Noises in the night

As a young child I lived in a rural area of Nova Scotia. My bedroom window captured the sounds of a nearby brook and occasionally a roaring ocean depending on the direction of the wind and ferocity of the storm. This soundscape was rarely interrupted by manmade noises, the road in front of our house was not heavily used although trucks were fairly common; hauling supplies and goods to the next village down the road.

There were few noises in the night to keep me on edge and awake with the exception of a Mickey Mouse watch. I received it for Christmas when I was about six and that watch ticked so viciously that I had to smother Mickey in blankets and pillows to get any peace. Luckily, I’m one of those people who have an odd effect on watches; they tend to die within months of being strapped to my wrist. Mickey quickly went the way of most other watches I have owned and drowned silently in the toy box.

At the age of nine, I left my babbling brook and moved to a bigger community, and then a bigger community and finally I moved to Vancouver- one of the biggest cities in Canada. Those stages of moving to ever expanding noise environments was effective in helping me block out each addition to the nighttime soundscape.

While I found little difficulty in blocking out the sound of rushing traffic and sirens, there have always been sounds, far less intrusive, that jolt me out of sleep. The first sound I reacted to was the sound of my cat Toodie coughing up a furball. This sound was always disturbing, making me fear for Toodie’s life. I’d jump out of bed as soon as I heard him start to choke and pat his marmalade coat until he stopped.

My sister and I slept in the same room for a time, and for some reason, her sleep was never impacted by this terrifying sound. As it turned out, not much could wake her up, take fire alarms for example; no effect.

And that fact became a very tangible difficulty when my family moved to Vancouver. The first night in our new apartment building-with boxes piled half-opened all over the floor, and no beds yet to be sleeping in—the fire alarm went off. At first my mother and I tried to figure out if this was real, was there a fire the first night in our new home; a home that had taken us weeks to find, and while we were finding it, we had been living in a tent. Surely not. A dash out to the balcony proved beyond a doubt that the alarm was real—two balconies over from ours flames and sparks were shooting down the side of the building.

We got my sister up, found Toodie and headed outside. It was a long night, but we got to meet our new neighbours, the building was habitable except for two units and we got to go back to our new home and finish unpacking.

Mickey Mouse watch, cat choking and fire alarms—my list of inescapable sounds.

Then I became a parent and hardly ever slept. Every sound the baby made woke me up. Or no sound, that was worse. Sleep inhabited a separate dimension from the one I lived in for at least five years. And after that, a full night’s sleep, that didn’t happen for another five years. And my parental radar has never diminished, any unusual sound in the night, I wake up.

Then there is this house, it’s old and old houses have lots of character including their own chorus of creaks, bumps, and rattles. Because my house is like my baby, I can’t sleep through all its many nighttime songs. Every bump is a drainpipe falling off, every rattle a loose window about to succumb to gravity, creaks are unwanted animals in the attic. The cacophony of sound is terrifying. I can’t block it out through sheer force of will, so I listen to talk radio all night—it’s the only kind of background noise that keeps the disturbances at bay.

Sometimes this doesn’t work, if the program suddenly samples a clip of music, I am apt to wake up. If loud alarms are part of the show, I will definitely wake up; but usually this method of sleep therapy works well for me.

Four o’clock this morning I heard a small voice call out, ‘Mom, can you help me?’ Aroused from sleep I quickly answered, “I’ll be right there.” I got up and made my way to my younger daughter’s closed bedroom door, opened it and saw a sleeping child. There was no movement, not even the squeaking of her door made an impact. Puzzled I went back to bed and caught a few snippets of the conversation currently playing on the radio. It became clear that the call for help had been broadcast on the BBC, not from down the hall.

My kids are older now, in the teen and almost teen years, and nighttime crises are few and far between. But it seems I will forever be locked in that space where a nighttime call for mom, is always a wake-up call.

Mickey Mouse watch, cat choking, fire alarms, and cries for mom—inescapable sounds.

I always come home

I don't think about it much. Usually on birthdays I am amazed by yet another unexpected year. When I turned 40 both my father and I were surprised I had lived this long. I wasn't supposed to-- medically speaking.

Recently a few things have made me think about this thing, this life I precariously lead on the brink of medical calamity. I just read an article about a mom with Cystic Fibrous. The title of the piece was What It's Like to Be a Mom When You Have an Incurable Disease. I don't have an incurable disease but I do have an incurable condition and it can be life threatening at worst and life disrupting at best.

I have lived with it all my life so typically I don't think too much about it-- dealing with my medical difficulties and waiting for a twitch that may or may not send me to the emergency room is something I am used to. And I really don't think about it as a problem, until a flare up. Then I can feel mightily depressed because nothing I do can make this better; make it go away. And it is also something that people cannot easily understand. I do not have a disease; I have a birth defect – it was fixed to the degree that I could survive but not to the degree that it would not seriously impact my life.

I have rarely given in to the idea that this precarious medical situation should affect how I live my life. In only one occasion that I can think of did it alter my path; when I thought of joining the Canadian military and realized with my food restrictions and inevitable hospitalizations-- I would not be a desirable recruit.

In lieu of a life of excitement in the Canadian Forces I opted for life elsewhere and moved to SouthEast Asia where I knew no one and nothing about the health care system. I was fortunate and lucked into a great North American trained abdominal surgeon at a little known hospital in my third year overseas. But that was after several bad experiences at hospitals where I was made to go through rigorous and unnecessary test to diagnose what I knew was wrong but which they had never before seen. Rarely do I ever find a doc who looks at my scar and can identify its origin as the birth defect known as an omphalocele.

Generally I just keep on keeping on and don't think too much about the implications of having a chronic, occasionally life threatening, condition. But as I said a few things recently gave me pause. One was the article that I just read and the second was the question almost voiced by a recent acquaintance of mine. When I was describing my medical situation to him he started to ask if I was not worried about my children and if...and then the question fell off. But I knew what he was going to say. Wasn't I worried that this thing might kill me before my kids grew up?

In truth, I never thought about it. Firstly, because I never thought I would be able to sustain a pregnancy let alone have two kids. Secondly, life has taught me that it is impermanent no matter your current state of health. If everyone worried about dying and leaving their kids behind-- no one would ever have children.

I have taken reasonable measures; wrote a will. Informed cited guardians of their inclusion in that will. Talked to my kids about what I wanted done with my body when I die; a discussion I had with them recently when an opportune moment arose and I was not in the least bit sick. Life insurance is a reasonable step; but they won't insure me for my condition so it seems like a futile measure.

Death is the end of everyones story; I have never assumed that mine would be written by my medical condition. I live with it, it is not my life.

Once in my early university years I had to write my own obituary for a class project. In it I gave cause of death as a fall from a mountain side while out scouting for archaeological sites in the Andes. It never even occurred to me that anything other than adventure would end my days. It still doesn't.

Occasionally I do worry about my health and how my time in hospital affects my kids. Mainly I just hope they don't get too scared when I am sick. I tell them when they are upset about a recent stay in hospital -- I always come home.

Love is the best art of all --response

I watched the above Moth project story the other day about a mother who was obsessed about giving her children a very happy childhood. This became her obsession as a solution to her own off-kilter upbringing where her parents were so concerned over her, and her siblings, safety that they lost sight of the art of living.

Today as I thought more about this story, this woman's madness began to feel familiar. In her I could see pieces of my own mother who fought so hard not to give my sister and I the childhood that she had endured.

My mother was raised in a big family and most of the fun times were only fun in retrospect. Both her parents were abusive but the driving force behind it all was her mother.

Throughout my childhood I heard story after story of the abuse my mother or her siblings had survived at the hands of their parents. Whenever my mother and her siblings would get together they would relive and retell these stories like so war weary veterans.

I heard some of these stories so often that I almost thought they were my own.

In light of the physical abuse my mother had suffered, she was determined never to raise a hand to her own children, never to be her mother. That was her greatest fear.

So she took what she thought was the opposite approach to parenting. She was against corporal punishment of any kind. As long as she did not cross the line of physicality she thought she was safe. What my mother never seemed to realize is that one did not have to raise a hand to hurt a child.

My childhood seemed focused in the corner; hours standing there as punishment. Hours sitting at the table over cold meals which would be reheated until it was finally bedtime. Hours of my mother's faced pinched in anger and hatred all directed at me.

When I was twelve she finally broke through the barrier and hit me. She only did it once. I am sure she spent a lot of time thinking about that moment afterwards; and not about how I felt, but about how she felt to have crossed that line. It made her angrier at me. I had pushed her across that unforgivable line that made her no better, in her own eyes, than her mother.

Things had never been good but from that point on they got worse. She forced me to go to a therapist and when the therapist told her that he did not think there was anything wrong with me and that perhaps I should go to group therapy with people who had problems with their parents she called him a quack.

She was determined to have me declared mentally ill so that the onus was not on her; so our relationship could be my fault not hers. When that did not happen she left. But not before she told me she was leaving because she could not stand to live with me. I was 14 years old.

With my mother living away and only visiting a week here and there every five or six months, my teenage years got better. I loved my school, I had good friends, I was mostly enjoying life.

Then when I was seventeen my mother decided to come out of her self-imposed Northern exile and return to the city. She and my then nineteen year old sister took off like a tornado; clubbing almost every night, double dating and bringing strange men home. I went on being the only sane person in the house.

It didn't last.

In February of my Grade 12 year, my mother told me I had two weeks to find a job and move out. I can't say I looked for work. I was traumatized. I went to social services, went to my friends and my mother stood in my way. She refused to let social services get involved in my case; she said I had a parent and she would make the decisions and told my friends parents, who were willing to take me in until school finished, the same thing-- but not as politely.

She called my school and started making trouble for me, telling my teachers and the school guidance counsellor that she thought I was suicidal. Homicidal was more likely. And on and on it went.

In the first week of March I came home from a school cross-country ski trip to find my mother and sister waiting for me. They were taking me to the airport that evening and sending back to my father in Nova Scotia. I didn't want to go but I had no choice—my mother had cleared out my bank account to buy the ticket and hidden all my shoes so I would not run away in the still winter-ish Edmonton night.

My mother was desperate not to be the crazy that her mother had been. But she was a different crazy which was just as bad for me. Getting away from my mother was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life.

This year I attended my grandmother—my mother's mother—funeral.

My grandmother was not an easy woman. But I always maintained a relationship with her over the years because all the bad was laced with some good –even great—times. I have fantastic memories of my grandmother. Unfortunately I can not say the same for my own mother. If I think really hard I can't come up with one good memory. I am sure there must have been some good times but they are heavily outweighed by the bad.

These days my mother sends me occasional cards and sometimes calls to talk on Skype. She sees her grandkids electronically and has even met them in person a few times. This is the kind of contact I can survive—impersonal, distant, indifferent.

I won't tell my kids bad things about my mother, I won't forbid them to talk to her, I won't keep telling them how I am trying not to be my mother. Because I am not.

Sometimes in this mothering journey I get a little guilty about not being the mom who gets down on the floor to play. I can't help it—I am just not into Barbies anymore. I may feel a little guilty about working and shutting the kids out of my office—but you have to work to keep the fridge full and the heat on and the kids know that.

I have never tried to not be my mother. I was never like her and that was always part of the problem between us.

When I watched this story about the mother obsessively trying to make her kids every moment fun, the antithesis of her own childhood, I felt pretty good because I know I have done that without even trying--the antithesis part of the equation at least.

I recently heard a radio report from a mother whose daughter just left for university. She was feeling depressed because her daughter was starting off on a new adventure in life and she was now left to finish off her life with no foreseeable adventures in her future. This shocked me. What was this woman thinking? Why was it that when her children flew the coop , that she did not think she could do the same?

When my children leave home- I will be leaving too!! I will get back my more adventurous live that I have forfeited while my children grow up. I know many mothers worry about the empty nest- all I can think about is how I will regain my singular freedom. That is not to say that I begrudge my children the restrictions they place on my life. I wanted them, and want to keep them safe and am unwilling to take the risks I used to take while they are still young. But in the back of my mind I am also waiting for the day when they take flight so I can too.