Tag Archives: youth

THIRTEEN

My first-born son is now a teenager. This has both he and I spinning. I HAVE A TEENAGE SON. How this happened I don’t know because I still feel like a teenager myself.

My sweet boy has resisted growing older every step of the way. He has always told us he does not want to grow up – even as young as 3 years old he knew that childhood was the best of times. I guess maybe his father and I have not made adulthood seem like much fun.

In his observation at skate parks and out in the world, teenagers have been both extremely annoying and also terrifying to him. He did not want to become a teenager. He was truly sad about the inevitability of it. Did I mention that neither of us can believe it actually happened? Here we are. With the growth spurts and puberty and cracking voice and big feet and interest in girls and changing vocabulary and eye rolling and everything.

I asked him on his birthday if he felt any different and he actually sat and contemplated this for a few minutes and finally told me the he did feel different. He said he feels SAFER.

SAFER! I mean…WOW. And obviously I asked him why and he told me that he is not a child any more so he is safer. He is a teenager. More responsible and equipped to take care of himself.

God, I could just cry my face off. Why does this seem so profound to me? This recognition that he has reached a new level of independence and it is so real to him? It has always been my job to keep him safe, and of course still is, but he also feels that he has a role to play in is own safety and he is up for the task.

How can he be so self-aware?

And why don’t I ever feel safer? I mean, safer because of my own self and not external forces like a police officer is standing nearby or I have a life jacket on.  If anything I feel less safe as time goes on. More vulnerable. More fragile. More mortal.

Part of me wants to open the can of worms about gender – is feeling safe a right of passage for boys? A natural state? So many questions beg to be asked but I am tired. I am busy. I don’t have the capacity to got there right now and I also wonder if that is a fundamental issue in our society. All of us women are too tapped out to rail against a modern civilized world in which being a female is still considered a weakness. The older I get the clearer it is to me, the more I see it and hear it. This pervasive tone of sexism here in our own very progressive country. AND how to describe the outrage I feel on behalf of all women who are living under total oppression all around the world, and I would go so far as to say hated in their societies. Unable to drive, receive an education, have independence. Made to cover themselves. Made to feel shame. I am ashamed. Ashamed that I do nothing to fight it but feel pissed off and blow off steam in what is essentially a secret blog.

Well, not nothing. I am a Mother to boys. I have a very serious and real responsibility to raise them to understand and respect the differences between women and men, and to shatter every myth that exists in our society about women and their inferiority. It overwhelms me at times. Like now.

I guess what is sinking in for me is that I don’t have much time. Childhood is so FLEETING. Life is a blink of an eye. I feel very urgent right now about reorganizing my priorities and where I put my energy and thoughts and effort. I am working on it.

For now, I take every chance I get to hug that kid as hard as I can AND he lets me. He has never been a particularly huggy kid, but I think he knows our hugging days are numbered, or maybe he knows I need it right now, or maybe someone gave him a stern lecture but I get to hug him and I do not take that for granted.

Holy Shit. Thirteen.

 

 

 

 

The Skin I’m In

So here is another post that falls into the category of ‘most selfish lady alive wastes your time talking about her skin care regime while millions, prob billions, of people suffer with real problems all over the world’.  **SIGH**

The thing is, I am kinda freaking out and have been really distracted for days by a decision I made earlier this week. Let me take you back a couple of weeks…let’s say to The day after my birthday. I took my youngest son to a party for one of his friends.  It was a kid/grown up situation and I love those. I love connecting with new people in a non networking setting. I will always come to your party. Please invite me.

Anyways, when I arrived the hostess told me that her sister and her sister’s six grown children and even some grandchildren were all there. Right away I was thrilled because as a member of six kid family it is so much fun to compare notes about things like giant sock piles and washroom schedules and general chaos. I love when I can make an instant connection with people and I totally did. These folks were LOVELY, and I would love to dive into that more, but right now I am seriously running the risk of straying way off topic, so let me make a potentially long story short (haha, let me try at least)

***UPDATE***This is the longest blog post I have ever written.

I met a beautiful woman who I assumed was one of the six kids but nope, she was their MOTHER. Their insanely youthful, hot mother. So I immediately asked her what her secret was and she told me that she uses a certain skin care line, which I immediately wanted. And lucky me because this stunning woman actually sells these products which are only available through a direct sales situation. She told me about every product she uses and one by one I was sold.  Hook. Line. Sinker.  The enzyme peel. The hydration mist. The serum. The moisturizer. The multi-step cleansing system.

So, I got my hands on a catalog and guess what? All of the products that I just had to have cost a whopping $530.90.  Can I just say that this is more than double the monthly income of a person living in Nepal. It is $200 more than the average Turk makes in a month. I could go on. You get my point. Who in their right mind spends that kind of money on Skin care? Not me.  That would just straight up be fucking stupid.

So I went back to the catalog, I spent hours reading online reviews of the various products, I narrowed my wish list down considerably to only two products worth $79.00. I emailed Mrs. Perfect Dewy Glowing Skin with a great personality to boot (hereafter, Mrs. PDGS with GP), and told her what I wanted. She responded with great news. A March Madness Sale.  This opened a whole new world of opportunity up for me. Two of the products I had taken off my list were dramatically reduced. I needed them. What a crazy insane deal!!!! All of that Hyaluronic Acid and peptides and mist could actually be mine for less than half price!! I could achieve the results of cosmetic injections without actually getting needles stuck into my face! WHAT.

And since I was saving so much on those products I could throw in a few of the others right?  And then… another miracle. Mrs. PDGS with GP offered to place my order with hers for an additional 20% off!! WHAT. Sign. me. up.

So I went back to my original wish list. I ordered it all, all 12 products (I currently use 2. Ain’t nobody got time for that (12! Gah), but that is a different issue all together). $226.00 later (Seriously awesome deal btw)  I am sitting here freaking out. Because right at this moment in our lives spending that kind of money on beauty products is not responsible – not that it is at any other time ( you know, unless it is 20X points day at Shoppers or something).

Because I know my husband is going to be really pissed off and there is going to be an argument. Because it is a slow time for him with his work and we are trying to be really careful so we don’t accumulate debt.  I don’t want to contribute to his stress. Sincerely. So I regret that this is coming.

I know it is being delivered to me today or tomorrow and I know that when it arrives it is time to face the music. I’ll have to listen to myself explain my own frivolity. I haven’t paid for the stuff yet. Because Mrs. PDGS with GP very kindly extended her own discount to me, I have to pay her in cash, but not until I receive the order.

I have been scheming. How can I sneak the cash out of our accounts, that are all joint, without my husband noticing? There is no way to do that, and furthermore, I don’t actually want to do that. I don’t ever want to be sneaky in any way in my marriage or work or friendships or life in general.

In case it sounds like my husband is some kind of controlling dick, that is not true. I am totally scapegoating him here.  It is my own music I have to face. My own weakness. My own vanity.  My own selfishness. My own weakness. Did I already say that one?

The fact is, I am all out of cleanser, 2 days away from needing moisturizer and I use fairly decent products so I would have spent at least half that amount anyways and not had this insane guilt going on.

Look, if all of the product claims are true I will write a follow-up blog and prob start selling them myself, and everyone who knows me will ask if I have had work done and when strangers find out my age they will want to know my secret and my life will be forever changed and I will be so happy that I will have to change the tagline of my blog to something else.

But seriously, when have beauty product claims ever been true? (Tell, me, I need that product).  Prob what happened is that someone totally recruited Mrs. PDGS and GP because she is gorgeous and has perfect skin and they knew that her very own face was worth a million bucks. Prob I am a huge sucker.  Def I am a huge sucker.

I am disappointed in myself. Disappointed because I want to just love the skin I am in and shine from the inside. Disappointed because I spent so much time this week fretting about this. I should have just cancelled my order and I can’t pin down why I didn’t. Is it because I am holding out hope that it works or because I don’t want to feel like an idiot calling this lady to cancel?  Either way it involves me caring about what other people think in a way that I don’t like. It involves me caring what I think in a way I don’t like.

I should have taken that $226 bucks and mailed it to a random person in Nepal or bought food for the food bank or given it to a group sponsoring refugees or bought a teenage girl from a low-income family a prom dress or put it into an RESP or RRSP  or  bought 100 strangers a coffee or…

God I suck. I am going to go read the fine print now and see what the return policy is on all of this stuff.

 

 

 

Message from the Heart

St. Patrick’s Day, otherwise known as the day I kissed my husband for the first time. FIFTEEN years ago.

The way time flies by totally freaks me out. I know everyone says it and it is a huge cliché etc. I just can’t get over it. I guess I thought I would be young forever, and well, I guess I thought I would be turn out to be immortal or something. You know that song Forever Young by Alphaville? That is like my personal anthem. My grandmother always told me she felt like a young girl inside and that looking in the mirror never stopped surprising her. I get it. I totally, totally get it.

If I could have one superpower I would freeze time, or maybe go back and just relive certain moments. Like the time we let our youngest son drive a golf cart when he was 5. His joy was a bigger joy than any joy I have ever seen. I could live in that moment for eternity.

I would go back to the last time I nursed each of my babies, and read them a story book at bedtime, and to the last time they napped on my chest or crawled into my bed with a bad dream. Just to savour it, to make sure I recognized the significance and sweetness of the moment and to store it in my memory (why not to their births you ask? Cause that shit hurt!!). I would go back to many of my teenage and 2o something days… to quite simply being that carefree. I would go even further back to my elementary school days when we hiked in the forest and ate our lunches by the river. I would definitely relive our wedding again.

Most of all, I would go back to today 15 years ago. The day that I kissed my husband for the first time. We had just spent an exhausting day together at a video shoot with his band. I held his hand that day during a break during a crowd scene because he had a groupie that would just not leave him be. I was helping him out of a bad situation and it felt good.

Just days before at my birthday party at a bar downtown I had tried to set him up with not one, but two of my sisters. I told them was a sweet and gentle man he was, I sat him right in between them. One of them wisely inquired… “If he is so great, why aren’t you dating him?” I had a myriad of excuses. What it boiled down to was that I thought I needed to be alone. I had JUST ended a really toxic relationship and felt damaged, sad, and uncertain of myself and thought I needed more time to get over it. I thought being alone was what one did under those circumstances.

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The Souvenir

He came home with me in a taxi after the shoot, just to hang out, to smoke a joint and relax. There was a little souvenir viewfinder of Vegas in the shape of a camera sitting on the seat so we kept it. (It sits on our kitchen window sill).

We were on the sofa, chatting and I could see all over his face that he was gearing up to kiss me. Inside of myself I completely freaked out. Because I knew that he was a very unique man. A serious man with morals. It would really mean something to him if I kissed him, so I couldn’t take it lightly.

I didn’t want to lead him on, or hurt him in any way, but on the other hand I didn’t want to embarrass him by not kissing him (and besides I wanted to) but I didn’t want to make him think we would have a relationship because I really wasn’t ready and I really needed to be alone. Didn’t I?

Something happened then that I can’t adequately explain, but that was a near to a religious experience as well, my religious experience (more on that another time). It was like a voice whispering to me, but from within. Perhaps how it would feel if someone was telepathically speaking to me. It was as clear a message as I have ever received. I had absolute complete belief. I had absolute peace and surety. The essence of the message was…

IT IS OK. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HURT HIM. KISS THIS MAN.

(I don’t think the caps really gives the right impression. It seems harsh, and in reality it was the opposite of harsh… Maybe italics will be better?).

It is okay. You are not going to hurt him. Kiss this man.

(Yup, much better)

And so I did.

And it was HOT. We stood in the hallway of my house making out for  a long time. Then he left and I went back into the house and when I saw my roommates I told them, because I was more sure of this than I have ever been about anything, that he was THE ONE.

And so he was.

I know I can’t re-live it…the time I was the most sure of something. The time I knew a thing without a single doubt. I hope that I get the chance to be that confident about a decision again in my life, but for now…

Happy kissing anniversary Charlie! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx