making this about me—much less you—but just her.

This lesson is much harder than calculus and I’m still studying it, reviewing it, intermittently failing it, because, at least some of the time, I want you to approve of my and my child and my parenting.

Flora—the current, five year old Flora—is stirring on the couch beside me now making whimpering unhappy noises as she wakes up from a quasi-nap, and I’m revisiting the second part of the lesson. Not about me. About her. What does she need? (Part of me says, a kick in the head.) Apparently, she says, her whole self covered with the blanket. Translation: control over her surroundings.

Take Three’s lesson was simple, so long as Take Two’s lesson was mastered. Repeat: it’s not about you or me. It’s about her. In capital letters: It’s about HER. Between three and five, children are as purely and completely selfish as selfish can be. They’re not psychotic, unsocialized, undisciplined: they just are. Purely, beautifully selfish. The world is all about them, and that’s all that matters to them.

This can suck to the rest of us having to live in the world alongside them. Until, that is, we realize that developmentally speaking, this is normal and inevitable… and it is possible to “work” with it. Asking a child in that stage to do something—or stop doing something, or, ha!, feeling something—because of the effect it has on other people is a recipe for frustration. They can’t comply: they don’t hear you. Oh, they can learn to fake complicity through coercive discipline. But they don’t get it. The world is about them.

At four and half, and into five, I know this. Flora’s world is all about her. In retrospect, on either side of five, Cinder’s world was all about him too. But he manifested it in a different way and it was easier to live with. It was all about doing stuff. For Flora, it’s about feeling stuff. Waaay more complex.

So, here we are in Take Four. Obviously, for me, part of the lesson here is a remedial review of Take Two. It’s not about me. It’s all about her. This part, I’m doing pretty well on. I need to work a little bit more on the fact that you don’t matter. And also, I need to flip the fact that it’s not about me on its head. I actually need to make it about me: that is, seize each of these moments as an opportunity to work on ME. MY response. MY feelings and MY expression of them. MY understanding. What am I doing in this moment and why, and can I be the me in this moment that I want to be? Can I be that me just a little bit longer? One more minute? Another after that?

People pay big money for transcendental moments like this: they go to workshops, retreats, read books, meditate… and lucky me, motherhood is delivering these life-changing, self-reflecting opportunities to me just about every day…

I wrote this post more than two years ago. Flora is now seven and three and a half months—she could probably tell you her age precisely to the day, perhaps the hour. And while we are not in “Take Five,”  we are still learning our sensitive, fragile Flora. She’s learning us too—the selfishness of five is long gone, replaced by hyper-awareness to the feelings of others, and hyper-despair when they are negative. Sometimes, this hyper-awareness makes me long for the selfishness of five. But that’s a topic for a future post. 

Bust of Flora

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise, and a re-run #4

A conversation:

3:30 a.m.

“Mama, wake up, I have a booger!”

“Hmm?”

“Should I eat it?”

“No… ah… here, give it to me, I’ll put it on the wall…”

3:56 a.m.

“Mama, I have another booger. Should I put it on the wall?”

“Yes.”

(From Life’s Archives, July 9, 2005)

 

A reading assignment that will change your life:

Anything by Rumi. I recommend Coleman Barks’ The Essential Rumi, but you really can’t go wrong. Sample at The Poetry Chaikhana.

 

A writing exercise to do instead of asking “when do you find the time to write”:

Go to your bookshelf. Find a book you will never read again. Fill the front and end pages with first paragraphs of books you’d like to read, but nobody has written yet.

 

An explanation:

This is the fourth week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

 

A re-run:

How I got deprogrammed and learned to love video games

(first published on May 19, 2012)

Cinder’s just shy of 10, and the big passion of his life is Minecraft. Or Terraria. Or both, but usually just one or the other. He loves them so much, he’s convinced his Mac-using parents to get him a PC laptop so he can play them more effectively. He loves them so much that his show of choice is watching Minecraft or Terraria videos on Youtube. (A digression for a Cinder recommendation: for Terraria, nothing beats Total Biscuit and Jesse Cox; for Minecraft, Antvenom is King, and Cavemanfilms is pretty good too. Now you know where to go.)

My boy loves video games. And this is a wonderful thing.

I never thought I’d find myself saying this. Video games were never a part of my childhood, and my experience of them as an on-looker—sister, girlfriend, wife—was, well, blah. Wasn’t interested. Didn’t understand the appeal. Could tell you one thing for sure: no kid of mine was going to waste his childhood playing video games. Could rattle of spades of research about how detrimental to the proper development of a child excessive (any) video game playing could be.

Well. What changed?

Simply this: My boy loves video games, and I love my boy. He started getting drawn to them about age eight, I suppose, meeting them at this friend’s house or that, telling us about them with excitement, in vivid detail. His game-playing father entered into his interest; his game-ignorant mother started to agonize. What to do? For what reason? With what consequences?

I spare you my internal angst, as first one online game and then another (“It’s educational, Mom!” Supported by Dad’s: “Really, Jane, it’s educational.”) got introduced. Then the X-box (“It’s Kinect, Jane—they’ll be exercising and moving while they play—isn’t that good?”). Then an iPad and all the apps and games that enabled. Here’s what steered me through it, though: I love my boy. He loves these things; he’s drawn to them. What’s he getting out of it? Why? How?

I love my boy, and if I love my boy, I can’t be dismissive and contemptuous of something he loves.

So, I’d sit beside him and watch him play. Listen to him talk about the games afterwards. In-between. Eavesdrop while he talked about with his friends. Watch while they acted out game scenes on the trampoline or on the Common.

I might tell you about all the things I’ve seen him learn from gaming another time (for one example, check out this salon.com piece about Minecraft ). Rattle of spades of research about how playing video games actually makes kids smarter (Here’s Gabe Zichermann talking about this on Ted Talks). But it really comes down to this:

I love my boy. My boy loves video games. His reasons for loving them are complex—but no less valid than my love for Jane Austen novels, or John Fluevog shoes. I do not have to love them just because he loves them—I do not have to make myself play them or enjoy them as he does, just because I love him. But because I love him, I can’t say—or think and believe—that what he loves and enjoys is a waste of time. Of no value. Stupid.

Flip it. Think of something you love. Knitting? Film noir? Shiny cars? Collecting porcelain miniatures? Whatever. Doesn’t matter what. I’m thinking of my Jane Austen novels, which I reread probably half-a-dozen times a year. Now think of how you feel when someone who’s supposed to love you and care about you—your partner, your best friend, your mother—thinks that hobby or activity is of no value. And takes every opportunity to tell you so. Do those interactions build your relationship? Inspire you with love and trust for the person showing such open contempt for something that brings you joy?

I love my boy. My boy loves video games. And I love that he loves them. I love that they bring him joy.

As I finish writing this up, Ender’s having the tail-end of his nap in my arms, and Flora’s listening to The Titan’s Curse. Cinder grabs his lap top, and sits down beside me on the couch. He pulls up an Antvenom video on Youtube. “I need to get this mod,” he says. “Cool one?” I ask. “Too cool,” he says. I watch him watching for a while.

I love my boy.

“Love you, Mom,” he says. “What do you want to do when my video’s over?”

Minecraft Castle

Minecraft Castle (Photo credit: Mike_Cooke)

A conversation, a reading assignment, a writing exercise, and a re-run #2

A conversation:

Cinder [precariously balanced on you-don’t-want-to-know-what]: “Everything’s within reach. You just have to figure out how to reach it without getting killed.”

December 26, 2010

A reading assignment that will change your life:

Ella Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must:

Should is how other people want us to live our lives. It’s all of the expectations that others layer upon us.

…

Must is different. Must is who we are, what we believe, and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. It’s that which calls to us most deeply. It’s our convictions, our passions, our deepest held urges and desires — unavoidable, undeniable, and inexplicable. Unlike Should, Must doesn’t accept compromises.

 

A writing exercise to do instead of saying “but I have nothing to write about”:

Write about why you have nothing to write about. Write for 10 minutes. Then another 10. Then another 10.

There. You’ve written for half an hour. Well done, sweetums.

 

An explanation:

This is the second week of my 12-week unplugged AWOL (don’t tell my clients… um or too many of my friends 😉 ). No phones, no wifi… also, no winter! I’m going to be documenting things old school via journals and postcards (if you want a postcard from… well, that place where I’m hiding… email your snail mail address to nothingbythebook@gmail.com).

The blog’s on auto-pilot with a conversation from the archives, a reading recommendation, a writing assignment (cause I can’t nag any of you in person), and unsolicited advice… er, that is, a re-run post of the kind I don’t write very often anymore.

Enjoy.

 

A re-run:

Moving from guilt to gratitude

(first published February 24, 2014)

I am sick, so sick, achy, feverish, exhausted, so-tired-I-don’t-think-I’ll-even-make-it-to-the-bathroom-even-to’-I-really-need-to-puke-tired…

(Digression-justification: I am obscenely healthy. I hardly ever get sick. And so, when I do, I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. Your husband’s man-flu, for which you mock him mercilessly? Forget it. I’m worse.)

I’m so sick, so-tired-barely-conscious, my rational-disciplined self is incapacitated, and the rest of me chooses this moment of physical vulnerability to assault me emotionally and mentally with… GUILT.

I feel guilty… oh, where do I begin? I feel guilty that I’m sick. That I’m not working-billing. Working-family-raising. That I didn’t get up with the kids. Actually I don’t even know where they are. Are they awake? Are they home? Are they alive?

I feel guilty that I’m too sick-exhausted-I-think-I’m-dying to really care…

I  need to get myself to the bathroom—but I can’t move, I can’t move—and the door opens and my beloved comes in with a puke bucket.

As I retch—I’m pretty sure this isn’t just the flu or the latest reiteration of whatever gastro-intestinal bug is floating around, it’s the plague and tomorrow I will be dead—he tells me he’s cancelled my appointments for the day and his, and the kids are fine, and is there anything else I need? Ginger tea?

I moan something incomprehensible and don’t hear his response. I’m too busy feeling guilty. Not just guilty that he’s taking care of me and the kids. No, that wouldn’t be self-flagellating enough: I’m guilty over our entire lifestyle. Guilty that our work allows my husband to be there for me and the kids on a day like this. We’re so stupid-lucky, elitist-privileged, bubble-wrapped.

So guilty.

I even start to feel guilty about this: if he had a shoot or a client commitment today that couldn’t be rescheduled—there are a dozen people he could call on to help. And they would be there for me, for us. In a heart beat.

As I start to inch my way across the bed to get away from the smell of the barf bucket, I realize that I’m  feeling fully and acutely guilty over being supported, connected. Loved.

That’s when my rational-disciplined self, however close to death it feels, snaps. Can’t take it anymore. And wallops its whiney-guilty counterpart upside the head.

“What’d you do that for? I’m sick! I’m dying! And I feel so GUILTY because…”

SLAP!

My rational-discipline self plays hard ball when roused. IT is on the brink of either slapping the rest of me again or, worse, delivering the mother of all lectures on…

…the door creaks open. “Ginger tea?” my beloved says. And… I am flooded with gratitude.

Gratitude for the tea. For the love that brings it. For the support behind it. For my entire life and everyone in it.

Why is guilt so much easier to indulge in than gratitude is to feel and practice?

I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s because guilt is selfish and self-focused… while gratitude requires humility and awareness of our interdependence, our vulnerability.

I drink my ginger tea. Puke it up almost immediately… then drift off into a feverish-restless sleep-coma-no-not-death.

But I slip into unconsciousness bubble-wrapped in gratitude.

xoxo
“Jane”

P.S. A. Deathbed experiences make me sappy. Sorry. How do they affect you? B. Clearly, I lived. Thank you for asking. But just barely… I’m pretty sure it was the plague. C. For the last few weeks, Cinder, Flora, Ender and I have been constructing a “Things That Went Right” wall. It’s a simple, fun project inspired by Martin Seligman’s gratitude journal exercise in Flourish: every day, each of us thinks of and writes down three things that went right that day. Three good things. Three exciting things. Or three ordinary things. The week of my plague, “I didn’t puke” was THE good thing each of the kids flagged. It’s all about perspective, right?

What Went Right

P.P.S. Tirzah Duncan aka The Inkcaster wrote a marvellous post about her freeing and beautiful take on beauty last week, and I’d love for you to read it: Beauty is far from skin deep.

For those of you deep in the toddler trenches, pop over to Stephanie Sprenger at Mommy Is For Real for a refresher on the concept of disequilibrium… and a tongue-in-cheek (or is it?) proposition of the massing of transitionin-disequibiriumiated (fine, it’s not a word, but you know exactly what I mean…) toddlers in a toddler “Red Tent.”

Looking for me? I’ve revamped the for-stalkers-and-bloggers-and-no-I’m-a-real-sane-fan! section: Find “Jane”

On hard days, happy moments, breathing and why we need to document it all

I.

First, Rumi:

“every breath you take
makes one of two choices:
you either surrender to your soul
or struggle with doubt”

…because the joyous Yuletide season is the most brutal time of the year for me, and for so many of you, and this year, for someone I love, it just got even worse, as bad as it can get, and what can we do?

Breathe…

II.

Second, Agatha Christie:

“All this poetry and music and translating Shakespeare and Wordsworth into Arabic and Chinese and Hindustani. ‘A primrose by the river’s brim,’ etc. … what’s the good of that to people who’ve never seen a primrose?”

Oh, Dame Agatha. I hope you’re lampooning the character who’s saying that, but if you’re not… I’m so sorry.

III.

Third, Ender:

nbtb-Happy Sledding Ender

Caption: This is a happy moment.

IV.

Fourth, a resolution:

I have not been as good at jotting down, documenting those happy moments as I used to be. I am so very grateful for the iPhone camera—and for Instagram—and the ease with which one can freeze one of those moments in time.

My New Year’s resolution, I think, is to document more, in ink—and in pictures.

I’ll try to share, why not? But mostly—it’s for me, my record. And for them, of course. I want them to remember me remembering them, if you know what I mean.

V.

Fifth…. breathe. Remember. Breathe…

VI.

Finally (don’t stop breathing), tis also the season for the bellyaching of overfed bellies and New Year’s resolutions that will lead to a fitter, slimmer, happier (ha!) you.

So, would-be-dieters, Rumi is totally on your side:

yesterday you filled your stomach
with all kinds of bread and goods

you became so sluggish
so sleepy

what comes of such indulgence?
either recklessness
or the need to go to the toilet

sounds of moans and mourning
come from the soul while fasting
but the only sound that comes after a meal
is a low-pitched rumble from the rear-end

so friend
if you want to hear what the soul has to say
then skip the meal;
if you want to hear from the other end
then bring the bowl closer to you

You’re welcome. 😉

xoxo

“Jane”

P.S. The Rumi poem translations are taken from Will Johnson’s Rumi’s Four Essential Practices: Ecstatic Body, Awakened Soul, and they’re Johnson reinterpretations, in part, of Nevit O. Ergin’s translations of Rumi into English from Turkish—which were translated by an assortment of translators from old Persian into old-then-modernish Turkish. What would Dame Agatha think?

Productive artists

This week, I am pensive and volatile, introspective and critical, vibrating with anxiety and full of energy. I am all these conflicting, competing things and I am struggling to make my words perform the way they want to.

Flora: “I’m feeling so sad. I don’t know why!”

Me too, little flower,me too. I put an arm around her and suggest we go up to bed, watch an episode of Friends together—mind pap, not even brain candy, more like Pablum that used to be the marquee brand but has now been retired, gathering dust on a creaky shelf in an old warehouse. It’s well past its expiry date—no matter, today, we will eat it anyway, because it’s what we… well, not what we need. But what we want, right now.

We watch. But it’s not about the watching. It’s about the cuddling—the 22 minutes of togetherness and physical contact and presence. The show on the laptop ensures we can be together without words. Without me lecturing (or whining). Her justifying (trying to put into words what can be silence).

Flora’s little brother was evil today and I worry that I am raising a vandal, possibly, worse, the Anti-Christ, a destroyer of worlds. I’m probably not—but I worry. That’s what mothers do, you know. Worry, worry, worry.

Flora’s worried too. She’s going on a trip next week, to New York City! With her grandmother, without me. She’s excited.

But worried.

Why?

Flora: “I’m concerned it’s not going to be productive.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, whose sentiment is she echoing there? Not mine, or is it? (What she means, really, is “I’m worried I will miss you.” But she chooses those other words. They’re safer.) Her father strokes her hair and kisses the tip of her nose. “To an artist, every experience is productive, important,” he says. I smile. Idly wonder if I should interject, correct “to an artist” to “to a human.” We respect-recognize-value-nurture the artist within Flora so much, but maybe that’s as harmful as trying to squash it, suppose down the line, she decides she’s over this drawing thing and she wants to be a neurologist, shop keeper or construction worker? Are we limiting her with the label?

(mothers, worry, worry, worry, worry…)

Flora’s room, in its glorious messiness, artistic chaos is so beautiful to me. When I open the door and peek in there, I am flooded with joy and love—her room is evidence of her creativity, her freedom, her exploration of the world and of herself in an explosion of colour. It is her self, her soul made physical—the same way my the space-that-is-me-made-into-place is mine (or, I detour, the way my words are me? Are my words me? That’s another story to explore…)

We have been talking about rejigging the children’s rooms for some time now, doing, finally, the Canadian thing and giving them each a room. This week, trembling under the weight of deadlines, consumed with anxiety over “Why haven’t they gotten the mark up back to me yet!” (and also, “why haven’t they paid me, yet, again, oh, wait, they don’t do that anymore, it’s most cost-effective for them not to pay their writers, bastards, I really need to rethink my career NOW”), I channel the nervous energy into making that happen.

It’s a game of dominos—the old film production office on the flood plain transforms into a sanctuary for me and Sean (“But it’s so cold!” “Yeah, but it’s two stories away from the ears of the children!” “And the bathroom!” “Lover, it will be so good, you’ll see…”), Flora, taking over the big bedroom currently shared by the boys and their Lego, Cinder into the shoebox with the big window that’s currently Flora’s over-crowded room (“Roof access!” he proclaims gleefully. “If you abuse the roof access, I’m going to put bars on it,” I warn him. “No you won’t,” he retorts. “It’s our fire escape.” Busted, dammit, never make threats you can’t keep), and Ender inheriting the former family bedroom with the king size mattress he’s been peeing on since he’s been born.

(As we play the dominos necessary to effect the change, I am most excited that my future holds a mattress free of child urine. Yes, yes, yes, YES!)

“Why does Flora get the biggest room?” this from Ender, the third child who’s most sensitive to “not fair”—and says “not fair” even when things are perfectly equitable and reasonable; “not fair” means “I don’t like this.”

I want to say, first impulse, “Because she’s an artist,” but of course, he has an artist within too. So, instead, “Because she needs the space and the light. You and Daddy can use her studio sometimes to draw and paint in—that’s part of the deal.”

“Not fair,” the little vandal humphs and goes off in search of, what? Possibly a hammer, something to smash. To follow him, or to risk it? I follow. He goes to a bin of Lego, starts to create.

I sigh with relief, for the moment. Call for Cinder to help me move a dresser down two flights of stairs. He takes over the logistics of the operation. “As you’re still a little bigger, you’d better be at the bottom,” he instructs me. I look up at him–yeah, another inch, and he will be bigger than me, and I suspect he might already be stronger… “No, just one stair at a time at the top here, but at the third step, veer right and over…” We get the dresser—it’s actually an antique Chinese medicine cabinet, totally useless as a dresser, three pairs of socks fit in each drawer, and my bras barely, BUT I LOVE IT, it is so beautiful—down to the bottom floor without hammering any new holes in the wall. I feel very satisfied. Productive. Lifting heavy stuffy, moving shit from one room to another—when you’ve done it, you feel you’ve done something, accomplished something, right?

Changing three words in a perfectly good sentence to make it better… not quite the same oomph. Waiting for a response to your email, phone message? Utterly draining.

Pensive and volatile, introspective and critical, vibrating with anxiety and full of energy, I survey the chaos I’ve thrust my house into. The work’s not done yet, but my minions are exhausted. “Go play,” I command, and they scatter.

I text a witch to ask if she can come smudge, exorcise some of the 2013 anxiety from the flood plain-level ex-office, our new bedroom.

Do all the things. Then, drink wine with people I love. Sleep like the dead.

Wake up, still pensive and volatile, introspective and critical, vibrating with anxiety and full of energy. Which is good, because there’s still so much to do…

xoxo

“Jane”

NBTB-beakerhead 2015 intrude

Look!

Fragment 1

Her: Look!

Me: No. I don’t wanna.

Her: Look! Come on! How are you going to understand if you don’t look?

That’s the point. I don’t want to understand. If I don’t look, if I don’t see, I don’t have to start to understand. I can stay here, away. On the periphery, full of judgement, empty of compassion.

Her: Look. Please. Look.

I look.

Fragment 2

An on-the-fly-translation of a Rumi poem in response to the burning of a manuscript:

“She said, I set this fire for a reason. Don’t question what you don’t understand.”

But if I don’t question what I don’t understand how the fuck am I ever going to know anything, learn anything?

Her: Look. Just… look…

I look.

Fragment 3

I have not idea what I’m looking at. What I’m looking for, I know. Truth, right? What else do we ever look for?

Truth. Some version thereof.

Flora: Mom? What is truth?

I look at her. I try not to lie.

I suspect I do.

Fragment 4

Look, a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:

“What happens next depends on you.”

Of course. Always.

Her: What are you going to do?

I look.

xoxo

“Jane”

nbtb-look

This should have a post-script, I think, don’t you? OK. Let’s do it:

You: Fuck, Jane, were you stoned?

Me: Stone sober, beloved. But pensive and playful at the same time. Also, generous. I wanted you to look. Did you?

 

Roadkill

I.

The car in front of us hits a jaywalking squirrel and as I swerve to not roll over the destroyed, twitching little body, Flora bursts into tears.

“Can we stop, can we save it?”

There is nothing to save; it is too dangerous to stop. I shake my head. She weeps all the way to the library. I reach out and hold her hand and let tears well up in my eyes.

(The mother I was two years ago, would have told her to control herself, to get a grip, to stop.)

II.

It’s 8:30 p.m., and the sun is low even here, and so the lake beach is deserted and the lake water, never warm, freezing cold. Flora and I are swimming through it, to the floating dock. There was a dead fish floating there earlier that she really, really wanted to examine… I promised we’d come back when all the other children—who were so grossed out by her zoologist’s desire to see what the fish was, how it died, where its wounds were they screeched and screamed and called for their parents—were gone.

The children are gone, and so is the fish.

Flora, disappointed, lets tears come. Then lets them dry up. We swim through the cold water, back to the shore.

(That’s the mother I want to be: the kind who goes back to the beach at sunset and swims through ice cold water to look for a dead fish with my child. Write that on my tombstone.)

III.

I can’t remember why they start planning my funeral, exactly—Flora and Cinder, I mean. I think it’s because we’re talking about the suicides of various famous people, and of course that naturally segues to burials and funeral rites and wakes, and I say how I really don’t want to have a funeral, but I realize it’s not about me—I’ll be dead, what do I care—it’s about the other people. And Flora, party planner extra-ordinaire, says,

“We’ll make it a big, big party! Who do you want to invite?”

“I don’t fucking care; I’ll be dead. All the people who want to come: all the people who love me.”

“We should invite all the people who hate you too; they’ll be really happy to dance at your funeral. Do you keep a list of those?”

I don’t. But apparently, I should, for my funeral.

Cinder prepares the song list. He’s going to lead with “Highway to Hell.” Follow up with “Staying Alive.”

Flora adds “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).” (“Especially if you’re murdered,” she says. WTF? I think.) Also, the Barenaked Ladies’ “Big Bang Theory Theme Song.” She pauses. “We end with Hozier’s ‘Take Me To Church.’ It’ll be kind of ironic, get it?”

I suggest the “Macarena” instead. They don’t get it.

(The human I want to be doesn’t want to be afraid of dying. And I don’t think, if I lead the full life I want to lead, I will be. Will I? So hard to know what will be. Hard enough to be aware, appreciative of what is.)

IV.

Ender’s favourite bedtime book right now is I’m A Seed, written by Jean Marzollo and illustrated by  Judith Moffatt.

“How many books are you going to read me tonight, Mama?”

he asks. I consult the level of exhaustion in my body.

“Four.”

I say.

He asks me to read I’m A Seed four times.

I raise my eyebrows. Feel “No” and rebellion rising in my chest, and then pause. What is the difference between reading the one book I’ve already read him dozens of times four times tonight… and reading four books I’ve already read him dozens of times?”

I read:

“I’m a seed!”

“Me too!”

Four times. Treat it as meditation.

(That’s the mother-human I always aspire to be; too often fail. Today, I achieve. Kiss his sweaty head as he falls asleep. Realize I’ve forgotten to brush his teeth. Fuck.)

V.

“Mom? Are you still thinking about the dead squirrel?”

No. Not even a little bit. But that’s not what she wants to hear.

“Mmmm. You?”

“Yes.”

I hold her tight.

nbtb-roadkill

xoxo

“Jane”

(in parentheses)

I just wanted to tell you…

…

(I have k.d. lang singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on a loop in the background. That tells you everything you need to know, really.

No?

You want details, background?

No. Today, I sketch in faint pastels, impressions.

The sound of laughter as the hail pelts the trampoline turns the strawberry bed into salad.

 

 

“It’s a $30 bottle of wine!” the poet holds the label up for me to see. “S-w-eet, is it full?”

No, it’s recycling, tipped over by the water, by that car.

At home, I have a bottle of significantly sub-$30 Mengage A Trois. We will drink it later, after we mop your kitchen floor.

The storm sewer drain is a bubbling fountain, and we are knee-high in freezing hail water, helpless and wanting to be doing something, but what?

Fire department. We all know we’re having a June 2013 flashback. They’re kind.

Adrenaline.

Text: “I carelessly walked to the hail and rain singing my song.”

It’s over very quickly, really. The alley drains. Dry. Everything’s fine.

Crash.

It’s probably a very good thing there is only one bottle of wine between the three of us, no?

In the morning, sunlight dancing in raindrops still suspended in battered leaves. Traffic reports, road closures, news I don’t particularly want to hear.

“There’s still snow on the trampoline!”

It melts as the sun continues to shine.

“Chocolate?”

“Yes, please.”

Memories are made of this.

nbtb-in parentheses

And what are we if not our memories?)

…

…but I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

xoxo

“Jane”

A Meditation on Purgatory, Stories and Memory

For Tirzah, The Ink Caster

I.

“On a very basic level, you are what you remember — your very identity depends on all of the events, people and places you can recall.

…

“[E]motional memory [is] when we relive how we felt at moments in the past — elated, sad, depressed, or angry. When we lose emotional memory of our own youth, we find that we no longer understand young people. If this forgetting progresses, we begin to lose touch with ourselves.

“And if we allow our emotional memories to disappear, as happens with Alzheimer’s patients, we will find a stranger staring back at us from the mirror.”

Richard Restak,
The Art of Doing: How Superachievers
Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well

II.

I remember. Do you?

Although sometimes, I think people with crappy, short-term memories must be happier.

My Flora is losing that sharp, endless, flawless memory that exists during childhood. If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about. Your four-year-old remembering exactly what he ate on the day of his third birthday. The two-year-old recognizing the street you visited only once before.

Ender still remembers everything. It’s so annoying.

Adults are always so amazed at the vividity of children’s memories.

Silly adults. All children remember. Most adults forget.

Worse, they overwrite. Reinvent. Remember what never was.

What a tragedy.

(Except, when it’s a blessing…)

III.

“The least contaminated memory might exist in the brain of a patient with amnesia — in the brain of someone who cannot contaminate it by remembering it.”

Sarah Manguso,
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

I contaminate, by remembering. I change, by re-experiencing.

And then, when I am ready to craft my version of how it really happened: I write it down.

And because you didn’t write it down, I win. My record stands. Your memory, I say, is faulty. Look. I wrote it all down. That’s how it happened.

(Thank you, Winston Churchill.)

The bitch of it is—I know what I’m doing, no one better. And so then, when you ooh-and-aah-and-coo and tell me, “So real, so brave, so authentic” (how I hate that word: Faking Authenticity), I am ashamed, because I know it’s not, it’s always, always performance, interpretation. Every word written, every word withheld: a choice.

The narrative is crafted, controlled.

IV.

In an average year, I write 30-40,000 words on Nothing By The Book. Moments captured, memories reinterpreted. Flora now reads and “remembers” her past in what I write. The responsibility paralyzes me.

“I’m writing me, not you,” I want to tell her. But I’m not sure she will understand.

“Don’t let how I write you affect who you are,” I want to tell her, but is that even possible?

“Don’t let me trap you, bind you, trick you, script a story that isn’t true for you even though it felt at the time true, necessary for me.”

“Are you telling me not to read your blog, your books?” maybe she will ask me.

And I will say… what? I suppose, this: “No. Read if you want to. But remember… it’s all just story.”

V.

“Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.”

Philipa Perry,
How to Stay Sane

VI.

My stories are, sometimes, my purgatory: a path to expiation, forgiveness, through suffering, atonement (a Catholic upbringing, however lukewarm, runs deep).

Sometimes–often–they are pure joy.

Always, the crafting of memory, disguised as preservation.

xoxo

“Jane”

nbtb-purgatory stories memory

Summer

nbtb-summer

Summer is the smell of crushed pine needles, mosquito bites, twigs in my hair, grass stains on their knees, and bath water so black, we need to go buy bleach…

Summer is days that don’t end. It’s almost 11, and the sun has set—sort of—but the sky is still all sorts of shades of blue, and I’m not sure when it will turn black—aha, here, now, look, darkness.

Summer is nights that don’t end. You know what I mean. (I know, I love that too…)

Summer is letting the weed patch bloom while I read six books at the same time.

Summer is scent, everywhere.

Summer is intoxicating. Especially this year, right now.

In gratitude,

“Jane”

Difficult-awkward-flow

nbtb-difficult-awkward-flow

I.

Sometimes, I do this: stroke into stroke into letter into letter into word into word into sentence and another one and look, there’s a paragraph, and then, what?

There is a book, by Stanely Eugene Fish, called, How To Write A Sentence. It is an academic book, a critical analytical reader’s book, a lover of words book, but not a writer’s book. No writer should ever read it.

Flora: “Whatcha doing, Mom?”

Jane: “I’m writing about writing.”

Flora: “Is that as pointless as reading about reading?”

Jane: “Pretty much.”

But I’m doing it because in this moment, writing about anything else is too difficult.

II.

I’m at this conference thing, and there’s a break, and the room naturally, inevitably divides into editors and writers. The editors are talking about participles and dangling modifiers.

The writers don’t actually know what any of those words mean.

That’s why we have editors.

III.

Jane: “Why! Are! You! Guys! So! Evil!”

Cinder: “It’s not our fault, Mom. It’s the way we were raised.”

Flora: “They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad.”

Ender: “I! Am! The! Most! Evil! Thing! In! The! World!”

IV.

Stroke into stroke into letter into word into sentence… it’s called practice, perseverance. It becomes chasing flow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t—there is only word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, oh, fuck, look, 500 words, 1400 words, it’s done. It’s not good. But it’s done. (The editors will make it better. Sometimes, even good.)

You can’t explain that to the people who say “Oh, I just love to write.” See, because they stop as soon as it’s difficult.

V.

I used to procrastinate by cleaning house, did I ever tell you that? My mom or Sean would take the kids out, I’d sit at the computer, the words wouldn’t come, and I’d get on my hands and knees and scrub the kitchen floor until it shone. Clean baseboards. That awkward-to-reach place in the bathroom.

I don’t do that anymore. I chase flow. The kitchen floor be damned.

Sean: “You’ve noticed I clean the kitchen floor now, right?”

Jane: “Um… sure, baby. Yes. Thank you so much.”

…

Jane: “Um… do you ever clean that awkward-to-reach place in the bathroom?”

Sean: “There’s an awkward-to-reach place in the bathroom?”

Yeah… I wonder what’s growing there…

But not enough to check.

xoxo,

“Jane”

But I would drive 500 miles, and I would drive 500 more…

I.

Cinder, 13 (too grown up, not adult enough, don’t hurry, my love, stay a little boy longer, longer), wakes me up at 4:30 in the morning on a day on which I’ve set the alarm for 5:08 a.m. in anticipation of an eight-hour road trip. He has a sore throat, is sniffly, hasn’t slept all night, and it’s almost time to wake up, and he’s upset.

“I’m sick, is this going to ruin our trip to Kelowna?”

he asks, on the verge of tears (too grown up to dare to cry, not grown up enough to know that you never stop needing to). He’s been looking forward to this trip, counting down the days, for nine months—since the last one.

“Nothing is going to ruin our trip to Kelowna,”

I promise boldly.

“I’m going to dope you up and give you a bag of lozenges to suck on through the car ride. You will snooze and rest. And by the time you are on a beach with your friends, you will be fine.”

(Hey, sore throat and runny nose: We reject your reality and substitute our own.*)

603.2 kilometres, eight hours through the winding Rocky Mountain roads, three over-excited children, one under-slept driver.

“Jesus, Mom, are you stopping for coffee again? We’re never going to get there!”

“Do you want to live? If I don’t drink more coffee, we will really never get there.”

But we get there, we get there in record time, by 1 p.m., we are eating cake for lunch. The Posse is reunited, and my best girl and I are crying all over each other’s shoulders, and an hour later, seven kids are in Lake Okanagan, and two women are trying to say EVERYTHING to each other.

nbtb-500 miles

“How can you guys have so much to say to each other? You text every day!”

—that, from Flora, to me and Marie.

“How can you guys have missed each other so much? You Skype for hours every day!”

—that, from me to the Posse.

^^^And there, in an oversimplification that isn’t, you’ve got everything that’s wrong with cyber-tribes. They’re contact, connection… but they’re not enough.

II.

I can’t remember when I first met Marie. “Isn’t that funny?” I tell her. I do remember a handful of awkward first contacts, coffees, “playdates” (I fucking hate that phrase). I can’t quite remember, though, either what it was that drew me to her—nor the moment at which I realized we were friends, and life-long friends at that. (Neither one of us is particularly fond of strangers.) Maybe it was that her house, like mine, had a solidly “lived in,” messy look. That her kids were barefoot and always moving and even louder than mine (to be fair, there were more of them). Or that we could go together to the river for six, seven hours—and either talk for all six of those hours or be silent for most of the seven, and it was all good.

She taught me more about vulnerability and courage than any other human I’ve encountered on my journey so far.

III.

Stretched out in the hot sun while the kids play in the cold water, Marie and I talk about boys, girls, husbands, exes, currents, potentials, children, shoes, books, art, writing, work, the red dress or the blue dress, the meaning of life, ticks, fleas, “what do bed bug bites look like anyway?” (don’t ask) and how to get caterpillar gut stains out of white cotton (you can’t).

“Mooom! I’m hungry!”

“I’m bored!”

“Mom! He called me a…”

“They’re picking on me!”

“Mom, where’s my life jacket?”

“Mooooom, I need…”

nbtb-kids on raft

We feed them. Water them. Re-apply sunscreen. Deliver a lecture on big people taking care of little people, and on not being asses to each other, and then tell them to go the hell away. We have more talking to do.

IV.

She leaves me in charge of supper when she goes to work. I go all out:

nbtb-simple supper

Then, I work too:

nbtb-sleeping while i work

When she comes back, half the children are gaming, and the other half unconscious:**

nbtb-gamers and jumpers

(I mean sleeping. Really.)

(Half of seven is… well, I can’t chop one of them in half. You know what I mean. Fractions are not poetic.)

I pour wine. We talk some more. When the gamers interrupt us, looking for more snacks (“For goddsakke, do you guys NEVER stop eating?” “Never!” “Not true—we were just gaming for two hours with not a single snack break!”), we’re crying. Or laughing.

It’s hard to tell the difference.

Both are necessary.

V.

We’re still, by the way, texting. While she’s at work:

“Hey, the twins and Ender are riding skateboards in the house. Is that cool? What are your house rules around that?”

While she’s making sure the kids don’t drown and I’m getting coffee:

“If it’s not too late, honey in my cappuccino, k, babe? Oh, and remind me to tell ya what happened on Tuesday when…”

While I’m at the grocery store:

“For Chrissake, this is fucking British Columbia, why is there no local produce in this store?”

“Where are you?”

“Your local IGA.”

“Yeah, it sucks. You need to go to…”

VI.

We watch our kids love each other and love being with each other, and it makes us love them more—and each other more. “Do you think they will be friends, when they are 20? When they are 40?” she asks. We don’t know, of course.

But we do know we, Marie and I, are going to be friends when we’re 60. 78.*** I’m gonna give her rides on my Vespa scooter. She’s going to buy me costume jewelry at Value Village. We’re going to wear age-inappropriate bikinis on Okanagan beaches and talk about boys, girls, husbands, exes, currents, potentials, children, grandchildren, orthopedic shoes (can they be sexy? Or do we just need to stop trying?) and support stockings (oh, those varicose veins!), books, art, writing, work, the red dress or the blue dress, the meaning of life, people who look like their pets, dentures, people who piss us off (“maybe it’s her, maybe it’s too much Botox”), and whether lime green toe nail polish on your 76-year-old feet is a strike against ageism or a cry for help (“Independence, baby! Don’t you fucking dare tell me what I can or cannot do to my toes!”).

And when I’m too blind, to old to ride that Vespa, I’m gonna make my kids drive me that 603.2 kilometres… and they’re not going to ask why.

xoxo

“Jane”

nbtb-girls on the town

FOOTNOTES (cause that’s how I roll)

*You may think I’m quoting Mythbusters’ Adam Savage here, but he’s actually quoting Paul Bradford in The Dungeon Master so there you have a quote within a quote within a quote…

**Aunt Augusta—you know Aunt Augusta, right? If you don’t, let me introduce you here: On yelling, authenticity, aspiration, and the usefulness of judgemental relatives-and-strangers—looks at this photo and pursues her lips.

“And you drove 603.2 km so they could play video games in the same room instead of via Skype why, exactly?” she says.

“I drove 603.2 km so that they could play video games in the same room instead of via Skype, exactly,” I smile. “Are you going to your bridge night tonight, Auntie? Yeah? Why, exactly?”

***I had my major life crisis at 38.5-39.2, from which I infer that I will shed this mortal coil at 77-78. I’m good with that. Right now, anyway.

And on that uplifting note, please enjoy this fabulous Proclaimers song:

 

Five exercises and a metaphor

Exercise 1

I start with your name, and then add hers and hers and hers and his and theirs and hers and his and hers and hers and I keep on writing until the page is full and I start another one. I stop to take a sip of coffee—it’s the one you gave me the last time I saw you, because you know it’s a blend I like and it’s not your favourite—and I bite into sea salt caramel dark chocolate—she put it in my freezer when she came by to give love and get love—and I keep on writing—in the notebook he gave me, because he knows it’s a luxury I’d begrudge myself. By page three, I know I’m loved and supported, that I do not have to do all the things alone (this is my favourite lie, by the way—“I’m alone and unsupported and have to do ALL THE THINGS by myself, because no one will help me” —sound familiar?).

When I stop writing… I might even pick up the phone, shoot a text.

“Help.”

Or at least, you know… seriously think about it. ;P

Sometimes, that’s enough.

Exercise 2

Three good things. All is chaos, but I write down three things that went well today, three things I’m grateful for. Little, big. Whatever. The water boiled for coffee. The grinder worked, and I didn’t drop the broken part that falls off behind the stove. The Vietnamese cinnamon titillated my senses; its texture on my fingertips as I took a pinch and dropped it in my coffee felt sublime.

I dip my finger in the cinnamon jar to re-experience that moment.

Yes.

(This is an adaptation of the Gratitude Exercise from Martin Seligman’s Flourish. A variant: The Gratitude Wall. Write all these things down on your wall. A door. Someplace prominent. Write beautifully or sloppily. Turn it into art.)

Exercise 3

“Let’s go get ice-cream. On the way, we’ll stop at Beadworks and the New Age and look at shiny things.”

“I thought you were avoiding dairy.”

“Meh. Not on a day like today.”

“OK, let’s go smell candles and bath bombs at the Beehive too.”

(A combination of Ice Cream Discipline (mine) & Julia Cameron’s the Artist Date, from The Artist’s Way—adapted for mothers. Who need to take littles along on most of their dates.)

Exercise 4

Art on an index card. A Zentangle. One photograph of—the sink full of dirty dishes, the art that life creates every day on the kitchen table. Today I have made something, created something, started something, finished something.

(For inspiration: Index card challenge on Daisy Yellow Art  and The Zentangle Method.)

nbtb-kitchentable

Exercise 5

A walk in the rain. If the sky is sunny, provide own raindrops with tears. Or just enjoy the sun.

I sunburn my nose; relish the sensation.

(Read this: Henry David Thoreau on Walking)

Metaphor

Ender brings me a tangled ball of yarn that he calls his puppy. He wants me to untangle it. Forbids me from using scissors. “This might take a while,” I warn him. “I’ve got no other plans,” he says. We set to work.

I know it’s a metaphor, but I’m not quite sure for what.

And it would work better, probably, if after 20 minutes, cursing under my breath and not-so-much-under-my-breath, I didn’t toss the yarn aside and say,

“Hey, love. Wanna go get a freezie? And then look at shiny things?”

xoxo

“Jane”

“The child weaned from mother’s milk…”

I.

“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.”

Rumi

Rumi’s translator, Coleman Barks, calls the poem that begins with these lines “Unmarked Boxes.” It resonates.

II.

Confession: I’ve just read my first parenting book in near a decade (see The Day I Stopped Reading Parenting Books): Anthony Wolf’s I’d Listen to My Parents If Only They’d Shut Up: What To Say And What Not To Say When Parenting Teens.

This is not, incidentally, a book review, but if it was, it would say, “It has good parts. It has bad parts. Read with a critical filter, take what’s useful, discard the rest.”

III.

I have a teenager now. I am still as much in love with him as I was with the newborn who woke me up every two hours. I will be more frustrated with him than I was with the toddler who pummeled everyone in sight… but that’s fine. That’s part of the package (It doesn’t get easier). My love for him has redefined how I understand, feel, experience love. Myself. The universe. I love him, unconditionally, and I will love him, unconditionally, until my experience of the universe ends.

Here’s something most parents don’t want to hear: he doesn’t love me unconditionally. No child loves a parent unconditionally. Meditate on that.

IV.

Whenever you tell me you love me. I think about what you might possibly feel for me, and what I think I feel for you, and compare it against what I feel for this child, for his siblings, and… if that is love, this is not.

You: Semantics. Always, with the fucking semantics.

Me: Words are important.

You: “What language does so spectacularly is lie, that silver-tongued projector of illusions.” That’s Coleman Barks, so you know it’s true.

Me: Fucking poets. Always telling the truth with their lies.

V.

That Rumi poem, the next line, it goes,

“God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box…”

(I was going to be a petty atheist and replace the first words with an ellipsis. But, I didn’t.)

I’m not sure about the metaphor. Is my son an unmarked box? Am I? Mostly, I am very literal—and there are still three unmarked boxes of loss in the space where I create.

VI.

I make my nocturnal teenager crepes and carry them up to his bedroom two hours short of his preferred waking time of noon.

Cinder: Best! Mother! Ever!

Jane: I know. Now wake up and get your sibs out of the house so I can work!

xoxo

“Jane”

photo (14)

P.S. Rumi, same poem: “I don’t want to make anyone fearful / Hear what’s behind what I say.”

Mosaic II

NBTB-mosaic ii

I.

What happens today is that I’m spending some time thinking about one year ago, but no time at all thinking about one year from now, which, on the whole, is an improvement.

And I’m not thinking about one year ago that much. Just a little. And mostly, the memory is accentuating my gratitude for today. Which is as it should be, right?

One year ago, I was 365 days poorer.

II.

“Moooom! Look! I made a giant poop in the toilet! I made you a birthday POOP!”

“Oh, sweetheart! I! Am! So! Happy!”

…and if your five-year-old had undergone a more-than-two-year-long toilet training regression, you too would think this is the best birthday present ever.

III.

Twenty years ago, I turned 21 at an R.E.M. concert.

IV.

In this precise moment, I’m listening to Leonard Cohen (but not crying) because instead of sitting in the bathtub in the dark, I’m sitting on my balcony in the sunshine, drinking Awake! tea and feeling mildly guilty—but not really—about all the work I didn’t do today. But fuck it, it’s my birthday and +22 and sunny and so, no. Instead, I roast hot dogs with my kids over a firepit for lunch while wearing my new dress (thank you, baby, your taste is immaculate) and I listen to that song again (oh, yes) and my fingers are covered with all the new shades of pastels I now have to play with and I don’t look in the laundry room once.

But I do the dishes and clean the kitchen. Because. Adult.

Leonard Cohen is telling me it’s closing time and to lift my glass to the awful truth which you can’t revealed to the Ears of Youth, and I laugh. There’s a note in my in-box from an editor, asking me if I’d like to spin a column about the rates (high) of depression among Millennials in the workplace.

Meh. Today, only give me cheery things.

xoxo

“Jane”