Yule never believe I did Xmas...

... and I kinda liked it.

It's strange to be really doing the whole Christmas thing, but I found I couldn't resist - I really wanted to get her a mound of treats for she is such a good little girl.

We read so much she needed books and pjs and things like that and that was a lot of the gifts, but it was wonderful to see her ripping open the multicoloured packages and see her mouth literally drop when she saw some of the things. I really see how you don't know giving til you give to your child. I felt unabashed joy at watching her get so many treats, to delight her as much as she delights us.

I read something the other night in one of my insomniac plagues (I've been up since 1:20 this morning already - bah!) in The Atlantic, an article about the chemical nature of happiness and the brain etc., and one of the passages really disturbed me and I've been thinking of it for days. In its arguement about the mysterious nature of happiness the author showed that studies have shown that while people say that having children brings them their greatest joys, when you test people during parenting they most often respond as 'unhappy'. His assertion is that children don't really make us happy at all, and I cannot imagine that to be true. I know that this is the 'easy' time, when she doesn't talk back, is little trouble, not yet a mind of her own. I know there will be challenges ahead that will make me respond as 'unhappy'. But to fathom that this person will at any point not give me the greatest joy I have ever known, the most pride and the greatest sense of family I have ever had is near impossible for me. Today we gave Nahanni some gifts, but she is literally my gift everyday. If I learned nothing else in 'Statistics and Methodolgy' I did learn that you shouldn't believe every study. I live its opposing theory every day.

Happy Holidays.

December, schmember

I was just commenting to Ez last night that I was tired of how things have gone this year and I'll just be glad to get the year over with and start anew. And in that moment I had a flash of deja vu - because I am certain that I said the exact same thing around this time last year. And frankly, that just makes me angry. I'm feeling a lot of angry lately, and a lot of frustration and general malaise. This birthday has become hard...it came in like a lamb but went out like a lion. Hell, I don't even want to talk about it, it makes me that exasperated. All I know is that I am sick and tired of wishing for the year to end so I could start fresh. I keep wondering when this whole mess that has become me will straighten out and we'll catch a break. It's been far too long, my friends, far too long.

Of course, there are the obvious ways in which I can give thanks and feel completely horrible and ridiculous to complain about my lot in life. But still, I want my old life back in so many ways - I want to be successful again and I'm so sick of banging against locked doors. I'm sick of kicking myself over decisions I made to the best of my ability and sick of torturing myelf over them. I'm sick of the whole damned thing.

Mercifully, I have a child who continues to light my days. At 'singing class' last week one of the grandmothers whose little boy I find irresistibly adorable began to talk to me about how she watches her grandson three days a week while her daughter-in-law and son work. She looked at me and said 'I was always working too, never had time for swimming or playing and I am so regretful now'. The look of woe on her face stills my heart even now and I feel blessed that even though this time has been absolute sh*t for my career, I know that I am serving my child in an immeasurable way. It's hard sometimes, to recognize that, but I know in my heart that it is true.

And inevitably, in some form (surely unimaginable to me) the pendulum will swing again and we will get a little time in the sun. I only hope it isn't to long, as we are feling a bit buried beneath it all.

How Does Keegan Get Her Groove Back?

It is 3:03 a.m. and I should be asleep. The good news is that I wasn't already up brooding, the bad news is that after Nahanni woke me up at 1:30 I started in earnest.

It's so hard to say whether all this is just a temporary part of being a mother of a small child or if I am falling apart altogether. I just cannot seem to get a good grip on things again, I've been spinning my wheels... The house is always a barometer of my mood. I go in streaks (I have previously admitted to a severe lack of housekeeping talent) and once or twice a year it really all falls to sh*t and who knows what came first the chicken or the cracked little egg, but my black mood matches the state of my house.

The tornado is back.

Actually, it's less a tornado and more like a vacuum, an absence. Every once in a while I just can't be bothered to try anymore in the whole game. I get tired of trying to stay ahead of laundry and the ever-present pile of dishes and clothes and filing. I get tired of going to auditions where the director is clapping before I'm even done and I still don't get it. I get tired of staring down all the ways in which I have disappointed myself and I just let it go. I remember what my bedroom carpet looks like; I just haven't seen it for a while. I know what clear counter tops and shiny floors look like, I just don't care to put forth the energy lately. I feel worn out. Funnily enough though, I'm not really tired. And I certainly am not tired of Nahanni, I just...

Like all of us (I must believe) I have regrets. I made choices that served me and choices that didn't and the lines are not always clearly cut, but the pain and the questioning certainly cuts deep regardless. I feel like I looked away and somehow lost the thread of my real life, the life I had imagined and worked so hard to manifest.

Obviously I have had some great successes, the most obvious one sleeping now above my head, her hair tousled, her small footed pyjamas warming her against the night chill. I have obviously succeeded well in her. She is smart and funny and polite and darling. I got a chart from the library recently that outlined stages of development and for her age group she is meant to do things like 'use 10 words' which made me laugh out loud. You mean in one sentence? She knows almost her whole alphabet and she makes amazing leaps in cognitive thinking and has almost no issues with verb conjugation, which is surprising even to me. I try to teach her all day long, for I know that everything is new and there is much to learn. She pages through our cookbooks and calls out the foods. She sat for over half and hour today reading the 'Memories of Philippine Kitchens' cookbook ['Phulippines! Phulippines - go live there!' {yes, that's actually what she said}] and called out 'Dragon Fruit! Mangoes! Shrimp!' - all things I had named for her only once while we shuffled through it the day before. Her new favourite things to say are 'Excuse me' and 'Thank you Mummy' and I give her things just to hear her say that. I have every hope that I will fail as rarely as possible in raising her and will not pass on my most glaring faults to her.

So there is not doubt that I am proud to be succeeding in what is, without cloying sentimentality, honestly the most rewarding and important job I'll ever have, but still, I wonder what happened to the pieces of myself that I used to be proud of? Yes, I have been a professional actor for well over a decade, have garnered awards and have begun to teach and to succeed in voice work and I've written things and...but where is the fire? Really!? What the hell happened to the person I once was? Is this just that time in life, or have I lost the plan?

I've wandered around in a dark mood for days, wrestling with this demon who never leaves my back, only lives more quietly at times than others. Lately he has blackened my eyes and my heart and is poisoning me against myself. I think my saving grace, even as it has 'interrupted' my previously prolific plans, is motherhood. I remember that how I act and speak and measure my life will be learned very early by my daughter and I must take care in that, for I have no intention of letting said demon take hold of my child. Yes, she will have her own demons eventually, I know, but still, I refuse to lend her mine. And all is not lost, I'm sure [although really, SAG? Are you serious - another strike? Are you not aware of how truly expendable we are!?] and I think perhaps I am hitting a certain creative bottom from which I must rise and rebuild.

I have always had trouble separating my worth from my work. I struggle to shut off the voices of those I perceive to be watching and judging (a vanity in and of itself, really) and to listen to my own voice, which has of late been dampened by circumstance and the general wearing down of life. I think I suffer when I am not being creative, and yet I don't know how to make time for myself anymore, how to begin to rebuild the woman I set out to be. I am not too ashamed to admit that I am feeling not a little beaten down by it lately, and I know this is that point in life when you can let it beat you or you can get up and brush off and fight back and begin again to create the life you imagine. I am learning that if I don't carve out the time it will simply disappear and become 'the time when I should have..' and all that. I used to be so smart, Now I have absolutely no answers at all.

However, I am smart enough to be paying attention to the real things. Nahanni has been waking at night for several nights, which is unusual. It would be easy to zombie my way into her room, sleepwalk through putting her back down. But tonight I sat fully awake with her in my arms. She lay her head on my shoulder, her legs wound around my middle like when we used to nurse, her small hand lightly brushing at the newly shorn hair at the nape of my neck. I drank it in, the very feel of her in my arms, the smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing in my ear, her little sighs. At one point, just when I thought she was asleep my mind, awake and fitful beginning to wander to all of this and she pulled back to look at me in the night glow of her room, she nodded her tousled curls and gave me the kiss of a fairy, right on my lips. She lay her head back onto my shoulder and fell asleep and in that moment at least, all was right in my world.

Right now she doesn't care what I do, who I am separately from her. Perhaps she is right and I shouldn't either. A wise little nod, I think. She is, afterall, a super-genius.

I never knew I was a Sculptor

They say it keeps getting better and so far, that's been eminently true. I keep trying to grasp at the wisps of this experience, so ethereal it slips through my fingers like grains of sand, solid and yet liquid; mutable and transmutable. It is an impossible game trying to define and concretize parenthood. It is simply something that lives and breathes...and then suddenly your child is 19 months or 19 years or about to turn...37?

I sometimes look at my neighbours, this wonderful Italian couple who have been so generous already with time and advice and food from their garden. They have a tall jar of cookies in their kitchen from which Leo (or 'Nono') liberally steals and gives to a delighted Nahanni. I think of them in that house next door, which he built and in which they have lived for 28 years, and I see the nature of what I am up against. I think of them living there, their day-to-day life of raising three daughters. Of Christmases and first school days and summer holidays. Of the reaping and sowing of that garden which has begun to feed us too. Their children are grown, and now 5 grandchildren, the eldest at 14, roam those hallways, eat the cookies from that tall jar. Surely they must wonder, especially as we cart our small child to and fro before their eyes - surely they too wonder where the time goes. I think of Enriquez, wrapped up thickly in crisp white cotton as they bundled him into an immaculate red car in the bouncing super-8 video of his homecoming and surely they wonder where it all went too?

Where do we store all those invisible years? Are our mental attics big and accessible enough to really do justice to all the wonder of these times? I have already forgotten so much it astounds me. I saw a woman the other day on some errand, her belly round and full with late pregnancy and she was poking into the swell below her navel and I stared full-faced at her in a sort of panic when I realized that I had somehow completely forgotten how it felt to be pregnant. I know that I made those very same motions not long ago - but where had that sense memory gone? How could such a monumental feeling steal so quickly away?

I asked my mother when she was here about Trevor. I have two small framed photos on a low-slung Indian table that Nahanni loves to cart around. She holds them up to me: "Grandfather - Pipi! Trevor! Uncle!'. She held them up to me and I looked into the face of my long-departed brother, bangs cut askew, a dab of food on his cheek, gorgeous unknowing eyes beneath those impossible lashes and a fear gripped me; a fear of forgetting. I looked at my mother and asked if she could still remember him, remember how he was as a little boy. I wanted to weep with the fear that she was sure to say no, that most of it had faded with time, but she never missed a beat before replying 'Of course!'. I felt a great sense of relief at that, that you could even still remember the life of a child who lived over thirty years ago for a mere 1,504 days (how could that be so!?). I saw in her eyes the truth of it, and though it pains me enormously right now as I absorb the weight of that number I just figured out, it effuses me too with hope that I will not lose these memories of my daughter's young life. That as she grows and prospers and moves inevitably away from me I will not lose but gain. I have to believe that the experience of raising a child is not reductive, like stone carving, but additive, like sculpture - building over a thin wire frame, adding clay over time to create a sculpture of her life. All the layers will be there, but time will have smoothed some of them over, covered them up thickly here, thinly there. Yes, she will be like that for me - a work of art that we have all built together.

Nahanni is, by my count, now 590 days old. I have been with her every morning and every night of those 590 days and somewhere in the recesses of my hippocampus lie every minute of every one of those 590 days. It is a thin layer of clay, still delicate and fresh and every day she adds a little here, a little there. She recites the better part of the alphabet (already!?) and another thin piece of wire is covered over. She counts to five, or triumphantly adds 'cuatro!' to my uno-dos-tres and yet another wispy layer is added.

It is tempting to think of that new clay being stripped off of you as a parent, so great are the responsibilities and energies of raising a child, especially in this modern age. But of course, part of the magic of this experience is that there is no finite amount of this mythical clay. Like the expansion and exponential multiplication of love that comes with the birth of each child, so it is with this supply. I should not fear losing the ties to these days because even if they are buried under thick layers someday, there is no doubt that they are there - they exist irrefutably. Perhaps I will have to turn back to these pages, these words to find the link to them, but in my heart I know that they will never be truly lost. Like Trevor, like Pepe; the layers live back in time, but there is no subtraction. I think back to Brockmeier's wonderful, evocative book 'A Brief History of the Dead' which posits a post-mortem netherworld where you remain 'alive' only so long as someone on earth still remembers you and it seems the ultimate affirmation of that of which I speak. So Trevor remains alive in the 'hamburger story' or the watch-on-the-ankle story, Pepe in the myriad odd tales the are still told of his quirky life. And so too, Nahanni's young life and my experience of motherhood and pregnancy and all of it will remain alive and promise to feed me well into the future.

May there be a millenium of clay.

Sugar Bee Tumble me Tumbily

I just spoke to my most lovely and dear friend Kate in L.A. and I am always amazed at what a gift of a friend she is. I have never left a conversation with her where I did not feel better about myself and life in general. In this case I laughed so loud I thought I might wake up Nahanni. This morning Nahanni was repeating over and over something that took me a while to tune into: "Auntie Chloe. Auntie Chloe" was the refrain. Chloe is Kate's daughter and when I became pregnant she exclaimed "Can I be Auntie Chloe!?" (she is an only child) to which I of course, agreed - and meant it. Nahanni has only met her once, when I was flown to LA to test for 'Virtuality' [bastards!] and it was so strange for her to be talking about that out of the blue. Although it wasn't really; not strange or out of the blue. I had been thinking of Kate a lot recently, thinking of the day I had met her.

I had made a call to my agent in LA to let them know that I was looking for a place for pilot season and he called back 5 minutes later having then received a call from Kate to say she'd be renting her daughter's (Chloe's) room while she was away at college. Within minutes we were in talks about me coming. She spoke of a sunny garden, of the loving animals in the home, of getting her Master's from Yale and being on Broadway and it seemed like a great place. I pictured her as I listened to her laughing voice, articulate tone - tall, New York sophisticate, a charcoal cashmere wrap tossed loosely over her shoulder, hair shorn close, pencil skirt, a delicate gauloise dangling from her fingertips. "Trying to quit!" she would whisper, somehow making a vile habit seem beguiling.

I arrived in LA early evening, after driving nearly straight from Vancouver, through snow and sleet, through the barrage of people that is California. Through gray concrete Sacramento and beautiful golden hills under vast blue skies, and then through the hell that is the 5/405/101 highway to hell that leads me white-knuckled into 12 solid lanes of traffic. My first hours in LA almost inevitably give me a heart attack - it's like being thrown onto a NASCAR track. I took the wrong off-ramp and ended up crawling down Olympic Blvd for over an hour and a half. I was beat, emotionally drained, worn through. Nothing was as I expected it to be. I dragged myself up the driveway, dirty and tired. Before I could ring the bell this is what I saw:

The green screen door swung open with a bang and a large, fabulously rubenesque woman in her 50's(?) was flying at me with arms flung open wide. Her crimson lips were framing a dazzling big smile and her red fingernails whistled in the evening sun. Her hair was madly, wildly red and curly and she was wearing retro cat-glasses with a leopard print motif. She says my name (I think) and pulls me into a hug like an old friend. The house smelled warm and a beautiful chicken dinner that she had cooked for my arrival sat waiting for me on the table. Even though my very first visit to LA had ended with me holding an Emmy in the parking lot of my new managers while looking straight up at the Hollywood sign - I can still say that, is a real welcome to LA.

It's funny whenever I think about that it makes me smile. It is funny too in the way that I think about my experience in LA. I often lament that I failed; failed myself, failed my shot, failed my career - but Kate is the once who reminds me, both in presence and in word, that victories are not always as we envisioned them. The gifts are always there, it just depends on how you are willing to see them. She graciously points out all the ways in which I was very successful there. I also think to myself that a lasting and dear friendship is a great success and I think there was a divine intervention that brought me to her. She has taught me a tremendous amount and I truly consider her my 'spiritual mother' and so it is true that Chloe is indeed 'Auntie Chloe' and she is 'Nanny Kate'.

She said such a wise thing to me today about Nahanni. I was describing what a singular joy it is to raise her and she said "Yes, and it is a lifetime gift - it is really the gift that keeps on giving!" and I could not agree more. Sagacious as always, she points out that while we would have had 'another soul' had I done things differently with respect to LA, we would not have had Nahanni and she is, undoubtedly, 'the perfect soul'.

I couldn't agree more.

OH, America!

I have lived to see the impossible! I have to say, for all the mixed feelings I have had about America, particularly during the last eight years, I am proud of the American people for showing that they were able to do something much of the world did not think possible - elect a person of colour to the highest office in the land. I give them credit for their willingness to try something new, to vote for change, unlike in Canada where we simply settled, once again, for more of the same bland version of politics we already had. For shame, Canada! Where is our Obama? (Please gods, don't tell me it going to be Justin Trudeau...I can't handle it. I'd rather have...well, anyone. He is no Obama. Hell, he isn't even Trudeau...)

See, I'm spoiling my own good mood.

All this was meant simply to say that I have my own audacity of hope again. I have hope that America will now start to scrape itself back together and maybe lead again. That old wounds can be salved, and new bridges be built. Perhaps it is a dawning of a new version of a very old game? Maybe, just maybe, he has something to teach and the means by which we can all learn. I have thought about getting involved again, and I think that means that the spirit is transmitting itself around the world and I can only hope it translates into a million small actions that change the world. Who talked about that, Margaret Mead? Yes...' '...

Let's do it.

------------------

On a lighter and wholly unpolitical note, I present to you (you, likely only being mom anyhow) 'Nana laughing' (Nahanni's title). More later...

Enjoy.

On Age and Distance and all that Jazz

There is a sharp double edge to the sword of having family come visit - eventually they leave and in doing so, take a little piece of you with them. Like walking around with a hole in your shirt, you feel the breeze but can't pinpoint quite where it comes from.

We've just spent a lovely week with my mom out here, a week that seemed to last about 47 minutes...and at the same time felt as though she'd always been here. I think that every child deserves to have grandparents around them to adore and spoil them, and every parent deserves not only the wondrous break, but also the satisfaction of someone confirming what they already know - that their child is the smartest and most amazing creature that ever walked the face of the earth. It is a cruel fate that we only get this once in a blue moon, as circumstance dictates that no one has quite enough money or time to make the trip as often as would be desired. And it is during these visits that you seem most to notice how big is the hole in your life that you were ignoring (if only to avoid the emotional realization of how much you miss your family) and also how quickly time passes. You suddenly see your mother as a grandmother, yourself cast in a role that once was hers; holding the baby in your lap, feeding, bathing changing encouraging...when did this become your reality? Weren't you just the child? Where did that wrinkle come from (yours or hers...)? When did your child learn to say 'accessories' or 'pissed off'? How did I get on this whirlwind of advancing time and how the hell do you get off??

Now obviously I don't want completely off, nay that is a fate worse than aging, but still, what the F? I was watching some video we took of Nahanni getting her new little 'red retro kitchen' (that took four hours to assemble) for 'christmas' (early since Jeanne was here) and I saw myself in a light I had never seen...I was suddenly *gulp* - a middle-aged mother...

How the hell did that happen?

Wasn't I just a young ingenue on the rise, face splashed across the screen or the page in all its (authentically) porcelain glory? Wasn't I just young and fit and upwardly mobile...when did I get...old? Okay, okay, don't lynch me yet, I know I'm not old old, but still...where have all the flowers gone? What happened to me? And what will happen to me when all I have held dear about myself seems to have faded away? How does one age gracefully in every sense of the word? How do you deal with the sadness of watching your parents grow older in pastures beyond yours as you do the same...? How do you deal with the sad realization that days are numbered for us all and that when you live far from each other the ones you share in real time and space grow fewer still?

I spend an inordinate amount of time in grocery stores nowadays and of course, one is bombarded by the rags and the latest one screamed out that 'Jen and Courtney [the ultimate symbols of urban youth and beauty] had face lifts and 'amazing' Botox'! What is there for the rest of us, or worse yet, those of us trying to still retain the tenuous grasp of that game without succumbing to (or necessarily affording) those lifts and tucks and paralyzing enzymes? It seems a little to me like those mythic snakes eating their own tails...there is no winning way to do that...

Yes, it is cruel to see previously unlined faces fall prey to the spiteful ravages of time and gravity, for who doesn't prefer their former unlined self? But by the same token, I saw myself holding Nahanni in that video as she shyly gaped at her new, exciting toy and I saw what I had earned in becoming her mother. The lines that sweep my temples are nearly all hers - and they hold in their hearts a million laughs. I am not the svelte young doe I was (or at least remember myself being?) but I hold in my arms something of such immeasurable value that I think in many ways is degraded by wishing away the battle scars that accompanied the life that led to her.

Am I talking our of both sides of my (gradually increasing) ass? Yes, undoubtedly I am. Goddammit, I want it all! I want my mother young and close and I want money and time and fortune and enough fame to get good roles but not so much they go through my garbage and I want privacy and time with my child and time alone and a clean house and a ravishing sex life and a Ph.D. and to have bought short on the sub-prime fiasco BUT...

Well, you know what the Stones say. And gods, have you seen how they aged?

I have no pithy answers. I am as confounded now as ever, and I supposedly know far more. Is this the fate of these years? Whatever will become of me...? How will I gracefully wend my way through time and space creating the life I wish for my family and myself? I cannot stop what is happening. I cannot stop aging, cannot change distance or time or reality...I can only breathe through the trials and try to do it with aplomb and as much grace as one can muster in mismatched socks and pants with avocado handprints the exact size of an eighteen month old...

I miss you mom. Now I really get it.

I guess I ain't no Oprah

Every time I think I have something to write about, I suddenly find that I don't. Why was it so easy when she was a small baby to find things to expound upon here? I feel like a fragment of my brain has been misplaced somewhere -- and I don't know where to find it.

I wonder to myself where my ambition has gone, my intense and burning desire to leave my mark, to rise to the top and all the rest of it. I wonder where my ideas went, where my inclination to start a line of this or that, to write that book, that screenplay, submit that article...? I know that I am more busy now than ever with Nahanni, but at the same time, there's this nap time, right - we're in it right now. I tell myself that I should be writing for one hour, exercising for the other, but more often that not I'm trying to keep ahead of the tide of untidy which never seems to leave my shores. I just cannot shake this feeling that my motivation has abandoned me altogether...and I somedays too tired to even care.

It's a sort of fugue state I'm in, I think. I am wafting around in a little cloud and I haven't yet figured out what will spark my next phase of Ultimate Genius! Hell, even relative genius. Middling genius?

I don't know. Where's Oprah when you need her? OH right. Oprah has a mysteriously unlimited supply of energy, ambition and genius.

Then again, she doesn't have any kids to distract her...

Yeah, yeah, Angelina Jolie. Piss off.

The Things You Learn...About Yourself

It's amazing what you can learn when you pay attention. Mostly I have learned how important it is to pay attention in the first place, that's a big one. When, by the third hour of almost non-stop colouring I am no longer in the mauvealous mood, I remember how short this time will be with her, how fast she is already growing and learning. It is surprising how easily she is leaving behind 'baby' words - like the 'emp-no' (empty) of yore and beginning to make full-fledged sentences. I was playing the 'Yummiland' movie the other day (I play Mindy Mint Chocolate Chip) and Nahanni clearly was not interested. She grabbed the remote and began furiously pressing buttons whilst repeating 'Turn off it. Movie. Turn off it'. I guess I know why we haven't gone to series...

I've learned that I'm torn somewhere between a near absence of ambition, a sort of self/motherhood imposed film industry vacuum and the voracious drive that lead me on in the old days. I'm attending the Red Carpet ET Canada festivities to close the Vancouver International Film Festival tomorrow night and when I learned that I hadn't been invited to another one last night for a company I have done a lot of work with, I felt...peeved, annoyed, heck, maybe even a little petulantly left out. That's a bit of a switch. I'm certainly out of the red carpet loop and I feel it, and I wonder how it will feel to do all that rigamarole again. I am looking forward to wearing a smashing red dress, that I will admit. And don't even talk to me about the shoes -- yum! Nothing says 'I'm back!' like a red stiletto.

As for mommyland, it continues to groove along and now that I have had a short reprieve from single parenthood while Ez has been between gigs I am enjoying it as always. Nahanni is smart as a whip, increasingly funny and a general joy to be around. I love to be with her and I pine for the days, not long ago, when when she was so small and vulnerable and new in my arms, seemingly mine alone. There is a certain romance to a new baby in your arms, a cloud of it descends upon you when you smell their small heads, their sweet breath warm against your neck. But like a summer dalliance or a shatteringly good vacation, it so quickly becomes but a foggy memory, it is almost cruel.

The new neighbourhood is taking me some time to get used to. I keep feeling somewhat shocked - some glaring thing will remind me that I am not in Kansas, er... North Vancouver anymore. The grocery store is a torrent of people, more intimidating even than the aggressive French mega store Carrefour. I am infinitely annoyed that they sell almost no organic produce whatsoever and I must remind myself that this is a different 'hood altogether - much more humbly working class and, I am discovering, predominantly ethnic. Ez says he feels much more at home here than "hoity-toity" North Van where he always felt somehow...lower than the standard. As for me, I consider myself to be a worldy person, vastly interested in the cultures of the world, their foods, their languages etc., but I have to jarringly admit, I felt myself somewhat caught off-guard when I took Nahanni to a Babytales hour at the new (to us) library. Of the 20-odd kids there (and their parents, grandparents and nannies) all but Nahanni and one other little girl were Asian - and it kind of threw me off. I guess I got so used to North Vancouver, that bastion of white upwardly mobile society - I never realized it. And I wondered why I felt unsettled by it - I wondered if they were all Spanish, say, would I have felt like that? I think that I feel disoriented when all the signs are in Mandarin or Cantonese, the magazines on the racks, the foremost book cases. I think because it feels inaccessible to me in a way that Spanish or Italian or French does not feel - I can muddle my way through any of them, but Chinese simply escapes me. And I suppose, the tables are somewhat turned on this white girl from Southern Ontario when suddenly I find myself to be the visible minority. And I chuckle when I think that my daughter is actually one-quarter Asian herself - though one would likely not know that to look at her [except other 'hapas' or mothers of 'hapas' who can always spot a child of mixed race].

We are loving the house though, its location is great for our needs, the house is warm, cozy and spacious at the same time. We had a huge housewarming party last weekend and though it was certainly a bummer that it rained, thus forcing us inside in droves of screaming children and jostling adults it was a wonderful time. There are so many dreams in life - travel, exploration, knowledge, and yet, one simple little thing - to own your own house in this city - there's something there that is also very, very satisfying. I suppose it is easy to mock it as plebeian, the whole middle-age get a house and have some kids thing, but really, it is some of the most rewarding time I have ever had...

Till the next adventure I guess. There's always another one with us.

It's the Little Things

There are so many moments when I find myself shuffling through words, trying to deal a hand that adequately describes a wondrous moment in this experience. But how to describe the singular joy of sitting in your own [hard-won] backyard in the glorious September sunshine while your lovely daughter romps naked in the grass, her little round cheeks popping in and out of the pool, her face obscured by a wide purple sun hat? The small joys of her holding out her hand to you to help her navigate the steep stairs - the first of her young life. All these moments which I am trying to tuck away and remember because I can see already how they so quickly turn into thin memories, mere shadows of the real experiences.

Nahanni continues to grow and flourish and her capacity for learning astounds me daily. Her grasp of language, her ability to wrap her little tongue around even the most difficult sounds is yet another of the wonders of this stage of life. She is proving to be very adept at language and plucks words from her brain like rabbits from a hat - they are that magical. She moved rapidly from the early words I was so impressed by and has largely left her signing behind in the wake of the myriad new words she has gained. The other day while running around the yard ('gwass!') she held up a fallen leaf and exclaimed 'Leaf! Hoja! Tree!' - and she continues to pick up words in French and Spanish both. She has even begun the rudiments of sentences and is able to repeat things you say days after you've done so. One of her new favourites is 'Do that! Carpet! No! No, no no! Cat!' - which is basically me yelling at the cats to stop ripping at the carpets. She works hard on her words, correcting herself until her little tongue massages the 'L' back into little, or sleep. I can tell she loves to speak, it thrills her to communicate.

She has developed a great fondness for the creatures that inhabit the yard and is particularly interested in spiders. Only a week ago she would call out 'PI-lo!' which was so cute - we still find ourselves randomly calling it out the way she did. It has already morphed into 'Pider' and she also now says 'web' and blows into the air, copying the way I always blow into the webs to see if the spider is alive or dead. The other day Ez heard her approach 'Daddy! Piller!' and she was holding a terrified little caterpillar in her outstretched hand. We are trying to foster a confidence in her when it comes to the creepy crawlies that are inevitable parts of the outdoors and she is remarkably at ease with them - even the yellow-jackets we can't seem to get rid of. She will say 'hurt you!?' and we say no, that they will leave her alone if she leaves them and so she doesn't panic when they buzz around her.

It is a wonderful thing to go into her bedroom in the morning to hear what words will be the first to open the torrent that continues throughout the day. After the recent spate of falling and bloody lips we gave her a popsicle (and do you know how hard it is to find real fruit popsicles?) she latched onto both the word and the treat and for days it was the first word out of her mouth in the morning - although that first day I walked in and she said this: "Taco. [what!?] Paco. Pocklo. Poklico. Popsliko." I mean, she worked hard on that one!

It has been a trial, coming to own this house, but oh, what a wondrous thing it is to have a home! We marvel at it daily, this mansion of ours (after 6 years in 726 square feet it is a mansion). We even climbed up onto the roof to survey our little kingdom, with its gorgeous maple and magnolia trees sweeping romantically across the front path, and our own apple tree scattering fruit across our yard. Every night we build a beautiful fire in the hearth and I step out at dusk each evening to sneak across the street and stare at it. I love the romance of the front yard, the way the trees arch over the path and dapple across the lights - it truly looks like the most romantic and mysterious little place. I love the newly painted red door and mailbox, the crazy sign the previous owner made on the lawn that lights up our address in the night (one of many quirky little oddities that drew us to this house). I love the smell of cedar burning in the hearth, that heady, woody scent we used to only get on our camping adventures. And there is nothing quite like entering into the great room, with its high vaulted ceiling and the great Indian mantlepiece, red candles flickering everywhere. It is especially welcome after the clinical (and clinically depressing) whitewalls of the recent open house nightmare. I hadn't realized how much personality had been sucked out of our living space until I began to put it back into this one. What glory to live in colour again! For me, colour is bliss...

I love watching my child learn and explore here. I feel genuinely blessed to have a real home for her, a real yard. I love the quirks of this strange and unique home and it is a great relief after the trauma of buying it that we love it as we hoped. I love that my daughter is learning to walk on those red-hued stairs, awash in the slatted light that falls from the Chinese-style back door. I love watching her 'hiding!' in the branches of our very own willow tree. It is the right home for us - interesting, unique - and far from perfect. We feel very lucky indeed.

Bloody but Unbowed...

Well friends, it's been a mixed bag around here. We've had a little of everything in our potpourri life - a quick little trip down to Seattle to do some voice work, a visit from my dad since Ez was away all but the two days we moved, several scrapes and bruises (Nahanni's visible, ours less so) and, mercifully, a little bounty too.

I know I should be here extolling how wonderful it is to finally be in a house, to have land and room to grow and all that, but I don't think I am quite there yet. Of course we are happy for the obvious, but it has been overwhelmingly stressful and we're not out of the woods yet. As you know if you've ever owned or bought a house - there's always something else. I don't even want to talk about it...

I'm trying to remain positive and thankful for the small blessings. I am immensely grateful for the friends who have helped physically and emotionally throughout this ordeal and I recall something my midwives said when we had Nahanni 'you find out who your friends are'...and ain't that the truth. I have had pretty steady voicework and continue to do episodes as 'Angelina Ballerina', although lamentably, they are still scratch tracks and not official yet. I start teaching again next week and though I don't know where I will find the mental resources, I know they will magically show up.

Nahanni has had a rough go, she's been incredibly and maddenly anxious - I cannot even walk up the stairs (but we have stairs!) without her ramping up 'Mumma!? MUMMA!?' - but who can blame her? It's been a tumult; a new place, stressed out parents and a daddy who hasn't been around much. I try to be patient, but the thin supply I possess is filled with holes and my temper leaks out sometimes in ways it would not normally do. I must constantly remind myself that she is very small and doesn't know anything about the hard stuff. To make matters worse, she has taken one spill after another. She was with a friend in the park and fell out of the baby swing (what baby swing has no crotch guard??!) and scraped her chin raw. She was just healing from that shen she fell face first on our concrete walkway and got a huge welt scrape on her forehead. The very next day she fell at home and got a huge fat bloody lip. It was a tough week for everyone.

It's pretty much how we all feel right now - banged up. We're walking wounded, but still - a little mercy please!?

Small graces though - our new neighbours, a couple in their 50's have been very kind. I keep opening my door to find treats - a huge yellow dahlia the size of my head, fresh purple beans and tomatoes right off the vine. Between that and the local farmer's market bonanza, we feel nourished at least. Things could be worse, I know, but I really look forward to them getting better. We could all use a break...

Under the bludgeonings of chance...

I don't even know what to really say, I just feel compelled to try and write. It has been a miserable experience buying this house. See, I thought I'd come here and write about it but trying to do so just makes me depressed. It has been one of the worst experiences of my life and so, I have necessarily learned from it. That I will say. I feel broken by the whole process, exhausted from it in every way.

One thing that really stands out to me about this experience though has been the notion of timing - it's all about the timing. A few weeks earlier in the market for us would have made the difference of somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000 in the overall picture. Just a handful of days, two fists full of hours and we would not be in this spot. It feels again like being punched in the face and I am reminded as I have been so many times that timing is everything. It is the difference between getting a break and getting broken, between dreams that sail and ones that sink. It's the difference between stopping at the light or getting broad-sided, between being on the wrong bus in Manitoba... Sometimes timing can really f*ck you, and I am trying to hold fast to the times when it has worked. Of course, as always, Nahanni is the living, breathing embodiment of that. In those moments, in that wilderness at that time in space was her -- and for that, our timing was right. You win some, you lose some...I know, but still! A little slack please?!

I hate what this makes me - the wingeing, kvetching woe-is-me person everyone hates to be around. I hate to be around me lately, which is why, for the most part I have been holed up in the trenches, aiming my gun out the little window and hoping no one else will peg me. Sometimes it makes me wonder why the hell we're even doing this, what's so f*cking great about the 'Canadian Dream' of having a home, a yard, a nice place to raise your kid. I wonder why I would be interested in doing anything that makes me this miserable and frantic. What's the point of working hard to live like this, I wonder. I find myself thinking 'To hell with this! Let's get outta Dodge and live a beautiful, simple life on some blue tinted seashore, in some green footed mountain chain...anything but this!'

Ez, ever patient, ever the rock, tries to gently remind me that we are here for my career [which is when I pop off with some pithy correction like 'my career that's in the toilet?' or 'the remnants of my career?'] and again, I wonder how it's worth it. I'm a simple girl, much simpler than I ever really knew. What am I really doing?

I know, I know, I can hear my lovely friend Kate across the miles from LA, psychically reprimanding me for drawing negative energies toward myself and my career and I hear it, but I'm finding it hard to draw from an almost empty well. I know that there are so many factors in the business right now - it's certainly not only me who's suffering. I ran into a script supervisor in the elevator yesterday and she was holding the door open, talking about how dead it is and how people are finding new careers and I literally put my hands over my ears and sang "la la la la" while I pressed the close button in her face. See - timing.

I think what I hate most is the thought that Nahanni will suffer from this in any way. Not only emotionally - what with having her mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown and her dad away most of the time (which isn't helping any of us) but I also worry about how the stress of this whole thing affects her. She's started referring to everything as 'messy' lately and it makes me feel awful for this uptight, over-clean way in which we've been forced to live for the last few months with this house on the market. {side note - I really, really hate doing open houses. They are a pox upon a normal household. People should not have to pretend to look like they live in a magazine. I don't. I live here.} I worry about how long it will take to dig ourselves back out of this hole. I grew up broke and I swore I would move hell and high water to never live like that again...and here I am; something that is especially painful and humbling after having risen so high. I have recently made a wonderful new friend who has a daughter around Nahanni's age and when we went to her house I actually started to cry when I saw how many toys and books and games she had - Nahanni was in heaven - and I realized she has so few toys and we just don't have the click to get her any right now. I want to put her in swimming lessons and I literally cannot, we just cannot spare anything right now with the hits we have taken in buying this house.

Sometimes it feels like in every way I am doing the opposite of everything I swore I would do in life. I abhor debt and now I am so far into it I actually had to sign over my internal organs as collateral. I always have tried to live below my means, so this is ridiculous...

This is the thing about life that really gets me. Whatever your story is, that's what it is. Some people get better stories than others. Even sometimes when you work just as hard, you do all the same things, the sun just doesn't shine on your little part of the forest that day and you get a different deal. It is both utterly demoralizing and strangely liberating to think about that. Sure, yeah, some people get to be Angelina Jolie or Richard Branson and some people get murdered on their honeymoon in Antigua. Makes a pretty compelling case for the middle of the bell curve, don't it?

This too...

She sits in my lap. The peachy pale oval of her cheek is awash in the deep sunlight of the canyon, dry and hot. She wears little jeans, hand-me-downs perfectly broken in. Her feet bob up and down as she kicks them in the breeze, her toenails little half moons of dirt. She presses herself into my arms, cocks her head to the side and looks up at me, her beautiful smile, all teeth and tongue glows brighter than the setting sun. I swear I will not let go of this moment, I will never forget the smell of the air, the river heavy and redolent. I will never forget how she feels in my arms, impossibly big and still, smaller than she will ever be again. I try to grasp back through time and imagine a time when I sat in my own mother's arms, I try to imagine all the mothers through time swearing they will never forget these moments but I know that thief time will steal it from me, chip away at my memories of her until only little snaps, tiny threads remain. I hold her tighter and try to breathe the scent of the sun from her hair, try to imbue every cell with her lightness and her beauty and the smell of this joyous day, this moment in time that too will pass.

a little list of words

Canada Day...
Well, I disappeared for 2 months and now suddenly I'm all prolific.
I was thinking about Nahanni's incredible vocabulary today and I decided to really try to come up with all the words she knows - I think it's a pretty grand list, and relatively definitive. I'm sure I've forgotten some, but I thought for posterity's sake it was worth noting. I find it especially amusing that her first word (other than mama) was 'dirt', but I admit nothing amuses me more than her walking around the house, cuddling her bear and reciting 'money money money' (I gave her Canadian Tire money to play with last week and she seized on the word). Ah, the earthly delights of a child in the throes of learning the world. Enjoy.

milk drink juice cheese berry dip snack hot apple no all-done please thank-you more you’re-welcome yummy oatmeal

duck dog cow cat hippo crocodile monkey chicken sheep bunny bird gorilla penguin bear fish mouse owl tiger butterfly spider ant octopus dolphin pig horse frog goat bee elephant turtle

dirt door up down mama/mommy dada/daddy nana lola puppa ‘anni (nahanni) help-me bath
diaper hurt bo-bo baby belly buckle button yellow purple blue train star wonder twinkle kiss hat eyes boca(mouth) money nose hairdo door boat bath flower
I-love-you boy girl tractor colour paper hand feet bowl walk rock car vacuum ball book
water bubbles garbage shoes/sapatos empty keys