The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 6 years to get that many views.
When I was a little girl, four or five, I asked Santa for a ‘walking doll’. I don’t remember sitting on the old guy’s lap – maybe my mom had written a letter for me, but clearly a request had been made. I woke with a start on Christmas Eve, and thinking it was already morning, I ran down the hall in my pajamas, stopping short at the entrance to the living room and peeking around the corner. Nothing can erase that moment, even now all these years since, for what I saw was my dad arranging presents under the tree and there front and center – was the unwrapped wonderful ‘walking doll’. I slid back into bed unnoticed, but absolutely delighted – not at all traumatized that Santa had blown his cover. Surely it was the jolly old elf who left the doll for my parents to display, and now I would be able to play with her in the morning, and all the mornings after that.
My mom wanted us kids to use our imaginations so she didn’t want us to have any of those crazy high-tech battery operated toys. The beauty of the tall hard plastic ‘walking doll’ was that her arm bones were connected to her leg bones by some mysterious inner wires, and so when you lifted an arm and moved it, her lovely flat footed leg took a step – no batteries involved.
‘Walking doll’ hasn’t fared too well over the years – at the hands of my two brothers and umpteenth male cousins she’s somehow suffered damage my sisters and girl cousins wouldn’t have inflicted. A blinking eye has been pushed into its socket ,and some horrible boy shot her right foot with a BB gun (back in the day when boys shot BB guns).
Since my own kids left home I’ve kept a few cuddly baby dolls for visiting little ones to play with and even a soft plastic one that never loses its sweet soft- plastic smell. And of course, I’ve kept ‘walking doll’ on a shelf in the basement – beside my own grown daughter’s fancy porcelain faced Anne of Green Gables doll.
Recently, seeking order before the house fills with family for Christmas, I did another overhaul of great magnitude of the junk stored in the basement and vowed ‘walking doll’ needed to go. It was rule #1 in the decluttering handbook – if you are not going to use it or display it, let it go. Those anti-clutter gurus dictate that I’m supposed to accept that even special gifts have played their role and to be content to hang onto the memories, but not the item taking up space and gathering dust. So I was determined to give ‘walking doll’ up, to tuck her into a bag of used kid’s clothing and take it all to a local charity. (Now I don’t actually believe a charity will want to pass along low tech walking doll with her matted hair and busted eye and foot, but I could never pitch her into the garbage myself.) Somehow the bag of clothes went and walking doll is still here.
Dusted off, with her hair fluffed up, she sits bleary- eyed on a bench in the front hall. I have a fuzzy plan to let her sit under the Christmas tree one more time amongst the glitter and lights. It must be the magic of the holiday season, that makes me hope that maybe Santa will hop out of the chimney (if we had one), pop her into his sack and take her back to where they take the broken toys, and I won’t have to play a guilty hand in letting dear ‘walking doll’ go.
I’m not freaked out about my age. I worried more turning thirty-nine than I did fifty. Thirty-nine seemed the end of youth. No kidding. At fifty, while I sometimes long for my mom on Sunday mornings to be making pancake breakfast in my kitchen, complete with juice in silly little glasses, I get that I’m the matriarch in the house. My first kid left home when I was – just a sec – math is hard for me when I haven’t slept all freak’en night –eighteen plus twenty-five equals forty-three – holy shit (excuse the language, I’m tired and cranky) was I only forty-three? These days women are having babies at the same age that I was all boo hoo over mine packing her bags – no wonder I’ve been blogging on that subject forever.
Where was I? Right, I’m not upset that I’m fifty – something-in-the-first-half-of-the-fifties.
Okay you guessed it – it’s this menopause bit that has me feeling crazy. (Acting crazy?) And somehow it seems aside from information gleaned from all those stupid email jokes with pot bellied old ladies with saggy boobs threatening their ill-prepared husbands, I don’t have the hard facts on this hormonal upheaval. I kept meaning to buy a book about it – seriously, this isn’t a dumb menopause joke – but in all the hundreds of times I was in a bookstore, I forgot. Right now I want to mention something really basic, almost intuitive, that I couldn’t remember the other day, but I can’t remember what that was. I did finally buy a book, and somewhere in the pre-amble to how for the next few years my life would be wacked, it told me I’d have trouble staying on task, and true enough I have, so much so that I haven’t been able to read the manual.
Just after I had that daughter of mine who left home eons ago – and is currently hormonally challenged herself – but at least she gets a baby out of it – I ran off to the mall for baby nail clippers and rubbing alcohol for that nasty umbilical cord bit and left her with her daddy. I thought the boys (boys, not men, I was just a girl back then) were staring at my voluptuous-as-never-before breast feeding body (I actually felt like a cow), but was shocked to look down and see I was leaking milk through my light cotton dress. Being almost the first of my friends to have kids – no one had informed me about how I might leak while out in the mall. I could never figure out how I missed that fun fact of how being a new mommy involved having boobs with no self control. And now I can’t figure out why I don’t know much of this menopause stuff. Yeah, I guess I always imagined that we get hot and fat and can grow mustaches. But where are the women warriors that are supposed to inform me about all this not sleeping (leading to hormonal blog writing), the ridiculous benign, yet annoying, restless legs, the lost of nouns and names and the further hindrance of my limited ability to do math.
And what was the evolutionary purpose I wonder, as the moon continues to rise on a November morning with me wide awake at 3:56 a.m.? It had to be that back in the day, having outlived our reproduction purposes the grand plan was that, not sleeping, we would wander out of the cave to rub sticks together and be eaten by a dinosaur – leaving more berries and wild animals for the younger women (my timeline might be skewed but you get the picture.)
Sometimes I see a women near my age who looks serene and calm, or maybe even a little giddy. And I think – she’s done, she’s been through it and come out on the other side, maybe she’ll tell me the brand of cream I can buy at the health food store that I can rub on my forehead and I’ll be able to remember the names of my four kids again. Help me, women friends out there in blog-o- (oh, God – I can’t remember how to spell what I want to say, my spelling was never top notch but it’s leaving me with my math and my nouns) okay, tell me just this, this could go a long way – how do I sleep again, like a baby (well, not my daughter’s baby) but those other babies that sleep all through the night?
Is it over stated to say it is a glorious fall day? Glory is in the air. ‘Glory’ – (Webster’s definition) ‘something marked by beauty or resplendence, as in a perfect glory of a day.’
Neighborhood kids that went to school wearing new fall cardigans and jeans will be coming home to put on shorts and run barefoot. Still, a news story reported that the weather is going to change shortly and the s- word is coming. The reporter said it that way – the S-word.
It was enough reason to change into my gardening clothes and bring in the harvest. I can harvest my teeny weenie vegetable garden in a couple of hours. Maybe vegetable patch is a better way to describe what I have going at the top of the yard.
I planted potatoes in the spring for the simple joy of digging them up – it’s like a game of hide and seek. A kid from the coast might like to chase clams on a sandy beach, digging into the wet sand where they see a spray of salty water spurt up. A kid from the prairie has to make do with digging up spuds. But it’s a sport to see what’s down there in the dark earth, hiding from the slugs and weather. With my measly three dozen potatoes piled on the kitchen counter I considered letting the whole vegetable patch be poppies and sweet peas next year – maybe just a corner designated for the rhubarb. Not being a big fan of rhubarb, even baked into a sweet strawberry pie, I could take it or leave it, but I love the way the phallic shoots pop up first, announcing spring.
Contemplating what other flowers I might add to the mix I started to unearth the carrots, pleased that the green tops were pulling out of the ground with the orange spears still attached. Suddenly the farmer genes that my grandparents passed along were winning out – I knew that I would poke a small variety of seeds into the ground again next May. It wasn’t the sight of the muddy carrots, that convinced me to continue – it was the sharp sweet scent, a scent you can’t quite pay money for at the grocery store. A scent that made me think of being seven-years-old and my mom washing garden carrots off with the hose and treating us to the first ones big enough to warrant pulling out on a hot summer’s day.
My Grandmother – Nanny – to all our family, started farming on her own homestead at age sixteen when she married my grandfather. And after they retired to town, she tended a gigantic backyard garden brimming with peas and beans, carrots and onions, beets and raspberries – until she was ninety-four-years old. She saved money by canning and freezing her bounty. I carry on the gardening tradition in my two small raised beds, even though my little effort probably costs me more in seeds and water than it saves over the half dozen meals it supplies.
I put away the shovel, rinsed off some of the small sweet carrots, and sat on the grass in the late afternoon sun to crunch on them. The planting, tending and harvest are comforting rituals – marking one season passing before the long winter and the anticipation of the spring to come. But right then, I relaxed on the lawn that will soon enough be white with snow and embraced the glory of the autumn sun.
In response to reading melancholy blogs from parents experiencing withdrawal from kids gone away to college and university, I promised to re-post a couple of those learning curves of my own. So here is PHONE-LESS IN SAN FRANCISCO
Seven P.M. on a Sunday night my twenty-year-old daughter calls, obviously near tears. “Someone stole my phone,” she cries. “I feel so cut off without it.”
But she is on a phone, one the cell company she’s been dealing with, has given to her. Born in 1959 myself, it takes me a minute to catch up. It’s not the phone, it’s the information in the phone. “I feel like I have to start over meeting people, making contacts. I feel so alone again, Mom.”
“Honey, honey, I get that you’re upset. But those people will call you. You’ll get your numbers again.”
“Mom, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve done this enough to know lots of those people were never going to call me.” What she’s done enough, is move around, this daughter of mine. This is the third time in her young life that she has by choice surrounded herself with absolute strangers – situations where she had to work to have even a single friend. From our home in Calgary, at age sixteen, she bravely did a high school exchange in Rome, Italy – isolating herself further by having to learn Italian. Her siblings went to school on the west coast, but she headed east to Concordia University in Montreal. Now, trading another cold Canadian winter for a foggy one, she was taking part in Concordia’s school abroad program by doing a year at SFSU in San Francisco. “People here have their own friends. I’m the new one. I have to call them,” she explained further.
I was alone in our renovated, too big house, when she’d called. Her dad had taken two of our nephews to an early hockey game. The weather outside was shifting, from a Indian summer to light flurries. Earlier I’d been in the yard pulling down sweet pea vines and raking leaves, and wishing I was cooking a Sunday dinner like some of my friends would be, for kids who stayed in the city for jobs and school.
“What are you doing right now, Mom?” she asked quietly.
“Missing you guys. Dad’s gone to a hockey game. I was going to make toast but the breads gone moldy.
“Mine too,” she said. “My bread’s gone bad, too.”
“I guess we need each other to finish a loaf of bread,” I said, from where I watched the sky turn dark outside the living room.
“Yeah, we do. I miss you guys so much.”
“You’ll get your numbers back, Lily. You’ll run into people. And some friends will call. It just seems bad now. I’ll email you Zoe’s and Hudson’s and Cole’s and your cousin’s numbers.”
“Will you do it now?”
Of course, I told her, yes, I’d do it right away. And I would add a note to her email, about how brave she was, and how I knew the next time we talked she would be okay again, having found her friends.
Both of my daughters have struggled through long distance relationships with boyfriends. Our eldest daughter, Zoe, was away starting university in Vancouver in her lonely (with roommate but no big family) apartment and she and the guy she’d left behind pined for each other through long distance phone calls – until it just didn’t seem like the right mix. My youngest daughter, Lily, was later off on the opposite side of the country discovery Quebec and Montreal and devotion to studies in a little studio while working her way into, and out of, a relationship that started long distance – and ended that way. Both girls tell me long distance is hard. Their dad and I did it too, decades ago, so I know that’s true, but sometimes you get lucky.
It is fall, the trees are golden, the sun is warm and all my four kids live away now. I miss them the most Sunday afternoons when their dad and I consider a bike ride or a drive in the country with not much thought to Sunday dinner. I come from the tradition of Sunday dinner and if any of them are home I try to do it up right. I’m okay now – after their long and gradual departure from our too big, too quiet nest. And now we’re the ones engaged in long distance relationships. I have friends who are melancholy because their kids have just recently left home for places in the city. And I’ve been reading September blogs from women – strangers to me, who are pining for their recently departed kids. For both types of parents, who I know reminisce for a September of grumbling about buying kids new gym shoes or calculators, and the morning chaos of getting a family out the door, I’ve decided to re-post my first few ‘letting go’ blogs.
I set up my wordpress blog two years ago while I worked at writing a book about all the crazy ways my kids left home – four kids – four different pursuits – one stunned mom. I was still pining over the firstborn’s swift departure, and only starting to see the humor in the second’s being held at the Canada/U.S border with all his belongings in a plastic garbage bag, at the same time confused about whether it would be a positive or negative for our third child to enter an ashram, when our youngest, a sensitive homebody, left to spend five months in Italy. It is about how during all that our family of six, learned to disconnect, discovered independence, (sometimes scaring the crape out of both parents) and how we all found new ways of being close. Text Me, Love Mom – Sending Your Kids Into The Wide, Wide World – the book is finished. To go with this ‘kids leaving home’ season I’ve decided to look back at the days when Zoë, our eldest of four was first living away from us – over the mountains, beside the ocean – far from our home, and I was afraid she would fall in with west coast nudist, vegans, (which she did) and never look back….
IS THERE A PATCH FOR THAT?
So we had our babies young by today’s standards. While mini-SUV’s stuffed with our peers offspring were trucking between Sunday music recitals and vogue over-the-top children’s birthday parties – my husband, Will, and I had already survived hip hop concerts in our basement and read the riot act at a host of eighteenth birthdays for young-adults-gone-wild. Of course, I didn’t feel that young. While my same-age friends were doing espressos to make it through the day, after getting up in the night with the little one’s bad dreams and winter colds, I needed a daily fix of latte and chocolate cake because one of my kids hadn’t returned a phone call in two days and another one would be calling incessantly because the road trip he was on had gotten a little sketchy.
Life is a journey and all that. But during what part of the journey was it easiest to deal with colic and a latent thumb sucker, and when have we learned all the skills necessary to convince a sixteen-year-old that they have to take pure math and that all the kids who say they’ve had sex really haven’t? I was only forty-two when my oldest daughter left our chaotic home in Calgary. I can see now that I was guilty of stalking Zoë with emails and phone calls, though it’s hard to believe I had time for stalking while still immersed in patrolling two teenage boys’ covert activities, and being a choir-mom for my youngest.
I had all these cooing babies that became boisterous teens – to fill our home and hearts and consume my time, patience and energy. For years and years, I had never thought much about them moving out and how my heart would deal with that. It was what was supposed to happen – the launch from the nest.
Zoë found her way to leave home with her copies of Love in the Time of Cholera, Harry Potter, and Dragon Quest gone from the shelves, her colourful collection of shoes gathered up from the closets, and the vanilla scented products stripped from the bathroom. Were my parents just as stunned and confused to have a child slipping out of their grasp and away from their influence? The media would have us believe that we have overindulged, overprotected and generally, now that parent is a verb, over-parented. Could this explain why I suffered from the jitters when one by one, all too quickly, my children dispersed and I desperately wished I could visit my local pharmacists and buy a patch to help ease me off them. What, I wondered, would be released for not NRT (nicotine replacement therapy), but rather CAHRT (children at home replacement therapy)? A chemical that could create the sound of their cell phones chirping incessantly, or of the front door creaking and them downloading a movie at two a.m., or produce the irritation caused by the sight of their chaotic rooms, or imitate the sensation of pleasure when one of them slowed down long enough to wrap their arms around me in a hug?
An astute observer would recognize that, though I was attempting to pull myself together, I was unable to concentrate on a task and was lumbering back and forth from one activity to the next. Bewildered, I felt like a mother bear I had seen in a film whose cub had been taken away too early. She had rolled her head from side to side, and clumped through the forest in a distressed fashion. Learning to deal with my first strayed cub my heart pounded, my sleep was uneven and I couldn’t concentrate to complete a task.
My kids say I could start my own lending library with my vast collection of parenting tomes, yet there was a void of information to guide me through these turbulent times, starting with the spring day that I scrunched up the envelope so I could see through its window that my daughter had been accepted at a university across an entire mountain range from home, until I realized I had worked myself out of a position with which I was damn comfortable.
They left home in the order they were born. Not enough time passed between Zoë, the oldest, moving out and Lily, the baby, phoning from a crowded European city to tell me how hard it was to find a place to cry out loud, the way she preferred to cry. Back up you kids, I thought. I want to run through that all again.
Tell me, how can it be that my husband wants to go back to the cottage this weekend and take the motorboat out of the water. As usual, as is my role, I protest. “No, no, no, it can’t be time to take the boat out. Summer is hardly over.”
It was only a month ago that we had sixteen people at the cottage, some bedding down on air mattresses or couches, others wondering if they could sleep in the boat, rocking on the water through the night. And a few weeks after that we had loads of folks again, and in exasperation of emptying the dishwasher another time from meals of fresh buttery corn and juicy burgers and failed popsicles – I declared – “When will this end?”
And then it did.
Come back, you summer revellers. I don’t want to put the floaties away and stack the outside chairs and tie up the canoe against the rising water of next spring.
Let’s squeeze our eyes shut from the smoky fire and then squint into the night sky at the mid- summer comets. Let me get mildly upset that someone’s used my beach towel in their impatience to dry off from a swim so that they could slice the last peach in the box, before dribbling it with cream.
I want to not be able to decide between reading my book on the dock (yes, that silly book), and chatting with my visiting kids and their gregarious friends, or trying again to make those popsicles.
Even more so I want to take another solo early morning kayak ride on the lapping lake, watching in awe as the osprey flies over.
And so I wish now, that with each swim I had stayed in the lake even longer, floating on my back, adrift in water that was ever so, never so warm.
Hey, while Grandma’s trying to catch her breath – I’m writing this on her iPhone to let you know what’s going on here, Mommy, but first I have to shout at Grandma, “No, No!” because there is a tiny piece of blueberry stem in my breakfast and she will come remove it from my presence. You know how I hate anything nasty like that cluttering up my highchair tray. I’ll digress, Mommy, to tell you I have Grandpa trained, too. Yesterday he found out some other grandfather has his grandson call him ‘Bronco’, so decided he wanted to be called ‘Cool Guy’. I say it and he’ll watch the ‘puppy’ movie with me another fantastic time. 
So the morning I found you’d left me, your two-year-old sweet baby girl, to go reclaim your misspent youth at that music festival for what? Five sleeps? – I was fine, really. I had my cousin to hang with and the other Nana and Papa before I got plopped in the car with this Grandma and caught up with some zzz’s all the way to the city. Grandma’s first stop was Toy R Us – what’s with you never taking me there? I think she was nervous when she saw my eyes bug out – she bought another potty and had me packed out of there in no time and over to Great Grandma’s (GG’s) and Great Grandpa’s so I could amaze them with my dexterity and climbing abilities and they could say over and over, “I’m just afraid she’s going to fall,” and encourage me to eat my dinner. Grandma didn’t want to let on that when I started to squawk the last twenty minutes of the three hour car ride (I mean really) she had passed me back a big old bag of potato chips and ruined my dinner.
The first night was hell going to bed without you folks. I started to cry – like seriously wail, and you won’t believe this Mommy, but somehow Grandma had left ‘Baby’ behind. Her and Grandpa started dragging other ratty old dolls up from their basement but Mom, Baby is Baby, no substitute was filling that void. But then ‘Cool Guy’ offered a movie and Grandma remembered you’d pulled the plug on my viewing ‘Bolt’ for the summer – the flick that I cleverly refer to as ‘puppy movie’ to help you all forget that the action packed animation is scary and that amazing puppy, Bolt, demolishes a ton of bad dudes. Well, that was the old folks solution to my frantic tears. Grandpa found it on his big screen TV. It was bliss Mommy, cuddling with them and watching puppy movie. Grandpa was such a fan of it that the next morning while Grandma ran out to buy me a big bucket of fat baby Lego and stock the fridge with my favourite healthy fruits and juices (like that lasted) Cool Guy and I watched puppy movie again.
Grandma’s been showing me off to her friends. It’s a pretty easy gig – she get’s me to say a few words that come out clearly, and you know, I show them that I know where my nose is (duh) and they are down on the blanket doing baby Lego with me or asking Grandma in a challenging way if she’s spoiling me with ice cream – and then she does. She had invited two grandma wanna-be’s-but-not-too-soon over passed my erratic bedtime and I know they were looking at us like the whole situation was out of control. But really, Mommy, it was late and I was bored with the fat Lego. She didn’t want me to watch puppy movie again (Cool Guy wasn’t home yet), they’d kiboshed my attempt at grabbing that glass ball dangling over the window seat (who makes a ball out of glass anyway), and I was so over toys. Someone came up with the ice cream idea and yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to say “all done” instead of mucking in it and pushing the dish off the tray, but honestly I was spent, and Grandma was frazzled. I knew if she’d just put me in the bath I could amuse her again.
Speaking of amusing people – the other great-grandparents came to see moi and were spellbound by my using Cool Guy’s iPad – iPad, iphone – it’s not rocket science – you scroll, you push, you tap – a baby could do it. Even more exciting – as time goes by Grandma lets me get into the cupboards she’s said no to earlier – so why wouldn’t I give that a go? Isn’t that what they’ll want from me when I’m older – persistence – going the extra mile? So finally I got to play with the glass candle holders and the fragile Easter decorations tucked away behind them.
Did I mention that people bring me presents – a new doll – so cute, but not Baby. Speaking of Baby – what’s this I keep hearing, something along the lines of, “do I understand about the new baby?” Seriously folks? Word here is that I’m too little to stress about a new sibling yet. Oh, and speaking of stress… Grandma gave up on the potty thing. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I like this new potty. She thought the other one wasn’t comfy. This one is so comfy and supposedly my using it for my business instead of perfectly acceptable diapers could have something to do with eating Smarties.
Hey, I can’t believe you’ve kept those from me too. I guess we’re even – you’re having a wild time at the music festival with Daddy and I’m kicking it up here with those chocolate bits of loveliness. It seems Grandma thought she could train me, but she handed over the Smarties when I whimpered at bedtime and she sort of whimpered herself about how she trained her four kids – you can train me, and good luck to you. I think it was a weak moment.
Today she took me out to visit another sweet grandma wanna-be… for more presents and you know it – ice cream. Grandma was super late getting there and I have to tell you, Grandma told this friend that she can’t believe she suggested to you, Mommy, that maybe you could do some of your art while I sleep. “As if!” she said to her ice cream serving friend. “I totally get that when this toddling ball of energy stops spinning circles all you want to do is catch your breath, or clean up the mess, or maybe for fun throw in the laundry and watch it go around,” Grandma said gulping back a glass of vino.
She brought me home and for dinner she let me pick and eat a zillion peas from what she calls her slug invested garden. After that I tried once more to stand at the top of the stairs to the lower level and shout what Daddy shouts at you when we’re all here together, “Zoe, are you coming?” Just hoping that you might be down there. That really got to the old folks – Grandma hugged me and told me “just two more sleeps” and Cool Guy said he’d watch puppy movie. They were both asleep before Bolt returned from his exile.
You two have fun – we are. But it will be blissful to snuggle with you and see ‘Baby’ again and get off this ice cream diet. Love you guys. XO Tessa (Grandma says I need an alias in case this is all too embarrassing later.
I wrote a blog about moving my youngest daughter to Montreal, a very short time ago. But maybe I was sleeping under a tree like Rumpelstiltskin because it appears that four years have gone by since I left her standing on the corner of St. Catherines and Rue Guy in front of Concordia University.
During that time she spend two years in one teeny studio apartment on De Maisonneuve Boulevard, did a year’s exchange at foggy San Francisco State University discovering that American’s are not, as she naively thought, very similar to Canadians, and a fourth year in an even smaller, though considerably newer apartment on Cote de Neiges looking far across at the Pont Champlain Bridge. Along with her studies she did two internships at popular youth culture magazines (the shamefully popular completely unpaid for internship).
I flew to Montreal with the whispers of approaching summer to help my daughter pack up and return to the west. Waking up in her studio on Cote de Neiges, with the sun deceptively warming the apartment through the window, I contemplated the basics of setting up and dismantling the belongings to support a happy, satisfied life. This subject is so much on my mind these days because of my own efforts at (here’s that tired old word again) – ‘decluttering’, as well as my exertions to help my parents rid themselves of some of what my mom feels would lighten her load. It had been a cool, even cold last bit of April, while we closed off this part of the life my daughter had in Quebec – during which she obtained her degree and blossomed from an eighteen-year-old girl, who I warned about street dangers and trusting strangers, to a twenty-two-year-old woman, who warned me as she left to say goodbye to friends, that she would return late and to just lock the door behind her.
I took careful notes when we first set up Lilly’s apartment, arriving on a red-eye flight from Calgary and driving a rental car directly to the Ikea in the suburbs. There we purchased the twelve dollar lamp and twenty-nine dollar desk, and the one hundred and twenty-nine dollar bed frame, along with two equally cheap stools to sit at the tiny counter in the galley kitchen-ish area, and one TV type table if she chose to eat on the half- a- couch and ottoman we found at Sears, while she watched a downloaded show on her computer (students don’t have TVs or land lines anymore.) And every summer and Christmas break we warned Lily about bringing too much back to Montreal from home, but still she accumulated a series of heavy coats trying to deal with the Quebec cold, the gift of the rice cooker, half a dozen pairs of stylish but hopefully warm enough boots, a tray of candles for the ambiance of warmth, two fans for the oppressive heat in the beginning and sometimes end of the term, a small library of books from her classes, portfolios full of edgy photographs from her Fine Art photography degree, as well of course, the cameras and equipment she didn’t start out with.
We had already packed and delivered to Greyhound Express three large plastic containers of the heavy items – books and boots and some dishes she was fond of, as well as her record player and records. Did I mention she had convinced us to purchase an actual record player here as a birthday gift and I could never dissuade her from adding to her load of Montreal possessions by carting Led Zeplin, Fleetwood Mac and Three Dog Night records from our basement collection every trip she took home to Alberta. Her posters, and collection of necklaces hanging on pin and LED flashing Virgin Mary light had been taken from the walls, we’d burned the candles down, the stools and little table and one chair sold on Craigslist, two book stands given away to an apartment neighbor, friends had come to claim some of the most intriguing prints, along with the most utilitarian warm clothes Lily was ready to part with, and her lonely cactus and one scraggly hanging plant. The guy she found to sublet for the remaining of the lease, got a steal of a deal on her bed and mattress and will never understand how she will miss her little half-a-couch.
Lily directed me to leave him the never used cake pans and muffin tins, saying, “See Mom, I told you four years ago I wasn’t going to become a baker.” True, in four years she became a accomplished rice cooker, but never a baker. Today we will eat out – having done a far better job of diminishing the contents of her refrigerator than the contents of her apartment that we will still have to show up with at the airline counter tomorrow. I’ve explained my strategy to Lily’s dad over the phone. Flying West-jet, each of our first enormous suitcases is complimentary, the second they will charge us twenty dollars for. Of course, then we will still have purses cleverly tucked into overstuffed backpacks, and carry on computer cases, probably with the last used towels falling out of them, along with a tube of rolled up prints and a flat package of the prints too precious to release to a week of travel on the Greyhound.
And if this is what she has lived with comfortably enough for four years what is it that I have filled my home with over a quarter of a decade? What are the precious goods, the necessary tools, the carriers of memory, and even the flotsam and jetsam, that surrounds me that couldn’t be sold to a few anxious buyers on Craigslist, tossed off to neighbors, packed into three small boxes on Greyhound and carried on a flight? 
Preparing to call the last Montreal taxi driver that I would converse with in a long while, I realized that as minimalist as we’d been, we still had a fair load for flying purposes. So, I decided, we must work at giving the appearance of lightness, of effortlessness – at that airline counter where they weigh things up. “Here we are, it is just her and me, and a few bags, nothing to get worried about, or charge us ridiculous amounts of money to bring. It is just us,” my attitude will say,” see – we are ethereal. We are light – so just us and a good part of the accumulations of a life of four years of growing up. That’s all. Just that.”
It’s spring, the weather is warming, the trees are budding a fresh happy green, and I want to start a campaign. It doesn’t have to be on every bus bench, or t-shirt, or go viral on the internet. It’s made up of two simple words, ‘Look Up’. Look Up. Look Up. Look Up. Though, my campaign has a subtitle – ‘Love the One You’re With‘. So right now, stop staring at your screen for a minute and smile at someone nearby. Smile at your partner. Smile at the person at the next table. The one right beside you at the transit station.
Didn’t you go out to a coffee shop to escape the loneliness of working at home? So let your eyes, and your humanity, drift away from focusing on your iPad. Take a break from texting on your cell phone. Look Up from the work, or play, that is keeping your attention on your laptop. Engage a stranger, if only with just a smile.
I am guilty, too. I have to wait to meet a friend at a restaurant, and I immediately reach for my phone. I hear that twinkly sound of ‘you’ve got a text’ and I’m immediately eager to see who is reaching out to me. “No, just Look Up”, I tell myself. The greeting will wait for me, if I just resist the urge to look down – away from the world unfolding around me, the toddler impressing his parents at the next booth, the waitress who might linger at my table, or I could gaze out the big window – see the golden setting sun, the small birds on the horizon, the row of purple tulips.
Perhaps I’m alone having a pick-me-up in a favourite coffee shop – what do I do? Voila, I reach for the comfort of my phone, to check my text messages, my email messages and maybe even Google the weather. Instead, I could resist the temptation to touch my cool perfectly weighted phone (thanks Steve) and smile at a stranger, or pause to connect with a silly comment about the weather, the way people used to – in the old days – sharing a thought with someone new. Worse is when we can’t resist the sneak a peak at the iphone when we’re not alone, but are with friends or family that we’ve sought out, or who have sought us out, to spend a few low-tech minutes of actual straight up human connection. That’s where the subtitle comes in – the ‘Love the one (s) your with’.
On a recent wet and windy day I stepped into that warm coffee shop to view the customers in the line-up, and those hunkered down at the tables with their half-sweet-non-fat-extra-hot-vanilla-what ever’s all looking down, hiding with their many sized screens. “Look Up,” was what I wanted to bravely call out. “Look Up and Smile.” 
Text Me, Love Mom 