The morning light on my dog walk today.

Busy bee.

Western Salsify gone to seed.

 

After the fire, fireweed.  Mother Nature will recover in Jasper.  Our friend lost his house, burned to the ground but he's ok.  He said he's got, love, family, community and insurance:)

I made the mistake of responding to my sister and that blew up in my face.  That's twice now, I won't be doing that again.  I'm feeling down today but I know it will pass.

 

We visited Jack's great grandma while we were in Red Deer.  She's ninety-one now and relatively healthy, except for her arthritis and dementia.  Her long term memory is intact but her short term memory is almost non existent.  Fortunately for me, we knew each other over forty years ago and she remembers me.

I dated her son, I'll call him Stuart, for four years and he's the biological father of my son.  I was young when we met, we both were, only eighteen.  There were immediate red flags but nobody talked about red flags back then and I was just flattered to have a good looking guy take an interest in me, actually, any guy.  I had no self esteem when I was a young woman and he made good use of that.  

Looking back, I can see that Stuart, was/is a sociopath, much like our son.  He was also an alcoholic, a chronic liar, and abusive.  I finally broke up with him when my son was a year old.  Stuart had come over to my place, the top floor of an old house, completely out of his mind.  He had peed on the stove and when I went to heat up my son's bottle of milk, the stench was sickening.  That was the final straw for me. 

As Stuart lay passed out in my bed, I thought of blowing out the pilot light on the furnace in my place and cranking up the gas.  At that point I realized I needed to get out of that relationship and I did, but it took another year to rid myself of Stuart and I even had to leave town for him to leave me alone.  

Stuart is three months younger than me.  He's had a stroke and lives in a continuing care centre in Calgary.  He's been sober for the past eight years, mostly because he had a stroke and couldn't buy his own liquor anymore.  He remains a sociopath.  He tried to sell his mother's home out from under her (his mother already had dementia at this point) which was when his family removed him from his mother's home.

That's part of the story.  The other part of the story is that Stuart had a wonderful, warm, loving, supportive family that I didn't want to break up with.  Obivously I didn't break up with them; we've kept in touch all these years.  

Stuart's mom is indigenous and was born in Hobbema, now called Maskwacis, the Cree name of the place, before the Europeans showed up.  She's still a lovely, funny, kind woman who is stubborn as hell.  Jack was so good.  She must have asked him twenty times, at least, how old was he.  He was kind to her, an old woman whom he didn't remember ever meeting before.  

And Stuart's sister is just lovely as well.  We've kept in touch all these years too.  We talked about my son and Stuart, about how similar they are, about how much they lie and use people.  It felt good to be understood and accepted, more accepted than I've ever felt with my own birth family.  I got and gave a lot of hugs yesterday when we visited.

We're home.  We were supposed to visit Jasper and our friend who lives there but Jasper was ordered evacuated on Monday night.  He made it out but we don't know if his house survived the fire.  I've been crying a fair bit.  Jasper means a lot to us, it's where we got married, where we went to take photos and where we went we needed to get away from bullshit.  The waitress at Papa George's know us and I wonder about her home too.

The highway is closed from the south and both east and west.  We were supposed to travel up the Icefield Parkway to Jasper but that's where the fire came from.  We cancelled the hotels and came home.

 Wildfire Frenzy Forces Massive Evacuation in Jasper National Park - West Island Blog

Sylvan lake.

Five year old gives it two thumbs up.

 

Calgary zoo, five year old was meh.

Highlight of the five year old's week, pool and waterslide at the hotel.

Jasper is off the menu now, Jasper national park is closed due to wildfires.

 Battle river

Sylvan Lake

 We're off on holidays for a week.  Take care.

 

I'm miserable today.  It's hot and it's been hot for the past week and it's supposed to be hot for another week.  Today's high is 35C (95F).  The trees are having a hard time, too hot and not enough water, so they're sending up suckers everywhere and dropping their leaves. The house can't cool off because it's too hot at night.

The lawyer said we have to take Jack to visit his mom this weekend because of our court agreement.  The alternative is to go back to court and ask for supervised visits again which I'm sure would make Gracie's mom and sister so happy.  Jack is finally back to normal again, just in time to go back to his mother's.  I woke up with a headache this morning because I'm clenching my jaw while I sleep.  If Jack tells me of any other problems, we'll be going back to court.  Oh yay.

So I'm grumpy and hot.  I ate Smarties for breakfast and I'm watching Schitt's Creek, so that helps, but now my new TV keeps randomly doing weird shit.  

Life sucks today but it will get better.

Just a random day lilly on my walk the other day.

Yesterday, Katie and I had an interview with a news agency in the city, about her having to pay for her incontinence briefs.  Katie has worn diapers her whole life but since she turned eighteen CAIL has paid for them, $217/month.  Katie also lives on something called AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) which is not a lot of money.  Right now she has enough to cover her daily living costs but with very little money left over each month.  In March her contract, or whatever they call it, was up and she needs to be reassessed to make sure she is still disabled?  Still incontinent?  I called CAIL, a four to six month waiting list to be reassessed because they are short staffed.

There is a whole long story behind this but I'm too lazy this morning to write it out.  There is a reporter who is helping disabled people deal with CAIL and AHS, to get the supplies they need paid for, and yesterday she came over to Katie's house and she wrote an article about Katie.  It says so much about a government that is willing to screw over disabled people while handing out subsidies to oil corporations.

But I digress.  Jack has been awful this week, a lot of acting out and meltdowns, he bit one of his friends at school because his friend was, "...not letting him relax and was stressing him out."  Gracie's words I'm sure.  So I asked him this morning if mama was mean to him.  He said yeah, she yells at me sometimes, so do I sometimes.  I try not to but he can be a challenge.  

But then he went on to tell me about her leaving him alone again.  He said he didn't want to go to the laundry room with her and she left him alone in the apartment.  So he took her keys and went outside but when he tried to get back in the building, he couldn't reach the lock to open the security door.  The he said that when they were coming back from the store, Gracie was walking ahead of him and went into the building without him, leaving him outside.  Both time she talked/yelled? to him from the balcony, then came downstairs and let him into the building.  He's five.  He has abandonment issues because of her and she pulls this shit and I'm angry and tired.

Update

I talked to Jack's other grandma and she doesn't know what to do.  She suggested that we should teach Jack how to be safe and I pointed out that he's five and it's our job to keep him safe, not his job.  She also can't take care of him this weekend, or supervise Gracie, because she's going away for the weekend, so she's obviously heavily invested in keeping Jack safe.  Still haven't heard back from the lawyer.

Charlie chilling on my chair.  All of the furniture in our house is covered with dog blankets because I like to keep it classy.

I'm retired now.  I worked for AHS for thirty-eight years, pretty much my whole life and nothing really.  My manager asked me yesterday for a photo of me because the nurse educator wants to post something in our online magazine, which surprised me.  I'm not sending them a photo of me now, tired after thrity-either years.  It was either this photo or one with a snapchat filter and no wrinkles, cause I'm still vain.  I sent her the grad photo.

I worked yesterday and realized that retirement is kind of like a death.  You're gone, life moves on.  People say they miss you but you know from years of working that a retirement, or a death, is like a ripple in a pond.  The surface is disturbed briefly and then returns to its former state.  I'm not needed by my patients, there are lots of good nurses there.  I wonder how long it will take me to let go and move on.

I also realized that your job doesn't really care about you.  Your coworkers care about you but not your job.  I know everyone says this but understanding is different than knowing.  "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard.

Life goals:)

My flowers are much happier now with some heat.  My husband and I have lived in this house for eight years now and I've wanted a patio/deck set for awhile but they're so expensive and I'm thrifty.  And then this one came on sale at Home Depot and it was a floor model so I asked for something off the price, which I got.  They wanted $85 to deliver it and I asked my neighbor if I could borrow her son's truck but he's out of town working on a pipeline.  My neighbor works at Home Depot and told me that I can rent a van there for $25 for an hour and a half, so I did and now I have a comfy place to sit on the deck.  The adirondack chairs were fine but it's getting harder to get up and out of them, don't laugh.

Yesterday it was cooler than it has been all week, so I picked up Jack early from daycare and we went to the spray park where he told me, "I'm on a team".  A bunch of boys had water guns, including Jack, and apparently they had split up into teams.  It's was all good until he got shot in the face and his mouth was open, talking no doubt, and he did not like that.  So we had a snack and drove into Edmonton to pick up poppa.  He's with Gracie now until tomorrow at supper time.

I also learned how to change the air filter and spark plug on our lawn mower.  Next week I'll change the oil.  Thank you youtube.  What else can I learn?  Don't worry, I'm thinking:)

So far I'm enjoying retirement, early days I know.  I will work on Monday though and I imagine I will spend the whole day wanting to go home.  I'm finding I'm not missing work at all, which I thought I would.  We'll see how it goes.  




 

The top flower is a Canada Anemone.  The western salsify has gone to seed and it looks like a giant dandelion.
 

It's been hot as hell here, up to 36C yesterday, in a two storey house with no AC.  Fortunately there is a lovely cool basement to sleep in.  I've been keeping cool, sitting in the pool as well, and yes, Canadians do own guns, water guns.

We went to court on Tuesday and the living arrangements for Jack remain unchanged for the next nine months and we go back to court in April to see how things are working out.  This gives us and Jack some stability.  Gracie agreed to it which is the first time she has ever put her son first.  It was a nice surprise.  I asked her if she had a job and she said no, her boyfriend was supporting her, so that's great.  I've never met the guy but he thinks Gracie is a catch.  I guess we'll see how that pans out.  It's always such a good thing for women to rely on men to pay all their bills.

Otherwise, retirement seems to be going well.  Yesterday I tried to change the lawnmower blade, twice, but both blades did not fit.  More research required, but I did take a file to the blade and sharpened it.  I also did some mending and shortened a summer dress that was too tight around my legs to take a proper long step.  I also decided to go visit my brother in August, by myself.  I'm hoping we'll both work on repairing our relationship.  

In another surprise this week, my oldest sister sent me a card thanking me for taking care of mum all those years ago.  Mum died in 2013 and I had virtually no support from my siblings at the time, plus I had work and Katie to take care of.  They then had a family meeting, without me, and decided what should happen to mum, without me, her primary caregiver.  I had a lot of anger attached to my grief and haven't talked to my oldest sister since mum died.  This same sister also made my life hell when I got pregnant with my son forty-one years ago.  She's almost eighty now and I've forgiven her but I don't really want her back in my life.  She's not the nicest person.  We'll see.  Families are hard.

This peony is from my neighbor's garden.  I thought the flowers were just white until I looked more closely.  I quite like the tint of pink along the edge of some of the flowers.

Really not much going on here.  It's hot, not hot like Florida or Arizona, but hot for here.  Today they're calling for a high of 32C (90F) which means the house won't be able to cool off during the night and I'll be sleeping in the basement tonight.

 

Western salsify, a beautiful, edible weed.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.  

Jack is home from daycare today because he's got diarrhea.  Never seen anybody so excited to have diarrhea; it's the staying home part that's go him excited.  Right now he's playing Roblox in my hubby's office, later on we'll go for a short walk and maybe take some photos.  There's a slough nearby with pelicans.

I'm not happy with how I've been dealing with him. I heard a woman interviewed on CBC last week, Michaeleen Doucleff, a science writer for NPR.  She has a daughter and she was having a very difficult time trying to raise her daughter.  Michaeleen has a bachelors and a masters degree, as well as a Phd, but she still couldn't deal with her daughter's temper tantrums. She started looking at child rearing books, looking at the science behind the ideas and was appalled at the lack of scientific evidence for most of the child rearing ideas that we embrace today. I'm a science nerd too and what she was talking about made sense, so I ordered her book.

The book looks at how Mayan, Inuit and Hadzabe people raise their children, raise happy, helpful children.  Years ago I had read about a woman who had spent time with Inuit people in the 1960's and she wrote about that time in a book called "Never In Anger", Jean L. Briggs was her name; she had also written about the Inuit style of child rearing.  Michaeleen read the book and wanted to learn more about it.  The Inuit people believe that children need to be taught emotional skills in the same way that reading and arithmetic skills are taught.  Children are not born with the emotional skills they need in life, we shape them.  That belief, that children are not born with emotional skills, but that they must be taught, means that they don't think children are being bad or manipulative, but rather that children have not yet learned a skill.  This removes the anger from the equation for those parents.  It's also a very different way of looking at children and their development.  Westerners/Europeans have a culture steeped in original sin which colours how we see our children, even if we don't realize it.  I was also raised in the "spare the rod, spoil the child" era, an era which believed that goodness and obedience could be beaten into a child. 

When I think about Indigenous cultures and what they must have felt when Europeans arrived and started having children, they must have been shocked by the brutality of European child rearing practices.  And then to have those Europeans declare them to be savages and take their children away to be beaten into submissions, it's a true testament to the Inuit culture, and all Indigenous cultures, that their culture and child rearing practices survived in any way.  It also makes me weep to realize how much damage Europeans did to Indigenous peoples and their children.  It was a crime that I'm only now beginning to understand.

I'm almost finished the book, "Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About The Lost Art Of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans" .  Now I'm in the process of translating it into bullet points that I can put on my fridge, to remind me what I need to do.  Right now I yell at Jack sometimes, not often but often enough that I really don't like it.  And I lose my temper, which I don't like at all.  I was raised in an angry house and I don't want Jack raised that way.  If there is a better way to deal with small people, I'm happy to try it and it would be good for me as well.  When I lose my temper, I always feel like a failure, that I'm just like my father.  My father's anger left me with lifelong scars and I don't want to pass that along to Jack. My own children still bear the scars of my anger and I don't want it to continue, not if there is a better to do things.

It's hard writing about being a bad mother to my children.  I did the best I could, with the tools I had but it makes me very sad to look back and see how much damage my own anger did.  I don't know if my own father was ever able to do that, to look back and acknowledge what he had done, but I can and I'm thankful that I'm still able to learn how to be a better parent. 

I took Miss Katie to a different off leash park last weekend, the one down by the zoo.  It's a huge park, complete with both paved and unpaved pathways along the river; there is even a sprinkling of coyotes, although we didn't see any.

Miss Katie has a list of things she loves most in life:

-babies

-dogs

- horses

-ice cream

-popcorn

Last Sunday she saw a woman with a baby wrap, complete with baby, and the woman had two dogs with her.  I told her that if she had been sitting on a horse, eating popcorn, Katie would have probably died right there and the woman laughed and understood my joke..  We also stopped at the Italtian Centre to buy sandwiches and drinks, so that we could have a picnic lunch.  While we were there, some man asked me if there was something wrong with Katie.  I told him, "No, she's just handicapped."  It seemed like an odd question, but what do I know?  He wasn't rude, just seemed concerned.

Katie had a good time, fresh air, and got to see babies and dogs.  And I actually got a photo of Katie smiling.  It's hard to believe she's thirty-two now.  My baby girl still.

We have another JDR (judicial dispute resolution) next week.  I just got off the phone with our lawyer, I had sent her an email yesterday with our concerns and what we want going forward, including support from my son and the government.  She didn't think that would be a problem.  She asked if we wanted support from Gracie (which made me laugh out loud) and I assured her that was not something we wanted to pursue.  She also suggested we ask for a longer term agreement, like a year, which would give all of us some stability, especially Jack.  

The lawyer also asked me if I think Gracie understands that she can't care for Jack.  I told her that I'm pretty sure that Gracie thinks she can, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.  

Enough dark stuff.

We've been flying kites.

 

And playing at the spray park. 

Otherwise, not much going on.  My house is clean and the laundry is caught up and even put away.  My flowers are blooming away and the sun has come out.  Probably time for a walk with a dog.