Rude awakening

This past week has been a tough week emotionally for me.  All week I've had a feeling of loss hovering over me, like an unwanted albatross. 

As I began feeling the weight of depression settling in over me I tried to evaluate the reasons.  I've come to some self-realizations as to my feelings of loss and loneliness…

Well, given that its this time of year there is no doubt that part of it is related the anniversary of my mum's death some 27 years ago.  Who really gets over the loss of a parent, no matter what age you are.  At first, when I began to feel "down" I put my feelings down to the lack of closure with mum before she died, but as the week progressed I began to feel it was something more...

Then it hit me - I was also experiencing the definitive end of an era in my life. 

Easy to miss the old place with all those memories...

Jodie (my ex) just sold our old house on Melrose Avenue and is moving closer to the subway line for the kids convenience so that they can get to school more easily and especially getting back and forth to my place which is close to downtown. Zach and Sami had been raised in that house, in fact the only house that either of them remember, and a definite connection to us as a family.  

Initially it was hard to believe that this had triggered something deep inside me, even though we've been living apart for more than two years and have both moved on with our lives I felt a definite sense of loss surrounding the sale.  

Perhaps it was a culmination of the images that spun through my mind, especially of the kids growing up through each of the phases in their lives.  As I sat on the plane last night reminiscing about those years a few great memories came flooding back to me:

Checking the kid’s height on our measuring wall. Like most households the kids were very excited to see how much they'd "grown up", so we had a wall where we had began measuring them from a very early age.  Generally we'd have them stand against the wall, very still, then the tickling would begin so it was hard to measure the height of a writhing child but it was lots of fun.  Of course you'd never see any change day-to-day, but afterward I'd always stand back and marvel at how much they actually had grown over such a relatively short period.  It always made me smile!

TW with Sami in the back garden commemorating the masterpiece
our homemade Totem Pole (background) - cake to follow.  Yum!

Another was the time I accompanied Sami on her Grade 1 class excursion to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see the Emily Carr exhibition.  Sami was completely enthralled with Emily Carr's Totem Poles.  So the following weekend she and I decided to build our very own Totem Pole.  We went to Home Depot and brought an eight-foot piece of redwood lumber, then some chisels so we could carve into the wood.  All I can remember is how sharp those damn chisels were and how I worried I was about Sami slicing her fingers, but surprisingly we came away unscathed after spending the weekend designing and carving the wood.  To finish the job we painted it in an array of bright and decorative colors before "planting" it in the back garden next to the climbing Hydrangeas bush, in the hope that eventually they'd climb all over it.  

The best part was as the sun began to set on Sunday night we had a little ceremony and christened the totem with cake and sparklers in the backyard.   Such fun!

Another of my favorite memories is Zach’s early morning “juicy, juicy”.  Shortly after we moved in (Zach was only two and a half and Sami a mere six months, so not mobile just yet) each morning Zach would stealthily come into our bedroom, stand about 6 inches from my sleeping face and say “juicy, juicy”.  He would continue to say it until I woke from my slumber and then trundled downstairs to get him his morning apple juice in a Sippy-cup.  With juice firmly in his hands we'd all sit in bed and watch the CBC kids morning shows…Teletubbies, Bob the Builder and of course The Koala Brothers!   He was better than an alarm clock, but to be honest there were days when he'd frighten the living daylights out of me, especially if I woke and he was nose to nose with me when he'd say his now famous "juicy-juicy" to me.

Zach and Sami seeing real Totem Poles - 2007
Stanley Park, Vancouver.  BC

Drawing on the driveway.  The asphalt driveway was a wonderful canvas for chalk drawings; these often-elaborate drawings would be full of maps with make believe villages and far away lands, sometimes with dinosaurs or other animals festooned all over.  

They'd last until the next rainstorm but they always made me feel good when I came home from work to see them still covering the double drive days after we'd been drawing.   As I recall we also played lots of hopscotch on the footpath out front. J

I wonder what each of the kids best memories are from growing up in our old home and neighborhood?  Hhhmmm - sounds like a good topic of conversation at our next family dinner.

I know some people might think that I'm too much of a romantic at heart, or perhaps overly sentimental, but at the end of the day I wear my emotions on my sleeve - it's who I am for better or worse.  

The definite upside of all this is that I'll cherish these memories for a lifetime.