Tag Archives: life

Taking Time for Me

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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I’m thrilled to be sitting at the dining room table, listening to the oven gently whirring as it cooks my chicken breasts mixed with the sound of birds softly chirping and an occasional car passing-by on the highway.It is peaceful.

I have been longing to write. Craving some solid, uninterrupted and quiet time to be able to sit down and reflect on some things.

Despite living in the (somewhat) country again, it has been a flurry of activity ever since our things arrived. We have finally (mostly) settled-in and my husband has started a full-time job. This also means that, for the first time since my son was 11.2 months old, I am a stay-at-home Mom.

I love my son dearly, and he is wonderful to play with and really well behaved, but I feel like my brain is shrivelling – I miss adult conversation and interaction every day, and having adult tasks/duties and responsibilities in my adult workplace.

I have never imagined that I was really the right ‘make’ to be a stay-at-home Mom and have always, truly, envied woman who seemed so full and fulfilled in the role. The ability to keep themselves challenged and stimulated as individuals while devoting so much of their energy and attention to little ones is truly impressive to me. I am, perhaps, too lazy for this. Or, maybe, too picky or difficult to please.

But, whatever it is that makes it a challenge for me to assume this role, here I am anyways.

I recall before I had given birth to my child that I had this dream of what my days of leave would look like: my baby would be sleeping sweetly, having been fed, changed, cuddled and cared for with perfection by yours truly and I would be serenely sipping a cup of tea while writing my novel.

I don’t think I even wrote one single word (other than facebook posts) for most of that time. And even then, the posts were largely pleading for help, or just posting a cute picture (or 100 cute pictures) of my perfect child.

I have felt challenged, on a personal level, recently to really carve-out time for what it is that is special and important to me and the one thing to which I consistently return is writing.

I know that woman are always talking about this and there seem to be endless articles about the importance of taking time for yourself. But, that is definitely more easily said than done when there is a constant list of things that need to be done.

However, I have really been working on the art of prioritizing and being “ok” with things that are not urgent, being left undone a little bit longer while I enjoy a moment. Yesterday I sat outside while my son had his nap, with a cup of tea and a little slice of carrot cake and I read and caught-up on my “5 Year Journal” entries.

It wasn’t that bad, actually. It didn’t really put me that much further behind in the tasks I was hoping to accomplish. Here I am, Day 2 of trying to be intentional about taking a small chunk of time out of my day to do something that is just for me and so far, so good.

I  Could Get Used to This

09 Tuesday May 2017

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It’s not “home” as I once knew it.

It’s not where I grew up, where I spent years of learning, maturing, laughing, crying, working and resting.

It is not where I rolled on the ground with the dogs, flung hay around for the cows’ lunch, learned to drive, or spent endless hours in my bedroom dreaming and pining for the kind of romantic adventures I had read about. It’s not where I fought with my brother, or where we spent hours recording ourselves on cassette tapes as we played Mario Bros. or watched Degrassi. 

My brother thought the tapes would be worth money one day. 

It is not where I used to sing opera at the top of my lungs in the hay loft, or dance around the calf stalls singing “16 Going on 17” when I was supposed to be cleaning.

No, it is not the home I grew-up in; still, it is home.

It is where my parents live and now, so do we.

Myself, my husband and our 3 year old son. Five of us under one roof. I am glad that we have our own space upstairs and will be much more glad when our things arrive and we have our space filled with our things. We have always been 3. The trinity. A perfect triangle. The 3 Amigos. 

There has been an adjustment period as we have expanded our triangle into a pentagon. The 5 Amigos. Or, as my son likes to point-out, the perfect finger family.

I get impatient with adjustment periods. I want to be settled NOW. I am hard on myself when I feel like I should be doing better, I should be feeling better, I should be more settled, I should have everything set-up and all the details under control. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s only been 1 week. Well, 1 week and 3 days. 

Although it has been, in actuality, a short period of time, it has felt as though we have been suspended in this unusual state for many months. I have gone in and out and around various stages of mourning. In the past few days I have cried over the loss of what had been routine family times, back when it was just the 3 of us. 

I have missed coming-downstairs on Sunday morning, after my husband let me sleep-in, to find my boys, sweetly, playing together. I would turn-on classical 96.3 FM and sit at the table with my toast, eggs and tea and just soak-in the sweetness of our trinity.

These moments are gone. They have become memories that feel terribly distant and teasingly close all at the same time. 

But, new moments and new memories are already beginning to establish themselves like the first green buds that poke out of the ground after a forest fire. New life full of new stories and sweet memories are already springing-up. My husband and I have shared many of these while watching our son with his grandparents; when he goes to help Nana feed the birds or bursts out laughing and says “You’re funny, Grampa!” in response to almost anything Grampa says.

And this evening I had a moment of pure perfection while bathing my son. I sat on the little, white stool that he uses to climb up onto the toilet or stands on at the sink to brush his teeth and watched him playing in the tub. As I watched him, the sweet smell of lavender baby wash circled around me and the song “Don’t Grow Up So Fast” by Train played quietly behind me, I realized that life couldn’t get any better than that moment.

Perfection. 100% pure perfection.

I wanted to seize on it, to tie it down, to capture it forever. 

In an attempt to trap the moment as long as I possibly could, I hit repeat on my phone. I sat there soaking in the sweetness, trying desperately to ensure that it was securely planted deep within my mind, somewhere it would never be lost. 

I did this another 4 times.

And I thought the thought that I have had many times since arriving here:

I could get used to this. 

Trying to Feel

29 Saturday Apr 2017

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Sitting in the back seat of my Mom’s vehicle, on our way to what will be our new home. In the past couple of weeks I have been asked, what seems like, hundreds of times how I am feeling about moving. 

I’ve always said “exhausted”, but today my husband found a much better word to express how we are feeling: numb.

I have only just started to allow myself to consider how massive this move really is. We are leaving Canada’s largest city, our bustling, noisy, gritty, downtown home to live in a small town. In fact, we are not even in the town, we are outside of it.

And, although, I grew-up in the area, I’ve been away for 18 years. I’m looking forward to the slower pace and being able to do more outdoor activities with my boys. But, I have become a ‘city person’ in many ways, and I will miss the excitement, the diversity, the fact that there is always so much to do, and watching the sunset glistening on the high rises. I will miss the street meat and array of buskers. 

I’ve tried to picture, to imagine, what life may look like for us now, to try to already begin replacing some of these moments and memories with the great things to come, but it is not possible. You cannot reminisce on what has not happened.

And so, what is left to do but to allow myself just to embrace the grief that comes with such life-altering changes? It’s not always easy to embrace grief. We don’t like to feel pain. We avoid it if we can. But, pain is an important part of grief because it allows you to really reflect on how much something has meant to you.

We became a family in Toronto. 

Therefore, here I sit in the back of my mom’s car, embracing the grief. Trying to wrap my ahead around the enormity of what is happening and allow myself to push through the numbness and feel.

It’s My Story – And, I love it.

03 Monday Apr 2017

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It’s always exciting to me when a chapter of my life is drawing to an end. The older I get, the more I am able to look-back on each chapter with pride and contentment. Perhaps this is because so much of my early chapters were filled with struggle, heartache and pain and as I get further away from them, filling my book with more adventures and happy moments, there are simply more memories from which to choose than there once was.
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I am also more excited than I used to be at the start of a new chapter. When I was younger, so much of my life was a blank page and I didn’t understand or fully appreciate the wonder of that.
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I recall when I was in my early 20’s, reflecting on my life and waiting for it to begin. In my mid-20’s, thinking I had experienced so much and yet, still thinking that I was still just waiting for when life would really start for me. At that time, I had only lived a small handful of chapters.
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Even though I somehow, at least on an intellectual level, knew that this was life, that it had begun, I didn’t feel it and I was still waiting.
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I used to meditate on the idea and try to will my whole being to a great epiphany of in-the-moment realization that this was life and it was wondrous. Then, one day, without me even noticing, it just happened.
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I can look-back on so much of my life and see these clear chapters, separations, moments of endings and new beginnings, of loss, of gain, of growth of retreat.
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And it’s all glorious.
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Now, more than when I was young, I revel at those blank pages. I am excited to think what stories, adventures, sites, smells, sounds and memories are going to fill these pages. I have a deeper appreciation for what it means to really be able to “look-back” and reflect on things.
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Natasha Bedingfield sings a song called “Unwritten” that has just started playing in my head as I am writing this:
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Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten.
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One day, years from now, I will be looking-back on this new chapter after it has been finished and I have moved-on to a new one, maybe even several new ones, and I will see the flashes of happy Christmases, sorrows and loss, moments of silliness, mistakes made, feelings of pride as well as accomplishment and, what I’m most looking-forward to, memories that are, heavily, steeped in love.
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I will be changed then, as I am now from the 20 year old me that was so eager for life to start.
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But, one thing will always remain – this is my story.
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And, I love it.
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Confessions of a Facebook “Creeper”

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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I admit it. I search for people all the time who aren’t my friends on Facebook. Usually, this happens during bouts of nostalgia when I find myself thinking about the people with whom I grew-up and wondering where they are, what they are doing, what they look like and how happy they appear.

I want to compare where I am, what I’m doing, what I look like and how happy I am with my childhood friends. I am always relieved and slightly joyous when I see that there has been weight gain, wrinkles, weariness…good. It’s not just me.

There are many people with whom I wish I had kept more regular contact. People with whom I am no longer “friends” – not even on Facebook. Sometimes I creep these people to see what life is like for them. I did this yesterday and spent a considerable amount of time looking at a few childhood friends and I was genuinely glad to see how happy they appeared. I was pleased that they had experienced adventures, travel, fun, love and beauty.

I considered sending a few friend requests, but got lost in thoughts of how it would be perceived by these people. I suffered from depression for most of my time in high school. This was before depression was really understood, talked about or treated. But, the biggest casualty of my depression was my social life. I withdrew from all of my friends and lost most of those relationships. One of the biggest hangers-on of this time period is embarrassment. I feel embarrassed all the time about how I was and I assume that people remember me in a negative light.

I was moody, judgmental, shy, confused, lonely and lost.

During these years my FB posts would have be the kind that you just get tired of seeing so you block the person so you don’t get the constant drone of negative status updates in your feed.

When I think about these years I am always overwhelmed with sadness for the many memories I have about stupid things I did as a result of my state of mind. I’ve been working on forgiving myself, and giving that girl a chance to heal and find acceptance; strangely, creeping on Facebook kind of helps with this. I’ve managed to ‘rekindle’ a few of these lost relationships and they have been extremely meaningful to me. Every time I send a request to a long, lost, friend and then we message back and forth a bit, and eventually just start to share life through the regular news feed, it helps normalize what feels like an extremely polarizing time for me.

I wish I could sit down with all of my old friends and have an open discussion about those years, explain what was going on in my world, express my regret for how I may have treated them, share my sorrow for all the lost time and then make-up for some of that time and move-forward as friends again.

My mind is full of many happy memories with them. I remember hours and hours of time spent together, laughing, talking about boys, playing stupid games, sleepovers, doing makeup, playing sports, passing notes in school…I see snapshots in my mind of us together on hammocks, acting cool at school dances, playing flag football, flirting and silly things like stuffing our shirts with balloons. The memories are full and rich.

But, then there are years where the memories are filled with pictures of school dances, football games, pep rallies and lunches filled with all these faces growing and enjoying life—but mine is not with them. These memories haunt me like shadows. Life was happening all around me, but I wasn’t in it.

So, I creep on facebook. I try to fill-in some of the gaps. I reach-out. I rekindle. I make progress.

I am so thankful for those friends with whom I’ve managed to reconnect because, the truth is, the folks with whom I grew-up really do mean a lot to me. They were the people that helped shape me into who I am today. They were my original cheerleaders, challengers and role-models. They were my squad, my family, my community. They exist in my memory as a deep and vast resource of life, joy, sorrow, lessons-learned, new experiences, comfort and friendship and I am so thankful for the ability to creep into their lives now and get a little piece of what once was.

250.4 My Life in Lbs

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

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I am getting excitingly close to leaving the 50’s and entering the 40’s.

I decided to take a look at my weight loss to date and figured-out that I am getting close to a 50 lb landmark.

It depends on which number I choose to look at, which is complicated a bit by the pregnancy/birth of my son.

Here’s my chart from Lose It:

Chart

 

My son was born October 17, 2013 and while still pregnant I had last weighed-in at 315 lbs.

After he was born, I got down to 283.5 on November 14th, 2013, but as you can see it went up from there for a while.

There’s a weird spike to 295 on March 25, 2014, but since there’s a previous mark that is 292.6 on January 2, 2014, I choose to pick an average there of 293 and just say that on January 1, 2014 I was 293 lbs.

With that little explanation, here’s a quick synopsis:

Jan. 1, 2014  (293 lbs) to Jan. 1, 2015 (280 lbs) = 13 lbs lost

Jan. 1, 2015 (280 lbs) to Jan. 1, 2016 (276 lbs) = 4 lbs lost

Jan. 1, 2016 (276 lbs) to Aug. 10, 2016 (250.4 lbs) = 25.6 lbs lost

Total lbs lost = 42.6

Getting so close to 50 lbs down.

I love this graph because it reflects a journey that hasn’t been easy, but I look it and see that I have never given-up. I look at it and I see hard work, perseverance, lessons learned, changes made, struggles, victories, tears of joy, tears of shame and, most beautifully, the creation and birth of my son.

To look at this chart is to see my life-the spikes represent times when life was difficult, dark times when I struggled to get out of bed in the morning and to eat anything other than toast, chips, chocolate and cookies. You can see times when the clouds seem to have parted and I go ‘great guns’ and drop a bit, only to rebound and hit another spike.

But, the general trend has been downwards and recently, the trend is pretty impressive. I have, clearly, learned a lot through my journey.

This morning I am feeling encouraged. I feel strengthened and validated in my pursuit of health.
I am not perfect. But, when I look at my life in lbs, I see a warrior who refuses to be defeated and is constantly honing her skills as she levels up and prepares to, once and for all, take down the big boss.

I Dreamed a Dream

05 Tuesday Jul 2016

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I had a dream last night that I had decided to leave my husband and run-off with an old flame of mine. This isn’t a unique dream for me, I have some variation of this dream every 3-4 months. 

The “object of my affection” is a guy who was my biggest crush in life, though in the dream he’s actually an almagamation of different people I’ve met into one super-human.

This dream always starts off so beautifully. My ‘dream guy’ has just professed his love for me and expressed the ultimate desire for us to be together. I’m swept-away. Swept-up in a daydream of violins, rose petals, strong arms and perfect love.
This is what I’ve been missing.

What I’ve always wanted.
My new/old beau and I spend some intimate and romantic time together. We embrace, we cry, we kiss we talk about the time we’ve missed and the dreams to come.

(At this point, I wake up because I have to pee. I go to the bathroom, pee, return to bed and fall back asleep, and am instantly brought back into the romantic reverie. My new/old beau and I have a few friends around us who are so happy that we’ve finally connected and that we have accepted the fact that we were meant to be together and I am feeling peaceful, happy and so in love).

Eventually, however, reality hits. This is the part of the dream where I start to think about how I would break the news to my husband. I begin to process how this will hurt him, and the realization starts to set-in that hurting him will hurt me as well, because his well-being was part of me. I don’t want to hurt him or see him sad.

More importantly, I don’t want to break what we’ve built together.

It hasn’t been perfect and it most definitely did not start-off in any romantic, loving, head-over-heels kind of way, but it is what it is because we’ve worked at it together. 

I never “fell in love” with my husband. We were good friends and I loved him as a friend. But, I never had romantic feelings towards him or felt attracted to him. Our romantic relationship hopped-skipped-and-jumped from friendship to ‘couple on the verge of divorce’. That is where our relationship started.

I never had the butterflies, the nervous stomach, the excitement and anticipation of being picked up for a date, or that feeling of being swept-up or falling in love. 

I have always wondered what I missed-out on. I try to tell myself that I don’t want, or need, the romance – that they are not required to be in a happy relationship, that it is unrealistic, that this idea of being “in love” with the person you marry is a fairytale, or something that only a few special (privileged) people get to experience.

I used to wake up after one of these dreams feeling resentful towards the man that was snoring beside me. Why couldn’t he be more like the man of my dreams? Why do I feel trapped and that it is impossible to leave to pursue a relationship like that of my dreams? I loved getting swept-away in this dream, a fairy tale, a plot for a Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan movie. I used to try to live in the dream as long as possible once awake. To pretend that it was real.

But, this morning when I woke-up, I was surprised at how I was feeling. I didn’t feel resentful or sad at my lot in life, I wasn’t desperately clinging to the romance I had experienced in my dream, I wasn’t depressed by feelings of being trapped or stuck, I was relieved. I was grateful that the man snoring beside me was my husband and nobody else.

I usually wake-up during the part of the dream where I’m just starting to feel sad about the looming idea that I might not be able to go through with it. But, this morning, I dreamt for much longer than that. In my dream I went through a lot of processing and woke up after I had realized that I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be with this other person. I wanted to be with my husband.

It was the first time that this dream didn’t leave lingering feelings of regret or sadness.

And there was no sadness there.

Only joy.

Joy and gratitude.

There are is still improvement needed and I clearly desire more excitement, romance, intimacy and adventure in our relationship, but I know that I want it in OUR relationship and not with anyone else.

I want to continue to build on what we have created. To explore and discover romance and beauty together. To continue to challenge ourselves and each other to make our lives the things of which dreams are truly made.

I love you, sweet cheeks.

Summertime Dreaming

20 Monday Jun 2016

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There has been something magical about this summer. I’m not entirely sure how to describe it, except for, perhaps, the fact that I feel more present. 

I’ve been trying to be really aware of each moment. I try to be mindful of how I am feeling, my surroundings, how my surroundings make me feel, etc.

A few years ago (ok, more than a few!) when I had first moved to Toronto as a young,naive, small-town girl, it was the end of summer and I had never experienced such heat and humidity before.

I remember feeling hotter than I had ever felt before in my life. It felt torturous in the moment, and I thought I hated it, but lately I’ve been having very beautiful remembering a of these days.

Feeling soaked with sweat, listening to Alicia Keys singing “you give me butterflies…”, day dreaming about the person with whom I was currently in love, eating very little, the sweet smell that, mysteriously, fills the Toronto air during the summer…

And I’ve been reliving it and it feels like that part of my brain, the part that used to be a wild dreamer, is waking up again.

I had forgotten what it was like to live life on a dream. I was always dreaming about more, about what was around the other corner, about the adventures I was going to have, the places I was going to go and the incredible mysteries of life that were unfolding before me.

Somewhere along the way, I got lost.

It’s been incredibly fun rediscovering myself. Just as I have loved watching my little boy grow, learn and discover the world around me, I am enjoying the experience for myself as well.

Life is meant to be lived. It’s meant to be full of, well, life. But, for years now I have felt as though it was just a cloud that I was, kind of, sleepwalking through. There was nothing much that inspired me. Nothing that made me want to get up and explore. Perhaps it was that motherhood completely overwhelmed me, or that I have been “burnt out” for years and am just finally coming-through on the other side of both. 

But, whatever it is, I’m loving it and I’m having a lot of fun rediscovering myself, learning new things about myself, and growing stronger and healthier every day.

Maybe I just had to sweat it out.

The Lost Girl

04 Wednesday May 2016

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The other day I was in the bathroom washing my hands and when I looked-up at myself in the mirror I got a surprise. I looked like myself again.

For years now I have looked in a mirror, searching for me and failing to find the person that once looked back at me. I would see someone with a puffy, tired, drawn face looking back at me like I was a stranger and I would say to her ‘who are you?’

I would stare at this person, intently, gazing into her eyes, trying to find the person I used to know.

Then, all of a sudden, she just showed-up.

The person looking back at me had the mischievous twinkle in her eye that was so familiar. She looked happy, refreshed and full of life.

I didn’t realize how much I had been missing her until she showed up again.

She took my breath away.

There was great relief to find that she still existed. I had been feeling as though she would be lost forever.

This girl and I were close once. We used to explore, create, love, laugh and live a wondrous life full of energy. She was brave and enjoyed exploring and trying new things.

I guess I first started losing touch with her when I was pregnant-the first time. After the miscarriage, she began to distance herself a little bit more. After moving country and finding herself more alone than ever, she would disappear for weeks at a time. She was never really the same after that.

After she gave birth to her little boy she disappeared, almost, entirely. There were brief moments of pure joy when she would show her face, but for the most part, she was lost.

I couldn’t find her. I would call out to her ‘where are you?’ and hear nothing in response. I missed the excitement she brought to the world, I missed the energy, the love for life, the hunger for experience.

I missed the love of art, the desire to create music and write thoughts, the joy that she would have when she watched a breeze rustling the leaves of a tree.

And, all of a sudden, here she was. A cheeky grin on her face, her eyes glowing like an andalusite gem, ready to take on the world.

Like Bastian in “The Neverending Story”, I have traversed through sadness, fear, loss, overcome great obstacles and battled “the Nothing” only to discover that I was the one all along.

The rediscovery of this girl has been a huge part of this journey that I call “seeking life now”. It hasn’t happened by accident. I have had to work at it. My lost self didn’t just appear of her own volition, I have been working on creating a safe space for her so that she felt confident in returning.

And, although she’s not 100%, fully back, the glimpse I have seen of her has given me new hope and renewed energy to keep working on the things I have been doing so that she has space to thrive once again.

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Art is what happens to you…

29 Friday Apr 2016

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Art- it’s exciting when a piece of art surprises you by impacting you in a way you never thought it would.

My husband and I took a half vacation day to explore the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). We had wanted to do this on Leap Day (Feb. 29, 2016) but it fell on a Monday and the Gallery is not open on Mondays.

So, we decided to do it yesterday.

We took the elevator to the top floor and found a volunteer leading a tour who invited us to join. Usually, I would want to just explore these things on my own, but today I was feeling like I could use a little extra input into what it was we were going to be seeing, so we joined in.

I’m so glad we did.

The very first installation we saw was one created by Micah Lexier. It was “a work of art in the form of a quantity of coins equal to the number of months of the statistical life expectancy of a child born January 6, 1995.”

Normally, I would look at something like this and think: “Huh…ok. Kind of interesting, I guess.” And not give it very much thought beyond that.

But, as we looked at it our volunteer tour guide said:

“Notice how the coins in the first box are neatly ordered and purposefully placed. This is the expectation of what life will bring-the hopes. This is how we all start out. Now look at the coins in the second box. It always reminds me of a line of a famous John Lennon song: ‘life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’.”

And then the tears came.

First of all, the installation reflected things I’ve been having about my own life for some time. For years now I have been trying to teach myself how to be present in the moment and realize that this is life.

There was a period of time when I felt I was constantly waiting for my life to begin. And then, all of a sudden, I looked and I saw a box, much like this chaotic box of coins, and I realized that this was my life. Life was here in all this mess, disorganisation and the many unplanned events and bends in the road.

I had been expecting to look at my life and see it as the first box: Ordered, dreams fulfilled, everything in its place, looking exactly as I had imagined it would. But, I have recently come to realize and accept my life as being beautiful, despite the fact that it looks so different to what I had originally envisioned.

Just as the neatly organized coins have their beauty, so do the scattered. And, as I looked at the 2 boxes the one thing remained the same, despite how the coins were placed, they were all in “my box”. And, that’s really what is important. Whether the coins are neat, or scattered, they are mine. They are my memories, experiences, struggles, victories, joys, sorrow – my life. And that’s beautiful.

Secondly, I sing that song to my son all the time. And, as I looked at these coins, I saw my neatly organized hopes and dreams for what his life will be in the first box and the reality of what it will actually be in the 2nd. I realized that his life, just like mine, is going to be what it’s going to be. I can’t control it and I won’t be able to keep it neatly organized for him. He’s going to experience pain, sorrow, frustration, disappointment, confusion and chaos. But, there will also be joy, love, freedom, hope, comfort and adventure.

There will come a time when the 2 coins that are currently in his box will be at the bottom of this heap of messy coins, almost forgotten. Except, the image of how they are now in their near perfection, will always remain in my heart. At some point, there will have to be a letting-go.

As I stood there contemplating all of this I made a promise to myself to help teach my son how to not miss life because he’s trying to keep his coins in order. I want to teach him to embrace the chaos that is life and to see the beauty in it while it is happening.

Out on the ocean sailing away
I can hardly wait
To see you come of age
But I guess we’ll bot just have to be patient
‘Cause it’s a long way to go
A hard row to hoe
Yes, it’s a long way to go
But in the meantime

-John Lennon-

 

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