Tag: Life changes

Can you imagine, momma?

When I lived with my mum we talked about a lot of things: old boyfriends, jobs, sex, politics, family, cancer, growing up in the Maritimes.

Strangely, the one thing we didn’t talk about was death. Maybe because it was always just there, hanging about our day to day. Curling the corners of all other conversations, colouring our lives with the faintest, but most discernible of hues.

I can remember one night sitting in her kitchen. It was the beginning of October and while we could feel the faint scratch of autumn’s fingertips, we still laughed as we turned on her little electric fireplace.

My mother sat with her tiny frame engulfed in an oversized white knit sweater, her hand loosely curled around a glass of red wine.

“If you don’t have children, that’s totally fine with me,” she said. “You and Marc don’t have to have a baby.”

I had been talking to her about the fact that I didn’t know if I wanted to have kids, and the fact that I was struggling with my indecision. I had always assumed that as I got older something would just click inside of me and I would suddenly want to have a baby.

“That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?” I asked her. “How you knew you wanted kids?”

My mother nodded as she tried to work out of a piece of food from her teeth. “I just woke up one day and knew I wanted a baby. That it was something I needed in my life,” she said.

“See?” I said. “That’s what I’m looking for.”

I shifted in my seat as I told her that my waffling was also something that worried me in terms of my relationship with Marc. How my husband definitely wanted kids, and when we got married, I had assured him that it was something that would happen – not right away, but yes, definitely, someday.

But there I was, early thirties, still hoping for that “a ha!” moment that I had been so sure would happen when I made him those promises – to spend the rest of my life with him, and that our life would at some point include another little life that we would make together.

“I worry about what it could do to us,” I told her. “If I end up not wanting kids.”

She looked at me with her discerning eye, before taking a sip of her wine.

“It’s something you’ll get through,” she offered. “But as I said – I can imagine it.”

I didn’t have a response to this. I just shifted in my seat, again, hoping that perhaps I could adjust my discomfort as easy as I could my body.

What is funny – and completely devastating – about this memory and conversation with my mother, is that I can without a doubt pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that I wanted – nay, needed – to have a child.

It was four days after she had been admitted to the hospital. Marc and I were driving back from her house to spend the afternoon and evening with her. I was in the passenger side of the car – her car – and I felt a sudden surge of grief pour over and through me.

These emotional tsunamis had been happening since I first received a text from my sister at 5:40 in the morning telling me an ambulance was on its way.

Most of the time it would feel as though I was going to explosively vomit up my heart. Like my skin was a gaping wound, my entire body over. Like the only thing I could possibly do was cry and scream at the entire ugly, stupid world until I turned to dust.

But this time, instead, I just looked down. I looked down into my lap and there, in my hands, saw the entirety of my love for my mother.

A tangible, pulsing, incandescent love.

Its warmth soothing my broken skin, its strong beat calming the mania of my heart.

And that was it.

That’s when I knew. That there was no other option but to put that love somewhere, into a tiny little life, made by Marc and me.

And then I cried. Great, heaping tears of love and loss – of the greatest happiness, of my boundless relief and a most infinite sadness.

They are the same tears I shed when wee Elanor Marie was welcomed by the world last August. When we now dance together, slowly in the early afternoon sun. When she reaches for my face as I kiss her cheeks and ears and lips and eyes.

When I watch as she marvels at the wide world over.

When I wish with all of my heart that my mum could be here.

That she could imagine all of this, too.

Rub-a-dub-dub, one maid in a tub

Somewhere along the way I started to like baths.

Now.

First, please, do not conflate baths with bathing. I think I have committed to the record enough times my utter obsession with cleanliness that there should be no mistake on anyone’s part to that of which I write – however, it is always best to err on the side of caution when it comes to these things, lest I be construed as some sort of horribly unwashed miscreant, who only now, in her thirtieth year, has come to appreciate a good scrub-a-dub.

No.

I have always, always loved to be clean.

What I haven’t always loved is one method to which this purity might be achieved.

Chiefly – baths.

I’ve even written a pair of entries chronicling my distaste for sitting in bathtubs, long waxing eloquent on how easily overheated one becomes just lying there, awash in your own filth and sweat; how horribly hard it is to read in that semi-reclined position, and never really knowing what to do with your hands, as they slowly freeze to death while the rest of your body steams itself alive.

(Honestly, you can imagine how surprised I am that Whirlpool has never scooped me up to do all of their advertising copy writing.)

However, this summer I had a horrible biking accident wherein I almost ran over a four-year old boy, and in my attempt not to take his life, I ended up taking a few years off of mine. I shredded my left arm and leg, and took a very scary knock to my head that once again reinforced my absolute infatuation with my helmet.

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Overall, I was left pretty shaken up.

The utter worst of it all was the fact that my skin was not just a grated mess, but one chock-a-block full of gravel and dirt (beautifully mixed in with my literal blood, sweat, and tears) which meant that as soon as I arrived home I was sent straight to the bath to soak my wounds in epsom salts and self-pity.

And how did I ever endure the full-body sting.

But, strange as it might seem, it was that summer afternoon, spent in that incredibly vulnerable position (there really can be nothing more helpless than sitting nude in the bath, your body a kind of delayed sunset – as it slowly changes colours at different times and paces – wracked with pain, and overcome with astonishment at how life can and should never be taken for granted) that I realized with surprise:

“Wow. This is actually kind of pleasant.”

I didn’t really think much of it until two days ago when I arrived home after a very long and very tiring twenty-five kilometer run into Vancouver. Arriving at Granville Island I was a perfect mixture of happiness, awe, and trepidation. The mercury that day was hovering just above freezing, and I knew that I was probably going to get chilled on my way home, no matter how quickly I made it to transit. Just walking to skytrain I had to keep rubbing my hands on the back of my neck, as I could feel the slow sting of the cold creep into each one of my fingers.

On transit I listened to music and cursed Translink – the one time I had hoped for an extra-heated train car seemed to the one time it would not be available.

When I arrived back in New Westminster I spent the last of my energy reserves to run home, sticking to the sunniest sides of the streets, taking short, quick strides, and hoping that my tired muscles wouldn’t balk at the steep hill that marks the way back to our house.

The only thing I could think of the entire time was the piping hot bath (complete with epsom salts) that I was going to take as soon as I walked through the front door.

Two steps into the living room and I was already disrobing, throwing my sweat (and now frost-ridden) clothes into the laundry basket. I turned on the radio in the kitchen, grabbed a fresh towel from the linen closet, and turned on the faucet.

It was all I could do to not climb in then and there (but the cool porcelain of an un-filled tub would probably have killed me) and I was not about to expire after twenty-five kilometers in my recovery bath.

The water was wonderful, and my time in the tub left me feeling light, limber, and completely rejuvenated for the rest of the day. I slept like a baby that night, and the next day was able to run a fast 5k and bike eight.

So it came to nobody’s surprise (myself being nobody here – call me Odysseus just this once) that after this morning’s fog-ridden, freezing run I found myself once again not only sitting square in my bathtub, but reading at that.

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I honestly don’t know what to say.

I guess people really do change.

So to everyone whom I resoundingly ridiculed over the last sixteen years of my (now ended) bathlessness – I apologize, and beg of your forgiveness.

I was wrong.

I embrace bathing (in the context of sitting in a bath, by myself, washing my physical and metaphorical wounds.)

But don’t even try me on hot tubs.

I’ll need another fifteen years to even consider them.