Still here, just quiet.

It is hard to believe that it has been 5 months since I have actually posted.  I have spent a lot of time on the internet, reading, searching, questioning and at times writing blog entries that are never completed or are deleted upon completion.  It is not as though I haven’t been busy.  I have a 3 month old who fills my arms most of the time and a 2 1/2 year old who fills them the other times and with full arms I have been busy with living and everything that that has meant.  I have been grieving – letting myself live within it, allowing myself to do what I need to do in order to become whole.  I have been creating – knitting scarves and blankets and sweaters; sewing dolls and quilts and clothes; cooking, baking and canning.  I have been learning – new ways of thinking about myself, the world and my place within it.  I have been searching – looking to find my way on what has become a spiritual journey of motherhood. This has all meant much messiness with tears and laughter.

One lesson I have relearned is to trust in myself that if I am open to the world and myself I will be given what I need.

I felt guilty about going to Galiano in June, I was being self-indulgent and could grieve and do what I needed to do just as well at home.  All of May and June until I left, I fought with myself to go or not to go.  I would cry, my body would tense qnd I couldn’t sleep when I had decided to not go away.  As soon as I changed my mind, my back would straighten, my lungs would open and I felt easy in the world.  I knew that I had to be near the ocean and trees.  I knew I had to be alone.  I thought I needed to grieve for my dad.  I went and it was wonderful.  Yet, I came back not dissatisfied per se but as though I had missed something.  At the time, I thought it was the fact that I hadn’t cried, that I hadn’t done the grief work I was supposed to have done.

Talking about it with Donna last week, I mentioned my dissatisfaction.  She asked me what did happen that weekend.  I told her about the books that I had found.  One called  Mother-Mysteries that was about the author’s spiritual journey with motherhood and Balance Point another book about a spiritual journey this time one with the environment as the focal point.  It was also here that I began to feel the pain and cramping that would result in my being put on bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy.  As I walked and read and sat my hand would rest on my belly, connecting to the little one who lay inside.  Donna laughed as I relayed my story.  “Maybe”, she said, “you didn’t need to grieve, maybe you needed to reconnect with the baby you were carrying inside.  Maybe, that was why the world offered you the books and your body sent you the pain.”

With those two sentences and observations it all began to make sense.  The world has been sending me what I have needed to guide my mind on this new phase of my life and while I have been dutifully taking it in, I haven’t been engaging with it.  My body keeps telling me that it needs to be centered and to be reconnected with my mind and heart, thus the compelling need throughout my pregnancy (even before dad died) and after to practice yoga again. I was on a new chapter before dad’s death.  My grief has become part of the story but it is only one strand.

based withinit

Labouring with grief

I feel as though I have fallen inward in my search for understanding and acceptance.  I am present, because I force myself to be, to not let the moment fade away or disapear but my desire is to fade away myself.  There are no books that I have found that tell me how to negotiate the waves of grief while wiping a snotty nose and finding amusements for two year olds.  My moments of grief are stolen, hidden not because I am ashamed but simply because I do not have the luxury of time or place.  Knowing that soon I will be giving birth again, existing in that place where life and death are not separate, instills an urgency in my need to accept and move through my grief.  Yet, just like the work of labour, the work of grief has its own rhythm and its own path and forcing it to move to another’s sense of timing will do nothing but ensure more pain that serves no purpose.

The birth of my daughter, was also my rebirth.  It was my transformation.  Outwardly, there was no sign or symptom of this change but I had shifted sideways, and my body became heavier and my soul lighter.  I could see and hear more clearly and my heart became more open.  I still fall back to my old ways, where I forget what really matters and become caught up in my own ego.

I am afraid that my upcoming birthing journey is going to be overshadowed and intertwined with my journey of grief.  I am afraid of being in that space where life and death are one and the same while learning how to accept the death of my father.  I am frightened that I will not have the strength or the capacity to go through two transformations at the same time.  I am afraid that my child will be born swaddled in my grief.  I am afraid that my sorrow will taint their birth gift and become a shadow that follows them on their own journey.  I am afraid that I will try to control my labour rather than letting myself fall into it.

So I search.  I search for words of wisdom that help me understand.  I search for the quiet places within and outside of myself where I can just be.  I search for the sounds that bring peace and comfort.  I search for trust and I search for hope.

Greatest Fear

There has always been a part of me that has looked over my shoulder fearful that my family and I have been too blessed.  I would hear about babies and children who had died or were sick but they were always that one step removed – my extended family was still untouched.  But in the quiet time of 4 in the morning, when my mind was vulnerable, my subconscious would slide under the door to whisper the statistics.  The time before dawn became filled with mathematical equations and probability problems as I counted up the tragedies and hoped that they were enough to shield my family.  Horrible isn’t it, that while my heart is breaking to hear of someone else’s pain there is always a part thankful that it happened to them and not me.  Dawn always came; the day shutting the door on my fears, pushing them aside to make room for living.  A piece always stayed behind though, ready to open the door when it saw its chance.

At some point in my bleary sleep deprived mind I must have made a wrong calculation and lost.   A brief phone call and suddenly my greatest desire is to go to my daughter, hold her close and never let her go.  Thankful that the visit to the doctor resulted in nothing more than a round of antibiotics and a sleepless night. Unlike another little one, who has just finished having a blood transfusion instead of birthday cake and is lying in a hospital bed  while her newly married parents and grandparents are told that she has leukemia and will need to live in a strange city for at least 6 months if not longer.

So while you hold your little (or big ones) tight, pray for a little girl who has a long battle ahead of her.  Pray for her parents who will be living far from their family and pray for all of us who hold them close to their hearts.

Objects In The Mirror May Appear Larger Than They Are

Anyone who has come out of an eating disorder is aware than the mind can play tricks. You may only weigh 90 pounds but when you look in the mirror your eyes are able to double or triple that until you take up the whole mirror. This playing with perception has never really left me though the days of dieting (or not eating) have long gone. Usually I am aware of my brain’s love of playing games and have a variety of tricks that I use to offset any craziness. Then pregnancy happened and that meant all of my little tricks became useless. Mostly because I was larger – 55 pounds larger and my body was no longer mine.

When I came out of the pregnancy in a fit of momentary madness I decided to clean my closet of all of my pre-pregnancy clothes as my hormone laden mind believed that there was no way that my body was ever going to fit those clothes again. So I packed everything up, pointedly ignoring Ryan’s gentle remonstrations to ‘maybe just put them away in the storage locker,’ and dropped the garbage bag off at the Salvation Army. I wore my maternity clothes, purchased some clothing on sale and continued on with my life. That was until the day my pants fell down as I was walking. Fortunately for everyone involved, Imogen and Sabine were the only witnesses and I managed to find a belt to hold the pants up. Cleaning out my closet I found a couple of pants that had escaped the purge and fortunately I had never had the heart to give up my skirts so I had something to wear that didn’t fall off. I was comfortable with the status quo until this week. Tomorrow I am going to a friend’s art opening and realised that I own nothing that is appropriate that fits.  Ryan put Imogen to bed and I went to the mall.

I actually argued with the salesperson who was helping me as she handed me a dress and I said that I needed to have a larger size and then grabbed one that was 3 sizes larger. She grabbed it back from me and gave me another dress one size larger. We continued this pattern as she helped me find a dress to wear. I took the dresses and went and tried them on. In the first one I felt NAKED. It wasn’t low cut, it had sleeves and hit just above the knee but I felt naked and realised that at some point I had disconnected from my body. What it did do was skim my body – a body that I no longer recognised as my own. The dress was SEXY and I am not sexy. I wound up getting another dress because I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to the SEXY dress. I left and went and bought some pants, tops and another skirt that fits me. By me, I mean the one that is actually in front of the mirror and not the one that I have been seeing in the mirror.

It was more of a sour grapes than an emerald green.

On Saturday we decided to have a family day and go to the Green Living Show. We were hoping to see something that we would be able to incorporate into the house. I was really hoping that there would be something on worm composting as I was hoping to start one this summer (assuming that the Strata lets me, I do know that there are rats, raccoons, coyotes and other wildlife living around us.) I was also hoping that there might be some booths devoted to food, cleaning and well things to do with living. What we got was rather disappointing. There was really not much of anything. We wandered around and looked at stuff, ate overpriced food and left with a sense of blah.

Talking about it afterwards we both realised that we were frustrated by the lack of anything new and the dismal showing of local businesses. WalMart, Chevrolet and Home Depot were there (I know the first people I think of when I am thinking of green businesses, though to be fair WalMart actually does have some very green practices as they actually result in cost savings.) but there was no representation from the local farmer’s markets, organic food chains (including SPUDS) or really any new ideas for living green. Having been researching environmentally friendly paints and other green building supplies it amazed me that there was nothing on green renovations.

The question is was this lack of representation and innovative ideas because of the marketers of the show or was it the lack of interest on the part of potential vendors? Sometimes I wish I had gone into marketing rather than teaching as it kills me to see good ideas and concepts under-utilised and is the kind of projects that I love to do. Thinking about it makes me get angry about New Westminster Quay all over again. There is a place that could do with an overhaul and is such a sad place and yet there is so much potential if the off-shore owners, community and city council actually decided to do something about it. Of course we are talking about the New West city council that was worried about having the farmer’s market at City Hall because of the garbage but have absolutely no problems in handing land to condo developers with no real benefit to the denizens of the city. (How about a new park, funding for the Mundy Park Pool …).

I have also been thinking about the concerns about the cost of food that has been in the news lately. I don’t know why anyone is particularly surprised about the increase in cost. Considering the cost of oil has gone up (which is used to make fertilisers, pesticides and run the machinery and transport the goods) and that more crops are being used as bio fuel. Why we thought using bio fuel would be better is beyond me. The crops used for bio fuel are still being grown with a dependency on oil which means that we are still reliant on the very thing that the bio fuel is supposed to be replacing. What I am hoping is that the increase cost in oil and the resulting increase in costs for farmers (and the corporations) will actually mean that more farmers may start looking at changing their farming practices. Especially if the difference in price between organically or biodynamically grown food and ‘regularily’ grown food is diminished.

I also find it mildly amusing that our incredibly forward-thinking government is promoting eating local foods and at the same time remove land from the agriculture land reserve and closed down farm run slaughter houses.

No Cry My Ass

It is now past noon and I have been “putting my child to sleep” for two and a half hours.  Is she asleep?  Hell no!  For the first hour and a half she cried and it didn’t matter if I was holding her, placing her in her crib, patting her back, talking to her, singing to her, and/or sitting beside her.  Oh, there were moments of silence.  There was even two minutes when she was actually almost asleep and then she woke herself up screaming again.  At the hour and forty-five minute mark she decided to stop yelling and start doing her “ba, ba, baing” thing which is what she does if she needs to tell me that I am a bad person and that she disagrees vehemently with whatever it is that I am or not doing .  This continued for awhile longer and then she went back to the crying.

At the moment I am reading a variety of books on getting babies to sleep.  All of them supposedly ‘no cry’ but nowhere in any of them do they talk about the child that just cries as soon as the idea of sleep is suggested.  The Baby Whisperer” suggest the ‘pick up, put down’ method.  Apparently as soon as they start crying you are supposed to pick them up, hold them (NO BOUNCING OR ROCKING though ’cause that is just BAD BAD BAD) and then as soon as they stop crying, you put them down.  When they cry again, you pick them up and so it goes.  At no point does she talk about the baby that has entwined her fingers into your hair and that the moment you lean uses the hair as handle holds to hang on.  As I  try to pry her one hand out of my hair, the other invariably has grabbed onto something else by which to ensure that she is permanently attached to my body.  This can also include but is not limited to my lips, shirt, crib, and air.  The No Cry Method does not even mention what to do if your child has decided to cry for two hours.  Somehow you are just supposed to include a variety of rituals and then Voila you have a baby that sleeps with no crying. My reading has not been limited to these two books but have included a vast array of internet sites, books from the shelves of the local bookstore or library and anyone who has a child that does not have bags under their eyes (the child I mean, not the parent.  The parent can have bags under their eyes for good reasons like staying up late and actually having sex with their partner, or going to a movie, or reading a book or well the options are limitless.)

The hardest part is that if I laid down with her in our bed, gave her some milk and then sat there with her she would have been asleep in twenty minutes.  However, due to her crawling and moving we can no longer put her to sleep for her naps on our bed.  So here I am – obsessing and waiting for the knock on the door from child services because of the complaints that have been made about the screaming child.  Though, we do have double-glazed windows so maybe she can’t be heard from the outside.  Part of the problem with this morning was that I was so conscious of her crying and worrying about what people would think.  There is something to be said for the anonymity of a an apartment versus where we our living now.

I am also worried that this is what my life has become – my biggest concern in the world and the only thing on my mind is whether or not Pumpkin sleeps in her crib.  There are political scandals to analyse, educational and environmental policies to critique, literature to read, music to hear and a mind to cultivate and all me efforts are consumed with the sleeping behaviour of an eight and half month old.   Has my life become so pedestrian?

Well, it is almost time for her afternoon nap.

Overwhelmed

This is the best word to describe my state of being at the moment. I am trying to be positive and glass half full but then there are the moments of complete and utter panic. I actually have felt a couple of panic attacks coming on but have managed to breathe them out. It has been a loooong time since I have had a panic attack and having one with an 8 month old hanging out on the floor is probably not the best way to restart them. I remind myself that I am not the only one who has to pack and move. I am moving a 20 minute drive away not across the country like some people that I know. Really all these reminders do is make me get mad at myself for being so whiny.

I have made lists and make sure that I cross things off to make myself feel better. This works occasionally. We have 20 boxes of books. They are lined up against one wall. I have 6 boxes of kitchen stuff. There are at least another 6 boxes to go. Then there is the den. The front closet. The clothes closet. Imogen’s stuf. The list is endless. 5 bags of stuff went to the Sally Ann and the Elizabeth Fry Society. There is a box of books to be taken to the used bookstore. There is the cleaner to arrange to come in and clean the place but no one is phoning me back. There is laundry to be done. There are the phone calls with the change of address. Oh, and an Imogen to be taken care of. Ryan had an assignment due this week which took up most of the weekend and he had class last night. He can only take Friday off (thank God for that) but because he has a student teacher he can’t actually take a day off to help pack.

Oh, and our landlords want us to take some pictures of the place furnished so that they can use them when they list the place. This means that I have to move all of the boxes in order to take pictures.

What happened to thriving under stress? Actually, I think if the stress was work related I would be alright. Each box here means that a tiny little root is being torn up, multiply that and I am almost at the point of being completely rootless. My house has always been my place to ground and escape from chaos. I am having a really difficult time with this move and I don’t know why. I find myself thinking about having to move again in a couple of years because we will have grown out of the new place. Moving into another place that is not ‘ours’. I think that might be the problem. My roots are questioning whether or not they should bother burrowing in if there is the knowledge that they are going to be ripped up again. I don’t think that I have committed to my new home but look at it as a transitioning place. That doesn’t bode well for my sanity.

Bad Week

I have been having a bad week.  Much of my time has been spent moving through the house breathing deeply and chanting, “this will pass.”  I’m exhausted and am feeling emotionally drained.  Imogen has been decidedly off and there have been a couple of nights where sleep has been non-existent.  My thighs, arms and breasts are bruised from her pinches and kicks.  The mottled green and brown skin would be good if I was trying for the role of Grendel’s mom- oh wait I am not Angelina Jolie.

Tuesday night, after hours of trying to put Imogen to sleep, I found myself sitting in the middle of the bed, trying to nurse and sobbing.  It didn’t help that at the end of the tears, I had a daughter sleeping in my arms.   I was too tired to see the humour.  This was followed up with last night’s mess of miscommunication between Ryan and I.

I went to Oakridge (never again) to buy a swim suit for myself.  I wanted something with full coverage.  If I could buy a 1920’s bathing suit that would be perfect.  I tried to explain to the salesperson that bikini waxes were a little difficult to do on a regular basis with a 7 month old and did they have something more like shorts.  I found out that I needed a ’specialty’ bathing suit because of my large chest.  When I explained that I did not want to spend much more than the $50 gift certificate as I was not planning on breast feeding forever and therefore would likely need to buy a new bathing suit in the near future, she looked at me as though I had asked her for her kidney.  If I thought that the trauma of having to see myself in a bathing suit would be bad enough, Imogen decided to turn it up a notch by deciding to go in a screaming fit while I was half dressed.  In the end, I left with nothing but the screaming child, and my self esteem trailing behind me.

There are half written posts that I have no energy to finish as I am trying to save it up to clean the house.  Laundry seems endless.  As soon as the basket is empty it is filled up again.  I finally put away the last of the stuff from Christmas.  I know that it seems ridiculous to worry about a clean house but I am uncomfortable when the house is messy.  I can’t relax until it is clean.

I think I am also lonely.  Visiting the school yesterday, was bittersweet.  The world has moved on without me.  I have not spoken to people that I thought were friends for months.  That hurts.  I want to say something to them but then question whether or not I am going to sound whiny.  Sort of like this post.  Maybe this will have done some good and released the poison.

6 months

It was 6 months ago that I gave birth to my beautiful daughter.  I knew that when I started on this journey that it would be a foray into the big scary unknown.  Little did I know just what a wondrous journey that this would be.  Every day before I open my eyes, I wake to her soft little body nestled into mine.  I feel her snuffly breath on my cheek and when I open my eyes there she is with her one hand flung over her face and her head resting on the other.  It is a lovely thing to wake each morning to a miracle.

Time has a different meaning now.  Before, there was always something more to do, something that needed to get done instantly.  There are still those moments but there is little now that really has that sense of urgency that means I can’t stop and blow raspberries or sing a song or give a kiss.  Sometimes we will find ourselves in a sea of half completed tasks, her in my arms and me in the chair chanting a song in her ear and rocking her.  In those moments we are somewhere else, adrift in a pocket of stasis where there is nothing else to hear or say or see or do.  Together we just sit and let the world turn by itself.

Her smile can melt my heart. Her furrowed brow when she concentrates at whatever task she is doing or action that she is analyzing makes me impatient for the day that I can share in what she is thinking and doing.  Such a tiny little thing and already her personality can overtake a room.  I watch and laugh as my parents vie for her attention, something that I can never remember them doing for me or my siblings and yet it seems right for them to do so now.  I hear the longing in her other grandparents’ voices as they make do with irregular visits via Skype and promise myself that ‘we will get better at phoning every week.’  I watch her eyebrow raise and her head perk up when she hears her dad’s voice when he comes home at night.  I join in her sense of satisfaction when she has managed to rip that paper just right or make that sound or finally reach her object of choice.  Tears come to my eyes when I hear her whimper in her sleep and see the shadows flicker over her face.

Every night I go to sleep with her at my breast, Ryan’s warm body beside mine and Sabine’s snoring furry self at my feet and thank God for the miracle of my life.

Branding the Baby

We decided before Miss Pumpkin was born that we were going to use cloth diapers. We have in suite laundry, are concerned about the environment and its what good parents are supposed to do. However, we also looked at the cloth diapers and knew that they were going to be bigger than her when we brought her home so we picked up some Huggies for newborns. We were appalled to realise that they were decorated with lovely pictures of Winnie the Pooh a la Disney, Pampers were no better with the Sesame baby Elmo and other ‘baby’ Sesame Street characters.

Since then, Miss Pumpkin has voiced her opinion over cloth diapers and it isn’t positive. When we are at home and I am feeling up to it, we will use them during the day. What it has meant is that I have to forage for disposable diapers that do not have advertising directed at my daughter’s subconscious and that don’t make me shudder when I touch them because they feel too much like foam. We buy Simply Kids and Seventh Generation chlorine free diapers. The Simply Kids are awesome and cheaper than Huggies or Pampers but are decorated with some sort of kid friendly characters. The Seventh Generation are equally fantastic and have no decoration on them, they are definitely more expensive. Which ones we buy is determined by where I am shopping when I need to pick up diapers.

Why the long post about diapers? I think it is a perfect example of how branding our children occurs without us really noticing. Winnie the Pooh is cute, adorable and how could Tigger be a bad thing for a baby. It isn’t – except that I am putting this on my child every day, several times a day for most likely 2-3 years. By the time, the toilet training is done and the diapers are gone my child has been fully indoctrinated into Disney’s version of Winnie the Pooh and/or Sesame Street characters. (When we were kids did Sesame Street have all of the dolls, clothing and stuff that they do now? I can’t remember)

Ryan and I had already decided that we wanted to limit the toys that Miss Pumpkin would own. It is amazing how quickly the toys can accumulate and most kids I know don’t really play with all of them. I have always been an aware viewer when it comes to advertising and media in general, in the past 4 months I have become hyper aware. I almost went into an apoleptic fit when I saw the ad for the Dora Explorer cash register which includes a charge card and other great add ons. Bratz dolls are another group of commercials that make me want to throw away the tv and move to the middle of nowhere. What bothers me most about these ads and all of the marketing that is directed to kids is that it creates whiny, mini consumers whose only way of getting what they want is to nag at their parents. Yes, it is the parents responsibility to say “no” but in a culture that is so commodified and where love is more often represented through things as opposed to time, I think this is easier to say than do.

What I find most difficult now is to not simply react to the things that I see, read and hear. It has become harder to step back and analyse my reactions. To ask myself the questions: “what is it that I find offensive?”, “what makes this appealing to children?” and so on.  It doesn’t help that I have read too many articles and books on the marketing to and commodification of children and teens in my past.  More often than not, what I am reacting to is the feeling that we are being controlled by corporations and conglomerates.  Children are being trained to be mindless cogs in the economic wheel of cheap labour and cheap products that make the rich richer and the rest of us and the environment poorer and sicker.

More and more we are becoming removed from what it actually means to make or grow something.  Our sense of what something is worth has been twisted so that items that should be discussed in terms of its quality have been reduced to measurements of quantity.   We process our food so extensively that we have to add back nutrients that are found naturally in it.  We talk about good food being expensive and yet we think nothing of buying Kraft Dinner because it can feed us cheaply and yet the $1 price tag doesn’t truly factor in the cost to the environment not to mention that the processed food is heavily subsidized by governments.  Furthermore, the actual nutritional value of kraft dinner is nonexistent, in that sense it is vastly overpriced.   When asked, I want my children to know what foods are in season, where they come from and more importantly how to prepare them.  We are luckier than most as there is the family farm that they will be able to visit and work on.  I want them to understand that everybody deserves to be paid for their labour, that the environment isn’t something to be pillaged.

In the end it will be about balance and our willingness to say  “no” when so many other people are going to be saying “yes.”  I just hope that Miss Pumpkin and any other squashes we find in the vegetable patch understand that there was a reason behind their parents’ madness.