Four walls around me

We had a disaster in January.

Not fatal, not tragic, but it may take me some time to go into it, to touch where it hurts.

But this morning, this song turned up on my YouTube feed.  It's not new, but in that way that life has, the lyrics have changed their meaning for me.

I sat in front of the computer and sniffled a little.

You might, too.

André is a wimp

I was planning other posts for today, but another post got in my way. Canada Post.

Canada, as one of my sympathetic friends has pointed out, is the only First World country with a Third World postal service. I mailed a package for elder daughter at 9:08 on the morning of April 18th, four days before Good Friday. It's right there on my tracking notice. On the Tuesday after Easter Monday, eight days after I mailed said parcel, I noticed that the package had been "processed". It was still in Ottawa, full of cupcakes, now over a week old. I filled out a "ticket", and they cheerfully reported that it had been delivered this morning, the very day elder daughter checked out of her dorm. She went to pick it up; no dice. It had been signed for at Dalhousie University. My daughter attends the University of King's College, next door. I phoned Canada Post, got put on hold, then some guy named André suggested that I had misaddressed the package. When I had the temerity to get angry, he hung up on me.

I didn't swear; I didn't call him names. He just hung up on me when I suggested that the situation arose from Canada Post making "mistake after mistake".

Clearly, I should wait for the Resident Fan Boy to get home before attempting such phone calls. Time to go to my happy place....
Sigh. My favourite Marx Brother movie (Monkey Business) with my favourite Great Big Sea song ("When I am King"). Thecoweyd,you're my hero.

And as for you, Andre, you're a wimp. May all your packages be misdirected. Go, and never darken my towels again...

Define "all right"....

This has taken me several days to write. And it isn't very good.

I think I've mentioned this before, but the trouble with journals and diaries is that the keeping of them often involves writing down the sad stuff. I guess it's supposed to be more therapeutic, but often it only seems to make the pain more real. In the same (open) vein, I've been struggling to complete my yearly rundown and have run into a snag with last November, which featured a number of set-backs, failures, and heartbreaks.

Earlier in this past rather horrific week in April, I caught the tail-end of the movie Hilary and Jackie, the 1998 film about the DuPré sisters. Jacqueline, who went on to great fame as a cellist, eventually succumbed to a particularly nasty strain of multiple schlerosis, dying deaf, mute, and in pain. At the very end of the movie, she's an apparition, standing on a beach in the early 50's and telling her child-self: "It's going to be all right."

But it isn't. Just a tad later in that same rather horrific week, I strode up the hill to school with younger daughter, holding the words of "Ordinary Day" by Great Big Sea in my head and heart (I embedded a Doctor Who video to this song in my previous post): "At the end of the day, you just gotta say it's all right..." But it wasn't. Younger daughter was stressed out and more socially-challenged than usual. She was yelling at and physically pushing away her "guardian angel" each recess. She was refusing to join in at recorder practice. To top it off, the so-called student-led conferences were scheduled toward the end of the week, and after months of no homework assignments at all, they came tumbling down, like objects thrown to a juggler. The juggler being me, of course. A few balls got dropped... Here's an excerpt of an email that I finally got the courage to send to the principal and teaching staff: I must confess I've been in a state of bewilderment since last week's student-led conference. My husband and I arrived in (her) classroom at the appointed time, and it was almost as if we were unexpected guests. The other students were cheerfully showing off their portfolios, but hers was nowhere in sight. We killed time looking at photo displays, waiting for guidance, and not sure what to tell (our daughter). This was our seventh student-led conference, the third with (younger daughter), but no one seemed to have prepared (her) for what was expected this time. When the portfolio finally made its appearance, it had the oddest assortment of documents; some were assignments we had recognized from earlier in the year, but others utterly flummoxed us: a Xeroxed fairy tale written in language well below (her) reading ability; what we took to be a prototype of (her) locker shield, except most of the drawings weren't by (her) and it inexplicably had "Grade Three" written at the top; and a penguin project with Xeroxed references to Antarctica despite the fact that (younger daughter's) project appeared to be about penguins living in Australia. Our hearts sank. Is this portfolio reflective of (her) work this year? Perhaps (younger daughter) chose these things herself? The portfolio gave us the impression of a last-minute search to find things to put in it. We felt rather too dispirited to stay long and left at the earliest opportunity.

I didn't tell them that both younger daughter's teachers had approached us and said pleasant things about her that sounded like grasping at straws. I didn't tell them that as younger daughter waded through the contents of this strange portfolio, I was struggling with despair, grief, and the voice inside me wailing: "My God, they think she's an idiot!" And I certainly didn't tell them that I staggered home, turned on the computer, put the earphones on with the Proclaimers full blast and wept while sorting through my family history files.

That night, I took 3 "Sleep Relaxes", but woke at 2:30 in the morning in a sweat with the opening of "Sunshine on Leith" running through my mind: "My heart was broken --- sorrow, sorrow, sorrow...." The thing is, "Sunshine on Leith", isn't about despair; it's about redemption, and eventually, despite the snaggle-toothed gremlins of worry besetting me from the dark of the early morning hour and the steady ache of my knee which is still slowly recovering from the sideways split of a couple of weeks ago, I eventually felt myself relax into sleep. Younger daughter had speech therapy the next morning, so I telegraphed my distress to her speech therapist and had a quick conference while y.d. played with the dollhouse in the waiting room. By happy circumstance, the developmental psychologist who assessed younger daughter five years ago was making a rare office stop-in, and led me into an empty office for a few minutes of compassionate listening and some dashes of perspective. When I left, I was no longer feeling quite so wounded (or murderous). I still diplomatically avoided seeing the teaching staff when dropping younger daughter off at school. It wasn't until Sunday (after some heavy Doctor Who therapy) that I summoned the nerve to compose the above-quoted detailed email which ended with: So, to sum up: May I be allowed to email? May I have notice of incoming assignments? Is it possible to have a regular idea of what (my daughter) is expected to learn? It took seven minutes for the principal to respond. To each point: "Absolutely". He also said he was stunned. I wondered anxiously what I had said to stun him. The next day, I had quite a long impromptu conference with younger daughter's homeroom teacher, followed by an off-the-cuff offer to include her in an after-school ecology survey that afternoon, and, oh Gawd, a sudden increase in homework assignments. Clearly, we're going to have to go over Point Number Two again... Miraculously, over the weekend, younger daughter's extreme anxiety seemed to melt away. Due to my own relief? Reinstating her vitamin regimen? (We'd been running low.) Even after a run-in with a rather notorious class-member during recess that day, her words didn't desert her. The boy pointed at the picture of Cruella De Vil on her teeshirt and (according to the guardian angel) taunted her: "Are you mean?" "Not as mean as you are, Adam!" Of course, now her guardian angel is being accused of putting the words in her mouth. Younger daughter's classmates evidently think such a comeback is beyond her abilities. And "Adam" is on the warpath, referring to her as "stupid". Still. For once we have a confrontation that has a ring of assertiveness to it. Here's younger daughter's take on the incident:

The human condition seems to entail a lot of singing hopefully in the face of inevitable decline, whistling past the graveyard. Is it all right? Reason seems to say not, but reasonability isn't always the best way to survive the day. The late (really late, she only left us last year) Madeleine L'Engle struggled with the "all right" question in several of her books, but I remember in particular the passage from the closing of The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, one of her many auto-biographical works, this one about the her mother's final months. A year after her mother's death, Madeleine is putting her grandchildren to bed and is confronted by the theological in the shape of her grand-daughter: "But, Gran, is everything really all right? Really? It is completely cosmic questioning, coming from a small girl in a white nightgown with a toothbrush in her hand, sensing the unfamiliar surrounding the familiar. It is warm and light in the house, but the greater the radius of light, the wider the perimeter of darkness. . . . I must answer it for her, looking down at her serious, upturned face, and I can answer truthfully only if I have my feet planted very firmly on rock. I think of the warmth of the rock at the brook, and that I will never know more than a glimpse of the ousia of the small green frog --- or of my mother --- or of the two little girls --- and this is all right too. "Is it really all right?" Léna persists. "Yes, Léna, it is all right." This is all I can promise my daughters, knowing that "all right" is a really, really relative term. But the Proclaimers sing: "I thank Him for his work, for your birth and my birth.."
And I do. Because, otherwise, all this seems terribly pointless.

April Cruel

It's bloody snowing again.

For the past few days, the waist-to-shoulder-high piles of filthy crystalizing snow have been slowly retreating from the edge of the sidewalks, gradually revealing beat-up garden ornaments and six-month-old dog droppings. The yard at my younger daughter's school is an skating rink in the mornings and a large iceberg-filled moat in the afternoon. However, it could still be said that progress was being made. Until midday.

I looked out the window between the knee-icings only to see the large white missiles plopping down and covering the newly exposed mud and khaki-coloured grass. This morning I had a hasty hall conference with one of younger daughter's EA's about an incident during morning recess yesterday, when she inexplicably yelled at her guardian angel and spent the period after recess weeping heartbrokenly while the EA tried to explain that yelling at friends is "bullying behaviour".

Is it? When I tried to find out what happened from younger daughter herself on the walk home from school yesterday, her response was predictable: "I don't want to talk about it." A block later, she said, "I'm feeling brave now." Heartened, I asked again, but she said, "I'm tired of talking about it now." What can you say to a child whose verbal abilities shut down when she's upset, who is probably terrified when the angry feelings well up, and who is convinced that anyone who tries to help her manage these feelings doesn't like or love her anymore? Bullying behaviour? Really?

And it's still snowing. I'm grateful that the internet is rippling with Doctor Who interviews and that David Tennant and Catherine Tate have been making the pilgrimage through the radio stations of London, leaving podcasts to take me out of my physical and emotional self. God help us if the spybots close down the illegal posters of the new Doctor Who; I've never needed it more. One of Mihangel's favourite posters got the axe last week, but he had titles and links all over the place, a veritable homing device for Auntie Beeb's single spies and battalions. Our favourite is a lady who comes out of the woodwork only to post at a specially-set up channel with renamed episodes. If she's found out, she pulls up stakes and posts from somewhere else.

Fanvids rarely get pulled, so here's two more of my favourites, this time with a Canadian content theme. The first is set (by woefully infrequent YouTube poster "MrsCake") to the optimistic, triumphing-over-adversity music of Great Big Sea from Newfoundland, and features, I think, five of the ten Doctors so far:



(Man, that was difficult to embed!) If Great Big Sea embodies the life-affirming possibilities of Doctor Who, then the Barenaked Ladies seem to perfectly match the quirkiness of the mad goings-on. Here's "Moto1261"'s interpretation of Rose's journey with the Ninth and Tenth Doctors which includes my very favourite version of the regeneration between the two:


Hooray for Canada! (Don't know if the posters are actually Canadian, but clearly they are People of Taste.) I'm starting to feel a bit better already. As for my younger daughter, I have to cling to the notion that what seem like regressions or even new problems are actually signs of progress. When she "lost it" a few years ago, it would mean days of recovery. Now, it's fifteen minutes of unpleasantness and grief. It may look like the Slough of Despond out there, but it's no place to live. Somehow, with plenty of backsliding and repetition, we'll all learn to cope...

Shoe fly, don't bother me...

I would be relieved about February being over if it didn't mean that we will now be stuck with March....

Okay, not that great a week. PMS and "periodicality" can be blamed for some of the glitches of this week, but not all of them. The disappearance of younger daughter's indoor shoes from her locker Wednesday morning, for example. Now, most schools in Canada are running on a shoestring budget anyway, so frills like music, arts, special education, and janitorial upkeep have been steadily trimmed away over the years. This means that parents must purchase two pairs of shoes for their offspring: "outdoor shoes" for coming, going, and recess, and "indoor shoes" for cutting back muck on the floor. Apparently, someone thought it would be a wonderful trick to stow younger daughter's shoes in an unoccupied locker a few doors down from her own. (This is a "caring school", as her principal puts it, so the lockers don't actually lock.) We think it was a prankster for two compelling reasons: younger daughter's EA (educational assistant) helped her suit up for school dismissal on Tuesday afternoon and is unlikely to have left her shoes lying in the hall; young classmate who suggested this aforementioned scenario had a smile on her face that made something in my tummy sink. Younger daughter spent part of the day in sock feet, the other part in boots, and was pretty damn miserable by the end of it. I had flagged down the vice-principal that morning after a fruitless search of the Lost and Found and informed her as lightly and non-paranoidically (probably not a word, but I'm periodical, so leave me alone) as I could, of my suspicions. A gallant member of the still-existing janitorial staff located the shoes just as the dismissal bell rang. Her name is Nicole if you want to add her to your prayers. This morning, the principal approached me to acknowledge my concerns. I felt very "managed", but that's his job, so I thanked him politely. On top of this, younger daughter is suffering from messy chapped lips due a combination of -20 wind chills and a subtly drippy nose, older daughter is contending with an emergency concerning an student living with Asperger's who has erupted all over her drama class (the one class where he feels accepted, apparently), resulting in Asperger's presentations presided over by supply teachers, and I am so sick of dumping...

So I was finished writing the August 2007 of my yearly rundown in my journal (one of the reasons I started this blog) in the coffee shop, and I found myself drawn to the dusty speaker perched high above the entrance of the hallway to the washrooms. Patrons squeezed by me as I strained to make out of the lyrics of a song that sounded so familiar, but that I just could not place. Grateful Dead? Maybe, kind of calypso-y for them, I thought. Just before the song ended, I manage to catch "it's time for him to take his children home", so I hurried up the street back to my house, hastily kicked my snow boots off and googled various combinations of the words I'd heard. It's Uncle John's Band, and I was right, it's the Grateful Dead and here they are singing it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EoQ3GkH4Zc
(One of these days, I'll figure out how to actually post videos here.) And then, joy of joys, I stumbled upon a fan-vid of my most favourite Marx Brothers film ever Monkey Business paired with my most favourite Great Big Sea song ever When I Am King: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cy2SxOUL7s
So, two of my sure-fire cures for the miseries, in one tidy package. Maybe the weekend will be okay....