Girls night out

Back in the day, I was never keen on the concept of ‘girls night out’. Truth be told, I wasn’t much keen on the concept of having girls as friends right up until I was going through infertility hell and made connections with women who have become the amazing sorts of friends with whom you can see yourself sailing into your retirement tea and rose garden years.

I wasn’t exactly a tomboy growing up, but I was always ‘one of the guys’. I used to hate social gatherings where the girls hived off in one direction and the guys did something else, because I was always way more comfortable with the guys. It became a point of pride, my inclusion as one of them, but then it became a problem, because I would let my ex-husband get away with all sorts of disrespect in the name of not being one of those women who just didn’t understand her man and his needs. Makes my blood boil to think about it now, in hindsight.

So I arrived on the steps of the sisterhood late in life. Although my oldest and dearest friends are mostly male, it seems easier now to make acquantance and friendships with women now. And while women can be capricious and catty and duplicitous, so can I. It’s a good fit!

I say all this by way of preamble to one reason why the concept of ‘girls night out’ is relatively new to me. The other is that I don’t tend to leave the house much in the evenings anymore. I can count on one hand the number of times since Christmas that I’ve left the house after putting the boys to bed. I think Tristan was probably close to six months old before I went *anywhere* without him, even leaving him to his father’s care. We’ve never had a babysitter other than my mother (and once, I remember hazily, a family friend, I think) and even then we employ her benevolence only once every couple of months.

But really, I should get out more. Because this past Friday night, Andrea and I got together for a simple coffee (okay, so it was Starbucks and they don’t make a simple coffee – it was a vanilla latte and a vanilla mocha, I think) and a couple of hours chat, and it was terrific. We’re doing a Lunch and Learn presentation on blogging for an office downtown in a couple of weeks, and we had gotten together ostensibly to outline our game plan, but mostly it was a bloggy gossip session interspersed with some maternal anecdotes.

Who would have thought that a couple of hours of coffee and chat could be so refreshing? Granted, Andrea is one of those people who seems to always leave you in a better mood than the one in which she found you, so if you’re looking for a coffee buddy, I highly recommend her.

But I think back to the other times I’ve gone out with my girlfriends, and how no matter how much I wanted to see them, I am always initially reluctant to ask Beloved to take on the bedtime routine himself so I can get out for a bit. It’s not that I don’t want to go out, it’s that I’m hesitant to ask him to take on the extra duties. And it’s silly, because I would rarely begrudge him the same opportunity – but he’s just not that social a creature and rarely ventures out either. What a couple of hermits we are, at least after 8 pm.

But as the boys get older and less needy, I think we’ll be resuming some of our old social patterns – and working in a girl’s night out more often. Playdates and combined family dinners are great, but I forgot how nice it is to chat with someone without a preschooler dangling from my leg.

Anybody free for coffee next week? *wink*

10-pages-in book review: Come Back

Today’s review is being written not at the 10-pages-in point, but after I have read the whole book. I’m glad I finished the book before I posted my review, too, because had I written it before I finished the book, it would likely have been a much less favourable review.

Today’s book is Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey Through Hell and Back. It is the shared memoir of Claire Fontaine and her 15 year-old-daughter Mia Fontaine, told in alternating first-person narrative. It follows Mia as she tumbles from seemingly happy, successful prep-school student to a drug-abusing, self-hating homeless teen on the run, and then follows her difficult recovery at boot camp-type schools in the Czech Republic and in rural Montana. It is a harrowing, painful, but ultimately redeeming story of a mother and daughter whose bond is stretched beyond capacity, but never breaks.

Claire Fontaine herself sent me an e-mail offering me this book to review, and I had a strong sense of obligation to keep reading it because of that. It was, especially at the beginning, a difficult book to read. Early in the book, Claire describes the abuse she and Mia suffered at the hands of her ex-husband. I found it nearly unbearable to consider the sexual abuse three-year-old Mia endured, and still can’t quite understand the denial and obliviousness that Claire claims upon realizing that it has had a traumatic and life-long impact on Mia.

It took me a while to invest in Claire and Mia emotionally, too. Mia’s early passages are full of contempt for her mother, her surroundings, herself – and it is difficult to reconcile this angry, troubled young woman with Claire’s insistence that Mia was a loving daughter who, at fifteen, still liked her mother to sing lullabies to her over the phone when her mother was working late – right up to the night Mia runs away from home. It’s hard to believe they are experiencing the same reality.

As Mia works through her recovery in a ‘school’ that has rules that require students to be locked down, be silent unless spoken to by staff, and line up heel-to-toe every time they move from one room to another (they are even forbidden from looking out the window), Claire is forced to face her own demons in a parallel recovery program for parents. I found Mia’s burgeoning self-awareness fascinating and redeeming, her mother’s slightly less so.

In the end, I’m glad I kept reading. Claire’s story of a mother’s determination to save her daughter is compelling, written with passion, hard-won insight and humour. It’s Mia’s story, though, that makes this book worth reading. Reflecting on her long journey, Mia writes:

It’s funny how things come full circle. Morova and Spring Creek’s philosophy is based primarily on accountability, of being aware of your choices so you don’t wake up miserable one morning and wonder how you got there. But, it’s ironic that the most powerful lesson I learned, the awareness that you alone create your reality, is one that children instinctively know. It never occurs to them that there’s anything that they can’t do or be. And it shouldn’t occur to adults, either; we’ve just grown accustomed to living with limitations.

I even learned a little bit about myself from this book. Claire, like someone we know who shall remain nameless, has control issues, and her insight into that through the parallel program for parents gave me insight into myself. And Mia’s examination of how it was her mother’s intense love that both impelled her to hide from that love in the dark world of drugs and worse also helped bring her back into the light gave me greater understanding of my own issues about needing parental affirmation.

I liked this book enough to share it, so I’m stealing an idea from Wonder Mom. I’ll pass this book along to a randomly selected commenter at the end of next week. If you’d like me to enter you into the draw, drop me a note in the comment box. To make it interesting, tell me something you did as a teenager that you hope your kids never do.

Edited to add: if you’d like more information about Claire and Mia Fontaine and some of the projects they are working on, or some resources for families dealing with abuse, you can visit their Web site at http://www.claireandmia.com.

Saturday morning at the firestation

What’s that, you say? You want more pictures of adorable, happy boys having fun on a beautiful day? If you insist…

On Saturday morning, we went to a pancake breakfast at our local firestation, a fundraiser by the local Lions Club. The breakfast itself, at $6 per person, is somewhere between forgettable and downright inedible, but the chance for little boys to play on firetrucks and police motorcycles is priceless.

Swimming in shame

Oh, the shame! Yesterday was ‘parents’ day’ at the boys’ swimming lessons, where parents are supposed to hop in the pool with their kids and get a hands-on idea of how the kids are progressing, what they are working on, and where they need improvement. For whatever reason, we somehow missed getting our notice about this last week, so while Beloved hopped in the pool as usual with Simon for the parent and tot lessons, I sat red-faced and miserable on the deck. I even asked the instructor if I could hop into the pool in my jeans and t-shirt, so great was my shame, but she gently suggested that wouldn’t be necessary, and instead I spent a guilty 30 minutes observing from the deck and wondering what psychological damage I was wreaking to my eldest son.

Judge: We have reached the sentencing portion of this trial. Do you have anything to say for yourself?
Grown-up, bearded, scruffy looking Tristan in shackles: I’m sorry for all the bad things I’ve done. If only my mother hadn’t missed parents’ day in the pool when I was four, who knows where I’d be now…

Apparently not so much. Only two parents of six were in the pool, and when I asked Tristan about it, he didn’t even realize I was supposed to be in the pool with him.

Grown-up Tristan, handsome and content, in conversation with his girlfriend: Oh, you got your hair cut off? Oops, no, I guess I didn’t notice.
Pretty girlfriend: Argh! Men!

When I was registering the boys for their swim lessons, I was a little wary about scheduling them both for the same time slot. Two wet preschoolers plus one wet parent (Simon is too young to be in on his own) is a lot of chaos mixed in with the regular chaos of 30 other families in the changerooms, but it’s working out pretty well. We go as a family, and Beloved and I alternate who stays dry and who goes in the pool with Simon, then we each bring a child into the changeroom. Gratuitous props to any of you who do it on your own, without a dry parent as backup! Two wet kids I can wrangle. Two wet kids PLUS one wet mommy is a little too much, especially when you’re rushing out to get home in time to watch Survivor!

In the parent and tot class, I am often the only mommy, which was a bit of a surprise, but it’s nice to see all the daddies in the pool with their 2 – 3 year-olds. And I have to laugh at Simon’s fearlessness. I dunk him, he comes up sputtering and laughing. I put him on the side and he jumps back in before I can even get my arms out. (Well, the jumping is new this week. Up until now, he just kind leaned forward and tipped stiffly into the pool. It’s very hard to catch a 30 lbs slippery board-baby in time to make sure he doesn’t belly-flop into the pool.)

It’s very interesting to watch Tristan interact with his swim instructor. He watches her with wide-eyed intensity (when he isn’t wandering off) and is usually one of the first to follow her instructions. I haven’t decided whether this is encouraging or annoying, after having spent the rest of the day practically howling at the boy to get him to listen to my words at home on the eighth or tenth utterance, let alone the first. He is, according to the instructor’s assessment, very strong and doing exceptionally well at this level.

Announcer: And now, the Canadian national anthem begins as the gold medal is awarded for the 2024 Olympic men’s 400 metre freestyle to Canada’s own Tristan….

Too posh to push?

There is an interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this morning that talks about how the rates of birth via caesarean section are rising, and how the added cost is straining the medical system. (But, I can’t help but ask, will the medical system be dealing with hemorrhoids for years after all that straining?)

According to a report released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information called Giving Birth in Canada: The Costs, the rate of births by c-section have climbed to 24%, as compared to just 17% in the early 1990s.

The cost of a birth by c-section averages $4,600, while a vaginal delivery costs $2,800. (This, of course, is cost to the ‘system’. It is one of the miracles of medicare that I walked out of the hospital after each of my sons’ births paying only the $200/night upgrade from a ward room to a private room, and even that was reimbursed at 50% by my supplementary medical coverage.)

The Citizen article says that in some Canadian cities, caesarean rates are approaching 30% of all births, almost twice as high as considered medically necessary by the World Health Organization.

What I want to know is how people are getting these ‘convenience c-sections’? Although I’m well-acquainted with the idea through the countless hours I spent on fertility and pregnancy message boards when I was carrying Tristan and Simon, I truly thought they were an American phenomenon.

When I was endlessly pregnant with Simon, as he moved off the large-fetus charts and onto the ‘you are gestating an elephant-calf’ charts, I begged for an induction – just an induction, mind you, at a week after my due date – and they wouldn’t hear of it.

Personally, I don’t get why anyone would choose a c-section over a vaginal birth. In fact, when my labour with Simon stalled somewhere around the 20th time in the 20th hour of labour and the spectre of a c-section began to materialize, I was terrified. To me, a c-section would have been a bit of a disappointment. There is an undeniable sense of empowerment, and a celebration of your body’s capabilities, that comes with pushing that baby out. (She said, in the hazy afterglow of two years past.)

I also can’t imagine having to deal with healing from surgical incisions in addition to dealing with everything else that came with caring for a newborn. The sleep deprivation and the cracked and blistered nipples alone nearly put me over the edge; the idea of trying to cope with incisions and whatnot, and of not being able to pick up my then two-year-old eldest son for weeks, is almost unimaginable.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely not criticizing caesarean births. Heck, that’s how I got here. (Breech baby, stubborn from the womb.) But it really does surprise me that (a) someone who is otherwise healthy and capable of delivering vaginally would choose a c-section, and (b) that an obstetrican would allow it, especially given the cost is 60% higher – let alone the additional health risks and longer recovery times associated with c-sections.

It’s all very interesting! What do you think? First, I’m curious as to whether the costs in Canada are similar to those in other countries. What do you think about elective c-sections? Would you? Did you? And since we as taxpayers are footing the bill, so to speak, should obstetricians permit medically unnecessary c-sections?

I may be past my best-before date, but at least I’m not spoiled!

Continuing with our all-memes-all-the-time theme… As seen at Decomposition and Mystery Mommy.

Are you spoiled? (My initial answer before completing the meme is a resounding YES!! And I like it that way!) You are if you can check of 40 of the following:

Do you have…

 your own cell phone (we have one for the family, but I don’t have my own)
 a television in your bedroom
x an iPod (not an iPod, but an MP3 player)
 a photo printer
 your own phone line
 TiVo or a generic digital video recorder
X high-speed internet access (i.e., not dialup)
 a surround sound system in bedroom
 DVD player in bedroom
 at least a hundred DVDs
 a childfree bathroom
X your own in-house office
x a pool (12′ seasonal kiddie pool)
 a guest house
 a game room
X a queen-size bed
 a stocked bar (does three bottles of red wine and half a bottle of something called firewater count?)
X a working dishwasher
 an icemaker
X a working washer and dryer
 more than 20 pairs of shoes
 at least ten things from a designer store (is Roots a designer store? If so, my answer is yes. I am all Roots, all the time. Cell phone, purse, clothes for me and the boys. It’s all a little embarrasing, actually.)
 expensive sunglasses
 framed original art (not lithographs or prints)
 Egyptian cotton sheets or towels
X a multi-speed bike
X a gym membership
 large exercise equipment at home
 your own set of golf clubs
 a pool table
 a tennis court
 local access to a lake, large pond, or the sea
 your own pair of skis
 enough camping gear for a weekend trip in an isolated area
 a boat
 a jet sk
 a neighborhood committee membership
 a beach house or a vacation house/cabin
 wealthy family members
 two or more family cars
X a walk-in closet or pantry (closets)
X a yard
 a hammock
 a personal trainer
X good credit
X expensive jewelry (define expensive? Real diamonds and pearls and rubies? Yes. Worth keeping in a safe deposit box? No.)
 a designer bag that required being on a waiting list to get (there’s waiting lists for designer bags???)
 at least $100 cash in your possession right now (snort – I had to fish money out of my desk drawer to buy a sandwich)
X more than two credit cards bearing your name
 a stock portfolio
 a passport (expired last year)
 a horse
 a trust fund
X private medical insurance (additional drug coverage through work)
X a college degree, and no outstanding student loans (but Beloved is still paying $400/month)

Do you:
 shop for non-needed items for yourself (like clothes, jewelry, electronics) at least once a week  do your regular grocery shopping at high-end or specialty stores (is Farm Boy a specialty store?)
 pay someone else to clean your house, do dishes, or launder your clothes (not counting dry-cleaning) (I wish!!)
X go on weekend mini-vacations (these are the *only* kind of vacations we go on)
 send dinners back with every flaw
 wear perfume or cologne (not body spray)
X regularly get your hair styled or nails done in a salon
 have a job but don’t need the money OR  stay at home with little financial sacrifice
 pay someone else to cook your meals (again, I wish!)
X pay someone else to watch your children or walk your dogs (what does daycare have to do with being spoiled?)
 regularly pay someone else to drive you (does the bus count?)
 expect a gift after you fight with your partner (hmmmm….)

Are you:
 an only child
 married/partnered to a wealthy person
X baffled/surprised when you don’t get your way (who, me?)

Have you:
 been on a cruise
X traveled out of the country
 met a celebrity (define celebrity? define met? I once cornered Margaret Atwood in a bathroom for an autograph, and shook Mikhail Gorbachev’s hand… I’m going to leave this one as a blank.)
X been to the Caribbean (I was nine. Barbados.)
X been to Europe (Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, France in 1995, then Paris on our honeymoon.)
 BEEN TO HONG KONG
 been to Hawaii
 been to New York
 eaten at the space needle in Seattle
 been to the Mall of America
X been on the Eiffel tower in Paris (twice!)
 been on the Statue of Liberty in New York
 moved more than three times because you wanted to
 dined with local political figures
X been to both the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast (but in different countries)

Did you:
X go to another country for your honeymoon
 hire a professional photographer for your wedding or party
 take riding or swimming lessons as a child
 attend private school
 have a Sweet 16 birthday party thrown for you

Twenty-six. As unspoiled as the virgin wilderness! (I know, I’m having a hard time keeping a straight face too.) To paraphrase Andrea, the Internet has decreed me as not spoiled, and so it shall be known forevermore.

And that sound you hear? It’s Beloved’s and my mother’s eyeballs rolling in their sockets.

The ABCs of Me(me)

Oh look, it’s another meme from Phantom Scribbler. Plus, I got tagged by Renée of Froggie Mom on the ‘weird facts about me’ meme, and these two dovetailed nicely.

Accent: Not that I know of, but when I first moved here I was told I had a Toronto accent. Eh?

Booze: Not usually. I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer on the odd social occasion, but alcohol is a big migraine trigger for me, and a three-day hangover is rarely worth it. My brother is slowly educating me on the world of good red wines.

Chore I hate: washing lettuce. (Really, I despise washing lettuce. Don’t mind washing peppers, or cukes, or whatever, but I really hate washing lettuce.) Cleaning the backyard of poop-dogs in the spring. Ironing. Making the bed.

Dog or cat: yes. One of each. I am admittedly a dog person, and not nearly so cruel to my pets as some people might have you believe.

Essential electronics: laptop. TV. Coffe maker. Hairdryer. Simon’s CD player for lullabyes.

Favorite cologne(s): eau de fresh-washed preschooler (tied for first with eau de fresh-washed Beloved).

Gold or silver: yes please. Rubies and diamonds, too. (My wedding rings are white gold with yellow gold detail, and my heirloom ring from my mother is white gold with a ruby.) But silver looks nice on me, too, especially in the summer.

Hometown: I was born in London, Ontario but after 18 years I guess I now call Ottawa home.

Insomnia: Sometimes. But not lately.

Job title: Senior communications advisor.

Kids: Yep. Two now, maybe more by this time next year???

Living arrangements: nuclear family with grandparents the perfect distance of a 20-minute walk away.

Most admirable trait: Infernal optimist.

Number of sexual partners: You really want to know? This is personal stuff – promise you won’t think me a tramp, okay? Three.

Overnight hospital stays: Two, one for each baby. Two nights for Tristan, one for Simon. Trips to the ER? Countless.

Phobias: This could be a whole post unto itself. Executive summary: things that grow (weeds, some more than others), things that rot (mould), things with wings or more than four legs (insects – again, some more than others; spiders are fine, but junebugs terrify me), things that go bump in the night, inanimate objects coming to life, lightswitches that don’t work…

Quote: “My theory on housework is, if the item doesn’t multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?” (Erma Bombeck)

Religion: Recovering Catholic.

Siblings: One brother, five years younger and six inches taller than me.

Time I wake up: Between five-thirty and six. Big improvements since daylight savings time, so much so I’m reluctant to see it in type!!

Unusual talent or skill: I can clap with one hand.

Vegetable I refuse to eat: Hmmm, nothing comes to mind. There are plenty of which I’m not overly fond, but I don’t think I’d outright refuse to eat any vegetable.

Worst habit: I leave things wherever I happen to be when I lose interest in them or get distracted by something else (as opposed to putting them away), and then become pathologically oblivious to them. I also hate clutter. This is a very bad combination.

X-rays: Teeth. Lungs for pneumonia. CAT scan for headaches when I was a teen. Probably various limbs during trips to the ER when I was a kid, but nothing stands out in my memory.

Yummy foods I make: Guacamole (my mother and Simon fight over it). Chicken fajitas on the barbeque. Peppered steak brochettes with grilled veggies.

Zodiac sign: If you’ve read more than three of my posts, this is almost as obvious as the question about how many kids I have. Leo, of course.

The movie meme

Thank goodness for memes on a bad day. Saw this orgininally at Phantom Scribbler and Mystery Mommy, but it’s been everywhere. It’s from this list of “movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies.” (Looks like, as usual, I know enough to fake it but not credibly. Again.) The ones I’ve seen are in bold.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“Alien” (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
“Bambi” (1942) Disney
“Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“Blade Runner” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“Blue Velvet” (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“Casablanca” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989) Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“Duck Soup” (1933) Leo McCarey
“E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher (one of my favourite movies)
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“Gone With the Wind” (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“The Graduate” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s A Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Frank Capra
“Jaws” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior” (1981) George Miller
“The Maltese Falcon” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“Modern Times” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“Pulp Fiction” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spielberg (really, I must get around to watching this)
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“The Seven Samurai” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Victor Fleming

I gotta admit, as a pop-culture junkie I expected to have seen more of these. And so many of them I’ve seen parts of, even can recite scenes from, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole movie.

I’d list Empire Strikes Back, Fight Club and any Monty Python from this list as my favourites. I’m surprised Bull Durham isn’t on here – I think it’s a star among sports movies. Are your favourite movies in here?

The gift of life, and so much more

It’s National Organ Donation Week here in Canada. I had a post on the topic half written before I realized I was repeating myself nearly verbatim from last year. (Those of you who know me well are of course shocked and scandalized to think I would repeat a story I have told once or twice or thrice before.)

So, I’ll wait here a minute while you go read that post from last year, and then you come on back and we’ll talk some more. Go on, really – I just re-read it myself and it’s a pretty good post. It’s about my dad, and his liver transplant in 2001, when I was about five months pregnant with Tristan. And if you’ve got a little bit of extra time, read this wrenching story of a five-year-old girl in Illinois named Annika who has endured two liver transplants, and will probably need a third.

In case you’re in a hurry and you only pretended to click on the link, here’s the important bits.

  • In 2003, 250 people died in Canada while waiting for waiting for new organs.

  • In the United States, 17 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant.

  • In 2003, just over 1,700 organ transplants were performed in Canada.

  • At the end of 2004, over 4,000 people were on an organ donation list in Canada.

    • All you have to do is sign an organ donor card (here’s the Canadian and American versions for you) and tell your family what you want. Yes, it can be that simple. If you want to do more, and you’re in the Ottawa area, join the living green ribbon campaign on Wednesday on Parliament Hill. I hope to be there.

    Last night, my folks invited us over for dinner. The boys had run off downstairs, and I asked my dad if I could talk about his transplant on my blog. We sat and talked for the better part of an hour about the chronology – was it 1995 or 1996 that he started getting really sick? – and the details. It seems like another lifetime, the bad times when my dad was sick.

    We talked about the false alarms. He had been on the list for a liver transplant for a year or so when the first call came. They waited for hours, my mother and father, having already been admitted to the hospital but then left to wait as the hours ticked by. They were told that the donor had hepatitis C, like my dad, but they had to wait to find out whether the liver would be too damaged by the disease to transplant. After hours of waiting and anticipation, they were told to go home. But wait! As my dad got dressed again and prepared to leave the hospital, they were stopped and told to wait yet again. They weren’t sure yet – maybe the liver was still good. For three more hours they waited alone in the hospital room before word finally reached them that the liver was not viable.

    The second time they got a call, they were told my dad was the back-up recipient and would receive the liver only if the intended recipient couldn’t make it in from Thunder Bay in time. This time, they didn’t even admit him to the hospital. The recipient made it on time, and my parents went home, again, to wait.

    We discussed last night, from the safe distance of four and a half years and 600 km, how the liver disease was horrible to endure, how the waiting and the not knowing were agonizing, but most of all how the hope was crushing. In his case, the fourth time was the charm. The fourth call came, and the liver was healthy, and the transplant was done. When they removed my dad’s liver, they found it riddled with cancer. It had been a ticking time bomb of cancerous cells.

    Last night, after a reflective discussion about the days of my father’s sickness and transplant, I listened to Simon’s belly laugh as Papa Lou played with him. I watched my father’s eyes shine as he laughed right back at Simon’s antics. It was a moment, a perfect moment, the joy of my father and my son loving each other, and it was a gift. A gift from a stranger we will never know.

    Imagine if it were your father, your wife, your son or daughter, your friend. Imagine watching them waste away, knowing that a call could come at any moment to rescue them, with the grace of God and a surgical team, from death itself. And imagine how you would feel listening for a call that does not come.

    Discuss organ donation with your family. Sign a donor card. Give the gift of life.

    Good-bye to an old nemesis friend

    When Beloved and I moved in together, way back in 1995, he came with baggage in the form of two slightly neurotic cats. The skittish tabby was Tiny (in name only) and the fierce, ill-tempered black one was Ben.

    Ben and Tiny had been with Beloved for a couple of years before I came along and bumped them down the totem pole of Beloved’s affections. I still remember one of the first times I visited, having Ben stand on my lap and butt his head against me as I sat next to Beloved on the couch. “Awww, he likes me!” I said, having been forewarned of his tendency to hate everyone except Beloved. It was only after a few minutes that I realized he was not so much being affectionate as trying to shove me out of the way and away from Beloved. It was a moment that would come to define our relationship.

    When we lived in a little two bedroom apartment perched in the attic of an old house in the Glebe, Ben would wake us up every single day between three and four in the morning, yowling for breakfast. You didn’t walk past Ben too quickly, or he would try to sink his teeth into your achilles heel on the way by. My friends took great joy in baiting him, because it didn’t take much to turn him into a hissing, spitting ball of angry black fur.

    That’s why when Beloved and I got married and moved into a town house and I could finally get the dog I had been dreaming of for years, I didn’t have a lot of problem relegating the cats to the finished basement family room / office when the dog and the cats proved incompatible. We tried over the years to integrate them, but Ben’s fierceness coupled with the fact that we were enjoying not being yowled awake hours before the first sparrow’s chirp eased our guilt about how this integration never seemed to work out. And so the cats dropped another notch down the totem pole.

    And within a couple of years after Katie the golden-retriever/shepherd mix arrived, the boys followed… dropping the hapless cats another couple of notches down the family totem pole. I bet you didn’t know totem poles even had basements.

    The cats have always been well-cared for, and had each other for company in the ‘cat cave’, as we came to call the basement. One Christmas we returned from a brief visit with my folks in London to find Ben lethargic and obviously sick, with mucus around his anus. It was New Years Eve, and the emergency appointment to the vet ended up costing us more than $700… to have the vet shave Ben’s ass, do a few tests, and tell us that his illness was likely gastrointestinal upset as a result of a new food we were trying.

    Both cats were fat, Ben especially. At his largest, he was 18 lbs. That’s why when he started dropping weight in the last year, we knew something was up. Then a few months ago, he started licking bare patches into his fur. But he was still feisty and spry, and although we suspected his days were numbered, as long as he seemed content (by Ben’s standards, anyway), so were we.

    That changed yesterday. It was obvious he was suddenly in pain. His feet slid out from under him and he just lay on the floor before getting up. Beloved brought him to the vet, who could without invasive testing diagnose more than one ailment, which probably still did not account for his pain and obvious lethargy. We could do more tests, we could try a pill-a-day for the rest of his life (those of you who own angry cats can imagine how much fun this would be for the cat, let alone the person trying to do it), but none of these things would be guaranteed to make an improvement. He was fifteen years old. It was time to let him go.

    He wasn’t my cat, despite the fact that we lived together for more than ten years. He was, to the end, Beloved’s cat, and it’s for Beloved that my heart aches.

    As I said, the cats lived in the basement, and while Beloved or I were often downstairs (the computer was down there, and Beloved’s office) the boys only came down occassionally, so much so that they often confused which cat was Ben and which was Tiny. When Beloved came home from the vet without Ben, we decided to leave the door open and let Tiny join us upstairs if he so chose. He can fit through the baby gate to the basement stairs while the dog cannot, and he spent much of yesterday on the stairs, not courageous enough to come all the way up.

    Yesterday, Tristan was aware that Beloved had taken Ben to the vet, but we had been evasive on exactly what had happened. We said that Ben wasn’t coming back, but Tristan didn’t seem overly concerned. He was, however, tickled at the idea of Tiny coming upstairs and spent quite a while near the stairs, coaxing him up. You can imagine why Tiny was reluctant, with Tristan, Simon and Katie as a welcoming committee on the far side of the gate!

    This morning, we had all just tumbled out of bed and into the living room when Tristan asked when Ben was coming home. The need for honesty caught up with me, and I told him, “Ben died, honey. He died.” To my surprise and regret, Tristan began to cry. I hadn’t expected him to grasp the concept so quickly, or with such empathy. He cried for a few minutes, gentle tears running down his cheeks, while Beloved and I tried with choked voices to combine platitudes with honesty to reassure him.

    The short attention-span of the preschooler is sometimes a gift, and Tristan was soon more interested in coaxing Tiny upstairs than in mourning Ben. A few times, he asked a version of “when is Ben coming back”, and one more time he cried when he grasped the finality of it. I found myself invoking God, and heaven, because they are comforting ideas and at least make the concept of death manageable and bearable, especially for a four-year-old.

    Good-bye, Ben. I promise to take good care of our Beloved for you.