EDITOR’S LETTER

PHOTO BY LIA CROWE

Family life began for me back in the mid-’80s when I moved in with my boyfriend of five months. The house, recently vacated by the boyfriend’s ex-wife, came with furniture, a pair of kids and a gerbil called Quasimodo.

“Don’t touch the gerbil,” Derrick warned his son, not five minutes after I arrived. “It bites.”

“It won’t bite me,” asserted Dylan. He reached into the cage to stroke the warm and furry Quasimodo who, startled from slumber, sunk its teeth into Dylan’s finger.

Dylan shrieked. “It bit me! You-you...asshole!”

“Dad!” Jessica shouted. “Dylan swore! And he touched the gerbil!” I—21 years old and unused to children at all—watched the unfolding scene with quiet horror. I was a career-pining, quasi-academic, eager to write my way to fame and fortune. Parenting was not on the to-do list.

But this all changed over the next few years. And by the time my own daughters came along, I’d fallen in love with all things family—a love affair that has endured these past decades far beyond cares about career.

And as it turns out, this scene with my eventual first husband, now my ex-husband, occurred at the start of another decades-long project. The result is my new book, Home on the Strange: Chronicles of Motherhood, Mayhem and Matters of the Heart. The book, like parenting, has been a labour of love, and I was beyond excited for its release on April 13 via Heritage House Publishing.

Home on the Strange follows a cast of strange characters (me, my family and friends) in a collection of 75 essays that peer into the everyday world of family relationships. What drove this collection of stories? My compulsion to write, for one thing. Myriad crazy anecdotes, for another. And, thankfully, a series of deadlines over the past three decades that forced me to record this treasure-trove of memories in real time. Over the years, I’ve written dozens of columns, first for newspapers and eventually for Boulevard and a few other smaller magazines. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the columns became perfect conduits for memories.

What inspired these stories? Well, when your younger daughter adopts a shop vac as a pet and you end up dragging it around everywhere by the “leash” (cord)—including the school play—you have to write about it. When you can’t sew and your elder daughter wants to be a slug for Halloween, or you mangle an educational sex talk with your kids, you have to write about it. When you drive across the country in a road-weary hippie van, run out of gas in the middle of nowhere Alberta, or drive 40 minutes through the wilderness of Vancouver Island, dodging potholes and bear cubs, seeking morning coffee—to no avail—you have to write about it. All these strange and amusing experiences beg to be told. I’ve also experienced some trauma, including my daughter’s devastating cycling accident and my husband’s near-death heart attack, and those stories are in the book as well.

As for the cast of characters, I owe them a debt of thanks for gracefully accepting my gentle-but-rather-public teasing over the years. But all is well. Derrick can’t divorce me over it…that already happened years ago. My daughters are safely tucked away in cities different than my own, and besides they’d never give up access to our liquor cabinet. That leaves my husband, Bruce, and I’m not worried about him at all. When I wrote my first book, Heritage Apples: A New Sensation, he was able to quote the pages on which he was mentioned and direct everyone to his photo. He’ll handle the notoriety. (See, I just did it to him again!)

Ultimately, the most mocked person in the book is me as I attempt to navigate this world as a mother, a wife, a journalist and, according to one reviewer, “a keen observer on the foibles and challenges of life.” This reviewer further states that I write with “humour, honesty, and humanity. And hope.”

Hope, indeed—I hope readers enjoy it.

Editor