family

My Life as a House


The quaintly cliché notion that surrounds terminal illness has no better friend than fiction.

I suppose if one has never watched another die than the idea that fleeting finality will coalesce into heartwarming relationship building that shores the foundations of love so that it may bear the separation and even jump-start positive growth experiences is comforting. As it is meant to be. But it’s not real.

Rob and I watched Kevin Kline’s 2001 film entitled Life as a House last evening. Of course, Kline’s character is dying. Naturally he is estranged from his child, ex-wife and living life in general prior to receiving his personal wake up call. And as most dying people do, he decides to demo the shack he lives in – interestingly situated on prime California ocean front property – to build a new home to leave to his sixteen year old son.

Although, the house is the least of what Kline’s character hopes to leave behind, a loft full of death-fueled ambition propels this man.

And it’s predictable. Epiphanies pop like flower buds in the morning sun after a night’s rain. Good is rewarded and annoying folk awarded their comeuppance.

Kline’s character dies more convincingly than 99.9% of the screen deaths I have seen. Having stood bedside myself, I am morbidly critical of fake death. His last moments struck truth. Not that I care all that much to see accurate death-bed scenes, but I hate it when they are prettied up.

Admittedly, given Rob’s recent heart attack, Dee’s birthday with all its memories, and it being the season of “anniversaries”*, we probably should’ve watched that horrid Vince Vaughan tripe holiday throwaway I found the last time we were at the book mobile.

But we are fond of Kline. He’s also worth watching. Vince? Not so much.

What’s stuck with me today though is  the lessons thing. That when someone becomes so ill that death is inevitable, those around learn something from that person’s grace under pressure example. Dying people are seen as sages and their loved ones gather at their feet like disciples at the Last Supper.

It’s not like that. Love is more often left hanging on whatever peg it was carelessly allowed to dangle on and recalcitrant children opt to revert even further to the typecasting of their younger selves. Neighbors more often decide to scuttle like roaches than step up and words are left unsaid that need to be spoken and shouted that should be swallowed.

The whole stoic saint persona was/continues to be the most difficult for me.

Rob’s recent brush with acute illness sharply reminded me that I function better in long seige conditions and not in the initial skirmishes when the enemy’s unknown and the terrain is new.

But I did like the house analogy. Death is a metaphor’s goldmine. To me it makes total sense that the old is razed and the new is rebuilt atop. Phoenix from ash. Apt.

I dream a lot about houses. They are never finished and I am usually in transit from one to another. They are always in the college town of long ago, which symbolically makes no sense aside from the education aspect.

I wonder sometimes what it will mean if I should ever dream that I am in a finished house. Of course, I will have to actually live in one first as I need a template.

Three houses passed university and not one ever “done”. Now there is a better analogy for my life.

Best line – “Change can be so slow that you don’t know if your life is better or worse until it is.” That, thank goodness, is not one of my analogies.

*I think the whole anniversary of deaths, non-birthdays, non-wedding anniversaries and – worst of all, in my own opinion – the idea that events leading up to deaths should be observed in any way are products of a society lulled into the false belief that death is the trauma that keeps on refueling. And that ‘s it better to acknowledge and acquiecse to it than simply acknowledge and get back to daily life. I read accounts of people who literally lose weeks to gearing up and ramping down. If I took time out to do more than simply recall that “oh yeah, that happened today”, I would never get up off the floor in the corner I was curled up in. I’d be like that old SNL skit. “Yes, the late Mr. Loomis used to lay in a basket by the door. He had no spine, you know. God rest his soul.”  If grief is a 12 step process, and I suspect strongly that it isn’t, it’s not productive to recycle it yearly. No good can come out of  that kind of hindsight flogging.

Reality Checking In


Recent traffic surges and an uptick in subscribers has left me feeling oddly pressured and blogging with the feeling of “daily chore” about it.

I’m also feeling less comfortable with personal revelation now that some of my readership dwells in my real world as opposed to the – as my daughter puts – “internet people” I’ve become accustomed to in my bloggy version of the reality show confessional.

And there is the fact that I am slowly inching back into the world of working … at a real job … for money. Not much money. You’d either chuckle at my audacity of referring to it as “work for pay” or fear for my survival if I were suddenly called upon to be the breadwinner again. Very little bread could be purchased with the bread I am making.

Pool all this and the end result is me not blogging much … again.

Regardless, there’s little news in the neighborhood to blog about at any rate.

Summer finds me in full-blown stay at home mom mode much more so than at any other time of year. Swim lessons. Camps. Weekends off in the wooded or mountain areas.

Last weekend we got away for a quickie to Garner Lake and this coming weekend, we’re off to a family reunion weekend a way up north near Grande Prairie.

Shelley’s family gathers every fourth year at one of the area’s community halls to pitch tents, horseshoes and bocce balls. There’s a big dinner followed by a dance on Saturday night and judging from the tales I’ve heard, I will be even more completely out of my elemental self than I normally am around Rob’s late wife’s family.

Trepidation is running at high enough levels that I’ve even tread back into nightmare territory – a sure sign that my exterior zen is squaring off with my internal misgivings and fears.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, Shelley’s family has been nothing but polite and graciously so to me and Dee, but feelings have flared out of sight.

Rob thinks I am being overly pessimistic and that everything will be fine, but every time I have been around that side of the family, heavy drinking occurs*. And I already know that most of the extended family are keenly aware of what my presence symbolizes which puts both me and them on sharp edges.

This is the first family reunion since Shelley died. Her mother, step-father, father and both her mother’s brothers have died in the interim. I can’t help but think that this is something that will not hit people until everyone has gathered … and had too much to drink.

Of course, it could all just turn out peachy.

I am crossing fingers for peachy. And taking my yoga mat.

*One of the sisters-in-law is an alcoholic who appears to only deal with her issues when she is completely shit-faced, which is clever because no one in the family can call her on behavior she has conveniently blacked out.

Sins of the Mother (or why my child isn’t popular)


One thing I didn’t factor in to my decision to procreate was the fact that my child’s early socialization would be largely dependent on my own ability to make friends. And I just don’t make friends. Not really and not easily.

My life has mostly been barren where close relationships are concerned. Growing up, I never had a best friend. I flitted from crowd to crowd. Jockettes. Band geeks. Newspaper nerds.

A college friend, who also went to high school with me, once commented,

“I never could figure out why you hung out with us (band geeks) when you could have been friends with anyone.”

And that’s the heart of the problem. I could be friends with anyone and so I am friends with very few. My personality is not calibrated to crowds, in or out. And friends were work. Work with dubious pay-off. On those occasions that I did put in the time and effort, my reward was second-rate. I seldom made the top-tier friend status with those who I was really attracted to as people.

Some of this, I know now, relates to my life’s mission. But some of it gets back to my distinct lack of “follower” DNA.

How does this relate then to motherhood?

Come to discover that my daughter’s popularity, or lack thereof, is directly proportional to my standing in the eyes of her friends’ mothers.

At the moment, I am a down arrow in terms of stock value.

It’s been coming. I saw it. The dance moms noses have actually gotten longer looking down at me this year for my indifferent regard for protocol. A few of them are in danger of becoming cross-eyed from all the askance looks they’ve shot my way.

I don’t care what other women – or people in general – think of me, and that is a statement I haven’t always been able to lay claim to over the years, but it bothers me that my lack of popularity reflects on Dee, who should be judged (well, she shouldn’t be judged ever really) on her own merit. She is a person in her own right after all and not just an appendage of me. Unlike many of the mothers I have met since becoming one, I didn’t have Dee to fulfill any thwarted childhood dreams of my own.

Recently, there was an “incident” with a ballet teacher that prompted me to pull Dee from the school just a week before the year-end performance. My doing this was based on Dee’s emotional well-being. I didn’t want to force her to continue when it was clear that the teacher had no regard for her as a person and saw her as merely a backdrop for her more talented students. This wasn’t the first problem with this particular teacher and forcing Dee to gut it out would have  – in my opinion – taught her that taking abuse from people is what “good girls” do for the greater good of her friends. Being female is enough of a trial in this world without reinforcing the ridiculous notion of “sucking it up” as a virtue.*

I earned a bit of scorn for this from the mothers of Dee’s dancemates. One in particular demonstrated her ire when she forbade her daughter – Dee’s school classmate – from dancing with Dee at the school talent show.

Dee has wanted to perform in the school performance since kindergarten. Her friend agreed to do the ballet number they’d learned together, but her mother won’t allow it. Retribution.

Only it’s directed at me through Dee. Which stinks. I have no patience with people who use children to prove points to adults.

Fortunately, Dee really doesn’t understand what has occurred. I sent a note to her teacher to let her know what happened and to keep her on the alert for anything that might come up.

Dee’s friend and her twin sister host an end of the year day long party and sleep-over the weekend after school gets out. Dee has always been invited. This year I doubt she will be. Another social conformity lesson for me that my daughter will have to pay for and won’t understand. The sad thing is that it won’t change me. I am unlikely, at my age, to bend to the will of people who I wouldn’t have chosen to make friends with in the first place.

It’s not that I dislike these women. They are nice. I’ve had pleasant conversations and passed time in their company. I am just not … I don’t know … someone who feels the need to run my life by committee or needs a lot of outside approval or validation? It’s hard to explain.

I made the right decision for Dee. I am her mother first and the children who were in her dance groups are not my primary concern. I find it hard to fathom that any of them were greatly affected by Dee’s absence anyway. The attrition rate at the end of the year performances (there are two) is high because they fall on weekend evenings and in this neck of Alberta – in June – that’s RV and lake lot season. People bugger off on the weekends. We don’t have a long summer season and no one squanders the tiny bit of time we get.

*There are times and places for sticking things out but not when you are being used or treated badly.