Category Archives: Real Life

About What’s Saving My Life Right Now

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Photo by Teigan Rodger on Unsplash.

At the end of Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, the author lists a number of things that are “saving her life right now” – intuitive, instrumental and illuminating things that are life-giving in organic and maybe unorthodox ways – a little different to what she conventionally taught from the pulpit for years as an Episcopalian minister. Things like: teaching at a college, living in relationship with creation, and encountering God in other people.

At the end of every one of her podcasts, Jen Hatmaker borrows this same question to ask her guests – What is saving your life right now? – and the answers are not usually spiritual or abstract. More often what is saving someone’s life right now are ordinary things like reading a poem a day, eating ripe in-season strawberries or watching the latest Brian Regan special on Netflix.

I thought about this last night when I donned my eye mask before going to sleep. It’s usually still light outside when we hit the hay in this house and all the sleep-gurus strongly suggest that when it comes to sleeping better, darkness is your friend. I’m not that great of a sleeper these days – at least not during the second half of the night when my water habit wakes me up. It took me awhile to get used to it, but I think my eye mask is saving my life right now, helping me to get back to sleep a little quicker than usual.

But then, when I wake up in the morning, coffee is saving my life right now. Well, really, coffee has been saving my life for a long time, since I starting making cups of milky instant Nescafe to help me study for final exams in grade twelve. However, I sometimes get a little overzealous in my coffee habit and it becomes more of a havoc-maker than a life-saver. A visit to a doctor a few months ago instigated a stint on a very strict hypoallergenic diet to identify any foods which were causing my post-menopausal body more grief than they were worth. Happily – and maybe the reason I was able to sign on to such austerity – was that I could still drink my beloved coffee. But only two cups a day. It turned out to be such a good thing, because I’ve returned to the delight of really relishing those two cups, so much more so than the 4 or 5 I was glugging down.

Walking in the morning is saving my life right now. I love walking year-round but in the summer, there’s nothing so wonderful as being able to walk out the door in the early morning, knowing I’ll be greeted in sound and scene by all the friendly flora and fauna that love the early mornings, too. (Of course, there are some enemies as well: swooping gulls and rumors of bears in the park – but I’ve learned to avoid their usual hangouts.) And during our record-breaking “heat-snap” last week, morning was the only time that a long walk was tolerable.

Intermittent fasting is saving my life right now. Or I.F. to those in the club. For those of you not yet inducted, it simply means waiting a little longer than usual before you eat your first meal of the day. For me that is anywhere from 10 to noon for a total of 14 to 16 hours without food. (I do get to have my first cup of coffee because I drink it black during this window.) It cuts down my calorie intake for the day a little, which is good since Mother Nature decided that older women need to burn less. This doesn’t help when you’re used to eating three squares a day. Plus snacks. Plus dessert. Plus plus. I.F. has given me some reins to pull on the horse I call my appetite and by the time I do eat “break-fast”, I feel hungry and a good-emptiness in my tummy.

And, of course, reading (as always) is saving my life right now, but more specifically: reading other writer’s journals. So far I’ve read May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and I’m over halfway through Madeleine L’Engle’s four-book Crosswicks Journals. Both women were writing from “about my age” in these journals, contending with everything from a raccoon who regularly breaks into the house every night (Sarton) to a mother’s last visit and then death at Crosswicks (L’Engle). And all the while, they were trying to keep up with the business of writing and managing a household, while also not getting as much sleep as they would have liked because of raucous raccoons and aged mothers. It’s a good reminder of the quote that “everyone is fighting a hard battle.” But in the midst of the battles are loveable grandchildren and velvety donkeys, burgeoning gardens and restful walks to the stream: things that were saving their lives right then.

It’s also a good reminder that it’s the little things that really make that difference. What’s saving your life right now?

About Manners

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[It’s fun to look back on my column from twenty-some years ago. Now my boys are sporting their own piercings and, as always, question anything that doesn’t seem relevant. And our town is refreshingly UN-ethnocentric now.]

This morning as we were having breakfast, the sound of a cement mixer interrupted the conversation I was having with my husband. Upon closer examination (although the resemblance with mouth open was astonishing), we realized that it was our middle son Tim, accompanying the chewing of his toast with a very audible, if fluctuating, hum. Rick promptly directed him not to open his mouth when eating. Tim, always obedient if it can be made into a joke, looked directly at his Dad and with a smirk, kept his lips pursed and tried to shove his toast into his mouth. Flushing away all of Dad’s effort at teaching Tim some manners, I nearly choked on my toast as I snickered uncontrollably.

It occurred to me later in the day that in the whole business of teaching our three sons some manners, it’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The situation is even more serious if they can succeed in making Mom and Dad laugh when we’re supposed to be stern. The trouble with etiquette is that a lot of it doesn’t make sense to a child. If spaghetti is served, why can’t it be thoroughly enjoyed with all aspects of the face and hands, as well? Why do you have to say “excuse me” when your body performs an uncontrollable function? Why do you have to say “thank you” for a gift you don’t like? Why can’t you stare at the person with multiple body piercings in apparently awkward places? Wasn’t that the whole point? So that people will notice?

Then there’s the whole realm of political correctness. In our primarily ethno-centric community, it’s always a point of fascination for my kids to see someone different than them. Although television helps, real life is no contest. It’s hard to tell a small child that they shouldn’t bring up a person’s color or nationality to them, not to mention size, disability, length of hair or choice of clothing, because the person might find it offensive. In a child’s reasoning, the obvious question is: “Why?” If that’s what the person is, what’s the big deal talking about it?

If kids were always perfect, polite and politically correct, “Kids Say the Darndest Things” wouldn’t have gone past the pilot episode. And lots of magazines will pay good money for you to repeat the very thing about your child that at one moment exasperated you and made you laugh the next. As one mother related when trying to get her demanding daughter to ask nicely for a book, the little girl blurted out impatiently, “Please, excuse me, thank you and God bless!”

Fortunately, most people happily excuse a child’s curiosity and their fumbled attempts at politeness. But just in case, it might not be a bad idea to teach them a blanket statement like that one!

About Accidents

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Photo by Matt Hudson on Unsplash

A recent Instagram post about taking personal responsibility after life deals you a crappy hand reminded me of something I read a few years ago in a book about achieving Your Personal Potential: you can prevent pretty much any bad thing that happens to you. You got struck by lightning? What were you doing out in that storm wielding a key tied to a kite, Mr. Franklin? You got passed over for a promotion? Well, at least you kept up your social media accounts – albeit during work hours (oops). You almost peed your pants on the 2-hour trip from Vermilion to Edmonton? Maybe you shouldn’t have had that extra cup of coffee before you left home or you should have stopped in half-way Vegreville. Mmmhmm?

You see where I’m going with this? Poop happens (again, another kind of accident), but mostly it’s preventable if we just take the time to Play the Movie in our heads of What Could Happen Next. Or as my husband likes to say: “Be a Boy(Girl/Person) Scout!”

I am reminded every time I go in my garden shed to retrieve my pail and my dandelion digger of The Time I Got Locked In the Garden Shed. Even though this is a different shed, the memory – and what I learned – still reverberates. The shed door had a vertical bolt lock, the kind that’s often installed horizontally. You pulled it up and opened the door but sometimes the bolt part stayed in the pulled-up state. On more than one occasion, on a windy day, I witnessed the door slam shut and the bolt fall into place. But on all those times, I was outside the shed.

Until I wasn’t. One day, I went into the shed to quickly pick up my pail when the door quickly shut behind me. This is where I argue The Case For Carrying Your Cell Phone With You At All Times. I phoned whomever was in the house and was subsequently rescued, with only the minute-est amount of snickering or consideration of leaving me in the shed for awhile (Because: Boys) – mostly because all those people in the house knew who was making them supper that night and for most nights after that. But in the 45 seconds between the phone call and the rescue I frantically made a survival plan of sleeping wrapped up in a tarp with a bag of lawn seed for a pillow, that is until I had eaten all the grass seed, the only organic edible that was in the shed. And I also berated myself for not propping open the door to prevent such an accident. [I also commanded myself NOT TO THINK ABOUT THE SPIDERS.]

Since I didn’t prevent “the accident”, I needed to do the optimistic thing and Look For The Lesson. I am now highly suspicious of all garden sheds, which is why you will see me painstakingly prop open the door of my now-tiny little shed with two or three of the tires that reside within. And why I store some Clif bars and an old sleeping bag in there as well. (JK. But a Person Scout probably would give me a merit badge if I did do that.)

But then, sometimes there are such things as Happy Accidents. There was another scene involving this same shed when I was on the other side of the yard, perhaps even in the same summer that I got locked inside. The rule was that whoever cut the grass was supposed to take the rolling garbage can full of grass clippings and empty it into the green bin on our block, no matter how many times you had to do it and no matter how tired you were after cutting our half-acre of grass. But on this particular occasion, one of the grass-cutters in the family had failed to do that and had wheeled the bucket full of grass into the shed and left it there. For a few days. Or maybe a week.

Until Tim and Simon opened the door to get a basketball to shoot some hoops. And after getting accosted with the smell of rotting grass, they were then overwhelmed by hundreds of little white butterflies streaming out of the shed, out of that bin of smelly grass. The three of us witnessed a real-life Planet Earth moment, but no cameras were rolling because we never expected such a magical thing to happen. We stood there and watched as the butterflies slowly dispersed and drifted off into the sky like so many helium balloons, all looking to reach Their Own Personal Potential. But the cameras of our minds were rolling and we still talk about it some ten years later.

There are some accidents we certainly wish we could prevent, but then they (hopefully) teach us a valuable lesson to Be More Careful. And then there are some accidents we know yield some crazy Butterfly Effect that made us happy that we weren’t.

About 10,000 Steps

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Photo Credit: Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Sometime last year, I bought myself a Fitbit. My motivation was mostly to keep myself honest about how much movement I was engaging in each day, especially since most of my work has me sitting at my desk and not moving my feet except to readjust them on my foot cushion. I downloaded the Fitbit app to my iPhone and fiddled around with it a little, but I did not change the default suggestion to try and meet the goal of 10,000 steps each day.

Guess what I found out? It’s kinda hard to get 10,000 steps every single day. Unless you’re a waitress or dog walker or a construction worker or elementary school teacher. But for me, meeting this goal is a decision I need to make very consciously. Even one turn around my beloved pond racks up only about 1000 steps. Maybe I need to take smaller strides?

Walking is kind of non-negotiable, though, isn’t it? It’s something that nearly everyone can do, the low-tide mark of basic movement and fitness. My denturist husband sees a number of older patients and whenever he meets someone who is still strong and spry after all their years, he casually interviews them: How do you stay so healthy? What’s your secret? And inevitably they report back to him that they walk. They are literally a ambling advertisement for good health.

So what’s the magic of 10,000? That number roughly equals 4 miles and the daily equivalent of meeting that can help you lose weight or at least maintain the status quo (as long as you’re not walking to the Ice Cream and Beer Store). And it can help regulate your blood pressure and blood sugar. All really good things.

So, every day I need to walk at least 10,000 steps and a couple times of week I also need to add in some strength training – because, hello? we lose muscle mass every second over 50. But 10,000 steps at one shot – for me – takes somewhere around 60 to 90 minutes. I don’t always have that kind of time.

Or do I? The alternative is…what, exactly? To spend more time watching television or scrolling through Instagram or reading – all of which are tempting in their own insipid way. After all, a body at rest tends to stay that way – it’s a Newtonian Law. If I don’t make the conscious decision every day to move then I’m making the opposite to stay on my butt. It’s not like I have to chase little people like I did when I was a young mama – and when it was probably harder to try limit myself to only 10,000 steps a day.

Of course, much of my sitting time is Working Time. But taking a time out for a walk – even around the house for a couple minutes as my Fitbit reminds me at 10 minutes to every hour – can be so rejuvenating. Just like when I was a young mama and Rick had to get me Out of the House and Away from the Kids in order to refocus, a step outside the house can be transforming. In other words, a hour a day is a small investment in my future.

See ya later. I gotta go for a walk.

About Walking the Pond

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One of the hidden blessings of our move just a few blocks west in our town is how close we are to The Pond. While we have lived for the last 16 or so years on the edge of Vermilion Provincial Park and have enjoyed the trails immensely, the five minutes it takes to walk to The Pond from where we currently live has been a true serendipity. Even when Rick gets home from work tired, once we get out the door for our constitutional, we are never sorry when we get to The Pond.

We’ve always been Walkers but the lockdown last March definitely cemented that distinction. With everything closed, the great outdoors became our gymnasium. With extra people in the house, each one of us used the park as our personal retreat. For the sake of just exercise, walking anywhere will do, but I find that the spiritual and emotional benefits of beautiful scenery definitely amplify the physical.

Walking the pond in the fall and winter is quieter – although we do see a lot of action from the muskrats. AND THE CRAZY BEAVERS.

But in the spring, it’s like Nature cannot contain herself. The leaves erupt from the trees like a time-elapsed video. And the beavers get chased away, it seems, by the influx of ducks and blackbirds. And maybe people – because we’re not the only ones who appreciate the finer points of The Pond.

I missed the crocuses this year, but yesterday I saw my first buffalo bean at The Pond!

And there’s always a lot of unreasonably paranoid gopher citizens on patrol.

Last year, Rick and I witnessed the hilarious mating rituals of the Red-Winged Blackbirds as the males danced crazily along the path totally oblivious to us as we walked by. However, I learned that a little later in June, they’re not so oblivious anymore and I stay away from the pond for awhile to avoid the protective dive-bombing parents.

But the best part, in the early morning, is the orchestra of frogs and birds and critters. Sound on!

About Women Rowing North

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The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.

All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?

It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)

It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing North comes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.

What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.

About Having Babies

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[This throwback post is in honor of my niece Jaime who just added a third little boy to her brood in much the same timespan that Rick and I had our three little boys. There’s always someone around us having a baby – it never fails to call up all those memories of “the good old days”.]

Three little pirates circa 1999.

I don’t remember the exact moment that I signed up to be a parent, but I believe my endorsement was a reflex action after the stick turned blue. When Rick and I got married, we knew we wanted kids eventually. After all, my new husband had two years of schooling to complete first. Who knew that after four months of practicing “planned parenthood”, much to our surprise we were planning parenthood?  After three kids in four years and lots of curious people inquiring if we knew what was causing it, we were pretty happy to be parents. In a way, having children is like stepping onto a scary, exhilarating, stomach-upsetting roller coaster. Once you have one, you often ask your partner, “You wanna go again?”

For all the satisfaction of producing a cuddly, adorable, dependent little baby there is nothing that replicates the shock of being awakened night after night by the same hungry, wailing, dependent little baby. Things like a full night’s sleep (four hours in a row feels amazing), bathing, hot meals (after re-heating it twice in the microwave, you finally just wolf it down cold), spit-up free clothing and two free arms become a luxury, like a fairy tale beginning: “Once upon a time, a LONG time ago…”           

Well, we’ve made it through that stage of parenting and we’ve successfully weaned, potty-trained and surgically removed soothers from our three boys, but our training in selflessness is far from over. The same issues of sleeping, eating and crying just resurface with new challenges. The kids still wake us up at night with nightmares, sleepwalking or parching thirst. As if that isn’t enough, now they can get out of their own beds and crawl into ours. If it’s already been a pretty bad night and we’re particularly unconscious, we might not even notice. That is, until the next day when you wake up with a horrible kink in your neck because some child was sleeping horizontally in your bed with one foot stuck in your ear. Then just as you drop off in the afternoon to catch a few winks to make up for the bad night and the bad neck, some child (who is supposed to be playing quietly in his room) calls from the bathroom for your assistance with the toilet paper.

And do I really need to mention the pitfalls of trying to feed young children? Just when I think I’ve developed a safe repertoire of spaghetti, chicken nuggets and grilled cheese sandwiches, the oldest child announces that he no longer likes the very thing that used to be his favorite and his adoring younger brothers follow suit. My kids don’t even like potatoes unless the cholesterol and fat levels have been exponentially increased and they come in a red box with an “M” on it. Which isn’t to say that I don’t make them eat their requisite age-numbered spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. There’s just a lot of nose pinching and gagging that accompany the process. When people see my three boys and comment that our grocery bill will certainly skyrocket when they’re teenagers, I just think that I can’t wait to see them eat a full meal.

I do have to say that the crying issue has changed a great deal. I no longer cry as much as my kids do. The initial burdens of childcare had me weeping daily for lack of sleep and lack of resources for managing this parenting thing. After a few years of motherhood under my belt, I feel like I can pretty much tackle anything. The roller coaster hasn’t really changed, but maybe now I’m just getting used to it. In fact, I’m loving every minute of it.

About Electricity

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Marcus Wallis on Unsplash

A funny couple of things happened this last week. Well, not really funny-ha-ha, per se, but more like “we can laugh about this as soon as we figure out how to get around it” kind-of-funny. My husband Rick was leaving for work early one morning, pushed the button to open the garage door and nothing happened. The spring on the door had broken and that essentially locked him in the garage. It turns out that a spring is a terrific mechanical aid not just for electrically opening the door, but also manually. He called his handy younger brother to help – or fix if he could – and between the two of them they managed to get the door to open and free our vehicles into the driveway until we could get the door fixed.

And then yesterday, almost immediately after his alarm went off, the power in the house went AWOL. After a few extra minutes in bed, he got up and tried to figure out how to get enough light in the bathroom so that he could shower and get ready for his day. He did it mostly in the dark, which heightened our appreciation for bathrooms in our past that have had windows. He finished getting ready – without the usual Global News in the background – and headed to the garage when he realized that for the second time in a week, he was locked in again. However, with the new spring, it wasn’t too hard for me to help him open the door and release him – although we do question the door designer who failed to add grabber-handles on the inside.

Ah, electricity! How do we use thee? Let me count the ways! Lights, coffee, garage doors! And need I mention that very special friend of mine: the Internet. Oh sure, I could use some data on my phone if I really needed to. But I didn’t REALLY need to. Unless, of course, this pesky power outage persisted.

But it didn’t. Pretty much an hour later, at 7:15 when lots of people are just getting up, the hum and shine of my interior domicile resumed and I didn’t have to entertain the idea of breaking out the camp lantern later that night or running my laptop battery down to zero.

But what if the power didn’t come back on? My brain was rehearsing this thought for the few minutes before the electricity resumed. Remembering stories of ice storms that resulted in power-less days-on-end made me question how prepared we really are. Can we cook? Can we bathe? Can we internet? And if I take it further, thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, when the electricity leaves and never returns, how happy would I be then?

In some ways, this pandemic has made me think about things like this. What sort of things can I live without? And how do I make my peace with the things lost that I have no say about? No gatherings of family of any real size. No traditional celebrations. No concerts. No farmer’s markets – well, not ones that aren’t highly policed and sanitized. No eating out inside or outside a restaurant. And some of the time, no haircuts, no libraries, no school inside the actual schools.

But we endure, even if it’s not all how we like it to be. I’m thankful that it’s spring and that the warm weather allows for walks together or visiting outside. There’s still thankfully the internet and the ability to Zoom if we want to. And there’s the hope that if we fix what needs to be fixed and we work together, we can bust out of our garages and be free again someday soon.

About Spiders

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Well, it’s spring and you know what that means: yep, spiders.

Spring also means washing windows, which is what I decided to do today when the temperature climbed up into the high teens. But washing the windows meant removing screens and and that meant there was plenty of time that my house was left vulnerable to Invasion of the Creepy Crawlies. So, I guess it’s my own dang fault for wanting to see out my windows.

To all the spider lovers out there – I KNOW: spiders are supposed to be SO GREAT because apparently their whole deal involves eating a bunch of other bugs. This is what my husband always reminds me of whenever I subpoena him for spider-disposal duty. As if reciting Science Facts will suddenly have me making up the spare room for our new guest. And the last time I looked, I don’t exactly have a bunch of other bugs in my house that necessitates an assassin to take up residence with me.

I have always maintained that as long as Rick is in the house, it is his responsibility to “take care” of any such unwanted visitors. (I’m not going to say “kill” because I leave the means of disposal up to him. Plus, I don’t want to offend any spiders who happen to read my blog.) However, if my male counterpart isn’t readily available, I will “take care” of the intruder myself. Because I can’t take the chance that he’s an extroverted spider who intends to call all his friends to come join him. Or a female spider because: You Know.

Usually this sort of “taking care” involves at least two layers of paper towel, because I need as much protection as possible from any spiderly-body-fluids that may happen to escape when I am “taking care” of the spider. The other thing that always happens when my paper towel blanket “shrouds” the spider (at an impressively rapid speed if I do say so myself) is that a strange sort of sound escapes from my mouth, not unlike the grunt I would probably make if I was chopping down a large tree. I can’t help it anymore than Hugh Grant’s character in Notting Hill can stop himself from saying “Oopsie Daisies.”

It makes no sense, this Rather Large Aversion I have for Critters That Don’t Belong in My House. After all, the spider in the picture above, although impressively large when compared to that door hinge, is still a whole lot smaller than me. And not poisonous. (At least, probably not poisonous.) But they’re awfully fast. And they can bite your face in the middle of the night. And, in some movies, grow to enormous sizes. Or turn you into a leotard-wearing superhero. Which I have No Interest In Doing. At All.

So, out they go. My House, My Rules. Which is why when I discovered a second spider in the shower right after Rick got home today, I made him “take care” of it. And except for the usual speech about a spider’s redeeming qualities, he did so without any weird grunts or girlish epithets. Or even two ply of paper towel.