mama monday: week 33 "womanhood, and all that is a woman"

In case you're wondering why I have ceased to post various fruits and vegetables that represent Baby Gaz's growth, it's because the growth at this point is difficult to document using fruits and vegetables.  Even websites are becoming more obscure in their offerings: your baby is the size of a Chinese cabbage!  A jicama!  A crenshaw melon!

Be assured that Baby Gaz is growing, Baby Gaz is moving (lots), Baby Gaz is hiccuping, and is healthy by all accounts.  The produce section of the local grocery store just doesn't suffice in describing how excited we are to meet him.

My husband, a lover of poetry and a fan of Walt Whitman, sent me this glorious poem a few months back: I Sing The Body Electric.  The poem should be read it its entirety - it is a stunning piece of art - but, if you're short on time, here are some of the excerpts that I thought painted a magnificent portrait of woman and her ability to incubate life.

This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
     all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what
     was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response
     likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
     diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
     and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
     love, white-blow and delirious nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the
     prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.


This the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born
     of woman,
This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the
     outlet again.


Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
     exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.


The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil'd, she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as
     daughters.


She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

wifercize wednesday: crushes, part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my discomfiting chronicle of grade school and high school crushes.  Your comments are not only appreciated but necessary to the purging process.  Don't leave me hanging.

Now, where were we?  Grade 11?

My obligatory crush on a poster boy for the 90s (long, greasy hair, wore plaid shirts, rocked out to Green Day and Nirvana) came in the form of Blair Brandon.  On Valentine's Day our school organized several "O-Grams" that students could purchase and the money benefited...something.  No doubt our swim team.  Malvern had an amazing swim team.  I was not on it.  One option was a "Stalker-O-Gram" or "Picture-O-Gram" or something equivalent - it could be purchased anonymously, and required someone to take a picture of your crush on your behalf, delivering it to you a few days later since I went to high school in the 90s and WE STILL USED FILM.  When the photo of Blair Brandon, donning his signature backwards Boston Bruins baseball cap, arrived secretly during homeroom class I swore I would never throw it out.  That was until he slow danced with my best friend at our school's video dance party later that month to Seal's Kiss From a Rose.  Which not only broke my heart but also destroyed my image of his cool, 90s charade.  Seal is so mainstream.

I was Luke Lockyer's girlfriend a total of four times.  Each time, I broke up with him.  The first time, we remained an item for the duration of history class (with Mr. Nider), geography class (with Mr. Butts - no joke), the period of 12 hours following (spent at our respective houses, sleeping), and before morning announcements I had broken up with him.  Via a letter I gave to him via a mutual friend.  The details of other three times allude me, but they were similar in cowardice.  Via his pager (remember pagers?), via the phone, etc.  We wrote bad poetry to each other.  Not bad-indecent, just bad-clumsy.  He wrote one entitled "Confusion" (no doubt due to our on-again-off-again relationship status) and I responded, appropriately, with "Confusion: The Reply".  Suddenly Melissa Etheridge's lyrics meant so much when I heard them on _____, "I don't care what they think / I don't care what they say / what do they know about this love anyway?", and when I reheard them on mix cassettes from Luke.  He went out on a limb and began writing song lyrics of his own for me and made a mix cassette of those too: "I'm walking in the snow / Like Pierre Elliot Trudeau" touched me deeply although it's impossible to say why.  We may have continued our volatile relationship had it not been for my switch to private school for my OAC year.  That, and my brothers' discovery of Luke's musical debut on tape and consequent mockery.  Which continues to this day.

Philip Holman both frustrated and intrigued me.  His marks were first in almost all our classes (I believe I beat him in English), while I couldn't shake the #2 placement, and we often sat together in alphabetized seating arrangements, Holman and Hunter.  Although his intelligence drew me in, his constant teasing (and the stubborn fact that I was a sore loser) guaranteed that the crush never fully developed.  Jerk.

A friend of mine, Charis, asked when I was going to write about the boys who crushed on me.  A valid question, and one that is mighty temping (I still have old poems and hijinxs committed to memory), but my story is the only one I can tell properly and it delves into the touchy subject of exes which I have written about previously.  Besides, the only boy who crushed on me that matters is the one who I married.

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):