mama monday: hope

One of the hardest commodities to hold on to while trying to conceive is hope.  I guess the same is true of any situation where the outcome is just out of reach - whether hoping to be hired, or hoping to be accepted, or hoping for healing, or hoping to find someone to spend the rest of your life with.

I once felt hope was cyclical.  It germinated, sprouted, bloomed, and then seemed to curl up and die before it was reborn again.  Over the past year, I've realized that it isn't cyclical at all.  The hope I have today of becoming pregnant is not the hope I had last year, or even last month.  It's stronger, deeper, and truer.  The growth/dormant stages I felt were actually spurts of progress and less obvious progress.  But it was always progress.

On a bad day, I still need my friends around me and I'll sometimes send out an email to ask for prayer (community is so helpful in times of extended hope-a-thons).  On a good day, I feel like my friend Naomi did when she so elegantly quoted these words in response to a piece of music called "Radio Protector" by 65daysofstatic.

I've included it here and recommend listening to it while you read.  The video is an unofficial one, but nonetheless enchanting:



While listening to the crescendo of the song, Naomi mused:

It feels like something's alive inside
Like I have motivation to fix whatever I want to
I have all the hope in the world

...I'm learning what it is to be content
That not everybody needs to know everything
There is beauty in the mystery
There is beauty in things not unveiled

It's not easy to hope.  It takes time and energy and a lot of guts.  But as my wise husband says, "It takes the same effort to worry as it does to have faith."  Worry tears and corrupts and demoralizes and although hope might sometimes feel like an uphill battle, its only goal is to mend and clarify and hearten.  As long as time and energy and guts are required I'd rather be hoping.

And when I'm tempted to give up, I like to remember the words of C.S. Lewis: "There seems no plan because it is all plan".

---

 

Yahweh, Yahweh

Always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh

Still I'm waiting for the dawn

- U2 (Yaweh)

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry,
and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed
to worry about anything whatsoever.”
- Mahatma Ghandi

foto friday: mixed nuts

I promise that this feature is going to pick up soon.  It's just that the company I work for decided to get it on with another company in the States and this week can only be described as administrative-clean-up-from-the-wedding.  But, for now:

Remnants of the filming of Hairspray on Roncesvalles still linger, including this 1960s men's/boys' haircut style guide in the window of a barber shop.  Just another visual aid to further my fantasy of living on the set of Mad Men.

 

 Nothing says class like "Brash & Sassy".

 

Unless, of course, it's shopping at "Ghetto".

I wonder if ancient Rome would believe that one day we'd be selling blinged-out versions of their most gruesome method of execution and wearing it as jewelry.  

 Gifts sent to my boss, who secured the new relationship between Us and Them.  His new title: Elderius Golfius Maximus.

A great new app for my iPhone (OK, it's not new...I'm just behind) called Instagram.  Yet another technological aid to further my fantasy of living on the set of Mad Men.

The practice fire drill we endured this Wednesday.  We're on the 26th floor of our building.  And I was wearing heels.  It's safe to say that if there was a real fire, our corpses would line this stairwell as employees panic and trample each other.

wifercize wednesday: domestic bliss

[Note: this is a post I saved in draft form on October 7th, 2009.  It was left unfinished due to a hunt for the quote at the end of the post - a hunt that took, apparently, AN ENTIRE YEAR.  Fortunately, the post is still true today as it was a full year ago.]


Perhaps it's the change in the season, and that change signaling the long months of hibernation to come. Perhaps it's reading "A Room with a View" recently, with its cozy, early 1900s colloquialisms. Perhaps it's hormones. Perhaps it's age.

I'm just so happy being a wife. Having a home. Sleeping in the same bed, next to my fabulous husband, night after night. After night.

Not ground breaking for you homebodies, but you who suffer from wanderlust? yes, you who are already plotting your next trip? you who can't seem to settle down but rather feel that what you're searching for is Out There? This is for you.

Instead of browsing more travel porn, let me give you a piece of advice. "You may need to see the world in order to find your place in it". That was God's advice to me in 2004, as I was weighing the pros and cons of spending a year in Korea teaching English. I took it as a green light (what traveler wouldn't have?), packed my bags, and spend a fabulous year in Asia.

I spent my 25th birthday on a beach on the coast of South Korea and discovered something: no matter where I was, there I was.  The same fears haunted me, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same desires, the same frustrations.  The only difference was that, on the other side of the world, I was miles away from a hug or a coffee or a kind word with anyone I knew well.  And anyone who knew me well.

It was while in Korea that I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and discovered this quote:

How can I leave that earth?  It is not good to go far from your native village.  Then you forget who you are.

The quote stuck with me, I wrote it out in my journal, it trailed behind me like a cartoon thought bubble for the rest of my time in Korea, it comforted me when I experienced re-entry difficulties back in Toronto, and it still makes me smile today.  My native village turned out to be better than I ever thought it could be.  And I know who I am.

mama monday: healthy competition?

Too many of the blogs written by women trying to conceive only focus on the negative.  Not being pregnant YET.  Not having a family YET.  Not being a mom YET.  The competition with other women who are pregnant can be particularly vicious, which is something that has never made sense to me. 

I'd assume that if one is so keen on babies that one would celebrate babies wherever they are, in any circumstance that they are. 

Pregnancy isn't the only stage on which girls have showdowns.  It's found everywhere from home ownership to home decor to marriage to weddings to relationships to fashion to careers to education and alllllll the way back to the playground.  Girls can be mean.  And usually to each other.

I'd like to take this Mama Monday to celebrate the girls who aren't mean.  The ones that let other girls into their heart, no matter the cost, and keep them there.  The girls who listen as well as speak.  The girls who give the hard advice as much as the easy advice.  And here's to hoping I end up more and more like one of those girls.

Melissa and her hubby, Jon, gave birth to the littlest friend in our group on October 10, 2010 (10/10/10) at 10:15 p.m.  His name is Noah Contstance Börger and although we've been saying hi to him womb-side for 9 months, it's amazing to meet him in person.  He's very, very fortunate to have a mom who doesn't have a mean bone in her body. 

Mama's hello.
Papa's hello.

foto friday: just chillin' at the home show

Someone at Andrew's school gave him free tickets to the National Home Show two weeks ago and since free things get us all excited, we went.

We were consequently quite pleased that we didn't buy tickets.  It's a bit of a bore, lots of exhibits and pamphlet-pushers, and very few booths that we liked.  Still, FREE IS FREE, and we amused ourselves regardless.

Melissa, bless her, came along despite being a week away from giving birth.  Her nesting impulses drove her.  Incidentally, we saw a few booths with art so poorly rendered (Andrew: "I could paint that.  And I don't paint.") that we coerced Melissa into opening a booth next year with some of her awesome art instead.

Just chillin' in my gangsta whirlpool.

Just chillin' with my homeboy, Bob Villa.

Just chillin' with his kristal chandeliers.

Just chillin' in a Japanese full-body massage chair.

Just chillin' in my dream wine cellar.

Just chillin' in the reflection of this helpful sign.

wifersize wednesday: beard, beard, no beard?

In honour of Movember, which is fast approaching, I'd like to outline my feelings on beards.  Or, indeed, facial hair in general.

The fascination with beards began at a tender age.  I'd sit on the edge of the bathtub and observe my dad shave in the bathroom mirror.  Not completely shave, mind you, as it was the height of the 80s and my dad sported a nifty Tom Selleck:

Because he was my dad, I naturally came to the conclusion that mustaches were the embodiment of manliness. I also became acutely aware that girls did not possess the powers of facial hair, since dad's kisses were scratchy and mom's weren't.

My girl friends and I spent high school mocking the peach fuzz that began to encroach on the upper lips of our male peers.  One of my first poems, entitled "Men", was published in the yearbook, much to my delight and my mother's horror, that began with the lines:

men are weird

men grow beards

and pathetic little 'staches

that make them feel 

cool

I fancied a number a few hardly any guys before I dated Andrew, almost all of which exhibited the goatee/soul patch.  I'm not sure when or why I acquired this penchant but I know it began to dwindle at the end of university, which coincided with the height of the metrosexual era.  The equation became: smooth faced boys = desirable. 

Something odd occurred when Andrew and I began our relationship.  He had a goatee at first (which, clearly, since I was so over that I wasn't thrilled about)...and I began to like goatees.  Then he Bic™ shaved once or twice...and I switched back to preferring him clean-shaven.  In spite of my protestation, he grew a full beard to celebrate Movember a few years ago...and I ended up liking that too.  At the end of the month he shaved all but a fat, caterpillar of a mustache that not only reminded me of my dad in the 80s (see above) but also took on a personality of its own as Andrew narrated things like, "The Mustache feels like Chinese food tonight.  The Mustache would like to watch television.  The Mustache made me do it."  Imagine my terror when, at the end of a week, I EVEN LIKED THE HORRIBLE, ANIMATED 80S MUSTACHE.

My theory is this:

I don't care what it is, just as long as it's on him.

Andrew's Italian hair follicles are similar to those of a wild boar - making his smooth face turns spiky by the end of a day, which I adore and is a lovely way to exfoliate.  Plus, his cheek/chin have a lovely way of retaining his yummy scent so I generally spend a lot of time around that area.  It doesn't matter what he's doing - kissing me in return, responding to emails, doing laundry, trying to sleep...  He concedes to my endless kissing as a water buffalo accepts the bird riding on its back.

My poetry matured along with my taste in men, thankfully, and Andrew's scruff inspired one called "Barbed" early on in our dating phase:

like fresh cut grass
on bare feet
his cheek
is ticklish
and pricklish
and delish
my kisses are quick
small skips
on fresh cut grass
it’s my little field of dreams
it’s my little corner lot
it’s my little Brillo pad
more dangerous still
than sandpaper,
though,
are the days
when a razor clears the way
for thoughts too hot to hold
so soft
so smooth
so…
a little barbed wire
to protect a treasure
is not
such
a bad idea

Recently I have fallen for the latest ad campaign from French Connection featuring a handsomely coutured and bearded male model.  Imagine my delight to discover it has made an appearance on our own Bloor Street with the declaration "THIS IS THE MAN.  FEEL LIKE WOLF":

Movember marks a special season in the lives of my gentlemen friends.  They begin to sprout all manners of facial growth, from full beards to Fu Manchus to handlebar mustaches to dirty-French-lip-hair.  My own brother ended up like this last year:

Upon the discovery of PicnicFace's infamous Beard, No Beard Movember madness reached fever pitch.  The possibilities were endless: beard, beard, no beard? beard, beard, MOOOSTACHE.



For further reading, I recommend visiting The Beard Revue which features art inspired by facial hair including this desktop wallpaper and handy legend (click to see larger image):

foto friday:

More amateur photography from my iPhone and me.  We make a pretty good team.  Unless I'm receiving a text.

Yonge Street - the brightest thing on a grey, Toronto day.

This snail mocked me on my recent jog.  I'm pretty sure I heard him say something about chilling out, for heaven's sake.

If you include wings, anything can be an angel costume! 
Even a bathing suit!

A fabulous Indian restaurant,  Shala-Mar, on Roncesvalles.

The bountiful harvest from our garden.  

Manicures/pedicures with the girls.  It took three Vietnamese (one more is looking on) to pull Melissa's jeans back down over her calves.

Our morning greeting from Oberon.  The affection is all for show: he's hungry and cuteness = being fed.

Know when to quit.

This is the outcome of the storefront that promised "Something Awesome".  They delivered on their promise.  Check them out here and here.  Go, Junction, go!

Our latest addiction: Killer Bunnies.  I can't explain it to you. 
Killer Bunnies must be experienced. 

wifersize wednesday: sexy time!

Yeay!  Another post on sex!  Let the peasants rejoice!  Let the hit count on my blog overflow!

So I was reading an article by one of my favourite online authors, Jon Acuff, who writes on his blog "Stuff Christians Like:

I hope that every time we say sex before marriage is harmful, we’ll say “sex after marriage is neon awesome.”

Christians have done their fair share of guilting, shaming, and condemning the general public into saving sex for marriage, but then the view of married sex they give to back it up looks like this:

When it should look more like this:

Psychologists have long held the opinion that we react better to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement, so why are we vilifying premarital sex without balancing out the equation?  At least balancing!

Perhaps its a puritan backlash against the way premarital sex is discussed in the media.  This article on sex on broadcast television does an amazing job of breaking down just how one-sided (and unrealistic) the depictions of single/married relationships are:

In this article (summary of a book with the same title) the statistics do one more than balancing the scales:

About 40% of married people have sex twice a week, compared to 20-25% of single and cohabitating men and women. Over 40% of married women said their sex life was emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to about 30% of single women. For men, it's 50% of married men are physically and emotionally contents versus 38% of cohabitating men.

This reminded me of an episode of How I Met Your Mother we recently watched in which Ted (single), Barney (single), and Marshall (married) were arguing over who had "more game".  Ted and Barney had ignored Marshall almost entirely until he did the research and recounted:

If Lily and I have sex twice a week, which, let's be honest, we all know is being conservative, and we've been together 10 years, plus 17 more times on the honeymoon, minus the two-week drought when I said the checker at the grocery store looked like a young Lily, then, we have had sex a total of, wait for it, 1,053-1/2 times.  My mom called once.

More frequent, more fulfilling, more fun sex after marriage.  Should we be surprised?  Isn't that what the plan was all along?

mama monday: monsters under the bed

I was reading a post by dooce™ recently that had to do with phobias she had as a child.  What really amused me were the 56 comments left by readers answering the question:

Dare I ask — and I may very well regret this — what were you obsessive-compulsive about as a kid?

I remember a little boy I met when I stayed in Ediburgh who must have been about four or five years old.  He was cute as a button but GOONESSGRACIOUS, was he ever obsessive-compulsive.  For about two weeks he developed a habit of coughing.  Not a I'm-sick-and-need-to-remove-phlegm-in-order-to-breathe kind of cough, more of a clearing-of-the-throat kind of cough.  All.  The.  Time.  A friend of mine and I took control of the situation by having him cough into his fist, "drop" the cough into the toilet, and flush it away.  We were successful but undoubtedly unleashed countless more phobias regarding toilets.

My own quirks were reasonable enough.  I heard a story about a woman at our church who had once swallowed a chicken bone and had to have it surgically removed.  Each time we ate chicken I'd inspect each bite with my tongue thoroughly before swallowing and would panic slightly if ever I swallowed something that felt a degree sharper than rigorously masticated chicken meat.  After the meal, if I hadn't died, I figured it was safe to assume I hadn't swallowed a bone.

Other O-C tenancies I began as a child I have yet to outgrow.  I still prefer (although I am mature enough to put the preference aside for the sake of decorum) not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk.  The habit had nothing to do with breaking my mother's back, or any other superstition, but rather some sort of mathematical and rhythmic game.  How many steps could I squeeze into each sidewalk tile before having to avoid a crack?  Would avoidance of said crack slow my walking tempo?  Would a longer stride spare me the crack each time?

If I am completely, utterly alone, I still avoid the cracks even at thirty years of age.

Many of the phobias, superstitions and obsessive habits children acquire are from a well-meaning adult giving them information without proper context.  Germs are a good example of this.  Knowing that tiny, invisible organisms are on your hands at any time and have the ability to make you sick might help children to wash up before dinner, but I doubt their imaginations stop there.

I love parents who exaggerate the silliness and fantasy of scary things, empowering their kids to feel fearless instead of fearful.  My friend Melissa, who is due this week, decorated her infant son's room with monsters.  The result is a bright, colourful room that encourages him to engage in adventure because love will keep him safe.

 

What were some of your phobias growing up?  Were they easy to break out of or did they follow you past childhood?  How were some of the ways your environment inspired you to live fearfully or fearlessly?

 

foto friday: the bay

It's shocking that department stores stay in business since most furniture, appliances, clothing and electronics can now be found at other, more specialized, megastores for much less.  Still, department stores continue to be one of the last habitats that one can find elderly women grazing peacefully on weekday afternoons.

My great, great aunt Dodie, who passed away when I was 18, took me to department stores when I stayed with her.  Since she also took me to the ROM, Queen's Park, and Centre Island, I naturally assumed The Department Store belonged on a shortlist of Toronto's attractions. We'd wander down the cosmetic aisles, explore the toy department,  and visit the artificial trees displays at Christmas.  Once, only once, when I found a $20 bill on the sidewalk by sheer luck (also due to generally looking down when I walked to avoid stepping on cracks) I was granted permission to spend it.  All of it.  Thus began a long, rewarding relationship with shopping.

I set about spending this small fortune on practical items, and bought a white pair of gloves.  I'm pretty sure Dodie encouraged me to buy a pack of underwear while we were at it which can only lead me to believe that I forgot to pack more than one pair on that particular visit.  After these investments I wildly spent the rest on a chickadee ornament (made from real feathers!), a plastic toy from Wendy's, and chocolate.  There was none left.  Thus began a long, debilitating habit of guilt/reward-based shopping.

When recounting the story later to my mother, I made a point of mentioning the gloves first. 

Something old-world and glamourous still captivates me when I walk through a department store.  Maybe it's in the wide, white aisles, the complimentary lighting, the posters of famous actresses-turned-models shot with even more complimentary lighting, the offers to try the elegant new fragrance from this designer, the life-sized Barbies styled in the daring new line from that designer, or the Pavlovian effect from first tasting buyer's delight/regret.

More likely, it reminds me of Christmas and of walking hand in hand with Dodie.  When I see elderly ladies grazing peacefully on weekday afternoons, I think of her.