GO

Shit, shit shit shit shit shit. 

People kept asking if I was excited about the trip, and I had to tell them no, it felt like reaching for something just out of grasp, that I wouldn’t trust that the rug wouldn’t get pulled out from under me until I was on the ground in Toronto.

This morning was a series of small hurdles to jump over. Zenny got a persistent cough and needed a visit to the walk-in clinic to make sure she was ok (she’s alright, just caught the cold going around). I had a checkup earlier in the week and my prescription wouldn’t be filled in time, but whatever, I don’t really need it. The bank had a question, but Mike said he’d call them from the pharmacy while picking up Zenny’s cold meds. My phone rang as I was zipping the last suitcase. I heard it in Mike’s voice as soon as I picked up. Here came the rug pull. He fucked up in a way he has never fucked up ever before, and he lost the financing for my house. The money is gone.

I called my mother. She drove over immediately. We put together a plan I have no control over, I am in the wind and it’s all in her hands now. “You have to go, you can’t go backwards, this will work out.” While I cried into her chest.

Then a snowstorm pushed our flight back 4 hours, to 2am. It may still get cancelled. Everything I was afraid of is happening.

We are at the airport, waiting at the gate. It’s midnight. I am feeling destabilized and scared in a way I’ve never felt before. I don’t know what I’m running towards, but I can’t look back now. 

Take your mark. Get set.

 “The holidays can be hard when you’re navigating a difficult change, because they’re often good,” my therapist said. “You’ve been dealing with these problems and feelings for a long time, and now you have tradition, family, happiness. But the holidays pass, and the issues are still there. You can let yourself enjoy this time, though. Be happy that everyone is together, and remember that you will have holidays every year, and people love you.”

Zenny slammed the bedroom door open at 5:04am and yelled “I LET YOU SLEEP IN 4 MINUTES EXTRA!” Mike’s entire body leaped a few inches off the bed like a salmon. My mother was in the kitchen, heating the kettle and fruitlessly trying to find coffee for my old pour-over coffee dripper - exposing herself as a lying liar who LIED about switching to decaf. I dug out my emotional support chai and made her a big strong cup while the kids upended their stockings and woke up the neighbors. I don’t care, if the neighbors can let their kids scream until 1:30am because it is a holiday, we can let ours scream at 5:04am for the same reason. Although if I’m honest, it was mostly my mother screaming, because I am maybe a bit too good at making industrial-strength tea.

NEW MOTORCYCLE GLOVES!

I had warned the adults of the family that I was kind of dropping the ball this year, what with all the repatriation paperwork and real estate negotiation and emotional crash-outs, so they rallied and made sure the kids had the fun stuff. Zenny tossed the insulated gloves and boots I bought her over her shoulder and tore into all the games and books. Leif got a discman and Lady Gaga cds because he’s interested in ancient history (I died of old age on the spot) and Gavin was excited about a color kindle to read obscure fantasy comics on. It was a big relief. It all turned out good, even though all I could really get my shit together with was the food. I sat on the couch under a pile of winter accessories (I WANTED insulated gloves and boots, thankyouverymuch), watching the cats rampage around their new kitty battle tower while the family filled the living room with shredded wrapping paper until it was time to get up and make eggs benedict à la prime rib. I didn’t fail completely, though - in a fit of ain’t-give-a-damn-about-internet-security that I had almost forgotten about, I ordered some really stupid t-shirts, a Murderbot “Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon” sweater, and an enormous floppy goose that went over really well. Nailed it - kind of accidentally, because I also painted my sister-in-law’s dog, who I did not realize had DIED, and made her cry happy tears when she got it in the mail. I should probably check Facebook more than twice a year.

It is all chocolate, Stranger Things (not the new season, we’re introducing Zenny to the first seasons because she’s finally old enough, so NO SPOILERS), and flaming figgy pudding from here on out.

Books and coos 

Eggs benny with tomato and roast beef. My mother worked her way through college as a cook at a restaurant,  so my poached egg game has to be ON POINT

It’s been messier 

The boy likes pianos, world history, and water fowl

Every year I find my favorite stupid shirts to give my kids something to talk about in therapy some day 

Billy liked the murder lair

I knitted that stocking when I was pregnant with him *sob*

Somehow they all fit breakfast on top of the chocolate they’d been eating for 3 hours

Look! Someone even took a picture of me. Kind of.

Evening at my mom’s house, and my hair was doing something good.

All the Eve leftovers go into a big meat pie on Christmas Day

‘Gluten for me, but not for thee’ figgy puddings, for people with and without allergies 

The walnut kept burning like a log until my mother poked it off with a fork and threw it in the sink

Mount the block

That "tits up" moment of bravery when you hear your event called only lasts until you get to the holding area, and then you're stuck pacing around anxiously, waiting for your heat. Those minutes usually include a sudden violent urge to run to the toilet, and you have to decide which you'd rather risk: missing the starting call or trying (and failing) to hold it in. I know it is always better to run for the locker room than it is to throw up or shit yourself in the middle of the event, and that is why I spent the weekend sobbing loudly in the car every time I was alone. After that, I slept like a baby - waking up screaming every two hours. Three days of nightmares and crying got the job done. I am exhausted, my eyes feel like I tried to squeeze them out of my own skull, but I’m better.

Now that my body has finished vomiting up all its feelings, I am up on the block. After the nightmares were done getting me angry enough to remember why I’m doing this, they switched channels and gave me discoveries in a new home by the sea filled with hidden passages and abandoned maritime relics, with a visit from a boy I used to love who told me to be more careful with what I share online. I jumped up and hugged him and said no.

I’m getting ready to board an Air Canada time machine back to the 90s, toss my smart watch and streaming services, buy a little vehicle (maybe a Subaru SUV, you monsters), and go find that house by the sea.

My kids humored me and posed for a group portrait. They decided to be very dignified. I want them to be the first painting I hang on my own walls.

It’s Christmas Eve, my best day. I bought the biggest prime rib I could find, and the Yorkshire pudding will be a foot high. Leif has forbidden me from calling the charcuterie a “shark coochie” platter, but I’ve got it loaded with meats and goat cheese and Brie. The mousse cake is chilling, the flourless chocolate cake is looking good. I don’t know what next year will look like, but today we are all together and everything is okay.

Merry Christmas out there.

Just straight chaos all around

Gavin turned 23 yesterday. We went to work anyway (he’s been subbing at the library for the past few months) and our student worker came in after school looking like she had put a finger in an electrical socket. She was pretty shaken up, and told a story with full pantomime about what had just happened in PE: one of the students, who was big for a 14 year old, had lost his temper over losing at badminton too many times and attacked the teacher. Then he attacked the security guard, a small scrappy woman who managed to shove the teacher into a room for safety while classmates tried to dogpile the kid. He knocked them all aside like the Hulk, trying to get at the guard, until he finally got bulldozed into a corner by some of the kids on the football team, who held him there until the police came to get him. He got hauled out, yelling and screaming and threatening to kill everyone and their family, police included, and got himself handcuffed and shoved into a police car. Our student worker and her friends had been scrambling around to keep out of his way while he was rampaging through the gym. Holy shit. Badminton must be a hell of a sport.

In the evening we drove over to my mom's and had dinner at the Mexican restaurant across the street from her house. Afterwards, walking back to her place for cake, a geyser of water was shooting up out of a busted fire hydrant at the end of the driveway. We stopped before crossing and watched fire trucks pull up to block the road in both directions. Then we saw the truck, standing on its nose between two smashed cars in front of the neighbor’s house. 

Somehow, in the short distance between the shopping center and the road, this guy had managed to gain enough speed to clear two speed bumps, fly straight across the road with no attempt to turn, crash into the fire hydrant, launch over an entire tree, smash the neighbor's parked car, flip onto a second parked car, and end up completely vertical. We ran across the road and realized that the driver was still trapped inside.

All the neighbors were gathering in the parking lot, and a cry of relief went up when we saw the figure leaning against the window raise an arm. The firemen got the doors open with a crowbar and pulled him out. He was trying to help them, pulling himself up so they could get their arms around his waist, and he was wearing a blue shirt with STAFF written across it in huge letters. The closer neighbors recoiled and yelled to the rest of us that he smelled like alcohol. I had been ready to wrap my arms around Zenny's face to keep her from seeing a dead body, but he just had a bit of blood on the back of his head. Police arrived, and we all heard them assess the situation while the firemen and paramedics rolled the guy away: drunk, no license, no insurance, expired tags, and a prior record of the same. He's going to be in some trouble when he's out of the hospital. Thank goodness it had been raining - that unit usually has kids playing outside on the sidewalk. A few feet to the left and it would have gone through their living room. 

Once the guy was removed, alive and in one piece, the mood lightened and all the neighbors started posing for pictures with the upended truck and geyser. We sang Happy Birthday to Gavin.

And this is why I’m getting a truck while I'm learning to drive on ice.

After the ambulance left, the firemen got the hydrant shut off and prepped the truck for supports. One of them banged a small hole in the door for the fork of the support beam to fit into, and a 4 year old gasped, shocked, and yelled, “HE DENTED IT!” We all started laughing. Miraculously, an intact case of sparkling cider bottles was sitting upright on the ground in the flattened ruins of the two neighbors' cars. If that doesn’t bring them good luck when they ring in the new year, nothing will.

We arrived home late, and just before bed, Leif suddenly got upset while looking at his phone. He had texted his friend about the accident, and his friend had started sending him panicky screen shots about a school shooting planned for the next day: the kid who had gotten arrested for threatening to kill everyone over being bad at badminton had gotten released, and immediately started posting pictures of guns and promises to shoot up the school the next day. A rumor started up that he was going to target Seniors for some reason. Now, I know that 14 year-olds are mostly full of shit, but this kid had already been kicked out of two schools and thrown off the football team for violence, it's completely possible he could have access to firearms, and I am not about to send my kids into a situation where they're genuinely scared they're going to die. It is always better to overreact when it comes to child safety. We called them out of school this morning and reported the threat - along with half the other families in the school. The principal had to issue a statement assuring everyone that the kid had been expelled and his grandparents had him locked down, with promises to call the police if he tried to leave the house.

And while that was going on, a storm blew through and took down the power lines. We sat in the dark at the library while people came in and asked if the computers were working because they just needed to print something really fast. Get out.

2025 has been wild. I have changed my mind about adventure, I want cozy socks and piles of blankets for 2026.

edited to add this small nice thing:

One of our regulars is a guy named Fred. He is a tough-looking leathery guy in his 60s with a bristly white mustache and an Australian hat. He sits for hours every day sucking on Ricolas loudly and banging at the keyboard with his index fingers, pursuing his lifelong goal of destroying (or at least perpetually inconveniencing) his arch enemy; the guy who shot his donkey 15 years ago. Also the guy's lawyer, who has to reply to his endless legal complaints for years on end. Fred and Annie have developed a mostly silent friendship; he jump-scares her by poking her ribs whenever he comes in, and she goes over to pat his arm whenever she comes in. The other day, while she was typing her memoirs and still sad about the Christmas story, he pulled a fresh Aussie hat out of his backpack and put it on her head as he was leaving. She asked if it was his, and he said, "It's yours now," and left. She was still wearing the hat when she went home at the end of the day. She really needed that small kindness. Incidentally, Fred is also the guy who pulled a kitten out of his backpack and gave it to me when I was having a particularly hard day last year. He has a way of knowing. I hope he outlives the donkey killer and gets a new little burro to love some day.

A story from Harris

One of my oldest friends dropped out of the sky this weekend, as he does about once a year. He gave me a spine-crushing hug and kissed me* when I picked him up from the airport in the middle of the night. We caught up the next morning while I made cookies for Cookie Monday (old family tradition to make the school week better). I told him what's been going on, and that not many people in my day-to-day life actually know what's happening because it feels like inviting trouble.

"Me, too," he said. "I never tell anyone when I'm traveling. In fact, I just heard from D [middle school classmate] a few months ago, and he said he wanted to get together next time I came through, but he always wants to go to clubs or something, and like... no. He said, 'don't worry, it won't be like last time', but no, no, no. I don't mind talking to him, but I don't really want to hang out."

"Oh no, what happened?"

Folks, I was not prepared for the story he told me.

Here it is, as best I can paraphrase, with names omitted:

Ok, so this was decades ago, I think you were in California. D finds out I'm in town and wants to go out to a club or something, and I'm like, ok, sounds good. He comes to get me in the middle of the night, and he shows up in this brand new red Mustang - one of those boxy ones that just came out right around then. Now this is a kid from Molokai, his mom was a house cleaner, he never had that kind of money, so I thought he must be doing pretty good for himself. I was like, “Wow, D, nice car, what's been going on?” He kind of leans in and he's like, "Hey. So we've known each other for a long time... Can I tell you something?" And you know, I'm not going to judge anyone, so I'm like, "Sure, man, whatever you've got to say, it's fine." He says, "... So, I'm a drug dealer." I was surprised, because this was a clean-cut kid, but hey, whatever. People have their own things going on. And then he says, "Yeah, and I just have to make one stop. It's no big deal. Just a drop-off, we'll be in and out in like, 5 minutes tops." Well, shit. We pick up his buddy somewhere on the way, and we drive down to this real shady area in Honolulu, down by the fuckin wharf or something, and I see this prostitute walking on the side of the road. That's his client. We pull over, double-parked, and he gets out to do his thing. We're behind this car, which the lady uses as an office to do business. It belongs to her boyfriend, but her boyfriend is in jail, and she can't get it running because the battery is dead or something, and she wants to move it. This guy we picked up evidently knows how to hot-wire a car, which is why we brought him, and he jumps out and gets it started in like 15 seconds. As we're standing there, and the guy is still sitting in the front seat messing with the ignition, this car suddenly pulls up really fast at an angle and blocks us in. It's the boyfriend. He just got out of jail, and he thinks we're trying to steal his car. He gets out of the car, screaming, "Get the fuck away from my car!" and walking toward us all tough and shit, and then sees D. I don't know what happened between the two of them, but he does not like D. He says, "Oh, D, I've got something for you," and goes back to the car and reaches down by the driver's seat. D says, "Get in the car, get in the car, get in the car." This guy pulls out a baseball bat, and starts running at D. I grab the other guy, we're scrambling, trying to get in the car and get the door closed, and the guy takes a swing and misses or something, hits just the front end of the car, then he takes another swing and it comes down on the door right as D is trying to close it, right over his head, TUNK. He gets the door closed, and the guy starts smashing the hood of the car, fuckin smashes the windshield, and D is throwing the car into reverse, crashing into the car behind us and then ramming the car in front of us, trying to get enough room to pull out, and VOOM, we peel out of there. The guy runs back to his car and starts chasing us, and D says, "It's ok, it's ok! We're going up to the North Shore, he's not going to follow us up there!" 

So we lose the guy, and D drops off his friend, and we're heading up to the North Shore. I'm like, holy shit, that was crazy, and D says, "Yeah, sorry man. Anyway. I just need to make one more stop." What the FUCK. "No, no! It's not going to be like that again, seriously! In and out, 5 minutes tops." I mean, what am I going to do? Fine. He makes the stop, goes in, does his thing or whatever, comes out again, nothing happens. We get back on the highway, and then he takes the last exit, and there's a curve, and the road has a median - like a divider between the two sides that's about, I don't know, 10 inches or so, with grass. He comes flying off the exit, going way too fast, hits the median, and we're fuckin airborne. And I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I had one of those moments, like when I was a kid throwing up on the Maui Princess and we hit that wave that sent me up to the ceiling and then slamming back down onto the rim of the toilet, and gave me the scar under my chin. I'm in the air and I kind of put my fingers on one hand up on the roof of the car... [he raises his left arm with two fingers pointed] and my other fingers on the door... [he reaches his right arm to the side] to hopefully guide me a bit, and then WHAM. We slam down, and the dashboard, the airbags, everything, explodes, everything plastic comes popping off in our faces, and we come to stop partway on the median. I somehow ended up in his lap, and he's like, "Shit, you ok?" and I was! I was totally fine, not even a scratch. We kind of, like, paddled the airbags out of the way, and D says his place is only a block away. He points, and it's right there, we can see the gates. The car can still drive somehow, but it's dragging the bumpers, and the windshield and hood are smashed, and we crawl up to a stop sign, scraping on the ground - and there's a cop car at the intersection. D looks at me and says, "We can't get stopped by the police." And the cops are right there, looking at us, with the bumpers hanging off and everything. "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to gun it, we're going to peel in through the gates, we're going to get out of the car as fast as we can, and we're going to slam the doors. Got it?" And he floors it. The car is grinding and pieces are falling off and the cops are on us, lights flashing, sirens. He swings into the gates of the apartment complex, we jump out, slam the doors, and the cops are right there behind us. They jump out, guns drawn, pointed at us, fuckin screaming, "GET DOWN RIGHT NOW, GET THE FUCK DOWN," and I've got my hands up, and just then, D's roommate comes running out of the apartment. His roommate is this tiny Filipino queen, and he starts screaming, "D, what the fuck did you do to my fucking car?!" and he takes off his slipper and starts fuckin smacking D with it. Yeah, IT WASN'T EVEN HIS CAR. The cops are watching this skinny guy beating his ass with a fuckin rubber slipper, and they're like, "Uh, sir, is this your car?" "YES IT'S MY FUCKING CAR WHAT THE FUCK D," and they're like, "You... want to press charges?" "I DON'T NEED TO PRESS CHARGES BECAUSE HE'S GOING TO BE FUCKING DEAD WHEN I'M DONE WITH HIM." And he's still hitting him with the slipper. We're on private property now, the car is shut, the owner is there and doesn't want to press charges... so the cops just gave up and left. 

It was crazy. So yeah, I don't really want to go out with D again. 

- - - 

I know I said I wanted more adventure in my life, but maybe not the kind Harris has. I dropped him at the inter-island terminal and we spun around in a hug and he kissed me again* and ran off to catch his plane. I'll have to come home for Christmases just to be on island when he blows through so I can hear the latest stories of his life as a wild creature. Or start dropping in on him randomly in Portugal with stories about polar bears and ice storms. 

*Not like that. We've been friends since we were 14. Like this:

Christmas spirit runs rampant at local library

The Christmas Spirit will trample you for a discounted tv and run you flat for a parking space, so you have to watch out for it.

Lately, a caretaker for a young autistic man has gotten into the habit of bringing him to the library so she can read by herself in a corner and let him roam around for a few hours without having to pay any attention to him. This is normally fine, he's a nice guy and just paces back and forth across the length of the library, vocalizing a little bit and looking happy. On this day, though, she had been ignoring him for over an hour and he was starting to get agitated, walking faster and making noises that caused studying patrons to look uncomfortable. He needed something, and the woman was sitting with her back to him without budging. Our new student workers are barely 14 and scared of everything - including work - so instead of being out in the aisles shelving books they were using this escalation as an excuse to hide in the office and bother my coworker. I was getting annoyed that the young man was being ignored and that our student helpers thought I couldn’t find work for them to do in the back room, so I went into the aisles to check the shelves and interrupt the woman’s reading a little bit. The young man started following me, pacing the aisle I was in and brushing up against me every time he went by. That's fine, if he needs company and it keeps him in one area, I'm okay with my butt getting brushed every few seconds. I did wonder if it had less to do with having company and more to do with me having a butt (it doesn't matter that I'm twice their age, if a person is feeling the call of the Horn they will rub up on a tree stump), but my sexual harassment meter has been broken by 20 years of public service - if I don't feel in danger, I don't really give a shit. If you bother my staff, though, I will throw hands. I pulled a pile of old damaged books to weed and dumped them in the back room for my coworker to make the student workers process. When one of my favorite library kids came in (Loki the Biter, my toddler time menace who is now a 6th grader), I left the aisles to help check out his books and chat with him about the first season of Stranger Things, and the young man went back to walking the length of the library, quieter and happier again. 

One of our regulars, who was sitting at the ADA computer, is an older woman who has been writing her memoirs for the past few years. Annie looks like a really old mall-Santa's elf, with limp bleached hair, a worn-out pink unicorn snuggie, and bright sparkly manicured nails. She's kind-hearted, has a quiet voice, loves God, and writes profanity-laced life stories about drugs and porn. I care about her a lot, even though she's emotional, refuses to wear her hearing aid, and constantly needs help with minor computer problems (eg: opening more than one tab and thinking all her work had vanished). While I was helping my library kid, Annie got up and walked over to wave down someone in the back office to help her. They were busy with the pile of books I had dropped on them, and didn't notice her until she called out, "Eenie meenie miney mo!" and pointed at one of them. When I looked over, one of the student workers was walking awkwardly to the computers to see what she needed. Unfortunately, he's a tablet baby who doesn't know how to use a real computer, so she was getting impatient with him. I needed to intervene, so I started wrapping things up with Loki and stamped his items. At that moment my coworker came out to put a stack of discarded books next to me, and Annie charged up and pointed a shaking finger at her right over my shoulder, crying angrily that she was mean and pretended not to see her so she wouldn't have to help her and she never shares anything about her life. Well, what did I just say about people bothering my staff? I might be crap at dealing with angry tradwives complaining about gay unicorn picture books, but I am very good at identifying and dealing with activated trauma. You have to get close to their face, make yourself the target, rephrase their needs, affirm that you care about them, and give clear firm instructions on what's going to happen next. Sometimes they need to be gently touched or hugged. Because she's mostly deaf, I snapped my fingers in her face to get her attention. "ANNIE. NO. I GAVE HER WORK TO DO. IT'S MY JOB TO HELP YOU. COME HERE. LET'S FIX THIS. NO, STOP THAT, WE CARE ABOUT YOU A LOT. NO, I TOLD THE STUDENTS NOT TO TALK TO PATRONS, HE THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO GET IN TROUBLE WITH ME. NO, IT'S NOT SAFE FOR THEM, THEY'RE ONLY 14. I'M HERE NOW, SHOW ME." Loki watched me steer her away by the shoulders, looked up at the young man flapping past him, bobbed his eyebrows at me in a way that said, another day at the library, and waved goodbye. I nodded at him. 

By the time the library closed 20 minutes later, I was buzzing with nervous energy and had locked my phone into the building. I didn't go back to get it. Annie needed a big pile of copies of her story printed out for the writer's group the next day, and she had dropped a page on her way out. I picked it up and saw her daughter's name, and it all clicked into place. The theme for this month's writer's group was "Christmas Memories". Her daughter was born just after Christmas, in early January of 1980. She had killed herself right before Christmas in 2018. Annie had tried to follow her. She had been writing about it all day, and those feelings were riding right up on the surface for her. People go on the attack when their body is trying to hold itself together. I've seen a lot of it. I've done it, too.

The next day, Annie was still raw and sensitive, but she quietly came up to me and gave me a long hug before leaving. I really do care about her a lot. It seems like the bigger a pain in my ass someone is, the more I see them and love them.

Be patient out there when the Christmas Spirit cuts in front of you at Costco or runs over your foot with a cart. Pain does bad things to good people.

- - - 

The arm-long checklist is getting shorter, one checked box at a time. The stress of the past few months has had me riding the snake with slowly creeping increases of caffeine and sleeping aids, at the expense of my short term memory and resting heart rate, so I dropped it all this week. Returning my central nervous systems to factory settings; I need to be sharp when tire hits the ice in a few weeks. The blaring headache subsided after a few days, my body figured out how to stay asleep on its own again, and my memory has been clearing up. I can remember all my dreams again every morning, which has been a mixed bag. I dream about losing grasp of my kid in a crowd, running into someone I used to love and feeling my heart stop, getting lost in a warren of dilapidated rooms and staircases. Still, it's better knowing what my subconscious is chewing on. Fear, loneliness, loss.

But you know what? At the end of the dream, I stepped out into a cold sunny day on a street in St John’s, looked around and saw my kid safe and sound, and felt like I had all the time in the world to do whatever it was I wanted. I think it’s going to be ok.

Edited the end of this post because I was feeling for Annie while writing it, and then the sunny feeling kept coming back throughout the day. It feels like the beginning of the good kind of excitement, and it’s been a long time coming.

Hang in there everyone.

Thanksgiving 2025

It feels like Thanksgiving was a month ago. For the past few years, my alcohol consumption has been limited to whatever is handed to me at a celebration, but my stress levels were so high on Thanksgiving that no less than six drinks were put in my hand and I did not feel a single one of them. It did short out the constantly scrolling to-do list in my brain for a few hours, though. I will jot this down as another bio-hack nobody should follow, right under using acetaminophen as a mood stabilizer.

I did not take any pictures or try a fun new recipe, but I did scrub the bathroom floor and cook a perfect turkey, so I am counting it as a hosting triumph.

On Sunday I went to pick up my painting from the gallery and inexplicably burst into tears while sitting in traffic on the way home, so I drove to my mom's house and sat crying through her box of tissues while she put a tray of tea and cookies down in front of me. I am not a person who cries much, generally speaking, so the past 6 months have been very confusing for my eyeballs. The other day I watched a tiktok of a mom picking up her teenage son for the last time, and when he wrapped his legs around her waist like a toddler it destroyed me, I was sobbing for an hour. I teared up just now, just writing about it. This is mutiny of the parasympathetic system.

Things downshifted when December arrived, eyeballs notwithstanding. My worry hardened into determination. The advent calendar became a countdown to departure. It feels like when you've waited all day for your event to be called, and now it's time to step up to the block and wait for the signal to take your mark. 

I am ready.

46

Oh no, it is the day of the annual birthday portrait pictures, and I haven't slept in a week. My eyeballs feel like they're made of fire and sandpaper.

I will update with decent photos later. Today we get work toilet selfies. 

bad outtake for authenticity

45 was a transition year. I started prying open the escape hatch, spending all my money and PTO on travel, tasting the air in different places, looking for home. I focused on getting better at painting, trying to level up with classes and workshops and research, making lists, forming plans. Now I am closing the book on the first 45 years, and opening up the next. 

There are a lot of balls in the air, and I feel very close to ducking and letting them all fall on my head, but I will NOT. I can make this happen. Tickets are bought. Airbnb is booked for a few nights in St. John's while we buy a truck. Rental cottage is being secured for 2 months while we close on a house. Realtor is in a flurry of communication with the broker, the broker is in a flurry of communication with the lenders, the lenders are acting like it's soooo hard to do international sales even though it's totally normal. A lawyer still has to get involved in all this. I can't get my brain to stop lighting up and scrolling like an arrival/departure sign at the airport as it adjusts to all the moving pieces of information. Once I finalize the contract for the rental, I'll have an address, and once I have an address I can get insurance set up for the hypothetical truck, and register for MCP numbers, and get Zenny into school. I keep remembering things to do and panicking, then talking myself back through it all step by step. I feel like the rug is going to get pulled out from under me at any moment, that my dreams will be dashed, or that I'll get there and my piece of shit truck will break down and we'll freeze to death on the side of the road, or that the caretaker at the cottage will be an ax murderer (he's not, he's the cousin of my friend's boss, but YOU NEVER KNOW).

I need sleep.

First, though: dinner at my favorite restaurant, and a cake made by my mother. Am I ready for Thanksgiving? No, I am not. But there is a bird in the fridge and potatoes in the cupboard, so we'll figure it out.

the jump

While my boss went on a tangent during our staff meeting last week, I checked my phone for upcoming appointments and saw that I had new email. I hesitated, because I was expecting to hear back about the job in Newfoundland, but I wasn’t sure I wanted bad news at that exact moment. I put my phone away. 

…Maybe those emails were just delivery notices and gallery stuff, though. I opened my phone back up. There it was: an unread message from my interviewer in Newfoundland. I scrutinized the partial sentence visible under her name. It said ‘Hi Holly, hope all is well in Hawaii! I…’ Hmm. That could go either way. If it was a gentle rejection, I would be back at square one and feeling depressed. If it was an offer, I would be at the start of something huge and feeling big feelings. I put my phone down again. 

Picked it up a moment later. Nobody starts a rejection letter with a first name and an exclamation mark, I decided, and tapped on the message. Tim must have seen my face do something, because he suddenly changed the subject, jumped ahead to Round Robin, and asked if I had anything to announce. He was smiling, but it felt like being pounced on by your mother-in-law at a family dinner after turning down a glass of wine. Announce? To the entire staff? With a face like a boiled ham? Definitely not. I turned my phone face-down and talked about the young homeless guy who had been masturbating through his pocket while asking me to explain WWII fascism a few days earlier (“So, what is fascism? Is that, like… Italy? Hey, can I ask, how old are you?”).

It was considerate of my contact to send me the offer at the end of a Friday, to give me the weekend to panic and discuss with family before formulating a reply. I sent my acceptance the same day anyway. 

Adding to this, two days earlier, Zenny was discovered to be hiding three failing classes and a long list of unfinished assignments. She has only had a phone - with parental controls - since she started middle school a few months ago, and it immediately became a huge problem. She began hiding it, pretending to do homework with it in her lap, and shutting herself into her room to FaceTime with her friends all evening. She stopped reading books and drawing, too distracted. We talked about it, timed the apps to shut off at bedtime, and tried to interest her in books she'd enjoy, but it wasn't going well. With this new crash in her grades, I took the device away, checked her messages, and found a group chat with her friends that was filled with swearing, racism, anti-school/parents rants, and borderline-too-sexual anime images. The worst texts were coming from one girl in particular, while the rest of the group tried to ignore her comments and continue conversations about Halloween costumes and k-pop around her thread spamming. I care a lot about children, but this girl needs help I am not able to give, and I can't have my own kid hanging around with someone who calls Black Santa the ‘N’ word (a lot of local kids think they get a pass on using the word because they’re not white, while still using it with the hard-R to insult Black people). I was really angry to see zero pushback from her or her other friends. I have hammered this into my kids for years: when someone says something gross in front of you, you need to say something. Anything. ‘That’s not okay”, “that’s messed up”, or just "NO", at MINIMUM. If edgelord teens don’t get called out by their peers, they become asshole adults.

We locked the phone down until it was basically just a brick that nags her with texts from immediate family, and we’re sitting with her to make sure she gets caught up on all her work. She's already doing better, reading books and making crafts again, but the friend group at school is still a problem, and in the course of helping her catch up I was alarmed by how stupid her homework is. They are giving her lower-elementary work, with coloring sheets and things like "Join these two sentences with the word 'and' or 'but'." In Honors English. No wonder she thinks homework is a waste of time.

So I'm taking her with me. Initially, I was going to let her finish the school year while I got everything set up, but I decided that she can sleep on an air mattress and eat ramen as well as I can. Once decided, it was a big relief -  I didn't want to leave her in the first place. I imagined spending the winter alone, cold and scared at night in an empty house, questioning all my life choices and dreaming about not being able to find my babies. She's excited to go, and I have just a slight pang of guilt about dropping a kid from Hawaii into freezing slush and darkness. It'll build character.

Leif is staying; he's graduating and going to university in a few months anyway, and he has a great girlfriend with a great mom who likes to feed him. He hugged me when I got sad about the thought of leaving him, and said he was glad I was going for it and taking a big chance. Also, he looks forward to getting my car. Gavin is just happy to have another place to visit - he's busy with university and not worried at all.

This is going to be a build-your-plane-on-the-way-down kind of situation. I am preparing to hit the ground like a guillemot.  

Don't worry, they're supposed to do that

Meanwhile, the man and I are still approaching this as a 'healing separation', because I'm giving him time to accept that I'm gone and get right with himself. Now that everything is in motion, he's starting to see this as an opportunity, and getting excited. Yesterday he said, "This can be good! We'll use the time apart to work on ourselves and focus on our own goals. I'll finish my tattoo coursework, do the blood-born pathogen training, and get certified. And then when you're all financially stable over there - like in the next 6 or 18 months or whatever - I can just quit my job and move out there with you!"

orly?

I put a few paintings up for sale on my website (hollybraffet.com). We are going to arrive with nothing but two suitcases, so it's time to try to scrape up whatever money we can. We are going to be really broke for a long time, but I will apply for grants and write books and sell art! It’s better to risk it all and fail than not try at all.

Everything happening at once

I was not feeling it this Halloween. We didn't have time to carve the pumpkin. Leif went to a sleepover. Gavin and cousin Chris took Zenny trick-or-treating. Mom and aunt handed out candy. I sat on the couch drinking a Guinness and trying not to be a grumpy asshole. The neighborhood was struggling this year; more porch lights off, fewer inflatable decorations, hardly any chocolate in the buckets. My mother handed out cold sodas, and the kids (and parents) were screaming with excitement because they were dying of thirst after walking so much longer in hot costumes to get treats.

So I kind of dropped the ball on this holiday, but the kids didn't really notice. Now there is a giant pumpkin sitting on my dining room table that I have to break down into pies. I wish I had a cute talking porcupine to feed it to. Or a trebuchet.

Other things are happening.

The art show opened (another honorable mention for me - “your art is so old-fashioned!”), and I took my turn sitting at the gallery for a couple afternoons while tourists and influencers hustled through without really looking at any of the paintings. Most of them just visit Ho'omaluhia to pose on top of rented Jeeps or jump up and down in fancy outfits. We are weird little animals.

This is the painting that won Best in Show, by the way:

On Saturday I presented my Scotland grant project to the Caledonia Society for their annual banquet. It went really well, except that Mike told me it was informal and then everyone showed up in dresses and kilts while I was standing there in jeans and gold sneakers. Most of the audience was not interested in art history and how pigments are made, but they laughed when I showed them Pug Dogs Through History as an example of how art is documentation; we would never know pugs had faces up until the 1900s without paintings to prove it. 

They liked my finished paintings, and I blew the opportunity to scoop up commissions because I forgot to bring my new business cards. I need a manager.

Burying the lede - one of the jobs I interviewed for has advanced me to reference checks/criminal history clearance, and I finally had to tell my boss what I'm up to. They haven’t made an offer yet, but it is feeling very real now. This might actually happen.

 

First thoughts: SCARY

Second thoughts: lots of things are scary: being accepted into university is scary; moving is scary; getting a new job is scary; having babies is scary. You did all those things before you had a fully cooked prefrontal cortex; you can do this now.

Third thoughts: you needed an undeveloped brain to do those things. NOW when you end up frozen and destitute it’ll just be because you’re dumb.

Third thoughts, as I have mentioned, are assholes.

Anyway, I have a realtor scheduled to do video walkthroughs for potential houses in case they actually offer me the job. “It’s really rural,” the realtor warned. I laughed in Trailer Trash. My dude, they have a Walmart.

My mother is supportive, but in a pragmatically negative kind of way. “Oh, yuck, cold. They get polar bears, you know.” WHAT. I did not see any polar bears growing up in St John’s. I checked, and yes, Newfoundland does get polar bears. But they don’t live there. They ride down on icebergs, hop off, eat a bunch of puffins, and then go home. How? Nobody knows. They just “migrate”. Unless they’re chasing people around or getting into trash - then they get tranquilized and relocated to Labrador. There are fewer than 100 that are too lazy to leave, so the odds of getting mauled by a polar bear are way less than getting trampled by a moose. No problem.

I’m getting complacent, though. It’s hard to maintain anger for years, and you’re not as desperate to escape when the door finally cracks opens. Stay angry, Braffet.