Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

by Lynn Thomson

  “Nothing feels right,” I said. “I don’t want to go back to the city. I’m afraid I won’t be able to look after myself, let alone the family.”

  “Ben and Yeats will have to do it. They’ll look after you, won’t they?”

  “They’ll try. But Ben gets so busy. And who knows how much time Yeats will be spending at school? I’m sure glad he decided to stay in Toronto, though. At least he’ll be able to do the laundry and clean the kitchen . . .”

  “And Ben will cook you dinner. And I’ll come to take you grocery shopping and your shoulder will be better soon, anyway.”

  “I feel so helpless, so useless. I can’t do anything without this pain shooting into my shoulder. I’m tired of it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to work, but I’m going to try. ”

  “Maybe you should give it more time.”

  “I don’t want to give it more time. And I don’t want to go home, either. I don’t know what I want, except for this pain to go away.”

  Every day, my journal started the same way: A bad, restless night. I kept waking up in a painful position. I woke five or six times a night. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all, despite the rain on the roof and the wind in the pines.

  Ben drove all my family over to the mainland, but because university didn’t start until the following week, the three of us stayed at the cottage alone together. It was very quiet on the lake. No dogs barking or doors slamming on neighbouring islands, no jet-skis roaring past or little people running over to our cottage asking for Ben’s baking. It was restful and my guys took care of me, but the shoulder wasn’t mending. I was living on Advil and ice and whatever healing vibes the forest sent me, but the pain wouldn’t abate.

  I SAT ON THE front verandah with a glass of wine, breathing in the city. Danielle was back at Western and all the boys had started university. The city was green and lush and not too noisy, but it was the city and I didn’t want to be there. Ben was in the kitchen making dinner and Yeats was upstairs listening to Townes Van Zandt. I could hear the music through his open window, hear the regret and heartbreak in Townes’s voice as he sang of the lonesome blue jay and the crying cuckoo.

  We sold books at Michael Ondaatje’s launch of The Cat’s Table, at a restaurant in the west end. I sat at the table, hoping the credit card machine didn’t hurt my shoulder. We used the old-fashioned imprinters and every time I pushed the top part over the bottom, my shoulder cried out. It was no good, but I worked anyway because it was busy and I didn’t want to let Ben down.

  Rupert came in from another event and spelled me off. I left the table and mingled, careful to avoid shaking anyone’s hand. I was beginning to learn which actions caused what kind of pain.

  After this event I went see my doctor. I’d been going to the physiotherapist and doing exercises, icing the shoulder and taking Advil, but it was only getting worse. The shoulder felt stiff and sore all the time, getting stiffer and sorer by the day.

  My doctor asked me to raise my arm at different angles and when I couldn’t raise it more than six inches in any direction, she said, “You have Frozen Shoulder, Lynn.”

  “Frozen Shoulder? What’s that?”

  She looked regretful as she said, “It’s an inflammation of the joint capsule. And chronic spasm of the surrounding muscles. It might get a bit worse before it starts to get better. You can have a cortisone injection right into the joint, but we have to combine that with an ultrasound to make sure we’re hitting the exact spot. There are possible complications with that. You can think about it.”

  I was wondering about the look on her face. I said, “How long does it take to get better?”

  “Back to full range of motion and strength? Typically, eighteen months.”

  “What? Eighteen months?”

  She nodded and we sat in silence for a few seconds. I could hardly breathe.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “and if I don’t have the injection, how long before this pain goes away?”

  “Well, that varies. Probably four to eight weeks for the worst of the inflammation to go down, but yours was caused by trauma, so it’s hard to say.”

  “So that means I need to tell Ben to hire someone else to work through Christmas?”

  She watched while I started to cry and then handed me a tissue.

  “It would heal faster if you could do nothing, really, except work on this. Physio, ultrasound, acupuncture, massage, ice. I’ll give you a prescription for anti-inflammatories and Tylenol 3s.” I had told her I wasn’t sleeping. “The Tylenol is for night-time, so you can sleep. But they might constipate you, so beware.”

  She gave me a gentle hug before leaving the room and I felt wretched. Eighteen months? It couldn’t be true.

  Over the next few weeks I learned that several of my girlfriends had had frozen shoulder, one of them three separate times. She’d had the cortisone shot each time. Another friend had opted not to have the shot and said she had three or four weeks of intense pain before it lessened. Her sister had had it, too. My neighbour had frozen shoulder one time when she was younger. One of the shopkeepers on the Danforth had had it in both shoulders at the same time (it could always be worse, right?). Everywhere I went, I met more and more people who had had this ailment I’d never heard of before.

  I couldn’t work or drive or write or chop vegetables. I couldn’t do anything with my right arm, my dominant arm. I couldn’t exercise beyond walking and even then I had to be mindful not to jar the arm. I ate and brushed my hair with my left arm. Since I was the person who usually did just about everything around the house, from grocery shopping to laundry, from grinding the coffee to feeding the cat, the family quickly had to adjust. Ben loved to cook and now he did the shopping as well, but we were approaching the busy time of year in the store. I was a bit panicked at the thought of asking my guys to do everything, even though they quite cheerfully offered.

  I was resolute about continuing with my weekly writing group, but had to write with my left hand. I had some experience doing this because every week we did a ten-minute writing exercise using our non-dominant hand. I liked those sessions because they seemed to access a different part of my creative brain, but it was slow going and doing it for the entire morning was tiring.

  Everything made my shoulder scream in pain. It turned out I was part of the small percentage of people who are stimulated by codeine, so the Tylenol 3s were a failure. The pain subsided but I was wide awake nearly all night. I tried taking them for three consecutive nights, just in case, but was then so badly constipated that I gave up and stuffed the bottle of pills deep into my underwear drawer.

  It felt like I was under notice from the universe to slow right down. It was time to stop doing all the most important things I’d taken for granted — work, writing, exercise, sleep — and figure out who I was once these aspects of my life were taken away. It was time to reconsider everything.

  YEATS PLEDGED TO HELP me around the house while I was recovering. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was drive, and even this situation didn’t inspire him to get his license. But he took out the garbage, raked the leaves, did laundry, carried groceries. I realized that although he and Ben often helped out with these chores and others around the house, I had largely kept responsibility of them. I loved raking the leaves and shovelling the snow and walking out to the Danforth to grocery shop. I didn’t want to let it all go and I wondered if Ben would be happy doing all the driving.

  “I love being your chauffeur, baby,” he said.

  I was in such an exhausted snit that even that didn’t cheer me up.

  I had to be mindful about everything I did and it was draining. I may have thought that a decade of meditation and fourteen years of yoga had prepared me for just sitting there, but this was really hard-core Zen practise and I fought it all the way. I was miserable. I was focused on what I couldn’t do, rather than on what this accident was offering me — time to reconsider my life.

  Then, one morning I sat in bed and decided I had to sur
render to it, like the Lama of Shey Gompa. No more craving what I couldn’t do. I remembered how, when Yeats was a newborn and I was crying on the phone to my midwife, she said, “The only way to survive this with any joy is to surrender to it. Surrender to your baby.”

  Her words were like magic: a little shift of mind, and a whole new life opened up. So I sat on the bed remembering that shift and cried a little with relief. I could surrender to this, too.

  I surrendered to the immobility and to months of physio and pain and a feeling of uselessness. I surrendered to Ben, asking him to tie my hair back so I could take a shower, opening every single door for me, and doing up my zippers and making my breakfast. I surrendered to the goddess of the household, who told me (in the form of my imagination) that it was okay to let the house go for now. I gave myself permission to not care about stacks of papers and magazines, or boots and shoes in a messy heap at the front door.

  It took a while but eventually I found that when I gave myself permission to do “nothing,” I set myself free in a profound way. I realized that it was like birdwatching. It may look like I was out there doing something — looking for birds — but really I was just giving myself the gift of freedom. I was not coming back with anything tangible (maybe a story or two) and, for the most part, the time I spent outdoors was experienced, at the most profound level, internally.

  Throughout those months of immobile self-awareness, I learned that all those things I thought were important to me really were important. I wanted to get back to the bookstore, I wanted to get back to writing, and I wanted to get back to exercising and keeping house (although I admit I was very happy to give up a lot of the chores). I also learned that I didn’t mind if Ben did all the driving.

  I usually drove us everywhere, including up to the cottage. Now Ben drove and I sat behind him so the seatbelt didn’t dig into the front of my right shoulder. Yeats sat in the passenger seat and chose the music.

  Because I was sitting behind Ben, I didn’t feel the need to converse with him, or with anyone at all. It was perfect. I could look out the window and daydream, something I had always done as a child on family holidays.

  I saw things that I’d never noticed in all the years of being focused on the road ahead. On Highway 118 out of Port Carling, the trees along the road were a thin curtain hiding all sorts of development. I’d always thought it was thick forest. On Highway 400 I saw the same thing and I saw quarries, too, where I used to think there were fields. In the city, I noticed alleyways and gardens and architectural details I’d never seen before. I found myself looking out the car window as we passed buildings and marvelling at the stonework or the rooflines.

  My world was changing around me.

  WE SPENT OUR LAST cottage weekend of the year on Thanksgiving. I still couldn’t do a thing, so I managed to get out of almost all the housework, including cooking the big dinner.

  Mom or Laurie always cooked the turkey (which the three of us didn’t eat anyway, being vegetarians), and I provided a few of the vegetables along with a tofu dish. This year my family excused us from any cooking. Ben prepared a Brussels sprout salad since that’s one of his specialties, but that was it. We gathered in the new cottage, where the children made a centrepiece from colourful gourds and red and yellow leaves they’d collected from the woods. We lit candles, drank good wine, and were surrounded by the smell of pumpkin pie.

  Thanksgiving at the cottage was always bittersweet, because it marked the end of the summer and the onset of winter, when our families didn’t see much of one another. I found myself mourning the passing of summer at Thanksgiving, but the deciduous trees were beautiful with their changing colours and the air was fresh and cool.

  There was much to be done to close up the cottages and I couldn’t do any of it. Ben cleaned out the fridge at the old cottage; he vacuumed all the carpets, swept and mopped the bathroom and kitchen floors. He folded the sheets and towels and packed up the food to bring home. He and Yeats took the stereo apart and packed it into the back closet.

  “Thanks, Ben,” I said to him, over and over again, until finally he said, “Stop it. You’ve done all this stuff for twenty years.” Oh yeah. I have.

  Meanwhile, Yeats helped with the outdoor chores — he piled the floaty toys into a room at the boathouse, moved the dock and deck furniture inside, put up the storm windows on the screened-in porch, brought in the beach toys and the path lights. Suddenly, it occurred to me that these men in my life were cheerfully doing everything because I couldn’t do anything. It made them feel good. I also realized that normally I took on way too much, when it seemed I didn’t even need to supervise.

  We visited all our special places on the island before leaving for the winter. I went with Laurie and Greg to the main dock to watch the play of light over the lake, and then with Ben to sit on the rock at the beach. Then everyone came together at the new dock to watch the children have one last, freezing, jump in the water. We listed all of the things we saw, year in, year out.

  All summer long, we spoke in singulars: “I saw the loon this morning.” Or, “It’s been a while since we saw the hummingbird.” Our cottage life had its own world of archetypes. We went down to the beach and sat on Family Rock, heard the kingfisher out in the bay. If we adjusted our vision, maybe we’d see it hovering for a few seconds before it plunged into the lake. The heron flew past, feet dragging behind. We sighed at the abundance, sunlight on the water, our sense of wonder deepening bird by bird.

  I saw the loon that last weekend off the north dock. It had its winter plumage on, so it wasn’t recognizable to my sister-in-law, who was standing beside me. She was surprised to hear of winter plumage and I took a moment to marvel at all the things there were to know.

  We saw only one raven over Thanksgiving weekend. Our archetypal Raven, bidding us farewell for the season, farewell for the year.

  I spent Monday afternoon looking everywhere for Pippin, who was in hiding since he knew we were leaving and he hated being in his carrying cage. He finally materialized from under the deck, but only after I’d stopped looking for him. He meowed at me and I scooped him up, wincing with the weight of him pulling my shoulder. This was one chore no one else would attempt for fear of being bitten and scratched — the picking up of the cat. I dumped him in one of the back bedrooms and shut the door.

  Greg drove us back to the mainland later that afternoon with his boys tagging along for the ride.

  Taylor asked, “What would you have done if you couldn’t find Pippin?”

  “I don’t know, Taylor. We couldn’t really leave him here for the winter.”

  “He’d freeze!” yelled Noah.

  “He’d starve!” yelled Taylor.

  “We wouldn’t leave him,” said Yeats. “We’d stay until he appeared, just like he always does.”

  “He’s part of the family,” Greg said. “I hope your shoulder gets better soon, Lynn. How are you going to wrap Christmas presents?”

  I looked at Yeats, who said, “I’ll do it.”

  BACK IN THE CITY, Ben left the house at 8:30 every morning and wasn’t home until after 11 p.m., working at the store and at the International Festival of Authors. I had to face the fact that until the end of November, he’d be home, on average, only two nights a week. It was his busiest time and I wouldn’t be working with him. It turned out my old joke was true: if I didn’t work with him, I’d never see him.

  Ben even missed Yeats’s high school graduation ceremony, and I was in no mood to understand.

  “What do you mean you have to work?” I said. “Can’t you get someone else to work for even just a couple of hours? I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”

  “I have to work that night. Rupert and Titus are both working, too, and Andrea, but we need two people at each side. Yeats said he doesn’t mind.”

  Yeats said to me, “I don’t even want to go, Mom. Why should I go? They’ll send me my diploma in the mail if I don’t go.”

  I was appalled and I wondered for a
minute if this was really all about my own needs and expectations. But I said what I was thinking anyway. “I’d really like to see you graduate, after all that work.” (Mine or his?) “After all your work. It’ll be fun, too, and you can introduce me to some of your friends afterwards.”

  “I guess.”

  We weren’t spending much time together, any of us, and the IFOA only made that worse. I was barely involved in their lives since I was so focused on trying to mend, and I felt a pressing need to attend Yeats’s graduation. He finally agreed to go, but Ben couldn’t be swayed.

  It turned out there was a publisher’s party that night that Ben wanted to go to, even after working until ten o’clock. Well. I decided that was a rotten choice, but I was so emotionally charged I didn’t trust myself to speak. I went over and over it in my head, but there was no spin I could put on it where it came out okay to miss your child’s graduation, even if the child didn’t care. I didn’t say anything out loud, but I let the anger fester inside me.

  IN THE JARVIS COLLEGIATE auditorium I sat in the third row to the left of the stage, next to a sweet and very old Asian gentleman who spoke little English. He smiled and nodded at me and told me he was there to watch his granddaughter graduate. The students filled the centre section of the hall and a small orchestra played in front of the stage. On stage sat staff and school board personnel, along with members of the student council. Once the audience was assembled, the emcee introduced the first speaker, the principal, and on went the show: the speeches, the awards, and then the handing out of the diplomas.

  When his granddaughter crossed the stage the man beside me tapped my arm and said, “That’s her. See how beautiful!”

  He was beaming and crying just a bit, which made me teary, too. I really teared up when Yeats received his diploma and I pointed him out to my new friend. I thought of all the hours I’d spent coaxing Yeats through school, all the drama and angst, all the nights I stayed up late trying to calm him down, get him through life. This part of the journey was completed, thank goodness, and I was here to witness this milestone.