Potty Party

This afternoon, an eighteen-month old said "Potty" and I put her on the toilet and she took a shit.  It was one of the most satisfying things that I have done in a long time.

I have strong feelings about potty training.  It seems absurd to me that all over the world, babies are getting by without diapers and by the time they are a year old they are able to walk around and shit and poop, for the most part in appropriate places at the appropriate times. Apparently, during the first few months of life, infants naturally make a noise that alerts their mothers when they have to go.  If no one responds to this noise, they’ll stop making it and spend the next year or so of their lives filling their diapers full of piss and shit and sitting in it until someone notices and cleans them up. 

In North America, when children are around two years old, we decide that maybe they might enjoy the dignity and cleanliness of eliminating their excretions somewhere other than in their own pants.  The problem with this is that now they are two years old.  I have only been working with two-year-olds for a couple of months, but I have noticed that most of the time when I ask them if they would like to please do something, one of two things happens.

Either they burst into tears, or they say, “no,” at varying decibel levels. Two-year-olds are difficult people going through a traumatic stage of life.  Suddenly they are more aware of what they want, but due to language barriers or more often unrealistic expectations, they frequently won’t get it.  On top of this, they remain burdened by blocks they don’t want to put away, crayons they don’t want to share and now, piles of shit and piss that after a two-year urinary and scatological free-for-all, they are no longer allowed to keep sheltered in diapers snug next to their ass cheeks.  Modern potty training tactics include waiting for the child to show “interest” and “readiness” in the potty before suggesting a regular elimination routine or heaven forbid, removing diapers.  With the limited attention span and boundless angst that I’ve seen in most two-year-olds, I really don’t think that this is a very timely, logical or promising way of going about things.

Also paradoxical to me is that some children are able to create full-fledged sentences involving subjects, actions and complements before they are introduced to the purpose of the toilet and the implications of their colons and bladders.  Children wearing diapers today know the difference between an octopus and a shark, a panda bear and a koala bear.  Sometimes they make elaborate statements such as, “the pineapple is too sour.” 

I say, “Go take a shit on the toilet, and then we can talk about pineapples. And octopi.  With joy.”

I realize that keeping track of when an infant has to go and sticking it in a feces-and-urine- friendly receptacle seems strenuous and time-consuming, but isn’t that kind of what you sign up for when you have a kid?  I mean, the kid has already barreled through your love one’s or your own vagina.  Compared to this, I feel like the inconvenience and occasional mess that occurs when your baby needs to go are pretty minor.   Plus you’ll be done with diapers and most accidents a year and a half earlier than the average parent which will mean a sure savings in both time and money.

Obviously nobody will listen to me since I’ve never given birth, or raised a child, and I’ve barely worked with toddlers for a total of two months.  But I’m ready to devote my life to this.  I talk about it to everyone I meet.

“How was your day?” the nice lady at the grocery says. 

“Oh you know, not bad.  The children are wearing me out."

“Oh, you work at a school?”

“Yes.  With toddlers.  Did you know…”  I ask total strangers when they toilet trained their children.  I even brought it up with the guy who sold me my first mutual fund.  These conversations fill me with delight. 

“Why do you think you love it so much?” asked the Boatman.  He was standing above our toilet taking a piss. I didn’t hesitate with my answer.

“I’ve never been so certain about anything in my whole life.” 

“You’re gonna change the world, babe,” said the Boatman.  “One poop at a time.”  He said it and I’m ready.  Let’s make a new generation of babies who are toilet trained before they’re one and a half.  It makes so much sense for everyone involved.  And I haven’t even mentioned the mountains of diapers that won’t end up in landfills.  Or the gallons of bleachy water that the well-meaning eco-concious cloth-diaper parents won’t be using for laundry.  Or the little baby chakras.  I’m gonna leave the chakras out of this one.  No one wants to hear about little baby chakras. 

But the point is, Pampers and Huggies can kiss my ass.

We need a change, folks. Let’s make it.

And when it’s all over, we can have Potty Party.  

The Potty Party Song:

This is the Potty Party Song, by splashnboots, who I happen to be related to.  The Boatman and I have designated it as "Our Song." We recently sang it at a Karaoeke Party. Likely because both of us were toilet trained after the age of two, we were a bit weak on the verses which, as you will hear, are somewhat complex.  That said, we rocked the chorus.  I look forward to our next karaoeke opportunity.

This post is all over, but here's some valuable information on elimination communication, the common term describing the process of putting your baby on the potty:
EC simplified by an expert Mom, blogger, and author Andrea Olson
Some people, like Ingrid Bauer, a mother and blogger from B.C. call it Natural Infant Hygiene:  Check out her site at gentleparents.com.
And of course we have our friends at diaperfreebaby.org.
Hope your potty party's a blast. Feel free to tell me all about it.

Toilet Tales, a book I regret not writing.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Locks and Keys
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two
Three Things to Make the World a Better Place

Sacred Fire

Vile shrieks emerged from the kitchen. Incomprehensible animal sounds of deep guttural rage.  Everyone seated in my grandmother’s sun room tensed up.  What was that noise?

My mother and her stepfather were fighting about the Boxing Day salmon.  Apparently Howard had taken it out of the oven and messed with the tin foil as he was inspecting its readiness.  In the process, he had destroyed the salmon’s meticulous aesthetic presentation, which had caused my mother exceeding distress.

In the sun room we were playing a game called “Questions,” a conversation starter for dinner parties and other awkward situations.  My Grandma had just read the question, “Would you rather be remembered for your accomplishments or for your character?”

The explosive bellows from the kitchen died down and my mother came to join us in the sun room, a little red in the face and tight in the shoulders.  She huffed and puffed ever so slightly.

 “What’s the question?” she asked.

 My grandmother repeated it.

 Being remembered for character is not always a good thing,” she said.   

 “I agree,” said Robbie, my boyfriend at the time.  I used to call him the Boatman because I met him on a boat. “I would like to be remembered by my accomplishments."  His statement caused some scandal in the sun room.  How shallow and superficial, some of the company was thinking.  But the Boatman already has excellent character and so it is natural that he would wish to aspire to something else.

“Well,” said my grandma.  “I can see that.  I hardly got anything done in my life.  In my next life, I’d like to accomplish more,”   Of course this led to great objection in the sun room.  And tears.  First my sister started, then my grandmother and my mother joined in.  Tears on this side of the family are contagious.   All this emotion inspired my mother to tell us all about her recent singing lessons.

“So I went to see this woman and she gave me all these scales and breathing lessons.  She said I didn’t breathe right so I did her exercises every day. I worked really hard.  Then one week, my soloist at the church had to go away so I didn’t have anyone to do the introit.  So I brought the introit to the singing lesson.  It was only a few bars long.  I’d practiced it a bit before, breathing deeply of course.  And at the lesson, I sang it for my teacher who didn’t smile once through the whole thing.  When I was done, she just sat there.  Finally she said, ‘Well, maybe in a couple of years, you’d be ready to perform it.’”

Now my mother was crying and soon the other women in the family would join in.  No one in the Boatman’s family cries at family dinner and so this is always an interesting experience for him.  My mother wasn’t finished her story.  She continued on a mile-a-minute.

“I just felt so humiliated.  I mean, what a thing for a teacher to say to a student.  For a four-bar introit at a church service in Perth Ontario! And she was charging like 75 bucks a lesson!”

My mother went on to say that she never went back to the teacher.  But the story still wasn’t over.  The next day one of her 12-year-old piano students came to her.   The elementary school talent show was the following day and she wanted to accompany herself singing “Knock, knock knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” by Bob Dylan.  

She went through the song once and it was horrendous.  My mother almost told her it was a lost cause, but then she remembered her traumatizing singing teacher and was determined to coach her student through the song.  She spent a whole hour labouring through the song with her student until she finally sounded good enough for the Stewart School Talent Show. By the end of the story, my mother was in tears again.

“You know, if you’ve got a song, you’ve gotta sing it.”

Now the salmon was ready and my mother returned to the kitchen.  More guttural animal rage and screaming.  This time, Howard was insisting on serving the salmon that had bones in it. The fury was astounding.  After serving everyone’s plate, my mother sat down at the table.  This time, she fumed and huffed and puffed, visibly and audibly.

At the end of the supper, my grandmother and sister had planned something delightful that was guaranteed to raise everyone’s spirits.  Bananas Flambé.

Banana’s flambé, or fried bananas is the stuff of legends in our family.  When my sister Taes was three years old, she went to visit my grandmother in her house in New Jersey.  One day, Grandma told Taes that they were going to a very special restaurant where they could have a very special dessert called Fried Bananas.  So three year old Taes was tremendously excited.  She rushed through her dinner in anxious anticipation of the upcoming dessert. The waitress came with the dessert menu and Taes placed her order.  But alas, the waitress returned with very bad news.  The bananas weren’t ripe enough.  Taes screamed and wailed and made a huge scene, somewhat comparable to the salmon rage.  Rather embarrassed, my grandmother dragged her out of the restaurant.  The next day, Taes called Grandma into the living room where she was watching Sesame Street.  As fate would have it, Big Bird was making Fried Bananas.  My grandmother wrote the recipe down, and our family has been enjoying the delicacy ever since. So on this tense and brawling Boxing Day evening, the whole family gathered around the stove to watch the process.  Taes poured the vodka onto the simmering bananas. 

“I think maybe you need a little more,” said Grandma.   So Taes poured a little more. “Okay, here it goes, said Grandma.  And she threw in the match.  Flames burst up from the frying pan up to the ceiling.  Grandma and Taes froze, eyes widened.

 “Oh wow,” I said.

 “Oh my God,” said my mother.

 “Throw a towel on it, Mary,” called Howard.  “Mary! Put a towel on it!” 

 “Put a lid on that please,” said the Boatman. 

 Nick, my brother-in-law caught the whole thing on camera.  (The movie is entirely delightful; however, for some reason youtube has banned it due to copyright issues. Something about the word flambé, or bananas. We're not sure...)

Probably it took us about forty seconds to find the lid.  In the end, combined with vanilla ice cream, the Bananas Flambé was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted. 

The End.

Happier Salmon Days
Sister in Salmon on Salmon with Salmon

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I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Poopy Mango Baby Wipes and the First Day of Christmas
Family Visits and Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Other Things that Happened in December

 

Poopy Mango Babywipes and the First Day of Christmas

Winter this year seems so long that I no longer remember whether or not Christmas happened.  And yet, how could I have forgotten?  Christmas this year was an epic event.  The Boatman and I and the Big Black Dog drove all the way to Ontario, and back. 
 
But first we had to have a fake Christmas Eve and Christmas with the Boatman’s family.  Fake Christmas Eve dinner was on the 21^st of December at the restaurant the Bicycle Thief.  Our handsome waiter sat me and the Boatman and his siblings down at a booth.  The waiter  looked familiar.  Apparently, so did I.
 
“I think I remember you from Montreal,” he said.
 
“Oh really,” I said.
 
“Yes, we went to a couple of the same parties.”

“Oh really,” I said again.  Being a pretty cheap drunk back in the day, all those parties were a blur of vodka-based drinks, inviting people to free private classes, some mouth-to-mouth contact, and extensive oversharing.  I had another look at our waiter and began to remember.  Dark, almost black hair.  Piecing light blue eyes.  Yes, I could remember.  His name was Pavel and I’d had a huge crush on him.  I think I’d tried to find him on Facebook and pined after his silhouetted profile for two and a half days before deciding that I had absolutely no chance. 

The Boatman and I ordered elaborately titled martinis.  We had over 3000 km of driving and 4 Christmas dinners ahead of us.  This was no time for restraint.  Pavel returned with our drinks.

“Now I remember the party we met at.  Mae West’s birthday.  You know Mae, from the BC crowd.  You did all these contact improv moves.”  (Mae West's name has been generously changed for her privacy)

“What’s contact improv?” asked the Boatman.  Until that moment, I’d forgotten, but now I recalled.  Since taking a first-year dance elective called “Body and the Imagination,” I’d been obsessed with contact improv and insisted that people join me in my passion at every drunken experience during my undergrad.  My move of choice involved getting some guy (or several) to hold me by the waist and lift me up as I jumped and reached for the ceiling, spreading my arms and legs like a kid making a snow angel.  When it came to selecting contact improv partners, I was relentless, uninhibited, and perhaps not all that discriminative either. 

“That sounds like fun,” said the Boatman. “People must have really liked you.”

“I guess,” I said.
 
With a little more digging, remnants of Mae West’s birth came to me.   I had just completed 108 sun salutations for a fundraiser at Darby’s yoga studio.  Before arriving at the party I’d consumed beer and a burrito with some friends.  After so many sun salutations, the beer had gone straight to my head.  Mae’s party had a Valley Girl theme, whatever that means.  I had no costume, but tried to compensate with my exuberance and contact improv moves. 

At the Bicycle Thief, Pavel came back and asked how our martinis were. The Boatman and I agreed that the martinis were excellent.  Pavel was a very attentive waiter.  Attentive and talkative.

“So what brought you to Halifax?” he asked.
 
“This guy right here,” I said, pointing to the Boatman.

“Oh really? Me too. I’m here for a girl.  And how long have you been together?” he asked, as though he was expecting me to answer not very long.

Just over a year and a half,” I said, relieved my answer was not more pathetic. 

“Oh wow.”  He seemed impressed. 

The Boatman’s parents arrived and the Boatman’s mother ordered a bottle of white wine for she and I to share.  Everyone ordered delicious and sophisticated dishes.  Pavel had something to say about each and every one of them.  I realized that besides moving to Halifax for a love interest, we didn’t have very much in common.   My ability to comment elaborately on any sort of menu item is extremely limited. I told the Boatman that now I remembered making out with three people at that party.  The first was a nineteen-year-old girl.  At the time, I'd been twenty-four.  We were taking a pee break from the contact improv.  Girls like to pee together.  The girl was pretty and French, and her name was Valérie.  My mother’s name is Valerie too, but Valerie in English. 

While she was washing her hands, Valérie told me that she was bisexual.  I must have already peed and washed my hands. 

“Well, that’s very interesting,” I said. I can’t remember if we were speaking French or English.  Probably English.  When I’m drunk, I like to talk really fast and this is much easier in English.  “Would you like to kiss me?” I asked.  We embraced and made out for a good ten seconds.  It was fun.  “Wow,” I said.  “I’ve never done that before.”
 
“I don’t believe you,” she said.  But it was the truth.
 
We left the bathroom and I followed her around for a little while to see if she wanted to cuddle, but she seemed busy with her nineteen-year old friends.  Oh well. You have to try these things out when you’re young.  I left Valérie and wandered around the party looking for some other excitement.
 
Some guy was leaving and so I kissed him good-bye.
 
Then I saw that Pavel and his friend were leaving. 

“Oh you’re leaving,” I exclaimed. 

“Yah, we’ve gotta go,” said Pavel.
 
“Can we make out first?” I asked.  Only Pavel’s friend said yes.  So I made out with Pavel’s friend in front of Pavel and then they both left.
 
That night I slept over at the party on the couch alone. I think the best way for me to conclude this story is with the pictures of me and the Big Black Dog naked in the shower.  It was the night after our fake Christmas Day with the Boatman’s family, and before we would leave to drive to Ontario in the morning. All day all I could think was, “There’s not going to be time.”  On Fake Christmas morning, I unwrapped more presents than I’d seen since I believed in Santa Claus, and worried about the hundreds of things we had to do before leaving at the asscrack of dawn the next morning.   One of them was washing the Big Black Dog and his poopy anus. The week before, he’d alternated diarrhea with constipation and now he smelled terrible.  The 18-hour drive would have been torture.  At ten o’clock that night I tried spraying him with some no-rinse pet shampoo concoction.  I wiped his anus with baby wipes. 

The Boatman walked into the bedroom and said, “it smells like poopy mango baby wipes.”  My efforts hadn’t worked.  There wasn’t any time, but I dragged him into the shower anyways and now you can see us both naked. 

The End.

Eliot takes bath before his long journey.

Eliot wants out.

Life is frustrating and unfair.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Sacred Fire
The Life of Eliot the Big Black Dog
Hip Replacements and No-Knead Bread versus Chapped Nipples and Low Sex Drive

 

Snow Day

My career as a kept woman seems like a lifetime ago. 
 


This is the dress I became a kept woman in

When I first thought of the the word “miscarriage” as “missed the carriage,” and pictured the baby on its way out and into one of those fancy prams before it fell on the sidewalk, I thought that I was very clever.

Last Tuesday, it started to snow in the middle of the night.  I woke up at 4 something to do my yoga practice and I didn’t notice anything on the ground.  While I was practicing, I still didn’t notice any snow falling down.  

At 6:35, I noticed a message on my phone from my co-worker.  I was delighted surprised to learn that the school board had cancelled school and we had the whole day off. 

What an excellent opportunity to catch up on my writing and translation studies.  Instead I killed the day napping, sneezing, and masturbating on the internet.  I had a mediocre cold, due to the fact that the children I work with have a great deal of snot inside of them.  They sneeze a lot, and as Eco-Yogini accurately points out in this wonderful Green Phone Booth Post about pre-schoolers and their parents, it is unrealistic for young children to figure out how to sneeze into their elbows.  They have only had elbows and sneezes for a limited amount of time.  Our expectations are too high. 
 
Anyways, the most interesting part of my Snow Day was possibly my nap.  It was the deepest nap in the world, the kind that you stir from only briefly and think, “How do I ever manage to be awake?”  I thought that I would sleep forever.  Towards the end, I remembered dreaming that I was masturbating with a plastic pink coat hanger.  When it occurred to me during my dream that I might try to get on with my day and do something else, I had the distinct thought, “But how will I ever manage to do anything else?”  In case you are wondering, my technique did not involve the hanger’s pointy end, or any sort of penetration.  Still, when I told the Boatman about my afternoon, he invented a new word in honour of the coat hanger experience: "Masturbortion."

And my great big nap he called, “Napsturbation.” 
 

Pink Plastic Coat Hanger

The night before the snow day, I dreamed I miscarried a delicate pink baby fetus.  It was in the shape of a perfect miniature baby which I’m pretty sure doesn’t  happen when you actually miscarry.  Then the contours of the pink baby crumbled like thin frail pieces of pink plastic that revealed the baby’s hollow centre.  A little plasticky spine had also be miscarried/urinated out, but the spine was separate from the rest of the baby.  It wasn’t on the inside.  I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works either.  The outside of the baby disintegrated entirely, and I was sad because then the only proof of my miscarriage that I could show the Boatman was the unconvincing plasticky spine which resembled a child’s toy.  (Or in the Montessori world, a child’s work material...)  No one would ever believe there’d been a baby inside of me.  In any case, I awoke before I could show the Boatman our broken, unborn child. 



Pink Plastic Fetus.  This one is all in one piece.  The one from my dream was not

I told him about it and he wasn’t that disappointed.  He is still luxuriating in his newly invented words.

This morning I woke up and recalled no dreams.  And I’m pretty sure I’m not pregnant.  

The End.





A pink baby carriage, not to be missed.
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt
 
What the fuck should I do with my life? Part Two.
The Boatman and the Maxi Pad
Birth Control







 

 

Locks and Keys

When I was growing up, my mother used to lose her keys constantly.  She would cry and say, “I’m such an idiot.”  My father was never very sympathetic about it.  One night, when I was around seven years old, my mother had a new gig directing a choir in town that was thirty minutes away from our house.  After dinner, she was getting ready to leave, but she could not find her keys.
 

"Drink me" plus keys

“I’m such a stupid idiot,” she said.

“You have to learn to put them back in one place,” my father said.

“Please can I borrow your keys?” she begged him.

“No,” he said.  “You have to learn to keep them in one place.” 

My mother search the house some more.  Soon she was frantic, pulling out drawers and sliding books and other objects off of tables.

“Please!” she said to my father.  “I’m going to be late.”

“You have to learn to keep them in one place.”

“My mother started crying.  In my family, the women, they don’t cry softly.  They wail.  And the wailing is contagious. Once my mother started wailing, my sister would join in.  That night, my mother and my sister wailed on one side of the living room while my dad stood across from them, shaking his head.  I sat a bit off to the side.  I did not contract the wailing until later in life. That evening, I did not wail because I did not want my dad to think I was a stupid idiot.  Instead I clenched my jaw and bit my lip and scrunched up my face.  My mother and my sister were short and tiny, tinier than me even though I was the youngest.  They made up one team.  The Tiny Wailers.  My dad was the other team, the Big Tall Mean Man.  I was too large and too tall to be part of the Tiny Wailers’ Team.  But I wasn’t quite big enough to be part of the Big Tall Mean Man team.  Plus I didn’t think that my dad was that mean.  Not always. 

A couple of weeks ago, I started working at a Montessori school.  I speak French to the three to six year old children while they take activities off of wooden shelve and “do their work.”  One of their jobs is called “Locks and Keys.”  There are three small padlocks and three small keys of three different sizes.  All the locks are closed when the children take them out.  The children have to match the keys with the locks and unlock them.  Then they can link the locks and the keys in the chain and then unlock them again.  They can do this for as long as they want.  They have to be careful not to drop the keys on the floor.  When they are done, they have to put the locks back where they found them.  In one place.


Locks and Keys, for the Montessori Children

 Next to the three to six year old class, the toddlers take things off of shelves and they do their work.  Most of them are less than two years old.  They are terrible at putting things back in one place.  And they are too small to fit tiny keys into tiny locks.  It would be a choking hazard.  My first day on the job, the toddler teacher had a car problem, so I got to hang out with the almost two-year-olds.  They were very upset that their mothers were not there.  One of them cried so hard he threw up.

“Mama, Mama,” he wailed all morning.  Just like in my family, the wailing was contagious.  Once one child started, another joined in.  Soon there were five almost-two-year olds wailing at the top of their lungs.  I was not Mama and so there was nothing I could do.  There was wailing all morning.  At lunch time, my co-worker gave me the keys to her car where she’d forgotten her tea.  Now her head was pounding from the wailing and the caffeine withdrawal.  But the tea could not cure the Mommy Withdrawal.  Except for naptime, the children continued to scream and cry and wail all day long.

At 5 PM, I ran out the door to catch my bus.  I would have to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the withdrawal method. There was no way I could manage a two-year-old person for an entire year.  A couple of stops later, I saw that my co-worker had left a message on my phone.  I still had the keys to her car.  They were in my pocket.  I walked back and another co-worker drove me home.  As the days go by, I am growing to really like my co-workers. 

But that night I fell asleep to sound of children wailing.  And it has been a bad couple of weeks for keys.  I can’t find one of the keys to the yoga studio that I’m not teaching at much anymore.  I have the key to the door at the bottom of the stairs, but the not the top.  Or vice versa. 

Part two and a half of the bad keys phase:  On Tuesday at 6:50 a.m., I radiated through the house getting ready to leave for work.  This jobs entails waking up around 4:15 for a 4:40ish start to yoga practice.  I leave the house around seven o’clock.  As fate would have it, I don't find it that difficult.  It seems that I was made to wake up early.  Although by Friday, the truck of fatigue starts to hit me, most mornings I am obnoxiously cheerful. The Boatman often makes fun of me as he drools on his pillow.

“Bye babe, I love you,” I yelled on Tuesday morning as I grabbed my keys.  “I love you!” I repeated.

“Bye, love you” he mumbled. 

At 11:30, we took the children outside for playtime.  That’s when I usually peak at my cell phone for the time and for text messages.   Four missed calls from the Boatman.  “Did I have his keys?” he’d asked.  He’d looked everywhere.  His dad had to drive him to work.  I looked in my pocket.  I had two sets of keys.

Every time something happens with my keys, I remember that night in the living room.  My mother and my sister wailing on one side and my father on the other.  In the end, my father relented and lent my mother her keys.  But first he tied them to a frying pan with a piece of string. 

I immediately called the Boatman’s keys, as the bigger kids slid down the hills and the little kids wailed at my feet, calling for their mothers.

“I’m so sorry babe,” I said to his voice mail.  “I’ll pick you up from work.”  Probably he would never talk to me again.

I texted him with profuse apologies and the promise to pick him up for work.

It’s okay, babe, he wrote back.  I can get a ride home. 

And that was all.  No frying pans.  No wailing. And when you pick the children up and point at the sky where the moon is supposed to be, sometimes they stop screaming.  

The End.

This post was supposed to have an Alice in Wonderland reference, but it got cut.  I love Alice in Wonderland. When Alice in Wonderland gets to the bottom of the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a curious corridor full of locked doors.  She wants to go through a tiny door behind a curtain that leads to a beautiful garden.  On a glass table in the curious hallway, she finds a key. The key opens the tiny door to the garden, but Alice is too big to fit through.  She closes the door and goes back to the table where but the door is so tiny that she cannot fit through.  She is way too big.  Back at the glass table she finds a bottle labelled “Drink me.”  Maybe she was thinking, “What the hell, it’s wonderland.” In any case, whatever was in the bottle made her shrink so that she could fit through the door to the garden.  Too bad she’d left the key on the glass table and the door was locked.  Now she was back where she started, but smaller.  So she starts to cry a little before seeing a cake that says “EAT ME” and eating it.  Then she grows to nine feet tall and she can reach the key again, but the door is nine feet below.  So she starts to cry a whole bunch and her tears make an ocean that all of the animals swim in.  I thought that this was interesting.  Being the wrong size to fit through the door and/or not being able to find your keys. Plus eating and drinking things to solve your problems.  I like that part. Interesting.  Curious.  

End of abridged section.



Alice looks at door behind curtain.
 
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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt
 
The Earth Will Shake Us off Like Fleas
How I am violent, by Erica J. Schmidt
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part One

 

The Boatman and the Maxi Pad

I haven’t worn a Maxi Pad in over a decade.  Almost a decade and a half.  I hate Maxi Pads.  They make you feel like you’re wearing a diaper.  You walk around positive that the whole world can see the little bulge between your crotch, and the sweat that seeps out on either side of your underwear, and that they can smell the smell that comes from… 

When I was 12 years old, I competed in a provincial swim meet in Brantford, Ontario.  The morning before we left, I looked at the brown streaky patterns on my underwear and figured I had more extensive skid marks than usual.  I used to get so nervous before swim meets.  I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at night and when I finally did, I’d dream that I was late for my race, and I’d lost my goggles and when I finally dove in after everyone else I’d forget what stroke I was supposed to be doing and I’d put my feet on the bottom and get disqualified.  Once, not in a dream, right before my race, I was standing behind the blocks and I puked gobs of orange juice into my hand.  I walked to the garbage, flung the orange gobs off of my hands, and then squatted down at the side of the pool to rinse them off in the water. The whistle blew and I stood on the blocks. I can't remember if I came in first or second, but I did win some sort of medal.

The morning before provincials, I figured that my nerves were just coming out the other end.   I threw out my underwear, got dressed, walked to the swimming pool that was down the street from me, and hopped on the bus to Brantford.  We stopped at the Tim Horton's/Wendy's rest station along the 401, Then I went to the bathroom and I discovered that the streaks had multiplied, and transformed into a brighter shade of red and they were coming from a different hole than I’d originally thought. 

For a loonie, I bought my first Maxi Pad in the restroom pad dispenser.  It was two inches thick and eight inches long.  All the way to Brantford, I looked out the window and thought of all the women in the world who had to wear Maxi Pads.  I did not feel happy to join the club.

At the hotel room before the swim meet started, the chaperone did her best to explain the logistics of a tampon, using her thumb and index finger as a hole and getting her daughter to insert through in two easy steps. 

I did not understand how there could be so much room up there.  For the tampon, and for other things.  In the bathroom, I made about a dozen attempts.  I limped out into the hotel room with my feet far apart. It felt like there was a knife up my crotch.  There was no way I could do breaststroke kick.  All my races seemed like a long shot.

Everyone knows that you can’t wear a Maxi Pad underneath a bathing suit.  And certainly, you can’t go into the water with one.  Of course I didn’t do that.  Instead I paced around the pool deck with a towel around my waist, praying that a massacre wouldn’t start dripping past my groins.  I jumped into the warm-up pool frequently, since my chaperone had said that for some reason periods didn’t flow while you were in the water.  While waiting behind the blocks for races, I would hope that the official wouldn’t take too long to blow the whistle, and that once we were on the blocks, he wouldn’t take too long to fire the gun.

It took me about eight months to figure out how to use a tampon without feel like I was stabbing my own uterus.  Although you’re not supposed to let tampons clog yourself overnight, once I figured them out, I renounced Maxi Pads right away.

A decade later, I began to bask in the wonders of the diva cup. It’s a silicon cup that you stick up there and it will catch your blood almost all day.  Minimal pollution for the world, less cost for you. And it’s interesting because you get a glimpse of your fertility all at once, before you dump and flush it down the toilet. The set-up is pretty good, but the other night towards the end of my monthly happy bleeding time, I complained to the Boatman that I was tired of sticking my fingers up myself to insert a blood capturing contraption.  He innocently suggested that I use one of the Maxi Pads that a house guest from the summer had left under the bathroom sink.

“No, no, no, no, no!” I proclaimed.

“How bad can it be?” asked the Boatman.  And he procured a Maxi Pad from the package.  After unwrapping it and removing the paper strip on the back, he stuck the pad into his boxers.

"It's not so bad," he said.  "I kind of like it." And then he went to bed. 

A couple of days later, I heard the Boatman laughing in our basement laundry room. 

“What is it?” I asked.  He came upstairs, bringing with him the Maxi Pad that he’d absentmindedly thrown in the washer, and then into the dryer with his boxers. 

 Here are the exquisite photos.

Boatman and Maxi Pad.

Forearm and Maxi Pad.

I wonder if we could use the Maxi Pad again.

The End.

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"A broken body is not a broken spirit"

Ever since I knew they existed I have been terrified of spinal cord injuries.  Having been active my entire life, I cannot imagine ever not being able to move or feel any part of my body.  One of the most traumatizing events that ever happened to me was someone else’s spinal cord injury.   I was 21.  It happened towards the end of my second year living and working at a l’Arche home, where people with and without intellectual disabilities shared their lives together.  At L'Arche, there was only one woman who had a physical disability as well as an intellectual disability.  Her name was Isabelle, and I’ve written about her a few times before.  Isabelle didn’t have a spinal cord injury, but she was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that comes in all sorts of manifestations.  For Isabelle, it meant that she was mostly paralyzed and needed help eating and changing her clothes and brushing her teeth.  She always sat in her wheelchair or lay on her bed with her hands held out to the side, her fists clenched and her  forearms forming 45 degree angles with the sides of her body.  Sometimes she said, “aaaa-aaa-aaa,” and often she laughed and smiled looked up with her eyes.  Looking up with her eyes meant “Yes.”  Looking down to the right-hand corner of her eyes meant, “No.”  She hardly ever said no.  Most of the time she was smiling and laughing and looking up. 

Isabelle at the river

It was easy to make Isabelle laugh and smile and look up more.  I knew all of her favourite songs.  I think everyone thought they did, though we were always singing different songs to her. Her very favourite was the ABC’s but she also liked Puff the Magic Dragon, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” James Taylor, the Beatles, Christmas carols all year round, and anything about Jesus.  Isabelle also liked it when you talked about her friends.

 Her favourite friend’s name was a like magic word.  If you talked about Elizabeth*, Isabelle would squeal and laugh, squeeze her hands close to her sides and look up with her eyes, over and over again.  "Yes, Yes Yes."  Elizabeth was a teacher at the Montreal School for the Blind where Isabelle went to school.  For around thirty years, she’d taught children like Isabelle, taking them swimming, singing them songs, reading to them, and helping them to communicate and gain as much independence as possible.  Though Isabelle had been in her class a number of years back, Elizabeth made the effort to keep in touch, stopping by Isabelle’s classroom regularly and organizing visits to Isabelle’s home.  During her visits, she’d drink tea and eat cake, take Isabelle for walks and read her poems. Elizabeth also recorded Isabelle tapes of her reading stories and poems.   She had a soft voice and lovely British accent.

“Hi Isabelle,” the tapes would begin.  “It’s Elizabeth.  I’m going to read you some poems.”  Isabelle loved Elizabeth's voice and she loved everything that rhymed.  One of her favourite Elizabeth tapes had Elizabeth reading William Blake’s songs of innocence and experience.  At the lines, “Tyger Tyger Burning Bright, in the forests of the night,” Isabelle would crack into joyful hysterics. 

Back when I used to live in the home, Isabelle cried about once a year, when all her friends went home from her birthday party.  All we needed to do to make her feel better was put on the Elizabeth tape. 

One Wednesday evening in the spring, I biked back to the home in pouring rain at the end of my day off.  Nathalie, my Francophone house leader was washing the dishes in the kitchen. “Quick,”  she said. “ Read the letter on the fridge.  I don’t know what it means.  It’s about Elizabeth.”  In my soaking wet clothes, I ran to the fridge. Over five years later, I have the letter memorized. 
 
On Saturday afternoon Elizabeth Freeman went for a bike ride and somehow crashed.  She endured several jaw fractures, but more important, was injured to the spine.  She has already had several operations and although it is too soon to make a prognosis, she may have done permanent damage.

For weeks, this letter was all that I thought about.  Why would this happen to someone who had devoted her life to empowering children who use wheelchairs?  Why would she have to be in a wheelchair too?  It was too absurd, too ironic.  I was devastated for Elizabeth, but also terrified for the fate of my own spine.  I rode my bike every day. It was just a matter of time before I would become injured to the spine too. 

 A month or so later, Isabelle was graduating from her school, since all the students graduated the year of their 22^nd birthday.  We’d prepared cake and a thank you song for all of the teachers.  It rhymed and was to the tune of "Puff the magic dragon."  The teachers were touched and delighted.  Isabelle had been a big star at the school.

Still at the rehabilitation hospital, Elizabeth hadn’t been able to make it.  But she made Isabelle a tape for Isabelle to listen to at her party.  I have the words of the tape memorized too.

 “Hi Isabelle,” she said.  You could still hear her British accent, but her voice was a bit muffled.  As soon as she heard her voice, Isabelle started smiling and looking up.  “If I sound a little funny, it’s because my jaw is stuck together with wires and an elastic band.  As you know a little while ago, I had a bad, bad bicycle accident.  I was riding long and my bicycle hit a bump.  I went flying over the handlebars and landed on my back.”  Matter of factly, she went on to say that she couldn’t feel or move her legs.

“So like you Isabelle, I have a wheelchair.  And the people here use a lift to get me out of my bed and into my wheelchair.  It was scary at first, but I’ll get used to it.” She said that her arms got tired from pushing herself in her wheelchair, but that too she’d get used to.  Then Elizabeth said that she was sorry she couldn’t make it to Isabelle’s good-bye party, and that they’d have to get together sometime soon.  Isabelle laughed and looked up.

“Yes, Isabelle,” Elizabeth said. “Some day when it’s really nice outside we’ll get together and we’ll go for a walk.  I don’t know how, but we’ll manage some way.” 

Since that party, Isabelle and I have had several visits with Elizabeth.  She’s truly a delightful woman. At one point there was hope that the swelling in her spine would go down and allow for more movement and sensation, but that window of possibility has probably passed. 

“Of course, I would love to walk,” she said to me.  “But I know that people can have valuable and enjoyable lives in a wheelchair.”  Then she looked over at Isabelle.  “Right Isabelle.”  And Isabelle laughed and said yes with her eyes. 

A couple of times, Isabelle, Elizabeth and I went swimming.  Elizabeth was lowered into the water on the chair lift first.   Isabelle went next and I waited to catch her in the water.  Before her accident, Elizabeth had taken children like Isabelle swimming so many times.  She would have loved to help Isabelle swim again.  But how could she if she couldn’t make her feet touch the bottom? Elizabeth didn’t complain, but I just thought of all the other people in the world who would never think of taking Isabelle swimming.  It wasn’t fair. To this day, I might be less accepting of the whole ordeal than Elizabeth is.

After I moved out of the house for people with disabilities, I started to practice Ashtanga yoga every day.  Although having the opportunity to practice was a total grace, I remember feeling immensely conflicted about it.  Headstands, backbends, all this was meant to take me deeper into myself.  But how could they be that important when other people couldn’t walk?  How could these postures relieve my suffering when wonderful, giving people like Elizabeth were stuck in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives?  What will happen when I fall off my bike and everything goes to shit? 

Over five years after beginning a daily yoga practice, I try to be grateful for my life and my body as it is right now.  Despite this, I often feel frustrated by my body’s trivial limitations, and terrified that all of its abilities will be taken away.  And I feel guilty for feeling all this, because it seems shallow and not very spiritual. 

Yesterday, I came across this beautiful TED talk by Janine Shepherd, an Olympic hopeful who was severely injured during a training bike ride.  

 
I highly recommend that you watch Janine’s magnificent story.  Her talk is called, “A broken body is not a broken spirit.”  It's a really good reminder.
 
The End.

*Name has been changed for privacy.  If you meet Isabelle and would like to know the real magic word, let me know and I'll tell you.

Isabelle looking angelic.
A broken body is not a broken spirit. And what does broken mean anyways.
 
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