writing in the (mom)ent

(this week’s assignment: write a story from the POV of the person in this painting)

This night, one that had all the markings of a triumph, now seemed destined for ruin. A girl plucked from the social margins, Charlotte had been chosen as the star of her school’s musical. She had delivered a flawless closing night performance. The arc of her narrative had captivated the entire community.

Yet, here she sat, dress torn, all alone.

Well, that’s typical, she thought.

No good comes from trying to be someone you’re not, her father always said.

Laying back on the bed, the crinoline of her designer gown scratching at her legs, Charlotte tried to ignore the urge to scream. Below her people were laughing, celebrating her success, without her.

The house was full of cast members, crew and school staff. And her mother, the woman she hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

God, what did she do to deserve this new layer of hell? That woman, whose only connection to Charlotte was her DNA, suddenly shows up.Tonight. The one time in her life when she thought, maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe I can fit in.

Her father always said, your mother is useless. A selfish bitch. A taker. Well, she definitely stole something from me, thought Charlotte.

My night. This was supposed to be my night.

Rolling onto her side, Charlotte noticed the ornate fixtures on the sink in the adjoining bathroom. One of the taps was dripping and although she could not hear the sound over the noise of the party below, she noted the rhythm of the drip and began to tap it out on the footboard.

You need to calm yourself, her father always said. Don’t be a hysterical woman like your mother.

By focusing on the drip, her breathing slowed, and her anger began to subside. She did not hear the door open, but the increased audio intensity of the party broke her meditative state.

“Charlie?”

Charlotte’s fingers stopped midair.

That’s a boy’s name, her father always said. No good comes from trying to be someone you’re not.

The woman entered the room cautiously, closed the door and leaned against it.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, and I really didn’t mean to rip your dress. It was my bracelet, it just caught…”

Charlotte stood up abruptly, placing her hands firmly on her hips. “Stop. Don’t make excuses. Father says that’s what you do.”

The woman flinched at the mention of her ex-husband.

Your mother’s the devil, she’ll scratch out your eyes if she gets close enough, her father always said. Who was he describing? Certainly not this mousey creature before her?

The older woman straightened up, trying to square her shoulders.

“Your friends are waiting for you. The hostess says there’s a sewing kit in the room next door, why don’t we see if we can fix your dress?”

Charlotte pushed her mother aside and began to open the door. “No good comes from trying to be someone you’re not.”

 

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time – Mary Oliver

That piece of inspiration sits on my wall as a daily reminder to give the idea of writing power and time.

It’s hard – perhaps because I feel like an imposter some days.

What is a writer? Some people say a writer is someone who writes. Other people say you are a writer when you make a living as a writer. One of those definitions includes a whole whack of people, the other excludes a large swath who spend a great deal of time giving power to their writing.

I have always written – poems and stories. Even before I could write full stories, I had a storybook in my mind which I ‘flipped’ through nightly to tell myself bedtime stories (funny how now I use a meditation app for its sleep stories….).

I have always wanted to give more time and power to creative work. I think, as I go through the process of taking courses, I’ve come to realize that I feared finding out that my writing voice is not good enough, that I am not a ‘good enough’ writer (whatever that means).

That ‘aha’ moment for me was when I received the comments for my final assignment in my last course. I realized I’d been holding my breath, waiting for my instructor’s feedback. The other assignments I had submitted had not felt risky. This piece had felt like a huge leap of faith. I was not writing fiction; I was writing in my own voice, telling my own story.

The courses I am taking have a pass/fail grading system. It’s all about the comments. The instructor was incredibly supportive, while giving criticism. But, she validated the fact that I am now doing the right thing by taking time to give power to my writing.

A consistent theme with the books I’ve been reading about the writing life show that people often doubt, they always wonder, they throw their work away and start again.

That fear, that wondering if I’m getting it right, well, if nothing else has shown me I am pursuing a creative field – apparently, that’s the tell.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong – Joseph Chilton Pearce

photo: a desktop inspiration quote from @hellowriter (the monthly subscription service from Firefly Creative Writing)

one day gone

unpack my bag

the hand me ups

soft loved items

memories emerge

scented candle

subtle florals

a woolen hug

 

shoes at the door

sharp salt crystals

fall from the treads

memories emerge

walks to the beach

wind whipped our cheeks

frozen belly laughs

 

scroll the photos

your beauty wrapped

in bright orange

memories emerge

the electric track

tinged with fear

high on life

 

hear your voice

one day gone

a stuttered hello

memories emerge

child of my body

woman of your world

small of my heart

 

Another inspiring writing prompt from my monthly subscription package – but perhaps not in the way that was intended.

The prompt is to take the gist of the poem above and talk about “some point in the future that holds a lot of energy for you” and think about what it would mean to you.

Your prompt: When I am _______ I shall…

For me, as soon as I read that line I thought of the countless promises I’ve made to myself regarding my weight.

When I am thin, not overweight (pick your poison), I shall be….what? Better? Happier?

Weight has been a thing for me since grade six. That’s a whole lot of times stepping on a scale, a whole lot of times when I made and broke promises to myself.

My heaviest was when my father in law died in 2009. The lightest adult weight I’ve been was in 1994 – after I was overly successful at weight loss and went far below ‘my goal weight’. Equally unhealthy.

You might say, I’ve lived a life where I have over loved food and under loved myself. Or you could say that I have had an unhealthy relationship with food. I’d say it’s been more complicated than I imagined.

My mother used to call me when I came home from school and ask how my day went. Often the answer was not well. As mothers do, she wanted to make it all better and she would send me off to engage with two of my favourite activities: eating cookies with milk and reading a book. (I am not mother blaming here; I put on my grown up girl pants everyday and have full agency over what goes in my mouth.)

I did not associate food with comfort then. But somewhere along the line, I did. Maybe comfort isn’t the right word – maybe escape?

In my life, I’ve read hundreds of books and eaten hundreds more cookies.

When I was diagnosed with celiac, in 2016, I felt confident that the restrictions on what I could eat would be a way to help me gain that illusive self-control when it came to food.

For a while, it did. But I missed what food, especially comfort foods like cookies, brought to my life – that feeling of escape. When the going gets tough, I turned to food.

What I’ve since accepted: it wasn’t about what was going in my mouth, but it was why.

Writing has helped. A lot. It is a new way to deal with stress and anxiety. It is a good way to confront the why.

Writing is a good pairing with meditation. And reading about other people’s struggles with life – and body image – has been amazing. Roxane Gay’s Hunger has been helpful in getting a clearer view on my relationship with food in the context of abuse.

As I started to think about writing this post, I considered who has a great relationship with food and realized that would be my children. And my hubby.

They all love food, but they don’t love it in an unhealthy way. And that made me realize, I haven’t been in love with food. I have loved the anesthetic it has provided.

***

Recently, I started physiotherapy due to knee pain. The therapist is around my age and is wonderful at putting the responsibility for my care in my hands. It’s been a very empowering feeling. I have to decide if I want to be able to access those very necessary joints in my lower limbs; it’s not up to her. This was not stated to me in some sort of shaming way; it is a fact that I have to want to do the exercises for the gains it will achieve.

When I make my short walk home from the GO train, music playing in my ears, I know that I miss long distance walking and so, physio exercises are an easy priority.

Yesterday, we went to a great gluten-free bakery and got some (very expensive, very tasty) bread. When I taste a good, squishy bread, I know that having a true love affair with food is possible. One where I am engaging with the tastes, not the momentary disconnect from whatever negative feeling I am having.

I mean, this is really good bread.

Lately, I have been making note of when I want to grab food that I shouldn’t, that I don’t need, that will mentally and physically weigh me down.

Boredom is the number one culprit. Anxiety is now second.

That is a very big shift in my mental health.

I can deal with boredom – the second part of my mother’s cure for a bad day is reading and that is truly a wonderful thing to exchange for cookies and milk. Those long walks, a good movie, all good remedies.

Having anxiety fall to second place as a reason to eat, well, that’s a good thing. I’ve enriched, enhanced and broadened my meditation practice. I’ve engaged in some good old deep breathing in public places and elevators. Learning to watch emotions and thoughts drift down a river of calm, acknowledging them but not engaging with them (mostly), is a beautiful feeling of success.

***

Another big shift over the past few years is about weight versus health. It’s a tough habit to break, focusing on weight. When my doctor stopped weighing me a few years ago, I slowly began to think about what that had meant – the number on that scale – in my way of judging me.

Success vs failure. Weak vs strong. Good vs bad.

***

I went back to university at 51, in anthropology (“the degree that makes you question everything”) which is proof positive that it’s never to late to change one’s thought patterns.

I’ve always said my biggest takeaway from university was the knowledge that I can do it, whatever that it is. 

There are two parts to being able to be successful here: prioritizing oneself and being able to ask for help. That’s another thing that university taught me – the journey is so much easier when you let others walk with you.

***

My answer to the prompt?

when I am ready to love myself enough to do the work, I will do the work. 

I’m ready.

when I am unable, I will ask for help.

I’ll let you know.

 

I’ve written three different blog posts today and don’t feel ready to publish any of them – could be because I worked on (someone else’s) taxes all afternoon and I’m just tapped out. Or it could be the rain.

But I have wanted to explain my work at McMaster so here goes:

It’s kind of hard to explain – but basically an archeology professor of mine is doing a long-term study on commemorative practices in cemeteries in Cambridgeshire, England. In order to do that, he needs a really big database to be able to make comparisons and figure out what are the motivators for people to commemorate, what are the patterns (do rich people do a type of commemoration and then others follow?), what are the economic factors, do people commemorate children or marginalized people (people from asylums, or workhouses) – he needs data.

I don’t get to do actual on the ground work in England. And no, I don’t dig up dead people. Not even close. I like cemeteries and I like the stories they tell, but don’t put me near bones. No thank you.

The work (done by other research assistants and me) involves taking burial data from the various parish records in Cambridgeshire and filling in commemoration information as well as occupations and other census data for the people buried. In the period we are investigating (1845-1925), the occupation of the head of the household, usually a man, is how everyone within that household is defined.

We look into genealogy sources (Ancestry being our most utilized) and graveyard sites. We have a success rate of finding occupation and other records of well over 85% for most of these parishes.

As a person who likes to make up stories, there is a significant amount of possibilities for storylines – with entire family stories written out over the decades. As the prof once said, you see the birth and the death of many people in that 80-year period.

Most parishes average about 350 burials in that 80-year time span so you get a bit of variety in the work, going between inputting of data and the internet research.

Yesterday, I completed a parish which had 6700 burials in that 80 year period meaning at times there would have been a burial every 2-3 days! It took me two months of work (about 21 hours per week) to complete. It hurt my brain to be doing relatively the same thing for days on end.

Upside: we are creating a database that will help support researchers beyond this project as well as the prof who hired me. This thought has been a good motivator in the depths of the repetitive nature these past few months.

So, not sure about next steps – discussions about what happens when my contract is up (in 10 days) have not taken place. It might be time for a bit of space between me and that computer, or that could just be the ridiculously big chunk of research talking!

 

Last fall, we went down to one car. This has meant a shift in my lifestyle from car dependence to walking/transit independence.

It may seem I have those descriptors backwards, but I do not.

I do plan my life much more carefully now, but I feel more stress free taking transit. I feel more reliant on myself, which I know is the complete opposite to how most people feel when they give up their car.

I am actually less rushed; I often did not give myself sufficient time to travel when I drove. Now, I make sure that I give myself more than ample time to get from point A to point B, especially during the winter or taking the subway (sorry TTC, but your reliability is not very, well, reliable).

Each work day, I take a GO train and then a GO bus to McMaster. There are the ‘regulars’ in the morning; the man who waits in a shelter with me at the GO station – he works outside doing roofing. We have a chat each morning and it’s amazing what can be summarized about life in 3-5 minutes.

On the train, there are not a lot of people going out of the city towards Hamilton, but there’s the guy whose already on the train when I embark; he’s always got a big coffee and when, on occasion, a friend gets on the train, it’s apparent he also has a very big voice (to hell with the Quiet Zone signs).

There’s a girl on the mid level and she’s always asleep when I board. One day I thought I might have to follow the directions of the ‘customer service ambassador’ who says to “give a little shake if you see a fellow passenger sleeping”. Fortunately the girl woke up on her own.

Of course, the train ride is always made interesting by that one special customer service ambassador who thanks us for “choo-choo-choosing GO” just before we leave the train at Aldershot.

Coming back home is a little busier, especially if there’s a hockey, baseball, TFC or basketball game. The Quiet Zone (the upper level of the GO during rush hour) is completely shot to hell then. Little kids are super excited to be going to the game which is completely endearing.

There may be a wee bit of alcohol involved in the small clusters of other groups heading to the game which makes for some interesting overhead conversations (and absolutely no reading accomplished).

That, though, is one of the great joys of transit: overhead conversations. I guess in polite society, we should pretend we don’t listen to other people’s conversations – and honestly, I don’t always WANT to hear people’s conversations – but I mostly find it interesting. In the writing course I took recently, it was recommended that we eavesdrop to help us learn how to write dialogue for our fiction pieces.

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

What’s really interesting to me is that when I take the GO train from Toronto to Mississauga on Fridays (after my writing workshop), there is NO TALKING at all in the Quiet Zone; people police others. I have seen many people remind others about the Quiet Zone and seen it escalate beyond polite reminders.

The subway (and the streetcar maybe too) are the best for people watching. I find it fascinating to watch how people interact with each other: men towards women; men towards other men; everyone toward people with disabilities or otherwise marginalized; how people behave toward the elderly; interactions (overt and hidden) between people of different races – you name it, take two stops on any subway and you will see it play out.

I have taken some of my commuting time to acknowledge my own prejudices and try to unpack them. When someone is fidgety and agitated, am I concerned for them or me? Is the concern for me stem from the fact they are unkempt? Because their skin colour is something other than white? What if it was a white man in a business suit?

It’s not always a comfortable answer, but the questions are pretty damn important to consider.

Another large portion of my time is spent observing people – like the man who was reading over a woman’s shoulder and, fortunately (I guess), was a faster reader than her, so he was never left behind. I wonder if he went and bought the book?

Next to the reader was a woman who was taking frequent, long swigs out of a bottle. Not a bottle in a brown paper bag. A large bottle of dark rum (straight up) that she took out during pauses in doing crosswords in a little booklet.

Generally, people on transit are friendly or, more often, neutral. I smile, usually people smile back. I greet the drivers, they say hello back. I’ve been offered a seat by young(er) people on more than one occasion. I’m never sure how I feel about that – it’s lovely and sweet, but am I really that old? I tried to decline once and the young man said his mother would be very upset if he was sitting and I was standing. So now I sit when a seat is offered.

I’m not sure, but maybe these people will help me create truer characters in future writing.

“I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles,” he said. “With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization – that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls.”  – Booth Tarkington

Let me hold this memory with gentle hands, the moment the room erupted with joy and love, the moment they lay you, my first-born, on my chest.

The fears of unknown futures and anguish of weeks of  bed rest – gone. You were beautiful and noisy and healthy. The relief was complete.

You changed my life forever, in ways of wonder and joy.

You had made quite an entrance, with people coming and going and layers of schedules meaning double the staff and it was chaotic and noisy and then, everyone, you included, were gone. And all I could think of was I needed you. We had not been apart in more than eight months.

The years ahead were ones in which I wondered and doubted and faltered; everything was new, and I forgot too often to listen to my heart. I wanted to recapture that moment, when they lay you on my chest, and I knew exactly what to do.

When I think of that memory, the memory I hold with gentle hands, I am propelled forward, when you turned the world around back to me, and emboldened me to find a new path of joy and fulfillment. You encouraged me with your loving, gentle heart.

*

Let me hold this memory with gentle hands, the moment you, my baby girl, lay within my arms, newly born.

Your appearance in the world was slow and fast. Ten hours of labour, too few minutes of pushing for the doctor to ‘glove up’. I wanted to see your eyes, but you were not quite ready to greet the world.

You came to us with very little sound, very little effort. You slept and cooed and stretched in the new space of the world. That moment was opposite to the future. Everything ahead was noisy and wonderful and arguments and hugs and baking and colouring. Haircuts with craft scissors. Books and bobby pins. Your smiles and other spontaneous, exuberant expressions of joy.

When I think of that memory, that first day memory which I hold with gentle hands, it was not until last August at your wedding when the world stood that still again.

I felt your breath when you were born, up against my cheek as I pulled you close.

I felt your breath as you walked down the aisle, up against the love surrounding you.

*

These are the memories I hold of my children, with gentle hands and an open heart.

 

• thank you to Shari & Mike Photography for the wonderful capture of the grown up version of my memory makers
• thank you to Firefly Creative Writing for this wonderful writing prompt

Today signals the end of my first writing course through U of T. When I began, I decided I would see how this one went before deciding to sign up for another.

I signed up for two courses for the spring. Obviously it went well.

It’s not about marks here; you get a pass/fail. It went well because I started down a path with guidance. I have walked the writing path many times throughout my life – writing stories and poems. I have often worked through issues by writing, but usually came up short to really working past anything. I continued to be stuck.

This course has been good in keeping my hand moving and my writing and understanding of the craft has improved.

What more could I ask for?

Coupled with this has been the time I spend at my writing sanctuary run by a wonderful collective every Friday afternoon. This is a workspace tucked in a storefront on the Danforth. I had to do an errand a couple of weeks ago on a Friday which put me two hours away by bus and subway – but it was completely worth the effort to carve out a few hours of silence and writing.

This wonderful group, Firefly Creative Writing also have a subscription service where they send you a monthly snail mail package full of inspiration and activities. My response to this month’s ‘play’ activity is above.

When I gift myself the time and space to follow this writing dream, I’m never sorry.

I decided to unearth my voice and my stories and the paths I’ve chosen have been fruitful and rewarding.

I cannot help but reflect back on my dream to return to university. That was the same pathway, and it was different. It’s the same because I wanted to do both for as long as I can remember.

The difference was that I had to prove something to myself by returning to university. I had to prove I was capable of doing academic, intellectual, tough, demanding work and not give up. Honestly, I often think I could have done courses like that forever, with regularly scheduled breaks, of course!

Then I started to write and take courses and focus on that, and I know I’m on the right path and it is a path that is much richer and productive because of the university experience.

The other way the two experiences – writing courses and university courses – are the same is that I never knew what I would do with my degree when I was done (other than put it on the shelf over the television where it remains to this day). I don’t know where this writing adventure is taking me. I have a fiction idea I am writing small pieces about and may put them all together. I have loads of nonfiction things I have written over the years and more in my head.

I do not know where I am headed.

So today is the end of the beginning. Let’s just see where it goes.