Today, I’m flying to California. Palm Springs, specifically, and then Disneyland (because, you know, you just don’t cross the San Andreas fault line without going to Disneyland. At least, I don’t.) California invited me, which was really awesome of California, I thought. There aren’t many states that will just go ahead and invite you to visit them and put you up and buy you dinner and stuff (I’m looking at you, New York). I’m not really sure what kind of hostess gift you give a lady like California – doesn’t she have everything, already? – but I’m thinking maybe some bacon-scented candles.

Anyway. Expect pictures of cacti and stuff. And modernist architecture and aliens, and maybe some roaming Coachella zombies who totally didn’t notice that the bands stopped playing, if I can find them. And then some princesses, of course, because, seriously: princesses.

Shiny, happy, smudgy-faced baby, all jacked up on Disney’s Animal Kingdom safari. Kinda hard to be angsty and sad, looking at that face. This is, I suppose, the function and purpose of angels.

*More shiny happy faces can be found over at Happy Face Central.

**And also here, where maple syrup and skateboards collided to create an alternate parallel Tennessean universe of awesome.

***Not here, though, because it’s a discussion about parenting and judgment and nasty things like spanking, and I might have been called “disgusting” in the comments, so. Fill up on angel faces at the other links first, maybe.

This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

Mr. Jasper, being assisted in the luge by his sister Miss Emilia, at the home of Mrs. Fussypants.*

*This is how we road trip. On skateboards. Etc.

**Actually, we’re in a Traverse, courtesy of GM Canada. But still.

My husband made this commercial. It’s kind of what he does, but this is a little different, because it’s something that he did on his own, with a partner, instead of with a massive creative team and production company and crew of whomevers doing everything from pointing giant cameras to making sandwiches, and it’s for a kind of competition, the result of which exactly will be I’m not sure what, but still. It’s important to him, and it’s a sweet and funny video, and so I’m going to make you watch it, and you will be grateful:

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

Friday’s as good a good as any for promoting a cause, right? How about two?

Cause #1: If you’re a Canadian woman, and you’ve had surgery, you might have been been given – while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent – a pelvic exam by medical students in training. It is, apparently, standard practice in Canada, and no, they don’t actually want to ask for your consent, because you might not give it. So they’ve settled for insisting that when you go in for surgery, you’ve implied that you consent to letting them do anything to your body that they like. You know, just like that time you accepted just one more glass of wine and got a little too drunk: you implied that you were just fine with whomever doing whatever to your body while you were passed out.

Gives new, sinister meaning to the phrase, trust me, I’m a doctor.

I ranted about it over at the Bad Moms Club yesterday, and posted an open letter/petition there in the wee hours this morning. Please leave a comment in support (and pass the link along!) – we (all women, and everyone who supports women – not just Canadians) need to raise our voices and say loudly and clearly that NO CONSENT means NO.

Cause #2: Most of you know about Tanner. Tanner is my nephew, my sister’s son, and he’s living with, but dying of, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. He’s really begun to decline in recent months. Our hearts are breaking while his stays strong – in love and hope, if not in muscle – and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to honor his strength and to meet his strength and to use that strength to move and to act, now, while he’s still with us. So I’ve decided to run for him, in the hopes that I can, by the end of a year, run in a marathon with his mother in his honor, to celebrate him – and, of course, to raise money and awareness for Muscular Dystrophy. I’m calling it 100 Miles For Tanner, and it starts with the Tiarathon at Walt Disney World in March (GM Canada has graciously lent sponsorship support so that we can make a road trip of it and really make it an adventure for the cause.) Find out more about it at Their Bad Mother, where I’ll be posting about my progress. And maybe think about clicking through the links to support the cause.

Thank you, always, for your awesome.

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.

The very best trip, though – the best of this year, the best of all years – the trip that I will hold tightly in my heart as yielding the most precious, sacred memories is this one: the trip that I took this past summer. The final leg of that trip, specifically, which took me to my mother’s home in Cache Creek, British Columbia, where I saw my father for the very last time.

I didn’t know that it was the last time, and that was, in some ways, a blessing. We had our time, a few days, sitting and talking and watching the kids pick strawberries and make cocoa and frolic in the river. He met my friends. When we parted, he said that he had things to tell me, difficult things, things that he didn’t want to talk about during such a happy time, but that we would talk about them soon, really soon, and I implored him, as I always did, to consider coming to live with us in Ontario, to come and build a straw bale house in the woods that we own, in the middle of nowhere, with the deer and the quiet, just the way he’d always wanted, just how he’d always wanted. And he said, maybe, maybe. Maybe it’s time to do that. And, we’ll talk, soon. And, I love you, sweetie.

And we hugged, tightly, and I inhaled the sweet, smoky smell of him, and I wished that he would stay longer. But he couldn’t, and we said goodbye.

And then he was gone, and then I traveled home, and then, three weeks later, he was really gone, and that was that.

Sometimes, the best trips are not the ones that involve adventures or passports or sunny beaches or the Magic Kingdom. Sometimes, the best trips are the ones that take you home, the ones that fill your heart with sights and sounds and smells that are so familiar but so precious that your heart could and would expand a thousand times over to hold them. That your heart will expand a thousand times over to hold. That you would travel a thousand miles a hundred thousand times over to rediscover and relive.

I would travel hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of miles to get to that place again, that place where I was in the first week of July in 2009, that place with my dad, that place in the sun. I can’t. But I will carry its memories with me, always, wherever I go.

(This post is part of the Best Of 2009 blog challenge issued by the lovely Gwen Bell. Thank you, sweet Gwen, for providing the opportunity to reflect.)

I am crying as I write this. Which means, basically, that post-partum hormones still surge through my body even over a year after the fact, and threaten to undo me at every turn. Also, that I am a sap.

I am a sap, and I am undone.

Soon, I will climb into a car and drive away from my children. This is a mixed thing: I so crave the break, the time to myself, but I ache at the very thought of being without my babies. My girl, I know, will be fine, and I will be fine without her, because we have done this before, and because she so loves her time with her daddy and the promise of a gift from somewhere far away. My boy, on the other hand, I don’t know. We’ve never been apart for more than twenty-four hours, and the one night that we did spend apart was painful for us both. I know that he is going to cry and reach for me as he sees me leave. I know that I am going to cry – more than I am crying right this minute – as I watch him watch me go.

As I drive away I will think about how much I will miss him – and her – and I will cry and wring my hands, but I will also think about how much I will enjoy the time away and I will thrill, a little, with excitement. And somewhere in the space between anxiety and anticipation, I hope, I will find peace.

Otherwise, this weekend is going to require a lot of liquor.

It was a mother duck and her three baby ducks, and I was pretty sure that we were going to kill them.

It wasn’t so much the impending massacre that made me scream. Nor was it the fact that the baby ducks – tiny mottled bundles of matted fluff – were so adorable. I’ve seen dead animals before. I’ve seen dead baby animals before. Hell, I’m pretty sure that I’ve eaten dead baby animals. No, it was the fact that it was a mother and her babies – that we were about to kill a mother! and her babies! – that made me scream. At the top of my lungs. With my arms flung over my head and my eyes squeezed shut.

Katie screamed too, of course. The fact that there was a giant truck bearing down on our vehicle from the right – thereby preventing Katie from swerving to avoid the Duckersons – made things worse. It was us and our children, or Mrs. Duckerson and her children. Katie chose us. Which, in retrospect, seems like the right decision. Survival of the fittest-who-are-driving-a-big-assed-SUV and all.

But it was a mother and her babies out on some misbegotten adventure, and as mothers out on their own misbegotten adventure with their own babies, the symbolism of what seemed to be their horrible end was just a little much for us to bear. And so we screamed. And kept screaming even after it became clear that somehow, miraculously, they had gone right under the vehicle and out the back end without ever even having a feather ruffled by the tires. Because, seriously, as portents go, that one was kind of confusing. Did the near-massacre mean that our moms-and-kids road-trip was doomed? Or did the averted disaster mean that we’d be fine? Were we going to get literally or figuratively shmooshed on this trip, or would angels divert the giant spinning tires of fate away from our feathers?

We didn’t know, so we just kept screaming.

*******

The girls, of course, wanted to know why we were screaming, and our reflections on fate and God and death were a bit complicated to explain, so we narrowed it down to death, which is simpler. In theory.

There were ducks on the road, I said. And we almost killed them.

We almost killed them? And they would be dead? My daughter, always with the logic.

– That’s right.

Like the dinosaurs? And my great-grandpa?

– Something like that.

But why were we going to kill them?

– We weren’t trying to kill them. It was just going to happen.

But why was it just going to happen?

– Because sometimes those things just happen.

Like rocks falling out of space and killing the dinosaurs?

– Yep.

And my great-grandpa?

– Your great-grandpa wasn’t a dinosaur. Not exactly.

But did something kill him?

– Yes. No. Sort of. He just died.

But why? Are we going to just die? When? WHY?

At this point, one wonders what’s really so bad about saying that God decides everything for us and for the ducks and for the dinosaurs and we don’t really know why and so could you just stop asking already? Except that such answer would itself, inevitably, provoke a but why? and there are just so many but whys that a person can take before their head explodes. Anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as death by questioning has never taken a road trip with a three year old.

********

The trip didn’t kill us. Whether that was because of our superlative road-tripping skills, or because God is amused enough by us to keep us around, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’m not all that interested in interrogating the why of our success, other than to reflect upon the utility of jellybean bribery, Der Kommissar singalongs and the occasional in-vehicle DVD in keeping small children happy during long drives.

But it was a success, not least because it affirmed for me – at a time when I needed such affirmation, badly – that regardless of whether the road is less traveled or more traveled, it is best traveled with friends and with family and with the spirit of curiosity and adventure. And that it is, always, well worth leading your ducklings out into the world, even if it does hold speeding vehicles and spinning tires and – if my daughter is to be believed – the ever-present threat of dinosaur-and-grandpa-killing asteroids falling out of the sky.

Just put one foot in front of the other, and go.

PS: If anybody out there has any advice on how to explain death to small children – or even just how to explain the difference between roadkill, extinction events and the deaths of grandparents – I would be much obliged. She is not letting this one go.

It’s going to take me a while to decompress from the awesome that was our recent road-trip adventure. It’s also going to take me a while to unfurl and soothe my heart, which got so badly crumpled in the emotional turmoil of mixing tremendous joy (adventuring with my children and my dearest friends) with terrible pain (the death of my grandpa and the consequent family implosion.) But I will recover, and my heart will unfurl, and when this happens – soon, soon – I will try to sort it all out into words. (And I will, I promise, open comments again so that we can be all discursive and such without risk of me melting down into a pile of exhausted, dribbly mush, like I did – live and in-person! – with the Vancouver bloggers, who were gracious enough to just pat me on the back and let me have my silence. And my martini.)

(I am not good with discourse when I am tired or sad or otherwise brainfogged. And did you know that martinis become significantly less dry when you leak gobby tears into them? They stay salty, though.)

Anyhoo.

In the meantime, you’ll get a pretty good sense of the flavor of the trip by watching this:

Eighties and nineties hits on satellite radio, jamming preschoolers, a head-bopping driver, Redneck Aunty crammed into the back seat with her Flip video and me recording it all for posterity and yucks. Add a whole lot of Happy Meals and an insufficient supply of Gravol and that about sums it up.

For now.