Enthusiasms: Pfingstrosen, Olive Again, and the Last Last Day of School
Pickle Me This Digest for June
Peonies: We’re at peak peony in my neighbourhood, and it’s splendid. And if that weren’t enough, I’ve splurged on a bouquet from Tonic Blooms, the most rewarding indulgence, because never has a vase of flowers been so engaging. The peonies are always changing, exploding into full-on froufrou. I especially love them because in 2021, when everything was terrible, I’d decided to go all in (in secular style) for Whitsun, the Christian holiday I only know from Barbara Pym novels, and ordered my very first bouquet from Tonic Blooms as part of the festivities. And then, upon scrolling peonies on Instagram, I noted the hashtag #Pfingstrosen, which was how I learned that Whitsun (the Pentecost) is also celebrated in Germany as Pfingsten and that peonies/Pfingstrosen are actually the flower associated with Whitsun/ Pfingsten. I’d had no idea, though I guess the seasonality is an obvious link, but it still felt a bit magic to realize I was accidentally authentically celebrating Whitsun. This year Whitsun was yesterday, Sunday, June 8, and my peony bouquet was a highlight.
Breezy Knots: Speaking of magic, I don’t think I’ll ever get over coming across the pair of embroidered bookmarks made by Briana T. inspired by the cover of my novel, Asking for a Friend. They’d been commissioned by a lovely friend of mine to share with her friend, and I loved them so much that I had to order more as prizes at my book launch. Briana’s pieces are all so gorgeous and make excellent gifts—she also has a lot of excellent rainbow fare for Pride. Check out her site! (And how cute are the little otters that she sent to me, which my children promptly claimed as their own?)
We Were Here Project: Mary Fairhurst Breen began collecting stories of the lives of people who’ve died in the current opioid crisis, beginning with her daughter Sophie, who died in 2020, and went on to tell the stories of others. “My goal was to emphasize the lives these young people lived – however brief – not their cause of death, which so often dominates the narrative.” These stories have now been made into a series of animated shorts with art by Jessica Hiemstra, and music by Eve Goldberg. The result is beautiful, moving, and an important way to know and remember people who continue to be so beloved. Learn more here.
Wild Irish Geese at the 4th Line Theatre: When I was a nerdy 12-year-old, I made a new friend whose brightness and creativity were immediately evident, and oh my goodness, were we ever silly (and likely VERY ANNOYING) whenever we were together, and it’s been the most wonderful joy to watch her star rise over the years through various creative pursuits. And now Megan Murphy is starring in the premiere of her play, Wild Irish Geese, at the 4th Line Theatre in Millbrook Ontario, included in The Toronto Star’s list of “10 Theatre Shows to See This Summer.” I’ve already got my ticket and I can’t wait.
School’s Out Forever
The first day of school was in 2013, when my children were 4 years and 3 mos old, and I was 34 with very few wrinkles or grey hairs, the baby strapped to my chest. I had never published a book then. Barack Obama was the US President. We’d spent that summer with my husband joining me on parental leave, both of us careful with my mental health, because postpartum depression had shattered me with my firstborn, although it would still be another decade before I understood that this had been what happened.
And now that firstborn was entering Junior Kindergarten at our local public school, a place we’d never considered when we’d moved into the catchment area, supposing we’d buy a house and live elsewhere by the time any hypothetical baby was ready for school. But we never did move (still haven’t!), so there we were two babies later, both of us as nervous, trusting and wholly unformed as our daughter as we left her at the kindergarten doors, sending her into the custody of a teacher who was calm, kind, and dispositionally unfazed—which bothered me at first. That he wasn’t concerned about our daughter, who cried every morning at drop-off, refusing to let me leave, and I’d have to creep out the classroom’s inner door into the school hallway, by which point I’d be crying too, the baby on my chest, as vulnerable as I’d ever been, surrounded by strangers, which was all kinds of mortifying.
I wondered if the teacher didn’t know how special our daughter was. How particular her needs were, her unique sensibilities. Instead, he told me she was fine, this was normal, that once she calmed down, she was happy. He was acting like a seasoned professional who’d seen this all before..and then I’d run into people on my walk home who’d tell me this was why they sent their children to holistic day schools that fostered each child’s unique natural genius, and then after talking to these people, I’d go and cry some more.
There are three reasons why sending my children to public school has been an easy choice for me, the first being that our local school is terrific, the kind of place where teachers stay for decades because schools don’t come much better; the second that my children’s learning needs are straightforward; and third, that even if neither of these things were true, we don’t have the means to do anything else.
Which is why it was a relief when the kindergarten teacher was right about my kid, and he ended up teaching her all of kinds of things I’d never been able to—how to write her name (when I tried to teach her, she claimed her initial would suffice), how to read, a special trick for putting her winter coat on fast, how to draw a picture that actually looked like the thing she was trying to draw, and so much more.
*
I’ve been thinking about our school as a container, the way it’s held us, the way it holds our community. I’ve been thinking about walking to school with the baby on my chest, piggy-backing the big sister, because she was walking slow, and we were running late. How that first year, we were always running late, because there is no marathon like trying to get out the door with a baby and a toddler, and it seems like a million years ago. I’ve been thinking about how there is no other school I’ve gone to for 12 years, almost a quarter of my life, and all the ways that my children have grown and learned and changed since that first day of kindergarten in 2013.
And all the ways in which I’ve grown and learned and changed as well, which I hadn’t anticipated, somehow supposing that being a parent, being a grown-up, was static and stable. That a person emerges and stays that way, instead of seemingly arriving over and over again.
*
In 2017, I published my novel, Mitzi Bytes, whose first draft I’d written during the summer of 2014 while the baby napped, her sister watching Annie on the couch beside me. As my world was very small at the time, I used the ingredients I had on hand to build my fiction, ideas, tensions and dynamics I’d encountered in our school community. I wrote about feeling like an outsider, which I think is familiar to most parents (I’ve never met anybody who felt like they fit in with other moms), and which was my experience often, although we’d also make some of our dearest friends at the kindergarten lineup.
I wrote about the culture of school fundraising and Parent Council, which I found overwhelming, like I was being hit by a never-ending onslaught of requests for cash. And this made it into the novel, my protagonist echoing my own feelings about fundraisers that required fundraisers to fund. At the time I was also a school volunteer refusenik, and my protagonist was too, the kind of bad-ass I’ve always aspired to be, a woman who knows herself and her value and that neither is contingent on other people’s opinions.
But because I am neither my protagonist nor a bad-ass, I ended up joining Parent Council just so nobody would think I was Mitzi Bytes (in spite of all the ways I obviously was), and due to many qualities that would eventually land me in therapy, I dove into school volunteerism like a maniac. I might have been part of a team of smart women, but their excellence only made me try harder. I remember the meetings I chaired where I was also taking notes because the secretary was away. And despite the fact that I was hoping to bring my aversion to school fundraising to the council, I ended up running several of those very fundraisers after all (Parent Council is the closest I’ve ever come to being drawn into a cult), spending swaths of time in the school office sorting order forms, counting counting cash, assembling brochures, and generally losing my mind as I tried to perform my identity as a Very Good Person (TM) working hard to beat back the forces of budget cuts, make a difference in my community, and create the kind of world I want my children to live in, one where the promise of public school always delivers.
*
As someone who works from home, school has framed my days for the last 12 years, even those days I didn’t set foot inside the building. Our youngest daughter is capable to getting to and from school herself, but consents to a parent accompanying her on the journey. My husband also works from home now in this post-pandemic world, so he takes her in the morning, and I will meet her at dismissal most afternoons, and this has become an indulgence, a treat, whereas I remember back when I did both school runs because I had to, and how it felt like I was spending most of my life schlepping children up and down Huron Street, thoroughly exhausting, and now it’s hard to believe there’s only a couple of weeks left before I never do it again.
*
My kids have had their own histories at the school, have their own stories to tell, but I’m thinking about mine, those days and days. Golden evenings in September for the Welcome Back BBQ, the basket of apples my friend friend Nathalie procured for the event well before I’d picked up my children’s habit of declaring things “very aesthetic.” I remember Parent Council tomfoolery and how much fun we had (sometimes). The lingering conversations at drop-off, the friends I’d get to walk home with, running into my friend Amy in the school foyer while I was eavesdropping on the school announcements to hear my daughter’s birthday announced. Volunteering on Pizza Day, which I always enjoyed because it came with a free launch. Book fairs, and anything that ever happened in the library, the time I got to chaperone the Forest of Reading trip. Celebrating the publication of Mitzi Bytes with other parents on the playground. The super stylish mom I’d stalked on Instagram who turned into the loveliest friend. How much I loved my kids’ teachers, and eventually learned about professional boundaries so that I almost got over wanting to be best friends with them, but not entirely. So many performances and recitals in the gym, how good it felt to be in such wonderful company.
I remember the Holiday Concert in 2019, the most crowded room I would be in for a very long time, and how I watched videos from it in the months that followed and felt such grief at what we had lost.
I remember that last day before schools closed the following March, and saying goodbye to other families, none of us knowing just what would lay ahead. How much I would miss them, even those people I knew just peripherally.
How precious those connections were once the kids returned to school but everything else was still locked down, and no one knew what they were doing. We were wearing masks outdoors, all of us doing our best, and I remember what a gift it was to connect, even briefly, and at a distance. That we were lucky to be a part of this community had never been more clear.
*
Community is hard though, which has been the toughest part of the story for me, the steepest learning curve. I had no idea what I was getting into when I dove in and decided I could take minutes while chairing the meeting. I thought that community meant a place for me to shine, to talk over the comments that were stupid. I thought that if we were reasonable and patient, we might be able to just skip the challenging aspects of being a democratic institution. I thought there was a way to get it right.
I had no idea how difficult other people could be. I had no idea of how difficult I could be, especially when perceived from the outside. I didn’t know that tension was part of the process, and not necessarily something that needed to be fixed. I thought I was in charge in fixing everything, which nobody was asking me to do, and which was also an unreasonable expectation to put on myself.
I started to learn about the problems with the provincial funding formula for education, and the province’s massive school repair backlog. I was very on Twitter, which meant I was furious all the time, and this was when Ontario elected a conservative government that proceeded to politicize public education like nothing I’d seen before. While, at least not since the conservative government that had gifted us that same flawed funding formula two decades previous, when I had been a high school student with no idea what the stakes were. And now, with my own kids in the system, I could see it for myself, that our public education system was held together with band-aids and chewing gum—which teachers were required to bring in from home.
I spent 2018-2020 helping to organize rallies and “walk-ins,” circulating petitions, baking sheet cakes, and writing impassioned blog posts about how we all need to act now for public education. I wanted our school community to feel as passionate as I did. I wanted to open the door for them to join me in my righteous activism (I still think it was righteous) and some did, but most didn’t, and it didn’t change anything.
One day I baked 100 muffins to serve at an early morning rally, which was lunacy, in retrospect, and even more so when you consider the size of my apartment-size oven.
During the winter before the pandemic, school staff and teachers were on rotating strikes, and we’d walk to school to picket with them in the freezing cold, carrying signs secured to broomsticks. We showed up at rallies at the legislature. We showed up, and we kept showing up, and then a deadly virus showed up too, and our schools were closed for months and months, longer than any place else in North America, and I felt like politics was ruined for me, along with my faith in politics as an agent of meaningful change, because all of the players considered it a game, and I was oh so tired.
*
Two weeks ago, I sat in the school gym for our final spring concert, and wept as a Grade Three class in which I knew nobody performed a dance I was seated too far back to see to a song I’d never heard before from Hannah Montana. All of which is to say that my feelings about school and about public education are heartfelt and far from rational. I was thinking about how the itinerant music teachers whose work had provided much of our program that night (though not the Hannah Montana) were being cut from future school board budgets. I was thinking about all the schools in Gaza that no longer exist, and the generation that’s being obliterated, about trauma that will be impossible to overcome. I was thinking about the children who’ve come up in our school who move on to private schools for intermediate grades and high school, and about what it means when their parents just want the best for their kids, and wondering how they manage to process the unfairness of that.
I’m thinking about band-aids and chewing gum, and the miracles that transpire, that somehow my daughter can play the clarinet, and read and write, and define a supermassive black hole, divide fractions, and read entire novels. That she knows how to be part of something larger than herself, and how the school has taught me this as well. It has taught me inexpertly, and what it’s taught me I’m still inexpert in, failing more than half of the time, but what I know now that I didn’t know then is that this is okay. That this is the way that people go, the way the world goes. All of us with our broken parts adding up to something imperfect that’s still precious and whole.
Happy Birthday Barbara Pym
It was 12 years ago today that I baked a Victoria sponge cake in honour of Barbara Pym’s centenary, and also because I was almost 42 weeks pregnant and had time on my hands. I went into labour shortly thereafter… (Read the rest)
Olive, Again
Podcast: What Happened Next
This week, I’m a guest on Nathan Whitlock’s WHAT HAPPENED NEXT podcast, presented by The Walrus, in which I talk about how publishing books has done a lot for my self-esteem (ha ha). You can listen here!
Catching Up on Bookspo!
Listen to the latest episodes of my podcast here!
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