Oh, the Horror!

The cute!

Why is Halloween such a monster event these days? Pun intended.  Halloweens of my childhood were one day affairs. A pumpkin was carved, mom taped a few decorations to the front window, a lame costume was thrown together and out you went. Back home, you dumped out your candy bag and began trading with the siblings for more of the good stuff. That was pretty much it. In a big year dad got a few fireworks and sparklers to set off in the yard. By the last year of elementary school it was all over. After that you got stuck with door duty unless you were a popular, cool kid and got invited to Halloween parties in your teens. Not me. I got door duty.
Once I left home I got invited to a few adult Halloween parties and they were always fraught with the stress of coming up with a costume. I'm fairly creative but costumes are not my thing. They ranged from the cute to the really bad.

The only thing worse than my
Minnie was the Gandolf next
to me.

I knew some people who planned all year for Halloween, trying to outdo their costumes of previous years, especially the couples. Gluing, sewing, building, painting, nothing was too much trouble to be the star of the party or event. I have to admit some of these costumes were pretty amazing but worth the effort? I don't know about that.
Then along came my children and Halloween in our house was a hugely popular event.  It was my youngest son's favourite day of the year. I have very creative children and they wanted their costumes to be unusual and individual. As long as they came up with the ideas, ( boy, did they) I could manage to pull the costumes together. I searched thrift stores with them, sewed superhero outfits, did elaborate hair and make-up, purchased grotesque masks, and more than made up for my own paltry efforts before they arrived in my life.Yes, I was indulgent.  I decorated with straw bales and pumpkins, cobwebs and candles. I baked 'witches fingers' cookies and helped out with the Spookfest event at their school. It was exhausting and my efforts were nowhere near the top of the heap in the overcharged atmosphere of suburban parenting. The demands got greater every year, Halloween was becoming out of control, fuelled by a plethora of cheap decorations at Costco and Walmart playing into the riotous imaginations of kids. Adults that loved Halloween turned their yards into graveyards, dressed in costume to answer the door and put out door mats that played spooky music when stepped on. Ack!

And turn into monsters!

They start our adorable....

The kids coming to the door got older and older. Teen-aged boys that shaved every day showed up on my doorstep dressed in their snowboarding outfits holding out a pillow case. Come on, dude, grow up, it's just candy! I told my boys that it ended with elementary school, after that they were on their own. If they wanted to embarrass themselves by trick or treating past grade seven, go for it, just count me out.  I still carved a pumpkin, hung a few decorations around the door and loaded up on candy for the kids. I was still on door duty. Slowly the fervour around Oct.31st waned around our house and then we moved into Vancouver where Halloween seems almost non-existent. It was like I had stopped banging my head against the wall.
Today we live a few blocks from an elementary school and on my walks I pass by houses with decorations on the lawn and cobwebs in the bushes.  It's obvious there are kids in the area so last Halloween I put out a lit plastic pumpkin by the front door and bought a bag of treats then sat back and ate them while watching TV. Not a princess or a Pokemon rang the bell. I'm sure they were getting their treat bags filled at community centres or private parties or wherever, just not door to door. Maybe their poor moms are being driven crazy by the nightmare that is Halloween but I don't feel it or see it.

A couple Gokus that mean
business.

So what fuels the mania for Halloween? And why the hell did I get so caught up in it? Sometimes raising kids feels like a twenty year brain fog. The Estrogen Veil as it is known. You just don't know why you do what you do sometimes. It's like waking up from a night of drinking and remembering the crazy stuff you did without the memory of WHY you did it. My memories of my childhood Halloweens are all good, I wasn't trying to compensate for what I didn't have. Was it just a collective hysteria in the neighbourhood fed by the love we have for our children? Or a bunch of stay-at-home moms with too much untapped creativity waiting for a project?  Or are we just children in adults bodies getting a chance to tap into fun again?  But I'm done with that, the hysteria that is, not the love and this coming Monday evening will find me with the porch lights out, the TV on and my hand in a bag of mini Oh Henry's thoroughly enjoying Halloween my way.

Let Me Give You Some Advice...

Advice. Some people like to give it, some people like to ask for it. Rarely does anyone take it. I read somewhere a few years ago that when people ask for advice what they are really asking for is for you to agree with the choice or position they have already decided upon. If you do agree it feels like they have taken your advice and if you don't agree they simply head off and find someone else to ask. Eventually someone will agree with them or they will give up asking and do what they wanted in the first place. An advice asker may seem confused about a situation and appear to sincerely want your help with the problem but if pressed will admit they are leaning a certain way. The role of the advice giver therefore is more to act as a sounding board than to really add anything to the conversation. I understand that is the technique many therapists use, they keep asking you questions until you figure it out yourself. They can't give you answers. 

Once I understood that concept I had a completely different point of view on the whole advice topic. I had been under the impression that people truly wanted my help when they asked for advice but I have no illusions about that anymore and it's made things so much easier. I no longer take any personal affront when someone doesn't take my advice. No more asking myself "why did I bother?". They don't actually want MY advice, they want me to ferret out their own answer and give them permission to go ahead.  I will still let someone run through all the facts and their feelings for me, then I'll offer up my wisdom and let it go. You can't make anybody do anything that they don't want to do. Let me repeat that, you can't make anybody do anything they don't want to do.  That's been another epiphany that has simplified my life. No one really wants your advice and no one will make the decision you want for them unless they want it already. Simple, right? 

I just like this picture and its courtesy
of my son, Nate Konyi

One of my friends has lived by the phrase "if you give someone the right information, they will make the right choice." Not true. She has been bedeviled by that one for a long time. It all depends on your idea of what the 'right information' is and what the 'right choice' is based on that. And so it goes with any advice, from something as simple as "do these pants make me look fat?" to "should I marry this person?".  My bet is that somewhere along the line Angelina Jolie asked a good friend if she and Brad should marry. That friend may very well have said no, sensing that perhaps things weren't too great in the relationship and the marriage card was being played to try to pull them together. Did she listen? No. And here they are headline fodder today. Angelina may have been given all the right information about her relationship with Brad and where it was headed but she made her own call. Did it for the kids or whatever. Often the asker is not asking the right question. When someone asks if the pants make them look fat perhaps what they should really be asking is "should I lose some weight before I wear these pants?".  A tougher question to ask and to answer. 

So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying, think before you ask for advice. Are you asking the right question? Are you simply looking for approval for a plan that might just be the easy way out, not the right solution? And understand that when you are asked for advice it may be flattering but any advice you offer will probably not be acted upon. Let go of that expectation, life will be better for it.  This doesn't mean that I don't wish to be asked for advice...ask away, I'll be happy to give it and won't expect you to follow it. Just don't come back complaining when your way didn't work out. 

Courtesy of Nate Konyi

Awash in a Pink October

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, always a tricky time for me. I had breast cancer twenty years ago and went through treatment from July 1996 through to mid-December, 1996. It was the whole nine yards, a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and five years of taking the prescription Tamoxifen. Some call it the "slash and burn" of cancer treatments but I was only thirty-nine years old, the mother of two young children and I had a stage two cancer. The doctors in charge wanted to do everything they could to keep me alive....and they did. I debated with them the necessity of each and every treatment, to their exasperation at times. I thought long and hard about my options and in hindsight I am glad I did what I did. It wasn't easy.

Happy to be in Maui with the family

Our medical system can be quite swift and effective when it wants to be. Though my diagnosis took too long because not one professional that I saw thought it was cancer, once it was found out to be so, everyone jumped into action. It was quite a ride from my surgery in July to the last radiation treatment in December, and with my doctors blessings I was on a plane to Maui for Christmas with my family about ten days after that last treatment. The trip had been planned for almost a year and when I asked the doctors at the start of my treatment if I could still go they did what they could to make it possible. I did my part by staying as healthy as I could throughout treatment. No small task.

Then along comes October, 1997. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, my first in my post-cancer world.  The papers and magazines were full of articles about women being diagnosed and treated. Some successfully, others not so much. Tales of recurrences of breast cancers, articles on the different kinds of breast cancers, statistics on cure rates and mortality rates and much, much talk about how common the disease was, what your chances of having it were and getting it again. It was overwhelming. I felt like I had post-traumatic stress syndrome. Pictures of women wearing scarves and wigs to cover their bald heads were everywhere. Pictures of mourning family members, too. The stores were full of pink -- pink bracelets and pins, pink labels on food and cosmetics...pink, pink, pink. The colour pink really has no connection to breast cancer in my mind, believe me, cancer is not pretty and soft and girly in any way. But no matter, I felt like I was drowning in a pink wave of breast cancer all over again.

Me in my headscarf on
 Labour Day

I understand that the painful stories of dying mothers, sisters and wives are meant to stir people to open their wallets and donate to the cause. And that cause has been very successful, breast cancer fund raising is a big business now.  I tried to write a letter to the paper to articulate what it felt like to be someone who had just been through the experience and to see it splashed about the paper every week for a month but I couldn't explain it properly and didn't want to insult all the women and their families working through their own situations.

The first few years after my treatment for cancer I would find myself getting anxious and emotional in June. When it happened the first time I didn't know why, but I soon realized that my unconscious was reliving the whole episode. I had lost my hair on the Labour Day weekend so that became an emotional touchstone as did various reminders throughout the fall.  As the years past and I continued to stay healthy those anxieties faded, the fear of recurrence dimming with every calendar change.

So now there is just October, the Pink month, and its tales of triumphs and sorrows. My heart goes out to each and every woman who gets a breast cancer diagnosis and to the people that surround her. I was fortunate to have such wonderful family and friends to help me through the experience and not every one has that. Others feel the need to go through it alone, telling only those who absolutely need to know. I don't understand that but I respect it.

We threw a party to thank everyone
who had helped me through it.

I think the huge success of the Pink campaign has allowed the media to tone down the coverage somewhat these days. I don't feel as bombarded in October with stories that make me cry but maybe it's me that has changed. My experience with breast cancer is in my distant past now, no longer a thing that haunts me on a daily basis. It is never forgotten, I have scars and other health issues as reminders of that time, but it is not a topic of discussion anymore. People I have known for years don't always know of my diagnosis, it just doesn't come up and that's a wonderful thing. I don't label myself a "survivor" of cancer, I'm just someone who had it and treated it with the help of the fantastic cancer care that BC has, care which I support with monthly donations. So it is now time for me to see October in shades of orange, again. Orange for the falling leaves and the pumpkins of Halloween. I don't need pink to remind me to care.

Much love to those going through any kind of cancer treatment right now, my thoughts are with you.

On A Technical Note

I feel I need to add a short note here about contacting me or commenting on my blog posts. Someone recently tried to email me by replying to the automated email by which they received my latest blog post. That is a "no reply" email service. I will not receive the message. If you would like to comment to me directly and privately, please email me at whatfayesaid@gmail.com.
If you would like to comment publicly on my post there is a place for comments at the very bottom of each post. You need not have a Google profile to do so, there is a drop down menu to allow you to post your comment various ways, including anonymously. I get the chance to read and censor any comments before they go on the site. I would love to hear your comments and will respond to them if warranted. Please feel free to leave something.
Since I also post my blog posts to Facebook  I usually get most of my comments there and so go ahead and continue to do that if you wish.
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Faye @ 50
Original artwork by Jill Charuk

Home

I am out for a walk today in my neighbourhood in Vancouver.  It is a perfect fall day in the city, blue sky, fresh breeze, about 16 degrees. As I stride along the sidewalks, scuffing at the smashed chestnuts that have fallen from the huge trees I pass under, I can't help but think about the city I live in and how much I love it.

Crushed chestnuts on the sidewalk

People say all the time that Vancouver has changed so much, citing the traffic, the expense,  the influx of immigrants, the old buildings being torn down, the new buildings going up...the bike lanes. But on a day like today, walking between West 22nd Avenue where I live and Broadway so much feels the same. 

My sister and I moved to Vancouver when I was fresh out of high school and she had just graduated college. We both had jobs in the downtown core and it made sense to leave our hometown of Richmond behind. To our delight we found ourselves in an apartment in Kitsilano. It was love at first sight. The beach, the funky shops of West 4th Ave, the bars and restaurants. What more could a couple of young, single women want? 

Richmond is flat, and when we lived there many of the areas were newly built, the trees spindly and held up with stakes, the houses an assortment of the five different plans that the builder allowed. But in Vancouver.... the trees were huge, the houses  old and unique, streets undulated up and down giving onto fabulous views of the mountains and ocean, and the beaches were full of people like us. Heaven.

I left the city almost a dozen years later to raise a family and then moved back with my husband and grown kids seven years ago. It felt like coming home. Even though I had grown up in Richmond, spent twenty years in Tsawwassen, the years that I lived in Vancouver had imprinted itself on me. It was where I truly grew up. My father spent part of his childhood in the West End, selling papers on the street corners and my mother went to UBC almost seventy years ago. I feel like there is a little bit of my family DNA here.

Forty-two years after I first moved into Kitsilano I am walking its streets again.  Going to the same library at MacDonald and West 8th Ave. where I used to check out books, renewing my drivers license at the same Motor Vehicle branch where I received my very first driver's license.

The sidewalk stamp at 14th and Stephens

As I walk, I look for the date stamped into the sidewalk below me that tells me when it was laid. Some say 2010, or 1992 but many read 1929 or 1931. Vancouver is not an old city and despite the feeling of some that it has been wiped clean like a white board and replaced, small signs like this remind me that some of the early days still remain. The sun filters through the same huge maples, chestnuts and oak trees that have been dumping their boatloads of leaves on these streets for decades.

Big, old chestnut tree

 Many of the funky old homes have been discreetly turned into triplexes and quadruplexes but they still stand. Yes, quite a few homes have been replaced but the unattractive boxes from the fifties and the horrible "Vancouver specials" from the sixties that went are no great loss as far as I am concerned.  Many of the new homes in my neighbourhood are a vast improvement. And their picture perfect  gardens are a delight. 

Broadway now holds Vietnamese and Thai restaurants where Greek and Chinese ones used to stand but the feel is the same. Pizza shops, bakeries, produce stores and banks line the street just as they did forty years ago. Change is inevitable, everything and everyone is in a constant state of change, but that is not a bad thing. I've changed a bit and I'm happy to see that Vancouver has, too. There are new places to explore, different cuisines to taste, more cultures to learn about. These are all good things.  When I'm strolling along Spanish Banks looking at the North Shore mountains or walking around Kits Point to the planetarium these changes all feel so small. They are just the spice that makes the dish. 

Avenue of Stars
Original artwork by Jill Charuk

When I first moved to Kits it was full of joggers, brown rice and people smoking pot, now it's yoga, quinoa and people smoking weed. The more things change the more they stay the same. So I embrace my Vancouver like an old friend, she has a new haircut, she's put on a few pounds and speaks a second language but her heart still welcomes me home.