We – Kyle, Emilia, Jasper and I – have never taken a vacation together. Not unless you count traveling to visit family during the holidays, which I do not, because no thinking human considers dragging small children across the country to sleep in Grandma’s basement – however wonderful and soul-enriching such visits with family might be – a vacation. Once, before Jasper was born, Kyle and Emilia and I went camping with the in-laws, which was an inch or two closer to something resembling a vacation, but that was three years ago, and, also: camping.

(Kyle and I used to go camping for fun, once upon a time. We would actually take canoe trips to remote beaches and set up a tent and pretend that we were the last people on Earth and it was really, really romantic. But we have kids now, and I don’t need a remote beach to feel like I’m the last person on Earth, scrambling to survive. I just need to spend an hour indoors with the kids shrieking and hurling Cheerios and the Apocalypse is right there.)

So today we’re going to Blue Mountain Resort, which has swimming pools and gondolas and a climbing wall and STARBUCKS, and we are going to hole up there for four days and we are either going to have the awesomest time ever, or the children are going to defeat us utterly and it will be like Lord of the Flies, except with room service, in which case, it’s been really nice knowing you guys.

Let’s say that you go to the drugstore to buy diapers and tampons and Vanity Fair magazine, and while you are there, you buy one of those little tubs of Noxzema – not the big one, the one that slides to one corner of the shopping basket and tips it with its weight, the little one that fits in the palm of your hand – and you take it home with you, whereupon arriving you take it immediately to the bathroom, thinking, I will just open it up and smell it, because you know that the smell will transport you, you know that it will make you feel fifteen again, and who doesn’t want to feel fifteen again, just for a minute, to feel fifteen the way that fifteen feels when a fifteen year old is standing in the bathroom with a tub of Noxzema in her hand, listening to the clatter of her parents in the kitchen downstairs, believing, knowing, that the thick smelly cream, deliberately smeared – upward, upward, so as not to pull down on the skin – will lift all the dark crud from her pores and from her anxious, adolescent soul. (continue reading…)

I like to think that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t take things for granted. I know how fortunate I am to have the life that I have; I know, too, that the terms and conditions of that life include no guarantees against frustration and sadness and pain and loss. I know, even the most difficult moments, that I have much to be grateful for, that I lead a life that is, for the most part, what the old philosophers might have called choiceworthy. I know that it is choice, largely, that defines my fortune and privilege: I am fortunate enough and privileged enough to be able to choose, to some not insignificant degree, my path and all of its little detours, to choose my pace and my direction, to choose to linger over or to pass by the myriad distractions of life, to gaze into the gloom or to seek out the sunlight. I am lucky, I know this.

It is also a characteristic of this good fortune, this privilege, that I am vulnerable to frustration and sadness (and, possibly, to depression; I’ll reflect upon this further someday) when I am forced to confront my limitations, when I look down this path or the other and see no way around a certain obstacle – some figurative bog or rock or troll-ridden bridge – and have to stop, give up, go a different way. That’s the very definition of privilege, I think – the luxury of getting pissy about being thwarted. Not that those who are less privilege don’t get frustrated at the obstacles that they are forced to confront – it’s just that, I think, the fortunate are more likely to put their hands on their hips and stamp their feet and say that shouldn’t be there, how dare that be there? and collapse to the ground in a resentful huff.

Or something like that. (continue reading…)

It was just one night, and one night, measured against the course of a lifetime, doesn’t seem all that significant. But it was a dark night, and I have never been able to shed the weight of the memory of it. I have never been able to put it, as they say, in perspective. I never will.

Jasper was not quite six months old. I had not slept in weeks. I lay awake as he stirred and fussed, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to rouse myself fully to nurse him or change him or soothe him. The darkness that night seemed particularly black, the kind of black that has a density, a weight. To say that it felt like it was closing in would be to use a trope that gets overused when writers are trying to describe dark nights and oppressive fear, but in this case it was true. The darkness was closing in on me like a heavy fog, like an army of ghosts, like a slick of oil, like night made solid and sinister. I couldn’t breathe. Jasper continued to fuss. I fought the dark.

I fought the dark. I think that I won. Even at the time, I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure. (continue reading…)

I wrote this post late last year, and it is testament to the force of its argument and its mantra-like qualities that I cannot even remember what incident it was that prompted me to write it. I’d now like to forget a confrontation with ugly that I had yesterday – ugliness that scratched the wound of an old ugliness, ugliness that was being hurled directly at the beauty of the other week, which meant that it had the potential to cause much hurt – which meant that it did cause much hurt, until I decided to follow the advice below – and so I am reposting it, in the manner of repeating it like a mantra, and asking for your support in asserting it, loudly and clearly and emphatically. Because.

How To Deal With Trolls: A Primer

Step 1: Ignore the trolls. (continue reading…)

This afternoon, I took 237 photos of myself in tutus. Red ones, black ones, yellow ones; with shoes, without shoes; with leotard, with tank tops; standing close to the mirror, standing as far away from the mirror as possible without making it look like the tutu wasn’t so much tutu as it was epic muffin-top… in every single one, with the possible – possible – exception of the one above, I look like a giant, drunk flightless bird.

It’s going to be a long week. Worth it, yes. But long. Also, scratchy.

Let me just get this out of the way: being detained and interrogated by the United States Department of Homeland Security because said Department doesn’t find it ‘convincing’ that ‘mom blogging’ could be a ‘business’ (skeptical finger quotes courtesy United States Department of Homeland Security) that warrants travel to conferences is, no question, nothing compared to being sentenced to death by stoning and other horrors that befall women outside of North America. I understand this. I know this. But. BUT.

Being detained and interrogated for any reason is really, really scary. It just is. And when it requires one to defend one’s choice of profession and the legitimacy of one’s work and, really, the credibility of any enterprise involving one’s status as a mother, well, it undermines one’s confidence, and also makes one cry. (continue reading…)

We have a nice life, my husband and I and our little family, in our pretty little house in our pretty little town in Ontario. We have a verandah, which is something that I always wanted when I was growing up: a verandah with a pretty wicker bench and soft cushions and a hydrangea vine climbing up to the porch overhang and providing dappled shade. And Emilia’s school is just down the road, as is Jasper’s daycare and the dance academy and the karate dojo and the cafe that brews perfect lattes. It’s a perfect, picturesque, exurban existence. And one that I think I might want to walk away from. (continue reading…)

(Skaha Bluffs, outside of Penticton, British Columbia, courtesy of Nature. Trip – and opportunity to cross off of life list item #24 -  courtesy of GM Canada and Skaha Rock Adventures. Mad rock-climbing skills courtesy of my vivid imagination.)

I’ve been off the grid. Like, so far off the grid that I didn’t even have cell service, which maybe sounds like something that is not that bad, but I’m also not with my children, and having no means of contact with the outside world other than a payphone five miles down the road at a run-down bar in a near-ghost-town on the Similkameen River when you’re apart from your children means that you spend a lot of time wondering whether everything’s okay, and whether your husband would actually use the emergency number that you gave him – the number that reaches family friends within driving distance – if anything went wrong, or whether he would just send a BC Parks forest fire helicopter like the one that came roaring down the river valley just last night.

Which, in case you were wondering: having a big government helicopter swoop down on your campsite is really somewhat terrifying when it’s just you and your mom and you are separated from your children because even though your mom, an experienced camper, insists that those helicopters are just patrolling for forest fires, YOU will be convinced that they are coming for you because some terrorist group has abducted your family and is holding them until you give up that flash drive that a secret agent planted in your carry-on luggage at the airport. It maybe doesn’t help that you are reading thrillers about international Templar conspiracies to pass the time without your iPhone, sure, but still.

As of today, though, I am back in the land of the wired. It’s good to be here.