Notes From A House Frau XIII

“And I Start to Complain When There’s No Rain”

Today we feel fantastic. We walked a giant loop today — all the way to the butcher’s in another neighbourhood and back again. Just about two hours, the RRBB and I, and he only cried once along the way. On top of that, he’s still sleeping in his bassinet of all places, and not on me, so I am taking advantage and killing items one by one on my to do list like they are a shooting game at the Ex in August. Bam! Checkmark. Bam! Checkmark. Bam!

I saw the kidney doctor this week and my blood work keeps improving. My creatinine is the lowest it has been in months, and there’s something called albumin that was well out of whack, which has also returned to normal. That’s the good news. Of course, because it’s me, there’s also bad news. Once I stop breastfeeding, and both the SFDD and the kidney doctor recommend (or are encouraging me to stop) weaning him at six months, there’s other medication that I’m going to need to start taking. I’d really like to do the entire year but we have to balance the continued health of my kidneys, which are still being damaged, along with still having some high blood pressure, from the preeclampsia.

Apparently, I could have high blood pressure for the rest of my life.

I am not happy about this. In the entire history of my disease, and that’s twenty years of fighting it now, I have never had high blood pressure. So, it seems I have to do all kinds of things to try and regulate it outside of medication: eating better (yeah, right, while on prednisone; give me strength), getting exercise (walking, walking, walking and starting back at the gym in March), and taking supplements (garlic, etc). Once some of the baby/prednisone weight comes off, hopefully it’ll improve too, but the end result is that I’ll have to take something called an “ace inhibitor” for the rest of my life. It’s protects your kidneys from the damage done by too much protein passing or something. They are blood pressure meds. I am disappointed that the preeclampsia has done so much damage and is taking so long to clear up — that it might never clear up is even more upsetting, but what would be worse is losing my kidney function entirely, and ending up either on dialysis or needing a transplant. We don’t need that kind of tragedy, we just don’t.

It’s been a long, long road back. Now that I have some perspective, and am that far away from everything that happened (next Thursday it’s 20 weeks since I was admitted to the hospital), and the baby is a little bit older, the whole world seems, well, less oppressive. Also, I was thinking about how hard winter feels generally — when you have to get up everyday and go out in it, when you don’t have the freedom to curl up on the couch and snuggle with a baby if it’s just too daunting — and usually by this time, I am grumpy, aggressive, angry and really, really tired. Also, I generally go through my days with a giant ball of panic that sits right in the middle of my chest. Panic about work, about getting stuff done, about work politics, about my career (or lack thereof), and when I got my new job, all of that sort of disappeared — sure, it was stressful, but I loved every minute of it.

So, I’m feeling conflicted these days. Now that I am feeling so much healthier, what kind of pressure can I put on myself to be better, to do better, to make better use of my days. A friend came over the other night and I was explaining to her how I feel, some days, like a very typical newish mom. I fill my days with “busy work” because I’m not the sort to sit still, but is this “busy work” worth it — should I still be trying to rest instead of speed balling through to recovery. It’s hard. I’m hard on myself. I set high, lofty goals. I demand a lot, and it’s this pressure that probably caused the disease (among other reasons) in the first place. It seems that I don’t know how to be unless I’ve got the giant, Pilate’s ball-sized stress in my chest.

It’s an unhealthy way to live. I know this. And I don’t put this kind of pressure on anyone else in my life; in fact, just the opposite. I want my friends and family to happy, calm and content. I don’t know why I can’t put the same kind of goals into perspective when it comes to my own life. There’s a part of me that takes everything so personally — that holds on to meaning that’s an impression and not truly a reality. Again, it’s not a healthy way to live. It’s not something I want to impart to my RRBB either, and certainly something that my RRHB finds hard to live with.

But back to the “typical mom” scenario. My RRHB has been doing a play all week with his new musical endeavor, Detroit Time Machine, and so I’ve been with the baby by myself a lot. For the first time in months, this is actually something I can handle. I’m not too sick to do it by myself. In fact, it’s been actually kind of fun. So, we were looking for something to fill our days and I decided we’d head to the mall (“mecca” with a small “m”). I adore the mall. You can take the girl out of the suburbs but sometimes, you can not take the suburbs out of the girl: case in point, Sherway Gardens. It’s just so, lovely.

So, the baby slept and slept and slept, and I refuse to wake him so it was late when we left the house, after 2 PM. I got myself all worked up that there would be traffic and he’d be miserable and maybe we shouldn’t go at all, etc. But he was perfect and only fussed a bit on the way home, slept while I walked around, and all I saw everywhere I looked was other moms — babes unbundled with semi-bored expressions on their faces. Some were even quite haggard (and if you’ve seen my hair, it defines “haggard”). And as I sat down, eating an ice cream cone and just people watching, the giant ball of stress dissipated. I don’t know what happened. I just took some deep breaths and enjoyed the moment.

I know this seems silly — but it’s all a part of how I think I’m changing because of the baby. Yes, I did talk my girlfriend’s ear off when she came over the other night because singing and talking all day to the baby isn’t necessarily conversation. But, I am also enjoying the silence a lot more than I ever have before. I’m enjoying everyday life when it’s not crammed into an already overstuffed weekend. I’m enjoying the new sounds the baby’s making. I’m enjoying the winter. I’m enjoying not working. Don’t get me wrong. I love my job and can’t wait to go back, but I’ve never not worked, and even when I haven’t slept, when the baby’s cranky, when I’m all alone and feeling the pressure of taking care of another life, I’m still more calm than I ever was a year ago. And maybe that’s what’s contributing to making me better too. That and a little retail therapy. It seems I just can’t stop buying soap.

#15 – I Curse The River of Time

Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time remains a novel about endings throughout its elegant telling of Arvid’s final days with his mother, who is dying of stomach cancer. Yet, it’s also a novel of disillusion, of abandon and of deep discontent. At 37, Arvid’s on the cusp of being divorced, and has never truly quite found his place in the world — if my mother were still alive, she would tell me this is a typical novel of someone suffering from “middle child syndrome.” Something she referenced quite often, in jest, when referring to her place in her own family.

Unable to face the fact that his wife, partner, of the last 15 years no longer wants or needs him, Arvid reverts into childish behaviour, following his mother to their summer cabin in Jutland after discovering she’s dying. Interspersed with the awkward and complex time he spends with his mother away from their father and the life they had both known for almost 40 years in Oslo, Arvid’s erratic actions are explored in context of his earlier life — when he was an ardent communist, a factory worker, a member of the peuple — and how his convictions, as well as his strong beliefs, are also changing in lieu of both his age and where he is in his life. There’s a lovely passage near the end of the novel that explains, perhaps, in part, his reluctance to let go of his marriage, of his beliefs, of his relationship with his mother despite the fact that each of these things are willfully being taken away from him:

…but when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant that you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realize that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.

In a way, Petterson’s novel explores the death of communism itself through this character — in his own disillusionment with the fact that it didn’t succeed in Russia, that the wall came down in them middle of the action, and that Arvid has worked for many years, not as a proletariat, but in a lovely bookstore — something that has made him extremely happy. Yet, he can’t let his party platform go, he feels guilt over his own disillusionment with the politics, with his own failure to move forward beyond his university beliefs.

His complex relationship with his mother also underlines all of his actions. When he tells her he won’t be going back to the university because he wants to become a full-time communist, she slaps him — a gesture of frustration over his childish ways, of his inability to fully command his life in an adult way, of never being quite “old enough” but always being “too old” in her eyes.

This rich, complex relationship, as are many situations between mothers and sons, underlines everything that Arvid does in life. He can’t seem to get her attention in the same way as his other three brothers, one of whom died tragically. She tells her best friend, Hansen, that he’s not entirely a grown up, and this is tragically reflected in his actions towards the end of the novel when it becomes glaringly apparent that she won’t live much longer. And still, Arvid’s almost selfish ways impinge upon the way his mother chooses to live out the end of her life — it’s his divorce, his troubles, his lack of understanding why his world falls apart around him, that is the most tragic aspect of the novel.

Yet, Arvid’s unhappiness, his inability to truly move beyond the earlier parts of his life that have consistently defined him, even loosely, remain grounded in a very real, very cognizant sense of place within the novel. Petterson dutifully explains Arvid’s routes, where he walks, how he drives, the churning of the sea as he crosses the passage to his mother’s summer home. All of the very real places one goes in one’s life — the train to work, the roads the flat sits above, the myriad of things that happens on the way somewhere (a man having a fit, a neighbour on a bicycle). To force the reader to realize, I think, in a way, that even if Arvid can’t come to terms with his life, like the passage above illustrates, his life simply goes on anyway, even if your wife doesn’t love you anymore, even if your mother is dying, even if the wall comes down.

Overall, it’s a brilliant novel, it sort of reminded me of Mothers and Sons, even though those were short stories, in the exploration of the relationship — but it’s more a book about a mid-life crisis, not your typical “bucket list” bullsh*t, but a very real crisis of consciousness when everything that you once stood for, that you felt worth saving, that you felt worth protecting, has changed and you haven’t. And you simply can’t understand why the you that was the same last week isn’t quite right for this one.

It certainly makes you think.

READING CHALLENGES: I already have a Norwegian entry for 52 Books, and I didn’t even take this off the shelf, so that’s zip for the reading challenges. But yay! to #15, I guess?

Notes From A House Frau XII

I Have Always Slept With The Door Open

This is how I spend much of my days. Dressed in scrubby pajama-like clothes, hair — a complete disaster, some sort of food or other mess stuck to my forehead, and a baby on my lap. Usually he’s sprawled out on My Breast Friend, the awesome-est breast feeding pillow of all time, or on my elephant pillow that Sam gave me for upstairs, as I am either playing Scrabble on the iPad or reading. If you can believe it, we had company over this day. Yes, this is me “dressed” for company. I have owned that stolen sweatshirt for many, many years… it’s actually embarrassing how old it is, which made me think a lot about what I wanted to write today: musings on the subject of permanence.

I know the above state is not permanent. That the baby won’t always want or need to fall asleep on me or will even be an infant for much longer. The time goes by so fast. He’s already 16 weeks, and will reach his 4-month birthday in about ten days. So, he’s ever-changing. Whether it’s a new sound he makes or a funny thing he does, it’s delightful to see his personality emerge. He’s an extremely happy baby. He maybe cries/fusses for about 15 minutes a day and usually only when he’s overtired, so if we can catch him on the wave into exhaustion, he doesn’t cry at all but does demand A LOT of soothing before crashing into sleep either on me or my RRHB, as noted above.

But when I was lying on the massage table after restorative yoga yesterday, and the RMT was pulverizing my back to try and get at the massive knots, she said that the best way to combat the muscle issues was to drink more water, get exercise and stretch it out. In my head, I thought, “And when does one have time to do ALL of that?” Plus, blogging, plus walking, plus taking a shower. Her actual words were: “I know having a baby can sometimes be time consuming…but…” And then I asked the dreaded question, “Do you have kids?” “No,” she replied, “I have friends that do.”

And therein lies the ultimate dichotomy: the complete disconnect between how much time — and I am surely at fault here for my own misconceptions before having RRBB (I am not just being critical) — a baby takes up in your life at this stage. The 2.5 hours I spent at yoga and getting a massage were the ONLY moments I have been away from the baby (with the help of the RRHB) in a week, since the last time I went to restorative. And next week, because my RRHB is doing a play, I will be taking the baby with me to yoga, and as well the week after that because he’s back doing some work. I’m even taking the baby to see the kidney doctor on Monday. I have no choice. And this is the permanence I have been thinking about for the last couple days.

Way back in the way back, when I used to be friends with a woman who once dated my RRHB, they were discussing kids. Keep in mind, we’ve been together for almost 13 years so this is a long, long time ago, and I’ve known my husband since I was 15. Annnywaaay, this woman said that it’s no big deal to have a baby in your life, you just mold them into what already exists, the change isn’t that drastic. This was the argument she was using to try and convince him, at 25 or so, to have a child with her. He didn’t buy it. And I am completely admitting my own ignorance. I thought the same thing. That they were like cute little bits of baggage, dress them up, pack them neatly, and cart them off. Yet, despite how utterly portable RRBB is at this age, that doesn’t mean that the change to our lives is anything less that completely and utterly drastic, and, yes, permanent.

Yet, the idea of swift, permanent change isn’t unfamiliar in my life. My mother’s accident when I was fourteen; disease at nineteen, multiple job losses over the years; etc. I know how to respond to tragedy. It’s almost always in the vein of Keep Calm and Carry On, push it all down, deal with it later, one day in front of the other, victory garden kind of stuff. I am strong, apparently, a “defeater of death” as one friend commented via email the other day, and it shows in especially hard situations. I can handle just about everything. Funny how all it takes is a wee, little 13-odd pound cutie-patootie to break me. And break me often. The disease didn’t kill me. Losing my mother didn’t kill me. All the other tragedy in my life only served to make me introspective and feed the desire to write novels where everyone dies in extremely horrific ways — novels that will probably never get published. But the baby, wow, that’s change on a whole other level that I was not remotely prepared for.

If he’s tired, cranky, can’t sleep, can’t be soothed, has an injury, anything out of the ordinary (he had a rash the other day), and I go bonkers. I worry non-stop about it, can’t stop talking about it, wonder how much I’m doing wrong on a daily basis, and honestly turn myself inside out until I am a little blurry around the edges — you know, like that camera lens they use to make older actresses all soft and wispy. Even my mother-in-law has laughed and told me that I need to temper the worry a little. And she raised my RRHB who climbed the antenna of their house at 2 years of age, walked at 9 months, and rolled over at a week (a week!).

I suppose what’s missing from this scenario, as compared to everything else I’ve dealt with in my life, would have to be the idea of tragedy. There’s nothing tragic about our son with the exception of how he came into the world, in the sense that giving birth to him almost killed me, and we pretty much celebrate everything about him. It’s a sense of happy contentment I have never known — staring at him as he sleeps on me for the seventh hour in a day is very different from lying in bed crying because you miss your mother so much even your teeth ache from the loss. They are both permanent. I will never get my life back exactly as it was pre-baby. My kidneys will never work as well. My body is forever changed (have you heard me complain about the awful stretch marks, seriously, I look like a tiger). My mind never strays far from him. I think of so much in relation to him that one would think I was the only person in the world to ever have a child (how ridiculous is that?). It’s all new for me, a new kind of coping, one where there are still plenty of tears, because, hormones. But I can laugh at myself a lot more now. I am trying to take things less seriously, less personally, because those are skills I want to impart to the baby.

Mainly, I don’t want him to know the “me” before him, in a sense. I want him to know the me that celebrates his existence in my life, the person I’m evolving to because we had him — there are things that I have come to know, about the idea of happiness, about what I need in my life, about the choices I’ve made, that are all a direct result of being pregnant, going through the whole WG attack, and coming out the other side. Yes, I am even stronger now, I suppose, which is actually kind of irrelevant. What’s more relevant is how permanently and fundamentally different I am now. How permanently different our lives are now. We make decisions because of him, for him, around him, and that’s okay. It’s not just about us, even though the “us” that existed before (and that we had a glimpse of the other night when we went to see a band at Lee’s Palace; twenty years I’ve been going there, sneaking in before I was of age, sneaking out well after) needs also to evolve, it’s definitely a richer, broader existence.

We were looking for ways to expand our lives before the RRBB was even an accident waiting to happen. We were thinking of moving to the UK for a year, just to live somewhere else, swapping houses with another couple thinking of doing the same. My RRHB has been constantly evaluating what kind of work he’d like to do beyond the music, and needed time to explore his interests, and decide whether or not that involved going back to school. Funny how life sometimes decides things for you: the disease made me focus more on writing, on books, things that I had always loved but never imagined would turn into a career; losing my mother made me self-sufficient in ways that I wish I didn’t have to learn but did; the baby has opened up my life and my concept of happiness in ways I never imagined or expected. All of these things are permanent. All of these things are drastic. All of these things are worth considering. All of these things make me who I am — and even if I feel a little lost these days, there are anchors there that I never knew existed, and I am sure, even in a fit of hormone-induced tears, half-naked on the couch, exhausted, I am quite convinced that I won’t float away.

I wasn’t so sure a month ago.

#14 – Emma

When I was younger, much younger, the first time I went to university, I sort of decided that “old” books weren’t worth studying. I did my whole English degree trying to avoid anything remotely written before the 21st century. It wasn’t easy. I think I had to do a Romantics and a Victorian class, along with Shakespeare, but I filled every elective with Post-Colonial, American, Modern British, anything to avoid what I perceived to be “boring” books.

No one ever said I was particularly smart in my youth.

But what it means is that I haven’t read all of Jane Austen. I’ve barely scratched the surface of some of the best work in the English language, actually. And it’s a good time of my life, two degrees later, working in publishing, to be reading these books for the 1001 Books list. So, in my quest for alphabetical order in my off the shelf reading, Emma came up first.

We all know the story: Emma Woodhouse makes all kinds of matchmaking mistakes, often puts her foot in her mouth, gets jealous, and sometimes becomes a person she doesn’t like very much. Emma takes the young, impressionable, yet pretty, Harriet under her wing (a girl with lesser prospects and an unknown lineage) and finding her a suitable husband (first Mr. Elton, then Mr. Churchill, then, disaster when Harriet falls for Mr. Knightley and Emma is not particularly pleased with this turn of events) becomes her goal. Throw in a little petty jealousy when the talented and accomplished Miss Jane Fairfax arrives on the scene and there’s plenty of picnics and parties to entertain the romantic in everyone. Of course, there’s a happy ending, and much emotional development upon Emma’s part. In a way, it’s a little bit of a coming of age novel — as we watch Emma develop from girl to woman.

Any critical analysis of the novel on my part would be ridiculous, I’m sure there’s nothing I can add to the conversation. We live in a society that’s already Austen-obsessed: There are mugs (of which I own four), multiple movies, numerous (far inferior) books, and a whole host of ivory tower work surrounding her life and her novels. But I will say this, from a format perspective, in terms of pacing, humour, theme, and depth of character, Austen certainly defined the novel for, well, just about every novelist to come after her writing in this genre. The more I read, the more I am astounded at the depth of her structure, how it perfectly suits the characters, and reaches a conclusion, while completely predictable only because I’ve seen Clueless about a half-dozen times, that made me smile.

I read in the introduction that Jane Austen, while writing Emma, that she was creating a character that people wouldn’t like very much — and I heartily disagree. I loved Emma, couldn’t stand Mrs. Elton (as I am sure I was supposed to), and thought that Jane Fairfax should just come clean already — she’d feel so much better. See, how you just get caught up in them like they’re real people? Sigh. So, I’ve got two more Austens on my shelf, so by the time I get back to the 1001 Books section, I’ll have two more delightful reads before I get into the real down and dirty stuff that I’ve been avoiding reading for years (like Murakami — I honestly have zero desire to read Murakami, but it’s on my shelves and I will at least attempt it. But, luckily, it’s in the “M’s” so it’ll take me months to get there. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the first letter of the alphabet on any shelf).

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m reading the new Per Petterson, I know, it’s out of order, but I’ve got to read the books sent to me from the publishers — they do get priority. Then I’ll be back on my Canadian “A’s”, which I think is a novel by Jason Anderson from ECW.

#13 – This Cake Is For The Party

One very good lesson for life: One should not read any other books whilst one is reading Emma by Jane Austen. They will all pale by comparison. So, it’s unfair to This Cake is for the Party that I had to stop at page 258 in Emma for a couple of hours to read Sarah Selecky’s short story collection for my book club.

This is not your average book club, just let me state that for a fact. I swore up and down, left and right, to hell and back, that I would never, ever join another book club. It’s not that I didn’t like my first book club experience. Let me just say it wasn’t for me. The ladies were lovely people. But they weren’t book people. It’s important for book people to be in clubs with other like-minded book people. They don’t have to all like the same books, they just need to read the books, want to talk about the books, want to talk about what works within the books and what doesn’t. My first book club didn’t do this — we had a blow job class once, that’s how far we fell. And I judged. And then I ruined that book club with one drunken night a club and some misheard gossip. Oh yes, but that’s not a story for the internet. Like I said, lovely people, but now, my new club, The Vicious Circle, is full of delicious, delightful, delectable, defined book people. We talk books non-stop. I feel like I am swimming with my own school for once; it’s an important feeling. Books are important. They start with words on a page; it’s only fitting that people use words to critique, enjoy, discuss, etc.

Annnywaay, so, long story short, we read This Cake is for the Party this month. Now, I don’t read a lot of short story collections. I tend to only go back to them if I’ve read a novel by an author I fall in love with and then double back to read earlier material. Case in point: Tim Winton. Or if the collection is written by Alice Munro, because, well, it’s Alice Munro. But we’ve been reading a lot of short story collections for book club — last month it was Jessica Grant, this month it’s Selecky, and next month we are reading Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting. I will freely admit that half-way through the meeting last night, I did say, “Can we then read a novel please?” It’s not that I don’t appreciate the art form — it’s that I expect a lot from it. The stories must have guts, be whole, feel intensely, and travel a long way from start to finish. These are high standards. But if you don’t have high standards, what’s the point?

Did Selecky‘s collection pull its weight? Not entirely. I’m being perfectly, perfectly honest now — I would have never read this book were it not short listed for the Giller prize nor a selection for my book club. And even after dedicated two solid hours to it, and saying out loud to my RRHB as I read feverishly while the RRBB took an abnormally long nap in his bed, I did like it overall. A couple of the stories truly broke my heart — especially “Where Are You Coming From Sweetheart,” which is about a teenage, motherless girl having trouble with her father’s completely inadequate parenting skills. She desperately wants to escape Sudbury and live with her aunt Juicy (LOVE aunt Juicy) and her cousin in Mississauga, where she wouldn’t have to stalk local parks for empty beer bottles and water her father’s growing collection of half-dead plants. There’s an ache to this story that so accurately reflects what it’s like to be in a house post-tragedy and it resonated with me personally for reasons I don’t have to repeat here.

The other story that blew my mind, that had the guts I so search out in a short story collection, was “Paul Farenbacher’s Yard Sale.” Meredith, neighbour of Paul Farenbacher, starts the story calm, cool and collected as the widow of the story’s namesake clears out her house after the death of her spouse. There’s anger, resentment, and a wonderful, wonderful scene at the end that I won’t spoil because it is delicious.

Lastly, there’s a delicious ending to the second story in the collection, “Watching Atlas,” that I wished more of the less strong pieces emulated. Often, I felt like the stories just ended for the sake of ending and, in the format, I truly believe that endings are even more important than beginnings.

But then, a lot of the stories feel too poised, they feel like they’ve been written and re-written, and there’s one in epistolary format that didn’t work for me at all. The other story that I really had trouble with was “One Thousand Wax Buddhas.” There was the use of the second person. And this isn’t something I can hold against Selecky. It’s important to play with form to get to the heart of your characters, to push your writing to another level, but I really hate the second person. Again, this is a personal opinion. I also am not entirely fond of “quirky” for the sake of “plot” — when characters have “quirks” that stand in for actual action — which is a point that came up last night.

She’s a polished writer, and there were some lines in this collection that were undeniably amazing. I earmarked about a half-dozen pages throughout, and even read a couple passages over because I liked them so much. There’s also a coherence to this collection that was missing from Jessica Grant’s book, these stories fit together even though they aren’t linked, but Selecky needs to rely less on her own devices (lots of extra-marital sex [what is it with affairs and books for me these days]; plenty of hippies making work in their basements and other places in their houses; and male voices that weren’t 100% believable). In a way, I felt these characters all needed to get out and live more — but that’s just me.

So, overall, my review of the book is mixed. Yes, I liked it. Yes, there were some truly great bits of prose. Yes, there were two or three stories that made me stand up and shout. And then there were some that weren’t on the same level as the others, for me. I think it’s important to read writers and read first books, to support the new generation of Canadian writers, and Selecky does that herself by teaching creative writing. But I got the sense that she has spent a lot of time with these stories. I am curious, now, to see what she’ll write next, or to see what she’ll publish less, if it’ll be more stories or a longer piece of fiction. But, regardless, I am hooked. I will happily read whatever she does next.

It’s Jane Austen’s World: We Just Live In It

From Emma:

“Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of the drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly through — and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very neatly arranged — sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen — I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time, and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with any steady course of reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding…”

As Mr. Knightley explains why Emma should not necessarily become good friends with Harriet, about page 26.

Notes From A House Frau XI

What A Difference A Day Makes

I saw the SFDD today, and what a difference a couple of weeks makes. The meds have been in my system for longer, and the disease is finally, FINALLY starting to respond. My kidney function is still elevated, but that could be damage from the pregnancy and the preeclampsia — I just have to accept the fact that things will not go back to my “normal.” As as my wise, wise RRHB said last night when I was a little teary crying, “I just want to feel like myself again,” “But you aren’t your old self, you’re a mother now, too.”

So often, I am concentrating on the things that I’ve lost — my health, my brain, my freedom, and not resenting the losses, per se, but learning how to adapt to this new life is taking a bit longer than I’d imagined it would. I’ve been reading a lot of interesting “mom” articles lately, and for the most part, they infuriate me. Case in point: “And Baby Makes Three…” and here’s where it all starts to fall down for me:

It’s nothing short of impressive, the way these new mothers embrace their changing bodies as a home for baby to grow in and feed from. The way that they innately know what their baby needs and can recognize the meaning behind every sound or gesture and can usually provide what’s needed to soothe them.

While this isn’t an incorrect observation, what the author fails to realize is the hours spent listening to your child wail, the many different ways of bouncing, rocking, walking, talking, feeding, feeding some more, and feeding some more before a mere piece of the puzzle — how to separate a “tired” cry from a “hungry” cry — reveals itself only to change radically the next day as your RRBB’s brain changes from, literally one day to the next.

For me, this is just filler content. Why even write this article if you don’t have anything remotely remarkable to say? Why capitalize on a cutsie, overdone, cliched head to go on to say how remarkable new moms are? I know I’m being harsh — but I think this piece would have been a lot more effective had the blogger job shadowed a new mom for an entire 24-hour period versus dropping in via Auntie mode, which, I too, mistakenly thought having a full-time baby would simply be an extension of.

And then I read Katrina Onstad’s piece in the Style section about how Spanx now has maternity options and threw up a little in my mouth. Pregnancy ravishes your body enough — I’ve gained weight that I can’t lose because of the prednisone, have stretch marks that are truly, truly awful, a c-section scar, and a pooch. I can’t imagine the damage you’re doing by forcing your body to not look pregnant — how does the baby move around? Hell, you aren’t even supposed to wear tight clothing when you’re pregnant; it’s ridiculously uncomfortable anyway. Shouldn’t we be allowed to let it all hang out when we’re growing a person inside of us? I mean, it’s hard enough to let go of the vanity (I truly did love my trim waist and my smooth, pretty stomach; all that has disappeared for now) after you give birth but to be “fashionable” by squishing down your baby bump? What is the world coming to?

And then we come to the all consuming topic of happiness. My goal in life has never been to “be” happy — but to understand happiness in relation to the truly tragic aspects of my life. Happiness isn’t a goal, it’s not something to be achieved for me, it’s something to be understood — it can’t be an item on a to do list, it takes hard work to understand yourself, to know what gives you pleasure, to avoid what gives you pain, and to realize that if you put “be happy” as a goal, you are automatically setting yourself up for failure. I was bombarded with “happiness” last week — Oprah had Goldie Hawn (wha?), a so-called expert, on her show, and it made me think a lot about the years I spent in therapy saying, “but I just want to be happy” without truly understanding that it’s as much a philosophical construct as it is a smile on your face. My goal in getting through these first few weeks of parenthood has never been happiness — my goal, as a good friend says, has been to keep my child alive, maybe, just maybe, have them thrive a little bit. The cult of Oprah’s a bit much these days — from the vegan challenge (been there, done that, um, last year) to the pale attempt to trivialize a very real, and very complex human condition (to Gretchen Rubin it, I’d say), and yet, I just can’t stop watching it.

Anyway, what is my point. I must have one. Yes. In my life I have always wanted to have children, whether they were mine or adopted, whether they were my nephews or nieces, I love having them in my life. And just when I had accepted the fact that we weren’t going to have any of our own for various reasons — the main one being the very real toll it could take on my health — I had actually, for the first time in my life, moved on. And then, surprise! We’re pregnant and 36 weeks later, we’re parents. And in between I spent three weeks in the hospital fighting for my life cursing the doctors that told me everything would be okay when, seriously, everything was simply not okay. Not okay.

But now, things seem to be coming back in line, and I can take a step back from “coping” with everything that happened to “enjoying” what’s going on now. I’m not going to say that articles like “When Baby Makes Three…” don’t completely trivialize how drastically and never-endingly parenthood changes your life; instead, I’m just going to giggle a little at their naivety. At my own naivety — I too once truly believed that being married and having a baby would equal “happiness.” That I cried and cried because those things, because of the disease (not the marriage part, natch), were denied to me like so much else in my life (was I ever REALLY going to be a modern dancer, probably not, so it’s okay that the disease destroyed my hip). When really, what it’s all about is finding a way to a different, newer, you — like my RRHB said, I’m never going to be the same “me” that I was 17 weeks ago when I went into the hospital, so why feel bad about it? Why worry about it? Why struggle with it? Why not let myself evolve along with the RRBB and see who comes out at the end — maybe she’s happy, maybe not, but one thing I do understand is that it’s not as easy as taking a quiz or writing some bland pap about how majestic your “mom” friends are (mine are awesome; don’t get me wrong). I am not a “yummy” mommy. I’ve got grey hair and loads of stretch marks. I have a “moon face” from the meds. But I can still make my RRBB smile like there’s no tomorrow — and there is bliss there, I don’t need Oprah to tell me that.

And seriously, we need real dialogue about what happens to us, to our bodies, to our marriages, to our lives, to our health. We don’t need a Hollywood fantasy or “perfect” moms or the pressure to do it all “right” or the heavy, heavy weight of “happiness” making it all harder to get through the day-to-day. Sometimes, all we need is an organic lollipop and a cup of tea, maybe a cookie — a couple of deep breaths, a good book and the time and space to write a few words. See, I’m starting to know this new me, she does look a little like the old me, just turned a couple of degrees to the south.

#12 – Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus is an assured and impressive debut from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: what a difference between it and the other first novel that I just finished reading, The Very Thought of You. There are none of the first novel jitters in Adichie’s work: the plot and pacing are excellent; the story crescendos at exactly the right moment, her prose is bright, lively and interesting; and, layers upon layers of fascinating observations exist between the essence of “family” and the breakdown of the “state” as Nigeria becomes subjected to a military coup.

Kambili and her brother Jaja, along with their mother, Beatrice, live in constant fear of their father, Eugene, a complex, difficult and deeply religious man. His Catholic faith sustains him, but it also represses his family, creates a power vacuum, and ultimately results in some of the most gut-wrenching violence (not related to a crime novel) I’ve read in a long, long time. Eugene rules his household with an iron fist, one clasped entirely to a rosary, and when his wife or children stray — whether it’s to talk to or see their “heathen” grandfather or to not become first in their class — the consequences are dire. The children, aged 15 and 17, live in constant fear of their father’s fists, his belt, his whip, and there’s no telling exactly what will set him off. Set against his rigid rules and regulations, Kambili and her brother find a few weeks of freedom when they go to visit their aunt, Eugene’s sister, Ifeoma. The time they spend with her changes them forever.

The backdrop of the family drama is set against a military coup happening in Nigeria. It’s fascinating that Eugene, so brave (he runs a newspaper as well as owns a number of factories that make food) in his intentions to resist the powers of the regime. He refuses to bribe the police officers, sends his newspaper editor into hiding, and remains incredible generous to the people who work for him. Yet, when it comes to his family, he simply can not see that subjecting them to the extreme Catholic values that he believes, in his heart, will save his and their souls, through the violence and an extreme restriction of their basic human rights echoes the very nature of dictatorship. I think this dichotomy, for me, strikes a cord that resonates throughout the entire novel.

Kambili can’t speak without stuttering, doesn’t smile, lives in constant fear of her father’s punishment, but she also loves him, as a daughter would. Her father’s violence whether it’s towards her, her brother or her mother, is simply another facet of everyday life. In a sense, I think this is why her voice feels so much younger than 15 — she’s suspended in a strange, awkward childhood, and only begins to blossom when she stays with her aunt and sees how normal teenage girls act. Kambili’s a lovely character — bright, intense, open, honest — and when you feel her father’s blows upon her back, you want to cry out for her to run away, to fight back, and when she finally does, it’s a revelation.

There’s so much to love about this novel, the setting, the way Adichie uses traditional language, the explanations of food, of their daily lives, and the rich landscape soiled, in a way, by the corruption that’s all around. Violence, at home or by the state, is an everyday part of life, yet Kambili can still see the beauty in a simple, special purple hibiscus. It’s an impressive thing to not have your spirit broken — something I admire intensely about this book, and something that I strive for in my own everyday life. And even when things are truly, truly horrible, there’s still a goodness in Kambili that can’t be broken, scarred maybe, but even those find a way to heal eventually.

READING CHALLENGES: Around the World (Nigeria) and Off the Shelf.

WHAT’S NEXT: I’m on “A” from my 1001 Books shelf, so I started reading Emma this morning. I love that I have spread out the Austen to read in my lifetime. I would be sad if I had already read them all. I’m exited I still have three to go.

Notes From A House Frau X

The World Is Constantly In Motion

The most surprising part of the last week or so is how magical the transformation is from “newborn” to “baby.” RRBB’s so much more active, especially when he’s sleeping — slurping and sucking on his hands, snorting, kicking off his covers, and somewhat trying to teach himself how to soothe himself, if not to sleep, then back to sleep, which I’ll take at the moment.

And like he’s constantly in motion, I, too, am in flux: up and down and up and down go the test results, which simply signals the need for more blood work, and more peeing into jugs. It’s so undignified. No one likes peeing in jugs, I swear, and the things that doctors need are never the things that the patients need. In fact, we’re more like babies than anything — we need comfort, hugs, calm words, patient hands. The other day in the doctor’s office, my SFDD took off my boots for me while I was on the examining table, just like a father would do to a five-year-old, and it was oddly comforting. And then, we saw my SFDD in the market the other day when we were grocery shopping. He’s such a very kind and gentle man — he stopped to talk to us quickly and cooed at the baby, commenting, like so many people do who know me better than they know my RRHB, that he looks the perfect picture of me.

So funny, people who know us both can’t stop talking about how he’s the spitting image of my RRHB, which is what I think; people who know me better all say the baby looks so much like me. In a sense, you see what you’re familiar with, making the baby different in the eyes of each that see him. I like that — different people seeing different things in my son (my son!) in terms of how they know me and his father, it’s nice.

The prednisone seems to be charging ahead with some obsessive/compulsive side effects these days. While I’m definitely sleeping more, thanks to an older baby and a very supportive RRHB, strange things are occupying my mind: a never-ending to do list that has items like “back closet books” and “file 2010 paperwork.” Longstanding, rolling items that are not remotely practical when you have a 15-week old baby. But the boxes and boxes of books in my house are no longer the sentimental mementos they once were — they are out of order, out of space, and lost in a time when words didn’t necessarily mean more to me, they just had more permanence.

I don’t need to keep every single book I read any longer. I am more mature as a reader — I know certain things about myself: I don’t reread; I like to get through a book every couple of days; I work in publishing and see A LOT of books; I can remember a lot even though I read quickly but passionately (slow reading, pffft); and I’d much rather pass along the book to someone else who might enjoy it than have to dust it for the next twenty years. That’s not to say I don’t keep certain books, I do, like On the Road and other books that I’d consider my favourites; lovely coffee table books, cookbooks, but we only have so much space, and it seems that all the words are weighing heavily on my mind these days. Maybe it’s because I have such limited time to string my own words together and maybe it’s because I have lost so many words too.

I find myself unable to finish so many thoughts. I’ll start to say something and drift right off. It’s impossible to do two things at once. I’ve been playing loads of Scrabble just to make sure my brain still works at a basic level. You take words for granted when you use them in a social situation every day. Sometimes, I even forget to talk to the baby, I just think he knows what I’m thinking by some magical baby-mother osmosis. And then I’ll snap out of it and start rhyming, making up silly songs, thinking that I’ve got a children’s book in me (doesn’t every mother think that? aren’t we all just so very wrong?): “I love you like the air loves the trees; I love you like the flowers love the bees; I love you…” you get the idea, right? More often than not, my RRHB has to say, “Use your words,” when I trail off yet again inexplicably in the middle of a thought, “can you pass me the, um, thing…”

We are going out this Friday night for the first time as couple since the baby was born WITHOUT the baby. My cousins are babysitting. I love the fact that our RRBB has a cousin who is about three weeks older than he is, my mind is full of all the fun the pair of them will have at the cottage, maybe not this summer because they’ll still be a bit too young to explore the forest or find salamanders in the swamps, but in the upcoming years, they’ll grow up as we did, and despite all of the truly tragic things that happened to me in my youth: my mother’s accident, my disease, all the family troubles, we, my two cousins, brother and I, had an idyllic childhood at the cottage. For now, they’ll have to be satisfied with knowing each other as baby friends, sleeping in the same crib and going to Stars and Strollers together.

Seeing, actively seeing and raising, the next generation forces you to come to terms with a lot of things that you maybe forgot. When I was out at my dad’s the other day going through all my old childrens books, I found Rupert. The first thing I did was open it up and smell it — the scent of the book as strong in its memories for me as the story. The idea that portions of my childhood have lasted so very long with me resonates in how I want to raise our boy. But it also resonates with me how little of his memories I’ll be able to control — what he remembers, how he remembers, what he holds with him into adulthood. I guess all we can hope is that we don’t screw him up too badly. And on that note, he’s fussing, and needs a cuddle.

Don’t we all?

#11 – The Very Thought Of You

When I got the British/Irish/Scottish section of my shelves, the book that came up first was Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You. At the time, I couldn’t remember a) why I had this book in the first place or b) where it came from. Most of the books on my shelves are from various jobs I’ve had, things I’ve traded with friends at other publishers, blogger review copies, you get the idea. But this novel was a rarity, something I actually bought. I think I was trying to read all of the Orange Prize novels for some challenge I had invented for myself, or something.

Annnywaay, I was ultimately disappointed in this book, and found myself, more often than not, rolling my eyes at her prose and complaining, loudly, to my husband about how melodramatic and often nonsensical the book was as I was reading it yesterday while we were playing Scrabble on the iPad as the RRBB slept (you get a pattern here… a LOT of reading goes on while the RRBB sleeps these last few days). The story of a young girl evacuated from London at the start of the Second World War, The Very Thought of You simply tries too hard to capture the essence of the time and place. The novel opens promisingly — echoes of The Remains of the Day float through the book as it describes the fall of the house of Ashton, whose last remaining heir, Thomas, had just died leaving the house to the National Trust and its inevitable treasures up for auction.

Thomas, and his wife Elizabeth, opened their home to 80-odd boys and girls during the war. With his body destroyed by polio, and the remaining members of his family dead, Thomas and his wife, Elizabeth, who is, natch, beautiful but damaged, find solace in children roaming the halls and playing outside while the war rages around them. Anna Sands, a quiet, contemplative child, misses her mother desperately but finds her way at Ashton Park. The girl gets drawn into the complex adult relationships between the Ashtons and the various other people embroiled in their unhappiness.

There are way, way too many characters in this book, and much of the narrative consists of awkward, cliched prose that melodramatically describes not only the failing relationship between the main characters, but also the multiple extra-marital affairs that seem to happen all over the place. No one is happily married in Alison’s novel, and it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The story could have been simpler, the prose more direct, and then I could actually understand its inclusion on the Orange Prize longlist last year.

The author does an exceptional job of getting into the mind of Anna as a child, but then falls down by dragging the reader through the rest of her life in a Titanic-like moment that feels very put upon as an ending. There’s no doubt that Alison has talent, but the novel suffers from a lack of true perspective, it tries too hard, which ends up meaning a lot of it just isn’t believable. There’s a point where too much tragedy between the pages simply becomes too much tragedy. I felt something similar when watching The Company Men last week at Stars and Strollers. Sometimes, the reader just needs a break from all awful things humans can do to one another, they need to actually love their partners, and someone, somewhere needs to find a bit of happiness, even if it’s only for a moment. I’m not saying that Alison’s characters don’t — I’m just saying that it’s all a bit overdone.

London during the war is a fascinating subject for me. One of my favourites to read about, and the idea of the novel works, as does its basic plot — but there were two secondary characters, Norton, a diplomat with whom Thomas Ashton worked, and his wife Peter, whose lives would have made for a far more interesting novel than the sappy “love gone wrong” and then “love lost forever” storyline occupied by the Ashtons, the two main adult characters. It’s a shame when one gets to the end of a book and all one has to say for it is, “well, I’m glad that’s done.” And considering the other Orange Prize nominees, including Barbara Kingsolver’s exceptional The Lacuna, I’m surprised that the panel included this book at all. However, despite Alison’s first novel jitters (overwritten sentences, the tendency to say something, then repeat it just in case the reader didn’t get it the first time, introducing bucketloads of characters that never appear again, the need to tell the WHOLE story), I’m curious to see how she matures as a writer. I’m sure her next novel will straighten out some of the above and what great exposure for an up-and-coming writer regardless of how I ended up feeling about the book.