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.

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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.