Living in the negative space

 

Tuesday I dropped everything, strapped on my helmet and pantleg elastic, and rode off to the FS training centre to take the Transitioning Home from Life Abroad course. I got lost twice. First I rode up one steep Gatineau hill, only to realize I must re-descend, then l did it again with another.

I hardly noticed the forest alongside but I knew it was there. I'd run its trails during a year of German training eight years ago. l arrived almost but not late to the course.

The pre-course readings included the usual graphs about the emotional stages of transition. It's okay, then bad, then slowly better. You'll just feel wrong. Then less wrong. No one cares how you've changed. Remember that they've changed, too. All this in much more eloquent words, all mostly accurate.

They included an article called That Discomfort You're Feeling is Grief. It was the first sign that someone understood, that all this could be understood. I read all the articles out loud to my husband.

An FS has to do many very different things, often on short notice and without preparation time or training, and must do them more or less competently. They must have this flexibility, self discipline, desire to learn, judgement and ethics, all without subsuming to the internal stresses these flexions create internally.

And one must do this for decades, through children, spouses, sickness, debt, neglected friends and family - all the many things that characterize normal life, while moving from country to country.

It’s very thrilling to satisfy one’s curiosity and fernweh, as the Germans put it - farsickness, as opposed to homesickness. It’s also exhausting. No wonder so many of us end up eccentric or divas, on the boards of one think tank or another, or alone. That’s another way of saying, there’s no way if knowing where this leads.

Another way of describing a life of change and discovery is to notice that new beginnings happen when things end. The things left behind can't be brought along, or not in their fully present way. They leave absences, holes so ragged they can't be stitched up in words. Or I can't.

My phone gives me the option of a typeface that is new to me, called Bahnschrift. This is German and it means, trainwriting. Writing of the way.

My Berlin life in Ottawa

The cheese man in the Byward Market tells me it's tough running a cheese shop in the Market. McDonalds is gone, he goes on, soon Timmies will leave, too. I exult that he sells Tomme de Savoie and Kaltbach, two of my favourite cheeses, but I'm sorry there's no Rote Teufel, which means red devil in German.

When I moved to Germany in 2015, I didn't know cheese. I liked Havarti and cheddar. For my first five years in Germany, I made no progress beyond this. Then, my friend H started invited me to join her on her Saturday morning trips to the market at Winterfeldtplatz. That means, winter field square.

There's a Turkish cheese seller, beloved among market stalls, who plies young customers with lollipops and serves up cheese samples to their elders. He has a smile, gives my change to my son, is always ready with a recommendation. And the prices are good. Sometimes we wait twenty minutes for our turn, canvas bags weighing us down. I don't notice. I'm strong from getting everywhere on foot, my backpack a permanent fixture over my spine.

H teaches me French cheeses, a wealth of information gained from paying attention to her French husband's relatives. Slowly I learn what I like. It takes all of my remaining three years in Berlin. Savoury sheep's cheese with coriander seed, hard oily Manchego threaded with truffles, the softer, younger Swiss mountain cheeses - Kaltbach. I like Brie de Meaux, my husband goes for creamy Delices de Bourgognes, my son likes Red Devil. I learn that I like mostly everything when eaten off the back of the cheese mongers knife. And that I get pickier at home, and as the days elapse since I visited the market.

I have H in my ear today as I pore slowly, lovingly over the cheese in the Byward market cheese shop. In Germany still, she's spending her afternoon watching Germany beat Serbia in the FIBA. We compare first weeks at school for the kids.

I'm alone in the store. Tourists fill the breakfast joints nearby. But the crowd of marketers I remember from Before-Berlin is gone. No one else is loaded down with bags.

During my first month back in Ottawa, I visited the Lansdowne market The crowd is lovely, it's a good market. The sellers are happy, they're selling. The fruit seller with the ponytail practices his German on me.

But the cheese and deli meat selection is spare. So, I'm branching out.

#condoliving #consolidation #ottawa
#ottawa #Berlin #tiergartensued #tiergartensuedcomics #comics #myottawa #bywardmarket #cheese

Dreaming of Canada

 

Next month I am moving back to Ottawa, and I don‘t want to go. There‘s no use telling the Germans. But, Lia „Kanada ist das Traumland!“

A dreamland.

They‘re thinking about mountains, Mounties and multiculteralism, and, by God, they‘re right about that.

For me, Canada is the place where I never felt as comfortable as I do in Berlin.

After being forced in Germany to live in a European way, and learning to love it, I realise that in Canada, I lived how I thought I was supposed to live.

Not only did I fail to live the way that I want to live, worse, I didn‘t even know how I wanted to live. I knew I was unhappy. I didn‘t know why.

The sin is people pleasing.

Even though people pleasing makes the world go around. Just ask anyone trying to keep a relationship going, any kind of relationship! Putting your needs and wants into perspective is healthy. We need to meet people halfway, at least partway. We can‘t always get our own way.

But failing even to know what our needs and wants are, like, in the first place? Cringe, says my inner teenager.

Here is what I have learned from living in Germany. I live to move and I need to move. I need stairs, cycle paths, a nearby park for strolling with friends, running or calisthenics.

I need to be able to eat well. I need a good and healthy food supply, and I need time to cook it at home.

I need to know where I live, to understand it and to have a connection to it. I need time for my family and I, for my thoughts and for my friends. And I need time and energy to care for my community. I need a nearby kind of life that I can live without a car.

I don‘t want to move to Canada because I am afraid that I cannot live this way in that country. I feel like my culture has let me down, by favouring concrete and ashphalt over nature, coveting ever-larger homes and cars, fixating on things instead of ideas and culture, putting the bottom line in urban design above people.

But Canada has lots of precious qualities. First among them, people who are warm and open, people who want to be kind. It‘s a very good start, right?

And my family can speak English there, when language has been such a barrier here, despite all my excellent language training.

So I hope that with a little bit of compromise, I can bring this late-in-life knowledge of how I need to live to the next phase of my life in Canada.

This time, it‘s not a house in the suburbs and two cars. Instead, we found a modest apartment downtown, near the farmers‘ market and shops, public transit, schools and library. It‘s not gorgeous, needs work, and I know that for years to come, Canadians will walk into our small home and look around quizzically. Um, so tell me again why you guys decided to live downtown?

I hope it was the right decision. I hope I can proudly say, well, I know it‘s not big and that we can‘t barbecue or play in the yard. But we moved here because we can walk to the brew pub or the theatre or the parade. I pick up food for our meals on my way home from work, instead of spending Saturday morning at the Superstore. We leave the car to languish in the garage. Our kids make their own way by bicycle to school, and they take the bus anywhere they want. They don‘t depend on their parents. We‘re all free.

Maybe once I have settled in at work, I can offer a free comics workshop for kids again, or start up a comics Meet-Up group for adults.

I don‘t know. I hope so. I hope it all works out a bit like I hope.

Have you been able to figure out how you want to live? And could you manage it?

Comics take over the neighbourhood

This book is a game changer.
Read it in my youth and never
looked back. 

I am in year two of my comics world domination right now, main themes being learning and teaching. 

Last week I hammered out an application for funding for a youth-led course to explore the neighbourhood through comics and the arts in the language of their choice. A local institution had approached me, after someone passed them my neighbourhood web comic, asking if I had any ideas for partnerships. Um, after 20 years in public service, yes, I have ideas! So, they signed on to provide the  event space. 

I have been learning about how young people can steer such opportunities for their own empowerment. My neighbourhood has an alarming number of youth and children in poverty, so the funding will pay my fee so that we can make the course free for them, but all Berlin youth twelve and up are welcome. We hope kids from the co-located Queer Centre will jump in. Drop-in format for those who cannot commit to a weekly course. 

I do not feel really educated enough to offer this course, but you have to start somewhere, and when the institution approached me, I reckoned I better bury the imposter syndrome. Few foreigners are engaged in the community despite us being a huge proportion of the community. So, you know, feel the fear and do it anyway (I loved that book).

I pep talk myself by reminding myself  that I studied creative writing and I have organised lots of events, plus I make comics myself. The other piece, the teaching piece, that's scary, but I did actually teach for two years before joining the foreign service. At the embassy where I served last, I ran an education program. Now, it was my team - not me - that actually met students in an interactive way and I only got pulled in as the suit with a speech. But still, it was good experience. I've got books on teaching art and on sociocultural programming on the coffee table. I have friends who know stuff. I've mothered - as an active verb - for over 12 years. The worst that can happen is that the course sucks. But the next one would be better.

So I hope I get good news this spring once the jury meets.       

Shorn

Photo Credit © Maja Jancekova

To observers it must be laughingly obvious that last year was the ideal moment, from one perspective, to leave a career and concentrate on obligations at home. I made a great decision. The kids went into partial or full-time schooling in the spring of school year 2019-2020, were again at home due to COVID-19 in the following winter, and then spent several months more in part-time home-schooling this spring. Now, my son is once again thrust into part-time schooling at home. It is such a wonderful thing that I can devote myself to their schooling like this. My kids are lucky.

I chose the wrong time from another perspective, my own, to leave my career. Starting a small art business requires time and dedication. I could already only work part-time on it for a number of reasons, and because of home schooling my available working hours shrank even further. To make a long story short, because people refuse to vaccinate, the full burden of their education falls to me a couple of days a week. My available energy has shrunk even more, because homeschooling is taxing. 

Both of my kids have attention issues, and doing any homework, never mind homeschooling, was always a total struggle. I am yelled at, hit, objects are thrown, I am whined at endlessly, it's exhausting, with little reward, and after years of my own health suffering I walked away in 2020, as I said, from the effort of trying to satisfy the twin demands of career and mothering. I chose a tough course that is humbling, that has involved a punishing drop in prestige and wealth, but that was healthier for everyone. The big bonus is that I love working on comics.

So homeschooling was never going to be easy, but for whatever reason, my children's school has been incapable - unlike most other industries - of getting on top of distance learning. We are in the third Corona school year, and still they cannot do more than send a couple of worksheets home per school day. It is the most difficult of things to motivate children like mine to do busywork like writing out worksheets. The lack of video teaching, group work and interactive activities is destroying their education. Filling in the gaps is impossible at home, when the children are totally resistant. I hear stories of other families, where the kids are engaged via Zoom with their teachers and classes most or all day, but it is better for my mental health not to think about it. It is too frustrating and I refuse to become bitter. 

In September and October I had finally managed to find a rhythm where I reliably painted between 5 and 8 pages of my book a week. Last week I managed three. I am so exhausted from pushing children to do schoolwork and homework that, after the weekend, it is Monday and they are at school today and tomorrow - and I just need to rest.

I started this blog entry about how lucky it is that I can educate my kids, or at least try to do so, because it is not lost on me that there are millions of other families in the far-worse situation where they cannot even dream of filling in the gaps created by this pandemic, never mind working on a financially stupid effort like a graphic novel. 

Counting my blessings always helps me feel marginally better, but it does not finish books.

***

In good news, I got a haircut after two years of butchering my head myself and which I paid for by baking a carrot cake. It turns out that the "amateur hairstylist" I found via Facebook is a talented scissors-wielder AND photog. She took this photo of me, and if I ever get a book deal, I will find a way to pay her for this an an author photo. Her Instagram is _ellenoir_ and if your desire today is to bask in rich, soothing, warm orange and rust coloured glory, click over.

Freedoms

As I reflect on what is happening in Afghanistan I think about how unusual my day Sunday would seem there. It was an unusually full day. I couldn’t help but notice a few things.

It was a Sunday in an overwhelmingly Christian country but I could be active as an atheist anyway because this country has freedom of religion.

For breakfast I ate cheese that I bought while alone on holiday with my child last week. I am a woman but I can travel without my husband.

I went to a comic book bazaar after lunch and gave out a comic book that I had made in which I comment freely - exercising my freedom of opinion - about my neighbourhood, its past and present, including controversial themes. No one feels that it is not my place to do this work and everyone tried to give me money for my work, even though the book is free. A woman has the right to work. A woman has the right to earn money and to control that money. A worker should be paid for their work.

There, I met up briefly with a female friend on her way to a protest at a government building. She had no fear for her safety and was going alone with her handmade sign. Freedom to assemble, to protest.

Then I biked home - alone, across town, exercising my freedom of movement while being female - and ate the meal my husband had prepared for our family, after he had already spent the day at home with our kids without me.

Then he and I went to a dance performance in which men and women danced an interpretation of contemporary life that had not been reviewed or censored by government prior to performance. The dancers danced intimately, often dancing with different partners. (Not having seen dance in many years, it was just wow!)

The person on call to help our kids in our absence last night, in case something went wrong, is a female full-time journalist. Her husband does not “work”, though of course he does, as they are parents. But anyhow.

All of you who have read this far are exercising your freedom of information and your ability to read.

That’s all I wanted to say.

You've got a family to run

Since I last wrote - three months or, as we pandemic sufferers experience it, an eternity has passed. In that time, countless women have conceived, grown, or lost babies. I say this because for me the idea of 'three months' doesn't signal a quarter. Three months is a trimester. Perhaps it is like this for other mothers. The other measure is the school year. Once children are in school, the calendar year feels very unreal. New Year's Eve should rightly fall on whatever moment marks the end of the longest school holidays. 

There is the time of the clock, and the time of the body. I spent so much time out on the land and under the sun during my childhood that the need for a wristwatch disappeared for a while. I have not smoked since Christmas Eve 2006, and I still know when six minutes has passed - the time from flame to filter. 

Time oozes so strangely nowadays. And I have much that I would like to report from my little corner! 

           

As for any caregiver of children who faces additional stresses - in our house attention deficits are a relentless pressure - homeschooling and lockdown extract all my resources, my patience, creativity, time, everything. I stay close by phone to my friends with special needs kids, my single mom friends, to anyone in my circle dealing with serious risks. The comfort from the school guidance counsellor - "It's not just kids in difficulty, many kids are having a lot of trouble with motivation. It's really bad." - helps drown out the unintentionally cutting words of the lucky few with independent children and the physical and material resources available to keep life going relatively normally. I just cannot bear it. I am genuinely happy for them - in my case Misery does not want to increase its company - but I cannot listen right now. Casual remarks like, "I expect my son to be independent. I don't look at what homework the school has sent home." Or, "We like her to get the homework done quickly so that the rest of the day is free." As if it were a choice. When all it is, is pure fortune. Now, I know that I am mostly lucky, I have never not known how lucky I am. But the ways in which I am not lucky are a major test at the moment, which I am only just passing.

So, having been worn down by this Lockdown-coupled-with-homeschooling to the point that my every failing and few virtues are in high relief, I am glad, regardless, to have suffered January. I learned a lot about myself, but far more about my kids. I don't blog about my kids in detail much, as I worry I could invade their privacy, but these few weeks have truly increased my respect for them. I am glad that we had this time. I understand them much better, the little jerks, and I really feel for them. And I wish they were going back to school on Monday. 

I pray and pray for strength, as, I imagine, do we all! 

But the good news is that I have won a small grant for expenses for a comics project (unrelated to my book). Since I do not yet have the official paperwork, I won't say more just in case I jinx it. (I make up for my atheism with superstition.) I am just so happy about this! 

Although -- typical for me, don't roll your eyes too much, they might fall out -- I have also been VERY nervous about whether I could do justice to the project that I proposed. Some sleepless nights, over-reliance on my husband's listening skills, etc. 

Being older is nice. I've had so very many occasions over the years to think poorly of myself and to doubt myself, and yet continue to survive at least somewhat intact. It is easier to ignore my own internal nonsense and just keep going. The project involves a great deal of research, so I have just sort of gotten down to it. I have two mental states: the self-doubting, jealous state that I feel when I am not producing creatively, and the mentally healthy, humble and methodical state I feel when I am. I love state number two. I'd like to apply for citizenship to it. Nothing can touch me in state number two. (Why aren't I calling it state number one?) Not jealousy, not mistakes, not awareness of my own totally mediocre skills. I'm just doing. I love it. 

So anyway. Hopefully I can manage the project despite the duties of home-schooling. If not, I will beg the project funder to let me delay for a few weeks. If they resist I will attempt to cajole them with news articles about the disproportionate effect of lockdown measures on women. But I doubt I would need to do that. They seem like really kind folks.

Next subject. My health is a lifelong problem, as some of you know, and I hurt my knees again. I finally managed to run five kilometres, a paltry amount by most runner's standards. This was the first 5K since my insides were injured during the birth of my son in 2012. Carefully cross-training, carefully increasing my distances, I have run without injury since starting again last August. I'd tried the year before, but injured the knees early on from running without orthotics. 

This time, all I appear to have done was to make the for-me stupid mistake of doing some difficult load-bearing exercises the day after the run. My knees immediately started complaining, and I've had swelling on and off for three weeks. The irony is that these exercises were test exercises to determine weaknesses in my body (from the book Runner's Anatomy). 

I was just trying to identify problems. Like a good girl. Why I chose to do these exercises the day after my most difficult run in a decade or so probably falls into the category of stupid things humans do because they evaluate risk badly. So, back to the beginning am I.    

 This post is not wholly art-related. By way of apology, I post here the pre-final line art for Chapter Five from The Engineeress, in various states of progress. I prepared an excerpt of my book based on Chapter four and am sending it out to publications now. If no one picks it up, I might make a zine instead. 

My very first comic publication, my memoir about miscarriage, was recently accepted for publication by Driftwood Press. It comes out later this year. My blessings, like I mentioned, are many. 

But "school" opens again Monday. Please wish me luck!