The other night “Frisbee”, my three-year-old son, woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, coughing and gasping for breath, his whole being seized with the struggle to draw air, his fingers clawing at his throat. Eyes wide, he stared at me in panic, and between coughs rasped “I want…I want…” but he wasn’t able to finish his sentence.
A few minutes later he was back asleep, his ribs sticking out with every wheezy breath, but no longer looking like he was going to imminently die of asphyxiation. I called the nurse’s line and was told to take him to emergency.
Unfortunately, we were in the middle of a rare West Coast snowstorm: snow wasn’t just falling gently from the sky, it was dumping like feathers from a giant, ripped cushion. It was snowing so hard a radio announcer dubbed it “snow-ma-geddon.”
As luck would have it, Craig—Frisbee’s dad—was out at a Christmas party in the only vehicle with snow tires. So I called 9-1-1 for an ambulance. When Frisbee woke up again, there were three large firemen looming over him, taking his vitals and strapping him onto an oxygen tank. Then the paramedics arrived. Frisbee, who might just be the most trusting kid on the planet, took all of this in stride, talking excitedly about his toy cars, and requesting we grab his favourite book to read at the hospital.
Still hooked up to an oxygen tank, he was carried out in the falling snow and strapped to a stretcher in the ambulance. We then crawled to the hospital on a silent and empty highway.
By the time we got to the hospital, Frisbee was doing great. The cool air and the oxygen had worked magic: he was sitting up on the bed, flirting with a nurse, and showing off his teddy bear’s craziest dance moves.
Turns out, he was suffering from croup (a Victorian-sounding malady which I had previously thought of as being relatively harmless ailment, permanently associated as it is in my mind with a scene from
Anne of Green Gables).
Anyway, long story short: Frisbee got examined, dosed with steroids, I learned all about the health benefits of the steamy bathroom, and we were discharged. After a long wait, we got a taxi, but two kilometers from our house, at 3:30 a.m., the cabby refused to drive any further. His shift ended at 4 a.m. and didn’t want to risk getting it stuck in the snow. Whether he was heartless, gutless, or just greedy and hoping I’d offer him a really big tip, I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because luckily at that moment a big SUV drove up, looking like nothing so much as a giant, black angel-mobile floating amid clouds of snow. I flagged it down, and we hitched a ride home.
The next morning, I was reliving the night’s activities with his dad. At one point, I asked Frisbee, “What was your favourite part? Was it the ambulance ride?” He shook his head, “No, it was coming home.”
The last year has kind of been like that night, only much longer. Sometimes I think we need a bit of adversity to really realize and appreciate what is important to us. At the start of the year, I wrote down a list of about twelve things I wanted to accomplish this year and tacked it onto my office door. It had the usual kind of New Year’s resolution stuff on it: “pay off credit card,” “learn to cliff climb,” “hike the Lions," "learn to blog"—that kind of stuff. A few of the more nebulous items on my list I think I did achieve (like “use less plastic” and “drive less”), but most of the items remain for 2009, and the years to come.
The fact is, by April the list had become totally irrelevant. Due to a family emergency, I had unexpectedly become a foster mother to a (then) two-month-old baby who Frisbee lovingly named “Coconut.” And for a few months, up until Coconut’s mom moved in with us and life became a lot easier, I was trying to take care of the baby and Frisbee, and run my editorial business, and keep up with my commitments as a volunteer, while not going totally crazy.
And then summer came. Coconut’s mother moved in and became a cherished friend, I got a part-time retail job selling binoculars to cruise ship passengers, and then, at the end of August, I ended up attending the Maui Writers Conference after one of my clients registered for it and was then unable to attend.
The baby, the retail job, and the conference were kind of like the emergency, the oxygen, and being discharged from the hospital. Coconut made me realize what’s most important to me; the part-time job got me out of the house, paid the bills, and was the least stressful w
ay of earning a living I’ve ever experienced; and being in a room full of writers who all my share my dream of publishing books was like being given a dose of medication and sent home.
I flew back to Vancouver feeling recharged. Two days later, the Ministry of Children and Families called to say Coconut and her mom could go home. A couple of weeks later, the binocular job ended, and I found myself sitting in my office staring at a stack of dust-covered manuscripts and the to-do list I’d tacked on my door nine months before.
Around this time, I decided to “retire” from Black Swan Services. I’ve still got a few editing projects I need to wrap up before Black Swan sings its swan song, but by next summer I plan to no longer be working as an editor, and instead focus more on my own writing.
To this end, I’ve found a part-time job at a university bookstore, a brainless job I’m grateful for, and I’m writing everyday. The writing is going slowly, and painfully, and on bad days I hate everything I type, and wish I was better at math so I could become accountant. But on good days, it feels right. Even though so far the trip is turning out to be a lot harder than I had thought it would be, it feels good to be going home.
So this Christmas letter, while long (thank you for bearing with me) is to celebrate a crazy year which has ended well, and to urge you to think about what’s important to you. Is it the list of what you think you should do? Or is there something else you really want to do? And do you ever stop and appreciate how good it feels just to just be where you are?
Blessings and Happy Holidays to you all,
Nadine
