Greetings from The Other Side

Posted on 4/15/2010 by cheesefairy

You know I like lists. But I can’t bear to inflict on you the list of shit that has been going badly in the past X weeks so I will just say, I have not been handling it well. I have been managing. I have been hanging on like the kitten in the kitten poster. At the end of your rope? Make a knot and HANG ON! But I have not been handling things well. Every step I took to try and make my life feel better around me, more like a fuzzy bathrobe, less like a 100% polyester long-sleeved maxi dress with sequins around the neckline and that annoying habit of sticking to your legs with static, well I’d take that one step and then get blown back about three blocks. And every time I got blown back three blocks I would stagger around for a bit, being mean and surly, then sad and tired, then gird my loins for another step forward.

It doesn’t make for great blog fodder. There is a difference between mean, surly, FUNNY! and mean, surly, no I mean it. The latter better saved for one’s significant other and / or one’s private journal, the paper kind with the little padlock that you hide under the bed.

If you would like to know what I have been doing for the past 3 weeks, imagine Bill the Cat.

But there have been wonderful moments.

– I finished a short story and shared it with my writers’ group. They were just the right mix of appreciative and critical and honest.

– Trombone exited a rather hellish phase that seemed to last forever but really was probably 6 months, aren’t they always? and turned back into the sweet, loving, easy-going, even-tempered kid he was before.

– Fresco is a textbook two-year-old (his birthday is coming up on Tuesday!) but has weathered back-to-back colds, a stomach virus and teething with more aplomb than I did as his mother.

– The sun. Is back.

– Today, after preschool, we played near the school grounds. There is a playground bordered by a big green field of grass, trees and wildflowers. Trombone and Fresco ran into the field and gathered dandelions for me. They would pluck one and run back, pluck another, run back. I had forgotten the smell of dandelion milk. When was the last time I picked a dandelion?

– On Sunday morning, after we had endured two days of rather intense simultaneous stomach viruses (the kids barfed, SA and I just felt like a combination of first and third trimester pregnancy)(meaning: queasy, achy, exhausted and deeply, madly in love with the shower) I was sitting in the park, the Close Park, where there is no shade so you can only go there in Spring and Fall, and the sun was perfect, just warm enough, and I was sipping water from a travel mug, feeling very content to feel better than I had felt the day before, watching Trombone dangle from the monkey bars, which is not something he did the last time we were at this park and it all hit me at once.

The tumult, the gnashing of teeth, the endless repetitions, the tears, the tears, the tears; all so that our children can break that cocoon around them a little bit more, get a fist through, feel the air on The Other Side caress their skin. Slowly, surely, in seconds, by quarters of centimetres, they grow.

And every time they grow, so do I. Away from that tense, coiled ball of frustration and anger in the pit of my stomach. Toward outstretched arms, a chest lifted to the sky, my heart expanding to contain it all.

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Against The Wind

Posted on 4/8/2010 by cheesefairy

This morning when Trombone was in school I took Fresco for a walk in the wind and sun so he would fall asleep and maybe dream he was in Newfoundland in July (I hear it’s windy there). Among the usual suspects on Edmonds St. (construction workers, fruit market owners, hair stylists, etc.) I saw a woman on inline skates*.

1. People still do this? Maybe it’s because I don’t live downtown anymore but I haven’t seen someone on skates in a long time. Do people inline skate where you are? Do YOU inline skate?
2. She was dressed normally (if lightly) in street clothes. Jeans, shirt. No purse or bag. Not wearing, you know, yoga pants or whatever skaters wear. I seem to remember they wear Lycra & cropped shirts. Again – might just be remembering the Stanley Park seawall circa 2001.
3. She had no helmet. Which doesn’t really surprise me because there are a lot of people who don’t wear helmets. Idiots. Her long hair whipped around in the wind.
4. While she skated along, rather precariously, she was trying to get some kind of device to work, like a phone or a music player.
5. She was on the road. Not the sidewalk. The road. With the traffic.
6. She veered out into the traffic and almost got hit by a cement truck. I had to close my eyes.
7. I stopped in at a Waves coffee shop to get a cup of tea and when I came out I heard sirens. One ambulance and two fire trucks blasted around the corner and went up Kingsway.
8. But when I came around the corner, I saw the skater alive and well(ish) and waiting for a bus.
9. She had her headphones on and was grooving to the music.

Observing her made me really miss taking public transit.

* I originally wrote “roller blader,” but that looked wrong and then I wrote “rollerblader,” which also looked wrong and then, ridiculously, I performed a search and realized it’s a brand name and since I hate the brand-name-as-real-name-thing, changed it all to inline skater, which is not as compelling but is, at least, correct.

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Semi Fiction

Posted on 4/7/2010 by cheesefairy

Walking up the street I saw the license plate frame first. “Paramount Gentlemen’s Club,” it read.

“Because looking at ladies in sparkly underpants and paying them to grind into your lap is ever so gentlemanly,” it didn’t read.

I noted the cream colour of the vehicle, its sleekness and its tinted rear windows. As I walked alongside, I saw through the open sunroof; a man, his back half in the back seat, his belly in the front nestled against the steering wheel. He lounged with one hand at rest on his crotch, the other on his cell phone. With the briefest of glances I took him in, rotated him through my brain and spit him out again.

“Yuck,” I said. I even shivered a little.

An old man was walking toward me on the sidewalk and shifted his body slightly so that we could pass each other. He nodded at my smile.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now that is a gentleman,” I thought.

I heard the thud of a car door closing behind me and looked over my shoulder to see the old man seating himself in the passenger seat of the cream coloured car.

“Ready to roll Pops?” said the driver.
“Let’s head back to the Club,” said the old man.

I turned away and kept walking home.

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Long Weekend to be Renamed “Endless Weekend”

Posted on 4/6/2010 by cheesefairy

First the good:

– Nobody I know died. Except Jesus, and he came back.

– I have the first line from my soon-to-be-written rap song. Ready? “I dive so deep I’m like baby beluga.” I had other lines too but I was spouting them (ha! get it!) in the car and now they’re gone. I’m a freestyler. I can’t be pinned down with pen and paper.

– Right now? The children are napping. Both of them. At the same time. Cue angel choir.

– So far today I have not had a recurrence of the headache I have had every day since last Tuesday. It responds well to Ibuprofen but is taking longer to go away as days go by. Yes, it is a tension headache, I know. I should be less tense! I should do relaxation exercises and meditate and spend more time lying on the floor breathing deeply.

– If you can press a muscle in the base of your skull and actually turn the headache on, like I did yesterday, it’s probably not a tumour. Yay!

– I had a great time hanging out with fellow Mizzleites on Thursday night, the night before the Long Weekend Of Ass began. It was like my own Last Supper right down to the bottomless flasks of wine.

Why was it a Long Weekend of Ass?

– Fresco. Sleep regression. Woke up at 3:30 AM Saturday morning and would not go back to sleep. Refused to nap later that day. Has been getting better, incrementally, since then.

– If Fresco doesn’t sleep, he is awake and Very Unpleasant. Think: meltdowns over whether or not you let him turn on the sink faucet. Tripping over his own feet and cutting up his hands on the cement. Barreling into the room, starting every sentence with “My turn,” and going from there. He is gale force.

– Don’t underestimate how much havoc this Unpleasant, Not Sleeping 2 year old will wreak on your own mental health. You may think you are strong enough to cope with him – after all, there are two of you adult-types! – but if you add in parental exhaustion (my own fault) and a root canal (SA’s) and the other child coming down with a cold (fuck my life) and that the weather is pissing down rain and colder than it was last December and you can’t even get a nap because… we’re boycotting naptime? Seriously? I don’t even LIKE napping at naptime. I have to be just short of putting my head in an oven to consider wasting naptime on actually napping but I knew I had to and now you are going to SHOUT THROUGH IT?

Tension headache? What?

It’s just that I have an hour, down from two hours (down from ENTIRE DAYS), to do the 45 things I want to do. If this weekend had come at the end of a stretch of good, productive weeks, it would have been cool. I could pick one of the 45 things. But the past 6 weeks around here has been non-stop bandaid, triage, bandaid, triage; every surface is not actually hazardous but not exactly clean, either and I’m not just talking about the house. My brain. It’s full of steam. I let off one short blast a day but really, what I need to do is let it all out. Short blast, short blast, short blast FUCK IT I just can’t pick one of the 45 things. I want to do them all and I want to do them all NOW and that means I need to go back in time and not have kids.

What? I can’t do that EITHER?

Listen, it’s bad. I know. I don’t think that way 99 percent of the time. Only when I haven’t had enough sleep. We were walking up the hill Saturday morning, the boys in the buggy because who wants to fight it? Not me, not today. Fresco started dozing off. Of course, he’s been up since 3:30 am. I confess, my first thought was, “NO YOU DON’T. If we don’t get to sleep, you don’t get to sleep.” Luckily there are two of us adult-types for sanity checks. Yeah. Let the kid sleep. Fine.

Reading around the twitter-facebook-blogosphere it seems like everyone else had great Easter long weekends. I just wanted ours to end so I could start looking forward to something else. Like Wednesday. I think Wednesday is the New Weekend. Mark my words.

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Four Years

Posted on 4/1/2010 by cheesefairy

Four years ago today we moved to New Westminster. Short version: We showed up at our new townhouse, 6 months pregnant, after having spent the previous three days at my parents’ house because our movers were fuckers so we had to find different movers a week before we moved and there was some issue with overlap; honestly I don’t remember why because I was 6 months pregnant and stressed out. When we showed up at our new house, the dude who was moving out was still here! His stuff was also still here! Even though we were the legal owners! So we went to the uptown mall to kill an hour and that’s how it became the most depressing mall in the universe: because the first time I ever experienced it, what I wanted most in the world was to have a bath, eat some pizza and go to sleep.

I think a lot of people at that mall feel that way. I was at that mall just the other day with Fresco while Trombone was at preschool and we had to go to the bathroom and the entire hallway to the bathroom smelled bad. I smell a lot of bad things in a given day and this hallway was all of them to the power of 17. Grease from the fast food places, plus poop, plus the poop of the people who eat at the fast food places. Bad! Smell!

I have three pieces of locally relevant news to share on this, my fourth anniversary of being an inhabitant of New Westminster.

1. The other day, the same day as the bad hallway smell, I got a parking ticket. It was just that kind of day. (It was also the day Fresco got up at 4:50 AM.) I was going to the post office to mail something I have been meaning to mail for 6 weeks now and I had the item, my purse and Fresco out of the car already when I put a dollar in the parking meter and the parking meter ate it and kept flashing 00:00. I looked at the parking meter. There were no phone numbers to call. So I said “fuck you parking meter” and we went to the post office and then to get me another cup of coffee. I let Fresco drink the creamer. That’s quite funny, watching a toddler drink creamer from a little container. I recommend it, if you need cheering.

When I returned to the car, there was a ticket, which DID have a number to call, so I called it. The nice lady at the City of New Westminster Parking Services, whose job must be so incredibly unpleasant, took my information and said she’d have someone check the meter and call me back. By the time we’d returned from preschool, I had a call back telling me my ticket was canceled because the meter was, in fact, broken.

That rocks! She was very polite and helpful. In future, however, I will just move the car somewhere else and I recommend you do the same for your maximum ticket-avoiding pleasure.

2. Today’s adventure while Trombone was at preschool found me and Fresco at the new Tommy Douglas Branch of the Burnaby Public Library. “Burnaby Library? This is not relevant to New Westminster,” you are thinking. It is too! Just wait!

Trombone’s school had a field trip to this library a few weeks ago and I didn’t get to look around. I wanted to go back. It opened in November 2009 so it is new and modern and shiny and so nice. The bathrooms alone are worth a trip. They’re just so clean. There’s nothing like a public bathroom that’s barely been used. Am I right? I guess because you know time is running out; pretty soon it will be all grungy and used and just like every other public bathroom in the world.

Usually we go to the New Westminster Public Library, which is old. Old and not shiny and – fine, it’s a fine library, but it’s the oldest one in the province and the bathroom reflects this. (Stop talking about bathrooms! OK!)

We really enjoyed poking round the Tommy Douglas library, Fresco and I, and the kids’ section is awesome, it’s got glass-topped cases with things to look at and a magnetic board that you can play with and of course, books, lots of them and I discovered that Mo Willems, he of “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” also writes “early reader” books and I found a bunch about an Elephant and a Piggie and suddenly I remembered that I don’t have a Burnaby library card anymore. Well I do but it’s got my 10-year-old signature on it and it’s somewhere in a box of crap in the upstairs closet. So I went over to the librarian and she gave me a short form to fill out and then she sync/linked my New West card with a Burnaby account and presto I can go to any Burnaby or New West library I want!

She was so friendly and efficient! I won’t say “unlike the New West librarians” because they are mostly fine and also they encourage you to use the self-check out whenever possible. I will say I would be cheerful too, if I worked at the new library, because it is very open and light and new and beautiful. I am going back there all the time for all my library needs. There were only about 15 people in the whole place. It was quiet like heaven.

3. Maybe you long term readers remember my woeful tale about our first trip to Westminster Quay? Short version: it sucked ass, we saw real Scientologists administering e-meter tests and I ate the worst hot dog ever. But great news! The Quay has been renamed “River Market at Westminster Quay” and it is currently being renovated and then repopulated. Yesterday they announced a new grocery store called Donald’s Market is going in when the Market re-opens this summer. I will probably still not eat a hot dog there. (I should probably eat fewer hot dogs anyway.) I have very high hopes for a new outdoor place to hang out, catch a river breeze, drink a cold coffee, buy fresh food, watch the tugboats go by.

(I bet at the very least the bathrooms will be awesome.)

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