text me love mom

A toast to American Thanksgiving and Kids Coming Home

In honour of American Thanksgiving and the tradition of young adults coming home for the first long weekend from college, I wanted to share a glimpse into our household during the Canadian November reading break and the first time my eldest returned to the noisy house of siblings she’d left behind.  So I give you this from Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest – only the nest wasn’t empty yet – just reeling from the departure of the eldest…

And so we had Zoë with us for her short fall reading break.  On the Friday and Saturday nights the house filled up with family and three or four of her best friends.  But Sunday, close to dusk, each of my four kids trickled back home from separate outings.   From upstairs I could hear them talking softly in the living room.  Coming down I found them in the dark – the boys showing their affection for their sisters in their odd boy way.  They had dog piled on Zoë and Lily.  It was reassuring to witness them that way, like a big pile of puppies heaped on top of each other.

One of my few friends with children older than mine had warned me that Zoë would have changed.  “I know it hasn’t been long,” she said, “but trust me, she’ll be different, more grown-up.  You’ll see.”  I had been nervous.  I didn’t want her to change, or even grow up particularly.  I would still rather spend a small part of my evenings driving her to piano lessons or to her girlfriends’ houses instead of e-mailing her in Vancouver or fighting for phone time with her long distance boyfriend.  But my friend was right.  My eldest daughter was different.  Oh, she didn’t have a total epiphany or anything.  She didn’t say, “Mommy I’ve realized how burdened you’ve been looking after us four kids.  Put your feet up and let me vacuum up the nacho crumbs before I massage your tired shoulders.”

But she was different.  I noticed that the first evening she was back as we lingered around the table after dinner, bombarding her with questions. It was a look on her face, a quality it was hard to put my finger on, except to say that she had drifted away a little bit.  I had gazed around the room at the others, Cole and Hudson and Lily, and imagined us all reuniting after future ventures.  Zoë swore that she would travel to the far north someday, being captivated by the notion of a trip to Yellowknife of even Inuvik, whereas Cole insisted he was going to snowboard in the southern hemisphere in Queenstown, New Zealand.  Hudson was harder to pin down –I think he aspired to travel back and forth in time, and back then I wrongly viewed Lily as a home body.

christmas bird-1In the upcoming Christmas season I would be happy to imagine them all staying put.  I was going to pretend for the three weeks that Zoë would be home that she had never left.  We would decorate a too tall, slightly lope-sided tree together and Will would insist once more on putting up the pissed-off looking angel Zoë made in kindergarten.  I wanted it to be a holiday season full of my kids dog piling on top of one another, and watching Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, all of us singing aloud to the Sisters’ song –

‘All kinds of weatherWe stick togetherThe same in the rain or sunTwo diff’rent facesBut in tight placesWe think and we act as one‘ [1]

I intended to encourage Zoë to humor Lily and I, and come skating with us on the lake near their grandparent’s property, after which we three would go for steamers, before coming home to whip up a batch of date-filled butter tarts for Christmas Eve.  She’d be impatient to go hang with her friends, (who would happily devour the butter tarts), but I hoped I could convince her to indulge us with a skate around the lake first.  I’d ask, but I promised myself to be a grown-up about it and not harass her to join us – just to ask.  She needed time to reconnect with her same-age peers.  At ages eighteen and thirteen my daughters couldn’t really act as one, but I knew that on Christmas Eve they would raise their voices together and happily sing about it.wooden santa

You hear it both ways.  Some people say girls are easier than boys.  “Oh, no, no, no,” others will tell you, “boys are easier”.  I’m not sure what exactly easier encompasses.  Easier to get along with?  Easier to discipline?  Easier to lose your mind worrying over? I do know that when Zoë went off to study art at Emily Carr – I thought a mother must only feel this out of sorts once.  But a year later I had to launch, as they say in those swishy mother circles, her exuberant brother, Cole.  Kids being kids, no two alike, and all that, there was hardly an ounce of knowledge I could borrow from Zoë leaving our nest when Cole decided to follow suit…

Happy Thanksgiving from your Canadian friends and if you want to read more of Text Me, Love Mom and the rest of all that …please check out http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

[1] Berlin, Irving. “Sisters.” Lyrics. White Christmas. The Movie. 1954

Our Dreamy Souls – Travels With My Young Adult Daughter

Staring out my office window a week ago, the last sweet peas still arched towards the sun, a late yellow rose had put out a new bloom, but now that is behind us for months to come.  The snow has arrived.

I tend to do more fall cleaning then spring cleaning – getting ready for time spent inside during the cold, and so came across a little journal I kept while my youngest daughter and I travelled together for a few weeks.  As much as parents like me, who managed busy households, dreaded all the kids moving out, this little journal reminds me of some of the best times with those young adult children.

My daughter Lily, was just eighteen and almost a year out of highschool.  It was her ‘gap year’. Lily had travelled solo back to Italy where she had done a language immersion program in high school. Her dad was nervous about her traveling on her own, so when she suggested maybe Mom could meet her over there for ten days or so, it was an easy sell. We both thought we should meet in Paris and then travel to the South of France.  Just the phrase, ‘the south of France’ stirred our dreamy souls. After a few exotic lazy days on the beaches near Antibes we took a train to see Milan, after which I was to return home and she was resuming her trip by meeting friends in Barcelona.

This was the journal entry I came across on the chilly November day, written on a warmer day several years ago in May –

“We’d arranged a taxi to pick Lily up at the hotel at 5:30 am this morning and bring her to the bus station. From there she will shuttle to the airport for her flight to rejoin her young friends in Barcelona. If she was anxious to get back to the freedom of being on her own, she never let on.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It made me happy to buy her a pretty summer dress and she wore it in the street of Grasse and Antibes, but she put on her black jeans and a t-shirt to travel.  I watched her gather her things from the hotel room and thought about what a sweet time we had together, sitting above Paris on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre – Lily describing the type of man she might like to marry, or lying on the beach in Côte d’Azar, trying to pretend we belonged there.  We had joked that perhaps we would have a spiritual experience when we went to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and then afterwards whispered in the sunny square of the basilica that of course, we had been moved by the majesty of the work.  That was just before a priest clucked his tongue at the hem of Lily’s dress, indicating it exposed too much of her legs – after we agreed that he had taken a long look at their God created beauty.”IMG_0865

I finished that journal entry by saying, “Lily and I have made memories to share to keep me happier when she goes off to university in September, and for other times, years from now. Lily knew she was running late this morning but let me go back for three more hugs and French ‘cheek kisses’.  I didn’t think I’d go back to sleep after climbing the stairs back to our small room but slid in between the sheets of the bed she’d occupied, where the balcony door was open to the breeze, and I fell into dreaming. When I have trouble sleeping with all of them gone off, I’ll try to remember the meals I shared with my youngest daughter, the sunsets that fell over our evenings, the fashions we clamored about in Milan, the late night conversations we whispered across our pillows – so that when the house is empty, with her and her siblings all living away, I’ll be able to bring it all back to mind.”

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Whimsical World of Grown-Up Coloring

Something wonderful is about to happen in my family.  It’s not a wedding or a baby or a career move – it’s a book. A year ago Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest was published – my story  about my four kids launch into the wide, wide world and my transition from a mom that ran a household –  to someone who was nervously helping her children get their bearings during this next stage of parenting. Now I’ve had the honour to work with my oldest daughter as she makes a dream of her’s a reality. Her truly lovely adult colouring book, Alice in the Womb, will be published this month.

_25A0448My daughter, Shea, (Zoë in Text Me, Love Mom) is an artist and mother or two little girls. She studied at Emily Carr and then received a MFA from the University of British Columbia.  When she learned she was pregnant with her first baby she found comfort and relaxation in creating fine pen and ink drawings of the transformation of that odyssey of egg to tiny baby.  These  are a series of accurately drawn images of the development and wonders of growing life, but are surrounded by a whimsical fantasy world of flora and fauna, birds and bees, and butterflies.  Shea always intended this wonderful palette of drawings to be published as a fine art book for women to discover page by page, and curiously suggested that some of her audience might like to colour them in with any variety of crayons, pencils or brushes adding brilliant or muted colour to this dreamlike collection.

_25A0420

Neither of us imagined that thousands of people would have  discovered the calming and creative world of adult colouring as her first beautiful book is about to be released.  Her younger sister, Rose, (our Lily in Text Me, Love Mom) just did an elaborate photo shoot of the artist, her studio and her little daughters so that Shea can now invite an audience of colourists to sign up for preorders of Alice in the Womb._25A0132

If you would like to preorder copies of Alice in the Womb (it will be approximately $18 CAN and it is perfect for colourists, art book collectors, new mothers or shower gifts) private message Shea your email at https://www.facebook.com/sheaproulxartbooks .  All photos by Midnight Train Photography.

Them’s the Breaks – Re: Wall Street Texting Interview

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
– Arthur Miller 

Well, I said that if Sue Shellenbarger didn’t cover all the tips I gave her about texting to your adult kids that I would post them here.  And it turns out that indeed, I must. Shellenbarger wrote me a very kind email apologizing because her editors at The Wall Street Journal decided that they wanted her ‘Work and Family’ column today to focus on parents texting to the teens that they live with, sometimes while they are together in the same house, in fact even the same room.  So, though she read my book Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest (available on Amazon), she was unable to cover any of the advice and idiosyncrasies I discussed with her in a half hour interview that I prepared for by chatting with my four twenty-something children about texting with parents.  Zoë, Cole, Hudson and Lily gave me tips both practical and slightly challenging, but all sensible.

 My twenty-seven year-old son, Hudson, said that the ethnography of the millennials is such that texting has become its own language.  He says people will text yeah, or nope because yes, or no sound abrasive and formal in text. Growing up in the culture, it becomes second nature to understand the unwritten rules of text, but as boomers we sometimes behave like Jane Goodall.  He is right.  I still find some of us boomers texting as if we’re engaged in old-school letter writing, instead of going back and forth with messages like the younger set do. My oldest son, Cole, has often advised, “Mom, you can’t send too many texts and they can’t be too long, keep them direct and I’ll get back to you asap.”

real letters

What I’ve realized myself though, is that texting is different for each gender.  My two daughters will engage in longer text messages quite happily, though both Zoë  and Lily agree that with texting being so prevalent phone calls are reserved for their closest friends or family members because calls now seem so intimate.

I’ve learned from communicating via text with my kids that being negative gets me nowhere.  As my kids (and I) mature that’s been a positive lesson, of course. Instead of starting with the demanding, Hey, how come blah, blah, blah?… I’ll turn my text around to a positive request.

When all four of our kids were still at home, ours was a noisy, active household, now when it’s quiet and I’m missing that, I’ll send out a text to each one and wait for those little ding-dings of communication back.  It lets me imagine them in their world for a minute. We all know that it can be annoying to be with a friend or family member who is texting away to someone else, and to them I think – love the ones you’re with, but with a few text lessons from millennials we can communicate better with the ones we love.IMG_0426

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal On Texting My Kids!

Texting, text, text, text. Text, text, text. Texting. It’s what we see all around us.  We are all staring down at our phones. Aliens spying from the heavens would believe it is the way us humans choose to communicate.  Sitting in a restaurant recently, gabbing away with a big group of family, we observed two young women sitting opposite each other in a booth waiting for their meals, but not looking at each other, just  texting, texting, texting.  One of the teens in our party suggested that they might be texting each other.

IMG_3968

I titled my book about the years my kids were departing home and all the transitions and escapades and sometimes strange and frightening times – Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest (available from Amazon).  It’s doubtful as I first started typing  away in my little office –  looking out over a snowy back yard, and then fresh buds of spring turning to leafy summer foliage, followed by autumn leaves scattering across the yard, and so it went round and round the years – that I could possibly have imagined how much even I would text.  Text, text, text. Text, text.

My pace was slow walking along Vancouver’ False Creek Seawall while texting my eldest daughter back in my home city. Walking and texting – one of those things you say you won’t do, but you do. The ding of an old-school style email interrupted the trill of another text.  The email was from Sue Shellenbarger, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of their ‘Work & Family’ column. Shellenburger was asking if she could interview me about how parents and children communicate via text.  Wow, could she ever.  It’s a hot topic that I am known to go on about a bit too much, even as I continue to evolve my texting style with my twenty-something kids.  I’d tell her how the guys text differently than the girls, how my peers text differently than young people and that my sons have actually given me direction on how to illicit responses from them.

Nervous about being interviewed, in the next forty-eight hours I met up with or called, and yes texted, Zoë, Cole, Hudson and Lily. It was fun, and again educational to chat purposefully with my kids about texting.  I took copious notes and referred back to my own book. Shellenbarger was a calm and reassuring interviewer.  We had a long and engaging conversation.  I don’t know how that will translate to what appears in her Sept. 9th column in The Wall Street Journal.  It’s always curious to see how an interview is interpreted into a column.  I’ll share a link to it in a blog post next week, and if she doesn’t cover all my tips on texting with adult kids I’ll share those, too.tmlm with backpack

Vancouver, Canada’s most splendid west coast city has had a dry, hot summer. We were there to see our son Hudson’s film, Faith, win the  Audience Choice Award in a student film festival.  The weather turned the next day and the rains beat down as I drove to our cottage in B.C’s interior on the shore of Shuswap lake. Yesterday the clouds hung low, with rays of sun dappling the still green leaves only intermittently.  There was a melancholy mood to the day as I prepared for my upcoming departure to our Calgary home, stacking lawn chairs, scooping water out of the paddle boat before covering it for winter, bringing in a geranium too beautiful to be ravished by fall storms.  Yet, during all that I was involved in text conversations with all four of my kids. That isn’t a common occurrence anymore.  Days and days can go by without me communicating with some of them.  (The boys anyways.) They all had something novel come up and were sharing it with me; exciting, frustrating, a new challenge.  Each kid’s texting was representative of their personality, from fervent and fast-paced to calm and sporadic. kayak with feet

Today is different.  They’ve all gone back to their other tasks. It’s my sister and a friend whose texts trill to me this morning. The lake is calm. The sun is out. I vow to leave my phone in the house and go out in the kayak to paddle and wonder what Sue Shellenbarger will make of our conversation about text, text, texting in her ‘Work and Family’ column in The Wall Street Journal next week.  Stay tuned.

The Secret of Staying Married …..

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

Nearly 60 years have passed between the quiet Friday night wedding service in 1955 in King City, Ontario uniting my in-laws and the boisterous three day celebration on Shuswap lake B.C. for their diamond anniversary. If fresh faced Bill and Norma, at just 20 years of age could have peered ahead through those six decades would they ever have imagined the four kids and their spouses, thirteen grand-kids with girlfriends and boyfriends, and a grand-son-in-law and the two adorable great-granddaughters?

dock

Their long marriage was celebrated from midday until the round moon rose high in the sky over three hot August days. The sun shone gloriously. The moonlight was brilliant.anniversary cake (2)

We swam, we floated, we boated, the athletic wake-boarded, the musical raised their voices in song.bango

A raucous cribbage tournament united us. The anniversary couple told stories, siblings reconnected and cousins shared on the dock in the starlight.

cribbage

Feasts were made and devoured, voices rang out, the little ones danced and twirled, and we laughed and laughed and laughed long into the night. Thank you Norma and Bill for that wedding night in 1955 and for showing us your journey of love.  XO  lucy sleeping on beachchair

Summer Blogs – Short and Sweet – like the season

mom and rose

My summer blogs are going to be short and sweet – like summer itself. Summer passes by all too swiftly – it’s only fifty-five or so days until a new generation of moms and dads will be giving their eighteen-year-old kids a hug good-bye that is supposed to last until Thanksgiving. Maybe that’s a kid that’s been trying your patience staying out all night because of a melancholy summer romance, or just hanging out with friends they’ve had since grade school.  A kid who is supposed to be a ‘young adult’ but perhaps needs to be reminded to shower sometimes, or find their bedroom floor, or hasn’t exactly floored you with their organizational skills – due of course, to that still developing frontal lobe excuse.

I’ve been there. Dreading a September that won’t involve getting back to the usual routine but instead will leave an emptiness in an otherwise busy house. A September that will involve wondering how often is the ‘okay’ amount to check in, instead of seeing my daughter come in the back gate after school still reading a book while she walked along.

IMG_1561-1

They left in other ways, too. My son went of to be a lift operator on a ski hill six hundred miles away. He had cell service at the tip top of the mountain and would call in the early morning – probably the time of day he felt loneliest. But that same son went to film school years later and helped me direct my very own short, short video about that crazy, early time of learning a new way of being a family.  The video goes along with the story that those changing times led me to tell with my book, Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest.(available on Amazon). Share the video with those moms and dads, sisters or aunts that you know that are going to have a different sort of September. It’ll make them smile.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Summer Cottaging Above The Forty-Ninth Parallel

Ah June – summer finally, in the place we live, where for a brief time we are tricked into forgetting how far north our ancestors managed to settle – up here above the forty-ninth parallel. I love summer, the exquisite season of heat, long days, sweet flowers, and travel back and forth to the briefly warm lake.

My lofty goal is always to stay at our lakeside cottage for longer and longer stretches every year. A dear friend reminisces fondly of how, as a kid on the last day of school her mom would have the station wagon ready, and then would ceremoniously draw the curtains on the city living room for the summer, before they all piled into the car for two long months at the lake. I long to be of that ilk but am unable to achieve it – always called back to the city for a worthy occasion.

And so I make these epic drives – our cottage isn’t an easy two or three hours away – no, we built our retreat a seven hour drive for my husband, but what stretches to a crazy ten or eleven hour journey if I am doing it on my own.  We’ll gather on the edge of the truly mighty Shuswap Lake (889 miles of shoreline) this July long weekend.

boys dive Three of our four kids will packed rushed bags and join us from different directions to barbecue, boat, debate musical tastes, and laugh late into the warm night, with sticky smores on our finger tips (okay, my finger tips). There’ll be other weekends packed with family or close friends, and after one full of farmer’s markets, bear sightings and cool swims, I’ll choose to drive back to the city. No matter how early my jump into the lake is – the one to refresh me for the epic trip home – by the time I’ve tied up the kayak and canoe, watered the thirsty geraniums, gathered up errant towels and bathing suits, taken the whip cream and sausage that would go smelly from the fridge, pulled the blinds and found the car keys under a hat – noon will be ticking in. My first stop is for a latte over ice and those super healthy cookies to take for the road at my favourite, EcoTreats in Scotch Creek.

fruit in car Time travelled from the cottage – twenty minutes. Okay – get moving. Next stop – absolutely favourite fruit stand for juicy cherries or early peaches that I’m convinced are tastier than any to be found in the entire city back home – time travelled – another hour and a half. Concentrate now – third required break is from boredom of driving – so the town of Revelstoke.IMG_3233

I’ll wind my way into town and here I get out and move around, usually walking and talking to whoever I catch on the phone, circling the Alpine style streets of tall homes and flowery yards before I find one of several bakery cafes for another iced coffee drink and something gooey and sweet to help me with the longest stretch over the
Roger’s pass and over the Rocky Mountains. During this hour and a half of high mountain driving with no services, I tell myself, for the zillionth time, to pretend I’ve never seen it before and so to pass the time being spellbound by the epic beauty – but I have seen it and seen it and seen it – so when that part of the drive is over I am so ready to ease the car to a stop in Golden, B.C. Golden of the amazing wooden bridge and the last
B.C. fruit stand. By this time the fruit that I’ve already bought hours back smells ripe and succulent in the car, but I pack in more – some green pears, some tart apples and a medium sized watermelon.golden bridge

My good husband is calling now, reaching me in this slice of cell service, never understanding how I cannot be home already. I push on, strict with myself now and contemplating a five hour energy drink for what is still a three hour drive. The little plastic pink bottle makes me feel awake just by looking at its magical capabilities all sealed shut in the cup holder. I manage to make it down through the mountains, past Field and Lake Louise, even Banff, but stop at Canmore just have to use the Tim Horton’s washroom and I don’t even want the six mini donuts that I reason can help the teeny bit of travel I have left to go zipping by. Oh, and I wash those down with an Ice Cap, calling my honey to tell him -that I don’t understand it either. Perhaps, I’m lifted up by aliens somewhere along the route, who are after my bounty of fruit and the secrets of relishing a short summer, and then deposited down on the highway again. I mean really, how could it take me twelve hours to do this cross country bountiful escapade?

(To read Text Me, Love Mom – the book about the hectic chaos of four kids being launched into the wide, wide world – during that next stage of parenting, click on the following links: Link to Amazon.ca http://www.amazon.ca/Text-Me-Love-Mom-Girls/dp/1771800712

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

IMG_4608fruit in tent

KIDS COME HOME – HONEST THEY DO

There are people who love their empty nest.  I’m just not one of them.photo 9 I had my kids in a cluster. When our youngest daughter was born, my oldest daughter was five and a half, and she had a two-year-old and four-year-old brother – I’ve done the math and it doesn’t make much sense to me either.  So we had babies, and toddlers, and the easier years of grade school-ers it seems now (only now) and then Holy Cow Batman, a house brimming with teenagers – loud (or disturbingly quiet), emotional, angst-y, experimental, lovelorn, sneaky, wonderful adolescences – followed by, because they left in a cluster, too – quiet.  Just me and their dad, with all the varied interests we always had and time to pursue them, inside that quiet.  I didn’t like it one bit, and he wasn’t so crazy about it either.  We’re people-people and our people were gone.  We didn’t necessarily miss driving them places, or their taking our cars, I couldn’t honestly say I missed cooking for them and grocery shopping for them – I mean, seriously, that was a ton of work and my cooking got less creative, not more, over the two decades, while the kids all swung towards that annoying health conscious fare.

No, I just liked them moving around the house, someone to shout out to from my office to the kitchen table. When their dad worked long hours there was always someone to meet me on a patio (free food – why wouldn’t they?). Their dad actually was happy when they’d come in late and tell him the movie he was watching sucked and they’d find something together to stay up to.

So maybe I’m making some of you sad, those that aren’t too excited about the empty nest either. But don’t be too sad because they come back.  Honestly, they do.  I remember being so forlorn when our youngest left us to all that quiet.  I mean, who’d know I’d miss being jarred awake to cars pulling up outside, and shouts of good-bye over even louder music. I was expressing my dislike of our uncomfortable new quiet to a neighbor woman, about fifteen years my senior, and she told me, You should enjoy the break, they’ll return for this or that reason.  Believe me, she said, they do that.

Well, she didn’t know my kids, I told her. My eldest was living with her boyfriend in another city. The second eldest was determined to be part of the film industry and there wasn’t enough of that work here, third child would be most determined to not move back home and the baby, who’d just left for university had been exploring new cities since a high school exchange to Italy. That ship had sailed – it was their dad and I, and grilled cheese sandwiches from there on in.  That wise neighbor gave me this little half smile that said, who cares about all that, kids come back.cropped-cropped-cropped-better-nest.jpg

Some days I feel like that Million Little Pieces guy.  I published this book, Text Me, Love Mom, Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest and guess what? The nest was empty, and (be still my beating heart) it will be empty again tomorrow morning, but it’s not empty now and over the last few years they’ve ALL had cause to return.  In the book, I was writing about the chaos of it all, the challenges of iparenting from far away, and the turmoil of our family getting its bearings again.  But over the years all our kids have needed a short term place to perch between; a job, a relationship, a school program or a decision. Usually just one of them at a time, never more than two.   Thank goodness the place to land – was home.

Both boys have made separate sojourns home for a few months to refuel, work, or wait for the next film project to pick up.  I’d go to the gym with them after having let that lapse, and we’d work out in our own corners. My oldest son would cook me the best eggs, eating his standing at the counter – I don’t know why.  The youngest son loves breakfast out.  Breakfast isn’t really my thing, but he’s a funny guy (when he’s not a serious guy) and the conversation was worth it.

The daughter that is all of their big sister, married her boyfriend and moved back to our city with their two small daughters and while house hunting they ALL moved in for three fun months of early mornings, an amusing messy toddler, a baby to snuggle, and all the glorious chaos of that.  Finally, a  year ago, when the house was too quiet again after all of that commotion,  our youngest returned from living in Montreal and then LA for a short time, to work and establish a photography business here,  but tomorrow morning she will drive off again with a packed car and an adventurous spirit and that chapter will close, too.

She humored her dad and I with a long walk on Sunday, though so tired from a late night with friends. This past week I’ve anxiously treated her to lunch out, and a bit of shopping.  But really new summer blouses and lunches on patios in the late spring sunshine are only ways of lingering with this person I will miss.  We will text and talk.  We always do.  But I’ll miss waking in the night to her coming in, I’ll miss  that she liked to buy the groceries for me –  it was like having a mom here instead of being the mom, I’ll miss her newly blossoming green thumb, I’ll miss her telling me, Mom, you look pretty.

photo (1)

The neighbor was right.  They do come back and now she’s off again.  More than anything I will miss a ‘kid’ in the house to call out to from this little room where I write.

To read more about Lily and I – along with the chaos of four kids being launched into the wide, wide world – during that next stage of parenting, click on the following links:

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

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

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.

photo - Copy

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.

IMG_0190

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.

photo (5)

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.

photo (11) 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

photo (9)