Something Left to Lose.

One of the best friends I have ever had is dying. These words seem to colour everything I do, everything I think, make me numb, swirl a cold, opaque fog around everything I usually enjoy. She is dying and there is nothing - nothing - that I can do. Nothing that will change the fact. Nothing that will make things easier for her. Nothing.

Her doctor has said that three months will be a long time for her to live. She has already gone a long way away from us. Some days she will not talk to anyone, sometimes she cannot hold a cup, keep her balance, focus her eyes. Other times she becomes something like her old, feisty self. She checked herself out of her palliative care room at the hospital last week and went back to her seniors' residence. She is 'doing better', her brother says, the last little while. I think she is angry and the anger is carrying her - she does not want to be a helpless lump in a hospital bed any longer than she has to be. She does not want her daughters' anxious hovering, trying to do for her what little she can still do for herself. She doesn't want anyone's sympathy or pity. She's still the fighter she has always been, even when so much else is lost.

Her daughters are trying so hard to help. I remember my mother's last illness and how hard I fought, coaxing a little food into her, planning to make her hair look better, blinding myself to how fast she was fading. One night my husband said to me 'She's dying, Mary. You have to face it.' How stunning a blow those words were as I did have to realise that I was failing. I couldn't keep her. Now I watch my friend's daughters, her brother, her mother (so fragile herself) trying to come to terms with the same hard truth. I see her daughters fighting, as I fought, to bring her back, just a little, to comb her hair, get her attention, support her. I remember the bewilderment. The stubborn denial. The pain.

The words of 'Bobby McGee' keep running through my head. 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' I've learned that when the person you love has gone, when you have nothing left to lose, the pain is different and finally it too fades to a dry, sealed scar. You are free of concern, of obligation; you also lose the connection although not the love. But it isn't the same love. It's a bowl of pot pourri, not the scented, living rose. I already know that survivors feel guilt, anger, regret. For many years I fought to remember my living vital mother, not the pitiful little ghost she became before she was finally gone.

I love it that my friend is fighting. She may drive her family nuts, she may do things that hurt all of us, but it is so like her. I want to shake her and tell her to let up on her daughters, her brother. At the same time, I want to cheer. She's still herself, aggravating though that self may be.

My friend has always been there for me for more than forty-five years now. Looking after my kids, going with me on escapades, always ready for lunch full of delicious gossip and highly sugared dessert. A provider of advice, of sympathy, of camaraderie, of fun. Vivid, colourful, opinionated, a blazing bonfire at which to warm my hands.

I'm already cold. But I will fight to remember her outrageous hats, her warmth, her real self, to hold her in my heart. And I will try to be there when she needs me until the end.

Scrooge has nothing on me

We get a weekly free paper delivered to our mailbox. I sat down after supper with it and started to page through the inserts and advertisements. Almost the first thing I found was a Christmas catalogue.

I am sure that with a little searching I could find many eloquent bloggers posting either in sorrow or in anger about the iniquity of starting Christmas in October. I may do the search, just to find some kindred spirits.

But what is really obnoxious about this catalogue is the range of absolutely, completely useless things it is promoting for the Christmas season. Oh, I don't mean the tree ornaments or lovely silky red bows, or the candles or the festive red tablecloths. Christmas would not be the same without those. But dip dishes with spreader knives formed into little reindeer heads? Bobble headed Christmas figures that spout jerky pop Christmas songs? Another catalogue that came through the door the other day has Christmas loo paper with tiny Santa heads on it. To wipe your bum with? Really?

There is another section in this catalogue displaying gifts for your loved ones. At a conservative estimate, ninety percent of the objects portrayed are something anyone could easily do without. The children's toys are Disney and dismal, the electronics over-elaborate and expensive, the kitchen section filled with large appliances that would overload the counter and whose function is easily replicated with a frying pan, a paring knife and a little patience. I'm not sure why I am going on about this as I am sure the same or a similar catalogue is in your mailbox too.

When these Christmas catalogues start fluttering in the door like dead leaves, I have a really reprehensible desire to make a large bonfire of them and dance around it, shaking my pitchfork. I don't do it, because burning coloured pages is bad for the environment. Or, we all know what people used to use the old department store catalogues for, after the newer one arrived. I'm tempted to emulate the practice. But my septic system would probably clog. And so I will make my usual bundle of magazines and trundle them off to the recycle bin at the dump. And hope that the predicted recession will mean that fewer of the obnoxious things get printed.

Grumble, grouch.

Career Choices

A few days ago I found myself answering a questionnaire that asked, essentially, 'why did you have children?' And I was brought up short, fingers poised, mouth falling open, because I could not come up with a cogent answer to this question. I am still thinking about it this morning. Why did I?

I had birth control. It was 1965 and, distrusting the then almost untried birth control pill, I was using a diaphram. A diaphram is not a method that is conducive to spontaneity, and one night I got involved and forgot to put it in. Result, the elder daughter. That's the simple answer.

That's not the whole answer, however. I was using birth control because my husband was in grad. school and we had decided to wait to have our family until he was finished. Jumping the gun like that was bad for me because it meant that I wouldn't stay in my teaching job long enough to get my permanent teaching certificate (it was simply assumed by the school board I worked for that if you got pregnant you resigned. Period.) After an initial reaction that could be described as mild annoyance, I felt pleased about oncoming parenthood. It was what I had signed up for, after all. You got married, you had a family, you acquired a house with a yard, your husband got a job that funded all of this. After the kid(s) had grown enough you might resume your job, perhaps part time, but it was a job and not a career. Your career choice was wife/mother. Being pregnant confirmed your status as a full adult.

I was not a baby lover. I had done the usual stint as a teenager of babysitting (and toddler and child sitting) and had been bored silly by the little darlings. I spent a few mornings looking after a breast fed baby about six months old and handled him with much the same nervous respect as I would have done a loaded gun. I had spent a weekend looking after a ten day old cousin and his three year old brother and did not remember that experience with fondness. When my mother and grandmother went gooey and cooey over a new baby, I would stand back and wonder what the fuss was about. Unless they were old enough to have a conversation with, kids were not my thing.

So why would I want to be saddled with my own? Good question. As I try to reconstruct that long ago self, the best answer that I can come up with is that I thought it was inevitable. My husband wanted children. Our parents expected grandchildren. My friends all planned to be parents. Society granted mothers a status that single women or childless married women lacked. For anyone who has grown up with the wider expectations and less homogenous society of the seventies and later, it must be very hard to realise just how rigid a social structure I had been raised in and how little I questioned it, even while I watched my mother and my aunts beating their wings against the bars of their respective cages. But that's another post.

In preparation for the arrival of the baby, we moved from our flat in the heart of a wonderful small town to a suburb where we could afford a house with a yard. I had no car and the bus service was poor. When elder daugher arrived, I did not feel the instant attachment that my reading had described. I was issued a fair skinned, diaper rash prone ectomorph who, born at 7 lb, 8 oz, weighed in at a month old at 8 lb. I had little to no knowledge about breast feeding and not much more about the sleep and wake patterns of newborns. I fretted and worried and wept. Fortunately, the ED was about as fragile as a faceted diamond and we both survived the newborn period. When she started to smile at me, I fell in love.

The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want my precious blossom to be an only child. And so, when she was five months old I weaned her to a bottle and got pregnant again on the first try.

Ten months later I found myself trapped in my suburb with two infants, one precociously mobile, and with access to a car only if I packed them both up early in the morning and drove my husband to his university. In the meantime husband had switched his sights from a Master's degree to a doctorate (with my encouragement, I should add, in fairness) and we were in for several more years of penniless grad student existence. The YD was even more precociously mobile, and my days were a blur of feeding, chasing and cleaning up after both hurtling toddlers and the dog we acquired to make the menage complete. My brain turned to mush and my marriage just about tanked.

And then, one wonderful day, I started to be able to have conversations with the terrible two. They grew fascinating personalities. They slept all night, every night. I have the most precious memories. Walking into the kitchen to find the ED spinning her sister in my big spaghetti kettle. 'What are you doing?' I said, bemusedly. 'I be cookin' Wen'y', the little person answered.

Every sleepless night, every miserable dragging day of post partum depression, every frantic search of my dog eared copy of Doctor Spock, all worth it. All repayed a million times, in the years since. I still regard other people's noisy infants with a somewhat wary eye. I still far prefer to deal with kids old enough to communicate, thank you. I've gone on to have not just one but several careers. If you ask me who I am, though, I would answer a wife/mother. Without regret.

If you were asked why you had children, if you wanted them, what would you answer? Would it be an easy answer, or a struggle like this one?

Christmas Angels

Under the Mad Hat put up a post last week about what she was making for Christmas, and asked her readers to tell her what they were doing. Rather than load up her comments, I decided to talk about Christmas presents here.

We all know what Little Stuff is getting for Christmas -- a three foot long recumbent stuffed moose, courtesy of her grandfather's having gone a bit nuts at the Christmas Auction. What she's getting from me is a set of wooden alphabet letters that spell her name, on wheels and pulled by a small wooden engine. At present, the first coat of paint is on and I need to get them sanded down and the second coat applied. Then I will paint tiny flowers, butterflies and other colourful designs onto them. I have pewter paint for the wheels. And that's it for stuff I am making this year.

In other years my long suffering family has received paintings I made, dolls clothes (from baby dolls to Barbies), caftans, crewel wall hangings, ditsy Christmas ornaments, photo montages, and on and on. I love to make things. This year the gifts are somewhat utilitarian. (If my daughters are reading this, I urge them to stop. Now.) One of them needs new kitchen cutlery and the other, kitchen dishes. I am buying Canadian, which I always try to do. I also try to buy locally, if possible, from craftspeople in the area. One of my neighbours, for instance, makes spectacular turned wooden bowls. If I do gift baskets, it's all local and highly slanted toward maple sugar products or cheese.

But the shopping that I do for fun is for 'Christmas Tree Angels'. Local kids whose parents are having trouble putting a Christmas together for them are identified by a local organization* and their age, size and two wished for gifts written onto a paper angel. I collect one angel for each of my parents and two aunts whom I loved and who were very good to me. Then I assign an angel to each one and go off to look for what I think that each one of them would buy for the child.

This year my aunt who was an art teacher has been assigned a teenaged boy who 'loves to draw', and today I put together a kit of a portfolio drawing pad, a case of varied pencils and the bits and pieces my aunt taught me how to use -- kneaded eraser, conté crayon, that kind of thing. For my parents I chose a pair of sisters who need clothes and I bought them each a set of pajamas and lovely pink fuzzy dressing gowns. (I'm not sure my Dad is really into the pink fuzzy bit, but he can choose the toys to go with the clothes.) My other aunt's child is another little girl -- this aunt was a very dressy, well groomed woman and I think she would have enjoyed the incredible array of Barbie clothes.

I have never been comfortable with In Memoriam commemoration of the day of death, and so I came up with this way to remember my family with love and joy, and also to pass along a bit of the happiness they gave me for so many Christmases.

* This one is close to us, but the one I work from is actually at the Community Health Centre