I am officially older than young, but I still need my parents

I am no longer young. Although I am not sure exactly what you could call that, because as Shazz and I decided last night, we are not middle-aged yet, although we are heading there at a rate of knots.

We decided this while sitting digesting our lovely roast beef Easter dinner that I had cooked, while Himself washed up and the young people watched tv on Kitty's pink tv in her bedroom with the lovely new green and cream fern patterned comforter.

We were wondering at the strange turn of events that had led us in the course of one year to be ecstatically happy that we were just sitting in an apartment doing this instead of out dancing around a pool table in Bearly's Blues 'n' Ribs, which is what I think we were doing last year.

It's been a long weekend...

And then I read the Irish Times this morning and find that less than 5% of young people know the first commandment: Remember the Lord is thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before Him. Which I know of course, as well as the other nine, in the right order, although I tend to get coveting and actual adultery mixed up. Because they're the same thing, aren't they?

So I am definitely not young anymore. But today, at least, for the first time in three months, I don't feel ancient.

Sometimes you have to break on the wheel to get off it.

Coming into this weekend, I was in pretty bad shape. The trip to Ireland had flattened me emotionally, which is why I've never actually written about it. Financially we were in a very precarious state, as we were facing into a job search for Himself and had to spend all the wriggle room money to buy a car to facilitate his being able to actually get to work in the city of crappy bus services.

Despite all that, I was fairly positive about the search: I knew he'd get something that would have a future for him in it; it was going to be all about how long we would have to stretch the budget.

Until next Thursday as it turns out.

So we knew when we got on the plane to leave Ireland, which was the hardest thing I think I've ever done, that it was going to be a tough couple of months. Then just to turn the wheel a couple of degrees tighter, just to be sure I got the point of whatever lesson Saturn is supposed to be teaching me about life, we came back to the coldest January and February this girl has experienced.

And a new member of the household.

Unrelenting mornings at the bus stop shivering in minus thirty windchill, scrambling to and from the bank, the post office, the Legislature, in howling winds that felt like they were peeling the clothes off you; and none of my clothes worked properly. And of course, I couldn't buy any new ones.

If you haven't done three months of minus temperatures and severe wind chills with absolutely NO body fat on you then you have NO idea what the hell I am talking about.

Add to that the two month job search. Which turned out great in the end, but which then involved waiting for the weather to improve so the job could start and then the usual Canadian bullshit about the payment cycle. Which is some chrissake insanity about always starting a job in the middle of a payment cycle and then having to wait weeks and weeks for your turn to be accepted onto the cycle and then it messing up and then finally getting a pay date when you're at your wits end and then that being a mistake etc, etc, blah di fuckin blah...

It happened to me too when I started working. The bastard Government still owes me two weeks wages. I will get it when I leave apparently. I won't get the effing interest I suppose.

This country suffers from the crappest administrative sector on the planet because they leech off the back of their unbelieveable resource wealth. They wouldn't last ten seconds in Ireland, most of them. There would be rioting in the streets if people kept back two weeks wages until you had left your job.

You betcha there would be.

Add to that finding a school, furnishing a bedroom, being a mother from scratch to a girl who thankfully is a very forgiving person, finding a new way to live all together with no outside because it's covered in snow and ice, and no trips to the movies or the mall or anything to ease the drudgery...

I didn't know what to do to fix all of this, so I did what I do when I don't know what else to do.

I worked.

And I cooked.

And I cleaned.

And I ordered people around relentlessly.

And I thought about where the hell my life was going. And how I had ended up in this place.

But I didn't say a word to anyone.

Which is where I made my big mistake of course.

I am a shit hot cook by the way. I can make a three course meal for three people that includes every bit of winter nourishment necessary for facing a day of minus thirty and driving hail out of a can of chick peas and three carrots and what's in my stores cupboard!!

I should be a quartermaster.

I can marshall the combined possessions of three people in a small apartment and render them invisible to the naked eye.

I can predict to the second when the bathroom supplies need to be replaced, and remember where I saw them on special offer, and remember to bring the coupon card with me and get the effing store to pay me to take the stuff off their hands.

I can manage the bills so that they get paid but we still get to eat that weekend.

I can do all of this on NO CREDIT.

And we still found the money for the pink television and the Japanese comforter.

Because I rock. And Himself rocks. And we are unstoppable when we are together.

The reason I could do all this is because about half-way through February I had decided to stop thinking about my life and get with the project. Seeing as I was the project manager.

In lieu of thinking, my brain started to get obsessed with my hair. A Canadian winter does nothing for your hair, and I hadn't been for a 'do' for a long while anyways, so my grey was starting to show. I had long, wiry, orangey, matted piles of the stuff that wouldn't do anything except squeak into a pony tail that made me look like the old English Royal that they had locked in the attic.

My brain started a little mantra in my head - want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done. Getting my hair done became a mythic milestone in my crappy life.

When I got my hair done, everything was going to be okay and the summer would be here, and Saturn would stop kicking us in the nads and we would sit outside in the sunshine with a beer and a steak and watch Kitty hang out with her new friends and Himself would caress my shiny, soft, brown hair (which he had stopped doing because his fingers were getting caught in the matts), and we would smile at each other in the knowledge that yet again the combined forces of the universe, despite their best efforts, were not able to tear apart what Himself and I have put together so carefully and lovingly.

Of course my brain, being my brain, had a second, lower mantra going about the new Shiseido eye cream Eileen had advised me to try. Which is still a pipe dream. All this because as well as having the hair of a shetland pony, I had dark circles under my eyes that were starting to evacuate south to my jawline.

From work.

Work....

On top of having a totally pointless winter session of the Legislature, we were renovating in work. So we had to move our offices around and live out of boxes for weeks on end and endure buzz saws and builders walking around yelling into their mobile phones and no kitchen and the smell of carpet glue and dust and general mayhem for six weeks.

Then everyone in the office got the stomach flu.

Except me of course.

And then we had to get ready for the Spring Budget session, which is a test designed to suck the will to live out of a person.

A month of ten or twelve hour days, stressed colleagues, stressed MLAs, a disinterested media (the worst possible audience for needy politicians), a population who are just trying to get the hell to the opening of the fishing and BBQ season in one piece, and no real issues to get to grips with. Just endless hours of droning by Ministers who seem to be capable of dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back for running this province into the ground.

And still the wind howled every day around Downtown Halifax, pulling what was left of my life force out of me, piece by piece.

I couldn't really focus on the vitally important issues of the day, being a little focused on getting us all through this winter, so it became increasingly difficult to put in a productive day. Then a money-making scheme I had concocted, whereby I would do extra work that needed to be done for extra cash, was refused by the powers that be. A simple decision; based on regulations I didn't know existed.

No discussion. Sorry about that.

They'll probably never understand how close I was to going postal that day.

Consequently, I lost the ability to sleep at precisely the same time Himself started work and had to set the alarm for five thirty am. We would go to bed early, fall asleep fine. Then I would wake up around three am, bathed in sweat, head screaming PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, about whatever... carefully, carefully I would wriggle away from Himself's arm, do my yoga breathing and try to calm down, nearly be asleep and then my brain would JOLT me awake again. I would get to sleep around four thirty. Then the alarm would go at five thirty and that would be it until 6.55am, which of course is five minutes before I have to get up.

Isn't it always the way.

But it was okay, because Himself was doing brilliantly in work, first person to get taken on full time after all the training was done; liking the work, making new friends and generally getting on with things.

We had made handmade cards out of my photos and I was selling them in work and I was bringing in a few bucks every week, which was the fun fund. So we were starting to have some actual fun at the weekends. In a middle-aged, boring sit at home with a bottle of wine and a dvd kind of fun way.

And Kitty was doing great in school, scoring As all over the place and making new friends and earning more money than us in her job.

So I just kept moving along; one foot forward at a time. And pushed it all to the back of my head and lectured myself about all the women in the world who have bad months every month and how this was a good learning experience.

And the winter dragged on and bad things happened to people I care about and there was nothing I could do to help. And new babies came into the world, and I couldn't even send a card.

But that doesn't matter, because it doesn't make me love them any less.

And it was at the bit of the winter when you can just see spring around the corner, because you had a hike in the sunshine and you could hear the birds building their nests.

Then when Kitty got paid for the first time (after she had finally made it onto the pay cycle of course), she tried to give me some money for the bills. Because she knew I had had to pay my immigration fees (over a thousand dollars) that week and she felt bad because I was worried about money.

That was the moment when I realised I was going to need more than a hair do to fix the hole that self-enforced frugality had opened up inside of me. But I pushed that thought to the back of my head and said it was her money and she was to keep it for herself and do what she wanted with it.

Which is to buy a Razr phone of course, which I think is a stupid waste of money of course. Which is under negotiation at the moment.

I am nothing if not inconsistent in my parenting.

And then my mother texted me and said she'd put some money in my credit card account for Easter.

I was sat in the gorgeous Gabriel's stylist chair getting my grey covered and the bottom eight inches hacked off before you could type MUMS R THE BEST!

Easter was here and I had four days off and I was going to get lots of sleep and it was all going to be fine the week after because it would be the last week of the parliamentary session, and the pay cycles would kick in together FINALLY and we could buy the BBQ without having to sell a kidney to do it, and the sun would shine and the winter was nearly over and I was GOING TO MAKE IT (WITH MUM'S SPOT ON TIMING AS USUAL).

Saturn must have been laughing his moons off...

The weather forecast had been mumbling about snow for a few days, but I had been studiously ignoring it because in my world it doesn't snow at Easter, even though when we went to Costco to get the Easter roast I nearly fell over with the wind. And then on Friday, when I went to get my hair done the furies were HOWLING around downtown and rain was pelting itself against the windshield of the car.

That night I couldn't sleep. Spent the whole night awake worrying about my immigration status. Over which I have no control.

Next day, Kitty went to work and Himself suggested a drive up the Musqodobit Valley to scout canoe and camping locations for the summer and get some fresh air.

I think he thought that the drive would have a soporific effect on me. Like it does on a cranky baby.

We were going to take the scenic route home down the Eastern Shore, which is magical.

Halfway up the valley there was a break in the hills and we could see as far as Pictou County.

Well we could have if the BLIZZARD bearing down on us hadn't been in the way.

Turned the car round, drove like maniacs back to the city.

That night, a foot of snow dumped itself on Halifax.

And I fell apart. Finally.

Colombo called. To see how I was. The effort of not telling her set me off finally. I wept down the phone, silently. She just chattered on so I could pull myself together, but the genie was out of the bottle.

I wasn't going to cry. No sirreebob.

So I yelled at Kitty. Then I yelled at Himself. Then I realised what I was doing, so I stomped out into the snow and stood there yelling at the effing universe until I was blue with cold, then stomped home and lay in bed, trying not to cry.

Then my mother texted me to say that Smoothie's Version 2 had opened that night, and everyone was there, and it was great.

So I thought for a long moment and then decided that there are some things that you can't do by yourself so I sent out an SOS by text and she called and I wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept down the phone at her.

She said, I wish I could give you a hug.

I wept a bit more.

She said, just imagine I'm giving you a hug.

I howled.

The way I should have the day I left Ireland and I thought my heart was going to break into a million pieces. Instead of wrapping a sheet of ice around it so I could keep going.

And eventually she made me stop crying and laugh instead and the Queen Dad got out of bed (it was two in the morning in Ireland) and grumbled about politics and ice hockey and made me feel like I was the most special girl in the world as he always does, and then I was able to make them put the phone down and go to bed. And I had a glass of wine and helped Himself celebrate the Maple Leafs squeaking into the playoffs.

And then I went to bed and slept like a baby and got up and lit the Easter candle because it is the symbol of a new beginning, and cleaned the house and cooked supper for Shazz and her boy who is in Kitty's class in school and we all ate until we were stuffed and then we watched Blood Diamond and thought about how pathetic our problems really are.

And now I'm still a bit sniffly and tired, but it's all going to be fine.

So what have I learned from all of this.

A family can live quite easily on a small amount of money, but it wears you out after a while. So those of us who are more fortunate should always bear that in mind when we think about the way other people spend their money. Sometimes something as useless and tawdry as a pink television can represent a lot more than plain old consumerism.

When you are in trouble financially, and you are trying to work your way out of it, be very careful whom you ask for an opportunity to do that. Being casually turned down is soul-destroying.

I already knew that people who purport to care about the working poor generally don't have a clue what they're talking about. Now I know it to be true on two continents.

If I hadn't had to do Lent as a child, I probably wouldn't have been able to do this. There was a reason other than religion why we had religious ritual. And we need something to replace it. An Observer Magazine frugality drive is not quite what I have in mind.

I live in a society where there is very little to do without money and a car.

I know who my Canadian friends are. I had figured I did, but now I know for sure.

Rabbit stew is very nice with fennel. But it is just as good without it.

My parents ROCK! (But I knew that anyways) If I can give Kitty half the life skills they have given me she will do fine.

She and I are going shopping today for a new pair of sneakers which she needs, and then we're going to look at phones which she wants. She has bowed to the inevitable, poor girl!!

At least her inevitable is not that she's no longer young.

Happy Easter!