daily life

Rebounding


I am still only partially recovered from last weekend’s training session. I went into that one on the heels of post-holiday-lag and a late night phone intervention with N1, who read my post about his mother.

N1 reads my blog here and there now (Hey, kiddo.) and though I suppose this should push me to censor a bit, I probably won’t.  He’s sixteen.

“I’m not a child,” he tells me.

But he’s not a grown-up either (sorry, N1) and certainly, I know things from a perspective historical and experience based – about our family that he doesn’t.

Long story shortened – I find out via Facebook (the joys of a mixed feed) that N1 was planning to make a little trip to his mother’s for the purpose of retribution.

First of all, violence is not a good idea. Second, it would have accomplished all of nothing.

So we talked and came to terms and in the end, N1 couldn’t have made the trip anyway because he’s totaled not only the car that my mother bought for him, but his dad’s car too. Within two weeks. I think only my mother has a better record for auto accidents than that in our family.

But as a result, I got about 5 hours of sleep before the Friday training and we worked on twists.

I love twists, but to do the standing ones without falling over, I need sleep and calm happy sinuses. I had neither.

By the time inversions rolled around Sunday morning, I was just enduring. Sometimes I think a big part of the training is survival. It’s like a special forces unit. Or Officer and a Gentleman.

Well, I have other options, but the nagging sense of being a quitter in the face of an obstacle that is largely myself is familiar.

Pray a bit to Ganesh and remind myself that it is just two more training weekends and a final weekend of testing. Woot!

This last week was a slow slog toward catching up on the rest that eluded me and ended with my toppling over in yoga class yesterday because I mis-aligned myself in a standing twist. Definitely left a mark.

But I thought I would score a bit of zzzzz on Saturday morning due to excellent training of the child – who can feed and water herself. However, the lengthening days means that birds tweet merrily from 4AM on (and they will only be getting up earlier in the next two months), coupled with a husband who wanted to get a jump on reno and a daughter who hacked up her breakfast like a cat who’s been grooming too much – and I am still tired.

And I have work to do.

Next Saturday I am presenting at the county library’s writer’s workshop, I have been stepping up my blogging on Care2 and 50 Something, applied for a new online job – for money … it’s an actual paying job … and I have to finish all my yoga reading this weekend because the next training weekend is the 30th.

I should have titled this post “ricochet”.

An Honest Scrap


Lora receives The Honest Scrap blogger award often, and I’ve enviously wished to be awarded this myself as I’ve read her scraps of self-truth.

Being a more interesting and less censored person than myself, it isn’t surprising that she is a frequent honoree. She does Gary Paulson’s creedo of “going there” proud via her blogging efforts. I don’t boldly go much anymore. Age isn’t a factor. Wisdom hasn’t come with wrinkles and fading hair follicles. I just live in the world more and am less inclined to be infamously known in my realtity.

Not that Lora is infamously known – that I know of – but more and more, people I interact with in real time read this blog. Honesty has become a hassle. Coy isn’t difficult to write, but it’s not all that engaging on a creative or personal level for me. So I don’t.

And I’ll bet you were thinking “she’s grown a conscience, chosen modesty or, at the very least, reconnected with her empathy bone”.

Silverstar blessed me with my very own Honest Scrap Award. It comes with the onus of relating 10 little known facts about myself, as if I have that many anymore, and the request to pass it along to other bloggers. Most of the blogs I read are written by anti-meme types, so I can’t bring myself to name names. I consider my readership to be go-getting self-prodders who will simply appropriate this award and write, or not, as the mood moves them. My blogging buddies are scrappy like that.

Little known? What does that mean exactly? Known to my readers – who are varied, sitting in front of screens that are thousands of miles away from me and whose faces I may not know if I were to encounter them somewhere?

  1. I believe in destiny and fate, but I don’t think we are at their mercy. Though most of the time you are locked into a path until it plays out, you still have options. Your actions have effects. Where you are right now is still mostly your own doing because our difficulties in life are usually the result of fighting destiny rather than working within the confines of our predestined trajectory.
  2. Enlightenment is more often rejected than it is actually elusive, in my opinion. It’s probably completely possible to learn everything you need to know without ever stepping foot on this planet. Life is a choice we make at some point, and I think it is the physicality of it all that lures us here in spite of the fact that confining our true selves to such flimsy and frustratingly needy vessels can cause us pain in equal measure to joy and pleasure. Life is addicting.
  3. I check the obituaries of the Des Moines Register daily to see if my late husband’s mother has died yet. Occasionally I will google the names of his aunts and uncles to check on their pulse status as well. If I never saw or heard from them again, it wouldn’t pain me one bit and I will be relieved when I am finally shed of the semi-annual sending of the photos ritual and their couple of Hallmark cards a year addressed to Dee – who has absolutely no idea who they are. She checks the cards for money. My mother and Auntie send cash. There is never money. I remind her of the sender’s connection to her. Her grandmother. She’ll frown. My mom is her grandmother and her grandmother sends money. Her Daddy Will’s Auntie Gem, who she hasn’t seen since her father’s wake four years ago. Auntie Gem solicits photos to distribute among the uncles. I haven’t heard from either of them since just after I wrote them in the summer of 2007 to announce I’d remarried and emigrated to Canada. Hmmmm. Okay, I should have said something prior but when I met Rob, I hadn’t seen or heard from any of them in 7 or 8 months. What I really wanted to do was not write. Just wait until they’d figured out I’d moved away and were forced to call my folks to find me. Or maybe they’d have called the police? One of the uncles had been a warden at the big state prison. He had connections. And it was evil but I didn’t do it simply because Rob thought I should write them at the very least. And so, the very least I did. And I look for(ward to) their obits.
  4. I sometimes miss television. Bet that seems like a mild revelation after the last one, eh? Some evenings I don’t feel like reading or writing and it was nice to be mindlessly entertained following a show with recurring characters and stories that spun out over a couple of months. I’m waiting on season two of The Tudors from the public library. Sure, the history is faulty and it’s mostly bad soft porn, but not thinking in a semi-active way can be okay here and there.
  5. For the first two years of Dee’s life, I let her daycare providers cut her finger and toenails because I was afraid of snipping her. Those women were saintly. I never changed a crappy diaper either unless it was a weekend or a holiday because Dee pooped once a day in the mid-ish afternoon. Kid is still fairly punctual though now it’s after she gets home from school because she refuses to do #2 in a public washroom if she can avoid it. Will was like that. Rob is like that. Not me though. If I have to go, I go.
  6. I like living in J’berg. If it ended up that we were here for the duration, I would be completely okay with that though Rob? Not so much. I have mainly lived unseen and unnoted in larger cities or crowded towns and here, I am recognized. Maybe not as “one of them” because small towns are a bit weird about the whole “nativism” thing, but I belong after a fashion and it’s all good.
  7. My favorite time of year is nearly upon us, sun days. Those longly lit days when the sun is up at 3:30 and barely dips below the horizon sometime well after 11PM. I would love to experience true white nights. I don’t think I could live there because it’s opposite are the night-days of winter, but maybe experience it one time?
  8. I don’t believe every child can be educated. This doesn’t excuse them from the duty of trying, but I don’t think everyone is born with the same innate ability to learn. We should come with a label: skill level may vary. I don’t think its genetic. My oldest nephew is clever as hell and he didn’t get that from his parents. It made it hard to be a teacher. Correction, it made it hard to work myself up about kids who just didn’t get it. They worked hard, tried their best and just weren’t very smart. And I can’t even say that it’s sad because generally, they were sweet kids who grew up to be sweet, hard-working, lovable and loving adults. Nothing wrong with that.
  9. I like Nickelback. I thought that pickle thing was mean. Keep your Nickelback hate to yourselves in my presence. It’s catchy. It pounds. The lyrics are suitably pop cheesy and I like growly voiced singers.
  10. If you have animals in your home, I will try to avoid sitting down – or being without shoes – because I am conscious of the dander, the hair and the fact that kitty litter does not stay in the box; it is everywhere your cat has ever pawed. Don’t kid yourself. Last night we stopped by the home of one of Rob’s friends to pick up a few things he needs to haul away an old Volvo of Edie’s. They have three or four dogs running loose and about 2 dozen cats that run in and out of their house. Right now, they even have a mama cat and kittens in their upstairs linen closet because the mama sneaked in and gave birth there a week ago. They haven’t moved them but instead, threw everything out of the bottom shelves of the closet into the hallway. Rob’s friend invited me to sit in the family room to wait while he and Rob rummaged around in the barn. I smiled. Nodded and after they’d disappeared took Dee outside. If I’d sat, I would have been covered with hair, and more cats than I cared to be and my nose was already running. If you have cats especially, I probably won’t sit if the visit is a short one and I will avoid long ones, but if I can’t – the only way I’ll sit is if it matters to me if your feelings will be wounded because I know it will appear as though I am judging you and I’m not. I lived with cats here and there, but fur and itchy throat and running eyes and nose are not something I will do for many people. If I have done it for you, you are special indeed.

Well, I am sure that disappointed, but now I am done. Remember, you are welcome to take the scrap and run back to your own blog with it or just tmi all over the comments.

It’s Probably Just Me


I don’t like being a “dance mom”. Two nights a week I haul the girl into town and pass time sitting on a cement floor while people I pay pretend to teach her to dance. Dance is just another version of those horrifying child beauty pageants. It’s all about outfits, costumes, hair and make up. Dance is incidental.

The ancillary stuff dominates. At the beginning of the year, the moms anguished over the ballet uniform: hair up in bun, black leotard, pink ballet shoes and ballet pink tights (yeah, it’s its own colour). Some of the girls weren’t dressed out properly and moms who’d been lectured on their own daughter’s dress code violations were stewing none too silently over what they saw as preferential treatment.

I’ll cop to being one of the privileged moms. Dee’s dance instructor doesn’t approach me with complaints on the odd day that I don’t get Dee’s hair into a bun, but that has more to do with my “who fucking cares” demeanor and the fact that I am 46 and  the teacher is just 18 than anything else.

“Why do you care what a teenager thinks about whether or not your child arrives properly dressed every time?” I asked. “Sometimes life gets in the way. The laundry didn’t get done or we didn’t have time to put hair up. It happens. No high schooler is going to lecture me on parenting.”

Unsurprisingly, none of the other moms had a response to that.

The current crisis concerns the costumes for the girls’ ballet festival performance. Festivals are weekend time sucks where dance schools gather and compete for bragging rights. I will miss both festivals this spring due to conflicts – yoga training weekends – thus saddling Rob with “dance mom” duty. He has been quite Dalai Lama about it.

Harry Potter inspired the choreography and it’s cute really. After 4 years of ballet, it finally appears as though Dee is actually dancing, but the costume is a mish-mash and two of the mothers aren’t pleased with the full effect. Every dance night there is a discussion about what can be done about the unacceptable costume. The poor little dance teacher keeps to the fringes because she’s afraid of simply scrapping and starting over – money has been spent and clothing purchased so far is non-returnable. She’s only 18, as I mentioned earlier, so I understand her reticence, but I am tired of the angst.

Who the fuck cares? It’s a stupid costume in a dumb festival that even a year from now, let along a hundred, won’t matter one bit.

But okay, I am not a girly, dancey, overly invested in my daughter’s hobbies kind of parent. It’s fine if you are, we all find our parenting level and rise or sink. I’ve, obviously, chosen the lower levels to dwell in, but I don’t aspire to motherhood as some kind of personal nirvana.

Against my will, I volunteered a few suggestions last evening when the discussion began to veer off into territory that might involve more personal involvement on my part. Interestingly, they were not dismissed out of hand.

More interesting, to me, was the jealous twinge I had a bit later as I sat and listened to one of the moms discussing the purchase of their new home.

In the newer suburban tract of The Fort, there is an attempt at upscale, executive type, homes. They bottom at about $500,000-ish, but keep in mind that housing prices in this neck of Alberta are stupid. Case in point, my home in Iowa – 1400 sq ft with sizable yard on a cul-de-sac sold for $163,900 at the beginning of the housing bubble burst. That same house here? Probably $350,000. People here pay, without a second thought, for slapped together shite on postage stamp lots in neighbors so choked with trucks, SUV’s and holiday trailers that parking is a nightmare in the residential areas. I will give Canadians this one kudo – they are fanatics about green spaces, bike/walking paths and parks, but neighborhoods might as well be tenements given the lack of space between houses.

The new home owner’s daughters are friends with Dee and the mom waxed on about the new home’s spaciousness – the exec housing is on three-quarter acre lots and have stupid amounts of square footage in addition to all the other superficial things like the upgraded flooring, counters, bath accessories and three/four car garages.

I don’t have counter top envy. Granite? Whatever. I do have space envy.

I’ve mentioned previously, and on numerous occasions, that in my last house I had very little furniture. I fought against the accumulation of it. My mother and MIL couldn’t grasp not wanting a living room set. But I have always preferred sitting on the floor and in fact, sitting on the floor is anatomically better for a person in the long run. There was so much space. Sometimes I would sit on the top of the landing and just bask in the openness.

As she talked about space and de-cluttering, as she is in the midst of packing, I felt jealous.

My practical side, for which I can thank my Depression-era born father and my brush with bankruptcy during Will’s illness, can’t fathom buying a home in Fort Saskatchewan of all places for $630,000 when the house I live in is paid for. Especially at my age in these economically dangerous times and with my level of paranoia about “what ifs”.

Still – space – the temptation.

Must think more yogically – detach!

UB mentioned the Buddhist (and its yoga premise too) idea that attachment is at the root of what we term “unhappiness”. Our inability to accept the impermanence that is all things in life holds us fast. Attachment roots and not in a good way. I have struggled with the idea but not the practice ironically.

Occasionally I comment on widow blogs. It’s not smart because I am far removed from common grief-think. Someone wrote about how being in a new relationship does not make things better and I disagreed. Falling in love with Rob and marrying again did make things better. I shouldn’t have said so out-loud because it’s heresy wide-open for misinterpretation, but I weary of the doom and gloom about the future after loss. I was “attached”, if you want to put it that way, to Will but I never believed that our marriage was anything other than time and place. We were destined to have a time and a place together that at some point one of us would leave. Everyone dies eventually. The idea that we have more than just brief moments together here and there over the course of existence is not something I question.

Sadness can balance happiness over the course of a mortal existence or one can swamp the other. I think we know going in what the general outline will be and it’s when we stomp our feet against it that life is harder than it would have been if we’d merely viewed it as transitory.

Marrying again didn’t make the fact that Will died better, it made me better. It re-grounded me, gave me an outlet for love again and bolstered my faith (I won’t say “rewarded it” because I don’t really believe in the whole reward/punishment model of existence). I think if one denies the benefits of moving on – however it manifests – it ‘s just resistance to the reality that life is impermanent and that should be re-examined for one’s own sake.

But, it’s probably just me.