Small Victories

Sometimes, when you feel like an idiot or a jerk, it helps to remember the good decisions you’ve made in life. Like the time when I was 18 and I didn’t get off the train in Jasper and rent a car with a bunch of strangers to drive the rest of the way to Vancouver. That one middle-aged French guy really tried to convince me but I resisted. That was really smart of me. Good job Alex. The three-day food poisoning I got from eating a ham sandwich on the train later on was super brutal but I still feel I made the right choice. A little salmonella I will take over the risk of rape and death and disappearing forever into the Rocky Mountain wilderness. Small victories friends, small victories.

Things we text.

I found this text message exchange in my drafts. I don't know how old this is. Three years maybe. Clearly I felt it was important enough to save and then immediately forget. Here you go - a glimpse into our marriage:

Kris Foster: Griff just texted me that she farted on your pillow

Alexandra Foster: Ya

Alexandra Foster: Lol

Alexandra Foster: Well she sharted on yours

Kris Foster: She also liked all of your grapes

Alexandra Foster: Licked?

Alexandra Foster: Or liked as in ate them all

Kris Foster: Licked, grapes aren't good for her

Kris Foster: I don't have any grapes to shart on

Kris Foster: Infinity no return

Kris Foster: Ha

Kris Foster: I win

Alexandra Foster: You're crazy

Alexandra Foster: I'm putting this on the internet

Alexandra Foster: Also thanks for reminding me that I have grapes to eat. They're crisp and delicious.

Kris Foster: Not anymore

Alexandra Foster: Well she didn't get the ones I brought to work

A Baby for Griff

Our dog has some very bad qualities. She goes insane when people come to the house, or walk past it. She steals food from your hand. She eats any and all available lipbalms, lozenges and Legos and occasionally frozen poop and dead worms and slugs. She drags her bum around and wakes up EVERY day at 5:00am, shakes her head and jumps on my guts. Her ears stink and she sheds enough for five normal dogs. Seriously.

But Griff has a quality that makes up for all of that. She loves Max. She is gentle with him. She abides his pokes, prods and slaps with zero, and I mean zero, complaint. The kid poked her in the TEETH and she did nothing. If he is getting out of control, she leaves the room. She doesn't growl, she doesn't bite. She just takes a break. She would have been a great puppy mother. 

I try to remember how much this means when I discover her barf in the corner from eating too many raspberries in the yard. Turns out she is a (nearly) perfect family dog.

I have no title for this.

I haven’t written anything in a really long time because I figured my next post was going to be heavy and I’ve been kind of a chicken shit about it. Also, I’ve been too obsessed with it to find anything else to talk about, so I’m just going to do this and get it out of my system.

I’m a sharer. I naturally have almost zero filter for personal information. I will pretty much tell anybody as much about my life as they care to hear and sometimes more. I’ve learned to reign that in as I get older, but honestly I’ll open all chapters of my life to whomever wants to know it.

Last September Kris’ brother killed himself. It’s not my place or my right to share the details of Shawn’s life so instead I’m writing this comment about what it’s like to lose someone to suicide.

I’m pretty angry. I have lost a lot of people – to illness, accidents, old age. In every instance it is sad, sometimes tragic, sometimes unexpected, but always conceivable on an intellectual level. I understand that cancer can kill a person. So can falling from a building. So can being 95. I can’t conceptualize suicide because I cannot relate to it. I have, of course, had times in my life where I have felt hopeless and desperate, but I’ve never been in so dark a place that taking my life made sense. So, I don’t understand it and it makes me angry.

It feels intensely sad. I know that Shawn tried hard to live. He tried really hard for a long time but he couldn’t extricate himself from his despair. I know he had moments of happiness with his wife, with their girls, with his friends and with his family. But the overwhelming sadness he must have been feeling before he died is heartbreaking. It will never be anything else.

I feel guilty. There are things I wanted to say to him but didn’t and will never have the chance to tell him. I took him being present for granted and I haven’t forgiven myself.

It feels lonely. Suicide grief is a different kind of grief. I cannot describe how it is different, exactly, but it feels different. Maybe it’s because there is a lot of stigma associated with suicide. That the person was unloving, was selfish, was crazy, that nobody loved them enough or paid enough attention to stop them. It’s also something people make light of all the time. Every time a person says “I wanted to kill myself,” in jest or to make a point about how bored they were in a particular situation reminds me that Shawn is gone. Lord knows, I have said this or pulled a mock trigger against my head to indicate my displeasure with something I felt merited more than an eye roll and I never once thought I might be reminding someone of their loss. I am acutely aware now. No one ever says “I wanted to have a stroke and die,” or “I wanted to get cancer and die.” I guess the connection there is that people who commit suicide are thought to be in control of their fate. And it’s possible they are. Maybe it’s the only thing they can control. But I don’t feel it. In Shawn’s case, his depression was in control. It took his life.

It feels empty. We have a shelf with a small urn, a photo of Shawn and our son when he was six months old – the only time the two of them were together – and a clock Shawn gave to my husband. It’s our Shawn shelf. It’s in our living room. Our son looks at the picture of him and his uncle every day. It’s hard to know that he will never know Shawn. Will have no memory of him. I never met my father’s parents and I feel that I missed out on something really fundamental. I see pictures and hear stories and feel a longing. I know that our son will feel that someday and I wish it could be different for him.

I love Shawn. He’s my brother. He gave great hugs. He was generous and funny. There’s a lot of sadness and some regret, but there is a lot of love out there in the world and I’m grateful for all the love I have and am able to give. For the rest of my life, I will wish he was alive – something that will never go away and never come true.

Oh those beavers.

To be fair, the man who was KILLED BY A BEAVER was trying to grab the animal and it was defending itself. If someone was trying to kill me, I'd probably bite him too.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/05/29/belarus-fatal-beaver-attack.html

A Puggle's Perspective

Puggle log: day 539 – the winter of my discontent has, thus far, not been made lighter. The very small one has become larger than me and now throws dangerous objects at me…I believe this to be on purpose.

 It started so many months ago. The man and the fat one left in the middle of the night, I was all alone. Thankfully Papa Don rescued me from my solitude and I lived two glorious weeks as his companion. When I was returned, the fat one was moderately less fat. The man was grumpy. And they had brought that tiny creature into our house. It has mostly destroyed my life. For many weeks it emitted a terrible screeching noise. This prompted the most terrifying sound from the moderately less fat one’s mouth hole. A horrible shushing sound. The only way to escape it was to creep slowly backwards out of the room. I took refuge for many nights in my room. I had hoped the man and I would move into a downtown loft but, no.

The tiny creature, I have come to understand, is one of them. It now sits in a chair and shares its food with me several times a day. For this, I will silently endure the throwing of very dangerous objects I referenced earlier. It moves around now, delicately, on two legs. It smells constantly of milk and fish crackers. And poop. Delicious.

The man and the other one don’t take me out to eat dead worms as much as they used to. They tell me to be quiet and go to bed and not knock over the very small one or hump his toys – even in good fun. Preposterous! I am waiting patiently for life to return to its former glory. Until then, I will continue to drag my bum across their carpet and lick my paws for hours in the middle of the night.

 

Thinking About: Guilt

I love my in-laws. I’m fortunate that Kris’ parents are kind people who love their sons and the women who married them. Judy told me one time after reading my blog that I could write for Chatelaine and, while I don’t read Chatelaine and only really know it as a reference in a K.D. Lang song, it was sweet of her to say. She requested a web log entry about guilt. So here it goes.

Women have a sixth sense. I’m not talking paranormal ESP or whatever (though I totally believe in that). I mean that in addition to sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, we also have guilt. It is an “ability” that generally revolves around our families. For example, ten years ago when my grandma was in the final weeks of her life in City Hospital, I didn’t help her out of her chair and into bed because I was afraid she would fall. I called for a nurse and it took like an hour for someone to come help me put her in bed. She was in pain and wanted to lay down and I blew it. She’s been gone a decade and I still hold on to that moment, feeling like a shit for not just doing it. Especially because I know my sister would have done it in an instant.

I feel guilty for asking Kris to move across the country twice. I feel guilty for feeling so much rage towards Max when he was newborn and wouldn’t stop crying. I feel guilty that I haven’t been able to stop him from falling in the tub FIVE times. I feel guilty that he eats processed food sometimes and that he goes to daycare for nine hours a day while I work. Then I feel guilty for not being at work when he has a fever of 40 degrees. I imagine that this will just continue to accumulate over the years as I hone my “ability” until I either reach an age where I can’t remember how do it, or I die.

The unfortunate thing about this kind of guilt (not applicable to criminal guilt, obviously) is that it serves us no purpose whatsoever except to make us feel rotten. I’m trying to get rid of it but it keeps hanging in there. For the most part, I’m a good person who makes relatively informed choices. Intellectually, I know this. Emotionally, I sometimes don’t feel it. Some days I succeed at being a good parent, sister, daughter and wife. Some days I fail miserably. The point is, when we die and whatever happens thereafter, it really won’t matter how many hotdogs we fed our kids or how many times we didn’t answer the phone. We’ll be too busy haunting the crap out the ones we left behind. Well I will be. If you just want to go float around in space, that’s fine too.

Thinking About: Skateboards

The other day, while Kris ran into Midtown to buy some G.I. Joe DVDs, Max and I sat in the car and waited. We parked on Pacific Avenue right beside the YMCA. In the 10 minutes we were parked I watched in amusement as three teenaged boys of varying sizes attempted what I can only assume were ollies on their well-used and stickered skateboards. They looked like they were having a good time and I admired their commitment to practicing this move over and over, despite being quite bad at it. Then, more teenaged boys arrived with their skateboards…and then some more. The little group grew to a whole nest of sweaty pimples in a matter of minutes. I found it fascinating to watch them roll up and down the sidewalk, cheering each other on in that blasé teenage way. I think what I liked most about their unintended show was how much exercise they seemed to be getting. I don’t know why the police and city officials give these boys such a hard time. They weren’t harassing anyone or stealing anything. They were getting some cardio. They should have been wearing helmets, but, other than that, it was a pretty inoffensive workout.  

Thinking About: Bossiness

Sometimes I get bossed around – my boss obviously does this (mostly in a fatherly way). Kris bosses me into doing things I don’t want to do, like eating breakfast and putting my clothes away. Max and Griff are bosses in their own right, non-verbally forcing me to scratch, feed, reach items, read the same book 2,000 times etc. I accept all of these happily, for the most part. I don’t care for people that try to boss everyone else about what that should or shouldn’t post photos of on their social media pages though. I don’t give a shit that you don’t give a shit about how cute my kid looks. I don’t post pictures of my kid or my dog hoping that I’ll convince some childless or dogless person of the merits of procreation and animal companionship. I post them because I like them and some of the people that I know also like them. If you are offended by instagram, don’t look at it. It’s really really simple to avoid. I have a deathly allergy to Advil. Like I literally will die if I ingest it and don’t seek treatment immediately. But I don’t go around knocking Advil and telling people they’re dumb for taking it because, hey, some people like the anti-inflammatory qualities of ibuprofen and, really, it’s pretty easy for me to avoid. The internet has allowed basically anyone that is fortunate enough to have computer or mobile device to create a public archive of their life. I think that’s cool. I like less judging and more accepting (or ignoring). And my dog is the best and my kid is the smartest.

Thinking About: Corners

What is it about corners that are so appealing? I always want to be in the corner. The corner of the elevator, the corner of the couch. I guess it’s because it feels safer to be tucked away than out in the open, in the middle of space. Not actual space, obviously I don’t have the physical or intellectual capacity to go to space. I’m not a stupid person, but I know my limitations and outer space is definitely one of them. But, just space in general. I fight the urge in meetings or conference sessions to sit in the back corner, because it’s antisocial. But if I have to sit in a restaurant with my back to open space, goddammit. My refuge at the end of the day is the corner of our couch – in the corner of our basement. You can’t get any more away from the rest of the house as my 7:15pm-9:00pm spot. After working/parenting for roughly 13 hours, all I want is to sit in the corner. It’s my shelter from the day that just happened and where I don’t think about tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if I’m watching TV, planning my Smurf Village, or playing Tetris. As long as I can be in the corner, I can relax. So here’s to corners!

Also, for those of you who feel like we should be pretending the idiot weather is no big deal because "we live in Saskatchewan - what do you expect," -  GO AWAY! Go live in the Arctic Circle if you love it so much. People are free to complain about whatever they want. Human beings have been commenting on the weather probably since they could grunt and walk only semi-upright. It's totally ok to complain about being cold and sad about an extra long winter.