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.
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.
So we’ve called it ‘the’ wedding for some time, as in I’ll have to do that before ‘the’ wedding, or let me get back to you after ‘the’ wedding. As so we did it – we had the much anticipated, highly celebrated, first wedding in our family of four kids and it went off swimmingly – with a few crazy watery challenges. Water was definitely a factor. My daughter and her good husband wanted to have a small-ish wedding at the Seabreeze resort, on a west coast destination called Hornby Island, amongst magnificent rock bluffs, grassy meadows and wide sandy beaches. Coming from Vancouver you take the BIG ferry, drive forty minutes and then board first one small ten minute ferry to Denman Island, cross Denman and then board your second small ten minute ferry to arrive on Hornby. Easy Peasy!
photos by Chris Ross
We all docked in a deluge of west coast rain. We tried like hec to get a ‘rain plan’ worked out with the resort. The normally hugely accommodating owners wanted us to display faith in the idea of sunshine. They told us it really “didn’t rain on their weddings” and put me off begging for some idea of an alternate course of action in case the beach we intended to hold the ceremony on was being accosted with waves. And guess what? It really doesn’t rain on their weddings. 
Slow autumn wasps came out in the golden sunshine and buzzed quietly among the guests, stinging a few people, including the poor, but brave little flower girl. Lovely candles were lit on the long tables, including a generously tall one on the speaker’s podium which the bride brushed by catching a ruffle on the shoulder of her dress with a small flame that two heroic aunties quickly doused with a bit of water. I assured my daughter that it was really very good luck to have your dress catch fire ever so briefly on your wedding day, and she believed me.
When you choose to get married at least two ferry rides away for most guests, and three for some, you take the risks that some important people might miss the ferry – like the young women we bribed to come be the bridal party hairdresser. Thank goodness she performed her hair- do magic quickly, and another aunt agreed to help out with some hair- do magic herself.
We had the bride, bridesmaids, flower girl and her mom, and the tiny ring bearer (the happy couple’s daughter) all tucked up in the car after an off-site photo session and while shooing a wasp from the car, realized we had misplaced the car keys (that’s us) – meanwhile back at the resort all the guests were waiting, as was the ridiculously delicious dinner – when suddenly voila – they were discovered on the floor of our rented cottage – right where the baby ring bearer had left them.
Loads of guests, including the bride and groom (honeymoon bound), after the magical weekend celebration were attempting to get off the island and return to where they’d come from, but were kept stranded on Hornby when a storm rocked the region and kept the little ferry from leaving until four in the afternoon – just of course, adding to the sense of watery adventure. 
That weekend it rained, it poured, it stormed – but from day break until the last song played on the day of ‘the’ wedding the sun shone brilliantly, in fact I saw the clouds part. The grasses blew ever so gently, and the blackberries glistened. The bride was stunning (hair done) and happy, the bridesmaids were delightful, as were the groomsmen. The groom was indeed handsome, happy and as fine as a prince. The flower girls and ring bearer were sweet as pie. The guests cheered, clapped and blew bubbles when the minister (another aunt) introduced the newlyweds. The resort treated us like royalty with fine food and service. The DJ’s were incredible with their musical selections – reading us like a book (a sultry romance novel). We dined, we drank, we danced. And danced and danced and danced. So we’ve had ‘the’ wedding. And what a wedding it was. 
Chris Ross photos
So we’ve called it ‘the’ wedding for some time, as in I’ll have to do that before ‘the’ wedding, or let me get back to you after ‘the’ wedding. As so we did it – we had the much anticipated, highly celebrated, first wedding in our family of four kids and it went off swimmingly – with a few crazy watery challenges. Water was definitely a factor. My daughter and her good husband wanted to have a small-ish wedding at the Seabreeze resort, on a west coast destination called Hornby Island, amongst magnificent rock bluffs, grassy meadows and wide sandy beaches. Coming from Vancouver you take the BIG ferry, drive forty minutes and then board first one small ten minute ferry to Denman Island, cross Denman and then board your second small ten minute ferry to arrive on Hornby. Easy Peasy!
photos by Chris Ross
We all docked in a deluge of west coast rain. We tried like hec to get a ‘rain plan’ worked out with the resort. The normally hugely accommodating owners wanted us to display faith in the idea of sunshine. They told us it really “didn’t rain on their weddings” and put me off begging for some idea of an alternate course of action in case the beach we intended to hold the ceremony on was being accosted with waves. And guess what? It really doesn’t rain on their weddings.
Slow autumn wasps came out in the golden sunshine and buzzed quietly among the guests, stinging a few people, including the poor, but brave little flower girl. Lovely candles were lit on the long tables, including a generously tall one on the speaker’s podium which the bride brushed by catching a ruffle on the shoulder of her dress with a small flame that two heroic aunties quickly patted it out. I assured my daughter that it was really very good luck to have your dress catch fire ever so briefly on your wedding day, and she believed me.
When you choose to get married at least two ferry rides away for most guests, and three for some, you take the risks that some important people might miss the ferry – like the young women we bribed to come be the bridal party hairdresser. Thank goodness she performed her hair- do magic quickly, and another aunt agreed to help out with some hair- do magic herself.
We had the bride, bridesmaids, flower girl and her mom, and the tiny ring bearer (the happy couple’s daughter) all tucked up in the car after an off-site photo session and while shooing a wasp from the car, realized we had misplaced the car keys (that’s us) – meanwhile back at the resort all the guests were waiting, as was the ridiculously delicious dinner – when suddenly voila – they were discovered on the floor of our rented cottage – right where the baby ring bearer had left them.
Loads of guests, including the bride and groom (honeymoon bound), after the magical weekend celebration were attempting to get off the island and return to where they’d come from, but were kept stranded on Hornby when a storm rocked the region and kept the little ferry from leaving until four in the afternoon – just of course, adding to the sense of watery adventure.
That weekend it rained, it poured, it stormed – but from day break until the last song played on the day of ‘the’ wedding the sun shone brilliantly, in fact I saw the clouds part. The grasses blew ever so gently, and the blackberries glistened. The bride was stunning (hair done) and happy, the bridesmaids were delightful, as were the groomsmen. The groom was indeed handsome, happy and as fine as a prince. The flower girls and ring bearer were sweet as pie. The guests cheered, clapped and blew bubbles when the minister (another aunt) introduced the newlyweds. The resort treated us like royalty with fine food and service. The DJ’s were incredible with their musical selections – reading us like a book (a sultry romance novel). We dined, we drank, we danced. And danced and danced and danced. And so we’ve had ‘the’ wedding. And what a wedding it was.
Now here is something that didn’t exist when I was home with babies – Stars and Strollers, the afternoon matinees just for parents ( and grandmas, and eager aunties, and friends) and – get this – babies. My daughter, Zoe, and my oh so adorable one-year-old granddaughter came to visit and we decided we had to give this a try. We picked a movie that we really wanted to see (maybe that was a mistake), which unfortunately was only playing way, way across the city (perhaps our second boo-boo) and headed off to meet a friend of Zoe’s and her one-year-old little guy, and to observe the darling chaos of it all. 
The movie was Bridesmaids and for a Wednesday afternoon there appeared to be a pretty big turn out of mostly new mommies and teeny weeny babies. I noticed a few grandmothers in the crowd, amongst the stroller pushers. My youngest daughter, Lily, wanted to see the movie, but not as much as she wanted to hang with her out-of-town tiny niece at the theater, so she was with our group, as well.
The lobby was a stroller-a-thon though the two women purchasing tickets ahead of me were being charged regular price for not having a under two-year-old with them (which is what the fine print on the Cineplex web site says would happen), but they successfully argued they should be entitled to the same discount the rest of us were getting for the inconvenience of being surrounded by all those babies. Now I have to say right off, if they really came to enjoy the movie, the constant interruption wasn’t worth the discount, but if they came to take in the sight of forty plus moms trying to take pleasure in a movie while nursing and changing and soothing and bouncing forty plus babies – now that was worth the price of admission.
Our driving across town had given grand-baby the chance for a solid nap so after a short period of calmly taking in the dimly lit room full of her baby peers, and then staring at the larger than life characters of Annie and Lillian on screen, she was ready to sit on mommy’s head, or travel from mommy’s lap to grandma’s lap to auntie’s lap and back again, while experiencing the new sensation of being fed little iddy bits of popcorn. None of the babies cried for very long, rather they all took turns at crying for short periods of time. Zoe and her friend were critical of the character development in the zany comedy, but who the hec knows how they could have possibly have followed the plot lines while keeping their babies entertained – though they and their movie going peers were all learning to be the mothers-of-all multi-taskers.
I figured twenty-one-year-old Lily would say that sitting amongst a roomful of wah-wah-wah-ing babies was a stupid way to watch a flick, but she loved her niece’s visiting her seat-side to press crumbs of sticky popcorn into her mouth, and insisted she was able to tune out the babies bawling over top of clever lines such as the bride, Lillian, asking her messed-up bridesmaid, Annie, “Why can’t you be happy for me and then go home and talk about me behind my back like a normal person?”
At the front of the theater was a changing table, a slightly lit-up spot where you would not miss a second of the soundtrack, but the audience had a clear view of you tending to your infants soiled diaper needs. We noticed only one man in the entire theatre, and when he was the one to come stand in that light and expertly change his baby, I know most the moms were watching this macho figure in his baseball cap rather than Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph and wondering if their own baby-daddy would be so bold? 
Stars and Strollers was an event, a gathering, shared camaraderie amongst a group of pretty new moms, allowing themselves – despite the squawking and wiggling of their infants – a bit of entertainment on a weekday afternoon. But I think I’ll go see Bridesmaids again – because I don’t feel like I’ve seen it yet.
Why was I always surprised by what it was like being the mother of this boy, Hudson – this almost man? I was driving him home from his second year at university. The term was finally over and I knew it had its up and downs, and that Hudson’s attention and focus had sometimes ebbed. But I saw first hand when I arrived to help him pack, that amongst his clothes, CDs and school texts, there were stacks of philosophy books, not required course material but books he’d picked up second-hand for pleasure reading because despite all resistance otherwise, he will always be a philosophical and reflective thinker who enjoys titles like Our Inner Ape, The Essence of Sufism, or On Being Free.
I was there staying with the relatives he boarded with during those last days and saw that he studied hard for his final two exams between the pull to visit a pub to say goodbye to friends he described as good guys, guys that he would miss. He was more mysterious about the girl he needed to see one more time.
Hudson had said he was looking forward to our road trip home. He even joked about it being a time to bond. Yet the mood was sober when we set out. He’d written his last exam that morning and I heard relieve and satisfaction in his voice immediately after, as he embraced the relatives he’d lived with, and together we left to meet one of his friends from high school and her young husband for a goodbye lunch. At age nineteen and twenty-three respectively, they were expecting a baby in a month, and were both excited and scared about the unplanned path their lives were about to take. Hugging his high school friend goodbye, her belly and the baby inside pressed against his own stomach, might have put the final touch of melancholy onto the mood he was in as we headed for the ferry.
We boarded a vessel two hours after reaching the terminal and consciously or not, spend most of the voyage apart, reading and watching the ocean waves on opposite ends of the ship. We spend that night in Vancouver with Hudson’s big sister, Zoë, and her boyfriend, in a house full of boxes and spilled belongings, because they were also packing up and switching residences as they were both starting Masters programs in the fall. They were thrilled to be making changes, but on that night they were weary and conversation was soft and slow in the dim, cluttered house. Hudson and I left Vancouver for Calgary the next morning, under a steady spring rain and a dull sky. Driving through the dampness along the long, straight highway to Hope, listening to my son’s choice of music, I actually wondered if his mood had changed so much so that he had given up the idea of enjoying the trip. A song came on that I particularly liked, Bowl of Oranges, “I like your music more these days,” I ventured. “I liked what you were playing yesterday at the ferry terminal, too.”
Sounding exasperated, and only slightly amused at my musical ignorance, he told me, “That was the same song, Mom. It’s by Bright Eyes. You always say you like Bright Eyes.” We gassed up the Durango and wound our way to a coffee shop in Hope. He ordered a yogurt, spinach salad and a water, while I justified my sugar and caffeinated choices of a brownie and cappuccino, as necessary for the road.
It was exiting from Hope where I took the wrong highway. I realized it in time to go back and still could have made better time by returning to the road leading to the Coquihalla Pass over the mountains. The wide, four lane surface would have taken us over the mountains in far less time. So what made me stay on the longer, winding two lane highway that curled through the towns of Spuzzum, Boston Bar, and Spences Bridge? My tired son wasn’t aware of my mistake and I took my time before I told him what I’d accidentally done. He didn’t react except to ask if I wanted to listen to a Bob Dylan documentary on the car’s DVD player. Sure, I said. Hudson had discovered Bob Dylan in his first semester of university. He had been away from home for the first time, experiencing residence life which he disliked, and his first west coast dark and rainy winter.
I must have discovered Bob Dylan spiritually for the first time in my youth, too. Via cell phone conversations our absent son had turned his sixteen-year-old sister Lily, who was of course, at home with us, onto Bob Dylan at the same time he made his discovery, and she had been downloading and buying all his works so that our house had recently filled up with – “ if I don’t get the girl I’m loving I won’t go down Highway fifty-one no more”. Lily set her CD alarm clock to wake her to Spanish Harlem Incident. After school it was House of the Risin’ Sun, It Ain’t Me Babe, and Like A Rolling Stone, and after she fell asleep at night I crept into her room to turn his crooning off.
A dappled sunlight broke through the clouds and the car crested the mountain top. I saw a small sign beside the road that said, ‘Jackass Mountain summit.’ Hudson was singing along with Dylan. My kids don’t mind telling me that I can’t sing, but this time there was no comment when I joined him, “Look out the saints are comin’ through And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.” The commentary continued, reviewers talking again about how Dylan resisted being pigeon holed, he didn’t like his songs to be considered protest songs. Listening, I noticed as we sped down the road, how even that high up in the mountains the trees were in spring bud.
“Hey Hud, isn’t it something,” I said, thinking back to the night before listening to Zoë talk about applying for a teaching position while she did her Masters, “ Can you imagine walking into university class and having someone as young as Zoë for your teacher?”
“Yeah, I can. I’ve always thought of Zoë as older. She’s my big sister.”
It wasn’t the response I’d anticipated. I’d hope to lead into a discussion about teaching being an option for Hudson. He always saw through me, and blocked my thinly veiled suggestions as if he was still playing defense on his high school football team. “Look Mom, I can’t think about going back to school. I know I’m not doing it this September.” He was clearly a frustrated philosopher and I felt I ruined whatever easy mood the music had brought us toward.
We stopped to stretch, and buy chips, water, and a pack of gum at a gas station in Spences Bridge. As we were walking out Hudson nudged me, “Weird, eh? Listen.” The gas station attendants were an old man and a teenage girl, and somewhere under the desk they had a radio on playing Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall. We stepped outside with an easiness between us again, talking about feeling goose bumps and what Dylan might think of the synchronistic occurrence.
Leaving town one of my favourite songs was being sung now on the DVD, or maybe just the one most imbedded in my memory. I sung out loud, though some of the words were guessed at or murmured. The road ahead of us looked like it was heading off the globe, the pavement met the horizon, and it seemed the car could lift off there and glide into the blue sky. “Isn’t it inspiring?” I asked over Dylan’s voice crooning, “I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it. Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.” I was worried about Hudson who wasn’t responding to my comment, unaware that he was considering the surrounding steel, gray cliffs and deep valleys and a wide river way below us before he said, “Yeah Mom, it is beautiful, isn’t it?”
It took a four-year-old’s birthday party for me to leave behind the malls and rush of Christmas preparations for a few lovely hours of a pass time I am oh-so passionate about. It’s an activity that I partake in during our long Canadian winter that calms me and makes me glow inside, despite the icy cold, and actually brings some melancholy early in March or April that winter weather is breaking up. The four-year-old was my daughter’s fiancé’s niece. Her birthday was a skating party, and while her uncle and mom assisted her in putting on brand new skates, I was lacing up my thirty-year- old skates for the gazillith time and already feeling the rush of pleasure my winter sport gives me.
Though neither of my parents skated themselves, on crisp winter days they’d drive us over to the rink and if the concession wasn’t open, they’d kneel over the snowy parking lot with the youngest of us five kids balanced on the edge of the car’s seat and tie or help tighten five pairs of skates. The littlest kids would be lifted up high over the heaped up snow around the pleasure rink and then set free to circle round and round the freshly shoveled surface. Somehow they’d taught my older brother and sister to maneuver over the ice, and then passed on the job of teaching me – to them. To this day I recall my siblings wool mitts holding mine and the two of them telling me together,” Push, push, glide. Push, push, glide.” Who knows which I enjoyed more, being the focus of my sister and brother’s attention, suspended between them on a snowy afternoon, or the exhilaration of a well balanced long glide?
If enough neighborhood kids showed up there might be a game of tag on skates, or the even riskier Red Rover. On the best days the concession would be open and music would be playing over crackly speakers so we could skate to Big Girls Don’t Cry, or You Are My Sunshine and warm up our numb toes in a basement room that smelled of sweat, wet rubber mats and watery hot chocolate. With a nickel we could treat ourselves to a thick sugary square of sponge toffee.
At the recent pre-Christmas birthday party the four-year-old’s uncle and my own daughter gave the little girl lessons with the historic push, push, glide and I took my first strokes of the winter across the even ice. The morning clouds were lifting, the sun was creeping over the horizon, and our breath puffed out in steamy halos. I listened to the swish, swish, then ‘tock’ sound of blades hitting against thick ice and thought, for this I will hang onto winter. Music came on the overhead speakers, Black Eyed Pea’s I Got A Feeling, the sound of 2010, not the sixties or seventies of my youth, but I was okay with that as my grown-up daughter left the others and joined me and together we push, push, glided around and around the rink until we could do just one more circle, and then one more again, before the minus twelve weather was too much for all our fingers and toes. New Year’s Resolution 2011 – Skate More…push, push, glide…push, push, glide. . .
Having our daughter Lily leave, at the age of sixteen, to live with an unknown family in Italy, as part of a foreign language immersion program was one of the biggest nest-departing challenges I’ve faced. Lily had never minded checking in with me and sharing what was going on. What I found hard to set boundries around was that when she told me details other kids would never divulge. I had a hard time not opening my mouth and attempting to guide her through her often impulsive, sovereign exploits.
Almost all of her contacts with home during her Italian Immersion program were through email. What she discovered about her peers in Calgary at that age was that out of sight was almost out of mind. As a result of that, I’d like to say I was treated to an almost daily email, but they were definitely not always a treat. At just barely sixteen, in such a unfamiliar situation, Lily needed guidance from me and her dad. My headstrong daughter didn’t always agree. Parenting loses a lot of its punch when you are a continent away from your child. When you say, “hang out with your host instead of that stranger you met on the bridge,” and your honest daughter tells you she isn’t going to comply with your rules, it is hard to enforce consequences.
So we bickered via email, I was forced to make great strides in the art of the consoling email, and we gave each other a sense of the life we were separated from, zapping our words across countries and oceans. Lily did tell me that she found a place to go to cry out loud – her preferred style of crying- and during those months she had reason to go there. Her older sister, Zoë, and I had a friendly wager about whether or not our sensitive, finicky Lily would last the full five months without sobbing that we had to bring her home. It was hard to determine the odds.
Text Me, Love Mom 