It is a great pity we don't know
When the dead are going to die
So that, over a last companionable
Drink, we could tell them
How much we liked them.
-Bernard O'Donaghue

There was a boy named Andre that I carpooled to Kindergarten with. He lived just below my hillside, in a small house with a street name that had to do with a tree - Maple maybe. Or Walnut.

Sometimes the two of us went to Mrs. Marple's house after school to get taken care of until our moms could pick us up. Mrs. Marple had a husband who had been electrocuted and had creepy pictures of Jesus up everywhere. I remember watching her teenage daughter wash her face at the bathroom sink - she told me that if I always washed with cold water, I'd never get pimples. I was five and didn't know what pimples were.

Andre kissed me on the cheek once in Mrs. Marple's basement. He was pretending to tell me a secret, but then he kissed me. And I laughed and wiped my cheek off and ran up the stairs.

He used to kick me on the soccer field and I would get infuriated and tell my dad and my dad would say: Oh, he probably just really likes you. And I would say: Why on earth would a boy want to kick me if he likes me?

Andre played the violin and always got in trouble for reading in class when he was supposed to be doing his work. And once, during show and tell, he lied and said that his sister Michele got kidnapped by the Pizza Panda but she was home safe now.

But I liked him.

In grade six, I slow-danced with him at the sock-hop to Mister Mister song called Take These Broken Wings. Both of us kept looking all around while we swayed back and forth.

In grade 9, I changed schools and never saw him again.

But then, last spring, I facebooked him for some reason. And I asked how he was doing and he said fine, that he was working and playing violin in a roots/bluegrass band and writing songs. And we emailed back and forth a few times.

And just the other day, I thought: I need a violin player. I should facebook Andre and see if he wants to move here. But I thought: No. That's too pushy. He's probably happy where he is.

But today my dad called with the news that Andre had killed himself and the funeral is tomorrow. And all I could think was: No, it's okay. I'll facebook him. I'll talk to him. I'll ask him how he is and... But then I remembered it was too late. Then I'd think the thought again: Hey, wait a minute! I'll just facebook him, and.... wait. no. never mind.

And after I hung up the phone, and the whole "I'll just facebook him" thing stopped looping in my head, I thought: If only I had emailed him when I'd thought of it. Maybe it would have given him hope, to know he was wanted somewhere, maybe the thought of making music out here where the winters are not so long would have cheered him up. If only...

I've heard this is what happens to people when they lose someone to suicide. They are forever left wondering if there was something they could have done... if only I'd called, if only I hadn't forgotten his birthday, if only I'd been a better parent/friend.

I wish now that I had said more in my emails. I wish I'd said that even though he used to kick me on the soccer field, I always liked him. I wish I'd asked him if he remembers carpooling together and how we used to wiggle our baby teeth and count how many we'd lost so far. I wish I'd said something about how being five years old together in a basement waiting for your mothers to come and pick you up never ever leaves you.

Figure out what the #*?! is the matter with my daughter.

It’s clear that the first thing that needs to be dealt with around here is the problem of my daughter. To be clear, I’ve been trying, in various ways, to deal with it for awhile: she’s intense, angry, snappy, and chronically miserable. She picks fights all day long and sometimes even wakes up yelling in her sleep. I’ve been reading books about highly sensitive children, have been trying to be firm with consequences such as taking away TV time or play time, or doling out chores if she has a bad attitude. I have gone the other way and just tried to foster connection—hug her and affirm her every time she starts the day out badly or throws a fit. Things always seem to get better for a few days, then worse again. For awhile, I was seriously losing hope. I was bracing myself for living the next 15 years of my life plotting getaways, maybe doing a little pot on the side to take the edge off.

So a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to stop TRYING to do something about it, and actually DO something about it. It had become non-negotiable.

I made an appointment with a counsellor who worked for the elementary schools. He was no help really—just hemmed and hawed and said no-brainer things like: “Well, I guess you just have to do what feels right” and recommended various books whose philosophies I disagreed with. But he did give me the number of Child & Family Services who could, he said, provide “affordable family counselling”.

I called, and made an appointment with Dr. David Jones (name changed), a counsellor who has a good reputation in town.

I spent the first half an hour sobbing on his couch while he nodded and handed me Kleenex.

“I’m sorry.” I said, after 15 minutes of crying. “I told myself I wouldn’t fall apart today and here I am doing it.”

“Don’t apologize.” He said.

So I cried some more.

I told him about the girls’ fighting, about how Iryn wakes up hollering at night, about how I worry she’s clinically depressed. I told him about how I walk around with knots in my body anticipating the next outburst and about how joyless life seems when she is around and how powerless I feel to change any of it.

I cried and cried and cried and he listened and asked me psychiatrist-type questions and told me his professional opinion of the situation. He was good. He was really good. In one hour, this psychiatrist blew my mind.

But I won’t get into it here, because, well, this is not a parenting blog. This is a blog (of late) about me and how I am going to change some things this year.

So what I am really here to say is this: that at one point, in relation to something about my daughter, he looked me straight in the eye and asked me when it was that I started doubting my intuition.

And at the moment, I couldn’t think of an answer. Because up until that point, I hadn’t realized that I had.

But the truth of it washed over me, not just in regards to mothering my children, but in regards to….everything. My whole life. Somewhere along the line, maybe not that long ago, I stopped listening.

I think it may have been after we moved here (to Kelowna) from Winnipeg. Something about that shift, that change of landscape, totally uprooted me. For the first 2 years, we were living in a tiny one-and-a-half bedroom basement suite with no sunlight. All the walls were beige. For months and months I would wake crying for what we had left behind. I would stare out the window at the blue hills and the pine trees and ache for the flat prairies and crooked Elm trees of my old life. I would write poems about my old front steps and about how my daughter and I used to eat blueberries on the sidewalk on our way home from the grocery store and about the thunderstorms that would split the whole sky in half.

At first I thought it was those things that I missed. But I soon came to realize that what I really missed was myself. I had left something precious of myself behind and I wanted it back. It’s taken me this long to start finding it again.

And so what I’m here to say is that if I’m going to change anything, anything at all, I’m going to have to learn to trust myself again.

When I got in the door after the counselling session, puffy eyed and rattled to the core (in a good way), I took off my boots and sat down at my piano. The tenants downstairs were out, so I released the soft pedal and began to play. I started softly at first, floating between tiny high notes and low, swelling crescendos. Then I was pounding, rattling the floor with a song that came from deep within me. I played and played and played, as if I was trying to wake someone, as if I had just remembered the notes to some long forgotten song. I played until I was exhausted, emptied out, then sat hunched over the keys feeling utterly spent, like I had just run a great distance.