'N' is for Nostalgia

Rene Descartes famously said "I think, therefore I am" - which I have humbly misappropriated for the purposes of this entry and changed to "I think, therefore, I keep". Or perhaps even better: 'I pine, therefore I am"... Of course, I could go on and on. Needless to say, nostalgia is a major part of the modern way of living, of remembering our lives, and it is doubtless part of the reason for the proliferation of giant mega-storage units throughout major urban centres. With all the new technologies that allow us to take a plethora of pictures and videos we are no longer forced to be selective as to which mementos and photos we keep - we can keep it all - and we do!

Now, I have complained here before about the lack of affordable housing in Vancouver and its accompanying lack of space and so I have, needless to say, had to become quite adept at paring down, at deciding as ruthlessly as possible what stays and what goes, but this has become particularly hard with respect to all things Nahanni. Like those letters one sometimes stumbles upon from an old lover that transport you back in time to that moment of unfettered joy (or sorrow as the case may be) I am loathe to let go of any items from her life that transport me through time to those most precious of moments. Today I was attempting to sort through Nahanni's clothes, trying to root out the ones she seems to be so quickly outgrowing and I pulled down a box of baby blankets and immediately started to weep. I tugged out a white flannel square, faded and almost ratty looking and clutched it to my breast. My head told me to toss it into the charity pile along with the other baby blankets but oh! This isn't just any blanket! This is the blanket in which she was swaddled, out from which her tiny, pink hatted, one-hour old head poked from her daddy's arms as he rounded the corner to the hospital room into which I had been rushed after a hemorrhage yanked us so rudely from our beautiful home birth. I know I will never forget that moment in time when we first were reunited, we three; how my breath caught in my throat and tears sprung hot to my eyes and I finally allowed myself to cry out all the fear that had gripped me as I lay in the ambulance praying to see my newborn again. I know I won't forget that, so why can't I let that blanket go?

I remember watching one of those home-improvement shows where the people are forced to deal with the ungodly amount of clutter and crap they've accumulated in their houses over time. One burly man began to cry openly when they tried to take away an ancient, decrepit old vacuum cleaner that no longer even worked. The host pressed him as to why he would want to keep it and he revealed that it was 'piggy', the vacuum cleaner his mother had used when he was a child, before she had died. Finally he was convinced to pose in a picture with it which they framed for him and, to his credit, he gave his little piggy up. I wonder to myself if that will be enough for me. I have my little box of mementos that I would grab on the way out if there were a fire - that tiny pink-striped hat, the clothes she wore that day on her first car ride to the hospital with her dad, racing behind the ambulance. But what of the other things? The stained receiving blankets with which they rubbed away the vernix and blood of her birth - why do I keep those? I've tried a dozen times to force myself to toss them but I have thus far been unable - until today. I lay them there, beside her little treasure box and I snapped a picture. After I finish this I will go into her room and put them in the bag with the other give-aways. And I will let them go. Just as I have had to let go of so many things in life, as we all do, I will tuck their memory away in the form of a photo that I will take out from time to time and smile or cry as the case may be and I think that will be enough.

Except that white blanket. That one I am keeping.

The crick in your neck is worth it...

No big tome today. Just a little video of our girl. Unfortunately it was taken with my camera and so it is sideways. I've lent the 3chip to someone and so here we are. Turn your head, it won't kill till you've watched it 10 or 12 times. I promise to be on an even keel again soon with all the pith and prowess you've come to expect from me.

And that really is the sign for 'hot'...

I'd Write More if I had a Writing Desk...

...and an 'o' key.

Childproofing has been an interminably slow process around here, making do with whatever flimsy rigging will work in the moment. We seem always too tired to do the actual work of it; it's a little like writing papers for university, you inevitably wait until you absolutely HAVE to do it. Drilling holes in cabinets for child locks and tucking away tangles of cords and making strategic areas will come, but so far their idiot cousins are doing the job. Tape is closing the extra bathroom cupboard that is not held with a zip-close child lock. I've moved everything in the cupboards that is dangerous or breakable (learned that lesson the hard way) up out of the reach of Miss Grabby Hands, although we will eventually have to break down and put locks on the silverware drawers. The computer has thus far been 'protected' by a fortress of foam floor squares but my smart little girl has foiled our defenses and is always leaning over them to plonk away at the computer keys. Today she actually managed to rip off my 'o' key, it is now a vacant scab on my already disgruntled keyboard. Clearly we need to rethink the system.

I think it is hard enough trying to find ways to write when you have a little one shuffling about underfoot, demanding every ounce of your attention (and rightly so, for the most part). But in a small space like this there is nowhere I can go to simply sit with my thoughts and try to complete something relatively coherent. My mind is aflower with myriad thoughts and ideas for articles and freelance work, scripts and show ideas, the goings-on of my novel, but I feel like I really need a space in which to work, a Woolfian 'Room of One's Own'. But in Vancouver, where real estate is more valuable than blood, it will be some time before that happens for me (and poor Ez, who has almost everything he owns in storage) - so I suppose a new writing desk, jammed into some corner will have to suffice.

I am trying to figure out how to be a writer, to regain what I feel was ground out of me in the fog of my dismal and mediocre education. It is hard to imagine that as a twelve year old girl I was kicked out of gifted and talented class because a teacher read the novel I was working on (without my permission, from a binder he took from me) and didn't feel it was appropriate to my Catholic education. I was so long bombarded by 'you can't' and 'you shouldn't' and 'it won't work' that I shifted out of writing at far too young an age - regrettable in so many ways. I look at what I love in life, travel and writing and photography and story-telling and documentary filmmaking and I am infuriated that I was led so far astray by those who were meant to lead me. Yes, hindsight is 20-20, but oh! If only I had known how journalism could have filled in the spaces where my passions lay I would have followed that path, a path where I think my intelligence would have been appreciated. I did always want to be an actor, and I have loved doing it, but I think that there is so little satisfaction to be gotten from the business itself that at least with writing, with journalism you have a product that you have created that is good or not good, not subjectively based on whether or not they already have a brown-haired girl (god knows people could never tell two brunettes apart). I have actually lost gigs, so many in a row it pains me to count, because they needed the ethnic card - they once told a casting director to find them 'an ethnic Keegan'. Seriously? This is my chosen career path?

All I really ever wanted to do was travel the world and tell stories, and perhaps now is my chance to do that. More and more as I watch the sordid demise of film and tv I want to pull further and further away. Ez found an island in the Philippines the other day that would cost us a fraction of what our apartment is 'worth', a smidgeon of the cost of a crappy house in Vancouver and I think about it, I really do. I want to roam again, I want to do something more than insipid MOWs and table-scrap parts. I want to live the adventure and so does Ez and perhaps writing is a part of that new life, that new adventure. Certainly I have no blind halcyon view of what that business is like either, but at least I could feel like there is some meritocracy there...

I went last night to a collaborative writing event for the Vancouver International Writer's Festival and it was really fun and inspiring (not to mention my first night out alone since Nahanni was born) and really made me see the potential I have, the desire I have to throw words against the wall and see what sticks. (One of my favourite pieces from last night was a haiku my partner and I came up with using our required words:)

botox cowboys shoot
iced zinc effluent into
carboard-faced starlets


I don't know what will happen. Ez always says that I am miserable about the business until I get a few good gigs and then I don't want to leave anymore -- and I know it's true. It is so easy to get sucked back into that world; the money, the fun, the excitement of it all. One thing about the film industry, there's always a chance you'll win its lottery.

Till then I mull, I sift, I write snatches here and there and try to keep Nahanni from stealing all my letters. At least she didn't bust the 'I'.

The Tunnel at the End of the Light

It's easy to be happy about a brand new baby, there is something infinitely exciting that carries you through the fears and the fright and the long, long night of those first magical weeks and months when you've just brought home a new life, especially the first one. A magical tide that carries you through sleepless nights and learning each other and unassailable screaming and illness and everything in between. There is a sense of adoration that envelopes you such that you are immune to the notion that it will ever be anything other than a babymoon.

And then your child develops a personality.

I knew it would happen, I even lamented it several times over the course of my musings here; seeing a parent screaming at a child in the mall, watching kids running miles ahead of their parents and wondering how they could let them so far from their grasp. I wondered how you could ever not feel inundated by the rush of love and emotion that came with this wondrous new person. I was fortunate, I had (and still do have) a really delightful and easy child, malleable in every sense -- although perhaps that will make this new transition to a having a child with opinions and likes and dislikes that much more difficult.

Where once I had a child who was pretty content to hang out by herself, playing for a while whilst I attempted to make some sense of the disorder that always seems to wash over my household in a torrent of piles; paper, dishes, laundry etc., I now have a child who needs to be with me every second of the day. She weeps uncontrollably sometimes when I leave the room, those big dramatic tears spilling over the well of her eyes. There are times when you'd think I'd left her for two weeks, she's that distraught, so needless to say, I don't get a lot accomplished of late.

Nahanni has also, to my mixed delight and chagrin, discovered that there are these magical things called options. Where before she would simply eat whatever we spooned into her mouth or placed in little shards within her sweeping reach, now she has preferences for things and she does not hesistate to apprise you of them. I finally introduced cheese into her diet and we quickly discovered that unless you hide it, you will spend the whole meal being chastised with that ever-pointing little finger until the stash has been consumed, regardless of your plan for her meal. Where she used to eat everything with gusto, you now have to be more strategic about when you bring out the big guns, the applesauce, the tiny orange chunks of cheese, the yogurt. Oh, not just any yogurt mind you, only the finest, thickest Balkan yogurt for my little gourmand. Not that I would feed her any of the usual yogurt that is replete with fillers, but sometimes I can't get the Balkan style and she seems to feel that it is an affront to her epicurean sensibilites. Which is not to say that she still doesn't eat a wonderful array of things, but it has certainly begun to be more of a challenge.

I am also beginning to see the light bulb go off with regard to numerous other parts of her life that were once more simple. While she was sick recently (again, yes - we'd only just gotten rid of the flu which swept through the whole house) she often woke up with a stuffed head, boogers crusting over her little nostrils, her curls damp with fever and we felt so bad when she woke up crying an hour or so after her bedtime that we let her come out and hang with us while we relaxed. Now I wouldn't call it a mistake, per se, but I would certainly admit that we opened a door that may have been stemming the tide of those magical 'options'. Suddenly she understood that there could be more time, fun time even, when the tv was on and we sat on the couch and laughed as she threw herself backwards into the cushions. The sickness went and the waking up did not. We could tell that she was testing her boundaries and let me tell you, the breaking of that new little habit has not been particularly fun, especially for Ez who is charged with calming her when these episodes occur. I am steadfastly refusing to acquiesce to what I know is a ploy to have more mommy. For some reason (and I know that this will be reversed with extreme prejudice in about 15 years) my daughter cannot get enough of me and she's not afraid to let everyone within earshot know it. Mercifully she is a very bright little girl and she is catching on quickly that this ploy is not working. Mommy has been decidedly off-duty after 7:00 pm and that, is one of life's hard knocks for this little one right now.

Now all this is not to say that I don't still delight in my child. I am simply admitting that the easy, tip-toe through the tulips of infancy seems to be coming to a close. Now I have a baby that tests everything with her mouth and so, gets sick. This is part of this new stage. She wants things she cannot have, wants to go places that are not safe, wants me to be there for every second of her day and these things are not possible - and she's not going to like it. Things are getting less easy, less simple and it is really a new challenge to roll with the ship as it lists and bobs through this next section of waves. Was it easier when she was smaller, simpler? Of course. But when I see her learning and becoming her true self, willful or not, I delight in the discovery along with her. It tests me, but it is delightful nonetheless. We were reading a book the other day 'The Belly Button Book' and she started pulling at her shirt to expose the strange little nub of her belly-button -- and I delighted. Now you can ask her where it is, or about her nose and her 'hair-do' and she will show you, an impishly proud smile beaming across her little face. She's begun to point to the computer and say 'Nuh-nuh' - which is her version of her name, and it means she wants to look at the slideshow of her pictures which takes up all the RAM on my computer. Now. I mean right now. She also will point and bounce up and down which means she wants to dance to the latin music that comes from my 'Coffee Break Espanol' Spanish lessons that I listen to every day. How can I feel upset about all this new personality when the good far outweighs the bad? Yes, she's more willful, but still invariably happy and easy to please and so I am lucky indeed. I am frightened by the tunnel I see at the end of the light of the hallowed babymoon in which I have been deeply ensconced; I am afraid of the time in the future when my daughter will inevitably push one too many buttons and I will see her not as my perfect child but as the ripening individual that she is. I may not like the moment but I will love the results. I look forward to discovering this little girl even as I am stocking up on ibuprofen in advance of the impending headaches...