Lame Little Check In

I have not meant to ignore this blog, and the few people kind and stalwart enough to tune in.

The reason I haven't posted in months is because I have had a welcome string of professional obligations, one of which is: blogging! I have been contracted to be the official blogger for The Site.  So I am getting paid to blog elsewhere, and getting paid means I am obligated to meet my deadline every week.

Life is going very well.  I am doing a solo show one day a week at The Site, I have done a couple of directing and writing contracts, and have been able to travel a little, which is unusual for me in the warmer months as I am usually completely tied here by work.

The twins are doing so well.  MIL continues to fail, but we are now in the final months of waiting for her to get a permanent placement in an elder care home.

I will try to do better at posting here, as this blog has become important to me, and has been a great creative outlet in the long winter months.

Until next time.....

I Suspect I am too Fierce

I suspect I may be too fierce.

My birthday is in a month and a half and my astrologer of choice is telling me it is time for my personal evaluation of where I am and who I am and where I am going, etc. etc.  I woke at 4am and my brain started in on this torturous introspection directive.  Except, as a good disciple of the western philosophy of self loathing, instead of a swift and tidy examination of where I am, I twisted the exercise into "what is wrong with me?"  The list is pretty impressive, but boils down to this one observation I have lived with for most of my life: I am too fierce. 

I haven't always been fierce.  As a very young child I was painfully shy and quite nice.  But over the years I have dealt with my natural introversion by developing a toughness of which I am not ashamed, but kind of weary.  I'm getting old, and I am tired of the hard side of myself.

How does my hard side manifest?  Well, let's see....

I have a long track record of not letting people get away with shit.  My guilty pleasure film is "You've Got Mail"  in which Meg Ryan plays a woman who laments the fact that she can never think of the right snappy comeback to say when being insulted or patronized.  I do not have this problem.  I can always think of a comeback and I almost always let 'er rip.

I am happy to lodge a complaint in a restaurant, and I am okay with abandoning friendships and acquaintances that are toxic with nary a backwards glance.  I have a quick wit and I will take the joke over the consequences on many occasions.

But the older I get the more I understand that it is not up to me to right all the wrongs of the world.  And I am flawed, so why can't I ease up a bit on the flaws of others? 

Here is a truth I know about fierce people: we are often deep, deep feelers.  We experience the highs and lows of life strongly, and our instinct to lash out is part of or way of dealing with the brutal beauty of this world. 

Still, I am tired of holding on to anger and fear and ready to free myself.  Can I do it?  Will I be able to break patterns that have held me together like glue for so long?  I have no F*cking idea.  But at the very least I have isolated the biggest problem area.

Parenting with Two Hands.

On the one hand...

I'm pretty sure I don't brush their teeth well enough.
They scream when I brush out their hair.
I don't give them enough vegetables.
I only ever bake from a mix, and that is still almost never.
I don't sit down and draw with them, and I really should.
I get frustrated with them within seconds of trying to get them to print.
I let them watch too much TV.
I yell too much.
I try to read parenting books and I yell and throw the books across the room.
I pretend I serve veggies raw because it's healthier, but really I just don't want to cook.
I expect too much of them.
I expect too little of them.
I haven't started them in music or dance lessons yet.
I should have started them on a second language by now.
I am so bad at establishing routines.
I let them see my anxiety.
I look at celebrity gossip on the computer when I could be reading fat important books, and they see this.
I say: "No, I'm too tired" too many times.
I give in way too quickly.
I hold out way too long.
I place too much emphasis on having a clean house.
I hide the Playdough because I hate cleaning it up.
When they do crafts I hide the messiest stuff.
I snap at them to get away so I can finish a blog post about how much I love them.
I swear.
I swear a lot.

On the other hand...

I let them see me continue to follow my dreams.
I have given them an artist for a mother.
I tell them I love them at least 50 times a day.
I have complete respect for their weirdnesses.
I notice who they are.
I bring them to rehearsals.
I dance with them.
I sing with them until they tell me to stop.
I listen around the corners so I can hear the magic in their play.
I remember how it was to be little.
I talk to them.
I don't mock them.
I am their champion.
I come when they need me.
I take the hits and dirty looks from people who don't like kids to be kids.
I let them be kids.
We show them a loving marriage.
We show them how to fight and make up.
We don't worship at the altar of quiet or still.
I let them see that creativity is essential.
I encourage them to notice beauty in light and colour and sound and movement.
I respect their fear.
I surround them with art.
I surround them with artists.
I parent from my heart and my soul.
I listen to myself.
I listen to them.
And I love them.
I love them.
I love them.
I love them.
I love them.

Not a Love Letter

It is the eve of the twins' fourth birthday.  And in the great tradition I have established here (ie. I did it last year) my intention was to use this forum to write a little birthday love message to my beautiful babies.  But to be honest, this day has been one for the memoirs.  I am so spent my head feels hot and prickly. I am emotionally wrung out.  If I wasn't such a complete weakling I would punch a wall or something equally dramatic but childish and futile.  So I'll take the weakling's way out and blog about it.

J is away on business.  Last night, at 3 am, I was jarred awake by a slamming door on the ground floor of our house, which is where MIL lives.  I got up and met her on the stairs.  She was clearly shaken and wanted to know how to get a key to lock out all these people who keep coming into the house.  These people are, of course, conjured by her dementia.  And the detail in her delusions is impressive.

Last night there were, according to MIL, people in the gallery space we have on the main floor and they were looking at all her stuff.  There were men in her bed and women messing up her clothes.  But the really good part of the story was her insistence that she had followed the people down the hill to a trailer where  they were playing games like bingo and cards, but by the time she got in there everyone was asleep.  Now, it has been snowing for two days and I hadn't shoveled outside, so when I asked her how she managed to walk down the hill without getting any snow on her she said something about having really good snow boots.  I walked around the house several times with MIL, to reassure her that all the people were gone.  I brought her upstairs, gave her some water, tried all the techniques - going along with the delusions, explaining the medical details of her condition, trying not to belittle her no matter how tired and frustrated I might become.  I finally got her settled back into bed and was back asleep by 4:30.  At 6 am I was awoken by O and a nightmare about being bitten in the belly by a crocodile.  I was finally able to get back to sleep and Z woke us all at 8:30.

MIL is running dangerously low on meds and tomorrow is the twins' birthday, so our plan for today was to go into the bigger town to replenish the medicine and cake making cabinets.  But there was a "heavy snowfall" warning issued for our area, and I just couldn't risk the drive.  We stayed home instead and MIL continued to be agitated, aggressive and confused all day.

My patience ran out when MIL noticed a petticoat hanging on the back of my bedroom door.  I had this garment made for me as part of a really important costume.  I use it on stage and for special appearances.  MIL insisted the petticoat was hers, that I had taken it, that she has had it for twenty years.  I am working on two hours worth of sleep right now, and I just didn't have it in me to go along with this particular delusion.  "This is MY costume piece.  It has NOTHING to do with you!"  Every time my back was turned MIL would sneak back into the bedroom and say: "Sweetie [patronizing tone], I don't know how you can say that this is yours when I have had one just like it for twenty years.  I mean, it was a different colour.  You must've bleached it."

I decided to escape and take the kids down to our local eatery for a special tea event.  If you have ever had a high tea you will know that it consists of about a million percent of the recommended daily cream and sugar intake.  So by the time we left the restaurant I was dealing with two Tasmanian Devils.

Our walk home includes one steep hill with a dangerous blind corner.  The girls were just horrible as they insisted on running away from me on the hill, balancing precariously on the side of a steep drop, jumping in deep snow, and in an impressive final  move O decided that she wanted to "crawl" up the last bit.  I was so frustrated that I ended up half dragging her by her hood for a few steps to get her out of blind corner danger.

So perhaps this explains why I don't really feel like writing a love letter to my kids at this exact moment.  But it's in me.  I'll get to it.  Maybe later tonight once the party in the bingo trailer down the hill closes down for the night.

Struck in the Middle with You

The new year comes in like a lamb when you have almost four years old twins and a rapidly failing mother in law and your husband is away on business.  I spent the evening at home, fell asleep with the girls, woke at 12:12 to discover I'd slept through both the turn of the year and the fireworks that happened pretty much right outside my door.  The only clue I had that the fireworks had happened was my MIL's quivering poodle at the top of our stairs.

New Year's Eve has a fine tradition here in our little 1930s Town.  For many years the NYE dance at the Community Hall was an awesome thing - family oriented with kids, adults, the drunk and the sober all dancing into the wee hours and spilling out onto the road to dance under the streetlights and in moonlight and starlight.  In the past few years the dance became a shadow of its former self, but this year some of our long term residents worked their butts off to bring it back.  How I pondered taking the girls, but the thought of trying to stick handle the kids by myself waaaay past bedtime and leaving MIL for an extended time ultimately made me chicken the hell out.  Next year for sure you will find two almost five year olds dancing under the stars with their mommy and daddy.  But this year I stayed in and loved my time with the twins, and had much opportunity to reflect back on one crazy ass year.

When I look back on 2012 I will think of it as the year of three years old, and the year of sixty-seven years old.  The twins turned three and were as amazing and joyful and challenging as ever.  They are such wonderful little kids.  They crack me up and drive me nuts and make me want to laugh and cry constantly. And, my mother in law, at sixty-seven, began the process of sliding deeper into a place where we can no longer reach her.

Dementia is a horrible, heartbreaking, unfair thing - but in its own, very odd way, is often fascinating.

I wish I had understood, when MIL first came to Town to be with us, that she must have already been in the early stages of this thing.  But I didn't understand and so our relationship was contentious and strained.  I found her eccentricity reckless and juvenile.  I couldn't understand the laissez-faire attitude she seemed to have toward the craziness of her life (I will not go into too many specifics, but her finances and recently ended relationship were in some pretty serious places).  She found me cold and was endlessly frustrated by my inability to accept what she saw as her help.  She felt I patronized her, which I did, because I found her childish.  She was desperately lonely, and the only "way in" she could find socially was to seek the town gossips and feed their appetites by talking about me.  Which made things worse.  Every so often we would have a big blow up, and I would promise to try to be a better daughter in law.  And I would, for a while.  I would ask her to concede on some of the points I felt strongly about.  She kind of did.

Once she moved in with us properly (she had had an apartment of her own for a few months) we were  suspecting early stage dementia.  And once we began to investigate, our suspicions were confirmed.

For many months MIL was still so able that she would babysit the girls, cook for herself, take her dog for long walks, spend hours sorting through stuff for the store she wanted to open.  But our relationship was still strained.  She wanted to be a bigger part of our daily lives, I wanted to make sure I and J and the girls spent the early years of our family time establishing ourselves as a unit, and I didn't think it fair or necessary that MIL be involved in every minute of our days.  She thought I was mean and her public bitching about me hardened me to her even more.  This is a VERY small town, and being gossiped about - especially when it was one-sided - was hurtful and embarrassing.

By the summer of 2012 things were getting crazier.  And it became clear that MIL was not going to be able to handle running a business.  And then it became clear that she could no longer be trusted to care for the girls for more than an hour or so.  And then she started to lose language and memory.  And just before Christmas she started to retreat from life and hallucinate a reality that involved scores of visitors roaming about her apartment at all hours.

And now we are living with a shadow of the woman who raised my husband.  She is rail thin, sleeps most of the day, and sees people who aren't there.  On good days she still comes up and eats with us and plays with the girls, on bad days we bring her food and help her dress herself.  We are in the process of getting her into a care facility but there will be a few months still, with her here in our house.  So I guess now is the time for me to prove myself as a caring, loving person.  Because it is all so very sad.  Yet fascinating.

There are the sad parts - watching this once magnificent woman nearly collapse with frustration when she tries to dress herself, the loss of contact with reality, the extreme frailty.  And then there are the fascinating parts - the hallucinations of visitors from all walks of life - First Nations men, boy scouts and girl scouts, hospital patients, Indians discussing current events in India.  There has always been a part of me that believes old people and children have a much clearer view into other realities, and the fact that this 1935 building has been a boarding house, grocery store, pool hall, art gallery, etc. etc., makes it all the more intriguing.  What if she really is seeing people who once passed through this place?  Who am I to assert that it is all the product of a failing brain.  Maybe her brain is opening up to other realms?  Yeah, that's a crazy thought, but one I have all the time now.

I am surrounded by a very supportive community, many of whom ask how I am getting through this time in our lives, and I must admit, there are days when I wonder that as well.  But whenever it all begins to overwhelm I take a little step outside of myself and ponder how I will remember this time, years from now, when it all slides into part of our family lore and mythology.  And here is how I will  remember it - profound.  There is extreme profundity in beginnings and endings, and right now we are helping two souls into life, and one soul out of life.  And the responsibility of it all is a sacred trust that we are trying to get right.  Sometimes we do get it right, sometimes we don't.  But right now I am acutely aware that what I do and say will be the first experiences for the twins, and last experiences for MIL.  And that is pretty big.

So there it is - my musings for the new year.  Appropriately, I am thinking about the beginnings and endings of things.  And how my middle-aged ass is right smack in the middle of it all.

Bad Things Happen

Yesterday morning I was fixating.  The first thing I was fixating on was the fact that the weather, after several days of heavy snowfall, had broken, and I needed to get to town to get groceries and some other essentials. In order to get to town and back before dark I needed to do much shoveling, dressing of kids, warming of car, etc. etc.  The second thing I was fixating on was a conversation my children and I had been exposed to the day before, about how boys fight and get over it, but girls are devious and manipulative and mean and learn it from their mothers.  I was thinking about how much I had wanted to protect my daughters from these most unfortunate words.*

And in the midst of my fixating I heard the news about the school shootings in Connecticut.  And then I didn't care that much about the other two things. Because who cares anymore?  20 little kids, ages 6 and 7, are dead.  And yes, I know, I know - children are dying everyday, all over the world and we go on as if it is nothing.  I know we, as a society, demonstrate gross indifference to child labour, poverty, abuse, murder, when it is in the context of  "far away" and "not affecting my daily life."  I know all that, and yes, I understand  the reason I (and many like me) are so destroyed by the thought of this shooting and not about the other stuff that happens everyday all over the world is because this is something to which we can directly relate.  These parents sent their babies to school, and a bad guy came to the school and shot them dead.  This could be us, this could be me. I am right there.

I started the drive to town yesterday morning listening to CBC radio, as usual, but the girls said something they have never said before.  They said: "No, mommy, turn it off."  So I turned it off and didn't listen to the half-hourly news reports that would have informed me of  "what we know so far."  Instead, the girls and I pointed to the trees, and the horses we passed, and we talked about what we saw, and we sang about monkeys falling off beds and reindeer, and Santa.

We had a nice day in town, and when I came home I read all the comments on Facebook about what had happened.  I put away groceries.  I cooked dinner.  We ate dinner.  We watched a show about a kid with a purple crayon.  We had a bath.  And then the girls went to play by themselves in the bedroom and I opened my laptop and let myself read the news and sob.

I didn't say "How does something like this happen?" because it is a meaningless question.  Crazy people go get guns and use them to shoot people.  It happens.  We've seen it happen again and again.  And after it happens we analyze the shit out of the how and whys and who is to blames. (When I was in my early 20s the Montreal Massacre happened and for months afterward the debate raged on and on about whether it was a violence against women issue or a random act  of violence issue.  Are you kidding me?  A guy armed to the teeth walked into a classroom, released the men, shot the women, and left a manifesto about hating women.  I think we can close the case on that debate.)

I didn't obsess about crazy US gun control policy, or how mentally ill people are left to navigate the world with little support, or how we exist in a culture that glamourizes violence to the point that we hardly even notice it anymore. I was too busy thinking about the parents, and how they will ever be able to get through this.

I did have a Facebook chat with my friend who has two small children as well, and we discussed how hard it is, in the face of something like this, to NOT just start thinking about raising your children in a fortress surrounded by a moat full of sharks.  But we can't.  We have to let our kids have lives, even if it means sending them off to school when, every so often, horrid things happen at schools.

And I did let myself focus on the love that everyone was expressing for a community of people we have never met in a place we have never been.  Because, as awful as these things are, they make us stop and put away the little, daily fixations, and look to one another and say: "I don't know you, but I know you.  And I can't love you, because I don't even know you, but I love you.  And I can't possibly know what you are going through, but I know that you are going through it, and it means something that your unimaginable loss is causing a mom far, far away to think of nothing but you."


* One day I will write a post about Tina Fey (who is the undisputed goddess of all things), and how important I think "Mean Girls" is, and how important the message is and was, but how the importance of Ms. Fey's  important message has been (like PMS) twisted into a blanket stereotype that does so much more harm than good.  But that's a story for another day.

Acting, Learning and Getting Merry like Christmas

It's been too long since I've posted, and once again I do not have a specific idea spinning to hang a tidy essay on, so I'll just freelance some ideas, shall I?

I am doing a short run of one of my solo shows at the Site right now, and I went through my usual process during my rehearsal period - first I felt dread, then fear, and then I yelled at my husband for booking me when he knows full well that I hate, hate, hate doing these things. Then I did the first show and remembered how fun it is to perform and couldn't wait to get back again the next day.  My process drives J insane as he is a natural performer and does not go through the same agony that I do at the thought of getting up in front of people.  I can't wait to write, and paint, and direct, all manner of solo or behind the scenes creative endeavors, but performing scares the crap out of me every time.  And I am an actor.  Dr. Freud...care to weigh in?

I am having a tough mom dilemma right now in that, here in our tiny Town, there is a very small group of parents.  The preschooler parents have tried to run a play group for a couple of years, and my girls love going.  However, there is something I am having trouble with (I had written out details, but have subsequently deleted as too many people who know me read my blog now, and it's not fair to work out my shit on here in that way - but basically something happened that I am uncomfortable with - and it made me feel like my kids needed me to protect them.)  Anyway, suffice to say, I was eventually so annoyed by this situation that I pulled my kids from the play group last week (major stress as I know how much the girls love to play with the other kids), and am contemplating taking them out for good.  Ugh - such a tough decision.  And such a classic parent conundrum - do I remove my kids from a situation they love, because I have grown uncomfortable with it?  And all of this got me thinking about the girls' future options.

So now that I have deleted out the details, the next few paragraphs will make less sense, but here goes: a wise friend of mine said something like this to me:  "If you look for bad behaviour in children, you will find it, and if you look for beauty and creativity, you will also find it - often in the same behaviour."  Isn't that awesome?  Isn't that re-framing in the most perfect way?  I hope I have shown, so far in this blog, that I am a person who owns right up to my flaws, and who is pretty willing to sing my own praises as well.  Well here is something I know I do that I like about myself - I always see the beauty in other people's children.  I always see a running laughing child as a thing of sheer joy, and not a behaviour waiting to be "corrected."  I think little kids are so much better than adults - freer, more abstract, so much more divine.  And as my kids near school age I have been hit with a realization I did not see coming - I think school and organized education and blind adherence to the mantra that structure and routine are ALWAYS the right choices are wrecking kids and turning them into the mass of unhappy adults walking around today.  A couple of my friends are engaged in a movement called "unschooling".  I was sent some links and opened the literature and it was like the damn clouds parted and a choir of angels started singing just for me.  I hate the idea of my kids going to school.  I hate the idea of behaviour that I honestly, honestly adore becoming "bad" the moment they walk into a classroom.  I hate the idea that passivity is to be emulated and a child who naturally engages, and questions, and jumps in with both feet needs to be taught not to sing, not to dance, not to question.  So, unschooling is (sorry for all of you unschoolers, because I'm not sure if this is right, but it is my take on it) basically home schooling but in such a way that allows the child to lead the way, to discover their bliss early in life, to have the parent watch and gently guide according to the natural inclinations of the learner.  When I did my Masters degree I studied the teachings of a ground breaking drama based educator called Dorothy Heathcote, and have now woven her methods into my work.  A few years ago, while she was still alive, I had the amazing opportunity of watching her teach.  She was so damn brave.  She walks into a classroom with a general idea of what needs to be learned, and she trusts that, through drama, the kids will get there (and will without question make hundreds of other discoveries along the way, and will learn a bit more about what it means to be human).  I think Heathcote was an unschooler before there was a word for it.  She believed in the children, and in their wholeness, and did not see them as adults in training.  So that's where I am right now with the idea of sending my kids off to be "educated."  I want them to be the people they want to be, not the people they are forced to be.

What else?...

Oh, here is a huge thing.  My beloved J is a little bit sick.  Well, in a way he is a lot sick, but in a way it is a good thing.  He had some news from the doctor about his health, and he does have a serious condition that, with some very big lifestyle changes, can probably be reversed.  So we are going to have to pull up our socks around here and genuinely commit to good food, rest, less stress, less saying "yes" to every contract that comes up, less consumption of bad stuff.  In a way, getting the news was like the big excuse we needed from the universe to do what we really want to do anyway - pull back and spend way more time with our girls.

It's the Christmas season and I am a complete Christmas nerd and it's true what they say - having kids brings back all the magic of this season.  My kids are drunk with it - every night is "Christmas Eve." every shiny, sparkly bauble is "magic".  It's bliss to feel the wonder of it all again.  And our decision to keep them away from network television means that our girls really have no association of Christmas with mass consumption.  When I asked what they want from Santa at first they couldn't think of anything, and then they said "toys and paint." Toys and paint.  Not some specific electronic or princessy marketed in your face until you want to puke thing.  Just toys and paint.  God I love those two.  

Those are a few things that have been on my mind.