The False Ducks Blahg

     Sorry, but this blahg is not going to be “This Is 50, Part Three.”  I think I ran that topic to ground with two parts.  Now it’s 2016 and it’s been a little over a month since my last blahg.  I thought I had better get on with it and come up with a new theme/topic.  Okay, so you asked for it, or maybe you didn’t and I’m just forcing it on you, but nonetheless this is the new blahg. This is actually number 52 in case you’re counting.

     As some of you may know, I started a new job, or rather 2 new jobs, back in 2015.  I was only working two days a week back then and wearing two hats.  I was a Community Counsellor with our local Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) picking up the overflow for mental health counseling and I was also the Accreditation Coordinator and overseeing the beginnings of Accreditation for CMHA.  I’m still with CMHA but in mid-January I moved into a new full-time role as Housing Preservation Counsellor.  It’s nice to have the work, and don’t get me wrong, but it’s also tough working five days a week.  How do people do it?  

     My day usually starts around 7am.  My wife comes and wakes me up and I have breakfast and my one coffee of the day.  I shower and shave and then make my lunch and get dressed.  I’m out the door just before 8am and at work by 8:30.   We live in the country and given that it’s Winter in Canada, I have to give myself a little extra time so I arrive on time and alive.  This last point will become clearer a little later on in this blahg. 

     I thought I was doing okay with the whole return to work thing and balancing my home life.  It has been a few years, approximately 7, since I had a job where it required me to actually go to an office every day.  I’m usually home between 5 and 5:30pm every day now depending if I have to run errands after work.  My wife is usually home by 4:30 because she now works only five minutes from our house.  Compare this to the more than 15 years she worked in Trenton; a drive of 45 minutes one way.  In the past 7 years, I was always the one at home and I primarily took care of housework and meal preparation.  That isn’t to say my wife didn’t also do her fair share.  I think I relied on her to do most everything on weekends. 

     I think I should speak a little about my wife’s daily schedule.  By comparison, it probably is a busier schedule than mine.  For the past number of years, probably going back to when she first started working at her school in Trenton, she gets up every morning at 6am.  This gives her time to have her breakfast and do her bathroom routine and to also get children up and make sure they are fed and catch the school bus every morning.  We only have one teenage daughter left in the house but it’s still part of my wife’s morning routine to nurture our daughter out the door on time.  Add to all of this feeding the cats and putting out the garbage and recycling every week.  I’m not a morning person so the past number of years I concentrated on the afternoon schedule when the children came home from school and up to and including dinner preparation. 

     Somewhere I’ve gotten sidetracked but listing all the things my wife does is certainly selling her short.  Now that I’m working, she had to recently call me to the mat.  I was letting her make dinner and clear away dishes from breakfast and dinner.  One night she had to say to me that she wanted a little help because I seemed to be letting her do everything.  She was right.  I was coming home from work and trying to catch up on some things on the computer or just flopping down and engaging with our daughter or watching television.  That’s not a good thing.  Like I said, she had to call me on it.  At first my reaction was to think about saying this was payback for all those years that I did the after school routine and had dinner preparation on the go before she came home.  Fortunately my brain is still working and I stopped myself from responding that way.  Instead, I took it to heart and have been better at being more in tune with her needs and what is needed doing around the house. 

     So, this blahg is about the balancing act.  I want to share something else that has to do with balance.  Last month I went to a workshop of dealing with grief and loss.  One of the handouts from the session had us looking at some children “Climbing The Tree of Life” and circling the child that we felt best represented who we are at this moment in our lives.  You can click on the image on the left to view the image better and to see that I selected the boy in the middle.  I felt he best represented me because he was about half-way up and seemed happy.  I also felt he was centered and had a good observation point.  When I volunteered this to the person who was leading our training, she referred to the boy as balanced.  Balanced or Centered, I think they mean about the same thing but the Balanced part ties in better to this blahg.  That’s me.  I think I really wanted to choose the kid hanging upside down who is drawing attention to himself but I don’t think I need to be that kid anymore.  But my answer may change if you ask me on a different day. 

     I want to add something else that happened a couple of days before the workshop about grief and loss.  I was driving on my way to work when my truck hit a patch of black ice and began to fishtail.  I tried to correct it by steering in the direction of the skid and taking my foot off the gas.  Unfortunately my vehicle began to spin around and around.  This was in a section where there were no houses and luckily no other cars coming in either direction.  On the left side of the road was about eight feet of shoulder and then a field protected by a wire fence.  On the right side of the road was five feet of shoulder before it dropped away about 60 feet into a marsh below.  The photo above gives you some idea of the layout.  It was only taken recently and not on the day of the accident.

     When I started spinning in circles I was hoping if I had to go off the road that it would be on the left.  No such luck.  I spun out to the right but luckily the snow was deep enough that the rear end of the truck stopped fast in a snow bank.  I heaved a quick sigh of relief when the truck came to a stop but then it started to slide backwards toward the cliff edge because I didn’t have my foot on the gas.  I quickly put my foot back on the gas and she climbed out of the snow.  When I looked at my tire tracks I noticed there was less than two feet from where the truck had stopped to the edge where I would have dropped off to the marsh.  On my way home, I tried to find the spot where I had gone off the road but the snowplow had come by in the meantime and obliterated my tracks.  If I had gone off the cliff then no one would have known that I was lying in my vehicle at the bottom of the cliff.  All I could think was that my wife and children might never know what happened to me until Spring.  That was a sobering thought indeed. 

     I know that last part really doesn’t have anything to do with a balancing act but it did put everything into perspective.  What would have happened… I don’t want to even finish that thought.  With all that thinking of what if, it did inspire me to write a new poem; which is something I haven’t done in a while.  I’ll close with that.  No song, no music, just my words:

 

                                   the balancing act

take a boy in a tree
legs akimbo
aware of sky and ground
trying to be somewhere in the middle
years pass
boy becomes older
bigger
maybe taller
maybe just bigger around the middle
maybe married
maybe children
maybe job
trying to stay balanced
on his limb
his own limbs flying
flying objects in the air
trying not to let anyone or anything
come crashing down

there’s no prize to keep your eyes on
you can’t look away
or everything falls away
maybe steal a glance here or there
at other boys in the tree
more likely other girls
but don’t let anyone catch you looking
certainly not the wife
sometimes you get a glimpse
of another part of the tree
the branch not taken
and you wonder

and in that instance
you drop something
your guard
your focus
and you shift
direction maybe
weight to another foot
and you pick up someone else’s load
maybe that parent
who climbed up after you
and now there’s things on your shoulders
more to bear
bear down
stay centered

some boys jump
walk way
from the jumble around the trunk
see the brass ring
maybe a selfish one
a way down
hide among the bushes
and be someone else
another boy

can’t be that way
this boy’s staked a spot
defend it
cherish it
wave off birds
other intruders
other boys
those other girls glimpsed from a distance

the balls are still in the air
plates spinning
head erect
eyes forward
no longer balancing
part of the tree
maybe the tree
rooted
beckoning to the other boys
catching their kites
so they have to come nearer
see this boy’s foliage

reaching out

calling out

climb up
climb up

stay awhile

 

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