Running On Empty or, How Patience is a Belgian Characteristic

I made a pledge years ago, when the 26th stopped being a real holiday, that I would not set foot in a store for a Boxing Day sale. It would continue to be a day for lying on the couch, eating Christmas mandarins and reading the book Santa left for me. And I’ve kept my word, eschewing that horrendous frenzy that is post-Christmas consumerism, but there isn’t always a book under the tree, and sometimes I feel like spending the day after Christmas somewhere other than on the couch.

So this year we had the idea that all of us – me, my favourite Belgian, and my three offspring – could go up to the mountains to do some skiing and snowboarding. Actually, the ‘we had the idea’ was really ‘he had’ - my Belgian - with me chiming in because it seemed like a fine thing to do, at that moment. But by the time Christmas night rolled around, my enthusiasm had waned considerably at the prospect of a very early morning, the uncertainty of finding rental boots for a son with Very Big Feet, having to make a trip to the Daughter’s house to pick up her gear, convincing the Elder Son that being together on the slopes was a better idea than his going shopping, and imagining myself hurtling inadvertently down a black run, scared shitless and swearing a blue streak.

Daughter tried her best to be head cheerleader and almost had me convinced, but then Eldest Son’s feet dug in too deep to move, and the whole idea started to unravel. My Belgian tried to salvage what was left and suggested that we just take Bigfoot Son and the Daughter, but since my approach to life is generally of the all-or-nothing variety, and with the vision of plaster-encased bones looming larger in my fevered imagination, I pulled the plug completely. And went to sleep feeling like the biggest party-pooper ever.

Morning dawned, and my mood was lighter. Let’s just go for 1/2 a day, with 2/3 of the kids, said I, brightly. But oh, we still have the boot problem. And OH, what about the PUPPY??? Forgot about him. He can’t be left alone all day, and Eldest Son will be in the mall and unable to help.  So let’s drop Puppy off at a friend’s place. But OH, Friend wants to come WITH us. In that case, let’s take Puppy, Friend, and while we’re at it, Friend’s puppy TOO, but OH, the car isn’t big enough for everybody. Let’s rent a mini-van, my Belgian offers, helpfully. But it’s Boxing Day, and even though every retail outlet on the planet is open and offering 70% off, the car rental company is not. And furthermore, Daughter needs to go back to her place to take a shower first, after spending two nights on the couch at her mother’s house. Back in an hour, she says. We all know how that goes.

When finally we leave, it’s way too late to do any skiing so we’ll just go to the mountains for lunch and maybe a swim in the hot springs. We go to the Friend’s house, and Son-With-Big-Feet hands his car keys to me. He’ll ride with Friend and Two Puppies in the other car and they’ll meet us at the restaurant.
Son’s German car has a 1/4 tank of gas, and by my Japanese car standards, that’s plenty enough to get to the mountains and almost back. My Belgian mildly suggests getting more.  Sure, sure, I say. But there’s no rush. Off we go, with now-grumpy Daughter in the back seat wishing she had never agreed to spend the day with her disorganized family, 3/4 of whom are pathologically incapable of making a plan and sticking to it.

It's a lovely day and it's great to be out of the city.  The mountains move closer but the needle on the fuel gauge moves to the left exponentially faster.  The Belgian’s renewed suggestion to get more gas takes on a firmer tone but I am the picture of insouciance. Oh, don’t worry, I say, there’s one about 20 km away and we’ll definitely stop there.

But OH, the engine is starting to miss. The road climbs uphill and pressing the gas pedal down is not having the customary effect. My Belgian gently asks why I am swearing.  Other than that he says nothing, not even I-told-you-so. In the rear-view mirror, Daughter’s eyes are rolling. I pull off onto the shoulder just as the engine dies completely, and there is now total silence in the car.

Daughter calls her brother, who tells me later how relieved he is that she is only calling to say we’ve run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and not that we are already at the restaurant wondering where the hell he is. We wait, fogging up the windows, buffeted by the hundreds of cars passing us at high speed.

My head fills with disaster scenarios. We will be struck from behind by someone who has mistaken the shoulder for the road. Son and Friend will be hit at the very moment they arrive to rescue us. Or, Son and Friend will not be able to buy a gas can at the service station that is only five short km away. (Couldn’t the damn car have kept going for two more minutes???)  Or, they will be able to buy a gas can, but Son will be struck by a passing vehicle as he attempts to fill the tank. I am driving myself crazy and get out to check which side the fuel tank is on. It’s on the right, so that’s good news, anyway.

An interminable time later, Son and Friend arrive with a full can, laughing their heads off. We have not yet been struck from behind. Nor do they get hit. The engine starts. We arrive at the restaurant for lunch at 4 PM and let the Puppies out for a pee in the parking lot instead of the frolic through the snow that we had planned. The sun has already dipped behind the mountains, leaving only the very peaks brushed in gold. The food is good, but then anything is when you’re really hungry and cold and relieved to be safe.

The hot springs pool is just what we need. Submerged to our chins amidst clouds of steam rising into the crisp indigo sky, we laugh about the day. I lean into my Belgian’s arms and gaze up at the 3/4 moon. Life is good again and I’m going to overfill the tank before we head back home. And next year I'll make sure to put a book under the tree myself.

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Something I've been Wanting to Say To You

A friend who teaches elementary school has a student who got into trouble for an incident that fit his modus operandi perfectly. When she confronted him, he denied any wrongdoing and was then suspected not only of the deed, but of lying about it. When the story was finally unravelled, it turned out that he was innocent. His teacher felt terrible for having doubly accused him and apologized profusely. He told her that her apology didn’t matter, that he didn’t feel any different or better because she had said she was sorry. She thought about that, and later took him aside to say that she now realized her apology was really for herself, but that her words had made her feel better. With time, she hoped, they would have the same effect on him too.

Well, they won’t, he said.

For a long time now, I have wanted to make an apology . Two, in fact. But hearing this story made me re-examine whether there was any point to saying I was sorry, if the words used to express regret are not well-received. And while it’s generally true that the giver of an apology feels a lessening of their burden, but the relief isn’t always reciprocated. ‘Do you accept my apology? ‘, we might ask, but the response is not always positive. How difficult it is to extend our regret to another, only to see it slip through their hands.

Reconsidered thusly, my apologies may simply become acknowledgements. There will still be a faint hope accompanying them that repair is possible, but an acknowledgement does not carry the same weight of expectation. An apology is a bit like a birthday present, offered without obviously anticipating anything in return. But if, when the giver’s birthday rolls around, nothing comes her way, there’s likely to be some disappointment.

A misunderstanding of the highest order passed between a brother and me some years ago and it remains unresolved, leaving traces still evident despite the erosion of time. On the surface, we appear to have gotten over it, and part of my reluctance to say anything now is a fear of re-opening an old wound. But I can’t bury things like he seems to be able to do, and my old distress, half-conscious though it is, regularly turns over and mutters in a dark corner of my mind. What also stops me from apologizing is that I believe I had valid reason to say to him what I did way back then, although I never dreamt that my words would have such a devastating effect.

And longer ago than that, events that I put in motion changed the course of my former husband’s life to such an extent that he cannot bring himself to speak to me. It is our youngest child’s greatest wish that his siblings, his father and I simply be able to share a meal together once in a while, on the rare occasion that we are all in the same city.

For that to happen, I would need to make an apology – or an acknowledgement – of what my husband suffered when he lost a life he had thought would always be his. For the sake of my son, I think I can do that, but there is something standing in the way. Until I started writing this essay I didn’t understand that it is the very real possibility that my regret will only be met with continued hostility. That it just won’t do.

That’s the crux of it. I’m afraid to say what wants to be said in case nothing comes back. No reciprocal acknowledgement, no acceptance, only silence. Or worse, outright rejection. But as Christmas approaches, I am pulled by a strong urge to make things right, to offer a gift in the true spirit of giving without expectation of something for myself.

Unwrapped, no strings attached and straight from the heart.

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Is that 'Ode To Joy' I hear?

Late, late last night, still awake long after my beloved had given himself up to sleep, I thought of the people I have begun to know in the last months, and in the night stillness, their voices seemed to come to me as faint, distant bells. Signalling their presence in tones sometimes resonant, sometimes delicately crystalline, they compelled me to listen and after a time I began to hear their clear, pure notes joining and blending together in a harmony of ideas and intention, motifs and themes.

In Penned but not Published, the writer asks if symbolism informs our writing, or our lives. Music has always been part of my life, and I once heard it described as the purest form of human expression. It seems, then, entirely right for me to consider music as a symbol for what is created in this place of writers and artists. It is our vast concert hall, and without benefit of a conductor, we play and practice, our melodies simple, tender, bold, complex, amusing, heartbreaking, dark and unforgettable; the kind of compositions that we remember long after we first heard them. We create an exquisite opus, contrapuntal and melodious although dissonance is an integral part of the whole – without it, music is saccharine and superficial.

Then today, The Pliers wrote of paving stones and the grass that holds them fast to the earth as metaphors for the things we must do in life, and how we choose to do them. She refers eloquently to “ the rush of feeling connected to another, above and beyond words and the rule book delivered by the stork along with one's corporeal form; the joy of trusting one's non-traditional ways of knowing” .

Her reference to the rule book, or rather, to its irrelevance, brings to mind another analogy. At the risk of mixing far too many metaphors, I liken my initial experience of this community of writers to being the new kid at school. On the playground at recess there are already well-established groups, and relationships within those groups – a hierarchy to be respected and an etiquette to be observed if the new kid has any hope of gaining entry to the circle. Depending on her level of self-assurance, she might try to integrate herself boldly, or hang around on the periphery, watching and waiting, analyzing the behaviour and personalities of the others to best assess her chances of acceptance.

It took me a few months to realize how preposterous this scenario was as applied to the blogging community. It took me that long to figure out that, in this environment, the usual rules do not apply. In the relative anonymity of this milieu we can present ourselves in only one context, without the factors that often influence how we form relationships in the physical world.

We are, simply, what we say. What we write. We may accompany or decorate our writing with lovely images, but we have, essentially, only one way to present ourselves to the world. In regular daily life, we assess, judge, analyze and absorb information about other people from a number of sources; the way they look, dress, the accent with which they speak, the pitch of their laughter, the quirks they reveal simply by their existence.

Here, almost nothing of that comes into play. In his book ‘Blink’ Malcolm Gladwell relates the experience of a female French horn player who auditioned several decades ago for a place in a major European orchestra from behind a screen. This was not conventional practice at the time, and although her playing was deemed far superior to the other applicants, she was denied the job once her sex was known. She didn’t give up, and her fight to be accepted for what she could do and not what her physical self was interpreted as being capable of became the basis for the standard practice of blind auditions for many orchestra players today.

Essentially, we are those musicians behind a screen. We play, we are heard and we are judged (yes, we are!) only by how we present our song. But there is an essential, crucial difference between an audition, the playground and what we do here as writers, and that is that we are not in competition . On the contrary, support of each other is what makes the music beautiful and each new voice only enriches the chorus.

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Now I Get It

In the Anglican Church where I spent countless Sunday mornings as a child hung a tapestry embroidered with the words ‘God Is Love’. This little phrase, so often evoked by the minister, made no sense to me and I puzzled over it for years. It’s fair to say that it was only one of many things said in church that I found unfathomable.

About twenty years later, a Christmas card arrived in my mailbox from a former boss who signed it, ‘Love, David’. I had never thought of him as anything more than a good friend and his use of the word ‘love’ took me aback. This was a term reserved for family members or people with whom one had long-lasting, deep relationships, and I had been taught that casual use diluted its meaning and impact. While I pondered the significance of David’s ‘love’, that old phrase—the one I had never managed to figure out—suddenly came back to me, and for some reason I turned it around. It became ‘Love Is God’, and then everything fell into place.

A long time ago someone must have decided that people needed to have something concrete to direct their spiritual efforts to—a ‘being’, as it were. Love, which represented the very best about humans, became personified as God. So, in my ‘aha’ moment, I decided that the phrase ‘God Is Love’ meant, well, ‘Actually, God Is Really Love’.

God is, as I have understood since then, the connection between us all when we care for each other, but it is not limited to the committed, long-term love we feel for a child, a friend, a parent, or a lover. Love, or God, also exists wherever there is understanding and complicity, in the kindness of a helpful gesture and in our humaneness when we give of ourselves to others.

My previous definition of love had been narrow and exclusive, but I began to realize that there were all kinds of other circumstances in which love flourished, however briefly. When we recognize need in the hesitation of an old person and offer a hand, when we respond with compassion to a victim of tragedy, when we delight in a momentary, meaningful exchange with a stranger, this is also love.

And it is the manifestation of God, because...God. Is. Love.

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My mother, my daughter, my sons, my lover

Our relationship with our mothers drives all others.

When I read this in a book a few years ago it struck me as an exaggeration, one of those smart phrases that condenses complicated wisdom into a smug sound bite. I was in counseling then, trying to figure out what part of the difficulty I had with my mother was my own doing, and put the question to my psychiatrist. Is this really true? I wanted to know. Absolutely, she said.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I had already started to understand that I wasn’t the same person with my mother that I was with my children or my friends or my husband. I felt off-balance, not entirely genuine. My confidence and assurance slipped away from me, or came out in the form of brittle bravado and a need to be right. I wasn’t really sure of my own identity when I was around her, and didn’t much like myself, either. My other relationships reflected the true me, I thought.

Naturally, the bond I examined first and most closely was the one I had with my daughter. My relationship with her was much better than the one my mother had with me; I didn’t try to impose myself or my views on her, or use the force of my intellect to intimidate her. I was more transparent with her, more honest, more accepting of her differences. Didn’t take credit – at least not overtly – for the person she was. I avoided making comparisons, stepped back from pointing out our similarities. Distanced myself from her, let her make her own decisions. In short, I tried to do things differently, tried to be different – tried not to be my mother. I almost managed to convince myself that she didn’t really need me because the last thing I wanted was to need my own mother. And was brought up short by the fact that my relationship with her was most definitely being driven by the one I had with my mother.

I had seen how hurt my mother could be by her expectations of love from her sons, by their insistence on going their own ways, by their sometimes infrequent attention. My role, as perceived by me and given motherly encouragement from time to time, was to compensate her for what she didn’t get from my brothers. On the other hand, I schooled myself to accept but not expect from my own boys, to take exactly what they were prepared to give without yearning for more. But my mother’s perception of loss became mine, and I secretly feared that the same thing would happen to me. And so my relationship with her influenced those I had with my brothers and my sons.

It hardly seemed possible that my most intimate, adult relationships could be affected by how she and I were with each other. These were stand-alone partnerships, above the fray of family dynamics and mostly exempt from its history. My connection to boyfriends, then a husband, then a lover had nothing to do with how I felt about my mother. But what was I doing by taking over, dominating many of these so-called partnerships? Showing how very competent and capable I was, hiding my self-doubt so that I could be, not just the equal of my mother, but better yet. It took a sensitive man to make me recognize what had been my pattern. He suggested that I did not have to prove anything to anyone, and in that perceptive remark was the re-making of my most important relationships.

None of this was my mother’s fault. She was not the introspective person I am, and preferred not to discuss nor even to examine, as far as I know, her own issues with self-esteem, of not having lived up to her own billing. I used to wish that she could just let it all go, those layers she had wrapped protectively around herself, so that I could really get to know the very human and imperfect woman underneath. But she did the best she could, and her best was driven by love and a desire for her children to be happy. Isn’t that the same for all of us?

There are stories I read by women whose mothers nearly destroyed them, who manipulated them with cruelty, or failed in their mothering through ignorance or their own inflicted wounds. The imprint of their experience is indelible and devastating. My story is not theirs, but only a small examination of the enormously significant role we take on as mothers.

With thanks to Friko for having planted the seed for this post, and with admiration for the brave and excellent writer of Shattered Into One Piece.

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My mother, myself.

My mother died tonight.

In fact, her essence was lost to us several years ago, when Alzheimer’s began to wreak its terrible toll on her mind. For the last year it was doubtful that she knew her children had once been the most important beings in her life, and the delight with which she usually greeted us was dispensed in equal measure on perfect strangers. People who have not experienced the non-recognition of a parent think this must be a dreadful thing, but our capacity to convince ourselves that, on some level, she couldn't not know us was greater than the evidence that she didn’t have a clue who she was talking to.

But this is not about Alzheimer’s, and how it destroys and kills so cruelly. This is about coming full circle – reassessing and forgiving what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible to accept. I am the only daughter of my mother, and inherent in our relationship was complicity and conflict, initially more the latter than the former, then the reverse, then swinging back again, to come to rest finally in the way that it should. We daughters struggle to understand and be understood by our mothers, to be accepted and to accept, to love and be loved.

Before I go further, I must explain that I had a mother who thought I was clever and beautiful, who supported me in most of the decisions I made, who never criticized how I raised my children, who loved me unreservedly and unconditionally. If all daughters were as lucky as I am, there would be no market for books on how to survive one’s mother and therapists’ appointment calendars would be half-empty.

Nevertheless, we had trouble with each other. It didn’t really start until I was well-grown, when I had children myself and could not deal well with the dual role of being a mother and a daughter simultaneously. I was an adult, responsible for the well-being and education of three very dependent human beings, a competent and capable woman who, for some odd reason, could not bring that confidence into my relationship with my mother. For various reasons — and I’ll spare the analysis — I wished to assert my independence from her, but in doing so, was so afraid to hurt her that I ended up hurting her more than I could possibly have imagined. Suffice to say that my wish for independence made me feel bad, and that bad feeling became blame, and the blame landed squarely on my mother.

We both tried to avoid a wall going up, but neither of us was skilled or prescient enough to find a better way to communicate. She still came for Sunday dinner, we still talked on the phone, but the gulf between us yawned wide and empty for the better part of ten years. Then it got much, much worse, and only in hindsight did I realize that her encroaching dementia had had a devastating effect on her behaviour and my reactions to it.

What saved us was a combination of things. One was the realization that my fear of being a bad daughter, my almost continual self-flagellation over my lack of compassion, had not had and would never have the desired effect of making me change my reactions. It simply made me dislike that part of myself so intensely that the wall got higher, and thicker, and became the symbol of everything I lacked. Once I stared that particular issue in the face, I could begin to dismantle the wall.

The second thing that brought us back together was my awareness of the increasing disintegration of her mind. My almost constant mantra over the ten lost years had been: What if she dies and we’re still like this? Well, she was dying, little by little. The person she had been was taking her leave, unwillingly, unwittingly, irrevocably. This person, whose opinion I had been so afraid of, was slowly losing everything that made her who she was, becoming a diminished, lost soul who I could only love again, unreservedly and unconditionally.

And so it was not too late, for which I will always, always be grateful. I wrote of my mother in my first essay for this blog, and had she known that her daughter would finally make the decision to write - well, and often enough - she would have been fiercely proud. I am sorry not to be able to say to her, ‘Look Mom, this is for you’ because she would have understood and forgiven and just been glad that I do what I do.

I have come full circle.

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Maybe it's a ghost story...

The south-eastern corner of British Columbia is a mountainous, thinly populated region known for its rugged beauty, abundant natural resources and a rough-and-ready past. Running parallel to the Canada-US border is the Crowsnest Pass, location of two of the worst mine disasters in Canadian history, the cataclysmic, murderous collapse of Turtle Mountain, and a reputation as a wild and lonely place. It was also the setting for the strangest experience of my life.

In the mid-seventies I was one of a small group of casual friends whose common interest was motorcycling, and early one summer evening we left Calgary for a few days of fun riding through the mountains, heading across the border and through Idaho. Our ultimate destination was Spokane, about five hundred miles to the south-west, give or take a few extra miles of detours to take our pleasure on sinuous secondary roads.

By the time midnight was several hours gone, we were well into the Pass, and it had started to snow. Our pace slowed, both for safety and comfort. Riding at low temperatures is an exercise in bloody-mindedness and the wind chill factor at even 50 mph makes it feel like the high Arctic. We were also getting tired, and I was not the only one nervous about losing control on the increasingly slick road. The Crowsnest Pass highway is dotted with the remains of once-thriving coal towns, some still clinging to life, others virtually abandoned, and we decided that at the next one we would call it a night.

Soon enough, out of the blackness came the relief of a neon sign, blinking wetly in the falling sleet. It announced a hotel, a clapboard structure that looked cheap and a little rundown but we didn’t care; all we needed was a place to dry off out of the cold and to get a few hours of sleep. We pulled off the road into the empty parking lot, unstrapped our gear and hauled it up the wooden steps to the hotel entrance. Light from the lobby spilled through the glass-fronted doors—a good sign at two o’clock in the morning—but but there was no one at the front desk as we went in. We rang the bell for service and waited, chilled to the bone.

Across from the front desk was a dining room, and after ringing the bell again and waiting for a few more minutes with no response, we peered through the doors to see if we could raise anyone. The lights in the room, which held about twenty tables, were full on, but our calls went unanswered. Somebody remarked that the food must be lousy as nearly every table held the remnants of a meal, with plates half-full of food and untouched glasses of beer. Cigarettes had been left to burn down into sagging tubes of ash. Chairs seemed to have been pushed back hastily and some had toppled over. Uneasy glances passed between us; the place felt eerie, hurriedly abandoned.

A narrow staircase led up from the lobby and we moved towards it in unison, bunched together and laughing nervously, a little too loudly. I figured I’d be safe with four guys but they sounded as apprehensive as I felt, and it wasn’t at all reassuring. On the second floor, rooms led off the hallway, some with closed doors, some wide open, lights on. Clothing was scattered everywhere, beds were unmade, messy. A red negligée lay puddled on the floor of one room and somebody wisecracked that the place must have been a brothel, raided in full flagrante delicto.

But the negative vibes were strong and we didn’t want to spend any more time up there speculating about the possibilities. No one wanted to stay, but going back out into the freezing night was not only unappealing, but risky.

Back downstairs, we tried to make light of it all. There must have been a police raid either for drugs or illicit sex, and that would explain everything. Someone pointed out that there had been no cars in the parking lot. Surely if the hotel patrons had been arrested, they wouldn’t have been allowed to take their own cars? What would make people leave so suddenly? And why did it feel so odd, as if the air were heavy with dread?

After a low-voiced consultation we decided to hole up in a corner of the dining room with a good view of the doorway and try to get some sleep on the floor. We arranged ourselves to be as close together as possible, and I was grateful for the chivalrous offer of an inside position. We hunkered down, all except for Pete, who sat upright against the wall and, to my consternation, drew a 9mm Luger from his pack to rest on his lap. No damn way he could sleep, he said. Too f-ing weird in here.

We slept fitfully, and just after dawn we were up, hastily pulling our stuff together, not willing to spend another minute in the place. In the gray, chill light we roared away one by one, leaving behind a nameless, deserted town and an enduring mystery.

This experience came back to me when my son returned a few days ago from a road trip that took him through that same part of the country. He and his girlfriend stayed at a hotel that seemed all right when they checked in, but once in their room he was taken over by a sense of foreboding so strong that he became violently sick to his stomach. In the morning his girlfriend woke up with the same feeling and they couldn’t get out of there soon enough. In Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ he writes of our instinctive and sometimes unconscious reactions to events, people and situations—messages that we often ignore, sometimes at our peril. What were we reacting to? I have often wondered if the place I stayed in was haunted, and my son is convinced that his hotel room was.

What about your stories? Have you experienced something odd that had no rational explanation and was left to float in the vague, unsettling realm of the paranormal?

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Baby, Don't Go

In the natural order of things, children are meant to leave their parents. They travel, go away to school, or move across town, and if we are wise we prepare ourselves for that from, if not the moment they are born, then at least from an age when the inevitability of their departure looms large. If we are good parents, we take satisfaction from their competence and ability to be independent, resisting the urge to hold on or to look back with longing to the time when we took their company for granted.

From the time she was nine, I knew my daughter would be a traveler. At seventeen she went to Serbia, a country made fragile by a war not long over and still staggering under the weight of its divisions. I was nervous about it, but stopping her was not even considered. From there she went to Paris where she lived for nearly a year before coming home to start university. Even then, she didn’t stay still, moving twice to other cities for work experience related to her studies. She always came back, but one day not too long from now she will make a bigger move, a permanent one, or as permanent as anything is in the life of a twenty-something. But her temporary absences served to inoculate me, giving me a defense against the malady of loss.

My eldest son rarely went very far, but even if he was physically present, his thoughts were always on the next thing to do, place to go, friend to see. He left home in a different sense, far more involved with his friends than with his family. Earlier this year he spent a few months away, in a place he wants to live permanently, but for now he’s back home, more often than not out and about. When he does leave for good, whether it’s to a faraway place or another neighbourhood, I’ll be so used to his comings and goings that I might forget that he’s really not here.

But today my youngest revealed that he is restless and eager to be somewhere else less provincial, less familiar. He has already put his plan into action, having quit his job and freeing himself to leave. The news hit me like a bus; without acknowledging it to myself I had counted on him being there, not forever, but for a good long while yet. I feel bereft, and am taken aback by the strength of my reaction. I can only put it down to a mother’s chagrin at the prospect of a finally empty nest – a conventional, classic response.

But there is irony in this. Three years ago I began to spend a lot of time away my children, starting a new life in France with the man I love, and although I came back home regularly, it is I who left them in the first place. The natural order of things was turned on its head, and it was they who had to get used to the empty nest. Somehow I had convinced myself that everyone had come to terms with our separateness, and more than that, that we were all stronger and more independent because of it. That might be true of them, but to my bewilderment, it’s not true of me. It’s an odd feeling, to be the one in need of reassurance that I’m not being abandoned. I expect I’ll get used to it – just like they did.

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Cinque Parole

 www.usageorge.com

Last week, Susan at Bear Swamp Reflections graciously invited her readers to play a meme game—she would randomly pick five words for those interested, who would see what could be done with them. I put my hand up right away, and this is what I got. Thanks, Susan—I hope you enjoy the result!

Adventure

My daughter came to visit us two summers ago, intending to stay for a week and then take off on a whirlwind tour of Greece and Italy with one of her best friends. But some major issue intervened – lack of money or a boyfriend problem, I can’t remember which—and suddenly the friend couldn’t go. I proposed Italy for a week—the two of us—not sure how eager she’d be to go on a consolation trip with her mother, but she’s one of those people who always looks at the flip side of disappointment to see what can be salvaged.

We split up the roles.  I’m hopeless at map-reading and Anne doesn’t like to drive in strange places, so she would tell me where to go and I would get us there. Giddy with anticipation of adventure, we left the Cote d’Azur on a hot July morning and arrived in Genoa mid-afternoon with a very imprecise Google map and a reservation at a youth hostel at the very top of the city.

Built on a series of steep hills, Genoa’s maze of sinuous streets is confounding to navigate, even for locals. Anne gleaned what she could from Google, supplemented that with half-English, half-Italian directions from a long-haired, cigarette-smoking policeman and her own excellent sense of direction, and got us up to the hostel and its spectacular view. Not just once, but later that night in the dark, too!

We drove along the coast, stopping too briefly in Cinque Terre, driving through the rolling Tuscan hills to stay at a fifteenth-century farm , then on to medieval Siena where we shared our supper table with a perfectly blond, newly-wed Swedish couple who knew so much about Canada that we made them honorary citizens. Leaving Siena, we zoomed south on the autostrada, Italian pop music blasting from the radio and Anne’s bare feet propped on the dashboard.

Rome was a bit intimidating to drive in, so once we found the hostel we decided to park the car in favour of public transport. Next morning, we found the rear window broken and a pair of cheap sunglasses missing, but in the beauty salon window beside the car was an invitation to come in for a ten-euro manicure. We accepted (a first for both of us) and figured it made up for the sunglasses.

Rome enchanted us with her possibilities. We walked for kilometres, waited for hours in blazing heat to see the Sistine Chapel, gawked at the Coliseum and marvelled at the treasures that lay around every other corner. We were told off for cooling our feet in public fountains, refused entry to St Peter’s due to my bare shoulders (after having warned Anne that cleavage and navels were non grata), ate fabulously well, and could hardly sleep for the heat and humidity. Four fascinating, exhausting days later, we got back in the car and left the Eternal City feeling like we had conquered it for ourselves.



Gate

Arriving in Pisa, we thought that finding the tower would be a piece of cake, so obvious that we wouldn’t need a map or directions to find it. We drove in circles for a while without success then decided that our best bet was to park somewhere and just follow people who looked like tourists.

The street we were driving along was parallel to a very long, high wall that looked like it might have something important behind it, but no sign indicated what that might be. My eyes were glued to the traffic and Anne, having finally dug out the map, was busy trying to figure out where we were. For a split second, I shifted my gaze to the right, to a small gate in the otherwise unbroken length of wall and the hair on my neck rose instantly.

Perfectly framed by the gate was the bottom half of the tower, the angle of its graceful inclination perilously, astonishingly close to, well, the tipping point. Once inside the walls, we sat on the grass for hours staring at the tower, fascinated beyond all expectation by its defiance of gravity, but that first, startling glimpse of it is among the most amazing things I have seen.


Mediterranean

From the first moment the sea is visible from the autoroute, less than twenty minutes after leaving my home in the hills south-west of Grasse, it is rarely out of sight. Entering Italy, the road passes through a seemingly endless series of tunnels, some more than a kilometre long, and as you emerge from each tunnel onto its companion bridge, you are treated to a stunning view of the sea hundreds of metres below. Sometimes the view only lasts a few seconds before the road is swallowed up by the next cavernous, echoing tunnel, but at others you are given a minute or two to take in the beauty of the coastline and its red-roofed villages nestled beside the vast, sparkling expanse of the Mediterranean.

All along the coast between Nice and where Anne and I left the coastal road near Livorno, the sea is a constant presence. At Genoa’s busy port, its colour seems to change to an industrial grey, but further on at mystical, beautiful Cinque Terre it broods and haunts in deepest blue.

From a viewpoint near my house, only a small patch of the Mediterranean is visible, but in my mind I see not just France, but Italy, Greece and Turkey, Cyprus and Malta, the Spanish and North African coasts, Egypt and Israel. Is there another body of water anywhere with this diversity along its shores?



Reform

We’ve taught them, for sure. Our boys have learned to be respectful –at least on the outside—and they know it’s just not politically correct to cat-call, wolf-whistle, or ogle every good-looking girl they see. That’s a good thing. We girls can walk down the street and not be confronted with the lewd stares and discomfiting remarks of guys who previously didn’t know how to behave properly. That’s a good thing, right? Well, yeah—unless you’re in Rome.

In Rome, it’s all about appreciating a good pair of legs, a fall of glossy hair or an alluring cleavage. The female form draws attention just by the fact of its existence, and it’s as natural as breathing for an Italian male to comment on what pleases him.

A man lounging in the open door of his shoe shop sees us approaching, walking side-by-side along the narrow sidewalk. Anne is tall and curvaceous; with her mane of curly, sun-streaked hair she is a knock-out, and he clearly thinks so too. He gives her a slow, careful head-to-toe appraisal and as we come nearer, his smile broadens and he calls out so the whole street can hear, ‘Bella, bella!’

He has made our day. To hell with political correctness; it feels wonderful to be appreciated for how we look. I say ‘we’ because he was generous enough to include me in his smile, and because I felt I could take some of the credit for my daughter’s gorgeousness, after all.

Subtle

We talked a lot on that trip.

If you have children and a driver’s licence, you know what that’s like, how being in the car with your child invites conversation and discussion of the most interesting kind. We spent hours in the car on the trip to Italy: talking, trying to find a decent radio station, Anne singing, telling jokes, me so helpless with laughter I thought I’d drive off the road.

Sometimes the talk was serious. There had been some major, difficult issues in her life over the last few years, some of them a direct result of a decision I’d made. In the car, the lack of eye-to-eye contact and the distraction of passing scenery means there’s no imperative to keep the conversation going, and that frees you to just toss things out as they come.

She had some things to say, and some questions to ask. Some misunderstandings were cleared up, and some new perspectives were found. As we headed home from Rome, I realized that in that glorious week spent with her alone, there had been a subtle but important shift in our relationship. It would have happened eventually, I imagine, but perhaps not so clearly and decisively as it did by traveling with her, talking so openly, and having to rely on her in ways I never had before.

While she will always be my daughter and I her mother, we would not go back again to being parent and child.

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Within Their Reach

Photo: Paul Yates, Vancouver Sports Pictures 

He was an extraordinarily tall, lithe and muscular young man with the perfect physique for basketball. For lack of self-confidence he had never played it but at nineteen he decided that his physical gifts would be wasted if he didn’t give it a try. A spark was lit, and his decision soon took on a bigger dimension.

She wasn't made to be a concert pianist, no matter how hard she worked or how much talent she had. Her tiny hands frustrated her desire to play more advanced repertoire written for longer fingers and a wider reach, but she was an enthusiastic and capable student whose music-making gave her pleasure.

He set his sights on a career in basketball, an optimistic goal even if he had access to intensive professional coaching, but his own resources were all he had. He kept his dream to himself, relentlessly working out to develop strength and memorizing moves gleaned from watching televised games. He joined a pick-up league and played every chance he got, trying to make up for all the missing years of practice and playing time.

She fell in love with a song she had heard on the radio and brought the sheet music to her lesson. It was a challenging piece, with wide, repetitive octaves for the left hand and big chords in the right – not very suitable for a someone with a limited hand span.

With unwavering focus, he kept at it, often alone. After a couple of years he felt ready to be tested and won a spot on a varsity team. The experience accelerated his progress and bolstered his belief in himself, but he was still a long way from having the skills of a pro. For three more years he trained hard, rarely missing a day, determined to overcome the huge disadvantage of having come late to the game.

Rewriting and shortening some intervals and a few unreachable chords, she found ways to cope with the physical demands of the score, without compromising or simplifying the music. As the weeks went by it came together, and the better it got, the more pleasure she took in it. Her confidence grew to the point where she began to think she could take the risk of performing it in public, at the year-end recital.

His hard work began to pay off; he impressed a coach with his work ethic and potential and made it onto the roster of a pro team. But it was often a brutal and ego-destroying experience; his size and athleticism didn’t guarantee him praise or playing time and for game after game he sat on the bench while his teammates did what he so desperately wanted for himself. He talked himself into patience – training, learning, waiting for his time. Finally, finally, it came, and in the final quarter of a crucial game where the scoreboard numbers leapfrogged back and forth, he sprinted and weaved and soared high.
When the buzzer sounded, his team had won by two points, and they were his points.

And on an evening full to the brim with celebration and pride, a grand piano came to life under the hands of a teen-aged girl who made the music her own. Her face radiated pride and satisfaction and the exhilaration that can only come with having hoped and persevered and succeeded.

These euphoric moments – pure and uniquely human – belonged to them not because they had been held accountable to the highest standards, but because in their intense, consuming desire they had been the very best they could be. They strove to be better than they were before, and in their effort was absolute excellence. Rising to the quest, not necessarily for perfection, but for personal betterment, they honoured us all.

For my son Gregg and my student Rachelle

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Can a mother be true to herself?

A thoughtful post on blue kimono about the state of women’s happiness raised some familiar questions that still have no clear answers, despite years of debate and exhaustive analysis.

The essential issue was about whether women can succeed on multiple fronts – career, family, personal growth – without compromising the quality of any one of them. A recent article in a Canadian newspaper about women in law is an illustration of the hostile environment that can face women who try to combine motherhood with professional success, but even for those of us who don’t deal with this level of challenge, the underlying issue is the same. If we are mothers, can we also be true to ourselves?

I can’t count myself among those who had difficulty establishing a balance, mainly because I had neither the ambition nor the education to be driven to a profession that demanded more than I could give. But on a much smaller scale, I have struggled to determine the formula that would allow me to define myself as a good mother without losing what I need to maintain my individuality.

Several years ago there was an excellent series in that same newspaper about women who did not fit the conventional slot society has reserved for mothers. One woman’s story was particularly unusual. Mother to two children, she had realized when they were still very young that she just didn’t have the nurturing personality that she felt was essential to good motherhood. Simply put, she had not been made to have children of her own.

With the valiant understanding of a husband she loved and wanted to stay married to, she moved to a house of her own a few streets away. The children visited whenever they wanted to, and she dined at the family home on a regular basis. Her relationship with her children was much better, she believed, and she was released from the overwhelming stress of trying to play a role she felt completely unqualified for practically and emotionally. The children were learning to adjust to their mother’s new situation.

The liberal, non-judgmental person I’d like to think I am admired her for her honesty and her creative solution. The critical, product-of-my-society person that I am more often couldn’t comprehend how a mother – a mother! –could leave her children like that, even if they were just down the street. Could she not have just stuck it out – taken some parenting classes, got a nanny – for their sake?

This is an extreme example of a dilemma that women with children face on a regular basis. When is what I want detrimental to what my children need? The lawyers who work punishing hours, the clerk at Wal-Mart invited to a quilting retreat that conflicts with her child’s sports tournament, the full-time mom whose dream of getting a master’s degree means a lengthy separation from her family – these women have to decide where to place the line separating self-fulfillment from flat-out selfishness.

A few years ago I began to spend significant amounts of time an ocean away from my children, who then ranged in age from 18 to 23. They coped with my absence with varying degrees of relief, resentment, and grief, and although I frequently went back to be with them for lengthy periods, guilt kept a strong grip on my gut. Did I have the right to put my desires ahead of their feelings, which I could not separate from their needs? Did I feel at ease with my decision? Yes, and no. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

No matter how many friends encourage us to ‘do it for you’ and despite all the articles we read telling us that it’s okay to look after ourselves, that self-care is the essential component of other-care, many of us do not easily make the decision to follow our own path. We may be in complete theoretical agreement with the idea of putting ourselves first, but when it comes down to the crunch, few of us shift our priorities away from our families without a little or a lot of accompanying angst.

And therein lies the rub. What we accept intellectually as reasonable is not always so comfortable emotionally. And for every time that we are able to draw the line, it shifts and resists on countless others.

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On the ultimate decision

Last week, an old friend got what she wanted most. Death was her wish, and it arrived in the way she had hoped it would — in her own bed in the apartment where she had lived for more than fifty years, the person she loved most in the world at her side.

A year ago she had tried to end her life, and the intervention that saved her was not welcome. She had always been fiercely independent and the thought of becoming increasingly reliant on the small community in which she lived was untenable to her. Her vision of her situation was realistic and pragmatic. With no living children to care for her, she was adamant that she would neither move from her apartment nor become a burden to her only relative, the grandson she had raised for most of his childhood.

Her home was a walk-up apartment in central Nice that she had shared with her lover for 40 years –they married only shortly before his death – and she would not consider any other, under any circumstances. She gauged her ability to cope with her advancing age by the frequency with which she was willing to go down and up four flights of stairs – over the last few years it had dropped from four times a day, to once, then to only a few times a week, until finally she had only enough energy to leave the building when absolutely necessary.

The first time she spoke to me of suicide was several years ago, when she revealed that she had accumulated enough medication to deliver herself a fatal overdose if and when she reached the point where life was no longer livable. My first reaction was shocked rejection of her intention. In remarkably good health for someone in her late eighties, she walked to the shops every day, went to the cinema regularly and treated herself to a weekly restaurant meal. She was keenly interested in politics, changing societal mores and the influence of the internet, and her plan to choreograph the end of her life seemed completely incompatible with the person she was.

But over many discussions with her, I began to see how suicide could be considered the reasonable act of a rational person who refuses to be taken hostage by diminishing physical capacity and declining health. She was clear-eyed about the future and would frequently remark that at her age, there were no miracles left.

After she failed in her first attempt a year ago, suicide became a frequent, almost obsessive reference in her conversations. She still went to the hairdresser once a week, still watched the evening news, still took an interest in what went on around her – but she had started down a path from which she would not be diverted.

A few months ago her eyesight began to fail rapidly and although she was willing to undergo treatment to try and save what was left, the effort so exhausted her that she stopped it after the first session. We had lunch together a few weeks later and she talked of her distress at no longer being able to read a newspaper, a bank statement or even to watch television. She knew of ways to put an end to her life but candidly admitted to her fear of suffering pain in doing so. It was difficult not to protest her single-minded intention, or to offer her empty reassurances, but I had no basis from which to argue that her life could be improved or would even be bearable.

All I could give her was my attention. As much as I could try to put myself in her shoes, it was impossible for me — forty years younger and in very good health — to imagine how hostile her future had become and how untenable was the prospect of needing help to function in her daily life. I believed she had the right to do whatever she chose with her life, and that it was not mine to moralize.

In the end, she tried again. She didn’t succeed, at least not immediately, but during the brief period of hospitalization that followed her second attempt a cancerous tumour was discovered. She refused both treatment and nourishment; her beloved grandson acceded to her wishes and took her back home. I don’t really know if I, or others, failed her, but I doubt she would think so. I only wish she had been carried off by a heart attack in her sleep and so been spared her terrible decision.

If ever I get to the age she was, I might then truly understand her determination to live — and die — on her own terms, but I could not admire it more than I already do.

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I'm undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair - Hilary Clinton

A reminder popped up on my screen yesterday that read, cryptically, ‘Forget it. You’ll be sorry—just like last time.’ My first thought was that some finger-waggling hacker with nothing better to do had been playing in my calendar, but then it dawned on me that I had written this little note to myself a year ago, cleverly predicting exactly when I’d get the itch to make a radical change to my mop.

For half my life since high school, I’ve had variations of the same, classic bob—a style that undeniably works best for my hair type but looks, well, boring. Not to mention unoriginal. What I really want is a drop-dead gorgeous hairdo—I’m thinking Victoria Beckham—that can be washed in thirty seconds and styled in under two minutes. And therein lies the rub, because the only style with a hope of meeting those conditions is a very short cut and there are two reasons why that doesn’t work for me.

The first one alone should give me sufficient pause that I don’t even need to call up the second. I’m tall—so tall that I only rarely encounter anyone at my eye level. Even men. The second reason is that I do not have an abundance of hair, and what I do have is fine. The way it works is this: the taller one is, the more proportion matters, and the sum of tall plus short and fine adds up to pinhead, which is not a look I care for overmuch. But even if I was five foot nothing, the fact remains that my hair, when released of the ballast that a bit of length gives it, refuses to adhere to a part of any location and falls straight forward. No matter how good the original styling was, I end up with second cousin to a bowl cut unless I spend at least half an hour and $15 worth of product on it.

Not everybody frets so much about their hair, for sure. There are people out there in shopping malls and public libraries who don’t struggle with angst about whether their locks look good. Or even clean! But I’m stuck with my preoccupation and am pretty sure I can blame my mother for it. She used to roll a mean chignon and wouldn’t dream of leaving the bathroom less than fully coiffed.

I’ve been around the block a few times, so to speak—the hairdresser’s equivalent of a serial monogamist. My fruitless search for the ideal style has driven me into the hands of countless cutters, but put an end to some promising relationships because there’s just no way to hide the evidence of my infidelity.

To be honest, I’ve only ever had one really awful experience—the time I decided, on a whim, to get my hair cut in a salon near Paris, with the wrong-headed assumption that if the coiffeur is French, ergo, he must be good. Jean-Jacques gave me a two-for one ‘do—short on one side and then angled irregularly to finish about three inches lower on the other. Language difficulties might have been a factor but who knew that behind J-J’s mild expression lurked a punk mentality?? Not since my mother cut my bangs within an inch of my hairline had I cried myself to sleep over the way my hair looked.

For those of us who came of age during the feminist movement at its most ferocious, hair talk made us skittish; it was way too girly and unworthy of our status as strong-women-to-be-taken-seriously. But in recent years, the move to public, full-frontal transparency has meant that women can now admit to their deep dissatisfaction with their hair, and some have even spoken openly about their most secret fantasies. Turns out that having a post-grad degree in theoretical physics and being able to do your own plumbing does not preclude believing in fairy tales. Well, one, anyway, and it goes like this: Somewhere out there is the perfect haircut, one so flattering, so easy to manage, so totally ME... that I will be unequivocally happy with it!! This is on a par with believing that the Mafia is a charitable foundation.

All this openness has helped me a lot. It’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who struggles with delusional thinking, and I am fully aware that I may have to protect myself from me with ‘don’t-mess-with-it’ warnings. But despite all that, I have a sinking feeling that history may repeat itself, even though between now and my appointment with the new guy next week, I’ll give myself every possible reason to keep the status quo.

I can see it all now. He’ll take a long, discomfiting look at me from all sides, run his fingers knowingly through my tired bob (it’s taken a whole year to get back to one length), and then suggest—without actually saying it in so many words—that with some layering here and some choppy stuff there, he’ll make me look fabulous.

And that reminder? Maybe I'll pay closer attention next year.

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The Last Supper

Creeping emphysema from a lifetime of smoking took hold of my robust, athletic father and turned him into a frail and fragile old man whose every exertion left him gasping for breath. Hospitalized after a fall, the slow disintegration of his body gathered speed and one afternoon a few months later my eldest brother called to say that things didn’t look very good at all.

Within a few hours I was on a plane. I felt guilty for not having gone to see Dad sooner, sick with anxiety that I might be too late. It was awful to think that he might leave before the rest of us got there, robbing us of any chance to say goodbye.

He was hanging on, but unconscious and unresponsive to touch or voice. I dozed in a chair by his bed, waking frequently to check on him. When sleep was impossible, I tried to bring back all the memories I had of him, but the same few kept replaying in my head. Walking me to school, laughing at my attempts to match his long strides. Showing my brothers how to fight fairly, with gloves instead of fists. Teaching me to waltz, my child’s feet tenuously balanced on his long and bony ones. Bringing home the first new car he had ever had—a two-seater MG. Sailing the dinghy one last time before winter came, through paper-thin ice. Coping well, despite all our fears, with a sudden loss of vision at the relatively young age of sixty five.

I wondered how and when he would die. He could linger for days, or even weeks. It didn’t seem right that his life, which had been by turns adventurous and industrious, familial and solitary, would finish in such a sterile, unworthy place. I imagined carrying him away to some beautiful spot; a high, grassy meadow overlooking the sea where, in the warmth and brilliance of spring, he could leave us behind in a setting infinitely more appropriate.

By daylight, nothing had changed; he barely breathed and his skin, almost luminous, was tinged with blue. The only one still missing—my middle brother—arrived in early afternoon. There was still no reaction from Dad.

Now we were complete. We sat beside his bed, talking in low tones, waiting, holding Dad’s hands and watching for the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. Then, astonishingly, he spoke. “Is that you, Garry?”, he asked of my middle brother, faint surprise in his voice.

By evening, he was completely alert. The next day he was strong enough to eat small amounts. He slept a lot, but between naps he talked with us, made weak jokes and took quiet, obvious pleasure in the presence of his family. We were amazed, and wary of what might happen next. Every time he dozed off I half-expected that he would leave us as abruptly as he had come back, but two more days went by and still he was there.

Finally, reluctantly, Garry and I made our plans to fly home. No one said anything out loud, but it didn’t feel right to leave without some kind of acknowledgment that these might be the last hours we would ever spend with our father.

What comes back to me most vividly about that last day is Dad’s reaction when we announced that we had cancelled his bland hospital meal in favour of a tasty supper of his favourite foods. Over years of living alone he had become a pretty decent cook and despite - and because - of the loss of his sight, cooking became one of his most important daily activities. Mealtimes were events to be anticipated and appreciated, and he planned them accordingly. Almost every afternoon at four o’clock he sat down at the little table in his kitchen with a glass of wine and two pieces of Stilton cheese—crackers on the side—and the highlight of his week was go out for dinner to his favourite restaurant. But while we were pretty sure he'd like the idea, we hadn't counted on the effect it would have.

‘Bring it on!!’, he roared, as if he'd discovered salvation at an old-time revival meeting. He pulled himself up straighter and smoothed his pyjama top - to be more presentable, he said. My brother poured a generous amount of red wine and held it steady for Dad to drink.

“That’s the ticket!” he chortled. It didn't matter that the wine was served in a plastic cup. Next came a cracker topped with Stilton, followed by another, and another. The tremors that had bedeviled him for years were worse than they had ever been; we took turns feeding him. My brother warned him not to eat too much or he’d have no room for the next course, which just made Dad laugh. Oh, we didn't need to worry about that, he said. His pleasure was so intense that it almost hurt to watch him. I was stricken by the fact that something this simple could bring him such joy. Why hadn’t we thought of it before?

The Greek salad was a big hit, eaten with gusto and washed down with more wine. This was the guy who, just days before, had been barely able to get a few tablespoons of applesauce down the hatch. With relish, he moved on to the spicy designer pasta, but soon he began to tire. The effort and excitement had taken their toll and then suddenly, he was asleep. We waited, wondering if we should just pack up what was left. My brother’s eyes rarely left Dad’s face, and on his own were shadows of tenderness and grief.

After a brief nap, Dad roused himself to continue but the pace slowed, and after a few more bites he pronounced himself ‘full fit to bursting!’. In the lengthening evening, we sat together as he drifted in and out of wakefulness. When finally it was late and time to go, we embraced him and wished him goodnight and goodbye.

A week or so later I called him on the phone. He told me there were still some leftovers and that at around four o’clock that afternoon the nursing aide had brought him some Stilton and red wine. “I had a wine and cheese party for one and really enjoyed it!” It was the last time I heard his voice.

My little dream of taking Dad to a meadow overlooking the sea was, in fact, a wish for a meaningful way to mark the end of his life and a gesture that would let him know how much he meant to me. But in its spontaneity and simple joy, the meal we shared with him - our Last Supper - did that perfectly.

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The Upside of Terrible Time Management

Tardiness is my Achilles heel. Chronic lateness has caused me no end of anxiety, the loss of a few jobs, and more than one strained relationship. But despite my best efforts it continues to occupy the next-to-top spot on my list of personal flaws.

It’s not that I don’t care about being on time. I hate to be late, but my estimation of the time it takes to complete a task is often wildly optimistic. So even though I should have known better, it seemed entirely reasonable that I could get up at nine o’clock, clean the whole house, hem two pair of jeans, make some freezer-ready meals for my kids, pack my bags, have a shower and walk the dog, and still be ready to leave for the airport by four in the afternoon to catch my flight overseas.

As usually happens when I load too much to do into too little time, the hours sped by. When it got to be nearly three forty-five, logic should have told me to ditch the shower I still hadn’t had, but my horror of being in public with yucky hair trumped rational thought. All the way to the airport I simmered with anxiety. I doubted that my youngest son had ever driven so carefully, but still we made it to the terminal just under the wire—one hour and five minutes before flight time.

The line of passengers checking in was short, although everyone seemed to have time-consuming issues with seat selection or overweight bags. I avoided looking at my watch. Normal people don’t get this, but we tardy ones rationalize that if we don’t look at the time, we might not actually be late. Seriously.

Finally it was my turn. I handed my passport to the woman behind the desk, who typed speedily, frowned deeply and then signaled to a supervisor. They conferred for a moment then he uttered words I never thought I would hear, despite having played fast and loose with check-in times all my traveling life.

“I’m sorry, but you will not be able to board this flight due to your late arrival at check-in.” My knees buckled. He might as well have told me I had 24 hours to live. We had a little back-and-forth, the supervisor and I, with me pointing out that I had actually been standing in line before the 60-minute cut-off. He informed me—officiously, I imagined—that what mattered was the moment I presented myself to a check-in agent.

I pointed out a few other things, such as how it was essential for me to be on this flight, and that this was all ridiculous anyway, because the plane was there, and I could get to it in time. But your bags won’t, he said, and that’s why there are minimum check-in times. I stooped a bit lower and tried to pull some imaginary rank by saying that I traveled this route all the time, with the implication that I was a Very Important Passenger. In that case, you should know better than to arrive late, he said.

Ouch.

I begged. Implored. I detest using emotion to manipulate, but I even turned on a few tears. Nothing doing. Now, I know that getting mad is the last desperate card of self-righteous people and it never, ever, works, but my sickening disappointment left no room for any kind of reasonableness. I tried to intimidate him. I demanded to know his name and position and let him know – without yelling, mind you – how displeased I was with the treatment I was getting. In a very regrettable way, I tried my best to shift the blame to him, but he was immovable; a granite block without a whiff of empathy about him . I had to give it up.

The agent who reissued my ticket couldn’t have been nicer. He saw only my distress, not the uglier flip side. While I waited to find out how much my mistake was going to cost, I cooled off a bit and did some hard thinking. The whole thing had been no one’s fault but my own and I had made things tough for someone who was only doing his job. It didn’t feel very good.

The agent handed me a new ticket, now routed through London instead of Frankfurt. He shook his head when I reached for my credit card. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. That did it. Relief dissolved what was left of my fear and anger and I resolved to track down Granite Man and tell him I was sorry.

I found him at the departure gate of my original flight—ironically, the plane was still there, delayed by forty five minutes—and offered my regrets for having made his job more difficult. He looked unconvinced and only reluctantly accepted my handshake. I slunk away hardly feeling any better.

An hour later, there he was again at the door of the London-bound plane. I figured I’d just pretend to be invisible, but as I tried to slip past him he said something totally unexpected. He asked, kindly, if everything had worked out in the end. And he apologized. For having upset me with bad news. For having appeared to be unfeeling, when in fact he had felt very sorry for me. It was the only way he could make himself do something he hated, he explained. I nearly hugged him. Then he asked to have my boarding pass and told me to wait a moment.

On the way to London, I had lots of time to reflect on human behavior and how, when we lose objectivity, the spillover is sometimes hard to contain. How important it is to be responsible for what we do. How we err when we make assumptions about others and how disarming an apology can be—although to be completely honest, I don’t know how easily these conclusions would have come had I not been spared paying a stiff fee. And thanks to the decency of the person I had affronted, I was enjoying an upgrade to business class.

That might have been the entirely satisfactory end of it all. But as I made my way to my connecting flight at Heathrow airport, I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. It’s a bit disingenuous to think that this improbable stroke of luck might have been a reward for being tardy, or sorry, or both. But still.

“Mom!! “ My eldest son grabbed me in a bone-crushing hug. “I'm about to leave for Amsterdam. What the hell are YOU doing here?”

Well, it’s kind of a long story. But you know how I’m always late...?

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Hanging out with Facebook

A couple of weeks ago I suggested to my faraway cousin Kathryn that she get a Facebook account so we could keep in closer touch. Her reaction was lukewarm. Both of her almost-grown children were on it and she knew enough about the tell-almost-all atmosphere of social networking sites to know that she’d probably be faced with things she’d rather not know. “And they might not want me to be there either, which would be hard to take.”

I had resisted Facebook for quite a while too, mostly since it seemed pointless for a relative introvert who had only three friends in high school and didn't go to university. My offspring were old hands at Facebooking but from my point of view, online socializing made for pretty superficial relationships. Then there’s all those privacy issues, and don’t even get me started on what a time-waster it is. Seeing my daughter absorbed in Facebook at midnight when she had an exam in the morning took all the self-control I had not to pull the plug on the internet.

But I’m not always around my children. In fact, I’m away from them more often than not, living on the other side of the ocean while they lead independent lives, working and studying, partying, snowboarding, jamming in the basement with friends. MSN has always been my communication mode of choice but instant messaging is dependent on physical availability, and I’ve spent a lot of time waiting and hoping for signs of life eight hours behind me.

And sometimes real-time chats are a bit like pulling teeth, especially with my biggest son whose tolerance for extended communication via keyboard is seriously limited. Around the two-minute mark in a conversation, he invariably needs to have an immediate shower, go to the gym or make something to eat. I got worried that we would soon be out of each other’s orbit altogether.

But when my daughter came back from Asia with hundreds of photos and uploaded the best to her Facebook page, I began to think there might be a point after all to having my own account. If we were FB friends, then I could enjoy her pictures right away without having to remind her for weeks to email me ‘just a few, please?’

So I climbed on. Within a week I had collected a whole six friends— half of whom were my own kids. I got to see the Asia pictures, and then spent some time wandering around other people’s pages. It turned out to be kind of fun – in a voyeuristic sort of way – to read the wall posts about last night’s party, the latest travel adventures or the best strategy for a better grade in that Friday morning Geomorphology class.

Pretty soon I was checking at least half a dozen times a day to see what was new and who said what to whom. Then a couple of my own kids’ childhood friends—people who had been around our dinner table countless times and whose knees I had bandaged – sent me friend invitations. I was flattered, but wasn’t that a little bit weird? Why would they want to share their stuff with a buddy’s middle-aged mom? My son told me that I was the one being weird and to just accept, already.

I got some invitations that I didn’t know what to do with from people I rarely saw and had nothing in common with. My daughter‘s advice was to just ignore them but I worried that my silence might seem rude. She rolled her eyes. Anybody who took Facebook seriously enough to be offended by a non-response was, in her view, in serious need of therapy. My sons just looked at me like they do when I really don’t get it. Wasn`t that the point of Facebook? More is better, right?

To my amazement, my octogenarian aunt joined up and asked my kids if she could be their friend too. This woman is like a second mother to me, but my children barely know her. What a windfall!! Now distance didn’t matter – they could all get to know each other and do some family bonding without waiting for a funeral or a wedding. I worried a bit about her seeing the photographic evidence of my offspring’s lifestyles – never mind the language they use sometimes – but she’s cool about most things.

“So give me a good reason!” said Kathryn. Well, because Facebook is like a virtual kitchen. It’s the place where kids and friends collect – even if briefly – and almost always leave behind a little something of themselves. Most of the time I hang around on the periphery, enjoying the humour, the smart-ass remarks and the obscure references to things I know nothing about. But more importantly, I’m also privy to nuggets of information that sometimes reveal how they view themselves and others and if life is treating them well – or not. How fun that camping trip was. How they need a new place to live at the end of the month. How great the job is. How it’s time bite the bullet and go back to school.

The kitchen is the perfect place to be an observer; it’s where you’re welcome in the lives of a younger generation as long as judgment and intrusion aren’t part of your act. My virtual kitchen allows me the contact I wouldn’t otherwise have considering how far apart we all are. An affectionate eavesdropper, I pick up littered scraps of news and conversation and drop in my own bits now and then, anticipating that somebody will have something to say in return. I’m rarely disappointed.
Actually, it’s almost as good as the real thing, although I really wish somebody would develop a decent hug application.

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