Nope, Not Feeling It.

I'll be totally honest.

I've kind of been thinking of taking a long-term hiatus from this blog. Blogging has been a good outlet for me for 10 or more years but lately, I'm not feeling it.  I still have a lot of opinions on a lot of things, but sometimes I just feel to damn lazy to back my opinions up with facts.  The kids are getting older, and they read and stuff now, so my ability to blog about them and their cute little foibles is becoming limited, because as they get older, they have more to expect in privacy.

Blogging has changed as well. I don't see the same kind of communities of commenters as I once did, and now it kind of feels like screaming into the void.

But, I suppose, I like having the outlet here. I like thinking that someone out there cares what I have to say.

Today marked the two year anniversary of my surgery, and I'm kind of bitter-sweet about it.

I don't miss my colon much.

I'm glad to still be alive, and functioning at about 90-95% of what would have once been considered normal.

I'm fat as fuck again, but I'm mostly okay with it.  Buying pants is bullshit, though.

I'm anxious a lot.  I get scared as hell sometimes.

Maybe I'll keep writing, and just stop promoting it. Maybe I could just make this a place to scream into the void.

There's a common theme amongst cancer survivors.. a lot of talk of Living Life To The Fullest™and Making Every Day Count™. It makes me angry, because it's such a privileged position to take.  I mean, it's a nice life, if you can afford it.

I still have kids to feed, a (ever-so-slowly crumbling) roof to keep over our heads, and a car to keep on the road.

Living Life To Your Fullest™sounds pretty good on paper, but the vision of quitting your day job and following your dreams is only realistic when it's built on three things: Money, Time, and Energy.

Once I had Time, and Energy, but no Money.

Now I find I have little Money, little Time, and only so much Energy to go around.

So, I get angry.  Once upon a time, I looked at where I was and said "It's cool, I've got my whole life ahead of me."

Now, I'm not so sure. I may not have another 10 years. I may have another 50.

Maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.

And here I stagnate, wanting to Live My Dreams™ and Make Every Day Count™, but there are mouths to feed and bills to pay and at the end of the day, I am lucky if I have the time and energy to type a few words, pick up a guitar or a paintbrush, or even stay awake through a full episode of Breaking Bad.

LottoMax couldn't come soon enough.

Are you there, Void? It's me, Andrea.

High School and the Fine Art of Giving No Fucks

It's amazing, you know?

It blows my mind sometimes, the way minor, yet arguably shitty, incidents and experiences can take you to a place you thought you'd left behind. Habits formed from self-preservation remain in play long after the threat has dissipated.

A 34-year-old mother of two, with a job and a mortgage and responsibilities can be reduced to an anxious, self-conscious adolescent in a matter of seconds, just from the sound of a giggling teenaged girl.

The high-schoolers have infiltrated the YMCA.  My mornings spent getting ready for work after my morning swim used to mean running into a few elderly women and occasionally one of my co-workers.  That was pretty much it.

But now there are high-schoolers. 

I hear their voices and laughter bouncing off the ceramic tile, muffled by the sound of the not-quite-hot-enough showers and my shoulders hunch up and my eyes, like magnets, are drawn to the ground.  I adjust my towel, just a little more tightly, as this body of mine, the one that not 20 minutes earlier had been gliding gracefully through the water now feels preposterous - all sagging, scarred, bumpy-fat flesh.  Taking up space.  Too much space.

"For the love of Gord.  You're 34 years old.  Woman the hell up already," I tell myself and sigh.  So many years gone by and I'm still affected.

I like to say that high school was a breeze, a lot of fun. 

(aside from grade nine.  aside from gym class.  aside from the girls who threatened me with violence because they thought I was "looking" at them.  in the change room.  I stopped looking up, ever.)

I tell people that high school was the time I ran out of fucks to give.  I learned to relax.  A little.  It was the time I tell people (and I tell myself)  that I learned to not care what people thought of me.

(I cared.  I just didn't let on.  It was safer if people thought they couldn't get to you.)

I practiced not giving a shit.  More accurately, I became practiced in the fine art of appearing to be all out of fucks to give. 

I learned to sneer at people, especially girls, I felt thought they were better than me.  Prettier, richer, more desirable.  The ones who had their shit together.  Brick by brick, I built walls of 'giving no fucks' to encase myself in and I told myself that they were nothing, of no consequence.

The most relatable character in this film, from my perspective. - SOURCE

My mother told me, "Hold your head high."

I held my head high.

But even now, hearing these voices echoing off tile, voices that exude the confidence of knowing the world is at your feet, sets my face to utter stoicism.  Instinctively, I still brace myself for mockery, setting my expression to one of utter neutrality, as I gauge the risk of making eye contact, or drawing attention to myself.

(go ahead.  Laugh at this fat, spotty, scarred body.  see if I care)

But of course, no one says anything.  Because this isn't high school, dammit.  I'm a 34 year old woman in the YMCA changeroom and I am about as incidental to these kids as any stranger on the street.

Good Night, Good Night, Sweet Baby

As an adolescent, I was moody, intensely emotional, and cynical.

Hell, as an adult, I am moody, intensely emotional and prone to bouts of cynicism.  As an adult I have the benefit of years of experience to back up my cynicism.

There is a family legend, or more accurately, an anecdote that tells of how my father, in his attempt to get baby Andie to sleep, would play me Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez records.

This story is always told with a wink, the punchline being that Dad's choice of baby bedtime music somehow contributed to shaping me into the moody, intensely emotional cynic I am today.

Music and sleep have always been deeply intertwined for me.  Music and life, really, but music has played a part in my dreams since I was a small child and would beg my mom to put a tape in the cassette player while I went to sleep.  My tastes were not exactly typical for a child of the late 80s and early, as my artists of choice ranged from Harry Chapin to Harry Belafonte, with some Stompin' Tom thrown into the mix.

How I ever fell asleep to Harry Belafonte baffles me.

Both my sister and I sang The House at Pooh Corner to our children. It may be the perfect lullaby.

I think that had I had children later, or discovered the Mountain Goats earlier, I would have found myself rocking my babies, singing songs like "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" and "Song for Dennis Brown"; songs with soft, lilting harmonies and lyrics about addiction and love doomed to fail.

Then one day, down the road, I'd tell them about how I sang these tunes to them when they were babies.. and if they were moody, intensely emotional cynics, such as myself, we'd chuckle to ourselves as if to say "Well, I guess we know where THAT came from."

Good old kid-friendly tunes. - SOURCE

Age, Relatively Speaking

Age, like time, moves in a dimension of which we are only subtly aware. A shiver down your spine.

My grandmothers, at 62, were so much older than my mother is at 62.  62, to a child, seems a ridiculously high number of years to live.

They've lived 20 years and more since then.

My mother at 34, was so much older at 34 than I am now.  34 was impossibly grown up.  At 34, my parents, for all appearances to my childhood self, really had their shit together. At 34, I am still not sure I qualify as an adult.

My daughter, at 13, is younger than I was at 13.

Or so it would seem. It may be a generation of coddled youth, or it may be my parental desire to keep her a baby forever.

I only have vague recollections of my great-grandmothers (the two who lived to see my birth), as they died while I was still basically a baby.  My grandmothers have already lived to see at least one great grand-child to adulthood may still live long enough to see the others grow up, too.

To my children, their great-grandmothers will never be a faint, fuzzy outline in a memory formed by a toddler's mind.

(My grandfather's never lived to see their great-grandchildren.  Neither did their mothers.)

Time's passage reminds me of my age. That's about the only thing that does.

My kids think I am old.  I almost have them fooled into thinking I'm a grown up.

It amuses me how gradually the alternative rock stations become oldies stations.

They just kept playing the same songs, twenty years later.

Source

Things that bother me that I should probably get over, already. Part 1.

Back in 1993, I was in grade 8.  As part of our music curriculum we were to form groups and perform a lip sync to the song of our choice (pending approval by the music teacher whose name escapes me).

My friends and I approached this nameless entity, who may have vaguely resembled Rhys Darby if memory serves, with great excitement and proposed our intention to lip sync to "(I'm Gonna Be) 500 Miles" by the Proclaimers, which to this day is probably the most innocuous song ever performed by twins with unintelligible Scottish accents.

We were denied permission to perform this tune, because the teacher in question felt the lyrics "When I  get drunk, I'm gonna be the one who gets drunk next to you" was wholly inappropriate for a group of thirteen year olds to perform.

We were utterly devastated.  Okay, maybe not devastated, but we were most certainly indignant.  Even  more so when we watched the other performances, which included a rendition of Nirvana's "Lithium"

Oh, yeah.  References to getting drunk are too inappropriate, but 13-year-olds singing the line "I'm so horny" is hunky-fucking-dory.

This, my friends, is why every so often, I am reminded of this incident and how it resulted in the grave injustice of having to lip-synch "Boot Scootin' Boogie" in front of my grade 8 class.  Which, I may add, also includes references to alcohol, thus making me question exactly what that nameless grade 8 music teacher had against a couple of homely Scots who apparently lacked a decent mode of transportation.

I have thoughts on Mothers Day.

Happy Mother's Day to the moms out there.  I'm lucky to have a lot of really fantastic moms in my life, including my own mother, my sister, my grandmothers, my kids' stepmother and a number of my friends, including a few guy friends who have had to be both dad and mom.

Parenting is hard.  I say it a lot.  It can be a constant struggle.  It can be a stream of constant worry, second guessing, self-doubt.  There's an endless barrage of information out there, mostly pertaining to the myriad ways one can fuck their kid up for life.  

Not everyone is good at it.  Some people are never meant to be parents.  Some of those people end up raising kids anyway.  

On Mother's Day, lets remember to be sensitive while we post our congratulations to each other on being such awesome moms or having awesome moms, that there are people who do not find this a day to celebrate.  People who have suffered at the hands of their mother.  People who do not speak to their mother.  People who had to grow up with out a mother.  People who have recently lost their mother and still feel the sting and loneliness.  People who desperately want to be mothers but are unable, for whatever reason.  People who aren't mothers and would be quite okay with it were it not for societal messaging that being child-free means somehow being less than. 

I love my mom. I'm lucky, that while she may not be perfect (and none of us are) I can safely say she's generally always had the best of intentions and my sister's and my well-being in mind.  

I like being a mom. I'm lucky that my kids make it easy to like being a mom.  Most of the time, ha ha.  I know a few mothers who struggle daily, who love their kids madly but have days, and sometimes weeks and months where it's difficult to like them very much at all.  

A few reminders:

Not all mothers have experienced pregnancy

Not all mothers are women

Some people do not love their mother. They might have a good reason.

Lastly, a note to the retail sector: if you suggest that a vacuum cleaner is a great way to show your mother your appreciation, you are officially and without a doubt THE WORST.

I'm looking at you Canadian Tire.

A Short, reflective post.

It has officially been six months since the last time I had a large intestine.  It's been seven months and a day since I received the cancer diagnosis that led to me parting ways with my large intestine, with whom I have for years had a tumultuous, codependent relationship.

It sounds like a cliche to say a lot has happened in the last six months.  A cliche and a lie.  I got the news. I wept. I raged.  I laid awake at night, contemplating my mortality.  I went into surgery, I came out of surgery, seven pounds of colon lighter.  I recovered, gradually.  Once, in a morphine haze, I advised my child who was dealing with a schoolyard bully to "just hit her."  

Parenting while on heavy painkillers is interesting, to say the least.

My tumor is currently still making the rounds somewhere in Utah, as geneticists search for the underlying cause as to why a 33-year-old woman would end up with colon cancer.

It was a great day when I heard the words "Stage One."

I got off the pain meds.  I started eating regular food again.  Mostly, anyway.  Some foods are less forgiving than they once were.  I went back to work.

I still worry.  A little part of me dreads September, when I will go in for my one-year scope.  By the way, I feel like the most popular girl at the ball, since it seems every doctor I've spoken with wants to get up in my junk with that sigmoidoscope.

Over half a year since my life changed, and yet, not much feels different.

I'd probably be the best lottery winner ever.

I bought a lottery ticket last night.  The LottoMAX to be precise.  A friendly convenience store clerk talked me into it. By talked me into it, I mean she said "Ticket for tonight? 32 million." and I said "Okay, sounds good," so you know, not a lot of convincing needed.  I figured, I've beaten a lot of shitty odds lately - as in the odds of cancer before age 35, and the odds of having two sump pumps and a battery back-up fail at once - so I figured maybe I could beat some odds that would work out in my favour.

I don't usually play the Lottery, mainly because I am cheap, but also because I end up fantasizing of what I would do if I won which ends ups being a set-up for utter disappointment when I inevitably lose (spoiler alert: I didn't win).

You know those people that win lotteries and within two years piss it all away? Yeah, those people suck.  How does someone actually manage to piss away millions in a two to three year period?

Not I.  I like to think I have it pretty well thought out.  I have a list of things I'd do upon winning the lottery (estimated on a $32 million win).  Not necessarily in this order:

- Pay off this dump.  Put aside a chunk of money to flip it and sell it.

- Pay off my student loans and any other debts

- Start a search for a moderately priced, but well-built 3+ bedroom home with a second bathroom and a good chunk of property, preferably with water nearby.

- Put away 50k each for the girls education

- GTFO of town for a few weeks with the kids and the Well-Travelled one to get my head together and do some financial planning.  Road trip.

- Take a percentage of winnings and put into investments and high-interest savings accounts

- Put aside a chunk for my parents, my sister, and handful of close friends to help them out

- Sabbatical

- Go from there

One extravagance I think I would definitely allow myself would be to replace all the shitty MDF furniture my house with actual real wood.

I think if I was smart about it, I could live out the rest of my life comfortably and somewhat modestly, and secure a future for my kids where they may still have to work, but would never have to worry about food or shelter.

Survivors Guilt, or Something Like It

I've been reading through the colon cancer tag on Tumblr, after being followed by another young woman who is also dealing with with this disease, and I really can't believe how easy I've gotten off with the whole colon cancer thing.  Aside from the diagnosis itself, which obviously is not awesome, I've really been getting a lot of best case scenarios along the way, and a lot of it has been pretty flukey, starting catching it early enough (stage 1) that chemo and radiation were not necessary, by virtue of what was a routine scope.  

The worst of my colitis was concentrated in the ascending colon (where the tumour was located) which meant that my rectum could be left in place even while removing the rest of the colon, making it possible to do a resection that let me avoid things like iliostomies (pooh-bags), when originally I was looking at pooh-bag for life. I had very little post-surgical problems aside from a minor ish infection in my join.  I didn't pop any staples or sutures, haven't had any subsequent surgeries.  I had a six-week follow up appointment with my surgeon and he's pleased with my progress.  I can return to a normal diet, and should be able to return to most normal activities in another month or so.  I'm going back to work half-days next week.  Did I mention, work has been fantastic and crazy-supportive about this? I know not many people get that luxury when facing major illness.

Even my bathroom trips have been best case scenario.  Where I was told I'd probably have to crap 3-4 times a day, it's been mostly once a day, like clockwork almost.  

The weird thing about all the best-case scenario business is that I almost feel like I have no right to complain.  Long ago I started dealing with shitty things by thinking of all the ways situations could be worse.  Problem with that is that I start feeling like I should ALWAYS be looking on the bright side and unless I am dealing with the absolute worst-case then I'm just being a whiner because somebody always has it worse than me.  It's the kind of thing that results in me telling doctors in the ER "Oh, I'm okay..." before the Well-Travelled One nudges me and whispers "uh.. No, you're NOT. That's why we're here."  It's the kind of thing that makes me apologize to people for getting upset, because I am scared because I had FUCKING COLON CANCER AND HAD MY ENTIRE COLON REMOVED, but it's okay I'm fine.  It's also the kind of thing that leads me to sometimes overdo it because I don't always ask for help when I should.

That's messed up, right? I forget that I have every right to get freaked out from time to time, which I still do, not gonna lie.  I downplay how tired I get sometimes, because my muscles are shot, post surgery that my body is not used to holding itself up.  I feel weird blogging about all this because I kind of feel like, okay, surgery is done, no more cancer, you can stop talking about it now.  

Meh, I guess it could always be worse.

Sleeping through the apocalypse

Feeling like ass, I came home from work last night, fell into bed and proceeded to sleep through the next twelve or so hours.  Given the circumstances of receiving a cancer diagnosis and facing major surgery, I feel like should be exempt from having to deal with stupid piddling shit like periods and the common cold, but alas here I am, couch-ridden, coughing up gross stuff and generally feeling like my limbs are going to fall off.

I had dreams last night of the end of the world. I don't recall much, just that at one point the temperature dropped and snow fell in globs the size of cookie dough dropped on a freshly pre-greased baking sheet.  And then someone screamed something about the apocalypse so that's when I figured the world must be ending.

Upon partly waking an odd thought occurred to me.  Could it be possible to sleep through the end of the world?  

Think about it.  Going to sleep, snug in your duvet, and waking up to complete and absolute destruction.  Or nothing.  Floating in space, like the ivory tower in the Neverending Story. I think I might be inclined to roll over and go back to sleep.

I might actually do that now.

This Restless Heart

I've been listening to Metric and reading Chuck Klosterman again. I've discovered that this is a bad combination as I'm finding myself restless and yearning for the open road. 

I'm possibly at another crossroads, and I feel that the next year is going to involve a lot of changes, as old friends move away and new friends are made (hopefully).

I find myself randomly entering addresses into Google Maps and (which has replaced my beloved, if tattered road map of Ontario). I find myself wanting to write and write and write, and converse with strangers in strange places and sleep in my car and swim in lakes off the side of the road.

I think of my favourite book The Watch That Ends the Night and Montreal calls to me for reasons unknown, although I'm sure Montreal of 2006 differs greatly from the Depression era montreal that MacLennan wrote of. But the idea of being in a place where I will only be able to communicate coherently with a certain portion of the population appeals to me. 

I want to document my trip and decide what to do with the finished product. Sell the rights? Destroy it? Lock it up in a safe deposit box, to be opened on the event of my eventual death?

My mother suggests I take my grandmother with me. My grandma is super fun, but I'm not sure how enthusiastic she would be with the neo-bohemian approach that I am considering. That's the problem with being a normally play-it-safe kind of girl... When I want to be spontaneous, I kind of go all out. 

Up until this week I was in a great place for hitting hotels and casinos and playing cards and shopping (which is the kind of vacation I would like to do with my grandma) but this roaming instinct has hit me with all the force of a Mac Truck, and I am feeling the need for isolation and being one with the road and all that rot... meeting interesting characters... having Hunter S Thompson type misadventures (minus the drugs though, but thats just me).

I want to visit places I have heard about in songs by Stompin' Tom or the Tragically hip.

I think I want to write a book.

But that is something for another time, as my children are hungry, and I am soon to find myself awash in dirty dishes and hot dogs and Kraft Dinner.

My domestic reality beckons. As my friend just put it... I should get back to doing the 'Mom' thing.