How It All Began...

It sounds cliche, but you really never know what life is going to give you. I would never have guessed in a million years, that at 41, I would essentially be shacked up, with a baby, living in Toronto...No way. I think I can speak for many of you out there, that you actually never thought you would make it to the age you are now. I certainly never thought I would make it to 35, let alone 41. It's not like I had a terrible childhood and was a tortured soul who was hell bent on destruction, I just thought I was burning too bright, too fast, and at 25, I could not see the future at all. Sure there were things, everyone has things, mine just happened to manifest in my 20's, not in my adolescence....At 19 I was freshly back in Victoria, after a 9 month jaunt in Ottawa that, quite honestly, almost killed me. I had just gotten a job at the coolest art cafe called JAVA. This was THE spot for the poets and musicians and general misfits of Victoria's alternative crowd. Many people came for the atmosphere and the smoking, some stayed for the chess, scrabble and go. it was here I found my people and to this day look back on Java as some of the best years of my life. This was right around the time I got my second job at Scandals as a speaker dancer(!). When B rolled into town, I have to say, I was immediately curious, as he had quickly nestled himself in the deepest niche of my friends and proceeded to completely ignore me! For those of you who know me and my penchant for demanding all attention in ANY room, you know this drove me mad! B later told me this was, in fact, done for that exact reaction. After three days of this routine, I promptly marched up to him and demanded to know who he was. After this dramatic beginning, we became fast friends, sensing a deep kinship with each other, it was a fantastic winter. Of course, at this time in our lives(mostly in my life) this was too good to be true. B tried in vain to get me to leave Victoria and come travelling around the world with him, he was sure I needed a bigger space and some room to grow. I was too afraid. I got angry at him for criticising my life and we promptly had a falling out...We both went on to have completely different lives, we married and divorced other people, I saw a little more of the world, I grew and had settled back in Victoria, doing first a fine arts diploma, and then an architectural interior design diploma. Upon a conversation with a close friend about the Java days and people we miss B's name came up, so of course I Facebooked his name and about 5 pages with the same name came up, but there was one profile pic of a fellow on a motorcycle wearing a helmet. I took one look at those eyes and I knew it was him....

The Beginnings...

When I was growing up, I never really thought I would have a child myself. I was not one of those little girls that dreamed of growing up, getting married and having a family.

When I was very small and until about age three, me and my Mom were alone. We lived on Cortez Island in a little cedar truck house and it is here that my ideas about family and home were first formed. There wasn't really a Dad, there wasn't really too much structure in that sense. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it wasn't a great way to spend my early years, but I think there was an impermanence to my idea of home and for sure was missing the Daddy component. Then we met Ed, and he is who I now lovingly call Dad today.. We became a trifecta, and it took almost two years for me to take him seriously as a father figure, let alone a person who wasn't going to leave. I literally didn't speak to him directly for over a year! (Sorry Dad).

As I grew older, I never really felt like enough of an adult to really seriously consider having kids. I mean the biological clock and I were having some serious conversations, but I never felt ready.  When I envisioned Motherhood I always pictured me, doing it on my own. It's not that I thought there wasn't someone out there who would do it with me, I just had deeply ingrained in me from childhood, that men are transient and the women are doing things with or without them.

Enter the therapy years....I have spent about 8 years working very hard on my "stuff" and trying to figure out who I really am, how I really feel about things and why, and most importantly healing the wounds from my past that hindered my growth into a happy adult. There are some pretty dark corners in my psyche that I choose not to get into here but let's just say, I now have an advanced degree in exorcism! Therapy changed my ideas about what a family can look like and how I felt about my capability as a Mother, and for that I am grateful. It also allowed me to forge a deep, trusting and lasting relationship with my partner now. Don't get me wrong, a relationship is always changing and it is work, but 90% of it is showing up right? So I showed up. And things happened.

Admittedly, this is a very truncated version of my life up to now, but I wanted you to have a sense of where I came from before I got into 'baby' part of my life and how i got there. Talk to you soon.

Hello There World...

Well hello again! This is my first blog post after stating the changes I want to make and the new path my blog is going to take. I find that I also have a new approach to blogging as well. I feel a little serious about it(finally!). You see, I always wanted to be a consistent blogger, one with good content and a strong personal voice, but never really knew what to blog about. I mean who really cares wether I glued my fingers together working on a craft project, or that the paper I had been waiting for finally came into the Paper Place? (amazing store BTW). So here I sit, baby napping, house somewhat clean, in front of my computer with so many ideas I don't really know where to start! Motherhood is pretty amazing (cliche, I know) but now having “crossed the veil” and had my kid, I'm finding it interesting and challenging in ways I never thought about. Like the fact that I did NOT like being pregnant! No one can really prepare for what it feels like to have what is essentially a parasite inside you for 9 months, squishing everything up into your ribcage and making sleep impossible! Don't get me wrong, from the sounds of it I had a really easy pregnancy (more on that later) but OMG I started missing sleep  almost right away! And what's with the sensitivity to every little sound in the bedroom? Sigh. I digress...Anyway, I'm hoping to find a nice balance between the artistic independent me (and my stuck together fingers) and the new Mom me (with my fingers stuck together for an entirely different reason)and talk about it here. So thanks for reading! Please feel free to leave a comment, unless you can't stand me, then you can take a hike.

A NEW DAY, A NEW BOY, A NEW POST!

Hello! from the above picture , you can see I have had other things on my mind these days than Blogging! Jake is 4 months old now and I feel that I want to change my blog to more relevant subjects than just life in general and journaling my random thoughts. Yes, I will keep posting about my art and things that interest me, but I want to start blogging about Motherhood as well. I feel like there is a paucity of Mom blogs out there that share the way I feel about being a mother . I would like to address my specific struggle to navigate in the world as a mom with many tattoos and some different ideas I have  about what it means to me personally to be a mother in this day and age of helicopter parenting.Also, what it's like to raise a boy and the things that worry me about that too! Anyway, I hope you will follow me in my little adventure and come to feel like Jake and Brian and I are family to you, if you don't already(you know who you are!)