There’s no problem. I’m okay. Everyone else seems to have a problem with me and whatever I do doesn’t seem to be right. So when I point out that the errors can be corrected at any time by those who seem to have the problem taking up the utensils and actually pitching in to help, then I am the one who is bitching, crabbing and biting off heads. Yeah. Right. I didn’t raise my voice, I didn’t attempt to make fun, I just put in the time to get it together for everyone else to take apart. That’s my problem.

Every day is a new start, new resolve. This time it will be different. This time I will spend my life fruitfully, economically, efficiently. The bed will be made – sheets changed, even – and floors vacuumed and laundry folded, perhaps even put away. Then I’ll have time to write a couple of pages. Pages of whatever, does it matter? Every bio of important and successful writers talk about the need to write at least 2 pages a day but they never say of what. I bet that doesn’t include the grocery list or list of the day’s chores. Mow the lawn.

Ignore the ladies chatting away on the treadmills beside me. Now I know why this one isn’t occupied. Go to the weight machines, try to remember the routine so carefully taught by a personal trainer who is now improving her kickboxing on a beach in Thailand. Is everyone into this gym thing into being the externalization of ‘so cool’ ? I really don’t belong. My pants are genuine sweat pants. Grey, lumpy, baggy – I’m smuggling potatoes out of the old country in the pockets…no just my car keys and cell phone. In case the kids call. I don’t belong here.

Each day starts with great intentions, a plan of action all ready to be implemented. Why shouldn’t this be the day everything gets done or at least started or at the very least planed for the next day. Then a child phones home, sick, wants to come to bed. Well, not actually to bed, more like as far as the couch to play video games or watch the latest crap on Much Music. Is there a special hell reserved for the person who created the idea for ‘the real life’? Is the road to it paved with my good intentions?

Pizza lunch. If there is one reason to be a working parent, it can be summed up in those two words. These are the duties the not-working moms all know about. The ‘we need volunteers for’ words. The school trips and fund raisers and all the other events where the few who don’t work take care of everybody else’s kids. We become the uber moms serving in the front lines of the budget battle over what is good for the kids and what is good for the tax payers. We can’t serve all masters because we’re busy serving the pizza.

It doesn’t seem like another week has already gone by. The days drag on a minute by minute basis but suddenly a batch of them, bundled into days and called a week has been tossed out the window. Again. The saying is, I’ll never have those days back again. And that’s true. Even if another day will come hard on its heels looking almost exactly the same. Take a look at a picture from three years ago and realize even if the days look the same, I don’t. I think the same but looked a lot younger then. Everyone does.

The greatest sport in the world and for such a quiet, shy country, it’s funny how blood sport is the national past time. And how everyone is an expert. He needs to stay in his net, that boy better shoot the puck, c’mon, check the bastard harder next time. Check him into the boards, into next week. That wasn’t boarding. Quit acting. And all on a first name basis with the players – a real Homer boy, aren’t you. Well, let’s see you in a few weeks when they’re not doing so well. When it’s someone else running up the score.

Easter obligation. Haven’t missed it for quite a few years and this year I sit at home. It isn’t the same anymore. A child of Vatican II. This new old conservative movement, back to the good old fundamental days before the doors were thrown open, before the people were allowed to actually think for themselves. Strange to be an older person and fighting to maintain the progressive ways rather than step back to the conservative, repressive attitudes before Blessed John XXIII. It’s like watching the children of the revolution rioting, waging war and dieing to build the regency of Napoleon.

Read about how there is a new evangelism among atheists, the need to preach the death of God and to prove themselves as insensitive towards the spiritual believers as ever an fundamentalist preacher was towards the godless. And I’ve seen it grow around me. Watched the jokes, the humour, the not so subtle digs at traditional dress and beliefs and little respect for what I may or may not actually hold dear. It is all part of being smart, I guess, to be adult, mature and part of the real world to be rude and unfeeling to what others believe.

And so the week begins, now that the holidays are done and I can return to my normal, somewhat solitary existence. Pretending to clean but not really having the energy to do much more than tinker on the computer, pretending to write and playing flash games for real. It is much easier to listen to someone else’s creative output and focus on matching tiles in a mahjong game. It was good enough for old Chinese ladies, bound feet, opium pipes, waiting for their sons’s wives to bring them tea. If only my mother-in-law smoked opium and liked to play mahjong.

Blood pressure is coming down, three days a week in the gym and double up on the ACE inhibitors. No salt. Except for Doritos, of course. And welcome to the second half of existence. Metamucil and a rec centre pass. Golf is later on and curling is over for the year. Lawn bowling is still a few years off, thank god for that. Don’t look forward to having to wash all that white laundry all the time. And how do you keep the grass stains off the white shoes? Ask Pat Boone. I’ll tell you who he is later, child.

So, will this lady phone back? Do I want to try going back to work again, again? After the last experience of enjoying getting back into it only to be shown the door – after two years of being a pretty darn good employee, despite having someone breathing down my neck and answering to the boss’s wife whose only real work experience was a few months in a government office before coming to work for daddy. The boss’s wife used to be the boss’s daughter. Should have known it would end badly. Maybe this will be different? Only the phone rings.

Trying to get too many things done today. Makes it obvious just how much I don’t do the rest of the time if this is doing too much. Bake a cake. Blow some eggs – literally, wasting water using a venture system and flask to suck the guts out of dyed eggs. Can’t use the eggs ‘cause the dyes are toxic. Like most pretty things: vibrant, deep, rich colours but make you puke you guts out and dye if’n you eat ‘em. This should serve as warning to most people but we keep on falling in love with the pretty ones.

Running around, hurry up and wait. Everyone has places to go but I can stay home and clean to keep it all ready for when they get back. My life in a nutshell – keeping the shell tidy for all the nuts – ha ha. When one gets older, one enjoys this weak little jokes. It’s from too much time spent inhaling cleaning fluids, I suspect. Or the dust or the grime or all the bullshit from the younger generation; it all ads up eventually – it isn’t gravity that kills you, it is the burdensome accumulation of everyone else’s expectations piling up.

Happy birthday, 16 years ago today. 16 years ago at 2:34, give or take, I wasn’t really there at the time due to stress and a healthy dose of anesthetic just in case they didn’t get in there in time to make sure the birthday girl actually survived the whole event. Just a tiny bundle – literally a bundle, wrapped up and rushed down the hall before anyone has a chance to take a look. At least I got morphine out of the deal, made it all quite bearable for me – I was just glad to be able to fall asleep.

Trying to get things organized, again. Start out the week with good intentions and end up wondering what will happen. Practice up on excel, I taught myself a lot of it but who knows what I’ll be tested on come Wednesday. I hate interviews, typing tests, program tests and even spelling tests. Why not accept the fact that by the time someone reaches this stage in life, they can either do it or fake it or figure it out? Why the hell not? Cause everyone says the same thing, I guess. Just get ready for the thanks but no thanks.

This is a day to forget absolutely everything, it seems. Go off to do one thing and get back just in time to remember where I was really supposed to be or at least who I was supposed to talked to instead of strolling through the gym pretending to lift weights. Shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore but I still haven’t had a shower. Everything is coming down to the wire. And I missed the damn dentist appointment – again. Rescheduled it 3 times already. It’s not that I don’t like dentists – I don’t like their fee structure and mine doesn’t use gas.

Time to cram and type and see what I don’t know. It makes perfect sense that it is harder to get hired these days because it is so much harder to get rid of someone once they are part of the organization, especially a government organization. Still, it would be nice if it were just a matter of saying, now really, do you need someone who knows how to do some minor word processing function or someone who can learn it, do it their own way plus already know a bunch of other stuff only learnt by years of experience.

Hide the sharp objects and find a quiet place. Everyone is home today and it’s the kind of day I really just want to be alone. I hate the day after an interview and especially one that involved testing to confirm my inadequacies. I don’t need a variety of tests to tell me and the whole world I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Isn’t it a given that as one gets older, one gets less important, attractive, fertile and mentally agile? Even if it isn’t true – or doesn’t matter. The less fertile part can be a plus for some.

Ah, the weekend is here. Well, almost here – tomorrow it will be here officially. That used to be a pretty important weekly milestone. The chance to kick back, sleep in and do whatever the weather and the mood permitted. That was before every day was the weekend. I’m not sure if working again is such a great idea after all. Except for the lack of money, it would be just about perfect to be not working in an office or wherever. The real world contact is nice but some of us aren’t cut out for it on a regular basis.

Ah, this is why I want to work. So I can go out and buy something without feeling guilty or having to explain/justify it to someone else. Someone who never really has to justify expenditures to me. There may be a pretence at seeking my approval but it doesn’t really matter in the long run. In the intermediate run, actually and usually in the short run, for that matter. It can be a source of resentment. The hard part is that I don’t actually lack for anything in terms of necessities. Compared with most of the big world, I’m laughing.

So it begins. I get the left overs, the hand-me-downs and the just-wait’s. Story of my life. Before it was because I was the youngest, now it’s because I’m the mom. We are the ones who stand beside, behind, just off stage and wait at home for. This is the role unless I can find something to save me. Even after the children have been living on their own for years now, my father-in-law still can’t make his famous macaroni salad for less than fifteen people. Is this what the future holds for me? I never did like macaroni salad.

Where did the day go? All those things I had planned and a minute later, the kids I just took to school are breaking the door down, asking what’s for supper. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter what I suggest, it won’t do. Did I hear that Dayle got food poisoning on the ferry ride home yesterday. That certainly adds to the dinner conversation. A minute of sympathy for Dayle, several minutes of joking sympathy for the poor person who ends up taking the complaint call from her mom. Momma Bear, she likes to call herself. And with very good reason.

Take a moment to brush the hair from her forehead. The breathing is steady, she is still asleep and I have to wake her for school. If I could have this moment forever, hold her in my arms as I used to when she was small, when she lit up at the sight of my face; her grey eyes blinking with the joy of a life untouched by life. Her heart was mine then, all mine and we were the world to each other. Brush the hair from her forehead and whisper, quietly, do not wake just yet. Not yet.

The rule of the Benedictines, apparently, is to start each day as if it is a new day. Which is, of course, fairly obvious, if you stop to think of it. But the concept is also not to carry within your heart what wasn’t done yesterday or the day before. Leave what was unfinished yesterday in the past. Take up that same chore as if it is the first moment you lifted the hammer, the pen, the spoon and carry on as if this moment is the first moment. Do not forget what happened before but do not dwell there.

It’s a sign of some kind of mental pathology, the inability to make a phone call to anyone, known or unknown but especially unknown. Even if the reason is a regular one, like making an appointment with a dentist or calling someone back. I wander about the house, puttering, not doing any other work but most especially not phoning. Every room in the house has a phone, reminding me of the obligation, that I said I would, that I should be, that…oh hell, I’ll check my mail, look at google banner ads and feel the phone, looming over my shoulder.

Sitting and listening to the stories, he needs to talk to someone and I figure it is a way to pay for my renewal of a contact. This is a person who can teach me, even if he is 15 years my junior. He wrote a great piece on testicular cancer – from a personal perspective – that didn’t whine, or seek pity but simply put the way it was out there for others to read. That’s what it’s all about, after all, isn’t it? More coffee than I should drink, jangled and feeling apprehensive, something bad about to happen – coffee breath.

A beautiful day for a drive in the country. Stopping here and there to pick up fresh veggies, a fresh chicken, fresh eggs. How healthy – except for the poor chicken, wasn’t such a healthy ending for her but, you know, she had a happier life than most chickens and isn’t that more important? We raise these critters for our consumption and justify their slaughter by saying they lived a better life than if they’d been raised in a factory farm. They don’t have the reflective ability to see, in the last few seconds of terror, that it wasn’t all bad.

Sailing on the cold blue sea. An unreal existence but for some it is all that life is about, should be about and everything they do is directed to getting themselves back out on that boat, on that water, the wind, the sun, aging the outside but keeping the inside young. There is still a status thing about it but, not even I can fault someone for pursuing the lifestyle and bragging in little ways about their good fortune and their golden children and their small but exquisite house, flexible hours. If that was my life, I’d brag offhandedly too.

When will this grouch leave me. The old lady that sits inside, wizened, bitter and continually nagging about not being good enough, being too fat, eating the wrong things, saying the wrong things, regretting everything and paralyzed into inaction so as not to make another mistake. Better to take baby steps. There are a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Close down the stupid game. Just start one hundred words, that’s all, just for today. Even if it means nothing. It is something. Be busy. Even better: look busy, move a rock from here to there then back again.