Stormy Weather

Friday, September 5, 2014  

We got walloped with a humdinger of a storm on Friday evening. Banks of clouds rolled in quickly in the early afternoon, bringing gusts of winds, thunder and lightning. I listened to the thunder and the driving rain and thought about my friend, K.B., who absolutely loved a good thunderstorm. Seriously, she would act like a child at Christmas.

It seemed to clear out as quickly as it came, and we were getting ready to eat dinner when our younger son came in and told us he was going to get the hacksaw so he could help clear the many trees that had fallen on our street.

That's when I grabbed my camera.

Things I Learned from Other Mothers

Most new parents lament that babies do not come with instruction manuals. However, if we're lucky, we can learn a thing or two from the other mothers around us. I know I sure did.

Odette is a mother of four children who lived next door to us in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu. We've lost touch over the years, but I was always astonished by how calm she was, how well behaved her children were, and how clean her house was. When we first met her, Steve and I only had two children - and that was plenty. Watching her juggle four inspired us to take the plunge and have a third.

So here are some of the things Odette taught me.

If you tell a child to do something, make sure he or she does it, even if it requires you getting up, holding the child's hand, putting the hand on the toy, closing the child's fingers around the toy, walking the child to the toy box and dropping the toy in the toy box. Several times. The message here is: I am serious about this, and it's not about my being too lazy to do the job myself. (This works best with very young children; teenagers tend to bite harder.)

The baby! It has teeth!
(Julia Roberts as an infant.)

Five minutes at a time. There are days when life just slides off the rails. Everyone has the stomach flu, the baby's teething, hubby is traveling for work, and the toilet stopped working. If you're like me, it's easy to get mired into thinking that things will never get better, that your husband will come home to find you and the children dead and surrounded by vomit and backed-up toilet, except for the baby who will have sprouted a full set of teeth.

You can tolerate almost anything for five minutes. I can't tell you how many times I've encouraged myself to hang in for just five more minutes. Often, the worst is over by then. Sometimes not, and you have to bear up for another five minutes. But it's JUST five minutes. On the bright side, I've had friends show up with dinner, or colicky babies fall asleep when I thought there was no end in sight.

One of Odette's paintings

Make time for you. We've all heard this one, but we mothers don't always do it, or don't really understand how that plays out. (Does taking a bubble bath count?) Odette was a self-taught artist who painted in acrylics and oils. She made time to be creative, whether that meant scheduling a weekly naptime date with me or going to the community centre in the evening. She also went to the gym regularly.

I remembered her lesson when I was a weekday single mother with four kids under the age of eight at home (Steve was on a course in Toronto for nine months). I booked a babysitter and signed up for a stained-glass course. It helped immensely!

My Aunt Vera had seven children and a seemingly boundless supply of energy. Honest to goodness, I have no idea how she coped, but she did more than just cope, she thrived as did the people around her.

Here are some of the things Aunt Vera taught me.

Always cook extra. I don't think I ever witnessed a meal at her home where it was just the nuclear family. (I suppose my being there already made it extended family, at least.) Usually there would be cousins from one branch or another, plus a couple of teenagers or kids she was watching for a neighbour. The food wasn't fancy (they were far from rich), but it was like the parable of the loaves and the fishes - it just never seemed to run out. What it meant was that young people, especially young adults, always had a place to be part of a family, because that's what the meal meant.

Make time for hubby. My Uncle Doug was fortunate to live within walking distance of home, so he came home for lunch most days. After eating, he would lie down on the couch with his head in Aunt Vera's lap. I realize this sounds exceedingly gross, but she would clean his ears. I think he just found it soothing, and more than anything, she was just being there for him.

Aunt Vera's hair was also red and piled on her head
in a series of stacked and interlooped rings.

Just because everyone else does things a certain way doesn't mean it's right for you. Aunt Vera never got a driver's license*. Imagine: seven kids and no driver's license! And she didn't get a washer and dryer until most (all?) of the kids had left home. Instead, Uncle Doug (or later, one of the older kids) would drop her off at the laundromat in the morning once a week. She would load nine people's worth of laundry into the machines then go next door to get her hair done. (It was a Marge Simpson affair, stacked like a wedding cake atop her head. It was not a loose updo like we have today, but an architectural construction fortified by hairspray and bobby pins. It probably took most of the morning for the stylist to wash, colour and set it.) She would be picked up at the end of the day having spent time looking after herself as well as taking care of housework. Brilliant!

*Note: Not having a driver's license never served as an impediment to her ability to direct the driver. She was a very participative passenger.

I also learned some things from mothers I never met.

From Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, authors of "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk", I learned some empathetic communication techniques. They have been known to defuse a bomb once or twice, though our kids would probably not know it. One of my favourites is the echo of wishful thinking: when a child is whining ("I don't want to go to pre-school!"), instead of stating that he or she has to go, try voicing the child's fantasy, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could go to pre-school only on the days we felt like it?" Surprisingly, I don't recall this ever backfiring on me.

I may do a "part two" on this topic, because I'm sure I've forgotten some of my mentors.

It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood!

The fall colours have definitely arrived here - and may, in fact, be waning. And I am falling in love with our neighbourhood all over again. Let's go for a walk together!

The view from our front porch, if you look up.

 And the wonderful climbing tree across the street ...

 And into the forest.

 Then out of the forest and ...

 back into another part of it!

 A grand old maple. (If I had Photoshop - and knew how to use it - I'd totally remove those hydro lines.)

 An intersection on the way to Brian's school.

The garden in one neighbour's front yard. I don't know what those purple flowers are ...
they're like miniature purple daisies.
I don't know if I want my front yard to be quite this meadow-like,
but it sure is pretty!

I'm so excited ...

That I just can't hide it!

I've been giddy ALL DAY because the fence-builders were here. And they built the fence! And it looks freaking fantastic! And it even SMELLS great, too (freshly cut cedar)! See:

Privacy is restored!

Is it weird that I'm so ecstatic about a fence?

But this fence is a big deal. It's been over two weeks [Seriously! Two weeks!] since we ripped out our neighbours' fence without their permission, and I've been more than eager to restore our neighbours' privacy. Each day that they were forced to gaze into our barren, chopped-up back yard was one more day that I felt guilty at having ripped apart their property. Today, I hope they will come home from work, look outside and mutter something along the lines of, "Well, thank the lord, at least we don't have to look at those bastards anymore."

Yah. Not getting my hopes up too high. Although we did have a very cordial e-mail from them earlier this week (after I e-mailed them to give them an idea of the timeline for the fence). He wrote,

"Of course we will be happy when the fence is up since we have been used to more privacy, but I don't think a delay of an extra week or two is going to be an issue...We wish you much joy with your new patio and with some luck, you still might have a chance to enjoy it and your swimming pool this year before the cold weather arrives."

Nice, eh? They may come to our eventual "pool-warming party"* after all. Who knows?

So, quite aside from the fence looking flipping beautiful, it really gives me a lot of peace of mind. Phew!

Aaaand! As if the fence were not enough excitement for one post, we also finally got the corner cabinets for our dining room! Yup. My brain is about to burst from happy-happiness. Aaaand - almost all of our china and crystal fit into the two cabinets - a minor miracle. Must be some kind of wrinkle in the space-time continuum when you open those pretty glass doors.

And, look: see those pretty curves cut into the glass doors? That's my kind of detail.

And last, but certainly not least, in my long list of overwhelmingly blissful events this week, I had dinner last night with my very dear friend, Heather. Heather and I were housemates in university, were each others' bridesmaids, and have stayed in touch over many thousands of miles, several time zones, and life changes. Heck. She is one of the few people besides my husband who knew me back when I was skinny!

Anyway, we hadn't seen each other in way too long; both of us living outside of Canada for the past few years made it hard for paths to cross. But, being with Heather is always like putting on your favourite sweater: comfortable, just right. So I had a fun, grown-up, girls-only evening with a dear friend. What's not to love about that?

There have been some less-than-stellar moments this week (first week back to school for the kids = chaos), but I am going to choose to ride this high as long as it lasts and ignore those Debbie-Downer moments.

*The pool will, in fact, be cold. We won't have a gas line installed until mid-October. Thus the pool will not be heated this year. But it'll be pretty to look at.

We'd better be careful, or that might come back and bite us in the - OUCH! What was that?

As if "karma cramps" weren't bad enough, we've gotten a taste of just how unhappy our backyard neighbours are: they called the city inspectors on us today.

The city inspector popped by for an unscheduled visit, without warning, and left a note in our mailbox that we have to install a temporary fence around the pool. I called her back to explain that the rest of the fence is going in tomorrow (so far only the posts are there); she said that was fine then, no temporary fence is necessary. She explained that they had received a complaint and had to follow up on it. I can only think of one direction that such a complaint might have come from.

I guess our neighbours are even more impatient to get this project finished than we are. Can't say that I blame them.

But now I'm worried that we're going to receive complaints any time we have a party, anytime we do anything that displeases them ... Guess we really "screwed the pooch" on this one, as Steve's dad likes to say.

P.S. I should note that we've been told that the fence has to be completed before the liner and water go in. We've never been told we needed a temporary fence.

Is there such a thing as "karma cramps"?

If so, that's what struck me down yesterday.
Shortly after I realized our error with our neighbour's fence, my tummy started imploding. I was never actually sick (no vomitting, diarrhea or constipation), but, man oh man, was I in pain! Even the movement of my diaphragm as I inhaled and exhaled was painful. I was this close to calling Steve home to take me to Emerg - I thought for sure I had a blockage or twisted colon or something.

All my soap-opera fantasies were in full swing: I pictured myself laying on pristine white sheets, hair (clean and gently curled on hot rollers) strewn wildly (but in an esthetically pleasing way) in a halo about my head; my beloved struggling to hold back tears as he feared losing me to this mysterious, incurable illness. A single tear escaped down his bronzed cheek. The monitors beeped steadily. 

And then, suddenly (well, in the space of about 10 minutes), it stopped. Just like that, leaving me in no pain - NO PAIN AT ALL, but just exhausted.

Not that I'm complaining, but this is actually the second time this has happened to me - though the pain this time was worse and lasted longer than the other time. But afterwards, I was reminded of that Monty Python scene where the old man declares he's feeling much better. Here's the clip (skip to the 1 minute mark):


All that to say I'm feeling fine today, thank you, and I think I might go for a walk.

Thank you for all of your suggestions regarding our neighbours and the fence catastrophe. Just a couple of comments:

• It's not that they dislike the style of fence we chose - they have no problem with it. The issue is that it was their fence. They had it for more than 25 years and they were quite happy with it. It's sort of like someone throwing out your favourite sweater just because it has holes and stains and it sags like a 90-year-old's bosom.
• We definitely always planned to plant lots of greenery along the back - some lilacs and such. So, eventually, the private, leafy view will be restored. (I don't think we'll plant a tree there, as it is under the power lines and would have to be clipped away from the wires, which just looks off-kilter.)
• I think there is a little passive-aggression in their rejection of planting something on their side of the fence: "No, I will not allow you to mollify me. I'm going to hold my breath and let you feel miserable." Fine. Whatever. I can't force them to take any compensation, but at least I demonstrated willingness to do so.
• We will definitely invite them to whatever party we host next. Sounds like fun. Yeah.

Today, all is quiet at the Sibbald household. Yesterday, there were lots of big machines and sweaty men all over the place. (Maybe I'm in the wrong business?) They left us with this:

Yeah! It is starting to look like a pool!

And they started work on this:

Weeping tile (in a coil)

Because there is such a slope to our lot, we are putting weeping tile all the way around the pool, and tying it into the drainage around the house. This should prevent water building up under the pool liner and causing the liner to displace or tear.

We screwed up.

You may remember from a previous post that we spoke with our neighbours, and that they were not happy about what we were doing in our backyard. They had quite liked the overgrown cedars at the back of the property - they, in fact, relished the privacy it afforded and were sorry we had ripped them all out. Even in their front yard, the hedges and shrubs are so overgrown that you can hardly see the house at all - just the front door and garage. As our neighbour put it, "You can easily see what our style is." They like green. They like privacy. They were sadder still when we cut down our half of the shared silver maple tree, but they did not protest.

Here is a glimpse of their backyard (which we can now see), and what they would like to see more of:

A leafy haven.

Then we blew it.

There is one key sentence in that previous post:

"They implied that, if we put up a new fence they would probably take down the old one."

Key point: although it was built right on the property line, the fence was theirs (a previous owner had built it). It matched the fences on the other two sides of their property. Although it was falling apart on its own, and would render any fence we installed quite climbable, they had no intention of taking it down, necessarily.

Imagine their shock when they came home from work on Tuesday evening to find the fence GONE! They had gone from a situation where they could barely even see our house behind theirs to this view of our backyard:

Barren landscape, ugly house.

Not exactly "leafy," is it? He sent me an e-mail this morning, asking, "What is going on?"

Steve and I had simply forgotten our neighbour's statement, forgotten that the fence was not ours to remove, and had gone ahead and had the fence torn down with the intention of putting the new, unclimbable fence right on the property line (with a jog inward to prevent kids' using the trees to climb the fence).

Can you say, "Oh, crap"?

I like to think that we have always been good neighbours. And we will be again, even with these neighbours. We'll make amends (we've offered a gift certificate so they can plant a couple of trees in their backyard). But, dang, I hate getting off to such a bad start!