Open Adoption, A Long View

My daughter at one-day old with her maternal great-grandmother. Her Noni, in Eugene, Oregon 1998.

Pearl at 2 months. Lazy summer days watching her grow.

June 21, 1998 was the first time I met the young woman who had chosen me and my then husband to parent her unborn child. She was 19 yrs old and 9 months pregnant and she had chosen us from a pool of waiting couples, families, and people hoping to become parents through "Open Adoption", a fairly new concept 2 decades ago.

Growing up in a northern community in British Columbia, Canada, I knew many adopted people. I could see how families were made in a multitude of ways, there was no shame in raising a child who was not your own. I knew I wanted to be a parent and when after ten years of marriage at 34, I was not able to become pregnant, I quite happily turned my attention to adoption.

I learned that adoption is a complex process fraught with intense emotion and bad information. When I began looking into it I ran up against quite a lot of bias and horror stories about all the ways it might go wrong. I spoke to multiple agencies who championed the process from many different angles with many different approaches. There were female children in India and China who were available for adoption, there were kids with extra needs, there were religious organizations doing the hard work of finding stable homes for waiting kids. None of these appealed to me despite some very convincing, almost militant representatives. The problem I had with the international adoption model was just that, the distance. I worried about the impact being taken so far away from home might have on a child. I knew I probably couldn't maintain that important connection to home a child from far away would need. I wasn't suited to a special needs adoption either. The kindest part of my journey was speaking to women who had adopted children with special needs and hearing them vehemently say don't take this on if it's not for you, totally without judgement. The world is a better place because of those families who often take on several children with special needs at a time. They are generous beyond compare. Then there is the issue of race and the notion of time. If you wanted a baby quickly, bi-racial was the way to go. If you wanted an all white child it might take longer.

When I looked into my heart I knew I would only raise one child and I wanted the experience to be the best it could be. Through an acquaintance I found Open Adoption and Family Services based in Oregon and I began the process with them in November of 1997. OAFS were leaders at that time in promoting an open model that supports the birth parents in their choice of adoption, a framework is created between parents and birth parents where the whole child is celebrated.

That June day in Eugene when we met my daughters birthmother she glowed with the fullness of the life she was about to give birth to. We sat in a restaurant downtown and talked about her plans for her life and her child's life. She did have plans to have a family at some point but not at age 19 on her own. She was young but steadfast and we talked about what the openness might look like in our case. She wanted to be a special friend to her child and she wanted her extended family to know her as well. Sitting there together as strangers, we imagined a future full of unknown scenarios and bravely moved forward. On July 16th, a perfect healthy baby girl came into the world met by a waiting family with a plan to surround her with love.

Noni, and Pearl at 20.

My daughter turned 20 on Monday and she spent this birthday with her birthmother in California. A perfect full circle moment. I'm so proud of what I have been able create with this beautiful kid and grateful for the great group of people she has around her. I dreamed it and a clairvoyant 19 yr old made it all happen. I did my best to make her proud. Thanks B!


For other stories on this topic click here.

Smoke, real and imagined.

Family Portrait

This is my submission for 2017
a year in review
taken near the summer solstice
it represents my small family
my primary relationships
place, people, objects
she is hidden and emerging both
my best project nearing completion
he is not pictured but present
unconditionally
I am the smoke

The Way Home, Days 6 and 7

We left on Monday. I organized the trip so that we would have 3 travel free days in Smithers. Driving out of Telkwa toward Quick where my mother lived is emotional. I miss my mother in this world, more than anything. It's such a huge weight to carry, longing for the person you loved most in the world. We carry on. The sky opens up and rains on us as we pass her turn-off and we wind gently toward Hungry Hill. I stare out the window trying to remember everything as it whips past me. Our lives in the sacred Bulkley Valley. The road is my whole life stretching out ahead of me. In the video Mark refers to it as the highway that has become our home.

Scattered along the highway there are the little houses, homesteads, left by the first white settlers to the area. Hopeful. In clearings. The hay grows up around them and eventually the ground will reclaim them in much the same way it has claimed their owners. I can't imagine what it was like for the first non-native people to this region.

 

Simple barns and rail fences dot the landscape and are weak attempts to to tame the wild landscape. Civilization on the inside, the natural world on the outside. A line separating this, from that.
 

The train follows the highway we have been living on. My eldest brother has worked for the CN Railway since he was 18. I naturally admired him so it made sense to admire trains as well. We rode them east to Jasper and then west to Vancouver. We climbed the Rockies slowly and waited in sidings without complaint. We rode them west to a place call Pacific. The train took me places and felt familiar doing so. The first time I went away for Christmas after my parents split up, I rode the train home from Saskatchewan on New Year's Eve, where my dad was living. We rolled past frozen Canadian landscapes, filled with remote crossings in sleeping towns. It was 4am when we came through Telkwa as the only Hotel in that small town burned silently down as we passed, speechless, headed west to Smithers.

Vanderhoof. The center of British Columbia. Not much else going on there besides Glen's Drive-In, the local Sino-Canadian restaurant. Some smart person moved all these heritage type buildings into one highway-close-locale. We stopped and snooped but ultimately ate our lunch of sandwiches at a picnic table under a green umbrella. We did little to support the local economy beyond a few words of encouragement to the local shop owners,

The Loon. I heard them calling in the night at the lake. It's a sorrowful sound. The end of day floats over the lake at dusk, the loon calls us to bed, and the lake air flows through the cabin pulling away the fog of the past creating whole new memories, good adult memories in place of the fantasy of childhood.

Nearing Quesnel, there are so many logging trucks on the road we feel puny in size and purpose. Our mission to return to my childhood home seems superfluous in comparison to the whole lumber industry. The local towns are driven by mills. Train tracks loop into sawmill yards and back out. Trucks, massive trucks, low slung, super long, populate the highway and we are submissive, hanging back to let them proceed. Swaying trailers, threatening to crush us, their logs poised to  impale us should the load shift, the trailer tip. They are like missiles traveling the roads, let loose on gravel, proceeding to pavement, headed to the next mill-town. We hang back, we brake, we count our blessings. The harvest is enormous, an unintended consequence of the Mountain Pine Beetle plague. I am witnessing the forests with their dead trees, and it doesn't look good. The future of these forests hangs in the balance. We are inconsequential and get out of the way to let these monsters of progress and sustainability pass.

The Caribou. Rolling hills and pasture land.The omnipresent river flows south to the Fraser Canyon, the landscape gets drier the farther south we go.

Williams Lake, B.C.

South of Williams Lake headed to 100 Mile House for the night. I had wanted to make the drive in one day but ultimately it just wasn't possible or advisable. The Fraser Canyon lies at the end of the drive and as treacherous as it seems in daylight it's potentially deadly at night for a tired driver in a car with malfunctioning headlights. We stayed in the Red Coach Inn as we had as kids when we drove to Vancouver for summer vacation. It was pleasant and slightly surreal to be there with my dad and older sister as well as my own family.

Day 7. We slept poorly in the hotel despite being tired. I turned the AC off to keep it from blowing on my kid who had developed a terrible dry cough, the cause of which would not become clear for another week. It was hot and still and Mark and I were anxious about getting home, getting back to life post travel. We had a light breakfast and hit the road, the sun at our left as we drove south to the face the canyon. I'm glad I made this trip with my family. I feel a little more whole than I did when we set out. I feel a little more Canadian and a little more connected to the people and places I grew up around. I feel more deeply connected to the landscape of the province and to that road that connects me to where my cognizant life began.

Up the Mountain, Day 5

 Our ski-cabin is the light spec at the middle of this photo to the left of the lift-line.

Legend has it that my dad moved us to Smithers in 1965 because of the mountains. He had other reasons but they were lost on me. We skied on Sundays, as a family. Other families went to church, we skied. We ate pancakes in the morning and then we all piled into the VW Bus and after he had yelled his head off at us to get our boots, poles, and skis together, we were off. It was exciting and terrifying. My father at the wheel, hunched over, willing the underpowered vehicle up up up, around switchbacks lined by snowbanks just waiting to suck you in. He was a mountain climber but had given it up by the time I was born. Skiing was his next passion. So we skied.

He built us a ski cabin. It was a PanAbode number and the pieces got dropped by helicopter onto the mountain like bundles of Lincoln-Logs. The area that was the mountain was on Crown land, owned ostensibly by the government and we were all squatters. People built little basic cabins to huddle in after a long day of skiing, there was no power and we melted snow for water. There was a Ski-Club cabin as well where you could eat your bag lunch. I spent a lot of time there drinking cocoa and amusing the other skiers. Our cabin materials got dropped in the wrong spot so the cabin got built closer to the main run than it should have. Our outhouse ended up in the meadow where the cabin should have been. In winter I remember the deep path dug into the snow behind the cabin to the outhouse. As a child it felt like walking a long blue white corridor to the little wood hut. Scary and magical and slightly stinky.

 

Crater Lake beyond the trees. The alpine flowers were sparse due to the dry summer. Elevation is about 5000ft.

The Green-T hut. This was near the site of the original rope tow. As you rode up you could see our cabin and an optical illusion was created, the cabin appeared to sit tilted back into the hill, I imagined cups and saucers sliding off the crude table inside. In years of heavy snow my eldest brother and his friends made a snow-bridge onto the roof of the cabin and skied down the hill and over the roof, launching themselves into the ether. Spread eagles all of them, landing mostly softly below. We sold the cabin when my mother was dying, I am not sure who owns it now.

Many of the original ramshackle cabins still exist as well as many newer better ones. Everywhere progress and change even on the mountain.

 

The original ski-club cabin.

The Bulkley Valley, Day 2 and 3

Coming into Houston. It's been raining on and off since Burns Lake where we bought Okanagon fruit from an idling delivery truck in a Husky parking lot. It had been hot and dusty in Prince George 4 hours earlier, I was glad the dog didn't come. Lakes, little or long line the highway through Fort Fraser. The landscape gets prettier and more gentle as you near the Bulkley Valley off in the distance at the base of Hudson Bay Mountain.

We were lucky enough to stay with dear family friends at a lake west of town. The mountain follows you everywhere. It's at the foot of main street and all the way out here at the Lake. I've told this story a thousand times but it's very true. When I was a kid our house faced the mountain and whenever someone came to visit who was not accustomed to living with a huge mountain topped with a glacier in their backyard all sorts of fanciful adjectives got tossed around. I found their shrieks of glee ridiculous and over done. A mountain. Who swoons at a mountain that way. I do, that's who. It was good to see the mountain again.

Bathers at the Lake. My siblings and I, our hosts and my daughter and husband. The mountain looks on. At 4 o'clock the kids from next door appear for ice cream and trudge up the hill where they are served their daily ration. We stay by the lake too relaxed to move imaging how we can do this again tomorrow.

The lovely cottage where we stayed. I slept well here knowing that my family was happy they had come along on this journey with me. I thought I might cry at some inopportune moment but the tears never quite came, my sleep was active instead.

The Fraser Canyon Day 1

Driving north of Hope. The trees are replaced with sage.

The Thompson River meets the Fraser River, I think. The signage is poor along the road. The road conditions are sub-par considering the volume of traffic on the road.

 Dry, dry hills. 99 degrees out. Too hot to ride a horse. We have no stamina in the heat.

The reappearance of trees, small and scraggly clinging to the hillside, grass comes later, further up the road.

Road Trip to the Past

 Big sky and supplies at Lac La Hache

I wanted to go to Smithers. I didn't want to go to Smithers. All summer long we were allegedly going to Smithers. The drive is scary to me, it's long and the highway is undivided most of the way. It's lonely and empty and dusty and it can be hot or very cold and sometimes icy and always bumpy and under construction. The logging trucks and transport trucks are plentiful, huge and vicious. The first several hours of the drive seems to be straight uphill with the river below you on one side and a crumbling rock face above you on the other side. My head hurt, we couldn't listen to music, I was worried about the car making the trip, I was worried about being stranded in a hostile landscape in a country that has become foreign to me. I worried about my dog back at home in the kennel. In the video clips of our first night at Lac La Hache I can see how I have my hand over my mouth surveying the scene, trying to sort out what to do first. The next scene is of the tent set-up and I know by then I had had a beer and was feeling better. The clips of the following morning I look more relaxed, by the time we reached Smithers, 9 hours later, the video shows me warmly embracing my family members who had also come for the Centennial of our little town. We had made it, alive.

One of many roadside shrines to those who have died along the Yellowhead 16

It's Here!

Jesus, if it isn't Christmas again. Next to school and summer break, Christmas is my daughters absolute favorite time of year and while I am not prone to overdoing things I try to make it as special as possible for her.  She would have us get a tree directly after Thanksgiving but my waspish reserve dictates we must wait until around the 20th of December. Now that she is older and busier we have to be flexible and look for opportunities to fit it all in. We got the tree on Friday afternoon, we trooped next door to my neighbors personal tree lot and sawed one down with his permission, of course. We decorated it Saturday morning whiling away the time before Pearl's dad came to get her for a weekend visit. As we decorated we talk about the decorations. Where they came from or who made them, which are our favorites and why. We talk about the approach to decorating the tree, the logistics and physics of it. I was not one of those parents who let my kid decorate the tree so this comes up in conversation too. I can't help myself, aesthetics are important to me and yes I am a control freak. Christmas is going to be a bit thinner this year but we'll have fun anyway repeating the old standards and introducing a few new tricks. I'm grateful for my kid, my husband and my improving mental health.

Anniversary

8 years ago today I married Mr. Seifred. As far as weddings go it was fun but the best part by far was the honeymoon in Tofino, a gift from my dad and stepmother. When we went back there last year I was filled again with the almost overwhelming feeling of happiness and well-being I had experienced that first night on that wild west coast beach, only this time we were three and that felt great too. We never do much to celebrate these little milestones beyond just acknowledging the fact throughout the day, counting our blessings that we met, reviewing how much fun we keep having together and then re-counting our blessings again, it's a happy little loop of love and gratitude. No gifts or fanfare required, just hugs and kisses and always champagne.

Post solstice wrap-up

5 days into summer. The solstice came but I didn't celebrate on the day and instead I ambled next door and did it belatedly with some longtime friends on Friday. We sat around under my white — ever useful in many circumstances—farmers market canopy in folding chairs, while the rain poured with all it's might and we agreed that this was certainly the only way to welcome summer in the Pacific Northwest. The very next day I got caught out in a thunder and lightening storm that blew down trees around the county and soaked my jeans and shoes, and dog. Yesterday it was okay all day weather wise and I went to the Cone Sisters Show at VAG with my sister and seriously considered whether or not we should dedicate our lives to leisure and art. You know, make a name for yourself in better circles like those Cone Sisters did. My sister gave me change for transit because I had none and showed me where to catch the sky-train to visit our stepmother which I felt was terribly good of her. It felt exciting to be inside the Gallery. Matisse's Odelisques were inspiring and hopefully, affirming.

I started this painting. That is all I have to report. After I have made about 400 of these I will have more of an idea of what it is I am doing. I think I should spend some more time on this one and then make another one right away. You heard it here first. I saw my stepmother again today so that my dad could go freely to Walmart to replace a pair of pants for her. I rolled her out to the garden and we sat and she laughed out loud, almost hysterically at times at what was going on around her. She was lively for a time but then began to think that one of the men was her father. She said, "my father never wore white shoes". She looked lost and agitated. I reassured her that everything was going to be okay. "I feel mad with madness" she said. On the way home I got lost on United Boulevard amongst road construction and landfill traffic looking for the good fabric store. Mark wrote his final securities exam and we went for a walk in the late afternoon with the dog and it was hard to tell what day it was because we had not spent the whole weekend together.

I have been alone much of the last 10 days which has been somewhat novel and certainly rejuvenating. Initially I felt freaked out about releasing my death grip on my young charge but a cooler head prevailed and I took the time off willingly and I am glad I did. The growing pains we experienced a few weeks back are gone and a new phase is upon us. This parenting is a tricky game of push-me pull-you and I for one do not always see the changes in direction coming but clearly there is no stopping them and that as it turns out is a good thing. The process is much like painting, you start, the colors run, you try madly to see the shapes and values and then you wait, and when it's all dry it looks totally different to what you planned or imagined.

Layering

Painting detail 5/25/12

Last Thursday I burned the red beans I was cooking while a man was rumored to be holding his family hostage a few miles from my house. I imagined at gun-point. On Friday with my skin still smelling of the burned beans I melted down and spent the weekend puffy-eyed and pale while my family simultaneously stroked my hair and avoided me. As scary as my mood swings are to me they must be terrifying to those around me. On Sunday I confided to my dad that I had been having a rough week. He has these rough patches too, we all do. On the bright side I did not hurt myself or take anyone hostage, and after a few rounds of Bananagrams Friday night we were able to laugh about the debacle of the day, the misunderstandings, and I think we may have all experienced teachable moments. I slept so hard that night that I didn't know where I was and on Saturday morning when I visited my stepmother and suddenly found myself trying to hack up a lung like I had TB, my stepmother who is struggling to get her words organized easily uttered "pollen". I agreed because it felt too hard to say no, it's a chunk of grief passing through me, but I feel certain I am going to be okay.

During my painting class on Friday I could feel myself relaxing into the work. The technique seen here involves creating a quick and simple gestural layer followed by subsequent layers of warm and cool colors all applied with tons of water. It's pure magic watching the image emerge.

Rite of Spring

A pair of Robins. One lays on the road, breast up, her fragile neck no match for the passing farm vehicles and minivans. Her live mate swoops and waits airborne, and the morning passes with cars and trucks too heavy for the road slowly grinding the little carcass into the blacktop, red breast no more.

My father is this bird waiting for his mate to rise again, her brain filled with blood. He flies to her side on the city bus twice a day and darts into her room in the neurosciences ward at VGH. He swoops behind her curtain and waits, places his large hand on her shrinking head. She smiles in her sleep but eats little. I say like a bird, and he reminds me birds eat many times their body weight each day. I adjust my analogy. She eats like a person who is not convinced she wants to keep on going with this particular charade.

Some days she smiles up at him when he comes in and they look at each other, what is there to say, they are both run over by sadness. She can't speak and so he holds her small hand or reads to her and tries to understand what her experience is. If she knows the difference between here and home, between black top and black hats, if she remembers about spring and Robins and how they hang together even when one is struck down.

The black top is not as solid as it seems. From her vantage point, the dead Robin can see it is many small rocks held together by tar that overtime shrinks away. And so it is possible to come apart and disappear in to the spaces in between, bones crushed upon impact, organs pulverized by tires, feathers damp with rain and demolished. The lucky ones taking flight on the spring breeze swooping and soaring across nearby blueberry fields in search of city buses.

Are you experienced?

Meat birds at 5 Weeks

It's Sunday here where I sit, somewhere it's Monday and I will be thrust into that reality soon enough but until then I will enjoy Sunday. As I sit and write this in my espresso induced sweat my head is full and strangely empty all at once. I feel calm mostly but occasionally have a flash of things that need my attention and I try to add them to the list for the coming week, things I must do, food I must cook, emails I must respond to. For now though we are listening to Neil Young and my husband is sitting across from me the way he does at his house and we have our laptops spread out on the kitchen table and the kid is recuperating down the hall with a semi nasty cough watching endless movies on cable-TV.

I have done nothing to document the chicks development as I had wanted to and time is leaving this idea in its dust. I imagined pages of quaint gestural drawings, spontaneous captivating paintings and daily photos. I even considered building a small lit cove in which I could drop a chicken or two for a couple of real money shots but I have not done any of it. In its place is growing disappointment and harsh words directed inward to the file of things I just never got to. They are six weeks old now, we are on the home stretch, in the next 3 weeks we will organize the butchering day and even though I never thought I had the stomach for this type of activity (and maybe I don't) I am willing myself to fall headlong into the experience. Why not. Why shouldn't I attempt to butcher 27 meat birds at home with borrowed chicken butchering equipment? This has been the work of farm women for millennia why should I be squeamish and spared.

In casual conversation regarding the butchering of various commonly farmed animals the question of what to do with the plethora of nasty bits that we refined North Americans deem un-consumable, it occurred to me that I would be in possession of a treasure trove of chicken feet, a delicacy in the Chinese community. One of the strange features of the Cornish Cross breed are their huge feet and thick legs. In an effort not to waste them I inquired about eating them to my Chinese friend who's old mother is visiting soon. I half expected her to be completely grossed out but instead she waxed poetic about the wonderful experience of eating them as a child, their fried exterior concealing a delicious gelatinous interior. She went on to tell how she had gone with her mother to Chinatown to the chicken butcher where you could choose a live bird and have it butchered on the spot, carrying home the recently live bird in a shopping bag.

So my new fantasy is that this old woman from China via Los Angeles, who has been described as looking like Nelsen Mandela will join us on butchering day perhaps wielding her own cleaver and be our guide. Women working together to shouts in Cantonese and English, and cries of the chickens as their throats are slit while the pile of beautiful yellow legs grows to be taken home and enjoyed for Thanksgiving.

Wanting

I am struck this afternoon by a young Libyan woman expressing her joy at Muammar Gadaffi's death. She said "We can want anything now". What struck me is that living in a democracy as I do I have never been in a situation where there were things I could not have. The only thing between me and the things I desired was usually hard work and I have generally worked hard. Lately I have been faced with a question that I can't seem to answer, it has risen out of the work I am doing on the novel I am writing. The question is: what does the hero want, and so I invert this question and wonder what do I want. An old friend resurfaced this week and she expressed her want as a desire to thrive. I keep running up against the question and I can't quite drill it down. Sometimes I think it stems from a lack of interest in anything or an interest in everything, it might be both, a plethora of choice has numbed me. I am happy doing very little, watching the meat birds eating is pleasant, so is watching the laying hens peck around. I am pensive and quiet, I enjoy that. I want to do what I want to do, not what I have to do. This is the challenge, trying to frame the want in a positive way, I want this, not, I don't want that. I don't want to die for example. I don't want to have to work for money forever. I want to work at what I want to work at. All the other stuff I have. A family, a good relationship, a place of my own. Maybe that's it, I have what I want, wanting more would be gluttony.

I realize in writing all this that picture for this post is rather meaningless except that it's what I am working on at the moment. It's a Rowan Yarns pattern by Kaffe Fassett. I cheaped out and didn't by the prescribed Rowan Yarn, it was just too expensive but the stuff I chose may be too soft, not structural enough, but we'll see. Looking at it here I actually don't mind it and some blocking will help. I am learning the hard way to go faster with these projects so that the details are handled consistently. I think I made the right front panel slightly longer than the left. Asymmetry is a look perhaps.

Beyond all of this I was invited to a birth this week of an old and dear friend so at the moment I am reveling in the amazing process of her tiny son appearing in a bath of water not 36 hours ago. My husband is flying home tonight after 10 days away and I am looking forward to being in his company again and hearing his stories. I am struck, struck by all of the love and connection I have witnessed this week. I guess if I wanted anything it would just be more of the same.

My Traveling Companion

Riding east on the WestCoast Express June/2011

I have been trying to compose an appropriately poignant post about my daughter, about the great depth of feeling I have for her and the rewards and trials of being a parent. But the time moves so quickly and I find I barely have time to think the whole post through, I am in the trenches as it were just living with her and enjoying it immensely. School is out now so we are on this odyssey called summer vacation wherein I try to be dedicated to near non-stop fun while still trying to work full-time. Summer, like life, is fleeting. I have never been a good playmate mom, I am impatient at best but I have always tried to just spend time with this child, slow myself down and expose her to the world in the best way I know how. In the summer that means visiting family and friends, camping, boating, riding bikes, reading and eating things we generally avoid in the off-season. I am making up for lost time I suppose. When she was 3, my husband and I split up and so began a 50/50 split of her time between us. Split straight down the middle, which was very limiting and to my mind not what I signed up for. One tries to adapt and make best use of the 50% without complaint, but it did wear on me and I felt like I got short changed until abut 18 months ago when the schedule was changed and she was with me more. Recently things changed again, and she was with me all the time and so that is what we have settled into and it feels so good to me. She is a wonderful person, not perfect but I never expected that. I feel like we have achieved the state I most desired as a parent, that we are traveling companions. She is a great traveler, she's adaptable and curious and she likes to tell stories about the things we see along the way, either from everyday life of the special trips we make like the time we just spent with my dad and stepmother. I am loading her up with interesting memories so that when she is grown and has her own kids she can look back at the crazy car trips with Mark and I and model her own childrens experiences after them as Mark and I are doing with her. She is a willing companion and I am so grateful to have her along.

Monday Duality

There is a certain newness and potential of a Monday morning, that when I don't feel too wretched, is really rather exhilarating. Spending time with my dad often means having deep conversations about the heaviness of things. This is where I got my "this half empty glass is still quite full" attitude. During solemn childhood walks his pathos was transferred to me, not through his hands as he always walked ahead of us just a little. He needed that distance to sort himself out I suppose, but the grayness did waft backwards off him onto me. His is a world of duality and he told me a few days ago to not worry about the why and instead to just carry on in the right direction. We discuss politics, mostly American politics and we feel depressed and then we touch on all the great things Americans have done and we feel hopeful once again. And this is how the conversations ebb and flow, we discuss luck and perseverance, and the importance of learning throughout your lifetime and the joy of reading and listening to opera. I swear a lot and then feel bad later that he thinks I am coarse. I listen to him and realize he is more conservative than I thought he was based on our rather relaxed upbringing. He is slumped over more now and he walks slowly, a museum crawl and I find it makes me tired and I want to surge ahead but I don't, I stay in the space with him and take in what he has to offer me because I know the supply is limited. With all this weight I still feel okay despite my anxiety tugging at my stomach and today is Monday and I am starting again and I can hear my dad encouraging me to soldier on and I might just say the same thing back to him.

Going Away

My dad and stepmother at the Reifel Wildlife Sanctuary, Westham Island BC

Have just spent a few days at my fathers house and not surprisingly woke up this morning with a raging headache, nausea and fear and anxiety rising like a raging river. It's been a few hours and I feel more normal but also tender. I had wanted to go and spend some time with the old folks to see how they're doing and now I know. I would say they are ready for some help. My dad is good for his age and my stepmother has Alzheimer's which we have known about for some time. She's mostly okay, generally cognizant but justifiably pissed off and prone to fussing. She was always this way but it's heightened now. We had some good chats over multiple glasses of wine and she seemed herself but there were moments when she would lash out and that was a bit hard to witness. My dad is not a touchy-feelie overly nurturing guy so it's hard for him to deal with her in this new and devolving state. He's used to her being capable and in charge and she is so much less that way now. I feel pretty drained after only 4 days, I can only imagine how they feel. I need to get in touch with all my siblings and report my findings, there are 8 of us between them. I am not looking forward to this but I feel like the time is right and there have not been any big crisis yet but there is certainly potential.

The good news I suppose is that when we arrived on Tuesday they were both tense and when we left they were cheerful which proves to me that they need more contact with all of us. It seems a simple solution considering the severity of what's happening.

Untitled #1

March 20th, West Spanish Banks, Vancouver BC

Nothing to say except that if you sit really still for a really long time everything is revealed to you and in the meantime if you have to get up and move around it is good to do a little sewing, carry a bit of firewood around and sometimes getup early and notice that the birds are singing and that you got through the winter, another winter without driving into a median somewhere.

I saw my dad today, his sweater had a small stain on it and it reminded me that they aren't as buttoned up as they once were and everything feels frail. We took a walk to the beach and I didn't talk to him about any of the issues, the big issues that are hanging over all of us. I just wanted to amble along next to him with the west wind blowing in our faces, hoping that it had already dropped its radioactive particles somewhere farther out at sea. And I feel more and more centered and unwilling to deal with bullshit because everything is fleeting and so I work on my knitting and chop the wood and hug my kid and at night I lay next to another human being whose dreams intersect with mine but aren't dependent on them. Tomorrow is Monday and I will rise and do and go and act and things will get moved along and it will seem purposeful and it will be, because I say so, because actions speak louder than words and that is what I am paying attention to.

An egg in the hand

Friday today and here's the chicken report. Since building the coop-cage before Christmas I have not lost anymore hens since Gloria the Brahma was so violently eviscerated. I still see traces of his wing feathers near the coop but can't bring myself to pick them up. The hens seem fine without him in fact they are better than fine, they seem a bit kinder to each other, a more cohesive group, no one vying for attention from the fabulous rooster. They are more of a team, even the two little bantam hens are doing well. I set the light timer to come on around 4am about 2 months ago and at 5pm when I lock the hens in I give them some corn to eat before bedtime, to keep them warm during the night which aids in egg production. Since then I have been getting about 4 eggs per day which was my goal. We eat eggs everyday and there are plenty for baking and I can also share some with my tenant when I am away and she tends to the hens.

Today also marks a bit of a milestone as it is the beginning of the last weekend that Mark and I will spend as swinging singles. After this weekend Pearl will be with us more of the time as her dad is leaving the state for work. With all change there is a period of adjustment but I see this as a positive thing as time is such a gift with a growing child. We'll have twice as much weekend play time to see friends and family, go to the movies, hike, shop and chill out.

I had hoped to give up something for lent and I was having trouble defining it but I think I can sum it by saying for lent (and perhaps forever) I want to set free my complicated feelings about the past and go forward without contempt or judgment for the lives of others. It's really quite freeing, happy Spring.

Covering my mouth

There's a message here but you'll have to figure it out for yourselves. The new proper water colors I bought are challenging and I seem to lean toward brown and black, too much color is difficult so I am sticking to just tones and shades. The paint is vibrant and a little goes a long way. My week is busy, meetings, work, commitments. Things are changing again in our domestic realm which seems appropriate as it is spring. I missed my mothers death anniversary this year but I did have a great dream about her now that I think about it and it was nice to see her. I worked outside all day yesterday so the yard looks a little better which makes it easier for me to work indoors all day, and as usual those closest to me continue to nourish and ground me.