family

Heritage Day Camping Trip


What is Heritage Day, you may ask. Well, I did and according to my husband, it’s just a holiday. If it has any significance he isn’t aware of what it is. Canadians seem to enjoy many holidays that conveniently fall on Monday’s. Canadians, in my opinions, have their priorities straight. Invent holidays and assign them to Mondays. It’s such a simple idea that it reeks of genius. Small wonder we in the states are taught from childhood to ridicule and make fun of our continental mates to the North. If the news about how many four day holiday weekends Canadians enjoy became common knowledge in the U.S., we might turn it into yet another meaningless action item on the trivia list that passes for issues in cluster-fuck ’08.

We had planned to travel to West Yellowstone for the holiday weekend and camp with Linette and Tea from the YWBB. Katy has never camped and was terribly excited about the prospect. However, Montana is more than a half a whole days drive from Edmonton, and after the jam-packed summer we have already had, and with anniversary of Shelley’s passing looming for Rob, we decided that we would camp in the comfort of our front yard instead. And Katy? She barely noticed the difference. 

Camping in one’s front yard is as weenie as it sounds, but I am completely unapologetic about it. I haven’t camped since before Katy was born and though she doesn’t have that horrified expression when the subject of peeing sans plumbing and walls is mentioned anymore, she is dubious nonetheless. Aside from the lack of sleep, it went well. In a few weeks we are going to give a campground nearby a try, and if this goes well we will kick it up a notch and tackle the real outdoors out West to the Jasper area. As with everything else, it is all about the baby steps.

A belated Happy Heritage Day to all!

Not Pregnant


My “monthly” (a term I thought was just another Canadian word but turned out to be my husband’s reluctance to use the word “period” in a non-punctuation manner ) didn’t arrive yesterday, and I spent a sleepless night worrying about the possibility of being pregnant at 43. It was not a silly worry. Pregnancy, as I remember it, is physically taxing, and I have been running on fumes for quite a while. There is also the added degree of difficulty that my age presents. I remember being quite put out with my OB-GYN for referring to my age as a negative when I was pregnant with my almost five year old daughter. I thought, and felt, that at 37 I was in the best shape I had been in my whole life. I think that had my late husband not gotten ill, I would have considered that pregnancy, and even the first six months of my daughter’s life, a challenging but not overly taxing life event that could have been repeated, God willing. In light of the actual chain of events however, I am not as keen on anything to do with the creation of new life beyond the initial fun stuff .

Rob and I had talked about having children of our own early in our relationship. True, we are middle-aged by social standards (Methuselah-Like by medical ones), but the fact  remains that we are both still in ”working condition”. It would have been foolish of us to ignore the issue though in a way we ended up doing just that anyway. He was concerned that I be sure I didn’t want any more children. His own were in their twenties, and while he was committed to the idea of my daughter, he was reluctant to start from scratch. But I had already put the idea of another child to rest. I truly had. I have no interest whatsoever in going through another pregnancy or experiencing childbirth and those mind-numbingly exhausting first months of a newborn’s life. I had quite unexpectedly ended up one of those militant nursing mothers who let their children self-wean and having only just gotten my daughter to give up “nursery” and sleep on her own, I selfishly wanted my body back.  I assured Rob I didn’t want another child.

But, for two people who were looking forward to someday, before they were too old, being on their child-free own, we sure didn’t take many preventative steps to ensure this. I occasionally wondered about it. Even pointed it out, though I hardly needed to as he was as aware of the contradiction between words and deed as I. There was an ambivalence on both our parts about the whole issue. Perhaps we were hoping that fate would decide the whole thing for us. I guess it nearly did.

Although I kept my fears to myself last evening, a sleepless night is a bit harder to cover up. So when I finally ‘fessed up after lunch today and followed that up with the news that all was well, I was a bit surprised to hear Rob confess to a bit of disappoint. He wondered if I wasn’t disappointed to and I admitted to the tiniest of regret but it is a bit more than that. Like him, I wish that we could have a baby together. Blondish and bright blue-eyed. Just like his dad. And I won’t say it is a silly dream, but it isn’t one that the universe is likely to allow us and we both know that. We have our girls. We have each other. We have a  pretty darn good today and tomorrow to enjoy, and a future to look forward to together. I am happy with what we have.

Normal Life


Normal for Rob and I on a weekend morning is lounging about in our robes, eating a leisurely breakfast, checking out what is going on in the world via our computers and sharing what we find and think with each other. Is that everyone else’s normal too? Probably not. I have long suspected that what the world calls normal and the way people actually live are two separate things. The first is a fantasy perpetrated on us by the self-appointed arbiters of life, and the second is the way things really are and are supposed to be.

There is much talk among the widowed about returning to what they regard as normal life. I guess I was never much of an enthusiast for the idea because my normal before Will died was anything but that, especially when I looked at what most people consider to be a normal life. Even before Will was in the hospice, and the nursing home before that, normal was skewed by his yet unknown to us by name illness. I really have no basis for what is normal married life or normal family life. My own family and upbringing may have been typical for the neighborhood I grew up in, but an alcoholic father makes for a pretty unpredictable family life, and as I grew my younger brother’s drug addiction just made that life more turbulent. Is it normal to lie awake until your little sisters fall asleep so you can push the bedroom dresser in front of the door because your brother threatened to kill everyone as they slept? I am thinking not. Probably not anymore normal than spending Sunday mornings spoon feeding Cream of Wheat to your nearly vegetative husband in a nursing home while your two year old looks on.

What is normal? Is it one of those eye of the beholder things? Or does it really even exist at all? Is it perhaps one of those middle class ideals they sell you through TV shows and movies? I am not too concerned about whether or not my life is normal these days. It is what it is. And mostly what it happens to be is pretty darn good. But it was no accident or lucky break because I don’t really believe in those things anymore. Life changed because I did and continue to do so. I chose not to wait for the day I was happy again and went looking for it. 

Today while my handsome husband is at work, I will tackle the household chores and rearrange furniture, in a likely vain attempt to make sense of the blending of stuff, and then take my daughter to her first day of kindercamp. Normal enough? I think so.