My Operating System is Out of Date

Barbara Kingsolver has always been one of my favourite authors from her early novels like The Bean Trees to a collection of essays on motherhood in High Tide in Tuscon and her foray into non-fiction in Animal Vegetable Miracle but I stumbled across the website The Daily Good and a Convocation address she gave in 2008 and it really resonated with middle-aged me.

"Because of your age." It's okay now to deck out and turn up as the village idiot. Hooray! I am old enough. How does this happen? Over a certain age, do you become invisible? There is considerable evidence for this in movies and television. But mainly, I think, you're not expected to know the rules. Everyone knows you're operating on software that hasn't been updated for a good while."


That just about sums up how I am feeling these days, like my software needs an upgrade. Of course the rest of the address goes much deeper into where our world is headed and she is rather prophetic seeing what has been happening in the last few months.

Life Lessons: letting them learn on their own

This week has already been a long one and it's only Wednesday. Everyone is looking forward to Spring Break next week although the weather doesn't look like it's going to give us much in the way of spring-like temperatures. My Other Half returned home after 15 long days on the road. He battled a snowstorm on the NY Thruway, a screw up at the border which resulted in having to wait two hours before he was allowed back into his own country with boats clearly labelled "Made in Canada." And he returned to the crushing news that Number One Son did not make it to the Provincial Ski Racing competition. This past season has not been B's year, he has battled anxiety and fear of crashing and despite his unbelievable ability to do well in training it did not translate into results and he didn't earn enough points to take him to the finals. Unfortunately most of the boys on his team will be going up north over the break to race. To add to it all Numbers Two and Three won three medals each in the Club Championships on Sunday and balancing their excitement with being sensitive to Number One's disappointment in his own performance was difficult to say the least. We've been through this before and it never gets any easier.

It is so hard to not try and make everything all better for your children. I am not, or at least I try not, to be one of those parents who fixes everything. I knew there was a good chance he wouldn't make it and I could have badgered the coaches to try and get another spot for him and they might have been able to but I don't believe that everyone should get a prize whether they have earned it or not. One of my issues with ski racing is that it has, at this level anyways, become a "pay to play" sport. As long as the parents are willing to pay for their kids to compete the coaches will take them. There are no try outs or cuts. Everyone makes the team. That is until the end when it really comes down to how you did in the races over the course of the season and unfortunately our son didn't do well enough to make it. It is a bitter lesson but a good one, one that we all have to learn at some point in our lives. He is an incredible athlete and his hockey team is still in the playoffs thanks, in large part, to B's incredible goal tending skills. It will be a tough weekend as he is back on the hill with the boys who are leaving next Tuesday for the Provincials but I am already so proud of him and how he is handling it. I just hope his friends are sensitive without being patronizing at their team party on Saturday as everyone knows who made it and who didn't. We won't make excuses for him and I know he has learned the first in a life-long series of lessons, one that I wouldn't try to shield him from no matter how much I feel his pain.

Life Lessons

I've been away for a while and I am only back on a temporary basis. Life keeps getting in the way but that's okay for now. I am sure I'll be back with a blogging vengeance in September. Something about back-to-school time. In the words of that Grand & Toy ad, "It's the most wonderful time of the year ..." So for now I will simply post a couple of things I have learned lately.

Always check all your pockets. In the past year we have, as a family lost quite a few things. These things were small and electronic so therefore their value was not directly in proportion to their size. The items were a brand new iPod Nano owned by Number One Son who lost it up at the cottage last summer. We looked everywhere, several times and finally bought him a new one for Christmas. The other thing was my small camera which I was convinced had gone out with the Christmas wrapping paper as the last time I used it was Christmas morning. We replaced that one a couple of weeks later and the replacement was promptly dropped by Number Two Son on the floor of the Alphorn Restaurant so the lens is now permanently jammed.

But back to the Life Lesson learned here. When it came time for me to pack the boys' stuff for camp I dutifully aired out their sleeping bags and even cleaned out their toilet kits and in doing so unzipped all the pockets. What did I find in Number One's kit? His old iPod that he had carefully packed last August. Hmmmm, do you think he ever opened his toothbrush holder either? So now Number Three Son has graduated from Number Two's iPod Classic which was my original to a barely used Nano. Lucky 8 year old that he is.

As for the camera? Well, we headed down to the pier one evening after soccer practise so the boys could cool off and I grabbed a backpack out of the front all closet to throw the towels in and opened one of the six or seven pockets and found ... you guessed it. The missing Christmas camera. So once I get the jammed one fixed we will have two identical Canon Sure Shots. One to take pictures with and one to lose.

Hope everyone is having a great summer, especially all you Asian spammers we bloggers love so much, I've never had so many comments I can't understand.

A MacNightmare

So here is the reason I haven't been on line much lately. I have been wrestling with my recent conversion to a MacBook which my darling Other Half gave me for my birthday. I took possession of it on April 24th and I have been caught in its shiny, new clutches ever since. That is until May 3rd, a mere nine days later when Number One Son and I were hard at work on a Social Studies project. Actually we were spiralling downward in a fight over when he should have started the project, when it was due (they all got an extension) and how, in the future, he needed to better manage his time, but that isn't what this post is about.

We finally found a cool template to use for his newsletter about John Cabot's voyages to find the Northwest Passage and had begun pasting photos and had written about one and half pages of text when we tried saving it. Now, of course we had been saving all along but suddenly this appeared -

Unable to save document due to invalid argument

Huh ... I thought our argument had been quite valid but really that was none of the Mac's business. Hit Command S again. Same message. Tried to do it the long way. Nothing. Tried to print what we had done so far and then the pinwheel thingy started spinning. Stopped everything and got on the phone with Apple Support. Went through two advisors until finally they had me shut it down manually and turn it back on.

"What do you see?" the advisor asked me in a comforting southern accent.

"I see a white light ... and a big question mark." I replied.

"Oh. Let's try that again," he says. I do. Same white light and question mark.

"What does it mean?" I innocently ask.

"Umm ... well ... it means it can't find your hard drive," says the nice advisor very calmly.

"But it's right here, in the computer, isn't it?" I say, trying to conceal the panic in my voice from my thus far oblivious son sitting next to me.

"Well, umm ... I haven't seen this happen before for these reasons. You'd be best to take it back to where you bought it and see if they can recover anything."

"Recover anything? You mean it's gone? My nine day old, barely broken in MacBook is dead?"

By this time my son is making a soft moaning sound which is getting louder by the second and I am barely holding back the tears. Tears for the social studies project and the production schedule I spent all day working on for our business, tears for the time it was going to take driving to the Best Buy two hours away, tears for all my Mac hopes and dreams, not to mention the sales job it took to convince my Other Half that switching to a Mac wouldn't cause any inconvenience to him or the business.

The advisor sheepishly continued with his script, "Well, thank you for calling Apple support, is there anything else I can help you with today?"

Oh, where to begin ...

Chchchchanges

An old friend dropped by today out of the blue. We sat on the couch in front of a cozy fire and drank tea and got caught up. She has chosen, although she might say it wasn't a choice, to live a very different life from mine. She is single, both her parents are dead and have been for quite a while and the only family she has is a half brother who is much older and had left home before she was born. She grew up and stayed in the same small town for most of her life, went away to school in the city but always came back. She has worked as a teacher, social worker and finally she worked at the town hall organizing events. She has never married or had a long term relationship, at least not one that I have ever heard about and about 6 years ago she made a huge change.


She sold the house she grew up in and was all that she had left from her parents, left the town that had always been her home and the people she called family and went back to school. First she had to go back and get the courses she needed for a Bachelor of Science as she had originally studied Arts. Then she applied to Nursing School and took the two year programme to become a RN. She was at school with girls straight out of high school doing their diplomas and at 40 she was considered the granny of the class, offering advice on men and studying while working in a notorious psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. She would come back for the holidays and regale (and horrify) us with stories of Christmas Eve on the psych ward. She has now found her place as a nurse on the front lines of an Emergency ward. Some of her stories aren't much tamer but at least every once in a while they are about a young child being saved. She is perfectly suited to the job with her sarcastic wit and ability to tell it like it is while being the comforting and caring nurse that you hope to meet in emerg.



She is happier than I have seen her in decades. She still isn't seeing anyone (that I know of) and knows that the long shifts that rotate from day to night reek havoc with her sleep and would try even the most understanding of boyfriends. But she loves what she does and she has found a sense of purpose.



Has anyone else made a radical change in their lives? Do you think it is possible to do with a family and all that sort of baggage? A friend's mother went back to law school in her late forties after all her children had grown up and was even contemplating moving to Australia when she was diagnosed with cancer. Not that I am thinking of doing anything crazy, but my dream has always been to pack up the kids and go live in France or New Zealand for a year. Guess that's why I am so jealous of Amy of Bitchin' Wives Club. Even the stress and pain of packing up a family of five to cross the pond to England seems like an adventure seen through her words and camera lens.

I know that people are often forced as a result of divorce or death to make radical changes and you wonder how they were ever able to do so under the circumstances but I remember a teacher once saying to our class of 15 year old girls that we could expect to change jobs five or six times in our lives. We all scoffed, our parents (mostly fathers) had worked at the same jobs for the same companies for their entire lives. It was inconceivable to think that you could be forced or choose to change jobs let alone professions back in the 80's. The world is a different place today as we enter into the second decade of the second millennium. And I, for one think it is better. More chaotic? Yes, but also much more interesting.

Yesterday I Listened

Yesterday I sat on the dock at a friend's cottage and listened to the kids' hoots and hollers as they jumped off the raft and their laughter as they played and the splashes as they swam and I listened to my friend tell me that his nine year old daughter has cancer.

She and my second son went to
pre school together and then started kindergarten the best of friends which they remained until the day in Grade One when they realized that she was a girl and he was a boy and things were never quite the same. She used to come over to play and when the boys got particularly silly or rowdy she would come and sit at the counter and make muffins with me. They would walk home for lunch together and push each other on the swing while I made grilled cheeses. She is now taller than my son with a mane of strawberry blond hair. She had to have part of her jaw bone removed in May so she is very self conscious now about her face which to me hasn't changed a bit. She isn't in any pain but the stress is taking it's toll on her parents.

So I sat and I listened and didn't know what to say. I still don't but I will call and email them every once in a while and I hope they will take me up on my offer to use my Dad's place in Florida when they need to get away from doctors and hospitals. The hardest part is the unknown for them and for those around them. The doctor's can't tell them how this will turn out so we will all continue to wait and listen and hope for the right words.

She would have been Thirteen

On June 20th my daughter would have been 13 years old. With the passage of time the pain has dimmed but I don't think the sense of "What if ...?" ever will, especially since I have been reading Maggie at Flux Capacitator's heart-breaking posts about her recent loss.


Samantha was born at 28 weeks with a heart valve that pumped in the wrong direction, I can't even remember the medical term for it now. As a result her heart was enlarged and had started to crowd out her other organs. We only found out because I had gone in for a routine check up and had commented that the baby must be sleeping a lot since I hadn't felt much movement in a while. They quickly hooked me up to a fetal monitor and began counting the number of movements per minute - way too few. I was then sent down for an ultrasound and that was when they were able to see her heart which at the 18 week ultrasound looked normal. I was told that they were transferring me to a downtown hospital and put me in an ambulance, I couldn't get a hold of my husband but told my mother what was happening, although I really had no clue. The ambulance ride was surreal, they made me lie on a gurney and I remember thinking that this all seemed like a bit much, that nothing serious could really be wrong.


I arrived downtown and was whisked up to see the doctor on duty who became my lifeline for the next 48 hours. My husband finally arrived and they assigned us a very young nurse who had only recently arrived from Newfoundland. We had to go across the street to have a fetal echo cardiogram at the Hospital for Sick Children and I found myself chatting away to this young woman, asking her how she was finding life in the big city and working at such a busy hospital. We still had no idea what was going to happen. The cardiogram was done and we went back to talk with the specialist who explained that there was very little chance that the baby would live to term and if she did (we knew she was a girl by now) that she would probably not survive the delivery and if she did that she wouldn't live for very long. Then they left us alone.


I don't remember what we said to each other or even how we came to the decision that they had recommended. I was to be induced and the baby would be stillborn. They hooked me up to morphine and started the intravenous drip that would make me go into labour. From that point on I was aware of what was happening but somewhat removed from it all. It's hard to remember what I was feeling, I have a much better recollection of how I felt after we went home. But later that night I delivered a 5 pound baby girl, she was wrapped up in a blanket and looked perfect on the outside, she had thick black hair, my nose and her father's tiny, perfect ears. When the nurse asked me if I wanted to hold her I couldn't. If I could change anything I would have held her.


We had to fill out both a birth and death certificate and make funeral arrangements. The only thing that happened that I will never forgive is when the anesthetist came in to remove the epidural she asked where my baby was. Later I wrote a letter to the hospital and suggested that they need to review their procedures for women who remain on the maternity ward after they lost their babies. After my experience so many people told me about their's. From friends to relatives who had never talked the tragedy of their miscarriages and stillborn babies. It is something that still very few share with others, although as Maggie's posts attest, it is so important to talk, even years later.



I know now that Samantha was never meant to be ours and that if she had lived we never would have known our boys. They wouldn't be the people they are. We talk about her a lot, my eldest once asked when he was about five years old, "Do you think you get old in heaven?" I replied that I didn't know and he said, "I think you get to choose your age because when I go to heaven Samantha will want to be old enough to be my big sister not a baby." I hope he is right.



I still wonder how different our lives would be if Samantha had lived - I wouldn't be the mother of three boys, I wouldn't look on in wonder at the little girls who sit quietly colouring when we are at a party while my guys run and wrestle and eat everything in sight. I know I look at those girls through somewhat rose-tinted glasses but I believe I am entitled to. Sometimes I wonder when people ask me how many children I have if I should say four, but then I would have to explain and that is too complicated. I am content that the boys talk about her and know that she was their big sister and a part of our family before they were born. We placed her ashes under a birch tree planted at the farm where I grew up. My mother doesn't live there anymore and we contemplated having the tree moved but I was worried that the tree might not survive the transplanting and I couldn't bear it dying in another location. Someday I will go back to the farm and see how much the tree has grown and think of how old Samantha would be and wonder again, "What if ...?"



Thank you all for allowing me to write this post, I haven't talked about this in a while and it felt like the right thing to do after 13 years. The boys finish school on Thursday and then we will head to the cottage and camp so I won't be posting regularly. I hope everyone has a wonderful summer and I can't wait to come back and do lots reading and catching up with you.

It's the Little Things

Everyone knows it's the little things in life that can make a difference. Here are a few of the ones that my friends, family and complete strangers have taught me.

• My sister-in-law taught me to warm the milk for my coffee first so that it doesn't get cold as quickly even after you have left it to change a diaper, pour a bowl of Cheerios or let the dog in for the seventh time.

• My father taught me to always be nice to the receptionist or secretary. They are the ones who hold the real power to get you in to see someone.

• My grandfather, who co-wrote the Canada food guide, taught me that cake for breakfast is never wrong.

• All my roommates over six years of boarding school and three of university taught me that you should never go to bed angry. You never know what you might wake up to.

• My mother taught me to ask myself during an argument, "Is it going to change the world?"

• My high school French teacher taught me to go with the first answer you think of if you really aren't sure, usually it is the right one.

• Every flight attendant who told me to put on my oxygen mask before the putting them on my kids taught me to make sure I have taken care of myself so that I am able to be there for them.

• My grandmother taught me that every teenager needs one person (doesn't matter who) other than a parent that they can to talk to about anything.

• My husband taught me that Nice Guys can finish first.

• My children teach me everyday that no matter how much your siblings drive you crazy you could never live without them.

What are the little things that you have learned that make a difference in your life?

When life is hard, here are somethings to remember

Maggie May, over at Flux Capacitor wrote a wonderful post that I linked to because her words really got me out of a hole and made me think about what I am doing to help myself and others in my life. Here are my personal additions to her eloquent words.

1. Sleep - Right now I can't get enough of it and I am usually getting eight hours at least, so the sleep that I am getting is not of the good quality sort. Part of that is because my Other Half is tossing and turning with his own worries beside me. He is going to try and do something about that, get some help and we are both going to work on solving the problems that plague us late at night.

2. Eat Healthily - This is something I have really fallen off the wagon from. I love to cook but my kids don't always love to eat what I cook. I try to buy local, natural and organic foods, but I do have certain food vices, like bacon and Cheez Whiz - together. I want to get back into feeding myself properly, not just eating the kids' leftovers or over eating because I am down. Spring is here and soon there will be fresh, local food to have fun preparing for myself and others.

3. Drink Water - Another thing I have let slide. Not enough water throughout the day. I can feel when my body needs it, now I must act on that feeling and keep drinking this vital fluid.

4. Keep Up Appearances - Not in the keeping up with the Jones way but I, far too often, leave the house barely having brushed my hair. I wear the same uniform everyday because I can't be bothered to put together an outfit and, for the last four months, it has been covered by my long black winter coat anyways. It is finally getting warmer, I can shed some layers (and some pounds) and be more inspired in my wardrobe choices. I don't have to spend any money, I have a closet full of clothes that I hardly ever wear.

5. Listen to Music - I always feel better when I remember to take my iPod with me when walking the dog (which I also need to do more often, for both our sakes) and I should always blast the tunes when I am cleaning the house (another thing to get back into the routine of doing regularly) and when the boys are driving me nuts. Music soothes the savage beasts, they say.

6. Dance - I can't remember the last time I danced, but I will find time to do so - soon and with abandon.

7. Have Sex - This is one of those things that falls so far down the list of priorities after sleep, kids, work, cleaning .... but one that isn't so hard to do. We just have to the make time and I know it's all good.

8. Take Care of the Spirit - For me this means taking time for me, whether I spend it reading or riding or writing. A friend once said that a happy mother makes for a happy family and she was right. No offence to all those incredible Dad's out there but if you want to take a reading of a family's mood, take the mother's temperature.

9. Be of Service to Others - Again, something that falls way down to the bottom of the list when things like paying the bills keep getting in the way but we all know someone who is having a tougher time than ourselves. I have to make the time to help out at school and volunteer in our community. This will help me with #8 because sometimes the best way to take care of yourself is by focusing on others.

Again thank you, Maggie May, for inspiring me to do some thinking and writing. Now I have to do some doing.

The Last Shaker

The photo of the monument in the graveyard at the Shaker Village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine is one I took last October on our way home from a trip to New England. I first saw it on a drive through the state 15 years ago and I laughed so hard my husband thought I had lost it. See, the Shakers didn't believe in procreation, they thought God would take care of that minor detail. Needless to say there are only 4 elderly Shakers left and one gravestone in the cemetery. I have driven past the village a few more times since that first trip and it still kills me.

Seeing that lonely stone kind of sums up my philosophy, "Don't count on anyone else to get you through life."