Untethered Typings

“Please don’t move, Denise. Just try to be still. Help is on the way.” These words came to me in what I was sure must be a dream. I knew this because the words were clear and I knew who was speaking them – a particular teacher at my school who also happened to be the father of a friend. It made absolutely no sense that he would be speaking these words to me in any context I could fathom within my 12 year-old world, so dream it was most certainly. There was also the intense feeling permeating this dream that I must have arranged myself into a very awkward sleeping position in the real world and I very much wanted to relieve that stiffness that becomes pain when such a position is held too long in sleep. If I could only just will my body, through this dream state, to move just a bit… “Oh Denise, please try to lay still. Just a little longer.” As part of the slow process of unpacking the non-essential boxes from our recent renovation, I came across a scrapbook I had started as a t...

I truly feel like I am in the golden years of motherhood. I absolutely love the ages my kids are. That they have their own amazing personalities that entertain, challenge, and surprise me. I get so much joy from the array of things we are able to do as a family of five. Dinner making. Weekends together. Movie watching. Reading. Board games. Sports – participating or watching. The list is long. There is so much joy for me right now and I am honestly head over heels in love with my family life. I feel warmth wash over me every single morning when I wake Graeme up and, still half-asleep, he reaches his arms around my neck and tells me good morning and that he loves me. My face aches from the smile produced when Anna asks if she can sing me the song she and her friends made up and sang in front of her class that day. I laugh the hardest at Lily’s hilarious comments on situations that are mature and always on-point (it may help that she and I have the same corn- uh, awesome sense of hum...

Well, hello. Here we find ourselves again. How odd, given my blogging track record, but anyway … I thought I might take a stab at capturing the impact I’ve felt regarding my last post . If you haven’t read it yet, doing so would make this here a fair bit easier to follow (but no guarantees on it being actually easy to follow because, well, ME .) So this post of which I speak, it’s the one where, prior to posting, inside me a prize fight had been waged: with near-terror in the face of rejection and awkwardness in one corner and the incredibly simple desire to just say, to express a thing because it mattered to me in the other. (The latter abetted, to a degree, by an increased swirling within me as I age of what some might call steadily upward levels of confidence. I, however, call it simply as I know it to be: just giving incrementally less of a shit about others’ potential perceptions). With the many articles, posts and general commentary about Bell Let’s Talk Day that were posi...

On the first day of the Frosh Week activities that I begrudgingly was a part of, a girl who lived in a dorm room down the hall from me interrupted whatever lame ice breaker had us standing across from each other in a circle, to say, “I used to be just like you. Then I had a mental breakdown. Like, put me in the hospital breakdown. But, I’m not like that now. I’m better.” I had looked at her, to see who the target of this ridiculous, Day One insight was and saw that that person was me. Starting university generally, and Frosh Week specifically, was overwhelming for me. I am an introvert, so this makes sense. Aspects of all of that that make some thrive and be thrilled made me recoil. Meeting so many new people. Being forced to play so many inane games. Fielding so many ‘opportunities’ for going to the bar, parties, sports events where I knew no one. Exhausting. These were the first words this person had spoken to me, besides our exchanging names. From the less than 24 hours that I ...

Today was fairly nuts - not scary or health-threatending or anything truly nuts like that - but it rendered me mostly exhausted and bewildered and out of any “parenting - yay!” juice I might otherwise have. The morning brought a grocery trip for a week for a bunch of people with three kids in tow. Usually I have the luxury of only taking one kid (the eager one) on my weekly grocery trip. Today I had the “luxury” of making it more of a family affair. So much so that a man, who had been eyeing up our cacophonous procession from the other end of the aisle as we approached each other, uttered mostly under his breath as we finally passed: “Oh…you’ve got your hands full. Jeezus.” Then later that day, vaccinations for Anna. She has decided she does not like needles since the last nurse who gave her a needle told her to hold very still because we didn’t want the needle breaking off in her arm because of any squirming. Evidence of this dislike: near wall-shaking howling and screaming for a ...

I’ve recently discovered something about my relationship with this middle-aged girl: Somehow, after almost eight years of ownership, I have become mildly allergic to my beagle. I’m pretty quick, so it only took three good instances of me sitting on the “dog’s” ( shudder ) chair and cozying up with the blanket she artfully arranges for herself each day on said chair ( shudder turning to eyes-rolling-with-nostrils-flared ) and then feeling the urge to repeatedly rub my eyes and verily shaking the house with my sneezes to sleuthily cement that conclusion. I did say my beagle, didn’t I? Well, let me tell you, if you happen to be one of the few to whom I have not yet relayed this key info: I did not choose her. She was my birthday present. Tiny and adorable and the best birthday present a husband who always wanted a beagle could give. She is Beatrice: affectionate, smart, bossy, slothful. And mostly a pain in my ass. Maybe it’s my kind-of rural upbringing at play but, wh...