Welcome To Tweenland

Two weeks ago, I won a subscription to Tweenland! I have never been so popular; never knew 58 texts could arrive in five minutes. That’s 5.17 texts a second. 

Emojis, photos, videos, shorthand, it was a potpourri of communication for all learning styles. 

“Uhhh, Miss C, why do I suddenly have a million texts?” 

She innocently picked her head off the couch. “Oh, I gave my friends your phone number.” 

            “58 messages.” I held up my phone. “I have 58 messages.”

            “Ooh, can I see?” Miss C leaned across and took my phone. 

Cue the slow claps. 

Nicely played youngest one, nicely played. 

When I suggested she give her friends our phone number, I thought ‘our’ phone number was the landline. 

Silly Mama, landlines are for telemarketers and scammers.

How fast technology changes. 

How quickly the young ‘uns reverted to their grandparents’ days of party lines. 

“You’re only getting that many messages because there are eight people on one chat and six on the other.” 

Thank goodness for the ‘mute’ button. 

This morning, iMessage is sitting at 173 unread texts. Yes, you read that right. Never mind that I got Miss C to clear the phone, my phone, at 5:30 last night. Twelve hours, 173 texts and none of them are for me.

Welcome to Tweenland. 

But you have two teenagers already, you say. Shouldn’t you have known better?

There were rumours, cautionary tales from the crypt of motherhood; mothers who’d willingly given out their numbers and suffered the same fate, but no, Miss Q and Miss S at twelve weren’t this enterprising and those were other mothers.

Sure, there were fainting couch moments, when they would melodramatically stagger into the living room, back of their hand to forehead declaring, “I can’t talk to my friends.” 

But they quickly gave up the ghost, preferring to emailing friends through Google Classroom over using our landline. Even though “no one checks their Google Classroom email,” insert eyeroll emoji.

A mere seven years ago I didn’t have a secondary phone. Even with kids underfoot, I didn’t need it. When I was out no one could find me, no one needed to know what I did. 

And now I live like I’m on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the television in the bathtub and phone in the car part at least.

My dreams of roaming the world untethered have vaporised.  

I’m sure my parents are having a good chortle. In 1991, when I was thirteen, they gave me my own phone line for Christmas: a section of telephone cord wrapped with yarn and a note congratulating me on breaking them. 

What a glorious gift: freedom to chitchat long into the night, to call boys and hang up. 

It was a life lesson: all that time wasted, hoping garçons would return the favour. Bah.

Like the chorus of our grad song by 10,000 Maniacs predicted, but now in past tense: those were days, but also, these are days. 

Now that Miss C’s reaping the rewards of a mother who’s gone soft in her old age, will she get an all-hours access pass to my phone, or her own phone eight months early? 

Ah, no. In our family, it’s wait until grade eight and your thirteenth birthday. 

Neither she, nor the hundreds of texts from Tweenland are smoking out this bear.

Dear Stealthy One

It was a dark and stormy Christmas night. 

Outside, the wind threatened to carry the lawn décor across the island, tree branches bowed, and bursts of rain pattered at the windows.

Inside, four humans stumbled to bed, satiated by the generosity and thoughtfulness of the season.

Alone at last, I sank into the living room recliner, scrolling through joyful moments and reflecting on how blessed we were for everyone’s health and ability to get along. As I basked in the warmth of this slice of goodness in what can be a very dark world, my peace was interrupted by the sound of our front gate clicking shut.

On high alert, I listened, watching for shadows. 

“Our gate just closed,” I called to my husband. 

To my horror, he strode to the front door and without hesitation flung it open.

“No one’s here,” he announced. “But there is something.” 

Trusting that he wasn’t getting chummy with an axe murderer, I joined him in the doorway.

A black box wrapped in a ribbon sat at our doorstep. 

Decades of consuming mysteries: Scooby-Doo, Nancy Drew, Hunter, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., culminated to this moment and my brain jumped directly to: BOMB! with Keith Morrison’s voice narrating, “They didn’t have any enemies, or did they?”

Did any of you leave a suitcase on our doorstep? Serious question because I’m about to call the non-emergency line… I typed to the family group chat whilst commanding my husband to open it on the balcony, not inside. 

“One of us has to stay alive for the children,” I said, placing the brick fireplace between us as he walked past holding the black box.

If my boxer clad husband, standing in the rain, with a headlamp strapped to his forehead, possibly sacrificing himself isn’t true love, I don’t know what is. 

“It’s a typewriter,” he announced.

“A typewriter?” 

“A typewriter.”

Was this a sign from the Christmas elves that I needed to publish those novels collecting dust on my computer for once and for all?

Did you perchance leave an old typewriter on our doorstep? I typed to my top three suspects. 

A conversation I’d had with someone about my enjoyment of typewriters, was a familiar wisp floating just out of reach of immediate recall. 

Of course, Miss Q gleefully surmised it was someone doing exactly what I like to do: leave weird things on people’s doorsteps. 

Just deserts!

By light of day, I have suspects but no clarity. The ribbon used to wrap the gift hasn’t appeared in social media feeds, the keys of the typewriter aren’t marked to spell out a name, and no one has ‘fessed up. Maybe if I had dusting powder, an interrogation spotlight or a ring cam…

This typewriter that arrived on our doorstep one dark and stormy Christmas night is not only a fantastic gift physically, but mystery and story wise, it has become a truly marvellous experience.

So, THANK YOU for this sprinkling of Christmas magic, Stealthy One. Not knowing who you are is adding to the enchantment. Please don’t ever change your kind ways.

The In-Between

This Hallowe’en I decided to establish our home as the neighbourhood’s full-sized can of pop house.

Yes, that’s right Kids, tell all your friends. This house gives out cans of soda that take up precious cargo space in designer buckets, give a great arm workout as you haul it from door-to-door and, potentially explode if you forget the secret tap before opening. Trick or treat.

Welcome to the in-between: the space linking the golden age of childhood to young adulthood, where our world is both non-stop, and becoming quiet, allowing my brain to concoct such follies. 

A survey of what the teenaged friends were doing on the hallowed evening found that Roman Candle wars were out and handing out candy at home was in. 

This didn’t excite any of my cherubs.

“Wait until you’re all nineteen,” I heard my mouth say before my brain could edit.

Like the ghost of Hallowe’ens past, I regaled my trapped-in-the-car off-spring with yet another tale from their mother’s crypt. 

We traveled back in time to the late nineties, to a night when twenty-year-old me, and my friends floated into Subway at 2am, dressed like witches, and told the singular employee behind the counter that I too was a sandwich artist, had food safe, and could help him tame the line-up of hungry revellers that stretched out his glass door. 

Lucky for both him and me, who was channeling Paper Moon, I traveled with my own prongs, and proceeded to delight my audience by using my Lee Press-On witch nails to spearfish what they wished: meatballs from their saucy swamp. 

Oddly I was never paid for my work…

In the in-between, my girlies at 12, 14 and 16 are equal distance from their own Hallowe’en horror health code violations, and orange and black day at elementary school.

Here in the in-between two-thirds of my children trick-or-treated, though one-third was on the fence until the last minute.

None of the schools sent notes home demanding the candy stay at home.

The bowls of collected candy still look full. 

Things are getting easier.

When leaving the house, we are no longer stalled by individual style choices, be that the wrong shoes or need for partial nudity on a random Tuesday. 

Everyone continues to move forward, unassisted, if I leave the pack to grab forgotten objects. 

There are three voices now calling out, “Shotgun!” 

In the in-between, the not-so-littles are both independent and dependent. My husband and I can be called upon for homework help or ignored. We have dropped into supporting roles; lovable tv characters who add colour and depth but can be written out at a moment’s notice. (Definitely not!)

As we move from the golden age of childhood into the teenaged twilight zone, there’s a hush seeping into my life like fog rolling in off the ocean.

I sat alone at the Eras movie, eating licorice, while my girls danced and sang up front. 

I don’t have to stay at their activities. 

They go to the mall without me. 

I miss the wrangling, the magic of a snack, the ache in my brain as I try to figure out why my small human is upset, but good news! Here in the in-between all those parenting moments still exist. 

However, without the constant pawing, my body and mind have started to stretch as though I’m waking from a long winter’s slumber. While I’m not the same carefree witch that I was in 1997 (Watch it…) there’s still time to give the revellers what they want. And where do I start? With full-sized cans of pop, of course.

“The Mother” Is she singing or yawning? We’ll never know!

The Last Week

¹Winds in the east, mist comin’ in

Like somethin’ is brewin’ and ‘bout to begin.

Can’t put me finger on what lies in store.

But I feel what’s to happen all happened before…

This is our twelfth back to school season, fourteenth if you count the two years of preschool. In a week, Miss Q will start grade eleven, Miss S grade nine (cue Barenaked Ladies) and Miss C grade seven. 

You’d think after fourteen years, the winds blowing in this new school year would be a breeze, but our sails still occasionally luff as nerves of the unknown cross our bow. 

Meanwhile, my wall calendar is under assault as appointments booked long ago begin to conflict with fall activities, and our bank account creaks and moans under the weight of running shoes and yet to be announced but always lurking start-up costs.

Don’t worry, we’ll find our sea legs and ride like Rose and Jack on the bow of the Titanic, er, like Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, Farley Mowatt and The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, oh never mind, I just think our family is ready to be busy and have routine again, okay?

This past year has felt like a rebuilding one; a much-needed breath before we descend into the final years of public school (six left) and thus, we’ve had a quiet summer with shorter than usual road trips and closer to home adventures. 

While this summer of small might sound like a you go girl moment, it has been an exercise in balancing screens with creative time, not bugging everyone in the house because you’re bored (sisters) and don’t feel guilty because someone says they’re bored (me).

Does anyone know how many times I need to utter, “Boredom breeds creativity,” until it becomes one of those trendy core memories for my kids that everyone’s TikToking about?

But truly, it’s been a good summer. Relaxing, full of sugar and capped off with a rare thunderstorm that literally, not figuratively, shook our house to its foundation yesterday.

Do I fret over the gloomy mum inducing guilt statement that says we only have 18 summers with our children? 

Sure, when I remember my dream of traveling to 195 countries, sailing across the seven seas, and sampling all 31 flavours at the gone but not forgotten Baskin ‘n Robbins with them. 

And never, when I remember that Jane Goodall’s mum followed her into the jungle when she was 26 and I’m 46, and still text my mum on a regular basis. So, as long as my husband and I heed Captain Von Trapp’s advice and allow our blossoms of snow to bloom and grow we’ll be f-i-n-e fine. Added bonus: they’ll want to traverse mountains with us. (Don’t worry, our lifeguard whistles are officially retired.)

This week as we squeeze the last grains of sand from summer vacation’s hourglass, we can feel the 

Winds to the east, mist comin’ in,

Like somethin’ is brewin’ and ‘bout to begin.

Soon I’ll be shuttlin’ kids from there to here,

And dinner will be at midnight for the rest of the year…

1. Chim Chim Cher-ee (East Wind) by Alexandros Martinegkos. Also, apologies, Mr. Martinegkos.

A lesson in microwaving marshmallows.

Okay, Barbie.

When I was in grade eight, my best friend and I went to Steel Magnolias. Turns out the crescendo of adult emotion was completely lost to my teenaged brain, and I was the only one in the theatre not weeping at the end.

Fast forward thirty years: I’m in a dark theatre, discreetly and not so discreetly jabbing at the water leaking from my eyeballs whilst my children: two teens and a tween, sit oblivious to the crescendo of adult emotions around them. 

Promise me you’ll watch this movie again in thirty years, I implored my cherubs as we walked outside.

Were we watching a story about a daughter dying? No. A bleeding armadillo cake? A woman named Weezer? A group of women lifting each other up in the face of tragedy? No, er, maybe? Sort of? But no. We are not. We were watching Barbie. Yes, you read that right: Barbie. 

I know I don’t get out much, but this movie might be one of the best movies I’ve seen, and I’m not just typing this because my red-circled Sears Christmas Wish Book pleas for a Barbie Dreamhouse went unanswered. 

I thought I was going to a movie to satisfy my eleven-year-old’s deepest Monday, er, summer wish. 

I thought I was dragging my teens to a movie to remind them who they were. (Cue Lion King.) 

I thought I was going to a movie for my inner child whose mum didn’t believe Barbie was a good role model.

I was so very wrong. 

To be fair to my mum, in the 80s, Barbie’s perfect 10 bod and reputation fit better with the plethora of thonged leotards bouncing in workout videos, diet soda wars and Madonna’s cone bra. My age-appropriate childhood was filled with Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, and Cabbage Patch Kids. I wasn’t left wanting… except the Christmas my next-door neighbour got a Brooke Shields doll, and two friends down the street got matching 10-speeds with ram handlebars.

To this green-eyed monster, Barbie was never about unhealthy dimensions. She was about all the cool accessories, and attempting to style her long hair in something other than a ponytail. A naked Barbie was super embarrassing; however, thirty years later as my daughters played, Barbie was almost never dressed. (Perhaps we should unpack that at another time.)

When my mum finally acquiesced and bought me (on two separate occasions) two of the least offensive Barbies she could find: Great Shape Barbie who wore a full turquoise jumpsuit, rainbow striped leg warmers, matching scarf; and one I called Imposter Barbie, because she was basic-basic, I allowed my older male cousin to cut their hair. 

Clearly Barbie wasn’t the problem: I couldn’t handle the power of ownership. 

So, why was the movie so gosh-darn good? 

Was it the amusing cringe I suffered through as I wondered what the men in the theatre thought about the laughing and sniffling women around them? Did they get all the jokes? Then there was my subsequent guilt for cackling at their expense, and then realizing I shouldn’t feel guilty, but should have empathy and then felt guilty for not having empathy… annnnd down we spiral.

Was it the cynicism I felt towards Barbie’s clever marketing department who preyed upon my nostalgia and my eleven-year-old’s wide eyes? 

Or was it heart-tugging juxtaposition frustration at Barbie for telling us we can be anyone and do anything, then hitting us with the line: We women stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they come. Sob. And, thank you, Mum. 

Nothing like self-reflection during a movie made by Mattel. 

Since I’m not getting kickbacks in the form of a pink jeep YJ, or Birkenstocks for this blog, go see the movie or not. Either way, I’ll be over here, thinking about this deep rooted, somewhat twisted relationship I never knew I had with one Barbra Millicent Roberts.

Shaving Magic Ken, who also doubles as Harry Potter and oddly resembles one of my brothers.

One Time, On A Band Trip.

If you want to witness the best of humanity, watch a high school band concert.

Sure, the elementary schoolers steal our hearts with earnest faces, and wide eyes that are either locked on their music teacher or scanning the sea of phones until they connect with their people.

And the middle schoolers might not wave from the risers anymore, but as their eyes bore into their music stands, their echo locaters are keenly in tune with our wherabouts.

But it’s the high schoolers, yes, the ones who forget to pick up paperwork about the concert and say they don’t care if you come or not, who are the true ambassadors of what is right with the world.

I spent last week touring Western Canada with Miss Q’s high school band. Due to a last-minute change in the size of the charter bus, I drove myself and two chaperones in my 2021 Mazda CX5.

While the Aries in me, pounced at adventure on the open road, the night before we left, like a true ram, I started questioning my life choices. Could I actually drive in real winter conditions? What was I doing driving two (almost) strangers into the mountains without a will?

Mercifully, the (almost) strangers and I ended up talking non-stop through 40 hours of driving without music, and still probably have stories to tell. As for the candles, chains, and matches in my trunk? The roads were clear.

Driving with a charter bus that held 51 students, the music director and two more chaperones was 2,600 kilometres of PURE JOY as I lived out my Smokey and the Bandit dreams.

Not that you asked, but I can confidently report bandmances are alive and well in the year 2023, just as they were in 1993.

I can also confidently report that the care this group of students had for each other was palpable.

When the hotel in Edmonton failed cleanliness, forcing some groups to switch rooms three times before finding an unsoiled bed, the ones who had rooms were offering water and jokes to their tired compadres.

When a student didn’t have enough bedding for his floor slumber, another room gave them their extras.

When a student bought 4 litres of ice cream because it was cheaper than buying a smaller ice cream bar, suddenly half the bus had ice cream courtesy of the savvy student.

Was it worth it? YES. School sanctioned trips, even ones to Edmonton during the thaw, are a safe place to let your child test their problem-solving skills, resilience, and natural consequences sans parental units. Ironic, I know, since five teens had parents present, but still:

Whatcha going to do when the ferry announces you’ve left your drumstick bag at the ferry terminal and you’re mid-strait?

How are you going to feed yourself if the bus driver doesn’t stop for lunch?

What happens if you get locked in a stairwell and don’t have your hotel key?

For the record: without my meddling, Miss Q learned that four juice boxes fit into her purse, and that she was the only one in her group who knew how to navigate downtown Banff.

As for the music?

At one school a young girl with giant glasses asked what the band sounded like if they all played together.

Using the oldest trick in the musical book entitled: how to make your band sound great, no matter how little they practice, the band director asked the band to pick a note using one, three or five on the B flat concert scale.

The bespectacled girl sat with her mouth open, then said, “That was beautiful,” when they’d finished.

Seriously, Kleenex, the band mums need your sponsorship.

What causes tears to pool, then plunge down our cheeks? Pride? Reflecting on the teens’ ability to play despite their internal and external struggles? Remembering their climb up the musical staff: from recorders and ukeleles to choirs, strings, and band? Realizing that we don’t have many years left to listen to this collective magic?

What I do know is the best in humanity is found in high school music. Social hierarchies vanish. Everyone is accepted, from pink ladies to jocks to freaks and geeks. They want to be there. They chose this. They may forget their ties, and grumble at the shoulder pads in their concert jackets, but there they are: playing for anyone who wants to listen. 

The New Driver

My life flashes before my eyes. Snap. I’m sixteen and sitting in my mum’s red four-door Honda Civic, at the university parking lot, timidly pressing my foot down on the clutch. Snap. I’m forty-five and my sixteen-year-old’s timidly pressing her foot down on the gas pedal of our grey Toyota Sienna in the same university parking lot. Snap. I have a sixteen-year-old? Snap. We have a minivan? Snap.

I hope Miss Q will see the minivan as an upgrade from the 8-seater maroon and silver Dodge Ram van: the other vehicle I learned to drive on. Buuuut we both probably wish we had learned (were) learning on a lamborghini.

Miss Q’s on high alert for banana peels and hidden thwomps as she accelerates confidently out of the corners like Mario from Mario Kart. Sorry, Andretti.

The 1990s cardboard ‘student driver’ sign that we used to fold to read ‘stunt driver’ has been replaced by a magnetic scarlet letter ‘L’.  The ‘L’ came with optional Velcro so it can be tacked inside a non-tinted back window inorder to avoid theft.

There’s a black market for ‘L’s in this town? Good thing we were given two: one to stick to our trunk, the other to pay for driving school.

On Miss Q’s actual birthday, we went down to the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) where I paid $15 so she could take the forty-five minute/ 50 question knowledge test. She answered 43 questions correctly in ten minutes, and off she went to a sight test, and official photograph, while I paid 10 more dollars for the license. Yellow paper in hand, we left. Welcome to driving.

Can we pause to examine how permissive ICBC is with your child’s visions of freedom-sixteen? Sure, there are rules like no electronics, and no driving betwix midnight and 5am, but after that? ICBC’s the beret wearing, thin cigarette smoking, cool cat, basking in the sunshine, whilst us haggard strays circle our teens’ outstretched paws suspiciously, wondering if dropping the keys will bite us in the derriere.

Sure, there are more barriers to getting your license for Miss Q than there were for, say, her grandfather, my dad, who in 1962 turned 16 and got a 90-day license that allowed him to cruise his neighbourhood without parental guidance. After 90-days he got his real license, allowing him to drive to school in the morning, ski hill in the afternoon, and race for pink slips on the weekend. Go grease lighting.

Meanwhile in 2023, my learner can only drive with a supervisor (25+) and a passenger, which means one sister is always safe, taxi duty still belongs to me. Not that I was going to give it up. Listening to Miss C trying to coax me into the drive-thru line-up of her favourite coffee shop, and Miss S analyze colour choices for the new elastics that will wrap her braces, as we drive to the orthodontist are some of my favourite moments as a parent.

Of course, now I wonder if Miss S and Miss C should start reading the Learner’s Handbook to get a jump on things, or if my husband and I should take a page from our fathers and turn our driveway into an auto shop classroom; let the littles work on an old car. Except true free-time automotive tinkering seems to have skipped a generation.

Also, let’s be honest, the sisters are n-o-t daydreaming about cars, just as I didn’t dream about touring the city in a maroon and silver monstrosity with seats that folded into a bed… Or did I? Seriously, what were my parents thinking? Sixteen-year-old me is still mortified.

Snap. My life flashes before my eyes. I wave in solidarity as we pass my contemporaries being driven in lazy loops around the university by their teenaged drivers. Snap. My mum’s calmly telling me to ignore the other drivers as I’m stalled on a hill for a million minutes. Snap. My husband, Miss Q and I celebrate this milestone with ice cream. Snap. I have a husband? Snap.

Farewell Fall

This year our pumpkins were not carved. There I said it. They sat on our porch until mid-November, untarnished globes, hoping to be gutted. But I’m not gutted.

Not when this year’s pumpkin weekend arrived with a band fundraiser, a yeti birthday party, first in-law visit in two years, a window being installed into Miss Q’s lair, costumes still being fleshed out, and a writing contest deadline.

Don’t worry, I managed to buy three boxes of candy with ample weeks to spare. Hashtag priorities.

This year we had a Victorian ghost (Miss S), a woodland elf (Miss C), two window installers (my husband and father-in-law) and a grandma, my mother-in-law, not me. Sheesh! I was a duck. Quack. Also, internally, I was Tevye from Fiddler On The Roof as Miss Q chose a friend party over trick or treating with her family for the first time in her life. Sunrise, Sunset. Sniff.

Two months after my leap into greener work pastures, I realize how much family life I was trying to cram into the not-always spare cracks my former job granted me. True, he who is governed by money, my husband, forlornly flips the beads on his abacus, but we now have new things to talk about when he gets home and finds an eight-course meal and our children, washed and playing quietly.

Oh right, time. Remember the pumpkies?

The end of October was also Miss C’s 11^th birthday. Like her sisters before her, Miss C’s Hogwarts letter was lost, which means she has more time to curl up in her adult sized koala Oodie and watch Full House on repeat if she gets to the television first. Not hard to do when you have teenaged sisters.

She suprised us this year by joining band and strings at her middle school. True, this isn’t astonishing since we are basically one mullet and electric guitar short of rivaling Jesse and The Rippers. However, since the beginning of time, Miss C has been staunchly refusing, like mega Excalibur r-e-f-u-s-i-n-g to entertain even the granular idea that she might join strings and band in grade six.

And then in September she came home with the forms for band (flute) and strings (violin). I eyed the forms. “Really?”

“Yes,” she stated. “I will only join band only if I can play the flute.”

Cue Good King Wenceslas on flute and violin scales rising through our floorboards. Never question a Scorpio.

Now that the pumpkins are living their third lives as compost, and our oldest teen has a window from which to escape, I should hibernate like a proper mama bear with the dregs of the left-over Halloween candy, buuuut we all know December only has three days in it: December 1^st, 15^th and 25^th. The best news? I get to be present for all three, which clearly makes me the present. Merry Christmas.

September Starts

When I made the decision to stay part-time, to stop my upward momentum, flip turn off the glass ceiling and dive back down to my family, I wasn’t doing it to be on trend with former CEOs discovering sourdough starters or have a riches to rags story to monetized. Although…

No. I did it for love. For my family, because someone’s got to be there for the children, even though they’re 15, 13 and 10, and may never understand the depth of my husband’s and my commitment to their well being.

I’ll pause while you find the martyr music.

Did I like the work I was doing? Yes. I liked being in charge. I leapt at the opportunity to lead a world class swimming pool, with a million-dollar budget out of Covid.  It checked all this Aries’ boxes. The best part? The humans I worked with and around; I loved helping them.

But there was always a tug. A niggly thread threatening to unravel. The day I promised both the teacher and Miss C I’d meet them at the beach as a chaperone, and then the school bus passed me on its way back to the school, loaded with sundrenched grade fours. A meeting at work caused me to miss the trip completely.

As the months wore on, my phone and I deepened our love-hate for each other as it lit up before dawn, at parades, during mini golf and a myriad of other “day off” activities. Forever the fixer, I texted back, thinking it would be easier to answer than to ignore.

I’ll tell you what was easier to ignore: my husband as he tossed around the ‘b’ word: boundaries.

I was Luisa from Encanto singing “Surface Pressure” on repeat as I drove from work to school pick ups then circled back to work on the regular. My days stretched as I bent and twisted, always optimistic the thicket was about to clear.

When I went on vacation this summer, I knew the writing was on the wall. I had to take control of my life and that meant taking a step down in money and power, but hopefully a step up in balance and happiness.

And so, I’m off to the dry side of recreation to run preschool programs. Naturally, a looming long weekend writing contest has left me no time to say good-bye to my co-workers and a building I’ve grown up in. Life’s never simple.

Tonight, 28-years almost to the date of my first shift as a 17-year-old, on the cusp of her senior year, I walked out as a married 45-year-old mother of three, nostalgic for the past, misty about what could have been, but grateful, as I begin my next chapter.

Postcard From Here

Four hot tub soaks a day sounds about right, or a recipe for my capillaries to explode. This is the peril I put myself in, as we wander from there and back again to see how far it is this July.

Greetings from Pender Harbor on the Sunshine Coast.

On Wednesday, we took the 9am ferry out of Swartz Bay, missed a turn leaving Vancouver which allowed us to momentarily intrude on my youngest brother, and then continue to Squamish in search of the next brother. They can run but they can’t hide.

Travelling with our girls who are now ten, twelve and fifteen has been a dream. Even though we’re driving a viola, watercolour paint, yarn, and various electronics around Southern BC, these girls of mine soak in the scenery and aren’t averse to adventure.

The second leg of our trip had us on a second ferry from Horseshoe Bay to what has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember: Gibsons, home of the Beachcombers, a TV show that ran from 1972, the year my husband was born, to 1991 on the CBC.

While we couldn’t find the tugboat, Persephone, used in the show, we did lunch at Molly’s Reach. It was there that Miss C declared she couldn’t eat with Nick, played by Bruno Gerussi, staring at her, so she and I switched places. The things I do.

Strangely, while we were at Persephone’s Brewing, my mum texted me to say the man who played Jesse on the show had died the day before. RIP Pat John.

The serendipitous moments continued as we drove through Sechelt. I got stuck in the wrong lane and had to go straight instead of left.

Once through the light, the traffic parted, like the red sea, revealing the gaming store my husband had read about on the ferry. More surprisingly, and directly in front of the spot I parked in was the Sunshine Coast Slipper Factory.

And poof, my husband’s 20-year quest was over.

Once upon another lifetime ago, his girlfriend (now ex- did I have to type that prefix?) gifted him wool slippers she’d bought at a craft fair.

He loved them to death.

Don’t worry, she was released back to the sea without harm and found another fella.

But once the slippers died, he thought he would have to wander the earth barefoot, never to be properly cushioned by another.

And just like that, the mournful bi-ped’s cries were answered, as a choir of angels sang him to the shelf where the very slips his long-ago girlfriend had purchased sat.

With new slippers in hand, we politely disregarded accepted the wool lady’s warnings of windy roads and set off to find shelter.

Highway 101 has officially been added to the twisty road list.

Though this artsy coast has only given us one full day of sunshine, it has been the perfect hideout. Light on the mosquitos, though they’ve still found two of us, and, more importantly, the salt air surrounding us has never heard of our lives back home.

From my sundeck hot tub, I soothe my undervacationed soul by spying upon the comings and goings of boats and mortifying my ten-year-old by shooting heart eye emojis at the garcons walking the gangway.

In my defense, my husband is now 50, so that levels me up into old man territory – clearly a theme of this trip, and even better if they have a boat.

The left, right, lefts that brought us here have opened our eyes to this side of west, and we’re in love.