What’s On My Mind This Week
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My life would be so much easier if I could master one, single, tiny little skill. Just one. You know what that skill would be:
Time Estimation
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if I could merely come within 2 hours of the amount of time it is going to take me to complete a task, when I estimate how long it will take me, that would be a great and good thing. That would be a wonderful and blessed thing. That would be a skill that would vastly improve my life.
For the last time (again) I am not a superhero, and I cannot do 12 hours worth of work in 2 hours.
No one can.
The laws of time and space simply won’t play that way.
It. Cannot. Be. Done.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to put on my running tights, tie a towel around my neck and darn well hope for the best.
When I get a moment, I will come up with my own superhero name.
Captain Idiot might be a start.
Right after Gabe was born, at my midwife’s suggestion, I wrote down everything I remembered about his birth. I suppose you could call it a birth story, but I won’t send it into a birth magazine any time soon. When my computer was stolen, the word file that contained it was stolen too. I hadn’t read it in months, and now, truth be told, I haven’t read it in almost 2 years. The truth its, I’m sure there are things that I forget already. I’m sure that there are events that have blended into each other, things that were once discreet and are no longer. I was, not sad to lose the file, but shocked. I wish I still had it, that I had emailed it to myself, thought to make copies.
I was never devastated, perhaps a bit melancholy, but not devastated that I lost the file. It was such raw emotion, that even for myself, it was hard to go back to. It was hard to read. I imagine that to go back now and read it would be like plunging a knife into my own chest. I am, forever, the mother of a dead child, but over time, it hurts less. Acute pain fades into sorrow, which fades into melancholy, and that has turned into a wistful sort of regret. The regret is not the end of the world, sometimes it is more present, I am more aware, but often while Gabe’s memory stays with me, the pain recedes into the back of my mind. I am always missing someone who isn’t present, even as I am fully present. I am in a moment that does not, cannot, could not include Gabe.
Mel had a question in her Friday blog round up – about the Hogworts pictures that move and talk, she asked who we would like to see. My immediate answer was Gabe, and yet, as I sat in the room that was to be his nursery and is now my office, painted in the colours I picked for him, I cannot see him there.
Gabriel’s photo, in a Hogwarts picture would be only a very small part of our loss. Such photo’s do not age, they do not change, they do not grow. They may interact, but they are still so very limited in their scope. Gabriel would always be the tiny baby, his feet no larger than my fingers. So impossibly small, and so tied up in his terrible death. The grief of his death was immediate, but not completely proximate. There is loss that your memories of your baby can never change, expand or grow. It occurs to me, my arms were so very terribly empty when he was first gone. They ached to hold him, not just any baby, but our baby. And now, I can see him in my mind’s eye, I can tell you, vividly what I think he would look like, how I think he would be. Just shy of his second birthday, I can close my eyes, and he is right there, just beyond my finger tips.
I could not have fathomed it, in those early days of bottomless grief. I could not have fathomed that not only would I touch solid ground at the bottom, but that I would find sunlight above again. I could not have fathomed that I would sit at my desk in a room that should have held a crib, that should now hold trucks and blocks, lean back in my chair and talk on a conference call – and that this would be good. I would not have fathomed the way the sun shone in the window, and the sound of the children playing across the street. I would not have fathomed this happiness.
Having all of this, I do not think I want hollow images of a baby too small to live in this world. I do not think this would satisfy me. I do not want to hold him here, limiting the size of my heart to its memory. I do not want to hold him as a micropreemie, and theology be dammed, but I will chose to think of him, growing outside of my view, out of my sight, but under the same sun, only in place that I cannot see.
I will believe that there are childlike shouts and trucks and blocks, ring around the rosy and grassy places to run. I will believe that there are dogs to chase and songs to sing. I will hold on to belief that the sun warming my feet on Friday warms his head, and we are both under the same sky, the watchful gaze of the same God, and that some day, I will be grown enough to join him, and he enough to know me.
And my dreams are full of those pictures, and I will sacrifice the moving, breathing photo of a tiny baby who could not stay, for the belief that he is growing, differently, somewhere else.
Dear Readers:
I realized on Thursday night that I didn’t have a blog written for Friday, which left me with 3 options: I could write a pathetic post about how I was too busy to write a post (but I’ve done this with alarming frequency lately and I’m getting tired of it, I’m sure you are too); I could post a LOL dog, as threatened (but if you wanted to see those, you would already subscribe to that blog) or I could write nothing at all.
The nothing at all was a particular problem. For 2 years today, I have come here, and I have written stuff. Almost every day. Usually a quote on Saturday and random stuff on Mondays, but I’ve written, daily. Very rarely twice a day. 761 posts in total.
So, there I was, standing in my bathroom, and I realized that if I didn’t write a post, 150 or so people were going to come by and they were going to look at my blog and realize that I didn’t post. Or, they would be disappointed that I wrote a crappy post. Anyway I cut it, people were going to turn up, and they were expecting something and as things stood, I had nothing. So I put down my toothbrush, put on my bathrobe, crossed the hall to my office and wrote a post.
I’m always a bit flattered and surprised when people tell me that I’m brave, smart, wise or heroic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m human and I like hearing it, but truthfully, I’m not really any of those things. I’m me. Just me. I’m not particularly funny or smart or wise. I’m a good writer, I use good English and break my writing down into paragraphs. I mostly use correct punctuation. I’m good at painting pictures with my words, and I’m profoundly gratified that so many of you find weight in what I say. I think about my blog, about all of you, often. I try to write about interesting things, and I try not to get into a writing pattern. I write blogs in my head now, I think about things, I see things, I experience things and I decide that I need to write about them.
And that’s exactly what it is now, a need. In 2 years I’ve seen bloggers come and go. Sometimes they move on, sometimes I do. I’ve made friends and I’ve made a few enemies. More friends than enemies, and that’s a blessing. I write about things, and sometimes, often times, I’m surprised by what people get out of it. I’m surprised at what is funny, or that something I wrote unintentionally gives someone comfort. Sometimes I write hard stuff, and no one notices, because it’s only hard for me. More often I write about life, its funny parts, its good parts, its sad parts, and I think we find something shared in the commonality of life. I read your comments, and to misquote Stuart Mclean, I think “If I would have known that this would bring your comfort or a smile, I would have written about it before now, I would have written it more carefully, I would have written it better.”
Which leaves me with this – just a thank you. For being on the other side of the screen, for your hands on your keyboard, typing comments in response to me, to my thoughts, on this side of the screen, on this keyboard.
It means a lot, and I wanted you to know that.
Mrs. S.
A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.
Ward McAllister
(I’ve always thought there is a special place in heck for anyone who cancels out of dinner with less than 48 hours notice)
While on the phone with my debate girls, we were discussing summary drug offenses (In Canada, if you are arrested for carrying a modest amount of marijuana for personal use you get a ticket rather than a court date). Anyway, one of the young women commented that she didn’t think that marijuana was addictive.
I disagreed. I disagree strongly.
Now, I’ll stop here. Lots of people use marijuana, including my neighbours, and they are good and decent people who pay their bills, have jobs and are an asset to the community. Frankly, I’m pretty sure that our cops have better crimes to fight than arresting my neighbours toking up in their backyard. No, it’s not the neighbours. It’s the kids who go looking for drugs as a panacea – to ease the hard stuff in life, to stop the hard stuff of growing up, and when marijuana isn’t enough to blot stuff out, when it’s not enough of a thrill, they keep looking. Not every kid, but some of them, enough of them, that we are losing millions a year.
I got involved in drugs when I was younger – enough – more than enough - and with hard enough stuff that I am profoundly fortunate to be alive. I am fortunate to be in possession of most of my brain cells. I am fortunate that no great harm came to me while stoned out of my mind. The fact that I have used cocaine makes my heart do strange things in my chest.
One of the girls asked me, not just if I had used drugs, but what I had used. My heart stopped beating. I’m not proud of my past, but I’ve reconciled it, and truthfully, I’m over it.I haven’t even really thought about it for years. I’ve never thought about explaining it to a teenager. I didn’t know how to explain. Things I haven’t remembered for years now suddenly came back. I didn’t know how to tell her about luck and fortune and stupidity. I didn’t know how to tell her I was lucky. I wasn’t smart, I sure as hell wasn’t in control, and I didn’t have a plan. I was lucky. And I didn’t know how to explain that. I didn’t want her to see me, and not realize, not everyone is lucky.
You see, it’s not the drugs. The drugs were bad, and if I’m honest they were good. After all, no one does drugs because they don’t like the feeling of being high. It’s enough that I’ve tried them, and enough that when I think about it, I am beyond thankful that I’m not dead. It’s the friends. It’s what I saw. It’s what I did. It’s what I did that I remember, and what I don’t remember.
I got to the end of junior high, and was sent to boarding school. I turned my life around and other than the fact I smoked for years, I’ve never had a problem. I ran into a friend during my first year of university. I was upset that I had failed calculus. He hadn’t finished high school. When he caught me up, 2 friends were in jail, one for murder. 3 friends became single mothers. 5 funerals in university.
And I don’t know how you tell a young woman this – not that I used drugs, but everything that goes along with it. The things you will do for drugs, the decisions you make and don’t make, dropping out of life. How do you tell someone that it started out as fun, and it ended with death? How do you tell them fear? How do you tell them the horrible, awful things you’ve seen? How do you tell them no one wakes up and thinks that they will become a drug addict? That you think you will control the drugs and then they are controlling you? How do you talk about the nexus of power and control and addiction? That people who supply drugs are exactly who your mum warned you about, and she didn’t warn you enough?
There was no good in it. It leads nowhere, don’t listen to anyone who tells you differently.
The older I get, the more thankful I am.
I have complained a fair bit about my job in the last few weeks, especially on Facebook. Well, I’m not actually sure I have complained, but I have commented that I have been working a lot. Which might be construed as complaining, even though it’s really not what I’m intending to do. It’s just that I went from a job that was I was at for exactly 37.25 hours each week (and trust me, I often took every 15 minute break I could) to a job that is, oh, 60, maybe 70 hours a week.
And you don’t scale up that much without losing a few things in the translation. Like sleep, and good eating habits and running. Possibly also my eye sight.
It’s been a huge challenge. Mr. Spit has stepped into the breech and he has cooked and cleaned and done laundry. He’s fed animals and let them in and out, and occasionally wandered into my office to fill up my coffee cup or bring me eggies. He has reminded me that this is not the end of the world. He has not said much when I have crawled into bed at midnight, at 3 am, at 6 am. He’s rolled over and cuddled me. He’s hauled me out of bed in the morning, tired and grumpy.
It’s been, well, it’s been stressful. Compressing 6 months worth of work into 6 weeks is hard, we’ve had someone quit, brought in 3 contractors, who are great but need training, and it’s been exhausting. I finish spending all of my day working in a small group and I go home and do hours of work to finish up what I didn’t get done that day. Some nights, like tonight, I don’t even get that far before I have to start on the work for the next day.
So, to be honest, I feel like I am running as hard as I can, on a road to a place we haven’t exactly located on the map. Well, that’s not true. The place on the map is called “April 6, 2010″. We need to have all of the work done by April 6th. In the process of doing this, I have been known to forget what day it is.
And in the midst of this, people ask me if I still like the job.
I do. That’s not an equivocation or anything else. I do like the job. I like the people, I like the work, and to tell you the truth, every time I see my new boss, I want to hug him. Honestly, I love the job.
I’m overworked. I’m perpetually tired. I’m sick. Still sick. I’m harried and I’m not sure if I’m coming or going. I wouldn’t want to live this way forever. I can do it for another month. You can be overworked for a month.
More than that, I’m appreciated. Not only am I good at what I do, I’m told that I am. It’s not a threat to be competent, it’s praise-worthy. The extra effort is noticed. There is no politcal (pardon my french) bullshit. I’m not looking for the knives before they hit my back. When I take the initiative to do something, or I make a decision I hear “Good Call” or “Thank you”. I went to my boss with a problem this week and he looked at me and said “Make a decision. I’ll support you.”
Every part of my job is not prescribed, I’m not checked up upon, and then checked and checked again. No one assumes that I will make mistakes. I get told the Why and the When. My boss doesn’t care about how it gets done. He figures if I have questions I’ll ask him. And when he doesn’t give me enough information and I have to hunt him down, he apologizes. He was wrong earlier in the week. I didn’t have to do it the wrong way, and then let him realize his error, lest I be insubordinate. I could tell him why he was wrong, he looked at it again, said “Yep. Thanks for catching that.”
It’s hard. It’s exhausting. But it’s not stupid, and I’m appreciated. I can live with hard. I can thrive on hard.
I’m sorry, I don’t usually do this. I really don’t. At least I hope I don’t whinge. I hate whinging.
Anyway, I caught a cold-like thing when I went to Vegas 3 months ago. It got a bit better over Christmas, and then it came back at the start of January. I have had a sore throat, a headache and a minor off and on fever for 2 months. I constantly feel like I’m on the verge of getting sick. I buy 2 bags of cough drops a week. (On a day like yesterday, when Delta eats the 2 bags of cough drops, I buy 4 bags)
I went to see my GP. My throat is fine, my ears are clear, my glands are fine, my adenoids are normal and I don’t have tonsils. I don’t have any sort of infection. Which means I have a virus. There’s nothing anyone can do.
It could last for another 2 months.
I’m so very tired of this.
I promise, when I started tonight’s call with my debaters, I kiboshed the idea of a mini debate because I was worried they would wipe the floor with me we would run out of time to review current events.
Also it was because I have the most horrendous headache and I have a virus, that I have now had for just about 2 months, and I’m very tired and I didn’t have a snow balls chance in Florida of rigging the debate rules so I could win I’m not at my best.
It was not because I had a trying day, in which I got to read the article we were going to debate on, but not actually think about it. It certainly wasn’t because I couldn’t remember any of the salient arguments about collective versus individual rights and had no idea how to argue beyond “Making Ambulances do the speed limit is mental”.
I absolutely promise I would have made it a fair fight, and I gave them the opposing side because I thought they needed the experience of arguing a point they disagreed with. It had nothing to do with trying to give myself any sort of advantage.
I skipped reviewing a logical fallacy I am often guilty of using because I knew I would be hoist on my own petard when they pointed that out to me we ran out of time.
I am not sad and pathetic, and greatly outclassed by a pair of very, very, very smart and witty 16 year olds, who I tell ya honestly, will be running the world in 20 years. (Maybe 10 if they don’t get distracted by boys?)
(Also, if you are the mother of said 16 year old girls, my techniques on negotiating curfews with parents may cause you some distress. Upon sober reflection, I’m not sure they needed any help with their negotiating techniques. I’m awfully sorry about that.)
I know, I know, we are the nice, polite, northerners. We put up with American food, American drink, American TV, our spell check can’t figure out how to spell cheque, we listen to others mock our health care system, and call our Prime Minister Mr. Poutine. We know you laugh at us. We know you think we are inept. We get it. We are the not particularly smart cousin you invite to family affairs because you have to, and we always surprise you when we have thoughts, dreams, opinions and aspirations of our own. We know. You laugh at our tendency to apologize, marvel over our ethnic diversity and think our Canadian-isms are a quaint little tradition, eh?
I attended a local awards ceremony a week and a half ago, when the Canadian men were playing their first game, and the game went to overtime. I sat in the largest ball room of a shwanky downtown hotel, with business and government leaders around me, and you know what? Towards the end of the night, everyone was on their phones checking the score. Word was moving from table to table. 1-0, tied, overtime, shoot out. By the time the shoot out happened, you didn’t have to consult the phone. You could hear the kitchen staff, you could hear the diners in the tony restaurant below, you could hear the cleaning staff. You could hear the cheers and moans, the whole building, every building in Canada, breathing as one. They stopped the awards to announce the winner, they didn’t have to, you could hear the cheers throughout the city.
This is what it means to be Canadian.This is who we are. This is what we do.
There were some accusations at the start of the games that Canadians thought these Olympics were nothing more than a big hockey tournament, with some side stuff thrown in. Can I tell you the truth? Most Canadians don’t care about anything but the hockey. Our answer is “well, yes.”
I’d hope we were hospitable, we were polite, and visitors felt welcome. I hope we put on a good show, and people had a good time. I think the facilities were pretty good, and I think the Olympics were mostly successful, doom and gloom British journalists aside.
Yeah, we do all the rest of the stuff. Actually pretty well, given that we set a new record for the most number of Gold medals won by a single country since, oh, ever.We are proud of our snowboarders, our bob-sledders, our curlers, our speed-skaters. Joannie Rochette is our girl now. That’s good stuff, and it’s no shame when a country with a tenth of the population of the US earns 70% of the the medals that the US does. We earned 55% more Gold medals than the Americans. Nothing to sneeze at there.
But hockey.
It is who we are, it’s where the veneer of the nice, polite, civil Canadian breaks off. Buried in our DNA is early morning practice, local rinks, skating outside, jersey’s with Gretzky, Messier, Richard, Roy, Luongo on them. At the core of who we are is a cold disk of rubber, a net and a stick. Hockey is our soul.
Coke had this commercial, it told the absolute truth – hockey is our game.We put up with a lot of crap from Americans. We suck it up and go along our way, because we are Canadians and we aren’t into fighting. You wanna call our Prime Minister, Prime Minister Poutine? You can’t figure out what a toque is? You can’t spell the Queen’s English? Whatever. You want to call that swill you drink beer? Pbft. You think my mail gets here on a dog sled? Sure.
But seriously, you come here and you think you are going to win hockey?
You all run along home now.
Ain’t nobody better than us.
It’s our game.
We derive immeasurable good, uncounted pleasures, enormous security and many critical lessons about life by owning dogs.
Roger Caras
( I wish I had taken Delta’s photo last night, when I gave her the lemon slice she had been pestering me for.)
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