EMERGENCE

Basket Case Writing

2012-01-25T22:56:00.001-05:00

Back in the summer, a fellow mother-writer and I weretalking about how we use our child-free time. Hers all went toself-nourishment—weekly yoga, an occasional spa or massage—and she hadn’twritten a word since her daughter’s birth nearly a year earlier. Mine all wentto writing: they leave the house, or I leave the house, and bam, I am at mylaptop, maximizing every moment with an efficiency that would boggle mypre-motherhood mind.

In the self-nourishment department, however, I wasdefinitely falling behind, and I could feel that it wasn’t sustainable. I’velearned that lesson before, when I had a breakdown in my egregiouslyhard-working university days, and I could feel it in the summer, in theexhaustion and tears and pushed-to-the-limit depletion that I occasionally fellinto. And you can only fish the creative well so many times withoutreplenishing it. “A creatively healthy writing life” became my goal some yearsago, after years of binge creativity, fearing and avoiding it, then furiouslyproducing as much as I could without taking care to take care of myself. I didknow better.

Still I pressed onward, because I had a book to finish, andtime to myself was limited, and if I spent it doing yoga or meditating orsprawled out at café tables with a newspaper and a cup of tea, the book wouldnever get done.

I pressed onward until an editor friend read the manuscriptearly this year and felt it needed expansion. I agreed, and I took a day offand then I dove right back in. For about three days. When it became clear thatmy resistance, and my exhaustion, and the heavy weight of can’t-face-this-daythat I was waking to, and my inability to recognize any good in my work, andfinally to produce any kind of work at all, well, all these were trying to tellme something.

My friend and I agreed in that conversation last summer thatwe needed both, of course. She wanted to write. I wanted to not drive myselfinto the ground. Nonetheless, I said afterward, I'd rather have anearly-completed manuscript and be a basket case than the other way around.

Hello, basket case.

Writing does nourish me, and makes me feel that I amfulfilling my purpose, living at the centre of my best self. But it alsodepletes me. It’s hard work. “I can see the words whirring around in yourhead,” says Richard. “They never stop.”

Being with my children can also nourish me; I don’t believeI have to be away from them, necessarily, to take care of myself. Today Aphrawoke me with, “Happy, Mommy! You happy too, Mommy?” and Maia made an Hespecially for me out of three green beans. They are creative and beautiful andconstantly surprising and delightful. My relationships with them do, more andmore, contain nourishment not only for them but also for me. Occasionally,snuggled up together on the couch with books or a DVD, being in their presenceis even relaxing.

Still, being onall the time, being there for my children and my husband and my house andtrying in every spare moment, in the tiniest ofyou-would-think-they’re-unusable spare moments, to get creative work done too,having words whirring constantly around in your head? It’s exhausting.

Yesterday I did nothing. (Well, not nothing. I had two youngchildren with me most of the day.) I read a book. For pleasure. It was AnneEnright’s The Forgotten Waltz.

It was great.

Today, it’s amazing. How rejuvenated I feel, how much moreclearly I’m thinking. How all the tasks that have been weighing on me aresuddenly doable.

I am restraining myself, however, from tackling all of them.I’m trying to remember the lesson.

Four Years Pregnant

2012-01-10T14:24:00.002-05:00

I was pregnant 41½ weeks with Aphra, and every day of thoselast two weeks required renewed effort to stay present, stay patient, andremember that the baby knows when to be born and will do so when she’s ready.I’d been sure I would go early—my mom had, my sisters had—and wryly responding“one week ago” to people who asked my due date was losing its novelty.

Yeah. So it’s an oft-used metaphor, but it came to me last night—dawned,really—when I recognized that my wound-up, stressed-out anxious state over mynovel-in-progress bore a lot of similarity to the so-not-zen-about-thisimpatience of my 41-week-pregnant self.

In December I set myself a submission deadline of January10. (Today.) In the fall I did the same thing for November. And September. Backin June I was telling people I was on my final edits before submission. I’vedone at least three rounds of extensive edits since June, and come Septemberand then November I realized it still needed more. I realized it wasn’t ready.It was a preemie. It needed more gestation.

Now? I just want this damn baby to be born already. Let’s gointo labour; I am four years pregnant and it’s time for the next stage.

Except today, January 10, I realized that after all thesedrafts, readers, edits, critiques, rewriting, tightening, redoing, I mightstill be trying to induce labour prematurely. Maybe. It’s hard to know today,because I’m so wound up and stressed out.

So I need to take a step back. That is my big due-dateepiphany. Calm down, trust the story, let go of some expectation, and maybe…maybe…wait.

Really looking forward to meeting my baby though.

Writing Partner

2012-01-07T23:41:00.001-05:00

When Anena Hansen first heard my name, we were both 19 and Iwas the newcomer arriving at her school claiming to be a writer. Writer was her role and she wasn’t relinquishing itto any upstart, and she wrote a short story that day to spite me.

I never have read that short story, come to think of it.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and we are best friends,soulmates, each other’s first and last readers, the person who knows what weare trying to say when we aren’t quite getting it right, without whose eyes nowork goes out. When I began the novel I’m planning to start submitting thismonth, I sent her each rough chapter as I finished it, not for feedback but fora witness, a person to hold the creative space with me, to cheerlead me as Idiscovered whether I could make writing work as a daily practice and find myway from the beginning to the end of a very long story. I’d abandoned myprevious novel attempt a third of the way in, after a lot of agonizednot-writing. Having someone other than me waiting for each chapter was anenormous psychological boost.

Anena lives in Kenya now, and until this week it had beenthree whole years since we’d seen each other. This would be a long time if weweren’t both people who have to process everything we say, think, and do throughwriting, and our daily emails are like the best kind of journal, one thatunderstands you and writes back. She stepped into my house on Monday and it waslike, cliché though it is, no more than a day had passed.

And among the great things we did this week was write thequery for that novel, side by side on our stomachs on my office floor,brainstorming, writing down horrible phrases and laughing over them andrefining them into good phrases, a kind of in-the-moment co-writing I’ve neverdone before and would hate with anyone else, but with the person who knows meand my work so intimately, it was the most marvelous instance of two headsbeing better than one.

Find a writing partner, aspiring writers are told. Findsomeone to share work with, to read your early drafts. I am indeed fortunate inmine.

Date Night

2011-12-22T02:11:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, serendipitous confluence: a babysitter linedup for our first date in eight months, and a last-minute email offering freetheatre tickets. It can be feast-or-famine in this actor’s (and actor’s-wife)life, and we’ve gone eight months without a night out together, but Wednesdaywe donned our dressy clothes and saw the opening of Hair from the front row ofthe Royal Alex.

I love being in a theatre with Richard. As a baby he wouldstop crying if brought into a theatre, and to this day there’s an inner glowthat emerges from him, an essence-of-him that is not turned on in any otherenvironment. I sneak peaks to see that essence there on the surface, drawn outlike his pores have opened to release it: a quiet intensity and concentration,an enjoyment, a pleasure, but a serious pleasure, a little bit analytical, reservingjudgment, entirely present, every sense attuned.

It reminds me who he is, this look. An essence that can getburied in months of underemployment, of being an actor without a character, of performingonly for stone-faced directors at auditions for parts he’s not quite right forand will not get, or parts he is right for and still won’t get, of thedisheartening, wintry slog when it seems work will never come again. An essencethat can get buried in the relentless mire of making the beds and vacuuming thefloors and washing the dishes and wiping the bottoms and answering the criesfor “Milk!” and “Help!” and “NOT THE BLUE ONE THE PURPLE ONNNNNEEEEEE!”

We wore nice clothes and we held hands and we addressed nochild or housekeeping needs and we sat in the front row of the Royal Alex and Iwatched the essence on Richard’s face.

It brings me backto our beginnings, this essence, when I set eyes on him for the very first timein a theatre in West Virginia, when he was Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and my extroverted best friend engaged himin conversation afterward while I hung back, shy but arrested by this dark,mysterious, blue-eyed Englishman.

It brings me back to the next time I saw him perform, asBottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on42^nd St. in Manhattan, after we’d written each other longsoul-baring emails for nine months and I flew to New York to “see the show” andto fall in love in person with the man I was already in love with on paper.

It brings me back to a week later when he followed me on myreturn to Toronto and he took me to Stratford and I sat beside him watching The Taming of the Shrew but mostlywatching him and the essence-of-him that emerged on his face like it was comingthrough his pores.

Two months later I packed everything important into abackpack and moved to New York City by train, and tromped from Penn Station to ThirdAvenue and 22^nd Street weighed down by my belongings and too cheapfor a cab and met him outside the theatre when his show came down. He was JackWorthing in The Importance of BeingEarnest and I went to see it the next night and gasped at the moment of hissmouldering entrance because there he was, there it was, the essence of him, and I was a girl from NorthernOntario who’d never seen professional theatre until recently and now I was inNew York City and an actor was in love with me.

I have watched him be so many people, on so many stages inso many cities and towns. I have sat beside him in theatres, watching hisessence emerge on his face.

Richard has played the Royal Alex, in a different life longbefore I was present to watch, before he knew me and moved here for me. It wasJanuary, in the nineties, and he remembers the cold.

Last Wednesday night I danced on the stage at the RoyalAlex, which is what happens to you when you’re seated in the front row forHair. I was not comfortable, but Richard enjoyed sitting in his seat andwatching me. Afterward we walked across King Street and ate a dinner neither ofus had cooked, without anybody interrupting us, and talked.

Sometimes Maybe It's Just That Becoming a Mother is Hard

2011-12-07T16:27:00.001-05:00

I was moremiserable than I’d ever been during my first days of motherhood, and by “firstdays” I really mean about six weeks, and three months, and maybe more thanthat. And I’m not even talking about postpartum depression. Though no doubt,PPD is a very real affliction, it’s also a label that undermines the verysimple fact that living with a newborn is, as writer Ariel Gore describes it,“like suddenly getting the world’s worst roommate, like having Janis Joplinwith a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.”

–Kerry Clare, “Love is aLet-Down”

I first read Kerry Clare’s essay “Love is a Let-Down,” chronicling thegritty truth of her adjustment into motherhood, when it won second place in The New Quarterly’s essay prize last year. I wrote to Kerry and she wrote back, andnow we live in the same city and meet at each other’s houses drinking tea andattempting relentlessly-interrupted conversations while our daughters squabbleover toys. Last night “Love is a Let-Down” was launched in book form as part ofthe anthology The Best Canadian Essays 2011,and I was there, without any daughters, drinking wine instead of tea, listeningto Kerry read from her essay and talking with other women about what it’s reallylike to become a mother.

Kerry specifies in the essay that she’s not talking about postpartum depression.Some readers, however, have begged to differ, and even the publicity for Best Canadian Essays 2011 refers to the essay's “personal insightson postpartum depression.” The label seems all too convenient, a neat way to packageany woman who expresses ambivalence or struggle with her life and self andidentity and time and future and relationships pulled out from underneath herby a child.

And I’ve got a few thoughts about that.

When I gave birth I was prepared for the postpartum weeks tobe no-fun-at-all. My sister had warnedme. Her first baby screamed all through her first night and didn’t really stopfor six months, by which point my sister was crying quite a lot herself, aswell as breakingdishes and turning regular knives into serrated ones by bashing them violentlyagainst the sink. She too had postpartum depression rattled off to her and found it dismissive andin her case inaccurate, felt that her responsewas a plain old to-be-expected kind ofresponse for anyone faced with the complete upheaval of her life, with toolittle support, with a person whoneeds and needs and needs you and won’t stop screaming about it.

There's something about a label thatallows a problem to be boxed up and put away. I don’t deny that PPD is a realand terrible thing, but pathologizing anyone who struggles allows us to ignorethe reality and normality of how difficult new motherhood can be.

As it happens, I had a blissful postpartum period, a gift Iwas surprised by and grateful for. But the baby I gave birth to was not myfirst baby. My first baby came to me aged 15 months, 8 months before I gave birth to baby #2, and my first days ofmotherhood (and by first days I really mean about six weeks, and three months,and maybe more than that) were indeed among the most miserable of my life.

When I was deposited intoinsta-motherhood, I wasn’t dealing with the challenges of newborn care andsleepless nights and milk-coming-in hormones, but I was confronted with the sudden and irrevocable change in my statusand identity and life direction, transformed overnight from independent free woman to non-stop need-filler for someone I wasn’t sure I altogetherloved, or loved as much as I should, and who most of the time didn’t appear tolove me all that much herself. I cried a lot. I felt incompetent and fraudulent.I could not express the depth of the loss I felt. “This is mylife now, one mundane, repetitive task after another,” I would think,following my new daughter in pointless circles around a playground track, andthen I would think, “This is not the life I want,” and then the tears wouldcome. I was floundering. It was like theworst babysitting job ever, one in which you aren’t getting paid, you can’t gohome at the end of the day, and the parents are never coming back. I felt many of the postpartum emotions and fears Kerry describes in “Love is a Let-Down.” I felt, asKerry writes, that I had gone and destroyed our life.

“I think I’m experiencing the adoptionversion of postpartum depression,” I wrote to a friend, except that, because Ihadn’t given birth, no one was diagnosing it as such. When Ispoke honestly with another friend about how difficult it was, how depressed Iwas, she was brave enough to ask me what no one would think to ask thebrand-new mother of a just-birthed biological baby: “Do you think maybe whatyou’re feeling is an indication that you aren’t meant to be doing this?”

By the time I did give birth to child #2, I’d processed my huge identity adjustments, my oh-my-god-what-have-I-done panic. Ithelped (of course, hugely) that she was an easy baby and didn’t cryinordinately and nursed well and slept enough, but I think it’s possible Ihad such a happy postpartum period in part because I’d already gone through thenew-mother angst in my postadoption depression.

So that from my experience (admittedlyonly one experience), the first days (weeks, months) of motherhood can be moremiserable than any other in one’s life not only because living with a newborn is like getting the world’s worst roommate, but also because regardless of the ageof the child who’s suddenly injected into your life, it means a complete andirreversible change in who you are.

It’s core, essential, root-chakra stuff.You don’t assimilate that kind of upheaval overnight. It’s worth crying a lotover. And it does not, necessarily, mean you have a medical condition.

Girly

2011-11-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

“It’s good,” he says to those who ask if he’s read my bookand what he thinks of it. “I mean…it’s girly…”

I’ve asked him not to say girly. I’ve asked him to say, ifhe must, that it’s a book about women, likely to appeal primarily to women.Girly feels dismissive. An apology. A write-off. Disclaimer. It’s good but.

Why can’t it just be good?

The principal characters are female. They menstruate and havesex and ovulate and get pregnant and don’t get pregnant. They drink wine andhave long conversations while drinking the wine. They grapple with the examplestheir mothers set. They build things with wood and run stores and earn degreesand have fights and cook food and start businesses and canoe and fall in loveand fall out of love and make weak choices and then make stronger choices.They’re human. But they’re female humans. Yes, definitely. There aren’t a lotof shoes, there’s not much shopping. But the two principal characters aredefinitely female humans.

Is there a problem with that?

Back in the summer Stacey May Fowles wrote an essay I’mstill ruminating on—“Write like a man: The unspoken rule for avoiding the pink cover”—exploring the question of what (if anything) it means to writelike a woman, and why women’s writing is received differently from men’s. “Inthe marketplace there are ‘books for her’ and then there are simply ‘books,’and serious writers should strive for the latter distinction.”

I’m really hoping not to get a pink cover.

The principal characters in my book are female. They getmarried and divorced. They buy houses sight unseen. They travel to Paris andGreece. They cry. One of them cries kind of a lot, but I’ve edited some of thatout. They say yes and yes and yes until they can’t say yes anymore and theybreak down and then they can’t do anything at all. They lie in bed for a weekwatching the light travel across the ceiling. They go fishing. They fall in. Theyfollow the same destructive patterns until they wake up and start learning towrite some new patterns. The support of other women helps them do this.

“The real question,” Stacey May Fowles asks, “the one weconsistently avoid in op-eds and blog posts on the topic, the one we’re trulyafraid to ask and that’s so much harder (and more embarrassing) to grapplewith, is this—why don’t we value women themselves? Their lives, theirexperiences, their domains—stereotypical and otherwise?”

“It’s good,” I overhear him again. “I mean, it’s girly…”

A sampling of my favourite female humans.

Let's Try This Again

2011-11-25T16:09:00.001-05:00

And so, I’m back.

It’s been eight months since Richard drove a U-Haul up andout our snowy driveway, away from Nepewassi Lake, and I stayed behind in thegutted house and cried as I swept piles of dust and lost hair elastics andmisplaced alphabet flashcards into hills at the centre of our empty, echoingrooms. We moved into a decadently spacious three-bedroom house with decadentlylarge back garden on a dead-end street in Toronto’s west end. We put on fancyclothes and drank champagne in a penthouse overlooking Lake Ontario at TheRailway Children’s opening party. Richard was a father and a doctor and amember of a close company in a theatre at the foot of the CN Tower. I revisedmy novel and sent it to readers and revised it again. And revised it again.

Maia’s security was rattled by the move and then, afterseveral weeks of clingyness and volatile emotion, she settled more solidly andhappily into herself than she ever had in our year and a half at the lake. Aphrahas embraced urban life with the enthusiasm with which she embraces almosteverything. It’s been surprisingly good, despite still missing them, to be outof the lap of my very close family, to be just the four of us in our home, cementedas a family.

One of those three bedrooms is my writing office. I’ve founda couple favourite writing cafés. We walk to the library at least once a week.We’ve made friends. I’ve been privileged to join the Toronto Women WritersSalon, which is the group of writing women I’ve been waiting for my wholeentire life. The Railway Children has ended, Richard has done a few filming stints, and we’re now back to the actor’s unstable life of auditioningand waiting and hoping. But we’re still here.

This blog has been on an unintended hiatus as I’ve focusedalmost every moment of my childfree time and creative energy into the book. I’mnow inputting my line edits and preparing for what I hope might be my finalread-through before I begin submitting the book in the new year.

It feels time to give the blog renewed focus. So here it is,my official relaunch, complete with new look and new address. Old links andbookmarks should still work, but for new ones you can make itwww.emergencejourney.com. My intention is shorter and more frequent posts, lessplagued—if I can manage it—by my perfectionist desire to put only meticulouslythought-out and laboured-over work into the world. Yes, I’m going to try towrite badly. Or at least, not so well that it takes me eight months to write apost.

I do manage 140-character posts a little more frequently,and you can find me on Twitter here.

If you’re a long-time reader, thank you for your patience andsupport and for coming back. If you’re new, welcome. Please makeyourself at home. Come in and say hi. I think I’ve got some red wine heresomewhere.

BS Soup

2011-11-25T02:01:00.001-05:00

It’s ten in the morning. I’m trying to write a grocery list.We’re out of salt, eggs, sugar. I start the list on a scrap of paper with apale green marker whose lid has been left off. Salt, eggs, sugar. I can barelyread it. Maia helps me make the list. I get online to check the ingredients ina vegetarian chili I want to try tonight. Where did the list go? Maia doesn’tknow. Oh, she tore it up.

Before I go for groceries I need to print out a short storythat’s ready for submission so I can mail it at the post office while I’m out.I’m just running up to my office to work for half an hour, I tell Richard. Itisn’t really even work. Print short story, scan it for glaring errors missed infinal revision, double-check submission guidelines, adapt a cover letter,address an envelope.

The girls do not want Richard. They want me. Crying,whining, trauma outside my office door. I let them in. Maia watches cake-bakinghow-to videos on my iPad. Cooling a cake in the freezer will reduce crumbs.Also, something called a crumb coat. “Nur, nur!” begs Aphra and I nurse herwhile I scan the story for glaring errors. Now Maia is playing Frère Jacques,over and over and over which kind of makes me want to scream. I scream. All I wantto do is print this story and write a goddamn grocery list. I type a coverletter one-handed. Aphra has finished nursing and begun climbing my head. Ihave one envelope left. I set it on the desk. Maia is crying. Aphra has taken offall her clothes and her diaper. I print the document. Maia wants me to dancewith her. I dance. I find the vegetarian chili recipe. Aphra has peed on thecarpet.

The recipe looks good. I run downstairs to the printer: thefirst few pages are fine but the final ones are bleary, smeary, and blank.We’re out of ink.

Aphra has scribbled all over my last remaining envelope withpurple pencil crayon.

I use the purple pencil crayon to start a new grocery list.

Maia needs my pencil crayon. It is a special pencil crayonand it is the particular one she needs.

I upload the short story to Staples. They will print it for90 cents, and I can buy a printer cartridge and envelopes and take the story tothe post office and get groceries.

I go for a shower. They want to join me. All right, Aphra’snaked already anyway.

Maia’s crying. She’s cold, she needs a towel, she wants a cracker.We’re out of crackers. Put that on the list.

It’s too close to Aphra’s nap time to go for groceries.

Where is my list? I don’t know where my list is. I startanother one. Salt, eggs, sugar. Sweet potatoes. Garlic. Crackers.

Bread. I need to put bread in the breadmaker so it can beready to eat with the vegetarian chili. Maia helps me. Water, butter, no Maiathat’s way too much butter, here is naked Aphra pushing up a chair to join us,here is Maia yelling at her because there’s not enough room, here is Aphracrying because Maia’s yelling at her. We have no salt. Is salt necessary to therising process?

Now I’m crying.

Before we leave for the grocery store at three-thirty I takea container of butternut squash soup from the freezer. I made it last week;we’ve been eating it for days. We will eat it again tonight, with the breadthat I will finish putting in the breadmaker when we get back from the grocerystore with salt.

I set the frozen container in the sink. The label, in myhandwriting, reads BS Soup.

The Unrooted Pieces of Us

2011-02-06T23:39:00.001-05:00

I began 2011 unsettled and ungrounded. We’d chosen to leave our home and so it no longer felt like home, like a place to safely rest in and build on. We didn’t know yet what would replace it. In my vagabond youth I moved without second thought, but now I’m older, now I have a family, now I have discovered that my work is best done in calm, steady routine with my feet firmly planted. The home is connected to the root chakra, to security, to the base of everything, and I could feel this palpably in my restless body and unstilled mind. Without the foundation of home I couldn’t settle into anything, not even to read a book.

I could write though, and I did so determinedly, wanting to finish this draft before the upheaval of moving and resettling. Two weeks ago I did it, draft three completed and all the structural and thematic and plot elements finally in their proper places. There is a small amount of deepening and expanding of the story that I still need to work on, but mostly it’s now line editing, work at the sentence level rather than at the section and scene level. I sent it to my First Reader, best friend and writer Anena Hansen, to read over the weekend, and her detailed response came back with this bottom line: “Your book is gold.” I read her email out loud to Richard and by the end I was bawling. Huge full-body relief and release and gratitude. All this work, and all these years, so much of my heart and brain and spirit, and someone has read it and said it is gold.

Richard bought champagne.

Several nights ago in our bed, the girls in jammies, Maia under the covers and Aphra crawling over bodies, I snuggled up to listen as Richard read the bedtime story. I could charge admission to the bedtime stories in our house, Richard’s expressive and many-voiced performance, our very own nightly one-man show. He’s reading Charlotte’s Web right now, a chapter book with few illustrations that should be far beyond Maia’s level, but she sits attentively. (In the very early days, when Maia was still afraid of Richard and would cry if left alone with him, I was delighted the night she took a book from my hands mid-story, padded wordlessly to the next room, and handed it to Richard. I am not a bad reader; it’s just that he is such a very good one.)

After the story the girls played out their pre-bed hyperactivity, hide-and-seeking around our bedroom while Richard and I cuddled on the bed, talking to each other and watching their antics, kisses periodically interrupted by small bodies climbing atop us or Maia shouting "Hey you guys! Hey you guys!" to get our attention. Affie discovered she could stand on her own, smiling proudly at her accomplishment while we all cheered. She started giving kisses, coming at each one of us in turn with her lips smacking wetly, saying “Mmma” and inciting hysterical laughter in Maia.

We were close and connected and relaxed and happy, all four of us enjoying each other's company purely. “This,” I said to Richard, “is family life at its best.”

And this is what I want to achieve on a more regular basis: true pleasure in being together, true presence in the moment. It is easy for life with two small children to become about survival, about getting through the day with mouths fed and bodies clothed and messes cleaned and some effort toward self-nourishment grabbed along the way. Too often I’m focused on escape: how can I keep them busy so I can get away to write, to check email, to get the laundry done, how can I multitask so that I am with them but also getting the dishes washed or the phone call made. Richard and I spell each other, facilitating the other’s escape, more often than we embrace being together as a family, slowing down to just be together all four of us.

We are both endeavouring to become more mindful parents this year, less given to knee-jerk responses, more conscious in considering and choosing and implementing ways of being with our children that feel genuine and respectful and connected. In a month’s time Maia will turn three and Aphra will turn one, and it feels like a huge accomplishment to have made it through age two and babyhood. (I will miss babyhood but I won’t regret seeing the back of age two, whose reputation does not come from nowhere.)

We think our girls will love the city. We took them again on Thursday, a madcap one-day ten-hour-round trip following a hunch about an apartment. Maia gripped my hand and pointed to every bench and bike and storefront and drainage hole, exclaiming “Look Mommy! A bench!” or “Know what’s that Mommy?” I hit my urban stride as soon as I was on the street, and I loved being there.

Around each apartment listing we pursue I create a life for us in my mind: here is who we would be in this neighbourhood, here is the yard where we’ll set up the kiddie pool, this would be our library branch, this would be the café I could walk to, in this room I’ll put my desk. With each apartment listing that doesn’t pan out, a life disappears and I’m back at square one, holding the pieces of us with no place to lay them securely down.

The pieces are Richard and I, a feisty and determined almost-one-year-old, a feisty and determined almost-three-year-old. They are my novel, which I will complete and which will take me, at last, on the path toward publication. They are theatre, Richard’s work that he loves and that has always defined him, the bedtime stories he will perform for an audience wider than Maia and Aphra and me.

I’ve backed off from the stress of apartment-hunting and am feeling much more present in where we are now—in transition. I’m reading a novel (Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife: delectable). I’m setting aside this week to focus not on the home search but on book revisions. And I have faith that our home, the foundation of our new life, will come. We just found out that the apartment I had a hunch about went to someone else, so we’re still looking. But it’ll come. I am, now, remarkably settled in unsettledness.

Country girls hit the city

Change of Place

2010-12-28T02:56:00.004-05:00

I’ve felt so rooted here. So settled, in a way that I don’t think I ever have as an adult.

For years Richard and I lived with a sense of temporariness. When we were in New York, when we were in Toronto, it often felt patched-together, precarious, like we were waiting for something. And usually we were: the next long-distance separation, the next tour, legal residency. We never owned much. We lived in a lot of furnished sublets, with closets squashed shut on other people’s shoes and Hello Kitty appliances. Our stuff lived for extended periods at Manhattan Mini Storage, together when we weren’t. Before Richard, I reveled in unrootedness. A three-month commitment to a place made me anxious.

Here, in a small A-frame cottage on the edge of Nepewassi Lake, winterized for our arrival, I have felt settled, well-placed. When we moved here a year and a half ago, we had no concrete idea how we were going to sustain this rural northern life. We were moving here for the babies—for Maia’s transition into our family near familiar people and places, for our baptism into insta-parenthood near a support network. We hoped to survive here at least through Aphra’s birth and newborn stage. We have lived month to month with haphazard injections of work and gifts and bits of income, Richard travelling ten hours in a single day for every audition in Toronto, once going back to New York for seven weeks’ work. We have lived on less than we’ve ever lived on in our eight years together, with less security, with no knowledge of how long we could keep it up before we’d be forced to hightail it back to somewhere with better job prospects. We’ve lived with a focus on how much we can get by without spending, on making things ourselves, on being together and raising our children and hoping, but not knowing how, we might be able to continue doing this.

And I have felt settled, well-placed.

In November Maia and Aphra and I accompanied Richard to Toronto for an audition, making a family event of it, staying overnight with my sister. Watching wide-eyed while the retreating Santa Claus parade drove unceremoniously past us as we descended into the city, traipsing together up Roncesvalles in search of Thai take-out with Aphra in the wrap on my chest and Maia earnest and engaged as she pointed—“Look! Look!”—at every storefront. The girls awed and enthused by the wonders of the city. I awed and enthused, too. “Look at us,” I kept exclaiming to Richard, “we’re a trendy urban family!” The trendy urban family I used to watch in Toronto, in New York, in the months and years before I was a mother, studying them for a picture of what that life would look like. A trendy urban family we did not become, because when we became a family we moved to the country, to a small A-frame cottage at the edge of a lake. And instead of giving our daughters walking-distance libraries and museums and play groups and playgrounds we’ve given them free-range roaming across grass and bush, grandparents and cousins next door, summer splashing in a lake at their doorstep, winter snow angels in an unlimited expanse of white. Instead of being that mother corralling her babies into cafés and bookstores and navigating streetcar and subway with one on her back and the other clutched by the hand, I’ve been the mother hanging cloth diapers on a long country clothesline, and wearing the baby and pushing the toddler on walks to visit the cows, and buckling them into car seats anytime we need to travel the long distance to anywhere.

That audition we went along for was a call-back for a commercial that Richard didn’t end up getting, but only a few days earlier he’d been in the city for a different audition, and that job he did get. He will play the Father and the Doctor in The Railway Children, a stage adaptation of E. Nesbit’s classic coming to Toronto in 2011. A solid eight to ten months of work—an eternity of employment for an actor.

And so, it seems, we are leaving our lakeside idyll and moving back to become that trendy urban family after all.

It’s been a gift, this year and a half of rootedness in earth and water and rocks and trees and family. This small A-frame cottage where we’ve become a family. A few nights ago, Richard and the girls already asleep upstairs, I paused at the bottom of the staircase after turning out the downstairs lights and I watched the orange glow through the glass-doored woodstove and I felt a great welling of gratitude for this home and what it’s been to us. And I wanted to hold onto it, to keep this precious, challenging season of our lives, and this beautiful place where we’ve been privileged to live it.

We thought, at first, to try to find a way to do this, but it’s feeling more and more like time to cut loose and take another plunge. I’m a little trepidatious, as of any major change. I know how to be independent and busy and hard-working and fast-paced and studious in a city, but I don’t know how to be a mother there. I think some things will be harder. But I’m looking forward to exploring the urban side of myself again, and to seeing what my daughters and I can make of that environment together. I’m looking forward to the Toronto Public Library and the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. To The Word on the Street. To Yoga Goddess. To Thai take-out. To all my favourite independent cafés. To the ease with which I will be able to leave the girls with Richard and slip out to one of them for a few hours’ writing. To fast internet. To building community. To finding, maybe, other mothers who are juggling writing and mothering. To being at the centre of a creative hub again, to watching my man on stage again, to bringing our daughters to the theatre to visit him. To watching Maia watch her first play. To giving them the richness of the city after having given them the richness of the country.

Such a beautiful home we’ve had here. Such a beautiful life. I have felt settled and well-placed.

A Year in Summation

2010-12-22T13:54:00.000-05:00

In 2010 I have yelled more, cursed more, become gripped with stronger rage, been more roundly overwhelmed and undone and out of control, than in any other year of my life.

In 2010 I have cried more swift-rising tears of awe and joy, felt more wonder that my life could have been anything but thus, known more depth of satisfaction and gratitude, than in any other year of my life.

You ask me, how's motherhood? You ask it breezily, as though inquiring into the weather, as though expecting me capable of producing a pat and ready answer. As though there is only one answer, and sometimes you provide it for me: “Oh, you just love it!”

In 2010 I have smashed objects against floors and pounded my fists into walls.

In 2010 I have gazed on my snow-shrouded cottage or my grinning daughter or my husband walking down the street with our baby wrapped to his chest and our two-year old gripping his hand and I have been sucker-punched by love and contentment and joy.

You’ve seen a few photographs and you comment: You’re obviously thriving in motherhood. You’ve watched me with my children for five minutes and you tell me, You’re a beautiful mother. You deify motherhood, dismiss it with a sanctification that precludes examination and leaves no room for complexity. You reduce me to simple words, cut me off before I can upset the Hallmark image.

In 2010 I have wanted to claw my way out of my life and catch the first bus back to who I used to be.

In 2010 I have become the Hallmark image, every saccharine cliché grown real and fully-felt inside me.

You inquire into my occupations and respond for me, You’re just being a mother. The sanctification juxtaposed with a just, an only, a dismissal.

In 2010 I have been engaged in the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

In 2010 I’ve become the fullest and richest and most complicated me I’ve ever been.

Mothering Writer, Writing Mother

2010-12-11T23:56:00.001-05:00

“So do you think maybe—I don’t know, I don’t mean now, but maybe in ten years—that you’ll try to write again?” – My aunt, commenting upon my new estate of motherhood

My biggest fear when weighing the pros and cons of potential motherhood was that mothering would devour writing. I’d always known I needed to write to be complete. I did not believe I needed to mother to be complete. I’d observed enough children and enough mothers to know how all-consuming a role motherhood is. I was the eldest of six. I was no fool. And so I was afraid, essentially, that mothering would devour me.

The fear has both come true and not come true. Some days, yes, yes, it is true, but just for that day. Some days the fear propels me into making sure it doesn't come true. The overall truth, however, the balance of all the days, is that my fear was spectacularly unfounded. Because here I am, a woman actively mothering and actively writing. Here I am, becoming my own model of a mothering writer/writing mother. Proving that it’s possible, because I needed it to be possible.

Some days I grab a snatch of myself early in the morning, a bit of time in the manuscript, and then I try to hold onto it all day long, returning at 10:30 pm trying to remember what plot thread I was following fifteen hours ago, fifteen hours and a load of cloth diapers and a batch of bread and stories and snow angels and dancing and tears and breakfast and lunch and supper and dishes, all with a baby on my back and a two-year old at my side. I try to hold on through all this stuff, all this work, all these needs, and I collapse at night once they're finally both in bed and I try to remember, who was I again? And what was I doing? Oh yeah, writing a book. Let's see now, I was looking at changing this scene to zzzzzzz....

Some days I feel depressed and disconnected from any intellectual or creative self and I consider giving in to the mire, the perpetual laundry and dishes and meals and children need need needing me, allowing myself to sink into it and remain there without the constant effort to climb back out and get back to the page. It could be so relaxing to give in and sink.

Some days the stars align and I have hours: Richard takes them to town and I stir from my desk only to stoke the fire, or he stays home with them while I drive to the local library and install myself at a table and plug in my earphones while teenage boys play online games and jabber to each other but I barely notice them because they don’t need me and I am writing and I no longer waste time when I am writing.

The thing about having open, unlimited time to write is that you don’t appreciate it. It’s too much, and it can paralyze. I now have the opposite of open, unlimited time to write. My writing and I are engaged in a clandestine affair—the quick shag in the closet, the hour stolen at the roadside hotel—and when I get time for writing, I don’t fritter it. I don’t spend it on getting-in-the-mood rituals. There is no foreplay for me and my writing anymore. We get a spare moment and bam, we are there.

Some weeks progress is measured in infinitesimal bites, tiny little bits of slogging through a scene, adding a scrap of dialogue, taking it out, editing a paragraph, free-writing for two minutes. It’s like swimming through molasses, not with the work itself but with trying to get to it, to make it add up to anything. Some weeks I get solid amounts done, I’m able to stay with it, to break from it and be present and joyful with my children, then return to the work and slip back into its flow. I can feel it building, substantial, significant. Getting somewhere.

I’m learning not to worry about it. I’m in the third complete draft of my novel, and although I’d hoped to be finished by now, I know there will come a day when I’m finished. I have not always known this. I also know that the period of time when my children are young is fleeting. It's not as though I haven't let years slip by in the past while I occupied myself with much less valuable pursuits than providing a solid foundation in life for my daughters. I’m willing—on my best days, I’m happy—to let these two amazing girls share space with this book.

Because the other thing I didn’t know when I stacked up the pros and cons of potential motherhood was how these small human beings would change me. I am more complex. I am both softer and stronger, more patient and more fierce. And I am theirs. I am no longer just my own. Or my writing’s.

In mothering circles I sometimes feel I’m using only one half of my body, or speaking with only half the letters of my alphabet, as I try to connect and fit in without acknowledgment of this other essential aspect of myself. In literary circles I can feel vaguely estranged because I have this other huge thing in my life that makes me, if only on a practical level, a different kind of writer.

I’m stumbling into my tribe. Kerry Clare shares an essential conversation with Marita Dachsel about the connections between motherhood and writing, and whether or not we should be talking about them. Through her I find Marita’s Motherhood and Writing Interviews. I find Amy Lavender Harris contesting the narrative that “a woman must choose between parenthood and an engaged, intellectual life.” I find Carrie Snyder, mother of four, signing the contract for her second book. I find those models, that company, that I was looking for way back at the beginning. I find that maybe the pram in the hallway (or the mei tai on the closet shelf) does not have to be the enemy of art, because these women are proving it.

And I am proving it too. I would never say it’s easy. But I will say it’s possible. Most days, it’s just about getting on with it. Caring for my children, with all the chaos and beauty that can mean. And writing—whenever and however I can.

There has been this

2010-11-12T00:38:00.000-05:00

I have officially crossed over. I am no longer Ambivalent Mother. I am no longer Woman Conducting Anthropological Studies in the World of Motherhood. I am no longer Mother Consistently Longing for Pre-Motherhood Life. I am no longer Woman/Writer/Self First, Mother Second. I’ve become one of them, a person who identifies herself in relation to another: I am Mother.

Last Saturday, in a harried mothering moment as I tried to start supper and keep both children occupied and attended to, I jiggled Aphra on my hip while I cut a slice of bread for Maia. Aphra’s hand lunged for the knife. Blood ensued, everywhere, blood and screaming.

The experience since—crazed with horror, rushing sock-footed outside for help, speeding the 45 minutes to the nearest hospital, three stitches to put her tiny finger back together, and my own emotionally-ravaged memories of the gash and the blood—has been so powerful and intense, has brought up emotion so strong and primal, that I feel irrevocably altered. It’s not the experience itself that has altered me, that has caused this crossing over. But the experience has shown me how altered I already was.

Because there is nothing I would not do to protect this little being. The loss of her, I feel, would devastate me utterly. I could not survive it. How does anyone survive the death of a child? I think of the people I know who have done so, and I think, how? How did they get through that? I listen to older mothers talk of children who’ve fallen into self-destructive lives and I hold my nursing baby at my breast and I cry and say, “How can you live with this? This was your little baby who you held close to your heart, and now, this. How can you live?”

Because she is everything. And I never wanted it to be so, but it is.

It is like a veil lifted, a revelation, a horrid and shocking revelation: throughout time, for millennia, and throughout my lifetime, all around me, there has been this—mothers and fathers living with the excruciating pain of loving their children? There has been this, and I never knew?

I know it now. I knew it as I tried to rinse away the blood—blood everywhere, on her shirt, on my shirt, in her hair and on her face and on the floor and the counter and the cutting board—and every time I got the wound clean enough to see I started to hyperventilate and sink toward the floor. I knew it in the back seat of the car as my mother drove us to the emergency room and I sat next to Affie with my arms around her, wasted, willing my mother to stop talking or trying to comfort me or trying to distract me because nothing you can say, nothing you can possibly think of to say, can possibly make me feel better when my little baby is in pain with the end of her finger dangling and I’m the one who cut her. And I’ve known it in the days since, cuddling her close, newly awake to all the potential dangers to her health and life and to how deeply these dangers, if realized, would slay me.

In all my weighing the pros and cons of becoming a mother, I never once considered how deeply I would love my child and how painful that love could be. That, to me now, feels like the biggest consideration: if you are going to become a mother, you have to be prepared to have your heart torn helplessly, hopelessly out of you, and to never be able to belong fully to yourself, fully independent, again.

Not because they tie you down, although they do. But because they will have your heart. And they will probably rip it to shreds, repeatedly, for the rest of your life.

Moving Into New Skin

2010-05-27T00:44:00.002-04:00

A surreal moment, the first time I look into the back seat to see two daughters in two car seats. Astonishment to find us suddenly a family of four. Eight months ago we were the two of us, and the back seat was just where you tossed extra bags, and now here we are, looking unmistakably like a family, and oh my goddess how did this happen?

But I felt, from the beginning of Aphra’s life, a sense of completion. A sense that now that she has arrived, we are whole. No longer suspended, we’re all here and we’re moving forward with our lives together. As though those months between when Maia joined us and when Aphra was born were a sort of limbo, waiting for the rest of our party to arrive so we could proceed.

And here we are, a family of four filling all the space in a car, proceeding.

And I am a mother. I have two girls, two years less a week apart in age, one who came to me from my body and one who came through another woman, through other caregivers, through a more complicated path of question and choice.

I feel like I’m starting to get it, this motherhood thing.

It comes in flashes of vision.

Aphra wakes me soundlessly, nuzzling my breast at 5:00 a.m. sunrise over misty lake, and we lie there together in the most symbiotic relationship I have known, my body nourishing her, her lips on my nipple and hand clutching my shirt and eyes locked on mine, and it clicks, This is motherhood.

Maia plays and splashes and giggles in the lake with my sisters, her aunts, her body hugged around one of theirs, her pale white easily-sunburned skin and strawberry blond curls so different from mine, her glee and her nervousness sharing space in her face, and I watch from the shore and see her lodged in this community of women and this nature-saturated environment, see in one moment the complexity of her past and her future, her developing personality, her increasingly intricate emotions, and I see that I am the guardian and the nurturer of all this, and it clicks, This is motherhood.

Both are finally asleep and it’s late and I’m tired and instead of going downstairs to relax or clean up I do that clichéd parenthood thing, except for me it is the first time it has ever been done, and it comes from deep inside me, I stand in their doorways and watch them sleep. And I could keep standing there for a long time, watching them sleep, and it clicks, This is motherhood.

Sometimes it comes, gallingly, in identification with a truism, a Hallmark sentiment, the sort of saccharine cliché said by or about mothers that once would have induced eye-rolling in me, or a demand for the gritty truth underneath the soppy sentiment. Now, I feel the truism and I think, This IS the gritty truth! That my heart has expanded. That my being is bigger. That before, I didn’t know what complete and unconditional love was. That they change you in ways you couldn’t have foreseen. That I could burst with this love, that I could stare at her for hours, as though she were a lover—this body, those eyes, the amazing fact of her presence, oh. Oh, oh. I love you, I love you, and oh! So THIS is what love is!

(That said, I rebelled against my first Mother’s Day, dying but not daring to counteract the syrupy facebook statuses with something like “All I want for Mother’s Day is a break from my kids.”)

I feel like I shouldn’t admit it, like it is a transgression of adoption philosophy, but I don’t think I started to get this motherhood thing until I gave birth, until I accepted into my arms this seconds-old infant to whom I am everything. Or perhaps it is just that enough time has gone by since I took on this role, and this was the amount of time—given my ambivalence, given my background, given my determined goals in other directions—that I required. Perhaps it is the hormones, which have kicked in to benefit and embrace Aphra and Maia both. Perhaps it has something to do with that state of suspension I felt through pregnancy being finally over, allowing me to settle into a new normal and move forward to define and embrace it. Perhaps it is Richard being away, back to NYC for seven weeks of work, and I thrust deep-end into this life, no weight-sharing partner to facilitate my escapes to the desk, to my writing, to the old pre-children life, to noncommitance.

It is all of these things.

And the thought comes frequently now, I am a mother. This is me, mother, instead of this is me, Heidi, writer-reader-student-woman, putting on a role called mother.

I have moved in. I am wearing the skin, and it is becoming, more and more, my own skin.

Power

2010-03-08T17:20:00.002-05:00

I had no idea.

No idea that this is the most important thing in the world, the most important I will ever do.

No idea that nothing, not completing my degree, not writing a novel, is this big.

I am ashamed and astounded that, becoming pregnant, I thought I had succumbed to a biological slavery. Ashamed of every child-centered mother I have dismissed as copping out of her own life, her achievements lesser.

Lying with my days-old babe on my chest, listening to the music that was in my ears as I laboured her into the world, tears roll down my cheeks as the truth clicks into place.

It is a secret. Pushing a human being out of your body--feeding her from your breasts--giving and sustaining life: nothing is more powerful.

Aphra Anena

March 2, 2010, 1:58 a.m.

8 pounds, 8 ounces, 21 inches

Present in Suspension

2010-02-20T18:41:00.001-05:00

Living in the present moment becomes a little more difficult when you know that at any time your present moment could turn into one of the more physically, emotionally, and mentally demanding experiences of your life. Going about a normal day becomes a little more difficult when you know that with only a little warning, your normal day could become the day your life changes completely. It’s hard to be constantly prepared for birthing and baby—to keep those birthing supplies always at the ready, to keep the tools learned for birthing in the forefront of the mind—while also continuing to engage in non-birthing, non-baby life with presence and patience.

I want to use this baby-free time to rest, to nurture myself, to enjoy my husband and daughter, to do the things that will be harder to do once the baby comes. But I’ve been feeling suspended. In limbo. Waiting. Some days anxious and restless, not at all the zen, present, patient mama I’d like to be. Tomorrow I will be 40 weeks pregnant. I didn’t expect to make it this far, only because my sisters didn’t with their three babies, and I had it in my head that I would keep with family tradition.

A couple weeks ago I began asking the baby to come on February 20. Today. The renovation of the house we plan to birth in was not finished, and I was anxious about giving birth in a construction zone or having to go to Plan B. My mother, who I have always thought so crucial for post-partum support, is going away for a week on the 28th. In uncentered moments I was pulled apart by the impossibility of knowing when my birthing time would begin, by the pressure of needing it to happen in between these two dates. February 20 felt like a good day toward which to direct my intentions.

It’s February 20. The house is ready. My mom is still around for another week. This morning, after a fitful night of occasional uterine tightenings and pulsings, I was disappointed to wake to no signs of baby’s imminent arrival. Anxious, restless. Tired. Unwilling to move forward with actively meditating on or suggesting to the baby and my body that today is the day—because do I really know that, is that just my attempt to control an uncertain situation?—but unable to focus on or engage in anything else.

Finally I listened to the day’s Hypnobabies hypnosis script, relaxing to positive affirmations and suggestions for my birthing time. I went for a long, slow walk to the dam with Richard in sunshine and above-freezing temperatures, to sit in the sun and gaze at the frozen lake on one side, the rushing river on the other. We talked. We laughed. We held hands. Back at home we sat on our porch with books and chat and cups of tea in the marvelous sunshine. If you closed your eyes it could have been May. Maia woke from her nap and I danced and sang with her in the kitchen.

It was a beautiful afternoon. I was engaged. I was present. I let go.

Washing the Dishes

2010-02-14T14:00:00.003-05:00

The writer I once apprenticed with used to tell me writing was like washing the dishes: it needed to be done, and you just had to roll up your sleeves and stand at the sink and do it, one dish after the next. I balked at this comparison—writing was hallowed! Writing was painstaking! Writing required inspiration, a sacred calling, anguished yearning, tears and blood, the right mood, the right pens. Writing definitely was not like washing the dishes.

When the time came, 10:55 last Monday night, sitting up in bed beside my sleeping husband, I felt not so much elation as a quiet sense of satisfaction. Ah, a job done, a job well done. 101,275 words, good for me. I woke Richard up to tell him. I emailed Anna. I went to sleep.

In our former life, one that did not require a babysitter and an hour’s drive to civilization, we’d have gone out for dinner or drinks to celebrate. When I finished my first novel at age 23 (there was also a second between that one and this one, which I worked on for five years through anguished yearning, tears and blood before judiciously abandoning), my mom threw me a book-completion party. This time, Richard and I clinked paper Starbucks cups and sipped soy chai lattes over Maia’s head after our midwife appointment, and Richard took Maia on a ramble while I sat in an armchair and indulged in a few moments’ pondering of the arc of my novel, the development of my characters, the satisfaction of having brought them this far. And that was good enough for me. I’m happy to have attained this milestone, and to have attained it before my baby arrived as I wanted so intensely to do, but it doesn’t feel earth-shattering. I’m aware how much work remains. I know it’s just that—work. The novel is far from finished, light revision needed in some of the earlier, more polished sections, heavier revision in the latter half of the book as I barreled through toward my deadline. A long road remains even after I make the book the best that I can. It’s a major part of the job done, but it’s not all of the job. And it’s a job. So I’m quietly pleased, I say, “Good work, Heidi,” and “Thank you, Universe,” and I keep going.

It’s growing up as a writer, I think, that makes for this quiet satisfaction rather than elation on finishing my draft. No longer the starry-eyed young thing with the view of Writer as awe-striking distant being possessing the highest of callings (and boy, does this view make it hard to get much written), I’m just a person who went to her computer and wrote her 15 or however many minutes a day, every day that I could manage until the story was completed.

I washed the dishes. They’re sparkly clean. I’m really glad they’re clean. It feels good.

Two Births

2010-02-08T17:49:00.005-05:00

“I’m enamored of the birth metaphor when it comes to the creative process: you conceive of a story, a poem, a piece of art; you let it gestate, you let it grow and kick inside you; you birth it into the world, still dripping with the waters of your inner-life.”

-Gayle Brandeis, “Our (Publishing) House,” Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts

So here I am, in the third and final trimester of my pregnancy, in the third and final section of my novel. Baby and book have been gestating side by side, each an apt metaphor for the other. They’re both growing—racing, in fact—toward full maturity, and the birth of both is imminent.

Today I’m 38 weeks pregnant. Little undershirts and sleepers and newborn-sized diapers wait in drawers. Birth supply bins are packed and ready by the door, along with a checklist of everything that has to make it into the car when the time comes. (Not quite so detailed as to include “Wife,” as Richard requested, but I’m trusting he can remember that one.) We’re planning a home birth, but not, alas, in our own home, since we’re an hour from the nearest hospital and half an hour outside our midwives’ catchment area, so we’ll be in my cousin’s home instead. I’ve been working with the Hypnobabies childbirth hypnosis program, and have spent the past two months training my logical mind to get out of the way, programming my subconscious mind with positive messages about easy comfortable birthing, learning self-hypnosis and deep relaxation and hypnotic anesthesia, visualizing my birth, listening to pregnancy and birth affirmations. Two days ago I woke before six with birthing waves, smiling to myself in the darkness, feeling the pressure and tightening that for the first time felt distinct and timeable. For a few moments, until I woke Richard, my baby and I lay together, the only ones who knew we could be about to meet each other. I felt excited, at peace, prepared, powerful. It turned out to be a practice run, the contractions abating after several hours, but it seems my body is getting ready.

Today I am one scene, probably one thousand words, from completion of my novel.

The disconcerting thing about having your baby’s birth as your book-completion deadline is that you don’t know exactly when your deadline is. I could have two or three weeks still, but my two sisters’ three babies came at or before 39 weeks and I’m semi-expecting mine to follow suit, so am trying to be prepared earlier rather than later. Richard says baby knows and is waiting for me to finish the book. Anna says that finishing your novel and birthing your baby on the same day would make a great cocktail party story (for all those cocktail parties I’ve been attending).

Earlier in the third trimester I had a hard time writing or getting into the headspace for writing. As though all my creative energy were going into preparing for birthing and baby, putting focus into the novel felt difficult, even irrelevant. My brain was mushy, I couldn’t concentrate, like some essential start-up button needed to be turned on and I couldn’t find the switch. I stared at the words on my screen and they were alien, hopeless, pointless. The first two-thirds of the book—the first two trimesters of the book, if you like—pulled me along as I followed a story that seemed already to exist, its own momentum carrying it forward, events transpiring securely and inevitably out of the essence of my characters. In this final section I have struggled; especially as I moved into the third trimester of pregnancy, the story felt forced, the inner truth of my characters murky and removed from me.

I’ve tried to be gracious with myself, to look beyond the Western-male-linear model of productivity and let myself be where I am. If there’s ever a time when I am not male and linear—or predictable and rational and schedule-able, for that matter—it’s now. (Okay, it’s always, but particularly now.) In pregnancy, especially with only a matter of weeks left until baby, the body and mind and spirit and emotions are primed to put everything into nurturing and preparing for the life inside, and if that takes over, I decided, that is right, and maybe I’m meant to just go with it. In body-mind-spirit-divorced society, of course you work your ass off right until you go into labour, but I decided with my mushy brain that maybe if I was being conscious about what I was going through, that productivity orientation can and should fade away as I move inward to prepare for the act of bringing forth new life.

So a month or two ago I relaxed my goal, my mad dash toward the baby-induced deadline. I gave up on revision before baby—and there will need to be substantial revision—and made the goal simply a full completed draft before baby. (The baby hiatus slots well into the cooling-off period I’ll need before rereading and editing anyway.) Then I gave up on even a completed first draft, as I faced insomniac nights and exhausted days, as getting out of bed for pre-dawn writing time became impossible because I needed all the sleep I could get just for survival, as my intellectual capacities shrank to the level of Sex and the City marathons on the couch. (Shhh… guilty pleasure.) I showed up for fifteen minutes of writing when I could. But a couple weeks ago I stopped to map out what needed to happen in the story to bring it to the end, and was startled to find myself with a mere five scenes to completion.

I was elated. Then paralyzed. Then didn’t write for a week.

But now, spurred by the tangible form this impending life change is starting to take—a birthing pool in our possession, a head engaged in my pelvis, those birthing waves a couple mornings ago—I’ve been knocking off a scene or two a day, mostly slogging through it, getting the job done without much fanfare or brilliance, but getting the job done nonetheless. And the slogging has brought me to this day: only the final scene remains, the culmination of an idea that first came to me three and a half years ago, that I have seen through several incarnations (one short story, then a different short story, before I realized it was a novel), through numerous interruptions (several years of intensive work on a degree, jobs, wedding, the adoption of a child, the carrying of another), in multiple locations (New York City: benches in Fort Tryon Park, benches in Washington Square, small round tables at Think Coffee, small round tables at the ubiquitous Starbucks, beneath the majestic ceiling of the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, in one apartment, in another apartment, in another apartment; Toronto: at the kitchen table in an apartment shared with my sister, on my tiny bed staving off loneliness in a cramped dorm room, in my Room of My Own in an apartment shared with my husband; Nepewassi Lake, at an L-shaped desk overlooking the water on mornings before my new daughter wakes, or sitting up in my white-shrouded bed when I have slept too long and can’t risk waking her by going downstairs). I have seen it through all this to today, the birth of my child imminent, and the completion of my book just one or two writing sessions away.

It could be tonight. I’d better get writing.

36 weeks

2010-01-26T04:32:00.008-05:00

A mild misty day, babe in belly, husband behind camera.

A different kind of romance

2009-11-10T20:14:00.003-05:00

5:30 pm and we have been inching through construction-obstructed traffic for half an hour. Maia, overtired from a missed nap and a full day of appointments and errands, has screamed through the entirety of it. I am overtired too, and as we crawl forward I offer snacks and bottles, toys and books, and finally turn forward with grim determination just to survive the 45 minutes until we're home. Through the screams that fill the car, I drape my arm around Richard’s neck and lean over to kiss him.

“Isn’t this romantic?” I ask.

“Actually,” he says, “it is.”

And this is one of the reasons I love my husband.

Questioning the Terms

2009-10-02T20:50:00.001-04:00

I’ve been starting most days by creeping out of bed around 6:00—sometimes earlier, sometimes later, depending when I wake and how long it takes Richard to convince me that I really do want to do this—and tiptoeing past Maia’s bedroom, down the stairs to my desk to wrap myself in a blanket and write my novel. I like being up while it’s still dark; it’s a different darkness from nighttime, feels like a separate, secret world, the world in which I write my novel. Often Richard joins me, builds a fire, brews tea. I get an hour, occasionally two, before we hear stirrings upstairs, contented babbling and then a more urgent, “Mama!” Richard usually goes to her, changes her diaper and dresses her, and brings her down where she races to my side for a morning snuggle. I write madly through those final seconds, listening to her and Richard chatter at the change table, and by the time she is descending the stairs in her bold forward-facing one-at-a-time step, gripping the railing and grinning, I can’t grab any more moments for myself because I am, all over again, too excited to see her, to watch her descent, to stretch out my arms to her little body and her large personality and the day that waits for us together.

I am a happy mama when I write. When I do not write, I am a discontented, distracted, gloomy mama concocting escape fantasies and wondering how my life disintegrated from purpose into endless repetition of mundane tasks. Because so far, motherhood all on its own, day in and day out, does not fulfill me. This is the truth.

In a gathering of mothers a few weeks ago—a gathering I felt somewhat fraudulent at, because can it really be that I am a mother?—I commented on the importance I’m finding in prioritizing my own nourishment in order to be able to be there for my child. Another mother, a seasoned mother, said, “I actually disagree,” and spoke of the commitment inherent in parenthood to being the selfless one putting them first, to giving and giving and giving, the dangers of feeling you have to get away from your child in order to be fulfilled. I went quiet because, after all, what do I know, I’ve been a mother for less than three months, and I felt suddenly alarmed that to admit such a thing as self-focused needs, personal pursuits, equaled among more experienced mothers an admission of child neglect, of not-quite-good-enough love and devotion. I felt also the precariousness of my situation, mothering a child to whom I did not give birth, for whom the legal paperwork is not yet through, felt I would be wise to express nothing but rhapsodic devotion to this little person, did not want anyone to misinterpret my assertion that my essential self includes more than my mother self. I felt chastened.

But I sat silent while the seed of my own self-knowledge, the burning intuition I am trying to trust, rested hard and stubborn in my gut. I will not be a martyr mother. I have lived quite a number of years with myself, and I have learned what I need for my own self-nourishment. I will not relinquish that.

My stumble into motherhood has been dominated—as so many must be—by my own mother, the kind of mother she was, the kind of childhood she gave me. In my memory, she was an All Mother, a Complete Mother, a Good Mother. A Martyr Mother that I cannot, cannot see myself being.

In Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World, Peggy Orenstein pinpoints the conflict that tore me up as we were considering adopting Maia, as I walked stunned and drooping through the early weeks of pregnancy. Describing her own ambivalence about the choice of whether or not to mother, she writes:

I realized that I was mulling over a choice without questioning its terms. I’d developed my own image of the Good Mother, who “did it right,” and she looked a lot like my own mom—someone who was satisfied as a mother and wife, who was happy supporting others, making her mark through the accomplishment of those she nurtured. It’s a sacrifice that she’s insisted was no sacrifice. I knew I couldn’t be that kind of mother, yet…I felt like hers was the “right” way to do it. I feared devolving into a conflicted, discontented version of her, becoming a person who lost her essential self in motherhood while trying in vain to “do it right.”…Was it possible to be a mother without being a Mother? In an interview, Gloria Steinem, who is childless, once said, “I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to have children, to live that life, and come out the other end with an identity of my own. The way I came to think of it was that I could not give birth to both myself and someone else. It was a choice.” I understood her point (127-28).

I understand her point too. Her point gutted me, kept me awake through panicked nights, saw me standing with my hands in dishwater at the kitchen sink, tears streaming down my face as I realized I’d boarded the no-stop speeding train marked Domestic Life that I’d spent ten years running from.

It was beginning to question the terms of this role I was adopting that gave me the courage, the hope, that I could do this thing. Do it in a way that fit me, do it without losing myself.

In all the decision-making months of ambivalence and fear, the early mothering weeks of tears and freakouts, in the terror of becoming my own mother that undergirded them all, I never once confided in the person who modeled for me these unquestioned terms of motherhood. Hyper-aware of my fears of motherhood stemming from the way she mothered, in anything beyond the superficial I stayed completely away from my mom in my process of becoming a mother.

Until the day two weeks ago, a day of frustrations and tested patience, discontent and purposelessness, a cranky child and a cranky me aching for the old life. A day that seemed to negate all the progress and catapulted me back to my fear-filled mantra from early summer, the I don’t want this life that ran constantly through me then. On this day two weeks ago, I burst into unbidden tears once again at all the accumulated struggles, and the person in whose presence I burst into tears was my mother.

Which was, of course, exactly the thing that needed to happen.

She did not feel criticized as I confessed how much I had struggled against motherhood, against the terms she modeled to me, how I still struggled some days with the mundanity of it all. We talked of my childhood and she reminded me of activities she did engage in, hobbies and interests she pursued when we were young, pottery classes, weekend counseling courses, several years of a part-time home business. I was amazed at my own narrow-mindedness in my definition of my mother, in my summation of her with “My mother had no life of her own; her identity was subsumed.” Perhaps this was only my perception; perhaps she was so there for me that I thought that was all she was. Still, she said, she thought it would have been good for her and for her children if she’d had more of a life of her own as we were growing up. She hadn’t thought so at the time.

“I have to do it differently,” I said. She said, “I know.”

And I think the terms, for me—so far, and do remember it has been only three months—come down to Amy Tiemann’s revelation in Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family, another of the books I clung to like a life raft in a storm during the first exhausting weeks as Maia’s mother: referring to the maxim “Motherhood is the most important job in the world,” Tiemann writes motherhood is not a job; it is a relationship (80).

This is it. This sums up how I feel about Maia, and it is very like how I feel about Richard. As neither a wife—and I did freak out about that one too—nor a mother do I feel I’ve stepped into a job whose description is defined for me, whose constraints limit me, whose terms dictate who I am and where I find my purpose. Instead, marriage is Richard and I in relationship, still ourselves, walking side by side. Motherhood, thus far, is Maia and I likewise in relationship. She is a person with whom I interact and engage, with whom I spend (a disproportionate amount of) my time, with whom I laugh and play, whom I feed and soothe, dress and love, whom I am attempting to accompany and nurture into herself, her life, her purpose, knowing that she will play a huge part in doing the same for me.

My job, the work I do, the source of a large degree of my fulfillment and purpose, happens every morning in the darkness of 6 a.m. And it has nothing to do with either Richard or Maia, who are my companions on the journey but not the purpose of the journey.

So on a day like today, when the two loads of laundry I washed this morning are now being drenched on the clothesline, when I have left my ambitiously-begun bread dough to bake in a hot oven when it is supposed to be only rising in a warm oven, when the dishwater I ran four hours ago is now a cold greasy pool in which the dishes bob unwashed, when my first major cloth-diaper poo sits upstairs on the bathroom floor waiting for me to figure out how to deal with it, when Maia’s lunch burns on the stove while I’m dealing with the major poo and she is cranky and overdue for her nap but I don’t want to put her down before she gets a bit of food into her except the food is now burnt, when all this is happening, still, I have written. I got up this morning and I wrote. I pursued my work, an hour, several hundred words, progress.

My work is what enables me to be in relationship with my daughter with presence and joy.

And those, for right now, three months in, are my terms.

Unconscious Conception & Other Failures to Live Mindfully

2009-09-11T16:14:00.001-04:00

Today I heard my baby’s heartbeat. Proof in the form of loud and rapid pulsations from my abdomen that there is another human being inside my body. Sudden, mind-boggling, transcendent confirmation that within this five foot ten space that I have always occupied solo (five foot ten, formerly 129 pounds, formerly small-breasted and flat-stomached), I am not alone. There is someone else here with me, making sounds inside my belly. Oh my goddess. I am having a baby.

I have not been as present in this pregnancy as I would have expected. I did write reams in the weeks after discovery, working through all I felt and feared. But now, for someone who tries to be conscious about each phase of her cycle, to honour what her body and spirit are going through with monthly fluctuating hormones, for someone who takes on new life chapters with piles of book on the topic and pages of ruminations in notebooks, I have been decidedly un-conscious about the unprecedented changes going on inside me. I would have thought I’d be keeping a pregnancy journal, noting daily changes in body and emotions, reading pregnancy books, creating conscious intentions for a spiritual birth, communing with the baby.

I’m not.

Instead I’m feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, a much more real, much more in-my-face little person who demands focus because she is here on the other side of my body. The fact of her makes this much less like a first pregnancy than it otherwise might be; she is the first pregnancy I missed out on, the older sibling who I did not actually carry in my body but who is nevertheless resolutely here, demanding time and attention (and very confused every time I point to my belly and say “baby,” when there obviously is no such thing anywhere in evidence).

In the time that’s left over from feeding and clothing and chasing and playing with a toddler, I’m trying to stay me. I’m writing, madly dashing toward my February novel-completion deadline, that indefinite date when sleepless nights and breastfeeding and a post-baby haze and hopefully a post-baby head-over-heels love will take over, when regular time at my desk will become a quaint idea from another era, when I will not be able to forget about this baby any more than I can now forget about Maia. I’m reading, books not about pregnancy: novels, books about writers or various aspects of feminism, research for my own novel, or, if something motherhood-related, social critiques of the institution and expectations on it rather than rhapsodic odes or how-tos. Books that connect me to the creative, intellectual life that I value and that I want to hold onto.

I’ve found myself resisting acknowledging that this is some special period in my life that needs to be treated differently from the life I had and the person I was before that pink line on the pregnancy test. Haven’t there been enough changes? Can’t I just be sort of normal for another five months, when being sort of normal will become completely impossible?

Pregnancy has been easy: debilitating exhaustion in the early weeks, but no nausea. I’m getting a belly, but it can still be hidden. I can’t feel the baby moving yet. I’m busy and focused. I can still forget I’m pregnant.

But not with a heartbeat pounding through my skin. A heartbeat that isn’t mine but is inside me, so intrinsically part of me I’m astonished that I haven’t been aware of it every moment since it joined me.

In the early weeks, I was torn up by the knowledge that conception had been more haphazard risk-taking than mindful intention. Every pregnancy book I opened started months before conception, with these are the vitamins you should be taking before getting pregnant, this is the check-up you should have, this is how to invite the baby’s spirit into your lives, every sentence a reproach. You’re behind, you missed all these steps, and there’s no way to go back! (Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood was a relief not only for its straight talk about the complexity of maternal emotions and about the maternity industry, but for the fact that she—a mature, educated, responsible woman!—had also conceived by accident.)

So much about pregnancy and birth is similar to the process of engagement and wedding and marriage preparation. The rite of passage from one way of being into another, the importance of awareness and ritual, the spiritual in the physical, the need to grieve the loss of a former self and prepare to move into something new. When Richard and I were preparing for our wedding, I put a great deal of awareness into the process, reading books with titles like The Conscious Bride, focusing on the ritual of the ceremony as the most important aspect, largely eschewing the bridal industry’s fluff and frivolity, guarding my pre-ceremony time carefully so that it could be a spiritual, transformative passageway into my new self. I’d thought I would bring similar care and consciousness to pregnancy and birth if the time ever came, but the difference, especially early on, was that—though I worked through some grief at losing my single self and struggled to figure out what Wife meant to me and how I could become one without losing myself—partnership with Richard was something that I chose consciously, that I felt ready for, that I fully wanted. It was a decision, and I could move forward into it with full embracing. Pregnancy, in those early weeks, still felt like something that had been sprung on me.

When I undress at night, Richard and I marvel at my swelling belly and full breasts, gasp, “Oh my god, do you think we’re pregnant?” He takes pictures. When Maia joins us in our bed in the mornings, she reaches for the belly butter on my nightstand, pulls away the covers to get to my tummy, and helps me spread it across my skin. I’m taking prenatal vitamins and trying to eat well and to rest when I need to. But becoming conscious about the pregnancy has largely been something I hope to get around to doing before February, in between finishing my novel and mothering a still-new-to-us child.

I felt a shift, after my appointment with my midwife. I drove to a café and ordered a warm drink and turned on my laptop and smiled the whole time, that heartbeat still thrumming through me. I called Richard to tell him. At the library I renewed instead of returning Birthing from Within, found Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth on the shelf (a book I read five years ago preparing to attend the birth of my nephew—a pregnancy I was more conscious about than I have been about this one, a birth that made me say, “I have got to experience this myself someday”). I drove the whole hour home with one hand on my belly, holding my baby. Richard had given me the day on my own to recharge and renew, was home alone with Maia, putting her to bed now. As I drove the highway, and then the smaller highway, and then the gravel road, and then the single-lane potholed even smaller gravel road that is our new commute between our house and any substantial civilization, I felt distinctly that I too was alone with one of our babies—communing with her, taking care of her, the two of us together listening to jazz on CBC Radio 2 in a car headed home.

Gestation

2009-08-27T15:46:00.004-04:00

It’s been a lot of big news to announce all at once.

We’re adopting a baby.
Oh yeah, and we’re having a baby. No, a different one.
And we’re moving to the country, north, to a house on a lake.

Three huge life transitions, any one of which would be momentous, life-changing on its own. I am trying to be gracious with myself. Would this be smooth and easy for anyone?

When I told one old friend, over smoothies on the back patio at one of my favourite cafés on Roncesvalles, I could feel the chasm opening between us that was a chasm between my old life and my new. She is still single and childless—still, not because that might or should change for her, but because it did for me; when we first met, I was single and childless too. She left her good job to move to an ashram in the mountains; she is planning a solo trip to India; she dabbles in dating but doesn’t tie herself down. She is the old me. I could feel—or perhaps, likely, this was my own projection—her rapidly-covered shock, the astonished moment before congratulations that covered the oh thank god that isn’t me. A day from driving north to take over Maia’s care, I felt the enormity of what I was embarking on as I saw the old me reflected in her life, as though we two had been on one ship and I’d now changed to a different one and was waving from the deck, watching as she and her independent, footloose life receded to a tiny speck that would soon have nothing to do with me.

Yesterday was another hard day. Exhaustion that could be pregnancy or could be depression, burrowing back into bed rather than face trying to carve out purpose and fulfillment from another day. Concocting desperate escape fantasies, fearing I am not, I am simply not, cut out for this. One year ago I was living in a fifth floor Manhattan walk-up, writing my novel every day, all day, in Ft. Tryon Park and Washington Square and Think Coffee, meeting Richard for drinks and dinner in the evenings, going to plays and movies. Six months ago I was writing papers and giving presentations and attending classes, my life bursting with challenge and thought. These days I am dressing and feeding a small child, going on bike rides on dirt roads with her close at my back, walking over to visit Grandma, walking over to visit Auntie Mar. Going down for a nap. Making supper. Eating. Changing another diaper. Getting ready for bed. Next day, repeat.

It is an adjustment to move from constant built-in intellectual stimulation, from a life dominated by adult pursuits and regular progress toward goals, to this slowed-down life focused on the interests and abilities of a one-and-a-half-year-old. It is an adjustment for the measure of daily accomplishment to shrink from papers finished or new chapters begun to mundane tasks that must be repeated again and again. Some days my big achievement is taking a shower.

Maia delights me in small, surprising moments: grasping my face in her hand to turn it toward her and plant a big kiss on my lips, taking her bottle from her mouth to blow kisses as she’s going to sleep, her daily "Mama!" when she wakes, the transported smile when she sees me. Who could not love this?

There was a day last week that I declared the happiest of my life. Richard took Maia for two hours in the morning and I sat at my desk overlooking the lake, then moved into the breeze and sunshine on the front deck, and worked effortlessly, steadily on my book, huge leaps of progress, new ideas, old ideas rediscovered, my outline firmed up so that I can see ahead to where I am going, so that finishing this novel by February felt eminently doable, probable. Richard had just received word, after 13 years of knocking on their door, of an audition for the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival, and I could hear his speeches across the yard as he rehearsed them to Maia, and I loved this, that here we were, both back in our art, both pursuing what we love, our daughter here in the midst of it making all of it even better than it would be without her. When it was my turn to take over I did so with joy, and all day long the fact that I had written—not just a grabbed 15 minutes at the end of a day, but whole hours together—coloured my perspective, my ability to be present with my daughter, to love the small moments, to love her. I felt complete, vibrant, fulfilled.

I’ve been baking bread by hand, cooking spaghetti sauce from scratch with ingredients picked fresh in the garden at our doorstep, saving chicken bones for homemade soup stock. Slowing down into a life that doesn’t come packaged at the grocery store, that isn’t carried forward on concrete. Richard and I sleep with our lake-facing bedroom door open, our bed piled with blankets, so we can feel the chill night air and hear the loons, the frogs, the water running over the nearby dam.

I try to keep days like yesterday in perspective, and to be gracious with myself. I have had so little time to ease into this. ("Our five-day gestation period," Richard and I called the period between finally deciding to raise Maia and actually beginning to.) I am 14 weeks into my first pregnancy, hormones running amok inside me. I’m nurturing life both in the form of the curly-haired redhead who’s taken over our house and the peach-sized fetus who is sharing my body. Never before has so much nurturance been required of me, and I am aware that I will not be able to do it if I don’t first nurture myself.

My sister pointed out to me, when I escaped for an impromptu therapy session at her house during one bad day (not yesterday, a different bad day; they are numerous) that during my moontime, I always allowed myself time to rest and recharge, to be gentle with myself, to expect little, without guilt. I have missed moontimes, missed my cycle, this pattern of emotions and strengths that had become a guide to myself. Perhaps, she suggested, I need to consider the pregnancy one extended moontime: a time when my body is working very hard, when I need extra rest, comfort, and gentleness. My initial resistance (nine months of being gentle with myself? how self-indulgent!) has given way to faltering attempts to change my expectations of myself, to not demand that I plough through this transition and this pregnancy at top production, that I let myself feel, and be, whatever I am.

So that on days like yesterday, when the gulf feels so great between me on this foreign ship and the familiar distant shore that I’m unsure I will ever see again, I let myself burrow back in bed, and rest, and cry, and let that be okay. And this leads to days like today, when I am dancing and splashing and playing with Maia in happy abandon, slipping into five minutes here and two there at my computer, working purposefully on my own creative project, somehow managing to mesh the two.

I am being born as a mother in all this transition, and you could say that as this new being called mother I was from the womb untimely ripped. That five-day gestation period for Maia was also only five days for the new me, Heidi, Mother. Perhaps this nine-month moontime is as much my gestation period as the Peach’s, as I come into my new self, hoping it will still contain a lot of the old self in it (I liked my old self) but knowing that a lot will be altered. Stronger, I hope, surer, more aware, maybe.

Suddenly, Motherhood

2009-08-15T23:00:00.006-04:00

When I met Maia, the three-month-old daughter of my teenage brother, I was overcome by powerful, unexpected connection. Crying within seconds of taking her into my arms, looking into her alert blue eyes, I felt not like I was meeting a new family member but like I was reuniting with someone I was meant to be with. It was not a meeting but a recognition. I wondered if we’d known each other in another life. Richard termed it The Maia Effect, the way I melted into tears whenever I so much as thought of her.

Seven months after I met Maia, my brother and his girlfriend, struggling with the challenges of teenage parenthood, broke up. Another two months later my parents had become Maia’s legal guardians and my mother was calling daily, imploring, "Maia needs parents." My immediate response was Yes, yes, yes. Followed shortly after by This is too huge, can we really do this, it will mean overhauling our lives completely; are we absolutely sure her parents can’t pull it together? I still had another four months of school, intense focus that consumed all my emotional and mental energy. Richard and I decided we would wait until school was finished before making a decision.

The next four months were filled with conflict. Moments of intense knowing followed by pulling back, uncertainty, deep ambivalence about whether I actually wanted to be a mother, ever, and whether I wanted to be the adoptive mother of this child in particular. I had never felt that I had to be a mother for my life to be complete. I felt the desire for a child but I also felt the longing for an unencumbered life pursuing my own interests and dreams and goals. I grew up in a community and a faith that set wife and motherhood as women’s highest, only calling. I didn’t know any mothers with jobs, let alone careers. These women gave themselves fully, to as many children as God sent them. (This was not the 50s; it was the 80s and 90s.) There was no being a mother and being something else too. There was no being a mother and being a writer.

I wanted to be a writer.

For years, as I forged my own way of being a woman, I had been determined to be different from the women I saw around me growing up, the women who were not the centre of their own lives but lived for the lives of their children. I didn't know if I could be myself and be a mother too. I found myself afraid both of losing myself into the identity of mother, and of not being able to attach to become enough of a mother. Both of being too much mother and not enough mother. I felt a fierce desire to hang onto my individual identity as a woman, to protect my time and space, my reading and writing, to be more than the nurturer of someone else's life.

Richard and I visited with Maia and with both Maia’s parents, wanting to be certain they were certain, discussing the level of involvement they would each want in Maia’s life, the boundaries and guidelines that would need to be in place. We talked and thought and analyzed and read. But by the end of May, finished my degree and preparing to go north for two weeks with Maia to make the final decision, I was envisioning a happy child-free life, writing and reading and travelling with my husband, getting more education, loving it. I was lying awake at night in panic, thinking I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a mother. The pressure felt enormous: Maia needed parents, we were the only options within the family, she was getting older, my mom was reaching the end of her endurance with an active toddler.

I agonized. I cried. I was terrified.

I thought, I'll go and I'll help my mother for two weeks. Then I'll come back to the life I love.

There was a night of unprotected sex. There was fertile fluid and tender breasts and I bought two pregnancy tests at Red Tent Sisters. The first one was negative. I took the second the morning I was to leave for my two weeks with Maia, and Richard and I watched a pink line, so faint we did not at first believe it, materialize between us on our farewell breakfast table.

For two weeks I took care of Maia in my parents' home and wrapped my mind around the fact of a life inside me, dropping into exhausted sleep at night (and in the morning, and in the afternoon), adjusting to a completely different life. I had moments of deep contentment, pushing Maia on walks in the stroller, one child in front of me, one inside me, amazed that this could be. I had moments in which I cried torrents, enraged that we had let this happen accidentally, weeping a constant litany of, "My life is over, my life is over; I don’t want this life, I don’t want this life." Some days, all I could see ahead of me was a life of slavery to a demanding being (or two of them), of never having time for myself, of my large and varied and creative life diminishing to diaper-changing and cleaning and loads of laundry I wouldn’t even have time to hang on the line.

Dr. Christiane Northrup writes about a spectrum of mothering styles. On one end is the nontraditional mother, "the woman who is primarily turned inward toward meeting creative needs that come from deep within her." This kind of mother "has to take care of these needs if she is to remain emotionally balanced and physically healthy. Activating the motherhood and nurturing circuits tends to take a toll physically unless they also have a lot of practical support. Though they love their children as much as anyone, they are not biologically wired for motherhood to fulfill them totally at the deepest levels" (Mother-Daughter Wisdom p. 17).

It relieved me to have this kind of mother acknowledged as a kind of mother that it is possible to be. I began to see that my fears about becoming a mother stemmed not from motherhood itself but from the baggage I carried around it: the examples set for me of the traditional mother—the other end of the mothering-style spectrum—whose personal identity was subsumed; the gospel preached to me of motherhood as woman’s holy duty; the decade-long fear of losing my dreams and goals and independence by becoming responsible for a small person whose needs would come before mine. I started to hope, as I felt early-pregnancy cramping and fatigue, as I fed and clothed and diapered Maia, that this was not the truth about motherhood and not the way it had to be. I started to open up to the possibility of myself and mother being the same person, without the one obliterating the other.

Tomorrow I enter my second trimester. I’m sitting on my porch facing the northern lake where we have moved next door to my parents and two doors from my sister and her family, to be near the support system we know we need. Richard is swimming with Maia, our daughter, who calls out "Mama!" periodically. She will be almost two when she becomes a big sister. This week I found the time and emotional space to start reading a novel for the first time in two months, something it felt for a while like I would never be able to do again. This week I also made time, at last, to get back into the novel I’m writing at my L-shaped desk now overlooking a lake; I’d like to finish a draft by my February due date, if I can. We are renting a cozy house, a three-bedroom cottage. Maia’s and Baby’s birthdays will be one or two weeks apart, or less, depending.

I am adjusting. It's challenging. I still cry some days for my old life and self. Other days, nestled in my lakeside home with husband and child and baby in belly, I am supremely happy.

Completion, Celebration, and Gratitude

2009-05-27T11:26:00.004-04:00

I am cocooned in my fluffy white-pillowed nest on a dark, wet, blustery morning, white lights twinkling, surrounded by frivolous novels and the remains of cups of tea. A bit fuzzy-headed from last night’s celebratory champagne and a lot tired from a month of intensive essay-writing, but oh so cozy and happy and thankful. I am done. I have done it. Two days ago I turned 32 and handed in my final paper of my undergraduate career. I drifted the streets in happy shock, too tired to quite appreciate the magnitude of completion, emotion striking me in periodic stabs of pride—I did it, I went back and did this thing that I thought I could never do—and gratitude—thank you, universe, for this gift—before I returned to numb, exhausted can’t-quite-comprehension. That evening Richard and I went out for cocktails and dinner and a lot of toasting and exhausted laughter and “I can’t believe I’m done.”

Yesterday I soaked up a Thai massage, sinking into a soft mat while my limbs were stretched and kneaded, took myself out for lunch and then didn’t know what to do with myself. Wandered, a bit at a loss, until I recognized that all I wanted was to be in my own cozy home on my own cozy couch, drinking tea and reading frivolous novels. I kept experiencing a sort of phantom limb sensation, a feeling that I must rouse myself from my comfy seat and go get some work done, before I realized a split second later that there was none. Richard and I celebrated again with champagne in the evening, because celebration has suddenly become the order of the day around here.

Anna sent me an email I sent her in June 2005, in which I danced around the finally-acknowledged-and-articulated thought that I WANT A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, my body leaping into tears as I read course descriptions, my mind conjuring obstacles, wondering if I could get in without a highschool diploma, wondering how I could put my life on hold to leave work and Richard and the home we shared for this longing within me to read and study and learn and have teachers and earn marks and get a piece of paper that said I had done so. Exclaiming, aghast, I’ll be thirty-two by the time I finish!

Everyone is rushing to ask, “What next?” At the moment, my answer is “Rest.” I want to read books because they delight me. I want to play in my own novel. I want to enjoy patios and open air and films and my husband. And I want to honour this transition from one important chapter of my life into a new one, to recognize that it is a transition, to process whatever feelings might come up as I move out of this intense focus on one thing that has given me purpose and fulfillment and built-in intellectual stimulation and a solid identity for nearly four years. There are decisions waiting to be made, money to be earned, a novel to be completed (and not just played in), an unsightly pile of clothing on my dresser and a thick film of scum on the bathroom floor. A next unknown chapter to step into. But they can wait a little while longer.

I’m grateful for this gift, this education I once thought had passed me by. Grateful for Richard who supported me through it. And grateful, just now, that it’s after 11 a.m., rain pounding on the roof, and I am still in my bed.

Happy exhaustion - May 25, 2009.

Present

2009-05-07T12:13:00.002-04:00

I am so deeply exhausted. I have so much to do.

That’s as far as I got on an email to Anna this morning before falling apart into tears. That pure exhaustion that can find no other expression. Then I cried myself into my running shoes and took myself out for a walk, which made a whole lot of everything better. My walks these days have been not so much fitness walks as walking meditations. I bring myself out of my head and into my body, focusing on each present moment, this step, and then this step, and then this one, and breathing deeply, and keeping myself present too by noticing and focusing on each piece of the natural world that I pass. Flowers and trees and new leaves, everything bursting into bloom right now. The cherry tree is taking over our front yard in white blossoms that look like a snowstorm when you glance out the livingroom window.

I have…oh, I’ve lost track, but I think it’s seventeen days left. 17 days, 4 essays, 2 take-home tests, freedom. Yesterday I loved my classes, felt a jolt of nostalgia as I walked across my familiar campus, saw students meeting in the cafeteria with advisors of departments regarding next year’s course selection, realizing suddenly it would all soon be over with no coming back next year. Today I am just exhausted, cannot think much beyond that. I’m deep inside a research paper on the medieval trobairitz due Monday, every one of the days after that tightly programmed in order to get done, try to get done, all of the essays lined up after this one. Spoke yesterday with classmates who can write papers in one or two days, and why can’t I be one of these? I may be forced to discover this ability in the next couple of weeks.

Trying to nourish myself. Trying to stay balanced. Trying not to work myself into the breakdown I have worked myself into before.

Two nights ago my grandma died, aged 96. This weekend I leave the work I would not have thought there was any possible way to leave, for family reunion and the celebration of a long life and a wonderful woman. My parents and all my five siblings and partners and offspring, and Richard and I, are all staying together in a cottage on Long Point. There will be a lot of singing, and country air and waves on Lake Erie, and family, and memories, and tears. There will not be any essays.

So, this strange mixture: exhaustion and academic pressures, funeral celebration—because that’s what it is, when someone precious has lived so long—tears for Grandma, tears for me and this breaking point I am stretched to, and a pause from it all to be present in this commemoration of a life.

This is Where

2009-04-13T08:44:00.004-04:00

Facing Monday morning. A holiday weekend behind us, three days of lake and family, of valiant spring sun melting the snow that still remains up north, of walks to watch the just-born calf, of lounging with talk and cups of tea on my sister’s sun-drenched patio. Of bathing and dressing and playing with my one-year old niece, of the transcendence that leapt inside me when she took two of her very first steps toward me. On Saturday my three sisters and close cousin and I went to yoga together, and I looked behind me through a downward dog to see myself surrounded by four of the women I love most in the world, sharing yoga together, and I thought, This is what I want. This is it, this is everything right here. This is where I want to be.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the North, the isolated, nowhere place I worked so hard to get away from, to expand into places and people who might understand my creative urges and big dreams, where I would not feel such an anomaly. I’ve lived in California apprenticing with a writer and in West Virginia mountains with earthy music-making hippies and in New York City. I've travelled to Paris and London and Rome and Budapest and Istanbul. I’ve married a man from England with American citizenship. Through marriage I had my chance and did not take it to fill out paperwork for legal residence in either of those countries.

My 23-year old sister, riding back home to Toronto with Richard and I, let out sighs of relief to be back in the city, back in civilization and further-advanced springtime. When I was her age I felt that way too—glad to visit, but gladder I’d escaped, had made a bigger life. But last night while she exulted, my eyes brimmed with tears as we left behind the rock cuts and the constant rivers and lakes on either side of the highway, rounded a bend and suddenly were undeniably out of Northern Ontario, bright lights spread out around us in the darkness, box stores and neon and fast-moving cars in multiple lanes. We are officially no longer in Northern Ontario, I said to Richard. It is gone. And I wanted to weep.

Listening to the Characters

2009-04-09T15:28:00.002-04:00

On Monday I listened to actor and playwright Kristen Thomson talk about the creation of her funny, moving, truthful play I, Claudia. Each of the four characters in the play wears a different mask (ie., literally). To find her characters, she tried on masks from a large collection and asked each mask if he or she wanted to be in her play. When she finally got four who answered yes, she went to work with them, putting each one on, becoming that character, improvising in his or her voice, letting it speak and finding out who it was. She recorded what they said, ending up with 150 pages of transcribed text, which she then went through to uncover the unconscious preoccupations of the play and to whittle it down to its core. She did not make the decisions, she said; through the development of each character, the play came into being. Her creative process was not one of sitting in front of a computer, intellectually putting a piece together, but of active, instinctual, organic unfolding of something deep inside her and also something from outside her, coming to her through the masks and through the authentic individual people she became when she put them on. The result in the play is a tremendous authenticity.

I’m not an actor, and I do most of my creation sitting in front of a computer, but I’ve known something of this instinctual process, and hearing Thomson encouraged me to find it again for the portion of my novel I’m currently plugging away in. My novel-writing is happening right now in daily 15-minute spurts before I move on to classes and essays, with the result that I am ending up with a lot of short and sometimes contradictory snapshots. I don’t have time to ruminate, to make it all cohesive; I am plunging into the story, trying to see one particular moment or one particular aspect of my character, and getting that down as it comes to me. One day she is a 7-year old in school, the next day she is a 7-year old who is unschooled, and I don’t have time to make thought-out decisions on this contradiction, so I leave it, rereading as little as possible, just putting down what I hear and see and feel on that particular 15-minute writing day. I don’t want to censor, I don’t want to edit; I want the truth of the story to have room to emerge without my conscious shaping. Later I will go through it and see what I have, see what it is.

Before hearing Kristen Thomson, I was trying too much to consciously shape, to have the story come out in finished form, to stir the batter and ice the cake at the same time. How can I ice the cake before all the ingredients are even in the bowl? I was also—hmm, cake analogy breaking down here—trying to create more than to listen, and so these last few days I have been listening more, listening without judging, letting the characters come out not through my intellectual forming of them but through whatever they tell me of themselves. You live in the Beaches next to Lake Ontario, which kind of messes up another aspect of the story I thought I was formulating? Okay, well, you live in the Beaches next to Lake Ontario then. And we’ll see how that goes.

Room

2009-03-31T12:33:00.003-04:00

I am in a room of my own. I am sitting at an L-shaped desk that says, all excited and ready, “What shall we write today?” To my left is the altar, and the wide-open wood floor space where I have just meditated, and the large tree plant Richard surprised me with. He surprised me with the entire room, in fact, Saturday night after we picked up the craigslist-found desk, and I came home at Earth Hour after returning the zipcar, and he led me by candle light into the room that has disintegrated into default storage space over the past three months instead of becoming the Room of My Own that we had planned, and there, Saturday night, it suddenly was. It was magic; it had materialized; my space just as I’d envisioned it. It has been nine years since I’ve had a designated writing space. I am deeply in love with this one.

So far what I have written in this room is morning pages and notes for a seminar on a medieval treatise on courtly love. Today for the first time the L-shaped desk and the room and I will crank out some words on the novel. I’ve been erratic these days in my practice of 15 minutes a day—some days I write shitty first draft on Part 3, some days I don’t even remember to turn to the book, some days (last Friday) I spend two hours reading the entirety of Part 2 and then writing notes to myself as though I am not the author: “You need to develop this character more…I didn’t feel the passion between these characters; you must show it more…I felt you were rushing, in too much of a hurry to clip along to the end…” Today I will put in 15 minutes, then I have to write a paper based on the medieval treatise material of the seminar I gave yesterday, then I have to dig into the essay on Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather and Late Nights on Air that has been languishing too long in its barely-started file.

I’ve just read an interview with Natalie Goldberg on the Shambhala Sun website, and she, too, has an L-shaped desk, or did in May 1998. Her books on writing helped break me open years ago. I could use some more breaking open, I think.

Yesterday I started reading the third-last novel of my literature degree: all these novels, all these many, many novels of this 4-year degree, and I have only three of them left. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment, and a bit of sadness.

I’ve been trying to remember presence and mindfulness. I’m taking a course on women and religion this semester, with a professor who asks, “How does that make you feel in your heart?,” a question I have never been asked in brain-centric university. The Buddhism section has been reminding me about the present moment, about mindfulness, sending me yearning for more groundedness.

Thus, this morning, meditation in my Room of My Own, and now this blog post of little bits of my present moment.

Ecstasy in the Halls of Education

2009-02-18T11:46:00.005-05:00

This morning, burial in the silent library to prepare for a presentation on George Eliot’s Adam Bede, hands gliding along spines, spirit leaping with delight at the George Eliotness of my surroundings: biographies, textual analyses, reams of bound volumes of her letters, titles like Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines and The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot. This woman, I think, is my soul sister, devoutly religious in early life, abandoning religion and eventually living a life detached from conventional mores, and, of course, writing always, a lot of deep and meaty and wonderful novels. I am building my list of books to read post-graduation with tender care, from passing references in classes or recommendations from friends or books drooled over and passed by in libraries for lack of time, and a biography of George Eliot is high upon it.

Last night, completion of a paper on the dramas of medieval writer Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, looking at her female characters’ positions as powerless desired objects in male-female relationships and their transformation into empowered desiring subjects in spiritual love relationship with Christ as heavenly bridegroom. I feel some affinity with these women: at nineteen I took a vow of dedication to Christ as my only Lover, committing to save my heart and body for him only (a vow I broke, it might go without saying, some years later). In my paper I argued that virginity and a spiritual love relationship were Hrotsvit’s women’s only recourse for agency, and I wouldn’t doubt if this were the case for me then as well, watching the women around me give their lives to men and children when I really wanted to keep my life for myself. But that is old, old stuff, and today I am just happy to feel the satisfaction of completing a piece of writing I’ve worked hard on, to be bleary-eyed from too much time at the computer screen, to be engaged, in love, with this business of education.

This afternoon, time to delve into Djanet Sears’ Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, tracing a character’s journey from traditional Judeo-Christian male God to the discovery of nature and a divine feminine, “the pure unadulterated awe of her.”

All this spiritual search, all these women.

Upcoming: more papers, more presentations, more reading and study, so very, very much more, from now until June when I will, for the first time in my life, wear a cap and gown and hold that piece of paper in my hands.

Today I am thrilled that this is my life, stories and their commentary in library stacks, focused composition of my own words on a page. Ideas and history, women and spirit, specialized honours in English literature, a big helping of women’s studies. And the biggest blessing, the return of my appreciation of this gift, the “I am so lucky!” that thrills through me, surrounded by books on this snowy Wednesday morning.

Pieces of Happy

2009-02-04T22:56:00.005-05:00

I am back in classes. The strike that put my life into a three-month limbo was forced to an end last week, and I arrived Monday morning to camera crews waiting on my small wooded campus, though they did not ask to speak with me—perhaps, a friend suggested, because I did not look newsworthily angry enough. I am instead delighted to be back. After this unexpected break, I feel the gift again of education, and I remind myself of myself in first and second years, grateful for this bounty, this time and space to read and write and learn. One thing I asked for with this new year’s intentions is to finish out my academic career with engagement, and here it is, after months of wishing just to plough through to the end and be done: I am sitting in the present, drinking in the literature, happy to be here.

--

My cloistered cell, the small dorm room where I lived in the fall, is still there, still set up, though I’ll have to move out in a few weeks. I went there after class on Monday, intending to pick up a few things and go home, but I stayed for hours. Winter sun streaking through the window, I dozed, read, made phone calls, intrigued by my desire to remain in this small space that is just mine. Feeling the energy of me, the altar, the bulletin board, the things I chose to surround myself with during those couple of months in the fall when I was a married woman living a solitary life. And then, rising suddenly from the sun-streaked single bed, I knew it was time to go back home. And when I walked into that home, the nest-for-two that Richard and I are creating out of the lopsided top half of an 80-year old house, I was happy, and at peace, and so glad to be there too. It’s this balance again—me, an individual; me, a partner.

--

I did find my way into my novel again, after that desperate sense of failure that dogged my entrance into this new year. There are new notes in my notebook, a few rough scenes on the laptop; nothing enormous—I was working full time through January, as well as returning to the essays that are, at last, soon coming due—but enough to inject my lagging spirits with purpose and fulfillment and the sense that I am, in fact, doing some of what I want to be doing with my life. A two-part workshop with Yoga Goddess on balancing energy to align with the Law of Attraction helped me to articulate my desires and plant the seed of my intention. Such an old intention with me, such an old desire; I have been saying “I want to be a writer” since I was eight, but I said it again with Yoga Goddess, meditated on it, attracted it into being: I have a thriving, fulfilling, creatively healthy writing life... I feel alive and powerful to be writing and to be living in close connection with my creative self and the creative force. I feel that I am at the centre of my purpose as I write... Through my writing and the success it has found, I feel vitally, passionately connected to life, to my essence, to the community around me and to the world.

The workshop suggests asking of your desires "How will this make me feel?" in order to bring the reality of those positive feelings into your experience. Michael J. Losier’s book The Law of Attraction suggests eliminating doubt by adding “I am in the process of attracting” to the beginning of such statements of desire. And so I will add it: I am in the process of attracting a thriving, fulfilling, creatively healthy writing life.

And how does this life make me feel?

Happy.

On Going Confidently in the Direction of Our Dreams

2009-01-12T15:33:00.008-05:00

Henry David Thoreau, on the bulletin board in the writing room of my early 20s: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."

After I met my best friend Anna’s plane from Kenya three weeks ago, we bought soy chai lattes in Penn Station and sat across from each other with her bags piled around us. In the three months since we had seen each other, she had travelled and transformed, was now back only briefly before returning to work on the NGO she is forming in Kenya for HIV-positive women. I looked at her, lean from hard work and diarrhea, glowing from life purpose discovered, from limiting patterns shed, from autonomy and empowerment seized like they were waiting for her all her life, waiting for her to put them on and wear them because they were custom-made for her. I said, “You are my mirror. I needed you to come back long enough so that I could look into you and see who I am now too.”

The path we’ve each travelled we’ve travelled together, over these past eleven years of becoming ourselves. I’m not sure we would have found ourselves if we hadn’t each had this mirror beside us, this soulmate, this other half navigating the journey toward freedom and authenticity, toward fearless creativity and a strong female essence inside of us. The person who is all this to me cannot leap forward on the path farther than either of us has ever been—she cannot become Anena, woman burning with life at the centre of her purpose, striding forward as doors open by the strength of the flow she is in—without waves rippling out toward me.

I have felt in limbo as this new year has begun, treading water instead of moving forward with my life and dreams. My husband and I have achieved the long-time goal of legal residence in the same country; we are living in what will be our home, but are camped out mostly in the bedroom in the strewn-boxes disorder of waiting for my sister’s move-out February 1, waiting until we can claim the space as truly our own. The university strike that has had me out of class for over two months rages on; my academic career is suspended, stalled, distant. Even before the strike I felt as though this education is a piece of clothing I have outgrown in the four years since selecting it—it’s too small, the style is one I no longer find attractive, the function doesn’t suit my lifestyle—but now the strike prevents me both from engaging with these last remaining months of my degree or from moving forward into a new phase. While waiting, I work in someone else’s bookstore, a job I like, but I’ll be 32 this year, and wasn’t I supposed to have attained something more in my life by now than retail sales clerk? I have not been working on my novel, my writing habits interrupted by moving and full-time work and no space of my own just yet and any other number of illegitimate excuses. After graduation looms the uncertainty of What Do I Do Next. There is no Real Job I feel on fire about, certainly not in any way approaching the fire burning inside my best friend for this passionate work that she has found.

Four nights ago I stumbled across the blog of a girl I used to know, in my billowy-floral-jumpered, Bible-studying, earnest-articles-on-godly-womanhood-writing days. She was nine then, as voracious a reader as I, and she liked to write. Now she is 25, and she makes her living as a multiply-published writer of books and articles, editor and writing coach, owner of her own small publishing company, exuding confidence as she writes about the kinds of things I used to write about, including earnest articles on godly womanhood. Reading her blog from my place of treading water, my place of being 32 and having no published books and no writing and editing career, my place of watching my best friend discover the burning purpose of her life and wondering if I will ever achieve any measure of success in the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, I felt panic and intense failure. She has my life! I thought. I felt as though I were looking at an alternate reality of me, a different conclusion in a choose-your-own-adventure novel: “Main character stays inside patriarchal religion and becomes a successful and prolific Christian writer, go to page 97.” Why, I suddenly panicked, did I choose “Main character detours to discover that patriarchal religion is stifling her and that she does not want her writing to reflect or perpetuate it; she goes off on a circuitous path toward freedom and authenticity and a strong female essence, and at 32 she is working in retail and has not published any books and does not indeed have very much to show for her claim that she is a writer”? When I found an endorsement of one of this girl’s books from my one-time mentor—the bestselling Christian author under whom I apprenticed for a year, the man I yearned to make proud—I wept. That was supposed to be me, the promising young writer whose work has pleased him, and it never, never will be.

It’s amazing how little time out of my writing and life-purpose pursuits it takes for me to feel like I am doing nothing with my life. A month ago I completed a significant section of my novel, and read from it to acclaim at my writing group, feeling how solidly I was moving in the direction of my dreams. Mere weeks ago my husband—one of the greatest gifts of my life—took the leap of moving to my country to be with me, and we crossed from our list an intention first set years ago. Why this heavy feeling of failure, this doubt that I will ever blaze with empowerment and purpose and creativity as I attain my dream?

Last night, an Angelic Messenger Card, drawn with the plea for something to comfort me in this malaise:

You have drawn this card because you are undergoing a period of spiritual initiation in order to give a specific presence and form to your dreams, hopes, and expectations…

The true challenge in your life involves your willingness to confront your own inner demons and to allow your deeply felt dreams and aspirations from your spirit to surface into your life…

Initiation requires you to release preconceived ideas about the period of training you are entering and to accept the higher good and spiritual guidance that places you under the protection and inspiration of the Universe...

This is a time when looking around and assessing your life on the basis of what you’ve already accomplished would be foolhardy, because you’ve accomplished little compared to what you may accomplish in your lifetime… You will need to accept a deeper and more profound insight into the nature of your life. A deeper resolve and greater intuitive appreciation of the life you were meant to live is the result of the period you are presently in…

You have not failed, but you are being sought to acknowledge the power of the sacred in your life and on the earth. You are being asked to trust the universe because you are awakening to dreams, visions, and spiritual understanding that will serve you well in this life.

And today, just a little bit more, I’m trusting. In something bigger than me, and in something deep inside me, and in this path I am still—yes, still—on.

Nesting

2008-12-30T22:38:00.006-05:00

We are in a slope-ceilinged bedroom that is our new bedroom, comfy queen bed with wine-coloured sheets, white lights in diamond patterns under sheer fabric on the ceiling. We are in Toronto. Today I began training my husband at the bookstore where I work: the owner is out with a broken leg and needs someone, so Richard had a job the very day he received his brand-new shiny Social Insurance Number (his first non-acting job in fifteen years, just to fill in while he waits for auditions and opportunities here). We landed in Canada December 22, one day later than expected because snowstorms cancelled all buses between New York City and Toronto. We rode all the way north, up to Sudbury, and were driven by my sister across squeaky-cold roads to the lake where the family lives. It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. My routines of meditation and yoga and novel-writing have fallen away, first into family and holiday chaos—we are so many people, six siblings and their attached partners and offspring, and it seems impossible to get together without the complications and fuss inherent in large-scale gatherings—and now into a lingering cold and the return to fulltime work and the transition into a new home and new life.

But oh! I am happy. I will get the routines back, eventually. I am living still out of a suitcase, with most of my belongings still in my campus cloister and all our year-and-a-half-old wedding gifts still boxed up in my parents’ garage. We take over this apartment from my littlest sister but she does not move into her new place until February 1, so the three of us, she, Richard and I, are sharing it for a month, and Richard and I wait to make it truly our own. But the knowledge that it will be our own, our first home that is ours, the first time we are both legal residents of the same place, this thrills us. It is different, out working all day knowing I will come home to a home, knowing he will be here. He bought me a book called Essential Home for Christmas, about how to create a space, to decorate, to build around neutral basics, and all of it is new to me, I who have always just been passing through, have never owned furniture (we will buy this queen sized bed from Leah), have done little more than paste up family photos and drape a piece of fabric across a window to create my temporary spaces. Now, hunting on craigslist for second-hand desks, discussing with Richard paint colours and the layout of my Room of My Own—“you tell me how you want it,” Richard said; “I want to make it happen for you”—I am excited to nest. We don’t know how long we’ll be in this particular apartment in Toronto—our vision board has us landing eventually at that lake where the family lives—but here we are, legal and together, and nesting.

The leap has been gentle. We are happy.

Being Gracious

2008-12-18T10:40:00.002-05:00

I’ve set myself a task today: do only what my body and spirit feel like doing.

I’ve woken this morning with the same exhaustion that dogged me yesterday. Yesterday, I napped on the couch in the afternoon with Adam Bede open on my chest, and woke to fierce self-chastisement, borne of this belief I still carry around, that I have worth only when I am productive. I was shocked when I finally stopped to consider the ungraciousness with which I was treating myself, my lack of ability to let myself be where I am, to sit with it and be okay. Such rigidity I hold myself to, and such self-loathing when I fail to measure up.

So then I started beating myself up for beating myself up…

Today my task is to be gracious with myself. To be gentle, to be good, to do only what delights. So, waking still tired, I did not spur myself from bed but instead am still there, propped up with pillows. In a while I’ll call my mama, then go put some pies in the oven, using up the last of the pumpkin left from Thanksgiving (American). In the afternoon I will head out to JFK, a spare winter coat in a big paper bag, to meet my best friend Anna, returning from Kenya after three months away. She is a new person now, making sweeping changes in her life, more powerful and autonomous than I have ever seen her, and I am excited to meet this new person and reorient myself to her. We will have a couple of days together, and then she will leave and we will leave, Richard and I. We’ll spend winter solstice, the longest night of the year, on a night bus to Toronto. Richard will land as a Canadian permanent resident. We’ll move my things out of residence into our new apartment and then continue the journey, another five hours north, to my family and snow and the little house on a frozen lake where we will spend Christmas.

A time of transition. Today—this morning—is really the last day of “normality,” of things as they have been. I’m going to take it easy.

Affirmation, Intention, Uncertainty, and The Leap

2008-12-13T13:30:00.004-05:00

Last night, a gathering of my New York writing group: people scattered on couches and chairs and floor in an Upper West Side apartment with a spectacular downtown view, writing for an hour and then reading, those who chose, from their work. I was one of the last, and for the first time I read aloud from my novel and exposed it to someone other than Anna. I am careful about sharing works in progress, protective of it as one is of fragile new plants budding before the threat of final frost has passed. I read an excerpt I wrote and polished in the summer, something hardier than the just-planted scenes I’ve been working on recently, but it was the first time these particular characters, this story, have met an audience. Taking my writing—this private, isolated practice—out into a public space, opening it to others, helped me to see my work beyond my own insular perspective, and the verdict was: it is good. Exuberant round of applause, genuine and positive comments afterward, and I felt—not praised, not ego-stroked, but affirmed: My work has merit. I am on the right path. Keep going. It is good.

I don’t expect I’ll be returning to this writing group again soon, this group I first attended five years ago, unemployed and renting a pull-out couch in a livingroom in Brooklyn for $550 a month, wandering the December-cold city from café to library to café, reading fiction and writing teeth-pulling scenes in a novel I would eventually abandon. I joined the group in desperate intention to create purpose and a life of my own in this forbidding city, this place where I had no space of my own, and in a relationship I was losing myself in because it was all I had.

That relationship is now my solid and nourishing marriage, and that abandoned novel taught me everything not to do in the one I’m writing now. That sense of couch-renting displacement, the wandering I have wanted less and less as I got older, is giving way to the home I have longed for. I might not return to writing group for a while because the reason for which I come to New York is about to be removed: in one week’s time, after five and a half years of long distance relationship interspersed with sneaking across borders to live illegitimately in each other’s countries, Richard and I will travel north to Canada, and Richard will land as a permanent resident, and we will move our things into the apartment that is waiting for us. It will be the first time we have a home together that is not a sublet filled with someone else’s furniture, not a visit with expiration date, not the uncertainty-fraught status of living unofficially in a place where you cannot legally work or stay long-term. Richard’s visa for Canada came a couple of months ago but we didn’t know if it would be practical for him to actually move there yet (one week ago, there was still a strong possibility of him going to Las Vegas on a year’s acting contract), and now all the uncertainties have shifted into focus and circumstances have aligned and we are making the leap: he is really coming, he is really staying, we are really getting a home. It is a huge, blind leap: he has an agent in Toronto but no work lined up; I am still in school and working only part time; we have less of a financial buffer in the bank than we would prefer. But we are leaping anyway.

So this has been my week: giving up my residence room, apartment-hunting long-distance for our first non-sublet very-own-home together, finding nothing feasible and meditating daily to find my centre in the uncertainty. Finalizing paperwork and arrangements for Richard’s landing, for shipping his belongings, for getting his Social Insurance Number, for zipcar-ing my belongings out of my dorm room to wherever it is we'll be living. One full day of untangling bureaucracy and fending off the mounting stress of moving countries, of looming unemployment, of not knowing where we will live—culminating in Richard snapping, me crying, and both of us leaving it all behind for $10 fajita and margarita night at a neighbourhood Mexican restaurant, for confessing our fears about this step and reaffirming our commitment to being together, our belief that when we leap, something wonderful will appear to catch us. A push from the universe in the form of an eviction notice slid under our door, which is how we discovered the woman we’ve been subletting from in New York has not been passing on our rent money to the landlords (it was sorted out by the end of the day, but still felt like a strong message). Finishing part two of my novel, unexpectedly, in a focused three-hour escape from the stress of all this. Working on an essay in response to my intention to remain academically engaged, in case the strike is suddenly resolved and I find myself back in class (still another uncertainty). An unexpected email from my sister asking if we want to take over the two-bedroom apartment in Toronto that she and I used to share: bountiful provision, sudden peace. And reading from the novel at writing group, and finding my work and my path affirmed.

Richard has already said that he wants the second bedroom in our new apartment to be my Room of My Own: my space for writing and meditation and yoga, my cloister. I love him for this. I love him, too—and am full of admiration and respect—for being willing to give up the life he has worked hard to establish in New York, being willing to move to Canada in—and this is no small thing—the month of December. He is willing to do this because it’s the country I want to live in. Because it’s the country, for no logical reason, for the intuitive surge inside both of us, that we chose one year ago when we had the choice of three places and needed to start visa paperwork for one of them. Because he loves me, and because we’ve joined together our writing – acting – spirit-seeking – envisioning – lives.

I’ve been using the word “uncertainty” a lot. I struggle some days to be at peace within the uncertainty. But there is so much that has come together in the past weeks, in beautiful synchronicity, that we could not have foreseen. For the present uncertainties, I am choosing to choose to trust, to keep tuning in to the centre, to believe. We’re creeping forward on positive intention and intuition, and here comes the edge, and now, here we go, we’re leaping.

Red Tent Gifts

2008-12-04T22:06:00.006-05:00

Yesterday, the third day of my moon, I awoke at 5 p.m. after hours of dream-filled sleep, of surrender to the heaviness in my body, to the desire to sink into rest. My rational productivity-obsessed brain felt sheepish and wasteful—such decadence, to sleep away the day. If I was not going to be getting stuff done, I should at least have been having a productive moontime retreat, productively meditating and productively writing down all the wisdom surging into me in this productively spiritual phase of the cycle.

But all my body had wanted was rest.

I have so much trouble—still—allowing myself anything but top performance, phases that do not produce something measurable, that are not laudable in others’ eyes. I have trouble, still, with guilt. First-born perfectionist whose job it was to keep herself and everyone else toeing a straight line, holding herself to a rigorous standard of purity and productivity, delving eagerly into a legalistic version of Christianity that forbade everything from jeans to dancing, eschewing idleness, television, afternoon naps, anything that did not lead up a linear incline to Perfection. Freedom has come slowly. Two years ago, when my best friend Anna told me the concept of an Empowerment Key that she’d learned in a spiritual retreat, I knew immediately that mine—revolutionary—was, “You’re Allowed.”

“Accept your cycle and your body. In this phase, this is who you are and how you are - do not try to be anything different,” I read today on Miranda Gray’s website. Such release, to accept and flow. You’re Allowed. Five years into honouring my moon cycle, I still need to remind myself each month, Your life is not meant to be a long linear climb. Five years in, my rational productivity-obsessed brain still lobs its protests, do you REALLY need to be resting right now, are you sure you aren’t feeling well enough to be doing SOMETHING? Still tries to force me into a linear continuity of one phase for always.

After I woke yesterday from my hours-long nap, I could feel myself still in a dreamy space, the fuzzy place of menstruation and sleep, the veil between physical and spiritual worlds thin. “I’m going into the red tent to receive wisdom for the tribe,” I told Richard, and for hours I sat at our altar, meditating deeply, intending, attracting, doing an Opening to the Energy of Love card spread for guidance in these coming weeks, writing in my moon notebook. I felt the effects of the day’s sleeping and dreaming in my non-physical, non-intellectual state of reception. I felt gratitude for this unproductive phase, for the opportunity to stop and listen and receive. I felt gratitude that I had not used it up in forced effort toward accomplishment. Such a gift, and it comes only once a moon.

Today, day four: still bleeding, but the Maiden energy, the go-getter, the producer, is emerging in me, dancing with the receptive Recluse. I meditated and did yoga, but the yoga turned into a romp on the livingroom floor with my husband; I sat on the couch and processed the guidance in my card spread, but this turned into desire for outward expression, and I have come to a café with live acoustic folk music and my laptop.

By tomorrow or the next day the Maiden will be dominant. She will make lists and cross things off them. She will write essays. She will outline the remainder of Part 2 of her novel. She will implement the guidance received by the Recluse, turning it into action. My rational productivity-obsessed brain likes the Maiden. But the real me, lodged somewhere between my heart centre and my third eye, loves it all, and is grateful.

Thoughts on a Quiet Morning

2008-11-29T10:25:00.002-05:00

Growing up in a family of six children—a very home-centred family, one that worked and played and schooled together at home almost all the time—I used to choose to miss out on events outside the home just to be able to stay home alone. Solitude, privacy, silence, freedom to do exactly what I wanted, which was usually sit quietly on the couch with a book or a pen.

I’ve done that this morning. My brother-in-law flew in from England yesterday evening, and I met him at JFK, and escorted him home and fed him dinner and wine and homemade pumpkin pie and tea, and visited until Richard returned from his evening show. We put him up in our bed, and slept on an air bed on the livingroom floor. It’s going to be a full weekend of entertaining and sight-seeing and social engagement. Fun things, and I’m so glad he’s here on his first-ever visit to Richard in America, but I am pre-moontime, and socially exhausted already, and my solitude-powered batteries need to be plugged in for recharging. They’ve gone out to breakfast and a walk in Central Park this morning and I have deliciously declined, so here I am on the couch with a cup of tea and my laptop and a stack of books, and it is so quiet, and I am alone. It felt just like me at sixteen, waiting for the door closed behind them, for the final “are you sure you don’t want to come?,” smiling with anticipation.

My pattern pre-moontime is discouragement and sadness and emotionality that seems to come for no reason, usually about the things that matter most to me, like yesterday’s tears about my writing and my partnership (“All I’ve ever wanted to do is write,” I sobbed to Richard, and an hour later, “Are you sure I give you enough, are you sure you’re fulfilled in our relationship?”). I’m learning to be gracious with myself in these times, to let the release happen, to love the increased sensitivity. My pattern pre-moontime is also, I’m discovering, intense creativity. I want to lose myself in the world of my book and am easily irritated with the mundane requirements of non-creative life maintenance.

My best friend and first reader returns from three months of travel at the end of December, and my goal is to have a specific portion of the novel finished for her to read when she returns. All summer I was sending her two short chapters at a time, and this is a large sixty-five page chunk that she has not read anything of. Last week I submitted three small short stories. I have two longer ones that I am revisiting and revising and plan to send on their rounds again, though I wrote them so long ago now and do not feel they are my best work. They might be, like so much of my writing, just part of my training process. I feel ready to emerge from training.

I made new intentions this week, feeling the need for an anchor in this open space of time. Four weeks into the university strike, I feel completely distanced from my academic life, still keeping up with reading but not working on any of my papers or feeling any urgency to complete assignments whose original due dates are now long past. School does not feel real to me; what feels real is my marriage and my writing, this time together, this time with my book. Still, it is too easy both to fritter away the time, and to feel terrible perfectionist guilt about frittering away the time. Especially in my pre-moontime discouragement, I needed the grounding and direction that intentions give me.

I intend to use the gift of this time in ways that are self-nourishing, relationship-nourishing, creatively healthy, and fulfilling.
I intend to create a room of my own—a mindset of space, time, and freedom to nourish myself and to pursue projects that fulfill me.
I intend to live in close attunement to my body and my cycle, honouring it at every step, in every decision, every day.
I intend to be gracious with myself.
I intend to measure my worth by the voice at my stillpoint.

DAILY:

Get out of the apartment (necessary for me when I have no job or classes to get me out into the wide world)
Play with the novel for 15 minutes
Meditate for 15 minutes
Moon journal

Fifteen minutes have changed my life; it’s such a doable number, and is enough to make me feel purposeful and productive and fulfilled; usually it extends into a much longer amount of time, but it’s so much easier to make yourself sit down for fifteen minutes than for three hours. So, time with my book every day makes an enormous difference in my state of mind and heart (not to mention in my book itself); meditation every day does the same. I’ve been choosing a meditation each day from The 8 Human Talents by Gurmukh, the book that was used in the Conscious Movement yoga class I took this fall. I am sitting in front of our altar and tuning in, centering, trying to access my intuition, my stillpoint, and this transforms me. I feel so much better when I do it.

Our altar contains, among other things, our shared vision board, and this week I added to it: a cozy log house to represent our home together, and a fat book with my novel’s title and my name on it. This week in my time in front of the altar I am focusing on attracting, in addition to flourishing writing and all the usual things, a life that includes that cozy home and that fat book and another item just to the right of these on the vision board: the artistic directorship of the theatre in the city near where I grew up, near to where most of my family lives in a series of cozy houses on a lake. Richard applied for the position last week; it would enable us to live together permanently in one place, to have a home of our own near my family in the region of the world that is closest to our hearts, to start a family of our own, while continuing to pursue both of our artistic goals and to live creatively fulfilling, creatively challenging lives. Ah, universe: this I ask.

It is so quiet on this holiday Saturday morning, on the couch in this apartment by myself. It is time to do my various fifteen minutes-es, which may turn into hours, but I have hours. Unless I begin to feel guilty about not doing schoolwork, but then there is the intention to be gracious with myself, and I think that today I am going to focus on that one.

The Nudge of the Inner Voice

2008-11-23T05:24:00.002-05:00

Six years ago, I was a green girl recently moved from the country to the big city of Toronto, searching with my friend Debbie for a room in which to live. We found a bargain on Wales Avenue in Kensington Market, around the corner from the youth hostel where we’d met, conveniently central to everything we loved. We exchanged dubious glances as the landlord led us higher up into the crumbling Victorian house, past rooms guarded by eight padlocks apiece, past roommates who stared with open hostility. The landlord himself was, shall we say, dodgy-looking: personal hygiene lacking, eyes shifting below our necks. He would accept only cash, he would under no circumstances give a receipt, and he required payment within half an hour.

We exchanged glances. We felt something funny in our stomachs. It was a bargain, and it would be so good to stop looking and settle in and live in the Market.

Resolutely squelching the instinct kicking me in the gut, I marched over to the nearest bank machine, withdrew my dollars, and marched back to Wales Avenue. A police cruiser was parked in front of the house, lights flashing. I tried to walk up the front step. A police officer’s hand stopped me.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Drug bust.”

Still I persisted. “I was just about to pay the landlord and rent a room here.”

“You don’t want to live here,” he said. “The police are here twice a week. There is fishy stuff going on in this house.”

I walked away with my money in my pocket, narrowly. Only a couple years later did I recognize, ahh! Intuition! That’s what that funny feeling was.

I am thinking of this story now, 4:00am on a night bus, two hours away from New York City, on my way back to be with my man. I am thinking of it and grinning because I have come a long way in accessing and acting on my intuition. I am thinking of it because a week ago, I knew intuitively that I was supposed to leave New York and return to Toronto, though my brain screamed that this made no sense, though every other part of me did not want to do it, though my mind second-guessed and second-guessed the decision while my inner knowing remained firm. And now, having acted on this intuition, I have settled affairs in Toronto so that I can return to New York to stay for a while, and I have felt definitively the rightness of having fulfilled these obligations, and in the process I have glimpsed some of what I need to make the rest of this strike-limbo period prosperous. And with little time lost, I am returning, and will attend Richard’s Off-Broadway opening tonight.

I am thinking too of other things I have known, in the years since the narrowly-avoided rental disaster: that I must submit a specific story for a specific collection (this one, incidentally) because it would be accepted, that the dark actor I’d just met would understand my soul, that the apartment we are in now—sublet for six months when we thought Richard was going to be touring and had no idea my school would strike and I would spend part of the fall in New York—was the apartment we should choose though others seemed to better fit our needs. In fact, funny enough, it is in apartment rentals that I now get the strongest hits: I almost always know immediately, often before I see the place. (And in the six years since the Kensington Market drug house, I have lived in fourteen different places.) (Though I really have to give Richard more of the intuition credit on the current NYC apartment. I was money-anxious and thought we should go for a sublet that ended in August…and then where would we be now?)

With so many things uncertain in our future—Richard currently has four different work possibilities in the air for the new year, only one of them in the country I want to live in—it feels like magic to be able to go to my stillpoint and know, even if I don’t know how yet (but oh, I’ve got one I am REEEALLY hoping for), that the way will open and we will know.

A Woman Must Have A Room of Her Own...

2008-11-19T21:45:00.006-05:00

I was surprised, yesterday evening, when I unlocked the door to my little dormitory room and stepped inside, to feel delight. The reed diffuser I bought in September in hopes of creating a soothing aromatic atmosphere was creating a soothing aromatic atmosphere, the first thing to hit me. The second thing: I left the room neat! And then: Ahhh. Here I am. My bed, my desk, my little altar, tranquil, waiting; the shelves held my books, the bulletin board my interests. The room, which I have been loathe to return to, which I have chafed against for its spartan loneliness, its unhomeyness, the fact that it does not contain my husband, who has never seen it—the room felt like a reflection of me. Here was a little space that I created, just mine, a room of my own.

I am grateful for the two and a half weeks Richard and I had together in our wood-floored and comfy-couched (if impermanently sublet) New York apartment. I am grateful—felt a leap of elation—that today I squared things with my employer, that I will work four days to help him catch up and then go back to New York in time for Richard’s Off-Broadway opening of Catch-22. And I am grateful for these few days in Toronto in my cloister, for a job to get me up in the morning, for a room to return to for reading and writing, for silence and solitude, for a space that is mine, for a routine that is mine.

I love my husband and I love living with him—indeed, the dream of living in a home together is much more consuming for us than it probably is for most couples, it being so regularly unrealized—but I see, now that I am back here in my solitary life, how living in intimate partnership with another person necessitates compromise and shifting, making way for another’s habits and needs, especially when he is the one with an established routine and life, and I am the one in suspended-classes-limbo, attempting to impose order into my open days, languidly working on papers that may or may not be due anytime soon, resisting the urge of the bed on sleepy mid-afternoons, getting up when he gets up (too early for me), going to bed when he goes to bed (too late for me), orchestrating my comings and goings around his, falling out of my habits of meditation and moon-journalling, wandering with laptop from kitchen table to couch to bed to café, with no space of my own devoted to it. Any inefficient time use—also, the slave-driving perfectionist guilt over inefficient time use—as well as any giving up of my own interests and pursuits to mould myself around his, are my issue, or maybe a combination of my issue and normal relationship space-and-time-sharing realities combined with suspended-classes-limbo realities. But in the cloister, it is just me. In Toronto, I have my own outside commitments to structure my time. I went to bed last night before ten, and woke to work at my desk on several projects before leaving for my job, and came back to my room at night after lingering in the cafeteria with tea and a book, and the only person I was thinking about was: me.

Richard, no doubt, is secretly enjoying his freedom in my absence to rehearse his audition pieces as loudly as he wants to, to stay out with the cast after the show without worrying about me waiting up, to play his English football computer game undisturbed—while also looking forward as much as I am to Sunday morning, when we’ll be, in one of the shortest separations of our relationship, back together in a shared home.

Virginia Woolf, of course, had it right: a woman must have a room of her own (and money too, she said) in order to write, to think, to produce. Right now I am feeling lucky: I have this little monastic haven, and I have an apartment I will return to in four days to share with my man, and this, it seems to me just now, is a perfect balance of hermitage and partnership. Someday perhaps we’ll have both in closer proximity and in more equalized amounts of time. But this is where we are now, and there is a gift in it. When I go back to the New York apartment, I hope I will bring the cloister with me, to carve out within the marital home this room of my own and everything it stands for.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Here Now

2008-11-15T14:55:00.001-05:00

Yesterday morning I called my boss and told him I will come back to Toronto next week. I hung up and bawled.

It feels wrong. Before I called him, it felt right, grudgingly so, but right. I talked with Richard about it, I considered the facts, I meditated, I did a Kundalini exercise for accessing intuition. I have never been good at decision-making, part of why I have been so drawn to the discovery of my intuition, to going to a still place inside myself and hearing, beneath the roar of my brain’s dueling arguments, unequivocally what is right.

I’ve been in New York more than two weeks, far more time than we expected to have just now, and my boss in Toronto—pacified till now with weekly phone calls and an ex-coworker able to cover Saturdays—has been getting antsy. I work only part-time; my main business is this fourth year of specialized honours in English literature. The university strike is going strong and classes are still suspended indefinitely, and I would happily stay here, in this home with my husband, but this boss has been good to me over my years of comings and goings, and work is piling up around him with my absence, and I would like to keep the job and keep him happy.

Am I really going to forgo an apartment that is a home with my husband, dinners and nights and conversations and walks in the park together, daily support of in-person relationship, the Off-Broadway opening of the play he has worked on for a year and a half, the dinner we have planned with friends—am I really going to move back into a tiny concrete dorm room and a bathroom shared with teenagers—for two days a week selling travel books for negligible wage?

Apparently, I am.

I was aghast after I hung up with my boss, sobbing as I booked my return ticket, every part of me resisting the click of the keys on my computer, the entry of my credit card number, the date chosen on the online calendar, Tuesday, November 18. I made the wrong decision, I made the wrong decision, my brain screamed.

Against my tears, I dressed in a happy skirt and black boots and got the train down to 42nd Street for my fourth-last day in New York. Against my tears, I walked through Times Square to the Central Humanities and Social Sciences branch of the New York Public Library. On a small printed form, I requested two books from the stacks, and waited for my number to be called, for the books to appear in their little book elevator, and I took the books and sat at a long heavy table beneath the high ceiling, exquisitely carved and painted, of the Rose Main Reading Room. In the hushed hum of whispers and turning pages and clicking laptop keys, I set my intention against my tears, and worked for two hours on an essay about the plays of medieval woman writer Hrotsvit. In the darkness of five p.m post-daylight savings time, I walked with the throng down Fifth Avenue, already featuring elaborate Christmas displays in shop windows. I bought underwear at Victoria’s Secret. At every step I resisted the knowledge that I am going back, the astonishment of what I have just given up, and what I have given it up for.

I am tired of this constant uncertainty, this life of separation, this norm of apartness with brief bright spots of togetherness. These two weeks have been a respite, so easy, after the initial novelty, to forget they are a gift with an expiration date.

I went downtown to the West Village. Pre-show buzz around me, I sat alone in my third row seat in the Lucille Lortel Theatre in my happy skirt and black boots, watching the stage, smiling. Waiting for the first preview, the first New York performance, of the play my husband has worked on for the past year and a half, I felt suddenly the gift of being here now. That’s all—I am here now. I won’t be here next week. I might not be here for opening night in a week’s time, but I am here for the first preview. I am in a theatre on Christopher Street, and my husband is about to appear on the stage. Afterward we will go out for a celebratory drink with the rest of the cast, and talk on the A train the whole way home about the play, and I will tell him I bought my ticket back to Toronto. Today I have had a good New York day. I made good progress on my Hrotsvit essay. I have new panties. I don’t want to go back. But I am here now.

Through the Wardrobe

2008-11-07T22:15:00.002-05:00

Since waking up last Friday morning to yellow cabs outside my Greyhound coach window, I have leapt into a magical alternate reality, rather like stepping through a wardrobe. Instead of a tiny concrete-walled dorm room, I live in a spacious wood-floored and homey apartment; instead of crying with loneliness at night in my half-sized bed, I snuggle up to my husband; instead of nodding to teenagers in the halls who stare at me with bemusement at my presence amongst them, I share dinner and wine with my husband and long-time grown-up friends in cozy East Village restaurants. Instead of a leafy North Toronto campus, I am on a lively upper (upper upper) Manhattan street. Instead of taking my chances on overcooked cafeteria food, I cook meals in my kitchen to eat by candlelight with my partner.

The contract faculty and teaching assistants at my university are striking. All classes are cancelled indefinitely. I have fled my student life, and I am here in my grown-up married person life, here gleefully, here as though I never left it.

I have experienced fourth-year syndrome this academic year: I’ve been in school so long, I’ve worked so hard for so long, I’ve written so many damn essays, let’s just get this over with already. In classes that fail to stimulate, I work on my novel. If something is important to me, I will skip a class for it. I do other things beside school; school is not the centre of my life, the shining privilege for which I will give up all, as it was in year one and two and three. Fourth-year syndrome is compounded by weariness with this separation from my partner. I stay up late with my novel some nights, in attempts to stave off loneliness and desolation and remind myself there is purpose in my life. I catch myself smiling and am startled, as though I’ve done something so unfamiliar it must be wrong.

But now I am here, a gift, unexpected time in my home with my husband. I have essays due (sometime, someday, when classes are back on) and reading to keep up with, and I am working on these—with enthusiasm, even. Richard leaves for rehearsal in the morning and I meditate and set my intention for the day: finish The Misfit review, start organizing thoughts and research on the Hrotsvit paper, make headway on Charlotte Brontë ’s Shirley, spend fifteen minutes (which will turn into more) on my novel, live my day with purpose and joy. I am invoking the habits of the summer, when the long open days were my own to orchestrate and fill, the scary and boundless place of no outside routine to keep me on course.

After a week I still watch myself—look, here I am in a Brooklyn theatre with Richard beside me, seeing a play; look, here I am running over to Broadway to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner from the lax corner wine shop; look, here I am walking with Richard to Fort Tryon Park on a Sunday morning, stopping at Frank’s Market for chocolate croissants; look, here I am watching the US election result on our bed on our TV with New York City going wild around us—I watch myself and smile and am delighted. Look, here I am.

Night Ride

2008-10-31T04:41:00.001-04:00

Four a.m. The darkened coach of Greyhound’s Neon Toronto-New York service. The gatekeepers between my love and I were easy on me this time, no questions I couldn’t efficiently deal with, something one appreciates in murky cross-border relationships. I have slept comfortably across two seats with ear plugs and an eye mask and the pillow that, in my advancing years, I will no longer travel overnight without.

I debated, the night before this one, putting off this trip for a week for various reasons that seemed prudent (“Prudent” my husband sniffed; if we’d been prudent we’d never have got together, I don’t think), and I lay the night before this one in my narrow dorm bed focusing at my third eye point, inhaling intuition, exhaling confusion. I awoke knowing, transformed out of indecision and anxiety into one knowledge: I am going to Richard.

I am giddy in the darkness. Two more hours. For the first time in two months, I will see my husband.

Longing

2008-10-28T23:34:00.000-04:00

“I feel like I live in the middle of a party I’m not invited to,” I said to Richard on the phone. Voices in the hall, giggles and gatherings, teenagers congregating in rooms with doors open and music playing, calling each other’s names. My single alien self gliding past them with strained smile, a nod, bundled in my old-lady sweater and crocs and pajama pants and eliciting, so it feels, bemused stares.

This weekend, a good friend from New York days, who lives now in Germany, was brought to Toronto for work. Saturday night and all day Sunday we gorged on friendship and communion, red wine and too-expensive food. A lingering dinner Saturday night, sharing plates tapas-style, ordering glass after glass of wine until we found out, when the bill arrived, that they were $15 apiece, talking and talking and talking. Tea Sunday morning, then brunch, more tea, and much later dinner again, more modest this time, no wine, but still such good conversation, real talk about things that matter, with someone who knows my history, has travelled some of it with me, and cares. It reminded me of other eras, when I had good women in my life regularly; feeling myself suddenly sated now showed me how starved I have been. I came home Sunday night after this spree of friendship, and I wept with loneliness, with the desire and lack and smallness of my present life, with separation from my partner, with the absence of the kind of circle of friendship that takes time to build.

I miss home. I miss a squishy couch and a chair, a kitchen table, a person waiting who cares that I am here. I miss belonging.

On Thursday I will steal a long weekend and travel to New York to see my husband. It will be the first time we have seen each other in nearly two months.

Inhaling Acceptance

2008-10-19T12:35:00.007-04:00

This week I reached the point in long-distance separation when I think I cannot bear it anymore. This point comes after the initial missing, after the becoming accustomed to apartness, after the enjoyment of competent independence, the this isn’t so bad, the immersion in my own fulfilling life and the happiness not dependent on physical presence with my partner. A month and a half since seeing him, like a switch flicked, I reach I-cannot-bear-it-anymore.

I am learning to breathe. Deep, conscious, mindful breaths that expand the belly on the inhale and contract it on the exhale. I am working through the chakras, from the bottom toward the top, in a conscious movement yoga class. The effects are seeping into my daily life: relaxation breath used to calm myself before a presentation; left-brain-accessing breath to spur me through a test; mindful drinking of water, the element of the second chakra, the seat of creativity and money and sexuality, which I visualize flowing through my life as the water flows into my body. And breath, mostly breath, energizing and connecting me.

This week, news of a potential job in England for my husband. A good job, an exciting part, something he has been intending for for a long time. Something that means he would not come to me in January as the approved permanent residency application now says he can, that the separation would be prolonged, just a bit longer. (And what jobs after that? Who knows... maybe another bit longer.)

I feel despair, frustration, like I and our relationship are coming up second again in the contest with the acting vocation. (Never mind that there is no actual job here for him, permanent residency notwithstanding, that he feels the pressure of financial necessity for both of us, that acting is part of him and that to deny himself a good part, a good play, is to deny his essence just as it would be for me to say I will not write.)

I have been expecting settled: magic ticket of permanent residency produces magic permanence of home and life together, conveniently ignoring in my fantasies the fact that actors hardly ever can be in one place for very long and hardly ever know from one season to the next where they will be and what they will be doing, the fact that the pool of work he is proposing to come to here is much smaller than the one in which he has been swimming in his two other countries.

If being completely settled is what you want, he says, stricken by the weight of my expectation, I cannot give you what you want. This is what I do. This is how I earn a living. This is part of me, as writing is part of you.

I did not used to want settled. I shunned the idea of life in one place. I travelled, I stayed behind spontaneously in new cities that enchanted me and left them when they didn’t, I could fit almost all my belongings into a backpack. I wanted the world, not just one small corner of it. I’ve still never signed a lease. I enrolled in a three-month course once and panicked at this level of commitment to not picking up and moving on.

Now? White picket fence please. A big bookshelf for all my books to lodge in permanent home. A desk at which to write. A community in which to set down roots, a baby to hold to my chest in a sling. A bed that is not borrowed, in which to wake up beside Richard and go to bed with him at night. A tomorrow of the same. And then another one. A marriage whose tangible proofs exist in more than text messages throughout the day and “Can you hear me? Is this better now?” Skype webcam calls at night. A home, a home, a home with my husband.

I can’t give you what you want, my husband says. You want a settled life. And I am silent, and weeping, because I do—and when did that happen?—and because I realize it is true that he cannot, just now, in the way that I want it, give me what I want. He makes his living, he lives his essence, as a professional vagabond. He fell in love with a wanderer, and now he is married to a woman who wants nothing but to stretch her roots down into earth.

In my conscious movement yoga class, week of the heart chakra, I sit in a posture to open the heart centre and tears stream down my face; I hold the pose, I hold my heart open, my body and spirit weeping for what I want and don’t have and have and miss.

I resent what my husband does for a living. Have I ever said that out loud? A year ago I was describing to a classmate the life, the uncertainty, the separation (compounded, in our case, by our different nationalities and my being in school; those two obstacles are about to be eliminated, leaving only one left, this work he has done since a child, that is in his blood, a director father, an actress mother, birth on purpose at Stratford-upon-Avon, a Complete Works of Shakespeare given as his infant self was held up in dedication to the theatre). I described to my classmate the living job to job, the touring, the six weeks in this place, the two months in that place, the inability to plan, even our wedding date booked with the knowledge that if an important job came up, the job might have to come first. She stared at me, aghast. “And you're okay with that?” In a split second of grasping for rationalizing response, I knew I was caught: I was not okay with that.

He is so good at it. I love to watch him on stage, to see the plays over and over, to analyze them together. I love taking part in this creative world similar to but so different from my own, collaborative, visual, physical as well as verbal. I love to witness him in his element, living from his essence. It is him. The first time I set eyes on him, he was an actor on a stage, a dark, brooding Benedick in Much Ado. Our friendship developed on the pretence of older established artist mentoring young aspirant—pretence only, of course; we both wanted each other—and what I was drawn to above all was his creativity and spirituality wrapped so indelibly in his art.

How can I say that I resent what he does, when what he does is him?

I resent, more accurately, the life that comes with what he does. That is the crux. But still, it is resentment.

The night after the heart-opening yoga class, a conversation, one of those disjointed Skype calls. He: I want a home with you too. It is what we’re working toward. But I can’t give you this settled life of never being apart, of knowing always what comes next.

Around midnight, I sob as quietly as I can in my narrow dorm bed. I go to brush my teeth, noting the stains on my face, thinking, I don’t have time or energy for emotional breakdown; I have to work in the morning; I have assignments due; it is already late.

In bed, focus on my breath. Long, deep inhalations that expand the belly, exhalations that bring the belly in until all the breath is gone. I go to the root, the unconscious centre, the first chakra. The chakra of acceptance; its shadow, resentment. I inhale acceptance, I exhale resentment. Over and over and over with long, deep breaths, I inhale acceptance: I married an actor, I love an actor, not an accountant or a cabinet maker or anyone with a consistent 9 to 5; we do not have a normal white-picket-fence life, but we love each other and in five and a half years together we have lived a vibrant, deep, expansive partnership. I exhale resentment: we are not what we are not, he is not what he is not, he cannot easily give me what I am now yearning for, and that is all right.

I fall asleep in peace, and wake to transformation: renewal, strength, serenity. What has come to me through my breath in the night is acceptance.

It is flowing

2008-10-18T01:39:00.004-04:00

I caught myself yesterday telling a classmate, “It is hard,” of writing and the writing life and trying to “make” it as a writer. I pondered this statement hours later, and saw that “it is hard” is a limiting negative belief that I have to change.

Creativity is housed in the second chakra, I’ve learned in my Conscious Movement yoga and meditation class. The element associated with the second chakra is water. We speak of writing in flow, of being in the flow, of opening to the flow of creativity. The visual image of water is one of ease, of a natural current taking the creativity along. One of the shadow emotions of this chakra is guilt. Guilt is the emotion I have so often felt when I’m not in creative flow: guilt for not writing, guilt for avoiding my writing, guilt for not living up to my expectation of what a writer does and is. Guilt that cuts off flow, that constricts.

If whatever comes out of your mouth is your mantra, “It is hard” has got to go.

- Writing is easy, writing is possible, writing flows easily and readily.
- A successful writing career is easy, is possible, flows easily and readily.
- There is an abundance of room at the top.
- The universe expands—flows?—to meet my efforts.

I can feel my whole body opening up and smiling with these words.

Five Days of Decision

2008-10-02T00:51:00.003-04:00

Thursday: A workshop in which I discover that the unmade decision of whether to apply for a master’s in English literature must be made and acted upon in a month’s time. Ambivalence, verging on panic; what do I want? What will get me where I want to be? I thought I had another few months to decide. (I did, but not if I want a shot at scholarship funding.) And I thought I knew; I really thought I wanted this, to keep going with this education. After the workshop, I am mostly dismayed. Tentatively excited at the thought of delving into further study of what interests me (women’s literature, women in literature), dejected to imagine further enslavement to the rigours of academia and time away from my ultimate goal (producing this particular woman’s literature). My heart is not here in this academic study just now; do I want to sign up for more?

Friday: Dinner out with editor friends, both holders of BAs in English lit, one of an MA in English lit, the other a second BA in journalism. Both say, “Please don’t do it. It will suck away your creativity. It will mean little once you have it. You will learn as much surrounding yourself with intelligent people, and reading and writing on your own.” I am elated, as though I wanted someone else’s permission to feel this glee in my gut at the prospect of graduating in the spring and moving on to what I am most passionate about.

Saturday: I call my sister and tell her, “I’m thinking about not applying for a masters next year,” and I laugh giddily, feeling freedom, even as I add, “I’m not sure yet; I haven’t decided; do you think I’m just trying to take the easy way?” She listens to my giddy laugh and says, “You sound pretty happy about this decision you haven’t made.”

Sunday: An afternoon under a marquee in Queen’s Park, listening to writers tell how they got where they are, to editors tell what they are looking for in new writers. The writers’ journeys are difficult but they inspire. The beginning parts of their journeys sound like mine. I glimpse a life in which I finish this degree in April, and then I focus on finishing my novel and working to get it in print. A life in which I finally—after twenty years—emerge to where I might be able to tell the middle part of my journey (one that includes successful completed book, one that includes “The editor called me and said…”, one that includes readers). A life where I work again (doing what? surely something more fulfilling than when I had with no degree at all?) instead of study, so that I am contributing to my marital income and we can afford for my husband to give up his steady work and take the leap of faith to come to Canada, and maybe we can actually be together and have a home. The idea of this life—life with my partner, life with my book—makes me want to weep with joy.

Monday: I have slipped into moontime, and I draw a Messenger Card for the message that I need this cycle. I get Love: Seeking clarity through spiritual awareness.

You have drawn this card to help you make important decisions for your life, create clarity out of confusion, and move through ambivalence and daily struggle…

You may be feeling a sense of impatience, an impression that you are ready to create the life you want, but the means of achieving or uncovering this new direction seem obscured…

You are ready to accept that you no longer need to feel overwhelmed by life’s demands or by the lack of clear direction or focus for your future. You are in a spiritual clarification phase, and you are being called to accept that, at this time, your future is unfolding in a spiritual rather than intellectual way…

You are being guided to have more faith in your intuitive choices and unexpressed initiatives. You are seeking to realize your emerging potential…

My intuitive knowing leaps.

---

I was relieved, when I began this degree, to be able to back off from giving writing the job of carrying my identity and purpose. Relieved to be able to say, “I am a student” instead of “I am a [fill in blank with one of numerous mundane bill-paying jobs: bookseller, personal assistant, office administrator] but really I’m a [barely published, often barely writing] writer.” “I am a student” was legitimate, verifiable: look, here’s my student card, here are the credits I am enrolled in, here are the grades I have received. “I am a student” was also promising: later I would be something else, but I didn’t have to say what just yet; I had three or four years left until that decision. I was relieved to have writing no part of my public identity, to let it hibernate for a while, to meet people who had no idea I had any writing aspirations and to whom I did not have to justify my claim to any. It was so relaxing, not to have to be “A Writer.”

I have felt pressure (from within, mostly) to continue on, to get as much official validation as I can get. To compensate for the fact that for so long I had no recognized credentials in anything and was fighting to prove myself to be intelligent, creative, capable because I said so rather than because a piece of paper from an institution said so.

Formal education has been wonderful. I have loved it. I’m good at it. (I have a piece of paper that says so.) I’ll likely want to do the master’s later, at some point in my life, because I like burying myself in books and words and thought, and being forced to consider things I would not otherwise.

But it’s always been for the writing. It is what I want. And it’s true, I’m not interested in being or doing anything else, and I’m not good at being or doing anything else. And I am not graduating with a very practical degree.

I am cautious. I have said too, too many times in my life, “I am a writer; I am writing; I am going to write.” I know it’s hard.

But it’s true. I am a writer. I am writing. I am going to write.

Sevens

2008-09-30T23:46:00.002-04:00

I am a real blogger now: I have been tagged! And even better, awarded. Warm thanks to Livvy at Livvy’s Life for conferring this status upon me.

My mission: to answer seven questions with seven-word answers.

1. WHERE WERE YOU TEN YEARS AGO?
Northern Ontario, soul-sucking office job, writing.

2. WHAT'S ON YOUR TO-DO LIST TODAY?
Dhuoda seminar, Canadian lit seminar, laundry, reading.

3. WHAT IF YOU WERE A BILLIONAIRE?
Must cultivate an expectation of abundance first.

4. FIVE PLACES YOU HAVE LIVED?
California, New York, West Virginia, Paris, Wahnapitae.

5. THREE BAD HABITS?
Chocolate for solace, self-judgment, literary snobbery.

6. SNACKS YOU LIKE?
Chocolate for solace, brie and crackers, cherries.

7. WHO AM I TAGGING?
To create, to connect, to be - lovely
Strolling Player – to see what he’ll do
29 Black Street – because I’ve been lurking

(It should be noted that Paris was only one week. But still. It was Paris.)

Forging through to the core of truth

2008-09-25T23:58:00.003-04:00

It is the end of a week of classes. Tonight’s discussion of Jane Austen’s Emma could not hold my interest, felt mundane, basic. This afternoon’s play text seemed dry, the discussion going over the same things discussions have gone over for the last three years, marginalization and voice, silencing and reclamation, good things that suddenly weary me. Wednesday, I contorted myself into acquiescence over studies of poet Dionne Brand and short story writer Alice Munro conducted as though writing were something remote and high that not one of us sitting around the table could actually do ourselves. These writers’ assertions in interviews that they never could have become anything but writers because they were good at nothing else made me twinge; I am good at nothing else too, only I am not at the other end of a successful career in which I can say “I had to be a writer; I was good at nothing else.” Instead I am here, being good at nothing. My head snapped up when I heard Dionne Brand quoted saying if she hadn’t become a writer she would be an unhappy woman working menial jobs in Sudbury—Sudbury, the Northern city where I am from, where I have been an unhappy woman working menial jobs.

Tomorrow I will work all day in someone else’s bookstore. Saturday I will do it again. Sunday, a day off to read assignments and start seminar presentations, then Monday it begins again, the cycle of events and efforts into which I am struggling to invest some passion, or, at least, enthusiasm, or, at least, interest.

Yesterday I felt longing for my novel like it was sexual; sitting in Critical Thinking, learning to diagram arguments, I resisted the lust that was gripping my body until finally I could resist no longer, and I succumbed to the file buried inside Microsoft Word, and pretended to be taking notes while my eyes feasted on the words and images of my novel, half-formed and waiting for me to come back to it.

This morning I attended a workshop on application to master’s programs, and found out that if I want to be considered for scholarship funding, I need to decide I want a master’s degree, and compile the paperwork and reference letters and statements of research interest and statements of the gaps in scholarship that I alone am qualified to fill before November 1. The thought exhausts me. I don’t know if I want a master’s degree, or if I want one now, or if I want one just to prove myself—to myself, to the world. I know my writing would be informed by it, as it has been informed by this BA degree I am limping my way through now, but do I need it, is it the best thing for me, do I want it simply to attempt to qualify myself for one of the nothing elses that I am not good at? One moment, I feel passionate about taking this education further, about thesis possibilities; the next, a whoosh of relief to think of graduating this spring and leaving to have a home with my husband and contribute to our income and use my time for my own writing and reading and learning. Leaving to no longer be this struggling adult student. At the same time, fear at not having my years patterned out for me, the decisions made; fear of returning to the same person I was before I left to do this degree, an unhappy woman working menial jobs, trying to write. Do I want a masters just to stave off this possibility?

The moon is waning. I’m waning. This week I have been tired, internal, scuttling away from socialization, trying to require the bare minimum of myself. This present waning phase probably has something to do with my lack of academic enthusiasm. “What have you done today to nourish yourself?” Anna asked me tonight, when I said how overwhelmed I feel. Ah—caught again. I thought a moment: I sat outside in the sunshine. I relished wearing a summery skirt and sandals, putting in my contacts and a dash of eye shadow. Sitting outside in the sunshine, I wrote out my conflicted, frenzied thoughts, trying to forge through to the core of truth they might be hiding.

For today, that’s a start.

Email from Citizenship & Immigration Canada

2008-09-18T22:29:00.005-04:00

Joy—tearful, overcome joy. Happy incredulity, sudden, visceral realization:

I will live with my husband. We will be legal residents of the same country.

Five years of back and forth to each other's home nations, of impermanence, of separation, dispelled in three lines:

Mr. W,

Your file is ready for visa. A letter requesting your passport will be
mailed to you within the next 5 business days. Thank you for your interest in Canada.

Moondance

2008-09-16T21:17:00.008-04:00

Five years ago, a friend made a passing comment over tea in my living room. “It’s so good,” she said, “when you’ve got a man who understands that women are cyclical beings.” I nodded uncertainly. Younger and less experienced than she, not wanting to appear clueless, I changed the subject. Forget men understanding it—I was a woman, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

August 1st this year was a New Moon, and it also began the final month of the free and creative summer of my novel. I bled with the dark of the moon, as we used to do before artificial light disrupted our connection to the moon’s phases, and, compelled by raging pre-moontime signals (irritability, depression, anger) and an intensive moontime (cramps that had me doubled over on my bed), I retreated inward. For seven days before and during bleeding, I set the outside world and my own pursuits aside and focused on my body and spirit and what they were trying to tell me.

Around the time of my friend’s comment, I had recently begun to journey out of life-long detachment from and demeaning of my body, out of an ideology of the body as base and carnal and meant for subjection to the intellect and spirit, and out of personal disconnection from my female parts as anything relevant to my identity or anything that I wanted any close involvement with. I had just started using a menstrual cup and stopped calling my period “George.” (The girls of the conservative Bible school I once attended used a man’s name to describe a woman’s experience; this finally struck me as wrong).

About a year later, I started reading Lara Owen’s Her Blood is Gold and taking time during my bleeding for rest and going inward, discovering that during the defenses-down diffuseness of menstruation I can learn a lot about truth suppressed during the rest of the month, discovering that resting with my cramps, hands on my belly, meditating and sending love to my body, eases cramps more effectively than reaching for a bottle of ibuprofen to silence what my body might be trying to say (such as “Please be gracious with yourself and lie down on this bed and do nothing”). I started to see my body as an integral part of myself, united with my mind and spirit, wiser than my brain in detecting and communicating truth. I started to experience my period as a gift, a means of deeper knowledge of myself and access to spiritual awareness, an opportunity for rest and renewal that can carry me through the rest of the month.

A couple years of intermittent and reluctant Pill use, however, along with the demands of busy life, have challenged the habit of moontime retreat. Sometimes it’s just a bit hard to set much time aside and just a bit easy to reach for the Advil and press on with responsibilities and efforts. The rest of the cycle is even easier to ignore; pre-menstruation and menstruation have the strength to force attention to them, but once the bleeding stops I’ve tended to trundle forward with business as usual, as though I am the linear being that masculine-oriented society expects me to be. As I’ve given attention and intention to my period over these years, I’ve been vaguely aware that after my period stops, the moods and inclinations, the levels of energy and creativity and sexual desire that I experience are not mere vagaries of environment and circumstance. I wanted, one day, to get around to noticing what my cycle was doing the rest of the month when I wasn’t paying attention to it.

The life-altering message brought to me by my New Moon retreat in August has its roots in my friend’s comment five years ago: You are a cyclical being.

Honouring menstruation is life-changing; honouring the entire cycle, pre-ovulation, ovulation, pre-menstruation: it is this that now has me—oh, can I bear to be so corny?—over the moon. (I can’t bear it. I apologize.)

In my seven-day moontime retreat, I meditated, rested, wrote, started a red moon journal, received guidance for the month ahead and insight into the month just past, paid attention to the moon, wrote down the strong intuitive hits I received, dreamt, slept, and felt the veil between physical and spiritual worlds thinner than I perhaps ever have. I felt both deeply meditative and powerful. And I felt an intense desire to take this further, to observe and flow with not just my menstruation, but with every phase of my cycle, as I had long thought but never taken the initiative to do.

And so I have, learning to chart my cycle, noting my moods and energies and creativity in my red moon journal, making a point of looking up and connecting with the moon, finding in her an unexpected sister who I feel intensely part of, related to. I’ve felt myself full when she is full, hibernating when she goes dark.

My moontime retreat produced book-altering creative insight, the weeks after it intense creative productivity, more solid, high-energy, high-word count productivity in one short period than I had achieved in any other period during my summer of work on my novel.

As summer wound down and the moon waned and I tried to stay closely in touch with my body, I felt my intensive productivity waning as well. One morning under a late-summer sun, on a bench overlooking the Hudson in Fort Tryon Park, I tried to spur myself into the productivity that had become my post-menstrual/pre-ovulation habit, and I recognized a shift, a new phase within me, an encouragement that came from my body to stop my outward production and to progress to taking in, to nourishing and learning, to bringing in the tools that will help me grow spiritually and carry me through the coming academic year. With this recognition came the realization that this tuning in to my cycle, observing, recognizing, and embracing the ebbs and flows, could be not only personally and spiritually fulfilling, but a ground-breaking key to my creativity.

The thought arrived and resonated: If I as a woman writer—if any of us as women with creative or productive goals—can observe, learn, and then respect these cyclical ebbs and flows instead of trying always to forge ahead with Discipline and with the constant high production of the male robot time-clock model, if we can tune into and move with the natural aptitudes toward creativity, production, insight, reflection, reception, retreat that come at the different phases of the cycle instead of fighting against them and trying to force ourselves into a linear path set always to “High Production” or even to “High Production every day from 9am to 3pm,” we might discover an incredible path into our creativity as well as into ourselves. If we understand how we work as cyclical beings, and if we listen to our bodies and our deep hearts and set our intention to honour them, we will not be fighting against ourselves to produce our work, but will be instead tapping into a deep, wise resource inside ourselves to birth our creative dreams.

An online discovery—unsought, synchronous—several hours later confirmed that these thoughts were not wishful fabrication. And so I am introduced to the Moon Goddess Series taught by Zahra Haji of Yoga Goddess at Red Tent Sisters in Toronto; I have attended the intro workshop, and have enrolled in the 8-week series. I have learned that my cycle is comprised of four goddess energies:

1) Pre-ovulation and New/Waxing Moon: The Maiden – Get up and go energy
2) Ovulation and Full Moon: The Mother – Nurturing & supportive energy
3) Pre-menstruation and Waning Moon: The Enchantress – Emotional & unpredictable energy
4) Menstruation and Dark Moon: The Wise Goddess/Recluse – Quiet and intuitive energy

And I am excited about everything within this that there is still to discover. The moondance, I think, is just beginning.

Marriage under a full moon, to a man who understands that women are cyclical beings.

Notebook

2008-09-13T02:01:00.004-04:00

A month ago, at Barnes and Noble, I fell in love with a book I had no use for. A handmade Nepalese blank book, with a cover of pressed leaves and petals, rough textured pages, twigs securing the spine. It fit none of the purposes for which I use notebooks: too pretty for morning pages, too bulky for my carry-with-me-everywhere notebook, potentially useful as my moon cycle journal but I had just started one of those and wouldn’t need another for a long time. Fancier, fussier than anything I ever find to be of practical use. I am not a buyer, and I could not leave this book on the shelf.

“Buy it,” Richard said. “There’s a reason you love it.” (My husband is wonderful for encouraging action on instinct; he was the first person, very early in our relationship, to ever ask me, “What does your instinct tell you?” rather than “What would be the proper and rational thing?” back when I was only starting to learn that I had an instinct. He’s also wonderful for encouraging me to buy things; he makes me feel not guilty about it.)

I began to read The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark, a book I approached with skepticism (writer, editor, perfectionist: I can’t be anything but skeptical of an author who chooses to write ‘bout and ‘em when about and them are proper and functional: can she have anything substantial to say?) but soon grew to respect. The Red Book encourages keeping a spiritual journal, a place to explore and notice and record and play and ask and intend and receive. But I already keep so many kinds of notebooks; I do nothing but write in notebooks. This was still the summer; when my academic year heats up, I will not have time for all this writing in all these notebooks. And why separate the spiritual from the rest of my life by giving it its own book?

The handmade Nepalese notebook, so impractical for anything else, pages too rough, size unwieldy. This is what I bought it for, I realized two weeks after falling in love with it in Barnes and Noble. A spiritual practice book, a signal of intention: I intend to awaken to my spiritual essence, to notice spirit around me and in me, to hear the divine inside me, to grow; here is the book for it.

But what exactly do you write in this specific, beautiful, sacred book, when you already write about every part of your life in every spare hour of your spare-hour-poor day?

The book is on my altar, blank.

I have been managing most days, in the frenetic schedule of acclimatizing to new courses and tackling reading lists, to touch in with myself in a significant way: a brief meditation, morning pages (three pages of long-hand free writing/stream of consciousness first thing upon waking), tuning in to my cycle, holding my hands to my heart as I watch the moon waxing above me in my walk home from an evening class. I remind myself, at the start of a day so packed with doing that I don’t know how I’ll get through to the end of it, to remember to be in the doing, to move through my day gently, with intention and presence, to be here now instead of being in the next item on my to-do list. To slow my movements, walk, don’t run, breathe, don’t scamper feverishly through headspace. This makes a difference; full days that a year ago would have depleted me are manageable and grounded when lived one moment at a time, with a gentle spirit. My little altar centres me: I am not just syllabi and reading lists and the scramble to fill the three credits that, at the last minute, I am suddenly without—here is what I am, vision board and handfasting ribbons and, oh yes, that beautiful handmade empty book, my spiritual practice book, my signal of intention.

This morning before rushing out to work—my first day back at an old job—I drew a Messenger Card, and I got Introspection: Appreciating that nature is teaching you to value life as a spiritual process. I wasn’t feeling particularly introspective (for once); maybe I chose in the wrong way, in too much of a hurry, with too little intention?

Tonight, ten p.m., I stepped onto campus/home under a waxing gibbous moon. At this hour the campus is still, trees and grass and silence. I heard rustling; a foot away from me, a small rabbit nibbled in the grass. I watched it, ears erect, unconcerned with my presence. It hopped away and I continued toward my dorm; one minute later a fox trotted across my path, stopped to look at me, waited, assessed, moved on.

Rabbit:
Guile, quick-thinking, humility, strengthening intuition, releasing fear, overcoming the past, resolution to change, fertility, new life alertness, nurturing, rebirth, balance.

Fox:
Shape-shifting, cleverness, observational skills, cunning, stealth, camouflage, feminine courage, invisibility, ability to observe unseen, persistence, gentleness, swiftness, diplomacy, wildness, adaptation, slyness, wisdom, protection, provider, intelligence.

I pulled my handmade Nepalese notebook from my altar. I opened up the textured pages. I’m asking for spirit and awareness and wisdom in my life; the rabbit and the fox, and Appreciating that nature is teaching me to value life as a spiritual process, seem a good place to start.

The Kids and I

2008-09-09T17:51:00.004-04:00

I am a 31-year old married woman among teenagers, living a life normally experienced by people ten or more years younger than I.

I feel old. I feel displaced. I feel longing for the life I left behind, one in which I was a grown-up with an entire peaceful apartment and a husband and other grown-up friends.

I am not in the swing of my courses yet, and so the purpose for which I am living this life doesn’t feel readily apparent. This is my fourth year as a university student but my first as a dorm resident; in past school years I have come here for classes and then left for the home I shared, though not with my partner, with my sister. She has moved in with her fiancé, I deemed a new apartment infeasible until Richard’s permanent residency comes through and we have some idea where and when we will live together, and a room on campus seemed practical and simple. So this year, after classes I just stay. By evening, when most of the students and professors have gone home, it is just me and the teenagers remaining. They are laughing and chatting and eating their meals together; I am alone with my dinner at an empty cafeteria table. If I were their age, I would feel self-conscious, but I mastered the art of dining (travelling, dancing, theatre-going, café-sitting) alone a long time ago.

Does age really matter? No—I’ve made some lovely acquaintances among nineteen-year olds in past years, and I really don’t want to be ageist. (For that matter, there’s a significant age difference between Richard and I. I’m the younger one.) It’s the different stages of life that make a difference, the fact that I am ready to be nesting with the man I married, that I think about motherhood, that I’ve lived and worked as an adult on my own for a lot of years in a lot of places, that so much growth and self-discovery is behind me while so much is ahead of them. It’s my re-ordering of life stages that makes a difference—whether or not these life stages are socially constructed—in ways that are often rewarding but sometimes complicated.

My Nineteenth Century Women Novelists course is made up primarily of mature students like myself, and there are a few others to be found in almost all my courses. It’s now, in the evening, that I want to go home to my home, home to my partner, that I want to be just a normal 31-year old married woman, who did not decide she could go back and do what she didn’t do at eighteen because she knew that if she didn’t she would regret it for the rest of her life.

Cloister

2008-09-07T23:04:00.001-04:00

I have moved into my cloister. I have a bed and a desk, a dresser, a closet, a window with wide seat-like sill where I can sit and look out over grass and trees. I have my books on the shelves—George Eliot and Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms; Her Blood is Gold and The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark. I have framed photos of Richard and I, our hands tied together with ribbons on our wedding day, our faces beaming under brims of hat and hood in a rainy Vermont forest three years ago.

I walked into this residence on Wednesday, after a nine-hour journey from New York and a night on my sister’s couch, walked down a dark corridor past oh-so-young-looking teenagers giddy with first forays away from home, into this small, stuffy room, and I thought of my husband and the home and the life we have shared, and I thought, “What have I done?”

After my first class I returned to the room, walked across the threshold with my eyes closed and my hands to my heart, and spoke words of blessing into every surface: “May only good cross this threshold; may only good enter this door; may only good come into this corner, and this corner, and this one.” I opened my eyes and I loved it, this small monastic sanctuary on this small wooded campus, where I will study and write and think and meditate and thrive in this year of my life.

I intended a weekend of moving in and adjusting, unpacking and catching my breath; instead, I realized suddenly on Thursday that I had three free days ahead—I don’t start my job till next week, there are no assignments due yet—and that this circumstance was not likely to recur. I attended my Thursday evening class, threw a few things into a bag, and left my cloister for a night bus five hours north to my family and the lake where they live, many of them, on several plots of land in several houses side by side, in the Northern Ontario bush where I grew up.

I have had two and a half days of family and nature: sweating in the sauna with sisters, brother, mom and dad and brave seven-year-old niece, running, shrieking, through wet grass to the lake under a waxing crescent moon, swimming alone in the dark a quarter of the way across the lake and marveling that this summer that I thought was over, this summer that I thought would be the first of my life in which I did not swim in a Northern Ontario lake, now found me unexpectedly, gratefully wrapped in cold, silky black water. A mug of tea by a lakeside fire, wet and cold from sauna and swim, family meals of fresh garden vegetables and local meat on the deck at sunset. A night in a sofa bed with seven-year-old niece’s supple, tan arms entwined around my neck—no matter that she thought I was her mother on the other side of the bed; I held her close and relished the feel of her, the stillness of this active body. Waking to mist rising from the lake, admiring six- and seven-year old nieces’ exuberance, creativity and curiosity, longing for them to emerge through puberty into womanhood with these qualities intact. Picking fresh basil and sage from the garden, holding six-month-old niece as she falls asleep in my arms, fishing with four-year old nephew, talking with my sister about raising children consensually, about her fledgling doula practice, about standing strong and unapologetic as our authentic selves.

This evening I watched lakes and rocks and trees recede, and I stepped off the bus onto pavement and caught myself putting off the return to my small solitary space; stopped for a soy chai latte, sat down on a couch, averted my gaze from hand-holding couples, picked up a newspaper—the Toronto Film Festival is on, all the celebrities are here, and I will probably not go see any films because that is the sort of thing I do with Richard—and felt myself reluctant to admit the true end of summer, the true beginning of separation from my partner and of solitary, hard-slogging life. Life has been too busy since our Tuesday morning parting on the corner of 8th Avenue and 34th Street for me to miss his presence in my days, and the full and love-filled weekend with family has put off the start of this new life. Coming back here to this tiny room, I knew I would feel my aloneness keenly. I didn’t want to feel it keenly. It is so much wrenching work, feeling keenly.

But I am here now, fresh baby cucumbers from my mother’s garden stored inside my mini-fridge, Richard on the other end of a Skype chat, the new Coldplay album playing and my small, so very small, single bed awaiting me (are single beds really this small? Could it be a half-single?). Tomorrow morning, Medieval Women’s Writing. Tomorrow afternoon, I hope to find space in this small room for an altar. I am here, by myself, and it is not so bad.

Preparing for Tomorrow's Present

2008-09-01T21:44:00.002-04:00

It is the last night. Today was the last day. I am packed (into my large, bright fuchsia suitcase, but that is another story), I have cried, I have felt my truth erupting in a sad, constricted stomach, nausea at what tomorrow brings. “Living in the present” has become a bit more complicated, because suddenly the present has collided with the future, and my beautiful summer of writing and marriage is giving way to a fall of monkish existence in a cement-walled student dorm, days spent writing academic essays instead of creative fiction, nights preparing presentations instead of sharing candle-lit dinners and making love or, at the least, holding my partner in sleep, waking up to share breakfast before rushing on into the day.

The dichotomy between my student life and my other, wider, freer life is greater because, due to work and nationalities, I am not with my partner while I’m in school. My tendency is to shrink into an A+ workaholic writer of papers and reader of books and attender of classes, a person who does not drink wine or go out to eat or watch movies or dance or have sex or have fun. I do actually love writing papers and reading books and attending classes—I chose this, at age 28, having recognized the growing regret within me and disrupted my life to go get the university education I’d never pursued before—but I am hoping, intending, this year to achieve a greater balance between academic life and emotional and spiritual fulfillment. This is the final year of my BA in English literature, and my journey from New York to Toronto tomorrow is a good thing, despite my tears. Still, this transition between the two lives is a gulf that is never fun to bridge. I have, for the most part, stayed unprecedentedly in the present, not allowing the parting of tomorrow to spoil the togetherness of today. But when you are emptying your drawers and closet, when you are removing your vision board from your shared altar and packing it into a suitcase, it is hard not to realize that in a day you’ll be on a Greyhound bus, and the next day moving into a small single room next door to 18-year olds whose eyes, when they eventually discover your age, will bug out in disbelief.

Now my husband has plied me with wine and cooked me dinner, and I am mostly happy. He will remain behind in New York, then go out on tour as the Dromios in A Comedy of Errors in a couple of weeks. We are waiting for word from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, to bring him to me sooner, we hope, rather than later.

Last night we sat in front of our altar and went through the intentions and prayers we had previously placed in our intention jar, finding some answered, some still in process. We wrote new intentions for this new phase of our life, and held our hands on the jar and blessed it together. Then we each drew an Angelic Messenger Card; I asked for guidance as I begin the school year, and I got Willpower: Finding the inner discipline to stay consistent with your daily spiritual practices.

This is exactly what I hope to do, for grounding, for balance, as I move into a new present. A good one, I know; a different one, but a good one.

Summer of Intention

2008-08-29T17:49:00.005-04:00

I began this summer with gifts: of time, of space, of freedom. I had three months—June, July, and August—in which I would not have a job or the pressure of looking for one, in which I would not have classes to attend or essays to write, in which someone else—my husband—would supply my sustenance and my housing, a bright, woody fifth-floor walk-up with fire-escape views of the George Washington Bridge. The only frameworks imposed into my summer days were Richard’s departures and returns for a hectic season of rehearsal and performance, and the necessity for someone (logically, me) to cook dinner, order the Fresh Direct, and scrub the toilet. The only tasks inside this freedom were to read all the books I wanted to read, to walk and sit in Fort Tryon Park and Washington Square Park and Central Park, and to write the novel I had been assembling notes on for months in time stolen from full-time school and part-time job and over-time responsibilities.

I have had this kind of gift before (this can happen when you are in an inter-national relationship, and are not legally employable in your partner’s country), and it usually started out well and then disintegrated into my panic at the wide-open, empty days and the monumental expectation to produce writing with them, into paralysis at the page, into two or three hundred words dragged screaming out of me, Dharma and Greg reruns and sheepish scrambles back to the laptop at the sound of the key in the lock. As Julia Cameron says, there is nothing so paralyzing as a great big chunk of time earmarked, “Now, write.” We can’t use the excuse “If I only had the time, I would be brilliant” anymore.

I began this summer also with gifts of love and partnership. Richard and I were married in July 2007, beside a lake in Northern Ontario, encircled (literally) by a small number of family and friends. Two weeks later, I bawled beside a Greyhound bus while the man I was just learning to call husband stepped into it for work awaiting him in New York City; I remained behind to prepare for my third year of English lit in Toronto. We didn’t see each other for three months, and this summer, in this woody apartment just south of the George Washington Bridge, would be the first time we lived together in a married home for longer than three weeks.

A day or two into this real married life, I was already, for all my women’s studies courses and growth into Strong Independent Woman, struggling beneath the weight of the word Wife. In my founding religion and nearly every role model of my youth this word meant “Woman who stays home and does the boring, supporting, life-maintaining-but-purposeless-in-itself work that will enable her man to be successful and important in the world.” And here I was, staying home, and here I was, being supported by my man’s successful and important earnings, and here I was, scrubbing the toilet!

At the very beginning of this summer, I sat down at the kitchen table in the woody apartment and whittled out my intentions for this gift.

To live in harmony and intimacy and depth of oneness with my partner.
To live a physically and spiritually healthy life.
To listen to my body and my intuition and let them guide me.
To write my novel with purpose and joy.
To nurture my creative health.
To be gracious with myself (this is a big one for a life-long perfectionist; over the past three years I’ve been in de-perfectionizing school; I highly recommend it).
To not measure my worth by my productivity (see above).

Addendum to the intentions:

The only thing required of me today is:

Do morning pages.
Meditate.
Walk.
Play with my novel for fifteen minutes every day. (These words are deliberate: play, not work; fifteen minutes, not six hours…of course the fifteen minutes often stretches into two or three or six hours, but the fifteen-minute goal is so attainable even on the busiest or laziest of days, that one is set up for constant success and its positive energy.)
Love my husband—I am in an ecstatic partnership (ie. not an important working man/ toilet-scrubbing woman dynamic).

Now it is nearly the last day of August. In four days, I will board a Greyhound bus while Richard stays on the pavement and waves. I go back to full-time school and part-time job and over-time responsibilities, as well as separation from my partner/ husband/ man-I-am-Wife-to. In these three months I have lived a creatively healthy existence of consistent, calm writing practice, and I have shifted from spiritual exploration to spiritual growing. I’ve written almost half my novel. I’ve gone deeper into my body and intuition. I’ve been pretty gracious with myself. And my husband has almost convinced me, with shock that I could possibly feel this way, that it isn’t my role to cook his food or scrub his toilet. (I still do these things anyway, most of the time. Sometimes we just order Chinese.) Beneath my grateful hands held to my heart, every intention of the start of summer has flourished into solid and beautiful manifestation in my life.

This is still something that awes me, the manifestation of intentions, but it is also something that I am coming to expect.

The Starting Point

2008-08-28T16:26:00.009-04:00

I have always yearned for a connection with something spiritual outside and inside myself, ever since I was a child brought up in—and then a teenager and young adult passionately embracing—a conservative Christian ideology. I have always been a person who writes, ever since I was an eight-year old with a pencil and a blue binder and a storyline suspiciously similar to that of my favourite Judy Blume book. And, like most women, I have always been female, ever since I was born to my ten-months-married parents and brought home to their farmhouse down a one-mile lane.

The constants: spiritual hunger, creative pursuit, situation inside a woman’s body and soul.

The changes:

1. I crept out of Christianity over a period of years in my mid-twenties, as doctrines became irrelevant, theological debate repulsive, restrictive standards inhibitors of the free, spirited, authentic life I increasingly wanted to lead.

2. I stalled and stumbled toward and away from and through my desire to write. Many short stories, a novel and a half, a few publications, a period of giving up and deciding to be an editor instead. Fear of the page, self-doubt and tortured avoidance of what I most wanted to do, transcendent hours of following the story to wonderful places.

3. I became aware that I was female. I stopped believing women were created as helpers to men, meant to live under their authority (see #1). I discovered feminism as a hell of a lot more than a bad word applied to selfish, straying women. I acknowledged I had a body that was more than just a necessary container for my mind: first I got close enough to it to insert a tampon (age 21, and only out of abject necessity), then to allow other things to be inserted (age 25, and that was pretty much against my will as well), then to take out those tampons and use a menstrual cup that allowed me to see and engage with my flow, to think about what it might mean beyond its biological functions, then to look at sexuality as something that might belong to me and not to a man who wished to conquer it (age 26).

For years I have been dismantling the faith of my upbringing, discarding what I once embraced. There was a fallow time, in which all I wanted to do was live my life: no higher powers, no seeking something more, no connection to an anything divine. And then there was the yearning, the emptiness of nothing where there used to be something, the feet dipped in sweet flowing rivers: a women’s circle, books on the sacred feminine, meditation and yoga, the discovery of the power of intention, affirmation, intuition, the discovery of a Deep Heart inside me that knows more and deeper and divinely.

This summer, I have transitioned from dismantling and exploring, into growing something new. Not a new One Truth, but many truths, many access points, a collection of them. Not new belief, but new What I Love, new What Resonates with My Spirit, new What Speaks and Shines and Transforms.

This summer, the struggles and lessons of twenty-three years of pursuing a writing practice—powered by the spiritual tools of intention and affirmation and intuition — have coalesced into fruit: I am living a creatively healthy life (not a creatively addicted or binging or abusive or intoxicated life), and I am understanding how to integrate creative production consistently and joyfully into a life that is self-nourishing and stable. These past three months, I have produced half a novel that I love.

This summer, I have embraced my woman’s body a notch deeper. I’ve learned to listen to it regularly and with intention. For several years I have researched and tried to open myself to the experience of the spiritual and emotional aspects of menstruation, and have tried to rest and retreat, as much as is possible, during my moontime. This summer some raging Pre-Moontime Signals forced me deep into a moontime retreat from which I emerged with new passion for my female body, for the spiritual wisdom it holds, for flowing with the wisdom of my cycle, for learning how my cycle relates to the moon’s cycle and how my creativity, energy, and emotions relate to my body’s cycle. I’ve just begun to chart my cycles—not for pregnancy achievement or even so much for contraception, but to know my body more intimately and to observe where my emotions and creativity are during each phase of the cycle.

Emergence. The act of coming forth from concealment, or of rising into view. The gradual beginning. The penetration of the soil surface by a newly germinated plant.

The summer is lightening, winding, mellowing into autumn. I am emerging. I know other women are too. I hope to share the female, spiritual, creative journey here in this space.