Postcards from the Mothership

(stretches, rubs eyes, peers blearily at the screen)

Oh god, I am so very tired. I thought the days of sleep deprivation were mercifully behind us, but I fear not. I’ve been up since precicely 4:15 am. I know it is 4:15 because Simon has an atomic clock stashed under his crib somewhere and wakes up at EXACTLY the same time for days on end. These past days on end have started in the ungodly hours before dawn, at precisely 4:15. Not 4:13 or 4:16, mind you. Every single day this week, 4:15 am.

He’s got this idea in his curly little head that when he wakes up at 4:15, he gets to go sleep with mummy, a myth perpetrated by mummy herself staggering around in the dark trying anything to make the baby go back to sleep for a little while longer. Some days the soother does the trick, some days the blanket does the trick, and some days only crawling into bed with mummy does the trick. How many of you are nodding along as I whine that once baby snuggles under the comforter he falls blissfully back to sleep, leaving mummy wide awake and grumbling in the gloaming? And no wonder I can’t sleep – he’s such a twitchy little sleeper. He grunts, he rolls, he hoots (there is no other word for it, he does in fact hoot) and he sticks his little feet in the middle of my back and kicks. He’s worse than his father! And inevitably, just as I finally drift blissfully back to sleep, the clock strikes 5:45 and the radio clicks on and another day leaps out of the bushes and exposes itself to us.

I’m not one of those people who functions well when sleep deprived. I can quite clearly imagine all the little synapses in my brain letting go of each other, breaking connections and disrupting mental traffic, so information traveling along its usual neural network highway gets as backed up as the 401 on a long-weekend Friday rush hour. That’s what my head feels like today – traffic congestion.

It’s better than it was. I went for more than a year without getting more than two or three hours of sleep consecutively, and averaging five or six hours of sleep a night. I was chronically and constantly sleep deprived. And it was not pretty. What I remember most is thinking, “I’m off work for a year at almost my full salary, staying home with my two spectacularly terrific children – this should be the best year of my life and I’m completely miserable.” And then I would feel guilty about being so miserable, when all I really needed was about 30% more sleep than I was getting.

I remember feeling such anger toward Simon when he woke up, when he woke me up, in the middle of the night. That part was scary. The sound of his cry would cause a violent release of adrenaline into my system, giving me that same nauseating rush you get after a bad scare, but three or four times a night, every time he woke up. I’d have to force myself to think of the “daytime” Simon, as I thought of it, the one who cooed and smiled and laughed, the one that I loved beyond reason, and not think of the nighttime Simon, my opponent and nemesis, who was not sleeping out of some form of infant spite. So many hours of silent and frustrated rage were spent in his room, rocking him endlessly in the darkness, while I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and let somebody else be the one responsible for taking care of him. Dark nights indeed.

It seems like it happened to someone else. I’ve never admitted to the anger before, never wanted to acknowledge it, but I can see from this safe distance that it was entirely the sleep deprivation. I regret those dark nights, regret not being better equipped to deal with and overcome my own tiredness. But that’s kind of like regretting the sky is blue, isn’t it?

So today I am tired. Oh so very tired. But I have learned that I can function on a whole lot less sleep than I ever, in the time before children, would have given myself credit for.

Pass the coffee, wouldja please?

It’s been hugely entertaining for me to relive my trip of a lifetime, even if it left some of you scrolling endlessly downward looking for something more current to read. Alas, ten years ago today, my trip ended – but not without a final dramatic turn. This is the day I decided Beloved was going to be my forever guy.

Well, the worst has happened. I missed my flight home. No joke – my flight left at 7 am, and it’s a quarter to nine and I’m still here. A series of misconnections on the RER (underground commuter rail) and heading to the wrong terminal first got me to the right terminal at 7:05, five minutes after my plane’s departure. Remember Salzburg? That was *nothing* compared to this.

To make matters worse, I had to deal with the world’s meanest airline clerk – she made the Grinch seem like the tooth fairy. The harder I cried, the snarkier she got. Finally, I ended up asking another clerk for help. She brought me back to the first lady (and I use that term sparingly) and together they managed to book me on another later connection into Amsterdam, flying into Toronto rather than Ottawa. It was either that or wait for the next flight into Ottawa – in two days. I don’t think so! So I paid a hundred-and-something dollar penalty and I’m flying into Toronto two hours later than I would have been arriving in Ottawa – we’ll actually make it into London earlier this way.

Poor (Beloved)! He drove all the way from London to Ottawa last night to meet my flight. I called him and woke him up (he’s staying in my apartment in Ottawa) when I confirmed my Toronto flight number and arrival time and he’ll drive back to meet me in Toronto. It’s a good thing he’s such a sweetie. God, I miss him!


So I’m waiting for my new flight to Amsterdam. A bright spot in this disasterous morning: I’m in the terminal waiting room, and it’s pretty empty, maybe a dozen or so people, when I hear what sounds like a very unhappy cat yowling. I ignore it for a few minutes, barely past the state of yowling myself, but finally my curiousity gets the better of me and I look around as the yowling gets more and more insistent, and I see an extremely sheepish looking old man with a picnic basket in his lap. The picnic basket is yowling to beat the band, and the lid keeps trying to pop open. He’s trying to shush it, but the picnic basket doesn’t want to be pacified. Finally, he opens one flap and a little tabby head pops out. He reminded me I wasn’t the only one having a bad day.

Killing time here at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, spending my last moments on European soil much the same way I spent my last moments on Canadian soil, wandering around the duty free stores, reading the newspaper, killing time. Yawn!

All in all, it’s been an excellent trip. Aside from trauma day in Salzburg and these unfortunate transportation woes today, it has been a flawless trip. Even this plane fiasco thing is not so bad – more of an inconvenience for (Beloved) than me. I would have preferred to fly into Ottawa, but I can deal with this (even though I had to sacrafice my window seat.)

Petty things, really. This has been such an experience! The people I’ve met have really made the difference: from the helpful people like the nice hosteliers in Amsterdam and Salzburg to the new friends like Niall and Terry to the people I’d just as soon (but never will) forget like the evil KLM clerk and arrogant LA Girl.

It’s nice to be back in the Netherlands again. The Dutch people really are nice, and they have the most charming sing-song quality to their voices that I didn’t notice anywhere else in Europe. It’s funny, too, to look around and remember how excited and nervous and eager I was when I came through here four weeks ago. Things that seemed so daunting – the trains, the toilets, the telephones, the hotels, the restaurants, the curriences – I agonized over each of them at one point or another, but quickly became acclimatized to each of them. Even languages weren’t that much of a problem; tougher in Germany and Italy, a snap in Holland and France. I was even beginning to think in French by the end!

It’s all about context and perspective; that’s what I learned on this trip. Something along the lines of the Bogart quote in Casablanca, about the problems of two people not amounting to a hill of beans in this crazy world. There is so much to see, and so much to know and to experience, and it is far too easy to lose sight of that, to become wrapped up in your own tiny world and miss the chance to be anything beyond what you already know, what you are comfortable being.

Categories: Europe95

You might have noticed that I’ve started tagging some of my posts with categories. This is a feature I’ve coveted from Typepad and other blogging software for a while. (Not that I’m easily categorizable. I came up with more than 20 possible categories just looking at my list of post titles. I do ramble on.)

Blogger still doesn’t have a category feature, although they came out with a comment feature within a week of me installing HaloScan and with Blogger Images the very day after I discovered Flickr, so expect something new from them soon. (Four hundred thousand bloggers, but they’re dialed in to me.) In the meanwhile, thanks to FreshBlog and Ted Ernst, I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us tags to organize some categories. When you click on a category tag at the end of a post, it will bring you to delicious, which sorts the tags by category and lists the posts.

It’s an inelegant workaround, but it does the job. I’ve been using delicious for a while. I love the social aspect of the bookmarking – what do other people think is cool. I’ve gone through some of the archives and tagged them, and will pick away at more of them as time permits.

Now, can anyone explain to me how to make conditional expandable post? The ones where you can truncate yourself and have a “click here to read more” link to the full text? (Andrea, no pressure, but I’m thinking of you here.) I tried the Blogger hack but I must have lost something in the translation from the original Spanish.

Speaking of Andrea, she’s got a really cool new project going on – a new Webzine called The Whole Mom:

We believe that mothers have important and interesting things to say about the world outside of the nursery, the kitchen and the playroom; but that too often our voices are marginalized into “mothers’ publications” or that, if a mother speaks in another venue, she will frequently mask her status in the interests of supposed objectivity. At TheWholeMom.com we believe that motherhood (of any kind) is central to a woman’s identity, but it is not the whole of her identity—and it is the intersection of this one life-altering role and the many other roles, pursuits, interests and identities a woman may have that we intend to explore.

Cool, eh? They’ve put out a call for submissions. Check it out!

Categories: blogging

The penultimate entry in my great Canadian Eurotour 1995 travel journal.

(Editor’s note: the last two sentiments took care of themselves in July 1999 when I returned to Paris with Beloved on our honeymoon. Six years later, I think we’re well overdue for another visit!)

Categories: Europe95

As I retype these entries, I feel painfully older. The person who wrote these words was so much younger than me, so much more earnest, so much more sure of herself and her place in the world. And so in need of an editor!

I’m sitting on one of the stone bridges on the inaptly named Pont Neuf, watching the sun set, reflected in the Seine. The Pont Neuf, by the way, is inaptly named because pont neuf means new bridge and this is the oldest bridge in modern-day Paris.

The sunset is spectacular, as it has been every night since I’ve been in Paris. It’s as if the gods are reaching out, seeking to inspire the creative spirits that are already drawn to Paris. The sun is a perfect sphere of an indescribable colour – not orange, not pink, not red, not yellow. It is the colour of energy, the colour only the sun could be. A few wisps of clouds, remnants of the day’s thick haze, paint the sky varying, shifting shades of pink, mauve and grey. The sun itself leaves a long, shimmering streamer of pink that crawls toward me on the surface of the Seine. With each degree closer to the horizon, the colour fades infintesimally, bleeding the landscape of colour shade by shade toward the monochrome of night.

And what a landscape it is, regally befitting such an imperial sunset. The Left Bank of Paris, with its tree-lined gothic façade. A wrought-iron pedestrian bridge fords the Seine in the foreground, and the deity of all iron structures, the Eiffel Tower, rises serenely from the backround, grey and surrealistically one-dimensional in the darkening haze.

Gradually, the sun is swallowed by the thickening haze, its illumination dampened and defeated prematurely, with no kiss for the horizon. But darkness falls gently, like a floating feather, creeping with increasing boldness from shady nooks and corners, even as the clouds still refract the sun’s dying rays.

Somberly, but persistently, darkness engulfs the city and soft pastels yield to deep indigoes. Then, from the twilight, a flicker of light, and another, like the reflections of stars in the earthly plane. Slowly, as if awakening from a day long slumber, Paris begins to illuminate herself – the footbridges, the streetcorners, the restaurants and apartments and finally, gloriously, the Eiffel Tower. Emerging, transforming, an urban Phoenix: Paris, the City of Lights.

(What can I say, it’s Paris, it does that to you.)

I guess I’m feeling excessively creative tonight because I’ve spent the day bathing in artistic history – four hours in the Musée d’Orsay this morning and another hour and a half getting my feet wet in the Louvre. Orsay was wonderful! The museum itself is a work of art, a converted railway station. I saw almost all the Impressionist paintings I’ve learned about, and so much more. I wish I could go back again and again. I’m in awe of the skill, the colours, the sheer talent, the history… let’s just say I’m in awe in general. There is so much more to see, to learn, to understand.

And I thought Musée d’Orsay was overwhelming – until I got to the Louvre. I’m glad I spent a while poking around there this afternoon – it took me that long just to get oriented and get my bearings. There are seven “schools” spread out over three wings, and nothing seems particularly coherent, from a chronological or artistic perspective. But I bought a little guide book and picked up a free map – god, I’m attacking the Louvre with the same tactics I use to learn a new city. I’m excited about tomorrow’s visit – today just whet my appetite.

I did a major sight-seeing tour of Paris yesterday. I wandered for a while in the Latin Quarter (my favourite neighbourhood) and got a little lost, then wandered through the gorgeous Luxembourg Gardens on my way to the Musée Rodin. I really liked that one; it’s one of the nicest museums I’ve been to. There is a huge garden around the museum housing about a dozen sculptures including The Thinker, a huge statue of Balzac, and an imposing door-type gate called The Gates of Hell – very disturbing. Inside, I was lucky enough to see my favourite Rodin sculpture, The Kiss (actually, Le Baiser) among hundreds of others.

My walking tour continued through Les Invalides, a huge palace-like Veteran’s home and location of Napoleon’s tomb. I carried on from there (having gone there more because I stumbled upon it rather than because I sought it out) to the Eiffel Tower, where I waited like a good little tourist in the 1/2 hour line up to go to the top. Worth it!!! A most excellent view of Paris, literally as far as the eye can see.

I continued my trek, heading down one of the huge boulevards that intersect in the 12-street traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe. Of course, I had to go up there, too, so I climbed the stairs to the top (yes, I took the lift on the Eiffel Tower. YOU feel free to climb 300m of steps in the mid-day August sun. Actually, the stairs only lead to the first of three observation decks anyway.) Anyhow, the Arc de Triomphe was an impressive structure, but less than 48 hours had elapsed since the aforementioned bombing, and I wasn’t willing to test my Garp-luck theory.

So, Intrepid Traveler (read: tourist from hell) took off for a saunter down the Champs Elysées, across the Place de la Concorde with its ancient Egyptian obelisk, through the Tulleries Gardens and into the courtyard of the Louvre, where I gratefully stood in the spray of the fountains flanking I.M. Pei’s controversial glass pyramids. Personally, I think they’re kind of funky looking, if not a little out of synch with the (baroque?) style of the Louvre’s palatial wings.

All in all, I figure it was probably a 20 or 25 km trek; it took from 9 in the morning until almost seven in the evening, but I saw so many great parts of Paris. Because I walked everywhere, I got to see a lot of un-touristed residendial and commercial areas that made the city more real and more endearing to me. Paris isn’t just a tourist city – it’s alive with the people who live in it.

As if Paris weren’t interesting enough on its own merits, this afternoon when I stopped off at the hotel between the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, I found the little square outside the Hotel Henri IV (my hotel) completely blocked off because they were filming a movie there! Details are sketchy, but I found out the working title is “Le Proprieteur” and it is a Merchant Ivory film. The scene they were filming was showing the WWII liberation of Paris. So I rubbernecked around there for a while, too, but time in Paris is a precious commodity to me. Speaking of which … à demain!

(Editor’s note: The movie was eventually titled Surviving Picasso. Quite ironic, given my Picasso obsession born in Venice and Antibes. I’ve since seen it – it’s quite a good film!)

Categories: Europe95

Yes, I’ve already posted today. Then I read a story on another blog, and I had to write this, too.

A while ago, I was reading Tertia’s blog and saw that she asked her legions of readers (around 2,000 a day) to help raise money for her nanny, Rose. Rose is a black woman living in South Africa, and for health reasons wanted to get breast reduction surgery. I am in no way commenting on the worthiness of Rose’s surgery, but I have to admit that I did raise my eyebrow – okay, I rolled my eyes. I’m happy that Rose has someone as influential as Tertia to help her, and it seems they raised enough to cover the $3000 or so required for the surgery.

Then I read a story about a 34 year old graduate student in in the United States whose husband has terminal liver cancer. Dean Dad mentioned her story on his blog, and I followed the links to Mary’s blog. Mary doesn’t know the grad student, who blogs under the name Badger, but has taken it upon herself to organize a Paypal account to help the struggling family with their overwhelming medical bills. I lifted this quote of Badger’s blog from Mary’s blog, and it broke my heart:

Here’s a quote from a Live Journal post she wrote last spring:

“Cost to date for surgery, CT-scans, hospital stays, doctors’ visits, and labwork: $79,000. Insurance benefit left for year: $21,000. Days left until new benefit year: 145. Response from Social Security Administration when I went down to their office with our 2004 tax returns to prove our lack of income: Priceless.
“There’s nothing I can do for you. Come back in two years.”
Prognosis of someone with stage four liver cancer: 3 months.”

Now, things are difficult because of the expense of the medication Mr. Badger needs for pain. Here’s another quote posted on her blog in July after a trip to the pharmacy to pick up a new, stronger prescription for morphine:

“Pharmacist: Oh, we didn’t fill the entire prescription. Your insurance company says you have reached the limit on your prescription benefit.
Badger: Oh!
Pharmacist: You would’ve had to have paid for the prescription out-of-pocket, which would’ve been over $400, so we’ve only given you a few pills.
Badger: Oh.”

Can you guess which fund I donated to?

Sorry for the service interruption this week. First I had a virus, then I gave it to my computer. Actually, neither of us had a virus, we were both just a little cantankerous and out of commission for a while.

But we’re back!

So, how’ve you been? As the first official Potty Week draws to a close, I am happy to report that Tristan has gone TWO DAYS without an accident. (pause for ovation) He is just two potty trips short of earning his metal Thomas and Annie and Clarabel, and we are all amazed that he seems to be at least superficially potty trained. We have a few more tricks to learn, like using public washrooms (when we tried the other night at Harvey’s, he kept wiggling off the seat and saying, “It’s not like home!”) and I’m not confident enough yet to leave him diaperless overnight. But we’re getting there.

My babies are all grown up! Even Simon has been growing exponentially this week, and now insists on having his food in a bowl or plate, and eating with a fork. And damn, he’s clever! (she said, completely lacking in bias) Tristan and I were in the bathroom washing our hands after a potty event, and I was enthusing that he had just earned two more stickers and would soon get his metal Thomas and Annie and Clarabel when Simon came in. He had gone into the train bag and pulled out Annie and Clarabel (the wooden versions) to bring to Tristan. He walked over to Tristan as Tristan was drying his hands and handed him the trains – he had been following our conversation, and understood that somehow Tristan going to the potty and him getting Annie and Clarabel were linked. And he knew which trains, of the several dozen that inhabit our dining room, were Annie and Clarabel. I was stunned!

And more progress, if you can stand it – Tristan started riding a big-boy bike this week, too! My dad found a bike with training wheels at garage sale a week or so ago for $15 and picked it up for Tristan. It’s just a shade too big for him, but by next spring it will be just right. We started letting him ride around the driveway on the weekend, and for fun thought we’d let him ride down to the mailboxes on the corner. We kept right on going, and he had gone around the block in no time, and with no difficulties (on his part; I nearly had organ failure running to keep up with him on the downhill bits while dragging Simon in the wagon behind me.) Now every moment Tristan is torn between wanting to play with his trains and wanting to ride his bike around the neighbourhood.

What is it about kids and bikes? I so clearly remember my first bike, or at least the first bike that mattered to me. It was blue with a banana seat and hi-rise handle bars, and had a white woven basket on the handlebars. I had Charlie’s Angels stickers, taken from those card packs that came with the flat, stale pink gum, stuck all over the seat.

Do you remember your first bike?

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Do not adjust your monitor.

Regularly scheduled blog service will resume as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

In the 2005 world, we’re experiencing technical difficulties. With less than a week of travel left in 1995, I was facing difficulties of another kind.

My god, I’m in PARIS!!

Categories: Europe95