Via social encounters, random coworker questions, discovered acquaintances and Interactive Internet Music Videos:

Dear Megan,

No one gets to escape their past.

Love,
The Universe

We went back to work on Monday, when our holidays ran out though the renos had not. Monday and Tuesday night we came home, had a quick, simple supper and went straight to work.

We were up until 2am Tuesday morning, getting everything together before Ethan and Rachel came home Wednesday. That evening, we finished assembling their beds, installed Rachel’s light fixture, and sewed curtains for around Ethan’s bed.

There is so much more we want to do: add moldings to the beds’ side-rails, paint or stain the beds, finish the trim around the windows and doors, finish Rachel’s ceiling paneling and put trim around all the ceiling corners, baseboard, sew and hang their window curtains. It never ends.

That night I gouged my finger on something as we hoisted Ethan’s mattress onto his bed. Later, as I held a board on Rachel’s bed for Ian to screw into place, the cordless drill slipped and flew into my finger. It didn’t do any major damage, just drilled off the top layer of skin and bruised me, but it sure hurt at the time. Later I barked my shin hard on something as I lifted it and tried to walk with it. Naturally, I thought, I will take more injuries in one hour at 2am than in the rest of the week and a half on this.

I was exhausted all Wednesday. Around suppertime, I texted Ethan and Rachel’s dad, but they were still a couple hours out of the city. My aunt had arrived in town for my mother’s wedding weekend, so we had a family supper that evening. We cut out early because Ian had yet to cut down their doors to accommodate the new floor-height and then rehang them so the kids could have bedroom doors again.

I was outside in the back yard with Hannah while Ian was upstairs hanging doors when I heard them come in. I’d told Ian to not let them go into their rooms until I was there, so I was trying to coax Hannah inside to go see and greet them and I heard Ian say to Ethan, “So? How was your week?” And Ethan replied, “it was the worst week and a half of my life. I was fighting with my dad the whole time and there’s something I’ve been wanting to do all week.” And he went running upstairs. Ian went running after him going, “wait, wait don’t go in your room.” And I grabbed Hannah and went inside.

Ethan was still on the landing when I got there, “Well I guess I can’t go in cuz I can’t open my door,” he said. I turned the knob, and it caught a little, but opened. Ethan pushed past me and threw himself dramatically on the bed. The bed that hadn’t been there before (just a mattress on the floor). Then I watched him pull his face out of his pillow and turn it around to survey the room. “Well I like that chandelier,” he said finally as I sat on the bed with him.

Rachel had some kind of wordless happy-face paroxysm on opening her bedroom door. So although she didn’t say specifically, I think she liked it.

That night, of course, the kids wouldn’t settle at bedtime and were getting up for snacks, water, conversation, complaints, books, etc, etc, until nearly 10. I had entertained wishful thoughts of being in bed by 9, but also, Ian and I had promised each other to look carefully at our budget and make decisions about daycare for the next year. So we were up after ten while I looked through our online bank statements to find pertinent budgeting numbers. After that, then we remembered that we had to deal with taking Ethan and Rachel to a daycamp that they’d missed the first three days of and that we weren’t remotely prepared for. So we had to dig out registration information, sign release forms and medical information forms and scope whether we had any lunch fixings. It was nearly eleven when I went to say something about being tired and the words wouldn’t come out because I kept slurring and jumbling them. Then I started crying. Then stopped crying. Finally got to go to bed, where I didn’t sleep right away because I was so miserable I had to cry some more.

Why am I telling you this? I don’t know, I’m just really trying to assess lifestyle and priorities right now. We’ve been going to hard, changing so much and taking on so much for so long now. In the last year alone we bought a new house, I worked on a ridiculous redesign project that required insane overtime from last November to February, we got married and we did this renovation project. Those were all exhausting and draining and “as soon as we get through this” kind of times. And the only one of those that didn’t cost ridiculous money was the overtime. And that one was the hardest to take psychologically.

I had a line on daycare for Ethan and Rachel that day and I tried really hard to talk both Ian and myself into taking it. I thought longingly back on our lives pre-Hannah, when we had this little routine of getting up at the same time in the morning, carpooling to daycare, doing our various days, carpooling home. We had routines and we had our holiday care all sewn up and didn’t have to be strategizing and worrying all the time. We didn’t have to give up all our own holidays to childcare for school holidays. We had our monthly budgets and nothing really changed month to month.

But we looked at our budget, looked at the debts we want to pay off as soon as possible and decided to just do a couple of hours of after-school care, so that I could at least work normal hours (instead of 7am-3pm)

Later, talking about it with Ian, I said, “I just felt so much more stable a couple of years ago and I want that back. I don’t know what’s different, daycare or what, but I was even more stable back when-” I had been about to say, “back when I was a single parent” but I had that epiphany moment right in the middle. “Oh! I know what’s wrong with me,” I said. And then, “I’m not spending enough (or any) time alone.” And as soon as I said it, I had that lump in my throat that happens when you inadvertently say something that’s too true for comfort.

So yeah, that was right before this wedding weekend full of family and suppers, brunches, ceremonies, 200 ppl receptions, lunches, cheesecake and gift openings. And there’s more busyness to come. But, overall, just having had that realization, I’m feeling more hopeful. I’m feeling like, “yes, finally this all makes sense.”

And as soon as I can give some time to myself, I really think it will get better.

The walls are painted. The ceiling paneling is installed and painted. The floor planks are installed, treated and sealed. We have yet to replace any trim - no window trim, no door trim, no baseboards, no trim around the paneling, no threshold pieces.

Ethan’s light fixture is installed, Rachel’s is not yet.

Headboards for both beds are together.

Tomorrow: assemble beds, install Rachel’s light fixture. Kids home Wednesday.

There are rainbows on my 11 year old son’s wall from his gaudy, sparkly Canadian Tire chandelier. He is going to love it and I am slightly jealous.

You have a lot of time to think while washing walls and applying coats of paint.

Washing Ethan’s walls I think about Where the Wild Things Are. Each time I come to a new hole in the wall, I see scenes in the movie of Max’s destructive streak. Ethan’s rage, like Max’s rage, makes him destroy even things that are important to him.

I think about the book, and how deeply the story has been embedded in Ethan’s childhood.

I probably read that book to Ethan every single day for eighteen months straight. There is a certain way that I have to read it - the right cadence, the right emphasis that I have taken from a daycare worker of my childhood. How many times could she have read us that book? I only went to that daycare for a couple of months, but she read it with such certainty and drama, and she was one of my favourites, so I paid attention.

We watched the movie only recently. My cousin had written months ago, “Hey Megan, I saw Wild Things today. It made me think of Ethan. Not in a helpful way or anything, it just did.”

That may be why I avoided watching it for so long, even though I had purchased it. Finally, after months of having it sit around the house, we found an evening to watch it. And I kept leaking tears all the way through. “They forgot the scenes where this fantasy world gives him the lessons he needs in order to understand and work with his anger and then he goes back to the real world ready to deal with things and grows up to be happy and successful,” I said tearfully to Ian when it was over. I obviously took it too personally.

Later, Ian said, “there was such a fuss about that movie when it was coming out, and then the fuss just seemed to fizzle. It never got mentioned or took off like it should have.”

“Probably,” I said, “the people who understand the dynamics were a little uncomfortable with the movie’s refusal to be easy. And the people who don’t understand were all, ‘why won’t somebody just give that kid boundaries?’”

Sometimes as we work, we puzzle over the little things we unearth and wonder about the last people who worked on the room.

There were little pieces of newspaper behind the baseboard. Nothing exciting in the newspaper - just a piece of the business section. Bland white businessmen in bland 80s business-suits. The most exciting thing was their mustaches. So many amazing mustaches in business in 89.

We found newspaper when we tore apart some wall in the basement at Robespierre too. Is that a thing? To put a current newspaper into your renos for future homeowners to find?

Painting in Rachel’s closet, I say, “you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still a bit of lathe and plaster in the back of this closet. This wall seems more pitted than drywall typically gets.” And Ian says, “I was wondering that about this wall that goes straight and then makes that pathetically weak angle just as it gets to the door, and whether that was because a new wall got poorly framed so it didn’t quite meet up with an old wall.”

I love old houses.

I picked the color for Rachel’s wall at a local lumber store - so I decided to get the paint mixed there for the sake of shopping locally. Ethan’s was picked from one of the C.I.L. cards at Home Depot, so I just got it mixed up there. So then I made the mistake of treating Rachel’s paint like it was C.I.L. or Behr - when, evidently, it was thin and prone to separating if you let it sit for five minutes. I did not, therefore, adequately shake or stir it before painting with it. So the first coat was really thin, didn’t cover, left drips, and was quite dark. When I went to cut in on the second coat, I noticed that the last wall of the first coat was a great deal lighter than the first wall was. And that my second coat cutting in was lighter than all of them. I surveyed my poor coverage and thought, “even if I stir it religiously to keep it homogenous from here on in, I’ll probably have to do three coats just to even this out.” So I took the paint chip to Home Depot to get them to colour match it in a better quality paint.

Though, not before the paint counter guy treated me like I was just being a crybaby. “Nothing’s going to give you coverage after one coat. Look at this demo here of the paint plus primer - EVEN THAT you can see the old colour if you look up close.” “You know that latex paint takes about twenty four hours to settle.” “You know that any paint is going to settle.”

QUIT DEFENDING THE COMPETITION’S SHODDY PAINT AND JUST MIX ME SOME FUCKING BEHR.

Came home and applied the Behr and I think I’m all done painting walls now. Though, as I was painting the new paint on, I realized that the colour I had chosen was really more blue than I thought. The original pink had been showing through enough to make my blue a lovely lilacy purple. This paint is not supposed to be purple, evidently. So that beautiful purple in this picture? It is now just dark blue. Oh well, I am not painting another coat.

The subfloor is down. The planks are all cut and half nailed down for Ethan’s room. Tomorrow we’ll do the planks for Rachel’s room and then start the ceiling panels.

Then we have to get the ceiling painted, the floor treated and varathaned, the baseboard and trim up, new light fixtures installed, curtain rods hung and the beds and linens finished. Whah.

I mean, we’ll get there.

The older children are in BC with their dad’s side of the family and Ian and I are fixing up their rooms. Hey remember that time when they were in BC for a week and we re-did my bathroom? That was crazier times than this one, fo’ sho’. That was removing three giant plumbed fixtures (the sink and tub of which were cast iron and like a thousand pounds) and then pulling up three layers of floor and pulling down lath and plaster walls and then putting down porcelain tile which turns out to be a bitch to work with. And if the bathroom wasn’t back together by the time the kids were home, the house was unlivable and I was screwed. Dire consequences indeed.

Here’s Ethan’s room. It’s difficult to get a better shot of it because it is ridiculously small. I believe I measured it at 87 square feet (and no closet). Unbelievably, we offered him the largest room in the house and he turned it down, opting for this one. It’s because this little nook just fits a single bed and I told him my idea of hanging curtains across it so the bed would be enclosed. His eyes sparked and he said, “I want it.” So we’re finally going to put curtains up for him this week.

This round of renos is not as crazy as the bathroom renos. As long as we get the flooring down before the kids come back it’s cool. Though I would love to have it together enough for a big reveal. I’m a terrible giver of surprises, but I can’t stop trying with the kids. I ridiculously crave that “eyes lit up” moment. And we’ve kept this pretty low-key, so I think the only thing they’re really expecting is some new flooring. Maybe paint.

Here’s a crappy, nighttime before shot of Rachel’s room. Ian is concerned that she will hate that I’m getting rid of her precious pink & purple in favour of blue. In my defense, it is a very purpley blue. A lovely, flaxy blue.

Okay, whatever. If she hates it, she can paint over it.

So Friday night we handed the kids over to their dad and went straight to emptying their rooms and scraping stucco off the ceilings - getting the stucco off the ceilings wasn’t a mandatory part of the renos, but we do want that stucco gone and it’s such a gross job and we thought that right before pulling out the carpet was the perfect time - because then the carpet acts like a big absorbent drop-cloth.

Saturday and Sunday we had to work around Hannah - someone needed to hang out with her while she was up, and we couldn’t do loud tasks while she napped. Ian’s mother took her Saturday afternoon while we ran to Home Depot and then started to put together their beds and pulled down more stucco. With Ethan’s room good and scraped, and our shoulders begging for mercy, Ian said, “I wonder how much drywall is? We could just drywall over it” And I said, “certainly not cheaper than the tongue-and-groove paneling I want to put on the ceiling. We could just put that over it.” So we bought some tongue-and-groove pine to put on the ceiling. Hello cottage.

Sunday we pulled up the carpet in Rachel’s room and got most of the particle-board sub-floor up, but then we had piles of carpet and subfloor and nowhere to put it. Today we borrowed Firefly’s truck and Ian ran some of our demolition crap to the city dump and then we purchased plywood sub-floor and our pine planks. That was ridiculous because we then spent most of the afternoon just on carrying this stupid amount of lumber up to the second floor and carefully stacking so it could sit for a day or two acclimatizing to the area where it will be installed.

Hey, who needs a hallway, anyway, right?

After returning the truck and getting Hannah from daycare, we managed to finish taking up the carpet and sub-floor in Ethan’s room by taking it in half-hour turns to bend over finding and pulling out nails while the other person rested their sore body watching Hannah.

After putting Hannah to bed, we had been talking about laying some subfloor, but instead we just started to cut in the paint on Rachel’s room and then quit for a beer and early bedtime. Last night Ian was up working on a client site that needed to be done for Monday morning in order for him to have his holidays this week. I stayed up for a while helping with some regular expressions, but then I wienered out and went to bed around midnight. God knows when he got to bed. And then we got up at 7 this morning in order to get Hannah to daycare and get started early.

I figure we have to have the planks down by Wednesday at the latest if we’re to leave ourselves time to get enough coats of varathane on it before the kids are back. Hopefully Wednesday isn’t too late. I remember when we refinished the floor at Robespierre it took daaaaays. But maybe part of the problem was that we were living in a different house and constrained by kids’ schedules so Ian could only get over there to do a coat once a day. Also, that was a LOT of hardwood all at once.

Too bad this is just a bunch of before pictures and doesn’t look like much. It’s coming together beautifully in my mind. Hah.

I’m big into cottage style and vintage shit these days. More so since we moved into this awesome vintage house with its cottage-y sun-room and poplar-shaded backyard.

Webleigh reminds me of my first house, just, all grown up. Double the square footage and with some upgrades in its past. But the cost of a house having a history of upgrades is that this house doesn’t have any original pieces.

I didn’t remotely realize how special my first house was for having original hardwoods, original doors, original baseboards and moldings, original heating grates, original door hardware, original clawfoot tub. But then, it also had its original furnace and original lath and plaster walls. Still, I miss all that character, and we tell ourselves that since we’re committed to this house, it’s worth our time and money to restore its character wherever we can.

Consequently, I have developed a habit of impulsively buying antique heating grates and old doors, for my eventual coup d’réstoration. Last weekend I scored two old doors. Wooh!

My older two are leaving for a holiday with their father and his family this weekend.

I have an idea, I said earlier this summer, since we want to redo the flooring upstairs, we should at least do the kids rooms while they’re gone.

Then, cause I’m silly, this morphed into a desire to really redo the kids’ rooms.  It doesn’t have to be crazy - new paint and flooring will do it, turned into and we could build them bed frames and replace their light fixtures and sew some pillowcases and curtains.

Ahahahaha…yeah. I’m excited.

We’ve had this house for a year as of this weekend too. And this will be our first big project on it.

As much as I already love Webleigh, I think finally getting into a project here will really make it home.

Last weekend I was running out to get lunch before going shopping for this reno-endeavour. I stopped by a store near our house that was having a big sale. There was a beautiful red trenchcoat that I saw and desperately wanted. Over lunch I outlined to Ian its price and how reasonable it was and all the reasons why I actually really need a dressy jacket for fall. But then I went to Fabricland to get fabric for the kids’ rooms where I was hoping that the fabric I’d scoped for Ethan’s room would be on sale. It wasn’t. So I did that mental traderoo logic, “welllll, if I don’t get myself that trench-coat then it’s totally fine to spend this much.”

And after I walked out of the store, then I was all, “Hm. I didn’t actually give up anything there.”  Frugality is hard.

I had run into my mother at Fabricland, so I was giving her a ride home and I spotted some old wood chairs at a yard sale. We stopped and went and looked, found the chairs overpriced, but there was a box of junky old lamp parts out of which I quite liked a solid cast base. There were no prices on the box or the items in the box, but it was pretty junky. The base I liked was part of a jumble of parts and wire, still connected to a cord that ran from the base through a tall metal pipe to the socket, but the pipe was ugly and didn’t fit to either the base or the socket. Whatever, I only wanted the base. So I carried it over to where an older woman and two younger women were sitting on lawn chairs.

“That’s an antique,” the older woman said to me.

“Yeah? What do you want for it?”

“Ten dollars,” she asserted without hesitation. And I couldn’t tell if she was joking. So I stared at her, and finally managed, “really?”

One of her daughters had stood up and was taking the jumble of pieces from me and trying to fit it together. “I think maybe it’s missing pieces,” I said. “Are you into antiques like this?” The other daughter asked me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Recently interested I guess.”

“FINE, $5.” The older woman said.

I gave her a doubtful look. Her daughter gave me a doubtful look. “What do you think?” Her daughter asked me.

Ugh. I had no idea other than that five still seemed ridiculous. “Would you take 4?” I asked. “No,” was her immediate and cantankerous answer.

And again I just stood there with a confused look on my face trying to understand why all the fuss.

“Mom, do you want to sell this or not? If you don’t want to sell it then just take it and put it away,” her daughter said.

It seemed like a reasonable conclusion, so I began to back away.

“Four-fifty,” the woman said petulantly.

That much fuss for fifty cents? “Yeah, okay.” I chuckled, “I guess you drive a hard bargain.”

“NO,” she told me indignantly. “You’re getting a Good Deal. That’s an antique.”

Oh man. Good thing I didn’t tell her I was going to dismantle it and throw away half.

We’re moving Hannah to a new daycare next month. I guess we’ve always had little reservations about the woman running Hannah’s current daycare, but we stayed because the young woman who actually worked with the kids was so great.

The woman running the daycare, we’ll call her Sunny, is one of those thin, blonde, outspoken women with a bizarre worldview.

Her employee, whom we’ll call Duckling, is somewhere in her early twenties. I’d bet that when Hannah started going there, she was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. She was very, very softspoken and unassertive. Sunny told me “you won’t hear much out of her but the kids just love her,” and I thought, “but will they walk all over her?” But they didn’t seem to.

Once Hannah started at the daycare it was Duckling whom we dealt with on a daily basis.

She really was very quiet. Some days trying to make conversation with her was almost painful. But Hannah loved her to extremes and was always happy to be dropped off with her in the morning. She kept track of all the kids’ birthdays and would bake them cupcakes and have little parties for them when their birthdays came up. She was always making crafts with them and took them outside every day and she did plenty of non-birthday baking to give the kids little treats at snack-time, like home-baked cookies.

Sunny ran another daycare in another house, but she wasn’t getting the business she expected, so she decided to consolidate kids in one house and so Duckling and her kids got moved to the other house. Unfortunately, Sunny didn’t tell me this, so I showed up at the first house on Monday morning and Duckling, looking startled, said, “Oh, she’s supposed to go to the other house today.” And then I looked startled and was like, “buh-? Pardon?” And she shrugged helplessly and gave me an address.

I was supposed to be at work in fifteen minutes, so naturally I was irritated not just at having to run Hannah to another house, but at being asked to leave my daughter in a completely foreign environment with no notice.

When Sunny called me that afternoon because Duckling had told her about my showing up at the old house and being irritated, so far from making me feel better, Sunny compounded the issue by saying, “Oh I told her she should have just taken Hannah and we would have driven her over to the new house. I told her moms don’t have time in their mornings to drive around, but she’s just socially retarded, you know. She’s so quiet, I don’t think she has a clue.”

WTF? I repeated that one to Ian and we both were all, omg, who says shit like that?. “Well I think one of them has social issues,” Ian said.

But shortly it was back to us just dealing with Duckling every day. Most of the other families seemed to have part-time working moms who didn’t work Fridays, so occasionally, when it was just a few kids on Fridays or even down to just Hannah, Duckling wouldn’t work a Friday and we’d see Sunny then.

Duckling changed a lot over the course of the last two years. At first, Ian would drop Hannah off and I would pick her up at the end of the day, and we’d compare notes. “She seems so nice, but are you able to make any small talk with her?” “Nope. Sometimes the scared looks and one word replies are so painful that I feel guilty that I even attempted it. Like, maybe it would be nicer of me to just leave her alone.”

Over time she moved into a level confidence and would talk easily with us about Hannah’s day, showing us the crafts or talking about the challenges in Hannah’s temperament. She even got to the point where, one day, when Hannah started to throw a fit about how I wasn’t to put her shoes on and then Ethan and Rachel fell all over themselves to offer her highness some pleasant alternatives, Duckling cocked an eye at me and laughed, “someone gets her own way a lot.”

But then Sunny lost the lease on the house, and while debating where to move everything to, Duckling said, “well, there is this geriatric care program back in my home town that I’d like to go back to school for,” and so Sunny figured she was going to move the daycare into her house and would hire someone new but part-time.

I went into it with an open mind. I mean, Sunny had the good sense to love Duckling. And Duckling was such an abiding girl that I had to think that most of how she worked must have agreed with Sunny’s philosophies because otherwise Sunny would have terrorized it out of her.

Then the Sunday night before the first day at her house, she phoned me at about 8:30 and over the course of a half hour phone conversation poured out her heart, in what seemed to me to be a slightly inebriated manner, about the string of bad luck that had led her to not be ready to start daycaring the next day and could I possibly, possibly keep Hannah home for a week and she felt just awful about it because she knows her other moms have backup but I don’t but if I could make it work then she would be able to tell the other moms she was closed for the week and she could get things together.

I stayed open-minded. Even if she did drunk-dial me, I was certain she would never drink ‘on-duty’ and being unreliable to me is a separate issue from the level of care that she’d give to Hannah or how happy Hannah would be with her. But I did start thinking, “we should check into the waiting lists for other daycares just in case this all falls apart.”

So the first woman she hired, she let go after a day. “Didn’t do nothing but carry her own baby around all day and that doesn’t fly with me.”

The second woman was prefaced with, “I really, really like her. But I gotta warn you, she’s really big.” To which I replied, “uh… does that matter?” And Sunny said, “Oh no-no-no-no. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just worried about the other parents. …And I mean it, you’ll be surprised how big she is.”

Needless to say, she wasn’t really. Not that it did matter.

That woman lasted about two weeks. I don’t recall if there was an explanation for her departure.

The third woman just appeared one day when I came to pick Hannah up. So I introduced myself, but I said to Ian that night, “I don’t even know if I should bother committing her name to memory.”

“Well, maybe we can’t blame Sunny for being a little picky,” Ian said, “Duckling was pretty great. And maybe hiring for a home daycare you find a lot of people who think it’s just going to be ‘being present’ all day and don’t think about taking the initiative to do crafts and activities.”

The third woman lasted longer than the rest. I don’t know how long - four weeks? But then one afternoon I walked in and there was someone new there, and she said, “Oh is this one yours?” And I said, “er, no. I’m Hannah’s mom.”

That night, I happened to go to Facebook as I do about once a month and I saw one of my fellow dancers had posted, “this is some luck. I’ve had three families reserve daycare space for December, make deposits, and then fall through.”

And I said, “do you still have space? I want to talk to you about space for Hannah.” And within half an hour we were on the phone. and I went to her place to check it out and sign stuff that Friday.

I think Ian was a little dubious about the whirlwind nature of the engagement. I outlined to him how confident I am in her character. I pointed out how excited Hannah was about hearing “belly dance music” at her house, and how this woman has a little girl just younger than Hannah and how her older boys go to the same school as Ethan and Rachel - so presumably when Hannah is kindergarten age, so will their daughter be and so when we’re trying to figure out how to get Hannah to school for half days in a couple of years we might be able to come up with something that will work for both families.

Ian pointed out what a good thing we have in Sunny’s general flexibility - mostly that she doesn’t mind taking Ethan and Rachel for a couple weeks in the summer. Which saves us a lot of holidays or the cost of pricey camps.

I agreed, but dismissed the concern with “we’ll figure that out next year,” it’s always hard finding summer care for Ethan and Rachel. Luckily a year passes between each “what are we doing for the summer” crisis and we get a chance to recover and strategize a little for next time. So I went ahead and gave my notice to Sunny.

Ian and I agreed that we would phrase it as, “a friend of the family is able to take Hannah,” and make it about money and convenience and nothing about her. Especially since there wasn’t anything concrete, just a sense of unease and worry about stability.

She took it well.

And then she made things harder by telling me, “I’ve decided to not bother hiring a part-timer. I’m going to sell off my little restaurant and do this full time. I’ve loved having a daycare back in the house. And my husband’s going to cut back his hours and help me out so I’ll have backup. And my [teen] daughters have been helping with the little ones too.” It sounded like stability. And Hannah’s been with this group of kids for two years, so I wondered if I was uprooting her for nothing.

Then last Friday, she called us at 7:00 in the morning and said how her son had been up puking all night and she was just too exhausted to take Hannah. I had to get to work to get a site up for a client to look at, so Ian stayed home and worked from home. “I guess it was easier for her to make that decision because she only has Hannah on Fridays,” Ian said.

“I thought she was going on about how much her daughters and her husband were helping out,” I said.

Yesterday I went to pick Hannah up at the end of the day. “Is Hannah still throwing up?” she asked me. “no. not for a couple weeks now.” “Oh Pip threw up so much on Thursday, din’cha bud,” she said. “And I felt so bad about calling Ian Friday morning, but you know, I was just SO tired. I just wouldn’t have been much use for Hannah, I knew you’d understand.”

I just stared at her.

I kind of hate the whole concept of daycare.

I have still not entirely figured out how to reconcile belly dance with feminism. That is, I love it. And it has certainly helped me to make friends with my body. And it’s wonderful to have an activity in your life where striving for mastery is challenging and fun. And there’s this community of women who, through yearly ordeals of putting together a full stage performance, have become more of a family than anything.

There is that when we talk of the history of the dance, we talk of its being by women, for women. Casual, for the joy of it. We emphasize improvisation, calling it more true to the original spirit of the dance.

But then there is a certain prevalent perception of what belly dance is. And if the whole world thinks it’s a sexy dance and we’re saying, “no, this is art,” is it so much different from calling stripping art? If what you are doing normalizes the perception of women as the sex class, or perpetuates a myth that middle-eastern ladies are sexily-empowered, the label of “Art” won’t do much to check the myths you’re feeding.

And then there is that you would never do a performance without shaving your legs, plucking your brow and wearing full makeup. I’ve tried to envision what feminist-friendly stage performances would look like - but the reality is that under stage lights, giving up makeup gives up visual impact. And this is still a visual performance.

And so I have two selves. The one who doesn’t know how to apply makeup because she’s never bothered to wear it. Who took grunge and anti-fashions as a lifestyle choice back in the 90s and never moved on when it went out of style. And then there is the self who pushes the envelope in clothing and makeup choices. Who experiments with style and colour both in attire and in makeup.

When I am getting ready for a performance I feel like a teenager again. That sense of standing in front of the mirror, stepping into a new sphere of fashion choices and being free to break a few rules in the process of learning what works for you.

Each time I do my makeup for a performance I put more makeup on than the last time. Each time I say to myself, “Well now you’ve fucked it up. This is the time you’ve gone too far and you’re going to look like a twelve-year-old who was trapped in an unfortunate explosion with her mother’s makeup kit.” But then I put on mascara and look again and think, “yep. That’ll do.”

So I have a story that I think is sweet, but that will probably just not make any sense to people outside of my family. I hope my aunt doesn’t mind my telling it.

My aunt Apple was over on Monday as I was getting ready for a performance. She was at the computer, moving photos off my camera, and I said, “I just have to run upstairs and put on my makeup for tonight.” Still facing quite forward, but with her attention obviously not on the computer, she said, “well- and I’ve been feeling so guilty for calling you a slut on your special day.”

Most amazing apology ever. Especially given that she really didn’t call me a slut, and isn’t remotely the kind of person who ever would do so in sincerity. I learned a tonne of my feminism from her. I’m still learning.

What happened was that on my wedding day, she walked into the house after I’d done my makeup (for the Canada Day performance) and quipped, “Oh you look like a slut,” with all humour and no rancor. And then I said something pissy but still jocular (like our family does) about how I try not to get into slut-shaming around my daughters cuz, y’know, we can all be as slutty as we like, right?

I hadn’t given it any further thought, so her admission of guilt gave me pause. And I said, “Oh man, I’m sorry I was pissy about it. I really didn’t mean it.”

And then she said, “well the funny thing is that I meant it as a compliment. Like, ‘Gee you look nice…’”

“All tarted up?”

“… all tarted up, yes.”

This would seem to be a story about makeup and feminism, but really it’s a story about how confrontation can be funny and sweet. Even down to the tongue-in-cheek phrase “your special day”. Amazing.

He: “I still prefer you without makeup.”

Me: “Still?”

He: “What does that mean?”

Me: “Well I thought you’d get used to seeing me in makeup and be like, ‘yeah, this is better.’”

He: “Nope.”

Me: “But these are the trappings of sex-class submission to a patriarchal culture that benefits you. You don’t find that hot?”

He: “And here I prefer a ponytail and a robot t-shirt. I guess I’m not a man.”

I wore my glow-in-the-dark robot t-shirt to work today. I was totally excited to wear it to work, thinking I had a number of coworkers who would appreciate it. But it turns out it’s not appropriate to invite your coworkers to join you in a dark closet to “see my robot light up”.

Live and learn.

* * *

My director and I were discussing getting feedback from people and how everyone can hate-hate-hate a project, but when it comes time to review it afterward, they only say nice things.

So I told him this story:

When I was working at Oz as a software trainer, management didn’t particularly care about the science of delivering good training or whether the trainees were satisfied so long as their management that paid for the training was not unsatisfied. So the only feedback they solicited was a lackluster followup email that was really a thinly veiled solicitation for testimonials.

I kinda did care about the training, though. And also cared about giving trainees at least the illusion that their opinions mattered. So I developed feedback forms and brought them along with a big envelope and would finish up training by handing them around and asking participants to fill them out. I implied that I would bring the feedback forms back to the office for my supervisors to peruse, generally by leaving the room and asking them to seal the envelope when they were done.

In reality, I would take them straight back to my hotel room and read them since my supervisors didn’t know to expect them and I was the only one who cared about them.

I have sometimes (even today) felt, on sharing this anecdote, that this confession slightly shocks people. Which I find funny - because even now, I don’t see the issue. Maybe it’s shocking because I don’t seem that conniving? Except that I don’t see it remotely as a conniving act. I see it as a dishonest, but compassionate act. Like when you help a child write a letter to Santa Claus so that you can learn their wishes.

I think it was helpful. It helped me refine what I focused on in training, it gave me the confidence to push participants to share their training needs early in the training instead of at the end and it led me to develop training manuals that I could customize for each client’s needs before training (and which, incidentally, I bound using report covers that I purchased because my office manager could never be convinced that providing documentation for training was beneficial).

And it was helpful for the trainees too. It allowed them a venue to express their opinions and took those opinions to the person within the organization who was most likely to act on them. And it was helpful for my company because it perpetuated to our clients the illusion that we were professional enough to invest effort in the quality of their training.

Anyhow, none of that story was particularly helpful in our exploration of getting people to be more honest in assessing projects and teamwork. At the end of my story, my director said, “and? Did anyone ever say anything particularly honest?” And I had to admit, “no. Even thinking I would never see it, they were always overly nice.”

There are worse problems to have.