Jane: Goddammit, it was really funny. I know, I’ll write about…
Ender: No!
Consent. It’s a thing.
This is why I now write fiction. For adults.
(But I’m still keeping notes for a bestselling memoir called The Secret Lives of Children.)
II.
This is not a non sequitur. You will see.
k d lang on creativity:
“if you just celebrate the fact
that you get to be creative
it’s a totally different ball game
than if you look at it
as a means to an end
as a vehicle to success”
(You can check out the interview that’s excerpted from here).
III.
While everyone was having a final moment with The Hip, I couldn’t bear to look and instead, feeling maudlin, I was binging on kd lang, and wondering… if I had learned I had an immediate expiration date—three months, three years, three days—what would I do NOW?
OK, we don’t. We only ever did it once… but I think it mildly traumatized them.
Jane: Um… yeah?
Flora: So should I die before you—I want to be cremated and have my ashes turned into glitter.
Jane: Glitter?
Flora: Yeah, you know. Like glitter glue, glitter paint, all sparkly?
Jane: I’m not sure if ashes…
Flora: You probably won’t have to do anything. After all, I am an evolved unicorn. I’ll probably just turn to glitter naturally.
Naturally.
IV.
We all have an expiration date—an end date—don’t we? What’s yours? What’s mine? Suppose it were tomorrow?
Fingers hover over the keyboard. Where the fuck am I going with this?
Ender climbs into my lap and knocks the laptop screen over. I tuck him into my left armpit and kiss his crazy dreadlocked hair. We shift and reposition—I try to reach other his squirming body to reach the keyboard with my left hand…
Ender: You’re squeezing me to death, Mom!
Jane: That’s because it’s rather hard to type while hugging you.
Ender: You can’t stop.
Hugging him? Or the other?
I wrap my left hand around his head. Type only with my right.
Where am I going with this?
If I had an expiration date.. what would I do? What would I change?
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
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.”
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?”
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.
“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!”
^^^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…”
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:
Then, I work too:
When she comes back, half the children are gaming, and the other half unconscious:**
(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.
“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:
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.”
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.
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?”
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!”
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.
Nothing By The Book 