Friday favourites, brought to you by Benedict Cumberbatch and more

Here are some things that have made me happy lately:

The Sunday New York Times in general, but this copy of the New York Times in particular, because my friend Nikki brought it in specially for me from Ottawa after my somewhat desperate call for newspaper culture. Thank you!

This quote from Flaubert, which I got out of a previous edition of the Sunday New York Times (you’re sensing a pattern here, aren’t you?), from an interview with the actress Julianne Moore: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Apparently, this is how Moore structures her own life. I’m thinking there’s some merit there.

Knitting! I am re-ravelling, slowly and gleefully, my unravelled guilt-blanket. So far, I’ve made this:

And I’m onto a second one, and a third one (because multiple projects on multiple needles, yo — I’m going to learn how to do cables this time round). On the Monday of the Thanksgiving long weekend, I spent a blissful couple of hours on the kitchen floor, sorting and untangling and colour-coding yarns, which are now propped up on one of my office bookshelves for inspiration. 

Come on over and make something. Yes, that is a double-dog dare.

Inspiration is contagious: Rachel is now knitting a scarf, and Isaac is getting in on the action with some gods-eyes (is there another name for that craft with the popsicle sticks? If so, let me know).

This post by my friend Elizabeth Jayne Liu, which combines stunning writing with stunning beauty:

I’m not a fan of hard work, but very occasionally, I can force myself to do it. So at the end of June, when I made the commitment to get real and work through the ugly shit I’ve kept cordoned off in dark corners, I thought that a monthlong break would be enough time to address my demons, and I would come back, like, perfect. Allotting 36 days to clear away debris like addiction and anger and depression seemed pretty generous, and I actually made a list of things I might try in case I finished a few days early. I watched a tutorial on how to make an owl zipper pull using the Cra-Z-Loom, and of course that bitch was #1 on my list.

I’m not sure how 36 days turned into 102, but I just want to take this opportunity to mention that if any of the coping mechanisms you use to stay functional involve pushing down grief and pain and rage about your past or your present, and you unlatch the gate that’s been corralling those feelings and they all escape in a mad rush and you have to chase each one down to see if it really belongs to you or it can be returned to the wild, um, you’re not going to have time to make that owl zipper pull. Yeah, I know, it was a surprise to me too.

Letters — as in, letters handwritten (or typewritten, but only on vintage typewriters with no connection to the Internet) on paper and sent via the post. When Ello came out, something visceral twisted in me. I don’t need more online social networks and status updates — I need deeper, one-on-one, social connections; long, meandering, run-on paragraphs. Ink on paper. The New York Times. I’ve sent a few missives into the world in the last few weeks, and several have found their way (or are on their way) to me. Alexandra sent a bunch of clothes, including this greased-lightning belt, for Isaac.

He wouldn't stay still for a picture, but he loves this thing. We had to take it to the cobbler to get it resized. He's worn it almost daily.

Brent sent a bunch of pig-themed notecards. I’ve sent chocolate, and books, and notes and letters out into the world — and I’m sure some knitted projects are going to find their way into envelopes and to the mail in the not-to-distant future (see how I tie that up so nicely there, bringing it back to the knitting?). Write to me. I'll write back.

Benedict Cumberbatch — yes, yes, I know I’m very late to this party, but on Wednesday evening I saw his 2011 performance as the monster in Frankenstein, piped in via satellite from London’s National Theatre. And man, he was brilliant. He and Jonny Lee Miller traded the roles of Frankenstein and the monster each evening — and now I can’t decide if I want to see Miller’s version of the monster or whether I just want to hold on to Cumberbatch’s brilliance. For reasons beyond my control, I can't embed the link to the preview, but it should be playing at various theaters in North America next week. You should go see it, and we can compare notes.

Have a good weekend, full of things that inspire.

Space

Lately, I’ve been craving vastness.

I’m blaming it on small-town (fine, small-city) life: not enough urban density, strip-mall architecture instead of cityscapes and soaring buildings, the same old same old round of a half-dozen restaurants and bars and cafés. I keep thinking of big cities, everywhere I’ve been in the last 12 months — San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles — and I’m chafing against the familiarity of this place, the way I can recognize the supermarket cashiers, the way everyone looks the same. I’m longing for somewhere big enough to be anonymous at the same time as I’m aching for my far-flung comrades. I’m chafing against the stark contrasts between home life and vacation life and my desire to integrate them, find some way to find the common ground between room service and no obligations or bedtimes and packing lunches and taking out the garbage and, oh, working for a living.

I’m blaming it on this parenting gig, the way it circumscribes my schedule, keeps me close to (closed in by) home as I navigate life with two small people in tow. Rachel is out of town, and so I am feeling acutely the pull and stress of amusing children, getting them to their various activities, the driving and the drop-offs and the back-and-forth of where are you and are you safe and can you wait to talk to me until your brother is done? It’s hard to leave the house some days with these two sets of often-competing interests, but of course staying home all day on a rainy Sunday leads to sure and utter disaster. The kids are alright, just fine, but I’m telling myself that parenting isn’t necessarily expanding my horizons at this very moment.

I’m blaming screens. I’m blaming the one I’m staring at right now as I compose this blog. I’m blaming the ones about which my children negotiate constantly. I’m blaming the tiny one that goes with me everywhere, its constant feedback or lack thereof both a lifeline and a stranglehold. Again, it's the problem of integration: how to come to a place of peace between virtual and physical worlds? How is it that the vastness of the Internet can fit into my pocket and give me tunnel vision? I had a massage yesterday, and my lovely, snarky massage therapist worked all the angry muscles in my neck and arms and shoulders and said, gently, “Do you think that you might look down a lot at your phone? Do you ever take a vacation?”

I’m blaming, I’m blaming. And even as I blame, I know that all this railing and blaming don’t particularly expand my horizons. And so what I try to do when things feel small, when my ribs constrict my lungs and my heart doesn’t have space to beat and pounds against my chest, is to stretch, find space.

On Sunday, that meant availing myself of a lovely friend to babysit and then getting on my bike and riding as fast as I could to the movie theater to see Boyhood — revelling in the big screen, in the Houston and Austin cityscapes and the hugeness of Big Bend Ranch State Park. Last night, it meant actually shelling out for a babysitter and watching (with the same friend) Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster, and Vanessa Kirby in A Streetcar Named Desire — even if I couldn’t be at the Young Vic Theatre in London, I could watch the live satellite stream of the production, and that was pretty amazing. (Yes, what I wouldn’t give to have been in the flesh-and-blood audience, but I’m trying here, people…). It means playing hooky from the obligations in my head to have a beer with a grieving friend on a weekday afternoon, and finding myself surprised by the intensity and emotion of the conversation that ensued at that bar. It means taking a chance on Tomlin, a new restaurant in town, and feeling life relax and melt over pork chicharrones and charred broccoli and grilled trout in a lovely space that could have been anywhere else I’ve been over the past year.

And, many days, making my life feel bigger means this: the Cascades. You walk a short distance through the woods and then end up on a vast, exposed chunk of the Canadian Shield, some of the oldest rocks on Earth. You can't get cell reception at there. Yesterday, a friend and I went there. We had planned for a quick walk around the neighbourhood to save time, but she showed up at my door and said, “I really think we need to go to the Cascades,” and I hugged her. And we scrabbled up and down the worn stone, next to the rushing water. And we talked — another one of those so many conversations I’ve had of late that brings tears, unexpected, to my eyes, nothing in particular so sad, just that everything right at this phase seems to bubble and rush to the surface.

And in that space, so big, so old, so primal, things shift — at least temporarily — into the proportions that I need. For a few moments, in this exact space, in this exact moment, life is the right size in relation to everything else.

I'm trying to learn how to hold onto that.

Blogger of the Month

 

Confession: I’ve never been an Employee of the Month. This may be because, with the exception of an 18-month stint working for an abusive boss at a health-policy research think tank, I’ve never really been an employee. This, of course, doesn’t count my stints in retail during high school and university: my very first job outside of babysitting was as a folder at Benetton. Remember Benetton? It still exists, although for me it’s forever locked in the 80s, those rugby shirts one of the status symbols I strove to attain. At Benetton, I was paid four dollars an hour to fold and re-fold sweaters in uniform rows. I would fold for hours, and then some customer would come along and unfold all my sweaters (and not buy a single one), and then I would grit my teeth and fold them all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat. In retrospect, this was great training for being a parent, except that at Benetton at least I got paid four dollars an hour for my efforts.

Yes, I have a point. The point is that, while I have never been an Employee of the Month, all that sweater folding and re-folding and musing about parenthood may have finally paid off. This month, I am Today’s Parent magazine’s Blogger of the Month — yes, that’s me right there on page 14 of the July issue, wonky hair and all.

I’ve been blogging for a few months now at Today’s Parent as “The Other Mother” — here's my latest, on one of big payoffs of having Rob in our lives. It’s a lovely gig, one that forces me to stretch my blogging and writing chops (is it possible to stretch one’s chops, or did I just mix a metaphor there? Don’t answer that.) and think more critically about parenting, and writing, and about writing about parenting.

But between writing here, there, and here, I sometimes feel pulled in different bloggerly directions, trying to remember which one of my very similar but slightly different blog hats I’m wearing that day. Not that I’m complaining. I love my job(s), or lack thereof, just like I love my kids. Even if there are days in both realms where, every so often, it would be lovely to simply fold sweaters all day long. Sweaters in nice neat rows, no one to mess them up at all.