Welcome to my Monday Musing. If you are new here this is where I write hilarious and meaningful things to help you feel “less heavy, more happy” because gosh darn it I can’t stop loving you. This week for no reason at all I present you with the following flow chart.FLOW CHART I would like your

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    No sympathetic suffering. Your suffering does not abate someone else’s. You can care and act in a loving way without taking on more hurt. One time when my youngest was like 2 years old, all tiny spriggy piggy tails and freckles and frocks, I opened the car door with her itty bitty finger

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So I am on my run from North Beach to the Golden Gate Bridge my last day in San Francisco and it’s pouring rain, and to paint the scene for you we’re in the middle of a world pandemic crisis. What?!!! You hadn’t heard? You legit had something else to talk about at the dinner table, over your

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  I’ve met someone. You say it with a dose of giddy in your inner voice. It’s not the same as some rando hitting on you at the brunch club or the night club or as you stride by them on a busy street. It’s not the same as a flirtation, or interest, or a suppressed

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So I find myself in San Francisco, for very mysterious reasons, doing very mysterious things, because, as it turns out, I am a very mysterious person. An enigma, really *tightens knot in scarf and adjusts sunglasses for eluding paparazzi. Currently I am at Trieste Café, with its brilliant history of renowned authors and artists and

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The Kings and Queens of drama, we celebrate them as artists with a rolled out red carpet, with gazillions of dollars, with shiny awards and with our devotion, our interest, our engagement and spare time. We watch their movies, their television, their plays. We celebrate and not just celebrate but invest in the stories they have to tell and in

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Today, is the big V day. The day we want to be spending with our beloved, either dining and romancing, slurping the same noodle until we unexpectedly lock lips, or avoiding the commercial trappings of capitalism in a united sarcastic front with our paramour while we Netflix and chill, preferably with a war flick. Oh right, Netflix and chill doesn’t really signify chilling or

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So the weekend rolls around, it’s Saturday, and my daughter’s been waiting for like days, all five of them if you’re in the mood for math, for me to have a few hours to take her to get some errands done and have a little mom time. It’s supposed to start early, like early afternoon, but

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 Through her veil the room is softened, the lilies dusted eyelet white. Candles glimmer, expectant faces embrace her. She is captured in sepia, ethereal and soft, gliding toward him lifted by wings. He waits, solemn, her soldier. The room can feel him quake, just a little. A rumble, low in the ground. His hands stick

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        For those of you who are new here, welcome to my Monday Musing, my weekly offering of insight and laughs on topics of relationship and emotional health, to fill your world with less heavy and more happy.   Turns out last Monday was not A-Musing.  In waiting room A folks were

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The New Year is a time when we revisit our hopes and dreams and wishes and intentions and all of that jazz. I know because my phone is blowing up right now with all of you lovelies looking for insight and support #igotyou. Please enjoy this oldy but goody on hope, and stay tuned for

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Champagne and sparkles twirling into the glorious night or a quiet eve in front of the crackling fire log channel, watching movies or playing games with the kids, or the anti-normative stance of going to bed at 11:30 because you don’t believe in the whole drama of it all, the consumerism, or confetti makes you

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Here it is! Erin’s Holiday Survival GuideBe patient with yourself first, and others second. Like they tell you in the airplane, along with other important tips for staying organized and keeping chill while plummeting to your actual death. Everyone is feeling it at decibel 100 and not everyone is good at even quiet, small, every

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I am a proud Mama this week. Not of my actual kids, I mean I am always proud of them because they give me so many reasons to be proud, but this week and today I am proud of you. I am proud of how far YOU have come. I am proud of the work

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It’s the nineties. On any given night the juke-box in the restaurant-bar is singing “I don’t want the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand,” and I feel this somewhere ugly and holy and deep. I barely understand it. I am at the heart of the middle of my onion by

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You know in The Sixth Sense (spoiler alert —if you haven’t see this twenty year old goodie you may want to skip to the next paragraph) how the little kid can see dead people and actually talk to them and it’s super scary until he figures out what they need from him and then it’s

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Fa la la la la, the cups are out and it’s time for holiday cheer! And guess what, kiddies?!!! That means it’s time to turn up the volume on the mall music, and also on ALL OF THE GOOD AND BAD FEELINGS YOU HAVE EVER HAD IN YOUR WHOLE LIFE! Whoopee! What —comma, deep intake

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I remember the Remembrance Day assemblies as a child. I found them confusing and terrifying. I didn’t understand the lowered eyes, faces. The scrutinizing stares and glares from grown ups, and worse, grown ups who were authority figures. Teachers, and worse yet Principals. Principals in my elementary school mind were the Grand Poobah’s of punishment.

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Have I ever told you about the time when my youngest was in preschool, yes preschool, and developed this crush on a boy in her class? Is that young for crushing? Well if it is, it runs in the family, because I can remember my first crush at the same age and his name was

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Daughter; Her memory starts when they are in the car, in the bright dawn of a summer morning. The world is crisp, and the car is filled with a sense of the unexpected. She has been included in an adventure, and though she doesn’t really understand what it is, she is buoyed by his anticipation,

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Kids love those “would you rather” questions, at least mine always have. I frustrated the daylights out of my children by answering that I don’t believe in choosing from two unpleasant outcomes, that I would choose neither, and that I would play the game when they put a positive spin on it, you know like “would you

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Last night I dreamt that I was attracted to a married man and agreed to a mastermind group with him in order to soak up his attention even though I knew it would be a one way giving street, me to him, and my friends all chimed in from some board room as judge and

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I was in San Francisco a little while back, and I was on a jaunty little run from our hotel to the Golden Gate Bridge which turned out to be a 9.4 mile round trip, and I was watching the world sway, the way you can when you are away somewhere, removed from all of your personal

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You know those commercials where the perfect woman is running around perfectly checking off all of those items from her holiday party get ready list, fanning the fragrance of warm brie-filled biscuit around the entertainment area while ornaments twinkle, and ice tinkles an invitation of refreshment and merriment in a crystal punch glass; checking her

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I’m not sure what you’ll be doing all week, but I will be talking to people about the intimate details of their lives. They will tell me about their heart aches, heart breaks, losses and traumas. They will tell me, sometimes with surprising attention to detail, what’s missing in the bedroom. And I will help

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This weekend, I thought I would be on cheer up duty for my daughter, on account of her life plans catastrophically falling apart, but as it turns out her bestie had it handled. I had cleared my schedule to take her to Peach Fest for the weekend, all the way back in B.C., which we

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  I am still driving, as I sit on my bed with my laptop open and a glass of wine on my night stand. I am still driving, the way you are after 12 hours on the road, which should have been 9, but construction. The air is buzzing, trying to pick me up and

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It was the first day of Grade One, only I was not your typical grade one student. I, and a handful of other kiddies like me, had been included in an experimental program for kindergarteners based on our reading abilities, and found ourselves in a shared classroom with thousands of extremely large children. Okay well there

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Hello Friends, Just a quick note to say that I will return to your inbox for our regular Monday Musing next Monday. Yesterday I was surprised and swept away by an invite to an awards ceremony for my youngest daughter, who won an academic achievement award in both science and journalism. Join me in a “Yay Tess”! If

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This weekend my youngest daughter graduated! I sat in an auditorium listening to 700-ish names called, hands shaken, inspirational speeches from institutional and political leaders, and from the accomplished young adults themselves. I enjoyed the crowd of giddy parents, some in sweats and some dressed as if to relive their own rite of passage some

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Mindfulness is trending. If you pop over to the magazine section of my local Chapters, there are a dozen publications on the topic, all giving us the skinny fry on how to salt and pepper our lives with Zen. Mindfulness, as it has been cultivated and reinvented by Western society, is about how to put the

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Calories in calories out is medically true. But it isn’t the answer to weight management or wellness, beauty or survival. We have to ask “why” calories in, otherwise we’d all just fix our math and weigh in somewhere in the perfect zone. Easy peasy! There are a ga-freaking-zillion strategies out there that are geared toward

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A beloved client of mine once sat down in the green chair, and feeling inspired by the success he and I had been having ventured to ask me if I could help him with his teenage daughter, then proceeded to list the numerous strategies he had employed to regulate her behaviour, all of which met

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Words. I have spent my entire life in a love affair with words. I wrote my first poem when I was eight, first song at age ten, which I will share for your general entertainment. It went something like:   I wish that you could understandJust how I feel about youI could not possibly live

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Oh the lure of an enticing profile, a chiselled jawline, a sparkling eye, some pretty hair blowing in a gentle breeze, a friendly-quirky-accessible expression as s/he hugs the family dog with such affection you dream that this could be you one day, in the arms of your new heart throb, though ideally with less slobber.

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Gather around children, today we’re going to talk about a little problem called “overachieving”. Yes, you, put down your April Grandmaster List revision number three, get off the stationary bike, stop doing your squats while trying to style your hair and practice your Spanish. This is for you— but not just you. It’s for you

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My University boyfriend is working in Jasper and hanging with the outdoorsy types and in some sense he is one of them and in others he is oh so not but he plans this adventure hike and knowing that I am a fan of both the outdoors and exercise he invites me to come along.

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Overnight in the emergency department. I keep straining my eyes under the horrible yellow glare, which it turns out is actually my bestie’s skin colour. And eye colour. Yes, she is yellow. Yellow is what happens when your liver is mad, it turns out. I mean I think that the rest of the room is

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You can’t operate on your own back.  Even if you are a leading surgeon in your field.  I mean, I’m not trying to hold you back (damn those unintentional puns – it’s a gift and a curse), but there are limitations, and I think it’s fair to say that your health and well-being would be

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If you are going to fix your relationship, or go about creating a good one from scratch, you are going to have to “give up” a thing that you cherish. What!!!??? You say…that does not sound good! And it does not, in fact, sound good. It sounds about terrible. We are tired, and we work

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    Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to not know, to NOT have all of the answers. We need to lower the expectation of ourselves to be all-seeing, and all knowing. Sometimes our best try needs to be enough. It needs to be enough that we show up, however we can while things

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  We all have a story that kicks us behind the knees. It’s not always the biggest story, it’s not always the one with the Hollywood glitz, the sensational story. Sometimes it’s the smallest of the small ones that truly gets us, for reasons we don’t even always understand. Once you get to know me

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Gather round children, today I am going to tell a Holiday story. There was a year, many years ago, when my children were wee. Decorating involved the delightful stacking and draping of ALL the ornaments on the Southwestern hemisphere of the tree. I should preface this by saying that the tree, the choosing of, and

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