My window

*Frog and Toad Are Still Friends is one of the first blogs I ever read and it remains one of my favorite. Time and time again its author Beck makes me catch my breath with the beauty of how she adept she is at capturing the poignancy of everyday life. Enjoy..."


My house is an old, old house and has an old house’s tall, narrow windows.


For several years after we moved in, we just never bothered putting up curtains – we were too poor to buy any that we liked, for one, and for another it just never occurred to us. Windows were for us to look out of, and it never occurred to us that people could look back in. It wasn’t until we finally did put up curtains on every window that it began to bother me to stand at the window exposed and looking out, with unseen people possibly returning my gaze.

I started blogging after a very serious, near-fatal illness nearly three years ago. I had read blogs in a casual sort of way before then, never commenting and not one of those blogs, oddly enough, do I read now, so I knew that they existed and I’d actually started a handful of short-lived blogs before then but lacked the compulsion and self-discipline to keep at them for longer than a week or two.

But then I got very sick and for months afterwards there was this dark curtain about me – how sick was I? Was I, in fact, dying? And it was that pressing question that started me at my blog, which was from the start light-hearted and silly while the real me was still laying down for much of the day, my actual bruised heart stuttering within me. I deleted that blog recently with a great feeling of relief, and although I now wish that I’d saved a handful of posts, I don’t really regret it. The false cheer of those early posts bothered me.

I think we’re lying (to ourselves, but still) when we say that we’re writing for the future, for some later version of our children who will read us, maybe, with understanding eyes. My blog definitely has a short lifespan – it will all be deleted someday, although I will make a point of saving a few things this time around, like the roses I kept from when my husband and I were not yet husband and wife but very, very young and dating. It’s not meant for my children, but I am writing for someone, and who is this invisible audience, this reading eye?

“Doesn’t it bother you to have strangers reading your private stuff?” an acquaintance asked me recently, which I responded to with a bemused shrug. Obviously not – I’m not a secretive person to begin with, but rather a smiling, friendly sort, quick to befriend and confide…. So my heart is pretty much on constant display anyhow, which is just as risky with one person as it is with one hundred, really.

The whole idea of what I write as being private, though, is a bit of a hard one for me to think about. After I was so sick, I felt very damaged inside for a very long time, like I was still half-dead and so when I started blogging, the me I wrote about was as much a creation as it was a reflection of any private reality. I wrote because of my paralysing fear that I was vanishing, that my hands would quickly become dust. So blogging was a rebellion of sorts, a way of making myself again out of mere words.

My friend worries that I have turned a light on in my life, that I am leaning out a bright window into the darkness, seen by unseen eyes. But what I primarily see is my own reflection, thrown back against the darkness, my shadowy, constructed self.

DMD: you complete me

I was certain I was destined to be a lifer.

I had an excellent job in an industry I love. I had been there nearly a dozen years and everything about it felt as comfortable as an old shoe. I was deeply appreciative and rightfully so. I told myself I would be a fool to go anywhere else. Ever.

What I didn't admit, even to myself, was that I was scared.

I can see now that the birth of my child coincided with the slow, steady death of my nerve.

I grew up presuming that fate would smile on me, but the trauma of Graham's birth showed me that fate laughs at presumptions. I had always assumed that my baby would be perfect and yet I was forced to consider that he was not.

Several stressful events occurred in the months immediately following his birth and almost overnight I became a worrier. I worried about everything. I felt insecurity creep over me at the strangest times, like a rogue dark cloud on a sunny day. I mourned my old self, but felt powerless to truly reclaim the loud, brassy girl, brimming with confidence, who always thought she would rule the world by the age of 40.

I know now that Don Mills Diva was a last-ditch effort to rescue that girl - a way to try and write myself back to the place where I wanted, needed, to be.

I wrote my way through a heap of pain this winter. I wrote brave, declarative statements when I felt the most shaky. I reached down inside myself, gathered together my shredded guts and sent them across the Internet, desperately hoping the the bravado contained therein would reflect back and somehow restore me.

And a funny thing happened: it worked.

The more I wrote the more confident I felt. The more confident I felt, the better I wrote. I found my voice, in every sense. I gained a lot of readers. I met - virtually and otherwise - a lot of people who expected that Don Mills Diva would be a woman of strength and confidence.

And I found, quite suddenly, that she was. Once again.

I travelled to San Francisco for the BlogHer conference and I met dozens (hundreds?) of you. I dressed up and acted sassy. I even bogarted the microphone at a packed seminar.

And then this week I started a new job: the kind of job I had started to resign myself to never getting.

Thanks to Don Mills Diva and to you, I now feel certain that I am indeed destined to be a lifer - here on the Internet anyway - where I will write my way into whatever my heart can imagine.

I consider myself more of a vocal stylist...

I know I’m a pretty good writer.

Please forgive me if that seems like an insufferable thing to say, but modesty, especially false modesty, has never been my thing.

Writing, on the other hand, is my thing. Always has been. My style may not be the stuff of Nobel-prize-winning tomes but nevertheless, the compulsion to write has been a part of me for so long I can’t imagine what it’s like to live without it.

If I am not writing, it means I am not well. No matter how difficult and distracting my life becomes, my ability to write, and to write in what I consider my trademark style, is a testament to my mental and emotional health.

Strange then, that I would gladly hang up my keyboard if only I could sing.

Because I can’t sing.

There I said it. Despite an abundance of musical talent in my family, I am a terrible singer. No matter how many times I have fortified myself with red wine and sang around a campfire or harmonized at a party or even (just the one time, praise God) taken to a coffeehouse stage with my guitar, I remain a terrible singer.

My husband, on the other hand, is a great singer. His punk band had a modest local hit in its day and reunited to wow the crowd at our wedding. His version of Margaritaville brings the house down whenever we stumble upon a karaoke bar and I am able to harangue him into performing.

And I do have to harangue him because, unlike me, he is modest. I find his reluctance to sing inconceivable, because if my voice was one-tenth as sweet and strong as his you would have to turn the hose on me to get me offstage.

I have been watching American Idol this year for the first time ever and listening to the performers every week induces in me a yearning so sharp and pure that I feel a physical ache in my gut.

Oh sure, writing is all well and good. But what I wouldn’t give to be able to sing like that? To be able to stop people in their tracks with the sweet lilt of my voice? To open my mouth and cause throats to swell and eyes to well and tiny hairs to prickle? To carry with me always a means to transport people to another place, another time?

Sigh.

I may be a terrible singer, but I continue to sing around the house on an almost constant basis. Our radio is always on and Rob and I have the following conversation several times a day.

Me: “I love this song. Want me to sing it to you?”
Rob: “No.”
Me: (turning down radio lest it obscure my voice): “Okay great!”

I have sung to Graham since the minute he was born. I sing songs about his hair, his nose, his poop, how much I love him, how silly he is, how pretty his mama is…(I told you modesty is not my thing).

And in the last few months my heart has swollen with pride as Graham has started to sing as well. He sings to the radio, he sings to the television, he begs me to play his favorite CDs and then sits and sways to the music, plaintively slurring over the words he doesn’t know and proudly shouting the ones he does.

My boy - the singer!

Maybe when he’s a rich and famous musician he’ll let his mama sing backup for him.

Or at least write the liner notes for his albums