someone up there has a bad sense of humour

My Dad had a heart attack on Sunday.

And one of my Mom's dogs died.

In a rational universe, those two sentences would never go in the same blog post. But, there they are.

Keep in mind that it happened on Sunday and I found out about it on Tuesday....

In a normal family, I guess, people might go to the hospital, get flowers and cards, hug. In a normal family, I probably would have found out on Sunday. So let's work with the assumption that I don't have a normal family.

What, on god's green earth, do you do for two people in that situation who seem to abhor nothing so much as having to talk to people? Where is the boundary between uncaring and intrusiveness?

I'm not feeling anywhere near as flippant as the above makes it sound, though exasperation is there in large measure. The truth is, I usually have no idea what to think or feel where they are concerned, having lived with them for so long in Solitude. I have no idea what they think or feel. Or want. Or need.

(I asked. She said "nothing." With my Mom nothing might mean nothing, or it might mean "I want you to know already," or it might mean "I don't want to trouble you," or all of the above, or maybe even she doesn't know. In any case, she said "nothing.")

I'm going to have to tell Frances about Lexi before my nephew's birthday party on Saturday. She'll be looking for her.

And I'm going to have to tell her about her grandfather, in terms a four (and-a-half) year old can understand.

I'm not used to thinking of either of them as mortal, at least not in the ordinary way. I'm diabetic, there's a fair statistical chance that they both will outlive me. They've both been in disgustingly good health all the way along (unlike their daughter) and I always just assumed they'd be there when I was gone.

Now I remember that my Dad's father died of a heart attack, when he wasn't much older than my Dad is now.

It's all a whole lot more complicated than it should be. I wish I could just be worried and scared and sad, and not confused and exasperated too.

Posted by Andrea at 6:56 PM | Comments (9)

42/6,000,000,000=0.000000007

Once again using the inimitable Douglas Adams as a source of puns and in-jokes, the above represents my personal portion of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, supposing it all gets portioned out among human denizens of earth only. Speciesist of me, I know.

Plus only the current generation. And no one born afterwards....

Umm.... So the first question is, how do I distract all of you from my shitty, haphazard math?

And the second question is, if 0.000000007 is my share of the answer, then what is my question?

For those of who you are not steeped in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, let me fill in the backstory (giant spoilers ahead. Continue at your own risk): according to that series, see, aliens built a supercomputer to figure out the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The answer the computer comes back with after x eons have passed is "42." "What? That's it?" The alien scientists complain. "Well, you didn't ask me for the question," says the computer; so the aliens, who happen to be little white lab mice pretending to be dumb animals in lab experiments to get their own way, build a really gigantic supercomputer called Earth in order to figure out what the question is. The planet is then blown up by a Vogon construction crew putting in a new intergalactic bypass just moments before the question was to be revealed.

So technically, you know, 0.000000007 of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is mine; and so are the questions leading to it. And yours too, of course. You have your own 0.000000007.

Victor Frankl argued that people are meaning-seeking animals, who can be happy in just about any circumstance so long as they believe that it means something. He believed this after watching who lived and who died in concentration camps during WWII. Psychologists today are making similar conclusions with more scientific rigour and fewer anecdotes: People with a strong religious faith are happier than those without, and this can be explained in part by the belief of the religious folks' that there is a God who has a purpose or plan for their lives, for instance. I am not at a stage where I am able to convince myself that there is a benevolent, omnipotent God out there who has a plan for my life, and I'm not particularly interested in contorting myself into that shape, either. Still. I know I'm happier when I think I'm here for something, for some reason larger than accident and random chance. Even though I know that accident and random chance is the actual, literal, logical, rock-bottom truth, it makes me miserable and I hate it.

I've decided I'm going to make up my own meaning. It's just going to be my own 0.000000007, so not very much and not very important, but all mine nonetheless. And I've decided that the supercomputer had it right: 0.000000007 is just my answer, it's not my questions.

(I hope to god you all know this doesn't actually have anything to do with Douglas Adams. Right? Right. Good.)

What are the questions that my 0.000000007 is an answer to? Figuring that out feels kind of like writing a novel. You have this hazy idea of where you're starting and where you might end up, maybe, and a few flashes of scenes along the way, and the more you write it the clearer it looks although sometimes you have to go back and start the whole thing over or rewrite three chapters you thought were finished, and most of it looks murky and dark and you keep barking your shins on furniture you can't see, so you sort of flail along with an arm held out in front of you, probing for what comes next, whether it's hard or yielding, smooth or rough, high or low, warm or cold. Sometimes you see exactly what's going on but most of the time you're thinking, "I don't get it," or "What just happened here?" or "Aren't you dead?" or "I really thought that was a sofa." Or, "Goddammit, this is the neighbour's house!"

I have no idea what my questions are. It'll probably take me the rest of my life to figure it out, hopefully before the equivalent of a Vogon construction fleet demolishes me for a bypass. Right now I figure it's something like "How can I make a good family for myself and Frances?" and "What makes people and societies change for the better?" and "How do you get people to fall in love with a place?" But my subroutine has only run about halfway through, knock on wood, so gods only know what that'll look like by the end.

It's such a nice, small number, too. 0.000000007. Who could be threatened by that? We each get our own tiny, tiny little bit; and mine doesn't have to bother yours, and yours doesn't have to bother mine, and it's ok if we contradict. It's not The Meaning. It's not The Meaning of Everything. It's not The Plan. It's just a few questions that add up to a very small answer, but they're my questions and my answer. I find it strangely comforting to think that the meaning of my life may just be to come up with a whole bunch of questions, the answer to which all combined is me.

What are the questions that you are an answer to?

Posted by Andrea at 9:16 AM | Comments (4)

I said I'd do it, I just didn't say when

A long long long long long time ago, back in March even, I promised Mad a ten-photo autobiography. Here it is, because I finally tracked down the cds with the photos on them, but...! I don't appear to have any photos backed up from Frances's infancy. Erik must have them. It stinks. So the autobiography abruptly ends about five years ago.

1. This is why I always say Frances doesn't look like me--because this is not what she looked like as a baby.

2. In the middle, with my big cousin S who I adored, and we were wearing matching dresses that my grandmother made us.

3. With my brother, in the brief span of years he was actually shorter than me.

4. Early highschool, with a Certain Reader of the blog, soaking wet after going on timberwolf falls at Canada's Wonderland. I spent a lot of my highschool summers there. I was probably about fifteen in this photo.

5. At the Casino night at the french school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec. In this one, I'm 18.

6. Frances is in there, you just can't see her yet. (4 months) Plus, I know it looks like the perspective is wonky, or Erik and I are tiny, but I am 5'7" and wearing heels. My brother and his wife are just that tall. They now have a baby who is turning one in July and is, no lie, already heavier than Frances is at 4 1/2. We're meeting L for the first time in two weeks at his birthday party, and I can't wait to take a picture of the two of them together.

7. Me, 6 months pregnant on the top of Vesuvius in Italy. That was fun. I would have been 28.

(Invisible Photos)

8. Me in the hospital with Frances before they discharged her. Isn't she cute? Look at the pumpkin-orange skin and the pumpkin-round head and that ridiculously tiny yellow preemie outfit with the bonnet! Look at all that hair! Just ignore the tubes and wires, please.

9. Me at the Motherlode conference in October 2006. (Was it 2006?)

10. Divorce certificate, which I am still waiting to get in the mail but which was, according to the lawyer, granted in early June. (Have I mentioned that it takes forever in Ontario? Did you know that you must be legally separated for a year before you are allowed to be divorced? I know couples who were separated for longer than they were married. What is the point of this?) I'm hoping to get this piece of paper sometime this year, at which point I'll scan some portion of it and put it up.

(By the way, I haven't had any spam comments on the blog since sometime yesterday morning, and although I've had real comments posted since then it's making me nervous enough to say that if you're trying to use the comments form and it's not working, you can email me at andrea@andreamcdowell.com.)

Posted by Andrea at 8:37 AM | Comments (8)

Summer Vacation (with a Side of Self-Help)

I actually managed to (mostly) not blog when I was on vacation. Can you believe it? I hardly can myself. And it was, pardon me for saying so, blissful. I mean, I still put in my thirty minutes or so deleting the 1000 spam comments each day that escape the spam filter (not an exaggeration, unfortunately) and commenting elsewhere for a few minutes a day, but mostly, I wasn't here.

Instead, I took Frances to Canada's Wonderland, where she is unfortunately still a few inches shy of the minimum height for most of the fun kiddie rides, including the toddler coaster, but where we had a great time regardless. She rode the rocket ships and the airplanes and we went on the helicopters and train together, and waited an hour to ride Scooby Doo's Haunted Mansion, and she got to ride on Scooby Doo again on the merry-go-round, and I took pictures and carried her around when she got tired of walking and wondered when I would remember that Frances can't finish an ice cream cone on her own and I'm better off getting one for us to share. Then we went to see the Dora and Boots show, and Frances joined the preschool mosh pit at the foot of the stage.

I took her to a Canada Day party and her first-ever fireworks and then listen to her ask me for the rest of the vacation if we were going to see fireworks again that day.

I brought her to the library and watched her play with other kids in the toy area while I browsed the non-fiction and got out a few titles. (I'm on a book fast until September--had I mentioned that? No new book purchases over the summer.) I got Frances her very own library card, which she brandished at other patrons. "I have a library card!" she told them excitedly in her non-library voice. "Aren't you lucky!" they told her. Later, she found a Dora book she has at home already: "I have this book at home!" she told another patron. "Wow!" they replied.

I watched her spend hours and hours playing outside with her beloved sister C.

And when she was with her Dad I spent most of a week with Greg. Back when I'd planned this vacation I was supposed to have spent the week doing a writing workshop, but it was cancelled at the last minute and I decided to take advantage of it. We went to Wonderland, where Greg (a coaster-phobe) was a good sport and let me drag him on a bunch of rides. I wrote 8,000 words of my novel and hammered out a few major plot issues, got a few other things ready to submit and followed up on a couple of others. We watched movies and went to see one of his friends play in an acoustic 80s cover band, and I spent an evening dancing for the first time in ... umm ... ten years? I used to love dancing in my early twenties. Then I married someone who categorically refused to do anything that even approached dancing. I ran, a lot. I spent some time down at the Don communing with nature. I also got air conditioning.

The air conditioning is a thirty-year-old window unit that my parents used in their first house when I was a baby. It has an "energy saver" switch. What do you suppose that meant in the 1970s? Am I going to crash the grid? Can I salve my conscience even slightly by telling myself that I am reusing? Probably not? At least I can sleep.

Now here I am, back at work, with probably seven weeks to go before school starts. Ack.

My life is great when I'm not at work.

Anyway. One of my Happiness Expert books said that the benefits of vacation generally disappear about a week after a return to work (and at least the level of restfulness completely vanishes for me by the morning after, since I can't get to sleep on time and then have to wake up early--I'm beat), but the psychology of savouring can help you get the most from good experiences.

The psychology of savouring! What next.

The Happiness Experts have even come up with some practices that increase savouring so you can hold on to the good stuff, including vacation, for as long as humanly possible. Which sounds good to me, especially the morning after the end of a really great vacation.

1. Share the good stuff with others. Talk about what you love and why.
2. Strengthen the memories. Take pictures, get souveniers, write it down.
3. Be proud and congratulate yourself/brag. My guess is this applies more to "I just won the Nobel prize!" than "I love the Behemoth!"
4. Focus your attention on the parts of the experience you want to remember and block out the rest of it.
5. Absorption: immerse yourself completely in the moment, don't think about what's coming next.

You'll have to take my word that I was repeating four and five to myself like a mantra, especially for the last few days. "Stay in the moment! Don't think about Monday! Pay attention!" And the photos I took will soon be printed and festooned liberally around the apartment and the cubicle (for the few remaining weeks I will have the cubicle), not to mention having already been plastered all over facebook. As for numbers one and two ... guess.

Posted by Andrea at 9:41 AM | Comments (2)

Reinvention

Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week is "How far would you go for yourself or someone else?" This was the first answer that came to mind.

"Solitude" is a story by Ursula le Guin story in The Birthday of the World where an anthropologist visits a planet without a society. There are humans on this planet, they have a culture; but they do not appear to congregate or form bonds. This anthropologist moves in with her two young children and tries to crack the culture's codes.

The adults never speak to each other. When they need to communicate, they speak to children in the presence of the adult they need to share something with, and in this way information is passed along. Each adult woman lives in a hut she makes with her own hands with her children. Men congregate in tribes on the outside of the villages; a man and a woman will have sex for a brief time and then separate, and she will raise the child within the village while the man returns to his tribe. They call this state of radical independence "being a person." In the end, when the anthropologist tries to leave with her children, the older daughter cannot readjust to a world where people are so rude as to talk to each other, to tell jokes and laugh, and so she fights until she is allowed to go back and make her own hut and raise her own children by herself in the village.

This resembles my immediate family to an uncomfortable degree. Everyone built their own hut with their own hands, metaphorically speaking; everyone met their own needs by themselves. On the rare occasions when communications had to be made, they were made indirectly in the presence of safe third parties. Connections were brief and meaningless and formed for pragmatic ends, and dissolved when the need that gave rise to them was past. It's only now as an adult, looking back, that this seems as crazy to me as it probably seems to many of you. Even now, the thought that people might actually tell each other how they're feeling about something, say what they would like to change, and have the expectation that a change might result from that conversation seems slightly shocking, almost taboo. Like walking behind the counter at a baked goods store, helping yourself to a couple of muffins and cinnamon rolls, chatting cheerfully with the staff about the weather, and strolling away without paying.

I carried this into my marriage, and so did my spouse. Needless to say, in most cases marriages will not thrive where each party considers themselves a self-sufficient island of one, making reconnaissances for necessary goods and services at unpredictable times, communicating indirectly via third parties, and expecting that whatever needs exist will somehow be met through this convoluted chess match.

It took almost a year from the date of the separation until I was willing to even begin to face my role in the breakdown of that marriage. It's the sort of breakdown where it would be very easy to claim victim status--and I'm skirting the edges of my gag order here--and that status is one that others have occasionally tried to shove me into. "It wasn't your fault," they say; "you were deceived and manipulated!"

That's true. I was deceived and manipulated. But, just like that Austrian wife who you can't help but think must have wondered what her husband was doing over the course of twenty-four years in that new extension he had built on the house and which he protected with a keyless entry, I wasn't just deceived and manipulated. I did a lot to foster, encourage and tolerate that situation; and it's only beginning to occur to me now, as I look back and see how different I was and how much some of my previous attitudes horrify me and how destructive my own actions were, that I can actually admit to my part in that mess.

I don't stay the same person from one season to the next here, do I?

I read in Mother Nature years and years ago that attachment styles should not be understood as disorders; that, if you are born into a world where you cannot count on other people to provide for your needs or care about your feelings, then the extremes of avoidant attachment styles--even sociopathology--are adaptive. Our ability to form different kinds of relationships depending on how people treat us as infants and young children has an evolutionary basis; be born into a cruel world, learn to be cruel. Be born into an indifferent world, learn to be indifferent. The people in "Solitude" are born into a world where they are required to meet every need they might ever have on their own, and their families are the microcosm in which they are taught to do this--it's adaptive. The problem in our world is that many of us are still born and raised within a microcosm that is cruel, indifferent, chaotic or unpredictable, and we adapt to it in all of the traditional ways; then leave that world and find that the skills it gave us are completely maladaptive because our families were broken systems that did not reflect the world. When you grow up in Solitude it can be painful and disorienting to try to live in society--just as it was for the anthropologist's daughter.

I'd like to say it's culture shock just because it would fit so nicely with the metaphor, but it's not. Culture shock is a timid, tepid experience next to this one. It's more like discovering that foundational elements of your personality were never intrinsic parts of your inherent temperament, but trained defensive responses to environmental stimuli; you wake up one day and discover that your Self is a suit of rusting iron battle armour ten sizes too small that you put on for a war that's been over for a decade. Clearly happiness will be impossible until I learn to take it off and let it go: I'm not in the army anymore, I am not walking over minefields or defusing bombs anymore; I don't need battle armour.

Peeling it off is slow, hard, and often painful work, but as much as I expect it will make my life better, I'm not just doing it for me.

Frances is, in every way, the opposite of that suit of battle armour. Her sensitivity and fearlessness, the way she wears her big heart wide open on the front of her shirt, is what I find most special and beautiful about her. But the people who grow up in Solitude aren't open, sensitive or fearless. It's enough of a tragedy for someone already self-contained and introspective to be that way in the world, but for Frances to learn the rules I grew up under, to learn to be an island of one without needs or the ability to communicate or feel, would mean breaking her in a fundamental way. And it's not something I would need to consciously set out to teach her. Just being that way myself, interacting with her that way, would be all I'd need to do.

If I am going to be the mother she needs me to be, the one who can help her learn to navigate the world as the person she is meant to be, then I need to learn how to break all those rules myself. Take the pathological independence, the indirect communication, the too-literal selflessness and let it all go, make a new Self with rules that work in the world I actually live in. Leave Solitude, and take my daughter with me.

Posted by Andrea at 11:14 AM | Comments (11)

Emotional Logic, Learned Personalities and the MBPT

Bea once again posted one of her inimitable ruminations on the myers-brigg personality types--this time, on the connection between an intuitive style and risk-taking behaviour. In it, she argued that adrenaline and fear are exciting for sensory types, but not for intuitive types, who find it more thrilling to live in their heads. Which might, for most of us, be true; except I'm going to draw a rather large line down the middle of the personality types based on nothing more than my own experience.

First, a primer (or a reminder for those of you who have forgotten): Myers-Brigg Personality Typing (MBPT) defines personality as something that intersects along four axes: Introversion vs. Extroversion (I or E), iNtuition vs. Sensing (N or S), Thinking vs. Feeling (T or F), and Perceiving vs. Judging (P or J).

Most of the time, I come up as an INTJ--a rationalist, a thinker. It's plastered all over this blog and I doubt any of you are surprised. But every so often, I come up as an INFJ--the T (thinking) and F (feeling) flip, and all of a sudden, I'm a visionary and a counselor.

I think, had I grown up in a different family, I would have been a thorough INFJ.

I don't know if this will surprise any of you, but I was an intense, passionate, hyper-sensitive little kid--born into a very WASPy family where emotional expression of any kind was considered at best gauche and at worst destructive. I've read in a number of sources that intellectually-gifted kids often have outsized emotions to match and process events and situations very differently, and from my own experiences, I'd say that's true. I'd see an ambulance going down the street when I was a kid and would immediately be concerned not only about the person in the ambulance (who might be sick! or dying! or hurting!), but all the people they left behind, the ones who called the ambulance, even then organizing themselves to get to the hospital--and the others, who didn't know yet, but would find out soon, and what would they do? I remember once seeing an ambulance drive down the street sirens wailing on Christmas Day, and even now all the worry and concern I had over the people left behind at home, surrounded by presents and wrapping paper and the turkey burning in the oven, and how they would be able to celebrate Christmas again the next year. Meanwhile my family was mostly exasperated because I was crying--again.

Or every time I saw a horror movie with friends and could hardly stand it, being self-consciously aware that they were enjoying it somehow, and I couldn't. Even at eighteen when I went to see a thriller with a group of friends, all I can remember of the entire movie is a scene where a man's leg was broken. It was a fake man and a fake injury, but it made me nauseous; my friends were having a great time. I've given up watching movies where I know people are going to get physically hurt, I can't handle them. Hell, if a character embarasses themselves on a TV show I feel a need to get up and leave the room, the vicarious embarassment for a fake person feeling something fake in a fake situation that is meant to be funny is still too much.

All through the month of May--and here I am, supposedly 33--I kept seeing caterpillars that had been partially run over by bikes. Their front ends were trying to crawl away from flattened rear ends melded with the concrete; and I looked at every one, and wondered if it felt pain, and apologized to it for living in a culture where our desire to get places fast means we feel entitled to trample little living things.

Which is why parenting my own hyper-sensitive little girl isn't as much of a challenge for me as it might be for other people. I get her. I don't feel a need to toughen her up or make her see sense.

So, being born with emotions that felt overwhelming and chaotic most of the time and with little to no immediate support in either validating or learning to manage those feelings, and also being born with a very large brain, I learned to distance myself from and manage emotions that otherwise seemed destructive and dangerous by analyzing them. For me, Thinking developed as a conscious tool to manage Feeling, not because Feeling was unimportant or small or underdeveloped but because it was way way too big.

I can believe that a lot of Ns, when faced with a risky situation, tell themselves, "Ohmygodno, that's way too scary, I could never do that! I'm going to stay inside and daydream instead." The adrenaline rush gives them no pleasure and they avoid it.

But for some of us NTs, it goes more like this:

"Ohmygodno, that's way too scary, I could never do that!" (pause) "But wait. Does that make sense? Should it be this scary? What are the risks, really? What am I afraid of? If the risks are that low, why am I this scared? I should just do it. I should just do it and face the fear, there is no rational reason to be this afraid."

Or this:

"I can't believe how furious I am. How could so-and-so do this to me? I should punch them in the nose." (pause) "But wait. Why am I this angry? Did they mean to do this? Did they do it to hurt me? Probably not. I shouldn't be this angry. I should go and punch something inanimate and unbreakable and wait until I cool down and think about this some more."

The feelings aren't small, they are overwhelming, and this makes them scary. The Thinking pattern of analysis develops as a means of self-defence, to prevent yourself from destroying your own life over and over again on the basis of negative feelings that turn out to be temporary. Sometimes this backfires, as when a hypothetical someone puts off a divorce for several years on the assumption that the anger is probably temporary and unfounded. In any case, it becomes a habit, a reflex that is applied to every emotion on almost every occasion, until it legtimately becomes a part of the constructed self.

The personality tests measure whether you think rational logic is more important than feeling, or vice versa; but it doesn't measure why. It can't say whether a person emphasizes thinking because they think feelings are unimportant, or because their feelings aren't strong enough to provide a basis for action, or because their feelings are overwhelming and it makes them seem dangerous. Those are pretty important distinctions, and depending on where you fall, your behaviours will be very different. In any case, I think a lot of NTs have learned to prioritize thinking, for whatever reason.

When it comes to adrenaline, to fight-or-flight, for those of us who have learned to tackle difficult emotions analytically, to manage feelings by distancing ourselves from them with a well-aimed theoretical dropkick, neither fight nor flight offers genuine pleasure. But fight offers pride and self-respect; whereas flight, conceived of as surrender, is demoralizing.

I purposefully do what I am afraid of because I am afraid of it, not because it feels good, but because it feels better. The alternative is defeat.

Posted by Andrea at 11:10 AM | Comments (12)

Lazy Tuesday Meme

A meme from CraftyDabbler:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.

2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.

3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was halfway through my last co-op term, living in a rented room in Ottawa, working for DND in their environmental office. It was the only job I've ever had or am likely to ever have where unexploded ammunition was considered a standard environmental concern. I have dozens of good stories about that job; sadly, many of them have been classified, so I will have to sigh reluctantly and shake my head in lieu of sharing them. The Canadian military might be pathetic but I'd still rather they not hunt me down.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

I'm going to read this as a "perfect, non-diabetic world" because I've never turned down a snack based on its calories or fat content.

1. soft drinks with actual sugar
2. waffles or pancakes at a restaurant
3. juice, milkshakes, smoothies
4. breakfast cereals
5. I can't think of a fifth thing I normally avoid eating because of its effect on my blood sugar. Pizza's tricky, I guess.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

1. chocolate, in small doses
2. shortbread cookies, on Saturdays
3. diet coke
4. black tea
5. homemade chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven, on special occasions

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Buy a small house, and hire someone to do the outside maintenance. I am not a lawn-mowing kind of person. Actually I'll take that back: replace the lawn with a nice, low-maintenance garden. That's much better.
2. Put aside plenty of money for Frances's education
3. Buy a few seats in parliament and give them to someone with brains. (What? Don't tell me they're not for sale.)
4. Never work for money again, unless it's because someone paid for something I wrote.
5. Give a pile of it away. Have fun watching people name libraries and hospital wings and school auditoriums after me.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Admin assistant in a Girl Guides office
2. Fry girl
3. PR in a municipal office, which involved dressing up as a giant stack of newspapers in the annual Santa Claus Parade. You haven't had fun until you've dressed up as a giant stack of newspapers placed on top of a giant blue box.
4. Environmental Officer parts 1, 2, and 3.
5. highschool substitute teacher. Yes, really.

Three of my habits:

1. I can't walk past a newsstand without checking out all the magazines, no matter how many newsstands I have passed earlier in that day with the exact same magazines on them.
2. "Frances, you're adorable. Did you know that? You're such a great kid. I'm so lucky." (I know, Mummy! You said that already!)
3. Poking various diabetes-related holes in myself.

Five places I have lived:

1. Brampton
2. Toronto
3. Waterloo
4. Ottawa
5. Germany

Five people I want to get to know better: (A nice way of saying TAG!)

1. anyone
2. who
3. wants
4. to
5. play

Lots of bigger posts brewing. This is my way of taking a breather.

Posted by Andrea at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)

A Good Day

Any Monday that begins with a one-hour sleep-in is bound to be a good one. I actually woke before Frances yesterday, and had gone downstairs to check the weather forecast online when I heard "Good morning Mama" from the top of the stairs.

I'm not sure why I'm Mama again. I was Mummy, then Mommy, then Mom for a few days; now Mama. In any case, I carried my sleepy girl in her mermaid pyjamas downstairs and set her up with a minigo and another watching of Shrek 3 (for the babies at the end, you see. The rest of the movie is just leading up to the part where the shrek babies appear and she can ooh and aah over how cute they are) while I blogged, after which we played ("Psst," I whispered, and when she leaned in, "I love you." "Psst," she whispered, and when I leaned in, "You're a great mommy") and got dressed and then I rode her to school in the bike. It was a nice enough day that she got to wear her crinkly pink skirt and her pink t-shirt with the butterfly on the front that makes her look, as she says, like a ballerina. An especially adorable one, since the preschooler belly pushes the skirt down a bit in front so that it poofs up behind her.

I had a lot to get done while she was at school yesterday afternoon; so after dropping her off I rode my bike down to the Don for an hour (#1--exercise), then went home and changed and headed off to Ikea on foot to get some organizing things to tackle some of the messes that developed over the winter and take care of a few nagging issues that are more apparent now that we've been living there for a while, and also a bathroom mirror so that Frances can brush her own teeth (#2). Took the subway home and reorganized the front hall and the closet, and good god, I have shelf space after all, also the floor is no longer littered with shoes of various sizes (#3). Put the other organizing gizmo in my closet and got all the sweaters my Mom gave me off the floor, where they'd been living for a few months because I have nowhere else to put them, and I'm not quite sure when or if I will ever wear so many sweaters (she was downsizing after changing careers herself) but they have to go somewhere (which reminds me: anyone in the Toronto area interested in some sweaters? Or some size 8 or 10P clothes? They're nice, I'm just not short enough for them) (#4). Put the clean dishes away, cleaned the bathrooms, engaged in the never-ending battle against the sand that Frances tracks in and dumps from her shoes to the floor (#5). Off to the mall across the street for a pitstop at the toy store and to pick up a few groceries I'd missed on Saturday (#6).

There's all kinds of plans I have for organizing the apartment over the summer; like, getting all the christmas stuff into semi-attractive storage boxes and keeping them over the kitchen cupboards, since there is all kinds of space up there that is otherwise going unused. Then taking the empty storage cabinet from the storage room and putting it outside, to use as a shed for Frances's outdoors toys (which otherwise get muddy or leafy or stolen), since it is waterproof and has space for a lock. This will clear up space in the storage room, so I can keep my bike there instead of in the living room; which will clear up a handy bit of space that could be used for a small bookcase, when I get around to getting one, for all the books currently stacked on the floor of my bedroom. At which point I could entertain getting a small desk for the computer gadgets that have nowhere to go right now; and I will probably get rid of the small green desk currently in the dining area because I never use it with the kitchen table right there, and it ends up just holding crap; so I'd take that out and maybe store it at my parents' and then get a small shelving unit to hold the crafty stuff instead. But one thing has to lead to another, so the first thing is to get the storage boxes that will fit over the cabinets in the kitchen.

Anyway.

It was a busy afternoon; after which I picked up my girl from the school and we walked home. At times she would let go of my hand and run off, small legs pumping, ponytail bouncing, staring back over her shoulder at me to see how I was taking it as she laughed. "Look at you go!" I'd say. "You'll never catch me," she'd reply. "You're right. I'll never catch you. You're too fast. Look at you!" At other times she would grab my hand and kiss the back and tell me she loves me.

"I have a surprise for you at home," I said.

"You do? What is it?"

"I can't tell you, or it won't be a surprise. Let's go home quickly so I can show you."

We got home and she found the plastic bag from the toystore in the front hall, and in it, two new balls to replace the ones that were evidently stolen from our front walk in the last few weeks. "Balls!" she said. "Oooh, I like this one, it's pretty." It is, too; it's a pink-and-white-and-purle o-ball with sparkles in it. "Let's go outside and play with them!"

"OK, but now we have a new rule: we can take one ball outside at a time, and when we're done we bring it back inside so it doesn't get lost again."

She picked the blue ball with green polkadots to start with and we went out front and played catch, Frances giggling all the while, and laughing harder when she missed and went to chase it than when she caught it. Soon C and two other neighbourhood children, both older than her, came riding by on their bicycles. "We're having a party by the rocks," said C. "Do you want to come, Frances? It'll be fun. We're going to have balloons and snacks and prizes and everything."

Frances jumped. "A party! How exciting!"

The mother of the older boy was also there. After a few minutes of chatting about this very exciting party, she said, "She's so advanced for her age! My goodness, look at you, walking already."

"Actually," I said, shifting my weight from one leg to the other, "she's four."

"Oh, my goodness. Isn't she adorable. I'd just like to eat you up!"

I laughed. "See, Frances, it's not just me. Everyone wants to eat you."

"It's true." The other mother knelt down. "I'd like to eat you with salt," she said, miming a salt shaker over Frances's head; "and pepper, and ketchup, and mustard," while Frances laughed. "Can I? No? Oh." She stood, and sighed. "She is so adorable. And you can just see her personality in her face, it draws you in."

I beamed. It's true, you know, but I never mind hearing it from other people.

The party was to start at seven. We played catch for a while longer and then went inside so Frances could have a small supper and call her father before it started. Good thing she was already in her party clothes, we both agreed. We came back outside and C joined us and said she'd been fired from the party so she wasn't going anymore, so here were the prizes and they could play their own game, and they did, and Frances "won" a few of C's small toys. Her favourite was the little fairy with the orange bendy wings, from which she could hardly tear her eyes; then C's mother came outside and took her to the park.

We went to where the party was supposed to be, but while the two older kids were there, no one else was; and (without addressing either of us, I'd like to mention) they decided to postpone it. I felt like telling them that when you fire your friends from the party you can't really be surprised when no one shows up. Frances was disappointed and didn't at first believe me when I said there wasn't going to be a party after all; I could hardly just take her home to bed after such a build-up, could I? So we went to the park, too.

She ran, she climbed chain ladders and bridges that looked much too big for her while I hovered anxiously behind in case she needed help, which she didn't; she went down big slippery slides. I remember the first yellow toddler slides only about half my own height two houses ago, and the light in her eyes when she first went down them. Now here she is zipping down some contraption way over my head, fearlessly. I watched the parents of the toddlers stare at us in something like fear or amazement or both, because Frances doesn't look older than their children but there she is on the big kids' playset and there I am, letting her. Then a few minutes in the chair swing and a very, very unhappy decision to go home to bed when it was already twenty minutes past her bedtime. "We'll come back on the next nice day," I promised her, "except for tomorrow because I'm going to need to give you a bath. Look at those filthy little feet!"

At home were two more surprises: a little nightlight that looks like a ghost from Ikea that will live on her flower table downstairs (except a bulb looked to be flickering a bit this morning, so I might need to exchange it), and her new mirror upstairs, where she brushed her own teeth for the first time (with some help) in her mermaid jammies before reading Little Miss Fun all snuggled up on the big bed, and then sleep.

Then eight hundred words for the novel, more tidying up, a talk with the boyfriend, and bed.

It was a perfectly ordinary, absolutely wonderful day; the kind I wish I could somehow trap in amber so I could always go back and see it again just as it was, every detail unaltered. The way her soft little lips pressed the back of my hand when she said, "I love you Mama." Her giggly grin over her shoulder as she ran, those tiny muscled legs winking. Patting the head of the ghost nightlight. Her tiny feet all crusted over with sand, the way kids' feet should be after a beautiful summery day, and her face streaked with dirt where she had rubbed it with her grimy little fingers. Laughing while she is admired by others, and showing off her pink ballerina skirt that rides up in the back. I want every bit of it etched in translucent stone so that twenty or forty years from now, it's still there. One of those days when even if you could, you wouldn't trade your life for anyone's.

Posted by Andrea at 9:18 AM | Comments (6)

Announcements

1. This is something I've been meaning to do for a while: a couple of you asked for my facebook profile since I mentioned that's a good way to see pictures of the WBKE, BN (which won't ever be posted here), and then I didn't respond. And seeing as there are about five bazillion Andrea McDowells in the world, you were not able to track me down properly.

Here it is: This is me, even featuring some of Frances's lovely artworks.

I also wanted to say (and have been meaning to say for a while) that I'm sorry I couldn't respond to more requests to follow me to the 'other' blog than I did. I wish I could have said yes to everyone, but then that would have defeated the purpose--in any case, many of you mentioned that you wanted to follow along for specific reasons (you also are single moms, getting a divorce, dealing with health issues, and so on) and I wanted to say that all of those topics are staying here anyway, with the exception of specific divorce details that I can't make public.

I meant to respond to all of the emails and requests individually and I still might, but time management is running away on me and I didn't want to say nothing--so here is a hopefully temporary something.

2. If you go see the facebook profile you'll notice that I am listed as 'in a relationship.' I'm not trying to keep secrets or anything but I think it's still a bit too new to make as public as the internet makes things. So that's all you get to find out today.

Except that he reads the blog, so be good.

And: Yes, we met on the internet; no, I did not tell him about Frances before we met; yes, he did read that post a week or two back about how I think it's a bad idea to make it public in the dating profile; yes, he did agree with me; yes, I think it's safe to say that he's ok with dating mommies; so there.

3. Plus, I am going back to school in September.

Unless I chicken out and change my mind, but I don't think I will.

More details to come soon.

It's been a pretty big couple of weeks.

So, what's new with you?

Posted by Andrea at 9:08 AM | Comments (11)

The Constitution of the Republic of Andrea

Jen linked to something called The Happiness Project a week or so ago; and while I will be brave and admit I'm not sure about the entirety of The Happiness Project (I'm thinking it's probably most advisable for those who have no serious mental health issues to begin with), I do like the blogger's Secrets of Adulthood, her own rules for navigating life (way down in the left-hand sidebar, beneath the Wednesday tips). (I like other things too, but this is a unitopical blog post.) It got me to thinking about what rules for life I've managed to put together, in the near-total absence of any conventional knowledge. And this is undoubtedly what I should have written for Julie's Hump Day Hmm last week.

But better late than never: Andrea's Voice of Experience

1. Treat others as they would like to be treated. If you don't know how they would like to be treated, treating others as you would like to be treated is a good starting place; but it's still better to know the difference.

2. Nice is about looking good; kind is about being good. Be kind.

3. Kids are resilient, so forgive yourself for the occasional mistake. But don't use their resilience as an excuse to allow a persistent negative pattern to continue, because if you do something over and over again it will have consequences. And you're the adult, it's your job to fix it.

4. Take a risk. Be willing to make a fool of yourself. At the very least, you'll learn something.

5. You can't be brave if you're never scared.

6. Harm none.

7. And since that's impossible, be willing to accept the consequences when you do harm.

8. The world already has one Angelina Jolie/Mahatma Gandhi/Alexander Graham Bell/Joan Didion, it doesn't need another one. It needs you.

9. Failure is temporary; apathy is permanent.

10. What feels like boredom or frustration is often resistance--not wanting to do the next thing that you know you need to do, not wanting to engage with your life as it is. Resistance is fear, always. This is the one kind of fear you should never listen to. Learn the voice that resistance has for you and beat it over the head with a big stick until it falls down in a messy, bloody heap. It is not your friend, it will not keep you safe.

11. You can't save the world on your own, but you can still contribute your own small piece. Have faith and hope that your own small piece will matter.

I'm sure there are more, but that's what I'm starting with.

What do you think? Tattoo? Too permanent? T-shirt? Too crowded? Coffee mug? No? Screensaver! Nah.... Stone tablet? Parchment? Petit-point?

Posted by Andrea at 3:27 PM | Comments (8)

Ten Ways to Duck Responsibility

1. Always be tired. Or sick. Or headachey. You can't be held responsible for actions taken under the influence of physical distress. Eg.: "I know, I was so cranky, but Stella had me up all night teething and little Joe's got a bug...."

2. Persistently misunderstand what people are asking you for. Eg.: "Oh! When you said you wanted me to stop off at the store and buy some milk, you meant today!"

3. Forget everything. Eg.: "Did you ask me to put my dirty clothes in the hamper? Are you sure you wanted me to unload the clean dishes? I don't remember you telling me that we had a dinner party tonight. Why would you write it on the calendar? I never look there."

4. Be drunk. Or stoned. Or both. I've never been either, so I can't be sure how this works, exactly.

5. Claim safety in numbers. Eg.: "But everyone was going to Hooters for lunch, honey! Why are you so upset? I'm only there for the chicken wings."

6. Have an unending series of horrendous days at work. Eg.: "Oh my god, that's right, you did ask me to finish the taxes this evening. I'm sorry. Really. It's just that I had this meeting that dragged on for four hours and...."

7. Experience trauma. (Note: this one is more convincing when it is authentic. Fake trauma tends to raise hackles, not sympathy.) Eg.: "But when I was little I almost drowned in a toilet and now the sight of a toilet bowl makes me panic, so I'm sorry but I can't ever scrub the toilet. And one day I'll tell you about what happened when I tried to take the garbage to the curb!"

8. Claim to be more highly evolved. Eg.: "I'm sorry that my sleeping with your sister bothered you so much. Personally, I don't believe in these outdated notions of territoriality in relationships and sexual possessiveness, but I guess we're not on the same page. Let me loan you my copy of Heinlin's Stranger in a Strange Land. When you're done, we can talk."

9. Lie. You'd better be good at it, though. Eg.: "Look, I don't know what you're talking about, or where you got that idea from, but I quite clearly remember coming home from work yesterday and spending an hour in the backyard pulling weeds, not watching Three's Company reruns, and if there's still a lot of weeds in the backyard that's just because I'm not done yet. So no, I'm not spending this evening priming the bedroom walls, I'm going out for a drink."

10. Blame Fate. eg.: "I couldn't help it, the Universe made me do it."

10. is new. 10. is only about a month old. Up until then, 10. was often my favourite way of getting out of trouble--not necessarily with other people, but with myself.

Any one of the first nine can be a valid reason for fucking up. Despite the stated desires of the composers of many online dating profiles,* we all have baggage, some of us more than others, and we all make mistakes, and sometimes the reasons for those mistakes are compelling and genuine. I'm not denying it. But it's more convincing and better when it is accompanied by accepting responsibility and making a genuine effort to change. You know, a real apology,** consisting of real remorse, and followed by a real reform, even if imperfect.

Whenever I didn't want to have done something--whenever it didn't fit with my conception of myself or who I wanted to believe I was--I'd blame Fate. I didn't do that on purpose, I couldn't possibly have, I didn't want to, I had to; what else could I have done?

I've mentioned this before: the Jungian concept of the Shadow, the part of the mind that holds everything we don't want to acknowledge about ourselves. It is not the Freudian Id, assumed to be an uncivilized child full of impulse without control. The Shadow is not necessarily bad or wrong; it holds what we believe is bad or wrong. Those beliefs don't have to make any sense. For instance, if you are a female and you believe it is bad for women to be aggressive, then your own aggression will get stuck in your Shadow, where you will never have to face or admit to it. But there it goes, frequently losing its marbles and ruining your life (or at least your day), safely out of reach. And when you encounter this trait in other people--in this example, when you meet an aggressive woman--you will hate them. This trait is unacceptable and so people who have this trait are unacceptable too.

Every fall and winter during the long dark days between the fall and spring equinoxes, and especially between Samhain and Yule, my Shadow and I get into a boxing match. I get to know it a little better, see it a little more clearly, and reclaim a few more traits I wish I didn't have but which are better owned and managed than left to fester unacknowledged.

This year's was tough. This year I learned that I am so convinced that I ought to be happy and satisfied already with what I have at this moment, that I do not believe I am entitled to want to be happy, let alone to actually do something about it--all my wants and most of my needs have been shoved off to the Shadow, where I label them selfishness, refuse to acknowledge them, and they end up periodically running my life. When I act on one, so terrified am I of admitting to having done so or even having wanted something in the first place, that--I Blame Fate.

Fate, for me, is a scapegoat for selfishness (even when the selfishness is appropriate or healthy). The Universe has no designs on my life. There are simply things I can't or don't want to take responsibility for.

Now I'm left wondering if Fate ever means anything but I don't want that to have been my fault or I don't want to have to know why that really happened. That Fate really means "I had to," without knowing or understanding why we had to, and without wanting to.

~~~~~

*I don't know what it is, but "no baggage please!" is a common phrase. I wonder, what, you want Sleeping Beauty? Someone who's been unconscious for the last hundred years? You want to be someone's first boyfriend? No? Then you're going to get baggage. More obnoxious is when it becomes apparent that by "baggage" they mean "kids."

**Far as I'm concerned, "I'm sorry" without some commitment to changing the hurtful behaviour is the equivalent of, "I know this is incredibly painful for you. I feel very badly about it but I'm going to keep right on doing it." This makes it, by definition, not a real apology.

(This is part of Julie's Hump Day Hmm--Julie, I'm so sorry, but you'll have to do the linking this week--Frances decided to share her cold germs with me!)

Posted by Andrea at 8:34 AM | Comments (4)

a life in six words

A friend was commenting the other day, as I shared yet another anecdote about the slow disintegration of my marriage, that I ought to write a book about it; and then, last week, the Goldfish wrote on her blog that I ought to write a book about my current dating adventures.

I agree with both of them; the trouble is that at the age of 33 I think I have the material for at least ten memoirs, and it's difficult to know which one to begin with. Here are the options, in no particular order:

1. The Diabetes Book. There are several good memoirs about living with type 1 diabetes out there right now but, given that it's an epidemic and all, there's almost certainly room for another one, especially if I can work in the pregnancy.

2. The Witch Book. How does a fundamentalist Baptist end up as a witch, anyway? It's a question I've been asked more than once. I think the answer could be a book.

3. The Other Woman Book.

4. The Marriage/Divorce/Legally-Nameless Reason for Divorce Book. Obviously I can't say much about that one here but I think it has a lot of potential, even if I'd have to write it under a pseudonym.

5. The Ugly Duckling Book.

6. The Growing Up Fundamentalist in a Secular Society Book. Not as much fun as it sounds.

7. The Dating Adventures Book. Past and present, a comparison of mores pre-internet and post, with a helping of "how to tell if the guy who's buying you a steak is actually a jerk." At the very least I ought to have enough outrageous stories to fill it up (like the guy who propositioned me after I accused him of stealing my wallet).

8. The Dwarfism Book. Aka, blog-on-paper.

9. The Single Motherhood Book. Still in the midst of figuring out what that one would be like; the one thing I do know is that it's not what I expected it to be.

10. The Combo Book. The Growing Up Fundamentalist in a Secular Society, Ugly Duckling, Converting to Wicca, Living with Diabetes, Coping with High-Risk Pregnancy Resulting in Rare Genetic Syndrome, Other Woman, Getting a Divorce for Legally-Nameless Reasons, Becoming a Single Mom, with Dating Adventures thrown in for leavening throughout, resulting in ... I don't know yet. I think, though, that it would be a pretty big book.

If you were me, which would you start with?

So you can see how this six-word memoir thing going around right now would propose certain challenges. Which memoir ought to be compressed into six words? I thought of a few:

Fifteen years, I still hate needles
I wanted you to choose me
Perfectionist (I like that one)

Ultimately they all leave too much out to be truly satisfying. The only one that works for me is:

My entire life is statistically improbable*

That * would be one hell of a footnote.

Posted by Andrea at 9:50 AM | Comments (10)

Rank Heresy

According to the article by Sonja Lubyomirsky quoted by Julie in her post today, "People learn early in life that success often is a matter of relative rather than absolute performance and, consequently, strive to learn how they stand relative to 'relevant others.'"

Relative success compared to relevant others--let's put that into layman's terms in the form of an internalized thought process, shall we?

'OK, so I'm not the world's best soccer player. I didn't score any goals last week, in fact; but that's ok, because I'm new, I've hardly ever played soccer before. The other people who are new didn't score so many goals either. Though they did score more than I did--but that's different, Joey is so much bigger than I am and Susan has always been such a fast runner. There was that other guy who didn't score any goals, I'm not the only person who didn't score any goals, though he did manage to stop the other team from scoring once or twice, and I didn't do that either--but that's ok. Soccer's a stupid game, I don't really care about soccer anyway.'

In other words, I highly suspect that most people select as their group of "relevant others" for social comparison whichever is likely to be the most flattering for themselves. And it works, right up until you live in a soccer-crazy culture where everyone wants to be great at soccer, and you "not really caring about soccer anyway" becomes just another thing wrong with you.

Like breasts. My female readers will know exactly what I'm talking about--nothing is more important to the social status of a thirteen-year-old girl than breast size. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me since my "relevant others" were all eight years old; I still remember nearly twenty years on a day in the changeroom before or after gym class (hands up everyone who'd still like to go back and torture whichever adult ever came up with the concept of group nudity during adolescence) when I was informed that next to so-and-so, who had half-melons, and next to so-and-so, who had half-apples, I had half-cherries. But that's ok, who cares about breast size anyway?

Oh, that's right, boys. Boys cared about breast size. They weren't even subtle about it. One day in drama class in grade 10, I remember, a relatively well-endowed girl leaned back and put her arms over her head for a good stretch--and the boy sitting next to me nudged his friend and pointed straight at her chest so they could both have a good ogle. Or another boy who was so offended by Guess brand clothing for some reason I never managed to fathom, who said he was tempted to go up to any girl wearing "guess" on her chest or her ass and estimate her bra size. Why bra size? Was there an innate understanding that this would be the most humiliating, or was it just that at that age there was little else as important? He never threatened to guess their IQ or their favourite colour.

All of which is to say that "relevant others" is sometimes a field which we are left to define for ourselves, and sometimes is a field defined for us. In adolescence, no one is free to decide that it's ok if they're ugly because beauty doesn't really matter anyway. We are all left to bleed on that killing field. In my gym class in middle school, there was a girl whose name began with W, with pale blond hair and blue eyes, a beaked nose, and at least and extra fifty pounds. Not only did many of the other girls mock her, but our gym teacher was relentless too, and made sure every day to tell her how unacceptable her body was. I hope the teacher's own body betrayed her in some greusome and painful way, I truly do; W was defined by her weight all throughout highschool, and whenever I ran into her (which happened once a year or so) the conversation inevitably returned to how well or how poorly she was doing with her weight-loss efforts.

~~~~~

I'd like to say we all outgrow it. Certainly it matters less as we get older, and when it does matter it hurts less than it used to; but it still matters, and anyone who says it doesn't has yet to be exposed to the marvelous world of online dating sites. I know, I'm back at that again; but it's relevant so hang on. Let's leave alone for a moment the examples that are so offensively shallow it's hard to believe it's not some massive cyber-joke, i.e. sugardaddie.com and their ilk ("Where the attractive, classy and affluent meet"--sure, that's just exactly what comes to mind when I think of sugar daddies) and focus on those that purportedly are trying to match people up to someone who could be a life partner (Match, eHarmony, certain sections of LavaLife, plentyoffish, etc.). The first thing you have to do upon signing up is fill out a questionnaire. Do they ask you about your views on capital punishment, your charitable donations for the last year, your favourite book, the amount of TV you watch?

No. They ask for your age, your body type, your height, your income, your level of education, whether or not you already have children, if you want any in the future, your smoking and drinking habits, give you a chance to tick off your hobbies (one of the two of the guys I met who listed "creative writing" as hobbies meant that he'd published a poem in the local newspaper's "poet's corner" once, and the other was referring to the three poems he'd written since graduating from university ten years ago, so you can imagine there is a broad field of possible meaning), and ask you to post a photograph. None of this is necessary. You can leave the whole thing blank if you choose but, as they sternly warn, "profiles with photographs get 8x the number of responses." Why is that? Because "prefer not to say" is interpreted by most browsers as meaning that the person has no relative success against any relevant others--that the guy without a photo has two heads, neither of which have a nose; that the one who left the income field blank is, in fact, living with his mother and hasn't held a steady job since 1993; that the one who has decided not to share about his drinking habits was probably drunk as he posted the profile. Sure, there's the ad-lib section where you can wax poetic about your deep and abiding love of cats, the importance of your spiritual values and the number of exes who would rate you an excellent kisser (and some people do, in fact, include this information); but the reality is that if you don't fare well on the social comparison section most people will not bother looking past it to the lovely and loving soul that lurks beneath. (Though in some notable cases the opposite does occur: someone does well on the social comparison section only to ruin it by revealing a sinkhole of moral values in the ad-lib section, for example, the lovely man who sent me a message and revealed that while he was looking for a woman who was beautiful and intelligent (while being neither himself, so far as I could tell), he could accept beautiful and unintelligent. Or--even better!--the man who said he was looking for a very submissive woman to have sex with while his wife was dying of a terminal illness. It's been many months since I received that one, Dear Readers, and I am still hard pressed to identify anything in that sentence that is not offensive, with the possible exception of the conjunctions).

The entire subject of dating, mating and marriage has always been a minefield of social comparison--stock phrases such as "I can do better," "she's out of my league" and so forth reveal it--but dating sites take it to a whole new level not only by making it clear and explicit but also by encouraging it. What do you want? What kind of lover are you shopping for? Make out a list and keep browsing till you find it; there's someone out there, someone perfect just for you, and you won't need to compromise or settle. Why, if you're not getting the kind of results you'd fancy, just rewrite your profile, tweak your age or income, put up a new photograph. It's all about how well you rate, your rank on the social hierarchy; and while the romance experts will tell you this is about chemistry and shared values and expectations, if the behaviour of people on dating sites is any guide, it has at least as much to do with how well your potential love interest reaffirms your perceptions about your relative success against relevant others. It's about bagging the trophy.

Posted by Andrea at 10:01 AM | Comments (13)

Fate For Sale

There was a time I thought that Erik and I were meant to be together--that it was fate, primarily because being together was so easy. No disagreements, no fights. It was only much, much later that I realized that the reason it had been so easy was because all of the hard things were not being said; and as anyone who has followed our story thus far can see, it clearly was not our fate to be together.

Which puts Frances in something of an interesting light, doesn't it? She is the best thing that has ever happened to me, the best person I have ever known; but if my relationship with her father was an accident from beginning to end, then she wasn't fated, per se. A massive serendipity. One of those fluke gifts of the universe, maybe; something that you could not possibly have deserved, but ended up with anyway.

Because the more I think about it, the one hallmark of fate is that it is never easy. It isn't something the universe throws into your lap. It's more like a gun the universe holds to your head while you're standing on the edge of a cliff. "Jump," it says, "or I'll shoot."

Who would argue that it wasn't Martin Luther King's fate to be the person he was, doing the work he was doing; or Gandhi's; or Bhutto's; and look at the terrible price they and their families paid. Or how many authors and musicians were jailed or killed, the price they paid to give us the work they were born to do. And how incredible it is that they paid it. It's hard to fathom such bravery. They must have known, or at least suspected. I think most of us are not cut from that cloth.

I know I'm not. I've known since I was five years old that I wanted to write and be a missionary, and there's nothing else on earth I'm better suited to. Ok, the mission changed; but I still have the soul of an evangelizer. (I hide it well.) (Don't laugh.) Unfortunately I've known since I was seventeen that I have an expensive chronic illness, and the price to pay to do the work that I still believe I was meant to do is simply too high. Both missionaries and writers are lamentably underpaid and have truly shitty health insurance policies.

Some cost even more.

One in particular I have carried around like a jewel in a little velvet box for a very long time. I took it out and looked at it sometimes, polished it, believing that if or when the time ever came, I could pay the price. The time came and I tried to pay it. It was fate, you see; how couldn't it be mine? And I'm strong. I'm very strong. If I can't pay it....

I can't pay it. The Universe is just going to have to shoot me.

I guess I'm stuck carrying that little velvet box around. Opening it up sometimes and polishing the jewel, then putting it away again. It's fate, you know. You can't just leave it on the curb for a dumpster diver.

What do you do with these little bits of cast-off fate, when the price was too high to make it real? How do you grow a scar around the place where it was supposed to be, so you don't tear it open again on a thousand little things? How do you reconcile the life you have with the life you still believe and can't help believing you were supposed to have?

Posted by Andrea at 2:16 PM | Comments (3)

Age Before Beauty

On Monday, I will be 33.

I'm telling you this now because Monday, half of you will be enjoying Easter festivities with nary a thought for your typical blog addiction. I'm also telling you this now because the blog turned 3 last week (such nice, synchronous round numbers) and this way I get to pretend I didn't simply forget to mention it. (Bad blogger.)

I'm still waiting to get creeped out by the numbers creeping higher. Thirty-three.

It's not that the passage of time doesn't bother me; it does, I resent every second I lose.

It's not that I relish the experience of being old, or even being older; if I did, I would hardly put so much effort into my health.

It's not that I think that after death comes some marvelous adventure, a la Peter Pan; I don't, I think life is, as one writer put it, a brief flash of light bookended by two periods of eternal darkness.

It's that by all biological rights I should have died fifteen years ago. And I didn't. Generally speaking, one only gets to be 25 forever when one dies at 25. Given the two options on offer, I'll take age. I get to be 33! Maybe I'll even get to be 45 or, hell, let's throw caution to the wind: 60! Thank you Banting and Best and the international medical-technology machine your invention spawned; I may hate the necessity of being part of it, but at least I have the choice.

It's true that I've done none of the things I'd planned to, by 33, and have undone substantial parts of the things I had managed to accomplish in their place. But I'm trying to use that as a reminder to make better use of my time and stay more faithful to the goals that really matter to me. ("World's Best and Most Up-to-Date Scrapbook" is, as it turns out, disposable; I can write instead.)

At the very least 33 has got to be better than 32. I expect it will come with a few more greys and a few more lines, and that click in my knee when I walk upstairs can only get louder. My opportunities for saying "Why, that must have been twenty years ago now" will increase, my ability to get up as soon as the alarm goes off will further detereriorate, and my chances of having a novel published by 33 have essentially vanished. I'm ok with that.

Posted by Andrea at 8:25 AM | Comments (11)

The Wicked Vow

(The Monday Mission will have to make an appearance on Tuesday this week; I have an idea but it's not fleshed out enough to share yet, even in the guise of a writing exercise. In the meantime, enjoy this pointless meandering.)

People ask me sometimes why the hell I ever bothered to marry my first husband since, in retrospect, it is pretty clear I ought not to have even dated him. An excellent question, to which I can only reply that I have the very bad habit of doing exactly what I say I am going to do, even when it becomes clear that it would be disastrous to do so. I said I would marry him, and then I did, even though I knew by then it was a really stupid thing to do.

I am so old-fashioned in this regard (and take a good look at this sentence, Dear Readers, because that's not an adjective you're likely to see me apply to myself again) that I view the words "I promise" as nearly inherently dishonest, or at least indicative of weak character. If you mean what you say, then you don't need to tag some sentences with "I promise," which would seem to indicate that sentences not so tagged you are then free to violate at a later date. If I say I'm going to do something, I'll do it; you won't get any greater commitment from me even if I am standing on top of a stack of bibles, qurans and books of shadows.

There are times when this trait is useful; for instance, I used it just about this time last year when I left Erik by telling friends that I was going to leave him. Having made this commitment to some friends, I was not then free to just forget the whole idea when the time came and I knew it would be painful and hideous. And New Year's Resolutions tend to stick with me, especially when I post them here, because I said I would do them, and dammit, I will.

Then there are the times when I make bad promises, and end up carrying on through on them because, well ... because.

"Rose followed the Old Woman's advice, and when she arrived at the seaside, she found a little hut with twelve narrow beds inside. Sure that she was soon to be reunited with her brothers, Rose waited by the hut. The sun began to set, and in its last rosy light, twelve great swans swooped out of the sky. As their feet touched the earth, the sun set, and before Rose's astonished eyes the swans turned into handsome young men. 'I am your sister!' cried Rose.

"Her brothers stared at her, horrifed. 'What have we done!' they cried. 'We have vowed to kill the first young girl we meet, because our misfortune came to us through a girl!' Rose shrank back from them, but in this moment the Old Woman appeared again. She faced the frightened, angry brothers: 'Break that wicked vow, which you never should have made. Can't you see? This is your own dear sister. Only through her can you be restored.' And she disappeared as quickly as she had come."

That's a section from a fairytale about a queen with twelve sons who makes a wicked vow of her own: I would sacrifice all of my sons to have one daughter. (Let's leave out how tremendously unlikely such a promise is in any patriarchal feudal society.) When her daughter is born, all of her sons turn into swans and fly away. They turn back into men only at night. The daughter Rose, when she is older, learns of what happened and resolves to rescue them. It's used as the metaphor tying together one of my favourite wicca books, The Twelve Wild Swans; and it seems this is something I need to learn over and over again. There is no honour in keeping a wicked vow.

It's identifying the wicked vows that's tricky.

Wicked vows can be anything from trivial ("I'll go on vacation when I lose twenty pounds") to the self-destructive ("I'll become a lawyer even though I hate it because my sister is a waitress and it broke my father's heart") to the truly wicked ("I will never let you see your son again"). Any promise made to self or other that should never have been made, and which you or I keep anyway, out of a misguided sense of integrity.

Some I eventually figured out:

I'll let myself write when I've earned it by doing everything else I'm supposed to do first--professional career and marriage and house and family--even though that leaves no time for it.

I never was the child they wanted, so instead I'll be the adult daughter they wanted, in a nuclear family with a big suburban house, even though I hate the suburbs, and hate driving, and hate having a big house to take care of, and even though the marriage is making me miserable.

I will do everything I can to save the world before I allow myself a moment's frivolous fun.

Others I'm still struggling with, unsure whether they are truly wrong or merely inconvenient.

I will never ask for more than I have, because I already have more than I deserve?

I'm stronger than you, so I will let you break my heart and I will never break yours?

How can I ever be sure?

Have you ever made a wicked vow? I will never make anyone angry or I will never make my mother cry or I will never tell them what you did to me? Others? Did you keep them, or break them?

Posted by Andrea at 11:47 AM | Comments (7)

Life Lessons

When I was in grade 12 a friend of mine, A, told me that a boy she was friends with had a crush on me. I didn't know him from Adam but I had this very bad habit of developing crushes on almost anyone who had a crush on me. This made life interesting. In this particular case the boy in question, whose name began with R and sounded suspiciously like an unpleasant bodily fluid, was (despite his name) cute and seemed nice enough and so, well, you can guess what happened. I only found out later that he was a crook. (Literally.)

Despite the romantic entanglements I was already busily weaving with gusto, I found--hey presto!--I had a crush on this guy. This progressed in typical highschool fashion (notes and rumours and finding pretexts to hover around the other person's locker and him driving home along my typical walking route an awful lot, and then just happening to offer me a ride) to a first date. We went to a movie. I remember nothing about it, not the movie nor what I thought of it nor if we ate beforehand or afterwards, except standing in line waiting for the tickets. We talked. I suppose it could have been called talking. There was an awkward exchange of sounds with various meanings, about subjects I've long since forgotten. All I clearly remember is how his eyes would widen slightly whenever I used a word more than two syllables long.

Oh my god! She's smart! No one told me she was smart!

This was our only date.

It might have been beforehand or afterwards by a several weeks that a group of us went to hang out at a conservation area after it was, technically, closed for the night; I remember he decided to climb to the top of a fountain at the entrance and relieve himself from the top. It was early spring, I think, and the nights were still very cold, and of course all of the girl were trying to impress the boys by wearing not nearly enough clothing; so eventually, the two boys who I did not yet know were crooks broke into a cottage bordering the conservation area, and we plundered their blankets for a while. The two boys who I did not yet know were crooks also helped themselves to a few souveniers and some snacks, and if you're thinking "Red flags, Andrea, wake up!" you'd be right. I only actually found out he was a crook when my friend, A, bought a used car stereo from him, found out afterwards it had been stolen, and tried to return it to the police only to be threatened by them for an arrest for purchasing a stolen good unless she told them who she bought it from. She didn't, and I don't think she was arrested, but it had the salutory effect of cooling the crush off anyway--though not until after the date.

After the date, he was difficult to find. He was not as frequently in the same hallway as my locker. He did not as frequently offer me a drive home. He did not ask me out for another date. What could it be? I wondered. A cleared it up: he decided he liked someone else.

The perfidy of boys! The fickleness! Of course he liked this other girl: she was tall and slim and very pretty and had huge blue eyes. We agreed that boys were scum. I can't remember what her name was so we'll call her W for reasons which will become clear shortly. A berated him on my behalf; said R (according to A), actually I think Andrea's a lot prettier, none of us think W is very pretty, she's too thin and her forehead is so high we all call her Warf (am I spelling that right? The klingon from Star Trek), but W's more fun and I think she's going to let me fuck her soon. I'm paraphrasing, you understand, but this is basically what it came down to.

Snookered again, I thought; but this, plus the whole crook thing, made him seem about as appealing as the bodily fluid that his name sounded eerily like, and I went about weaving my romantic entanglements elsewhere.

But we were still friendly and, one day, walking down the hall with him and another mutual male friend who was not a crook, they asked me how I was feeling. As it happened that day, my head was pounding with a migraine, and I was counting the minutes until I could go home and drown my sorrows in a bottle (or a few capsules) of acetominophen. I said, "I feel like something is splitting my head apart with an axe from the inside."

There was a pained, awkward silence, but I didn't care, my head hurt too much.

A few days later A told me that R and his friend thought I was talking about him. "What?" I said. "I had a headache." "That's what I told them," she said. Boys.

A tendency towards metaphor can get a girl into trouble.

In just over a month I will be 33, almost twice the age I was that year; I'd like to think I've made some progress since then. For instance, I recognize the concept of red flags and keep a cursory eye out for them. I realize that someone who has trouble with words more than two syllables long is unlikely to be a good match for me. I've even figured out that just because someone has a crush on me does not mean that I need to reciprocate--that someone else will someday also be interested in me and there's a chance that they won't be a petty criminal or a jerk.

So why is it that dating again makes me feel like I am back in highschool?

Posted by Andrea at 9:47 AM | Comments (9)

Born to Accommodate

Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week is about speaking up vs. staying silent--and it's something I have strong feelings about. No surprise. Only I can't come up with anything that relates to her scenarios, except:

It would depend almost entirely on what I ate for breakfast.

Yeah. That's it. Am I full, or hungry, or hot, or cold, and how much sleep did Frances let me have the night before? In other words, am I cranky? If I'm cranky, I might say something, or at the least might direct a very pointed look at the offender. I keep my pointed looks sharp with the use of a dedicated whetstone, so you know, these aren't your garden-variety pointed looks.

If I'm not cranky, I probably won't say anything. At all. Nice or otherwise.

And then people tell me that I'm brave here, only I've always been brave in print, and I still can't speak.

In part this is because I think by writing. I know the usual thing is to think by thinking, which leaves one open to the use of any medium at all to express the resulting thoughts. Not me. The best I am likely to do in public when confronted with a new question or issue is a thoughtful, concise and coherent, "Huh."

In part, this is because I introject, and if you had seen me last night, Dear Readers, watching the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the new Sharon has to slit her hand open to plug herself into the computer before a cylon virus destroys the ship--sitting on the couch with my eyes clenched shut and my wrists pressed into my stomach because it fucking hurt just to watch it, and yes, I know it's not real--you might understand why I'm meeker in person than I am online. Imagining someone's reaction is quite enough, thank you; actually seeing it often puts me out of commission altogether.

Sometimes, even when I know exactly what I want to say, I open my mouth and the words turn to stones in my throat. It's not at that point a conscious decision to keep peace by keeping quiet so much as an internal hijacking by some part of my mind that has decided my words are a kamikaze mission. But why? Is it fear, and if so, of what? It's not what I believe to be right, or good; if you asked me what I believed, I'd say this again, as I have many times before:

"In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words. ...I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?" (Audre Lourde)

That is what I would say; but what would I do, if someone made plans in front of me that didn't include me? Excluded someone from a playgroup because of their sex? Repaid good money with shit service? Such small things, shouldn't it be easy? For the monetary transaction conducted at one remove it probably would be, but the others?

Stew, ponder, swallow some bile, crease my forehead. Then come home and blog about it.

~~~~~

"Youth Decay" (Sleater Kinney)

Acid tooth
It's got nothing to do with you
but if you wanna watch me chew
my teeth are cutting you out
Stomachache

Well it must be in your head
It must be something that you did
Food just doesn't seem to work out
Am I rotting out?

Daddy says I got my mama's mouth
I'm all about
a forked tongue and a dirty house
Mom has said
yes this happened to me long ago
But no one would believe me when i said:

Close my mouth
Was I born to accommodate
I'm so good at playing dead
words just don't seem to come out
Should I eat something sweet instead
wash away all those things we said
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
how many doctors will it take
Oooh Oooh before i disintegrate

Posted by Andrea at 10:53 AM | Comments (9)

Moral Dilemmas II: where I answer my own rhetorical questions, or start to

Him: What do you think about dating more than one person at a time?

Me: I think it's fine, so long as everyone is being honest and knows what is going on.

Thinking: And even then...

When do you owe someone that honesty?

While before the first date is too much too soon, and after marriage is too little too late, there is a wide grey area in between where potential misunderstandings, hurt feelings and awkward conversations abound. This is probably why most people either a) avoid dating more than one person at a time or b) avoid having the conversations, thereby cheating by default.

But: is it the expectations that lie at the root of those misunderstandings and hurt feelings--that is, that people date one person at a time, and therefore only exceptions to this rule require communication--or the lack of honesty? If we expected people to be dating more than one person until hearing otherwise directly from them, how would that change?

~~~~~

Last week I read a column in the Globe and Mail titled The Other Woman, all about those poor sad dupes who believe the married guy loves them because he buys them lingerie.

Before I get to the part where I choked, I'd like to point out that any woman in any relationship who believes that a guy loves her because he buys her stuff, regardless of their official relationship status, is a poor sad dupe. This is not an affliction that holds only for The Other Woman. All of us are in the position of attempting to judge someone else's intentions and honesty based on a combination of gifts, actions, words, looks, consistency, and so on; none of us will ever fully penetrate or understand the heart of another.

Here are the choking hazards:

It's true there are women who profess not to care if their man leaves his wife.

...aha, but they are miserable, self-deluded wretches, engaged in a pathetic pretense. Deep down all women want the diamond ring and the white-picket fence. We have chosen to disregard what the women have to say about themselves, and will shortly share with you instead the musings of a group of self-proclaimed 'experts' who have not a shred of evidence among them.

But I would suggest that's an unhealthy display of defensiveness and self-degradation, and it points to the problem that many psychologists say underlies the reason single women settle for a part-time man. It's that old bugaboo: low self-esteem.

...because there's no such thing as a psychologically healthy woman who doesn't want to be married or partnered, would rather have several casual relationships over one serious one, enjoys being single or has tried marriage and didn't like it. Since we can't find a mental illness common to all women sleeping with married men which can be treated pharmaceutically (pity, it's so much more profitable), we'll just shame them all into silence or compliance by telling them it's their low self-esteem.

Here's one way to see things clearly. Think of yourself as a Ferrari in a garage that you are offering to him to use any time he wants. You fill it up with gas. You keep it clean, finely detailed for his pleasure.

...because clear thinking in relationships always involves objectifying yourself and seeing yourself primarily as a man's ticket to orgasm. This, by the way, also defines high self-esteem (see above).

The best advice, however, is the pre-emptive kind. Channel Barbara Amiel: When she was between husband No. 3 (David Graham) and husband No. 4 (Conrad Black), she was in London, moving among the great and the good. There were plenty of men, but she knew what she wanted and what she deserved.

...because Conrad Black may be a felon, but he's a rich felon and he was all hers. Good thinking, Barbara!

Ready for more? Let's read a few comments.

On second thought, I'll let you read the comments. Except for this one: "Here's one thing I know to be true: Cheaters cheat. It's what they do."

Too true. Scientifically proven. DNA studies have in fact found that these types are a separate sub-species, the Homo Sapiens Infidelus.

I have been both the jezebel and the frigid bitch. I was the same person both times. Wasn't I?

My self-esteem was not sky-high the one time and rock-bottom the other. Being the jezebel, if anything, reduced my sense of myself because what the hell was I doing? Why was I doing this? A scenario that strikes me as more likely (if you believe women are people) than a wilting wallflower waiting for a married man to make her feel complete. My ethics and morals were not substantially different. I was the same person--not, in either case, wholly innocent; not, in either case, wholly to blame; in both cases the same mix of insecurities and strengths, blind spots and clear thinking, wishes and fears, smarts and stupids that I am on most other days. I was me.

Anyone can become at any time the person they are sure they will never be, doing the thing they are sure they will never do. What sort of hubris allows one to think they are exempt from human failings? At the very least any woman who's ever been through the first year of motherhood, when all of our precious notions of what sort of mothers we can be and will be crumble into a haze of sleep-deprivation and expert-laden guilt, ought to know better. She ought to know that all of us are capable of failing those we love most on earth simply because we are sometimes not the people we thought we were or wanted to be.

Most of the science I've read on the issue of infidelity concludes that both men and women are not lifelong monogamous pair-bonders, but opportunistic adulterers. That is, we will remain faithful so long as we are convinced that this is our best deal (in a modern society, factoring in the cost of divorce, the impact on children, and so on); but once we are presented with something we think is a better deal, we'll take what we can get, for as long as we can get away with it.

It's not a flattering portrait of human nature; but then, science can also explain most of our altruistic and nurturing behaviours including within our immediate families through mathematical formulas based on ratios of genetic relatedness. It feels noble, spiritual, pure, high-minded, and it's not.

From the gutters of humanity's primate nature (ask any female chimp how many males she fucked per offspring and, if she were human, she'd give you a wicked little laugh) to the heights of romantic idealism in the next installment, since this one is getting long enough, don't you think?

Posted by Andrea at 9:03 AM | Comments (4)

Andrea + Books = True Love Forever, Also No Money (Or: the UnShopping Midway Update)

January I did ok. In January, this is what I bought:

A birthday present for one of Frances's friends.
Art supplies for an actual project that I am working on and having great fun with, sort of an art journal/book of shadows in a box.
Three magazines. That's where I slipped up. They were not essential and did not meet my criteria.

Still, for a month of no shopping, that's not bad.

First weekend of February, do you know what happened?

I bought four books. Yes, four.

One is Bub and Pie's fault. I saw a comment she left on another blog about The Highly Sensitive Person and decided to read it. There were no copies available in the library system (I checked) so Chapters it was.

Two is The Green Family's fault. I am trying to cook more meatless meals, and my current cookbooks aren't cutting it. Sure, they have pasta and dairy dishes, but almost all of them have meat. So I bought a vegetarian cookbook. This, I told myself, was a reasonable compromise that will allow me to make environmental contributions for years to come. I tried the potato-and-cheese frittata on Saturday and not only did I love it, but Frances liked it too. And it had onions in it! (Frances is not keen on the vegetables.)

Three is Fun on Friday's fault. I decided it would be Fun to teach myself how to cook indian food on Fridays. This is when I cook for myself, see, and make things I know Frances won't touch. So I bought an indian cookbook, and actually went straight to the grocery store afterwards to get fixings. Ground beef curry, green beans, potatoes and basmati rice later, and I was very happy.

Huh. It just occurs to me now that I'm going to blame the blog in one fashion or another for three of my book purchases.

Four is not only squarely my fault, but led to more shopping. It's a workout book. I have the elliptical, that's good; I have a few cardio dvds, that's good. I have weights and a few workouts torn out of magazines; I've had them for years and they are getting very boring, not to mention too easy. That's not so good. This one looked like it had enough variety to keep me going for a good long time and it wasn't wimpy. No offence, but I like it when it's hard to go upstairs the next day. That's my aim. And couldn't I have waited until March? Yes ... but no. I got it that same Friday.

This then led to the realization that the 15-lb weights I had been using and which were already too easy and had been for a while were going to be really too easy because these workouts use fewer reps and sets, and if you're not a weights person that won't mean anything, but I knew there wasn't going to be any point doing these with 15 lbs, and I tried it on Sunday and I was right. So I went to a used sports equipment store and got new weights--dumbbells that will get me up to 35 lbs and if that doesn't keep me for a while, I'm screwed.

But they were used! Does that count?

Lesson learned: I can do one month.

Second month is a bit tougher.

But I'll keep trying. And in the meantime I can make yummy indian and vegetarian meals while contemplating my innate sensitivity and then burn it all off by hurtling around a few chunks of heavy iron.

Posted by Andrea at 9:17 AM | Comments (12)

Four Pounds

Dr. S: So how do you think you've been doing with blood sugar control lately?

Andrea: Good. Not as well as before, I know my control has been slipping, but I think that's just an adjustment period issue.

Dr. S: Makes sense. Yes, it looks like your A1c might be closer to 7 now. Still, that's pretty good. And you've gained four pounds. You'd lost a significant bit last time, though, so that's to be expected.

Andrea: Right.

Dr. S: Here's a new blood test requisition. See you in six months.

~~~~~

Vanity: Four Pounds!

Sanity: Relax.

Vanity: Four pounds! Four pounds! Six months!

Sanity: (sighs)

Vanity: At this rate, I'm going to be 200lbs by the time I'm 40.

Sanity: Has that ever happened before?

Vanity: I will die alone!

Sanity: Are you listening to yourself? Are you crazy? You weighed more than this when you got married.

Vanity: I'm fat! Four pounds!

Sanity: You can stand barefoot with your feet together and your legs don't touch. You are not fat.

Vanity: Four! Pounds!

Sanity: It's January: the holidays JUST ended and you JUST had a cookie decorating party for your daughter. It's four freaking pounds. Breathe.

Vanity: I liked being slim. It was fun while it lasted.

Sanity: Did it make your life any better?

Vanity: I could always just cut back on my insulin. That would work.

Sanity: Full stop. I don't think so. That could kill you. Four pounds won't.

Vanity: Oh no, it'll just end all of my chances for earthly happiness. Maybe I need to get another cold....

Sanity: You are nuts. Didn't you go through all this when you were 22? And decide that as long as you were eating reasonably healthy and getting some exercise that whatever weight you ended up at was obviously the right one?

Vanity: (sobs)

Sanity: (drums fingers on the metaphorical table)

Vanity: Four pounds.

Sanity: So now that the festivities are over, cut back on the junk food a bit and see what happens.

Vanity: No. How many leftover shortbread cookies do we have?

Sanity: Lots. Wait--hold on a second--slow down!

Vanity: Four pounds.

Sanity: Well, that'll fix it, eh?

Vanity: Where's the chocolate?

Sanity: You have got to be kidding me.... You're not kidding.

Vanity: By next Wednesday you'll have to roll me out of the apartment on a dolly.

Sanity: Here's an idea: STOP EATING.

Vanity: Are you making fun of me?

Vanity: I am absolutely making fun of you.

Vanity: Four pounds!

Vanity: You have a beautiful daughter, a good job, great friends, you're writing a novel, you manage to keep the house clean and cook fresh meals even though you're single, you work out nearly every day--and you are going crazy over four pounds.

Vanity: Are you calling me stupid?

SAnity: YES. Check your blood sugar, take your freaking insulin, put down the cookies, and stop freaking out. You are NOT going to ruin our lives over four pounds!

Vanity: (sulks)

Sanity: Don't make me tie you up and lock you in the basement again.

Posted by Andrea at 8:59 AM | Comments (11)

Damn That Cat

It happens once a month--irritability, sleeplessness, teariness, sniffles. I wish I could blame it on hormones. But no. It's irregular, for one thing (early one month, late the next); for another, my hormones are largely artificial right now thanks to a handy prescription. It's not hormones.

I remember back in the summer, thinking about these occasions, believing that they would be a boon to my personal productivity. All of the things I would be able to accomplish! All of the sleeping in I could do! Instead, I spend them largely fighting off the cat.

These are Frances's long weekends with Daddy. Normally she visits with him from Thursday to Saturday, but once a month on a weekend that is determined jointly, she goes from Thursday to Sunday. I have the whole weekend to myself. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

Now: All of the things that made this a good idea back in the summer are still true, the most important one being how much Frances misses her Daddy. She needs these extra-long weekends with him. You should see how excited she gets, Dear Readers: how she begins to jump up and down as soon as I remind her, when I pick her up from daycare. How, on the way out of the school, she tells everyone she passes: "I'm going to see my Daddy!" A statement that for most children would not be such cause for joy. How she runs at the door when he rings the bell, leaps into his arms. How she asks me plaintively on every other morning if her Daddy is going to pick her up today.

And I knew this was going to be hard. In fact, the prospect of not seeing her for a few days every week was one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did. I knew this would be hard. I did not know how hard it was going to be, partially because of other unrelated decisions I've made since then. Mostly because I'm a sap, and I hate to be apart from my little girl. Hell, I took Frances with us when Erik and I went to Vegas a few years back because I could not stand the thought of leaving her behind even for a few days, and I routinely turn down business trips and have since the beginning because comfy quiet hotel bed be damned--I miss my girl too much.

The first few months, I looked forward to the extra time and was struck in the face with a concrete bat when the much-longed-for sleeping opportunity arrived, only to be spent battling the cat, instead. So many things I could do with that time if only I could shake off the funk and do them. It's sitting in that empty apartment by myself for two days that does me in. Frances's toys too quiet and tidy in the corner, her bed too neat and empty upstairs, no insistent demands for apple juice or hopeful, "But I want a friend to play with me. Won't you be my friend and play with me?"s. What I need to do, of course, is get out of the house--but that's been difficult these past few months and being an introvert it wasn't easy to begin with. So instead, I end up sitting in a too-quiet, too-tidy apartment with too much time on my hands to wonder how exactly it is that I ended up there. And how it is that I've ended up making decisions this past year far too much like the ones that got me here to begin with; and how Frances and I paid such a high price to get out of that situation, yet given the chance I find myself sliding so easily toward its flip side; and wondering how long it's going to take for me to learn this simple god-damned lesson, and how someone supposedly so smart can be so completely fucking stupid.

It's not good enough. I have to do better.

Posted by Andrea at 11:21 AM | Comments (3)

A Near Miss

Frances does not go over to play at C's house as often as she would like, for various logistical reasons, the most important of which to date has been the toilet. Specifically, their bathroom is not equipped for a person of such small stature to use it on their own (and why should it be?), and I don't know who would help her in my absence. There was, on one of their earliest playdates, an Incident; and it caused Frances great shame and embarassment, so since that time the rule has been that she can go to play for an hour, after she uses our bathroom, and then I go pick her up, because that's about as long as I can count on her bladder lasting. Which is fine; she's my kid, it's my job.

But. Over the holidays, C was pet-sitting her aunt's pomeranian, a round furball that looked more like a stuffed toy than a pet and, as you can imagine, Frances was entranced. I let her go over to play and started the laundry, counting myself lucky to have some unforeseen free time to do it in. As I've mentioned before my apartment does not have in-suite laundry but the laundry room is right across the hall from my upstairs door, so except for its hours (8 am to 10 pm daily) there is no inconvenience.

A couple from Russia (there are many, many Russian immigrants in this apartment complex) was doing their laundry at the same time; the man turned to me and says, "Is that your baby?" I look out and, indeed, there are Frances's face and hands pressed to the glass door separating our block from C's--this glass door is right outside C's upstairs door, so she can't have been there for more than a moment. I grab my laundry room keys and open the door for her; "Why aren't you playing at C's?"

"I had something very important to tell you," she says.

We go into our apartment. "Oh? What was that?"

"C likes her dog a lot. It is a very cute doggie. It kissed me! Kisses are nice." (We'd had the dog and C over for a bit before Frances went to her house, and Frances walked the dog--small enough for Frances to walk on a leash--around the ground floor. When the dog stopped to lick Frances's fingers, she looked positively ecstatic. "He kissed me!" she said, voice full of wonder, and held her fingers out in front to contemplate them. Her first boyfriend (or girlfriend) is going to be hard-pressed to top that reaction.)

"That's true, I can see that."

"Maybe someday I can get a doggie."

My lips twitch. Earlier that very day, on hearing about this situation, a friend of mine had predicted that this request would be forthcoming. He was right. "Maybe someday. When you're a little older."

"OK."

"Are you done at C's?"

"No, I told her I was coming back."

"OK. I'll walk you back there."

I do this--two doors down in the upstairs hallway, and thank the gods for that hallway in wintertime. Only be for long enough to finish the laundry--to get everything out of the dryer and back into the apartment, and then I will go get her. But before the laundry clock is up there is a heavy knock on the upstairs door. I expect it to be C, or maybe C's grandmother (her mother is working) with Frances, and so open it with a smile.

It is not C, nor is it C's grandmother. It is the newest apartment complex superintendant or whatever she is, she helps out in the rental office and I've met her once or twice. She is tall, very slim, with long blond hair of exactly the shade you imagine when you hear "blond"; very pretty, in a Cover Girl cosmetics way. One can imagine the faux-Manhattan skyline behind her in a print advertisement exhorting one to buy their newest mascara or lipstick, with a wholesome toothy smile on her face. Beside her is Frances.

"Frances!" I say. "Why aren't you playing at C's?"

"Well I was," she say. "And then I wanted to tell you something."

"OK. Come in." I don't know what I am feeling. Missed dread, maybe. The joint revelation that something very bad could have happened; but it didn't, because there she is, wanting to tell me something. The new superintendant-or-whatever stares at me, obviously expecting some greater reaction. "A man found her," she says, "wandering around in the L block. He called me."

"Thank you."

Frances comes in past my legs. "I wanted to tell you, Mummy. I have something to tell you."

"Just a second." My heart is beating fast. This woman is expecting something from me; it's clear on her face that she thinks I'm a terrible mother right now, from whatever response it is I am lacking. I should be effusive? But she's fine, isn't she? Standing by my legs, wanting to tell me something. I should be relieved? Was I supposed to think she was missing? But she was playing at a friend's, and I thought she was supervised.

"You forgot your camera again." A stupid thing to say. "Why--why aren't you still at C's?"

"I left."

"Clearly."

I should be afraid? But she's fine, she's right here. I should be apologetic? But she was playing at a friend's! She shouldn't have been playing at a friend's, maybe? Am I supposed to feel caught out, guilty? Because she looks only two, I should have been there with her, supervising her myself?

Once when I took her to the Zoo, and brought her into the kid's area where there is a big treehouse with a big slide, and I walked her to the top of the slide and then taken the stroller to meet her at the bottom, she went missing. I stood there and she did not emerge, although other children did. Checked the top again--not there. Checked the bottom--not there. Checked the top and the bottom again--not there. How does a child go missing between the top and the bottom of an enclosed slide in a play structure? I checked the entire kid zoo, every exhibit, imagining myself explaining to her father that somehow I had lost Frances at the zoo, somewhere between the top and the bottom of the slide. Frances was nowhere. How could she be nowhere? I checked the top and bottom of the slide again; growing frantic. Where could she be? She had to be somewhere. I approached a few strangers and asked them, have you seen a girl about this big, blond hair, glasses, wearing an orange t-shirt? No, they all said. I ran around again, checking every exhibit, and coming around a corner saw a cluster of adults gathered around a child. "Where's your Mommy?" one of them asked.

"Frances!" The crowd parted and I hugged her. "Where were you? Where did you go?" The terror broke and I cried; I'd been so worried and now there she was and now I was crying.

"She was at the bottom of the slide," one of the strange adults said.

"I waited for you and you didn't come," said Frances, crying too.

I said nothing. I couldn't speak, in any case. I just hugged her. And I remembered (and maybe you do too) all the times when I was a small child shopping with my mother, following her boots or shoes around the mall, and looking up to realize that it wasn't my mother after all I'd been following, and trying to find her, and failing, and wondering if I would never be found again, and maybe I would have to live somehow in the shopping centre, maybe sleeping on the mattresses in the department store and eating the free samples in the supermarket; until I was found. I'd never before understood the violence of my mother's reaction when she found me. "I was worried sick," I finally said.

This was different. I'd only found out she was missing in the very instant she'd been found, both halves of the dramatic tale presented in the denouement. Yet this very pretty woman expected the traditional conclusion, me clutching Frances to my breast and telling her I was worried sick.

What I am, at that moment, is furious--she was at a friend's, she was supposed to be supervised, she was not supposed to be sent to walk home on her own--she can't open those big glass doors separating blocks so how she got all the way down to L is a mystery, someone else must have opened all of them for her--and if she walked out of C's house on her own someone should have come to tell me. The first time--she wandered out the upstairs door and no one had time to notice, maybe, and were waiting for her to come straight back in; but two times in an hour? I can't show that to this beautiful girl with her own two daughters at home who clearly, clearly, is thinking I am not right in the head right then. But I am furious. I want to know why my little girl was wandering around L block by herself, when I thought she was safe at her friend's. I want to know why no one walked her down the two doors to find her house, when she is only four for god's sake, and just learning to read; I want to know why no one made sure she got home safely. I do that when C comes to play at my house and C is eight. And I know C's family is Russian and (from Ponderosa Jennifer) that Russian culture is a little different when it comes to child-rearing and C's grandmother successfully reared children there presumably with much less supervision than I have come to believe is necessary. However. None of this is helping, in that moment.

"Thank you," I say again to the superintendant-or-whatever. With the shock still rigid on her face, she walks away, and I close the door.

I am still furious. Furious at them, or myself? Not sure at that point. Why did I walk her back over? Why didn't I ask why she'd been allowed to come out into the hallway by herself? Why did I assume it was a fluke and they knew better? Why didn't they look at that glass door separating our blocks and realize she could not possibly open it for herself? But the fury is certainly not Frances's, who can't be expected to know better, so I calmly sit down and let her tell me this very important thing she needed to say.

"The doggie is so cute, Mummy. C really loves her. It is really C's doggie, not her aunt's. I would really like a doggie, Mummy."

"Maybe someday," I say again. "When you're older."

I imagine going down the hall to bang on their door and demand an explanation; but C is a child, and C's mother is at work, and C's grandmother's english is poor. It would not be a fruitful conversation. It would lead to bruised feelings without hope of resolution and possibly a rupture of Frances's one friendship in our apartment block. And after all, isn't everything fine? Isn't Frances at that very moment asking me for a pet doggie? C is a good kid; it's just that she's a kid. She can't be expected to be responsible for Frances's welfare.

I'll have to speak to her mother, I think, dreading it already. Lord, the potenti