Message in a Bottle

I've been tagged for the first time in my bloglife.

Here are the rules:

You are about to send a virtual Message In a Bottle across the Blog Ocean. Leave a message in the sand or on the bottle. Write anything you wish. Be a pirate or a poet. Serious or silly. Anonymous or not.

What message would you like to send out to the universe?






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JLee's Place
Drowsey Monkey
My Brain Hurts
Larry Hnetka Goes Hmm..
Rainbow Pastor

Having my first...

My daughter is expecting her first baby in August. Yes, I'm to be a Memé again. In going through some old file folders I found this little piece I wrote not long after having her.

I loved being pregnant. As my belly grew, I wallowed in the glory of all the preferential treatment I received and the mounds of pecan pie that I consumed. Visions of cherubs filled my dreams. My waking hours were spent decorating the nursery and devouring parenting books and while I fought a loosing battle with girth control, I developed a stout determination to be the best mother that ever walked the earth.

What could possibly go wrong? After all, they're only babies, nature's most adaptable creatures. It would be easy to get an infant on a reasonable schedule within two weeks right? Yes, those were the blissful days filled with pleasant dreams and anticipation of giving birth to the Gerber baby.

Someone once told me that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is - I went into labour three weeks early. Now most people know me as a cool and quite competent woman but I must confess that when my water broke, I lost it. Had it not been for the composed demeanor of the seasoned head nurse, I most certainly would have forgotten everything I learned in prenatal class.

Once I got it together again and resigned myself to the fact that this baby was going to be born before I got the garage to put the snow tires on the car, the delivery went well. Apart from a brief moment of respiratory arrest when they made the mistake with the epidural and froze me from the waist up instead of from the waist down, it was eight mercifully brief hours of labour, delivery in a regular hospital bed and back to the ward in time for supper.

After the delivery I was consumed with energy, ready to tackle anything that came my way and when they brought little Jennifer to me I nursed her like an old pro. Shortly after feeding time was visiting hour and with my cooing bundle nestled in my arms I held court like the Queen Mum. Exuding confidence I proudly exhibited my latest accomplishment and boasted that I felt so good that I felt like going home then and there.

Before I knew it visiting hour was over, my new daughter was finished her final feeding and was whisked off the the nursery until the wee hours of the night when she would be returned to me for another fix. I settled down in bed to rest and dream about which of her new outfits I would bring her home in.

The morning bustle of the hospital roused me with vague recollections of fumbling in the dark with a screaming infant - surely a nightmare. When the nurse came in with my baby I asked her if anyone got the number of the bus that hit me. She giggled, placed Jennifer in my arms and on crepe soles squeaked away to get the rest of the layette.

Jennifer was wide away and hungry. Our eyes met and at that moment she began to howl. Perhaps I should have combed my hair I thought. Oh well, maybe if I feed her she might like me better. Calmly I began to go through the motions of breast feeding and as I pulled my baby towards me the reality of the situation overwhelmed me. I was condemned. For the next eighteen years I was solely responsible for this child.

Instantly my bravado dissolved, I was utterly inept and it wasn't long before I was howling louder than the baby. I spent the rest of the morning sobbing into my pillow, inconsolable, trying to bear the disgrace of knowing that my baby was in the nursery being bottle fed.

Tragedy in Toronto

Canadians sure do like to poke fun at the American media.

Great Expectations

I have come to realize that I have high expectations. I demand a lot of myself and push myself to achieve. As I write this I've just finished watching the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon and I'm remembering the joy, excitement, sense of adventure and pride I felt as a child during the early days of the space program. I don't think I realized it until just recently how much my childhood fascination with the space program influenced my life.

For as far back as I can remember my heroes were what today, we call nerds. Scientists and inventors who asked questions that no one else dared ask. Who dreamed of things beyond what the rest of the world thought possible. People who through hard work, sacrifice, dedication and an unswerving belief that what they alone dreamed could indeed be achieved, found a way to do the impossible - fantastic even.

I get goose bumps when I think that just about the time I was learning to ride my bike without training wheels, there were men, slide rule in hand, conceiving the plan to launch a human being into space. When I think of the whole space program, one word comes to mind - audacity. Dictionary.com defines it here:

au·dac·i·ty –noun. 1. boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought or other restrictions.

I get goose bumps because I am thrilled to know that such daring exists. These folks at NASA took up a challenge to put a man on the moon within a decade. Perhaps today that doesn't sound like much of a feat but when you regard it in the context of the technology that existed at the time, the fact that they accomplished this is quite miraculous. The laptop upon which I type this probably has more computing power than all the devices which existed at Mission Control at that time. The astronauts, who were not simple barnstormers plucked off a circus tour but highly educated and trained pilots, knew that they could die in what they were attempting. They saw their friends die on the launch pad in a lift-off simulation yet they didn't waiver.

When I think about the courage and personal fortitude it took to pursue this goal, I get goose bumps. The astronauts, engineers, physicists, chemists, machinists etc. put their minds to accomplishing this goal, expected to accomplish this goal and did it. They did it.

I get goose bumps when I think that we ever thought we had the right to use space as we saw fit. Talk about the ultimate expression of eminent domain. I'm speaking to the little known cold-war program to put spies into space. At the same time our collective imaginations were being sparked by the advent of space flight, the American and Soviet governments were in another space race - one to put a team of men into space to spy on each other. The PBS series Nova covered this in a program called Astrospies.

So in watching the space program I grew up believing that anything was possible. I grew up believing that through hard work, I, and anyone else, could achieve. I grew up with high expectations of myself. I think what has driven me to survive an abusive marriage, raise my children, put myself through school and build the life I have is my expectation to succeed and achieve. Surely, if it were humanly possible to put a man on the moon it was possible for me to rise above whatever circumstance in which I found myself.

The downside to this belief is that I tend to think that just because I did it, others should be able to do so too. Sometimes I think I do others a disservice by projecting my own level of high expectation on them. I think in a lot of ways I pushed my expectations on my children. Recognizing their strengths and potential I can see how sometimes I have pushed them towards what I thought was best. The problem in that is that by doing so, I don't allow them to explore and learn from their own journey. It's hard when you are alone raising children not to become over protective or smothering. You know all the mistakes you've made and you don't want your kids to repeat them. The big lesson for me as I go through my middle years is to trust that I have given my kids all the tools they need to be decent, independent, responsible adults and have the audacity, if you will, to just step out of the way and let them be just that.

On clear, dark nights out here by the lake I still gaze at the sky. If I'm patient, I can see satellites orbiting above and think of Sputnik and a certain July event that was so thrilling it brought tears of pride and joy to Walter Cronkite's eyes. Although I'm learning to be more mellow as I age, when I look at the stars I feel sometimes it's alright to have high expectations because it gives us all something to reach for.

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Good things grow in Ontario....

I was cleaning up my hard drive and found these photos I took at Parkdale Market when I was visiting my mother in Ottawa late last summer.

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The Lobotomist

Last Monday I felt fine. Had a few doctors appointments during the day and later that night settled in with my local PBS station.

They aired a program titled The Lobotomist. The program was an account of neurologist Walter Freeman who devised a procedure which came to be known as "ice-pick" lobotomy. It was performed by lifting the eye lid, inserting an ice-pick, using a hammer to tap the ice-pick through the bone in the orbital socket then moving the ice-pick from side to side to detach the frontal lobe from the thalamus. Sounds like something straight out of the Inquisition eh? Well this little operation was done, ostensibly to help patients suffering from various mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression.

I was horrified and the images in the documentary disturbed me but I simply couldn't change the channel. The next morning I woke up with one of the worst head colds I think I've ever had. I was so sick I couldn't move my head from side to side without feeling the most excruciating pain and dizziness.

While I was truly sick with high fever, chills, ear aches and horribly stuffed nose, after reading blog buddy, Dr. Deb's post on the Nocebo Effect, I can't help but wonder how much our subconscious mind plays a role in our physical health.

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Winter 2007 at the Lair

Took these photos just before the holidays.

The ghost of Tom

In my life I've loved three men. The last man fathered my two children. The second man broke my heart. I woke up this morning thinking of the first man I ever loved.

I met Tom when I joined the youth group at our parish church. He was seventeen and I was twelve. To him I was just another skinny little girl in the choir and while he was always polite, he never really gave me the time of day. Still though, I knew I loved him.

At twelve I knew a lot about love. I had already had two real-live boy-girl dates with Jerry, an older man of fourteen - one where we took his kid sister to see Bedknobs and Broomsticks and he paid and even held my hand when we lined up for tickets and the second when we met at the rink across the street from my old grade school to go ice skating. He bought me a hot chocolate, made me laugh and kissed me on the teeth. He even brought me home to meet his mom and we spent an afternoon listening to and talking about his Black Sabbath Paranoid album. I really liked Jerry and he was the first boy to ask me to dance at the school dance and the first boy to peddle his bike half way across the west end just to go bike riding along the river with me.

I remember reading somewhere that the ancient Greeks had three words for love. Philia, indicating a brotherly/friendship love; eros, for a romantic/sexual love and agape for an unconditional/spiritual love. I suppose in my twelve year old brain I entertained the notion of a romantic love with Jerry, I mean he did kiss me, even if it was only on the teeth, but in hindsight what I felt for him was the love of friendship.

With Tom however, it was different. I had a big crush on him. He played the guitar and was the leader of the guitar masses we had at church. He looked like a cross between John Denver and Cat Stevens and while I watched him hang out with the older girls I secretly hoped that one day he'd notice me. My fantasy of some day being Tom's girl was shattered the Sunday morning our parish priest proudly announced that Tom had decided to enter the priesthood. Now those romantic fancies seemed wrong - sinful even - and had to be purged. I left the youth group and didn't see Tom again until one summer day when I was sixteen.

I was walking down Bank Street in The Glebe in Ottawa when I heard someone call my name. I turned around and there was Tom smiling at me and just as handsome as he ever was. I stood there, astounded as he threw his arms around me and gave me a big hug. I didn't think he would even remember me and here he was, warm wide grin under a bushy moustache telling me how great it was to see me. Cars, buses rushed by, pedestrians jostled me, for all I know a dog could have been pissing on my shoe but all I heard, all I was aware of was Tom asking me if I'd go have coffee with him. Over coffee he told me of his experiences at seminary while I nodded and smiled. After about an hour he said he had a bus to catch, got up and was gone. I didn't see him again until the fall when walking down Elgin Street I again heard someone call my name.

For the next three years that's how it was with us. Tom would pop into my life from out of the blue. We'd spend an afternoon, a few days, a week together then, poof, he'd be gone. In those interludes he'd sing to me the songs he'd written, read to me from his journals, we'd talk about art, music, poetry and all things spiritual. He found himself dissatisfied with the Church, left the seminary and for a time wondered what he would do with is life. He felt he was called to some type of service but wasn't sure what that would look like for him.

With Tom I saw the movie Midnight Express and pondered Warhol's soup cans at the National Gallery. These were things I couldn't do with the fellow I was dating at the time - the second man I loved; man who eventually broke my heart. If I were an ancient Greek I would say that what I felt for Tom was a combination of philia and agape. The girlish romantic infatuation of a twelve-year-old was transformed into the love one has for a kindred spirit, a pal, a buddy, someone who understands your quirks and loves you for them. He knew I was dating (and later became engaged to) the other fellow and I knew he dated other girls and that was fine because I didn't see Tom as someone to be romantic with. He was, as Anne of Green Gables says, a bosom friend.

Tom never kissed me. Not until the very last time I ever saw him. We had spent the day together and in the afternoon ended up at his parents' place where he shared a couple songs he was working on. I had a date that night with my fiancee and it was getting late so he walked me to the bus stop so I could get home in time to get ready. We made small talk as we waited for the bus and just as it arrived, Tom took me in his arms, gave me the most passionate kiss I had ever experienced in my then, nineteen years and said, "I don't want you to marry him, I want you to marry me." The doors to the bus opened and I hopped on, deposited my bus ticket, plopped down on a seat and as the bus pulled away watched Tom stand at the curb until I couldn't see him anymore. Heaven forgive me but the one thought that went through my head was, "Oh no, now he's ruined everything." Somewhere in those years that we were chumming around together, without me knowing it, Tom fell in love with me and I didn't know how to respond. So I didn't. He must have called the house every day for the next two weeks and I kept dodging his calls until he stopped calling.

About two years later, when I had broken up with the fiancee and was dating the man who I would later marry and have children with, my mother phoned me at work to tell me that Tom had been killed. The account of his death was not clear but he either fell or was pushed off a twelve-storey building. I couldn't bring myself to attend his funeral but did, months later, visit his grave.

I often think of Tom, his music, his prose, his humour, his smile and the love I felt for him. When I think of him I can't help but wonder what would have happened had I had the maturity and courage to not get on that bus, to answer his phone calls, to see him one more time.

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