Stuffing In The Stories. And Being A Person This Was Not Lost On.

(MAJOR snark alert … )

Last Monday evening, after the PTO meeting wound up —

Because yes, dear reader, this quaking-in-her-boots introvert went to another PTO meeting.

I raised my hand and — my voice tight and quavering — spoke:

“I have a really out-there suggestion,” I began. “The annual school dance that’s coming up in March … ? Well … I’m wondering … could that dance *ONLY* be a dance?”

(As opposed to what it’s been for years, dear reader:  a dance PLUS a pop-up Dollarama (Plastic crap for sale! Step right up, kids, and get your plastic crap here…!) PLUS a pop-up corner convenience store (Hungry? Thirsty? Of course! It’s been — what? — a half hour of standing around the gym dancing? Here, have a bag of candy, and here, have a bottle of water that — yep! — you can open, take one sip from, and then set down and forget! Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be dumped out later [thus becoming a complete waste of resources] by your friendly host of parent volunteers!).)

Whoops. Did I say all that? Out loud, at the meeting, I mean?

No. Somehow or another, I managed to keep all my snark bottled, although I confess I *did* slip up and — before I even knew what I was doing — I was asking if people had read this CBC news article about China refusing Canada’s completely-wasted March dance water bottles recycling.)

(Some people should simply not be permitted to venture out.)

Slip-up notwithstanding, discussion ensued.

And then: agreement, tacit as well as expressly stated.

🙂

🙂

🙂

So as I was saying:

After the PTO meeting, I stayed awhile and visited with my son’s friend’s mum, and we had a discussion that largely centred around the difficulties of getting boys to read, for goodness’ sake!

I commiserated.

Twelve is a hard age, especially for boys, and especially when those boys have easy access to a screen. As this Luddite has said before, screens rob from reading.

“We have all these wonderful books in our house,” she lamented. “Shelves full of classics! And the boys do not pick them up. It’s as though they’re allergic to paper.”

My solution, I told her, lay in the fact that I am determinedly — actively — stuffing my boy’s head with stories, by — warning, warning: shameful admission alert — continuing to read aloud to him, despite his advanced age.

The necessity to repeat myself, to say to her — “No, you’re not following me … (my son) did not read Animal Farm on his own; I read it aloud to him…” — really brought the point home for me: it does seem that my continuing to read aloud to my 12-year-old son constitutes some sort of subversive act. (As further evidenced by our mutual reticence to sit on the couch and read together when his older brother is home from university and is prowling in the adjoining kitchen. “Why are you STILL reading aloud to him?!” he scolded TWO YEARS ago. “He can read on his own!!!”)

Okay, yes, I get it.

I *do* know this will not — and cannot — go on forever.

And there was, in fact, a space of about three months this fall in which I thought, mournfully, Well, that’s the end of that!

Earlier in the summer, we had finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (the Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass). And, oh my gosh, how my son LOVED that epic tale! We then went on to Mary Norton’s classic, Bedknob and Broomstick, which my son also loved. After that came Orwell’s Animal Farm, which my son thoroughly enjoyed. (He also, it must be confessed, enjoyed the look on his teacher’s face, who, when he asked this fall if anyone had read Animal Farm (their next classroom read-aloud), fully expected no hands to be raised.)

But then we went on to Howl’s Moving Castle, and therein lay my mistake.

My son didn’t love it. At all. (Nor did I, to be honest.) We stopped two or three chapters in. And at a bit of a loss as to what to choose instead, I allowed time to pass. Several long weeks of it, in fact. And evenings which had formerly been given to reading were instead given over to Star Trek Voyager. Evenings in which I sweated:

• Sometimes literally: It was a sweltering summer and the misery of that was compounded by the arrival of surely-this-is-a-cosmic-joke hot flashes.
• Sometimes figuratively: Without our read-alouds, this kid is barely reading at all! How on Earth will I get this kid reading more? He/we can’t stop yet! — surely there are more stories I should be stuffing into his head?!

An overheard snatch of conversation between my older son and his girlfriend led to me casually putting Artemis Fowl into my 12-year-old’s hands. Pay dirt: EIGHT books for him to devour! And once those were done, a second windfall arrived: Robert Muchamore’s Cherub series. EIGHTEEN books! And a further seven in a prequel series…

So yes, I had him reading again.

But still: the loss of the reading-aloud — the loss of the thing I’d done for 21 years, the loss of the thing I (fancied I) did so well, the loss of the thing I SO loved doing … the loss of that ached.

And then, serendipitously, Lynda came along with a post about a perfect holiday season read-aloud. Matt Haig’s A Boy Called Christmas. That got us back on the reading-aloud horse and A Christmas Carol followed immediately thereafter.

Which has now led to The Neverending Story.

Which will lead to …

Of course, I don’t know if it will lead to anything else.

Because he’s inching up to 13. And if the requirement of reading-aloud has long since passed, then the wanting must surely be hanging by a thread.

Hanging by a thread seems to be a fitting phrase for the way I’ve been feeling the past while. I’ve felt — very keenly at times — that my purpose in life is shifting underneath me. It’s been a year of introspection, a year of gathering — words, ideas, quotes, lyrics — a holding-tight and clinging-on, as though those gathered words were life preservers that could buoy me up and keep me afloat.

And although a listing-out of those gathered ideas is perhaps coming soon to a blog near you, there’s one, in particular, I’d like to share now, as it perfectly ties this post together with my last.

In my search for a 2018 wall calendar this past December, I came across this:

This is the work of Austin Kleon.

And on his blog, just last week, he had his latest instalment of newspaper blackout art and this lovely freeform poem:

A person

This was not lost on

is

who

I

want to

be

YES, I thought, the cadence of his words sending a symphony through my psyche.

This is NOT ONLY who I want to be — who I’ve always wanted to be — but this also — poetically — sums up my life’s work as a mother.

This explains the reasoning behind all my efforts to get my children reading, to keep them reading, to read aloud to them well beyond the point of normalcy.

Because: Not only were all these efforts simply the best part of motherhood — the snuggling-up intimacy, the sharing of stories, the lyrical turn-of-words that fashion prose into music, the breath-held pauses as four (six, eight) eyes roved over work-of-art illustrations, the ceremonial slowing-down, the communal savouring of ideas, the unspoken desire to learn-new-things together — but this ALSO spelled out a means to an end: it was (is) the route by which each of my children could (can) grow to become a person this was not lost on.

Literary references. Humour. Irony. Walking-in-another-person’s-shoes-for-200 pages-empathy. Sarcasm. Dry wit. Meaning which can only be found between-the-lines, or in a shrug, or in a raised eyebrow.

I didn’t (don’t) want any of those important things to be lost on my children.

And maybe, just maybe, there’s an extension to be made here.

Maybe, just maybe, if all those things are not lost on my children, there will be one more thing that’s not lost on my children: Connections.

Connections between, oh, say, the plastic bottle they might have held in their hands at the school’s March dance, and the news report that China is no longer willing to take Canada’s glut of recycling…

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Coffee Houses and Introverts, #WittingNotKnitting and #GleaningMeaningNotCleaning

Who’s worried? Do we look worried?

Last weekend at hockey, as our 12-year-old son’s team hit the ice, my husband leaned into me and said (hyperbolically, jokingly, obscurely), “Let slip the dogs of war.”

Julius Caesar? I thought.

“Where’s that from?” I asked, unwilling to commit myself to the guess.

“I think it’s Shakespeare … probably Julius Caesar,” he said.

Although he’s (reasonably) well-read, he’s an engineer, and is hardly a bastion of knowledge when it comes to English literature. So he did what we all now do when faced with a burning question: he pulled out his phone and googled it.

It *was* Julius Caesar.

As neither of us has *actually* read Julius Caesar, I’m not exactly sure how we managed this tidbit of conversation in the opening moments of our son’s house league hockey game. Clearly — or, well, I hope it’s clear — we’re not a couple of elitist and erudite academics —

Here, let me lead you to my shelf-of-shame to prove that point:

No Shakespeare For Dummies for us … but we WILL confess to being rather fearful of it…

— nor are we vociferous and vicious hockey parents who equate the game with war.

(We’re well-behaved whisperers, I swear it, although I have no way of proving that point.)

So where am I going with this story?

A segue, dear reader, a path to something confessional: there is something in me that loves conversations such as these.

There is something in me that craves knowledge — trivial, important, obscure, earth-shattering, useless, practical — I want to know it all.

When I graduated high school in 1985 I was excited to head off to university.

I had this notion in my head, you see, a very distinct picture of what it would be like there: groups of students and professors gathering to share Big Ideas, each person’s remarks and ruminations providing a springboard for another’s, a tangential spider-webbing-out of knowledge and analysis, complete with witty repartee.

In short, I was expecting an Enlightenment-era European coffee house.

This was not what I found.

The Faculty of Science, as it turned out, didn’t present — on a metaphorical silver-platter — a plethora of philosophizing pupils with whom I could sit and talk.

And even if it HAD — even if a group of such people had miraculously appeared in front of me and invited me to join them — I’m not sure why I imagined I could ever take part in such discussions.

I was (am) a capital I Introvert.

I have a brain that curls up, armadillo-like, at the slightest whiff of danger.

Ask me a question, in Real Life, and what will happen?

Well, that depends, really.

If you’re a university English professor you will get a deer-in-the-headlights look of panic. And dumbfounded silence. Please-dear-God-let-him-move-along….

If it’s just the two of us, if I feel comfortable, I will probably be able to answer.

But if I feel even slightly stressed or anxious, my brain will shut down. I will stumble, waffle, stutter. I may be able to salvage the situation — somewhat — because I may still be capable of asking you questions. But I will then likely go overboard; I will pepper you with questions. Because, not only am I genuinely interested (in your answers; not, as you might begin to suspect, in making you squirm under cross-examination), but that is also, you see, an introvert’s best defence: keep them talking so you don’t have to.

I have always been fascinated by people who could easily talk, by people who were witty, by people who waxed philosophical, by those who *knew* about things, who could speak with authority about politics, history, literature.

I’ve always wondered how they became that way. How did they know all this stuff? And how did they manage to coherently convey all they knew?

Were they simply extroverts, the people who could do this?

Or did they have a training ground?

I had seen it in movies: huge families gathered around a dinner table, discussion dancing while potatoes were passed and forks and knives clacked against plates.

And I had occasionally seen it in Real Life. Although my family (growing up) was small and (mostly) alone in Canada, thousands of kilometres removed from everyone else, although it was nearly always just the four of us around the table — my mother, my father, my brother, and me — I did, on rare occasions, get to join in on these bigger kinds of gatherings.

And by joining in, I mean, of course, observing.

Sitting silent, listening, answering if the need arose.

Hoping, fearfully, that the need would not arise.

I knew nothing, after all. It wasn’t as though I was a well-read child. And the things I somehow *did* know? Well, they were trapped inside.

I remember one time being in The Netherlands, visiting my favourite aunt. (The Knitter). Her (much older) children were at home, visiting from university, or from their jobs. We were gathered in the living room, my aunt and her two grown daughters knitting, needles softly clacking, the discussion going from one thing to the next as I sat silently beside the spinning wheel, the talk taking place in English (for the benefit of me and my brother, the only two present who could not speak Dutch). I can still hear the charmingly-accented English of my more-than-a-decade-older cousin, can still see his wavy dark hair falling over his forehead, as he told us the tale of a friend who went to North America. She hated it. Because, you see, she had to plug something into a socket one day, and it felt to her as though she was inserting an electrical plug into a face.

And just as that perception was sinking in, just as I thought Oh. My. Gosh.YES! North American electrical plug-ins DO look like faces and of course! one *could* get that feeling—

My mother let out a loud tch!

The noise that expressed a mixture of disdain and dismissal and utter impatience.

“A plug-in is a plug-in!” she said, scornfully denying all imagination that claimed otherwise.

A beat. A taste of the atmosphere I breathed at home. Silence, weighted, the only possible follow-up to the not-silence, which was nearly always worse.

And then the talk shifted, moved to things I cannot now recall.

I remember — much, much, much later — long after having left that (mostly) silent or not-silent home, long after meeting and marrying the man who grew up reading encyclopedias, the man who researched facts on ice prior to our second date so we would have something to talk about as we laced-up skates, the man who belonged to a noisy family, his own plus extended, where I (mostly) sat silent, observing, slightly shell-shocked at the civility of their not-silence — long after all that happened, I remember sitting, crowded, around my in-laws’ dining room table, brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephew, and our (then) two children squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, discussion dancing as potatoes were passed. I remember, clear as a bell, my daughter, seven, joining the conversation.

Talking. Offering. Laughing, cheeks flushed. Responding. Enjoying. Relaxed.

And I remember thinking: how?

How is she doing that?

Is that simply her?

Confusion. I had thought she was like me when outside her natural habitat: an observer.

I, the watcher, had pegged her early on, watched her watching.

A program at the library, a gathering of toddlers, all of them marching in a circle to music.

All but her.

An expression on her face.

WTAF.

So then how? How was she doing this talking now, seated at this crowded table?

Where did this ability, this confidence, this fearless fluidity despite being in foreign-parts, come from?

I remember — shamefully — feeling envious of her.

And then suddenly it hit me: did she have a training ground?

And if so, who had provided that?

Had we had a hand in that? My husband and I?

My husband and I, who sat at our kitchen table, our small family of (then) four, hundreds of kilometres removed from everyone else, somehow, someway — imperfectly — dispelling silence, talking about …

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You’re probably still wondering where I’m going with this.

And the only answer I can come up with is, nowhere. It was swirling, the words wrapping themselves around my fingers — letters like yarn, keyboard like needles; I wrote it and I wanted to share it. #WittingNotKnitting

Here’s the thing: I want to share more stories.

Because here’s yet another thing: as much as I wanted to — as much as I still feel the need to, as much as I once believed I could (if I can *just* phrase my arguments in the right way…) — as much as this was the utterly naïve and idealistic reason I began this blog … I cannot save the world.

And if this blog cannot save the world (duh), if I am sinking under the weight of responsibility that refuses to give up that delusion, then I am only left with two options: I can stop writing here altogether, or I can use this space to find solace in something else.

I’ve confessed to what I love.

Now here’s what I want (besides world peace and a solution to climate change and the end to hunger and inequality and plastic pollution): I want words to counter-balance weight. I want a way to cope with loneliness. I want less silence in my days. I want to compare notes. I want conversation. I want to laugh about metaphors. But aloud, here; not just in my head. I want my life to stop shrinking, to conquer the fears that crowd out possibilities, the fears that I’ve allowed to reduce me to a list of merelys (merely a cookie-baker, merely a scrubber-of-toilets, merely a volunteer). I want #GleaningMeaningNotCleaning. I want to learn things. I want to know things. Important things — like literary references and the details of carbon sequestration, and what it means to be real and brave and entirely human on this spinning planet — but also unimportant and purely pedantic things, like, could Harry REALLY see Uncle Vernon’s feet as—

(Whoops. That’s a post for another day.)

And although all that seems, on the surface, to be a list of useless things-to-want in the face of everything that’s happening out there, there’s something inside me that says otherwise. Something that tells me the solace of story-telling is somehow fundamental, even when everything is going south.

So I can’t promise this place will turn into a pseudo-Enlightenment-era coffee house, nor can I promise that I will be capable of entirely letting go of the (cranky) persuasive essay, but I do hope you’ll continue to meet with me here, to pull up a virtual chair and sit and talk with me, a person who still has a lot to learn, and not just about hashtags —

(I have no clue if those are real hashtags. I don’t even understand how hashtags work. Or what they’re for. I only know that making them up (is that allowed?) gave me a small hit of joy.)

Reflections From Post-Toy Parenthood

I never used to be a dog-earer of books.

Books, it seemed to me, were *this close* to being sacrosanct, and as such, were things that one shouldn’t mark up, mar, or mutilate in any way, shape or form.

But lately, I find myself so moved by what I’m reading that — not content to merely pass by truisms that speak to me — I’m needing to mark them.

Here’s one such truth I recently came across, from Matt Haig’s Reasons To Stay Alive:

If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.

The only thing I would add to his words would be the qualifier, And during the holiday season, when seemingly *everyone* (except you) is hohoho-ing, this loneliness will be magnified ten-fold.

So … where the heck have I been since mid-November?

Stuck in my cranky head, I’m afraid.

I knew, when I happened across this scene in my local big box home improvement store on October 5th (OCTOBER 5th!) —

— that it was going to be a grumbly kind of a fall.

The words “going to be” are inaccurate, of course; my grumbly-ness is a humming continuum that began who-knows-when, but was last mentioned in this post, in which I reported that I had spent the last part of August in high dudgeon, flinging open cupboards, hunting and purging as though my life depended on it.

Well, what I didn’t mention in that post was the fact that my 12-year-old son was going through a similar phase:  “I feel like my room is too full of stuff,” he told me one scorching August day.

So, with my help, we embarked on a major clean-out of his room. We went through his closet, his desk, and his bedside table, and we got rid of a heckuva lot of crap.

(I feel it’s important to note that what I consider to be a heckuva lot of crap is probably minuscule by other people’s standards.)

Because I am a see-er of all the stuff, a noticer of everything, it was interesting to observe him as he went through the process of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. He is the least sentimental of my three children, and as such, he had a fairly easy time making his decisions. The thing that pulled him up short, though, and caused him a bit of angst, was the actual fact of disposal. After making sure to recycle anything that could be recycled, and after setting aside those items we deemed were ok to donate to Goodwill, he was still left with a pile of items. And as he looked at those non-recyclable, non-donate-able items, as he picked up each one individually and turned it over in his hands, several observations came flowing from my deep-thinking boy:

• Why do I have this?
• This can never be unmade, can it?
• We came in LAST…why would they think it’s necessary to give us trophies?
• I guess I can get rid of all these medals because they’re meaningless, but they all came from China, didn’t they?

My son’s exercise in purging reminded me of a show I watched just after we moved back to Canada seven years ago.

Now, I should explain that our family has had three major moves over the past twenty-one years, and although they’ve all come with their unique challenges, this last move was the one that nearly did me in.

With little to choose from, we naively bought a fixer-upper, a house brimming with “potential”. My husband moved here six weeks ahead of the kids and me and began his new job, spending his lonely evenings stripping wallpaper, and hiring a contractor who began gutting the laundry room. When we joined my husband the house was in a state of upheaval.

And when our moving van arrived and deposited all our stuff into the midst of that?

Total overwhelm.

In an effort to make myself feel better, I did two things:

First, I set gratitude mantras on replay in my head:

• we have a roof over our heads
• it’s winter and we have heat
• all the faucets deliver clean, safe drinking water
• we have sufficient food
• we’re not living in a war zone
• the kids are safe and healthy and beginning to adjust to their new schools

And secondly, I also began (in my evening downtime, when I wasn’t scrubbing wallpaper paste or mudding-and-sanding damaged drywall or cursing the original owners to hell-and-back for (evidently) allowing wallpaper to be applied to unprimed walls) to watch Hoarders and what was probably a little-known show on HGTV-Canada called Consumed.

If you’ve ever watched Hoarders you’ll know it’s an utterly painful and pitiful watch. But Consumed (which could be termed Hoarders-lite), was somehow less disturbing. The show featured “normal” families whose homes were (somehow, someway) overrun with stuff.

This was the way the show worked: after allowing the families to select a set number of items to keep, the remaining contents of the house were boxed and carted off to a warehouse. The family then spent a month living in their bare-minimum house, and after enjoying the freedom of living in an uncluttered environment (because yes, they all *did* seem to enjoy the experience), they trooped to the warehouse where they were forced — under the pressure of time — to sort through the entirety of their possessions in order to determine what to keep and what to toss.

Moral objections aside —

(it’s doubtful that this sort of ripping-off-the-bandage approach to hoarding is therapeutic or helpful in the long run)

— this show added one more item to my gratitude list: however overwhelming our living situation was at that moment, however resentful I felt at becoming Chief Shuffler Of Stuff, however angry I was that I had somehow allowed my life to be taken over by a house … things were at least NOT AS BAD as they could be; obsessive squirreling of sentimental items aside, I was at least not (quite that much of) a hoarder.

Now, although it’s been at least five years since I’ve watched this program there’s one clip from one particular episode that still runs through my brain, as it did that day in August as I was helping my son to clean out his room, and as it did this December, when I went to the mall, feeling the weight of holiday expectations and the pressure to provide *something* in the way of Christmas presents:

There’s a girl, blonde, about 14 years old. She’s standing in a warehouse, and she’s surrounded on all sides by boxes upon boxes upon boxes — some closed, some opened, some unpacked, the detritus on display for all to see.

This is ALL her family’s stuff, and she and her family are working against a ticking clock, a TV camera documenting the painful indecision that marks each and every decision. And suddenly, after working for hours, this girl has had it, and she upends a huge box of plastic toys directly into a large garbage bin.

Over-thinker that I am, that scene never fails to elicit the following grumbly questions:

What was it all for anyway? Why were those crap toys made in the first place? For five minutes of fun? And then, once the *actual* fun was over, what were they good for then? To sit on a shelf, on display? To gather dust? To be crammed into a drawer? To clutter up this girl’s life, to make her room — and her house — so fucking full she and her family required an intervention?

I realized something this December, when I looked at my 12-year-old son’s Christmas wish list and saw that he hadn’t even asked for a LEGO Architecture set:  I am now on the POST-TOY side of parenthood.

The hard truth that I’ve come to over the years is that so much of what gets brought into our children’s lives constitutes junk, and while there may be small hits of pleasure at the moments of receiving and the moments of giving, the net cumulative effect isn’t a positive one; I think it’s actually damaging — to them, to us, to our relationships, to the environment.

• We stuff our kids’ rooms and then get angry at them when they can’t keep their spaces clean.
• We fill their Easter baskets and their Christmas stockings with cheap trinkets and then wonder why they’re ungrateful.
• We buy them toys with little-to-no play value and then complain that they can’t settle to one thing.
• We give them prizes for *everything* — for doing the very things they’re supposed to do, for merely showing up, for coming in last — and then call them entitled.

It’s worth noting that even when we ourselves actively try to set limits, even when we completely buy into the truisms of less is more, quality over quantity, expectations are best kept low and reasonable, even when we ourselves are refraining from stuffing and filling and buying and giving —

(even when that refraining is still — after years of practice — accompanied by a panicked notion of not-enough that sneaks insidiously in and threatens to derail it all on the 23rd)

— the stuff STILL seeps in.

It comes from well-meaning grandparents, from teachers rewarding good behaviour, from school fundraisers, from fast food restaurants, from informational giveaways, from sports organizations, from birthday parties … it enters our children’s lives and sits there, until — at the age of 12 (or 14, or 18, or whenever they’ve said why the heck do I even have this) — it gets swept ignominiously into garbage bags and set out on curbs and trucked out of our sight.

At which point, the over-thinking grumblers among us may reflect, What was it all for anyway? Why do we do* this?

I think we do it because it’s fun, because it’s expected, because everyone else is doing it, because it was simply there — on sale! and so irresistible! — in Wal-Mart.

I think we do it because we worry about our children’s self-esteem, because we don’t want to disappoint them, because we ourselves felt deprived as children.

I think we do it because although we recognize monetary costs we still don’t understand (or we refuse to see) the connections between the things we consume and the raw materials and energy it takes to create them.

I think we do it because enough is a concept we continually struggle with.

I think we do it because saying yes is easier than the thought that we will be perceived as a crank.

Of course, this fear of being perceived a crank is really what this post — and my silence since November — is all about.

But I suppose, if I want others to speak their truths, then I have to be brave enough to speak mine, even if I come off as a crank.

/hits publish after three months of revisions/

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*”We” refers to both me and the royal we-as-a-society; the active verb “do” is equally interchangeable with a passive how the heck did we allow this to happen?