Life These Days: A February Blob

There was a snow storm here in Toronto. The roads were perilous on the way home from Chinese class, which I feel earns me some sort of medal as a tiger mom that is usually trailing off at the back of the pack, stumbling by accident into an event that no one else is competing in. The next day, the kids had a snow day. Everyone I know seems to be fleeing or has fled to Mexico or the Bahamas or a cruise ship, refusing to bring me along with them. Don’t you have…children to take care of? they ask me, confused, as they pack their swimming suits and passports and wave goodbye.

I alternate between extreme chaos and a total vacuum in which all space and time cease to make sense. Either I am narrowly avoiding stepping on someone’s art project and then seeing my life flash before my eyes as I slip in a blob of yogurt, which is, at least, fresh, or I am sitting in silence, surrounded by laundry and stationery, one step away from being either one of the Ediths in her Grey Gardens.

From my cosy seclusion in my grey gardens, I had to go on this very stressful bank phone conversation to authenticate my personhood and they asked me these security questions. I found them incredibly disconcerting, and things that I have no idea about: “did you say your name was Edith?” or “how many lines of credit do you have?” or “what is your role with Wonder Pens?” For a second I had a moment of existential panic. I take photos of the cats. I write a weekly newsletter that nobody reads? I…order the mushroom cat stamps? It was a moment of internal crisis when I really and truly had no idea what my official role is, and if I didn’t know that, if the bank had no reason to believe in my existence, was I really a human?? Was I going to be sucked back into the matrix? Was I already in the matrix?? I could see Jon massaging his temples in his office, on the other line, unable to watch the car crash unfold.

In any case, life continues on. Naomi has discovered and really gotten into the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. This is not, shall we say, necessarily the journey I would’ve wanted her to go on, but everyone must travel down the lonely road alone, and make their own decisions at their various forks. She is learning lots of important vocabulary, like what the difference is between “dork” and “geek.”

We continue on, life with its riches and delights and treasures to be dug up from  deep within the piles of laundry, along with the cats. The kids flying down the hills on sleds, clutching onto Junia so she doesn’t tumble out, maxing out our library cards, folding “dumplings,” playing Bohnanza with a fouled deck, taking life into my own hands, driving out into the wilderness to pick up a bunch of French manga for Caleb from a Facebook marketplace post. “Why didn’t you ask if they could deliver?” Jon asks.

Follow up security question: “What are you buying? More books?”

I will end with this picture of Junia’s cheese falling out of the package onto the ground of the YMCA parking lot. A metaphor for February, a metaphor for life. A blob of laughing cow on the grey pavement, on the way to stripping down in a public change room and getting into a pool of cold water. I am the blob of laughing cow. But not laughing. Just the blob, lying on the pavement.