#52 – The Marriage Plot

The commentary that floats around the interwebs by some genre writers, okay, well, Jennifer Weiner in particular, about how novels by literary writers about subjects like love and family are treated much differently than when they are written by commercial authors. At its heart, The Marriage Plot, is a novel about a love triangle set in the early 80s at a very prestigious university (among other places). But it’s also so much more in terms of the themes that flow through the narrative–the implications of modern feminism, the quest for a more spiritual existence, the difficult and very trying reality of coping with a loved one with mental illness, they all meld and blend together as Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell graduate from college and start their lives.

Eugenides is an exceptional writer, but what’s more, he’s an exceptional novelist–the book is complete with rich, full characters who are both flawed and intensely drawn, which, when coupled with his gift for storytelling, makes for a novel that rips along. I couldn’t put it down and to say that I read it in one fell swoop while caring for a toddler–at the cottage–well, that’s dedication.

There’s a spark to the narrative that’s almost cinegraphic, whether it’s Eugenides contextualizing the time and place where the book takes place, or simply describing a house party where a piece of major action happens, the story rips along at a pace that I couldn’t match. I read this book as fast as possible, in almost one sitting (as much as one can sit with a toddler who needs to eat, be changed, be entertained), and enjoyed every minute of it. It was honestly the most enjoyable novel I’ve read all year.

Mommy, Daddy, RRBB Make Three = Family

My husband, with his ever-delightful voice, sings a variety of made up songs to our son. “Mommy, Daddy, RRBB, that is our family. Mommy, Daddy, RRBB, that is our family. Mommy, Daddy, RRBB make three, and that is what we call a family.” And they get stuck in your head. For days. Which is infinitely better than having the theme from Mighty Machines rolling over and over in your brain at all hours of the night–I’ve been there too. The cottage is amazing but I’m kind of thankful that it’s closed up for the season. All the driving, all the doing, all the toddler-management, all of the panic of getting there and getting home–it’s a lot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s worth it, just for the sunshine and the swimming alone, but I’m ever-so tired these days. A familiar refrain, yes, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

So. The last few weeks have come and gone. I’ve slept and not slept. I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve discovered that the key to surviving either is a nap and a good cry. I’ve pretty much given up reading novels at the moment. My brain simply can’t compute, or I’m not particularly inspired to say or do anything. I’m spent. In the truest sense of the word. That said, I did have a good spell of writing this week, it’s not particularly good, but at least I did it. Time moves forward. I’m stuck. Another week goes by, I get nothing done except surviving. The pattern defeats me.

We have, however, done a world of fun family things over the last few weekends. Days that have left my little boy wrangy and exhausted from fun–days that I know he might not remember but I will, and even thinking about it now cracks me up. The High Park Zoo and his now obsession with Highland Cattle. Springview Farms and their amazing tractors sprawled all over the grounds. Thanksgiving at his grandparents and playing the leaves. Visiting a fire truck with his Poppa. Happily accompanying his frantic mother who’s trying to get meals organized for an incredibly busy week. Preparations for a birthday party where he will turn two.

Two.

And what a wonder he is–his language, his comprehension, the very way he snuggles into you one moment and then kicks you like a donkey the next. The best moments of the day come while watching him “dance”–this involves jack-rabbiting around the room exclaiming, “that’s a good song!” He cracks me up. Sometimes, it’s close to a movie moment, those seconds where you are convinced you should have never been a mother, where you’ve yelled at your son in a typical knee-jerk reaction without thinking first, and then within three seconds the two of you are giggling crazily at being pet like a cat. In the end, there’s nothing like a day alone with a toddler to teach you everything you need to know about life. You know?

TRH-Yes, I Am Still Reading Books

So, this used to be a book blog. Way in the way back before I got off track by babies and work and life and jobs and babies and fun and life and all kinds of other stuff, I actually used to read books. A lot of books. These days, if I finish a book a week, well, every two weeks, I’m lucky. And I’ve lost track now of where I am in terms of reviews and who knows what else. There are a couple of books that I’ve read in the last few months that I do remember… Continue reading “TRH-Yes, I Am Still Reading Books”

The Seasons Turn Turn Turn

We spent Friday and Saturday up north closing the cottage. At the beginning of the summer, it was a death zone for our almost-two-year-old. Now, he’s familiar with the place, understands the rules (nowhere near the dock without a life jacket on!), and has a veritable playground set up with a broken-down jeep that he can climb on and pretend to drive, an old sandbox and pool from a previous generation of kids up there, and about a bajillion trucks, front loaders, dump trucks and excavators. Shutting down for the summer is always bittersweet for me. September always feels like the start of the year for me, all of those years spent getting ready for school, being in various different kinds of school, it’s hard to think otherwise. I bought a giant calendar to try and keep us organized and it started with September. I have moved the RRBB into long pants for his daycare days. I’ve started making many more meals in the slow cooker. I pulled a bunch of the garden down yesterday and I’m still not prepared.

It’s funny, I can’t get through a single day without leaving some aspect of my life completely incomplete. Work’s busy, but that’s good, life’s busy, and that’s good too–but I’m frustrated and exhausted just trying to keep things just moving forward. I know all working moms must feel this way. There’s a Van Morrison song from one of my favourite records that tears me up every time I hear it lately, about a mom making sure her boy’s got clean clothes, putting on his little red shoes–reminding me that it’s okay if things slip, it’s okay if all we manage one Saturday is clean clothes and leave half the garden done. If we can manage a smile or two in between the brilliant meltdowns and toddler tantrums, we’re doing okay. If I can manage to get soup made and bangs trimmed, that’s even better.

Right now, the whole strategy of jamming my “old” self into the pockets of time I have to myself, simply isn’t working. I need a revolution. I need my whole outlook to change. And, if you’re anything like me, you know how impossible this is–change feels big and overwhelming. I did manage to make headway in terms of budgets, and getting that part of my life under control, but every month something comes along to blow it out of the water. Money, like time, well, there’s just never enough of it. And then I bring it all back to motherhood, and how that’s going these days. Closing the cottage was a good indication–at the end of it, I was exhausted, it’s hard work, and we were lucky enough to have my aunt and uncle keep watch over the RRBB for most of the day–and I was angry at myself for not having more energy, for being out of shape, for letting the disease win, for all of the things I can’t control bleeding into the parts of my life that I actually adore. I think I said to my aunt that I was frustrated by how limiting the disease has been — a day that would be nothing for a healthy person just about destroys me, and then I’m irritable and cranky with my son, my husband, which isn’t fair to anyone.

Keeping control over the crankiness that comes with pure and utter exhaustion is almost as much work as trying to get some sleep. It’s amazing to me how RRBB slept so well from about 4 months until he was just about 1, almost always through the night, maybe a quiet night feeding or two when we were still able to breastfeed. Now, it’s as if something has possessed him at night–he’s up sometimes two, three times, screaming, wailing, and completely inconsolable. Just a week or so ago, if he was totally freaking out, I could stand at the window and he’d look out at the moon. If there was no moon, he’d say, “No moon, only lights momma.” Pause. “Only lights momma.” A little bit of poetry to calm him down. Now, try to take him to the window and it’s, “Nooooooo!!” Shriek, scream, shriek, scream. “Too scary! Too scary!” How does he even know what scary is? I’m ever-impressed with the evolution of him, as a human, but I’m finding the toddler stage particularly challenging. “Momma put the pillow on you!” Translation: Put the pillow on him. “No pillow!” Translation: take the pillow off. “Momma put the pillow on you!” You see the cycle emerging? All the hijinks to push back the bedtime, which used to be blissfully easy. Don’t even get me started on the wrestling match that is changing diapers or getting dressed. I’m telling you, the MMA would do well to hold training sessions with toddlers who need to get dressed. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ll often take out EVERY SINGLE T-SHIRT he owns just so that he picks the one he wants if it’ll avoid a complete and utter meltdown at the sheer audacity of there being a dinosaur and not an excavator on the one clean shirt left in the drawer.

And here’s the rub. I’ve been writing this blog post for four days and am no closer to either being coherent or completing a single thought. So, I’m just going to leave it here.

Review: The Essential Tom Marshall

The latest in Porcupine Quill’s ongoing series, The Essential Tom Marshall, co-edited by David Helwig and Michael Ondaatje, seeks to preserve and celebrate the work of the Kingston poet in a tidy, eclectic volume of work. Let me make a confession: I have two degrees in English and have studied Canadian writing for years. I work in publishing. I have (years ago) published some poetry of my own and, yet, throughout the travels of my literary life I have never come across Tom Marshall — I even went to school in Kingston, lived there for many years, and am ashamed to say that I had never heard of him before the package arrived on my doorstep from the publisher.

And it’s a shame because I adored these poems. As someone who slogged through winters at Queen’s, I can honestly say that there was no mysticism left in me when I finished my undergraduate degree, and yet, the ability for Marshall, in the opening poem entitled ‘The park is more like a wood,’ to bring his sensibility to an every-day park seen from a bedroom window. In a sense, this first piece uses traditional symbolism, calling back, in a way to the Romantics who did the same–heightened nature in verse with an eye to discussing human nature–especially towards the beginning of the poem where the ‘moon bends, beckoning our lips and bodies back,’ and irresistible pull. And yet, he refuses to leave it there, choosing instead to invert the symbolism in a sense, an utterly modern worldview where: “Sun blooms in our bodies / like a soft death / a warmth that is far more permanent than love.” And his park is inhabited, later, in “Fall” by “perverts of several kinds,” one must love “through” as “the bruise of life burns outward.” It’s a glorious poem, as the narrator stands both aside and within the part at various points during the year, observing life from within but knowing you must live through it, and necessarily knowing there’s a varying difference between watching and seeing.

The parks, the places, the pictures in these poems are ever-moving from heightened symbolism and back to stark realism. The poet who believes the park eternal (in “Coda: Macdonald Park) realizes that “leaf and lost desire” curves, ever-shifting, nature a part of him as we became aware in the previous poem (“Interior Monologue #666) where becoming a “slow, lethargic vegetable” (a rutabega) becomes further proof of the inability, of this narrator, to distinctively separate himself from the natural world.

It’s always hard to write about poetry because it contains such a personal experience with language. So different from the novel, where you get lost in a character, pulled out of yourself, deceptively simple works like these do the exact opposite–the simple choice of words serve to highlight your own relationships, your own experiences in a park, your own utter inability to love properly, perhaps even greatly. As Marshall says in “Strictly Personal”: “If I could / always have been so / open how different / things might have been.” In a sense, as the leafs fall off the trees, decay and melt back into the ground in so many of these works, the poet too looks back upon a life that’s melted away–where choice would have been different had he/she lived “by the dream / however strange…”

The Essential Tom Marshall does its job incredibly well, celebrating a poetic gift that’s both light and intense at the same time–the simple structure and relatively easy language open up the depth and resonance of this work almost immediately. I read the book through twice in two days and would happily again and again, I’ve ear-marked at least a half-dozen poems, and let them echo through me. I was inspired and aching on the subway in the last couple days just to be able to write a little bit on my own–truly, that’s the gift of a great poet, is it not?

How Many Ways to Cook Your Chicken

I was inspired by Kerry K. Taylor’s post “1 Organic Chicken, 22 Meals, $49.00 Bucks,” and so I roasted a chicken this weekend for our family. My chicken was not as expensive, but I bought two of them (one for the freezer because it’s ever-so hard to get to the butcher), and some other supplies for the upcoming weeks. It’s all a pale attempt for me to put into action the increasing guilt I feel over not cooking enough at home. We order a lot of food, and we’re also trying to civilize (ha ha ha ha ha ha!) our two-year-old and have full family dinners a couple of times a week (RRBB often eats earlier than we do, hopefully this won’t be forever).

So I cooked this lovely old chicken, roasted some vegetables, which were terrible, made an apple crisp and some muffins too this weekend. Sometimes, cooking feels like such a balm to me, it’s work that is rewarding but also fills up the busy time. Having a curious and over-active toddler doesn’t make it easy–he wants to stir everything, dump everything, and generally make a giant mess as I’m trying to keep things tidy, but it’s killing our budget to eat out so much.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make some chicken soup this week, because I did make stock from the leftovers, which is at least two, most likely three meals, and then some when you add in Ethan’s meals too. But every week, like anything else in my life, I try so hard to say, “oh, no ordering this week!” and then bam! something hits and we’re stuck back in the same rut of ordering and eating bad food. It’s so unhealthy. Yet, it seems to be all about surviving these days. Add to my over-layered sense of guilt–I read Mark Bittman’s delightful Cooking Solves Everything Byliner original the other day, and have been feeling the pressure to at least try and cook more. It’s easy at the cottage–there’s no phone, and hence no take-out, but the minute we’re back in the city, cheap Chinese food’s on speed dial and there goes another year of my life to bad cholesterol.

My health, for once, feels kind of stable, even if I’m always exhausted and rundown. At least my kidneys are cooperating and my bloodwork isn’t a puzzle for sixteen-dozen specialists to figure out. But even if that’s under control, I’m still the unhealthiest I’ve been in the last five years. Being overweight, under-stimulated, sluggish, and a whole host of side effects from the various medications I’m on, means I’m stuck in a rut that I can’t get out of. It’s hard to put all that pressure on one lonely “happy”-esque chicken to solve my problems, but it was a good step. Fingers crossed our soup turns out.

Walking in the Rain

The weather yesterday morning was amazing. Piles of rain collapsed as if someone was actually pouring buckets down from the sky. I love days like that, have always loved the rain. I had a polka dot umbrella. RRBB had his Thomas attire. We stepped outside and walked around the neighbourhood until it was just too cold and we had to come inside.

There’s a moment, and I wish I could pinpoint it, when my son discovers something new–and it’s not even if it’s new truly, it might just be new that day–and he explodes with a sense of wonder that I wish I could emulate. The stairs we’ve gone up and down a hundred times, well, it’s the 101st that really matters. An airplane, awesome. A garbage truck? We might not survive the excitement. And then we come crashing down, clashing a little, the two of us, a temper tantrum, some screaming, dumping of an entire box of organic smoothie on the kitchen floor, and all wonder is lost in an attempt to hold on to your patience and capture just a little bit of understanding.

Because, here’s my biggest lesson this weekend–sometimes your kids will simply not do what you want them to do.

Sometimes they will do the exact opposite of what you want them to do.

Continue reading “Walking in the Rain”

Halifax, Homesickness and Sleeplessness

What a goofy self-portrait. I should have turned around so that the ocean was behind me. Walking the boardwalk in Halifax in the spare hour I had in Halifax last week during sales conference, I felt like quite the tourist. Beautiful scenery. Exceptionally touristy shops littering the non-ocean side of the walk, I bought a sweatshirt that says, “Halifax,” and a baseball cap because I forgot to pack one, and revelled for a moment, in being away. Continue reading “Halifax, Homesickness and Sleeplessness”

Catching Up: Halifax Styles

My RRHB took this picture of our son at Dufferin Grove Park. Yet another example of an amazing place, in downtown Toronto no less, for children. Whatever Doug Hollyday has to say, and it’s idiotic, almost embarrassing to those who voted for a man who can be so obviously obtuse about urban life, we are finding Toronto to be a perfectly wonderful place to raise our son. I wasn’t here, I was at work, but I heard all about it from my husband, and there’s pictorial evidence that my kid’s doing just fine being raised in Little Portugal.

The last few weeks, months, even, have been hectic. The busyness never seems to abate, and now that we’re going to the cottage as much as possible, I know that the summer is going to whiz by. The weather has been amazing and as much as I believe we’re urban people, I do appreciate being by the lake up at the cottage on the weekends–the water, the heat, the BBQ–it’s an amazing place to just be out and enjoying the season.

So, a few things have happened. I got to write this for Today’s Parent, which made my week. I’ve read about 10 books that I haven’t had a chance to blog (I’m going to try to get caught up this week). We’re in Halifax for sales conference; here’s the view from my hotel (I can see the ocean if I lean a certain way; I love being able to see the ocean). Today, today I left my son at home for the very first time and am spending my first night without him.

Without him.

As I was leaving and bringing my suitcase downstairs, he kept saying, “Ethan (his says “Etin”) go on trip.” And my heart just collapsed a little. I wept a little in the cab to the airport. Then I sat on a plane and read, uninterrupted, for almost three hours. I haven’t done that in over two years. I have almost finished a book in one fell swoop–remembering what that was like was pretty amazing. Despite the fact that I had been up since before 5AM (he’s an early riser, that boy), I didn’t sleep on the plane. Reading seemed more important, more precious. But the leaving him. The being away from him, well, it’s hard. I know it’s healthy and good and will all turn out all right, I’m just not entirely prepared for it. Like I was saying to someone today, he’ll only ever be my one child–and I miss enough of his life by working that being away, even though he was a misery guts these last couple days, I’m torn in two in terms of leaving for my work trip.

Anyway, getting caught up–this weekend I managed to clean out my closet. Win! I was packed and ready to go without any stress (we have many hours in the day when said baby gets up at 530AM). I’ve been managing to keep with some small changes–riding my bike, keeping up with that, swimming on the weekends, but the weight is stubborn and not coming off. I still don’t feel like myself. I don’t even feel like a version of myself these days. My health is finally stable so I can at least concentrate on staying well, but I’m exhausted after the battle.

We spent a brilliant week up north after the July long weekend. My RRHB gave me a typewriter for mother’s day (photo to come, naturally) and I was using it up there–so, much, fun. I’ve been working on a essay for a friend’s collection and that’s been an interesting writing experience. A friend has done a substantive edit on my novel (fingers crossed I have a few moments to look at it during the evenings after conference is done). For a long time, I’ve been thinking about giving up my writing life, that it’s just not going to happen for me, and I was coming to terms with it, slowly. Now, I feel maybe that’s hasty. Who knows. I can’t seem to stick to anything these days.

On top of all the other crap that’s happened, and this is a big confession, the cyclo that I had to take last summer has officially put me in early menopause. What an insane ride, surprise! you’re pregnant–the most fertile and, well, “womanly” I have ever felt, and then not even eight months later I’m an old woman, no period, baby playing with my blood pressure cuff and super dumpy from the prednisone. I can take a lot when it comes to my health. I can endure blood tests and more tests and biopsies and bad news and bad luck and more bad luck but for once I would like to be the rule and not the exception. You know?

Today I walked by the ocean. I wonder if people who live in cities and towns by the ocean take it for granted like I take the cottage for granted? It’s beautiful here, absolutely lovely. I’m excited about being a full-on, wickedly goofy tourist.