Life in progress

Category Archives: Parenting


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What is it with today?

All day, all this weird shit has been going on.

First my debit card was compromised – I lost almost $200 and would have lost more had I had more money in the account. When I called the bank the first thing they asked me was, ‘Were you in Puerto Plata yesterday?’ to which I replied ‘HA! I wish’. Anyway, they apparently tried 4 times to withdraw $200 from my account.

Second I get to the dentist’s office to pay my son’s bill for three teeth to be filled – $618. When I asked my ex to pitch in he simply told me he’s broke.  *sigh* …and I’m not. HA! again.

Third, I get home to find I’m apparently NOT a mother and so Mother’s Day didn’t apply to me – see the last comment on my About page.

Fourth, I was sitting in my living room and at exactly the same time my laptop shut itself off and my cellphone came on…except the cellphone doesn’t have a sim card in it. I just keep it around to set alarms on.

Fifth, I’ve tried 3 times to put a link code to my About page in this post and it keeps screwing up.

Is there a sun spot I’m unaware of?

I just…

Is it just me?


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Yes, yes, I know it’s Mother’s Day

As much as I want to wish all the moms out there a Happy Mother’s Day *waves to you all* I’d like to say something else.

Happy children’s day.

Because without them we wouldn’t be blessed with the privilege of being called a mom.

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Fred, Chris, Alex, I love you. 🙂


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To pseud or not to pseud

…that is the question. What’s in a name after all? It’s something by which you are instantly recognized. But which one of you do you want recognized… I think that’s really what it comes down to.

We all have different personas for different occasions. To my children’s teachers I am nothing but a dedicated mother. To my readers, a sage. (Stop laughing.  Oh okay laugh. It was a joke.)  But seriously, I am myself. I am a woman who has never, on a regular basis, worn makeup. What you see with me is what you get. And yet few of the people in my real life understand where my imagination goes.

This post was brought about by the fact that, after a rather questionable fic I wrote last night, I lost a follower on my fiction blog. Whether it was someone who went ‘Ewww, what am I reading?!’ and clicked unfollow or whether it was someone who deleted their blog (a robot perhaps?) I have no idea. But it got me to thinking. My writing covers many different things. I’ve written a children’s book which is currently being illustrated by a friend and most certainly will go out to a publisher under a pseudonym. The stories I tend to enjoy writing however, go from humorous (my Second Seat on the Right series ) to perverted ( Beauty ) to horror (see a short story entitled ‘Reaper’) and of course the psychologically horrific Boy Series on this blog.

I understand that it’s probably important to write under different names for different genres. My biggest concern, however, is protecting those I love from the depths of my imagination, not only for what they would think (I believe they already suspect a great deal anyway – case in point, my eighteen year old son telling me I’m a sick fuck) but also for what the people my kids have to deal with on a daily basis – what are they whispering about mom?

Having been married a number of times I’ve been through a few aliases in my life, to the point where the hardest part of filling out an application form for something was deciding on my surname. My kids don’t even have the same last name as I do, and to this day you wouldn’t find me under Linda Hill in the phone book. But it was the name I was born with and the name I’ve chosen to stick with from now on, no matter what.

Unless I don’t.DSC00191


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Another week, another… seriously?

photo credit - Wikipedia

photo credit – Wikipedia

Friday evening is here, the kids are home for the second weekend in a row (their dad is supposed to take them every other weekend but apparently, work) and I’m fighting a chest/nasal infection. I went to the doctor and he asked me, “So, you have a chest infection?” – information he got from his secretary who asked me what colour my phlegm is – to which I replied, “yes”. He listened to my chest in four different places, through my shirt AND my bra strap and within 30 seconds I was walking out the door, the prescription faxed directly to my pharmacy from the doctor’s desk.

Yeah.

So I get home from the pharmacy and take two of these little yellow miracle pills and lo and behold I can speak again! For the first time in a week I don’t feel as though I’m going to cough up a lung sometime in the next few moments. Unfortunately the side effects may include death.

I hope my ex will get the hell off his ass and come and get the kids if that tiny little detail that the doctor, in his infinitesimal (no, that doesn’t mean infinite) wisdom, failed to inform me, comes to pass.

Then again maybe the run-on sentences will get me first. 😛


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Wait! Why are you running away? – how to look like a really bad parent in public

I was sitting in a Tim Horton’s enjoying a sandwich and a coffee the first time it happened. My then seven year old son sat across the table from me, smiling and flirting with the ladies as per usual. One of his new admirers (he has many) asked him from an adjacent table if he wanted one of her crackers. She must have felt sorry for him – there I was eating and he had nothing, not a drink nor food. Since he’s Deaf, I answered for him.

“He doesn’t eat,” I said with a smile.

It was all I could do not to laugh at her incredulous glare. I’m sure she wanted to ask me if I was nuts. She went back to her soup and completely ignored him for the rest of the time we were there, despite the fact that he was smiling and waving at her, trying to get her attention back.

My son Alex, up to that point had never eaten or drank a thing in his life. You see the tube in his nose in the picture?

Alexsmile

He now has one implanted permanently in his belly. Why didn’t I just give the woman in the Tim Hortons that little bit of information? Let me tell you a story.

When he was about six months old I took him for a couple of hours out of the hospital  that he called home for the first eight months of his life. I decided to take him to the mall since I wouldn’t have made it home and back before he had to feed again. I couldn’t leave the hospital, however, without equipment. Attached to his tiny body was a heart monitor. I went into the lady’s washroom to change him and a woman came up behind me to see him. She saw the monitor and asked what it was. When I told her I was graced with an expression of absolute terror and, no word of a lie, she ran from the washroom. THAT is precisely why I don’t tell people about his feeding tube.

Fast forward to when he was eight. I took him, my boyfriend at the time and a friend out of town in the car. I was driving and the friend, who knew sign language was sitting in the back seat with Alex. They were chatting and also sharing an orange – that is to say she was eating the orange and he was sucking on the rinds. For some reason he found them more appealing. (No, I’m not apologizing for that. HA!)

Anyway, we decided to stop at a KFC on the highway. As usual, we all got our food except for Alex. Two things you need to know at this point: Alex loves to suck on chicken bones, just so he can pretend he’s actually eating something and he is a clean freak, which means he HAS to be the one to throw everything in the garbage. So there the three of us sat, happily watching Alex flirt with a restaurant absolutely packed with people, suck on bare chicken bones and clean up after us. It was the general consensus that we should have brought the orange peels in for our little slave, for good measure.

The moral of this story is, if you see a kid in a restaurant not eating but seemingly having a good time, it’s probably best not to try to interfere.


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Sundays

I remember Sundays BK (before kids) as a day when I woke up in the summer to hear lawnmowers going and the scent of freshly cut grass wafting through my window. I remember waking up and going downstairs to retrieve the Sunday Sun and laying in bed with my first husband, reading the paper and thinking about coffee.

I remember Sundays of watching movies on tv and spending my day on a knitting project or going for quiet walks or long drives: destination no where in particular. Maybe for ice cream. I remember laying in bed in the spring and seeing the new buds on the trees outside my window.

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But that was all BK.

Now my Sundays are filled with cooking for the family, cleaning, entertaining a little guy with an unlimited amount of busyness about him. Sundays are about breaking up fights between my elderly mother and my young son. Sundays are about sleeping in until 6:30 if I’m lucky.

The one thing I can still hold on to?

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Coffee. There will always be coffee.


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Call me weird

This may be strange – it’s something I’ve never talked to anyone about before – but once in a while I kind of sit back from myself.  Hmmm…no, that’s not right.  (Maybe this is why I’ve never talked about it before.) Try again.  Sometimes I look at my life and wonder how I got here.  By here I mean in this house, in this town, with these people I live with. I guess that’s the strange part about it. ‘These people’ I live with are two of my kids. Of course I know ‘these people’ – I gave birth to them. …wow, right? I am responsible for the existence of ‘these people’!

Anyway, this is something I’ve done over and over again in my life. Just sat back and looked at where I am and what brought me here…living with my kids.

For the first time in the years I’ve been doing this however, this morning I did it and it scared me. I realized that this is what dementia must feel like.  How did I get here? Who are these people? That there might come a time when I can’t smile and answer those questions for myself – that there might be a time when I’m asking these questions for real…

I think I have a new appreciation for what it must be like to have Alzheimer’s Disease.

But am I weird for doing this in the first place? Or does everyone do this once in a while?


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Unparalleled grief

goes on

Flowers for Aaron

Down the street from me lives a lady. I see her often, sitting on her front porch, when I’m going by on my paper route. Occasionally I stop to talk to her – she has a grandmotherly attachment to Alex, my son. In the summer she gives him popsicles.  She never fails to ask me how he is if he’s not with me.

In early January she lost her husband quite suddenly. She has family, two daughters who live with their own families not too far away, who were very supportive, taking her where she needed to go since the driver in the household passed away. When I talked to her about the passing of her husband she seemed to have made peace with the idea that he was in a better place. He left her to live alone with her disabled son.

Today, when I came to her house I stopped to talk and she asked me, ‘Did you hear?’

‘Hear what?’ I asked.

‘My son passed away last week…’ she told me.

Tears came to my eyes before I could stop them, causing hers to flow as well.

Her son was an adult. He had been sick for the past two weeks and was unable to fight it off.  His heart gave out. He was born with a heart defect much like my Alex was.

No parent should outlive their child. I’ve said this again and again and yet, it happens.  How can life go on after that?

How?


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How comments can hurt

It didn’t start as a comment directed at me, but it bothered me nonetheless. The discussion was about a situation in which a man, with a disabled wife and a small child had taken a weekend ‘off’ to visit with friends and came home to find his wife had died. The comment, on a friend’s journal, stated that the commenter couldn’t understand why, if the man loved his family at all, he would need a weekend away from them.

I am a single mother of two disabled kids with whom I live alone. I love them more than anything in the world – but I need time off! By the time their father’s scheduled weekend with them comes around, which is supposed to be every two weeks but is more often not until the third weekend, I’m all but pulling out my hair. Loving them doesn’t preclude the work that’s required to look after their every need, nor does it make up for the fact that I don’t get any more than five hours of sleep a night when they’re here.

Back to the comment: I tried to explain to the girl who made it that it’s not that clear cut – that there are many things that go into the care of the disabled and the very young. She came back to say that she knows – and that she looks after her disabled parents. I fail to see the parallel. In the end I got the last word, telling her that she is a better person than I am.

It’s probably the way the conversation was left that bothers me the most. That I couldn’t make her see I’m not a terrible person and that I don’t not love my kids because I need time to myself to recharge and re-align my emotions, still sits badly with me.

It makes me wonder whether people out there with different problems than I have are just reluctant to look deeper into the difficulties of others or if they simply don’t care to try. It’s this ‘it’s not my problem so you must be doing something wrong to make it yours’ attitude that worries me. At the same time I hope they are never put into my situation, a little part of me hopes they are. Not very altruistic, but there you go. Sentiment breeds like sentiment.


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What’s in a plan

I remember back in high school being asked where I thought I’d be and what I could imagine I’d be doing with my life in the year 2000. There was no way I could have predicted that I’d be living in the province of Quebec by that time but I was. I remember thinking I’ll have 3 kids because that’s what my mother says my hand is telling me – not palm reading exactly but counting the small lines in between the bigger creases in your fist where your baby finger meets your hand. Try it. Is it right? Somehow I doubt it if you’ve got five or more children. But I digress.

My thought for today is that speculation is really useless. Take the bombing in Boston for instance. There, right there, is proof that no one can predict what might happen in the next few seconds, let alone the next 20 years. (Yes, I’m dating myself.)

Having said that, all three of my children were born in the province of Quebec, and yes, they were all born by the end of 2000. But how many things might have happened to change that in the years between?

Do you ever think about what you’ll be doing in 20 years? I suggest you check your fist…

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