Fridaaaaaay!

My favorite! Do you have any fun plans for the weekend? I'm going to the LIBRARY tomorrow! Hooray!

In the meantime: here is my last Canadian Family post. Look at the picture of that guy on my post - he has a PELT on his wrists! Brrrr. And don't forget to enter my magazine subscription giveaway if you haven't yet - it's open to everyone.

You know what?

I've had a bit of a malaise about writing lately but I shook it off this morning and wrote something that pleased me very much. I'd love to have you read it.

Here it is: Trees.

I have a second post up at Canadian Family magazine's blog and I'd love to have you comment on it. Thanks!

(also, don't forget to enter my giveaway for a subscription to Canadian Family! The giveaway is open to everyone.)

This post is not about anything ABOUT SOMETHING

One of the funny - not in the "ha ha" sense, really - side effects of having been SO sick for the last two weeks is that not eating for basically two weeks really makes the weight just fall off. And my appetite hasn't returned either, so I'm either going to melt down and be all svelte-like OR I'll die. Or, more likely than either of those, my appetite will return JUST fine and I can stop being so dramatic about it.

ALSO I am totally out of shape. I just took the kids to the grocery store and then played outside with them - nothing strenuous - and now I am sitting here puffing away like I just ran a marathon. PATHETIC.

I've been thinking about ghost stories lately because
a) I have been sad
and
b) I read a lot of ghost stories while I was sick
and one of the things about ghost stories is how DISAPPOINTING they so often are. A few people have done them very well, but no one very recent, I don't think. And don't suggest I write them because I am too totally craven and all I'd get to was "Beck was alone in her office when suddenly she heard heavy footsteps in her basement" and then I'd be crying on the phone to my husband. But if you wrote that, I'd scoff.

But. I have been thinking about ghost stories, as I said, and thinking about why they DID work and don't work anymore (or are their modern ghost story writers I don't know about?), and what MAKES them work. What strikes you as spooky, as haunting? What would make a ghost story work for you?

Hey, look at me!

I'm all writing at Canadian Family's website and stuff this week! My post is about our decision to keep the Girl home from a school trip this past week and its unexpected aftermath. I really hope to see you there.

I also have five subscriptions to Canadian Family magazine to give away - if you'd like, you can enter over on my review blog.

In other news, I have hardly been so sick before in my whole life. It's FINALLY going away, but that was QUITE the week, and that is apparently what I get for sitting in a snowbank last week, so SERVES ME RIGHT.

Anyhow, go comment on my post! And maybe they'll hire me on as a full-time columnist and then I'll be INSUFFERABLE. AWESOME!

Today's post

... is called The End. Isn't that ominous? But no, it's nothing of the sort.
See you there!

Argh

So it's been a solid month of being sick for my household. A MONTH. Not all at once - thank goodness - but it's been a magical merry-go-round of sickness. First The Girl! Then The Boy! Then The Baby! And now back to The Girl again, huzzah! And I don't know about YOU, but my creative muse does not feed on constant sickness and worrying about whether or not I have enough Tylenol for whoever has the fever tonight.

Anyhow. Yesterday, my friend-the-photographer came over and we headed outside to take some pictures for a project that I have coming up in a little while. And again, I don't know about you, but having been sick for a whole month does NOT make me feel particularily fetching, so I was rather hesitant about this whole photography thing. She took about 100 pictures and some of them were pretty nice, which was cheering:

She's a MAGICIAN! Of course, I probably caught double pneumonia from sitting in the snowbank. Hooray!

Today's post...

... is partly about a cake I'm planning on making and partly also about a few other things, maybe.
It's here.

Luv

My recent "cardiac"* excitement has made me a bit bemused about hearts in general. Who decided that love resided in the heart, anyhow? The early stages of infatuation for me were indistinguishable from a severe head injury. And my Brooding Misery while separated from my now-husband for FIVE FREAKING YEARS seemed to involve a lot of not eating, so... digestive? All I know is that love made me really thin. The more in love I was, the more I looked like I was about to die from cholera, or some other romantic, diarrhea-based illness. But that was romantic love, which for me was a selfish, selfish thing.

*not cardiac at all, but thanks, local medical people! That made for an exciting day.

I still remember the first time I totally loved someone else.

The Girl was eight months old and she was fussy and it was the morning and so I was holding her and walking up and down the vile, vile shag-carpeted hallway of our Grim Apartment, and all of a sudden she laughed and I looked at her and it was just like a religious experience, this sudden wash of golden love shooting through me, through the pain of my still-infected Cesarean scar, and all the way through to my bitter, damaged heart, to my secret thought that I could never love anyone.

(and before that? I had felt a miserable sense of driven obligation. I couldn't stand to let her out of my sight, woke up twenty times a night to check that she was still alive, could barely stand to let anyone else touch her. It was an awful, murky sort of feeling.)

And in that moment, all of the misery and the darkness was washed away. I was simply a mother holding her laughing baby in the sunlit-dazzled hallway and in that second, I loved her for the rest of my life, simple and uncomplicated.

When I was so sick four years ago, my husband drove the kids to the parking lot of the hospital and had then march to my window and The Girl stood there with her mane of uncombed blond hair and her giant smile and waved and waved at me and I thought it was going to be the last time I ever saw her. I've written about this before, but it was such a searing feeling and it has stuck with me, my child lit up like a firefly at the sight of me at a window.

It's easy to forget these things in the everydayness of life. But I have never forgotten those two things, what it felt like to look at my child and understand what it meant to love her as her mother, and what it felt like to look at my child when I thought that I would never see her again, to fix that smile on my heart forever.

My heart, which I'd thought in my immature angst was so bitter, so damaged.

Important Caveat

As I wrote yesterday, Robert B. Parker wrote tough guy detective fiction. If you like the genre, you might like his books. If you're interested, I would start at the beginning, with The Gudwulf Manuscript (his character changes remarkably in later books, but it's a good place to start.). Looking For Rachel Wallace and Early Autumn are good entries as well. There are 20+ books in the series, so that oughta keep you busy for a while.

And if you're not already a fan of tough guy detective fiction, I'm probably not going to be able to convert you. I like it, though. (and if you like that sort of book, too, you'll probably also like Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet.

A Writer I Really Like Died

One of my very favorite authors died not too long ago. I am referring, of course, to Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer For Hire novels. I LOVED those.

There is no way I was referring to J. D. Salinger, of course, creator of that prize preppy suck Holden Caulfield, author of several more books of people Too Delicate For This Mean World, and famed recluse. We read Catcher In The Rye in high school which caused several of the more Literary And Susceptible Girls to swoon over Holden as a sensitive, desirable boy.

But he wasn't.

Look: he had some obvious emotional revelations ("Teenage hookers are sad.""It is sad that my brother died."), but otherwise, his sensitivity only applied to himself - how poorly he thought of other people, how sad, how sensitive he was - and never extended to empathy or actual compassion towards others OR towards moderating his behaviour so he didn't cause unnecessary pain to other people. These are not good qualities in even IMAGINARY boyfriends. But OH he had lots of feelings. Deep feelings. And I am deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have deep reservoirs of feeeeeeelings, even book people.


1. Pretty much everyone has lots of feelings. Most people just try not to make a huge deal out of it.
2. Having lots of Big Huge Feelings spilling all over the place, therefore, does not make you extra-sensitive and special - it means that you don't handle life well. This is not something to write lots of books about.
3. Children are not some sort of gold standard for how people should be. We don't start out innocent and perfect and gradually become corrupted by This Awful World - we start out completely self-centered and gradually learn that OTHER PEOPLE MATTER TOO. And I think that any adult who holds up children over and over again as our emotional superiors is a bit... off. I don't know about you, but I truly APPRECIATE other people's ability to censor what they're thinking, to not express every flickering emotion that they have, to be, in Holden's language, phony.
4. Have you read Joyce Maynard's book about her relationship with J.D. Salinger when she was a very, very young looking 18 year old and he was FIFTY-THREE? Ewwwwwwwww.
5. Now read number 3 again and prepare to feel a bit icky.
6. Being a recluse doesn't make you interesting or deep - it just makes you weird.
7. There are things I care a lot about in this world. The emotional illnesses of spoiled neurotic rich kids doesn't really make it very high on this list.

And yes, Salinger was a literary-writer and Parker wrote mass market fiction, but I find Salinger's books very dated now, very much a product of the 1950s and nearly unreadable. (also in this group: John Cheever.) This isn't his fault - literary fashions change rapidly - but I much prefer Parker's wise-cracking, soft-hearted tough guys to anything that J.D. Salinger wrote. They live in a morally complex world, they have to make hard decisions, and when people hit them, THEY HIT BACK. Pow.

And Parker had this to say about writing:

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had
the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I
would give up being a writer without a blink.

I like a writer who would say that. I like writing. I like to think that someday I will write my own novels - we'll see, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had wise-cracking tough guys in them - but the important things in my life are my husband and my kids. I could stop here and be content forever, and I like knowing that he felt the same way. Was he a great writer? Oh, probably not, but his books were deftly written and fun and I always felt braver and tougher when I put them down.

I am sick!

I wrote a little bit about it in this week's 5 Minutes post.
I am feeling - phew! - MUCH better today. I'm still rather wiped out, but nothing like I was.
So. Back to my couch.

So tired.

"Hey Papa! Are you going to help us build a shaduf*?" The Boy asked his grandfather last night. And my father gave me a bit of a look, but not as much of one as you might think, since I've always been into doing kooky things. For example: earlier today, I helped make a paper model of the Parthenon, which was either HIGHLY educational or a big waste of time, I am not sure. But it's fun.

*We're going to build a life-size model of a shaduf when the snow melts. Irrigation here we come!

And then we made St. Brigid's bread. I had each of the kids make their own loaves - The Baby's was made of teff and rice flours, mainly, and The Boy used whole wheat flour and oatmeal for his. And they both were DELICIOUS and then we made St. Brigid's crosses and The Baby said "I am weaving a St. Brigid's cross. It is also a Thunderbird*." and I laughed until I hurt my stomach. And then I felt theologically guilty.

*in the Haida sense. We were making totem poles last week.

So life is good. Funny, even.

There is also something just heart-breakingly awful going on in the lives of people that I love very much right now, and it's... heart-breaking. And awful. And yet life still goes on and is good, and how can I reconcile this? The answer is, I guess, the same way everyone else does, which is to say as best I can. But it's hard some days.