Novus Domus

Today I am off to help my mother househunt. I’m not expecting we’re going to find THE ONE on this trip, but we’re scheduled to see seven properties and I’m hoping by the end of the day we’ll both have a better idea of what she likes (or doesn’t like) and what she is looking for in her new life (and it really is a new life and not just a new residence as she will be moving from the eastern end of the province to the south, leaving a rural area for a heavily urbanized one, and changing from a sprawling four bedroom house in the woods to a condo or a townhouse).

The process of selling her house and preparing to move has been very stressful for my mother. She’s going to leave behind the house in which she’s lived for the past twenty-six years, the house where she raised her children and the house where she was left behind when they went out into the world, the house where she celebrated her marriage to my stepfather and the house where she sat with him until he drew his last breath.

That house has a lot of memories tied up in it.

When I left it (at the point where I thought it might have been for the last time) earlier this month, I took pictures of the yard while Q. was loading the kids into the car. The sun was out. There was fresh snow. It was beautiful, but both Mum and I knew how desolate it would become later in the winter.

Mum had tears in her eyes as I snapped the last few photos.

“This house needs a family,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “It’s just hard for me to realize that my family has left.”

As hard as it is to go, Mum wants a different life now. She doesn’t want to rattle around in that house, alone as she ages, and hundreds of kilometres away from her children and grandchildren.

And so, over the past year, she has taken the steps to make this move possible.

I’m really proud of my mother.

She has been extraordinarily brave.

It takes great courage to be willing to pack up the life you have known longer than any other.

The process of choosing the new house has been hard for her. She isn’t quite sure what she wants her new life to look like. It’s hard for her to imagine the possibilities. It’s easy for her to get overwhelmed.

That’s where I come in.

Over the past year I’ve been my mother’s unofficial financial advisor and real estate consultant.

I helped her to make a budget and a spreadsheet that would let her track her savings.

I’ve gently helped her come to accept the reality that she will need help from her daughters to be able to buy a property in the new market that is not either a hovel or so small as to make her feel claustrophobic (neither of which we want for her).

I’ve asked her the hard questions, sometimes more than once over several months, to try to help her identify her priorities (two bedrooms, at least some outdoor space, lots of light, a good kitchen, a decent walk score and access to transit).

I’ve offered advice on online property listings.

And tomorrow, I’ll be with her when she first looks at properties after she’s sold her house.

It’s going to be real tomorrow (I think) in a way it hasn’t been before when Mum’s looked at places.

Now she’s actually in a position to buy one.

I expect that will feel a bit overwhelming too.

It will be good for her to have company.

I spoke to Mum on the phone yesterday, when I was eating a (late) lunch while writing my seminar paper for Thursday, and she was in the middle of the long drive from her old home to what will become her new.

We chatted about our plan for Wednesday.

Mum told me that she’s continued her practice of gratitude: every day she writes three things in her journal that made her happy or for which she is grateful.

My Mum has given me so much.

I’m so glad I can do something for her.

Outbreak?

Last Saturday we spent a delightful day with labmonkey, Pea, Spud, and three-fifths of another family (whose parents I’ve been friends with for longer than I’ve known Q.)

The reason only three-fifths of the family were in attendance was on Friday the Dad emailed to say that everyone was feeling unwell and they weren’t sure whether or not they should come, given the littlies.

I wrote back saying that, while I couldn’t speak for labmonkey, I took the view that since E. was in school, he and P. were exposed to pretty much every germ out there. Colds and other minor illnesses really didn’t bother me.

The Mum and the middle child opted not to come, but the others did. There was pulled pork for lunch and pizza for dinner. The adults tested out a boardgame Q. has invented (needs some tweaking but shows great promise) while the bigger kids built marble runs and LEGO creations. The littlies napped (but not at the same time). All the kids trashed the living room, which by the end of the day looked like a tornado had visited. After dinner the adults and big kids played Codenames Pictures while P. and Spud pushed buttons and pulled levers on the exersaucer while also staring at each other suspiciously.

We had a great day.

Monday morning labmonkey messaged me to say she was afraid Spud had Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease. On Saturday he’d had only one suspect spot, not enough to set off any alarm bells. By Monday it was a different story. A doctor confirmed the diagnosis Monday evening.

It’s possible E. had a very very mild case of HFMD in kindergarten as I can remember him having a few odd spots around his mouth and then learning later from another mother that HFMD was going through the class.

I’m not at all certain that’s what it was.

And I’m absolutely certain P.’s never had it.

The incubation period is 3-6 days. If we can get to this weekend without either of them being sick, we should be in the clear.

Q. is convinced our kids have super immune systems since they almost never get sick, even with E. (no doubt) bringing home all kinds of surprises from school.

Fingers crossed he’s right.

Do What You Can

My Dad is still not in his new house.

Partly this is a result of the administrative red tape that is snarling his ability to hire the personal support workers he needs to be able to live at home. There are many hoops which need to be jumped and everything seems to be moving at a glacial pace.

The modifications that need to be made to the house to allow Dad to live there have not been done. I do not know if the delay here is also tied up with the funding issue or if it is because my stepmother is insisting on unpacking boxes (also at a glacial pace) instead of making phone calls and getting quotes.

I am trying to be charitable, but it is difficult. My stepmother has made it very clear over the last year and a half that she feels my sisters and I (and the rest of my father’s family) have no place in the decision-making process around their new life. Offers of assistance are deemed to be interference (especially if the information provided was discovered on our own initiative). Fundamentally I do not trust her to be able to manage this very difficult situation.

My friend who is an RT has her doubts about the direct funding system- she feels it is too new and the kinks have not yet been ironed out. She also feels that requiring the patient’s family to manage the staff required for the patient’s care is an unfair burden. She told me, point blank, that my stepmother will burn out very quickly if she continues to refuse to allow anyone else to help.

I am expecting, dreading really, that when my father eventually does move into the new house, it will be an unmitigated disaster (or, in Q’s words, an “effin’ gong show”). I am trying to prepare myself for this, to reconcile myself to the likelihood that the final phase of my father’s life (however long it may prove to be) will not be what we have wanted for him, what we would have fought for, what we could have arranged, if only we had been allowed.

It is affecting my relationship with my father, as much as I wish it didn’t. I have had to place some emotional distance between myself and the situation or I would not be able to function. If I wake up too much after nursing P. in the wee hours, I am likely to spend an hour or more lying awake in bed worrying about what is yet to come. I am so deeply angry at my stepmother, and I am disappointed that all through the aftermath of his accident my father has not been willing to fight her on this, to insist that other people be part of the process, that the tasks be delegated.

I should not have been surprised. When my father first got engaged to my stepmother, I wrote my father a long letter outlining all the reasons why I thought he shouldn’t marry her (and I believe to this day that they were valid). I asked him not to show her the letter.

He gave her the letter, which meant I then had to endure a letter from her expressing her disappointment and hurt. And this has been the pattern- there is nothing we say to our father that is “in confidence”, nothing that he won’t then go and tell her. He throws us under the bus where she’s concerned, as labmonkey likes to say.

We would move the moon, if he would let us.

But all we can do is watch from a distance and hope that we will be proven wrong.

*******

My mother is quite possibly about to sell her house (she has an acceptable offer that is conditional on a house inspection which is taking place tomorrow).

I don’t think she believed this was going to happen. She’d resigned herself to another long, dark, cold winter there. That this might not happen, that she might need a new place to live early in the new year, has thrown her into a bit of a tizzy.

Finalizing the sale of her house has eaten up all of her emotional energy, which meant she’s become overwhelmed by the prospect of having to simultaneously start seriously looking for a new place to live. Understandable- it’s a huge change (from a big house on multiple acres in a rural, economically depressed region to a condo in a mid-size city in the most densely populated region in the province).

She doesn’t know what questions she needs to be asking herself.

She doesn’t yet know what her new life could look like (or what she wants it to look like).

It was all getting to be too much.

So she delegated the real estate search to me (making me very happy in the process, because looking at real estate is a guilty pleasure).

Yesterday I had a very productive thirty-minute phone conversation with Mum’s agent in the new city, which answered some of my questions and clarified some of the factors at play. Then, this morning, I had a forty-minute phone conversation with Mum where I asked her some hard questions about what she wanted (or thought she wanted).

Some of the questions she had firm answers for (a balcony is non-negotiable).

Some of the questions she was able to use to think about her new life more carefully (no, she doesn’t need two full bathrooms because most people who will be visiting her will now live close enough that they won’t need to stay with her overnight).

And some of them she genuinely couldn’t answer yet (will she feel comfortable walking alone on nature trails when she doesn’t feel she can walk alone on the isolated roads of her current area), so we will keep all options open as we move forward.

It is still very much going to be Mum’s decision about where she lives, and I’m sure she’ll take a larger role in the process once the sale is finalized and she can clear some mental space for thinking about the future.

But for now she needs me, and, let’s be honest, her need has come at a good time.

It’s good to feel useful.

If I can’t fix my father’s future life, maybe I’ll at least be able to help my mother build a good one.

Hallowe’en

Mel’s most recent Microblog Monday post (which I yet again missed participating in as Mondays are devoted to prepping Tuesday’s class) was about sucking at Hallowe’en.

The title grabbed me, as I was, for once, extremely confident that I was rocking at Hallowe’en this year.

Then I read the post and discovered that for Mel, sucking at Hallowe’en meant not being super creative with her choice of costume and opting for comfort over clever. Since it hasn’t occurred to me to dress up at Hallowe’en for more than a decade, my definition of sucking has to be different from hers.

We are largely minimalists in our Hallowe’en preparations at our house, a combination of lack of time (both), lack of creative skills (me) and a lack of interest (Q., who comes from a country where Hallowe’en was a non-event in his childhood and is only now starting to get a bit of a foothold thanks to the inundation of American culture). Q. is happy for me to do whatever I want to do, but finds the entire holiday deeply strange.

I buy the candy (and secretly eat too many tiny chocolate bars) and buy the pumpkins and carve the pumpkins with E. and roast the pumpkin seeds and organize E.’s costume and take him trick-or-treating. Q. stays home and hands out candy (and secretly hides the tiny Snickers to eat later).

I suspect this is our last year where our house boasts only one (or two, if I’ve felt ambitious) inexpertly carved pumpkins, as E., at six, is now cognizant of all the decorations on the other houses. He believes firmly that we should “make our house more scary” next year. I quite like the giant webs stretched over people’s front porches, complete with equally giant spiders lurking in the corners. I’d be happy to string something like that up next year, provided I can buy a pre-made web (see above re: lack of creative skills). I think Q. would draw the line at some animatronic monstrosity.

This year was especially complicated since a) P. was now in the mix and b) I teach on Tuesday nights, so would be unable to participate in any of the evening festivities. Luckily my youngest sister was in town and was happy to come and help out.

As of Monday morning, our house had no candy and no pumpkins. Despite discovering on Monday morning that our two closest grocery stores were out of pumpkins (although there was still plenty of candy), by Monday night all was sorted, and we’d even managed to carve the pumpkin after dragging it home after school (E. picked the largest one in the flower market and we were just able to get it home by draping the bag over the handle of the stroller to take some of the weight). E., like last year, drew the design for the pumpkin and (new this year) did some of the carving himself, as well as most of the scooping.

I felt like I spent most of Monday rushing around in a blind panic, but I was still utterly confident that we were going to have an amazing Hallowe’en because E’s costume was THE BEST.

Months ago, E. decided he wanted to be the Titanic for Hallowe’en.

He never changed his mind.

I haven’t been one to make E’s costumes in the past. He was a hand-me-down monkey his first year (when he didn’t go trick-or-treating), a shark his second (I picked that costume and purchased it), a bunny his third (the first year he decided what he wanted to be- a friend made him bunny ears and a bunny tail and I dressed him in brown), a monkey (again) his fourth (because he was insisting he wasn’t going to go trick-or-treating at all and I had a (different, larger) hand-me-down costume that we stuck on him when he changed his mind (predictably) on the day itself), a red snake his fifth (I ordered a snake mask from Etsy and made a tail of sorts by stuffing paper into one leg of a pair of red tights), and a witch his sixth (I ordered a witch’s hat online, stuck him in my graduate gown from the UK and handed him the child’s broom we have in the kitchen). My approach to costumes can best be summed up as “buy it and keep it simple”.

This approach doesn’t work when your child wants to be the Titanic, especially when your child is obsessed with the Titanic and has firm ideas about how the costume has to look (“The fourth funnel was a decorative funnel, so all the funnels have to have smoke coming out of them except for the fourth and it needs to have working red and green lights to show the port and starboard sides and an iceberg dangling off the side, but just the tip of the iceberg because most of it would have been under the water”).

Between E’s vision, his auntie’s creative genius, labmonkey’s willingness to use her Amazon Prime membership to purchase a captain’s hat at short notice, Q.’s deft touch with an electric drill, our surprisingly appropriate collection of craft materials, and my determination not to disappoint my kid, over the course of a couple of weekend afternoons, we built a Titanic costume.

And I am not going to #humblebrag here: it was AMAZING.

E. brought the house down at his school’s costume parade.

On Hallowe’en night, trick-or-treating with his baby sister, the shark (reusing his old costume!), he was a sensation.

He came home with a frightening amount of candy. “People gave me extra as soon as they saw the costume!” he told me the next morning.

He was SO happy.

He’ll probably remember that night forever.

I don’t think we’ll be able to top it- we’ve peaked at age six (either that or we’ve just set a very worrying precedent when it comes to creating unusual costumes from scratch).

It was so worth it.

Microblog Mondays: Our House(s)

Both of my parents’ houses are up for sale.

They are for sale for good reasons: my mother wants to move closer to her children and grandchildren, and my wheelchair-bound father cannot get into his house and needs to sell it so he can move to the new house which will be accessible.

Still.

It is surreal to be able to look them up on MLS, to read how the real estate agents have described them, to watch the slideshows of the rooms I know so well.

My mother has lived in her house for twenty-six years.

My father has lived in his house for twenty.

Neither of those houses is “home” for me now, but I have a lot of memories tied up in both.

E. is also struggling. He’s asked both sets to take videos of the houses, “going through every single room so I can always remember what they looked like”.

Some change is good. Some change is necessary.

That doesn’t always make it easy.

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.

Microblog Mondays: Waves

We’re down under at the moment, visiting Q.’s family.

It’s technically winter here now, but the weather has thus far more closely resembled what would be a nice spring day at home (except in the late afternoon when it gets cold and dark unexpectedly quickly).

Yesterday we walked to the beach. There were humpback whales breaching off shore and sea eagles soaring overhead. It was a beautiful day.

E. went for a paddle in the shallow end of the rock pool.

Q. went for a swim in the ocean.

He caught a few waves and even though I know, I KNOW, that he grew up doing this, that he has done this thousands of times, that he knows how to read the ocean in ways that my father never could have, I still spent his entire swim trying not to cry or throw up (I wanted to do both).

I haven’t been next to the ocean since it happened.

I’m going to be visiting this beach every couple of years for decades to come. One day my children will not want to swim in the rock pool. They will want to dive into the waves, just like their father, just like I once did.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it again.

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.

Microblog Mondays: Cake-tastrophe

E turned six today.

He requested, just like last year, a train cake (although with a few modifications).

I am not what you would call a Pinterest-worthy mama. The train cake last year was a stretch, but it turned out surprisingly well. So I wasn’t too stressed when I woke up this morning and still had to bake and decorate said cake.

By 11:03 a.m. I was sitting on my kitchen floor sobbing because absolutely NOTHING was working with the cake. It stuck in the pan and broke when I tried to get it out; it crumbled whenever I tried to cut it; the icing glued to the crumbed edges and broke them off; the jelly roll sitting on top of a flat slice of cake looked nothing at all like the oil tanker of my imagination.

The cake was completely, utterly, fucked, and I no longer had any time in which I could fix it because I was out of cake mix and out of icing and P. was soon going to wake up from her nap.

And although I knew it was JUST a cake, when E. had woken up that morning he had been disappointed because he had thought that all of his presents would be out and wrapped just like at Christmas and when I’d taken him to school he’d said to me sorrowfully that “this hadn’t been how [he’d] imagined [his] birthday would start” and the thought that I would have to pick him up that afternoon and tell him I hadn’t been able to make him the train cake he wanted, the train cake that he’d picked the decorations for when he went with me to Bulk Barn, the train cake that he’d asked for months ago, just broke my heart.

So I sat on my floor and cried.

And then I called in the cavalry.

My youngest sister turned up with a slab cake and more icing (AND helium balloons including a giant silver E) and my mother turned up with one of those icing nozzle things and together we fixed the cake.

And E. loved it (except for the fact that I directed my mother to put the boiler too far away from the cab of the steam locomotive).

Some days it really does take a village.

What was your worst baking disaster? Were you able to fix it?

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.

Microblog Mondays: Tale as Old as Time

When my sisters and I were little we had a tradition of going to see every Disney animated film in the theatre. Originally this was less a conscious tradition and more a “going to the movies with your parents and siblings” thing, but as we got older it became a deliberate choice. We would rearrange our schedules to make it work, even after we started university.

Our first film was The Little Mermaid in 1989. My youngest sister was five, so it probably wasn’t an appropriate choice (sorry, third child). As labmonkey pointed out, exposure to Ursula at that young age possibly explains our youngest sister’s long-term fear of the ocean and the creatures that live in it.

Our unbroken streak lasted until 2002, when we did see Lilo & Stitch but then didn’t watch Treasure Planet, partly because at that stage I’d moved across the pond to start my graduate work and partly because it looked like such a terrible film that we weren’t inspired enough to make it happen.

The Little Mermaid; The Rescuers Down Under; Beauty and the Beast; Aladdin; The Lion King; Pocahontas; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Hercules; Mulan; Tarzan; Fantasia 2000; The Emperor’s New Groove; Atlantis: The Lost Empire; Lilo & Stitch.

14 films.

14 years.

We grew up together with the music from Disney soundtracks running through our heads. I can still sing, letter perfect, “Under the Sea”, “Circle of Life”, “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” and a host of others. We have an entire series of sibling in-jokes that require, for example, only that one of us says “Llama face!” to the others to make us all fall about in helpless laughter.

Those movie trips are some of my best memories. We were children, then teenagers, then young adults, but the cartoons were always there. We had our quarrels as siblings do, but our bond never weakened, because between our father’s military career and our parents’ divorce we figured out very quickly that we could only ever truly count on each other to be there.

And then real life intervened and we all grew up too much and the tradition died.

Until now.

Yesterday, my sisters and I went to the movie theatre to watch the new Beauty and the Beast.

We were without partners, without children.

We worked out that the last time the three of us were together, just the three of us, was in the fall of 2010, when I was barely pregnant with E., just before my youngest sister moved to California.

We ate popcorn and Swedish berries.

We laughed and we jumped in our seats.

We bit our tongues so we wouldn’t sing along to the songs that we STILL know, after all these years.

We had so much fun.

I hope we get to do it again.

Do you love Disney animated films too? What’s your favourite?

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.

When you can’t go home again

My mother is planning to sell her house. It is the right decision: she is newly widowed; the house is much too big for her and too hard to maintain; the property is rural and isolated and requires too much work; she is a long drive away from her siblings, children, and grandchildren; and she does not have a strong support network of friends in the area where she currently lives.

It is a big house that got away from my mother and stepfather over the last few years as he became increasingly unwell. It is in an economically depressed area. Up until a couple of weeks ago, when I’ve thought about the reality of Mum selling the house, my thought process has largely revolved around the fear that my mother will want to sell the house and not be able to, or that she will sell it for such a pittance that she will not be able to move closer to me and my sisters, even if we help financially.

I’ve been afraid that the house will be an albatross, a millstone wrapped around my mother’s neck, dragging her down and chaining her to the past when she is willing to move forward and explore a new future.

When I saw my mother last week, she commented that the real estate agents who have been in to see the house have called it a “breath of fresh air”. There are, apparently, not many houses of its size on the market, and there are buyers who want a larger house.

They don’t think it will be hard to sell.

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but in that moment, when the sale of the house became a real possibility, the door that I have been keeping resolutely shut cracked open and the emotions that I have been holding at bay flooded in.

Because it’s not just a house, of course.

It’s our childhood home.

It’s the place my city-born son loves to visit most of all.

It’s where I can see all the stars.

Selling the house is absolutely, without a doubt, the right decision. And yet, last week, when I was sitting in the bedroom that used to be mine, looking out the window at the snow and the trees and the landscape that my body recognizes as “home”, it seemed impossible to comprehend that it might be one of the last times I was there, that at some point very soon visiting my mother will not mean returning to the place where I grew up.

It’s another loss.

How do I make the space to grieve it?

Microblog Mondays: Guilty Pleasures

I love real estate.

Before we bought our house, I loved going to open houses, especially when we really were just “looking” and weren’t ready to buy yet.

I’m on the email list for one of the agents who is most active in our neighbourhood, so I feel like I have a good sense of how things are selling (extremely quickly and for stupidly over asking because the market in our city is out of control).

When we bought our house, we bought what we could afford and we bought a house that would not prove to be too big for us if we weren’t able to have children. We’re going to be in this house for a long time now, as we can’t afford to move up to anything bigger in our neighbourhood (see comment above about the ridiculous state of the market). So until recently I didn’t really have any reason to look at listings or go to open houses.

My mother is going to be moving, hopefully sometime this spring or summer.

She’s set me loose on MLS to look at listings in likely areas. When she comes to visit we’re going to go and see some places in person.

I have already spent a couple of hours cruising the website, looking at walk scores and watching virtual tours.

I am SO HAPPY.

Do you have a guilty pleasure?

This post is part of #MicroblogMondays. To read the inaugural post and find out how you can participate, click here.