on a red bookshelf nightstand
a few nights before we were to move into a home with central air
i woke in a humidity daze
and noticed my husband’s pocketknife
resting peacefully beside his USB drive
Leave it to Lily to get me in on another reading challenge when I’m already up to my eyeballs in delicious lit. However, she deserves a HUGE pat on the back for taking this subject at all, and that demands my attention and participation. And… well… alright, alright, it’s timely and I need to read these.
Mental Illness. It’s not an easy subject. It’s not an easy life. Very frankly, I’m scared of going crazy. I’m a survivor of suicide. I lost my mother. And I sit in an office, on a couch, each week and pour out my heart over it. That and the fact that my family was completely unable to handle the topic of mental illness. They chose blame to hide their guilt and grief, pointing the finger at a scapegoat. Me.
So, you can see why I feel this topic is of great importance. Lily asks us to read four books, one on each of four different mental illnesses. For myself and my own issues and growth and journey, I’ve chosen to focus mainly on memoirs of schizophrenics and the topic of suicide.
Because I was not able to help my mom, there’s a real part of me that doesn’t want to read tales of those who have come back from the brink and been cured. But if I can get an inkling of understanding…
Neither do I look forward to hearing the siren call of suicide in someone’s head. The allure. I want to run. Hide. Pick up another Brandon Sanderson and lose myself in it. But I do that already. If I don’t face this, if my emotions can’t mature, I’ll never get off that couch.
Can ya tell how much I’m looking forward to this?!
The Reading Challenge is called Understand my Sorrow, and here are my books:
The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
ps. I’ve picked more than required because a) I need it and b) they don’t all appear to be at my library so I’ll have to see which ones I can find.
Ding dong!
The doorbell rang unexpectedly for the first time on Sunday.
From our vantage in the kitchen, the husband and I could see two short-haired shadows on the other side of the door. We shouted for our son to come upstairs as we said hello and breathed an inner sigh of relief that the mountain had come to Mohammed. So far, we’d seen few children in the neighborhood, but suspected – rightly as was now evident – that they were playing hide and seek with us.
“Hello, how are you?” we greet two young boys, our first official visitors. “Seely will be here in a sec…”
(let’s play the game where I call my kids Seely and Temperance. Got the 5th season of Bones on the brain.)
As they finish removing their bicycle helmets – what good boys! – they manage to give me the shock of my life…
“We were looking for Temperance.”
ps. It all ended well in a soccer game at the local park. Seely went with.
Once upon a time, we moved into a townhouse and found it was already inhabited. Moo!
Two and a half years later, last month by current reckoning, we moved away from that townhouse, having never evacuated the previous bovine residents. I made this drawing because I found I would kind of miss them.
We lost our backpack. And it had the bathing suits and beach towels.
It was our usual summer routine. No car for the day meant a trip on the city bus, just the three of us, to feel the heartbeat, hear the sounds, know what it is to be part of something larger. First stop: library, second stop: the beach.
But somewhere between home and the library, we lost track of one of our backpacks. We were sad and panicked and outright bummed, but searched with vigor and… yes, desperation.
The search was extensive. We left no aisle unturned, though not literally. Imagine the poor librarian and her face if we had done that?! We combed the fiction and nonfiction, audio books, movies, graphic novels, everywhere. But in vain. We stopped on the second floor only hoping to vent the sadness that weighed our exhausted feet and hearts.
From that vantage you can see out the front windows, That day, they were our salvation. For we spied our beloved from afar. It sat, alone and untouched just outside on the blue bus bench. All was restored, all was well, time for the beach… except for the “but” lingering on the other side of the bench: a neighbour, nefarious and unknown.
He was reading a book. Seemingly harmless and yet we raced as if at any moment tranquility would turn into tempest and our arrival would be too late. Our lives depended on it!
There was little need. Backpack in hand and safe once again, the stranger was kind and endearing. The adrenaline racing in our bloodstream suddenly useless, and the day went on, emergency forgotten with the kindness of strangers.
Later we sat on a hillside curb. Apparently being a part of something larger means waiting. To pass the time, I imparted the wisdom of automobiles. It is always a strange hour when you find it quite unusually necessary to teach your children something so mundane that you never even realized it required teaching. How do you tell a Ford from a Toyota? My son was trying to turn the punch buggy game of spying Volkswagon Beetles into a punch Kia game because that is the car that we drive. Only he thought EVERY car was like ours. Ahhhh, no, not exactly, dear one. And so began their lesson of which car is which… Honda, Ford, Dodge, Toyota, Ford, Kia…
Between bus stops we air-conditioned ourselves out at Fabricland and bought new patches for the kids’ school backpacks. They, patches not backpacks, are the only thing I enjoy collecting simply for the joy of doing so. And I’m passing on the silliness. They get a new patch each year. I sew them on. And when a new backpack is required, we remove, place and sew again. How I love my backpack patches and theirs. My green university backpack is like my life story in patches.
Last year our acquisitions were found at the comic book convention – Buffy for me, Super Mario raccoon style for the boy and Care Bears four in a row for my girl. The selection wasn’t nearly as good at the fabric shop this day, but she found a teddy bear patch that reminded her of the bear she sleeps with every night – so that she always has her bear near – and he found a frog with bugged-out eyes holding a book – because he looks a little silly like my son acts.
Tim Horton’s ended up another minature detour. Not that surprising, I know. We had to wait for the appointment that was scheduled between the fun and a double double with donuts can’t be beat for re-fueling. We sat down. And the kids had their cinnamon rolls warmed up.
“ planted morning glory seeds along the back fence - can't wait to see the wall of green! 1 week ago
Robyn: "Save another mom some trouble? Mission accomplished! We are having a Jedi Training birthday party for my son. The one thing he keeps asking us to do is a scavenger hunt….how? we keep asking ourselves. This..." (read)
cecilia: "just omit the meat from your bean meals, like meatless chilli and spaghetti. we love lentils here, lentil soup, lentil curry over rice… I’ll put some more thought into this." (read)
Kalanna: "Amazing, eh?! I’m going to have to read up on what to do with them next. hehe But it is lovely to have a bouquet of lavender on my kitchen table in late November. They kept blooming!" (read)
