Text of e-mail: “What you can’t see is the epic turd. I spared you that. So the four year old sits on the John and reads Vanity Fair while dropping bombs.”

This is what happens when I leave the house for the day. Everybody gets all up in the body art and then someone takes a massive crap – while, apparently, reading Vanity Fair, which, thank god she’s picking up the important life skills early – and then someone e-mails me the evidence. (continue reading…)

This is what passes for humor in our house. You’ll be forgiven if you get confused and think you’ve stumbled onto rehearsals for a kindergarten performance of scenes from the works of Ionesco.

Yeah. I didn’t get it either.

The question was: what story are you telling yourself right now? (And, can you give yourself permission to change the ending?)

The answer was: this year, this decade, is ending in sadness. This year, this decade, is ending and my heart is wrapped in grief.

But: I can give myself permission to change the ending. I just need to figure out how.

A start: reflecting on the things that have made me happy this year. To wit: traveling across the country with my children and with dear friends; having a few lovely, brilliant days with my father before he died; my husband, who is my joy and my rock; my children, my children, my children, my children; overcoming fear; overcoming greater fear; facing fear and calling it to account and demanding that it reveal itself as something more, something better, something beautiful.

This is the ending that I want for my year, an ending that celebrates all the joy that circumnavigated the grief, and ending that finds the bravery in the fear and the beauty in the darkness and the wonder and greatness and living and loving that was in everything.

And I want this ending to be a beginning, an opening-up, an opening-towards new fear and new beauty and new wonder and new confusion and new dark and new light – because all of these need each other, each of these requires the others – and all of this as it folds back into the old and becomes greater-than and more.

And it can be. It will.

Happy New Year.

Have yourself one. Maybe, while you’re at it, have some beer nog, hug a child, and think of all the things – spiritual, material or otherwise – that make your life abundant. And let your heart be light.

Happy, happy holidays.

Last night, I was writing a post about having had a particularly bad day while Christmas shopping. It was a post about struggling with grief over the holidays, about the heartache that comes in those moments when you’ve gotten caught up in the holiday spirit and forgotten that something – that someone – is missing and then suddenly remembered and OOF. It was a post – again, again – about my dad. I struggled to write it. I always struggle when I write about him. I was wondering, as I always do, why I persist. I was feeling sad.

Just as I was finishing it, I heard a small voice from the other room, singing, in very high, measured tones, hallelujah.

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Because, when I’m not looking, he makes our daughter a Christmas suit out of foil wrapping paper and dresses her in it.

And then, suitably attired, they sit down for cocoa with marshmallows and smashed candy canes, and when I say to myself, this is golden, it is true both literally and figuratively. And my heart shimmers like her Christmas Suit, and life is good.

He gives me this. This is better than the bounty of a thousand Santas.

I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’ve traveled across Canada, and the continental U.S., and parts of Mexico, and most of Western Europe. I lived in Spain for two years. I’ve taken the train from Barcelona to Brindisi and a boat to Greece and  had a misadventure on a Greek island. I’ve canoed up remote lakes and hiked into the back-country of British Columbia and I’ve rafted the Thompson River, a few times. I’ve taken a tugboat up Indian Arm, in waters thick with jellyfish. I’ve traveled through the Mediterranean singing show tunes with a proto-Wiggles live stage show for children. I’ve taken my two small children, on my own, to Disneyworld.

I’ve had some memorable trips. I’ve had some wonderful trips.

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I’m Canadian, so I celebrated Thanksgiving weeks ago, but still, it’s hard to ignore all the cheerful goodwill and gratitude in the air when American Thanksgiving rolls around. Also, the pie. That’s all anyone has been able to talk about this week: PIE, pumpkin or otherwise. And stuffing and turkeys and liquor. Oh, and gratitude.

Gratitude, like appetite, is contagious. So, herewith, an account of my thanks, the things for which I am grateful (not, please note, in order of importance):

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A few weeks ago, I said this about Hollywood’s defense of Roman Polanski:

What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To all the boys and men (and, yes, perhaps, women) who would grab and grope and hurt and rape, and to all the boys and men who wouldn’t? That sometimes, it’s okay? And that even if you wouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t necessarily condemn someone who does grab or grope or rape… who? Your sister, your mother, your wife, your lover, your daughter, your child?

I could not have imagined, when I wrote those words, that one might also have added this suggestion: that it’s okay to stand by and watch as a young girl gets gang-raped.

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More evidence that my (almost) four year-old is ten kerpillion times more bad-ass than I’ll ever be:

I know. She puts you to shame, too, doesn’t she?

(For the record, she can last about 35 seconds longer than I can playing Nine Inch Nails on Rock Band. By the time she’s five I expect to her to be able to play a full set of ACDC, and to be able to record it, mix the video, and launch it on YouTube, all by herself. At which point I will become entirely superfluous. Which is probably not as bad as it sounds, but still. Maternal obsolescence, ahoy!)