Tag Archives: my navel is awesome

Fifty-Seven — Things to Do?

Our stretch of warm, sunny weather is drawing to a close. This week, I feel disjointed. Summer is far from over but it feels like something is turning.

I think it’s my own fault. After swimming lessons ended I thought it would be nice to have a couple of weeks without plans. What was I thinking? You have to have plans with children. Or they eat you.

Okay, they don’t eat you.

But they are old now, these children. They no longer are amused by going to the Sand Park (read: baseball diamond across the street) to play the game where they run away from me and back. They have expectations. They have friends, though none is currently available, except the neighbour, back from vacation. Evvvvery day they play with the neighbour, who is fine, really. In small doses. The doses we are having are larger than recommended.

Yet, I make no plans. Every morning, fresh with sleep and cool air, I expect something exciting to do will occur to me. It doesn’t.

I shower and that is generally satisfying.

We listen to some music and that is fun.

I create an errand and we run it.

I’m the mom and I’m borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. THEY are supposed to be bored and I am supposed to tell them to make a comic strip or climb a tree or clean the house. We’ve been to all the parks, except the really far away parks. We’ve been to the mall, and Costco, and the beach. What else is there? There’s a Teddy Bear Museum in Abbotsford? I feel far from resourceful. Resourceless?

Furthermore, I’m nervous that I’m bored. In a month and a half, they will both be in school and THEN WHAT. People say, “Oh how wonderful it will be” and I agree with them because I do, I actually agree with them, but also, I can’t just stare at the Internet for six hours a day. What will I do? *

Further furthermore, I’m afraid that my nerves about being bored mean that I need to be institutionalized and / or I have lost my identity and when the children are at school I will be a shadow of a human, lurking around corners and hissing.

Success! I just out-ridiculoused myself and now I’m no longer bored OR nervous.

Onward, Thursday. Everything’s better in August.(tm)

* it’s likely there will be more on this topic at a later date.

Fifty-Five

I’ve been exploring mindfulness, thanks to the excellent website Raptitude and a particular post of his that explained how to stop worrying what people think of you. He (Raptitude’s David) refers to a book on mindfulness and meditation called “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” by Jon Kabat-Zinn which I immediately sought out at the library, despite the title which reminds me of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which in turn reminds me that I used to be a person who cared so much what people thought of me that I sat through that whole movie. (I might have fallen asleep at some point.)

It’s an entrancing book. At first I had trouble jumping in but now I’ve made space for it in my day and I carry it around with me and one of the things Kabat-Zinn says is to resist the urge to talk about and analyze and brag about your mindfulness practise so I will not!

I have come to realize that writing is a manifestation of mindfulness for me, at least the writing I do in the morning, and in the past two months, the writing I do here. I expect nothing of either space other than that I should be able to occupy it until I am finished.

It’s why I keep coming back, I guess.

Eli found this balloon on the street today and brought it home. It’s a fundamentally true balloon.

Fifty-Four — Habits

Bring Back the Words: Do you have a habit that wouldn’t make sense to most people?”

Do I have a habit that wouldn’t make sense to most people? I flatter myself that I am fairly average, while still being completely exceptional, so I suspect not. Let’s go through the habits I can think of and you tell me if they make sense or not.

— I eat chips while I read, in bed, before going to sleep. Some people I’ve met think this habit is horrible and disgusting and it is if you think about all those chip crumbs in your bed and the greasy fingers turning pages. Awful! But to me it is nearly always* necessary.
* unless I am already so full I can’t move or I have no chips.

— It’s a rare evening when I manage to drag my tired and chip-encrusted ass out of bed after I’m done snacking but before I turn out the light so I can brush my teeth before I go to sleep, and that’s another disgusting (non?) habit. It also makes my morning breath The Worst Ever Except for Your Dog’s and yet.

Aside: Maybe this should instead be a study of ‘Do I have a habit that is so disgusting it will make people run screaming from my internet website?’ Maybe.

— Nine squares of toilet paper. No more, no less.

— I need a NEW KNIFE to spread my peanut butter. Not the other knife that probably has peanut butter on it but might have mustard on it. Can you imagine something worse than peanut butter mixed with mustard?

— I have a habit of having brilliant ideas about my future and not following through.

— I have a habit of making too many plans for one day and nothing for the rest of the week/month.

— I have a habit of buying pens and notebooks like the revolution is coming and there will be no pens or notebooks and people who can write things in notebooks with pens will get extra cheese and hugs.

— I have a habit of furrowing my brow.

— I don’t ever want to eat the last of anything in the fridge or freezer. Is this a self-preservation method, or politeness? I don’t know but that quarter cup of ice cream is going to stay there until it either turns to solid freezer burn or SA eats it.

— I write every morning in what used to be a spiral bound notebook but is now a binder because that’s just more practical/cost-efficient. Three pages, longhand, journal-ish stuff (sample: I am so sleepy I wish I had coffee oh I do have coffee I love coffee) to start my day. My right wrist is suffering from limited mobility due to all the longhand writing but if I skip so much as a day I start to lose my little mind. At 18 months straight, I guess this is a habit.

Hey it all makes sense to me, probably because if I don’t make sense to me where does that leave me? SENSELESS. Except the tooth-brushing-before-bed thing. I really should make that a habit.

Also the more I type “habit” the more I think of rabbits. Rabbits are so great.

Forty-Six — My Relationship with (some) Books is Complicated

All of a sudden, my library books were all done and gone and I had only the same books on the bedside table that I’ve kept there for years. What is it with the books I own, is it that they sit too long and I put other things on top of them, prioritize around them, neglect them and then when they are all that’s left, realize I hate them for the way I’ve treated them?

On this table I have three parenting books, four novels, and one book of poetry. I keep the poetry there because I love it and I might need to look at it at a moment’s notice. That’s how it is with poetry. It’s Lorna Crozier’s Everything Arrives at the Light and it’s been in my possession for almost twenty years and I love it dearly. I have read it many times.

I have read the parenting books too; How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk (BRILLIANT) and Liberated Parents, Liberated Children: Your Guide to a Happier Family (DITTO) and More Speaking of Sex (FABULOUS).

But the novels. I just can’t seem to do it. Songdogs. The Book of Negroes. The Cellist of Sarajevo. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. All these books, acclaimed and loved, acquired on purpose. I bought two, borrowed one and was given the fourth. And I want to read them! But I don’t want to read them, or I would have read them by now. I have read the first few pages of each and then I put them down and reach for the latest library book and if, like the other night, I realize I have no library book, I read one of the parenting books again, or just go to sleep.

It’s not that they’re all depressing. I read depressing books all the time. It’s not a problem.

More and more, I find myself not re-reading old favourite books, not revisiting anything I’ve got on the shelf. I go to the library, I read new (or new to me) stuff, I take it back. Is it a switch to the culture of temporary? Resistance to what I “should” be reading? Am I a library addict? (I feel certain there are friends of mine who would scoff at such a label.) That is, in part, why I started writing down all the books I read this year, as well as a few paragraphs about each one. I didn’t want to forget, or let the books just slip out of my brain when I am done with them and they go back to the library.

These books sitting next to me while I sleep, waiting quietly for me to pick them up and love them, they exert too much pressure. Tonight I will put them away and if I don’t go looking for them within a year, I will give them away. Resentful books can’t exist in a happy home.

Forty-Four — EveryMom

We spent the weekend camping with a bunch of people, some of whom I knew and some of whom I didn’t, all of whom were totally awesome. Little kids frolicking on a mossy forest carpet, adults drinking their weight in assorted alcoholic beverages, walks and brisk air and sunshine and tent sleeping and campfire smell. O! Campfire smell, I have missed you. Perhaps I will have an opinion to share about camping with the kids, something we only did once before, three years ago, and which obviously scarred us. But at the moment I am too tired and can only relate two anecdotes.

1. Yesterday I was walking, alone, up the very steep hill from the beach to the campsite. A man and his teenage daughter and their big shaggy dog were walking ahead of me. The dog kept turning around to look at me and smile and pant at me. The man was getting annoyed because it is a steep hill and come on dog, just walk. They were walking so slowly that I passed them, and then the dog sniffed me and smiled and the man said, “There, you saw her, are you happy?” to the dog and I smiled at them and thought, “gosh I am such a special person that even DOGS have to smile at me,” and then I heard the man tell his daughter that he thought the dog thought I was her MOM. Not the dog’s mom. The girl’s mom. In other words, the dog thought I looked like its owner, who is the mother of a teenager.

2. Today I was at Safeway, alone, replenishing our food supply because we ate all our food when we went camping. Weird, huh? Anyway, this dude was pushing a toddler in a stroller and as I passed him the toddler got all excited and said something toddlery. I ignored him because I don’t talk to strange toddlers and then I heard the man say, “Yes, she DOES look like Mommy but she’s not really Mommy.”

First of all, suddenly my “you look familiar” face has gone from “that girl from the cheese shop? Maybe?” to “Mom” and how do I feel about that, I wonder? And second, he made it sound like I was purposely impersonating the kid’s mother. “She’s not REALLY MOMMY. Don’t be fooled.” Hey, I’m just buying bread and apples, man! I don’t want to be anyone else’s mommy! I sure as hell don’t want to look like EveryMom, unless I can make money from it. Can I?

Is it too late to do commercials for laundry soap or yogurt? I guess then I’d have to eat yogurt. DEALBREAKER.

Thirty-Nine — Life is Good

I am thirty-nine years old. 39. It’s kind of cool to be here, teetering on the edge of a decade that starts with a four. I’m not overfond of the number four but I’d rather not be dead so here’s to picking your battles!

You’re as old as you feel. If pressed, I might say that I *feel* thirty-two. I think this is because I had a child at thirty-two and my life is on pause. I mean, not really. I am living my life. Here I am right now in this moment. Hi.

Hello.

Hi.

Part of me feels like my old life got suspended in amber when Arlo was born and this seven years of my new life is just a fork, a path I took, and maybe when it ends I’ll go back to being thirty-two. So let’s see, that would be when he’s eighteen, in eleven years, when I am hey fifty!

Oh, I see. That would be the mid-life crisis: when I come back to being not-a-parent, or, a parent still but not of small children, and I’m not thirty-two at all, I’m fifty.

Ha ha! Surprise! The path back to your old life is CLOSED. Overgrowth, snakes, you know how it is. You can’t go back.

(But wait, childless people have mid-life crises too.)

Of course I know all this, but there is a difference between what the head knows and what the soul wants. The soul sometimes wishes she could pick up where she left off at thirty-two. But the head knows a) that’s a fool’s errand and b) the soul and the head are way better off now. All smart and more accepting and empathic and relaxed about stuff.

Where are we going in these woods? Where does this fork lead? I don’t know. But I have bear spray and common sense and some trail mix and overall, it’s a nice walk.

Twenty-Nine

I was reading NurtureShock last week, approximately six years behind everyone else, and something stuck out for me. The concept of praise.

I am a praiser and a praisee. I don’t think I’m a praise junkie exactly but there are things I do more for the praise and recognition than for the joy of them. (What kinds of things? Um, I can’t think of any offhand, but I’m sure there’s something.)

The research says –I am too lazy to cite here– that when we praise for ability instead of effort, what we get is children who only feel successful as long as they are praised, or until their ability ceases to exist. If we praise for effort, we get children who want to make an effort because the reward is the same; whatever that effort’s reward would have been anyway.

So “you’re so smart” is not as effective as “I like how you tried the question over and over until you found the answer.”

It makes sense. Even as an adult, what can you say to a compliment like “You’re so tall! I wish I was tall!” Yep. Tall. I had nothing to do with it.

Yesterday I opened up this comment page and found I had been comment-bombed by Allison. Allison, who is witty and compassionate and a true blue internet friend that I hope to meet someday. She went back and read something like fourteen posts and left comments on them, many of which had no previous comments at all, and it was this warm blanket of happiness around my shoulders when I saw it. “Oh someone is reading,” I thought, “someone IS reading. Someone is CARING. Someone likes what I say.”

Now, I said I would write 100 blog posts in 100 days and I missed one day I think so far but I never said I would stop if no one commented. I love comments, we all love comments, but I find it hard to find the time to comment on all the blogs I used to read / still read. I get it. It’s part of the give and take of blogging; we write for ourselves and others and we read to connect with those others and some days there just isn’t time to write and read and comment and make dinner.

As I work on effectively praising my children so they don’t give up when faced with algebra someday, I’m trying to also be more conscious of how I talk to myself, and how I rally my internal support system. without waiting for someone to tell me I’m great, they like me, they approve.

So: no comments! I want to keep going without your support!

(Just kidding. But no pressure. Not that you were feeling any, probably. It’s the end of June and we’re all tired. I know.)

(As you were)

(Happy Wednesday)

Twenty-Seven — Why Are We Here?

Ginger is doing a weekly prompted bloggity thingeroo .. you can participate too, if you want! I am going to answer both prompts because the first one is a very short answer.

Prompt one: Why did you start blogging?
A: I started blogging because I wanted people to read my words.

Prompt two: What is the best decision you ever made?

So much waffling. What IS the best decision I ever made? Moving to this townhouse, to the city of New Westminster, which seemed like an OK decision at the time, actually turned out to be a great decision. Having children was a pretty good decision, but I’m not sure it was the best ever. Career-wise, there haven’t been many great decisions, other than quitting the job with the creepy boss.

I think the best decision I EVER made was to move out on my own when I was 19.

It was 1993 and I had just finished my second year of university. I lived in Burnaby and went to school at UBC, so my bus trip was an hour each way. I spent a lot of time on the bus, scribbling in my journal or listening to my big, yellow Walkman and staring out the window at Hastings, Granville, Broadway, 10th Ave.

I was starting to really resent my overprotective father. While I was in high school, I complained bitterly but never really rebelled against the house rules. But when I got to UBC and started meeting new people, people I hadn’t known for five or ten years already, people who listened to grunge and electronica and folk music instead of top 40, people who wore cut off jeans, tights, combat boots, people who dyed their hair and pierced their faces and had tattoos and wrote poetry and made films…well, I desperately wanted to be a part of it. That life. The life that started with me being able to stay out past 10 pm.

In June, 1993, I blew away all the treaty negotiations. I decided it would be a good idea to celebrate writing my last exam of the year by drinking a lot of vodka and grapefruit juice in Stanley Park with my friend. Obliteratedly drunk I arrived home well before curfew but that didn’t matter as much as the fact that I was dropped off by a strange man in a pickup truck who had rescued my friend and me from the railroad tracks below Gastown. Apparently we had been wandering on and off the tracks, my friend had a hammer, and the guy with the truck –Bill, I think?– took pity on us and drove us home.

Whooee! was I in trouble. And rightly so. I had to go to my brand new part-time job at the cheese shop the next day with a wicked hangover and that was nearly punishment enough. As part of the fallout from the “discussion” that ensued, I declared that I would move out of the house that summer and get my own place. Dad said, “No you can’t.” Having a bit more than a little of his stubborn blood in my own veins, that was all I needed to hear.

In mid-July, my friend Joanna and I moved into our two-bedroom suite in a house at Main and 22nd Street. A month later, Sarah joined us and we were an amazingly big-haired trio of roommates for a year, after which we went through roommates and new apartments for a few years before settling down with our significant others, to whom we are all now married.

When I moved out I didn’t have any real plan, other than I would work at my job selling cheese and pay my rent and tuition and for food and drinks. Jobs came and went, tuition got paid, albeit more slowly than it had when Dad was paying it, and it took me an extra couple of years to get the credits to graduate, but I did. Eventually.

I learned how to survive; how to cook, clean, give notice on an apartment, quit a job, look for a new one, accept the kindness of strangers, be good to my friends, manage money (eventually..this was a very steep learning curve), maintain the relationships I needed to maintain and release the rest.

What I experienced living on my own made me into the person I am today; someone who understands that ordinary people make mistakes and deserve forgiveness and second, third, fourth chances, myself included. Someone who isn’t scared of smelly people, who sees something interesting in every conversation. Someone who has at least seen how the other half lives and knows how close she came to that poverty line, how close she was to crossing it.

I was young and stupid and lucky. I could easily have ended up on the other side of that line. If my parents hadn’t forgiven me, mellowed, held their tongues, invited me for dinner every few weeks, helped me move. If my friends hadn’t lent me money or fed me booze when I needed it, if, to start with, I hadn’t been young and white and educated, with all the privilege that those afford a person.

God watches over drunks and idiots; double-plus if you are both?

The most important thing I learned was that the real world is indeed a dangerous, wonderful place, and that I could handle it.

And the place where I hold all those lessons; the practical ones like how to budget and the people ones like how to talk to people on the bus, is the place I will draw from when my kids are out in the world and I’m scared for them. The world is a dangerous, wonderful place, and they can handle it.

7 Thoughts on June 1st *

I had forgotten how bad the song “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas is. It’s like a car crash in your Chardonnay. In the past year I’ve only been paying attention to Jeff Tweedy’s (of Wilco) renditions of BEP and I think I will go back to that existence because it’s way funnier. Here, go see it. Don’t watch the original afterwards. It will just make you sad for humanity all over again.

I feel this overwhelming solidarity whenever I see another woman my age with grey hair. I want to go fist-bump-five her.

We went to a parade today and it occurred to me that parades are like a very passive Halloween. Kids sit and watch people go by and some people come over and hand the kids candy. In Ontario, Arlo is quick to point out, they THROW candy at you. (we went to a tractor parade on his birthday in Ontario last year)(and it’s true. They did throw candy.) I guess this relates to the softness of the west coast in general.

June 1st is the beginning of the last month of school. Here is a funny post about that. Which you have probably already seen because it’s had 4,000 likes on facebook already.

It being June 1st also means Arlo’s 7th birthday is one month away. I want to embrace the idea of planning his birthday party and have it be the challenge mountain I overcome / climb for the month of June but I think it will probably end up more like me lying at the bottom of said challenge mountain in a pile of poison ivy, weeping. Metaphorically speaking.

I used to be ashamed of myself for going to bed so early. But now I just shrug because I love sleep and sleep loves me and we are going to be together forever and you can’t break us up, no never.

Today I found myself critiquing the parade we went to, compared to the parade we attended last weekend. This is the new thing I’m ashamed of myself about.

*edited to add that of course this is only post number 6 / 100 and I am so tired I titled it with a 7 by mistake.

3 — Internet Cleanse 2013

A few weeks ago we tried to switch internet service providers. The reasons are not important. It was meant to be a routine prisoner transfer and we ended up without an internet connection for almost two weeks. Ten years ago, that would have been ‘enh,’ kind of like if now you had no home phone service or no chequebook for two weeks — most people know how to find you without using the phone or writing a cheque.

Well I have carefully crafted a life where people other than family should *not* phone me or ask me for cheques because I won’t answer/write one. They are trained to e-mail. I love e-mail. Except when I don’t have access to mine.

Without an internet connection, our house has no e-mail, no world wide web, no tv (we are Netflix only) and no music other than the dusty CDs we dig out of the milk crate and play through the DVD player and TV because there’s no such thing as a CD player any more. We listen to internet radio, or we listen to our own music, copies of those CDs ripped and streamed over our server. None of which works without the Internet.

(This is my panic face.)

For the first day without internet access I was OK. Well, first I sulked a lot, and then I was OK. I have books, after all, and amusing children! and a radio. And a car. I took the car to the library and took out five more books and the maximum amount of DVDs, which is ten (10).

The next day I realized I was reading four books at the same time, trying to replicate the internet experience of multi-tasking, like when I go to Twitter and five people have posted interesting links so I open all the links in new tabs and then read the first three sentences of each tab and move on — oh, but don’t close the tab, don’t be silly, I’ll probably go back and read the rest SOMEDAY.

I was doing that with books. Two fiction and two non fiction. Just like the Internet!

I also took my laptop to the library and to Starbucks because there is wi-fi there, so I could log in, collect my e-mail and open up a bunch of tabs with articles to read later when I absolutely needed something to look at while I ate my lunch or after breakfast.

Why is reading a book so much harder? I love books. But sometimes (more often in the past few years) I want something quick. I don’t want to get all involved in some IDEA. I just want a hit, man.

It’s kind of sad and scary, actually. I have methodically destroyed my attention span over the years. I used to have a very good attention span.

But it is possible to recover. It is possible to wean yourself from the constant news / not-news / opinions / etc. cycle and then, when you go back to the playground that is the Internet, just limit yourself to climbing a structure OR sliding down a slide OR doing some monkey bars; not all of them halfway, over and over, like some demented five year old who spent the whole day inside.

While I was internet free, I missed: the BC election, various natural disasters, political scandals breaking, and countless instances of hilarity and poignancy. And, of course, all the bullshit that accompanies politics, natural disasters, political scandals, etc. namely: everyone in the world’s ability to instantly pronounce opinions on same.

But I didn’t really miss it. At first I felt like I was missing something; possibly everything. A limb! Then I realized I was carrying on with my life just fine, that the radio is very informative, that everything else is just noise and without noise, I don’t have to try so hard to filter out the important bits. Result: I was more relaxed. I only had to focus on real noise: the kids, the leaf blower, the telephone, my own inner voice. Other peoples’ issues were no longer relevant or pressing.

Which is how it should be, most of the time.

(And which doesn’t mean I wasn’t glad to see the connection come back.)
(This is my gorging-on-netflix face)

bad with titles

pretty good with stories