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A Facebook find. :)  And why I keep blogging. 

Odds & ends

• Unfortunately, all local library programming -- including the book club meeting I was going to attend -- was cancelled last night because of the weather -- record snowfall (in the range of 25 cm, or about 10 inches), not to mention extreme cold/windchills. (It is STILL snowing, on & off, this morning!) I am thinking I will sit out next month's meeting -- do I really want my introduction to a book club (and to its members) to be with a book called "The Mothers"??  But I WILL try again in the near future. 
• Another nearby library branch has a book club that meets tomorrow night to discuss "Beartown" by Fredrik Backman. I only just started reading the book last night. Think I can finish 400 pages in a little over 24 hours (not including sleep time)??  If not (ummm, probably not!), the first book club, the one I was going to attend last night, will also be discussing "Beartown" at a future meeting.  :) 
• On the bright side -- no shovelling to do at our condo :)  and no messy commutes to deal with, because we're retired & don't HAVE to go out unless we want to. (We often go to the mall on Tuesday mornings, but we're staying put today!) 
• Thank you all for the recent birthday wishes! In addition to the articles on aging that I mentioned there, I found this one by a favourite columnist (Elizabeth Renzetti of the Globe & Mail):  "Create till you drop, and other lessons from late bloomers." Loved this passage at the end: 

"Has there ever been a more suffocating phrase than old lady? It is a pillow to murder ambition, historically. But perhaps not any more, as we choose new directions for these long, long lives. Maybe we can take back the phrase, break it and shape it anew. Old lady painter. Old lady writer. Old lady, victorious."

• Check out Mali's recent series on menopause as a childless woman (four posts to date -- here, here, here and here). Related reading from other childless/free bloggers: 
• "The Childless Menopause" by Jody Day of Gateway Women. 
• "Childlessness and the menopause" by Berenice of Walk in Our Shoes. 
• "Go To The Head of the Class" and "The Change: For Reals" by Pamela at Silent Sorority. 
• I stumbled onto a new childless/free living site recently and took a scroll through their Twitter feed.  I "liked" a whole bunch of recent posts and responses there, although I didn't contribute to the conversation myself. When I returned a while later, however, I was slightly stunned to learn I'd been BLOCKED.  Now, one of the conversations I was responding to had to do with abortion/medical terminations -- which I know is a contentious subject -- but the site was emphatically pro-choice, as am I. I'm not a very experienced Twitter user -- I like/retweet far more than I actually tweet or comment myself -- so I'm a little at a loss as to why I was blocked -- unless perhaps the sudden volume of my "likes" led them to believe I was some kind of bot??  What do you all think? (I am sure many of you out there are far more experienced Twitter users than I am...!)  Anyway, sort of strange/funny/ironic that someone who has been living & writing about the childless/free life for almost 20 years now in various forums should find herself blocked by another childless site...!  

#MicroblogMonday: Small pleasures & annoying things

Some recent annoying things:

• Getting woken up at 5 a.m. on Sunday by the snowplow, clearing snow from the laneway & parking lot (i.e., directly beneath our bedroom window). :p  
• And.... more snow in the forecast for today. Heavy snow, in fact (at least 15-20 cm expected), & continuing on till tomorrow morning. It's already started, and the roads were already slippery when we were out for lunch & groceries earlier. And of course, my first book club meeting at the library is tonight... we'll see... (On the bright side -- no shovelling required!! ;)  )  
• Wearing a cardigan over my long-sleeved T-shirt, and socks AND slippers on my feet -- and STILL feeling cold (dh, meanwhile, still goes around the condo BAREFOOT...!!).  :p  
• The lightweight down jacket I bought last winter continues to shed feathers, particularly all over the seat of the car where I sit. :p  Perhaps not QUITE as copiously as before, but still enough to be very noticeable. :(  

And (for counterbalance) some recent small pleasures:  :) 

• Getting a haircut on Friday and feeling somewhat less shaggy. :)  
• Spending a good part of the weekend on the couch watching some fabulous figure skating (U.S. national and European championships).  :)  
• Receiving & going through a pile of documents from stepMIL that FIL had been keeping -- including dh's passport -- from 1970!!;  funeral cards, the guest book & the bill from his mom's funeral;  his parents' marriage certificate, etc. etc....

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

The mother of all book dilemmas ;)

I went to one of the local library branches today to get a library card & ask about the book club, which meets next week. The librarian who runs the club told me they provide the books, and we'll receive our copies of the next selection (to be discussed at the February meeting) -- "The Mothers" by Brit Bennett -- at next week's meeting (where we'll be discussing "The Alice Network," which I assured her I already had & had read).

OK, I have to admit, I flinched at the mere mention of the title. ("The Mothers" -- not "The Alice Network.")  Yes -- I am ashamed to admit -- I am literally judging a book by its cover/title. Even though, glancing at the blurb, it doesn't seem to be a "mommy-lit" kind of book.

I'm trying to tell myself that this is part of the reason why I'm joining a book club, to be exposed to books & authors I might not otherwise look at. Who knows, I might wind up enjoying it.

But seriously -- the next read just happens to be a book called "The Mothers"??  What are the odds, right?  Just one more reminder of what I am not. :p

Have you read "The Mothers"?  Would you recommend it?

(On a completely different note, I was shocked at how few BOOKS there actually were in the library. Many of the shelves were only half-filled/half-bare, and there were far fewer shelves than I expected to see. I grew up in towns much smaller than this one -- although granted, this was just one small branch of about 10 in this city -- but the shelves of my childhood libraries were crammed with books.)  The computers, on the other hand, were being well used...  I guess it's obvious I haven't been in a library in quite a while, but yikes!!)

#MicroblogMondays: Blue Monday

I've been feeling just a little bit "blah" the last few days. Christmas is long over... my birthday is over.

We were housebound for most of the weekend:  there was a snowstorm on Saturday... and although the skies were much clearer & sunnier for most of Sunday, temperatures remained bitterly cold (like, -17C & -29C windchill at the peak of the afternoon sun... that's 2F & -20F for those of you in the States!).  It didn't help that one of my high school friends was posting photos on social media of margaritas on a sunny beach in Mexico...!

Before the weekend, on Friday night, we attended a funeral visitation for a 70-year-old woman (a relative of a relative) who died in a tragic car accident earlier in the week (caused by some young idiot driving at twice the posted speed limit -- at 7 a.m.!!)(truly, the drivers hereabouts are THE WORST  :p  ).

Because of the weather, anytime we do get out of the house these days, it's generally to someplace indoors -- quite often, the bookstore, the supermarket or the mall (although we did take a trip last week to the well-known local art gallery where I have a membership to view an exhibit that was wrapping up).  At the malls, the clearance racks are getting pretty picked over, but there's not a lot of cool new stuff arriving yet to fill the stores. I've been finding it difficult to get into a new book.

And then I realized: today is Blue Monday. (And of course, February, my least-favourite month, is just around the corner...!)  Well, I guess that explains it (at least partly...!)...

(Previous Blue Monday posts here.)

Is it a Blue Monday for you?  What's your favourite mid-winter pick me up? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

58

Another year older..! I recently celebrated my (gulp) 58th birthday. Kind of daunting. I don't FEEL 58 (except maybe sometimes in my knees...), and I hope I don't look it -- although I have definitely noticed more grey hair showing up lately. But, as my grandma used to say (& as I'm sure I've written here before), "It's better than the alternative...!"

Even before my birthday, I was thinking a lot about the subject of getting older, and specifically without children. There was that post from Cup of Jo that I flagged in an earlier post, about choosing not to have children, and all the young women in the comments section wondering what life as an older childless/free woman might be like -- seeking reassurance that things would be OK if they didn't have children.  There was Jody Day's social media comments on aging:

I'll be 55 next year and it really feels like a huge milestone - the beginning of my transition towards my 'young elderhood'. I'm excited by the idea of what an older, childless woman's life can be like - because as with my trip through being a middle-aged childless woman, I've found there's very little guidance or inspiring role models out there and so I'm going into unchartered territory - again!  

It IS unchartered territory -- not because we're the first women ever to head into our senior years without children (we're certainly not), but because we're the first writing about it, analyzing it and connecting to other childless/free women via the Internet.  All of us are fumbling our way down these roads less travelled (although it's great that we've been running into more and more fellow travellers along the way lately!).  (If I HAD to lose a baby, go through infertility & wind up childless not by choice, how fortunate I feel that it happened right at the same time that the Internet began taking off, bringing me support from wonderful online friends every step along the way! -- a comfort that previous generations of women never had.) 

One things I've observed (& written about before):  so often, those of us who wind up without children feel like we have to do something fabulous with our lives as "compensation."  On that front, I suppose, I have failed miserably.  ;)  I haven't travelled the world (yet?!), or worked with starving children in Africa, or found a cure for cancer.

But.

I've watched my two nephews grow up to be fine young men, and dh & I have tried to support and encourage them along the way as best we can. We've helped to pay for their educations. We've been to their weddings, and provided generous wedding & housewarming gifts. We hope to spoil their babies someday (sooner vs later!). We spent 10 years supporting other bereaved parents through our support group facilitation work. I've managed to retire, early, and put the corporate rat race behind me. I've stayed married to my husband for almost 34 years now. I've stayed connected to my family. I've extended my family tree, not by birthing babies but through my genealogy research, by connecting the people here and now with the people and stories from the past.

That's something.

Do I regret that I'm not a mother? Of course I do. 

But is it possible to have a good life without children?  Of course it is.

If there's one thing I've learned over these past 20 years, it's that life is what you make of it.  You don't always get to choose what happens to you, but you DO get to choose how you deal with it.

When I lost my daughter -- and then realized I would not be having any other children -- I eventually realized that I had a choice.  Did I want my daughter's brief existence to destroy the rest of mine? Or did I want to honour her life by living the best life I could -- even if it wasn't the one I originally had in mind? (Being childless may not have been a true "choice," but what I did with my childless life most certainly was.) If there's a life beyond this earthly one, I want her to look at me and be proud to call me her mother.

No, it hasn't been the life I planned... but it's MINE. It hasn't always been easy (whose life is?) -- but, on balance, it's a pretty good life.  I may not have the children I wanted -- but I have a pretty great husband. ;)  I got to retire at 55, with a pretty fair severance package, a defined benefit pension (an increasing rarity these days) and some benefits. I have a lovely mortgage-free condo full of books and music and other nice things, with a great view of both sunsets and sunrises, and no snow to shovel or grass to mow. I have a wonderful family.

Seriously, I am a lucky girl (and I still often feel like a girl), and I know it.

*** *** ***

Related notes:

This article was published in the New York Times, appropriately, on my birthday. :) It's by Mary Pipher, about older women and happiness (and thank you to Sarah at Infertility Honesty for bringing it to my attention!).  Pipher writes about being in her 70s, but there was still a lot I here I could relate to.  Sample excerpts:

Gratitude is not a virtue but a survival skill, and our capacity for it grows with our suffering. That is why it is the least privileged, not the most, who excel in appreciating the smallest of offerings... 

Our happiness is built by attitude and intention. Attitude is not everything, but it’s almost everything...  

We may not have control, but we have choices. With intention and focused attention, we can always find a forward path. We discover what we are looking for. If we look for evidence of love in the universe, we will find it. If we seek beauty, it will spill into our lives any moment we wish. If we search for events to appreciate, we discover them to be abundant.

I wasn't the only one who found Pipher's article relatable. ;)  Pamela immediately grasped the specific parallels between the life Pipher describes and our lives without children, and transformed the piece into one of her brilliant word swap blog posts.  Please read!

Finally, Cathy used her final post at Slow Swimmers and Fried Eggs to recount five things her infertility journey has taught her.  It's a great post. :)  Go over, read, and thank her and Eric for their insights over the past few years. 

"The Alice Network" by Kate Quinn

"The Alice Network" by Kate Quinn has been in my TBR pile for a while now. The premise (female spies in World War I ) sounded intriguing, it was a "Heather's Pick" (personally endorsed by the CEO) at our national mega-bookstore chain (also a featured pick from actress Reese Witherspoon's book club), and it was on sale, lol. It also happens to be this month's pick for one of the local library book clubs I'm hoping to join, and so I picked it up about a week ago and started to read.

The book actually interweaves the stories of two different women from two different eras:  Evelyn (Eve) Gardiner, who is recruited to become a spy in 1915 wartime France, and Charlotte "Charlie" St. Clair, in 1947, a wealthy American college girl who is pregnant, unmarried and desperately searching for her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in France during the Nazi occupation. The structure goes back & forth between the two women's story lines. Both are interesting, but Eve's is by far the more compelling. I've heard of Mata Hari, of course, and the book reminded me of Edith Cavell  (there's a mountain named after her in Jasper National Park in Alberta), but I had no idea that so many women were involved in intelligence work in the First World War. Moreover, there's an author's note and appendix at the end that make it surprisingly clear just how much of this book was based in actual historic fact and on actual people.

It's a novel by a woman, about women (strong female, even feminist, characters, at that) -- and yes, there is romance -- but it's far from chick lit. ALI caveat:  the book includes several unplanned pregnancies, abortion, infertility (of a peripheral character -- who later has a baby, of course!), and the death of a baby/child (as recounted by an observer).  The brutality of the German/Nazi regimes during both wars -- including torture and mass murder -- is made abundantly clear.

But is it worth reading? Absolutely. Perhaps it's a bit long (almost 500 pages) -- but the subject matter is really interesting, and it kept me turning the pages, especially towards the end. I gave it four stars on Goodreads. (And note to Hollywood: I think this would make a really great movie or mini-series for TV.)

This was book #3 that I have read in 2019 to date, bringing me to 13% of my 2019 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 24 books.  I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 2 books ahead of schedule to meet my goal. :)