On Resiliance

My garden used to be full of these coneflowers. The were always the first to come up in the spring and their bright purple colour made me very happy. I love it when there’s something so unbelievable in nature–a colour that bold–how can it exist?

The space outside our house, well, I’ve tried to tame it. It’s got flowers that I planted from seeds, it’s got many different kinds of lavender, it’s got all kinds of native plants, and then the leftovers from when it was landscaped for about six months before my garden simply said: nope, we far prefer to be this way, wild as wild can be.

But my coneflowers have disappeared. This is the last of them, and it’s weak and barely hanging on, finally giving up the ghost to the many many brown-eyed Susans that propagate like, well, plants. And oh, the metaphors. I’m getting there. My mind this week has been wild, too, vacillating between trying to prune negative thoughts, and the kind of emptiness you get from days without sleeping. Hollowed out, a bit. Exasperated.

We are going up north tomorrow to begin to clean out my grandmother’s cottage. We’re going to rebuild, on the exact same footprint as the building that’s there now, grandfathering, it’s called. (So the permits and stuff haven’t been as complex as if we were building a cottage from scratch). The new building should be up this year, and then we’ll finish it this year. Like anything, I’m pruning memories, gearing up for the well of emotions when the old building comes down and we replace it with something else that’ll last for generations in my family like this one has. Don’t get me wrong, the building isn’t anything special–as a friend of my brother’s joked, “it rains in the cottage before it rains outside.” Last summer we went up for a bit of pandemic break when we were allowed to travel, and the whole place was filled with mites. The outhouse is seventy years old. Honestly, it’s time for it to go–but it’s created friction between my brother and I, as he doesn’t want us to tear it down (he has a separate place on the property), like I’m taking something away instead of looking at it like we’re building something that’s going to last.

Like my coneflowers, as the gardens of our life expand and contract, certain plants come and go, and the building is after all, just a building. But it’s hard when emotions keep winning over. It’s been a hard week for me. Work reviews and disappointment and never-ending Covid (I get my shot on Monday) and really late nights trying to get everything finished, and feeling very upset at myself–like wishing I could prune the wild out of me that sometimes doesn’t quite fit in with the world. Get deep down in the mess of that feeling of failure, and it hurts–it does, like I’ve failed to save my poor coneflowers.

All my tricks aren’t working and I’ve resulted to sleeping meds, just to get a break from the relentless chaos in my mind. Which is a bad cycle anyway. I can feel the disease grumbling but the doctors think I’m imagining it–maybe I am–but . . . maybe not. So now I’m going to sleep in a medicated haze for a week, stop taking the meds, be awake for about 48-hours and hopefully things in my mind will have levelled out by then. Or maybe not–I just keep thinking if I can get to next week, maybe the chaos will level out.

The news, can’t without crying.

Reading: Laura Lippman’s latest.

Watching: Exceptionally terrible but deliciously good Discovery of Witches.

Tomorrow I will be near a lake, and looking at scenery that’s different from the view out of my front window. What?

On Aging & Friendships

Friday. How did that happen?

Behind, behind, behind, that’s the pitter-patter that’s been in my brain all week–I’m so very behind. Behind in getting our taxes organized (they were still filed on time thank you to a wonderful family friend who does them for us). Behind in work. Behind in my ongoing list of to-dos. Behind in getting out of my head and getting outside. As I said on Instagram this week: “My heart just isn’t in it.” That’s a line I stole from a Neko Case song called “In California” that has been in my head all week and I’m even behind in getting it out of my head.

But today it’s raining, I’ve worked my work week (I do M-Thurs, 8AM-6PM and keep Fridays quiet so I can attempt to not be behind), and I’m sitting quietly in my office listening to the album, finally. Oh, and I’m writing my weekly blog post. So, where’s my head at this week? What do I need to process? Where am I wandering in my mind. Behind, behind, behind.

More than any other season, the summer is a memory-builder for me. It’s the season of adventures. It’s the season where I’ve done most of my traveling, and it’s the season where, like many other people, I recharge–soak up enough sunshine to get me through a Canadian winter. But it also means that my mind cycles through regrets as often as it reminds me that I have been to Paris four or five times.

Trying to capture that sense of a season in prose is hard. Those feelings, the freedom, the fact that I once drove halfway across the country to spend not one but two summers in Banff, Alberta in university without a phone or a credit card or really any kind of safety net–that’s what I want to bottle in some way and show it to my son one day. Look, your mom did these things, she did them even though she had a disease, even though she had no family out there, even though it would have been safer to stay in Ontario. We hopped in a car with one of our roommates and we drove from here to there, found jobs, found places to live, built a community, and lived wild for four months before going back to university in September.

I did all of this with my friend Hannah. We met in first year, we were in the same dorm at Queen’s. We both were taking arts courses, and we came from similar backgrounds (read, we didn’t go to private school). We became fast friends. And I used to tell people that Hannah was the person who was most like me in the world–and that I was lucky to find her at school. It wasn’t the happiest time for me. The trail of sadness after losing my mom before starting high school, getting sick with the disease, and a number of other compounding losses meant I was deeply messed up those years. I made some really poor decisions. Most of them involving boys. But I used to think it was all worth it because I had Hannah. We stayed together for all of university, the kind of BFFs you have in your early adulthood, when you find your second family. Your chosen family. And you think, yes, this is it, I can finally be myself.

And we stayed friends for a long time after university, too. She lived (or still does, I don’t actually know) across the country in Vancouver, and I’d go see her once a year, once every other year, often planning other adventures around seeing Hannah and spending time together, and when she’d come back to Ontario to see her family, she would do the same. I remember one year when I turned thirty my now-husband and I flew to Vancouver, spent time with Hannah and her fellow, and then drove all the way down to California. It was a fantastic trip, even when my now-husband told me (on the eve of my birthday no less) that he never wanted to get married or have kids. Ha! Funny how these things turn out as we’ve now been together for twenty-three years and our kid is turning eleven in October. But my point is that things change. People change. But you never notice how you, yourself changes–and when you’re as stubborn and intensely anti-reflective as I am–it seems that you never do.

Except, I must have. And she must have to–because, I’m sure you can tell from the title of this post, that we are no longer friends. I don’t even really know what happened, but when my son was about ten months old, Hannah had come back to Ontario to see her family. I was talking to her on the phone from our cottage, excited to drive somewhere to see her, even if it was halfway between her place and ours–I wanted her to meet my son. I wanted her to see him. And I wanted to give her a hug–as it’d had been one of the most difficult years health-wise I’d ever had–truly, and without a word of hyperbole–I was lucky to be alive.

The phone call hangs in my memory like a picture on a wall. When I can I see you? I ask. Hannah hums and haws. I’ll drive anywhere, I say, I’ve got the car, I can come to you. No, she says, she’s got to help her family with a yard sale. And I’m upset at this point–crying, big dopey tears–I’m heavily medicated, I’ve got a newborn, I’d learned I’d broken my pelvis and my blood pressure was in the toilet from all the meds so I was living through mud, my husband was back in the city working, and I was surrounded by my family who helped with the baby all the time, but I was exhausted. And she said, I don’t think it’ll work out, this time. But you won’t meet the baby? I said. You’re breaking my heart. Those my exact words: You’re breaking my heart. Don’t say that. She replied. Don’t say that. And then we hung up–we must have said goodbye but I don’t remember–but I do know this was the last conversation we ever had.

And to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know what that triggered for her to stop talking to me and I just knew that I couldn’t be the one to call first and all these years later (my kid will be eleven this fall) I still regret not getting over myself and just calling her the next week to say I’m sorry or what happened or why did that upset you so much that you simply ghosted me.

Because it’s hard when you’re already in so much pain and in such a tough place to see how that tough place might impact those around you. And all of this is to say that for those friends that I’ve lost in my life, today I am feeling the regret. I’ve got a big birthday coming up in July (I’m not going to name the numbers, it’s awful, LOL) but I will say that these past few weeks I’ve been really contemplating the loss of friendship and how it impacts your life.

I love my husband. I love my son. I love my other BFFs, and my beloved ride-or-dies from high school who knew me before Queen’s and still loved me after I got home, which I think might have been tough, as I was probably more than a little bit of an asshole. And I’ve got other wonderful friends that I’ve met in the years since, mom friends, neighbours, our close-knit crew that make up our found family, my husband and I–and I have some absolutely amazing girlfriends that I talk to all the time, that I make a point to see, that I love to be in their company because they’re truly amazing humans that make my life better every single day. But a part of me still misses my friend Hannah who one day stopped talking to me and never resurfaced again. Because that’s what loss is–it’s that people make an indelible imprint on your life and when they’re not there any more those feelings don’t have anywhere to go, and there’s just a bit of a hole. It might be a pinprick, it might be a black hole, but it’s a hole nonetheless. And sometimes it aches like a phantom limb when you’re behind, behind, behind in just about everything.

I could go one and tell you about another relationship that fell apart a few years ago that I still miss too, but I’ve obviously talked too much as it is. I could tell you about the time I blew up my old book club with my big mouth (sense a trend?). These are my three main regrets in life–losing Hannah, blowing up my old book club, and the loss of another friendship that’s still too raw to really process, and it’s been almost three years for that one.

Oh, the song’s on now–“said you were happy for me, but your heart wasn’t in it,” the line goes. “Just a phone call away, now there’s nothing to say, as the days roll by disconnected.”

And that’s sort of where I am today. Pondering regrets and wishing I could make apologies, fill up those holes with some sunflowers, maybe a little earth, pat the garden down, give a place for the bees to congregate and tell the people that I let down that I do still love them.

On Handstands and Heartstands

Watching my son balance against the wall (even though this picture is a few months old now) feels like an apt visual metaphor for the past week. The hours are long but the days are short, and even through the tedium of working from home, now, again, for the foreseeable future. When I find it hard to concentrate, I think of my boisterous boy here–balancing with all his might, trying to perfect something he’s never been thoroughly taught. He’s the epitome of an autodidact–when it comes to gymnastics. From cartwheels to front flips and roundoffs and somersaults, you would think that we weren’t following the naturalized parenting advice to “go where your children lead you.” But we did. We sent him to a few gymnastic camps to which he promptly said, “nope, too many girls. More hockey.”

The other night at the dinner table, we’d been having a harder conversation. There have been a lot of issues with the rules lately, and managing screen time, school being from a computer vs a classroom, and me working so much, means that when we do attempt to claw back some of the screen time, his world explodes. And when his father said something akin to the fact that you have to talk about your feelings with your family because where else are you going to do it, “I mean, not your friends, obviously.” To which my son immediately became a teenager, scoffed, and said, “Pffft, no.” Meaning he never talks to his friends about his feelings but essentially about Minecraft, and whatever else is happening on YouTube. I mean, I don’t get it, because I talk to my friends about my feelings all the time, in fact, I wonder, often if they don’t get sick of hearing about it.

Raising boys is not for the feint of heart. “Oh, mom’s crying again.” My son will often tease if we’re watching something that causes my waterworks (it doesn’t take much, truth be told, ever since I’ve become a mom, I cry A LOT). And I can’t never tell if it’s because he’s feeling empathetic or mocking me. That’s a hard one.

With their inherent contradictions, 10-year olds are a fascinating bunch. They want independence but can’t keep track of anything. He leaves a path of destruction throughout the house that is shocking sometimes (and I say this as someone who has learned for cough-cough so many years that I also have a Pig Pen-esque way of leaving piles of crap wherever I go) and still wants to be cuddled like he was when a toddler in bed at night. His feet have reached that floppy puppy phase where they’re huge and he hasn’t quite caught up to them yet, and we are missing, desperately, the structure of organized sports. It’s a balancing act, for him right now, hovering between being a small child and being a tween, and the transformation is something. He says “brah” without the least bit of irony but will be the first to point out that something is sexist. He is a fierce defender of animals and refuses to let his friends litter. He laughs uproariously at the word “junk” and what it refers to but still wants me to read Charlotte’s Web to him at night. Man, it’s been a blessing being home and seeing these changes–a gift of pandemic life–but I might give my left arm for us all to be back in school in September. Having never been a 10YO boy, sometimes I forget that he hasn’t been either, and all of the things he’s going through are absolutely new to him, too. Ah, parenting.

In other news. I’ve been rewriting a coming of age novel that I started a few years ago called Burlington that I actually really like. I workshopped some of it in the Harvard course I took over the winter, and feel like I have a solid way forward. My goal (putting it out there) is to have a solid, queryable draft by the end of the summer. It’ll be a reach with all of my “real” work to do + teaching + a course rewrite I’ve also been contracted to do with Ryerson. Living in the overwhelm has just become such a part of everyday life that I don’t even notice it anymore. Like if I don’t have 47 tabs open on my computer my brain shorts out, not knowing what to do next (like, relax? To echo my son, pffft).

The weather’s so nice that we’re out biking again (glorious). I’ve been slowly reading A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet who is a writer I just discovered this year and one where I can hardly believe I’ve never read before. We watched Shadow and Bone as a family and have now moved onto Sweet Tooth, which I adore in all its Lemony-Snicket-goodness. And I’ve been editing some really amazing romance writers through work–which scratches that emotional itch that only Harlequin-type books can. But a post about that later . . .

All in all it’s been a good week. How are you?

On Beginning Again

As the world prepared to enter into its second winter of lockdown, I knew that I couldn’t continue in the same vein for another year. We’ve coped well, I think, our family unit, from finding an equilibrium between both work and school being at home, to following all of the never-ending guidelines by the provincial government and cocooning in our house, again, in a vicious never-ending circle. This isn’t news. This isn’t even interesting. Collectively, perhaps what’s lost this time around in Covid summer is that “we’re all in it together vibe.” These days I feel like we’re all that annoying childhood moment of being in the backseat of a long car journey whining: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet?”

And we are not there yet.

We are still daydreaming of the destination, of where that car might take us–whether that’s to see beloved cousins or explore a city we’d never been to before. The above is a picture of my foot on some literal crossroads. Taken at the top of the West Toronto Railpath, one of my favourite parts of my neighbourhood, I plop my metaphorical foot down each time I get to the top of the trail and make a decision to go left or right or to turn around and go back the way I started. Except the view isn’t ever the same, even if you take the same route home. There are different people to see, different trees to see, and the birds, the birds, the birds.

And yet, there are days when it’s just not enough. The lists, the planning, the constant hum of forced motivation when we’re all stuck in such bad patterns. Way too much screen time. Way too much separate-togetherness. We have huge things happening this year–from work to life and more, those crossroads, again, that we all come to. Big birthdays. Next year my son finished elementary school. We are building a new cottage where my grandparents’ cabin has stood for 70+ years (it’s falling down). We’re finally finishing the backyard. All of these things have been planned for years, and still–that feeling of sitting on the precipice persists. It’s all going to go wrong. We won’t find the rest of the capital we need. My son will ultimately stop succeeding academically. I know these are not rational or even normal thoughts but there seems to be little escape from the pockets of panic that creep into the corners of my mind. And that’s not even to mention the hum of the pandemic that has changed so much of our daily lives.

I had made some New Year’s Revolutions in January. Go outside every day (This one I’ve kept). Practise French and Swedish (I’ve missed two days now in the last six months; not bad). Take a course that’s just for me (Harvard Extension School; it was called Proseminar: Elements of the Writers Craft, and I spent weeks writing an essay on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and it was glorious). Try to find balance between work and home (have not remotely accomplished this). File our taxes on time (Pending). Read (I do this all day every day, I count work reading). Walk (See above; going outside). Write (I wish I could do more). And so on. Without the structure of these kinds of lists, I fall far into my own head. I fall deep into the abyss of worrying about the disease, about our mental health in this whole experience, of what kind of life we’ll have, of what’s happening to the Earth, of hoping my friends and family stay safe, of missing people and not seeing them, of being relatively bad at keeping in touch . . . and then, and then. And then.

So, I’m beginning again. I’m adding to the list. And some might suggest with everything that’s going on, more isn’t the answer. But if I start here once a week, and say it out loud. That it’s not that bad. That we’ve done a good job surviving so far. That I love to put virtual pen to paper. That I can carve out a bit of space here for just barfing out my feelings, we can make it through the next few months.

It’s not so much blogging as it is maybe journaling. Trying to work out personal essay writing in small chunks so I can practice some narrative nonfiction. I can go left, right, or back the way I came, and each time the sentences will look a little different, which is exactly the point.

Nothing Is Ever Easy

Yesterday was the first day of spring, and it’s still very cold outside. The heat is still up high, and we’re still wearing sweaters, although I have given up my boots. I will take my cold toes over clomping around in snow boots. I’ve been having a bit of a tough time coping with some unstable situations, nothing that we can’t handle, but it’s drawn me down a rabbit hole of thinking that I’m having a hard time escaping.

Things are not easy right now. I know that’s the case for many people, for many people in far worse situations than I am, in far worse places in the world. NPR was reporting on what just happened in Austin, and hearing about the data breaches on Facebook, and the beleaguered communities here in Toronto, I know I’m lucky in so many ways. But that’s what’s hard about facing challenges, sometimes, you’re blinded by the stress, the everyday nonsense, and can’t look beyond.

My family is very supportive of my edict to “get outside” on the weekends. We’ve spent so much time inside this winter, not doing the things we really enjoy, snowshoeing, skiing (well, in my mind I enjoy skiing, we never go), walking through the woods. We attempted to do it this weekend at Mountsberg, a provincial park near Hamilton, and it was crowded, filled with people, and exactly the opposite of what I needed. When I feel trapped or frustrated, I think I like open skies and big trees and the sound of the wind and fresh air and all kinds of other things that remind you that even when the everyday is at its worst, you can still put your feet down on solid ground and move them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want and where I want to go next. This idea of middle age being a stopping point, but also a starting gate–all the building blocks of what’s come before leading me here, to this place, one that’s of transition. The only problem being I’m not at all sure what I want to transition to. I’m happy to take suggestions…

In these moments, when it’s so very hard to see what’s next, I miss my mother, my grandmother, so very much. I don’t know what it is about that kind of ache that comes to whenever I’m feeling alone or overwhelmed or in a place where I don’t know how to make a decision. At this point, I’ve lived far longer without them than I ever did with them, but the visceral missing them never seems to waver. The same questions run through my mind, would they be proud of me, how would they counsel me, how would I be different if they were still here. My grandmother would have been 98, which feels impossible. We just don’t live that long. Even knowing she wouldn’t still be here when she’s not here is a roundabout way of saying that I still miss her, and her advice, and her thoughts about what to do next, where to go in this meandering way of life.

Anyway. Those are thoughts for a Wednesday. I’m saying little, I’m afraid.

3+ Protein & Doctoring in the Modern Age

My kidneys are spilling protein. For any of us with kidney disease, or having your kidneys impacted by another disease, you can understand what this means. It’s a sign that they’re not working all that well, and having protein run through them damages them even further. For a while, I was taking this blood pressure medicine that helped–it stops the protein, by opening up something-or-other (I do not know the specifics), from doing further damage and it was working for a while. The downside was that it plummeted my BP and so I was dizzy all the time and super woozy. So, they took me off of it.

But now I’m going back on the meds, and I’m fine with it–I know the routine, I know I don’t have high BP, and so, psychologically, I can cope with this medication. I can not feel angry at it or damn it all to hell and “forget” to take it because I’m so pissed off with the disease in all its forms.

What’s funny is that the doctor and I did all this diagnosing via email. He sent the test request to me via email (well, his secretary did; she’s awesome). I emailed them that I’d done the test and should I take the meds again, and he said “yes!”. I find it all quite amusing.

And even though taking a 24-hour urine test is mildly (read: extremely) annoying. All the back and forth around it isn’t/wasn’t. What a revelation, what a way to live your life — easily and actively knowing what to do and just actioning it. It’s shocking actually. Can you imagine if everything was that easy?

A Picture of Moss

This is my favourite moss. It’s a spot just up off the driveway of our cottage, set back into the woods a bit, near a bit of a clearing. I walk to it, by it, all the time, when heading out on adventures with our boy if his cousins have already left and he needs an adventure-mate. It’s unbearably grey and rainy here in Toronto, and cold. Perfectly acceptable end-of-February weather if you felt as though you could endure even another February day.

So, today in my my mind I’m brushing my hand against the fluffy pillow-like moss on the rocks by a place where I’ll be in a few months when the weather changes, and we’re in the rush-rush of the summer season. The colour is delightful, and green, proving that even the sight of something so hopeful and growing can help you through the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the longest-shortest month of the year.

Over the last few weeks/months/years, I’ve been having a hard time concentrating. At first I put it down to the disease, and that never-ending “brain fog” it induces both from medication and from, well, disease. But it’s more than that, it’s too many decisions and questions during a day, it’s not enough exercise, it’s too much sugar, it’s too many hours spent with a phone, watching too much TV, it’s the in and out of how to spend the couple of hours at the end of the day after the boy is in bed before my mind can actually fall into a fitful sleep.

I decided this year to pump up my reading by making myself accountable to GoodReads. I set up a reading goal (52 books), and I’m tracking them on my phone. At times like this, fiction gets hard, but nonfiction feels like a breeze. I’ve finished Roxane (with one “n”) Gay’s excellent Bad Feminist. I’m really enjoying Worry-Free Money and felt like Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home wasn’t necessarily about being happy or being at home (goodness she’s a writer in love with quotes. So. Many. Quotes.). I’ve started reading a book about Monet’s Water Lilies series. Nonfiction has a way of soothing your over-worked mind, I find. Letting you puzzle in someone else’s thoughts for a bit as yours continue to be muddled and messy.

Reading has always been the way in which I sort out my world. But working in publishing means that I’ve gathered many, many books–my shelves are sinking at the weight of it all–and so, like many other years, I’m trying to work my way through them. Make some hard decisions. I have books from my very first publishing job that I’ve carried around for years, hoping to read, planning on reading, when is that moment when I’ll just know that no, I won’t get to this in my lifetime, and is it worth the emotional baggage and years of collected dust. I never imagined from that very first moment when I discovered reading could be a challenge (remember Read-a-thons? I took them as a personal gold-star-maker, used up both sides of the sheet and then some) that I could “succeed” at, that there might be a moment in my life where books didn’t give me pleasure. Now, with life so full and balance completely off, I’ve struggled for the last few years to find my way through the backlog of books I have on my to-be-read shelf.

But who am I without a book in-hand? What do I do without a giant stack of books beside my bed? How do I define myself if I’m not a reader.

I’m getting older. I’m outside of mainstream publishing. Beyond the books that win the Giller or the GG, I don’t know what’s hot at the moment (but if I read one more essay about Rupi Kaur through teaching I might have to give up entirely) and I’m not sure I care any more. Finding my way around the stacks that I have might be a valuable thing to do for a year, maybe two–to not buy the latest bestseller (or anything new, really, unless it’s for book club) but suffering from FOMO is a real thing when it comes to my reading.

Anyway, enough rambling for today. Perhaps I shall go home and finish something while my family’s at hockey practice.

Where Even To Begin, Again

I’m sitting at work, contemplating getting my lunch, and thinking about how to re-start doing something you haven’t done in a long while. How do you re-ignite a relationship that’s fallen fallow? A simple hello?

Hello.

A bit of a simple conversation?

What have you been up to lately?

Reply: Not much, life…really. My son has started playing a lot of hockey. The transition from little kid to almost-big kid is a bit tricky for all of us. There are so many complex emotions, it’s a lot, really.

A bit too heavy for a first post after many years, perhaps.

For the last three years, I’ve been working at a publishing start up, which isn’t much different from a regular start up. Lots of hours, lots of stress, lots of travelling. And by the time I get home, my brain is mush. It’s impossible to think. I’ve tried reading. I’ve spent a lot of time on the couch watching TV and eating apple blossoms (and chips). Watching movies with my family. Trying to clear away the space that needs to exist between me, and them.

But how do you begin to begin again? I suppose you just have to start. Open up the program. Set your fingers up across the keys, and go.

In a way, this online place has always been a way for me to start. To get things flowing again. To remind myself that I exist in this world in a concrete, up and down way. So many things are still true:

1. I am a person with a disease

2. I am a mother, a wife, a member of a family

3. I am someone who works in an industry that I enjoy

4. I am happy to be in my own home (even if we’ll probably never pay for it)

If I ran into someone on the street I hadn’t seen in a while, it’s not the minutia of life that get’s discussed, it’s the broad strokes that get attacked. But, as always, this has been a space for me to try and work out the wonder of my life as well. And my life is filled with wonder. It’s just something that I easily forget when the drudgery of the days threatens to hold me down, and smother me with its pillows.

The photo of my boy is from a hockey tournament we went to a few weeks ago, in Niagara Falls NY. I love the photo of him in action, trying so hard, even if he’s not always succeeding. In the last few weeks, I’ve been philosophically struggling with where I am. Physically, I am here. Physically the disease is stable, and I am relatively healthy, although exhausted all the time. And those struggles, the ins and outs of constantly defining and redefining who I am and what I’m doing, maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m searching for other people’s words because I’m find it ever-so hard to find my own. Like a habit that’s broken, I need to get my 66 days under my belt (apparently, according to Gretchen Rubin that’s how long it takes for a new habit to stick). No pressure. I’m just going to keep talking, if that’s okay.

On Self-Publishing: The Work Boyfriend Experiment

The Work Boyfriend While I was in graduate school, in a pitch of desperation during a flare-up of my Wegener’s, I made a list of accomplishments–not current, but what I wanted out of life. Most of them were typical for someone of my age and state-of-life, I wanted to have kids, and find a better job, and go to Paris, and England–and foolishly, write a book.

At the time, I was barely surviving grad school. I mean, I ended up with a degree by the skin of my teeth, and was then set adrift because my plan of becoming a professor sort of relied upon going forward and doing a doctorate. Further school was not for me, I wasn’t cut out for the competitiveness, nor the cutthroat nature of grad school, but I did enjoy writing. But my work at the time was a mess, I mean, there’s stream of consciousness and then there’s just words on the page, which is what my writing tended towards.

Over the years, I’ve gone back to thinking about that list, because it’s in my nature to simply cross items off and keep moving forward onto the next line that will ultimately bring fulfillment. Except that’s not quite how life works. Goals are hard to achieve, and sometimes they take far longer than you’d ever expect. So, way in the way back I had “write a novel” on that list, and it wasn’t until this passed December that I finally crossed it, metaphorically, off.

Still, I want to distill what I was actually trying to observe–writing a novel is one part of it, following the journey of a character from start to finish in a way that’s readable, entertaining, and engaging is a very rewarding goal. But I think what I was trying to escape at the time from the misery of my one-bedroom underground apartment was my quest for a career. So, it’s never been about just “novels”–it’s more about making a living from my pen. At the time, I was reading a lot of Aphra Behn, and was besotted by the idea of earning my keep from writing. And in the following years, I’ve managed to make a dent in this goal, whether it was abridging classics for kids, being a complete hack on the internet, and publishing the odd poem or two about Johnny Cash. I’m not an artist, and I wouldn’t even call myself an author if anyone asked. I never thought I would make a very good freelancer or magazine writer, although I’ve never pursued either of those options, primarily because I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to fall into a career in publishing over the last decade. I just really like writing. I like characters and pulling out sadness and pushing bad situations to worse and examining the human condition and poor decisions and so on.

I managed, over the course of about three years, to write a solid draft of a very Canadian novel. It was highly flawed and utterly unpublishable. I can see that now, but what it did give me was the courage to keep going. It gave me the idea that I could get to the end of something if I focussed on the process that works for me (I was doing a page a day, rain or shine) and held onto the time. The biggest hurdle was finding the right voice. I’m a natural echo. I am deeply influenced by the written word, by music, and by movies. And so the first book I wrote was super literary, really intense, and completely unbelievable; if you can believe it, I was reading, watching, and listening to super-heavy, intensely artistic, and amazingly gifted art-art at the time. A friend of a friend at work kindly referred me to an agent, who read the book and even more kindly rejected it, and by then I was at the end of my pregnancy, which meant that we were at the beginning of the terrifying journey to bring my son into the world. So, novels were once again put on the back burner.

Fast-forward a couple of years. And I’ve found my confidence again, found the right voice, the right tone, and am plugging away again at something different this time–it’s old-school chicklit, like you’d have read at the beginning of this decade. Think Gemma Townley or Jane Green only edgier because I’m incapable of writing characters who aren’t, at their core, completely messed up for one reason or another. The book is there, and I can see it, the beginning, middle, and end, and I find that if I write the ending, always an afterword of a sorts, I can get TO the end. THE WORK BOYFRIEND had a cute concept, a good conflict, and a resolution at the end that I thought was satisfying.

Starting a business, of any kind, is a challenging endeavour. Even though I’ve been in publishing for a decade now, I knew it would be a challenge to put the book out myself. I’m extraordinarily lucky that I have a business partner with whom I am keenly matched, and I also understand the necessity of certain parts of the process, like copy editing and building a fully functioning epub. In that sense, I’m luckier than a lot of writers who come into this space. Still, the challenges are legion. Just because we work in publishing doesn’t mean that the publishing world will do us any favours. Publishing is, above all, a business. Just because I might have met the editor Globe Books through work at some point, doesn’t change the fact that they don’t review self-published books. And we’re a small two-person company without marketing budgets and have no interest in publishing a physical book. The whole model was something I wanted to try, simply because I’m interested in the differences between how my business does its business vs. how the business could be done outside the business.

So, the book is up–and friends and family have been kind and generous with both their time and their social media space. We have a great cover, and some amazing early reads, with some solid reviews up on Amazon. Now the real work begins. We made the decision not to put the book up exclusively on Amazon, which means our royalty percentage is lower. Kobo’s a big part of the Canadian ebook market, so we spoke to some kind, generous people at Writing Life. And female-driven, romantic-type stories do well on both Apple and Google, from what I’ve seen on their bestseller lists. So we’ve got the positioning down pat. But none of this guarantees the book will be merchandised, and I completely understand that–primarily because, like I said above, the ecosystem of publishing revolves around the fact that it’s a business, and there’s limited space for self-published authors, independents like us, on the homepages of sites like iBooks or Kobo. And the number one way of finding ebook readers, of discovery, is via merchandising.

With merchandising out of the picture, we’ve got to start building up word of mouth and momentum–which isn’t easy. It’s the hard work of find readers, of supplying reading copies, and of asking for favours, which I’ve never really felt comfortable doing. Social media will only take you so far, and a like does not equal a sale. I have wonderful friends and an incredibly supportive family, but they aren’t all ebook readers, and it’s not the same as your aunt heading into the bookstore and buying ten copies of your book because she’s so proud of you… So, it’s interesting. There’s the added issue that there are millions of ebooks on the market, and breaking through is hard–the formula, publish lots, offer your readership something for free, and slowly build an audience is what we’re working towards, but that’s more relevant for romance or, ahem, heavy romance, then the single novel-type novel that I’ve written.

So, the experiment continues. I’m over the panic and worry for the moment, the money that’s out there will trickle back with every copy we’ve sold. Right now we’re sitting at over 50+ copies, which isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. We’ve made about $100.00, which I am incredibly grateful for, and the most profitable copy of the book I sold was emailing the ebook to a friend who bought it directly from me. And I think my experience is very different from what Jowita Bydlowska talked about in the National Post, primarily because the kind of books we’re writing are different, but the struggles are the same–to find an audience, to build up a readership, to make it on your own–it’s akin to the scrappy DIY-nature of most of my life. And I’m staying true to my list, to the distilled goal anyway, of making a living by my pen–even if right now it’s coming in painfully slow drips and drops of $10.00 payments from Amazon.

We’re getting there. I’m now realizing that perhaps I was premature in crossing “write a novel” off my list, because while I might not be an author in the traditional sense, I did find the essence of myself in that list. “Write a novel” wasn’t the end, it was really just the beginning.

The One With The Kilt

Back when my mother was in high school in Mississauga, at Gordon Graydon, she wore a kilt–the one on the attached photo. She’s standing on the far end, next to my grandmother, and both great-grandmothers, with my uncle in front. They lived not far away from where my in-laws live to this day, in the house where my husband grew up. After my mother had her accident, so much of her old clothing ended up folded and away in the closet in our spare room, the sewing room, the one my grandmother would sleep in on the nights she would stay with us if my father was working. I like to think I would have discovered the kilt anyway, would have worn it regardless, because I loved it and wore it all through high school with black tights, liquid eyeliner and big, clunky black shoes. I wore in waiting for the bus in sub-zero temperatures that would meander all around the neighbourhood, eventually picking Katrina up, and we’d spend an hour, even more, in transit to get downtown where we’d walk up and down Queen Street like we knew what we were doing. Oh, that bus ride, it was killer, it took ages and ages, transferring at Square One, which, back then, was just rows and rows of orange-striped buses that were never remotely on time. I wore that kilt out dancing until all hours of the night after Lesley got her license, and we’d end up downtown at RPMĀ  after filling up on Diet Coke and Mars bars, which masqueraded for dinner. I wore that kilt late at night, hanging out with the skinheads at Michael’s with my friend Amanda, terrified at the conversation, and thrilled to be there at all, sipping a tiny class of ridiculously warm and watered down draft, and wondering if it was a good thing that a fellow named Chad had my phone number (it ended up being fine, really thanks to Jay, who bailed me out of so many situations when we were in high school). I wore that kilt rolled up so it would appear shorter, and never dry-cleaned it–wore it until the buckle wore through the leather. Maybe I wore that kilt because it was my mother’s. Wore it because it belonged to her, and I could thread my way back to her, ever so slightly, even though we were not remotely the same size, same build, or even really had the same colouring.

It’s a strange thing to raid the closet of a ghost, in a way. My mother wasn’t there to tell me not to cut down her suede skirt or to how not to royally mess up “sewing” a skirt with this phenomenal black-patterned material she was planning to use. My mother wasn’t there to make sure I took care of her clothes, but I did in my own way, just by pulling them out of their ghost-like status, and breathing new life into them. I forgot to ask my aunt where her family might be going on this occasion. My paternal great-grandmother in her splendid pink outfit with that glorious hat. My uncle’s hair is so tidy. My mother is probably in grade nine or ten here, her hair in a bangs-with-bob style that I wore through much of high school, too. I still have this kilt, tucked away in a box in our basement, yet another reminder of stuff I’m not quite sure what to do with, like my prom dress, which I’ll never part with simply because my grandmother hand-sewed it in places, and it’s still beautiful, to me. Maybe my son will have a daughter, and I can hand her a musty pile of 70s & 80s & 90s clothes for when she’s a teenager striving out on her own to define herself by how she looks instead of what she feels inside–I wanted so badly to be different, never really internalizing the fact that we are all inherently our own snowflake. I remember a bus ride, early on in my time at high school, still reeling from the loss of my mother, still beside myself at the weekends visiting her in the hospital, trying to cope with the sheer weight of the loss of her from our everyday lives, our house so quiet, slowly losing furniture, and never really coming back to life, when I got into a fight with someone about something as asinine as whether or not INXS was better than U2, and then burst into tears. “It’s okay,” someone whispered to someone, “her mother was in a car accident.”

And that became the rallying cry. The only story. The whisper between teachers and parents and other kids who knew me before–the girl whose mother was in a car accident. It explained so much and described so little, a definition beside my name in the dictionary of my life. There’s nowhere to go from there. You can’t explain or push it away, it sits there, lump-like, waiting to be unparsed by legions of therapists over the course of a lifetime. We are nine full years away from having a teenager. Our boy, still giddy with the thought of school, of doing his activities, of learning how to swim, of learning about life, only understands the bits and pieces of what’s come before, and he certainly doesn’t grasp the sadness. There’s a wonderful book by Oliver Jeffers called The Heart and the Bottle. It’s about love and the loss of a parent, and the young girl who closes her heart up in a bottle to survive it all. I read that book to him because I think it comes close to explaining what that kind of loss feels like when you’re a young girl who loses her mother. And I cry a lot when I read it to him. Not big, wet sloppy crying, but just some tears that leak out because that’s sometimes what tears do. They’re there just to remind you that the sadness stays sometimes even when you’ve dealt with the loss, and talked about it, and remembered, and filled up some of the spaces in your life.

I never got to fight with my mother over that kilt. Never got to ask her permission to wear it. I just took it out of her ghost closet and put it on, claimed it for myself, a strike in my individuality column, or so I thought. Maybe she’d have been fine with it. Most likely yes. But she was keeping it for her own reasons I’ll never know. Whether it was to remind her of high school or because she did want me to have it at some point, or because she had a hard time giving old clothes away. And because it’s hers, I have a hard time passing it along too, even though it doesn’t fit me anymore and probably never will again, and I don’t need to look like a school girl anymore, anyway. I can walk down Queen Street and know exactly where I’m going. That’s the gift of growing older, being able to look at how silly you were to brave the frigid temperatures just to visit Pages, but knowing you’d have probably not turned out the way you had if you hadn’t read those books or played those records or raided your mother’s closet.

The other day, I was carrying our boy up the stairs for his bath/bedtime routine. He had the hiccups. He pressed himself to me, monkey-like, as we went upstairs, his “hic hic hic hic” right against my chest. And for a moment, it felt like he was back inside, “hic hic hic hic” was what I felt for almost the entire eight months he was in there. I didn’t know it was possible to be reminded of my pregnancy in such a vivid way–it was pretty great. And I wanted, at that moment, to tell my mom, one of the many things I’ve stored up over the years–put away into stories or tales or hidden way into the hinterland of my subconscious–and ached to be able to let out. Maybe that’s what I’m finally doing here.