April 8, 2003

All this should change. The way this page works. The frames. The heading. Some things I want to write about don't fit into any day, particularly. They simply are.

Rob has written a really snazzy script for me, a dynamic functioning thing that slots in new entries, places them in the right spot in the archives and front page. How it shelves is according to date. It doesn't matter when I'm writing this, so a recent but random date is going to be the name.

I have two siblings, two parents. My sister and her family live in Northern California. My brother and his family are in Nova Scotia. Not surprisingly, I don't see them very often. Perhaps surprisingly, despite calling plans and internet access, we aren't often in touch, really.

My mother and her third husband live in Alberta. We are friends, she and I. We talk on the phone several times a week.

I think she would agree that I had a difficult childhood. We are closer now than we were then, even though I mostly lived with her then, and rarely see her now. Time and distance.

My father lives in British Columbia. In the past fifteen years I have seen him exactly once. He left my mother when I was eight. He left me, personally, when I was a teenager. And he left me all over again, ten years ago.

He's dying of a very slow cancer.

He keeps some contact with his youngest child, and only son. I tried to write a letter to my brother explaining why he shouldn't think ill of me for not making more of an effort to reach out to the father. That there were things spoken he didn't know about.

In the end, I reached out anyway. Where there's life still breathing, there's hope. And this is not the sort of small-minded thing I'd want to regret later.

So I wrote my father a card saying that even though he told me to stay away from him, if he had changed his mind it would be great to hear from him. The card was written on the exquisite stationery Tamar gave me for a bridal shower gift- heavy, formal ivory card, blind-embossed with my name and Rob's.

I included my business card, with my brand-new domain name and mobile number, the logo, all that.

It's been two months now.

Maybe he still feels the same after all. Or maybe he just hasn't gotten around to writing yet.

At least I tried. Maybe I should go see him sometime anyway.