Winter details

I knew the night so well in Nova Scotia. I looked to the glow of the street lamp from my bedroom window to check for rain or snow streaking through the fog, powered by the open-ocean wind. I knew the persistent cling-cling of rope snapping against masts at the wharf.

Often I was the only one awake, unless the rest of the townspeople were laying awake in their beds like me, in the dark. From my vantage point I could see that the rest of the lights were out.

The wind rattled the old windows, and the hot water heaters popped as the pipes alternately expanded and contracted. My father breathed heavily in his sleep down the hall. I heard the television's high-pitched test-pattern screech, and wondered how my mother could sleep through it. I rose from bed to make my way down the winding staircase and turn off the TV. I kissed my mother's forehead and wished her a whispered goodnight, to fulfill my daughterly duty without waking her. Then, before returning to bed, I paused in front of the picture windows, looking seaward and seeing nothing. The old woodstove crackled, the fire glowed orange through its gaps.

I wondered what the rest of the world was doing, outside of this last jut of land before the Atlantic void, then caught a chill and wandered back to my crisp bed sheets, thankful that my mother hung them outside to dry despite the cold weather. They smelled like the wind.

Montreal to Mexico

Barrage of questions:

So that's it? You're just going to drop everything and head south for the winter to learn another language?

You mean to tell me, that you are going to leave a well-paying, resume-padding job on a whim?

What about your boyfriend? What does he think?

What about your classes?

Can you afford this?"

Answer: Can we talk about this when I get back in May? I'm really busy right now with Salsa lessons, studying Spanish conjugation and saving money for paradise.

An open call for insight

It's exhilarating being on the edge of opportunity (and reason).

Do I give it all up for passion? Is it passion? Or am I following the emerging lines in my skin like a map away from here? The lines are carving their way over my arms, hands and the corners of my eyes as a reminder of where I've been, and where we're all reluctantly headed.

Am I really giving anything up? My boyfriend and appartment will still be here. As will my debt and birth certificate...and the two remaining classes I must complete before earning my second university paper. My stable, well-paying, resume-padding job will be gone before I've been there long enough to make it count. Oh, and my current employer is the husband of my previous employer. I might piss people off.

I am at a crossroads. This life of mine feels like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books I loved so much as a kid. A cognitive therapist might actually blame those books for the adult I've become.

Do I drop everything for a few months and learn Spanish in Mexico? This is a call for help.

Ever want to influence a stranger's life? Now's your chance. I'm vulnerable.

Si, puedo...in Mexico

I checked my messages as soon as I walked through the door, and chose to ignore those from credit departments. I opened my mail; there was a cheque in one envelope for more than I’d planned on. Rent. I can pay it.

Alone, in my clean and cluttered apartment, I exhaled: Yesssssssss.

With a quick finger calculation I determined how long it will take me to become debt-free. Another determined how soon I’ll be able to return to Mexico.

Welcome the New Year. My thoughts catapulted back to the beach at midnight.

Unpacking only those items I feared may have broken during my travels (una calaca for Dia de los Muertes, Banda CDs and sacred heart mirrors – yes, now you too can see yourself in the sacred heart of Jesus, even if your soul can’t).

Then, I called my girlfriends, grabbed a bottle of wine and the two Mescal samplers I imported as gifts and packed a clean pair of panties so I could stay at their house that night instead of mine. Mine was uncomfortably familiar. The panties, and the slice of pizza I choked down on the way, are the only evidence of any remaining survival instinct I had upon my return to Canada.

I’d been washing my hair with a bar of soap for three days. I left a little sand on the seat of each toilet I visited. My skin is a little browner, my freckles have gone mad, and my feelings fluctuate between intense excitement and profound loss, distracted only by my itchy scalp and oozing mosquito wounds. I needed to be with my friends. I needed to sooth my soul with red wine, the preferred treatment for moments like this in my home base, wearing more sand than make-up.

Although it was a short trip, a solid chunk of my heart stayed in Mexico, a little bit at each casa de huespedes, at each beach, on each boat and with each person with patience enough to help me learn Spanish and talk to me about Mexican history, politics and love and contradictions. In exchange for an intimate travel experience, Mexico tapped into my core and took a little more of it everyday. Perhaps this is why the Mexicans I met said Mexico has so much heart. They’re stolen from unsuspecting young women – and in Mexico they stay.

The last time I felt like this about a place, I moved to New York for three months.

Zihua, you turned me inside out. Once you have my heart, you can have the rest of me.

Barren

My freckles will conceal my liver spots. I’ll worry less about a flat stomach, and more about my knees. I’ll have a nest egg and struggle to keep my teeth. I’ll have laugh lines.

But, in the meantime, I have to decide what to do with my womb.

You’re young. There is still time, say my parents.

I am nearing thirty, I remind them.

What is your plan? Where is your security? ask my parents-in-law.

What is my plan?

Mourning for the world, weighed down with a responsibility beyond choosing UNICEF greeting cards and buying fair trade coffee, I reasoned it would be irresponsible to procreate.

How, I asked myself, can I introduce another soul to the world in a time when the neighbouring superpower detains people without trial, when my own country is rumoured to do the same? How can I intentionally subject another child to global warming? As infants develop bed sores in group homes, how can I consciously decide to not choose one of them? How, when hordes of parentless children are placed in foster care, only to be subjected to further abuse, can I give my maternity to someone who doesn’t yet exist?

Besides, I might be infertile.

I have two sisters. The eldest once declared she'd never marry, and never have children. Her son came as a bit of a planned surprise, and is now a beautiful and agreeable eleven-year-old. The junior sister by one year, demonstrated far greater interest in reproduction: a degree in early childhood development, tolerance of me (the littlest sister by thirteen years) as her shadow, and a declared desire for several children. She had one, now also eleven. Two, if you count the amount of time she babysat me, now twenty-seven. Three, if you count her ex-husband, now forty. Today she battles, via lawyers, to do what she believes best for her daughter.

Where is her security?

If I were to have a child now, it would be a bastard. I would have no maternity or insurance benefits. It might bear my imperfections. But, I don’t think I am supposed to think about that.

I shortlist names. I don’t think my spouse likes any of them, but I’m not ready to compromise. I suppose with children I would learn. I suppose, if I did carry full-term, I would celebrate that 1970s medications administered to my mother to prevent miscarrying the foetus destined to be me, don't apply their now-known side effects to my particular reproductive organs.

But, first thing’s first.

On a strategic path to a career with maternity leave, keeping my options open, I sit on several committees with a particularly strong-minded, socially-conscious childless professional. Occasionally, she asks personal questions that can’t be answered without careful consideration.

What do you want? she asked.

Feeling particularly vulnerable, made sensitive by my in-laws’ prodding, I justified my decision to probably not have children by recounting the ongoing collapse of civilization and environmental ruin. She listened, entirely unconvinced.

When I was your age, she began (as many advice-givers do), I felt the same way. Her hand was nestled in her grey curls, absently scratching at her head.

Vietnam. Pol Pot. Agent Orange. Thalidomide. The Cold War. I was convinced, she said, as many were, that the world was ending; that it would be unfair to bring children into the world as it was. Thirty years later, and we are no better or worse off, but now I’m fifty. Had I known, my choices would have been different. Happiness for me now, is being a really good aunt.

I thought of my sisters’ children. And, of how we live a thousand kilometres apart. And, that there will always be drought in the Kalahari.