Category Archives: My failing sanity

Miley and Me

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The other day I woke up with No Scrubs stuck in my head; this isn’t an entirely strange thing, as I do like that song, and hear it fairly often on one of my playlists. What was strange, though, was how tenacious it was. All through my morning yoga practice I kept hearing hanging off the passenger side of his best friend’s ride over and over. A scrub is a guy who can’t get no love from ME. Then I took a Peloton ride and the very last class was No Scrubs, and it started to feel surreal. After that there was no getting away from it; I wondered if this would be like the time I had the Lido Shuffle stuck in my head for days, and kept hearing it on the radio, and is this is how it starts, the descent into madness.

The next day I chose a Peloton ride that had a No Scrubs-free playlist, but it turns out that I am becoming unhinged anyway, as I got all choked up singing along to Miley Cyrus’ The Climb. There’s always going to be another mountain, I’m always going to want to make it move, it’s always going to be an uphill battle…at which point my singing voice started cracking and I started rapidly blinking back tears. To MILEY CYRUS.

Well, things have felt a little Uphill Battle-ish lately. Every morning I wake up with renewed positivity and optimism, and just as soon as I cross a few Stressful Things off my list, five more Stressful Things take their place. This past week a very unexpected, fairly serious health issue popped up in the Boyhouse, which is causing me considerable worry, as we are moving next month, and this needs to be taken care of prior to that. We are not just moving house, but moving provinces, and let me tell you that I absolutely love the Canadian universal health care system for the most part, but it can be hard to get things in a very timely manner, and inter-provincial health care is not ideal. Switching provincial care and finding new providers is going to be a Big Deal, but I’m trying to keep my head up and take things step by step.

This move is something that’s been in the works for a while, and although I have had some emotional ups and downs about it, I am definitely looking forward to being settled into my new home. In the interim, however, everything feels like chaos. I am not a person who Does Well With Change, in fact, I’m kind of the opposite, and everything is changing at once. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It’s like ripping off a giant bandaid, or getting a Brazilian wax all in one strip. OUCH, but also, it isn’t dragging things out, I guess.

Anyway. Things will get done. In not too long, I will be on the other side of this. On the huge plus side, my son had his second dental surgery this week and it went really well. It went so well that I had a few moments of regret that the first went so badly, but we cannot change the past, people. He and I spent an afternoon watching Forrest Gump, and because I am currently an emotional wreck, I spent much of it blinking rapidly and swallowing hard. We both agreed that the best parts of the movie were the Vietnam scenes and the friendship between Forrest and Lieutenant Dan, and that the music, as the kids say, slaps.

One thing I am very much looking forward to in my new home is gardening. The growing season is solidly four months longer than it is in Calgary, and this winter is going to be all about planning and designing my new beds. The trick will be to keep Rex out of them, which takes some doing. Incredibly, after a winter of being sat on and walked on – Get out of the garden! I said countless times this winter, only to be answered with a look of innocence before slowly trampling the beds on his way out – my Siberian irises are in full, gorgeous bloom. On the other hand, Rex seemed to have killed my creeping Jenny in the hosta garden. Who knew one could kill creeping Jenny? I thought it would survive nuclear fallout, but apparently, it cannot survive a winter with Rex.

Weekly Reading

Foreverland: On The Divine Tedium of Marriage. It’s interesting how sometimes a book will come into your life at just the right time, and will resonate with you so strongly that you might look around, wondering if someone is actually inside your house. Or your head. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of essays that is so honest, so candid, and yet so funny and self-deprecating as this. It’s divided into four sections that can be described as courtship and engagement, wedding and early parenthood, house, home, and parenting older kids, and, finally, bumps in the road, including dissatisfaction, illness, and the pandemic. I cannot even describe how much I related to so much of this book, even for things that happened long ago; it has been a very long time since I had a newborn, but her description of the feeling that the baby was an actual part of her body and when she was separated from the baby, it felt like she was literally missing an organ was so exactly what I too experienced. It is a rare book that makes a person feel completely seen and less alone, but this absolutely did. It’s really a beautiful, yet brutally honest, look at so many facets of marriage and life, and I loved it.

Funny You Should Ask. I read most of this in waiting rooms so I think I was a bit distracted and found this book a bit hard to get into. It’s a nice light romance about a journalist who interviews a movie star and then they meet again ten years later for another interview. The interview skyrocketed her to fame, it started a bunch of rumours, I don’t know, it was fine. I liked it just fine but didn’t love it. Apparently this book went viral on TikTok, so my meh reaction could be just me.

The Paper Palace. Wow, this was a really incredible book. On the surface, it’s about a woman who has just had a clandestine encounter with her oldest friend, and now she’s faced with the choice: leave her marriage and her much-loved husband and children, or stay and figure out how to deal with the fallout. One might think, as I did initially, if she loved her husband so much, why the affair? This book delves into the past fifty years, and how it affected a twenty-four hour period. It’s filled with secrets, and horror, and love; it shows the butterfly effect of single actions, and the connections between us. It is so well written and the descriptive writing is beautiful. I had no idea what was going to happen or how it was going to end, and it’s the kind of book that leaves you wondering and wanting more. I really loved it.

This week felt so long, but I am, Monday morning once again, filled with renewed positivity and optimism to tackle the ever-growing To Do list. Happily, my skin care routine is working and I look fantastic.

I hope you all have a beautiful, uncomplicated week. xo

Crying In Superstore

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I am not at all a stress or emotional eater – in fact, in trying times I tend to lose my appetite and forget to eat – but I am a Taurus, and I love to treat myself, particularly when I have had a lot of onerous or tiring tasks. Not always is that treat food-related, although I do love a good Lindor or a bowl of chips with guacamole. More often that treat is a book I’ve been looking forward to after I have washed the floors or an interesting podcast to listen to while doing something boring like folding the laundry. Friday nights that treat is a nice glass or three of wine, to celebrate the start of the weekend. Sometimes I treat myself with a nice bottle of scented lotion or a new beauty product. And then sometimes, I feel the need to bake myself a cake.

Hoo boy, it has been a week, and also, there is more to come. In a nine-day span, every male in this house will have had a medical thing to deal with: my older son had LASIK surgery last week, which turned out to be a real success, my husband has a colonoscopy today, and if you have ever had one yourself, you know that the prep is much, much worse than the actual procedure, and my younger son has not only another podiatrist appointment this week, but his dental surgery got bumped up to this coming Wednesday. That latter is actually a blessing, since I received information that the Grade 12 BBQ and yearbook signing party is on the day that he WOULD have had the surgery, had the surgery not been moved. As it is, he won’t miss the festivities, and he will be hopefully all healed up by that time.

By saying yes to everything and being encouraging of all activities, I have been really committed to ensuring my son has a really great senior year, and I think that he has. In the past, the school has put on a banquet for graduation – except, of course, for the 2020-21 grad classes – but this year, the school decided to have a big dance instead, with grads only, no family members allowed. The school did, however, ask for parent volunteers.

Me: Oh hey, honey, the school needs parent volunteers for the…

My son: No.

Me: But…

My son: NO.

I mean, it’s probably for the best. Who wants their mom hanging around their grad party, even if she is considered to be the Cool Mom? The theme was “A Night In Hollywood” and my son went with a group of his buddies, and it was the best time ever, the end.

Careful readers may have noticed that I said every male in this house, and as such, Rex is included. Oh, Rex. The day of my son’s graduation I took him to doggy day care, as I didn’t want to leave him alone in the house all day. It’s like I have a giant furry toddler. The very next day he whimpered at 5:30 am to be let out and then had, how shall I say this delicately, explosive stomach upset. ONE day at doggy day care! IT IS JUST LIKE HAVING A GIANT FURRY TODDLER. It seemed to be a fairly isolated incident, with a couple of less-dramatic incidents, and he had his usual enormous level of energy, eating and drinking normally. I didn’t worry and I moved on with my life.

That is, until Tuesday when he again whimpered to be let out, this time at 5:00 am, and then he was outside a LOT. One thing no one really tells you when you have a baby is how much time and energy you spend examining their diapers and noting things like colour and “seediness.” The same goes for pets. I found myself examining the back yard and when I discovered blood in one of the very loose stools, I went from Perfectly Calm to Panic at the Doggy Disco. I called the vet who said that they could not get him in until the next day, but if I wanted to come by to grab some probiotics, that would probably help. The next day was when my son was having eye surgery, and then he had checkups the day after that, and it was all the way across the city, during rush hour, and no, I could not bring Rex in the next day, all was ashes.

Panic Level High, I headed to the vet to pick up probiotics and then found myself bursting into tears at the front desk, being completely unable to speak, and unfortunately, the woman I was sobbing in front of was not the same woman who I spoke with on the phone, so she was completely puzzled and alarmed. Who is this crying woman? Did her dog die? Finally the woman I had spoken to did come by, looking at near-hysterical me, and then asked me to wait a moment. She came back to say that if I was willing to just drop Rex off for the afternoon, the vet would squeeze him in between appointments and then call me when she had examined him.

I zoomed home and then zoomed back to the vet, then zoomed over to pick up groceries, but I could not calm down. I could NOT calm down. Rationally I couldn’t understand it: I was doing everything I needed to do, Rex, by all measures other than his BMs, was obviously fine, everything was okay. Still, I couldn’t settle. I would take deep breaths and then my eyes would well up, looking at the bananas and spinach. Then I had a notification on my phone, which is when I realized the date: it would have been Barkley’s birthday. At that point I started crying in the produce section. It was just too much. Everything in my life felt like Too Much. I managed to settle myself down enough to finish shopping – buying all sorts of weird “low fibre” foods for my husband’s upcoming colonoscopy prep – and to drive home. I had just finished putting everything away when the vet called me with the good news that Rex just needed to be dewormed, he was fine, and I could come and pick him up.

Because of Rex’s size, he was in an exam room all by himself, as opposed to in a kennel. The vet started to lead me to the room he was in…and it was the room in which Barkley died.

So it’s been kind of an emotional week, I have to say, and I’ve got a lot to get through this coming week. One foot in front of the other, the only way out is through, etcetera, but hopefully there will be less crying at Superstore.

Weekly Reading

Yellowface. I really love when a book has a lot of nuance, a lot of questions, and nothing that is black or white. This satirical novel about a woman stealing her dead friend’s manuscript, editing it, and passing it off as her own is absolutely incredible and full of so many unanswered questions. The biggest question it poses is who gets to tell what story? This is a very interesting question to me and I think about it a lot. For example, years ago I read American Dirt and really enjoyed it; it was only afterward that I found out about all the controversy surrounding the author. But does that take away from the story? For me it didn’t, for you it might. It’s important to note that women have been telling men’s stories, and vice versa, and I don’t tend to think that’s wrong. Of course, there is the added layer of the publishing industry and the biases and exclusions involved. To add to the irony, the author tells a story about a white woman, which she is not. In addition to the big question, there are many small ones. What about the creative process? Where do stories come from? If an idea comes from a conversation, and a book is written about it, was that a stolen idea? Another theme in this book is the role of social media in our society and the “pile ons” that can happen. There were just so many things that brought to mind the last fifteen years of social media, trolls, etc., and how they affect real people. This book shows the competitive nature of publishing and how everyone is scrambling to get a piece. At the heart of it, this book shows how a lie can turn into a giant web of lies, and how keeping secrets can kill a person from the inside out. I almost never say this, but wow, this book lived up to the hype!

When The Apricots Bloom. I thought I would love this book about 2002 Iraq. It has, theoretically, everything I love in a book: description of a different culture, an alternate look at an international political situation, three women protagonists and how they are connected. But yet, I did not like this book AT ALL. The plot, which should have been interesting – the secret police, espionage! – dragged and the dialogue was terribly stilted. What a disappointment.

On this emotional roller coaster of a week, I had my first kale harvest of the year! The gnomes must be helping. I had planted a few different varieties and they were delicious. I hope you all have a beautiful, non-roller-coaster style week, with lots of fresh produce and minimal produce aisle crying. xo

More Screaming Into The Void

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Thank you all for your kind and supportive comments regarding my son’s dental surgery. He is booked for the second surgery, and I was happily surprised to hear that it will take no more than twenty minutes under general anesthetic; I am still salty that we didn’t do this in the FIRST place, but the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, etcetera.

When I asked the nurse on the phone several spastic questions, she was very calming and made me feel like a) my son’s particular issues might be problematic in a regular dental office, but are par for the course in their specialist’s office, and b) I SHOULD HAVE INVESTIGATED THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE. But again. Planting trees, we don’t know what we don’t know, and I will probably never trust a regular dentist for advice again.

I am a person who generally likes Mondays. Monday is generally a good day for me: I have a morning to accomplish things and then an afternoon class with a lovely group of ladies, we have pasta on Monday nights, and I am well-rested from the weekend. This past Monday, though. I felt like Garfield, or these guys:

Honestly, it was a ridiculous day of frustration. The dental office and oral surgeon both kept phoning me, while I was walking Rex, to say they had emailed over various forms and paperwork that needed to be responded to, but I had received nothing. My personal email was working fine, but our family email – which I use for all such things – kept giving me error messages. Finally I contacted our internet provider, who informed me that there had been a password compromise, so they locked my account. I mean, good? But also, I would have liked to know that?

The fellow on my Help Chat had me log into my account on their website, which required a two-step verification process; the authentication code was sent to…my email that was not working. There was no way around this. EMAIL OR NOTHING. Eventually, after much wrangling we did get around it, and all was resolved, but it took a significant amount of time and as soon as I finished the mountains of paperwork I needed to leave to teach my class.

I was feeling fairly agitated by this time because MORE DENTAL SURGERY, plus all the email issues, plus filling in all the forms and finding all the cards with all the various health numbers on them, which needed to be done IMMEDIATELY. Because of my preparation for my flying birdies, my sons carry their health care cards on their persons, but luckily Past Nicole had anticipated issues and had photos of the health care cards on my phone, which I finally remembered. Finishing all this, I zipped over to the community centre, thinking how nice it was that the heat was finally fixed, and that it was a beautiful warm day; I expected the centre to be fairly warm and was dressed accordingly in short sleeves and capri-length leggings.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I entered the room to discover it was freezing, and not just freezing, but Freezing With Blasts Of Freezing Air. The air-conditioning was on full blast, and when I asked the women in the office if we could possibly turn off the air-conditioning, they replied that they could not. It had been jammed on full blast since the previous Thursday, and no one could figure out how to turn it off. A service call, they said, had been requested.

I think if someone had told me all of the issues affecting my classes in the past two months, I would not have believed them. I would not have believed that a community centre could be shut down completely for six weeks to work on the HVAC system, I would not have believed that after those six weeks I and my fellow teachers would be required to teach for two weeks in a hall with no heat, I would not have believed that my unheated yoga classes would be punctuated with the sound of drilling into metal and that I would have to beg the workmen to please, PLEASE stop drilling for five minutes so my students could have a peaceful savasana. After all that, I certainly would not have believed that I would be faced with an air-conditioned room that no one could possibly bear being in. I just stood and stared forlornly at the thermostat for a long time, randomly pushing seemingly useless buttons, until the centre manager came up to me and said that, happily, the boardroom was empty that afternoon and the air conditioning didn’t seem to be on in that room, so if I could help her move chairs we could hold the class in there.

It was cozy and wonderful, and afterwards I felt much more calm and ready to tackle life, until I got home and chaos seemed to follow me. Every single task I needed to do took five times longer than usual because of small complications arising – from emails to event planning, from trying to activate a card online to making dinner, every little thing was way harder than it needed to be, for no reason that I could tell except that maybe I had angered the universe at some point and was being smited.

It’s a good thing I am not one of those people who think that Monday sets the tone for the week. I simply waved the white flag, ate some leftover Mother’s Day cake, and went to bed, thinking, like Scarlett O’Hara, that after all, tomorrow is another day.

Weekly Reading

The House On Mango Street. I really loved this little book of tiny vignettes about a Latina girl growing up in – and getting out of – Chicago. I loved that in the prologue, the author talked about wanting to write for people who are busy working for a living, who don’t have much time to read and are tired. Each story vignette is very short, and that’s why. It’s an absolute delight of a book.

My Body. After reading No Filter, my friend Cherie (HI CHERIE) recommended this to me as another book of memoir essays about a model and the modeling industry. I had no idea who the author of this memoir was. That has never stopped me before! If you also don’t know, she’s a famous swimsuit model and actor, who became famous after appearing in the video for Blurred Lines. Funnily enough, I was talking about this book to my husband, who DID know who she was, which was probably the most surprising thing I learned this month. I liked this collection about the life of a model and the bad men who take advantage of them, but I think what was most interesting were her essays about being an Instagram influencer. To the outside world, being an influencer might be perceived as an easy way to make money, but my goodness, it is NOT. It is a job, and not one that I would like, involving a lot of work and obsessing over screens, likes, and comments. 

Thankfully, the rest of the week was much more smooth, productive, and happy than Monday portended, albeit smoky, and it included some gardening, long chats with friends, a birthday dinner for my mom, my thousandth – thousandth! – Peloton ride, and a freshly groomed and ready for summer Rex. This week is my son’s graduation ceremony, filled with all the fun and social things that go with it. I hope you all have a beautiful week! xo

Five For Friday: The Smoky Eye Edition

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  • There are terrible wildfires north of us, and we have been experiencing immensely smoky air and extremely poor air quality. It has improved a bit over the week, but Tuesday was an absolute low point. We had intense, gusting winds and being outside felt exactly like having smoke blown in my face, but at 80 km/ hr. Smoke in the air is pretty common here in late August, but in mid-May it feels weirdly apocalyptic, unsettling, and scary on so many levels. The sky looks cloudy and foggy, but it’s neither cloud nor fog, it’s smoke. There are many more important and urgent issues at hand, obviously, but selfishly and superficially I have to say that a) it is so disappointing to come to the end of a long winter only to be faced with dreadful smoke that really cuts into the pleasures of being outside in nice weather, and b) my hair smells. When I bend over and my hair goes into my face, I think something stinks in here, and then I realize that something is my own hair. My hair smells exactly the way it would after coming home from the bar from a night of dancing and drinking vodka slimes out of little jugs. I guess this is specifically a problem of Youth In The Nineties, because no one smokes in bars anymore. Or really, at all.
It looks like cloud and mist, but it’s smoke
  • On that note, remember going to bars and dancing all night? I heard the song Strike It Up the other day and was instantly transported to the dance floor at the Fox and Firkin. I was talking to my boys about this, and how if you met a guy in the bar you would maybe exchange information by writing your home number on a piece of paper or napkin, or maybe on your own hand. Nowadays, the youths just exchange their socials, which really cuts down on the awkwardness of having your dad answer the phone or your brother saying that you couldn’t come to the phone because you were in the bathroom.
OMG how embarrassing
  • Speaking of the Nineties, the other day I remembered General Foods International Coffees, which I thought was the height of elegant home coffee solutions. French Vanilla! Cafe Vienna! Suisse Mocha! And all you needed was a tin of the powder and some hot water. I remember thinking, back in the day, that it was so exciting to actually go to a coffee shop and order a cappuccino, as they were not as ubiquitous as they are now. It was a super-fancy treat to be able to do that, and these days it could not be more run-of-the-mill. I mean, there is nothing you can do at Starbucks to make it feel like an exotic treat, no matter how many syrups or shots or non-dairy milks you use. Nothing these days compares to a cappuccino in the early Nineties. The absolute peak of my coffee excitement was when I was in Europe for a school trip in grade 11, and I had a cappuccino in Rome. At the time I couldn’t imagine life getting better than that.
Post-cappuccino excitement
  • There is an election going on in our province, and there is a woman who is running in the riding where I teach yoga by the name of Jenny Yeremiy. Every single time I see her signs – which is every time I drive to the community centre – I think, giggling, “JEREMY YEREMY?” and then I remind myself that it is JENNY, not Jeremy. This is the sort of thing I think might happen to a normal person ONCE, but it happens to me every time I see a sign, and there are probably five signs from the time I enter the community until I get to the centre, and then back again. So ten times, twice a week, I think JEREMY YEREMY, and giggle. I would blame this on the smoke’s effect on my brain but it’s been happening for weeks now and also, at this time last year, the community was advertising a night of food trucks. Taste the Trucks! the signs said cheerfully, and every single time I would think “Taste the Tricks?” and picture men with their tongues hanging out of their mouths while looking lustily at attractive sex workers. Although, technically, I think a trick is the man in this situation, this is still a thing that happened in my brain for weeks. Too long, didn’t read, I think something is broken in my brain. My son was on the couch post-surgery, blearily flipping through Disney Plus, and I saw a show with a picture of a Storm Trooper. “Bad Bitch?” I said to my son, “That’s a weird thing to have on Disney Plus!” He looked at me tiredly and said “Mom, it’s Bad BATCH.”
In the parking lot, giggling about Jeremy Yeremy
  • Speaking of tricks, in the book Easy Beauty, there is a scene near the end that I have not stopped thinking about since I read it last week. The author and her son and husband were going to a magic show at the park, at the husband’s behest. The son – who was about seven – kept loudly making statements about how he was not impressed with the magician, how he knew exactly how the trick was performed, and then detailing HOW the trick WAS performed. There’s a secret compartment, the magician has something up her sleeve, etcetera. The husband kept asking him to be quiet and then, of course, the punch line is that the magician did something incredible – she made a stuffed rabbit disappear, collapsed the box she had put the rabbit in, and a live rabbit was in her hands. The little boy was, finally, in awe. What bothered me about this entire scene was that prior to this final trick the author kept high-fiving and praising her son for being so smart! So cynical! No magic show was going to fool him! All the while, other people exist, and were there to hear this little boy brattily talk about the lameness of the magic tricks, while his mother praised him for this behaviour. The woman’s husband kept begging them to stop, because it was disruptive and bothering other people, but the woman proudly KEPT GOING. I obviously wasn’t there. I have no skin in this game. People parent in many different ways. AND YET. I am so bothered by this rude behaviour, that affects me not in the least, I cannot even. I CANNOT EVEN.
Rex cannot even either. He’s in a constant state of wonder.

It’s a holiday weekend around here and I am desperately hoping for the smoke to dissipate and for the north to get sheets of rain. We are heading up a little north ourselves, to celebrate my mom’s birthday. I hope you all have a festive, non-smoky weekend. xo

…And I Get Off On The Pain I Inflict

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One way in which I have been preparing my little birdies to fly is to have them gradually take control of their own medical and dental appointments. Some medical professionals, such as our podiatrist, who, YES, we are still seeing six months later, require me to be with my younger son as he is a minor, but for the most part, I have been letting them figure things out on their own, being in the background for support. This has led to some things I did not anticipate, such as my older son making an appointment for LASIK eye surgery later this month, but for the most part it’s been fairly smooth and predictable.

We have all had dental appointments in the past month or so, and my younger son’s was the most recent. He came home telling me that he’d had several x-rays, and he required dental surgery to remove his four wisdom teeth and an extra tooth that he had somehow developed. He was under the impression that a) it was fairly emergent since his wisdom teeth were growing in sideways, and b) the extra tooth was very close to a nerve.

He told me the dental office would consult with the dentist who performs these surgeries and would get back to me. I didn’t love getting this information second-hand, because have you ever received important information from a 17-year-old? But I Serenity Now-ed, and waited.

On Tuesday I was at the garden centre; my older son had the day off work and so went with me, which was a delight. An extra cart AND someone to encourage me to buy more flowers? Heaven. We were in among the annuals when my phone rang; it was the dentist calling to schedule surgery. My son has a lot of things going on in the next six weeks that I didn’t want ruined by a painful recovery, but the coming weekend was free and so we scheduled him in for Friday morning. I zipped around the next day, picking up soft, high protein foods, and the single Ativan-like sedative he was to take an hour before surgery.

A small onion in the ointment was that I had planned to go to my parents’ on Thursday for my mom’s 70th birthday. We are having a family party for her next weekend, but my aunt was up visiting – this is my beloved Aunty C, of the Aunties fame – and I hadn’t seen her since 2019, so after my Thursday class I packed myself and Rex into the car and drove up. It’s a two hour drive so I was in the car at 6 the next morning, navigating a weirdly foggy highway and Friday morning traffic, to be able to get my son to his appointment at 9:00.

I have never had a tooth extraction myself, but my husband had his wisdom teeth taken out when he was in his forties, and it was absolutely a non-event. I was expecting similar, based on the dental office (“He’s so young, he will recover so quickly!”), and based on the fact that my husband’s procedure took perhaps a half hour at most. So I was completely unprepared to be there for three and a half hours, during which my son’s freezing wore off and they had to redo it. I was also completely unprepared to be told, at 11:45, that the procedure was “more complicated” than they had anticipated and at that point, had only extracted two of the five teeth, and that he would have to get the other side done at a separate time.

By the time they finished, at 12:30, three teeth were gone and the dentist told me that their initial assessment of “Advil alternating with Tylenol every two hours” was now “go pick up this prescription for Tylenol 3, he’s really going to need it.” WHAT HAPPENED HERE. The dentist told me that he would not be able to work on the other side, it was too complicated for him, and that we would have to go to a specialist, which, honestly, I wish we knew in advance so we could have skipped this whole thing and just done that in the first place. Did they not realize this from the x-rays? Were they just hoarding my son’s procedure for themselves to collect the money? I couldn’t help but feel a bit betrayed.

I’m not going to lie: Friday was a really rough day, made worse by the thought that we have to do this all again soon. The dental office cheerfully assured me that my son would just “sleep the day away” post-surgery, which goes to show that they do not know him at all, the guy who slept exactly zero minutes on our red-eye from Maui, and who, like his mother, essentially has to have one foot in the grave before lying down for a nap. What can I say, we aren’t nappers. He did, however, have a really good sleep Friday night, which I did not expect at that point, and was much more chipper on Saturday.

I’m still a little salty, though. We have to do this AGAIN. In the next three weeks we have the following: a family party for my mom, my younger son’s graduation ceremony and all the stuff that goes with that leading up to and after, my older son’s LASIK surgery, my younger son’s graduation dance, my own 30 year high school reunion that I am organizing, and my husband’s colonoscopy. THIS IS A LOT OF THINGS. Not to mention our day-to-day stuff and everything else that is going on around here. We have to get it done before July, but he also has final exams in June, and I am just screaming into the void over here.

Well, it will get done, just like everything else. In the meantime, it’s hard to stay too salty when I look out my window and see not just Salvadore, but two new friends, Slider and Fernando, who my son and I came across at the garden centre. Look at them frolicking in the kale patch! Life is good, even when it’s frustrating, is the lesson I’m taking away.

Weekly Reading

A Likely Story. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be the child of a very famous person, and the pressure involved in following the footsteps or finding one’s own way. See also: Ty Gretsky. This excellent novel follows the only child of a very famous writer – who also happens to be a narcissist. After the death of her beloved mother, the daughter discovers a secret and becomes involved in a convoluted web of lies and secrets, all the while trying to please her famous father. This was a great story with complex characters, and I had no idea what to expect from the ending. I really enjoyed it.

I’m Glad My Mom Died. I initially put this on my hold list last summer, and then changed my mind after a few months as I didn’t think I had the bandwidth to read about a mentally ill and abusive stage mother and her daughter’s coping mechanisms of alcohol abuse and eating disorders. But then a few friends read it and thought it was good, and I guess I had a weird kind of book FOMO? Anyway, I put it back on the list and here we are. I feel kind of gross and sick after reading this, to be honest, and I have to warn anyone who might want to read this: there are some pretty grim and graphic descriptions of her bulimia. Like, really graphic. Based on what she went through I’m impressed that she’s still here – her mother sexually abused her in the shower on the daily until she was 17, her mother forced her to restrict her calories and generally treated her like garbage. The cover blurbs say that it’s “impressively funny” and all I can say is I don’t think we read the same book. I didn’t find it funny at all. I did think it ended weirdly, with her vow to overcome bulimia and then the next chapter she was healed? I don’t know, I applaud her for writing this, as it was obviously therapeutic for her, but it was not therapeutic for me to read. I read most of it while in the waiting room at the dentist, and I will say that I am not a book snob, but I actually felt embarrassed when someone asked me what I was reading, because the title is so incendiary. I don’t generally wish death on people but I am also kind of glad her mom died. She made Joan Crawford look encouraging and nurturing.

Easy Beauty. This was a brilliantly written memoir about moving through the world and navigating motherhood with a painful and very visible disability. The author weaves her story with journeys – the actual travel kind but also emotional and spiritual – and discussions about works of art and philosophy. It’s dense and not an easy read, particularly when it comes to the way a person values themselves in a world that values and revolves around the able-bodied. I can’t say I enjoyed this, exactly, but it’s an impressive piece of writing.

I hope you all had a beautiful, restorative weekend. It was obviously a pretty low-key one around here, but the Mayday and Nanking cherry are in bloom, my older son and I planted containers and I did some gardening cleanup, there was cake, and we all watched Top Gun Maverick for the second time. Here’s to more blooming in the week to come. xo

Snow, Selfies, Sensitivities, and Segues

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“I don’t know how anyone can live in Calgary for any amount of time and STILL be surprised by snow in April,” my son’s podiatrist said to me, conversationally, as the snow flew sideways outside the window in the exam room. I agreed, and went further: snow in May hardly makes me blink, although I did feel a little alarmed at the snow mixed with thunder that was happening at the time.

I took a few photos, not for shock value on social media – there would have to be a real dump of it for that, and this was barely a centimetre – but because the snow looked really pretty contrasted with the blue skies, giving rise to the very popular Calgarian view that “at least it’s sunny.” Blue skies are lovely, it’s true, although given the choice I would take grey skies and much shorter winter duration.

I like to take photos, but I also like to have my picture taken. There is a photo, circa 1979, of my dad and brother dressed up for a Scout meeting, and I am in the corner of the photo. I remember desperately wanting to be in the photo, but being told this was a special photo just for the two of them. I was photobombing before photobombing was a thing.

I was thinking about this when I was recently taking photos of the guys on the beach; a woman offered to take photos of the four of us, which I gratefully accepted. She said to me that moms are always behind the camera, and should be in photos more, and I think that’s very true generally, but not particularly in my case. I appreciated the sentiment, but there are lots of photos of me, and when all else fails, there are selfies!

Recently Engie (HI ENGIE) asked how to take a good photo of yourself, and I have two pieces of advice: find good lighting, and shoot from above. The first photo is a straight-on shot, and you can see that by taking the angle higher, it results in a more flattering photo.

That last photo cracks me up. A few years ago, my MIL discovered the selfie function on her phone while looking down at her phone, and was absolutely horrified to see herself in that way. She told me tearfully that she could not BELIEVE how bad she looked and how much she has aged and is that what people see when they look at her? GOD NO, I told her. I was quick to assure her that NO ONE is seen in that angle and that we all look terrible when shot from below. Shoot from above! Find good lighting in the house! If all else fails, try the car.

Even with good lighting, not everyone loves having their photos taken; we all like different things, of course. I was thinking about the rich tapestry that is our world when I was recently in a bookstore: there are so many different kinds of books. How many books have been written in the history of time? It’s overwhelming to think of, but also heartening because there is something for everyone. No matter your taste, there is something out there.

I read a lot and I do try to read a wide variety of things, but within certain parameters. My dislike for dystopia, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy is well-known, so I avoid those genres. I love books that are very character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and I have been told at times – usually by strangers or slight acquaintances on Instagram – that such books are boring. I suppose to some they are, because I find my avoided genres to be boring, among other things, and so it doesn’t bother me that we don’t all share the same view.

But sometimes, it does bother me. Not often, but sometimes I will share my feelings about a book to a friend who has similar tastes to me, and then I will be taken aback when that friend isn’t on the same page, so to speak. I have many friends with widely diverging tastes, and so this is a very infrequent occurrence, but sometimes I do feel a bit hurt when a friend doesn’t love something in the same way, when usually they do.

This is a very silly way to feel, because I didn’t write the book, I have no stake in the outcome of the book, and yet. Several years ago, after I talked about how much I loved Calypso, a friend mentioned she had read it and hated it. I was so surprised since we had shared a similar view of many books, but when she said I just don’t get it, it’s not funny at all, I admit to questioning everything we had talked about before. Who is this person, I wondered, maybe we don’t have anything in common after all.

There are people who prefer cats to dogs, and although I can neither understand nor relate to such feelings, I can appreciate those people all the same. And most of the time I simply appreciate that we all have different reading tastes and love different things, but once in a while I will feel a bit hurt and put out. It feels like a dog person saying how much they love dogs, but they don’t love MY dog.

Speaking of my dog, he was a bit put out that I had to leave him to go to the dentist. I was mentally prepared for it to take all afternoon, but happily for Rex it turned out to be only a cleaning, not a checkup, and it took only fifty minutes. Some of you may recall my last dental appointment, which took ninety minutes, much of which was probably due to the long, involved conversations I ended up having with the hygienist.

Sometimes I wonder is it just me or everyone, and now I realize that no, it’s just me. A simple cleaning probably should not take fifty minutes, but the I ended up in another long, involved conversation with the hygienist, a different one from last time. She kept stopping what she was doing to get my reaction to her viewpoint, or to ask me a question, and while I’m always happy to chat, I did at one point think could she just talk and I listen? Would it be rude to ask her to just keep scaling?

It is interesting to think of how one topic segues into another, and sometimes I wonder how did we get here from there? What is the thread that links topics? Unsettlingly, sometimes no such thread exists. Our conversation started, as it always does, with yoga. As soon as a stranger learns I am a yoga teacher, the conversation naturally goes into that person’s experience with yoga, and their love for or hatred of it. After that we discussed the following, in order: seed cycling for hormone support, bodybuilding and how the hygienist placed second in the Bikini Division of a recent competition, the use of creatine and supplements in the bodybuilding world and how the hygienist refuses to use them, leading to a second-place only, our favourite red wine varietals, the Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby, ziplining in Costa Rica, competitive dance routines set to Mamma Mia, salsa dancing, the hygienist’s broken foot and the physiotherapy she is doing, her ex-boyfriend’s habit of leaving used dental floss on the living room coffee table, germ phobia and the increase of such feelings during the pandemic, and lipstick. How did we get there? I don’t know exactly, but shout-out to Cover Girl Outlast lipstick. “Oh wow, this is the most amazing lipstick!” the hygienist said to me. “This whole time, it hasn’t smudged or left a mark on my gloves at all!” Getting through a dental cleaning with perfect lipstick does feel like a win, and also, seed cycling? Who knew! Certainly not me; life is so interesting, you can learn new things every day.

Weekly Reading

The Social Climber. I thought this was going to be a rags-to-riches story, instead it’s a novel of revenge. The first half of the book, I was sure the book was going to go one way, and did it ever veer in a different direction! It was very entertaining, with some very unexpected twists. Thanks to Birchy (HI BIRCHY) for the recommendation!

Trespasses. At the heart of the novel is a love affair between a twenty-something teacher who occasionally works in the family pub, and a married man twice her age who is a renowned barrister. This simple affair is greatly complicated as it takes place in Belfast 1975, the height of the Troubles. To be honest, this is a time and place I know little about so I spent a lot of time looking things up to understand context, characters, and what was happening. Without that info, this story is confusing and difficult to understand. But oh! It’s really excellent. It’s so moving and I literally gasped out loud at some parts. DO NOT GET INVOLVED WITH MARRIED MEN is always a good place to start but when the married man is a Protestant who defends IRA members, and the woman is Catholic, and it’s Ireland in the 70s…things might be even more doomed. If you don’t have a background on the Troubles, like me, use this book to do some research and reading. It’s really good. Who recommended this? I feel like one of my readers did and I cannot recall who. If it was you, let me know!

Hello Molly! Sometimes I’ll read a memoir by a celebrity I hardly know, and I’ll feel like I really wish I hadn’t. But this was the exact opposite. Molly Shannon is an incredibly hard working, interesting, and inspiring woman. She had a really tough start to life – she was in a car crash caused by her father when she was four, and her mom, baby sister, and cousin were all killed – and wow, did she ever do everything in her power to live a happy and fulfilling life. This was a very easy to read and quite uplifting memoir. I can’t say I was a Molly Shannon Fan before – but I am now!

It’s going to be a busy and fun week ahead; lots to do, and also, it’s my Birthday Week! I hope you have a wonderful week. xo

Maui Encounters, Medical Emergencies, Mini Eggs

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This week’s post is brought to you by the letters M and E! I could say every post is brought to you by ME, I suppose, but let’s separate the letters this week. In addition to the title, I could also add in Massively Exhausted. Whew, I don’t think I’ve fully recovered from the red-eye flight, the time zone change, and the incredible amount of work I’ve been doing since returning. I’m in a massive decluttering and organization project, which I’ll discuss in detail later – hold onto your hats – and it’s physically and mentally draining.

Something that happens to me now that never happened in my pre-perimenopausal life is that I can tell with one hundred percent accuracy when my period will start, and it’s not just that I have existential angst, a descent into non-specific sadness, and sleeplessness. That happens, but for the purposes of this story, I will tell you about the one other symptom that is a neon sign that Nicole Is Getting Her Period: my breasts. Suddenly, my breasts go from resembling the stocking that Laura Ingalls set out for Santa Claus that contains a single orange and a penny in the bottom to over-inflated water balloons. Va-va-va-voom! I would appreciate this brief foray into bustiness a lot more if it was not accompanied by agonizing pain that makes me want to bind my breasts like a medieval upper-class new mother who has just handed her infant off to the nearest wet-nurse.

It just so happened that this Playboy-centerfoldness occurred on one of our last days in Maui and although I know better, I really do, I donned a bikini that, while absolutely adorable, was maybe not as supportive as others. I did notice that I was a bit more cleavage-y than earlier in the vacation when I had worn this specific bikini, but yolo. I soldiered on to the beach. My mistake was soon revealed in a literal sense; it was just fine when I was swimming or bobbing around in the waves, but when I hopped on the boogie board and caught a wave, I ended up flashing the entire beach as my breasts popped right out. Right out. The bikini top was completely BELOW my breasts and I scrambled to pull it back up, while not letting the boogie board float out to sea as the waves pulled back. It was no mean feat, let me tell you. Fortunately, my sons were behind me in the waves, and so were not psychologically scarred, at least as far as their mother’s public semi-nudity is concerned.

I decided to call it a day at that point, and headed to our little umbrella-and-beach chair set-up, letting the guys play in the water while I read a bit. I was soon approached by a young man, at least twenty-five years my junior, who was holding an M&M tube, the kind that contain mini-M&Ms and are found in Christmas stockings everywhere, except for Laura Ingalls’. He held up the tube with a huge silly smile and asked if I wanted to see something cool. Awww, I thought. This maybe-slow young man wants to show me something. I gave him a big, encouraging smile, and said sure. He opened it up and I peered inside. What…was it? Was that a little crab leg? Or legs? Dead bugs? It was hard to see – I was under the umbrella and I had sunglasses on, and the sun was at this fellow’s back.

“What is it?” I finally asked, after an uncomfortably long pause. “Weed!” the young man said with enthusiasm. “Do you want to buy some?” At this, I burst into laughter. “Oh, HONEY,” I said. “Honey, no. No thank you, dear.” It was like I was ninety years old and someone asked me to go skydiving, or to have some backdoor action in a public washroom with a stranger. He looked a little started at my laughing and asked if there was anyone I knew who might want his presumably M&M-scented weed? I shook my head and said “No, sweetie, I don’t.” He looked perplexed at both my cluelessness and my laughter, and set off, presumably to try to sell to someone who didn’t seem like his own mother. Or grandmother. I was gratified that he thought I was so hip, even though my “honey, no” would indicate that I am not.

I haven’t smoked weed for well over thirty years, but I do, on occasion, use over-the-counter sleep aids. I decided to take some Gravol for our overnight flight; generally I am a person who can sleep in transit, but I thought I should take something to help me get more than a couple of hours. According to my watch, I did sleep five out of six hours on the flight, and the hour that I didn’t was fairly interesting, if somewhat worrisome.

I had completely passed out as soon as we were in the air, and I blearily awakened to some jostling, anxious voices, and the caution to “stay in your seat.” I opened my gritty-feeling eyes to see several flight attendants in various stages of distress, right at my seat. The woman directly behind me was having a medical emergency; she had been treated for a sinus infection while on vacation, and suddenly was having severe shooting pain in her eye, as well as feverishness and nausea. Fortunately, the man across the aisle from her was a nurse – and was coming back from his honeymoon! – and he was able to assist the flight attendant with the emergency medical care she was administering. The flight attendant was on a phone call with a hospital for more instruction, and at that moment I thought to look at the digital flight map. We were directly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, an hour and a half from Maui and four and a half hours from land, so there would be nowhere to turn around or to land. Perhaps it was because it was the middle of the night, perhaps it was due to my aforementioned Lady’s Holidays, but my thoughts started to go dark. What happens if someone is having an emergency and there is nowhere to land? What happens if someone dies on a flight? What do they do with the body? They couldn’t possibly just leave the dead body in the seat, but what? Is there someplace to put a body? Things are pretty tight on a full plane. Would the body be put where the flight attendants sit for takeoff and landing? Then what of the flight attendants? These unsettling thoughts kept pinging into my brain until the woman was given an antiemetic, put on oxygen – the tank was under my seat – and the flight attendant said she’d check back every ten minutes, which indicated to me she was stabilized somewhat. Relieved, I drifted back to sleep, waking only a couple more times to peek over the seat to make sure she was okay, before we landed.

With five hours of unsettled sleep and a time difference of four hours, I was pretty disoriented when we got home to our clean but food-less house. Does grocery shopping ever end? Of course not. Since we were in a condo in Maui, we ate a lot of meals there, which meant grocery shopping in Maui, too. Which is fine, but what I am saying is that I wasn’t super excited to immediately set out for the grocery store while the rest of the family napped at 9:00 am. However, I did want food and I had to pick up Rex in the afternoon, so off I went.

The very first thing I saw in the store were the one-kilogram bags of Cadbury Mini-Eggs, and they were on sale for $5 off. I have an actual mini-egg preference, and that preference is Cadbury, so I immediately picked up a bag and dropped it into my cart. Dropped it. Into my cart. As soon as the bag made contact with my cart, it exploded, and a kilogram’s worth of mini-eggs scattered all over the aisle and into the produce section. I stood there, frozen, as mini-eggs cascaded from my cart, rolling and bouncing in all directions. After about five long seconds, I looked around to see a produce clerk coming my way. “I’m so sorry,” I said, still staring at the rolling eggs that were now surrounding other people and their carts. I followed the apology by surpassing the world record in banal statements: “The bag, I think the bag, I think it has a hole in it?” The clerk assured me that it would be taken care of and not to worry. I picked up another bag and very slowly, very carefully, placed it in my cart.

Weekly Reading

I read so much on my vacation that I am going to make a separate post about all the books I read; the excellent, the pretty good, and the really bad. Do you rate the books you read? I do, but privately. I give a rating out of five on the spreadsheet on which I track my books, and it’s extremely subjective based on how much I loved the writing and how it made me feel. I don’t get too mired in the details, but a five would be a book I absolutely loved, and a two would be a book I hated but still was able to read. I am realizing now we all have very different methods of rating. I was talking to a friend about this, because I was surprised to see her rate a few books I really liked as threes. A three, to me, is meh; a book that is fine, but that I would never re-read. To her a three was pretty good, a maybe re-read, and a five would be a book of the quality of Maya Angelou or James Baldwin. I found that so interesting! I am not at all stingy with my fives; if I loved it, it’s getting a five. If I loved it but had some small quibbles, I will give it a four.

In any case, I read one non-vacation book this week:

In Every Mirror She’s Black. This book follows three Black women who all come to Sweden because of one powerful Swedish man: one through employment, one because of romance, and one as a refugee. Their lives intersect but are very separate. The ending is pretty intense, and I would say this book had its ups and downs for me. I didn’t love it but I liked it well enough.

More books to come, but in the meantime, I must get on with my week! I hope you all had a lovely Easter weekend. xo