the Good Things

The Good Things 

I feel like I’ve been living a nightmare since last week Wednesday. Find the good things, BTT says. Of course, he is one of them. Here are more of the good things. 

The prayers a lot of people are praying. I know people are, they’ve told me that. And these prayers are being answered. Also. @grandmamavis is such a prayer warrior. 

All the new things Bébé B is learning even in a hospital room tethered to an IV machine. 

The all’s right with the world feeling when BTT and Bébé B and I all fall asleep under the same roof. 

Hope that treatment plans will be worked out and we’ll be home soon. This hope has been very tenuous at times; tonight it’s stronger. 

The many people I’ve met these last nightmarish 1.5 weeks. Sometimes i see them for only minutes. Sometimes we don’t exchange any pleasantries. I am not a people person so being forced to come into contact with so many strangers is overwhelming. Still, I like the times when  I find out how many grandchildren someone has or the names of someone’s kids or why someone regrets choosing the job they did or why someone loves their job or about someone’s wife’s pregnancy complications or where someone grew up or who knows someone who shares my baby’s name. I like finding relatable things about the strangers. 

The woman smoking under the No Smoking sign outside the hospital door who made my day with her uplifting comment, “you look snazzy in green.”

Our local hospital supports and advocates cosleeping even though the big city one doesn’t as we found out abruptly and sleepily at 2am. 

The sacrifices people have made so our child could receive the care he needs. Specifically

1 . The man who “has a thousand children” (his coworker’s words) who stayed at work late to care for Bébé B. He probably skipped having supper with his wife and all his kids to help us, BTT pointed out. Really it was his SO and 1000 children who made most of the sacrifice.  

2 . That unnamed child somewhere in Regina General who is still waiting because bébé B received the IV line meant for him. Our child was somehow prioritized over someone else’s child and we are so grateful. My heart is also hurting for the child and the child’s parents who are still waiting. 

This child who makes us so joyful in hard times. His epic whole-face smiles and his sparkly blue blue eyes. His cuddly chubby body cuddled against my shoulder. His conversations. (is he always going to be this talkative?)  The fact that two months in we still argue sometimes about who gets to hold him.

One Year Later 

I’m posting this on Canada Day, remembering my July 1st post from last year.  It’s been another Canada Day filled with heart ache and mixed emotions across my country. Canada, or rather Canadians, have had a rough couple years. We’re struggling to reconcile our differing opinions on how our country should function through the pandemic and into the future. We’re struggling to respectfully acknowledge and mourn a terrible past, the horrific things our country as we know it today was built upon and move forward. The words of our national anthem ring truer than ever tonight, God, keep our land. God, keep our people. 

A Revelation

A Revelation

The Sermonette I wrote to myself tonight.

“casting all your care upon him; 
for he careth for you.” 1Peter‬ ‭5:7‬

No one (but me) ever talks about their least favourite verse in the Bible. Because so many others love this verse I’ve only thought of it as a cliche and never as words that could be meaningful to me.  I’ve never stopped to think about the meaning of it. Possibly the main reason I’ve avoided thinking about casting my care on anyone else but myself is that I love to carry my cares around alone feeling all proud of my broad shoulders.

Week 8.

It’s hard to write about now. 

Everything is visceral and intense. 

The emotions, bigger and better and more complicated than I imagined. 

The actions. Hours and hours of breast feeding. The many is-he-still-breathing checks I perform in my newmom paranoia. 

The state of being. No being alone. ever. Semi exhausted but also motivated and euphoric when it comes to the small human. 

The secrecy. Eavesdropping on BébéB having deep conversations with his daddy. Keeping the secrets he shares with me during his 4am diaper changes. 

The feelings. So much delight in BébéB’s smiles and coos. So much excitement and pride in when he learns new things. So much love when I look into his blue blue eyes and see them crinkle in a smile. 

The ways my self and my life have metamorphosed in the last two months: not at all but also completely. 

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.