Lucy clicks off the cordless phone and sets it back in its recharging cradle on the desk in the nook off the kitchen. “That got off to a good start,” she tells herself. “Mom is not fighting the homecare help.” She has just finished a conversation with the Silver Birch Seniors’ Services Society.
The homecare worker paid her second visit today and her mother signed the agreement. According to the homecare staff, she is getting along with the worker and enjoying the visits.
Lucy is at home as are her two children, the thirteen-year-old boy and the eleven-year -old girl. A blizzard having begun late yesterday afternoon, Thursday, her employer told her to stay home and do what she could over the internet on Friday. That was a kind move in the anticipation of school closures that indeed took place in the morning. Most families are hunkered down for a frigid weekend in late November.
She tugs at the cardigan she wears with one hand and clasps a ball point pen with the other and unwittingly commences scribbling circles into spiral lines upon the blank pages of a notebook as she gazes blankly at the laptop’s screen. She is distracted by thoughts stemming from the phone call.
The quasi professional assessment corroborates her own diagnosis; her mother appears alert and physically healthy although she is socially withdrawn and inactive. Next, they—the Silver Birch staff—would ask the doctor to give her a thorough check-up and a new hearing test. Also, the Society is advising that her mother is reaching the age where bathtub supports and other safety aids installations would be good preventive measures in the event of a fall or some other accident. Information on such equipment as well as on nutrition and seniors’ programs is being mailed to her.
Lucy has been thinking about holding a party for her Mom’s seventieth birthday in March when she would stay for a couple of weeks. Now she thinks she should not wait that long to visit her. She will call her mother and try to talk a bit despite the problems they have communicating by phone. She needs to see her and discuss the situation in more depth. At least now the worker can pass on messages and notes from daughter to mother.
Shortly she contemplates paying her a visit for a few days over Christmas. In the past two years, they had not seen her mom at Christmas because of her in-laws’ plans one year and Glen’s management retreat that had infringed on the holidays but made a Christmas away in California practical. That had been fun, the escapade to California.
Lucy’s siblings live farther away, one in Arizona and the other in Winnipeg. They have younger children. For those two reasons, travel to Grandma’s is more awkward and more expensive to organize for their part. She living closer, having professional training as a social worker and being the eldest and a daughter at that, everyone just assumes that Lucy is taking care of things for Mother.
The siblings do not keep regular contact. Long ago, the chords of antagonism got so tight that they stopped bickering, replaced by the aggravating unceasing hum of steely electric wires of genealogy and history that are impossible to cut, impossible to forget.
Alberta is already extra cold and snowy this year. At least a getaway from the freezing weather here to a sojourn in BC would be a relief.
Lately, it is apparent that her mother needs more attention. Lately, it is apparent that her husband does not. He does not need her attention much, anyway.
The most innocent sounding words between her and her husband fly at each other like icicle shards. They pierce and cause pain unintentionally. Truth remains unspoken, frozen into thick blocks of ice. Perception through them is blurred and touch chilled and obstructed.
Lucy does not know how things got so cold. They have been trying to do well what normal people do, according to the norms that they have assumed existed.
She is not worried that Glen is indulging in relations with other women. In fact, she could excuse a blimp or two on the record, if he did. They had each played the field and had a series of lovers before they started dating each other in the last year of university.
That was when they met at the university in Saskatoon some 15 years ago. There were compatible enough and it was time to get more serious and settle down. They were both lucky to get good jobs in Calgary, she starting out in social work in community services and he briefly in law before accepting a position in a state agency. So they married and started a family.
They are not possessive of each other. They each recite the requisite “I love you’s” at anniversaries and birthdays. They arrive home in the late afternoon and eat together with the children most days. They fulfill the duties of their self-assigned division of labour at home. When they are out of town, each calls the other every night.
She is confident in his devotion to her and his family. Yet a wheel had slipped off the rails somehow. Something is not right. They are on track but wobbling and teetering.
Lucy shifts her gaze to an absent stare at the frosty scene outside the window in the yard. All is quiet. She remarks how pairs of tiny talon-type footprints form curious circles in the snow. In winter days such as this, not even the chirping of birds could be heard. She cannot hear the kids play in the recreational room downstairs. The quiet was a big reason why she continued working. She cannot stand that pressing sound of cold silence of this big rambling house. It is like the noise of perpetually turning water wheels and grinding mill stones—separate circles of life rubbing up against each other producing the antithesis of warmth. There is no friction in their lives, really. They live on a never-ending carousel of coolly regulated domestic life.
When the family is together in the kitchen and sitting room on the main floor, the sound seems to happen all around her, apart from her. The kids report on their daily activities and make plans and she interrogates and replies automatically. Sometimes each of them is preoccupied with her and his own activity and remains incommunicado. It is as if the house is getting bigger as their life is growing. The spaces between them are enlarging. When the speak, if it is the spaces between the words stretch longer and longer. Meaning becomes more and more remote. She and Glen do not discuss much of anything these days; they update each other on the jobs and household maintenance, shooting out questions and suggestions about logistics that they each confirm or reject with explanations in steady machine-like rhythm.
She feels detached from the domestic life. Work life in her role as a director of employment programs at the YWCA has a life of its own; she is caught up in the momentum of the organization. She still identifies with the job and sees the social value in her work, for there continue to be success stories despite funding and policy shifts and the economic decline. But the tasks have become less meaningful to her as she has advanced through the organization. She spends much of her time managing electronic messages and documentation and sitting in meetings as if on auto-pilot.
She cannot express herself. She is losing herself in habit. It is getting buried in piles of tasks and disappearing in the blur created by the nonstop scurrying motion that keeps the wheels turning. She feels that people do not really see and hear her really.
Yes, California had been a welcome reprieve from the standard spin cycle of their daily life. “Why has their relationship cooled?” Lucy found herself wondering frequently in recent months. They have been doing all the things they planned developing home and career with two beautiful kids.
Is the appropriate remedy to monotony the scheduling of diversions such as entertaining shows and vacations? That is what vacations and other diversions are for, after all. Or, do they need a strategy to produce deep healing? How do they re-humanize themselves? How do they reconstitute themselves and their voices? Where and how can they find meaning that resonates today?
Something should be done, thinks Lucy, forehead rumpled. They could be on the brink of despair. She thinks she detects the groans of shifting surface ice in the distance; there could be a sudden crack followed by a complete break anytime. What would result would be an irreparable abyss.
Perhaps her mother’s need for a transition in life is being matched with the emergence of a life transition of the wider family just becoming visible on the horizon ahead of their slowly rolling lives. The necessary tasks that the family takes on ensure that their lives keep rolling together. Lucy still believes that this work is the priority. The world must spin, the ship must keep navigating the freezing waters.
She takes the lead in making the family’s Christmas schedule. Her son has his heart set on joining a ski trip with his cousins. Glen will accompany him while she takes their daughter to see grandma.
She will go by car to BC so that she may take the artificial Christmas tree and other supplies along. “Why don’t you just get a tree while you’re there?” asks her husband. Lucy reasons that the fake tree is smallish and fairly old. She can leave it with Mom if it seems best to give it up. The family has returned to the practice of buying real trees each year anyway, setting the false tree up downstairs to show off the real one in the limelight of the main floor. They can live with one tree each season. Her husband concurs but worries that the roads are dangerous to which she replies that she will take it easy and do the trip in two days. She will enjoy the scenery. She has not seen it in years and knows that Tammy will like the trip. Besides, the “boys” will enjoy more “guys only” time together that way.
“And the girls will enjoy more “girls only” time together,” replies Glen with a sardonic smile.
“A trip will do me and Cindy good too,” Lucy answers defensively.
“I know, hon,” says Glen giving her a light hug.
They busy themselves planning their respective trips. To Lucy, the logistics of her plan are much less onerous than a plan to host a big festive meal at home. She will be relieved of entertaining the in-laws, at least until New Year’s day. The problem will be fighting off boredom. She will have to plan some activities that her mother can handle. Perhaps the homecare worker should still come during their stay.
Using a service care for her mother is a big help. It seems to be going smoothly, which is a relief.
Getting service is often a hair-pulling experience these days, so any simplification, any assistance is welcome to Lucy. Calling a government line takes navigating through intricate voice menus and long waits only to speak with partially trained frontline worker who dispenses inadequate answers. Going to an office in person can be even more confusing and frustrating. The regulations and forms change all the time. Information is unreliable. The response is usually, “no.” One has to arrive armed with insistence and preset rationality.
From trying to sort out an apparent mistake in a tax assessment to ordering an item from a catalogue, from requesting a refund for a purchase to making a dental appointment for her kids, the velvet hand of bureaucracy frustrates their lives causing further agitation leading to grief, which feeds the atmosphere of anger. She can only control a tiny corner of her existence at home and at her office. Beyond those domains, it seems like people are under siege.
The recent episode entailing the delivery of a gift for Trixie’s birthday still bothers Lucy. She found it online and, carefully noting the details, completed the order as instructed. But the store personnel failed to inform their customers that the drivers were on strike at that time, some of the company’s clerks performing only minimum duties and the managers taking on a lot of the work. Without its own drivers, the store was using courier companies and adding the courier delivery charges to the online orders, without informing customers. There were many foul-ups in the course of this debacle during the busy December purchasing period. First, Trixie’s gift was delayed. Then, it turned out to be incorrect. Then Lucy had trouble registering the problem. They told her she could not return it. Of course, she disputed this claim and finally got them to agree, at which point they said that she would have to return the item herself to a depot or be charged another delivery fee. Lucy had difficulty in arranging an opportunity to complete the return especially in the bad weather of an early winter. When she reached the service desk, they told her that the information was not on file. Lucy resorted to shouts and threats, so unlike herself. She was forced to take the thing home and go back another day after securing a resolution over the telephone again. Then she had to make an additional trip to find something at another store to give her child as a birthday gift. Trixie had not been happy getting the gift late. Lucy still awaits the refund to her credit card after having written an argument to the company.
What often looks like stupidity or incompetence may be something else, reflects Lucy. Sometimes, in fact, it is as if people are being too helpful and trying to do too good of a job. She knows that employees are subject to more and more “quality control” just as the government is more and more obsessed with security checks (and contriving lengthy convoluted explanations by which to justify them). “One encounters an endless wall of bluntness, negativity and denial everywhere one goes these days,” thinks Lucy. It is one hitch after another with every attempt to accomplish something outside her insulated habitual existence at home and the office. The institution she works for is under attack, being chiseled away by “accountability;” soon the hounds may be scraping at her office door. When she encounters snags, they seem to claw at the skin constantly.
Lucy is caught in ambivalence. It appears that she is damned if she stays within her little spheres of existence and damned if she ventures outside them. The spheres of her life seem to be snowballing downhill. She cannot change their course.
She finds herself adding wine to her shopping lists more often. She is reaching for the bottle more and more frequently, earlier and earlier in the evening. The bottle is always a guest at staff luncheons and dinner parties with friends. She notices Glen imbibing, though his elixir of choice is beer. Still, this fluid does not melt the ice. It only numbs their brains and produces more headaches.
Now in their forties, the couple is starting to grow rubbery folds around their middles. Lucy tries to be diligent and spend some time on the stationary cycling machine after work. She finds it difficult to tolerate the futility and monotony of its spinning wheel. She borrows her son’s MP3 player when she can in order to complete stints of exercise—afternoon television being so lame that it does not provide an antidote.
“We can’t go on like this,” Lucy declares aloud. She suddenly snaps her body into attention, whipping the page with scribbles off the pad with her left hand to toss it carelessly into the pail beside her and swinging her right had up to grasp the sturdy ballpoint decisively. She draws a plan of action. First, she makes a note to call her sister-in-law in Ontario to talk about her niece’s plan for the holiday pronto. Winona is going to school in the Fraser Valley while her mother is preoccupied with another family member in Toronto. Maybe she would like to connect with Auntie Lucy for a change this year. Second, she writes down a few of the next steps for organizing her mother’s birthday party. Third, she makes a reminder to call the school homestay program right away. Maybe her son would like a stay-at-home friend for awhile. Maybe it would jazz up the household to have a foreign guest, relieve the humdrum. “We can at least be more interesting!” Lucy mutters.
“Mom! When’s dinner? Can I have something now? I’m starving!” announces Collin, her 13-year-old son.
Ignoring his request, Lucy instead asks, “Say, Collin, how’d you like to have a new friend stay with us?”
“Aw, are you talking about that homestay thing again? I don’t know. Well, some kids at school say it’s okay. I’ve met some of the foreign students. They’re all right, even though they’re a bit out of it,” says Collin with a slight laugh. “Can it be a guy, like a guy my age? I guess there’s no problem with having an extra person around, if he wanted to hang around here.”
Lucy’s face cracks its icy edges to form a warm smile.