family

Maybe I should Just Live Blog Topless?


So yesterday was a banner day for views. Between my YouTube version of a Hallmark greeting in honor of my handymanly husband and taking part in nursemyra’s T-Shirt Friday, I nearly topped out at 150. Woo-hoo, eh?

The week was packed with errands and reno and school preparations and family melodrama.

BabyD has been having tiny bouts of anxiety about her upcoming induction into grade one and all day school. To the point where she has been making Rob and I a bit peeved with “growing pain” episodes and tears at the drop of a hat about – nothing as far as we can ascertain.

We dropped by her school on Thursday as the teachers were finally back in the building and a visit to the grade one classrooms and a chat with her kindergarten teacher – in addition to picking up her supplies – has calmed her a bit. I will be taking her in on Tuesday but Wednesday we start with the bus back and forth. Fortunately, the little boy behind us (renters – it won’t last) is going to be riding the bus with her and with luck they will be in the same class.

Tee is a nice kid though Rob doesn’t think he is too bright (he thinks that about the boys ElderD and MidKid bring around too) and today BabyD and Tee played princess and My Little Ponies happily for over an hour. I have high hopes for this friendship*.

Most major activities for the fall are now booked. Ballet on Monday night for BabyD. Yoga twice a week from 10 AM to 11:30AM (me). I found a yoga strength training drop in class on Friday mornings too, and I am signed up now for the writing course at U of A. It’s being taught by a local journalist and writer and is designed for immigrants to tell the story of what brought them to the area. She is going to put together a book in which some of the stories might be included and there is a public reading after the class is over. Very cool opportunity.

Thursday being my dad’s birthday, I gave him a call around lunch because it is better to talk to him early in the day anymore. He is in bed most of the time and is not really eating again. Our talk was brief. He was not very responsive and sounded worn out and very old. Sometimes he is lively and witty but more often than not now he is sounding far away.

CB tried to call dad too a few hours later but got our mother instead and was told to call later as dad was asleep again. His call to dad was really about him – he needs help escaping his situation in San Francisco and wants to go home. To Iowa. That’s desperate folks.

Thwarted, he called me but got the answering machine. His tone told me I needed to call him right away and my instinct was right. He was zoned on his anti-anxiety meds and he talked – mostly at me – for an hour and a half. Basically he wanted me to convince the folks to bring him back to Dubuque.

And that’s what I have done.

But first I told him that it was time to really put the past in the past and take his relationship with our parents from now forward. No more looking back.

I told my mother the same thing when she tried to bring up CB’s long ago hell raising of his teens. I pointed out that he was a kid and they were the adults. They didn’t know he had mental health issues even as a small child but they had made mistakes and some of them were wrong no matter how the spin played.

I talked to my brother again on Friday. He sounded much better and I told him to call home and hash details out with the folks. Later DNOS called to wish Rob a happy birthday**, and when I told her about urging our parents to bring CB home for a bit, I got her pat reply,

“Oh really.”

Our mom uses the exact same expression and tone. DNOS sounds just like her sometimes – and would be horrified to know it.

Anyway, it means “WTF are you up to” or “Thanks so fucking much but I don’t think so”.

I noted but ignored. I am tired of some of the older family dynamics.

Dealing with CB is upsetting. It reminds me of Will in the earliest days of his illness – before we knew anything really – when he would get anxious or angry and plaintively tell me he had no idea why he felt as he did but that sometimes he felt like he was losing his mind. Sadly, he was and no one believed him or me.

CB’s quest to find mental help or help period has been fruitless with most doctors and other professionals telling him (or accusing him – take your pick) that he is actively choosing to live an effed up life. My folks and DNOS still believe this to some extent too. I don’t.

But I have no magic wand (or excess cash lying around) to help him, so I remind my parents that CB is their son and they have amends still to make. Unfair? Perhaps. But that is what big sisters are for.

Today Rob is off to the city to help ElderD move in with her friend who is a boy whom she loves and who loves her. Beyond that is anyone’s guess. Our massage therapist thinks BoySheLoves is gay***. We’ll see.

BabyD and I are off to shop for school clothes.

Next up is cleaning for a garage sale (good freaking god help me) and to put our new fall schedule to a serious road test.

Life in the Great White North.

* Like that the family doesn’t move soon. They are acreage crazy and it’s not looking good.

** My family worships my husband like aboriginals with a Coke bottle*.

*** Okay, we wondered about that too but ElderD says “no” because she wondered also and asked.

* nursemyra rightly reminds me that Australians might take offense at the coke bottle reference. I was thinking about that movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, when I made the comparison. My family acts as though Rob dropped from the sky like a god in Greek Mythology and it irritates me to no end as it seems to me they are happier with him than they ever were with my late husband. I meant no offense but realize now that some people were offended and I am sorry.

Song Lyric Thursday – Happy Birthday, Dad!


My father turns 81 today. Something of a miracle really as the doctors have had us outfitting him for a casket more than once* over the past three years.

He is a very lucky man. Not because he has survived long past medical predictions but because he used the time to make amends to his family and to be a better husband and father with the extra time he was granted.

Not many people would have fought like he did or work as hard as he has to remain around and rebuild burnt bridges and build new memories. He had much to atone for and, in my opinion, he has acquitted himself admirably.

I imagine that many people would wonder why long life has been granted to someone like my dad while so many other – younger – people were not as lucky. He certainly didn’t merit the time if one were to look closely at the choices he has made and the people he has hurt by them.

But life really isn’t interested in our opinion. It keeps its own counsel as to who reaches old, old age and who does not. There are reasons. And they aren’t our business.

I don’t know if Dad even has a favorite song. It wouldn’t be rock or pop because he loathed the stuff we kids listened to as we were growing up. The only music he ever listened to at all was country and big band. In fact he met my mom at a dance and they did their early courting on the dance floor.

My father is a man who not only knew how to really dance but he loved to dance.

Happy Birthday to my dad then. A lucky man. A good man.

*Dad got sick around the same time as my late husband began his final decline and has cheated death on a regular basis since. In fact, Will’s first bout with pneumonia occurred when I was propping up my mom during Dad’s first surgery following recurrent TIA episodes. My father was upset that he couldn’t come and help out while Will was in hospice. He is really the only one of my family who wanted to see Will when he was in hospice. No one really visited him but BabyD, me and his mom for the entire three months – but that is another story.

Camping in the National Trailer Park


Campgrounds are like holidaying in a trailer park. At least that is the conclusion I have come to after all my campground experiences.

Will and I tent camped back in the day in those large couples groups where sleeping and being sober are optional activities. Noise is ever present though the decibel level varies with the amount of daylight which means louder at night and death-like quiet in the heat of the afternoon when everyone is sleeping it off.

Well not everyone. Not me. I found tent camping with the gang an adventure in good humor and something I needed to recover from once we got home.

Rob’s camping history is more family and then just couple oriented and is decidedly more au naturel. Off road. Desolate. Mountainous. With activities right off the cover of an eco magazine.

We have a tent trailer and since last summer’s front yard camping adventure, BabyD has been begging to camp away from home. So we set up camp late yesterday afternoon at our local national park just twenty minutes east of here to spend the night.*

We arrived to find that both the site next to ours and the one beyond were occupied. The farther of the two was an old land yacht that belonged to a couple of young men who were clearly not into the rustic adventure of the outdoors. They had either borrowed dad’s RV for a weekend away or were shift workers with too much money and no sense of a better way to spend it.**

Our near neighbors at first glance appeared to be a man and his harem and children.*** But it turned out that the gentleman had drawn the short straw, the other husbands arriving much later to rescue him from the gaggle of wives and horde of children.

Though we didn’t take much note of them at first, they noticed us. And stared. A lot.

It could have been that Rob was shirtless. Or that he went into camp set up mode as soon as we arrived with his typical methodical and efficient manner. Or it could have been that unlucky chain smoking dude tasked with setting up their camp (a job he didn’t do too well****); Rob was clearly in his element and he made it look easy and impossible at once.

It wasn’t until we were eating our supper, prepared with precision by my husband and myself, that I started paying more attention to our neighbors.

The women were engaged in a lively conversation about Rogers, a cell phone company up here who pride themselves on monopoly and poor customer service. It was no surprise that they were complaining but what was truly interesting was their attitude about paying bills they actually owed.

They weren’t too into that.

They boasted to each other about refusing to pay for  certain services that they used but hadn’t understood were extras. One of the woman maintained that she regularly harassed Rogers’ employees into discounting her monthly bill. Another told about cancelling her service after she’d gotten a $400 bill and couldn’t understand why they sent her one for $2000 the next month. After all, she’d told them they had over charged her and that she was cancelling. Didn’t they understand that?

What I understood clearly was that these people were white trash and I find it so interesting that trash is not always white. Being white trash is a mindset. A philosophy of life born out of a combination of conscious disregard for the way the world works and crappy parenting a bad set of genetic fortune.

I taught for a long time. Public school. Mostly working classes (hardly, poor and indebted to plastic). There is a prevailing sense of entitlement to things one isn’t born to yet unwilling to work for and a disdain for anything or one that points out the error of this logic.

Eventually the poor lone husband was joined by the other mates who helped him set up his tent again (he had to move it as it was on the land yacht’s space and another tent besides. Here I should pause to point out that there were seven adults and almost twice that number of kids. In the end they all ended up sleeping in the two SUV’s as we had a wicked storm push through and the great thing about that – for us – is that for a time the thunder and wind drowned the inane conversation and drunken-ness.*****

So how was our trip? Good. Despite the fact that BabyD slammed the tent trailer door on her thumb and face planted off her bike into gravel after hurtling down a hill (she’s okay – just her usual bandaged and bruised self), it was a great success. I even learned to pee in a waste basket.******

We will definitely be doing more of this in the future.

* Since BabyD has never camped outdoors with the exception of our own front yard, Rob was not anxious for our first “real” overnighter to be too long or too far from home.

** Fifth wheels or RV’s are the nouveau riche of Alberta’s answer to the summer place. People buy lots near what passes for lakes around here and then motor out to them every weekend they can manage. For the money they put into it, building a real cabin would be a better idea but that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone.

*** Don’t assume that only the FLDS gets away with polygamy up here.

****  At one point one of the women borrowed an axe from us so he could chop wood for a fire – I think they had run out of cardboard and plastic debris from their meal – and as I watched him hack at a piece of wood like a girl, I asked Rob, “If he cuts his leg off, our we liable? It being our axe and all?” Rob just smiled devilishly and said, “No.” But I know he was thinking that he would have to be the one to put the tourniqet on the guy when he did chop his foot in two. Although since we didn’t bring the first aid kit, I would have had to supply the shirt – his was already off.

***** The drunken-ness was the land yacht boys. The white trash neighbors just smoked. All seven of them and those really stinky foreign cigs too.

****** In keeping with my adventures in peeing in unconventional places, I ended up squatting over the plastic waste basket during the height of the thunderstorm. BabyD was so impressed, she tried it herself. Next up is pooping in the woods. Like the pope.