Tag Archives: Memories

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. 

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.

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.

Life is Magical

19 Saturday Mar 2016

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but my mind is full of memories that seem to be filled to the brim with magic.

I’m not talking saw the girl in half or house of Gryffindor magic. But, I guess what I will call, movie magic.

These are moments and memories upon which I look back on and see them as if watching a beautiful film. Everything is perfect- the lighting, the mood, the script, the cinematography, the soundtrack- it’s all there.

My movie reel is beautiful. I love tapping into that part of my mind and just reliving these moments.

Most of them are bittersweet. Unrequited love, happier days long forgotten, a time when life was less complicated. But, it is so sweet to relive the moments and experience the thrill of the emotions that accompany each one.

I love reliving life in my mind. But, I am constantly questioning if I am living too much in the past. I have, until recently, spent a great deal of time simply wanting to go back.

The positive impact this life movie reel has had on me is that I have started to realize how beautiful, how magical, life really is.

I seek to be fully aware of each moment because, one day, these will be the magical times I think back on with nostalgia and wish I could relive.

I try to live the moment to its fullest the first time, so when I see it again years from now, I don’t feel sad that I hadn’t known how wonderful it was at the time.

I find myself yearning a little bit less for memories of the past and embracing the present moments, looking for every morsel of joy, love, wonder, imagination, beauty, emotion and magic that they have to offer.

This is life.

And, it’s not that bad.

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Memory

14 Monday Mar 2016

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I have said this before, memories are tricky, unreliable things.

I believe that most, if not all, of our memories consist of factual truth, embellishments of emotion, imagination and external influences (such as seeing a picture, news article, or hearing someone else’s account).

While they may not be 100% fact, memories, especially those from childhood, can tell us a lot about how we were feeling at the time. They should not be judged. They should not be criticized. And, there’s often no real need for them to be “set straight”. They exist for a reason.

They are called “Autobiographical Memory”.

Our memories help shape us and, in turn, our lives. I grew up as the baby of the family. I am used to having everyone else tell me how “things were” or at least, how they remember them.

I also have grown-up constantly trying to keep the peace and protect everyone around me. This has meant that, time and time and time again I have never shared what I remembered, how I have felt about things and the memories that have been my experiences through life.

Even now, as I started this blog, I have had to constantly battle the urge to edit or not write because I didn’t want to upset anyone. I have held my own memories, recollections, feelings, thoughts, and stories close to my heart, where they could be safe, long enough. I want to share them. I want to share this world that I grew-up in. As I remember it.

I know that my memories are never going to be 100% truth. Sometimes, they may not even be more than 20% truth. But, they are mine.This is how it was to me. And, as part of who I am, they don’t need to be corrected, just accepted as part of me, my story, my substance. I know that they are not, necessarily, perfectly accurate and I know that there are other people involved who have their own versions of the stories, their own memories, their own feelings. I do not write to take that away from that. We all experienced things through our own lenses. This is my space to share through mine.

Fear, loneliness, trauma, anger, shame, embarrassment, love, uncertainty, humor, imagination, sadness-they will all be a part of why I recall things the way I do. And that’s important.

This is what my world was. These are the experiences, memories and feelings, both fact and fiction, that all led-up to this point. Right here. Me.
Here in all my strengths, weaknesses, victories, failures-the love, the hate, the fear the bravery. Everything I am comes from these memories.

It may not be 100% factual truth-but, it is 100% me.

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Prom

25 Thursday Feb 2016

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To this day I can’t remember what kind of reasoning or excuse I must have given to my  prom date (who also happened to be my brother) when I drove us to my teacher’s house before heading to the prom.

This action is something that plagued me with intense self-disdain and embarrassment for years.

‘How completely ridiculous am I that I did something like that?’

As an adult I can understand why I did it and I have been telling myself to cut the teenage me a break.

My home life was not stable and could be fairly volatile at times. This teacher was one of the few people in my life that made me feel safe.

I was attending prom despite the fact that I desperately did not want to go. I had never been interested in attending a prom. But, it seemed important to my mother that I attend, and then my brother offered to go with me and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or let anyone down (see my “People Pleaser” post).

Because I felt like I had zero control over anything and was about to walk into a world that I believed would chew me up and spit me out like I was yesterday’s gum, I needed to see a friendly face.

I went to his house to get some confidence.

If he said that everything was going to be great and that I looked lovely, then just maybe, I could survive the horror that lay-before me.

When I look-back on photos of my prom I’m always struck by how much I look like the ghost of an old grandma who died on the way to a wedding. Truthfully.

Our prom theme was, perhaps, the most disgusting theme ever used for a prom: “Truly, Madly, Deeply” based on that, ‘oh so amazing’ (makes me want to puke to this day), song by ‘Savage Garden’. We didn’t walk in the grand march, but I think we watched everyone else doing it as that horrible song played over and over and over again.

While at prom I did have some fun, despite myself. My brother and I danced a fair amount. He was incredible and kept saying things like: “Let’s show these assholes how to dance’.

I think I ditched him pretty unceremoniously at the end. I can’t really remember the chain of events, but I don’t think I stuck-around prom for that long. I remember going to a friend’s house afterwards and eating a crap load of junk food while watching a movie or something.

Most of me just wanted to forget that the whole, horrible, night had ever happened.

But, years later, after being able to forgive myself for the stupid things I did when I was a lost teenager, searching desperately for security, acceptance and self, I think back on my prom and the words that come to mind are not that it was lame, torturous, unimportant or stupid.

Now, when I think about that night, these are the words that float to the top: My brother is amazing. He loves me so much that he was willing to do that for me.

And, we really did show those assholes how to dance.

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