Bread Crumbs In The Butter

Superpower

An episode of How I Met Your Mother reminded me that superpowers was one of the blog posts I had composed in my head during my three week of rocking chair captivation!

We all have a superpower.

Let me explain to those scratching their heads and searching the depths of their closets for their long one piece underwear...

Erin, my fourteen year old daughter can find anything.  If you've been looking that one pearl drop earring for an hour, Erin can walk into the room, close one eye and crawl under your bed, throw out seventeen socks, forty bobby pins and six novels until voila! There's your earring!

Kristyn, my sixteen year old daughter, can take any photo or painting and draw it exactly as shown. It's an amazing talent and one that I can't even imagine having. Of course, the most adorable part is that with her amazing talent and sheer concentration comes the fact that she sticks out her tongque as she works. Just as she did when she was a toddler making sandcastles.

My sister is freakishly strong. I don't know what it is or what she eats, but she has always been able to not only kick my ass, but open jars and beat truckers at arm wrestles. (Dad, don't ask about that last one, just trust us.)

My oldeset and dearest friend Lianne has a wicked memory for details.  Trust me, girl knows more about my teen years than I do! She has birthdays, shoes sizes, natural hair colours and all sorts of minute details at the tip of her tongue. There is nothing like standing in a crowd, telling friends a tale, only to have her say "Actually it wasn't 1990, it was 1991 and you weren't wearing jeans you were wearing track pants. I know this because we were driving so we couldn't have been fifteen years old and you had your track pants on because when we agreed to do that scavenger hunt you wanted to win so badly you refused to put jeans on in case they impeded your ability to steal street signs and Quebec political signs. Remember, we went to the Depanneur to get beer? It was raining that night and then we went for Big Macs?"

My superpower? I start trends. I don't mean that in a douchebaggey, hipster kind of way, but I can be surfing the internet late one night, follow link after link and find the most obscure song. I will play it for weeks, only to hear Ryan Seacrest announce it as the biggest mover on the countdown that week. I mean, the first time you heard "Ho Hey" by The Lumineers were you not wondering where in the world that folksy magic had come from? I think Ryan is monitoring my downloads. Should I be worried?

On a whim one day in December (okay, it was more like three years of begging, suggesting, and to be honest, bullying my stylist), I got bangs.  What do you know!? Michelle freaking Obama rocks the Innaugural Ball with a lovely fringe. Let's not even go near the Golden Globes red carpet.  Yes, I know Zooey Deschanel has been sporting bangs for years, but her superpower is that she can see th future and how hot I was going to look.

Oh? Anothere superpower of mine? Humility. I'm Captain Humility!

I'll let you tell me what your superpower is now and shut up.  But before I do, I will hereby take absolute full credit for unleashing "Shut the front door!" on the world.

Consider your superpower and please share it with me. I might let you in on the latest trend!

A letter to myself

Dear Chantal,

I hope this letter finds you well. If memory serves, I think it does even if I tend to sugar coat some of the period of time that represents who I am sending this to.

You're a new mom! Which means you made it through eight months pregnancy. We told everyone who would listen that the baby was coming early and they looked at us like we had two heads. Take that, suckers!

I know you spent a good part of your morning somewhere between tears, fear and a genuine fixation with what is happening to your body.  I'm hoping this letter will shed some light and give you hope? I can tell you, the scars on your stomach are not going to go away, but they will fade. You will still look at them quite often and wish them away, but you won't sob. In fact, you'll earn quite a few more. I won't freak you out with how many pregnancies just yet, because I know what Kristyn was like as a baby and chances are you started your day with puke in your hair and that's enough for now.

Would you believe me if I told you that sixteen years from now you will be starting your day with a hot cup of coffee before your children even open their eyes?  You'll shower alone and style your professionally coloured and stylishly cut hair and put on clothes you probably would now call too dressy for church. You will go to work and be in your office putting out fires before your kids even pack the lunches that they themselves made. Your house will be messy and you will be behind on the laundry because time improves us steadily, but it doesn't work miracles. Besides, that's why you will have four kids.

I'll let you chew on that for a bit.

Four kids.

As I write this, all four are not only still alive, but healthy and amazing.  I can't wait for you to see what we created.  They are the four most foul smelling, ridiculously smart, hilariously exhausting, fascinating people on the planet. They yell at each other constantly and trust me, they get really mean. Even the mean part will impress you because they can be really witty and cutting to each other. I can't even begin to hurl some of the insults they've thrown out.  They are energetic and expresessive and engaging.  A couple of them are more reserved than the other two but even they are outgoing and confident to a degree twelve year old us would be jealous of.

We have done an amazing job.

When I sat down to write this, my intention was to advise you to slow down some and to work on your neurosys and worry less, but I know you will calm down some.  The more kids we had, the more me that we became.  As the years go, you will go from the worry wart who calls your obstetrician's office with every twinge to the woman who gives birth in her master bedroom one freezing cold night in 2003.  Those solid food charts on the fridge? They won't last. In fact, I'm not completely unsure that your son's first solid food wasn't something he found in the yard as we raked leaves. I would have written it was strained peas in his baby book, but truth be told, I never bought one.  We only have three on the shelf and only one is written in.

I'm not saying you or I become lazy, but what you're about to embark on requires not only guts and a firm stomach, but all of your focus and attention too. You're going to feel completely insane for a few years and I'm sorry.  You're even going to break a few of your precious cardinal parenting rules. Meaning yes, you will yell and cry and swear and your kids might even see you drink a bit too much and yell "In your face!" as she beats someone at cards. 

You are going to face some heavy stuff. Conversations you tell yourself you are prepared for now, but nothing, and I mean nothing, makes you ready for some of the things you are going to say, hear and do. I'll tell you this now, don't worry. You'll do it and do it well. I know I still have a ways to go, but I'm pretty sure the us from sixteen years in the future is writing a similar letter with the same words of encouragement.

Love,

Chantal

ps - Waking up in the morning and your first thought being "God, how long until bedtime?". Yeah, I'm sorry to say that hasn't gone away yet.

 

Birdwatching

I had a bit of an accident during the wee hours of December 31, 2012.

Before you get ahead of me and assume, wrongly, that by the "wee hours of December 31" you think I was prancing around a fabulous New Year's Eve party in an adorable coral dress and Kate Spade heels, let me clarify. The wee hours I am referring to here are the hours between midnight and 5am the day of New Year's Eve.  I spent the actual dawning of 2013 fast asleep, concussed and unable to digest any food worth talking about.

We're still not sure what it was. Food poisoning? The flu? God's way of telling me that no one was ready to see me in an outfit that required those paste on bra things? In any case, I found myself tossing way more than my cookies for a good portion of three hours in the middle of the night. I tossed so much that I became faint, as people generally do when they've been party to what can only be deemed a Costco hotdog exorcism.

If I was the sort of person who didn't enjoy people laughing at my expense, I would sugar coat this next bit and lie about how I hurt myself badly enough to warrant nearly one month off work. Good thing for you I am not that sort of person...

The last thing I remember was sitting on the toilet. But fear not, when I came to my pants were up, so I definitely did not take an Elvis-style header off the throne. What I did do, or so we have pieced together through our CSI-like investigative skills, was stand up and faint.  I took with me the towel roack, laundry hamper and one vanity drawer. Oh, and I knocked my head on the very hard, very porcelain toilet.

I have no memory of anything except waking up. I remember feeling as though I was being pulled back into consciousness against my will. Wherever I was, I liked it just fine.  That is, until I realized by looking around me and feeling the searing pain in the back of my head that something very bad had happened.

And I was right. A severe concussion, my third and by far the worst so far (the other two caused by sports with more street cred but far less comedy) left me with a doctor's note for three weeks off work and instructions to do absolutely nothing while I recovered.  Trust me, the people who love me took this very seriously. They checked up on me. Ignored my texts! Took the TV remote with them when they left!

Every day at 9am, my house cleared out and I was left with a rocking chair, a quilt and the view out of my bedroom window. The only entertainment I was provided with was a birdfeeder and CBC Radio 2.

What did I do? I watched birds. I cried. I whined. I wrote blog posts in my head and then promptly forgot them all. I cut my toenails. I wore the same jogging pants for 23 straight days. I ate pie for breakfast. I called everyone I know just to chat. I counted all of the teeth in my mouth using just my tongue, timed myself, and then tried to break that record. I cleaned my closet. I found out that blue jays are very mean birds and vowed to learn how to use a slingshot. I planned the weddings of all three of my daughters (I hope they like lace!).  I named my future grandchildren (I hope they like Cecilia!). I learned that even if I am not tired, I can fall asleep if I just keep staring ahead and replay old episodes of The Facts Of Life in my head.

This post was originally aimed to give advice should you find yourself in the position of not being able to use your brain for anything of interest, but clearly I have not achieved that. The only thing I can offer you is my phone number and an enchanting retelling of the episode where Jo decides she wants to become a nun.

**By the way, I am mostly fine now. The recovery process is slow, but I feel better than I have in nearly a month and I continue to listen to my doctor - I'm stubborn but the stupid hasn't been knocked out of me yet.