Parenting: The young adult years, Take I

Daughter is home for reading week. Unlike the holiday break, this visit has no sense of frenzy. It is like the old days. Except. It's. Not.

I've always felt that I've been about one or two steps emotionally ahead of her. This is to say that yes, I'm an emotional misfit and most parents I've observed seem to have a lot more maturity than I've ever felt.

This feeling was driven home last night and in fact I am now suspicious that Daughter's emotional maturity is starting to catch up and even surpass mine. 

During last night's rather heavy dinner conversation I found myself unable to offer anything resembling answers to her questions. I hit the 'parenting wall'. I suggested that she try to nurture the type of relationship with her father in which she could ask him these same questions for I had no idea what to say.  All I could do was listen and then offer the physical support of a long hug that seemed to acknowledge my failure to provide adequate guidance as well as provide the soul soothing comfort of physical closeness that used to be so central to our relationship. Our physical need for one another seems to have been misplaced during her teen years, as is healthy and normal.

Daughter, at 18, is now an adult. And she is facing adult concerns. As a fellow adult that also is her mother I think the most mature thing for me to do is step back from my parenting pulpit and remind her that sometimes all we can do for our fellow man is offer a hug that reminds us that we are - fortunately - not alone facing life's trials and tribulations.

Inside, I am swirling with chaotic protective emotions that are screaming to protect her. Demanding me (and my inner annoying maternal perfectionist) to seek out answers that will better my vacant "I don't know what to say" responses from last night. I have to squelch the urge to email or text her father and make demands on him that will fall on dead ears (history is a brilliant teacher).

I was told recently by a wise man with more than four decades of parenting experience that conversations with my young adult child would start to get very interesting.  What I didn't realize when he said that was that the interesting bit was not necessarily just on the surface but would hit me in a place inside that until last night, I didn't know existed.

Me: An Original Nerd/Geek Fashionista

This picture needs no accompanying words with respect to the title of this blog.  But, for posterity, I will accompany it, below the (most awesome pic ever of me) with thoughts and ruminations of the last sixty days of my life.  Yes, it's been awhile.

I was 11 and I wore those shorts out.
I outgrew the tshirt (my dad's old rugby team).

In the past two months I think I've had the opposite of writer's block: Writer's bounty.  I have so many ideas I don't know where to start. It's like a waterfall being forced to trickle into a tiny tube.

And then there is this other major life change I'm facing which is how I came upon this classic picture of me.  I'm clearing out my house.  It's the ocean for me this summer. In writing even that short sentence the thought of fresh sea air makes me salivate (not joking).  I am desperate for it.

So, to recap, briefly, the last two months:

1. I have a curious affliction I'm calling writer's bounty.
2. I had some lovely quality holiday time with daughter and out of town friends.
3. I have been to many Toronto museums (I've discovered the free pass system).
4. I am implementing a weekly internet free day and live life as though it hadn't been invented yet (Tuesdays). 
5. I did my first ever spoken word performance (see here for evidence!).
6. I have enrolled in a course called "Getting Paid in the Knowledge Economy" and am very much looking forward to it.
7. I have been feeding the birds in my front yard feeder regularly. This brings an inner joy that must mean that I'm getting old or wise (or simple?). It brings to mind an expression that a dear friend shared with me over the holidays:  "And this too."  

And, back to the picture.  Even at eleven I preferred comfort.  I remember the softness of that cotton t shirt   And those shorts fit perfectly and at the time I felt were quite fashionable (go ahead, laugh, but unless you were 11 in 1978 then shut up lol).

Default World

I am midway through my drive across Canada (from Vancouver, BC to St. John's, NL). I have taken a day to regroup and write. I have only one week left on the journey and have had no time to write or read.  I have been driving and having power visits and brief social interactions to do with my concurrent LettuceConnect.ca Harvest Trek 2012 venture.

I have been away from home for over two weeks and returning to it last night was strange. It doesn't feel like home now. Daughter is firmly ensconced in university so she is not here. There are no animals to greet me.  My Toronto residence seems to have taken on a temporary quality. And I don't mind. I did enjoy my comfy bed last night and will again tonight before leaving for the east coast of my journey early tomorrow morning.  But beds are quite mobile and after camping in the open for three nights in the Rockies and on the Prairies I am pleased with how easily I coped with a nomadic type of existence, even if it was only for a very short time. Being a nomad suits me and although I'd had inklings of this part of my character before the trip I now see how solidly it is part of me. It has bloomed, as it were.

I find this lack of personal emotional engagement to my return to Toronto quite interesting and might just be the most important take away from my trek across Canada. I have little vested in Toronto anymore since friendships cross many borders nowadays. I own just a tiny bit of property. My return to the city was also met by my respiratory system with a permanently slightly congested nasal system. That is another strongly received signal. Perhaps my already compromised state of health might fare better in a location not covered by a thick layer of car exhaust fumes.

In my journey so far I've also had ample time to contemplate life, the universe, and everything (well beyond the factors of 6 and 7 or 42 for you non-mathematician types). I have also faced the reality that my reality is self made. This may sound like a rather obvious thing to some of you more grown up types but I've known for a long while that I'm emotionally less developed than most of my peers.

I have learned that each and every day gives me the prospect (or blank slate) of shaping my reality and this is really quite an astonishing discovery to me.

I am still getting used to the idea and yet a part of me has reawakened too. This feeling of a blank slate is like the resurgence of a long ago feeling.  A feeling that was sparked by certain teachers, books and my parents when I was a child.  Heroes like Terry Fox running through my hometown in my youth also helped stoke that feeling.  My re-visitation of his memorial on Terry Fox Day solidified the reawakening.

In the copious amounts of tears that I shed while at and after visiting his memorial I was left with the certainty that reality is something each and everyone of us shape.  And I am hopeful that I am ready, willing, and able to rise to the occasion.

I cried with new found admiration for this young man
at his stunning memorial overlooking Lake Superior.
Terry Fox is a perennial hero.

Rainbow Shite

I felt the urge to sing and dance my way through the streets yesterday.  It was the first time in my memory that I have not had to go to school (as student or teacher) or be home for someone that was in school.

At 45 years of age, this was a long overdue thing. So I pranced around Vancouver's Chinatown for the afternoon. 

One stark reminder of reality was when I followed the signs for the public washrooms.  This led me straight up East Hastings. I put away my fancy smartphone in an instinctual move to preserve personal belongings.  East Hastings in broad daylight is just a tad unsettling, to put it mildly.

Living in Toronto and knowing most of the downtown core I really can't think of an equivalent area.  The desperation and pain of the people hanging about in rundown hotel doorways and in the alleyways literally seared my soul. I could almost feel torture oozing out of their empty and junked up eyes.  Eyes that were also sizing up my oh so obvious tourist get up (not to mention having clean clothes and a full set of well maintained teeth).  I slid my phone unobtrusively into my cargo pants and picked up my pace.

As I walked I wondered what kind of a joke the Vancouver City Tourist Office (or whatever it's called) was playing.  I thought of a series of webcams stationed along the route to capture the puzzled, then horrified, and then terrified faces of innocent tourists following these prominent signs out of Chinatown.  Innocent tourists just hoping to relieve themselves in a city sanctioned loo.  And a crowd of staffers laughing all day long at this private network of webcams.

The public bathrooms were below a Community Centre.  The entrances to both the men's and women's facilities were crowded with junkies and alkies.  There was a security guard prominently posted outside the Centre and he silently pointed to this sea of jonesing humanity when I enquired about the public washrooms.  I blanched at the thought of being jumped in the underground bathroom or on the way through the dozens of bodies to the top of the staircase down entrance.

All of a sudden I didn't need to go to the washroom so badly anymore.

I crossed the road and from the edges of Chinatown stood and stared back at the community centre and the throngs of people in various states of withdrawal and desperation.

I had gone from feeling like I was on the top of the world to being shaken to my core and powerless in the face of the bleakness of humanity.  I recognized that there is nothing that I can personally offer these people yet every cell in my body screamed that these people need help. 
Vanxouver's dark side (seen constantly in the downtown core) seems to be a perverse antitheses to the majestic beauty of the sea and mountains that surround it and the exquisite architecture that houses it's more fortunate residents. It's as if, at the end of the rainbow there is a pot of shite instead of gold.  And just like the saying goes, into each life (or city) some rain must fall.  Some of the more fortunate even get to shit rainbows....which is the feeling I had alongside the dancing in the street feeling after traipsing, accidentally, through Vancouver's lower east side.

PS I can't straighten the pic on the blogger Android app. Ugh.