When I was growing up my mom went on some extended trips to India, and every time she came back her bags were overflowing with beautiful things for my sister and I. There were rugs, giant block print sheets, gorgeous notebooks full of thin pages, hats and saris- and eventually these wood block stamps made their way back to the Canadian prairies.

I used to play with them when I was younger, and you can still see the technicolor stains on the small ones that were my favourites. They make beautiful patterns and I wish I had a whole case of them that I could use! I love the carving details on the larger stamp and the tiny wild shapes of the small stamps. My favourite detail is the writing that’s on some of them. I’ve been saving them to use for a special client’s website or blog design someday, or to make a notebook cover with their patterns for myself. I can’t wait to really use them like they’re meant to be used…

I think my favourite detail is the writing that’s on a few of them- I wonder what it says, and if it’s a note from India or between my sister and I from forever ago. For now, I think that little mystery just adds to their beauty.

My paternal grandmother was a tough lady, and her name was Pearl. When she was a little girl, she was the first one on horses who hadn’t been broken and would ride the wild ones into haystacks to stop them. She was incredibly beautiful and went to Hollywood when she was young to be in movies, and eventually came home to the prairies and raised her family. She passed away when I was very young so we didn’t get to know each other well, but in the few memories I have of her she was teaching me to sew or cook at her house. It’s fitting that the one thing of hers I have is a box of recipes.

When I got my first apartment I started slowly exploring the recipes. Some are definitely from a different era and not to my taste (She wasn’t into vegan baking! Who knew!) but being guided by notes from the 1950′s and 1960′s has been a lovely way to learn. I’m still a much better baker than I am a cook- but I like that while she’s not part of my life in the normal way, my grandma was still there with me in the kitchen, teaching me how to make high bush cranberry jelly and her special kind of chocolate cake.

Since Leigh-Ann and I officially took possession of our new studio space on December 1st, I’m slowly starting to move my home studio over to “The Nest” (as I’ve started to call it) and as I’ve been sifting through yarn and scrabooking paper, stamps and reference books I came across an incredible gem! My first driver’s license was tucked into a box of things I’ve yet to scrapbook!

I remember this picture so well- I was working lighting for a theatre show in high school and went to get my license in between a dress rehearsal and the show. I had no idea they would be taking my picture, I had a hoodie and pigtails, and was mortified when they asked to take my picture! This was me trying to mask how upset I was that this would be my picture until I was in second year university!

And then I had to take another look at it, because I didn’t really believe what I saw. Guys, I was totally born in 1985. This wasn’t my first driver’s license, it was my fake ID from high school! I forgot I’d even had one!

Sure enough, tucked behind it in my ID case was my real one…

This makes me smile extra wide because my “going out to the bar” phase lasted for a nano second. I started going with friends just before I turned 18, and less that a year later I knew I was done. It was a lot of fun for a little while, and I was trying to find my place- but I’m an introvert at heart and while I wanted to “be cool” and go out clubbing, I’m just not that person! I’d rather be at a concert or catching up with friends one on one, laughing with my knitting girls or trying new food. I haven’t been to a club for years, and it seems like I must have been a whole other version of myself to go to the trouble of a fake ID to get inside one!

Growing up and figuring out who you are (and who you aren’t!) is tough stuff, and this was a reminder of it that made me giggle. I might have been a rebel, but I was a rebel who was in pig tails on her fake ID- something about that’s just perfect. Right from the start it wasn’t really meant to be, don’t you think? :)

Before I move on, I wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who reached out after my last post, with encouraging words, sympathy and deeply personal stories. I’m bowled over and am extremely grateful, and I’m going to be working through all the notes you left for me this weekend :)

I’ve never been an “in front of the camera” person- I’m all about behind the scenes. I worked steadily in entertainment for nine years (since I was 15!) and loved every minute of it, from calling cues as a stage manager to marketing and designing in music. I knew it was time for me to leave the industry last year, and since then I’ve been figuring out what my life looks like without the opening nights and sound checks- but I’ve never felt a pull toward performing like many of my friends.

But that’s not to say that it doesn’t run in the family!

My grandma (who I call Baba) used to be “Miss Roma” – the original host of the children’s show The Romper Room in Manitoba in the early 1960s, and the station she worked for is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year. As part of their celebrations they’ve released archival photos of all their programming, including images of her working on set that haven’t been released until now. I just found them this week and I love the peek behind the scenes they give into my grandma’s life as a young working mom…

As a classically trained singer, being in the spotlight was totally natural for her. And another fun family fact? My grandmother’s cousin also had her own television show in the 1960′s and was one of the CBC’s first singing television stars- “Our Pet” Juliette on The Juliette Show. All I have to show for those genes is that I’m convinced I can rock “Zero” at karaoke after one too many ;)

Do you like being in the spotlight?

If you are, what’s your favourite way to perform? And if not I’d love to know what your favourite off key, super enthusiastic karaoke song is. I know you have one…

{images: CTV Manitoba}

I don’t know when it happened, but something changed in me this year. Over the winter, in the thick of school and worry (and probably mid-cup of tea) it hit me: if not now, when? It sounds corny, but after a year of plans falling through, it was like being hit by lightening- I have to stop planning and start doing. I have to find the energy inside myself to stay positive and charged up, all the time, and I have to do it like my whole life is at stake.

It sounds dramatic, right? But this is my reasoning: if all we have is what’s happening right now? Then in every decision, my whole life is at stake. And in that case, I want to be paying attention and going to bed tired because I’ve given everything I can. I want to make this life joyful and creative, and I want it to count. I have to start now - if not now, when?

So after a lot of thinking this is my birthday list. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s all mine.

This year I will…

Start a real, official business and open up shop on etsy. I’ve filed all the government paperwork for this, but it won’t feel real to me until I see the cheques with my company name on them (which I’m so excited for!). I’ve been dreaming of different product lines all spring, I’m in the final stages of logo design with an amazing illustrator and this summer I’ll have lots to show you!

Be passionate, determined and single-minded. Working on Four Little Pots and doing more freelance work in the spring taught me an incredible amount about how much I can get done when I focus in and refuse to let anything shake me. Working on projects that I love energizes me. I’m aching for long work days and glue on my fingers, and I’m excited to dive in.

Get involved in the local scene. There are wonderful meet up groups, knitting clubs, yoga studios, and craft mafias where I live… and I need to get out there. The idea of making more friends who share my interests makes me really happy- I want to build a fantastic circle of local friends to complement my girls who are far and wide.

Remember my passions & invest in them. I have so many interests that have fallen by the wayside since university: city planning, religion, history, cheesy sci-fi, film noir, theatre, real literature – these all make up part of who I am and they surface in wonderful ways. I need to keep exploring, no matter what my main focus is.

Make lots of time to play with Mister. Because he’s amazing. I never imagined that another person could be so fundamental to my whole life, I never even imagined that marriage could change me, and yet here I am. Loved & fed & kept up to date on movies, American holidays, and state of the art puppy wrangling techniques. I want us to have more good food, belly laughs, field trips and adventures together, just to be gratuitous about the whole love thing.

Love this little blog! Connecting with you in this place makes me so happy, it’s one my most rewarding projects. I am so proud of what it has become! Making friends and learning the ropes of blogging has been an amazing journey so far. I want to keep making this space more and more me, and I can’t wait to see where that will take it.

Stay present. A lot of the time I get caught up in spinning narratives for myself – about anything from work to friends – and more often than not it ends up causing me to get stressed out and vacate what’s actually going on in this very moment. I’m working on living more intentionally and being slightly less day dreamy. Just slightly.

Stretch. I want to grow my comfort zone by challenging myself- this can be anything from starting to volunteer to getting a table at a craft show, or going to a professional development workshop. I want to stamp out the little voice that suggests I count my self out and tune into the one that wants to deliver above and beyond expectations.

Stay focused, work hard, and pay attention to the positive thoughts. Because the alternative really isn’t an alternative.

{Like the idea of a birthday list? Check out  Sandy’s & consider making your own!}

Six years in a private junior high and high school was definitely interesting. My school was progressive, secular and high pressure. It hung on the British structure, from uniforms and boarding to being put in one of four “houses” when you were admitted. My graduating class was unprecedentedly large at a whopping thirty five girls, and my time inside its gates were wild. They were everything you would imagine and more. We worked two grade levels ahead of other schools in most subjects and the implication was clear: this is a gift from your parents, so get the scholarships they paid for.

It was tribal and claustrophobic in the way only family can be, and as you can imagine that kind of an environment bakes rebellion into your system. So when I graduated, I did what you might expect: I took a year off to regroup, broke up with my awful high school boyfriend, cut off my hair, pierced my nose and started stretching my ears to a zero gauge.

I didn’t want to be a girl from That School and I didn’t want to go to school with Those Girls. I needed a clean slate, and if I couldn’t bring myself to move away I would be a new version of me. Only the new version of me was just as shaky and uncertain as the old version, and just as confused.

I don’t know how many people end up having their mom beg them to get tattooed, but mine did. My mom is crazy and wonderful, definitely not your normal mom. She got it into her mind that what would knock all of this rebellion out of my nineteen year old system was simple: I just needed to get a tattoo.

I started pulling together ideas and trying to find something that had meaning to me, that wouldn’t be trendy or strange when I was an old woman. I thought about the year that had put me in this strange and upset state. It had been so difficult I was nearly pulled apart.

I found out that I’d been repeatedly cheated on by my boyfriend of two years, who had spent the previous six month constantly accusing me of being unfaithful. He’d started telling me who I was allowed to see and who I wasn’t, in so many words. He was making threats. I was afraid of him and deeply sad all the time, but finally had the courage to break up with him. He retaliated by making up awful stories about things “I’d said” about my friends, until I had no friends left and was almost completely without support. He started following me, showing up at my house at all hours of the day and night, showing up at my friend’s houses, at restaurants when I was out to dinner. He was always sitting in the background to let me know he knew where I was. My phone rang all the time, and he would show up at my mom’s house, screaming and pounding on the door until we had to call the police. I was rocked by panic attacks constantly, and was eventually diagnosed with a completely out of control panic disorder that paralyzed me to the point of not wanting to leave the house.

It was months and months of heartache followed by months and months of fear. I became a paper shell of a person who might blow away or burst into flames at any moment. My mom looked into my eyes and told me we would get a restraining order, a therapist, and a tattoo*. And in the mean time she would make me some tea.

I tried to find an image that would reinforce everything I knew I needed to become: strength after being broken, peace after being afraid.

I’ve always been hypnotized by koi fish. I could stay at a pond for hours peering into their funny faces and looking at their sleek, beautiful bodies. They grow to be so large and so old, always wrapped up in the hush of underwater.

I took Japanese at school until I was in grade eight, and in their legends the strongest koi fish can swim upstream against anything. Eventually it swims to the top of a waterfall where it leaps into the air, and in the mist is transformed into a dragon. When I was nineteen I knew that I needed to be a dragon girl, no matter how scary that process would be. I knew I could make  a decision about who I wanted to be: the nervous girl at the back of the room, or someone whose happiness radiated out through their every motion and word. I could be someone joyful and unapologetic if I worked on myself every single day for as long as I could see into the future.

This May I’m turning twenty five, and I’m closer to being that girl than I ever could have imagined. In a couple of weeks I’m meeting to talk to my artist about another piece (this time on my shoulder, the chronic pain in my back is too bad to have this built on) to celebrate how far I’ve come.

Every now and then I think about what these drawings on my body will look like when I’m an old woman. Will I still like them? Will they still be me? But when I get to the heart of it, I’m not worried.

They wil be perfect because they are a part of me. An old and creaky, belly laughing dragon girl is still a dragon, after all.

{get a closer look here & here}

*While I spoke with the police a number of times, I was too anxious and overwhelmed to go through with getting a restraining order, and I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had gone through with it. Talking myself out of what my therapist and the police recommended was another part of justifying my boyfriend’s behaviour. If you are in an abusive situation, please seek the help and the protection you need to feel safe.

We started going west when I was about ten. We had never taken a road trip, but in the middle of another child custody stalemate, between another move to another school and packing boxes to move to another house my mom thought we could all use a vacation.

“Banf-f!”

She pronounced both F’s clearly and winked at my sister and I. I loved her but Dad’s jokes weren’t as funny when she told them.

Packed into the Jeep we borrowed from my grandpa, we rushed through the prairies like rocks being skipped over wheat fields towards the ocean. I would press my face up against the window in the early summer every year and watch Manitoba melt into Saskatchewan, then into the rolling foothills of Alberta until we finally skyrocketed towards the clouds and passed into British Columbia. We would camp beside lakes that were perfectly clear at your feet and the deepest royal blue where they rested at the feet of mountains, and shriek at how cold they were no matter how inviting they looked.

I didn’t go to B.C. for most of my teenage years, but during my first year of university I had to leave the prairies to clear my head. I had just met Mister, and after a series of very traumatic boy related events I wasn’t quite ready to cope with a relationship. We started dating and I went from “I’m okay” to “OKAY SO I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS AT ALL” in pretty much one move, but I immediately knew what I had to do. I needed to think, and I needed space- the best place for that is Out West. I packed my things and stayed with a friend in rural BC for a week and then spent days wandering Vancouver without knowing anyone in the city.

While I was in rural BC I met a girl at the rural community centre who would become an extremely close long distance friend in the next years, and in exploring a city that was totally new I made peace with not having my bearings. Somewhere in English Bay I finally calmed down. I went home, let Mister in, and dug in to try and carve out a very new, very different life.

Something about going west has always been healing for me. My over active imagination can’t get over the spectacle of the mountains, the sheer scale of the lives they’ve swallowed up, and how living at the edge of the ocean while being pressed up to the shore changes my perspective.

I went west last weekend looking for peace that I haven’t been able to find in The Little House these past few months, but that’s not exactly what I found…

{image: nosexnobone}

There are two books I read last year that I loved, but that hit too close to home. Eat, Pray, Love, about a divorcee who uses a year to go find herself in Italy, Indonesia, and India, and Kabul Beauty School, about a beautician who leaves her family to go to Afghanistan, and ends up helping set up beauty shops all over the region- one of the only businesses a woman could own under the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia law. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, but in spite of my enjoyment I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.

There is something about affluent foreign ladies traipsing around far away countries to find themselves that just makes me cringe. It’s so unspeakably colonial. Wanting to see another country is one thing, but what were these women running from? Why did they need to leave their families to go somewhere so far away? What’s wrong with them? What about their daughters??

The only problem with that line of logic is that Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t have children, and the woman who wrote Kabul Beauty School had sons…and that my mom started leaving the prairies to find herself in India when I was six.

I call the years from when I was six to eight years old my India years. My mother would go for 4 to 6 weeks at a time, seeing big cities and then going to a rural valley to practice meditation with other Westerners and their teacher. I mostly remember her coming back, she would come home to our farm house with horses in the back yard, and my little sister (who was four the first time she left) and I would lose our minds. I remember holding onto my mom as hard as I could, trying to drink in all the time we had missed. Her long blonde hair would be even longer than when she left, and she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I remember being extremely upset by how fast my image of her faded when she left. It made her even further away. Where now we have skype and broadband, in the early 90′s we didn’t have dial up in the country and the time difference made phoning next to impossible. I don’t think we ever spoke on the phone, I think it would have made her time away even worse.

When she came home her duffel bags were full of new fabrics and tiny presents for us that smelled wild and full of spices. She brought us notebook with pages that were extraordinarily thin, taught us to write in Hindi and brought us bindi’s that we wore on our foreheads with delight. Our whole language changed when she was home. If my mom was doing the laundry or making tea she was the laundrywalla or the chaiwalla (walla is a Hindi word for someone who is hired to do something). I learned how to pronounce complicated and strange sounds of another world, and read through the Bhagavad Gita with her. I liked the stories about how Ganesh got his elephant head the best.

If nothing else, my mom was alive with stories. There were ones about the buses that careened up the sides of mountains at speeds that made the western women sick with worry. There were the babies kept thin and sick at the airports by the beggars, and the dangerous power lines that were often fixed by men prodding at them with long poles and no safety equipment. There were the swami’s who were so powerful that when they meditated they could generate heat that would melt their jewelery and burn them if they didn’t take it off, and others who could create holy objects from thin air. It was a place alive with magic where things that couldn’t happen anywhere else happened every day.

I did yoga with her, meditated with her, and went to Hindu temple with her. I wrote letters to her Buddhist monk friend in my childish printing and he called me his dharma sister. And every time she left it was worse. I was convinced she would always be going away, and would never stay with us. I would dive into everything related to India so I could be closer to my mom. With everything I had, I tried to feel like India was exceptionally important so I wasn’t so unimportant and small.

India was a huge part of our lives until I was about 12 years old. I was all mehndi and plans to see the world, but as I got older my enthusiasm waned and I started to really think about that time. No matter how hard I try, I fundamentally cannot fathom what she was going through that made this necessary, and I don’t know if I ever will. I love my mom, and I know this couldn’t have been easy for her. I know she was trying to dream big - but I can’t help but be mystified when I think about it. But I love her, and while the years that led up to India and were followed by my parent’s divorce are still a mystery, I know she can’t answer my questions. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but the person I want to talk to is the 31 year old version of her, while she’s on her way to the airport. The woman who I love and know now has as much trouble explaining it as I do understanding it.

I’ve poured over it for years and while it’s taken a long time, I’ve started to realize that the reason I can’t understand the mysterious and seductive country I’ve puzzled over for so long is because it isn’t a place on a map. India is a place in my mother’s heart that’s full of magic, chai, palaces and possibility that’s a million miles away from a normal life.

Or that’s what India used to be, at least.

There are some experiences that put you firmly in a “before it happened” and “after it happened” territory. Moments that define how you look at the world. And they always seem to be moments that start normally enough.

It was St. Patrick’s day, I was 19, and I hadn’t seen Alex in months. Her short spikey blonde hair was almost in a buzz cut now, and her baggy men’s shirt and pants exaggerated the mock seriousness of her expression. She looked like a fine young English gentleman, and when I told her so she adopted an accent and started gesturing wildly, talking about her exploits over the past few months. I laughed while she told me about her newest girlfriend – not the one who was coming tonight, don’t confuse them! – she was always over the top. I shook my head. I told her I was single now, Mark was gone for real now, and that the scars on her arms were healing up really well. I held her forearm and inspected it while she pulled out her cigarettes.

“I love you. If you do any more of this I’ll fucking kill you, do you understand me, miss?”
“Young man to you, don’t give me away you maniac! Lets go outside, yes?”
“Yes!”

We spilled outside the bar, catching up on what we’d been up to since high school. I couldn’t believe that I knew this girl before she was this person, back when we were so small. I lit my cigarette off someone’s who was standing outside with us, then I leaned into her as she lit hers off mine.

“Hey dyke! Why don’t you light mine?”

I turned around and looked at the guy who was standing in front of me, I laughed and turned back. Alex’s friends were all over the map, but this blonde kid was really out there. What a weird approach! He looked like he should be hitting on 19 year olds and driving a pick up truck- just some normal looking guy.

“Hey dyke!”

This was a weird game he was playing, I wondered how they would have crossed paths.

“Hey dyke, I’m talking to you! Won’t you fuckin’ talk to people who aren’t queer?”

I looked up at Alex. Her jaw was locked and her eyes had gone hard. She didn’t know him. He was talking to me. He was talking to me. I felt a hand crush down on my shoulder as he spun me around, pushed his face in mine and shouted again.

“HEY QUEER!”

Without thinking I pushed him back with all the weight my body would allow, “Hey asshole! Leave us the fuck alone! You don’t say shit to me, and you don’t say shit to my girlfriend! Do you understand me?!”

Alex stood tall behind me. There was a tense quiet that lasted for a year.  He sized us up and took another step towards me, and in a minute she flew in front of me- this time we were both shouting, both moving forward, both going to guard the other. People stepped out from inside the bar and turned to see us facing off with this wall of a famer’s son. There was a deafening silence, until finally he wavered and walked away.

We stood, vibrating with adrenaline watching him retreat. Alex and I blinked hard for a moment and then tossed out cigarettes down and moved quickly back inside. Alex ordered us drinks, calm as anything while I looked around the bar, dazed. Wondering how many other people in the room had those words inside of them, waiting to explode.

K: “I didn’t think that people DID that anymore. Did we just get gay bashed? What just happened?”

A: “What just happened? Since when am I your girlfriend?!”

I took a long sip of my drink and shook my head at her amused expression, “Oh shut up,” I laughed, feeling shaky and as tough as a tomcat, “you belong to the world.”

{image: lolita.se}

When we were little, we lived in the country.

There were horses in our little barn, cows and farm animals across the road at my friend Brent’s house. I knew which electric fences were on at what time of day and how hay is loaded into the lofts of old fashioned barns. I knew that when my hands got cold I could find my dad’s horse and put my hands under his chest, that he would drop his huge head down and hug me into him, making me even warmer. He would steal the toque off my head by its pom-pom, trotting away from me as I laughed and shouted – he would wave it just out of my reach as I jumped and grabbed for it while he shook his head proudly until he was finished playing and would drop it as I finally reached it.

I knew how, in the winter mornings, when the sun was too eerily bright, that meant it was really cold and when I went to visit the horses they would have beards and eyelashes made of ice crystals and would breath impossibly hot, earthy air on my face when I kissed their spongy noses.

We only lived in the country like that for a few years before my parents got divorced. I was seven and, being old enough to understand what was happening, and being incredibly sensitive, I didn’t handle it well. I know that I was happy a lot of the time – but the way I dealt with it was to block everything out. From the time that I was 7 to the time that I was about 13, I only have a handful of memories. My sister can recall things that we did that we haven’t talked about since she was five or six – but unless an event has been told again and again as a family story, I probably don’t remember it.

One of the things that I do remember was that while we lived out in the country my favourite game to play with my blonde, fey little sister was Mukluks. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it sounded wild – and so the Mukluks were people living in the forest around our house. My sister and I would track through the woods finding evidence of their existence (deer trails) and be on constant guard against their kid napping attempts. There was danger at every turn! We were the last guard keeping them from the house! It was an exciting game that had us running through the woods many afternoons.

Every winter when we get past the first date with cold, when the temperature stops wildly fluctuating, and locks in at -20 C or colder, I remember when we would play those games. There was so much possibility – it felt like just by believing in Mukluks, they could materialize from behind the snowflakes at any moment.

This winter, as an early Christmas present, I received my first real pair of Mukluks. I wore them to dinner last night, and when I saw my sister she saw my new shoes and immediately laughed,”I THOUGHT THEY WERE REAL! I believed you!”

We were in one of my favourite, run down little restaurants, where the owner is a Korean PhD who knows me by name. It’s closing down next month, finally coming to an end. As I laughed with my sister I shook the pom poms around in circles, smiling. Mine look pretty real to me!

Handmade Black Mukluks, $200 CAD