Yes, today I received divine reassurance that we made the right decision.
Last weekend, John and I finally decided that we will not embark on the kitchen renovation project that we've been thinking about for the last few years. At least not in the next year or two (or perhaps three or four). I've come to believe that the reason we have not actually started it yet is because I do not have the intestinal fortitude required to weather a project of this magnitude. Not right now anyways. We have done a lot of talking about it, but it never goes farther than that. John just doesn't care enough to do anything about it and I just can seem to force myself to make the requisite inquiries to get the process started.
I fancy myself pretty handy around the house. I can usually diagnose basic problems and even fix them most of the time. This week was not a good week for me on that front, however.
Earlier this week our oven decided to konk out. On Sunday evening, it worked fine. Monday I set it to preheat. And nothing. What the...?
Today, I successfully managed to somehow stop all hot water from flowing to our kitchen faucet. I was, ironically, trying to fix it (again). I turned off the water under the sink and when I turned it on again, nothing. I can make absolutely no logical sense of why it isn't working. Valve open, water flowing. Valve closed, water stops. Valve re-opened, hello water, where are you?
I eventually gave up on that because I was so perplexed I wasn't able to think straight. I decided instead to move on to something more basic. I had picked up a dimmer switch a while back that I thought would be nice to have in our dining room. Today was the day to make it happen. I should have read the signs: today was no day for me and house projects. But I didn't. I should have just conceded after trying 4 different configurations of wiring, running to and from the fuse panel, each time returning dejected after my commands of "let their be light" were left disobeyed. It was only in my final fury after trying half a dozen different things that I grabbed the packaging and saw that the dimmer is incompatible with compact flourescent lighting. Nerg.
So. In sum, my oven still does not work. We still have no hot water in our kitchen. And I'm certainly not in the mood for a romantic dinner, even if we had a stupid dimmer switch that worked. A full scale kitchen renovation project will have to wait until the day that I'm convinced that it will be worth the sacrifice of my sanity.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
St Andreas
Yesterday, Andreas asked me what a saint was. I was busy with something else and so I have him a quick, distracted and very rudimentary answer. Something like: Someone who does good things. Oh. He says happily. So I am a saint then!
Me: Well, you do do lots of good things. But to be a saint, the church decides after someone is dead whether they get sainted or not, whether they have done enough good things.
Andreas: Ohhhh. Well, then you must make sure that when I am dead, if they make me a saint, you have to tell me. I will have my cell phone with me all the time. Or you could just email me.
Communication with dead wannabe saints made easy.
Anything is possible when you are six.
Me: Well, you do do lots of good things. But to be a saint, the church decides after someone is dead whether they get sainted or not, whether they have done enough good things.
Andreas: Ohhhh. Well, then you must make sure that when I am dead, if they make me a saint, you have to tell me. I will have my cell phone with me all the time. Or you could just email me.
Communication with dead wannabe saints made easy.
Anything is possible when you are six.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Happy St Paddy's
St Patrick's Day is chockablock full of significance at our house. Partly because it's an Irish holiday. But mostly because it is a marker of our return to Canada after our time on the fair island of Eire.
March 17th, 2006 was the day that the four of us wearily boarded our flights back home after what felt at the time like a failed experiment in Belfast. On that day, my friend Margaret bestowed this Irish blessing upon us. It felt very appropriate - both for its sardonic truth and for its well-timed and good-natured humour. Classically Irish.
May those who love us, love us.
And for those who don’t love us
May God turn their hearts.
And if God cannot turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles
So that we may know them
By their limping.
It's hard to believe that 5 years has passed since that day. Like it was yesterday, I remember sitting at the airport with tears in my eyes, jealously watching early morning revelers decked out in their green jumpers and plastic bowler hats. I wished I felt like celebrating. Instead I felt deflated and defeated. Instead I was mourning.
Today, 5 years older and wiser (hopefully), I see with the insight of some distance and perspective. What felt like failure at the time now feels like but one segment on the grand adventure of life. Yes, I grieve our losses - friendships cut short and so many memories left unmade - but the pangs of grief fade over time through the remembering of them and the sharp edges of the pain are made smoother through the gentle friction of its touching.
Today, 5 years older and wiser (hopefully), I see with the insight of some distance and perspective. What felt like failure at the time now feels like but one segment on the grand adventure of life. Yes, I grieve our losses - friendships cut short and so many memories left unmade - but the pangs of grief fade over time through the remembering of them and the sharp edges of the pain are made smoother through the gentle friction of its touching.
Today will be a day of remembering for us. And I can't but help remembering some of the hard stories of our friends.
Ian and Donna were our next door neighbours. Theirs is a “mixed” relationship – Donna is Catholic and Ian is Protestant. Within the first week of us moving in, Donna tells us how Ian suffered significant brain damage as a result of a brutal pipe beating by a local paramilitary. She doesn’t give many details, although she does say that Ian had been hospitalized for several months and was expected not to live. Ian still had obvious difficulty with walking and communicating.
When I asked my friend Margaret how the Troubles impacted her childhood and her family, she seems surprised by the question, as if no one had ever asked her that before, as if she’d never thought about it before. She doesn’t know what to say. She says her family wasn’t really politically minded, that they had just a regular upper-middle class life. But after a few moments of thought, she speaks of remembering the feeling she would get when the doorbell to her family’s home would ring when she was a child. She’s curious now whether her father ever wondered why she would always race to the door to answer it before he had the chance to, even pushing him out of the way so that she’d get there first. I remember the exact moment we were talking about this and my silence in anticipation of her explanation. I was afraid of what I was hearing. She laughs when she says, “Obviously I believed that whoever was at the door would be less likely to shoot a little girl”.
My friend Ashleigh is a primary school teacher at the interface school where we worked part time. I remember her telling me of her inability to cope with the demands made on her by the situations that her pupils face daily – poverty, neglect, violence and exploitation. She felt completely overwhelmed and under qualified to help them and their families. She spoke of going home at night and sitting in a darkened room, rocking. She said her husband thinks she’s crazy.
But even more than that cold hardness of the Troubles and the plague of community trauma that still simmers (and sometimes boils) in Belfast, I remember our beautiful, every-day life there.
I remember our many walks up to Belfast Castle. And down to the city centre. Bike rides round by the lough. Hikes up Cave Hill. The beautiful cavernous Fortwilliam Church and the many friends we made there. The young neighbourhood kids playing footy on our front pavement: Demi. Ryan. Janet. Sean. Our neighbour, Ian, who seemed to always be looking for his lost dog, Misty. Daily trips to the Tesco. And perpetually wiping dog shite off the wheels of the pram.
Crocuses poking their wee heads up in January (yes, January!). Wet, grey weather, making the warm sunny days all the more glorious. The time the neighbour's cat plucked a pidgeon out of mid air. The time Nicholas' little stuffed Pelican named Scoup became a tragic casualty of the Antrim Road traffic. The way that the other moms at playgroup would give me concerned looks when Andreas' routinely opted for pushing the doll pram around.
Toast and tea. Bickies and milk. Sammies from the chippy on the corner. Nipping out to the shop and bringing back sweeties for the boys. A run down to the library at the bottom of the road. Feeding the swans at the Waterworks Park. And the wee Irish accent that was just beginning to take hold of Nicholas' speech.
Happy St Paddy's. And cheers to Ireland.
Ian and Donna were our next door neighbours. Theirs is a “mixed” relationship – Donna is Catholic and Ian is Protestant. Within the first week of us moving in, Donna tells us how Ian suffered significant brain damage as a result of a brutal pipe beating by a local paramilitary. She doesn’t give many details, although she does say that Ian had been hospitalized for several months and was expected not to live. Ian still had obvious difficulty with walking and communicating.
When I asked my friend Margaret how the Troubles impacted her childhood and her family, she seems surprised by the question, as if no one had ever asked her that before, as if she’d never thought about it before. She doesn’t know what to say. She says her family wasn’t really politically minded, that they had just a regular upper-middle class life. But after a few moments of thought, she speaks of remembering the feeling she would get when the doorbell to her family’s home would ring when she was a child. She’s curious now whether her father ever wondered why she would always race to the door to answer it before he had the chance to, even pushing him out of the way so that she’d get there first. I remember the exact moment we were talking about this and my silence in anticipation of her explanation. I was afraid of what I was hearing. She laughs when she says, “Obviously I believed that whoever was at the door would be less likely to shoot a little girl”.
My friend Ashleigh is a primary school teacher at the interface school where we worked part time. I remember her telling me of her inability to cope with the demands made on her by the situations that her pupils face daily – poverty, neglect, violence and exploitation. She felt completely overwhelmed and under qualified to help them and their families. She spoke of going home at night and sitting in a darkened room, rocking. She said her husband thinks she’s crazy.
But even more than that cold hardness of the Troubles and the plague of community trauma that still simmers (and sometimes boils) in Belfast, I remember our beautiful, every-day life there.
I remember our many walks up to Belfast Castle. And down to the city centre. Bike rides round by the lough. Hikes up Cave Hill. The beautiful cavernous Fortwilliam Church and the many friends we made there. The young neighbourhood kids playing footy on our front pavement: Demi. Ryan. Janet. Sean. Our neighbour, Ian, who seemed to always be looking for his lost dog, Misty. Daily trips to the Tesco. And perpetually wiping dog shite off the wheels of the pram.
Crocuses poking their wee heads up in January (yes, January!). Wet, grey weather, making the warm sunny days all the more glorious. The time the neighbour's cat plucked a pidgeon out of mid air. The time Nicholas' little stuffed Pelican named Scoup became a tragic casualty of the Antrim Road traffic. The way that the other moms at playgroup would give me concerned looks when Andreas' routinely opted for pushing the doll pram around.
Toast and tea. Bickies and milk. Sammies from the chippy on the corner. Nipping out to the shop and bringing back sweeties for the boys. A run down to the library at the bottom of the road. Feeding the swans at the Waterworks Park. And the wee Irish accent that was just beginning to take hold of Nicholas' speech.
Happy St Paddy's. And cheers to Ireland.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The power of power
I love it when my children give me advice. There is something so precious and so pure about the honest expressions of their very own life experiences.
The other day I was grumbling my growing frustrations to no one and everyone as I was fiddling with kitchen faucet, trying to finally fix the &%@#ing thing once and for all. I paused after a particular moment of despair and sighed. OK it was more like a growl. It was then that I felt Nicholas' hand on my shoulder.
Mom, when I'm feeling frustrated or mad I just tell myself something to make me feel better. Like the other day when I was at school, playing a computer game in the library, I kept losing. I was doing terrible and I was getting frustrated. And then I said to myself: Nick, you are fighting NO ONE - and you are LOSING! You can do better than that!
I laughed. That's exactly how I felt. Like I was fighting no one. And losing very badly. For me, the thought was despairing. For Nicholas, it gave him power.
Out of the mouths of babes.
The other day I was grumbling my growing frustrations to no one and everyone as I was fiddling with kitchen faucet, trying to finally fix the &%@#ing thing once and for all. I paused after a particular moment of despair and sighed. OK it was more like a growl. It was then that I felt Nicholas' hand on my shoulder.
Mom, when I'm feeling frustrated or mad I just tell myself something to make me feel better. Like the other day when I was at school, playing a computer game in the library, I kept losing. I was doing terrible and I was getting frustrated. And then I said to myself: Nick, you are fighting NO ONE - and you are LOSING! You can do better than that!
I laughed. That's exactly how I felt. Like I was fighting no one. And losing very badly. For me, the thought was despairing. For Nicholas, it gave him power.
Out of the mouths of babes.
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