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.
Fred, Chris, Alex, I love you. 🙂
…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.
In each of us the idea of it is cradled, warm and glowing. It’s something we wish for, something we strive for, something we hope to behold and to create. For each of us there is a singular nuance that we recognize and when we see it, or hear it, touch it, taste it or even smell it we know. It lights up a part of our brain like nothing else can.
It is beauty.
It moves us, it inspires us. It comes in so many forms. I remember once, I had taken an overnight flight from England back home so I had been up all day the day before and because of the time change and having to look after my kids… let’s just say I was exhausted. In this state, I was in the car for some reason and the song ‘Comfortably Numb’ came on the radio. I sat and listened to the entire thing. It wasn’t until the guitar solo at the end when I started to bawl my eyes out, positive that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. …at least since I saw Pink Floyd live so many years before that.
How do you describe something that, to you, is so beautiful that it makes you cry? By giving it life. Like the gritty, piercing of David Gilmour’s guitar crawling up the back of my neck and wrapping me in a warm blanket of pure, ear-splitting devastation.
By giving an inanimate object a soul we can not only describe what we see but how it makes us feel.
Sakura
I see a delicate cherry blossom, known only to spring. It signifies both the brilliance and the swiftness of life and all its glory, for it comes and goes, so very quickly.
Beauty can be defined in so many different ways. For some of us it is in a face, in the sound of children’s laughter. For some it is home and the aroma of freshly baked cookies or the comfort of a roaring fire on a cold winter night. For some it is the exquisite line, where pain and ecstasy meet – the drop of blood, the single tear shed for love.
Beauty is one of only many things that move us, that make us want to write or to articulate our emotions in other ways. To be able to elicit in others the emotion that comes from our deepest most precious place where we know things such as beauty is a gift. It’s one that I hope to practice and somehow, perfect.
Seems one of the neighbourhood’s kitties has gone missing.
Mmmm…reward….
Seriously, check out the reward.
Do you think I can pass off Thomas as their missing cat?
Thomas the feral cat
There’s a bottle of wine in it for me if I can pull it off.
In other news, I’m afraid to go into my front garden in case there is black and white cat hair littering the ground around my daffodil.
Speaking of flowers, we have some!
Here’s to spring!
Cheers all!
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. 😛
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?
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.
It seems the man-eating daffodil from last week didn’t eat the neighbourhood feral cat after all.
Thomas the feral cat
The kids call him Thomas. I don’t know if anyone has actually been close enough to pick him up to see if he rattles; maybe he’s more a Thomasina. Here s/he is picking through the remnants that the garbage man left on the side of the road. Many of the neighbours leave food and water out for him/her, but I guess old habits die hard.
The daffodils are doing well so it seems spring is, in fact, here.
Stalking daffodil
You can see the dangerous daffodil in the background on the left in this picture. I still don’t trust it.
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.
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?
Coffee. There will always be coffee.
So it’s not really ON my paper route – I took these pictures in my own front yard. But I was on my way home from my paper route, so I’ve decided this counts.
My perennial weeds
I just wanted documentation that spring is coming. It is! And soon I’ll be able to leave my winter coat at home.
Gotcha!
Doesn’t it look like this daffodil is about to attack? I haven’t seen the neighbourhood feral cat in a few days….
I was having a discussion with a friend on Facebook this morning about why a real human being can feel sadness over a fictional character. Another of his friends stated that it’s because the writer has done a good job. But is it really only that?
When I create a character, the first thing I come up with is a mental image. With that image comes nuances in dress, movement and speech patterns. From there, especially from the speech patterns, I begin to see where they live, how they grew up and what brought them to the place where I insert them into a story. With all this information they take on a life of their own and from there on in, I become more of a spectator in their world than the person directing them. I may know where they will eventually end up, but how they get there depends entirely on how their life has evolved to put them in my story in the first place.
I wish I could remember where I read it, (and if you know or even better if someone reading this was the one who said it first PLEASE take credit for it!) but something that affected me profoundly was the statement that, (paraphrasing) “if the characters I create become real, then I feel very bad for what I put them through in my story.” I do think the characters I create have an existence somewhere in the world. Call me crazy. But this very thing is what makes it possible to relate to them, and why a reader can be happy for them or grieve for them.
Getting back to my original point, I don’t entirely take credit for having done a good job when my readers feel for my characters. They tell my stories – I’m just along for the ride. They have, as I do, their own private thoughts, and their own private world.
lindaghill.com 