text me love mom | Text Me, Love Mom

I Must Go Down To The Seas Again – Come With Me

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied
– John Masefield 1902

When I was just a kid – just nineteen years old, my parents helped me pack their car with a very big red suitcase, a stack of books and a few containers of my mom’s homemade baking, and drove me (and my boyfriend – who was just along for the ride) over a mountain range, through one and a half provinces, to board a ferry across the Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island, and the city of Victoria B.C, so that I could start my university years. My folks and boyfriend stayed long enough to help me search the newspaper’s ‘Apartment For Rent’ ads and to get me set up in a small furnished suite in what I so happily called a character house.

Wow. Life happened. Let me tick off the details for you – turned out moving away from my family of seven people, and boyfriend of two years, made me unbearably homesick. Rather than moving into university residence (my mom’s smart idea, which I ignored) I moved across the country with said boyfriend and tried an eastern Canadian university the next year. For lots of reasons – probably the strongest being that we were two young to work out our difficulties cohabiting – we left the east, zig-zagged a little bit, and found ourselves ocean side again – back at The University of Victoria. With one and a half degrees between us (I had a head start), we got married, he finished his degree, we moved home to Calgary and had a baby girl. Galloping along, we packed up a beat-up truck this time, which only broke down once when we crossed over the mountains again so that boyfriend – now husband – could get a law degree, and while he did so we had two baby boys in Victoria. A few more beat up cars and one law degree later, we returned to Calgary with – the now three-year-old daughter, two-year-old boy and new baby boy. The forth baby (girl) was born back in Calgary shortly before her daddy was called to the bar. It wasn’t religious – we just liked having all those babies. Time passed. Babies grew and grew and grew.

Now this little tale is about the good parents who drove me to Victoria to begin those cross province journeys to the ocean, back before the time of my crazy childbearing days. My parents were both raised as true Albertans, people who love a Sunday drive through the foothills and admire fields of golden grain shimmering in a Chinook wind. Yet, when they retired they chose to treat themselves to a month or two in Victoria as a late winter destination, while they waited for the season to lose its grip on Calgary. Yesterday my mom calculated this is the seventeenth year that they have spent a part of spring in this ocean side city, whose ambiance has been part of our lives’ journeys. They’ve come to take pleasure in the daffodils, tulips and frothy fruit tree blossoms, long weeks before they’ll decorate the streets of home. They trade the blue skies of Alberta for quiet treks along the shores of the deep blue ocean.

For the last several years my siblings and I have joined them at different times during their coastal reprieves. When the drive itself became too much of a chore, I’ve driven their car out, packed up with all the trappings of home to make their stay comfortable – including those tins of mom’s homemade baking. My brothers and sisters, and grand-kids and nieces have come out too, all pleased to spend time fueling their desire to see green foliage, and basking in sunny strolls (or foggy ones) along Victoria’s long breezy breakwater.

My four kids (the subjects of Text Me, Love Mom) text to see how we’re all making out, the girls from where they currently reside in Calgary, the boys from their homes in coastal Vancouver. (Is it silly to wonder if their ocean side birthplace influenced the makeup of their wee baby bones so they now choose to reside on the coast?) I text my kids back from a tea house, or a long leisurely stroll, “Grampa and Grandma say hello. We just ate the best lemon blueberry scones ever. You doing okay?” Every year my dear mom says they won’t make the trip again, too tiring getting ready, too much has changed health wise. But always we convince them to make the journey one more time – their walks are shorter, the breaks for tea time longer. For the last several years I’ve joined my parents here for the better part of a week of their month long stay. Today I’ll head home from this place where I began my truly growing up years of raising kids. Mom and Dad will stay behind for a few more weeks to revel sunny days watching the ocean roll over the rocks, and the pilot boats head out to guide ships to shore. Ah, the journeys we take for ‘the call of the running tide.’

Please click on the following links to order Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest – about the ‘next stage of parenting’, when the kids leave home, come of age, and the family gets its bearings again.

Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Amazon.ca http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Indigo/Chapters http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/text-me-love-mom/9781771800716-item.html

In the UK at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Pop. Pop. Pop. Went the Bubble Wrap.

Let me think? Was I a bubble wrapper? When our eldest daughter, Zoë, was first accepted into university, I was still focused on running around raising four kids – from tweens to this very young adult. I had only just begun to worry about Zoë leaving home, and was surprised to feel so jittery, and off balanced. That summer before we drove her a thousand kilometers away, I thought about her room being empty or her friends not hanging around our family room and I’d try to hide my teary eyes. Hec, when I imagined our Zoë roaming along Vancouver’s Commercial or Main Street, discovering Wreck Beach (the infamous nude beach) or just searching for eccentric, like-minded friends, I felt like I nervously needed to speed write an ‘independence manual’. It made me think about dropping her off the first day of kindergarten, and walking home across the playground with her two little brothers, four-year-old Cole, trotting along beside the stroller with not quite two-year-old Hudson in it (five months pregnant with her sister, Lily – I know, I know -it seems impossible to me now, too.) and I remember thinking, “That’s that. Zoë is part of another world of influence now. She’s not just ours anymore.”

Did I become a hovering helicopter mom in response to those emotions? Back then we were all ‘bubble wrapping’ if we compared ourselves to the moms that brought us up. My kids were lucky to grow up in a calm residential area with a few kids in almost every other house. Even still as parents we tracked them with rules and landline calls from house to house. When I was a kid growing up in the same area, we ran out during the day and were allowed to roam free until the street lights came on or dinner time approached. My own mother was a very good mom, more devoted to hardy meals, and cleanliness then I ever was, but the boundaries around ‘watching out for your kids’ were so wide and free and quite literally liberating. At age say, ten or eleven, I could report that I was going on a bike ride and go off, limited mostly by my own sense of adventure. We were truly free range children. When my mom did express concern for my late arrival I used the lame excuse that my watch quit or I wasn’t near a pay phone .
But as Zoë, Cole, Hudson and Lily approached their late teens we bought them cell phones (our household cell bill could almost pay a college kid’s cheap rent back then) and voila – I could call them home, or check on the late night party, or simply request that they – “Text me, love Mom”.
Maybe I hovered closer to the others after I had to think about Zoë out of our grasp in a far, far away city, especially if she was ignoring my annoying texts. And as the three kids talked about travels around the freaking world and got into the vices that kids get into, I was forced to listen to the pop, pop, pop of all my bubble wrapping love.
As much as they might have caused me to ‘come undone’ during the stories in Text Me, Love Mom, my four artistic kids are all helping me out in this new era of on-line everything. The boys wanted to (okay – I pestered them a bit) make short-short YouTube bits from the book – which were a blast to do and are coming soon. My eldest daughter painted the beautiful cover of the book and now here is my youngest, through her Midnight Train Photography – http://www.midnighttrain.ca offering a playful look at this journey. Love you kids.

Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Amazon.ca http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Indigo/Chapters http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/text-me-love-mom/9781771800716-item.html

In the UK at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

contact via twitter @SheaProulx

Was There More Daydreaming?

Do you remember that time? The time before ‘this time’ when we were somehow more free to be alone? If you are a young reader here – you won’t recall it, as it never really existed for you. Let’s see – do you recall calmly sitting at a bus stop after school waiting for your ride, and just staring out, maybe thinking about needing to call a friend from home so the two of you could pick a spot to meet at the mall, say the frozen yogurt stand at the food court or the bench beside the phone booths in the middle? And if your friend wasn’t there when you arrived you would take out that letter to your cousin that you started in math class, and finish telling her about the new guy you liked, but you couldn’t tell her to look up his grinning mug on facebook, or send her a selfie of you waiting for your bus home – still glowing with your crush on.

I’m not being holier than thou. I love, love, love my phone and all the way it connects me to the world. I tell myself to leave it behind on occasion, but then I quickly think– “Oh no Self, what if I need to take a photo, something that I immediately have to post to my friends or tweet to strangers? Come on. Really? I could send them one of the 628 photos currently in my magical phone? I wrote my book, Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest when I realized with my kids going off into the wide, wide world I was feeling more than a little jittery. And then ca-pow, I managed, as parents do now, to be connected to them in a way that I was never connected to my mom. When I flew away to university and was terribly homesick for my big family, she splurged on pricey long distance encouraging phone calls, and we wrote letters that involved pen, and paper and stamps – and hey, if we could have texted each other (for free), I know we would have. So it isn’t that desire for connection that I am being slightly forlorn about today.

No, I’m reading a captivating book called – The End of Absence – Reclaiming What We’ve Lost In A World Of Constant Connection, by Michael Harris, a writer from Vancouver, Canada. Harris says, that “the difference that future generations will find hardest to grasp is the end of absence – the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished.”

He makes me aware that I am part of the last few generations who will remember that other time, a time when it was easier to hang out with yourself, to be alone and okay. Do you remember those days when if you walked to the corner store or the library it was just you, without a phone in your hand – or maybe you might have run ahead to catch up to a neighbor you spotted to talk to, because that’s how you ‘shared’, not by posting share? (Though of course, the irony is that I’ll soon finish this post and share it.) Will my four kids, who launched themselves in the world and at times ignored the tether of my cell phone – probably because I was bugging them like crazy, or they were up to deeds I wouldn’t approve of – will they recall the time when there was no little beep, beep and ding, ding in their purse or pocket, and how if they were out with a person, say me or their dad or each other, they were really just with them. Was there more daydreaming back then? Do they daydream between texting, and checking facebook posts and watching YouTube videos? Do I?

To read Text Me, Love Mom – the book – go to http://www.amazon.com/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712 or http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

Seventeen Year Olds Do Stupid Shit

Mid-January and I’d be so happy to steal away to my favourite latte shop, bring a hot one home to my little office, stare out at the winter white and brown back yard and get back to that novel I started way (seriously way) too long ago. But this wise guy that I’m married to insists that, having taken a good chunk of the last seven years writing and publishing Text Me, Love Mom – I should put some of my restless energy into sharing it (okay, promoting it) to all those folks out in the wide, wide world that I was writing it for. Readers are telling me that Text Me, love Mom is funny – funnier than I thought, as I was caught up in the drama of those four darn kids freaking me out with the insanity of ‘twenty-four being the new eighteen’ as they made their way in the world. Read Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest and you’ll find the funny bits, but I decided this January morning to offer up a more dramatic ‘teaser’. The chapter is called ‘Teenage Runaway’ and begins with this great quote from my sassy youngest kid –

“You and dad are really the wrecking ball of all of our outlaw, runaway fantasies. Why couldn’t you jerks go and be crack addicts or religious fanatics so we could have excuses to live on the wide open road?”

– Lily

This is a story of all the ways and times my kids left home, but there is a chapter I thought best to leave out until Lily granted me her permission to put it in. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “It will add drama. I’m happy to supply some drama. Just as long as you remember in the telling of it, that was then. This is now.”

This is the story of Lily running away — only she, of course, never calls it that. Much to her chagrin, the rest of the family does. I try not to think about it too often, the way you do with times in your life when you are so terribly off balance. In fact, those sixty odd, uneasy days when Lily ran away were the first time we had a completely empty nest.

For twenty-three years, one month and twenty-nine days, I was a mom with children living at home. In the early autumn of her seventeenth year, Lily was going to be the last kid still residing with her dad and me. After a summer of living with us and doing lucrative summer jobs in Calgary, both Cole and Hudson had returned to the coast. Hudson had moved in with a bunch of guys in Victoria, and Cole, elated to be starting a film production program in Vancouver, was renting a room in the house Zoë and her boyfriend lived in. As I look back on it all, there had been some foreshadowing of Lily’s departure before she left home in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.

To be fair, Lily would tell it differently. She woke me up at two a.m., putting her face up close to mine to whisper that she couldn’t find her social security card and needed it for a new job she was applying for early the next morning. She went on to explain to me in my groggy haze that she was going to stay over at a girlfriend’s near the job’s location. I stumbled out of bed, despite her telling me not to. Standing in the light of the hallway, Lily told me she loved me and gave me a long hug, apologizing for disturbing my sleep. You are not a mother for twenty-three years, one month and twenty-nine days (Zoë’s age) without knowing something is bloody well up when that sequence of events takes place, but somehow I fell back into bed and had the last restful sleep I would have for weeks…

– poster by Shea Proulx and Creativision.

Hey, come make a laughing, oohing and awhhhing crowd around me…

Never done this before – a little bit nervous about being that person that no one wants to make eye contact with standing behind a table full of crisp new books in Chapters. If you’re my friend I know you’ve read Text Me, Love Mom, but do you want one for your mom, sister, wife, dad, sobbing woman across the hall, … you know, that person who can’t quite get a handle on the kids booking it from home?

Readers keep telling me the book’s funny – some of my family’s sketchy adventures are humorous – in hindsight, others required an extra strand of worry beads.

I’ve been lucky to be able to launch my book in my hometown, Calgary, then east to Toronto and Rye, New York, then zig zag west again to Victoria and finally Vancouver – where my most humorous offspring did a comedy gig to introduce me. Biggest lesson learned – North American favourite book launch fare – chocolates. But tomorrow – Thursday Nov. 27th from 1 to 6 pm. I’ll be signing books at Chapters Chinook Centre, a mall that holiday shoppers have already descended on. I’ve come upon those authors at their stations and tried to guess with quick sideways glances whether I might want their cherished tomes, before stepping up to their table. Planning my stint behind my own stack of books, I feel differently – don’t be afraid of me, just come visit so I don’t feel lonely. Let’s just chat – about anything, the predicted crazy snow storm, our endless holiday shopping lists, and okay – maybe this stage of parenting where the kids have taken off and now you’re excited for the noise and chaos of them coming home for Christmas. Just saying.

It’s A Small, Familiar World for Text Me, Love Mom

It’s a small, familiar world. I’ve been fortunate to be able to launch my book Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest in my hometown Calgary, Alberta for my crew of family and friends, and in Toronto for the eastern folk, AND even in Rye, New York – a little apple just down the road from the big apple. One of my BFF’s, Michelle Christopher, was instrumental in arranging an exciting ‘premier’ launch at Calgary’s Glencoe Club. My nerves were a bit on edge as the room filled up with familiar faces. But the most familiar, my two daughters, Zoë and Lily, were there to read from Text Me, Love Mom with me – the audience giggled and grinned in just the right places, as we did a mother-daughter volley of their leaving home adventures and my hovering mom reactions.

A week later Lily flew to Toronto with me – just a two hour time difference, but we woke each other up at five am and whispered about our Eastern insomnia, which left us a bit punchy during our sight seeing. We were looking for that ‘big lake’. We could feel the breeze off it, but darn it, sight seeing close by we couldn’t find Lake Ontario until we almost fell in. The team at my publishers, Iguana Books, and Aunt Bonita and my big sister, Gail, surpassed my expectations in bringing in a crowd for Lily and I to entertain with the comical emails from the ‘my baby goes to Rome chapter’.

I was over-the-moon when Suzanna Keith, my husband’s cousin’s wife, and market and media sales person extraordinaire agreed to launch Text Me, Love Mom in her home to an audience of her talented friends and co-workers. (Read her blog at http://techandtravelmom.com/) Fifty woman from all walks of life; journalists, lawyers, yoga instructors, bankers, and lots of moms, mingled in her living room for an evening of wine, cheese and chocolates (big hit) – and then applauded Kristina Bicher’s (http://www.kristinabicher.com/about) vivid and moving poetry from her book, Just Now Alive, and laughed and gasped at the exploits of my son Cole’s first sketchy trip traveling around the U S of A …and my attempts to track him via texts.

Three launches down – two to go – I’ll take the book to Canada’s west coast and launch it in Victoria and Vancouver in November. (Can I keep saying launch?) I’m still shaky before I read, but I don’t have to be. Us moms seem to ‘get’ each other. We’ve hovered and helicoptered – at least the media says we have – but the experience of letting them go off to grow up when you really want to hold on tight, is universal. Home in Calgary, down east, or in Rye, New York – everyone knows a sister, a friend, or the colleague across the way – who is eager to be comforted, and I hope entertained by reading about getting through this next stage of parenting.

Text Me, Love Mom is available at Chapters Indigo online, http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/text-me-love-mom/9781771800716-item.html ,Iguana online – http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-kindle-edition/ , and in the UK at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712 or any of your favourite on-line book sellers as well as Pages, Shelf Life Books and Owls Nest Books locally.

Closing Summer – Text Me, Love Mom

At the end of summer, I’m asked, often enough to make it remarkable, did you close up the cottage? I imagine myself dressed as if from another era, maybe a kerchief on my head, pulling heavy canvas sheets over the furniture, putting up storm windows, whatever that entails, and boarding up the doors. So the question amuses me. Still, though we don’t ‘close’ our retreat, we do close something when September rolls around all too quickly.

Septembers are different then in years gone by. Our kids are scattered now. The boys are in Vancouver, one making the September trek back to school to study film production, and using his midnight hours to work with his brother producing an inquisitive documentary about youth culture.

Our daughters are here in the city, the youngest launching Midnight Train Photography (http://www.midnighttrain.ca/) and the eldest did buy the new September backpack – for her small daughter to bounce around in circle time, and learn the ‘clean up’ song with Miss Jenny at playschool. All six of us manage to reunite at Christmas, but it’s at the lake in the summer where we jubilantly celebrate family time – with campfires, and lazy hot days on the boat, and mixing it up with the tiny ones with buckets and pebbles on the shore.

We still try to make it to the cottage on the B.C lake for a respite from city life, on a few winter long weekends. So while we don’t close the cottage in early September – there’s no denying that we close ‘summer’. The dock is hauled up to the beach, where the stretch of pebbles will only get longer as the lake creeps back, the red canoe is tied up high in the trees, the fire pit covered from winter rain, the lawn chairs that had been circled around it on super- moon nights, hauled inside – along with a bundle of wiener and marshmallow roasting sticks.

Making the long drive out late in the year, we arrive in the dark and use the still ‘open’ cottage, huddling around the fireplace, stamping our feet until the place warms up to provide a cozy refuge from winter, but outside – we will have closed up the season of summer. I’ll miss the kids and send them that message, Text Me, Love Mom. If this blog resonates with you during these shortening September days, you will enjoy my recently released book – Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest – available at Pages Books, Owls Nest Books, and Shelf Life Books in Calgary or your favorite online book seller. Welcome to Autumn.

September Takes My Breath Away

The leaves start to drop. The air is fresh. A school playground fills with shouting kids, and pick-up soccer games – and I feel melancholy, but on the edge of excitement, too. More than January, isn’t September the time of new beginnings? New grade school? College and university? Parents and kids fill backpacks with crisp notebooks and coloured pencils, then head to the malls looking for squeaky new runners? There are anticipatory trips to Ikea to deck out tiny dorm rooms or studio apartments full of furniture with funny Swedish names.
But there’s boo hooing all across the country too, for all those kids heading out the door with hockey duffles converted to super suitcases, and back packs hiding that favourite worn out stuffie, or that last pair of sandals hopeful for another month of warm weather?

I have four young adult children who are just now getting used to my having written a book about this next stage of parenting, about all those Septembers – those goodbyes until Thanksgiving. When Zoë, the eldest, left home, her copies of Love In the Time of Cholera, Harry Potter, and Dragonquest gone from the shelves, her colorful collection of shoes gathered from the closets, and her vanilla-scented products stripped from the bathroom, I searched the self-help sections for a manual on how to let go. Now that I’m a true empty nest-er, it seems a bit odd. After all, I still had three hyped-up teens in the house. One of them leaving home should have given me a little more room to breathe. But it didn’t. It took my breath away.

I was able to relive it all, writing Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two boys, One Empty Nest. (Hey kids – I gave you pseudonyms – relax. Nobody knows who this Zoë, Cole, Hudson and Lily that I write about are.) If you’ve been following my erratic blog, I’d love it if you check out my book. It’s been one hec of a ride. And if one of yours has packed up and will be spending winter and spring in another part of the country, or maybe another country – it’ll be okay. Really.

A hug that lasts until Thanksgiving –

It’s the strangest thing, having written this book over too many years of my kids coming of age. (What does that mean ‘coming of age’, really?) And odd to have made it through another ‘stage of parenting’ and to have detailed it all – the first big good-bye that had to last until Thanksgiving, and with the next kid – the debate over the ‘gap’ year, which wasn’t really a debate at all – at almost eighteen he’d made his decision – he was going to be a liftie, then counseling another one, who’d never even gone to summer camp, through hating residence life while considering an ashram instead, and finally, giving up managing the fussy youngest, who defied management, on an Italian exchange. Somehow the four of them guided each other, and I learned to lose my hold on them all, eating grilled cheese with their dad in a too calm house. Now Text Me, Love Mom – Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest (the book) is out there and I hope it will ease parent’s apprehension about sending their progeny into the wide, wide world. Love to hear your thoughts. Did it make you hold on tight to the child you also have to say the first long goodbye to? Are you going to buy it for your mom so that she can see what sketchy situations other people’s kids get in and out of? True, I’ve hovered and helicoptered but there are days when their journeys have lifted my spirits and I’m optimistic that the book will lift yours, too. It’s available from Iguanna Books and all your favorite online book sellers.

TEXT ME, LOVE MOM – the book is out!!

It’s Happened! – Text Me, Love Mom – Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest is available from all your favourite online booksellers or from:

http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-print-edition/
http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-epub-edition/
http://iguanabooks.com/books/text-me-love-mom-kindle-edition/

My four kids have moved out into the wide, wide world. Now I’ve been the recipient of the text that said simply, “Mom, I’m lonely.” Or the more practical, “How much milk do you use to scramble two eggs?” much preferable to the famous, “Mom, it’s all gotten sketchy. Can you help?” There has also been the late night text, “Mom, you awake?” before taking part in a long conversation from the dark living room.
Back up you kids, I want to run through that all again. Except for that bit, oh and then there was that other adventure we could give a miss too, and of course, the time Lily ran away. I’ve wrapped it into a heartfelt tale of letting go when you really want to hang on tight. If you’re getting ready to send off an offspring, or are anticipating that – Text Me, Love Mom – Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest is the book for you this summer (or your friend…or your mom or …) The book was written through bouts of apprehension, strict counseling, and therapeutic laughter as I tried to satisfy my deep need for correspondence by tapping into my phone, “Text Me, Love Mom.”

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