family

Do you know what I have had enough of? Small talk. Conversations with my father that take hairpin turns into uncharted and awkward waters. Neverending planning to see people to whom I have nothing to say but "Oh. Huh. Oh really? Still in Ajax. Huh. Oh. Nice. Yep, just down the street. Yeah, I probably will borrow my friends' wagons. Ha ha."

Last night Amy and I had a surprisingly good Thai dinner in Keswick. You might not think that a small town on the shores of Lake Simcoe might be the place to find a good green curry, but I assure you, that's faulty thinking. The food we had last night was as good as, and in the case of that curry, better than, any Thai food I've had in Ottawa.

The brunch I made this morning, for my mom and sister-in-law, for mother's day, during which I conscripted Amy to cook, even though it was her birthday, was very definitely not better than any brunch I've had in Ottawa. I've poached eggs before, but not very often. And cooking tip #42: If the water is not hot enough, the egg whites will disperse into the water. You won't think this is a problem until you do get the water hot enough, and the egg white molecules, thoroughly entwined with the water molecules, will cook and turn the water a cloudy white just before they create a foamy scum on the surface, just before you put the whole pot in the sink, grab a skillet, and start frying.

So yes, you can also add: kitchen disasters in other people's kitchens to that list.

Amy is going to kill me, because I'm pretty sure she doesn't like this picture. And you know, it's not the most flattering picture I've ever taken of her. Maybe because I was laughing so hard I had to hold my breath to take it? And that was making her laugh? And I don't think either of us knew why exactly we were laughing so hard except it kept getting funnier and funnier?

If you have an extra few hours on a cool, sunny spring Thursday, I highly suggest you take a road trip with my sister. You will have a most excellent time.

I love that drive. We used to take the 401 all the time, which makes no sense, since I live 45 minutes north of the 401 and so does my family. Sure, it feels faster on the 401, because you're driving at 140, and when you take the 7 and 7A, you're lucky to push 100. But the back roads take the same amount of time and way less gas.

On the 7, too, you can stop whenever you want, and you end up in these weird rural way stations. The first place was a complete hardware store. With nails by the pound, and boots, and vacuum bags. The second was a greasy spoon restaurant serving samosas and curry, with a lot of signs in the bathroom telling you how to flush the toilet and to please turn out the lights. I got out of the car and was taken with how clean the air smelled, yellow-green, like those fuzzy tails that hang off of birch trees. The smell of the bathroom hit me even harder, a mauve fake floral sitting in cakes: one on the back of the toilet, one on top of the paper towel rack.

Then there's the dusk. The 7 and 7A take you mostly through countryside, forests and if, you time it right, through farmland as the sun is going down.

As always, being home is a maelstrom of planning with immediate family, aunts and cousins. I find it incredibly frustrating, because none of them are communicating and it's Amy and I trying to figure it out, and mostly Amy on the phone, because I hate that part, and mostly me saying "I don't know, yeah, we could do that then, but oh, we need to be at the hospital by 5, and-" And quite frankly, I'm not sure why most of them want to see us, since we get together and there's nothing to say, nothing in common. But that's blood family for you. Some people you can spend 5 hours in a car with and still think it could have been longer, other people get a begrudging half hour.

It is a very great lot of pressure to write the first post on the new system. I've been thinking hard since last Friday about what I should write. I wanted it to be brilliant, just in case there were new people coming to this space for the first time.

I don't have time for brilliant.

Guessing from the incredibly slow turnover in my Google reader, I'm guessing that I am not the only one navigating those particular waters.

Maybe it's the spring busy time. After such a long arduous winter, the past couple of weeks have been insanely busy and/or stressful for almost everyone I know. Has been for me, what with the housebuying and dating and website fiddling. The only thing I have not tried to change is my job, and even that is only because I decided not to apply for the perfect job.

And I'm off to Stouffville tomorrow, to visit my sick Granny. Though accurately, she's no longer sick. She's over the infection that put her in the hospital, but the turmoil of it has made everyone realize that she's no longer safe living alone. Including her, though she is not happy about that realization.

It's good that she's healthier, it's good that she'll be out of the hospital once my dad and uncle have found her a space. And I worked as a housekeeper in an old age home from 15 to 18, so I can tell you that at least one of them was a pretty clean place.* The people who worked there were mostly nice, there were activities.

But they're all institutional. That can't be helped: the horrible greens and pinks, the disinfected smell, the terrible food from powders, the unrelenting sameness. The most I can hope is that she'll have a room to herself and we'll be able to move her favourite things over. Her white lamps with the blue flowers on them. Her two frames of decorative plates, the ones the same powdery soft blue as her eyes. The Robert Bateman print of a cardinal between them.

Come to think of it, that'll fit right in.

I'm more sad about this than I've been letting on, even to myself. I don't want her to move.

First, because she doesn't want to.

Second, selfishly, because she's the first of my elderly female relatives to have to leave her home. That's how I've seen the end of my life - a heart attack at home, maybe a few days in the hospital after, and then done.

Third, because I can put myself in her place and I can feel how lost and frustrated I would feel at my body betraying me so badly I had no choice but to leave the space that had made me feel safe.

Generally, I don't love going home. It's a lot of visiting, it's very tiring. Very little alone time. Most visits, I don't look forward to going, and I only go for a few days. This visit, I'm trying to rush the time before Amy arrives and we head out, until I can see Gran and hold her hand, try not to cry for her that everything changed.

*Provided I wasn't too hung over.

I think that my Gran is dying.

Not in an "everyone is dying" kind of way, but in a "I don't think I'll make travel plans that don't involve going home" kind of way, because, as Shelley put it, cancelling a fun trip to go to a funeral is not going to make the funeral any easier.

I have no real reason to believe she's dying. Yes, she's almost 94; yes, she's in the hospital; yes, she had a serious stroke nearly 5 years ago that we were all surprised she survived.

But: she's been living quite well on her own up to now, and lots of people live to be in their late nineties; the infection that put her in the hospital is under control; under her soft exterior, she comes from farm people, who are a tough people.

So I'm left with the woo: a general feeling that she has had enough.

I've had this feeling for a long time though. Over the past year and a half, I've seen my grandmother turn from an incredibly gentle, soft-spoken, laughing woman, to one prone to fits of irritation and frustration.

She's started giving away more and more of her possessions.

Everything she owns, she knows who gave it to her. My last trip back, she gave me back the tiny pig sculptures I'd given her for Christmas in 1983. Both Amy and I also got a compact, complete with original cakey powder. She knew the back story for each one - who had given it to her, when, why. I don't know where I've put mine.

When I talked to her on the phone two days ago, we talked for just over two minutes. By the end of it, she was frantically tired: she mumbled "I have to go now" through still-broken teeth and exhaustion, hung up as I was saying "Bye, Gran, I love you."

I don't know what to think, exactly. I do love my grandmother, very much, though we had a blip about 8 years ago that severed an innocence in our relationship. We never spoke about it face-to-face.

She's a generous woman with a warm soul. My mother once said, "If you want to know the truth, you go to your Grandma C. If you want to feel better, you go to your Gran." It was the truth. I have heard about three unkind words out of my Gran's mouth.

So I hate to see her so much not like herself. Not the self I knew her as.

Maybe I'm wrong about this dying thing. Maybe she's not, or not immediately. Right now, not having seen her, only having heard her wheezy voice over the phone along with the stories of her hallucinations and severe lack of mobility, I feel it in my bones.

My bones are preparing me to grieve for a woman who has been the glue in our family for at least as long as I've been around. But maybe that's just the spring damp.

In just over one hour, I will be going to another house inspection. I have everyone I know crossing their fingers for us. We really really want to own this house - these houses, rather, since it's two separate houses on one property. They're built against each other, but are entirely separate.

When we first started looking that would have been ideal. Their space, my space, very very separate space. To start, we really wanted a side-by-side duplex. Both sides with access to the backyard, lots of space inside, maybe my side would be divided into apartments and we could rent one out. But the only SxS's that came up were fucking dodgy and even more fucking expensive.

So almost everything we looked at was up-down, and we didn't think that was ideal. Little Dog really doesn't like stairs, and in almost all of the up-downs we looked at, the Ess's would have been in the upper unit(s). Not perfect. There was also the fact that in most of the units, the main floor unit (mine) was gorgeous and well kept and the upper unit was, well, generally not. Not perfect, but it's what was out there.

And then the more I envisioned how those spaces would work, saw us all living in the same house, the more I really wanted that. The more it came to seem like family all under one roof.

Because that is what this is about for me. Building family.

Mostly. Of course, finances play into it. I can't afford a home in Centretown by myself, and I won't leave my neighbourhood - my community - for the sake of owning. I love my current apartment, and I don't think that paying someone rent is throwing money down the toilet any more than I think buying food is throwing money down the toilet.

Especially when I do the math and realize how much money I will be giving the bank over the next 21.1 years.

Especially when buying food is literally throwing money down the toilet.

Buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do. It completely disrupts your life in a way that moving apartments and looking for a job (the former top two activities on the list of things that stress me out) don't. Part of it is situational, I'm sure, with one of us here and two of us in Halifax. Shelley has thanked me a number of times for taking this on, and I brush it off. Not because it hasn't been stressful and disruptive, because it has, but because it's been equally stressful and disruptive for them. Just differently.

But we're in it, and we're dealing each in our own way,* and it looks like the deciding is almost done. The agreements have been signed, the financing has been firmed, and if it doesn't fail on inspection, and please please please let this be an easy pitch, we will be waiving our conditions in the near future.

And, one roof or two, starting to build a life together.

*For example, Steve's facebook status often seems to be "Steve is stressed and going out to hit people with sticks." In martial arts class.

Amy, Eric and I trundled off to Stouffville this past weekend for two days of crazy family visiting. Crazy pace, not crazy family. Really, my family is pretty normal.

Saturday morning we went to visit my brother and his family. Amy and I played Pass the Baby and took turns breathing in Declan's lovely baby smell and rubbing our lips on his soft head while he grinned and cooed. Immy had been asking for me for days, was quite excited that I was coming. In theory. When Dave brought her downstairs from her nap, all we could hear from the top of the stairs down was "Megan? Megan?" However, when I greeted them at the bottom of the stairs and leaned in to give her a kiss, she looked at me blankly. Dave handed her over, I held her for a couple of seconds and then she held out her hands to go back to Daddy. I always suspected that the concept of me was much more exciting than my actual presence.

Saturday afternoon we all went to Gran's and met my Dad there. There was chatting and laughing, etc. etc. And then out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement and bare skin. I looked down. Amy was putting her sock back on.

"What are you doing?" I totally interrupted the conversation. Everyone closed their mouths and looked at Amy with raised eyebrows. She turned red.

"I'm turning my sock the other way."

"You're what?"

"Well. I just noticed it was the wrong way and the strings were sticking out and it was bugging me. So I changed it. I didn't figure anyone would be watching my feet, Meg."

"Well I wasn't really watching so much as I was looking in that general direction and noticing that you were doing something."

While we were splitting these particular hairs, everyone looked from Amy's feet to their own.

"Hey," Dad said. "One of my socks is inside out too."

We laughed. Ha ha, incompetent Butchers.

I looked down. "Umm."

"You know," Eric said, "how is it that out of 6 Butcher feet, four of them are wearing inside out socks? You'd have better odds if you'd all put them on in the closet."

My sister handed her camera over to my 21-month old niece. In case you'd forgotten, this is what the world looks like to a toddler: looming adult crotches and close-up floors.

"So what was one of the slightly inappropriate things my dad said?"

"'You seem like the kind of lady who can suck and blow at the same time.'"

"Riiight. There was more though, wasn't there?"

"Oh, you mean the part where he threatened to break the guy's arm if he moved the cigarette butt pail?"

+++

I have spent the last two weeks scaring Eric into thinking my father was some kind of boyfriend-eating monster. Thing is, my father used to be a boyfriend-eating monster. The boys of my youth were terrified, if also a little in awe, of my father.

But he looooooves Eric. Loves. Him. Told me, in front of Eric, "not to let this one get away." He has barely spoken to most of my boyfriends, never mind told me to hang on to them.

So when my dad was laughing and cracking jokes and being a generally very jovial man, Eric was not the only person slightly non-plussed. Later that night, he said "Your dad is really nice and funny. He's like Dad two-point-oh."

It's possible that I needed to see my dad through someone else's eyes. I knew he had mellowed out a bit over the last 5 or so years, but the only people I really have to talk to about him (besides you, dear internet) are my sibs and my mom. Who don't have exactly unbiased opinions about him- for good or bad. It was good for me, I think, to get a viewpoint from someone who hadn't lived with my dad when he wasn't a very happy person.

The rest of the weekend also went well, though it wasn't as surprising. Everyone really liked Eric. I had been a little nervous, not that they wouldn't like him, because 1) really, what's not to like, 2) as long as I seem happy, they'd be inclined to like him anyway and 3) it doesn't really matter what most of my relatives think because I don't see them enough for it to matter much. No, I'd been nervous that I'd revert to weird unflattering childhood patterns, or that even if everyone liked him, it just wouldn't be a good fit.

Sometimes I just like to worry though.

Eric and I "camped out" on my mom's back porch. Pretty fun, though the first night, we froze our asses off. Well, I froze my ass off until I hogged all the covers and tucked them in tight around me. I might seem like a nice person, but when the cold seeps in, it's another story. I will throw you over for a little nylon and down.

In my defense, I do it either when I'm completely or mostly asleep. Friday night, every time I came out of the haze just enough to realize I was cold, I'd tuck another inch or two under me. Until Eric woke up freezing and barely covered. Though that did give me the opportunity to wrap myself around him pretty tightly to warm him up, and he didn't seem to mind that part too much.

The next night, however, we piled on the covers and were quite toasty.

My mom's house backs on to a pond. I got up at 445 am saturday morning to pee. It ended up being quite the excursion, since the air mattress wasn't quite full and I was on the side away from the exit. So I was on my knees, bent over Eric's legs, arguing with the flap zipper and kept tipping over and falling on top of Eric, but not in a sexy way. In a clumsy "I know you're trying to sleep but I really really really have to pee" desperate kind of way. When I finally did make it out, half dragging and half launching myself, and nearly breaking Eric's knees in the process, my very presence irritated the Golden Labradoodle* next door, who proceeded to bark until I was in and out and back in the tent.

But the sunrise was stunning.

The drive home was good too. It was me and Eric in the front, switching off on driving duties, and Amy and Aurèle in the back seat. I'm not sure we could have fit much more in the Yaris, which has about 8 cubic feet of storage space. When Amy went to get her camera out of the back, it was a bit like those snakes-in-a-can tricks. Not quite as sproingy, thankfully.

She got her camera out of the back because we stopped at a place in Orono called the New Dutch Oven Restaurant, and I wanted a picture of the sign.** I felt compelled to stop, since I had been talking a week or two about a dinner Eric had made me in a dutch oven. A lot of sniggering ensued as I vainly attempted to stand my ground and point out that it was a cooking pot long before it was a fart joke.

It was like the little car was magnetized, and even though we'd only meant to stop somewhere for a sandwich, we all felt that a meal at the New Dutch Oven Restaurant was something we couldn't pass up. The food was what you would expect: it tasted good with ketchup on it.

We got home around midnight and it was nice to be back, even after such a short time away.

*"It's a what?"
"A Golden Labradoodle."
"Labradoodle? What kind of name is that?"
"Well, it's a mix of a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle. Labradoodle."
"Who owns a Standard Doodle?"

**I'll post it when she sends it.

Friday nights and Saturday mornings are for nerve wracking.

Later this morning, as you'll notice over in the sidebar, I am reading at WestFest. For days I've been saying, "Hoo, yeah, pretty nervous about it." Not really feeling nervous, but knowing that I was and was just refusing to feel it.

My palms started sweating. I'm feeling it.

I've read enough times in Ottawa that I feel I've found a groove - I've gotten used to knowing, if not the whole crowd, then at least a good chunk of it. It's nice and comforting, though can get a little odd when I'm reading the more raw, sexy stuff, and I'm not quite sure where to look. As in "Oh, right, I just made eye contact with a good friend of Eric's as I said 'your cock getting thicker and darker.' Maybe I'll look at the back wall now."

Small discomfort aside, it's usually pretty cozy. Tomorrow, though? Tomorrow there are going to be some friendly faces, for sure. But it's not my element. Frances Itani, for fuck's sake. She's, like, a real writer.

It'll be good for me, I think. The nerves are good news, too. I always perform better when I've had a good case of the jitters.

Last night was a different kind of nerves. I met Eric's family. There was no doubt in my mind that they would be entirely lovely. He is one of the politest and most respectful people I've ever met, and though I'm sure nature played a role, I have a feeling that quite a bit of that is due to nurture. His oldest sister went out of her way to say hi to me on Facebook, which I thought was super sweet and extraordinarily welcoming. And I'm a nice person, and I'm nice to Eric, so there is no real reason for them to not like me. But still. What if I said something stupid? Or out of place, or didn't realize I was trying too hard till it was too late. Or, more likely, what if I couldn't think of anything to say at all and I seem like a sullen brat? Or a snoot? I don't want them to think I'm a snoot.

When we picked his oldest sister up, I clammed up. After Hi, I'm not sure I said one word on the way from her house to his other sister's house. I didn't really say anything for the rest of the night, either, though I could tell I had loosened up by the end of the night, because I told one of my long hand-flapping stories while Karen was in the car. There was one part of my brain telling the story and another part thinking, wow, you've chilled out, eh?

They're such a nice family together. Teasing, but sweet. Really funny. Tanya and her husband Guy had just gotten back from Germany and had a lot of stories. I laughed pretty hard, particularly one that involved them getting on a train that kept reversing direction after one stop. It felt easy to be with them, even though I was too shy to say anything.

I have it good though. Most of my family is really nice too, but my dad? Eesh. While I love him and am very much like him, my father is a gruff, impatient, cranky man. He has little tolerance for bullshit and makes no bones about telling people when he feels they're bullshitting, which sometimes creates what I see as needless conflict. In the past, he has been more likely to grunt at my boyfriends than talk to them. Really though, he's a huge softie. But it took even me a long time to see that.

If you've got the time today, please do come see me pretend to not be nervous on the same stage as Frances Itani. It would be lovely to have a friendly face out there. I promise to do more than grunt at you.

This is a couple weeks late, but I am an auntie in quadruplicate now. Declan Jack was born March 1. He is brother to Imogen Towriss.

Goddamn, he’s cute.

We don’t know what to do about the name though.

Immy’s full name is completely bonkers. Towriss is weird even as a last name (it’s my gran’s family name) and Imogen is a little heavy for a baby, but it was shortened very easily to Immy. The only problem with the name Immy is that when my sister Amy is also around it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s being chastised for playing with the buttons on the dishwasher.

Declan, however, is another story. Declan is a very nice name, but probably no one will call him that. Everyone will want to shorten it. But to what? Consensus is against Dec, because it looks too much like a calendar month. Several options have been floated so far: Dek, Deck, Dex are the three that come to mind, but I seem to remember at least one more.

Apparently, my brother doesn’t like Dex, which is my front-runner, because it sounds too much like something you put on the back of your house. I thought that was a very weird thing to say, considering that all of the options start with ‘d’ and have some kind of a hard ‘cuh’ sound to end them off. We’ll be hard pressed to escape the construction comparison. Dex at least gives him a wicked future DJ name too.

Maybe they’ll just call him Jack, which is the name of at least three of his great-grandfathers. Amy and David and I grew up in awe of our Poppa – Jack Butcher - who was an odd and amazing man. I’d be pretty happy if we had another Jack.