I’m not a cosmetics hobbyist

    A few months after my son was born, a neighbour of ours alerted the Welcome Wagon, a representative of which arrived, breathless at my door with a package of samples and coupons, a clipboard for checking off my name and a tissue-paper lined basket full of tiny knitted hats from which (my son no longer an infant) I was to choose the biggest. Following that brief visit, a cosmetics company lady contacted me by e-mail to arrange a free pampering and a goddess-on-the-go makeup trial. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this, but for me there are some words in the English language that make me cringe and the liberal use of pampering and goddess as applied to my post-pregnancy self, while still nursing and cooped up as winter dragged on outside, were some of those words. Vocabulary aside, I accepted.

The lady pulled up in an SUV and hauled out the equivalent of a carry-on suitcase from the back. She was short and wore a long faux leopard print coat that I hung on a wooden hanger in our entryway. She was middle age but fought it back with shiny eye shadow and a sharp burgundy hairstyle. We set up on the dining room table. She had a flimsy plastic tray with rounded indents where she squirted a bit of each of the skin-care products she wanted me to try. There was a three-in-one cleanser, and cream and a powder foundation applied with a cotton ball she had supplied. I looked at myself in the tiny plastic mirror angled upwards in front of me, attached to a plastic base with the flimsy tray insert. There was eye cream and then easy makeup in tones meant to compliment the colour of my eyes so that I end up having shiny eye shadow like hers and deep red lips and rosy cheekbones. She recited package deals from a laminated sheet in a chirpy voice like an awkward poem. I bought the powder foundation and a brush to apply it with.
While she put things away, we tried to talk and she asked if I’d be interested in selling products for this company founded to empower women. But I’m terrible at sales and being recruited made me sad. When she left I sent a selfie to my sister for laughs.

At the same time I got a little obsessed trying to figure out a skin care routine that was more sophisticated than the wash-with-bar-soap and hydrate-with-cream routine I’d followed since I was a teenager. I decided to buy the whole skin care package from a website I found called Paula’s Choice. It arrived in the mail with helpful numbered stickers you could apply to the assortment of bottles the kit included; cleanser, toner, exfoliant, retinol treatment, daytime moisturizer, night-time moisturizer and a mask to be applied weekly. I’ve come to like it, I’ve adopted this twice-daily routine and find it comforting now.

I’ve read about chic ladies who, à la française, pick cosmetics based on the pretty packaging, or others who inherit habits from fair-skinned mothers and deftly mix high-end products with common pharmacy store finds. Some women can make a hobby out of experimentation and others enjoy the advice they find in thick magazines – the ones I usually find intimidating. I envy those women their flair. So while I write about this solution I’ve found for myself, the ease and the confidence I feel using it, it’s like a secret happiness, a far too practical approach, the surrender of something of my je-ne-sais-quoi. 

Miscarriages, I've had a few

For the longest time I didn’t know what to say about miscarriage because I would either dismiss the subject or try to make a joke. Even now, as I write, I’m tempted to leave them as a footnote instead. But if I gather together the four failed pregnancies and the three months they each took, the miscarriages were a year in our marriage. It’s an ever diminishing year as time moves on but this is the reflexion I owe it.

The first miscarriage I had was into our second year as newlyweds in the month of February. We were excited to become parents and savoured the feeling. The three month ultrasound showed a seven week foetus, quiet, a circle of white in a little sea of black, suspended there with perfect little human indentations that could have later stretched out into little arms and legs, the beautiful spinal curve, the head still tucked in. We were still uncertain of the joys a child could bring. 

I’ve always liked being a reasonable patient. I knew miscarriages were common, I didn’t feel like crying when the doctor came in to confirm it offering me Kleenex, explaining the options for its removal. Dilation and curettage is a simple operation where the cervix is dilated and the uterus is swept clean. The procedure was new to me and with Christian I followed the steps with mild curiosity. I was a secretary at the time and my supervisor insisted I take the next day off. I went to a small jeweller in Saint-Boniface and bought myself a necklace to commemorate this first failed pregnancy and the being that might live on somewhere above me, somehow linked to us, his or her would-have-been parents. I tried to feel sadness and searched for tears but couldn’t find any. The necklace had a curved silver piece that swept around a blue stone and I imparted it with maternal symbolism. 

The second pregnancy resulted in a tiny little girl and so when I had a second miscarriage, Christian and I hoped we were following a pattern. Soon after I fell pregnant again a fourth time. It was to be the third miscarriage. 

This third miscarriage hurt. Christian and I started to question our feelings, our little bit of grief like the restlessness you feel when it’s another cloudy day. I started to look for a meaning. This little bit of pain suddenly morphed into something that, if you were to pull at it, would cause an unravelling. What was a miscarriage? Was this aborted project a real, whole human, with a soul, a purpose, a beginning, a mission, and an end? Or was it just the very beginnings of a life, yet to be infused with a soul, yet to grow into a purpose, yet to know an end? And we began to question our grief. Why did this third miscarriage hurt? Had we suffused this pregnancy with more expectation than the other two? And if we had, the grief we felt was it not perhaps more indicative of our thwarted intention than it was of knowing a life had ended? What were we grieving? Was it a project or a being? I had to decide to stop thinking about it, to accept the event that highlighted our imperfect knowledge and our limited understanding. 

My gynaecologist ordered tests and I discovered an inherited Robertsonian Translocation. One in one thousand three hundred people are carriers of this genetic imperfection. Christian and I found ourselves in the enviable position of knowing why we had miscarriages. When I had a fourth a year later I went to the hospital and bought magazines to while away the time. It was September. My mind was placid if impatient. 

After that September Christian and I had two boys in surprising quick succession. The miscarriages are now in the realm of faded experiences. Awhile ago they consumed all our thoughts. I used to track my symptoms and attempt to calibrate them against a successful pregnancy. Christian and I would imagine superstitions for ourselves sometimes announcing the pregnancy or keeping it a secret. For three months I would try to develop an inner ear to match that of those women, who, like witches with magical divination, were so attuned to their body they could know if it was bearing life or not. I would think of names. Sometimes I’d talk to this mass of burgeoning cells, thinking of it as a baby, sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes it was too painful to decide whether talking to it was helpful or not. It didn’t matter but I would catch myself wishing it did. The wear of it would depress me. I would waver between exercise and distraction. Regardless of the outcome, pregnancy was fatiguing. 

There is no advice I can give about living a miscarriage but I don’t think that the experience is lost. I think that as I went through four of them, clumsily even, I had the chance of growing in grace, of cultivating patience and empathy, of practicing kindness even while selfishly wanting to hoard it all for myself. Even if I don’t have anything tangible and can barely grasp at the words to express the sensation, these four miscarriages are part of me, part of our couple, part of our family. I’m trying to learn to be grateful for them.

Mrs Major's House

I loved Mrs Major’s house, lowly and brown on St Pierre Street. She and her husband Stan had it built in 1975 and not ten years later a tragic boating accident made her a widow. The street is easy to find at the southern end of the city limits, where Eglise Avenue is the last one on the left before you cross a small bridge with planters for railings, and take Highway 75 straight down to the United States. St Pierre Street runs across Eglise Avenue, bisected by that historic church. Mrs Major’s house was to its right, on the side of St Pierre Street that ended with the now commemorated Pollock Island park. At the tip of the island, the La Salle river meets the Red and when it isn’t separated from St Pierre Street by flooding, it makes for a pretty nature walk.

Mrs Major’s yard dipped downward from the street, and the white door on the wood front always opened with the sound of the weather-stripping seal breaking and a long whine. The entranceway landing between two floors was small and company always found themselves in a bottleneck arriving or leaving. The steep linoleum covered stairs leading up or down were protected by a black wrought iron railing, and Mrs Major would lean on it from the adjoining dining room to add postscripts to the goodbyes. Guest or tenant, you always came into the house looking upwards. It was an awkward position, but no matter how I imagined changing it, I was always unable to come up with a satisfactory solution.

The kitchen was in the corner beside the garage, facing the street. A countertop separated it from the dining room and the countertop had a row of cabinets on top that stood detached from the ceiling and had doors that opened on either side, so that dishes could be accessed from the dining room or the kitchen. The counter space, the fridge and the stove formed a u-shaped hub and Mrs Major would duck her head under the cabinetry to survey the table or ask a question. Food was occasionally passed in the same manner, a basket full of homemade buns would be pushed forward and the person in the dining room sitting against the counter was expected to turn and grab the basket and pass it forward. There was a door beside the refrigerator that led to the garage and a staircase leading down to her white car parked between long stacks of firewood. The stairway was used as an alternative freezer in the winter, easier to access in her old age than the one in her basement. She would trundle firewood using an old wagon between the garage and the front landing where there were seven steps or so down to the cast iron stove she liked to use in the winter.

She liked to hang simple artwork. The tall wall beside the entrance closet had a picture of a woman representing the Virgin Mary, pointing to her exposed heart, her tunic vivid peach pink, the background a variety of bright blues. On the wall behind the upright piano in the living room were cheap gold frames with pre-made cut-outs for family pictures. Years ago when the spaces had already been filled, she took to sticking pictures she received from grandchildren and friends into the corners of the frames or propping them up all along the piano. Her adopted son Ronnie had drawn a Virgin Mary too, with geometric shapes to reflect round rosary beads around a mantled silhouette in black ink, and she pinned this in her room opposite the door until there were so many pin holes that when it was dry mounted as a gift, they had to cut a strip around the drawing. She had the kind of spirit of poverty that prompted her to keep the same furniture through decades of use. She never changed the ornamental knickknacks that lined the bookshelves and the TV set at the opposite end of the living room from the piano.

Even the carpets and linoleum were very old; wild shag in the bedrooms, a practical light grey cut pile in the long living room. More than one grandchild had been wrangled into her great spring cleanings that displaced furniture, unpinned meters of handmade curtains, and filled buckets of soapy water. A visitor who might not have noticed that the walls were newly painted in the same white would hear all about the adventure of getting Cathy who was afraid of heights to hold the ladder so that her grandma could reach and dust the ceiling fan. In her eighties, the house, not possessing a bone marrow to renew its cells, started looking tired of its cleanings. The things that had always stayed the same needed even more effort to do so just as she had less to give.  The garden that had been moved up from a lower bank beside the river and closer to the house got smaller. The stairs were a fight even when, with her bursitis, the minimum amount of using them was still too much. Sometimes she’d forget her cane, or a burner on the stove, and then to her embarrassment she’d find herself asleep, again, on the red velvet chesterfield, sitting a little slouched to one side, because staying awake when there was less and less you could do only invited the fatigue from all the years of daily doings accumulated in tired bones and failing eyes.

She left the house, putting it for sale with a few final upgrades for better market value, and so it became the subject of third-party scrutiny. The comfort of its familiarity couldn’t be financially appreciated. It was finally sold and then emptied and I couldn’t shake the feeling that even while its only resident was moving to a better-suited place, we were leaving an old friend behind, a piece of Mrs Major.

The move felt like a humiliation, a necessary concession to old age. Her furniture, used to so much space, looked cramped in its new apartment quarters. The small freezer she bought looked awkward in the tiny kitchen. She made a point of never going back to her old neighbourhood. 

I do sometimes drive by her house, taking St Pierre Street purposely, just to hear the sound of the wind in the oak trees and feel how the sun pierces through. The new owners put blinds up in the windows and puttered in the flowerbeds. I don’t know them. Their residing there separates me from the house. I wonder if they love it and doubt that they do, and then try to shake that feeling and be more reasonable. There’s no use for nostalgia, no time for it, a house is a building, it has a function, but tied up with a person, it looks like a partnership, and this was one that I wished never ended. 

Francine Prose's List of Books to Be Read Immediately

I thought it might be helpful to create an index with Francine Prose's list. The numbers in green refer to the page numbers in her book Reading Like a Writer where she talks either about the author or about the book she recommends. Two titles in grey are books she refers to but are not part of her list. Feel free to suggest corrections to this first draft.

Link to Evernote - a checklist and partial index

1 of 52 things to do in Manitoba: milk goats

Doubtless, there are a number of small, visitor-friendly farms in Manitoba, but Aurora Farm is remarkable for the effort it makes to educate the people who pass through. Louise May, the farm’s owner is a busy lady. Google her and the web unfurls a list of links, including her active Twitter feed and her appearance at Winnipeg’s City Council with a live chicken during the city’s backyard poultry debate.  What brought us to her farm on a Sunday in March? Some friends and I, all city girls with a penchant for natural food and scenic outdoors, decided to take a Goat Milk Cheese Workshop. One workshop was offered in the city, but the one Louise was hosting on her 160 acre farm in St. Norbert promised its participants the opportunity of milking the goats. We donned our boots and headed out.

My farm experience is limited to literature and ancestry. I told my dad that I was going to milk goats.
“They’re easier to milk than cows” he said.
“Really?”
“Well yeah, they only have two teats” he said.

We arrived at the farm just as morning chores were beginning. The seven-month-old kids in one pen were bleating, anxious to get back to their mothers. Does are separated from their young for the night so that the farmer can have a good supply of milk at the beginning of the day. The barn had several stalls and one heated room for milking. Louise had devised a wooden stand where the goats hopped up and ate grain while we each tried our hand and extracting their milk. Cats dozed, perched on top of shelves or tucked inside cubbyholes.

Washed and stripped (i.e. the first few squeezes of milk are discarded), a doe’s teat is warm and soft. The technique calls for a little dexterity; the teat needs to be pinched between your index and thumb trapping the milk inside, and then squeezed from the top down with your remaining fingers. Aiming for the bucket is the next challenge. When we’ve all had our turn, Louise finishes off each one in a matter of minutes, the milk producing nice foam on top.  

Louise hosts the cheese making in her open-plan kitchen with burgundy cupboards. The area in front of her stove fireplace is a circular mosaic with a large heart-shaped stone in the middle. She rescued the house from demolition, choosing instead to tackle the black mould and other problems it presented and adding on to its exterior as the need arose. Shelves laden with scented goat-milk soap line a yellow, wood-beamed eastern-facing room, while a few of her heritage chickens live in a comfortable southern facing add-on, across shelves of seedlings and containers full of soap-making supplies. Louise hopes to soon add a bungalow with a converted commercial kitchen to her property. She talks to us about the garden they’ll be planting this year on a prime piece of property full of freshly composted soil. It will supply about 200 fresh produce boxes for families in the city. It is a new project she’s taken on with the help of Mary, a resident university student of agriculture. The property is also home to visiting WWOOFERS (young people who are part of the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) who benefit from the organic farming experience and who, on Louise’s farm, have no shortage of animals to care for, including horses, alpacas, sheep, ducks, and the house trained cats and dogs. But Louise, with her long grey-streaked hair doesn’t look like a harried woman. She doesn’t go on about how busy she is. In fact, sitting in her kitchen as she explains the process for making one or another kind of cheese, you lose track of all the work involved in owning land and caring for animals. In her house, the hassle seems like fun; juggling animals, property, workshops and artisanal wares looks like a pleasant possibility, an almost enviable way of life. That is the charm of Aurora Farm, and just the thing a couple of city women needed to be reminded of.

After reading The Corrections...

... these are my favourite quotes. When I look at them I wonder how much they are about the author, Jonathan Franzen, and then how much they are about the reader for having selected them.

“11. He turned to the doorway where she’d appeared. He began a sentence: « I am - » but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as seen as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness were’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word « crepuscular » in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvellously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods - « packing my suitcase, » he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.

16. …and assumed the burden of seeing La Guardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

18. …she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

99. Enid, who all her life had been helpless not to observe the goings-on on other people’s plates, had watched Denise take a three-bite portion of salmon, a small helping of salad, and a crust of bread. The size of each was a reproach to the size of each of Enid’s.

100. …with the skimpy laugh with which she tried to hide large feelings.

251. Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.

263. …what you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

271. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.”

Quote

I am reading Flannery O'Connor's letters. My favourite is a letter she wrote to Eileen Hall on March 10, 1956. Here is a large part of it.

“When I first began to write I was much worried about this thing of scandalizing people, as I fancied that what I wrote was highly inflammatory. I was wrong - it wouldn’t even have kept anybody awake, but anyway, thinking this was my problem, I talked to a priest about it. The first thing he said was, “You don’t have to write for fifteen year old girls.” Of course, the mind of a fifteen year old girl lurks in many a head that is seventy-five and people are every day being scandalized not only by what is scandalous of its nature but by what is not. If a novelist wrote a book about Abraham passing his wife Sarah off as his sister - which he did - and allowing her to be taken over by those who wanted her for their lustful purposes - which he did to save his skin - how many Catholics would not be scandalized at the behavior of Abraham? The fact is that in order not to be scandalized, one has to have a whole view of things, which not many of us have.

This is a problem that has concerned Mauriac very much and he wrote a book about it called, “God and Mammon.” His conclusion was that all the novelist could do was “purify the source” - his mind. A young man had written Mauriac a letter saying that as a result of reading one of his novels, he had almost committed suicide. It almost paralyzed Mauriac. At the same time, he was not responsible for the lack of maturity in the boy’s mind and there were doubtless other souls who were profiting from his books. When you write a novel, if you have been honest about it and if your conscience is clear, then it seems to me that you have to leave the rest in God’s hands. When the book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry about this is to take over God’s business.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Three things I learned about blogging

1. Imitation is useless. My own voice is in me, I need to be patient in cultivating it and therefore take time and care in everything I publish.
   
   Sometimes I wish I was a photographer. I catch myself admiring another blogger's work and supposing their work is easier, more rewarding. I have to remind myself that that isn't true. Every artist willing to publish has decided to invest time in cultivating their talent. Not cultivating my own, or being jealous of others is a mistake. "What I do is me" * will be my motto.
    
2. My blog will not cater to family. This is by far the hardest thing I have had to learn. The stories of bloggers who wrote for family and then gained an international audience appealed to me but frustrated my desire to write serious pieces. "Too much reading" relatives would say. "More pictures of the kids" they would cry. And because I am a sensitive flower and love to please, I would listen. The internet gods have since invented Instagram, my husband and I got iPhones and everyone is happy.
    
3. The only way to overcome fear created by a bad experience is by jumping back in. My elementary school English teacher, Mrs. de Carle, once read us a story about a deep sea diver who nearly drowned during one of her dives. When she was rescued and cared for, she was encouraged to dive again the same day in order to get past the bad experience.
   
   I had my amateur blog professionally re-designed. It filled all the criteria of the blogger I aspired to be. It obliged me to publish daily posts with pictures. It also integrated my Twitter feed. As a result, the pressure I put on myself increased and I became unhappy with the idea of blogging. I stopped blogging for an extended period of time. I then made peace with my inability to tweet and deleted my Twitter account. Then I started journaling.
   
   Journaling became my New Year's resolution and my weekday practice. But writing in secret doesn't allow me to grow as a writer. Instead, I need to find the joy in blogging and the joy in sharing. I owe gratitude to Austin Kleon and his book Show Your Work for giving me the courage.
   
   Thanks for listening.

* a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins