A Pledge

Younger Daughter (YD) on the left, Elder Daugher (ED) on the right. Clothes by Grandma

 I gave my daughter a piece of advice in the form of a truism a few days ago. “If you do not put yourself first,” I pontificated, “no one else will.”  A trite piece of advice but a sound one and I meant it. It is a working adage that I have tried to follow, off and on for sure, during my life, and a thing that I was sorry I did not do, if I had not been doing it Got that? Right.

JG and I are both in our eighties and, logically, moving toward the end of our ability to live by ourselves and look after ourselves. Much as I want to deny this, my creaking bones, lack of balance, frozen shoulder, reduced blood oxygen level (and lack of patience about all of these) are facts. It is hard work to make the bed, cook a meal, get showered and dressed in the morning, sweep the porch, stay awake while trying to read. JG has ongoing issues as well. Our daughters are doing some eldercare now and will see it increase as time and infirmity go on. Thus the advice in para #1 above.

The cabin 'at the farm'

It will not be the first time that our offspring have had to come second to what we, the parents, chose. When they were just school age, we chose to buy recreational land, a 100-acre parcel, over an hour’s drive from where we lived in the city. Not a cottage on a beach, not a chalet in ski country, but an old abandoned farm at the very end of an unimproved road. (So unimproved was the road, in fact, that for the first few years we accessed the property in winter by snowmobile.) The cabin we built on this land was heated by a woodstove, lighted by propane, serviced by an outhouse, provided with water drawn by the pailful from a surface well and provisioned with food toted in from the city, mostly, as in summer we could not leave food requiring refrigeration and in winter canned goods froze. We chose to spend all of our weekends and holidays ‘at the farm’ and the daughters were part of it by necessity.

I worried from time to time that the girls were missing out on vital parts of growing up, on bonding with groups of friends on weekends, movie dates, sports teams, even television (no hydro, remember). On the other hand, they learned to navigate by themselves in scrub bush, cross-country ski, build a fire in the snow, take their rowboat out onto the creek. They became, faute de mieux, readers and players of board games. They packed their own weekend clothes, packed their city activities into five days a week, and also learned to rely on each other. That they fit their lives into what we, their parents wanted to do, was not entirely a bad thing.

The year that the ED was in Grade 13 my father decided to move himself and my mother from their large Windsor home to an Ottawa bungalow, a short drive from where we then lived. I don’t know if I have mentioned that I am an only child, but that I am is pertinent. My mother was fragile both physically and, increasingly, mentally, and my father needed help in looking after her. I found them the house, facilitated the move and, in self defence, enrolled in a two-year certificate program at our local community college. My father did what he could to cushion me by hiring help summer and winter for their large yard. (They considered apartments when planning but my mother needed flowers and grassy space.) My mother did enjoy my reports of what I was learning and it gave me hours in the day that she perceived to be my own.

I passed that course and actually (and at my age, too) got a job in the industry, but my mother was really struggling and dad could not cope. I got calls at work; I lost weekends. I quit the job and took on eldercare. At the end, at one point I was sleeping on a rug beside my mother’s bed with a light shining on me so that she could see I was there. Luckily for her and all of us, her physical health broke down and she died before the mental stress became unendurable. My father took about a year to regroup, then moved himself into a seniors’ residence and installed his childless sister in the next apartment over. I became a chauffeur when necessary, but dad managed himself and his sister mostly solo. I started a home-based business in the intervals.

The house JG built 'at the farm'

Dad died in September of ’97 and my aunt lasted until February of ’98. Meanwhile my mother’ s unmarried sister’s health deteriorated and I was the caregiver there, first long distance to Windsor and then, after a move for her, in our city. By this time JG had retired and we were building our forever home here ‘at the farm’.  And, up until the big Ice Storm of ’98 crunched our bush, we were making maple syrup. I was a busy person facilitating other people’s lives for a few years in there. But once we got settled, I found several fun things to do for myself in the place where I found myself, mostly by joining boards of interesting activities. I became a busy person in my own right once again.

I miss, profoundly, being that busy person. Bad health, partly fueled by a lifetime of bad habits, has pretty well parked me in an electrically controlled recliner chair in the living room or here, at my computer, where I feel still in charge. We are very lucky to have the financial resources to hire help for what we cannot do ourselves. (Or we can hire help once we admit we can’t do it; some problems in this regard.) Our daughters take the time to check on us by phone and in person at a level I really hope is not too onerous, and their father has the odd job for them to do (on the roof, for instance) when they visit. Not too demanding yet.

If I am going to be honest here, I would have to say that I resented getting pulled into a lot of care for my elders. I knew it had to be done, I knew I had to do it, I even wanted to do it, but I still got angry about being ‘on call’. Or, I think that was at least part of the anger. The rest was, I believe, anger at fate. Anger at illness that turned my vital, intelligent, funny mother into a whiny child. Anger at age that robbed my equally funny and independent aunt of her self-reliance.  I can identify a mixture of annoyance and amusement at my male-dominant dad’s assumption that whenever he made an appointment, I would be available to take him to it. Maybe the problem was being taken for granted, for coming second in the calculation of what should happen.

Unless and until age and infirmity rob me of my personality, I swear I will do my best not to take my daughters for granted. And to manage so that they can put themselves first. 

Wearing several hats at once.

One of my favourite amazing bloggers is bon over at Crib Chronicles. She has lately written a post about buying recreational land and the impulse to live a life of self-sufficiency. I started to write a comment about this post but, when I had reached about the one hundredth word mark, realized that what I should be writing was a post of my own. So, please go and read her post about almost buying a cottage. You'll love the writing and be fascinated by her topic. And I will add my bit to the discussion.

When you buy a hundred acre piece of vacant land, it can take over your life. It took over ours.

Our early years as a married couple were a mad scramble as we variously coped with doctoral dissertation, two babies in fifteen months, frequent moves and not enough money. Once JG finished his post doc, however, and settled into a permanent job, once the kids both started school, things, especially our finances, became smoother. And we decided that while a suburb was a fine place to raise and school young children, it was also noisy, crowded and nerve racking. We decided to buy recreational land.

Our first few investigations told us that a cottage on water in our price range came with even more noise, crowding and nervous tension. We started to look for a peaceful place, hopefully with access to water, where we could spend weekends. What we found was a hundred acre plot that had been settled and farmed in the nineteenth century but that latterly had returned to scrub bush. At the end of a rutted track on a dead end road, it was a perfect hideout.

My father, an avid consumer of survival fiction, worried from time to time about how his precious grandchildren would survive come Armageddon. He helped us buy this piece of land, and encouraged me to teach the girls subsistence farming, archery, self defence, all the skills he thought necessary for living through cataclysmic times. My husband was far more concerned with building an insulated cabin for all year weekending, taming the overgrown field and bush, killing marauding porcupines and exploring every nook and cranny of our new-found possession.

We did get books about surviving in the bush, we made (awful) soap and tried boiling down maple sap à la our pioneer ancestors. I tried gardening, but the competition with deer, coons, rodents and birds, on a two-day-a-week basis, was just too aggravating and I continued to keep my kitchen garden in the back yard of our city house. An electric fence, large dogs and a good aim with a twenty-two are the kind of help back woods gardeners need. Living off the land? While cat tail roots may be nourishing, they taste terrible. I was never inspired to see if porcupines were any tastier.

What did happen is that our daughters became very proficient at finding their way through the rocks, hills and swamps, learned to snowshoe and cross-country ski, charmed chickadees to their hands with sunflower seeds and, by helping with JG's various building projects, became competent carpenters. This was some comfort to my father. Later, my land happy husband acquired two hundred more acres of scrub bush, we became maple syrup makers and when he, a research scientist, got an early buyout from his federal government employer, we moved to this land permanently and built a home here. My grown daughters love it here for recreation and peace. I feed the deer and do not compete with them and live in gardenless tranquillity.

It was sometimes difficult, living five days in the city with part time job, two kids, dog and husband (um, not in that order), two days on the land, fitting all the city work into the four evenings, keeping two kitchens stocked, two houses clean and repaired, working with the woodsman husband long hours in the bush, cutting and stacking cabin stove and sugar camp evaporator wood, getting ready for the sugaring season, enduring the long hours of boiling, bottling, checking the lines in the bush for leaks plodding along through deep, soggy snow on snowshoes, lugging the equipment. Twice a week packing, travel out and back, arrange the children/teenagers' lessons and social life around two day absence from their milieux, keeping track of it all, could be frustrating, onerous.

We have friends who made the break complete, moved entirely into rural mode, grew food, raised their children there. Gradually they have adopted some amenities, buy more of what they need, made things easier. We have friends who have always lived here who seize on any and every labour saving device to make farm living smoother (theirs is the garden with the electric fence and all that, a garden where I weed in exchange for produce.) We have retired to 'the bush', and that is somewhat different. I shop in the nearest town for most of our food needs, and while JG happily lives a forest manager's life, I spend my time doing what my interests and age suggest to me, volunteering, reading and writing and photography, the minimum of housework. I no longer help in the bush - my joints and back are too vulnerable and, in truth, I'm not that fond of hoiking pieces of tree around.

As a young wife and mother I did what I had to do. I put myself at the end of every list for twenty years of child raising and for several more of housebuilding so that we could live comfortably here. I am now nurturing, slowly and carefully, my sense of self and my autonomy.

In the end, you see, the land and the dream have taken over only as much of our lives as we allow.

Reports from a Pack Rat

When we were down south visiting my in-laws over the holiday, I found my brother-in-law in custody of a tin box full of old and battered photographs, a range that had belonged to my sister-in-law and one or more of her aunts. I sorted some of these out, that portrayed family that I recognized, and am now in the process of trying to do some restoration on them. Some are of my SIL, some of my MIL's family, taken during WWII and shortly thereafter, some of my husband as a boy. Nice memories, since I find myself as a preserver of family history for Little Stuff, someday.

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Above is a photo of JG's father taken in 1933: he would have been in his late teens or very early twenties. (Must find out for sure - can't remember his birth year off the top of my head.) The second 'cleaned' version has had the tonal balance changed and some of the creases and blots removed from the face and figure. I still have a lot to do on this one. Unfortunately the tonal values in the face and in the stains on the background are so close that playing with the colour of the stains makes the face lose definition. There are other avenues left to explore, though.

I have a lot of family data. My father's cousin is and has been an indefatigable delver into their family history. My family name is Holden, and Bob has traced the Windsor scions of that name right back to Elizabethan England, found a coat of arms, and put together a fat loose-leaf book of information. He and some of the other cousins of that generation also found the money and will to have the original Holden log house restored and moved to an historical park in Essex County.

My mother' family is one I have done a lot of work on: I did a seminar course in social anthropology a long time ago and was given the assignment of studying my family. I ended up with a huge genological table, a short write up on most of my immediate ancestors, and a lot of other neat stuff, most of it winkled out of my grandmother by my mother. I have a tape of my grandmother talking about raising her babies with sound effects from my baby interspersed. Lovely.

And, for the last seven years, I have been building this blog as a record of her grandparents for Little Stuff. As well, on the computer and now backed up to separate storage are large files of family photos, and other records. I recently read a post in which the writer described how she is archiving her child's art work on line and so I am doing some of that as well. (Because I can't store it all!) I have my two girls' work plus Little Stuffs. I have Commencement programs and University graduation programs and newspaper clippings. And once they are scanned and safely stored, I can Throw. It. Out.! Or, at least, some of it.

My grandfather Holden was a keeper, of clippings and pages from newspapers among other things. The YD has two posters made from the front page of the newspaper on the day Edward VIII abdicated and the day WWII ended. She also has my father's service medals and a fine photograph of him in uniform, all of which we intend to mount into a shadow frame.

I have a braid of my own and one from each of my daughters, mounted in a frame by my mother. I have at least one bronzed baby shoe and there used to be more. I found a nasty little envelope among my mother's things with all of my baby teeth in it. Pack rat and collecter of Stuff that I am, I hope someone knocks me on the head before I get that bad.

Must get back to playing with the old photos. More later. I love this stuff. And I am counting it for 365, okay?

Memory

This week's prompt is 'memory'.  With Remembrance Day tomorrow, what else could I post.

This is my father in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve.  He joined in January, 1940 and was discharged in 1946, in pretty rough shape.  After a stint doing convoy duty across the North Atlantic in a corvette and a brief reprieve as an ASDIC instructor, he joined a destroyer as Executive Officer and ended up in the Mediterranean.  He never talked about his war to me or, I think, to my mother, but by the time my daughters were adults he could bear to tell them things.  This was a great joy to him as was his love for and pride in his grandchildren.

This is my father-in-law who joined the army in, I think, 1941 and fought his way through Italy.  After that he was in the Netherlands at the end of the war and the first weeks afterward.  He had some very amusing stories about the Netherlands, but not about Italy.  He was an artillery spotter in the Italian campaign.

Two wonderful men, gentle, thoughtful, intelligent.  Both scarred by their years of fighting.  Both able to carry on, look after their families, find happiness in the small pleasures of life.

Courage, and love of country, look like this.

Someone Else's Photograph

The Elder Daughter and her family took a mini-vacation over the weekend.  She sent me a buch of photographs this morning, mostly of fish with various members of the family, but some of scenery.  And this one blew me away. 

It is a source of both pride and embarrassment to me that my daughters are so much better at things than I am.  Better photographers, better cooks, much better athletes, better records in university and beyond, better at home design and decoration, better dressed.  Well, sometimes.
 I guess I did something right.

Cornered

The YD's very white dog decided to go swimming in the beaver pond.  Here are the ED's photos of  her glorious romp and of what she looked like when she came out.

 And here are my shots of the clean-up.

036/365  Clean Once More.

An Afternoon at the Park.

Little Stuff spent part of July with me while her parents were away, part of it with all of us at a cottage and a few days doing fun stuff with her parents.  In August her parents returned to work full time and her program was to be gymnastics three mornings a week and a local day care for the rest of the time.  But by the start of this last week, Little Stuff had had more than enough of the large, noisy and disorganized daycare where she had been spending her afternoons.  The friend she was counting on hanging around with was being cool to her, and while she was loving the gymnastics, the afternoons and especially the two full days at daycare were reducing her to tears.

The ED called me and asked if I could go in to the city for a couple of days and provide child care: she did not have to ask twice.  I picked up Little Stuff from her gym and took her back to her own house for lunch.  The last bite was not in her mouth when her chum from next door, who had been away visiting overseas for the whole summer, appeared at the door to the breakfast room.  There was a joyful reunion.  Little Friend is a year older than Little Stuff and a grade ahead of her at the same school, so they don’t spend too much time together at school, but they are the best of companions otherwise.  They asked if they could go to the park and feed the animals.  No problem there.  Little Friend went home to gather permission and provender, Little Stuff gathered up stale bread, peanuts and carrots, and we wandered off  to the park, which is a riverside park, very large and full of overfed animals and birds.

The girls chattered non-stop all the way to the park, most of it lost on me.  Little Friend speaks four languages but not one of them is English  - the two of them communicate in soft and idiomatic French and Little Stuff translates as needed.  Going to feed the birds and animals is a regular treat that they have both been doing since they were toddlers and they know just what to do.  In a very short time they were surrounded by pigeons 

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and, aside from Little Friend having a finger mistaken for a peanut, a very good time was had by all, including grama who was photographing like a mad woman.


They played in the park the whole afternoon, checking in with me only to let me know if they were going some distance away.  They climbed trees and giggled and collected weeds and giggled and showed off their new dance and gymnastics to each other 

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and giggled and ran and jumped and .... well, you get the idea.  It was probably the first unstructured afternoon either of them had spent for a long time.

Grama lured in the wildlife with some of the stale bread and took more photographs.  The wildlife gets fed a lot at that park.  

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Check out the tummy on the second squirrel, the grey one.  

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The river carried masses of ducks 

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and gulls, all with one eye for a handout, the park itself is full of squirrels and along the river bank live groundhogs and other small mammals.  When I finally decided that we had to go back (Grand-mere a besoin du cafe!), they were both rosy and exhausted and when we got back to the house they were glad to collapse in front of the TV and watch the Blue Planet video until supper time.

I’ve just described what appears to be a rather boring afternoon in excruciating detail.  It wasn’t boring to me, however; I had a beautiful day, a camera (should have taken a flask of coffee, though) and a happy, relaxed grandkid enjoying some truly unstructured time.

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to leave a record of who I am and how we related for Little Stuff.  She has just turned seven and if I died tomorrow she would remember me, I think, but probably only vaguely.  I was lucky to have one grandmother who lived until I was an adult with children of my own; of my other grandmother, who died when I was four, I have only scraps of memory and mementos.  I want Little Stuff to have much more than that available if, as an adult, she wants to know.  I wonder if she will remember this day, or the days at the cottage, as special, happy ones or if, like me, her memories of these very young years will be hazy at best.

If so, maybe this story and the photos will remind her.  I hope so.  It is always good to remember being loved.

How I wrecked my daughter's refrigerator and other stories from the trenches.

I am living at the elder daughter's house this week, looking after Little Stuff while the ED and spouse are at a conference.  This should be quite an easy task as Little Stuff is now almost seven and can look after a lot of things herself.  Grama's tasks include putting together a huge lunch including three snacks and a main noon meal, finding something a starving kid wants to eat for supper, delivering her to school, picking her up from daycare, listening to and helping with homework, and keeping the menagerie fed.

It is this last task that was the undoing of the refrigerator.  This house resembles a small zoo.  There are lizards, snakes, fish, a tortoise the size of a punch bowl, a quite demented cat (of whom more later) and Charlotte Ann, the guinea pig. She lives in Little Stuff's bedroom in a well appointed cage and gets fresh veggies twice a day to supplement her kibble (or whatever - dried guinea pig ration, I guess).  On the first evening, Little Stuff opened the frig to get out some greens and ripped the front panel off the crisper.  Oops.

Well, Grama decided that fixing this ought to involve disassembling the three drawer pile and cleaning it all up, then putting the front panel back on and reassembling.  All went well for the first two steps as I carefully took out all the food, took the parts out and set them in order and cleaned.  The last step was a big disaster.  I could not get the pile reassembled in a way that allowed the door to shut.  I tried over and over.  Meanwhile the food in and out of the frig was getting warmer and warmer and so was I.  I needed help.

Now the ED is without doubt the most organized person I have ever known, even more so than my mother whom she resembles a lot, and so I knew that the manual for the refrigerator would be stowed somewhere logical.  I am not logical, I guess, because I could not find the dern thing.  I found labelled and dated photo albums, art supplies, correspondence supplies, camera manuals, a neatly stowed drawer of scissors and other necessary bits and pieces, an alphabetized disc collection, with notes and dates, a stash of cards and other games, financial correspondence, all neatly stowed and handy.  No frig manual.

Food still getting warmer.

Finally, in desperation, I stacked all the bins back into the frig, with the food in them, piled one on top of the other.  And the door shut.  Daughter and spouse return home tonight and will, alas, be greeted by an almost unusable refrigerator.  I have stacked the beer and diet pop in the front where they can get it easily.  Logic tells me this mess will seem less annoying after a nice cold brew.

As for the cat, she decided last night to abandon Little Stuff and sleep with me, having fallen in love with my dressing gown as a cat bed.  At approximately 1:00 am she jumped up onto my bed with a resounding thump.  Startled out of a sound sleep I flailed out with both arms and sent the poor kitty flying off the bed and onto the floor.  And then she disappeared.  I was afraid I had hurt her and so I got up and searched for her to see if she was intact.  Cat was no where to be found.  This morning she reappeared, her usual sinuous self, and when she saw me she arched her back and hissed.  I am persona non grata in cat land.

And here I thought I was going to have a fine, easy time.

Forty seven years ago today ... taken at our wedding reception. Every time I look at this photo I marvel at how young we were. I also snicker a bit at the arrangement of my feet and the super innocent expression on my face as I grasp my illicit glass of champagne. (My father had just pointed out to me that I was the only person under legal drinking age at the party.) I was twenty: I would turn twenty-one in two months' time. And I lived in a society very different from this one.

In 1963 divorce in Canada was only possible by an Act of Parliament, abortion was illegal and the sole reliable female contraceptive (the diaphragm) was only supplied to married women. The pill was just being invented; the majority of women who trained for a career became nurses, teachers or secretaries and only expected to 'work' until marriage or, at the upper limit, until the first child was expected. Women wore trousers only for leisure; teachers, nurses and secretaries arrived for work dressed in skirts, nylon stockings with seams and dress shoes. We all wore girdles with suspenders to hold up the hose. We were sitting (in some discomfort) at the start of the roller coaster ride into the very different culture prevalent by the end of the decade.

I had been raised by old-fashioned parents pretty much to pre WWII standards - Kipling style standards. I promised to marry 'forsaking all others, as long as [you] both shall live'. That is pretty much what I have done. And so what I am describing here is the life choice I perceived, not that of the boomer generation and beyond whose partnering options are greater and different. When I was a teenager I also speculated about studying law and was deterred from doing that by my father, a lawyer, who told me that the women lawyers he knew were frustrated and miserable. That was his experience and that informed my choice.

There have been a number of times in my life when I have regretted marrying. Not marrying the man I have - I can't imaging being married to anyone else - but marrying at all. The grass growing in the yards of the self managed living quarters of single women with their own incomes and lifestyle and furniture choices has looked very green and lush at such times. If you marry, as most of us do, someone with interests and decision making processes far different from your own, the necessary compromises and choices of life as a couple make you into a person far different from what you ever expected you would become, in your heady and heedless youth. When I decided that I wanted to be married, I clearly remember thinking that I would have to make such compromises and promising myself that I would do so. It has sometimes been harder that I ever could have imagined. I have, from time to time, failed that promise, have been too stubborn or too spineless. I have also, from time to time, been astonished at the generosity of the man I married in accepting my interests and accommodating me against what his choice would have been. But still - marriage can be a very Procrustean bed.

I am sure that my grass might look long and luscious to a single woman from time to time. A strong marriage, and mine is one, gives a woman a husband who earns money, does not stray, is a good father and grandfather, a partner, a companion. While a single woman chooses her own bed, she does lie in it alone, must be solely responsible for supporting herself and has a very different and less permanent support group. For a single woman to have a child is a very difficult choice but the knowledge that she will never have children is also difficult.

Well, it is 2010, and I live in a world so different from the one of my childhood that I can sympathize with my grandmother's bemusement at stretchy baby clothes, television cartoons and suburbs built for car-driving families. Sometimes I imagine myself telling her about my neighbour who checks out her granddaughter via Skype. I own one dress and two pair of pantihose and run a graphics business out of my house while wearing slippers. The only constant in my life has just finished calculating that we have been married over twice as long as we were single. He does that kind of thing.

And I may haul out a bottle of champagne later on to-day.

Winter Weekend, Chez G

This was going to be a thoughtful New Year's post, but then the ED sent me some photos and I can't let this one go by without sharing.

Little Stuff got skis for Christmas.  She and her parents came out from the city for New Year's Day (lamb and Crême Brûlé prepared by YD and yes it was amazing) and she tried out her skis on the laneway.  Which curves.  Daddy and Grama stationed themselves on the edge to take photos; Mummy was acting as a ski lift.  On one pass, Little Stuff hurtled by, missing Grama by milimetres. 

Grama was, understandably, a bit shook up. Because while Grama would recover from impact, she is not sure her Nikon would. (In fact, I am signalling a near miss to Daddy, but it surely is as funny a photo of me as I have ever seen.)

The YD's furry baby has discovered a world of little animals living under the snow.  She has not caught one yet, but not for lack of trying.

Grama's Newest Baby

As of tomorrow morning, I am looking after the YD's little darling.  And here she is.

Meet Shamwari, Shammy for short, a golden doodle.  A large furry baby of a dog, with a wistful face and a need to be close to her mistress at all times.  The YD goes to the washroom?  Shammy is trying to peer under the door.  The YD goes off in her car?  Shammy has one eye and one ear out for the car until the YD comes back.
However, in the meantime, if she cannot have her mistress, Grama is next best.  She settles down on her favourite piece of the living room carpet (as shown) and keeps the other eye and ear on me.  If I get up, she watches to see where I go.  The tail is tucked between her legs, the eyes even more wistful than usual.
As soon as she hears the car, up she pops, the tail goes up, and she heads for the door.
Tomorrow the YD has to go into the city and get a lot of paperwork done.  She is going to spend the night at her sister's house.  Shammy is staying here. I hope I can be an adequate substitute for the Beloved for a day and a half.
Wish me luck.

4:30 pm.
There is a new game, chez G.  It seems to be a version of hide and seek.  Mary opens front door and wants Shammy to come in.  Shammy runs around the house and hides.  Mary closes front door.  Shammy comes up onto porch.  Mary opens door.  Shammy runs around house and hides.  Mary opens back door.  Shammy runs around ............ do dogs giggle?  Because if so, this one is giggling.
She is now in the house, courtesy of JG.  Still giggling.

Several days ago I read a post about the vulnerability of children and the terror a parent can feel about the dangers a child can face. She was talking about a seven year old. My daughters are now in their forties, well integrated adults with good careers, nice homes and money in the bank. So I should pat myself on the back and settle back in my rocking chair, content that they are safe? Sigh. Today I took a look at the photos taken on a canoe trip the YD took on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

One of the first photos I saw was this.
A little later, I came upon this one.

The YD is home quite intact, cleaning her equipment after a successful trip, sorting her photographs and, she tells me, writing up the experience. I may fall asleep tonight with images of red canoe bottoms floating through my mind.

I am not and never was a risk taker. I have gone on long distance swims, but never without a boat as escort. I stay away from the edges of even small drops. I drive 115 km per hour on the 401. (Getting caught at 120 km per hour nets you a big fine.) I do not eat wild mushrooms. I am, in fact, quite a cautious person. How, then, did it come about that I have an adrenaline junkie, a happy gambler, a chronic risk taker (you can imagine my voice rising shrilly as the list goes on) for a younger daughter. It must come from her father's side of the family.

I have photographs of my precious child rappelling down a rope from a helicopter, floating down out of the sky under a parachute, balancing on a ridiculously narrow piece of rock on the side of a cliff many hundreds of feet above solid ground, kayaking down a waterfall in Mexico. There is a video of her bungee jumping off a bridge over the gorge at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. She went, hiking, solo, in the Namibian dessert. She has tales of driving in land mine infested territory in Kosovo and Mozambique. When she was robbed on a beach in South Africa, she chased the thief. And that's just what I know about.

Strangely enough, I don't worry about her a lot when she is off on one of her mad adventures. The YD is a supremely competent and skilled adventurer. I feel confident that she knows what she is doing and won't do it unless she believes her skill level is up to it. (Although she has said that once through the Grand Canyon is enough.) Her father worries - enough for both of us.

But I do wonder what she will decide to try next.

Back from the Wedding

I guess we had summer last week; to-day I am wearing a sweater and a fuzzy and am contemplating putting the winter duvet back on the bed. Do you think if I do that the weather gods will send us a heat wave? I am half afraid they will. It does not do to annoy the weather gods.

However, it is so cold the bugs have pretty well vanished and I was therefore able to paint the garage door without slapping myself with the paintbrush. After almost three years of bare untreated woodiness, the door is now a fine shade of dark green, to match the trim. Also we have a new roof on the house, also a fine shade of dark, dark green. The roofers arrived at 7:45 last Friday and seven of them climbed up onto the roof and started scraping and shovelling. And banging. And running back and forth. JG could not stand the noise and spent most of the morning wandering around outside watching them work. By noon they had the field half of the new roof done and about a third of the front. At this point the sky darkened and the rain came down by the bucketful, causing seven men to scramble off the roof, pick up their tools and depart. They left us in good shape, with a small strip of plastic protecting the seam between the old shingles and the new ones. Not a drop leaked anywhere. They returned on Monday and finished the job.

We were not here on Monday enjoying the fairy footfalls on the roof, as we had travelled to a wedding in Toronto on Saturday and then gone on to Fort Erie to visit with my mother-in-law. It was some wedding! JG's great niece, whose father is part of a big Canadian/Italian family married a young man from an even bigger Canadian/Greek connection. There were about three hundred guests. There were five bridesmaids. The groomsman danced around the reception with a loaf of bread on his head and the rest of the guests (mostly from the groom's side) prancing after him. The bridesmaids had not practised this traditional dance; the results were rather chaotic. The bride's family had arranged for a six course dinner, this after a serving of antipasto which would have made a fine meal all on its own. And when we left, the groom's family were laying out a dessert table that it broke my heart to miss. It was an amazing event, all in all. Both the bride and the groom's families pitched in to put it on; I have a sneaking suspicion that there might have been a bit of Italian/Greek competition somewhere in the mix.

The whole question of what kind of wedding to have is, in my view, a fraught one. Big versus small. White versus colour. Time of day. What to eat and when. Photo ops. Dresses and what are the men going to wear. It amuses me to check in our local weekly paper for the 25th and 50th (and other marker years) anniversary announcements. It is easy to spot which anniversary it is by looking at what the bride and groom are wearing in the (obligatory) wedding photo. Glasses with pointy frames? Fiftieth. Long hair and a pale coloured coat on the groom? twenty-fifth. Strapless dress? First through tenth. Some of the announcements put in a 'before and now' pair of photos and it is huge fun to look at how the married pair have changed over the time span.

The great niece went the whole nine yards with her dress. (Literally!) She had a tulle veil that trailed behind her and on which the junior bridesmaid stepped as the happy couple was leaving the church, bringing the triumphal walk down the aisle to a fast stop. She had a bolero jacket with train over a strapless dress, the latter fitted with tiny buttons in back and, let me tell you, fitted pretty dern tight, also with train. Under all of this I am sure she was wearing one tough set of underpinnings. She looked spectacular. So did the bridesmaids who were in a uniform colour but each with her own choice of design for the dress. A smart move, in my opinion. My best friend once put me into a floor length turquoise tube, with overskirt, and I still shudder when I think about it. In August. In an un-air-conditioned church and hall. There is something to be said for strapless after all.

Wedding traditions. Ah, sigh. The same best friend also had a trousseau tea at which, as the matron of honour, I had to 'pour'. Even in 1966 this particular torture was going out of style. A lot later, my now ex son-in-law was determined that all of the Scottish traditions to which he was accustomed would be carried out in the ex colony where he was being married. He wanted a Real Fruit Cake for the wedding cake; none of this Canadian angel food stuff. He wanted a glorious outdoor background for the wedding photos. (This was Ottawa in early April. He got the inside wall of the church.) And I got to run the whole thing. It turned out fine, but I sure sweated the preparations, especially when my father got involved in what we should eat at the reception. Smoked salmon, he wanted. For one hundred people. He paid.

I hope that Saturday's bride will have wonderful memories of her great day, just as I have of mine. She is now, I believe, sorting through several thousand photographs of the event. Two photographers caught every glorious moment. And, poor thing, writing hundreds of 'Thank-you's'. Fifty years from now, I hope the wedding picture looks timeless.

Nothing in her life became her like the leaving of it.

When my paternal grandfather was in his early seventies he had a completely debilitating stroke. He could move only his head, was incontinent and could not speak. I remember being taken to visit him and watching him turn his head away from me, tears streaming from his eyes. He lived that way for several weeks and died. My father was so stricken by his father's plight that he acquired from his doctor a lethal dose of sleeping pills and gave me instructions that if he was ever in a like state, I was to administer them. Luckily, for me and him, he died in his sleep one evening while watching a ball game on TV and I never had to make the decision of whether to use them.

I have tended a lot of dying relatives. My mother, my mother's sister and my father's sister all had varying degrees of dementia in their last years and months. It was heartbreaking to watch them struggle; caring them for them took all the strength and courage that I had. My Aunt Marion, the last of my charges, had an inoperable cancer, macular degeneration, emphysema and incontinence. Experience had taught me a lot by the time she came into my charge. The instructions I laid out at the nursing home included a comprehensive DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), including instructions that she not be taken to hospital, and permission for morphine for 'comfort'. She too died peacefully in her sleep, but it took a few months. My daughter and another aunt took turns with me, sitting with her. If I had had to do it alone, I think I would have broken.

The hardest thing for me is that my memories of these loved ones as competent and vital women are overlaid with images and experiences of their debility. I have to fight past a vivid mental picture of my mother in her last day of life, frantic with pain, frightened, a tiny figure of bones and white skin, to see her as I want to remember her. My aunt, much the same, I fight not to see her with her head lolling back against the headrest of her wheelchair, jokes and stories all gone, waiting to die, her clawed hands limp in her lap. This aunt was an artist and her hands were beautiful, skilled, graceful, producing marvellous cartoons and paintings. That is how I want to remember her and that is, no question, how she would want to be remembered.

I do not want to leave a memory like that for my children and grandchildren. I do not want to spend my last days with them knowing that they are struggling, that visiting me is heartbreaking, that their grief is compounded by my debility. I do not want to become their task, their burden, their nightmare. What I want is a legal way to take my own life while I still have the mental and physical capacity to do so. What I want is a quantum change in medical ethics and the law of the land that will allow me to die with dignity, my own mistress still. My kids are not going to like that either, I know well, but I believe that such a death would leave a clean wound, not a festering, lingering sore.

If the law will not change to allow me access to a nice lethal pink pill, I want my children to give instructions for no medical intervention and lots of morphine with a clear conscience and then go home.

To a blogging friend who is living this, my love.

An Old Wife's Tale about Breastfeeding

In September of 1967 we decided to visit the Centennial Expo in Montreal; our younger daughter was two months old, a sturdy, easy, breastfed baby. In all of that huge site there was one (1!) 'changing station' for babies. The YD was a happy little lump in her knapsack, packed in with diapers, until she got hungry. Once she decided she needed feeding, she became very noisy. So she got nursed in some peculiar places.

One day at noon our best option seemed to be a huge cafeteria beside the Russian Pavilion; it was almost empty and we could all eat while she did. So I established myself at a table, unbuttoned my jacket and blouse and fed her. My husband and his parents went through the cafeteria line and brought the food over, giving me a carton of milk, with a straw. Just then the YD, who was very hungry indeed, gulped some air, air-locked and shrieked. As I hoisted her up onto my shoulder to try and get the bubble out a waiter came over to see what was up and, looking at the milk in the carton, cleared his throat and asked if he could warm up the baby's milk. My husband and FIL, a wonderful guy with a big sense of humour, both grinned widely. And then the poor waiter must have realized what was going on because he turned a fine shade of scarlet and slunk away. My FIL told the story for years.

I'm not sure why I decided to breastfeed my kids. It was not common to do that in 1966. I had some problems nursing the firstborn and ended up switching her to a bottle at about five months. My doctor advised me to feed her rice cereal before I nursed her and spread the feedings out to every four hours; you can imagine how well that worked. But the next baby I took successfully to drinking from a cup. Mind you, she was what was called an 'enthusiastic nurser' then. Industrial level vacuum system was more like it. And, in the sixties, the received wisdom was to start solids with rice cereal at six weeks, adding fruit and vegetables starting about three months. With all that in their little tummies, I think babies in the sixties slept more and longer. We won't talk about the diapers, please.

Your mother might well have breast fed you and your siblings but when I decided to breastfeed I did not know one woman who had successfully done so. Women in my family swore by bottles. My friends with kids? All using bottles and regarding me with a very sceptical eye. Between my first, born in April '66, and the second in July '67 (yes, the second pregnancy was planned. Did I ever say I have any common sense?) a La Leche league formed in the city where I lived and I at least had some peer support. And, thanks in part to things like La Leche, by the early '70s breast feeding was much more common. By the '80's many, many women were breastfeeding successfully. As my peer group left their bearing years behind, though, I stopped paying attention.

When my granddaughter was born and I started to be interested again, I found that the landscape had changed. There were all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, lactation consultants, support groups, books and pamphlets. And there was the Internet and mommybloggers. Advice, support and success stories on all sides. It was a steep learning curve for me. How do you offer advice on 'a good latch' when you have never heard of the term? I watched the ED popping the baby off the nipple and reattaching her with unbelieving eyes. The nurse who handed me the ED just simply checked to make sure I wasn't going to drop her and trotted away.

I have been reading mommy blogs, including the nursing mothers' posts, for two years now. Nursing stories are thick on the ground, as are opinions about the value, spiritual and physical, of breast milk and bonding. I have learned a huge amount about the things that can go wrong, the sheer intense sleepless labour of raising a baby for six months on breat milk alone, the tricks and travails. Some things are still the same. I can trade bitten nipple stories with anyone. But....but...it all seems so complicated now. So much to learn, so many things to watch for. So much to do! So many voices raised in praise and sometimes overdone advocacy. So much shame if nursing doesn't work out.

The only thing that bothers me about having switched the ED to formula is that I got bad advice. Some of the mothers of today, however, sound so desolate, so shamed, if they can't nurse their babies successfully. They believe that they aren't good mothers. I think that's sad.

Breast feeding is cheap, convenient and if it goes well, very rewarding for both mother and baby. But in my observation you can be just as good a mother holding a bottle. And your baby will do well.

This post appeared first at Canada Moms Blog, where I am on the roster of contributors. I would like to direct you to the post there. However, probably because the site is still under construction, I cannot seem to access an archive and find that post. And so I am repeating it here.

Wordless Wednesday; Spring on the Madawaska River

Yeah, that is snow falling.

Grama Considers a Bit

This post is up at GNM Parents as a guest blog courtesy of Slouching Mom (whose slot I am subbing in for a couple of posts) and the technical whizzes who run the site. There are some really, really fascinating posts there and it is well worth taking a run through.

Our five (almost six!) year old granddaughter, whom I can't keep calling "Little Stuff" much longer, staying with us last weekend while her parents were away. When we took her home on Monday night, the house looked like a daycare from hell. A puzzle on the coffee table and another on the record cabinet, her drawing table and chair surrounded by ink sticks and paper and feathers and plastic eyes and stickers, her cross stitch pieces on the couch, her paint by number on my sewing table, assorted pine cones, pieces of moss and other treasures in bags here and there....... well, you get the picture.

I spent Tuesday alternately putting stuff away, wiping sticky finger prints off the windows, vacuuming up grit and collapsing in my reading chair where I promptly went to sleep. However, she had a good time. I got an email from her mother that said she had talked non stop from the time we delivered her until her bedtime, telling her parents all she had done and seen. And that's all good; if she likes to stay with us, her parents don't have to worry about her while they are away.
Little Stuff will turn six this spring. Watching her grow is a bit like seeing a speed video of a flower unfolding.
Still reading? Pop over to Grandparenting: Building Memories to see the rest.

It's Still Winter Here

Here are some more photos of winter in Eastern Ontario, just for the fun of it. The first one is Little Stuff's mother, the ED, tapping a 'spile' into a tree in maple syrup season. A very long ago maple syrup season. I think she was around twelve in this shot.
Here is a shot of the trails the deer make when they come in to feed on the corn and 'deer ration' we spread out for them.
And here is Little Stuff on her spandy new high tech snowshoes. This was a different day than the one when she took off running across the field in them, caught a snowshoe and had her little red clad foot pull out of the snowshoe and boot. She lay on her back with the red foot up in the air like a danger flag and laughed and laughed. Until I waded out to her and shoved the foot back into the boot, snow and all. 'That's COLD Grama' she shrieked. We went back inside.
I'm really thrilled to be posting at Canada Moms Blog and have just put up my first post there which references this one, or would if I had not typed the link improperly. I will try to figure out how to get the button attachement for this site onto my blog --- as soon as I recover from my first experience with Typepad. This recovery may take a while and some black coffee and maybe some chocolate. But the Canada Moms Blog is a really neat concept and has some super good bloggers on it (besides me, of course. Erm?). Take a look if you can.

Status!

Grama! My tooth came out.

Monday Mission - three Sided Conversation

Fish: Hmm. That looks like a tasty bit of worm there. Chomp.
LS: Grandpa! I've caught a fish.
Grandpa: Hold the pole steady there. I'm getting the fish.

LS: Grama! Look what I caught.
Grandpa: Good stuff.
Fish: @#$%^&*!!!

Grandpa: You've got another one.
LS: Can I hold him, Grandpa?
Fish: My brother warned me that there was something strange about that worm.
LS: Look Grama. This one is a bigger one.
Grandpa: Well done, Little Stuff!
Fish: Someone. Get. Me. Off. The. HOOK!
Granpa: Boy, this one took the bait, hook line and sinker.
LS: Don't hurt him, Grandpa
Fish: OW! That's my tonsil you've got in the pliers.

Splash!
Fish: That's the last worm I'm going to eat. Ever!
(Grandpa is washing the blood off his finger.)
LS: Is that your blood Grandpa or the fish's?
Grandpa: Mine. Ouch.
Fish: Serves you right! Meany!

_________________________

Grandpa exhibits his catch on another occasion.
Fish: I want my mommy!