The Village

It takes a village to raise a child, the old proverb goes. Our baby isn’t even here yet, but already they have their proverbial village. 

“ I think the Ukrainians are more excited about our baby than [the Mennonites.]“ my husband has said to me more than once. He should know. His friends and customers, many of them grandparents by now, have faithfully asked about his pregnant wife and unborn baby in the last few months and love to share their own experiences with being parents.  Lately some of them have been messaging and calling ostensibly for legitimate reasons, but mostly to ask, “You daddy yet?” 

The people who own and run local establishments and know us by sight or possibly reputation, are full of questions about due dates and health and are effusive in their well wishes. Random strangers in stores and restaurants hug me and congratulate me. Most of them don’t do the hugging part. One adorable old woman in Superstore told me, “you are carrying a precious baby boy.” We’re impatient to find out if she’s right or wrong about that. 

The ladiesatchurch are very good at asking, “how many more weeks?” and “are you all ready?” Some of them have bits of advice for me. Buy gripe water before baby is born. Make sure you have enough blankets; it’s summer and they’ll get dirty quickly if you spend time outside. You need a thermometer for those middle of the night tiny baby fevers that can cause so much worry ! they say. 

There are different women from the community who call me regularly to see if I’m okay and ask how big my bump is. “You will be a good mom,” they tell me. One raised 8 children and the other has been a mom to many more than that. They have the mothering wisdom of years and their concern for me comforts and encourages me. 

All of these people are beyond our immediate circle of family and friends. In this group we have mothers (and fathers) who give us things for Hermit (including advice) and tell us things we need to know and share stories about when we were born. We have excited siblings including the little boy who is actually a teenagers and often asks, “is Hermit here yet?” and the sisters who listen to me talk about being pregnant like it’s the only possible conversation topic and the brothers who give my husband joking advice about being a dad. We have friends from nearby and far away who put on the most delicious baby shower and/or give us lovely gifts and/or share things they’ve learned about having a baby and being new parents in the 2020s. 

You are part of our village, cliche as this sounds. I am awed and blessed by the sheer amount of people who care about us and our child. Many women do not have supports of any kind around them through pregnancy, birth and parenting, but I am surrounded by love and support. I realize how blessed I am. 

La Vie

The dog sleeps soundly on the floor beside me.

The husband rushes off to help someone, and then someone else, and then someone else.

The bébé and I have conversations about when he’s going to come meet us. He says 4 more weeks if we’re lucky; I try to persuade him that anytime now is good.

The snow silently melts a little more, while The mud becomes muddier

The boy calls once, twice, sometimes 3 times to say hello, to vent, to beg to come over, to talk to the dog.

The sky lights up with auroras, and, tho I see it for a minute and marvel and make my husband come admire, mostly I just asleep under the spell of their majesty.

The husky and I see animal tracks wherever we walk. The fields are full of them, the hedgerows even more. One set of tracks could really only be from a bear (I know, Because of Google.) I now believe the brothers in law who say they’ve seen bears nearby.

The dirt in my green house shoots joyful tiny seedlings up toward the light. 

The tow trucks run a little less often than they used to, but still very often. People still hit bison, jump snow banks and roll vehicles. Someone’s neighbor children lock the keys in their vehicle and run away yelling “April Fools.” Someone’s car dies necessitating an evening haul to Yorkton. Someone gets fed up with their family using their broken down vehicle as a garbage receptacle necessary another evening haul to Yorkton. 

The weekend approaches, is here. Sour dough buns rise on the counter. Saturday dawns quiet (no work calls yet !) I think about working on whittling down my todo list. My husband actually does work on his. La vie continues. 

Who Lives Here ?

Who Lives Here: a few of the towns / areas I’ve been so far this year identified by descriptions of the people who live in them. 

Who lives here ? The people who like perfect streets and tidy ugly appartement complexes. The ones who thrive with a little bit of everything handy in an orderly fashion. Traditionalists who are learning to push boundaries, who believe that anything can be accomplished if you work hard enough. The ones who like a nice paved parking lot to set their eclectic second hand stores on, especially if it’s near a Tim Hortons. The ones who use their land to their advantage, to build bigger things with more  cement, to buy and sell on a whim, to make themselves better people. 

Who lives here ? The ones who want adventure, and novelty and beauty. They’re the ones who seek prestige and then self medicate with cocktails of mind altering drugs when they don’t find it. The ones who live their lives among a grandeur that sparks leaps of imagination. The ones who are willing to contend with weird weather patterns to live in the country of their dreams. The ones who identify with the land surrounding them, who delight in being swallowed by its hugeness and are slaves to its drama. 

And how about here -who lives here ? The hard working ones, who aren’t afraid of dust and dirt and long long days. The ones who crave aloneness and space. The ones who appreciate a ubiquitous form of beauty broken by the most spectacular skies. The peoples who would die of hunger without their daily dose of small town gossip. The only ones who are strong enough to deal with the wiles of the most drastic weather patterns -hails, droughts, winds, blizzards and, in between these all, one or two scorching weeks of summer. The people who identify with the land they live on, who live from it and grow from it and are at its fickle mercy. 

Willfully Ignorant

A few years ago when the ladies in my Sunday school class were competing to see who read the news the least I thought they were a bit crazy. I believed, and still do, in being informed about what’s going on in the world, not only locally, not focusing on a single situation, but provincially, nationally, and world wide. I felt that their choosing not to know, meant that they missed a huge opportunity to broaden their horizons and expand their world view and understanding of other people.

I know for a fact that some of the loudest proponents for staying off the internet for the sake of one’s peace of mind no longer hold so tightly to that belief. Some of these same women have also been the loudest proponents of pandemic born conspiracies they read on the internet. They’re not the only ones I have changed my viewpoint as well, only in the opposite direction. It’s strange how time and pandemics do that. 

It’s something I’ve only noticed in myself recently; it hasn’t been a fully conscious change. Maybe it’s been a subconscious way of indulging the avoidance part of my personality and protecting myself and this bébé inside me from extra anxiety and worry. Do you know what [insert name of prominent revolutionary] did today ? Have you heard latest on [insert pandemic drama / political movement]? Do you know about [current war] ? Don’t you read [insert blog name here] ? That’s a no to all of the above.  I have and still do love a good political discussion / debate.  I’m mostly uneducated but no less opinionated. I’ve also turned into a second hand information kind of girl whose vocabulary includes a lot of phrases like My husband says and My brother told me and I heard my mil say. 

I’m here for not knowing everything. It’s okay to not know all the details of every European war. Not because we don’t sympathize or care, but because there are a lot of other problems in this world that we care about, too.

For me, I want to know about every situation. The details I need to know are the less reported, less political humanitarian sides of the unrest and natural disasters dominating the news cycles, or, more often, not dominating the news cycles. Thousands of refugees, almost half of them children and a high number of girls and women, have been displaced from their homes as violence, volcanos and climate change continue to surge  across huge swaths of Africa including Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Nigeria, and Sudan. All this has been going down while I obliviously scroll through recipes trying to get cooking inspiration and debate different baby paraphernalia on Amazon. The global pandemic has impacted the world in more ways than I realized: it’s caused a dramatic spike in poverty and starvation worldwide, reversing the consistent downward trend of poverty in the past two decades. In South America, on top of an extraordinarily high rate of virus deaths, hunger rates have risen unequivocally in  in the last 2 years. And right here, pandemic related drama has strained the family relationships and emotional and mental health of a friend sitting beside me in church.

So I’m willfully ignorant in ways I choose to be, such as what our prime minister said yesterday or the status of one specific war no one can stop talking about. Do politics actually matter in comparison to the Human side of things?  Instead, I’m trying to use my heart rather than my brain when it comes to life and human suffering. I’m letting my heart break for hungry toddlers in refugee camps all over Northern Africa as I sit with a guiltily full stomach and listen to my congregation sing “I am sending you to the war torn lands…where the people cry as the sun goes down for the want of a piece of bread…” I’m going to go visit my ancient neighbour who has had a very depressing and difficult winter for real instead of just thinking about it. I’ll intentionally  keep my heart open to the words and feelings of the women surrounding me in the church benches after Bible Study tonight instead of focusing on myself. 

Multiplying Decimals and Other Things I’m Bad At

Multiplying decimals is harder for me than for 11 today. I end up with the correct number, but keep inserting the decimal point at the wrong spot. How ? I do know this stuff, in fact I just finished explaining it to 11 a couple minutes ago, like I did to many other 11s in a few years of teaching grade 5. While I mindlessly make mistakes, 11 gets the dot in the correct spot. He may have multiplied 9x7 and got 54, but at least he’s got the decimal concept. Unlike me. 

11 loves it when I’m wrong. He gloats over it, counts the ones he got wrong against the ones I did. He remembers and catalogs my mistakes as easily as he forgets his own. 

A lot of kids like it when I make mistakes, actually. Helping 11 with his stack of homework today makes me remember my first group of school kids, who took as much delight in correcting my occasional  spelling/grammar  mistakes as I did in catching theirs. The first time it happened, I was kind of defensive. I was supposed to be the teacher. As time went on I learned to see the fun in it, and eventually I even started to admire the crazy proofreading and literary skills of my 6th graders. But to this day I still haven’t forgotten one girl’s accusation at the end of a grammar lesson on the past tense of see. “You say ‘I seen a moose.’ just like the rest of us.” I had just finished cruelly attributing this exact phrase (a personal pet peeve) to local dialect. I was in denial about my grammar at that point, but have since tried to Listen to myself speak occasionally. Spoiler alert: she was right.

Another class, most of them driven athletes, liked to call my raises and off side mistakes in hockey. It didn’t happen  a lot, but when it did I felt the way they must’ve felt when I yelled “take 100” at them across the ice when they forcefully lifted a little kid’s stick -Defensive and a little angry. In the school dynamic, the line between respectfully correcting a teacher and outright insolence can be a fine one, and it becomes even  thinner outside on the ice. I’m not saying my kids crossed that line; it was the rare time when any of my students were outright disrespectful ever, maybe even never. But when it was me with 10 ruffians on hockey skates engaged in an intense and incredible game of hockey, my guard came up immediately at any hint of defiance. Again, I know these kids were right. I was so busy making sure everyone else kept the puck below head level and yelling at the uber confident kids to “PAAAAASSSSSSS!” and keeping the slacker from playing in a snowbank that most of the time I forgot to watch my own stick. I’m sure I made a lot more mistakes than they ever dared point out to me. 

There’s another group of kids that loves to comment on my clumsiness and tell me how much less clumsy everyone else they know is. Kids being who they are, this is never done is a cruel way. It’s a guileless statement of facts and nothing more. Every time I pour Lexus a glass of water she nags me good naturedly about the 3 drops that inevitably fall beside her cup. She even told a random lady we chatted with the other day about how clumsy I am. And, just like my former students and their grammar corrections and sports advice, this girl is not wrong. 

All this is to say that I make a lot of mistakes in life and, weirdly, have found this makes adulthood more relatable to the kids in my life. Maybe this is a universal thing, a bridge between all humans, not just between children and adults. I’m still learning and learning and also sometimes failing to learn to admit my mistakes and acknowledge the things I’m bad at, but the kids in my life are doing their level best to make me humble. 

Me vs Sandwich

 Me vs Sandwich: When food and the Bible coincide. 

A phrase from a Bible verse (2Corinthians 3.18. KJV) made me compare myself with a sandwich. It used the words open face, talking about beholding God. That phrase open face really got my attention. It connotes beauty and friendliness and serenity, really  all the good attributes in a person beaming out of their face.  

I think my husband or maybe strangers might know this better than I do. Whether I’m like my favourite sandwich. 

Open faced. 

Sandwiches are better this way. So am i. 

Written 2 long years ago in 2020 when people still walked around with their faces showing. 

Domestic Dream

 

I’m living the domestic dream. 

Of a good Holdeman woman.

All except for the milk cow. I still don’t have that. Sad face. 

This Domestic Dream hasn’t always been my dream, and I have long fought the stereotypes that accompany it. Nevertheless, here I am, and I’m actually quite happy here. The part I’ve long feared about embracing wife life/ stay at home mom life/ good Holdeman woman life is that it seems like an irreversible decision. Nevertheless, here I am, and I am happy to be here! 

Here’s how the domestic dream is playing out for me:

The puppy is perfect. Yes, she peed on the floor at first, but her adoring puppy dog eyes made it all okay. She’s better company than our current cat Ladder Kitty (rip, Worangey😢): more cuddly, less hairy and much more down to earth. No, Rebel is not a house dog, but she thinks she should be on these really cold days and on the nights when a coyote pack  decides to feast on her deer. Her adorable husky face is picture perfect sitting straight up and perfectly still in the front seat of the tow truck beside Brent or me. She’s a perfect silent companion for me on my quiet house days and long bitterly cold walks. She’s never happy/ relaxed in the mornings until she’s said a very lively good morning to both Brent and me. I have to remind myself sometimes that I actually don’t even like dogs. 

We have long term house renovation projects. Is there anything more Holdeman Woman in Rural Saskatchewan than that ? Progress is slowing the further into winter and pregnancy we get. We are both trying to be patient and optimistic, and having moderate success with both. In fact, I think our families are more depressed by our construction (also destruction) projects than we are, but as winter wears off in the next couple months, we hope to pick up where we left off when the snow started flying.   

Long leisurely walks with my dog and my bébé (and once, on the day after Christmas, with my husband!) in the sparkling winter sunlight, or more often the winter twilight and sometimes even under a full moon, are a part of my daily life. On the coldest windiest days we don’t wander much past the sheltering rows of trees, but, when the weather cooperates, we sometimes walk miles across the lonely prairie. 

Parts runs for the mechanic version of my husband (not to be confused with Version Tow Truck Operator) happen so often that I recognize the front desk employees in Napa, Olsen Diesel, Canora Automotive, etc. Consequently, I also know which ones I want to avoid when I walk into each place. Possibly they all despair when they see me coming, but I have unwittingly become much more well versed in the lingo of injector cores and thermostats and spark plugs, etc, so I think I am an easier customer than I used to be. 

I talk on the phone a lot and give a lot of receptionists and health care workers my health card number and date of birth. Why did nobody warn me that being pregnant would mean a lot of phone calls with strangers ? 

This week I help cook hot lunch for the school children. This will be our first time ever doing this. For so many years we were on the receiving end of this deliciousness; being the one doing the cooking and serving makes me feel like a real life good Holdeman adult woman. Maybe someday the feeling will be reality.

After moving to the next town over and then spending Christmas holidays with their dad a few hours away, our neighbor girls have started coming over again. Lexis spent her hard earned money to buy us a Christmas gift, and I feel so honoured, especially because I could tell she put some thought and debate into what to get us. She bought Brent some gummy worms and me a Christmasy green mason jar with starry string lights inside. She wanted to come to church with us last night so I quickly altered one of my skirts for her to wear; she doesn’t wear dresses normally, but it’s very very important to her that she wears a dress or a skirt when she comes to church. The service was too long for her and she basically fell asleep near the end, but she was adamant that she was happy she came. All the girls are super excited about our bébé and feel like it’s partly their baby, which is fun for us to see. They are convinced it will be a girl so we can all have lots of girl parties; BTT likes to argue with them and say he’s sure bébé will be a boy. Lexis went around yesterday telling all the Ladies at Church that she wants a girl and Brent wants a boy, Which made me giggle to myself. It should give the Ladies at Church a day small nugget of gossip, anyway. haha 

Byeee. I gots to get back to my domestic dream and clean my floors and cook supper so we can go back to church for more reviving.