A room of one's own

Elder daughter has now been in residence for two weeks. Tomorrow, she will emerge from the sofa corner she's been inhabiting in a modified self-isolation, and will venture into places like the kitchen and the laundry-room.

What has become evident is that, with elder daughter here for the foreseeable future, and the Resident Fan Boy working from home for a similar length of time, and no coffee shops, we really need a working area separate from the living area.

The Resident Fan Boy spotted a notice at our favourite second-hand furniture shop, offering "viewing appointments". He made one, and I shuffled the row of totes, laundry baskets, high-boy, and television stand along the eastern wall of our bedroom, and found a space of just under four feet.

The lady at the shop has been home for about six weeks, and has a case of what I'm going to call "pandemic patter". My mother has noticed it when she calls around for her church. Elder daughter noticed it when having a Zoom chat with a group of Hades pals that lasted three hours. The sun was gone when she staggered in from our patio, where she'd gone for privacy.

Furniture shop lady chatted and chatted. Her daughter's boyfriend has moved in, and while he's lovely, she's wondering if he's ever going to leave. She got yelled at by an elderly man at the grocery store, who charged her with his shopping cart, hands trembling on the bar, and bellowed: "She's hogging the meat counter!!"

We understood the garrulousness, and, because it was a furniture store, we sat down.

We've acquired a charming old secretary desk. The top folds down into a plain table, but contains two deepish small drawers, and little slots that could accommodate cheque-sized envelopes. It might be a great place to store theatre tickets -- if theatres ever open again.

I discovered that the desk can line up to the far east corner of the window, so I can get a breath of fresh air and gaze out past the plantations outside. Our floor is slightly subterranean, so I see the flowering shrubs at eye level and beyond, masked people walking their dogs on the sidewalk.

At seven in the evening, the pots and pans will bang in tribute to the health care workers, and I'll hear the clamour, like scores of distant bells.

Gee, I can hardly wait...

Georgia Nichols writes a very funny daily and weekly horoscope, which often has useful advice -- even if you think astrology is bumph.

Recently, she informed me - well, I read it in her column; she doesn't advise me directly - that this coming year, starting this month, will be like October 1992 to November 1993 and November 2004 to October 2005.  As I've mentioned, I've been updating my yearly and decade-long rundowns, so I did a quick run through my diaries to see what that may mean.  ("Connect the dots!" GN exhorts.)

What I found were two very different years.  In the autumn of 1992, we moved into our much-loved house, two blocks away from Demeter, where I hoped to raise our then only daughter.  That year was filled with the joy of our firstborn's first year, and while there were disasters hitting friends and family, they pelted around us like a rock slide that didn't quite hit.  A charmed time.

Autumn 2004 to Autumn 2005?  Oh gawd.  The year when I came to the realization that I would never feel entirely at home in Hades.  Elder daughter's entry into middle school with the ensuing crises of social awkwardness and shunning.  Younger daughter's ejection from the ideal school programme which had been nearly a perfect fit for her into "regular school" -- because she was "doing so well".

Dots to connect?

Upheaval and change.

Life as usual, then.

Multi-level journalling

Last October, I couldn't for the life of me remember what younger daughter had worn for Hallowe'en in 2006.

I've kept journals since I was ten - not particularly consistently, mind - and ever since 1990, in the aftermath of one of my "used years", I've done rundowns of individual years, which involves a quick précis of each month in a given year.

Recently, I got four years behind, but I'm stubborn, if nothing else, and spent the past spring and summer catching up.

Why do I do this?

Ira Progoff was the creator of the "Intensive Journal method" in 1966 and about twenty or thirty years ago, "Journal workshops" seemed to be all the rage.  I never attended one -- they're kinda expensive -- but we were going through a rather dreadful period in our lives, beginning with The Resident Fan Boy losing his mother and his job in the same week, a few months after we had taken on a mortgage.

I heard about Progoff from the Volunteer Coordinator at Victoria Hospice where I was myself a volunteer. I took any part-time job or contract I could muster, finished with my master's programme, then purchased the book, working through the exercises of dream recording, meditations, and micro/macro journalling.

Did it help?  Sort of.  It gave me a focus in the maelstrom of continually dashed hopes.  After nine months of agony, the RFB got a job with the federal government and our long inexorable path to Hades began.

But I can't blame Progoff for that.

To oversimplify the process, you don't really keep a linear sort of journal.  Your writing sessions become a sort of lens:  sometimes you write about the minutiae of the day; sometimes you skip waaaaaay back and look at a year, or sequence of years, looking for patterns.

The only Progroff practice I have really stuck with is my "yearly rundowns", which I'm not sure is even a Progoff practice, but it's based on those months of journalling his way.

Some years - the "used years" - are torture to write down.  I recently did a "decade rundown" of the years from 2001 to 2010, and was astonished at how much I'd forgotten, and how painful it was to remember some of it.  I have to wonder sometimes if I'm not simply re-injuring myself.

However,  I can't just let my life and my memories of the early lives of my children slip away into a blank, and that means the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. Lately, remembering that the  Progoff journalling  process involves several levels of journalling, I've been carting around between three to five journals:  one for daily "free writes", one for keeping track of my time, one for my genealogy scribblings, one for dreams, and, oh yes, a separate journal for the yearly rundowns.

It turns out that the "rundowns" are proving to be really handy way of figuring out when something happened.  On a prosaic note, the RFB recently wanted to know when we had the roof re-done, for the insurance records.

And younger daughter's 2006 Hallowe'en costume?  I hadn't written it in the rundown, nor had I written it in my regular journals, nor had I taken a photograph at the time or mentioned it in my correspondence.

It occurred to me, months later, that I could try asking her.  She's living on the spectrum and has severe memory issues, but not for everything.  She told me, clearly appalled that I'd forgotten, that she had been Peter Pan.

Jingle Dog

In Canada this week, the papers have been full of the trial and conviction of the father and mother whose nineteen-month-old son died of meningitis because they thought he had croup, and, believing in natural remedies, gave him mixtures containing horse radish, garlic, and onions, among other things before consulting with a naturopath. By the time they realized the severity of the little boy's illness and took him to hospital, he was beyond medical help.

Well, you can imagine the debate, and the largely unhelpful comments accompanying the online articles, mostly along the lines of:  "How could they not know how sick he was?"

The Resident Fan Boy and I know all too well how imperceptibly illness can creep up on a small body.  The week after elder daughter turned six, younger daughter slid quietly into lassitude.  She didn't seem seriously sick, but she kept drifting off to sleep.  We'd find her sprawled across the living room carpet where she had been playing, the cat sitting on guard beside her.

Our regular family physician was on holiday, but the locum was attentive.  I think we took younger daughter to the doctor's office three times that week as she failed to improve - or worsen.

That Friday, I was observing an ESL teaching practicum, a nicely flexible job that I did for the university.  The Resident Fan Boy stayed home from his work to take younger daughter to the doctor, as we'd prearranged as a follow-up to the previous appointment.  I returned from the morning class to find the house empty and a message on the answering machine.  The locum had sent them straight to the hospital.

I frantically starting throwing clothes, diapers, and other supplies into a packsack, weeping to myself:  "Oh my little darling, she'll be so frightened!"

The RFB knew I'd arrived when the nurse informed him that his daughter's grandmother had come.  For some reason, she thought she should repeat this story to me as she led me through the corridors.  I had no time to be irritated; younger daughter, flopped against the RFB's shoulder, caught sight of me, and started arching backwards, crying out and reaching for me.  I automatically lunged toward her, and as I took her in my arms, she sagged bonelessly against me, clinging to my neck.  She was clad only in a diaper and already hooked up to an IV.

When I placed her in the crib in her hospital room, I rummaged in the bag I'd flung together, and produced Jingle Dog, a favourite toy that one of my English cousins had given her the previous autumn.  It was the first time I'd seen her smile in a week.

The RFB went home to resume care for elder daughter, and I spent the night snatching sleep on the love-seat next to younger daughter's crib, not quite having the nerve to try to crawl in with her.  In the morning, the nurses discovered that she liked Pedialyte popsicles, and soon took her off the IV drip.  Late that afternoon, after a very long wait for a doctor to sign her out, we took her home.

All through their childhoods, we vaccinated our daughters and took them to doctors regularly.  I'm not sure that makes us superior parents; we still slid into this crisis doing all the "right" things.  We were lucky - younger daughter came home from the hospital. I do know people who do not vaccinate and who distrust doctors, like the mother and father who have lost their son.  None of these people are stupid or uncaring.

It's just hard to grasp how gradually, then how quickly, things can go wrong.

The awful truth

I used to, thank goodness, keep journals of what the girls said when they were very young; otherwise their childhoods would have slipped away from me completely.

One morning, when elder daughter was three and a bit, she came to talk to me in my bed, as was her habit at the time. When I affectionately called her "baby", she protested: "I a girl!"
That's right, you used to be a baby, but I know you're a girl."

Thoughtful pause.

"Is you growing into a man?"
"No, I'm a woman. I'm grown. You'll grow into a woman too."
Disbelieving laughter.
"No! I a little girl!"
"Yes, but you will grow into a woman."
"No!" More laughter.
"What are you growing into, then?"
"A baby!"
"You've already been a baby, then a girl, then a woman. Daddy started out as a baby, then he was a boy, then he was a man.'

Slight pause.

"I'm going to tell him."

From the bathroom, I heard: "Is you a baby?", followed some time later by "Is you a man?" She got an affirmative answer to the second question.

During her birthday lunch today, we discussed the hurdles of her new job as communications specialist for a small but influential arts group, and told her our own work stories of eventually shedding the embarrassment of not knowing things in the beginning.

And that conversation was about growing up, too.

I'm so glad I wrote things down about the long-vanished little girl, as much as I love the woman she grew into.

The not-so-soote shoures of Aprille

I entered the chapter room of the cathedral with elder daughter (then six), pushing younger daughter (then two) in her stroller. My heart and stomach sank as I felt that old familiar suffocating pressure of barely repressed hatred emanating from Bête Noire (whom I've described in a previous post) who was studying the bookshelves. Demeter offered her hand to his wife who ignored her and greeted the cousins who had entered with us. We retreated to the other end of the room; Demeter was white with shock and hissing her indignation.
"Mama, please..." I whispered.
"They can't hear me."
"Yes, but the girls can."

That had the desired effect and in a mercifully short time, the little procession of family mourners made their way to the front pews. I brought up the rear, coaxing younger daughter along. The Resident Fan Boy sat on the aisle next to elder daughter's first godmother, then me with younger daughter, elder daughter next to her grandmother, the two cousins, and finally the Holy Family (the RFB's term for the Bête Noire, his wife and children). The body of my late father-in-law was escorted in by six of his brother priests clad in their black cassocks, their surplices left off for this Maundy Thursday. We rose, and I turned, then remembering it wasn't a wedding, studiously cuddled younger daughter, using her as a buffer against the hurt and the hostility. She leaned forward, gazing at the lit candles on the stripped altar, murmuring: "Birthday, birthday..." I prayed she wouldn't burst into song.

During the recessional, I held the Resident Fan Boy's arm as he followed the casket into the late afternoon sunshine pouring through the open west doors of the cathedral. Younger daughter held his other hand, goosestepping merrily to Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary. I glanced over my shoulder to elder daughter, whose tears glistened in gold rivulets down her cheeks as the sun caught her face.

Another uncomfortable hour at the reception. The Bête Noire's wife had set up court in one corner of the chapter room, while I flitted around chasing children and greeting whom I could. After a discreet message from First Godmother, who had been aware of the rift for years and who had never mentioned it to either party, awkward arrangements were made for the bewildered cousins to join the Holy Family for drinks at their hotel, then have dinner with us.

I escaped as the crowd dwindled and with relief, stepped out of the side entrance into a soft spring evening at sunset.

Godmother Two had left a casserole, a true sign of love from one who hated to cook to another who felt the same. When the cousins arrived, the talk was of the service, how father-in-law would have loved the theatricality and symbolism of the somber black guard of brother priests and the Maundy Thursday setting. The Resident Fan Boy told of elder daughter's reaction to the stained glass window in the modern chapel, a recent addition to the cathedral: "That's not what God looks like!" On hearing this, elder daughter made a bee-line for the study and emerged some minutes later bearing this portrait: "The good things come from his hands and the bad things come from his feet," she explained.

This is the sixth month I have "Nablopomo-ed", and for four of the previous five, I have gone through the rather painful "Mirror of Erised" exercise of leafing through old journals in search of a kind of unifying theme for the given month in my own http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflife. November is preparation, February limbo, September transition, and March crisis. April, since it comes right after March, seems to be a time when the crises blow up in my face, or I end up exploding myself. What shall I call this? Eruption? Outburst? Would "effervescence" do? Maybe not.

How about the "outpouring" of April? It's a time of the first thunderstorms of the year here in Hades, a time when, if I'm to learn anything from my journals, it's best not to take too much initiative, since there's that increased risk of being blown sky-high. My next Nablopomo month should be October. In the meantime, I hope to keep blogging, not in a steady downpour, but in intermittent showers.

Remembering Novembering

Back in the nineties, when my girls were very, very young, I used to record "A Prairie Home Companion" off the Seattle public radio station (which we could access from Victoria), so I could listen to it at my leisure throughout the week. "PHC" was so saturated with music, skits and stories, that a single listening didn't suffice, and besides, I found it hard to settle down and give it my full attention on a Saturday night. I remember a kind of November when the streets in Victoria were coldly damp and the air full of a sort of grey/gold light from the almost winter sun shining through the clouds. I was hurrying to wherever I was going with my Walkman on, listening to Garrison Keillor repeating emphatically: "Be prepared for something wonderful to happen..."

This is the fifth month I've "NaBloPoMo"-ed, and almost each month I've done this, I've hauled out my journals from the past twenty years and read entries of the month in question. I wasn't able to do this for August 2010 because I was three thousand miles away from my diaries, but for each of the other three months - February and September of 2009, and March 2010 - a theme has seemed to emerge. My past Februaries seemed frozen in limbo. Septembers were months of transition, and Marches rife with crises.

Novembers? Well, they have been spent in preparation, mostly for Christmas of course, but they seem to be a period for things that aren't quite due, but soon will be: December seminars that I quaked about teaching, school field trips and projects, my own children's being. November was the month in which I underwent amniocenteses and saw my children for the first time on the monitor during ultra-sound. In the case of my elder daughter, it was a time of joy and wonder; during the second procedure, my fluid started to leak and I spent twenty-four miserable hours wondering if I'd lost my younger daughter.

Looking through my journals is not an easy thing to do. I'm hit with waves of nostalgia and regret, bewilderment at the motives of someone whom I am no longer. There are flashes of joy and warmth, though. Memories of friends, of concerts, of things shared, and pleasures savoured alone.

Two gems, one from each daughter's earlier years:

We discovered, having moved into the neighbourhood of Fairfield near downtown Victoria, that the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies were an easy walk away. Elder daughter, then at age two, persisted in calling it "Forgiveness Day".
Younger daughter had received a gift of the book Angelina and Alice from the Angelina Ballerina series.
"I can read it," she told me earnestly, "because I was a mouse..." (And so she was. For Hallowe'en.)

In a few cases, I had mentioned music that reminded me of particular times. Here are two songs that, for me, belong to two different Novembers:

Oh, gosh. So much coming at me. Every time I look around... I'm going under....

March to a different bummer

Some time during the final months of her life, my grandmother turned to my mother in a rare moment of lucidity and said: "The nice me is all gone; all that's left is a nasty old bitch." Those words come back and haunt me regularly.

Each time I do NaBloPoMo, I haul out my journals and diaries and check entries for the month being covered. In February 2009, I looked back at past Februaries and got rather depressed at the glimpses of my former happier and clueless self. Last September, I reviewed my past Septembers and concluded that February is a limbo month and September is a transition month.

March, at least for my family, is a fertile time for crises. As the temperatures slowly rise, events seem to unfreeze and hurtle into motion, often with alarming consequences. I've spent a good chunk of the day reliving stuff from left field and stuff from right field that still landed with a good hard thunk: my sudden diagnosis with gestational diabetes during my second pregnancy; the news that we were moving to Ottawa, my father-in-law's last inexorable slide into death, my elder daughter's fall from a school stage resulting in a broken clavicle; learning that my younger daughter was being transferred from the school programme in which she had been thriving. Yep. Good times.

Not all events that happened in March were incoming missiles. The Resident Fan Boy and I became a couple in March, and turning the pages, I stumbled across faces, exchanges and scenes I'd long forgotten. Maybe I'll get a couple of posts out of them.

I've used a number of approaches in my journalling, many adapted from Ira Progoff's books on journals. Sometimes, I track a day from minute to minute, usually when I have a deadline. Each January, I do a rundown of the past year, to see what shape it's taken, and I've even done quick write-ups of personal decades, looking for patterns. However, while I think I agree with Socrates about the unexamined life not being worth living, sometimes I find myself wondering: Have I improved at all? Wasn't I a nicer person before?

Looking back at my entries for March over the past decade or so has been a wee bit distressing. I seemed naïve, of course, but certainly more sociable, in a guileless and shallow sort of way. The depth that comes with maturity has things to recommend it, and given a few hours to ponder, I might even be able to think of some of those things. Oh dear, couldn't I go back to being the unenlightened slob I was? Callow she may have been, but she may have been better company. Is my niceness doomed to drain away into bitchiness?

Poor Gran. I bet it was March...

Hello my baby frog

Yesterday's thaw melted layers of snow away and like an archeological dig took our front yard back in five weeks back in time. The needles left from the Christmas tree that waited forlornly for the chipper after Epiphany are now resting on top of the snow as if the beaten balsam was hauled away only yesterday, and a paper coffee cup that someone apparently tossed by our porch sometime before Christmas slowly emerged from the snow bank throughout the day. Today, the temperatures have plummeted back to -12 Celsius, and the streams of water leaking from underneath the drifts have frozen into hazardous C-shaped patches of ice across the sidewalks.

I've been traveling back in time too. Despite the pain of reliving past Februarys, (that's why they call it "nostalgia" - νόστος nostos "returning home", and άλγος algos "pain" ), I have been unable to resist following February from about 1989 to now. Some events I remember, some I have forgotten but the entries bring them back, and there are things I don't remember even though I made a note of them at the time, a shame because they are happy memories that I wrote down to preserve. One was of watching the Resident Fan Boy standing in a beam of afternoon sun streaming into our bedroom. I was sick, and he had taken elder daughter to the park and was enthusiastically regaling me with their adventures. Another was of returning home down the boulevard from a Shrove Tuesday dinner at Christchurch Cathedral in Victoria on a clear night under a sky brimming with stars. Elder daughter, about three or four at the time, was balancing along the walls and singing "Twinkle, twinkle, little star". Little gems of life that have been pushed completely from my mind, but they must have happened; I wrote them down. I watch myself moving sightlessly through the past towards my present. I can't help but feel compassion for her, my hopeful, clueless past self. She won't know what hit her.

Here's a memory I hadn't lost. To understand it, you may need to see this classic Warner Brothers cartoon from the 1950s:

It's a cold February afternoon without the slightest hint of melting, our first winter in Ottawa (I don't recall a Winterlude thaw that year). Younger daughter is four, and I'm still raw and wounded from the result of a team assessment by the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario the previous month. February means phone calls, forms, slipping into the basement to cover my weeping under the hum of the washing machine. And consultations. On this particular afternoon, the consultant is a Speech Language Pathologist, making a home visit to observe younger daughter. She turns up during lunch, and younger daughter is doing what she does best --- under-performing. One of the aches of having a special needs child is being forced to see the little person under your care through others' eyes, particularly professional, assessing eyes. Every beloved quirk becomes a symptom, every endearing idiosyncrasy becomes a note on a pad and later, a line in a report. My heart sinks as I hear younger daughter murmuring to herself in unintelligible syllables. At one point during lunch, the SLP remarks brightly, "That sounded like noodles!"

"She can say 'chicken noodle soup', I say as lightly as I can manage. But I know I'm Just-a-Mother-in-Denial. After lunch, the consultant pulls out her bag of tricks, and tries to guide younger daughter through some matching games involving animals and numbers. She also attempts to get younger daughter to join in the various verses of "Old McDonald's Farm". Finally, she packs up, smiles encouragingly at me and leaves with a few supportive comments and suggestions.

"May I have some chicken noodle soup?" asks younger daughter. That evening, she will inform her father that she "played wit' an'mals an' money", and, sitting on the stairs after an outing, launches into several verses of "Old McDonald's Farm" with all the animal noises. I shovel the walkway, singing under my breath: "Send me a kiss by wi-yah; Babee my heart's on fi-yaaaah..."

("Ribbet," says younger daughter. Everywhere a-ribbet, ribbet?)

In which the newbie blogger rationalizes why she is weighting down cyberspace with her stuff

Blogging is one of those twenty-first century things that up to now has eluded and bewildered me. Come to think of it, up to this year, so did Facebook and photo-sharing which I also began in the last few months. Maybe I'm going straight to hell...or Hades...



I remember reading an newspaper article about 10 years ago about journalling and diaries. It was some kind of New Year series and journals were wedged between weight loss and meditation, I think. One of the journallers remarked that he kept a journal so the passing years wouldn't recede into long blank spaces, which is basically my excuse. I've kept a diary of some kind since I was ten. I was inspired by Anne Frank and named my diary "Aurora" because Anne addressed her entries to "Kitty" and when I was ten, I thought Aurora was the most beautiful name in the world. I wanted to be just like Anne Frank (preferably without dying in Bergen-Belsen). One thing I did learn from her was that you didn't have to write in your diary every day. So I wrote, sometimes daily, sometimes not for months at a time.

About fifteen or so years ago, I read the books by Ira Progoff on his journal workshops, and although I never attended the workshops, I got in the habit of trying to use my journals to step back and see blocks of time. Sometimes I try to look at a day, or a decade. Every year, I do a "run-down" of the year, for easy examination. Now, theoretically, this should take at most, 12 days if I do a month each day. It never works out that way. What usually happens is that I nip through the first months quite quickly and then spend days, even weeks, trying to get the summer into a brief narrative. (Summer is when Persephone returns home; in my case, I return to Victoria, British Columbia to visit my mother and because the thought of spending 12 solid weeks in the sticky grip of Ottawan humidity is more than I can bear.) There are two problems that arise from this activity: 1) I get to agonize each year about the fact that I only seem to be truly alive for two months or less a year; 2) while I'm trying to capsulize, I don't get any other journalling done and spend each January wondering what I did for the first quarter of the previous year. I thought an online blog might fill in the blank, and reassure me that I have some sort of life beyond instinctive breathing from January to April.



Today, the Resident Fan Boy and I took younger daughter to see The Water Horse, a pleasant little movie -- sort of "ET lands in Scotland and Frees Willy with the Whale Rider". This was made in (mostly) New Zealand by an American production team with (mostly) English actors (yay, David Morrisey!) with some Scots and New Zealanders thrown in, so I got the impression that somebody was a little confused about the differences between Scots and Irish. The characters kept exclaiming stuff like "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" and "Holy Mackerel" which seemed a bit odd for Presbyterians (presumably) in 1942 to say, and the end titles rolled with Sinead O'Connor crooning away prettily, followed by a very Chieftain-esque instrumental. Maybe I missed something. Still, younger daughter was entranced, and the Resident Fan Boy didn't nod off, the highest praise of all. (I still haven't forgiven him for sleeping through The Seventh Seal.)