In her opening keynote speech for Blissdom Canada '11, Catherine "herbadmother" Connors challenged the audience to come up with answers to four questions. It has taken me longer than it really should to come up with those answers. Though I understood what Catherine was after – intellectual curiosity, both humble and rigorous, is the key to true wisdom. Applying the same models of scrutiny to connect with honesty and integrity is the key to social media – I felt squeamish.
What would you say if your child came home from school and told you a group of girls had been repeatedly picking on her?
What would you tell your boy if he came downstairs and told you cyber bullies have been harassing him?
What happened when you encountered injustice, cruelty, harassment, or bullying? As a child? As a teen? As an adult? What are you modeling as you help your kids navigate these stormy waters?
This summer we couldn’t make our annual trip to the berry patch.Our winter freezer will be empty of smoothie-ready berries, my February pies will be bereft of the raspberries that give them zing in the soft-apple and hard-pear winter months. But it is not the berries that I will miss most; it is the berry picking itself that will leave a hole in our summer.
The good people at NAOT sent me a new catalogue. I was preparing for a big trip and largely ignoring my own shopping needs because my own shopping needs seemed entirely secondary to emptying the fridge and getting the dog’s anal glands expressed. Would I consider blogging about some sandals? Shoes I already know and love and for which I would not have to go out and shop? OKAY.
When Erica challenged me to “put a blog where my mouth was”, I agreed because I wanted to try to speak the truths I felt were missing around me. I agreed because I felt blogging was an opportunity to step into the chasm that opens between writing publicly and failing privately and to try to take an honest look around at the dangling roots and the long shadows. It is why I continually try to poke at the cultural gap between the “yummy” and the “mummy” and it is why I strive to speak honestly about the mess.
I am from the prickly shelter of chestnut trees and stern stone houses built to weather the cold. I am from Colour TV and square fading baby pictures with dogs and cats and horses in every one.
I am from half way up the mountain with bicycles on the sidewalk and back doors unlocked. I am from dreams of escape beneath a Holly Hobby quilt, from kitchen haircuts and homemade corduroy dresses I secretly loved, from long trips in wood-paneled family wagons to far flung stony shores.
There was a movie I watched years ago with my boyfriend. Harrison Ford stars as a husband desperately searching the alleys and apartments of Paris with a punk ingénue for a sidekick/pawn as he tears apart the city looking for his missing wife. He’s intent, rumpled, equal parts angry and confused. He doesn’t speak French but he tries urgently to get the police to believe that his wife wouldn’t just disappear. They shrug, roll their eyes, raise their Gallic eyebrows at the pretty young thing and imply that wives do this sort of thing all the time. Especially in Paris.
There are certain things which seem like a good idea at the time, but which are, in fact or in the clear light of day, not a good idea at all. For example:
Painting bedroom walls the colour of ruby slippers without first doing a sample test
A third pina colada
The do-absolutely-no-exercise-and-get-super-fit ab sculpting belt advertised on late night TV
Every time the doors close behind us, it is like walking into a tropical exhalation, the humidity, a thickness I gratefully enter, shedding layers, feeling my skin relax and my curiosity awaken. It is a refuge we regularly seek out. That afternoon though, the air was filled with living confetti, a vivid blue butterfly landed on my daughter’s shoulder. Iridescent, it perched, fluttering, soft as a blink. We had come to visit the tropical rainforest room on the day of the butterfly emergence.
