Writer’s Block


I can write about anything but my stories right now it seems and I am a little frustrated. I guess it’s a good thing that I can write at all and so I will try to focus on the up side, but I feel a little like I am screaming into a wormhole. Maybe there are people on the other side who are hearing me but I feel a bit alone here on the blog. I have my loyal commenters and they help, but the anonymous come and read? and go without a sound, just a click of the counter. Maybe it is feed back I am missing? Maybe I should start a page for a piece of fiction? But I worry about exposing my fiction to the web on my own because my publishers consider stuff on blogs as having been previously published which is ironic since they don’t give you writing experience credit for being a blogger in the first place.

I still haven’t heard back on any of the stuff that is out and the superstitious side of me thinks it is because I haven’t gotten my residency card or a work permit yet. If I had one or the other, things would start to happen. I have gotten my first approval and Rob sent in the fee for my work permit which I should have by the end of this month or beginning of the next. The PR card itself is waiting on an FBI fingerprint background check. We didn’t do that back in October because it wasn’t clear that CIC wanted both that and a state check. Another example of how badly worded the application directions are. They have been sent and will take about a month to get back. Add to that another month for CIC to get the results and process them and we are now looking at June for residency at the earliest. Frustrating. 

My mood of the day is frustrated. It’s not spring. I can’t focus to write really. I feel fat. My child is crabby. And the coyotes are too afraid of Cat to eat her like we hoped they would. Seriously, we have a Cat that is too feral to keep indoors but too tame to dump in the woods and a fields all around us stocked with coyote. Since it has been warm, Cat has been living outdoors instead of in the garage and not one blessed thing has happened to her expect perhaps she is keeping the coyotes away from our yard. I kid you not, even the toms in the neighborhood are afraid of her, so the idea that she would frighten wilder animals is not that far-fetched.

Jordan was home for supper last night. She brought her “friend”. He is an ex-boyfriend whom I am not fond of simply because of the things that Rob and Farron have related to me. Jordan has a way of attracting decidedly off-beat, and in need of social skills, young men. She was telling us about the latest to be attracted to her, a young man with two inoperable brain tumors who works at the liquor store with her. He has attached himself to her like an extra appendage and she is too polite to reclaim her space. And it’s not just the brain tumor. She would feel sorry for him regardless because he is just one of those people who appears to have been raised by wolves but probably just had your average two people who shouldn’t have ben parents upbringing that so many of us get stuck with. Except that most of us survive that and he didn’t. The brain tumors are just icing on this rather untasty cake.

Katy was quite taken with Jordan’s friend because he played games with her before dinner. She gets so excited when either of the older girls comes to visit but she doesn’t understand that they are much too old to be the sisters that she longs for. Jordan’s friend promised to play games again after dinner but instead sat at the table chatting – as adults are wont to do. After a while of waiting patiently in the living room, she ran upstairs and burst into tear. I went up and comforted her. Her feelings were hurt and it’s hard to explain to her that she just isn’t going to have a sister kind of relationship with Jordan or Farron or anyone they bring home. That is just something she will have to learn over time. There is too much of a gap and despite their willingness, neither of the older girls is going to be able to bridge it given the short amount of time Katy sees them and that will likely only get worse as they get older too.

Environment Canada promised sun today and it’s 2:30 and only just peeking. I am trying to be patient but I want spring. I want warmth and sun and dry.

Brood Brangelina


I used to read the celeb bashing news/blog Defamer quite a bit in the early widowed days. It was funny. Mean. Biting. Sarcastic. And really, really funny. Except for the grocery check-out displays of the obligatory mags designed to make me feel inferior and underprivileged in comparison to the rich and famous of the world (and whenever Rob visits WWTDD and reads me the more outrageous stuff), I don’t get much celeb news reverent or otherwise. However I was tag surfing here at WordPress and ran across a Defamer piece on Brad and Angie’s menagerie of wee ones that I had to share. Seems all is not peaceful or blended in a home with four very small children too closely spaced in age and acquistion. The boys fight and the girls fight and apparently all three of the adopted ones beat on the bio-baby. Not only that but in order to get a moment’s peace, Brad and Angie – the Dalia Lama eqvialents of parents – feed their children junk food! Makes you smile a bit, doesn’t it? To know that even parents with staff can’t crowd control any better than normal parents. What was really funny about the article was the comments. Most of the people replying shared stories of their own war-torn childhoods and sibling unrest. My own family is comprised of four children. We fall in a five year age span that conspired to make my mother’s life such that when warm weather finally arrived in the late spring, she would send us all outdoors as soon as breakfast was over and lock the screen doors, front and back, behind us. We were only allowed in to pee. If we needed water, there was a hose in the yard. At lunch she would call us to the picnic table and feed us sandwiches and kool-aid. Afterwards she would cart everything back inside along with anyone young enough to nap and the rest of us were locked out again until just before my father would get home from work. Nothing Brady Bunch or Mama Partridge about that. News that the oldest Jolie-Pitt son was beating on the younger reminded me of the many times I pummeled my little brother. Right up until the day he chased me through the house trying to poke me with a wooden pole attached to a flag we’d gotten for the fourth of July. I managed to slam my bedroom door shut just as he launched the thing at me javelin style. It drilled a hole right through the door. We covered it up with an Andy Gibb poster on one side and Shaun Cassidy on the other. It was a month or more before our mom discovered it and we were forced to confess to the hole’s origins. The hole is still there. My dad was too cheap to replace a whole door just for a little hole. Sibling spacing. A lesson for us all.

Something in Common


I seldom buy The Edmonton Journal these days. I am a Globe and Mail girl. However this last weekend I was compelled not once but twice to grab it as I hustled in and out of the Safeway. The Saturday Edition featured the story of a young (very young) widower on the front page. His wife had been murdered by his brother and it inspired him to crusade on behalf of the victims’ rights movement which inadvertently has become the start of a promising political career. My friend, Marsha wrote a blog piece recently about finding the good in tragedy and this young man is a prime example of this idea. An idea that not everyone shares but I believe is true. Something good is meant to come from loss. Even it doesn’t then the lesson was lost and the tragedy is magnified. Lessons? Yeah, lessons. We weren’t put on this earth to accumulate stuff and make imaginary friends on Facebook. There is a higher purpose.

The Sunday Journal did not appear to have any widows hiding in it, but on the inside of the Culture Section there was an op-ed that first ran in the NYTimes by an author named Patty Dann. The piece detailed her relationship with another widower and how it went from the sharing of a mutual experience to friendship and love. He had written a review online about the novel she had written detailing her late husband’s illness and death. She sent him a note and they eventually became e-mail pals. The whole thing reminded me of Rob and I. How we’d started out on the e-mail and somehow what was just support and an opportunity to “talk” to a like-minded adult of the opposite sex subtly and suddenly became oh so much more. As often as I was told back then that it wasn’t possible to know something through their written words it’s nice to be validated by Ms. Dann’s story. Not that it surprises me. She and her husband to be are writers and Rob and I too. People who don’t know how to make themselves heard through the printed word or to hear someone in kind couldn’t be expected to understand how powerful a medium the writing is.

I am not sure why but I don’t relate to every widowed’s story. I understand the emotions because they are common to us as a group but the deaths themselves are so varied. The young man whose brother killed his wife had no warning. His brother was a drug addict with a mental illness who’d been released from jail on bond without any warning to his family despite his harassing them. That’s awful and too common but not something I can relate to. Just as I know that very, very few widowed can understand what it is like to care for a 29 year old man with dementia or be married to a non-responsive invalid you only see on weekends in the nursing home or hospice. I was widowed long before my late husband actually died and will never accept the idea that was so forcefully pushed at me that there is no such thing as anticipatory grief. It’s real. And I know that from ugly experience. So I find what similarites I can with others who lost spouses to long illnesses but know that I likely won’t find anyone who was emotionally and mentally cut off from their spouse for years prior to the end. One thing that draws me to some widowed people are tales of their loved one who changed mentally. Personalities flip-flopped by diseased brains. Ms. Dann’s husband had glioblastoma and lost his memory. My late husband’s memory was wiped clean by a neurodegneration caused by an inherited metabolic disorder called x-ALD. Her husband was terminal from day one. So was mine. It’s different when there is no hope. It just is.

She was luckier than me though. Most people with determined outcomes are. Her Willem understood what was wrong with him, and my Will never did. He was able to help her make final arrangements for himself. I had to do that alone, guessing at what he would have wanted as we’d never had a whole conversation about it. I dug through my memories for anything I thought might help. The only thing he did give me was the headstone. I knew that he wanted one and a place to put it. She got to make love with her Willem again and I did not. Will was uninterested in anything but pacing in circles and Mountain Dew, which he would have consumed non-stop had I not hid the cans. He didn’t know who I was. He called me “Babe” and called to our daughter as though she were a puppy  “SweetiePie. Here Sweetie Pie.”

Ms. Dann wrote a book about her experiences. It seems to be what widows do, if they have any inclination or ability (and even when they don’t have the latter at all). I honestly haven’t read anyone’s first-hand account of widowhood in book form even though I know that I need to write my own story and might benefit from seeing how others have done it. Or not. 

For now though, I have found a widow with whom I feel a bond. We fell in love again with men who wrote us e-mails.