Treating Your F$&#s Like You’d Treat Your Money: A Robyn Unravelled Master Class

All week, a friend of mine has been devastated by a difficult time she’s been having with a relative. Their relationship has never been good, but my friend has a huge heart and always wants to make things better. Without going into the details of her situation, I can say that I can relate to it all too well.

Today I shared with her the philosophy I have developed over many years of caring too much about people who do not care about me, and she said it helped put things in perspective for her. I had been toying with posting it here for a while, and in honour of my sweet friend who’s had such a tough week, I am posting it now!

Welcome to Treating Your Fucks Like You’d Treat Your Money: A Robyn Unravelled Master Class.

My brother and I have never, ever gotten along.

I’m three years older than him. Three years, I have found, is an awkward age gap for siblings. Growing up, you’re not close enough in age that you really enjoy playing together, but you aren’t far enough apart that to form caretaker/charge dynamic either.

We always fought growing up. I like to say that my brother is my exact inverse in that we have absolutely nothing in common, except for roughly 50% of our genetic material. I am plain, introverted, responsible to a fault, and love to laugh at myself. My brother is devastatingly handsome, outgoing, couldn’t care less about where his next month’s rent money is coming from, and takes himself very seriously. I can’t fathom living a minute of my life the way he lives his, and I’m sure he feels the same way about me. Our dad always called us ‘Chalk and Cheese’, to say we couldn’t possibly be more different.

We managed to frostily co-exist in each other’s periphery for a decade or so, and then my parents split. My dad not only moved out of the house, he moved across the province, eight hours away by car. My mother essentially had a breakdown from which she never fully recovered. And, predictably, Chalk and Cheese reacted to these traumatic events in spectacularly opposing ways.

I pushed my feelings down– deep down, because I knew I would need to do so to survive what was coming. I grew up in a few short months, as my mother depended on me more and more to be another adult around the house. I would later learn during my undergraduate degree that there is a psychological term for what happened to me– parentification— and it was awful.

My brother on the other hand, regressed. He rebelled, lashed out, and generally acted like a brat. I think I knew I wasn’t cute enough to pull that shit and get away with it, but it worked beautifully for him. In retrospect it was a far better strategy– he got limitless attention and all I got were chores and some pretty spectacular daddy issues.

Even though I was not quite three years older than my brother, I was now his caretaker (remember how I said above that’s not the natural order of things for siblings born this closely together?). He started getting in trouble at school. My mom and his teacher somehow thought it was appropriate to include 14-year-old me in his parent/teacher meetings and include me in disciplining him. I was responsible for feeding him, making him do his homework and keeping the house clean before my mom got home from work. And guess what? He fucking hated it. And I don’t really blame him for that one bit, it was a shitty situation for everyone. But the way we were forced to interact in those teenage years established a dynamic between us that’s hard to shake to this day: I’m the bossy wet blanket, and he’s the blatantly favoured, selfish brat.

Because this dynamic exists between us, I gave and gave in the relationship and got nothing in return. I’d drive him places, spot him money or bail him out when he’d “forget” to get mom a birthday present (I’d put both our names on it, and then later he’d give her something extravagant that was just from him). I helped get him a job at the place I worked. I was his supervisor. He failed to show up on time or do what I asked him to do, and was eventually fired (not by me) for physically threatening me in the workplace. I am pretty sure he called me a fat bitch every day of my teenage life. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly wonderful to him either, but even as we grew into adults the relationship continued to be exhausting and a source of stress for me.

Two Christmases ago, it hit me.

A month prior, my mother called me and said, “You know, I really think your brother has changed for the better! He wants to send you a Christmas gift– I put it in the package I sent up to you.” I was delighted– not because of the gift itself but because of what it represented: he was finally giving something back to the relationship! I immediately was overcome with guilt– I had stopped sending him Christmas gifts the year before (shortly after he implied my Muslim fiance was a terrorist) because he hadn’t sent me so much as a card in years. Hastily, I ran out and got a card, shoved $50 I didn’t have inside and sent it off signed with kisses and hugs.

Christmas rolled around and I had one of the worst bouts on influenza of my life. I actually spent Christmas Day in bed. My mom called to wish us a merry Christmas, and my brother was there with her. She was upset because there was a terrible snowstorm, and he wanted to drive 400 km back to his apartment. I reflexively went into parentification mode and told him not to be stupid and stay at mom’s ’til it cleared up. I probably could have been nicer about it. He then cursed at me, and told me off until I cried. I asked him to put Mom back on the phone. He never mentioned the card or thanked me for the $50. He had sent me a $3 novelty t-shirt that did not fit.

Lying in bed, feeling physically and emotionally miserable, I bitterly realized that there was nothing I could do to make him love me, to make him respect me, to make us have the affectionate relationship most of my friends now have with their siblings. We were too different. There were too many years of resentment. I took out my phone, blocked him on social media, and took a glorious NyQuil nap. Life has been improving steadily ever since.

My years of being a de facto parent to a person that literally hated me was awful, but it made me responsible. Like, almost pathologically so. One of the consequences of this is that I have always been excellent with money. At first it was out of necessity– I had to help mom pay the bills while saving money for university– but now it’s grown into a legitimate interest in personal finance, almost a hobby.

Recently I started thinking about how the concept of investment can be applied to more than just money. Time is more precious than money (you can always make more money!), and we choose who and what we spend it on. We often feel concern and anxiety for those we love, which is exhausting. We spend our energy, our affection, our trust on the people in our lives. The idea is that we invest these things to make our relationships stronger and more rewarding. But what about when the people you care about don’t care about you? What happens when you emotionally invest in someone and get nothing in return?

The answer is simple: You need to treat your fucks like you’d treat your money.

This is a crude but rather succinct way of saying “why are you wasting your time and energy on a relationship that does not improve your life in any way?” Stop giving a fuck about those people. Fucks are finite. Reserve your fucks for those who give a fuck about you.

Here are the things you should consider:

How much can you afford to invest?

In your financial lifetime, there will be lean times, and there will be times of abundance: When you’re a poor university student, every penny you have often goes to daily necessities. Later in life when you’ve established yourself in your career and learned to budget your money, you’ll have extra income to start saving for a home, planning for retirement, and other non-immediate essentials. Perhaps an illness or some other unforeseen circumstance will one day cause you to re-evaluate and adjust how much you can afford to invest for a while. The amount of money you can afford to invest will likely fluctuate throughout your lifetime.

The same will be true in your personal life. At certain times in your life, you will have plenty of emotional capital to spend on your relationship with others. At other times, you may not have the ability to give so freely. This is especially true for my friend, who is expecting her first child in a few months. Before she was pregnant, she may have had the emotional resources to spend on trying to fix a difficult relationship. Now that’s she and her husband are in the midst of the excitement, fear and stress that comes along with expanding their family, she quite honestly has enough to worry about. In a relationship worth maintaining, the other party will understand that and perhaps try to spend some extra emotional capital on you– which leads to the next question:

Are you seeing a return on your investment?

Imagine that you have been heavily investing in a stock or fund that is performing poorly. Your hard-earned money isn’t growing, and maybe you’re even losing money. You would likely cut your losses and sell, and find a safer, more worthwhile place to put your money.

Relationships are an economy based in emotional currency. Just like your bank balance is finite, you have a limited amount of time, energy, anxiety, and sympathy you can spend on a person. If funneling all of your emotional resources into a relationship and you aren’t getting anything worthwhile back– respect, appreciation, friendship, love– it’s worth considering taking a step back to figure out what you’re actually getting out of this arrangement. I had been maintaining a stressful and aggravating relationship with my brother for years and got absolutely no support from him in return. In my case the loss of the relationship only meant the loss of that stress.

Don’t be afraid to buy low… sometimes.

All of this is absolutely NOT to say that you need to abandon a relationship the second it turns sour. In fact, just like in the stock market, this is often an optimal time to invest MORE (if you can afford it).

Maybe your best friend has been having a hard time lately and is taking it out on you. Is that fair to you? No. But, you know that before this rough patch in her life, she was invariably a loving, thoughtful and and caring person who enriched your life in many ways. To use a financial turn of phrase, you know that historically, her stock has performed well. Continue to invest in the friendship– give her space if she needs it, but let her know that you will be available to talk if and when she is ready. Chances are your friendship will be all the stronger for it in the end. In my case, I had never had a warm relationship with my brother despite my investments, so I had no reason to believe it would suddenly improve.

So there you have it: Treating your fucks like you treat your money– This principle is shockingly simple, and somewhat embarrassingly obvious, especially as someone who would never make these same mistakes with her personal investments. I find it adds a little rationality to the obviously emotional and subjective realm of interpersonal relationships, which can help you see things more clearly.

Interestingly, my mom jokingly said to me today that I should start talking to my brother again, because in his line of work he is able to get family members a deep discount on airfare. I said that there is no discount in existence deep enough to tempt me, and it’s really true. What that discount would save me in dollars would end up costing me dearly in sense, so to speak. Plus I have like a million frequent flyer miles 🙂

What do you think? Will you start treating your fucks like you’d treat your money?

–R

Girls of That Age (or, How to Decide to Ruin Your Life)

I’m getting to That Age, you guys.

It’s a tale as old as time: Once you hit That Age (it has varied throughout history, but nowadays it tends to be twenty-eight or so), you notice that many of your contemporaries are undergoing a dramatic shift in values. Wild weekends of wanton debauchery start to become fewer and farther between, and are slowly replaced by housewarmings and baby showers. Your best drinking buddy is married and off the booze in order to ‘prepare her body for conception’. Even that chick from university who loved casual sex and took MDMA the way most of us take our daily multivitamin is now on child number three and can’t stop posting images of those ‘babywear’ wrap things. Bizarre and jarring as these transformations may seem, reaching That Age is a natural thing and a rite of passage. Not much has changed through the generations.

What IS different about reaching That Age in the 21^st century is the internet. The Digital Age has, of course, given the entire population access to an unfathomable and unprecedented amount of information. There is no facet of the human experience we can’t educate ourselves about with just a few clicks of a button. It’s only natural, as our friends pair off and have babies, to wonder if that’s the route our own lives will take, and to do a little investigation of our own.

Turns out, the internet is SUFFUSED with parenting stuff. The articles are ubiquitous—one can hardly browse the web or check social media without seeing a half-dozen or more references to mommy culture:

• Clickbait Lists (“Twelve Things You Should NEVER Say To a Stay At Home Mom!”… “One Hundred and Eighty-Six Pregnancy Symptoms No One Warned You About!”… “Seven Reasons Why Having a Newborn is Basically Like Owning a Tiny, Shrieking Rhesus Monkey Who Only Shuts Up When You Let It Chew On Your Tits!”)

• Mommyblogs (“You’re Damn Right I Chose an Epidural”… “Don’t Let Them Drug Your Baby: An Open Letter To Expectant Mothers Considering Painkillers During Labour”… “Why You Aren’t Really a Mother If You Had A C-Section, You Lazy, Selfish Piece Of Shit”)

• Forum Posts— certainly less evangelical in their message than the articles and blog posts, but to a childless outsider, chilling in their own, unintentional way— (“Baby is 5 weeks old, just discovered husband’s Tinder profile”… “How is everyone else coping with this third degree vaginal tearing??”… “Baby only stops crying to vomit—plz advise??”)

And then of course there are the myriad of Facebook statuses and Twitter updates posted by parents, chronicling in real-time their harried, sleep-deprived, anxious, cash-strapped, stressed-out misadventures.

Everywhere you turn on the internet, people are sharing their experience with parenting, and the general consensus seems to be that it is fucking awful.

It’s enough to make a girl of That Age clamp her knees together forever.

At first blush, this information is indeed terrifying. In fact, I don’t mind telling you that the unfiltered play-by-plays of parenthood so readily available online have made me seriously question my once-strong desire to have children. However, I do think there’s a lot at play here. Surely having children cannot be this unabashedly, overtly terrible, otherwise no one would do it. And of course, when it comes to stuff posted on the Net, we are likely dealing with a biased sample —it stands to reason that a new mother is probably more likely to vent online on the day her infant shits in her mouth than on the day it takes a four hour nap, allowing her to get caught up on all her PVR’d Scandal episodes. It’s also entirely possible that all this prospective parent nightmare-fodder is posted by a small but vocal minority, and that the majority of happy, chilled-out parents are off somewhere with their kids and having a kick-ass time (PS: Happy, chilled-out parents—please confirm your existence; things are getting pretty bleak over here on The Interwebs).

But even after considering these possible limitations and biases, another variable emerges that you can’t really ignore. Once you delve into the content of these posts, there’s an undeniable theme:

• “I can’t even take a shower, the kids always need me!”

• “We just moved to a new neighbourhood, so now of course I need to meet all the parents in the area and arrange some playdates”

• “Little Maashtynne is doing tap, piano, and softball this summer, and we’ve got Paighsleigh in swimming, t-ball and extreme motocross. There’s no time for anything else!”

Now, as someone who is not old enough to have a clear recollection of the fall of the Soviet Union, it might be facetious for me to talk about days gone-by, but I’m gonna do it anyway: when did parents stop being parents and become LITERAL SERVANTS to their sprog? Kids are definitely capable of making their own friends and seeking them out to play with—they’ve been doing it just fine since the dawn of time. They also don’t need to be in a half a dozen organized activities each, especially when it results in the exhaustion and discontent of the family at large. And I distinctly remember being allowed to cry or whine for a few minutes while my mother finished her phone call or ate her dinner– god fucking knows we didn’t dare interrupt her while she was in the tub!

For parents with small children, the family dynamic seems so incredibly different these days. Parents are involved in every single aspect of their child’s lives to such an unprecedented extent that it even has a name: “helicopter parenting”. As in, hovering. Like a mosquito. It doesn’t take an expert to recognize that such an arrangement does not for a happy home life make.

So what happened in the twenty-five or thirty years it took for the latest crop of mothers to be born, and then have their own children?

For the answer to this and many of life’s most burning questions, I turn to contemporary British chick-lit. Nearly twenty years ago in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding writes about a phenomenon she dubs “Competitive Child-Rearing,” in which extremely ambitious, career-minded new mothers essentially try to out-parent each other in attempt to recreate the satisfaction they felt back when they were excelling in the workplace. Fielding’s description of Competitive Child-Rearing was meant to be hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek, but as time goes on, this particular part of the book has definitely crept into ‘it’s funny because it’s true’ territory. Fielding is pointing out that the the shattering of the glass ceiling has changed the way women think about life, success, and parenting. It’s not hard to see the antecedents of today’s helicopter parenting in Competitive Child-Rearing.

My point is, parenting has shifted dramatically — it’s no longer about balancing the needs of your entire family; it has become an exercise in raising the best possible progeny, no matter what the cost. Take a look at this poor woman (or rather, this woman and her poor, poor bastard of a husband). She puts her husband last because at all times because “being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job”.

I seriously just rolled my eyes so hard I saw my own brain.

I would propose to you that as a parent, part of your job is to demonstrate a healthy, loving romantic relationship to your children so that they know how to love and respect their future life mate. Part of your job is to teach your child that she is not, in fact, the centre of the universe, and that there won’t always be someone to take care of her every whim.

Maybe your job is really to let your kid whine while you’re rinsing the conditioner out of your hair in the shower, or to finish the conversation you’re having with a friend before attending to your little one. Maybe your job is to put yourself first sometimes.

The French have done this for years, and while their techniques are often decried in North America as abusive or callous, to me being raised in the French style sounds an awful lot like being raised before parenthood became a constant game of one-upmanship, before we decided as a culture that good parents never have a moment to themselves, ever (except of course, to write 3000 word treatises on how they never have a moment to themselves, ever, on their expansive and meticulously-kept parenting blog). The information age we live in now makes it possible to broadcast the ‘glorification of busy” in real-time, to ensure that our peers know how proudly exhausted and miserable we are, and to pressure them to keep up.

So, fellow girls of That Age, we have a decision to make. Knowing what we know about parenting in the 21^st century in all its horrid detail—the trials of pregnancy, the gore of labour, the sleeplessness and marital discord of new parenthood, and the ridiculously impossible standards of hyper-parenting that will be imposed on us all the while—what are we going to do?

Are you drawn so strongly to motherhood that none of these gritty first-person narratives can scare you away? Or, like any good Millennial, will you use the information at your fingertips and decide to bow-out of New Motherhood, and maybe be permitted to have uninterrupted showers for the next 18 years?

I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: after our early thirties, the reproductive choice afforded us by society will be encroached upon by biology. For many of us, time is running out to make a decision. Maybe, paradoxically, this was an easier choice when we were less informed.

Maybe it’s not so easy to be a girl of That Age in the Information Age.

For Mary

Seven AM exactly. A ringing telephone at an untimely hour injects icy fear into any heart.

For the first time in my life, my mother’s voice on the other end of the line gave me no comfort. She managed to utter the essentials before collapsing into a heartbroken wail.

Reflexively, I began to chant a prayer—appealed for help from a God I’d given up years ago as I’d watched my incredibly strong, incredibly stubborn, incredibly beloved grandfather to wither and die, terrified, in front of me.

I don’t remember when or how I got off the phone. My next recollection is curling into my fiancé and wailing her name over and over as though, if I called for her she would rush to my side and dry my tears, as she’d done my entire life. I have never wanted anything more than to press a final “I love you” against her beautiful, familiar face before she was whisked away from me forever.

* * *

I was supposed to call her the weekend before. Her mobility had been decreasing for the last few years. She’d fallen in the bathtub the week before and hadn’t told anyone– until my mother had come to visit and noticed the goose egg on her forehead she tried to conceal with her fringe. Mom told me about this, frustrated and annoyed, but I knew in my heart why Gramma had kept it a secret; it was her signature combination of mousiness and pride. She didn’t want any fuss, nor was she willing to brook any insinuation that she belonged anywhere other than her own home—an eclectic paradise of overgrown gardens, knick-knacks and memories she spent half a century curating.

For most of my life, I’d had to listen to my mother’s laments about her parents’ living conditions with lukewarm sympathy. But as she told me the story of the bump and the bathtub, I knew in my heart I could finally do more. I could take care of her. I wanted to. I lived three thousand miles away, but she had lived in Edmonton before, and three of her four grandchildren were here.

For the first time in my life I had more money than I truly needed. There were lovely assisted living facilities minutes from my home. I had a great job, an even better boyfriend, and a sweet little house with an extra bedroom. She could come to me on weekends, when I had time to be with her all day long. The natural light in that extra bedroom is brilliant— she’d love to sit by the big bay window and drink her tea, or knit. I’d buy her a chair to go beside that window. And a better mattress for the spare bed. I’d pop in to see her most nights on my way home from work, bring her groceries and take her wherever she needed to go. I’d finally make her do something about her bad knee.

For the rest of the week, my imagination was full of how life would be—she’d help me plan my wedding (he hadn’t proposed yet, but that’s an inconsequential detail while in reverie!). She’d tell me delicious, sepia-toned stories of days gone by, and finally teach me how to crochet. My mother, having been relieved of the stress of overseeing her care, would once again remember how to have a conversation that wasn’t just an angry soliloquy, and my sweet younger cousins would have their only living grandparent minutes away from them.

I would call her on the weekend, and gently, gently, talk to her about leaving her home in Newfoundland and coming here to be with me. I knew it would take more than one phone call. I knew she wouldn’t say yes the first time, the second time, or even the tenth time I asked. But she would say yes in the end, because she loved me, and I loved her. I needed her.

The weekend came, and I got busy. Nothing overly important, just routine errands. Just life. I knew she went to bed early, and I told myself I wouldn’t want to disturb her with a phone call too late in the evening; the three-and-a-half-hour time difference between Newfoundland and Alberta makes the logistics of phone calls a nightmare. In reality, I made every excuse to put off a difficult conversation until the next weekend.

For her, next weekend never came. She died in her sleep on Friday morning.

There is nothing in my life I will regret more than not making that phone call.

It doesn’t matter that she would have said no to my proposal, or even that she would have died long before we could have arranged to have her come here. In my selfishness, I robbed myself of the chance to hear her reedy, wonderfully wizened voice one last time. To make her laugh. To hear her call me “Robyn Mary” with honey in her voice, because to say my name was to say her own. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave the house her husband had built her, that tiny palace only she could see amid the weeds and moldy carpets, but in my offer was the reassurance that I loved her, that she wasn’t a burden to me, and I wanted her with me always.

All of that, squandered, because I fancied myself too busy.

* * *

My grandmother was loved by everyone who knew her, but understood by so few. She was quiet. Introspective. Eccentric. In the last years of her life, she’d been slowed by the depression that had wormed and settled into her brain around the same painful time I banished God from my heart. My immediate family loved her dearly, but were often frustrated and confused by her near-pathological passiveness and desire to be left alone in a house that stood while crumbling.

I understood her– at least, I think I did. So much of who I am came from her, and the lifetime of influence she’d pressed upon me. We both understood the pleasure that only comes from making something with your own hands.  We knew the quiet joy of an evening spent in solitude. The comfort of bustling about in a kitchen, of Jane Austen. She and I both were intimately familiar with the all-consuming melancholia that seeps in at the loss of a man, loved fully and with one’s whole heart.

Her quirks weren’t burdensome to me because I shared them. Our secrets alone, forever.

I will carry the phone call I never made with me for the rest of my life. I deserve that pain. But I’ll also carry a golden wedding band, and an ancient copy of Pride and Prejudice with her maiden name neatly inscribed on the flyleaf. And I’ll take with me all the things I know, and love, and want, and fear, because she placed them in my heart herself.

And I will dare to hope that she already knew the words I’d left unsaid.

DIY IKEA Frame Chalkboard Menu Tutorial

I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions. To me, the phrase conjures up images of annual gym memberships forgotten and buried in the bottom of your purse by mid-February, or clean-eating frenzies that are abandoned as soon as it’s warm enough to start thinking about barbecue again.

So I’m not calling my decision to be smarter about my food choices a New Year’s resolution (even though I did start on January 1st!). It’s a ‘lifestyle change’ that I hope will last longer than the guilt-fueled promises we usually make ourselves in the hazy, hungover aftermath of New Year’s Eve.

I love food. It’s my vice (I don’t smoke, there’s too much alcoholism in my family to risk being a liquor aficionado, and sex is not something I think about unless it’s currently happening to me. Come to think about it, if it wasn’t for the constant swearing and blasphemy, I’d make a pretty excellent nun!). I love it, but I also want to be healthy. I believe you can still eat the food you enjoy, but in moderation. In the long term, I will probably lose more weight by eating smaller portions of my favourite foods than trying to eat nothing but kale and quinoa for a few weeks before burning out completely and seeking solace in the arms of a bacon double-cheeseburger.

It’s all about small, sustainable changes, like measuring your portions, occasionally reaching for fruit when you’d rather be reaching for chocolate, and cooking more at home.

That last point is what inspired today’s DIY project. I quite enjoy cooking, but when you’re working full time and have a busy life, its often so much easier to stop for takeout on the way home. Since one of my ‘sustainable changes’ (remember, we’re not calling them New Year’s resolutions!) was to cook more at home and to use my new slow cooker at least once a week, I thought it was time to get serious about meal planning. Having a plan for the week makes shopping easier, helps you know what meat to defrost the night before, and (my personal favourite) puts an end to the daily, “I don’t know, what do YOU want for dinner??” exchange: “Tacos. We’re having fucking tacos for dinner. Look at the sign.”

Plus, it looks ballin’ against my relatively bare, long kitchen wall. And so on-trend; chalkboards in the kitchen are so hot right now (or at least, that is what Pinterest would have me believe.)

With that, let me show you how I made this sucker:

1) Guilt your fiance into giving you the frame which contains the bizarre Edmonton Oilers fan art he never got around to hanging up in the man cave. (Or, you know, just get one from IKEA). Mine is 24″x 36″ but any size you like will do. Just make sure it has a pane of glass! (Not pictured: Bizarre Edmonton Oilers fan art. You’re not missing much– it was pencil drawing of Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle staring earnestly into the distance, with something printed underneath about how they are the future of the franchise. Unsettling.)

2) Remove glass pane from frame and set on some paper or drop cloths. This is going to get messy.

3) Rough up the glass with sandpaper (it doesn’t really matter what grit, you just want to give the glass some teeth so that the chalkboard paint will hold onto it. Also, if I knew then what I know now, I would make  sure to clean up the grit that sheds from the sandpaper– some of it ended up getting stuck in my paint later on.)

3) Apply your first coat of chalkboard paint. You have two choices: liquid, or spray paint. I would have vastly preferred to go the spray paint route, but it’s the middle of winter and there’s nowhere outside to do it, so I sucked it up and bought Martha Stewart Crafts Multi-Surface Chalkboard Paint in black:

Overall I was pleased with the results,  but I am sure the application would have been much easier and even with spray paint.

Anyway the trick here is to apply many thin layers, and all your brush strokes should be in the same direction. Here’s what my first coat looked like:

I experimented with brushes a little, and found that the wide synthetic brush on the top right worked far better than the foam brush on the bottom left. I bet a mini-roller would have worked better than either of them, BUT NOW I WILL NEVER KNOW.

4) Apply AT LEAST 2-3 more coats of chalkboard paint, waiting at least a hour in between coats. Paint will still be tacky after an hour, but as long as your hand comes away clean when you touch it, you’re golden. Here’s my glass 4 coats later:

5) Let chalkboard paint cure for at least 24 hours. While you’re waiting, you can do the frame!…

6) (Optional) – Paint your frame as desired. If you like your frame the way it is, by all means skip this step. I, however, wanted the frame to compliment the grey accents and counter-tops in my kitchen. I went with Martha Stewart Crafts Multi-Surface Satin paint in Arrowhead:

Again, spray paint would have been the optimal choice, but January in Edmonton is not the time for such luxuries. Like the chalkboard paint, you’ll want 3-4 coats, drying at least an hour between each. I also noticed that the paint didn’t want to stick to the glossy IKEA finish. The extra coats eventually covered it, but save yourself the trouble by priming or sanding it first.

Here’s a picture of my frame drying on the coffee table. (Not pictured: Fiance, angry and distressed that lack of table space has necessitated the use of his man cave):

7) Once you’ve let your chalkboard cure for a day, you will want to “season” it with chalk. This is to prevent the first thing you write on the chalkboard from being permanently burnt into the finish. It’s pretty fun actually– take a piece of chalk and run it sideways all over the chalkboard. Feels like grade 4 art class, just go with it.

8) Ladies, from here there are two possible options:

• Option 1 – Buy some stickers. Apply to chalkboard as desired. Drink leisurely glass of wine. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, unhindered by additional chalkboard menu-related tasks.
• Option 2 – Decide it’s a good idea to use your fucking Cricut.

Do Option 1, ladies. Do you hear me? Option 1. What does that wine taste like? Is it something nice and fruity? White zinfandel maybe?

I, like a complete sucker, wanted to DIY even the stickers. And, while there were certain advantages like having more creative control over exactly what the board looked like, and the size of the lettering, it was not worth the aggravation or the cost (do not ask me what I paid for a package of Cricut vinyl, just DON’T).

Here’s what I did, in case you have just taken a whole bunch of drugs and think that Option 2 might be a fun way to spend a Sunday:

9) Put chalkboard back into frame, and cut out some PAPER letters with Cricut (you’ll definitely want to try a few different styles and sizes of fonts before you commit to cutting into a $2, 12″ x 12″ sheet of vinyl). Lay them on the chalkboard to get a sense of how you want the letters positioned.

10) Once you’re happy, and 100%, ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY satisfied with the letters, cut them out on the vinyl. You’ll need to press all the air bubbles out from between the adhesive backing and the vinyl (also, don’t forget to use the vinyl “kiss cut” setting on the Cricut!)

11) Use math/eyeballs/wizardry to position adhesive vinyl to chalkboard. I laid the paper stencils on the chalkboard exactly where I wanted them, and then traced them with chalk, so that I could see where I wanted to place vinyl. I have no pictures of this process because I was too busy TEARING MY OWN HAIR OUT WITH HOW FRUSTRATING IT WAS.

12) Hang chalkboard. Write your meal plan for the week. Enjoy the sound of no one asking you what you’re having for fucking dinner that night.

Easy! And cheap– much like the pasta I already know we’re having on Wednesday.

Enjoy!

-R

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

I love Halloween. Like, really love Halloween.

Partly, it’s the time of year. Fall is the season for sweater weather and brisk, whipped-up air that smells like promise. Almost overnight, the woods explode with red and gold before the trees relent and let their leaves fall to form the burial shroud of the dying summer. It’s a time of change; the ancient hallmark of a world waiting to be thrust from brightness into the dark.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in the middle of this time of transition, we celebrate the dark and the things that lurk within it. Only at Halloween do we revel in fearing the things we cannot see.

Even now, at twenty-seven, Halloween still holds for me the possibility of magic. Of course, I know there are no such things as ghosts, or witches, or vampires. But there could be– who can say for sure what happens in the shadows on All Hallows Eve, a day when the metaphysical comes unbound and anything can happen?

There’s a child-like thrill in indulging in the spooky, the imaginary, the unseen. There’s an innocence in it, a feeling of innocence that becomes harder and harder to capture as the years pass. But no matter how jaded I become, I always know that on October 31^st I can be seven years old again and, for a few hours, ghosts roam their lonely plains, witches are real, and magic can happen.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I really love Halloween.

So this October, when my fiancé stood in the bedroom doorway and asked me if I wanted to decorate the house, and I curled away from him in tacit, tearful refusal, I had to acknowledge that something was wrong.

***

I fight an on-and-off battle with both anxiety and depression, but it’s the anxiety that gets me most often. I can almost feel it physically, like tentacles that wrap around my chest and constrict, so that I can’t breathe, can’t concentrate, can’t think of anything except this monster that’s choking me. Some mornings I literally wake up terrified, with a pounding heart and a scream in my throat. If I get up and get moving my panic subsides and I can forget, at least for a little while. But in bed at night, with no barrier but the looming dark between me and my thoughts, my ancient reptilian brain begs, pleads with me to get up and run, to save myself from an ineffable danger that doesn’t exist.

It took me a long time to understand this, but I have struggled with anxiety my entire life. When I think of my early childhood, I remember being afraid all the time. I can remember lying in bed in the middle of the night, utterly paralyzed with fear.

It was not the thrilling, familiar fear which children seek out and relish at Halloween, the goose-bumpy exhilaration which can be shed at the end of the night along with that year’s costume.

I felt fear of death. Fear of growing up. Fear of knowing that I had been born, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was burdened with the terrible knowledge that I would grow up, grow old, and then die. Not only that, but everyone I knew and loved would suffer the same fate, and, at least in the case of my parents and grandparents, I would most likely be alive to watch it happen.

This fear was debilitating. I was scared in the daytime too, and this was the only fear my family saw—I was scared to be alone, scared to try new things, scared of my teachers, scared I would get into trouble. But as uneasy I was in the daytime, those fears were nothing compared to the stabbing, primal terror I would feel at night, crushed under the weight of my newfound understanding of life and death as I lay all alone in the dark.

My parents seemed to think I was just a “worrier.” After I grew up, my dad laughingly remarked that I’d spent my childhood “constantly shitbaked”. While I sometimes wondered how normal a full-on existential crisis really was in a seven-year-old, I didn’t give it much thought—after all, I had never known a life without fear.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I read this blog post by psychologist Sheryl Paul, that I realized that my childhood “worrying” was probably something more sinister. Paul writes:

“One of the first questions I ask a new client who’s struggling with relationship anxiety is, “Did you have anxiety as a child?” It’s no longer surprising to me when the client says no because I can almost guarantee that she’ll answer affirmatively to my next question, “Did you worry a lot as a child?”

For some reason we don’t correlate anxiety with worry. Perhaps it’s because there’s still some stigma attached to the word anxiety, so culturally we latch onto worry as a more palatable term. Yet it’s essential to understand that worry is the mental manifestation of anxiety. Experiencing nameless dread or identifiable dread as well as being called “too sensitive” or “overly sensitive” as a child are other indicators that anxiety was likely present.”

In that moment, I realized with a jolt that I hadn’t suddenly developed a problem at with panic attacks at twenty-one years old. I was never just a worrier. This problem was nearly as old as I am. Twenty years later, I could finally hang a moniker on my “nameless dread”: anxiety.

While I could accept that my terror was a consequence of an overzealous amygdala, I couldn’t dismiss the validity of my night-time thoughts as easily. Existence, death, meaning—those are real questions that beg real answers. They snarl at you from the shadows, the glimmer of bared teeth and glassy eyes only hinting at the monstrosities that lay beyond. Real-life danger couched in a figment of my own imbalanced mind.

Anxiety—and the questions I find imbedded in it—is a horror, but one that feels intimate and familiar after a life-long acquaintanceship, and as much as I hate to feel it well within me, I know it almost as well as I know the freckles on my legs.

***

Thankfully, panic doesn’t rule my life. Like everyone, I experience anxiety mostly in response to stressful or worrying life events. So you can imagine my shock when, in early October, during a period of rather intense emotional and professional stress, I didn’t have a panic attack. Not one. I was nearly waiting for them to start—typically they come like clockwork. Instead, I just had this feeling of apathy. Like I didn’t care. Like it didn’t matter.

Initially, this was great, and I was truly enjoying my sympathetic nervous system’s newfound give-no-fucks attitude to the less-than-ideal occurrences in my life. It had been such a long time since I could feel stress without having a physiological reaction to it.

But within a few days though, enjoyment was replaced with ambivalence. Then apathy. Then nihilism. Sure, the stress wasn’t bothering me, but neither was anything else, good or bad. Nothing could make me feel happy. I had no interest in anything. I started coming home from work and going immediately to bed. I was tired all the time.

Though I couldn’t see it at the time, I was being flung from one end of the spectrum to the other, from the anxiety I know so intimately into depression– a not-completely foreign, but less familiar terrain.

Then the internal monologue started.  My inner voice went from its typical judgmental and disapproving tone to mercilessly abusive. It was like someone had set up a Jumbotron in my brain, and was playing a highlight reel of my most embarrassing moments on loop. Twenty times a day, fresh shame would wash over me like the crest of a wave– a flush of memories, things I should have done differently, said differently. And, like a wave, each intrusive thought eroded me, wore me down until I literally couldn’t remember why I deserved to live, be loved, work, eat, breathe, exist.

After about a week, every time I blinked I saw a noose. It was tied with a synthetic yellow cord and hung from the shelf of the spare bedroom closet. My inner demons were being about as subtle as a punch in the mouth, and I understood implicitly their message; there was exactly one way to quiet my inner voice, to ease the guilt, to stop wasting the effort and the love of others.

When the guilt and shame were too much, I could find a half-beat of relief by imagining the scratch of the nylon tightening against the delicate skin of my throat.

The pain was glorious and beckoning.

***

The dichotomy between anxiety and depression, at least for me, has always been interesting. I almost never experience both concurrently—it’s like my brain can only accommodate one chemical imbalance at a time. Yet, there is a link that persists between the two. It’s a deep-seated link that I do not fully understand, but it became apparent in the days leading up to Halloween:

“Hussain,” I said late one night, in the dark, “None of this matters. Why do we bother to do anything? We’re just going to die anyway. Everyone we love will die. I didn’t want to be born; why was I born?”

My happy-go-lucky fiancé’s response was, I think, the sane one: That we have to make the most of the short time we have on earth. Our actions may not matter in 500 years, or even 50 years, but they matter to us when we are alive, and that’s all the motivation we should need.

I wasn’t terrified. In fact, I was the opposite—just flat, devoid of emotion save for the melancholia that had permeated my every fibre for the last two weeks. But I was lying in bed, in the dark, ruminating on the same existential thoughts that I’ve been wrestling with for more than two decades. These thoughts are with me in anxiousness and in depression. They arise in the darkest hour of my night, and seem to be a part of me– or at least, they are innate in the part of me that struggles. And they haunt me, long after my heart has stopped racing, long after the noose has stopped calling my name.

***

A few days later, my house was festooned with glittery pumpkins.

I had snapped out of my unhappiness as quickly as I had sunk into it. The voices stopped. The guilt subsided, and I started to remember why life was worth living. How different the world looks when the light peels back the shadows. How lucky I was to be extricated after only two weeks.

I resisted the call of the noose in the bedroom closet. It wasn’t the first time it tempted me, and I know it won’t be the last. To be perpetually seduced by it is as much a part of who I am as my curly hair and dimpled smile. I can only wait to be beckoned by it again, the way Nature waits for the summer to yield and give way to the burgeoning fall. My shift in seasons may bring fear, or it may bring hollow apathy. The only certainty are those ancient, terrible questions which have no answer but the grave.

And so, as I wait, I will inhale the crisp, enchanted air of that sacred October night. I will remember that the autumn, too, must be succeeded, and no season is permanent.

And I will celebrate the fearsome, beautiful magic that can only exist in the shadows of the deep, dark unknown.

You, Too, Could Probably Knit Something: Long-Tail Cast-On Tutorial

Thinking about taking up knitting? For fuck’s sake, don’t do it.

Knitting sucks. It’s tedious and mind-numbingly repetitive, and takes for-effing-ever to make even the tiniest baby garment. Additionally, there is absolutely no economic advantage to knitting. Seriously, I’m fairly confident that if I took up crack cocaine I’d be out roughly the same amount of money. And I’d be thinner.

From what I understand, knitting seems to be like raising children: Really enjoyable if you’re already obligated to do it, but you’re probably better off not starting in the first place.

Go find another craft. Turn back, if it’s not too late.

The problem with knitting is that, not unlike crack cocaine, it is addictive. The tedium of “knit one, purl two” quickly becomes a comforting, almost religious mantra. You pay a fortune for supplies, give up all your spare time, and usually unravel it 4 or 5 times, but it’s totally worth it when your beloved recipient (you would never knit something for someone you didn’t adore) looks at you with beaming smile and asks incredulously, “you MADE this?”

The highs are so high, man.

The You Too, Could Probably Knit Something series is meant to ease the pain of having a stupid, annoying, but unshakable hobby. I’m definitely not an expert, but I have been knitting for a very long time. Over the years I’ve discovered some simple things that can make knitting a lot easier, while improving the quality of your finished work. Some of these may be common knowledge, but they were new to me when I discovered them, and they’re the sort of things that I would have loved to have known when I was a novice knitter. 

The inaugural entry in our series:

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Bro, Do You Even Rib? The Long-Tail Cast-On Will Change Your Life

Until recently, knitting the cuff of a mitten or sock was utterly enraging. The traditional cable cast-on (every grandmother’s stand-by, and the one you newbie knitters probably know the best) left me with saggy, inelastic ribbing that left me feeling like my mitts were going to fall off my wrists if I let my arms fall to my sides.

To add insult to injury, in just about every knitting video I could find, the mittens and socks made by pro knitters had impossibly snug and secure cuffs, with tons of give and elasticity.

“How do these bitches on Youtube get their cuffs so springy?” I’d ponder aloud, often garnering a few dubious looks on public transit.

The answer, it turns out, is the long-tail cast-on.

What is the long-tail cast-on, you ask, and why haven’t you used it before? The long-tail cast-on is simply a method of casting on stitches that provides improved stretchiness and elasticity, especially when you’ll be working a rib pattern—making it ideal for the cuffs of mittens, socks, or any other project where you’ll want some horizontal stretch. The problem with the long-tail cast-on is it can be hard to learn. It’s just about impossible to explain in words, and even with photos and videos it’s still not always easy to understand. I personally tried to learn it a few times before I was successful.

But I want you to learn this TODAY. I mean it. You’re not closing this browser window until you can long-tail cast-on like a motherfucking champion.

I’ve tried to make this as simple as possible, using words, pictures and the occasional GIF to paint the clearest picture I can. You can learn this.  If you’re still stuck after this tutorial, send me an email!

1. Shockingly, the long-tailed cast-on gets its name from the fact that you start with a long tail. Most cast-on methods just require you to leave a few inches of a tail, and stitches are created from the working yarn (the yarn attached to the ball or skein). With this method, you’re actually creating the stitches using the tail, so you need to make sure you have left enough of a tail to make all the stitches you need. If your pattern calls for you to cast on 100 stitches, you will need a longer tail than if you were casting on 10. If you’re not sure how much tail you need, overestimate—it’s better to trim off excess at the end than to fall short and have to start over. Make sense? So far, so good.

2. With your left hand, make an “L” shape with your thumb and index finger. Drape the yarn over the fingers so that the long tail dangles from the thumb, and the working yarn dangles from the index finger.

3. Use any necessary combination of the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th fingers to hold the long tail and the working yarn together and against your palm (I find the 3^rd and 4^th works fine for me):

4. With your right hand, take your needle and hook the yarn between your thumb and index finger, bringing it toward the fingers pinching the yarn. Now you have two “loops”: the one created by the yarn on your thumb, and the one created by the yarn on your index finger:

5. Ok, so now we’re at the tricky part. Don’t worry, it looks way worse than it actually is. All we’re doing is taking the bottom strand of Loop 1 onto the needle, moving upward to also take the top strand of Loop 2 onto the needle, and then putting all of Loop 1 on the needle, and pulling it tight. Clear as mud? Thought so. Watch the gif:

After pulling it tight, you’ll notice that my fingers are back in step 3’s initial position. You can now cast on additional stitches by repeating steps 4 and 5. Here’s a gif of me doing a few stitches in a row at ‘normal’ speed:

I know it looks incredibly complicated and terrifying. That is because it is, for the first 30 minutes or so of practicing it. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes very easy. This method is actually way faster than doing a cable cast-on. Totally worth the effort of learning!

So there you have it, the long-tail cast-on in all its weird, confusing glory. The learning curve feels a tad steep, but trust me—this shit is worth it. Want proof? Here’s a thrummed mitten I made using long-tailed cast-on:

As you can see, we don’t have that ugly flaring at the edge of the cuff that happens when you use looser cast-on methods. The ribbing is tight and uniform, and just look at the elasticity!:

Here it is, on my wrist. Fits like a… well, a glove!

There are a ton of reasons for using the long-tail cast-on, and it’s one of those basic things you can do to give your knitting a way more professional, finished appearance. In fact, unless I specifically want the decorative, twisty edge that the cable cast-on is primarily known for, I’m casting on pretty much exclusively long-tail these days.

What are your favourite ways to cast on??

-R