River

The river here is encased in concrete. At first I thought it was just the river near the mills but it's not. It's the whole thing all the way through town and into the next town. The result is, Adams and North Adams don't suffer from flooding. There's just no way the river can get out of the chute.

But it feels odd. It makes me feel like I want to take a sledgehammer and hammer it free.

Pity for deadly things - a common enough flaw and right now, certainly one I am at risk of adopting.

Stories to tell that can't be told. Always the hardest thing.

Morning

Still raining in Massachusetts. Looks like it might be another of those summers like the first time I visited when it just doesn't stop raining at all. Cold all the time too.

He asked me this morning, if I was homesick. Lord, how I hate questions like that. They never mean what they ask. I know I'm difficult, I wake up alert and he hasn't seen the half of it -

Sometimes I really do think I am just way too much of everything for anyone, ever.

Supper

Here I am in a small town in Massachusetts. Seems like it will never stop raining. Doesn't bother me as it would in Victoria or Ottawa, probably because I'm not alone.

There's been very little work done on family dynamics as they apply to the eldest daughter in a dysfunctional family. Many of us, it seems to me, end up alone. There's a certain amount of unspoken pressure to take on the role of family matriarch and carry the load.

It's a tradition in my family, one I've bucked and not entirely successfully.

Arriving here was a shock, now settling in for a while, I'm noticing things about myself I never noticed before; some of them pretty alarming.

I've been groomed to be alone and to be the adjunct member of a family circle, trained to help, to be the extra maternal figure who steps in with the kids but who has no real life of her own. Ok, I'm a writer, mostly, and I do have my own identity but that identity is a little hollowed out when I'm by myself and by myself is what I've been for a long time now. (with obvious and prolonged breaks to take on mostly sacrificial roles with men)

Now I'm here. Things are different. This man is self-sufficient and I have work to do so I get down to doing it but at the same time I find myself drawn to the kitchen to cook.

There's a chicken in the oven, rubbed with garlic and butter, stuffed with millet,onions and garlic, flavored with unfamiliar spices and as soon as the tastes started coming together, side dishes started suggesting themselves; mashed potatoes, of course because that's what one eats with roast chicken but there are apples in balsamic vinegar in the oven too - to echo the french idea of heaven and earth, there's a small, simple green salad in the offing - all it needs is a bottle of dry, white wine and you have an actual meal - one I would order in a restaurant. Way too much food and too elaborate for a Tuesday.

But I'm a different person here. I wake up at 5:30 and write for an hour or more before getting on with the day and there is this other person....

I hardly know what to make of it but one thing I do know - we're not in maiden Aunt territory anymore.

Privacy and Life

Where does one end and the other begin?

There is someone new in my life. He takes up a pretty big space in my thoughts. It's hard to write around him but he is much more private than I am and wishes to maintain it.

In the past that has meant I have not written. It cannot mean that anymore.

Being involved with a writer means, to a certain extent, living with some public edge. It's like a live/work space. Sure there are private areas but there is overlap. Fact is, I write about intimate, domestic things here and for the moment anyway, my intimate domestic situation has changed.

In Ottawa, I'm alone. I live in my little space, do my little work and carry on. It was getting to the point where it was a little crazy making. Here was this person, 6 hours away, I could talk to him, sure, but it's not the same as spending time together, seeing if you're compatible in day to day life.

So I went to him.

He's got his own stuff going on. But it's not the same as my stuff. Anyway, I need to be out of the closet about this - about him, cause at the moment, he's at the center of my life. I'm at his house and it will be that way for a month, more or less.

Chances are good, the next few entries will be about things I notice in resuming the day to day routine of a relationship.

This morning I told him he was "my mother's revenge." It's true. He reminds me, gently and kindly, to do all the things my mother reminds me to do. Put the iron pills where you'll remember to take them, where you'll see them every day, make lists, put the keys on a hook by the door - all that stuff. And because it's coming from him and not from my mother, I really can't roll my eyes and sigh and say, "whatever." I have to give it space and respect and nine times out of ten, he's right.

My mother already loves him and they've never even met.

Now if I could only figure out how to get enough sleep.

Morning

The sun woke up and so did I.

Getting my bearings in a new place means inviting light in, almost invariably, and this is no different. Here I am in a new place, trying to maintain someone else's privacy and, if anything, even more aware of the need and the value of being as true to myself and as honest on the page as possible.

After all, if I can't do it in this limited forum then what chance does my poetry have? It suffered so much for that while I was in another relationship - won't go there again.

It is just after 6:00 am. I've made a little spot in the wide, brick sill of one of these windows so I can sit and write and look out at the river, such as it is.

The river here has been lined in concrete, walls raised, 400 per cent over its natural walls, it is a wide, shallow basin, like a drain for the water of the river that really should be touching the soil. But it still does make that lovely sound.

It's interesting to me how two people can be so dissimilar and yet so complimentary. I'm very glad to be here, there's lots to do, lots that needs my doing it.

In all likelihood, I should leave it at that for now and go back to bed for a while which is what I'll do.

Then Again....

In my last entry, I said if an invoice or two didn't come through, I would have to cancel my plans.

Well. I decided to examine my premise and change that instead.

This morning I got on a train and went away.

Tonight, I am somewhere else, and very glad of it.

What I learned in doing this is pretty simple; nothing is contingent on anything else until you decide it is.

And even then, you can change your mind if you want to.

More later.

Climbing Out

Dark day, passed.

If anyone reading this has a sense of narrative suspense, here's something I'm doing right now.

I'm invited to visit Massachusetts this summer. Since my work is rooted in the computer, that's pretty easy for me to do. Provided, that is, my employers pay me on time. This year they've found it nearly impossible to do that. I've felt shame about that and I know a lot of other freelancers/independent consultants take that shame on themselves too. In the last few days I've realized, this is not my fault.

I've kept my word, I've delivered and I've kept my rates low and my deadlines incredibly flexible. People seem to think that means they're more important to me than - well, more important to me than me.

This is where that ends.

On Saturday, May 14, the lodge at Mt. Greylock is opening for the season. Someone I care about has suggested we go. They will be having a number of traditional Mohawk activities, a blessing, storytelling, dancing and I'd like to be there. I have Mohawk roots and I've never seen a Mohawk ceremony despite having been to numerous sweatlodges, pipe ceremonies, blessings and even a potlatch.

If two overdue payments don't come in today. I can't go.

Money has always bothered me. I am ashamed of the need for it, I'm uncomfortable with it, I don't value it. It's done too much damage in my life to have any place of honor with me. But the fact is, we all need it and it's past time I came to terms with that reality.

My ability to do what I need to do in the time I need to do it depends on my ability to be confrontational over the next 24 hours about money.

I can hardly describe what utter revulsion and fury I feel at that fact.

We all have these issues, I think. The things we would rather die than deal with. But the problem is, we can choose to avoid them and we don't die - that's not the choice. We choose to avoid them and they press closer, they begin to rule our lives, they stay with us and like a guard in a basketball game, they block us from doing the things we need, want and deserve to do.

So here's the choice - play hard against that guard, confront him and shove him back where he belongs, or lose.

I'll keep you posted.

Cycles

It's my dark day.

For the most part, women will not tell you this. In fact, we usually keep it to ourselves. Still, every woman I know, if you ask them, will admit there is one day at the end of the monthly cycle where nothing is ok. It's odd because people refer to PMS as a moody time and there is that, yes. Hormonal cocktails are potent stuff and the week leading into the whole event can be pretty stormy but it's nothing compared to the dark day at the end.

On the dark day you can't do yoga. You discuss important things with people you love at your peril. You can't be considerate. You have a messy house. As far as you're concerned, nothing will ever work out and more often than not, indifference is the most enthusiasm you can muster for anything. All your dreams are swirling around the drain, your life is ebbing away - nothing works and never has and never will.

If you've given birth, the dark day is very much like a diluted version of the transition stage of labor - it stretches out for a whole day and feels like it will be there forever. It's bleak. Nobody can change it. Right?

On my dark day, I can't write and yet must write. I resent everything.

My way of coping with it is to avoid people and try to get a lot done. But my nature is to be expressive. It's a quagmire, it's a mess. It's dark.

This morning I listened to two women arguing about whether the word "slut" could ever be reclaimed.

On the one hand, other, worse words, have been reclaimed and rebranded (like words in gangsta rap music) and I think, slut is a lot easier and more fun to reclaim than many other words. It also carries a smack of restoring sex and sexuality to the positive spectrum and I am all for that. On the other hand, as this much older and more staid academic argued, women are the only group of oppressed people who must be intimate with their oppressors.

I think I disagree with that, and not only because lesbianism is an option.

The urge to objectify, dismiss or oppress is not rooted in group identity, it is a personal impulse. When someone, male or female, tries to tie me down, possess me or make me feel terrible about my appearance, my sexuality, my expression of gender or just my somewhat unorthodox lifestyle choices, they're not doing it because they're male or female or from one ethnicity or another. They're not doing it because I have to be intimate with them. They're doing it because they are personally threatened by me.

Women have been as possessive over me as men and not (that I know of) for sexual reasons. Women have tried to exert the same levels of control as men and have acted out of jealousy as much as men. Some men have been free of these traits but you know, if I'm honest? In my own life, I've experienced more judgement, more jealousy and more possessive behaviors from the women in my life than the men - to the point where I have avoided most close associations with women. (which was wrong of me because those women were representing themselves, not women in general.)

People don't do anything as a group. We all act as individuals and we act from impulses that protect, benefit or even damage us personally - not as a flock of sheep.

Countries are made up of people and governed by individuals with individual agendas and physical realities that influence their emotional states. Be wary of an insecure leader, he'll be a tyrant and his political party has nothing whatever to do with it.

So today, I am feeling discouraged and frustrated. I'm listening to women argue on the radio and staring down the barrel of a Conservative majority that has cut funding to most women's organizations while they were still a minority and had to get those cuts past a supposedly compassionate opposition. I'm listening to a woman journalist talking about the prevalence of sexual assault while working as foreign correspondents. I'm realizing we haven't come a very long way at all, Baby.

I'm feeling trapped and smothered and it has nothing to do with the word "slut." The people who make my life hard are probably just like the people who make your life hard. They're just like the people who perpetuate sexual assaults or the insult of the word "slut." They're individuals acting on individual impulses and infusing their actions with individual meanings, many of which have little or nothing to do with any group and everything to do with their interior drama. And the same is true for the people who do this stuff to you - I guarantee it. They just use the social-communal stuff as an excuse. It's a comfortable place to rest their neurosis.

And - we are all held hostage to one degree or another by these things. I think the secret is to know it, even when you don't feel it (and today I certainly don't) even when you don't believe it, you have to tell yourself; "My actions and reactions originate inside me." You have to remind yourself of that and hang on to it until you can believe it because it's the truth.

When my body progresses past this stage, I'll start seeing hope again, I'll be grateful and happy and write about better things but this is a part of life. It's a part of life for most, maybe all women - and I want to acknowledge it.

Especially since it's possible that I will feel as though I have accomplished absolutely nothing else for the day.

Cycles are a bitch.
It's hard to be human if you want to do it consciously.

Candor

Suddenly, in the last few days, people have started paying attention to this little blog.

Up until now, except for the six of you, I assumed it was going completely unnoticed. I have used this blog as a diary, a place to rant, a place to think - generally speaking I think of it as singing scales into a cave. It's an exercise that benefits me by the practice because it goes somewhere but it hasn't felt real.

So I apologize to the six who have followed it and introduce myself anew to those who have just found it.

My last entry mentioned a lot of uncertainty around work - all of that turned out to be a coincidence. The interwebs were acting up and everything went down at once. That very same night I was taken to dinner by that very same employer and asked to recommit.

Things change every day. I think that is true for everyone.

So the question becomes, how does one write and reach down into that deep well of honesty that is supposed to make the work strong and resonant and good?

I am trying to bring some music, however plodding, to the mundane details of life in this blog. I am trying to dig up as much honesty as I can. I am trying to be brave enough about it to understand I am not heroic or even sensible all the time. Who is?

Spring has started to edge its way into the city. The trees are netted with a transparent haze of green, in a week, there will be leaves but not yet. The reason I called this blog ice lolly is way back in the first entry if you want to know. It has a lot to do with the weather and a little to do with humor.

There are some new realities that will doubtless be coming up in this blog - the Conservative majority government is one, my ambivalence about Ottawa is another. Travel does seem to be a constant theme and I do not expect that to change much. Without a doubt, the people in my life will turn up from time to time, how can they not? But I should say, the new guy, he's asked for some discretion and so I will try to comply with that request where I can.

For the most part this blog is about the world reflected through an ordinary life in an ordinary place by an ordinary woman. Maybe it's like your life. Maybe there are some differences. Please feel free to comment on anything you wish. I always do.