daddy issues

I went to see Hugo today with my kid. She is recovering from the flu and we needed to escape from the excavation of our basement. Maybe there are bodies down there, I wouldn't be surprised. Why do they kill parents? They love to kill parents. It seems that a kid can't be a hero unless they are orphaned.

I met a guy recently. He likes to take photographs. I dislike having my picture taken. It is like my face is trying to escape the scrutiny. He had lights on me and was obscured behind a lens. Then he started to ask me things. He asked me about my dad and I found myself at a loss. I wanted to tell him something. He seemed like the right person to tell things to, but I was blocked, I was thinking, all girls have daddy issues.

My father was a photographer. He was also unhinged. He had been a brilliant PHD student, destined for academic stardom, but he got sidetracked. Sidetracked by a Leica and a collective of New Mexican hippies, acid, Buddhism and a wanderlust. My mother and he had a very different relationship, I think, although it is all conjecture. She doesn't talk about it. She would if I asked, but I seem to know not to. He would wander and she would sometimes follow and sometimes not.I know he must have had girlfriends, I can see it in the eyes of one of his photo subjects.

Eventually she moved to Montreal from New York City and had me. My sister was already 3. We lived in Outremont, next door to a houseful of kids called the Rings. My father came to visit sometimes, until he had a psychotic break and was carted off to the local crazy house after leaping on my mum. My sister, 5 or 6 at the time, ran to the Rings for help. After that he went back to NYC where he continued to take photos of crumbling garbage heaps and dilapidated signage. I don't have any memories of him. The only one I can recall is looking out the window at the rain spattered glass while my mum told us that he had died. He fell out of a window she said. I was 4 and she says I cried. I don't remember. I just recall the view, obscured by those plastic decals of triangles and squares and circles that you could stick and remove and make houses out of.

New York's finest were thieves back then, and they stole his cameras. They left the prints though, and I have them. They are my only evidence. I can see his humor, his intelligence and his complicated view. There was interest a couple years back and a gallery contacted me so they could mount a show. They did and through that I got in contact with a woman who was one of his closest friends. She sent me the story of his death, because she had been there. By now I knew he did not fall. The story was heart wrenching. He did not die right away. She found him, three stories down on the ground, and in the ambulance he was telling her it was alright, he was going where he wanted. She thought he was going to survive.

I thought about the pain this must have caused her. She knew something was wrong some days before, but hippies like to let people be. They don't question the weird. Strangely enough, I don't either. Sometimes I feel that I should feel more. Some kind of loss, some kind of deep pain. That I should be broken somehow, as orphans often are. I am not. I had family and love and I was young. I don't miss him. There is no hole.

I like this photographer, and I also have a weakness for academics, it seems. My daddy issues must be there somewhere, like it is for most girls. I come to the end of this post feeling much the same way i did when I was questioned under the lights. Thinking that I am trying to say something, but not sure what it is.

Pets

First off I want to say thank you to those of you who wrote me such kind words of encouragement. It is not that I forget that I have an audience, after all, I am writing with you in mind. It is more that I am continually surprised that you stay and listen decide to come back. It moves me that this blog gives you something.

I was torn about what to write about this time. I wanted to write about my shit eating dog and then I also wanted to write about love. I wonder if there is a way to put them together? Let us start with the dog.

I have a dog. He is perfect in every way. Except one. One very very imperfect way. He likes to eat shit. More specifically, his own shit. Well he will eat the shit of other dogs too, but what he loves most is his own fresh shit. This dog is beautiful, sweet, loving, obedient and silly. I would let a two year old walk him. I want to train him to be a therapy dog because he is so perfect. I think I love him.

I got this dog because my ex husband was depressed. I have always had cats. I still have them. My ex had a dog when he was a kid, and somehow I thought a dog would help him. Maybe get him to walk outside and have a buddy. Someone on his side that he could just get support from in a way only a big furry mop of a dog can do. So I found this big black muppet of a dog and he had a fatal flaw. The kind of flaw that makes you hate him. The kind of flaw that makes you consider getting rid of one for. How can you love a dog who just ate his own shit?

I fell in love with my husband at first sight. That has never happened before to me or since. I remember walking into the bar where I was supposed to meet him and sitting down across from him and looking into his face and knowing instantly that the game was over. That this person across from me was who I was going to be with. I even knew he felt exactly the same thing at the same time. We were together every day from that point onwards. We were repulsively affectionate and sex was in a place I had not been before. We fit. I remember the second time I saw him. He came over and we sat on my porch swing surrounded by the branches of the tree that was planted below and we held hands. We stood up in the kitchen and we kissed. All I wanted to do was lift my shirt so that the skin of my belly would touch the skin of his. I did. And when our stomachs touched it radiated a warmth that melted me.

Later in our marriage he wanted fish. I hate fish. I said to him, they are your fish. I am never taking care of them. He wanted them anyways so we had fish. When he moved out he left them. I saw it as a passive aggressive fuck you and at the time I was mad at him still. Mad at him for not being happy I suppose. I was stuck with the shit eating dog and the stupid fucking fish. I am not proud of what I did next, but I did it anyways. I could not bring myself to flush the fish, and i certainly did not want to be vacuuming up fish poo and cleaning filters and dealing with all the horror that it is to maintain a tiny glass box filled with imprisoned fish forced to live in a world of plastic plants and weirdly coloured rocks. I was always told that fish were delicate, that if the water got cold or the filter was broken that that would die instantly. Well it turns out that is not true. it turns out that guppies and neon tetras can live for a couple of months.. in stasis.. with no food, no filter no water change in a green sludge of algae. I would go in each day, hoping that they would be dead, but they weren't. I was horrified at my cruelty, yet I could not bring myself to either flush them or feed them. I just sat there and watched them slowly die. They did finally. There is guilt there .

I still have the dog though. Over the years I have learned how to curtail his shit eating ways. He gets some sometimes, but it is not often enough for me to hate him. My yard is spotless and I diligently ensure that I can still love him. My ex takes the dog on the weekends with our kid. I think the dog makes him happy now, they wrestle and hang out. The fish tank is long gone. Thank fucking christ.

Not Unicorns

It has been a long time since I have written. I could blame it on the holidays, but I wont. A friend of mine who reads this blog told me he thought that I wrote it one step removed. That I wrote other people's stories and ones from my past and that these were at safe distances. I think he is right. I want to write about unicorns. Metaphorical ones. But I can't because it is about me and sex and love and I am not up to exposing that yet, mostly because of the story I am about to tell you. It is a story about me. In the present. And I am writing it because I was angry.

I am trusting when online, I chat with people with brutal honesty. If they ask me something I like to tell them the truth back. As I mentioned before, I am online dating. I have met some friends, and even some unicorns, but I have also met ones with whom I was not well matched. Blame the robot, his matchmaking statistics are sometimes way off base. (This is a shout out to my OKC clan.) Well I must have pissed someone off.

I was chatting to a guy who decided to google me. You know, you have done it. We all google ourselves. If you are unlucky enough to be in the entertainment biz, IMDB will tell you your rank and how many points you lost this week. If you are a doctor or a teacher, go to rate-my-whatever-profession-people-want-to-bitch-about and see what the gossip is. If you are someone: wikipedia will know you or, if you are a just a plebeian, you can just see what comes up in the google search.

Well this dude turned up me, giving hand jobs, being "fucked by bull dykes" and other such lovely descriptors. It seems someone was mad at me. They posted impersonating me on all kinds of comment boards and then linking them back to my work site. Conversely they posted on gay and lesbian sites having me make homophobic and right wing christian statements. Which belies a certain sense of humour I suppose, the irony not lost.

It was the ultimate bathroom wall stunt. I can't lie, it shook me. It frightened me and it made me feel like I was back in grade school being bullied in the hallway. It served its purpose, it made me stop writing things that were personal. It made me feel exposed and vulnerable and criticized. It made me feel shame. As I have written before, I am not a big fan of shame. It highlighted to me that there is
so much hate and homophobia and repressed sexuality still in the world.

The thing is, I am not a pudgy smart kid in grade four anymore. So I say this.. fuck you and your shame. It is not mine. At least not anymore. I will write about unicorns, and kinky sex and queers and love and death and more. I promise.

Next time. After I have finished washing off the bathroom wall.

Sticky Sweet Fingers

I was born on Christmas day. When I tell people this, they all have the same reaction. Christmas? Really? Oh wow, that must suck. Quite frankly they are right. It does, sharing your birthday with the baby Jesus blows. Saying this, I still love Christmas in a way only a dyke reared. agnostic cynic can. My daughter wants to know if Santa is real, and I refuse to tell her he is not because part of me thinks maybe, if I just believed. he would be. One too many watchings of Miracle on 34th Street I guess.

My family Christmas never involved Christ. In fact, in our household the ladies would sneak into churches on the eve and "steal" a flame from a prayer candle. They called it taking back the light. We would have a winter solstice dinner on the 24th where we would sit around the table, each with a long thin unlit candle in our hands. One person would start, and light their candle from the stolen flame and then say something about the year that passed and some hopes for the year that was coming. Then they would kiss the person next to them and light their candle and the next person would do as the the one before until all the candles were lit. We ate tourtiere and had sweet perogies for desert. The ritual, as it was called ended sometime in my late 20s, after everyone had moved off and new families were made.

Christmas morning had tons of people and presents and fresh baked croissants with scrambled eggs and bacon. I go over to my sisters these days with my daughter and my mum and we still eat the same thing. My family is small though. and three adults and three kids makes for a fairly sparse Christmas dinner. My sister cooks and amazing turkey. There is an emptiness to me though, around that table. I am missing my other mothers, the noise and the wine and the laughing. My mother and sister are civilized, refined and it is quite polite.

I married a man who had a huge family, so my daughter knows the chaos and fun of a house filled with cousins. I think my husband would dread it, but I was in love. I was in love with the chaos, the slightly too drunk aunt, the ten kids rampaging through with shiny new toys. Mountains of paper and bows and sticky sweet fingers looking for batteries. The family was so big the grown ups did not buy each other gifts beyond some home made cookies, or a Toblerone bar. My mother in law would take me aside in a separate room and give me a special gift. One for my birthday, although I knew it was because she liked me best. I liked her best too.

My husband and I split about a year ago. I have not seen my in laws since. I miss them often and regret that it is too painful for him to have me join sometime. I know he could not bear it, so I understand that it can't happen. I did not really realize till afterwards that divorce was about more than a couple, it was about a separating of family. I lost a large part of mine, and Christmas has made me mourn that this year.

This year I am presented with a night all alone. I will have a morning with my ex and daughter, and eggs and bacon at my sisters, and a polite turkey dinner with a very nice wine and some tasty appetizer crafted out of a Bon Apetit back issue. My daughter will be rampaging with her cousins and aunts and uncles at my ex's, and I will go home to my tree and my dog and face the night by myself for the very first time. I feel dark about this. I wish I did not. I wish I had not joined the ranks of the holiday disappointed. My maudlin cliché reaction to an emotionally charged holiday.

Truth be told, I am not alone. I am not neglected. I am spoiled. Spoiled by having had too many good Christmases.

It has been a formative year and i think perhaps what I really need to do is light a candle. Light a candle and say something about the one that has past and something about my hopes for the year that is coming

So, goddesses, this is what I have to say:

I am grateful for my friends, the ones who gave me love and let me into their lives this year. They welcomed me into their "web" and I love being caught in their world. I am grateful for the kisses my daughter gives me unsolicited and plentiful. I am grateful this year for the man who showed me love and affection and kindness and for his perfect lips. I am even grateful to math, for kicking my ass, which needed a firm boot upside it.

I hope the next year brings me closer into the hearts of my new friends. I hope that I rest more and treat my body more kindly. I hope that I can find the balance between family, school, work, myself and love. I hope that those people around me who have had losses and pain this year find the new one brighter and lighter. I hope to plan, on the 24th of December 2012, a raid into a church, to steal a light so that I can sit around a table with meat pie and polish sweet dumplings and kiss the lips of those closest to me and see if some of these wishes had been fulfilled.

Don't worry, the next post will be funny.

Mythology aka pee pee and poo poo

I was sitting around a table one night after my play rehearsal getting to know my cast members in a more intimate way. Somehow that lead to stories of urination. How we got there , I am not really sure, but that is where we were and it was only going to take a turn for the worse. We were talking about the strangest place we had all peed. Nobody had really peed anywhere all that strange, although certainly there had been questionable choices. Ones like in the garbage can of their childhood camp cabin. or behind a mailbox, or on a friend. The thing is, it lead to a story. Regular readers will know I love a good story.

This story is particularly unnerving, because it is impossible to believe that it is true, but it was being told by the person it happened to. It has all the elements of a perfect urban myth... but she swears that it actually happened to her. First I will tell it, and then, well then, I will get to the complicated emotional reaction I had to it.

My friend is Chinese. She grew up in China. She told us that when she was there, some twenty odd years ago, that she had relatives that lived in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. She said this village was remote, very very remote. They did not have electricity. or indoor plumbing. She stressed that "back then" these villages were totally non westernized, completely traditional and technological advancements had not touched them.

Well my friend, only five at the time, had to go to the bathroom. She said to us, they had no toilet paper. Seasoned world traveller that I pretend to be, I say, sure, lots of places use their hands or water to clean themselves. She said , well they used dogs. Dogs? Yes, dogs, to lick them clean. She said they made her bend over and have her ass licked by a dog, whose sole household duty seemed to be the nether region hygiene of their masters.

My brain imploded when she told me this because my first thought was, is she just making fun of my white privilege..seeing if she can make a bunch of stupid Canadians believe that the Chinese have a village where ass licking dogs are valued members of the family? Was she somehow playing in to Westerners love of being repulsed by Asian dog cuisine and referring to it every time they eat in a Chinese restaurant? How could I retell this story without coming off like some Coldwar era Bugs Bunny cartoon, repleat with slanty eyes and buck teeth parodies? And holy fuck, if this is actually true, how does THAT make me feel?

I started to think about the dogs, wondering if perhaps they were repaying some karmic debt. I also have a dog, and he loves poo, and I thought, that would be dog heaven for him, so maybe there is no karmic debt, and what the hell is wrong with me, lumping all Asian cultures and religious beliefs into one? Do Chinese buddhists even have a karmic concept and are they even frickin buddhists in that remote village? My anti oppressive theory readings ringing in my head, scolding me for my racists assumptions and generalizations. I had renewed respect for my friend as I had absolutely no idea if I should believe her and she was extremely convincing. Was she fucking with me? If she was, I respected that. If she wasn't then what a crazy good story she had.

And then I started thinking about the bestiality angle of the whole concept. Wondering if people took the dog to the bathroom for longer than required times, Was there an element of pleasure here, and maybe the good wife of the household, neglected by her husband, might be enjoying her evacuation time just a little too much? I started to warm to the concept and think maybe this was a genius idea, a symbiotic, man/beast environmental solution to deforestation. Why not use dogs? Better than bleach and trees.

I suppose my meandering point is that I am amazed by what a story can do, how it can be hilarious, disturbing, evocative and quite simply incredible. Incredible is the perfect word. So good you can't believe it. I want to believe it , but then it fills me with the unbalanced feeling of being simultaneously horrified and filled with wonder at the prospect of ridding myself of toilet paper forever. Why not have this be the next North American appropriation of Asian culture? The zen of canine. My friend would no doubt pee herself laughing at the thought of us.

Unclean

I write this as one of my cats drinks out of an old water glass that has been sitting on the table next to my couch for the last few days. I have been writing about love and death and politics for the past few posts and I think it is now time to talk about something really important. My deepest insecurity, my most intimate personal detail, my Achilles heal. My relationship with housework. Or more to the point, my lack of of a relationship with housework.

I think some background is in order. I was raised in an alternative household. They called it a lesbian collective. These days my friends call it a dyke ranch, and we all dream of making our own very own version... the urban dyke ranch. In my childhood collective there were five women and three children living together in a giant lower duplex in a leafy neighborhood in Montreal. It was the 70s, which pretty much explains it. The women were political old school, Birkenstocked hairy legged lesbians, who made a reality of the dream of cheap rent, shared household duties and communal children. For the record, hands down the most awesome way to grow up, hence my lottery fantasy of buying a 4 plex and filling it with unicorns and rainbows.

Eight people in an apartment, no matter how sprawling, make mess. Five people cleaning makes for varied results, mostly averaging on the slightly untidy, but passable . The thing is, no one person cleaned and no one showed me how to. The kids cleaned their room, which was a giant finished basement that we all shared. The mums would come down every Saturday and pile ALL the crap in the room in the middle of the floor and tell us, what ever is still in the middle of the floor in a couple of hours, ends up in the garbage. It was the 70s, so we believed them. Panicked cleaning ensued, which was mostly comprised of shoving things in to play chests and under beds out of sight.

In later years after we had moved into our own house with just my mother and her lover, we did have some chores. I did dishes, laundry and cat box. My mother was an English professor. She was about as tidy as you can expect from an old beatnick intellectual. There were dusty books piled in corners, and couches that had never been vacuumed behind. Surfaces stacked with old mail, exams and papers. Cat hair. Cleaning was not that high on the list and we lived in comfortable disarray.

I went to a fancy private school and when I would visit my friends houses with their clean surfaces and white rugs and I would feel shame. I knew that my house did not stack up. I was always muttering apologies about the state of my place, which after watching Hoarders on TLC, has made me realize was not all that bad. A little dusty, and you might not want to look under or behind things, but it was not shamefully dirty. Yet I felt it. Deep inner personal shame. Like my soul was unclean. I know these friends had housekeepers and stay -at-home moms. Housewives as they were call back then. Wives of houses. Is stay-at-home mom somehow a better term? I could go into a whole diatribe about the cult of child rearing versus husband rearing in the post feminist era, but that would be a digression purely for my own amusement.

All this to say, the shame has stuck. Any friend of mine knows, that I am in a constant state of apology for my dust bunnied hallway and my mountain of unfolded laundry. I manage the dishes, the actual washing of dirty clothes and cat box mining for poo nuggets, but please don't look in my closet, or the pantry or the penicillin research project in my fridge's fruit drawer.

My favorite friends to visit are the ones who are messy too. If their house smells a little of cat urine and there is several months of unopened mail at the door, I feel instantly transported. Transported to my youth and happy days on the the dyke farm, where mild chaos meant home. My shame melts away and I happily wash out a dusty mug to drink tea without coasters and eat cookies on their couches. I know that this person will understand me, not judge me and perhaps even be experiencing the same feeling.. relief.

The other day I went into my daughter's room, which was a disaster of the proportions only producible by a seven year old. I said to her.. I am putting everything in the middle of the floor, and when i come back whatever is left there will be thrown out. I have decided not to look in her closet. Her shame is growing in there.

ˌənriˈkwītid/

un·re·quit·ed/ˌənriˈkwītid/
adj. Not reciprocated or returned in kind

Of course my day started with a conversation about homosexual rabbis. I was on the mountain with a recently widowed member of my bereavement support group and we somehow got on the topic of gay. Those who know me know that a conversation about the sexuality of a rebbe is pretty much par for the course.

The woman i was talking to was the kind of woman that is rarely bred anymore . Composed and charming, she has done good works all her life. A loving wife and mother and centre of the family. Financially comfortable, but not ostentatious. She has grace. Katherine Hepburn. She was the woman who found her husband of 40 years dying on her kitchen floor a few months ago. She was the woman who had to learn how to cry. And she is alright with rabbis having sex with whatever gender they choose.

She had seen a movie she said, where a Lubavitch young man moved into another man's house. They fell in love, but it was unrequited, because the ultra orthodox could not be gay. She said it ended badly. She felt it was so sad that a person could be forbidden love in this way. People should not be denied love she said.

It made me think about unrequited love. Exquisite, obsessive and heart wrenching pain. Pain of loving and it not being returned. Yearning. It is not just romantic love that can be unrequited. It can be for parents, for best friends, for siblings and for fantasies. That is the thing, it is idealized love.

Because it is not returned, your imagination grows it into the most perfect love, the love that will stop the ache, the love that will fill your soul. No wonder it hurts. It hurts because you create exactly what you think you need, and then tell yourself you can never have it. If it was returned would it match up? Would it pale and be a disappointment? Would the Lubavitch men turn into an old gay couple, getting on each other's nerves and farting in each other's beds? Is that love worth killing yourself over?

It is the impossibility of unrequited that makes it so all consuming. Its size is infinite. Unreconcilable. The more impossible, the stronger it is.

Then I thought about my widow. And then I thought about grief. I though about losing your partner to death and remembering them as beautiful and perfect. And then it made sense to me. unrequited love.