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

When it is quiet.

I have been avoiding this, afraid maybe of what will happen when I actually stop to write.  Unsure of whether or not I am strong enough to let my mind and heart be open to one another.  These past 6 weeks have been so surreal.  I wake up each night with a start, there is no gentleness, no quiet wonder just a single jolt and my eyes are open and I am aware.  It is as though my consciousness refuses to let me have a reprieve from the knowing.

I cry when I am alone, when it is quiet.  There are no sobs, no wails – just tears that find their way down my face.  Sometimes, it is just one or two, sometimes I can not tell where one stops and the next begins.  Even so there is no pain, just emptiness and a deep bone sadness.  I have two faces, two bodies.  There is the practical, dependable daughter, sister, mother, friend, wife who walks ahead to make sure all is well and then there is me, who wants nothing more than to fold into herself, to find a quiet place far away from everybody.  A place where I can breathe in the wind, feel the rustle of the leaves on my skin, sink into the earth and listen to the world’s song.  A place where I can nurture the child that is rocked in my belly; a concrete reminder that our lives and deaths are part of a bigger dance.

I know that he is still here, that he watches over us and always will.  That eases my soul, but I am no enlightened being, my physical self wants to see his smile, hear his voice, watch him with his granddaughter, feel his arms around me and know that when I walk up the stairs, he’ll be there.  I want what is tangible, to feel his side and I have no shame in my desire.

Something in me has shifted.  I think that I have finally lost the last of my innocence and I mourn for her but I feel as though she has been replaced by something as equally wondrous.  It is as though this journey opened a part of me that has been dormant, waiting for me to be ready to accept it.  Maybe it is because I decided that I would see the beauty in dad’s illness and death – that I wouldn’t let it twist me.  I chose and choose to find the blessings, to let myself be completely in the moment regardless of how difficult, to listen to myself and to others, to reach out and to not stop laughing.

I miss him so much.

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.

Monday’s Small Blessings

• 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
• Sipping coffee with your husband while the sun shines.
• Listening to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme .
• Feeling a little sharp bump in a tiny mouth.
• Running into an old acquaintance that you are happy to see.
• Finding a tiny blossom on a pepper plant.
• Remembering to remember the everyday things that make life beautiful.

At some point I folded in on myself. To say that my life has become narrowed and myopic is too simple. I am neither disengaged with life nor dissatisfied with it. It is as though most of me is engaged in solving a problem and has left me running on the back-up emergency system. This has meant that I am able to focus on one task or contained engagement but anything that requires me to be truly present has resulted in me shutting down. I have caught myself a number of times being in a middle of a conversation or event and physically turning away. I am not necessarily uncomfortable in these situations, I enjoy observing and listening I am just unable to participate. In my head I have something to say but then when I open my mouth, the words have become bungled and I grasp for something to fill the space. This has meant that when I have attempted to join in I become the ‘that weird person that disrupts the flow of the conversation with their incongruous statements.’ It makes me wonder if there is much point in trying to engage or if it would be better to read a book or make muffins.

Oddly, I am still able to be sharp when attending to matters like meetings at work and solving various issues that have begun to come up in the planning for next year. However, that part of me is easy to access. She is the fall back personae, the doer, and the one that is running the show at the moment anyways. However, she is also the person who refuses to read anything that may be thought-provoking which has meant that I have to go further than the local library as I have read their collection of Terry Pratchett.

Occasionally I look for the rest of me, the parts that make life more than planning for dinner. When I find them they tell me “not now we’re busy” and then shut the door. I hope they are done soon because I would like to go out and play.

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.

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.

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.

Swimming Sound Waves

Music has always been a larger part of my life than I would have thought possible for someone who doesn’t sing or play an instrument. I have always had an eclectic and varied relationship with music. For the most part I will listen to anything and everything. You are just as likely to find my voice twanging on some Dixie Chicks as it is snarling out a line from Audioslave. There are definitely some genres that I have been unable to incorporate into my life’s soundtrack but not because they are bad – they just don’t work for me.

My first tape was Cindi Lauper, quickly followed by Billy Joel and Michael Jackson. I used to wait patiently by the radio, tape cued for that one song to be played. My early mixed tapes were filled with songs caught in mid line. Later, I would have the luxury to access a collective library to create mini soundtracks. The last mix was the last break-up album. There is a line from a movie (Dog Park?) where the character is told that when he can listen to the break-up tape without crying then he will know he is over his ex.

I used to get dragged to noise shows above the Smash Gallery. I would inevitabley fall asleep on the couch. I guess my ear was not sophisticated enough to appreciate the music coming from the front. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time at the Commodore, getting into concerts with my fake id and paying $8 dollars if we had missed the opening act. There was also the Cruel Elephant good for a Punk show and then the variety of booze cans whose location if you asked me today I would not be able to place.

I often play a game with myself trying to create a soundtrack that would encapsulate the specific moment that I am in or a memory that I have. Like scents, an opening bar can propel me back to a specific place, time or person. I Touch Myself by the Divinyls conjures up an ex, a fitting song for a megalomaniac who wanted me to be at his beck and call – his trophy that he could bring out and show off on special occasions. Other songs immediately send an endorphin rush to my cells and if I close my eyes it is 2 am, I am sweaty, dancing and surrounded by a safety net of beats and bodies.

I have begun to introduce my daughter to music. She falls asleep best to Leonard Cohen and likes to play with her ball in time to Blur. I move around the house singing made up songs about what I am doing. Some of the songs are on repeat. I sing her songs that my mother sang to me. I sing her songs that I love, Summertime and Somebody. I listen to mum sing to her granddaughter some of the songs I remember from when I and my siblings were young, others have obviously been held in waiting to be shared only with her granddaughter.

A new melody is being overlayed my own. Together, for now, the two melodies will play together. As she grows older, they will pull apart and become movements to be played independently. I can not wait to hear her life’s symphony.