Too long for a Facebook status update

Today was the last day of classes of my Bachelor's degree. I took so long to get there, and now it's almost over. It's a bittersweet day.
And in my Inbox this morning, from the daily dose of Frederick Buechner I subscribe to, was this gem.

Be Alive

YOU ARE SEEING everything for the last time, and everything you see is gilded with goodbyes. The child's hand like a starfish on the pillow, your hand on the doorknob. Caught between screen and window, a wasp unfolds one wing. With a sick smile, guilt-ridden, the old dachshund lurches off the forbidden couch when you come through the door, his nose dry with sleep, and makes for the pillow by the hot-air register. It is the room where for years Christmases have happened, snow falling so thick by the window that sometimes it has started to snow in the room, brightness falling on tables, books, chairs, the gaudy tree in the corner, a family sitting there snowmen, snowbound, snowblind to the crazy passing of what they think will never pass. And today now everything will pass because it is the last day. For the last time you are seeing this rain fall and in your mind that snow, this child asleep, this cat. For the last time you are hearing this house come alive because you who are part of its life have come alive. All the unkept promises if they are ever to be kept have to be kept today. All the unspoken words if you do not speak them today will never be spoken. The people, the ones you love and the ones who bore you to death, all the life you have in you to live with them, if you do not live it with them today will never be lived. It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again. Be alive if you can all through this day today of your life. What's to be done? What's to be done? Follow your feet. Put on the coffee. Start the orange juice, the bacon, the toast. Then go wake up your children and your wife. Think about the work of your hands, the book that of all conceivable things you have chosen to add to the world's pain. Live in the needs of the day. -Originally published in The Alphabet of Grace

So that was lovely

I keep thinking I'm going to blog stuff and then I don't, but then this thing happened and it was too long for a Facebook post …

A tiny bit of backstory, since I haven't blogged since sometime in the spring …

It's been pretty stressful here in our house, what with an incredibly busy semester for me coupled with Brad suddenly becoming unemployed and plunging into a deep depression two days before the semester started, added to the fact that there's been quite a lot of mental illness flare up on my part.  (One day this semester I realized that instead of using knitting to ground myself, I was stabbing the ball of yarn over and over again with the knitting needles …in class.)

Thursday I hit meltdown.  I spent a lot of the day ugly-crying and by evening had worked myself into the worst asthma attack I've had in a very long time.  Because my asthma symptoms are atypical, presenting with pain between the shoulder blades, if I can't get it under control with inhalers, I have to go to the ER to make sure I'm not having a heart attack, as pain between the shoulder blades is a common symptom of heart attack in women.

So that's the backstory to this lovely story, which is indeed lovely.  I went in and over the several hours that I was there, they ruled out heart attack and blood clot and chest infection but were not pleased with the fact that my blood pressure was rising and did not seem to be lowering at all.  At some point, several hours into the process, I realized that Brad was actually allowed to be hanging out in the back with me, so I went and fetched him from the waiting room and we held hands for at least an hour and when they came to take to my blood pressure again -  seriously. this is so lovely -

It was close to normal.

Globalization for the Woefully Uninformed

Okay not globalization.  The IMF, actually.  This is part of a project for a university course on globalization, which is a word that meant nothing to me six weeks ago except "the name of that course I still have to force myself to take".  Part of the project is a "creative element that is action-oriented" and I have spent the last six weeks either racking or wracking my brains (depending on how that is meant to be spelled) trying to figure out what sort of call to action was going to result from my research into the IMF.

And then I remembered that information is power, and even though my approach to politics and global concerns is still to suddenly have to be in the other room when they come up, maybe there's someone who will read this and find it mildly interesting and go look up stuff about the IMF's involvement in low or middle income countries and find themselves outraged and holding a sign outside a politician's office.  And more power to you.

For the uninitiated - here's what I know that I didn't know six weeks ago.  Do with it what you will.  (Let me first say that every article I read talked about the empirical nature of the data they were about to present, and let me also say that every single person I have ever met has their own interpretative opinion of just about any piece of empirical data.)

1.  What is the IMF?  

     I think I'd likely heard of the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and heard the words and thought "oh nice, some kind of something in place to give financial aid to poor countries. What a nice idea."

So that's not really what the IMF is.  The IMF's mandate is to provide short-term relief of macroeconomic problems arrived at by poor countries borrowing money from rich countries and then finding themselves unable to make a payment.  (Kind of like Lower Slobovia can't make its car payment in June, so it borrows money from Transylvania.  Only then it still can't make its car payment *and* pay Transylvania back, so it goes and asks the IMF to loan it money so it can make all its payments).

2.  Isn't that a good thing?

     Sure.  Maybe.  Or not.  The IMF doesn't just say "sure, here's the money, pay me back when you can."  The IMF says "well, LS, you got yourself into this position by spending too much money on movies and popcorn, so unless you put some kind of governable process in place that limits your movie and popcorn money, we're not lending you this money."  Only when it's real countries involved, the controls are somewhat more over-arching.

3.  OKAY but fiscal responsibility is STILL a good thing, isn't it?

    Sure.  Maybe.  Or not.  The IMF isn't really accountable to anyone, and there's this really fine line between economics and politics (yes, I used that word, on this blog.  It may never happen again.) so really, the IMF is saying "well I will tell you how to run your country and nobody is going to make me accountable if that all goes wrong."  ( Kind of like if you are somehow addicted to popcorn and the IMF makes you quit cold turkey and your quality of life takes a sudden serious nosedive but they don't pick up the phone to talk you through it).

And here's where it gets tricky.  We're all secretly convinced we've got the right answer, on a personal level, on a community level, on a political level.  And right now, there's this massive neo-liberal agenda that is being promoted on a global level.  (Neoliberal in this context is characterized by the extreme devaluation of labour, supply-side economics, and privatization of just about everything.)

And many of the conditions attendant upon borrowing from the IMF are conditions that equate to little more than the imposition of neoliberal values on countries where they may or may not work.  If you've read this far, and you actually find this interesting, check out this article:

Re-evaluating IMF Involvement in Low-Income Countries: The Case Of Haiti

And if you're really interested, just type "IMF good or bad" into your search engine and read to your heart's content.  (And if you become an activist for IMF reform, could you just send me a quick note so I can let my professor know?)

Watch this space

Just in case there's someone out there I've never met who wants to know what the poetry that is being let loose on the world these past few months is all about - I plan to tell a bit of the story here, over the next few days and weeks.

Mother's Day

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say Mother's Day has been a problematic day for me.  Likely when I was younger and mostly did As Expected (beyond one cranky day in grade five where I got tired of always being called a brain and the teacher said "remember to pay attention to the ..(I forget what letter).." before she gave us a spelling test, and so I deliberately spelled them all wrong ...) I bought the requisite gifts and cards and there may even have been breakfasts served in bed.

And then I got older and moved away and got married and started to realize that all those complicated conflicting feelings I had about my mother were actually justified and also not my fault, and I went through the motions without actually meaning much of it.

And then we started trying to conceive, and there were at least a dozen years where being in church on Mother's Day was pure torture.  And then the children came along and for a few years, when they were tiny and compliant, Mother's Day was deeply satisfying.  And then they got older and I wasn't being the magical sort of infinitely patient mother I had fully planned to be and things weren't looking a lot like the imagined life I had planned and then more things and other things and about five years ago, as I was feeling slighted on Mother's Day, I realized I didn't ever want another day like that.  And I changed my perspective, and I remembered all those years I'd cried in church on Mother's Day because I wanted a CHILD, ANY CHILD.  I also remembered how far short of my personal goals my own performance as a mother had turned out to be, and I cut my mother some slack. (It helps that my mother, who used to lose her temper on an hourly basis, somehow (God) became a woman who has almost completely lost her ability to lose her temper.)

I decided that Mother's Day was going to be my own personal thanksgiving day - Thank you God for these amazing kids.  Thank you God that despite all kinds of trauma, (mine, hers, known, unknown), my mother and I have a relationship that is even often satisfying to both of us.

This year I've added a realization.  My mother was in the hospital, and she was very very ill and the doctor was of the experienced opinion that she would die, and then she started to get better.  And as she got better but still not that great, she got petulant and mouthy and I was the brunt of most of it.  And when I say most of it, it was only three incidences in eight days, but it wounded me deeply and it took me a week of doing nothing but knitting and Netflix to get over the emotional shell shock.

But I realized that I still love her.  I grew up terrified of her and I still love her.  She is so much more at peace than she ever was when I was growing up, and things are SO different now that loving her is a lot easier - she's kind of sassy and funny and I don't have to tiptoe, much, but that's actually beside the point.

The point is I love her because she raised me.  There's a lot of us out there with similar upbringings, and some of us have relationshoips with our mothers and some of us don't, but I want to say this, to MOTHERS -

This is a relationship where we need to be intentional, because we occupy the spot labelled "mother" in someone else's life.  What fills that spot is something your child will carry with them their entire lives, and it will forever inform who they are.

Can we please be careful with our babies, our toddlers, our teens, our adult kids?  Can we make what occupies that spot fragrant and not frustrating?  (As our children age, I think we need to be intentional about listening more than we talk but that's likely another whole blog post.)

I want there to be a better summing-up sentence than this but it's all I have.

April is Poetry Month

(I want to say this, right up front.  If you are someone who knew my family, knew my father, knew me, all those years ago, and this post brings up questions or responses or reactions that you want or need me to hear - I am open to discussion.  Always.  Message me on Facebook, email me at brekke2004  (@gmail.com) ...the time for silence, for silencing, is long past.)


Poetry speaks straight into who I am, at the core of me, in the ways that nothing else does. As I sit here trying to frame this blog post, imagine lines of poetry floating in the air, crowding my office space.  There is birdsong out the open window, I've had coffee, all four of us are under the same roof for the first time in such a long time it pleases me to a degree that is almost painful.

This blog post has a reason, though, a purpose beyond "let's talk about poetry, let's give a nod to the late-arriving spring".  Here are some of lines that fill this room, this morning.

"...Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it."  Sharon Olds 

"...I sit beside an old man
who cannot hurt me

forgiveness is -

what?

a deer no one
has ever tracked..."

From Come Cold River, Karen Connolly

"...I can tell he needs this but I am not stupid
I leave and watch what remains from the safety
of the meticulous
pressed tin ceiling" 

From The Truth Of Houses,  Ann Scowcroft


None of these people wrote this poetry with me in mind, and yet it has fed me, and held me up, and helped me think through first if, and then how and when, I will tell my own story.  The poetry itself had work to do in the world, and these poems could work in me because they were out in the world.

I have poetry that, while well-written, deals with some disturbing topics.  This year I learned that the word "ambivalent" doesn't mean "I don't know what I think", it means "I have opposing strongly held opinions about this".  Therefore, I can clearly state that I have ambivalent feelings about the poetry that was most recently published in ELQ, and the poetry that is coming out in May of this year.  (No link because I can't find one, but the poems are in an anthology entitled drifting like a metaphor, and there will be a launch at the Memorial Park Library at 7 pm on May 16, and several of the poets who have work in the book will be reading.  I will be one of the readers.)  My opposing strongly held feelings are:

1. Yikes.  Am I sure I should be that stark, that honest, that disturbing?  And also, to be honest, the insiders (see earlier post, somewhere, about DID ...) are terrified of "telling".

2.  Sharon Olds. Karen Connolly.  Ann Scowcroft.  I write what shows up - I don't have any choice.  When I try to force that choice, then I'm brought back to another poem, this one by Leona Gom, published in this collection:

These Poems

These poems are homesick.
They keep crawling out
        from under my pen
and running back to the north.
They will not be domesticated.
They will not be toilet-trained.
They mess all over the page
with their persistent images ...

(...)

...And when there is no way out
they curl up spitefully
       underneath their titles
and starve themselves
      to death.


And there it is again, the feeling of being recognized, validated, seen, not-alone.

I write what shows up, and when I try to force it, I can't write.  If this is what is showing up, then maybe, just maybe, there's work this work is meant to do in the world, and why would I refuse to let that happen?

***

So.  Here's one of the poems that came out last summer in ELQ.  You can see the painting it was written in response to here.


On Viewing Rosetti's Annunciation

I'm pretty sure Rosetti got it wrong -
the terrified girl, shrinking
against the back wall
of her suddenly too-small room

I know this room, what happens next.
     What happens next is
     not necessarily violent -
     sometimes there was great tenderness, even
     weeping, often a twisted, misplaced gratitude -

no - not only violence,
although it must be said
     there was also anger
     urgency, roughness
     in my own too-small bedroom

not always violent
always violation

and this is where Rosetti gets it wrong
his angel extends not invitation, but imperative
the stern face allows one outcome only

I want to slip into the frame
wrap warmth around her shaking shoulders
promise:

This is a Father you can refuse


***

And I have now used up my courage for this day.

How Not To Hate Your New Phone

Sometimes you have to get a phone with a different OS from the one you have known and loved for years, especially if your Windows phone has worn out and your provider  no longer carries Windows phones and you are of the opinion that you refuse to pay money for a phone if you are eligible for a "free" upgrade.  However, changing from a phone you know to a phone you don't may include whining, of varying intensities and frequencies, as you get to know your new OS.  Here are some steps I took to ensure I had a new non-Windows phone that I loved.

1.  Walk into the cell phone store and announce you need a new phone, but you want to see only their "zero dollar" phones.

2.  Look at the two identical-looking phones they show you and ask what the difference is, after you read the boxes and see nothing glaringly different.

3.  Take the one the person behind the counter tells you has a bigger screen.

4. Get home with your Android phone and start joyfully loading all the apps that you couldn't use with a Windows phone.

5.  Do this for ten minutes before your phone tells you you have no space, because you have gotten an EIGHT GIG phone for your zero dollars.

6.  Ignore your friend and your husband when they tell you to take the phone back right this minute while you still can.

7. Negotiate all the many learning curves, like getting your calendar to show up, and your contacts, and all the other things you cannot live without, complaining bitterly that all you had to do to accomplish this with a Windows phone was TURN IT ON and ENTER YOUR ACCOUNT number.

8. Use the phone for six months. Mutter at it on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

9.  The 197th time you have to move an app BACK to the SD card after the Android phone helpfully moved it back to the largely full internal storage in order to update it, announce you have Had Enough.

10.  Go back to the cell phone store and after a few weeks of talking (it may have only been an hour), choose a phone that lets you make no changes to your smoking good deal legacy plan if you pay $$$ for a stronger better faster phone.

It took me about an hour to set up, because all I had to do was go look at my old new phone and copy stuff.  And it is so fast.  So very fast.  It is likely much slower than yours, because it's still only 32 GB with 3 GB of RAM but it is so much faster than the phone I clung to on the moral high ground.