And the Oscar goes to…
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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Friday I’m in love
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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Saturday night’s alright
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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The big D
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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Just do it
Grab your steaming mug of tea, or java, or hot toddy (there’s one from the archives), and put on your reading socks. Or if you’re not in the deep freeze with us Albertans #actuallytoocoldtorunaway then blend your margherita and take a slow sip of sympathy, or gloat if you must while you join us in
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It’s OK to hope
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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A cup of kindness
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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I choose you
Christmas twenty one years ago I lay on my sofa with my head in the lap of the person I loved with that ‘all in’ depths-of-the-ocean kind of love, tears filling my eyes and blurring the lights on my Christmas tree into a watery seascape, then dripping onto his jeans as he stroked my hair
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Erin’s Holiday Survival Guide
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 love you, man
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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If you please
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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Taking the cake
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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Give Pete a chance
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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Rememberance
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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The name of the game
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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20/20 vision
It is a time of mystery and magic. Jack o lanterns glimmer from porches, tiny ghosts swing from trees. We dress as witches and ghouls and kitty cats, and slip into the expansive night. The air vibrates with other places and times, and we can touch them, ever so lightly. It feels as if a
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Learning to fish
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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Gratitude Platitude Pudding and Pie
As a culture, and maybe a world wide one, we have been over saturated with the concept of gratitude in recent years. Tales of how so and so lost everything in the crash or the fire or the flood, and then he got diagnosed with something severely diagnosable, and then his wife left and even
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Going Home Again
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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My job is not to let you…
I used to tease my sister that she really should go on one date before breaking up with a man. Just one, little tiny date. A coffee, a walk? Before she found the Red Flag, ran through the streets waving it and blowing a tuba, and then hung it on her door with a clove of
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I raise you a north wall
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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The same place
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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Tic tac time
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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Trust is a complicated affair
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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The long play
Here is the nightmare; it’s Christmas Eve and you are at the mall. Wait, no, that’s not it. It gets worse. It’s Christmas eve and you are at the mall and you can’t find the gift that you need, and you keep running from store to store, but everything just feels meaningless, un-special. Nothing gives
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Swim, dance, be hit on in questionable circumstances by strangers
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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Road trippin’
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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Should I cool it?
I can remember a story book from my childhood where the lucky protagonist, a kid of maybe eight or nine, is taken for ice cream to a shop that boasts an unfathomable, ridiculous number of ice cream flavours, and in some incredible twist of fortune, he is allowed to get ONE SCOOP OF EACH on
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Take your win
I am sitting here in my bedroom, propped up on the King bed, thirty percent of which is my evening office, seventy percent of which is my dog’s personal lounge parlour, with my laptop on my lap. I spend a lot of time here, in this position, pillows stacked behind me, client notebooks stacked at
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Twenty percent more
I preface today’s musing with a small broadcast, which involves some practicing of what I preach, turning the tables, and asking for help with a sticky wicket. If you read my Vulnerability is Hard musing, all about Thelma, Louise and other deadly ways to never ask for help, well you will realize that I have had
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The common denominator
What does love share with being really, really drunk? Commonly I hear people say that if you add a few drinks you see a person’s true colours. I beg to differ. Drunkenness brings out a person’s garbage. All that is unhealed and suffering and struggling in them. The drunk aren’t mean people who have been
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Judgement Day
So it was a run of my younger daughter’s grad, my birthday, my older daughter’s birthday, my sister’s birthday and Father’s Day, all in the span of slightly more than two weeks. If you are what you eat, I am currently seventy percent frosting and forty percent merlot. Yes, I can do math, and I
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Drinking the Kool-Aid
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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A moment for recognition
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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Now you see me, now you don’t
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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I’d like my Zen on the side…
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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I want candy
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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An adjustment of attitude
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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Hanging from a rope
The unthinkable. The unspeakable. The un-understandable. For some, the unforgivable. The big check out. The big chill. The ultimate F you. The scariest of the scariest. I am going to talk to you about it. I am going to talk about the WHY. And I am going to talk about what it means for the
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The Subtext
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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On Easter Bunnies and the Resurrection
So it’s Easter, pagan celebration of the Goddess Ostara, spring renewal and fertility (already a few weeks in), Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ. Family celebration of eggs, that, if you’re like my family, are sometimes hidden so well that the bleary eyed, mom-bunny who got carried away at the wee hour of stupid
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Just swipe right for love
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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We’re all sleeping with the enemy
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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Light therapy
I received this gift for my birthday last year, and I saved it and used it, recently, to get myself a “facial treatment” – nothing invasive, nothing that makes you look like a rock lobster for a week, or a hopeful but less skillful student of the martial arts—but rather a gentle, collagen stimulating “light
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Of mountains and molehills…
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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Faking it
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
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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My ego called late last night
At 11:30 pm my ego called on the telephone, in the guise of my eldest daughter who lives out of province. She was having a bad day. Her bad day, unlike the bad days of many of us, was worse. Because her baseline of suffering is worse. Okay, well, I don’t know what you are
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Where to stick your big dreams
So. This amazing incredible thing happened. My youngest daughter is in the process of applying for Universities. It’s competitive. It was competitive when I did it, a wee 34 years ago. Now the competition is stupidly stupid. Like stand on your head and rub your belly in concentric circles with your right hand while you
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What am I attracting?!!
How many times has a client sat down at my table and confided “I don’t know what I am attracting but terrible things keep happening to me. I am a positive person. I think happy thoughts. I try to visualize good things coming. What could possibly be going on in here that I
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My funny Valentine (rated 18+ish)
Sometimes our cringe-worthy moments of dating vulnerability are not what we all expect. Sometimes what is hard is not the whole business of opening our heart with a prayer and sigh of resigned despair as we hand it over on a platter and wait for it to be smashed cruelly to dust with our lover’s
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V-Day goodies
Oh the sweet celebration of LOVE! Pink hearts and chocolate, couples flagrantly making out over the dinner table at your favourite restaurant. V Day means something different to all of us. When romantic love is working for us we are giddy, and we dress up, and dine and exchange gifts. But sometimes, just every
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The story of us
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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When I was rescued
I am driving across the Mission bridge in Calgary in my little red Mazda 323 with the sunroof open and a fresh diet Coke in the console, heading toward my house on Elbow Drive which I share with a revolving roster of colourful roommates (woah, that’s a mouthful of alliteration). I am 25 and
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When you can’t see for looking
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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#MeToo is a universal condition
We can’t be oppressed, singularly, as women. If we are oppressed as women then we are all oppressed, as a species, or a culture, which is to say that no one thrives in an oppressive system. No one comes out of that arrangement “alive”. And we are oppressed. We have a #metoo movement, and
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The new year
The new year. We bring it in with whistles and blowers, with streamers and confetti. We dress up in our gowns and our suits and our sparkles and bow ties. We expect better. We raise our hopes to the disco ball in the sky. We count, down. We kiss. And then we do something terrible.
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One last hoorah!
ONE LAST HOORAH! Sometimes the 3001 things we have to get done over the Holidays get in the way of the things we wanted to do, for our selves, our loved ones and the second we get a chance to breathe out and start digesting our goodies we are pinged by thoughts of “I forgot
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Let the light in
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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It’s only a tree!
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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Erin’s gift guide
Erin’s Holiday Survival Guide Be patient with yourself first, and others second. Everyone is feeling it at decibel 100 and not everyone is good at even quiet small every day feelz. Forgive yourself, already. Do it when you wake up. Do it at lunch. Do it before you go to bed. Spread some extra forgiveness on
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The holiday season
Christmas. Or as the language forward speaking among us prefer to call it, The Holidays. The time when the emotional baseline for humanity cycles from manic to depressive a mean average of 16 times before the cocktail hour. When we are capable of swelling and glowing with newfound camaraderie for Susie in the adjacent
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Vulnerability is hard
Sometimes we would rather Thelma and Louise ourselves off a cliff than feel dependent on someone. Because depending on someone, inevitably, invariably, blows the hell up. We don’t want to have to ask for the favour, borrow the money, impose on the time, space, peace or FREE WILL, of another human being, then feel
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It’s okay to hope
It’s okay to HOPE. Nothing will explode. Kittens WILL NOT be set on fire. You won’t fall through a hole at the bottom of the earth reserved especially for the weak and pathetic because you harbour a belief something you want is possible. You’re allowed, to vote against statistical probability, against reason. Who gave
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