#MicroblogMondays: Soccer Day and Hockey Night in Canada ;)

I'm not an especially big sports fan/watcher, but it's a big sports day hereabouts that's going to be impossible to ignore.  

First, the EuroCup soccer tournament is happening over in Europe right now -- and Italy will be playing against Croatia at 3 p.m. this afternoon (my time).  Dh will be watching. He won't be alone.  Have I mentioned that I just happen to live in the most Italian community in all of Canada? (Something like 45-50% of the population is of Italian descent -- and that's down from a few years ago!)  Whenever Italy is playing soccer (in EuroCup, World Cup, Olympics, etc.), the local cafes are packed with fans. Cars sport large Italian flag decals and flags.  And if they happen to win -- even a relatively insignificant game, but especially if they win the tournament -- chaos erupts. The streets in the downtown area of the little village that forms the core of what's now a sprawling suburban community are jam packed with people celebrating. Cars drive up & down the streets -- including the major street just outside our building -- with horns honking, sometimes for hours.  

These victory celebrations have their roots in Italy's World Cup victory in July 1982. When that game ended, hundreds of thousands of deliriously proud Italian-Canadian fans packed several kilometres of St. Clair Avenue near Dufferin in Toronto, one of the traditional Italian areas of the city. Dh, his brother & some cousins were there (and actually burned out the horn on their dad's car, lol).  Many Italian homes hereabouts (still!) have a photo of that team and/or that celebration on their walls -- and it's been called a seminal coming-of-age moment for the Italian-Canadian community. (This 2017 blog post -- originally published in Corriere Canadese, an Italian-Canadian community newspaper -- has some great photos, and explains the groundbreaking impact of the win very well, as does this 2023 article by an Italian-Canadian for an Italian-American online news site. If you're REALLY interested, I even found someone's master's thesis on the subject (!): "Siamo Number One: Toronto Italians, Soccer and Identity, 1982.")  

Later tonight, at 8 p.m. local time, it's the Edmonton Oilers versus the Florida Panthers in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup (NHL hockey) finals.  Florida won the first three games of the series;  Edmonton came back to win the next three, so this game will determine the champion. The last time a team came back from losing the first 3 games in the series to win the Cup was 1942 (!) -- the Toronto Maple Leafs over the Detroit Red Wings.  The last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup was 1993 (Montreal Canadiens over the Los Angeles Kings), and the last time the Oilers won was 1990 (versus Boston Bruins). 

I guess you know who I'll be cheering for. ;)  "My" team has always been the Winnipeg Jets, of course ;)  but the Oilers back in the early 1980s -- the heyday of Wayne Gretzky (who is just two weeks younger than I am), Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, etc. -- were a close second. I have a genealogy webinar on Zoom that I've signed up for, but I will be keeping an eye on the TV set after that's over!    

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

A few odds & ends for the weekend

• Goodness knows IVF (and the entire fertility industry) is far from perfect, and could use some better regulation/oversight -- but over the past 45+ years, IVF has nevertheless brought a lot of children (and a lot of joy) to families who desperately want them -- including Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle, who recounts his family's personal experiences with the procedure in "The perverse zealotry of the anti-IVF movement." (Gift link.)  Subhead: "If they knew what patients endured, antiabortion extremists might learn more about caring for unborn babies."  
• On the same front, from Jill Filipovic:  "Why You Should Care About Southern Baptists and IVF." (Subhead:  "They are a bellwether for where Evangelicals are headed. And they're coming for fertility medicine.")  
• Stirrup Queens is an adult! -- Mel is marking 18 (!!) years of blogging and building the online ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) community.  :)  I've been reading her almost that long, and I know I owe her a lot -- I'll bet many of you do too.  Go offer her congratulations on this milestone. 
• Lesley Pyne is wrapping up her blog, after 11 years, 225 posts and a book! Go wish her well and thank her for everything she's contributed to our community. 
• The elections in the U.K. got Sarah at Apricot Lane Coaching thinking about what a party platform that recognized single/childless people might look like, which led her to write "A Manifesto for the Childless Not By Choice." (She's got my vote -- I loved it!)  

"The Cost of Living" by Deborah Levy

After spending a lot of time lately reading fairly lengthy books, mostly for the various book clubs I belong to -- and falling slightly behind on my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal for this year -- I decided that my next read would be a shorter book of my own choosing. I turned to  "The Cost of Living" by Deborah Levy, which is a sequel to "Things I Don't Want to Know" (reviewed here), and part 2 of a trilogy.  In hardcover, it's 187 well-spaced pages, using a generous type size. 

"If a woman dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape, how might she describe this new composition?" the flyleaf description reads (in part). 

"The Cost of Living" recounts a tumultuous period in Levy's life, including the end of her marriage, and the death of her mother, which stirs up memories of her childhood and her arrival in England. She moves, with her two daughters, out of the family home and into "a flat on the sixth floor of a shabby apartment block on the top of a hill in North London."  It's difficult to write there, but a friend comes to the rescue with the offer of a garden shed/studio in her backyard, where her late husband, a poet, used to write. Levy rents it from her and purchases an e-bike to travel between the two spaces.     

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want," Levy reflects.  

If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world. Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.

Like "Things I Don't Want to Know," the story seemingly rambles from one incident/anecdote/memory to the next. Gradually, certain themes and recurring motifs begin to emerge. As with the first book, the writing is absorbing and full of gems -- it made me think.   

As a childless woman in a pronatalist world, I especially appreciated this passage:  

When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.

3.5 stars on StoryGraph. I debated whether to round that rating up or down for Goodreads. My original impulse was to downgrade to 3 stars -- but after I sat with the book for a while, and went back to re-read a few passages, I decided to (once again) round up to 4 stars.  I'm hoping to get to Part 3 of Levy's "Living Autobiography," "Real Estate," later this year. 

(I will swear that, in "Things I Don't Want to Know," she wrote about her son -- here, a son is not mentioned, but she writes about her two teenaged/young adult daughters. I did a search through my e-copy for the word "son," but turned up nothing -- did I imagine him??  Her Wikipedia entry only mentions the two daughters.)   

This was Book #20 read to date in 2024 (and Book #3 finished in June), bringing me to 44%  of my 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 1 book behind schedule to meet my goal. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2024 tagged as "2024 books."    

"Magic for Marigold" by L.M. Montgomery

My L.M. Montgomery Readathon Facebook group will begin reading and discussing one of Montgomery's lesser-known novels on/around July 1st: "Magic for Marigold," originally published in 1929.  As I usually do, I began reading the book on my own before our group read & discussion began. (And I'll count it as a re-read when we're done.)  

Our heroine is Marigold Lesley, the 6-year-old daughter of Leander, who died shortly before she was born, and the timid, "put upon" Lorraine, who continues to live under the thumb of her late husband's family, including Marigold's "Old Grandmother" and "Young Grandmother" at the Lesley family home, Cloud of Spruce, near Harmony Harbour on Prince Edward Island.  

I know I read "Marigold" once before, when I was a kid and devouring every Montgomery novel I could lay my hands on, in the wake of "Anne of Green Gables."  But I don't think I've read it again in the (*cough!*) many years since then, and I had very few memories of what the novel was about -- although a few of them came back to me as I started reading -- perhaps most memorably, the family conclave at the beginning of the book to decide what to name Lorraine's baby. (Several relatives decided that "Harriet Ellen Louise Lesley," after three fourth cousins who were all "foreign missionaries," would be just the thing -- until Old Grandmother, who had a wicked sense of humour, pointed out what those initials would spell!).  

Reading the book again now, as an adult -- dare I say, (near?) senior citizen?? -- I can see why I haven't been in a rush to pick it up again in recent years. On the plus side, there's a lot here that will ring familiar to readers of other LMM novels:  rapturous descriptions of PEI (and nature generally); witty dialogue; absent/dead parents; large, judgmental extended families (the Murrays of New Moon, the Stirlings of Deerwood), domineering matriarchs (Grandmother in Jane of Lantern Hill, Marilla Cuthbert, Aunt Elizabeth Murray);  imaginary friends (a la Katie Maurice in Anne of Green Gables);  beloved cats;  faithful family servants (Salome  & Lazarre here; Susan Baker in the Anne books, Judy Plum in the Pat novels).  I liked Marigold's (childless!) Aunt Marigold -- the female (!) doctor who saved her life as an infant and after whom she was ultimately named -- and Uncle Klon (first name "Horace" (!), but nicknamed "Klon," after his youthful exploits in the Klondike). There's a nice scene at the very end of the book:  

Aunt Marigold coming out, noted Marigold's face and sat down beside her. Aunt Marigold, who had never had any children of her own, knew more mothercraft than many women who had. She had not only the seeing eye but the understanding heart as well. In a short time, she had the whole story. If she smiled over it Marigold did not see it. 

On the other side of the scale, I have to admit that I just don't find Marigold as "int'resting" as many of Montgomery's other title heroines. Maybe because she's a child (she ages from 6 to 12 here). In many ways, this is a brutally honest portrayal of childhood (the terrors, the petty jealousies, the "mean girls" at school, the unsympathetic adults...) -- which is, perhaps, why I'm not as fond of it as this book as others? (brings back some cringeworthy memories...!).   

A few reader reviews described this as a "collection of stories" about Marigold and her family. Some of the material in the book was, in fact, repurposed from LMM's earlier magazine stories -- and we do go from one episode to another to another without much of an overall story arc. Many of the vignettes revolve around Marigold's visits to relatives, where she meets and makes friends with the local children and gets into various scrapes. 

Also (and, **content warning** here), the book is also, in some ways (as many older novels are), an uncomfortable reflection of the times it was written in. For example: Young Grandmother notes there was a "half-wit" in Marigold's mother's family (!), and Salome tells Marigold that their hired "boy" (he's married with children!) Lazarre will not go to heaven because he's French-Canadian (!). (Young Grandmother concedes that French-Canadians can, in fact, go to heaven, so long as they're good -- but her tone reflects her doubt that this is possible...!) The very last line of the book also seems both dated and somewhat sexist, and made me roll my eyes.   

After some thought and mixed feelings, I'm rating this one 3.5 stars on StoryGraph, rounded down to 3 stars on Goodreads.  If you're an LMM uber-fan/completist, you will want to read "Magic for Marigold" -- but there are many other books of hers worth reading first. You can probably safely skip this one (or move it further down in your TBR pile) without feeling like you missed out on much. 

This was Book #19 read to date in 2024 (and Book #2 finished in June), bringing me to 42%  of my 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 1 book behind schedule to meet my goal. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2024 tagged as "2024 books."    

#MicroblogMondays: Three's company :)

**(CONTENT WARNING:  Pregnancy announcement!)(NOT mine, obviously!  lol)**  

It's now Facebook (& Instagram) official, so I can (finally!) spill the beans here:  Little Great-Nephew is going to be a big brother!  

Yes, Older Nephew & his wife are expecting their second child in late December.  And thus we will be great-aunt & great-uncle for a third time.  :)  

Older Nephew called dh's cellphone on the last day of April. Dh just happened to be in the shower (!), and when I saw it was Older Nephew, I answered the call. He doesn't call often. I explained dh couldn't come to the phone just then -- so he told me. :)  I ran into the bathroom so dh could share the news too (above the noise of the shower, lol).  

It was a surprise -- first, because his dad/BIL hadn't blabbed the news yet to dh (the men in that family CANNOT keep secrets!), and second, because both nephews had said they likely wouldn't be having more kids. In Younger Nephew's case, beyond just how expensive it is to raise kids these days -- particularly in this city! -- they went through IVF to get Little Great-Niece here -- and if you're reading this blog, I'm assuming you have some idea of just how expensive THAT is!  I'm not sure whether this was a surprise to Older Nephew & his wife too -- but they are both enthralled by Little Great-Niece, and I have a feeling she might have had some influence here. ;)  

I asked Older Nephew if they'd told Little Great-Nephew, and they had. His reaction? "Oh, good."  That was my reaction to HIS reaction, lol.  He's been kind of lukewarm towards his cousin/Little Great-Niece, albeit he's been warming up to her a little more recently, especially now that she's walking and doing more things. In fact, LGNephew says he hopes he's getting a little sister (!) and, in fact, he thinks it will be a little sister.  He's been right before about other people's babies, so we'll see...!  He had the honour of spilling the news on FB & IG, posing for a photo where he's wearing a T-shirt that says "Big Brother... loading,"  lol. 

Some wistfulness, and yes, definitely some anxiety on my part. (Not quite as much as her pregnancy with LGN, which was during the exact same timeframes as my pregnancy with Katie, 21 years earlier.)  But mostly just gleeful anticipation of another little great-niece or nephew to spoil.  :)   

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

Odds & ends

A couple of personal notes:  

• It's been overcast, grey, occasionally rainy, and cool to chilly, more often than not lately. Where is my summer??  :(  
• Younger Nephew invited us over for lunch last Saturday, along with his parents (BIL & SIL). They live close enough to us that we could walk there & back. Little Great-Niece entertained us royally  :)  and we left with enough leftovers for lunch for the next several days.  :)  A very nice afternoon! 
• Dh recently remarked on the number of books showing up in his e-book sales emails related to fathers & kids -- and dads and daughters in particular (in advance of Father's Day this weekend).  He usually doesn't say much in this vein, so I'm guessing it was bothering him more than usual...!  :(  

And now, a few good recent reads on my radar lately:  

• A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a thought-provoking piece I'd read by Ruby Warrington in her email newsletter, which (together with a Substack piece from another writer) got me thinking about "information overload versus creativity." 
• Ruby received such a big response to that email that she decided to post the text on her website and to point to it on her social media accounts. I had to do a bit of hunting to find it (it's kind of buried in there!), but here's the link, in case you'd like to read the whole thing:  "Creativity in the The Era of 'Peak Content'."
• Says Ruby, introducing her essay: "I realize the irony of me putting the following into a blog post that I also plan to share on social media. In fact, I hesitated before writing this piece, which I originally shared on my newsletter. Wouldn’t I just be adding to the problem? But the response was overwhelming; clearly, I am not alone in these reflections. Which makes me think a new way of doing things is ready to emerge."
• The New York Times interviewed 10 prominent artists on the subject of grief and how it's changed them. 
• Alison Motluk has a thought-provoking essay about the implications of sperm donation on her Hey Reprotech Substack:  "Anonymous Father's Day." 
• Is U.S. First Lady Jill Biden Hunter Biden's mom? Monica Hesse of the Washington Post weighs in. (I know everyone's story is different, but may step- and adoptive mothers will relate...!)
• As someone whose daughter was stillborn at least in part because of placental issues, I was glad to see this article in the Atlantic:  "A Breakthrough in Preventing Stillbirth." (Subhead: "Half of pregnancy losses have unidentified causes. The placenta could provide answers.")(Gift link, good for 14 days after this post is published.) 
• https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/06/placenta-stillbirths-research/678570/ 
• "You Decided to Become a Mother. What Happened Next?" The New York Times wants to know! (Gift link.)  There's a form you can fill out. (You may be contacted by a reporter for more information.)  It would be nice if they got the message that the journey to motherhood is not always smooth, does not always end happily ever after and, for some of us, motherhood ultimately never happens at all.  
• Jake Tapper mentioned on CNN today that many of the 20 children who were murdered at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut 12 (!!) years ago would be graduating high school right about now. !!!  
• Hearing that was a gut punch that brought tears to my eyes. I remember how incredibly hard it was, watching the parents of Katie's peers proudly posting photos of their child's graduation in June 2016, and then taking them to university that fall (and mourning their "empty nests" -- when mine had never been occupied to begin with...)  My heart goes out to the parents of those precious children who never got the chance to grow up and graduate. 
• At the time Sandy Hook happened, Mel wrote about focusing on remembering just one of the young lives among the many snuffed out prematurely on that terrible day. As I wrote in a blog post at the time, I chose Ana Marquez-Greene, whose family had ties to my home province of Manitoba.  I still think about her whenever Sandy Hook comes up. 

"The Hollow Sea" by Annie Kirby

"The Hollow Sea" by Annie Kirby is the July pick for the Nomo Book Club within the Childless Collective private online community  The book was published in the U.K. two years ago;  it's finally become more widely available, including here in North America. (I even found a paperback copy in my local bookstore!)  

Kirby is childless-not-by-choice, and a member of the CC community, and infertility, loss, grief and childlessness (as well as adoption) are central themes in this book. 

"The Hollow Sea" tells the story(ies) of three women (actually four). The main character, who narrates her parts of the story, is Scottie, who is trying to come to terms with childlessness after one fertility treatment after another fails. She's haunted by the photo of a remote island in the North Atlantic that she spots on a website.  When the opportunity arises to do some volunteer work in the area, she jumps at the chance, abandoning her bewildered husband, their three remaining embryos and their life together. 

There's also Charlotte, adopted as a child by an infertile couple, Helen and Phil.  And finally, there is Thora (Thordis), who lives in a cottage on a remote island in the North Atlantic with the child she calls "Fairy" but whose name, we eventually learn, is Susan. Gradually, these three storylines begin to connect, secrets are revealed and longstanding mysteries are (eventually) resolved.  

This book reminded me in some ways of "The Metal Heart" by Caroline Lea, which our group read and discussed in January 2023 (reviewed here).  It contains elements of mythology/fairy tales, which are generally not my thing. Timelines shift back and forth between the present and the past in all three storylines, which can sometimes make the overall story a little difficult to follow.  I will admit I found the ending just slightly dissatisfying (for reasons I don't want to outline here, because, spoilers!).  

But the writing is beautiful, the story is compelling and kept me turning the pages -- and every word related to infertility, loss and childlessness is bang-on accurate. 

A solid 4 stars.  

Content warning:  Along with the triggers you might expect when adoption/loss/infertility/childlessness is part of the story, there's also a blackfish/whale hunt that may be difficult reading for some. There is also some domestic abuse in the story. 

This was Book #18 read to date in 2024 (and Book #1 finished in June), bringing me to 40%  of my 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 1 book behind schedule to meet my goal. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2024 tagged as "2024 books."