And in the end

As I watched her speak, I tried to imagine what she must have looked like in her thirties. Her husband died when her youngest was only six leaving her to raise the three kids on her own.

It wasn't easy she sighed.

And now over thirty-five years later here she sat on this park bench pouring her heart out to me, a stranger.

She has been battling colon cancer for going on nine years and as a result of the chemo, now suffers from osteoporosis and arthritis. Her workaholic daughter helps her get groceries once a week but she hates to bother the daughter unnecessarily so she waits to hear from her. Sometimes it's almost two weeks before this important business woman calls her mother. Her sons both live in Vancouver and run a construction company. They each have a few grown children who also have children.

They're both very busy. It's hard for them to visit. But they came when I was first diagnosed.

We talked until Deaglan was near ready to have a meltdown because I was ignoring him. She had been out walking, trying to get some exercise at her doctor's request, when she saw the three of us at the park. She came and sat beside me on the bench as if we were old friends.

We discussed motherhood, her youth, her kids, her grandchildren and her great grandchildren who she's never met. She told me about a new medication for arthritis she's discovered through a friend of hers who has a computer. She is now almost considered a survivor of this cancer that has been plaguing her. Her philosophy over the past nine years of treatment has been to get up every single morning, bathe and get dressed whether she wants to or not. Then she climbs down the stairs and starts the dishes or dusting. If she feels exhausted with her efforts then she lays down on the chesterfield until she feels better, but at least she is clean and dressed.

I eventually had to pull away and tend to my toddler and infant but I've thought about her almost constantly since. Is this the course our lives eventually take? Do we just end up alone, battling the breakdowns of our bodies and loneliness, without the help of the younger generation we worked so diligently to nurture and raise?


This is a Red Writing Hood meme from the Red Dress Club. There were a choice of two photos I could use as inspiration and I chose this one entitled resigned.

Things I'm loving this Thursday

I'm joining Teresha over at Marlie and Me in taking inventory of what I'm loving today. Phew, I need this after yesterday's downer of a post!

1. This hat. It was a gift from my sister when Deaglan was born and I'm so happy to see it making an encore.

2. Coffee!!!!

3. That we have a playdate with a little girl who recently was diagnosed with Leukemia. She's doing great considering and being around her really makes me grateful for all of my abundance.

4. Shaune for cutting up the onions for the batch of spaghetti sauce I'm going to make today. I hate cutting onions!

5. My friend Kelly over at My voice, My view. Even though we've never met in person, I feel like we are kindred spirits.

Happy Thursday!

It sounds like I'm complaining but I'm not

I'm participating in Pour Your Heart Out Wednesday with Shell over at Things I Can't Say. In Shell's words: Write a post from the heart. Something that has been weighing on you. Something you feel passionately about.Something you've been wanting to talk about. A cause, a memory, a belief, a world view. Anything.

I'm still not sleeping. Naveen sleeps once for a three hour stretch from 8 to 11 every night. After that he's up every hour or so. I don't know how to change this so I feed him and usually end up pulling him into bed with me because I need to get a few hours if I can. Well, I was getting these precious few hours until last week when I started him on baby cereal. The changes on his digestive system at least I'm assuming that's what it is given that it's the only new variable I've added to our routine (I started with oat cereal knowing from experience that rice is constipating and then switched to barley once the oat cereal was gone) have increased his wakefulness at night so that whereas before I was able to get him back to sleep after nursing him, now he stays awake for up to another hour each time. At night, my life feels like one long torture session.

The sleeplessness is taking its toll.

I give my best self to the kids. Some kind of miracle, I can only credit to my higher power, takes over and I am mostly alert and present for their needs. We do arts and crafts, go to the park, read books and play. I stay on top of the laundry - an absolute necessity now that Deaglan goes through about six pairs of underwear and three outfits a day, and if I forget to put a bib on Naveen his shirtfronts look like he's been through a carwash from drooling. The house is clean at the end of the day most days and Deaglan almost always gets something homecooked for his meals (even if it is hotdogs or scrambled eggs).

But when Shaune gets home from work, I have nothing left. Most nights I've just finished bathing and settling two kids and I'm anxiously waiting for the baby to wake up so that I can feed him again and try to get him back to sleep and it's my only time to do something for me like have a glass of wine and watch a show.

When little people are mercilessly demanding from you all day long, your attention, your patience, your love, your body to feed them, your hands to change them, your arms to hold and hug them, your undivided attention so they won't get hurt or hurt each other, you become covetous with the few moments you can steal for yourself.

With two tired grumpy people in this house, arguments and bickering are at an all time high. We're dealing with a very busy, very energetic toddler splat in the middle of the tantrum- throwing, jealous-of-the-new-baby-so-I'll-demand-all-of -your-attention, my-energy-level-just increased-exponentially terrible two's.

Sigh. That's it. I'm done pouring my heart out.

Brothers

I caught this a few days ago. I want to apologize upfront for the almost-disciplinary moment you'll have to sit through, and also the high falsetto voice I use when talking to Naveen. Clearly I have no technical abilities or I would have edited it a bit. It's also a tad long. It's almost impossible to catch a few moments on video where Deaglan is somewhat cooperative - he's lost all patience with my constant picture taking. He's like the celebrity and me, well I'm the paparazzi chasing him for some good blogging material. And yes, Deaglan still has his soother. I'm working on weaning him from it but it's tougher than I had thought and I haven't really given it a serious effort.

Found

I'm participating with the ladies at the RDC and this week's prompt asked us to "Dump our Junk": We're borrowing this week's Red Writing Hood prompt from NaNoWriMo Prompts, a blog dedicated solely to National Novel Writing Month. Here's your prompt:"Your protagonist empties the contents of his/her pockets, purse, and/or backpack onto a table. What all was dumped onto the table?"

I've been participating in National novel writing month and this is an excerpt from the novel I'm working on. It's also connected to this post I wrote last week for RDC.

A niggling at the back of his mind, he couldn’t quite articulate was bothering John. But he couldn't find two seconds to try to figure out what it was. So far that morning he had washed every window on the main floor, and then went straight to work on the floors. His usual Saturday to-do list was longer today and he still had the upstairs to work on. When he finally could, he ran to his room to gather his thoughts, figure out what he couldn’t put his finger on.

It looked different somehow. Something was missing but he couldn’t immediately name it. Then his heart skipped a beat. He scrambled down onto his hands and knees and peered under his bed. The backpack was missing. He had been careless after school yesterday and forgotten to leave it in his locker. The pep rally had distracted him from his usual routine. Once he realized he still had it, it was too far to walk back and he would have been late. Janice did not tolerate lateness.

Nervously he sat up on the bed wondering what to do next. He could have sworn he had shoved it deep underneath the bed but she had obviously found it. As if reading his mind a head poked through his doorway.

"Mommy wants to see you," whispered his six-year old foster brother Joel.

John walked the 20 seconds to his foster mother’s room as if he was walking the plank of some ancient pirate ship...only this wasn't his execution but he was certain that plunging into a cold raging ocean would surely be a better fate than what Janice had in store for him.

She sat on the edge of her bed, hands neatly folded in her lap. The contents of his backpack were arranged on the bed ,anything that meant something to him, the things he had managed to keep from her all these years, suddenly out in the open.

"Do you want to explain this boy?" She asked in her cold steely voice.

Swallowing the urge to throw up he shifted from one foot to the other. He looked at the contents spread out on the bed. These were all the things he treasured most in life. Then he saw it. His eyes darted to the picture of him with his brother Irv and his Mother. Janice had taken it out of the now worn Ziploc baggie and torn it in half.

A sob caught in his throat. The tears that stung his eyes could not be held for long. They fell silently down his cheeks and he missed his beautiful mother with a force that threatened to break him in two. He missed his baby brother Irv almost as much. The picture had been on the fridge. His mother had grabbed it and stuffed it into his bag before the man from the Children’s Aid Society could object. That night was still felt fresh in his mind. He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. Janice was unmoved.

Laid out were also his sketchpad and a set of charcoals, a pack of Hubba Bubba, a Swiss army knife that he had found under the bleachers at school, his wallet which she had emptied and splayed open, some notebooks, a science textbook, crumpled up gym shorts two pens and a lighter. But none of these things were incriminating. It was the stack of white envelopes held together with a rubber band addressed to him that caused the trickle of sweat running down his back.

He could see that she hadn’t opened them yet, but the address alone would be enough to make life worse than it already was. These were what he did not want her to see. Sanjay brought them to school whenever they came in the mail. He lived for those letters. They were everything, his only connection to his parents.

My first love

I'm participating in Mama Kat's writer's workshop. I chose to use the prompt Look up a favorite childhood actor and tell us where they are now:
One of my favourite parts of the day in elementary school was when the teacher read to us. In grade five Mr. Jansen introduced us to S.E. Hinton and her novel The Outsiders. It changed me. The whole experience affirmed my already growing love affair with reading.

The silent rapt attention of the class while he read a few chapters each Friday afternoon, the exhilaration of hearing our teacher talk of things so unorthodox in our Catholic school environment, while he opened up a world where the poor kids known as Greasers fought to keep their turf and dignities intact against the rich and privileged soc's (short for socials) gave me joy. I remember the excitement with which we would all discuss the chapters we had just heard on our walks home, trying to figure out who amongst us would be considered Greasers and Soc's.

The following summer I borrowed a copy of the book from the library and read it again even memorizing some of the passages and the Robert Frost poem Stay Gold*. I can recite it by heart to this day:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf a flower
But only so an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
And dawn goes down to dayy
Nothing gold can stay.

In grade six our family moved all the way to Tucson Arizona. It was a devastating and difficult move but I found enormous comfort when Hollywood came out with the movie version of The Outsiders. That I was seemingly half away across the world and yet this beloved story was known there too, eased the pain of leaving behind my friends and school.

It was when I fell in love for the first time. He was the lead character in the movie, Ponyboy Curtis, and the actor's name was C. Thomas Howell. To me, he was Ponyboy, I made no distinction between the character and actor. I wrote his name on all of my notebooks, and there was always an I love T.H (Tom Howell) at the top of every note I passed to friends. I used my allowance and babysitting money to buy any teen magazine he was featured in, and plastered my share of the wall, of the bedroom I shared with my two sisters, with his pictures. I even wrote to him once and received a postcard from his Fanclub Headquarters. It said something like:

Thank you for the letter. Stay Gold. C. Thomas Howell.

His name was a stamped signature but the rest had been written in pen. I was convinced it was directly from him and carried the postcard around in my pencil case showing it to anyone and everyone.

I hadn't thought about Ponyboy in a long time. A few weeks ago I was watching Criminal Minds and there he was, C. Thomas Howell. He was guest starring as the unsub and time had not been kind to his face. He was gaunt and lean, his hair shaved close to his head. There was nothing left of that teen hearthrob I once worshipped.

I guess Robert Frost knew what he was talking about. Nothing gold can stay.

*I googled the poem after I posted this. The title is actually Nothing gold can stay.

It's how I roll

I don't know how to order a Starbuck's coffee. I could learn but I really don't want to. I usually say something like yeah, hi, could I get a coffee, something mild, equivalent to a medium?

I've never written the acronym LOL in a communication or used the phrase that's how I roll.

I'm not sure I'll ever join Twitter and I only started texting this year because Shaune insisted we upgrade our phones. Usually my texts are to Shaune and they say things like: Need cat food and ketchup.

I'm just not cool.

And I'm not writing this post to seem cool in some uncool nerdy way. I can accept that I'm not hip or trendy, I will never be on the cutting edge.
I've always been okay with this but I came face-to-face with it a few weeks ago when Shaune rolled his eyes because I announced excitedly: I think I'm gonna learn how to knit! I think he said something like: Why don't you knit yourself a shawl granny to keep yourself warm. If he knew anything about knitting, he'd realize that that's a lot harder to do than it sounds.

He wasn't frowning on knitting in general but just pointing out once again that motherhood has changed me, really changed me.

I like the changes. I think they suit me. I feel better in my skin than I ever have. At the end of the day I don't mind looking in the mirror and seeing my unkempt eyebrows, and stray grey hairs. I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. It's okay that I didn't get everything done. I fed the kids, changed them, got them outside and tried to focus my energy on teaching them something, even if it was just how to use Elmer's glue or eat solids for the first time.

And hey, just because I didn't Tweet about it, people can still read all about it on my blog! Blogging makes me a little cool right?

Halloween was fun - Deaglan was a dinosaur and Naveen wanted no part of being costumed. Shaune and I took Deaglan out trick-or-treating (we only made it to about six houses before he was ready to come home) while gramma and grampa stayed home with Naveen to hand out candy. Thank goodness we had tons of trick-or-treaters and very little candy was left over.