Life in progress

Tag Archives: family


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Shhh! Don’t Tell!

I’m an excellent person for keeping secrets. Unfortunately, I’m a horrible liar. Unless it comes to my mother, in which case I’ve been practicing since I was four and had it down to an art by the time I was a teenager, I blush, I look the other way, I avoid eye contact… I do everything in the book that will show anyone with an ounce of observational skills that I’m not telling the truth.

Is it a good idea to entrust a bad liar with a secret? If the person you’re confiding in knows your deepest darkests, and they also know, say, your spouse, do you hope that somehow they will suddenly find the ability to not blush, or simply avoid your loved ones lest they give you away?

I’m finding myself confronted with these issues, not in real life, but because of my writing. My plot is so thick with secrets at the moment, that not only am I having a hard time keeping track of who knows what, but I’m finding it difficult to not give things away to my reader.

I actually studied the body language of people who are lying, just so that I could write a more believable liar. In this, I’ve found the perfect way to tell when my kids aren’t telling the truth, and how I, myself, can become a better liar.

But back to telling secrets. Everyone has them, whether they’re big like infidelity or small like you think someone looks horrible in their favourite suit. Fibbing is a necessity when it comes to secrets. Secrets in fiction can be the backbone of a story.

Can a person who is a bad liar even have secrets? I sometimes feel as though I’m an open book, for all to see. Maybe that’s why secrets are prevalent in my fiction – practice for real life. I’m puzzling it out on paper.

Do you suffer with this dilemma, either in fiction or in real life with yourself or someone you confide in?

Tell me. Tell me your secrets. I won’t tell anyone, promise. 😉


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10,000

I’m finding it difficult to come up with something trivial to post here today, when in the Philippines so many are feared dead.

There have been too many natural disasters to count, far too many innocent lives.

It boggles the mind.


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It’s Official

As of today, two of my children are adults. My middle son turned 18 today.

It’s really strange for me. I know I’ve said it before, but I’m in a unique position. I can watch him shave his face, reach up to hug him because he’s so much taller than I am, and yet I bought him Lego to unwrap today – the contradiction being because he is severely autistic.

I feel sad that he isn’t like his older brother – thinking about moving in with his girlfriend. I don’t know that he’ll ever have one.  But at the same time I am, very very slightly, content that for a while longer I will be able to watch over him.

A very happy birthday to you, Chris.

Chris

I love you very much.


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Post-Hallowe’en Indulgence

I have a love/hate relationship with Hallowe’en.

I’m in a unique, somewhat unenviable position of having a child who enjoys trick-or-treating but doesn’t eat – all of his meals are administered through a tube. So while he’s at school, I must either hide the candy or eat it.

indulgence

Though I do my best to resist temptation while indulging in my second love (after my kids) of writing, as they say, resistance is futile. After all, what better way to pass the time whilst NaNoing than eat sweets?

Thank goodness for running around the mall doing Christmas shopping in December, eh?


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All for the Cause

It’s Movember again and time to raise awareness for men’s health issues. Last month we wore pink ribbons for breast cancer.

I find it strange: when I was a kid there were no colourful ribbons, nor were there people shaving or not shaving to make others pay attention to their cause.

Now I’m not knocking anyone who decides to put themselves or their adornments out there to attempt to raise money or simply let everyone know what they’re fighting for; far from it. In fact, it makes me feel bad that I don’t have the resources to help out everyone.

But that’s the thing. It’s because there are so many different causes that foundations have sprung up, that ribbons are being worn, etc. because every one of them wants to be noticed.

Were diseases just not talked about years ago? Was research played down? Or is it that horrible diseases are so prevalent now, disabling and killing off our populations that our governments can’t keep up with the demand, and so the public must find a way to pay for the fix themselves?

The logical, dispassionate side of me wonders if it is the earth’s way of depopulating and renewing itself. The paranoiac side of me wonders at the possibility that the governments have a hand in it…  One way or another, it is natural selection – survival of the fittest.

But neither of these scenarios slow us down. We will always fight for what we believe in. Whether we are acting as survivalists or puppets, we can only do what we can to save those we love from the ravages of disease. I’ll be thinking of that, every time I see a ‘tache this month.


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Above and beyond

Good Saturday morning! I hope everyone is having a nice weekend, particularly those who don’t have to work. If you have a regular 9-5, you shouldn’t be working today, right? Then again…

I was reading the paper (it’s become a habit now, since I did my challenge) and was struck by an article in the entertainment section about Jared Leto and his loss of 30+ pounds for the sake of his role in the upcoming movie, “Dallas Buyers Club.” You can see his picture here. It’s really quite shocking.

Reading this lead me to think about what we do for our jobs. Sure there are some of us who flatly refuse to wander outside our job description, but at some point I think we’ve all been in a position where we’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty for what we do for a living. Some of us do it all the time.

My own job, as a stay-at-home mom is 24/7. You might say being on call all the time IS part of my job description, and it is. But at the same time, I didn’t go into it with the expectation that I was going to be in it alone.

His Majesty

His Majesty, for whom I slave night and day

 

And speaking of my ex, over the last ten years he has been working at a few different retail chains as manager. Budgets in these places always seem to be a concern, according to him, and he is constantly having to work overtime so as not to tax the budget by having to pay employees – he is on salary.

I’d be interested to hear what you do that is ‘above and beyond.’ Come on, toot your own horn. After all, it’s rare that we get any appreciation from all we do, isn’t it?


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And so the true paranoia sets in

I had no idea that it was a ‘thing,’ but apparently, with senile dementia comes paranoia. As my mother ages I’m thinking more and more that I need to research the stages, before she goes through them.

Last night she told be that she had been talking to her sister, six years her senior, on the phone and that her sister is losing her mind. My mother loves to complain about anything, but when it comes to her siblings, nothing has ever been more delightful to her than being superior to them. Being an only child I can only assume that this is a result of early childhood bullying, or simply being told what to do, since my mother is the youngest of five.

Anyway, she was gleefully informing me about how her sister had related the same thing story times in the space of five minutes, and then the subject of my mother’s apartment came up. To backtrack a bit, before my mom moved to town, I lived in her apartment since I hadn’t found a place of my own. Her apartment came available on the market, so I bought it. Then when her old house sold, she bought my house and I moved out of her apartment the day she moved in. Confused yet? Just keep going.

She forgets that she came to visit me when I lived in her apartment. She swears up and down that she never saw the place before the day she moved in. When I tried to remind her last night, she not only denied it, she told me that I was the one who was losing my mind, not her – she’s obviously worried about it even if she won’t admit it.

What really got under my skin, and is worrying me, is that she accused me of saying she saw her apartment before she moved in just to make her think she is going crazy – like I’m doing it maliciously.

I’m getting close to the point where I’m going to have to move her into a place where she can have assisted living. Not a nursing home, necessarily, but a retirement home at least. She wants to move in with me, but I just can’t handle it. My children have to come first, as well as my own health. She is just too much work.

I’m just afraid if I wait too much longer, she’ll think I hate her. This paranoia thing is really scary.


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16/16 – Yesterday’s News – The Orange Box

It’s my last day to report on what inspired me from the previous day’s newspaper, and I must say, it has been a challenge. I may start again after NaNoWriMo is finished – then again I may take a break. I’d rather not try to make plans that far in advance.

On my final day here then, I’d like to talk about the orange box. Being that it’s Hallowe’en, you might assume that it’s related in some way to the holiday, but it isn’t.

The orange box is being introduced in my city to go alongside the blue box, for recycling paper, plastic and tin, and the green bin for compost. What is the orange box for, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t ask and I’m the only one just finding out about it…) It’s for electronic recycling.

How, you may ask, (and this time you really may be asking) has recycling inspired me to write a blog post? I got to thinking about what we consume. Throwing away something electronic was something we used to do maybe every five years, if not ten. Years ago, things lasted longer not only because they were built better, but because they didn’t go out of style as fast. In my house right now, however, I have five old-style computer monitors, four computers – the oldest has a 5 1/4″ floppy drive – one ancient laptop, and one old tv set, not to mention numerous broken cellphones, VCR’s and DVD players. All of the monitors still work, but what else am I to do with them but throw them away?

Having written all that down (and I’m shocked), I realize that the time has come when we need such a thing as an orange box. Still, it makes you think, doesn’t it? All this junk we’re getting rid of into landfills and that which goes up in smoke to pollute our air – where are we going to live when it all takes over?

Here’s to the original, organic orange box. May one light up your Hallowe’en!

orange


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10/16 – Yesterday’s News – Caring

moon

The article in yesterday’s newspaper that caught my eye was about a community group which takes disabled adults (over age 16) on outings. The sentence in the article that sparked my interest in particular said, “Without our programs, some of these individuals would be staying at home so it helps reduce the risk of isolation for the parents and caregivers as well as the participants.”  That got me thinking.

The first thing that comes to my mind when someone mentions ‘caregiver’s isolation’ is simply the fact that when they’re stuck at home caring for someone who is disabled, they just don’t go out. But it goes so far beyond that.

As a parent of disabled children I find it hard to have discussions with parents of “normal” children, because we have so little in common. Even people who aren’t parents of kids the same age as mine (for instance, if they’re grown up and moved out) have a hard time relating to me. Whether they assume because my kids aren’t like theirs, they can’t possibly have any of the same tendencies, or whether they’re afraid of being told that their problems can’t possibly be as bad as mine, I”m not sure. Maybe it’s both. Therefore, I try not to talk about myself much. When they are kind enough to ask me about myself, no matter how nonchalant I am about the way I live, telling anyone about my kids is a slow death towards being a conversation stopper. Occasionally they’ll mention a niece, or a neighbour who has a similar circumstance, or they’ll ask me questions about the health of my children, but when I’ve said all there is to say, if I don’t quickly find something other than the weather to talk about, (and it’s always up to me to find something, because no one knows quite where to go after being told about my kids) then it’s game over. In fact, come to think of it, it shuts people up about as fast as telling a stranger I’m writing a novel. Think about that for a while.

Having said all that, I’ve been invited out tonight with my next door neighbour and six of her closest friends for dinner, none of whom I have met before. As long as I can keep the conversation away from my kids, I should be fine. But of course someone is bound to ask me what I do for a living…

My point is, the isolation parents and caregivers of the disabled experience isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as it sounds. So next time you come across a single, stay-at-home mom of disabled children, or a novelist for that matter, don’t be afraid to look beyond what’s apparent.


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My Baby is a Teenager

Ah, the innocent narcissism of a child. Not to be confused with the pathological sickness found in some adults, we are born with a strong sense of self-preservation, and it’s not until we grow that we realize our own needs aren’t all there are. I wonder where we cross over. Is it the first time we see our own mother cry? Somewhere, somehow, compassion becomes a part of our psyche, and that’s where the narcissism of childhood ends.

However, on days like today nothing matters to my son, Alex, except Alex. My baby turns thirteen years old today and he’s extremely proud of himself. It’s delightful to me to see him bask in his own glow. It was beyond my wildest dreams when he was born that he’d ever reach this milestone, and so I’m happy to make his every wish come true.

Alex 'n' Me (1)

Alex ‘n’ Me

Four foot two, and sixty pounds, he’s a dynamo of enthusiasm and love for everyone around him. In his mind he is as small as his frail physique; as much as his physical age is telling him he needs independence, he still comes to mom for cuddles when something hurts. He retains that childish innocence – that me me me mindset, and yet he’ll pat me lovingly on the cheek if I say I have a headache.

I have no idea how long his childishness will last… I have no idea what to expect of tomorrow, but I do know one thing:  Today, nothing matters but my baby.