Me: [Brief synopsis of the story of Adam and Eve.]

F: But why would them doing that make everybody have to die. That’s not fair.

Me: Good question. I guess when they made their big mistake it changed them so that the babies they had were changed, too.

F: Oh.

Me: And all the babies that were ever born came from them, so.

F: Oh.

Me: But it’s okay, because God loves us even though we make mistakes, so he sent us Jesus to make a way that we could live forever after we die. So we don’t really die.

F: Well, how does that work?

I wanted to enjoy my baby’s infancy & my toddler’s toddlerhood and I could not. As it was, it took everything I had just to get through it. I couldn’t see my way to the other side. I wanted to let myself off the hook for that, but the messages everywhere were that this time of my baby’s life would go by in a wink and I’d regret it if I didn’t savour it, enjoy it, wait until my babies were bigger to clean the house and so forth.

Not that cleaning the house was much of a temptation in those days.

On a particularly difficult day, one of those days when it took all of my energy to get the children from one place to another, when the whining or the crying or the tantrums seemed non-stop, two women walking towards us said, “Oh, you’re so lucky. I think that was the happiest time in my life.”

Oh, Lord, I thought. Let it not be so.

As with labour, which seems to last forever until it’s over, I think the relief of its being over makes you misremember how long it felt & and how difficult. I still have not forgotten, though. And I do not regret my failed attempts to savour every last moment. What I regret is the pressure I put on myself to do a better job of savouring, and the guilt I laid on myself when I failed to do so.

Last week, a blog post was making the rounds about this very issue, about how difficult it is to really enjoy this difficult time. I particularly appreciate the analogy of parenting to climbing Mt. Everest:

Brave, adventurous souls try it because they’ve heard there’s magic in the climb. They try because they believe that finishing, or even attempting the climb are impressive accomplishments. They try because during the climb, if they allow themselves to pause and lift their eyes and minds from the pain and drudgery, the views are breathtaking. They try because even though it hurts and it’s hard, there are moments that make it worth the hard. These moments are so intense and unique that many people who reach the top start planning, almost immediately, to climb again. Even though any climber will tell you that  most of the climb is treacherous, exhausting, killer. That they literally cried most of the way up.

And so I think that if there were people stationed, say, every thirty feet along Mount Everest yelling to the climbers – “ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF!? IF NOT, YOU SHOULD BE! ONE DAY YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU DIDN’T!” TRUST US!! IT’LL BE OVER TOO SOON! CARPE DIEM!”  – those well-meaning, nostalgic cheerleaders might be physically thrown from the mountain.

After I shared the post on Facebook, a friend of mine sent me an essay by Carol Shields, on time passing. From the afterword of Dropped Threads, it gave me comfort and hope. She writes about the admonition given at her graduation from university not to waste time, because it flies. But as her life goes on, she realizes that this is terrible advice & untrue:

Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing: it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters.

The mother-of-small-children chapter seemed to go on forever, but, in fact, it didn’t. It was a mere twelve years, over in a flash.

I want the life she speaks of, with ”shallow time and fallow time.” I want to waste time. I want time to pass more quickly during the hard years. Her words, here, give me hope. There is time. Plenty of it.

“Go back through. Add it, the big plot detail and the new character it needs; web it through and earn it in each line, and make the changes and the textural touches necessary to bring it about rightly, justly and convincingly. Take the pains. Build it strong.”

–Richard Bausch (from a Facebook Status Update dated Dec 3, 2011.)

I’m 50 000-odd words into a first draft of a novel. I’m one or two scenes away from the end, and only now do I see what changes need to be made. It took me almost 200 pages to figure out exactly what my main character was yearning for, and why, and how knowing this solves all of the problems that were weighing on me. It is a testament to my growing ability just to do the work (in the words of Richard Bausch, whom I was lucky enough to have as a mentor this past summer), that the prospect of redoing it all from the beginning is not exhausting but exhilerating. 

I need to get zipped up into the snowsuit of myself.

I was entering a time of quiet coziness with myself: I wanted to speak less and be less available to other people. I was tired of writing, or, rather, of my ambitions to write, and the phrase popped into my head. Because it wasn’t at all like melancholy. It was just cozy. I wrote it down on the fridge and when I think of it I remember an early winter in our old house, a brief stint of baking my own bread, reading The Corrections, listening to Sufjan Stevens for the first time, and the general sweetness of my life with the man I love, one small toddler, an easy job, and a delightfully empty future.

I have recently gone through the same state again: a happy mood of solitude. However, the zipping up into snowsuits–that is, the hiding myself away from view, at least blog-wise–that I’ve done since my last post on this blog in February has not been totally out of coziness. Since I returned to work, life has been pretty non-stop. Some of the things I have done this year are:

• worked more hours per week than I have since before having children
• continued to find time to write as many times per week as possible (and somehow written a handful of new stories and 3/4 of a novel draft)
• began Cross-fitting (though I still can’t do a pull-up sans band)
• trained for and then ran a half-marathon
• took a week-long intensive course with the Humber School for Writers
• learned to drive standard
• applied for & got an exciting teaching job
• studied for and took the GRE
• madly prepared for MFA applications
• gave up on MFA applications when I found out I was pregnant again.

I managed, in all this busyness, not to become overwhelmed with anxiety, although there were moments when I worried that I would. I have become better at managing my stress without dropping any balls. Which means that, in the year I turned thirty, I think I became a real grown-up. I’d still like to yell less at my children; however, I am a finite creature and more than pleased with this progress.

This year I also discovered that the phrase I thought I’d written I had actually stolen from Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I happened upon a review of it after I read & loved Nicole Kraus’s Great House, and discovered that I had read this phrase three years ago, and not remembered it:

I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself.

Oops. I was a sobered by this proof of unintentional plagiarism. It had been years since I read it! Richard Bausch is right when he says that we, as writers, must read constantly and just absorb what we read, because our minds lose nothing. Everything is there, waiting to be uncovered.

Dangerous Laughter

(1) A few days ago, I finished The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. It was so good that I wondered how it was that I’d never read Dame Muriel Spark before, what with her great reputation, affiinities to Virginia Woolf (at least I thought so, in terms of structure and sense of humour), and some twenty-odd novels.

Aside from the conciseness of the prose and how humourous the characters were, I loved how she moved betweeen past, present and future, sometimes telling us the fate of a character (her death) while still introducing that character in the novel’s present time. Miss Jean Brodie is eccentric, hilarious:

There was nothing Miss Brodie could not yet learn, and she boasted of it. And it was not a static Miss Brodie who told her girls, “These are the years of my prime. You are benefiting from my prime,” but one whose nature was growing under their eyes, as the girls themselves were still under formation. (45)

The six girls under Brodie’s wing watch themselves and each other as they become women, just as we watch their characters grow and deepen. Brodie was, according to Spark , a certain kind of woman of which there were legions in the 1930s, when the novel is set:

These daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. They could be seen leaning over the democratic counters of Edinburgh grocers’ shops arguing with the Manager at three in the afternoon on every subject from the authenticity of the Scriptures to the question what the word “guaranteed” on a jam-jar really meant. They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German…. (43-4).

I am an eccentric myself, though often closeted, and I could relate to this woman. (Particularly regarding the argument about the word “guaranteed”–I can, for some reason, see myself there). It’s good.

(2) I’ve also been reading Steven Millhauser’s excellent short stories in Dangerous Laughter. In particular, I loved the section called “Impossible Architectures”, which includes a story about a maker of miniatures that get smaller and smaller, a story about a Tower that manages to reach heaven, and a story about a Dome that covers the entire earth. These stories aren’t character-driven, but dwell on detail and speculation about how these impossible architectures affect the lives lived within them.

The story about the maker of miniatures can be found at The New Yorker. (I first read it as a podcast from the New Yorker Fiction podcast series).

I have been committing a kind of dualism. I have been thinking that my body is just an accessory, a bunch of tools, and that the place were I live is only the place where I hang my hat. Instead, it seems, our surroundings build us at the same time that we build them, and the longer you stay in a place the more it imprints itself on you.

I know that this is partly about familiarity; there were families in our buildings that had packed grandparents into the same space that the four of us were filling. A friend from Taiwan reminded me that Taiwan’s population is seventy times Toronto’s, which density is impossible for this Canadian to imagine. Most of the other academics in our buildings had come from far-flung places, even the Canadians, and expected to move again, and maybe again after that. We were only dabblers in this life, at least for now.

A few things I have noticed in our move from Hamilton to Toronto and back again:

1) Hamilton has a lot of things particular to it that I really like. Before moving, I thought that I would find many of the things I loved about Hamilton (running trails by the escarpment, its small but passionate arts community, our organic food share, a La Leche League group I liked, my small,  idiosyncratic church) in Toronto. I thought all cities were basically the same. But the very things that make these two cities so different–particularly  their very different statuses in the Canadian economy, their divergent costs of living, the pace of life, & population density–trickle down to affect all of these other parts of community. There were running trails, but I had to dodge traffic andvrun through throngs of shoppers to get to them. We couldn’t find a food share as good as the one we use here. The arts are huge in Toronto, of course, but so huge as to be intimidating to me. And while we did find a great deal of community in the group of fellow transients in the student housing, we also found out that we have loved our smaller city, even with its smokestacks and bad reputation, all along.

2) When our space got smaller and higher off of the ground, time passed too quickly. Pressures built. It might be that the pace of life in Toronto was contagious; while we had nowhere important to go, everyone else did, and everyone was always texting and chatting on phones and clacking past on high heels. This was exhausting. In the high heat of summer, I found it quite distressing that I couldn’t find a place outside to be alone. But we both noticed it, that the days passed quickly, and the evenings too, and not just because we were having so much fun, but because we were high-strung. Or, perhaps it was that the size of the space affected the size of the day. Or, perhaps it was that you never quite left the rest of the world behind you, as it was reminding you of its presence with frequent siren-calls and late-night street cleaning.

3) If stores are everywhere, you shop more. Or at least I do. 

4) If stores are everywhere, you get lazy. I have become so accustomed to having eight coffeeshops in my small block and a grocery store/shopping centre across the street (and every other thing in walking distance) that the grocery store only a five minute walk from our new apartment in Hamilton seemed amazingly far away today. There was a Starbucks probably two hundred feet from our building. Before we moved, Adam said, “At some point, Starbucks started to seem far.”

5) Raising kids in downtown Toronto raises its own challenges. I had not been in the habit of using the stroller much before moving, but it became a necessity once we were in Toronto, partly because of road safety. There is so much more to be aware of on those busy streets. Yesterday, I was able to walk with both girls to our neighbourhood library. It was the first time 16-month Simone was able to meander down a sidewalk. Fiona picked berries from someone’s hedge. I missed this place.

I am sure there are other placesin the world that I could love. I hope so, anyway. I know that doing this huge move in the midst of all of these other stresses was probably not the best idea. Even so, there is much that I loved about Toronto, and Fiona and I cried about it on our first night in the new place.

“I miss our old apartment, Mom,” she said. “I miss all the people there.”

I am grateful for the life we had there, the friends we got to know well, the things Fiona learned, the things I learned. Simone was there for half of her life! And I am grateful now, that we had the chance to move back to a city we love, near our families, and in an apartment so pretty it seems too good to be true. I feel impossibly wealthy.

There has been lots that was good about this decision; we’ve loved, particularly, that community, because living here is like living in a hotel with a bunch of people in similar circumstances, and you often don’t even need to live the building to visit a friend. I’ve met some amazing women, most of them mothers, people who have lived all over the place, seeking their academic fortunes.

These last eight months, though, have also been a huge strain for us. This is not only because of our changed financial and housing circumstances–we’ve gotten used to those, and I’ll miss plenty about the lifestyle here–but because of what moving here meant for our future.

Before this, we could pretend that we were settled down. We had bought a house, we drove a car, I had a job, we were near our families, and we could pretend that this downswing in income and the fact that we would have to move for a job were not inevitable. We liked our life, but it was temporary, and we knew it.

What we didn’t expect, upon moving to a new city into temporary lodging, was how unmoored we would feel. We felt unrooted, adrift, totally lost and unable to discern whether this feeling was something that would pass and leave us feeling just as settled as before, or whether it meant that we were plenty happy before and that was something we should cling to. We were told that “everyone feels this homesick at first”, but it was hard to get settled in this new place, knowing that it was only a stopover on the way to another new place as soon as Adam graduates and finds work or further research somewhere else. (This, to us, is the worst downside of the academic life–you will have to relocate.)

The other issue was also symbolic, also in our heads, and nevertheless real: moving meant that we were really investing in Adam’s career path. Before this, we’d had more of a balance between us of work and life–I worked part-time and so did he, and we spent lots of time just hanging around together with the kids. It is a lot of pressure on Adam to become the sole breadwinner (sole potential breadwinner?); I hate not contributing to the family income and I’d love to have something outside of the house to do.

There was a lot of soul-searching, reading, prayer, consulting with our elders, and consulting with our peers. There were also plenty of tears and arguments. The decision we’ve come to, after lucking into an amazing apartment in a great neighbourhood in our hometown, is to move back. We’ll still be downsized–renters without a car–and we’ll continue to live on less. I’ve learned a lot about community-building and the life of faith here that I hope to take with me.

The other decisions about our future will wait for now. For now, we’re pretending we’re settled.

I’ll be reading the rest of his stuff. His philosophy is simple and epicurean: worry over the future is a capitalist construct, so live simply, enjoy life, don’t work so much, don’t buy so much, have fun, sleep lots.

He speaks about what creates work frequently and also the dichotomy of life and work as a false one. I haven’t been blogging lately, and this is because, like things themselves, things-to-write and things-to-read really do create a lot of work for me. I don’t want my pleasure and leisure to become things to mark off of a list and that’s what my blog and my library account are doing. I think I’m going to buy less and consume less information as well, particularly on the internet, but also in the form of magazines and newspapers (I’m a sucker for them, then I find myself treating them like homework I need to get through).

I’ve got some more unschooling to do. I haven’t decided what to do with the blog. I need to declutter my brain.