Thankful Tuesday: Second Chances

This is Tuesday, so I am joining in the Thankful Tuesday party over at Micha Boyett’s blog, Mama: Monk. This week I am thankful for second chances, however you define them. This is what second chances looked like in our house this week.

The second 192. The 192 is the third (and last) in a sequence of buses that Jessie takes to get to the Food Bank where she volunteers two mornings a week. The 192 is a very important bus, as it allows her to actually get to the Food Bank warehouse without getting killed, because that last little loop in the industrial park has no sidewalks and is an artery for transport trucks that ignore stop signs. Having tried to pedestrian train her with at least three or more hour-long sessions crossing the major 6-lane intersection with minimal success (she lacks a certain finesse needed in judging traffic, a finesse that is critical to life-altering/ending outcomes), we decided that there are only really two options if she misses that last and final morning 192. Option 1 involves me dropping my work and jumping in the car to cross town and either escort her across the intersection or drive her from the bus stop to the Food Bank. Option 2 involves getting back on the bus and coming home. Yes. It’s THAT dangerous. So this morning, when she was late and I was up early working to a 9am deadline and the phone rang I almost didn’t answer it. I just didn’t want to deal with either option. It was Jessie. And she was distraught because she missed the 192. And then . . . and then her voice shot up an octave and became filled with excitement. “Mom! I see another 192!” Somehow she had lucked out and there was a second 192 just behind the one she missed. Rarely do we get second bus chances. So this morning I am thankful for yesterday’s second 192. And so is my client.

The Plan Gifts of Hope catalogue. This year, as we try and try and try to move away from so much STUFF at Christmas (for the best rule yet, go over to for the 4-rule: something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read), I was trying to convince Jessie that we punt the gifts for the Grays and the Harts (our alternate and chosen families) and instead clear time to spend together and pool our resources to pick some community/world service gift, like all volunteering together at the Food Bank or doing a Christmas hamper. While Jessie liked the idea of it, she wasn’t absolutely convinced. “But Mom! I really want to get Rachel earrings!” She had her heart set on it. Then, the Plan Gifts of Hope catalogue  came in the mail I put it on the table with the others (some more local, others more specific)  I had stashed away and had her look through the descriptions. Three hens and a rooster for a family. A rainwater harvesting tank for $500; literacy training for two women for $120 … the list continued and Jessie sat enthralled with what we could do if we pooled our money and how we could decide together, en famille. So I am grateful to my daughter for reconsidering my idea, for giving it (and maybe some other girl or community) a second chance.

While there are other second chances I am thankful for this week, I’m out of space and time and I’m giving my nascent cold a second chance to recede. What are you thankful for?  

Transfer(able) Skills

This bus that Jessie is on (the lovely inspiring moving busthat her PR professor talked about in her life metaphor) may be memorable. But it is also expensive. At least the way Jessie paid for it Monday.

Since graduating from high school in June 2011, Jessie has become quite accomplished at taking public transit on her own around the city. While this has required an interesting teaching technique (one part scaffolding, one part being yelled at as a mother-torturer who is making her take the bus when it would just be easier to DRIVE her! ) Jessie has successfully mastered the routes to more than 12 of her regular life destinations (including the Food Bank, H’Art Studios, dance rehearsal/class/teaching destinations, as well as all the arts venues in the city). There are so many locations because her schedule is what we have come to call irregularly regular (see calendar ). I.e., she doesn’t attend a program or work at the same place every day of the week.

Jessie is proud of this accomplishment, and so I am I, but probably for different reasons. Jessie, because she can now go just about anywhere— and I swear mastering our bus system is akin to surviving an Outward Bound adventure; and I because a) I survived the teaching process, and b) I get to add another hour or two to my working day. The only drawbacks are the number of junk food establishments she has to walk by en route (did I say walk by?, well, we are working on that), and the random unpredictable calls I get when she gets lost and I have to try to find here somewhere in the nether regions of the city.

Since she takes the bus so often, Jessie has a bus pass that she has to buy monthly. This, and a selection of basic health care and other items—mostly black pens, notebook, and paper, which she goes through at an alarming rate—is what she is responsible for remembering to buy out of her budget for basic living expenses. Sometimes, though, she forgets to buy the pass and then panics the night before the 1st of the month, and comes up with what she still thinks of as a brilliant solution: me driving her to work.

I say still, because me driving her has NEVER been an acceptable solution. It may be on the solution list, and it may be acceptable to her, but it’s never one that I agree to! Ah, the dirty work of teaching some measure of independence.

Sunday night she realized that she hadn’t bought her October bus pass, so she went to the corner store and bought 2 sheets of bus tickets (2 tickets for a bus ride, 6 tickets to a sheet) to get her through the day . . . and some in reserve just in case.

Monday, when she came home from the Foodbank (where she volunteers 2 mornings a week), we went through her purse to clean out the receipts and other bits of flotsam. Where I found this:

Six transfers, and NO bus tickets.

It appears that she used bus tickets EACH time she got on a bus (3 buses there, 3 back), instead of a transfer , because she couldn’t find her transfers . . . in her mess of a purse!  This is how much it cost her to ride the bus Monday:

She didn’t want to talk about it, until I translated it into more meaningful terms, i.e., that taking the bus had cost her the equivalent of 8 muffins or a new CD AND left her no money for snacks for the week. THEN she was willing to sit down with me to review the use of transfers again. 

Street Proofing or, Forget What Jesus Would Do and Just Keep Your Head Down

Jessie has a wild schedule this “first-year-of-no-school” year. While it includes a good mixture of both down and active time to keep her contributing, learning, creating, and growing, what makes the schedule so wild is that it’s not the same routine every day, as it had been for school and hence most of her and our lives so far. And it involves a lot of bussing to different places all across the city. Places that I might not normally go. Places that have no sidewalks and trucks that roll through stop signs (the Food Bank); places that require at least three transfers through points that I can’t access with a car (and hence can’t be a rescue backup); and places with more druggies, homeless alcoholics, skanks, and barely leashed Rotweilers per square inch than anywhere else in the region (downtown Rideau Street!).

Of course, it’s to this last location that Jessie has to travel 2 times a week. At night. To the dance school billed as being “located in sun-filled, heritage studios.” What they don’t mention are the hordes of tattooed and pierced street kids blocking the narrow entrance to the three flights of rickety stairs that bring you up to the creaky and perhaps sun-filled, if one were ever there in the daytime, studios.

While Jessie did a dance intensive at this studio during the summer and managed to get there on her own with no hassles (maybe it was all the tourists balancing out some delicate drug-to-decency ratio?), September’s journeys played out somewhat differently.

Dan was the travel accompanist and on the first night managed to herd her past a drug deal going bad on the way in. On the way out it was a skank fight. Night journey two was a longer story involving a dog, a tattoo, and a pipe, with the added Fellini-esque bonus of some spandexed and feathered street opera singer. We agreed that while Jessie could technically get to and from the classes on her own (she was comfortable with the bus route and knew where to go), it would be just too dangerous.

This, and the dubiousness of certain Christian teachings as practiced by transitioning youth with disabilities, was confirmed on night journey three. This is when Jessie and Dan were approached in the bus shelter by a staggering, red-eyed, malodorous gentleman holding out a grimy hand requesting spare change.

Jessie looked him in the eye and said, “Sorry. I don’t have any money right now. But I really admire you and you should keep up the good work. Because what you are doing is making a difference.”

Dan, taken aback by her response (the gentleman in question was too stoned or drunk to hear anything she said after “sorry”), asked her what she meant. What kind of work did she think he was doing and why on earth did she admire him? She explained that he was probably looking for money to clean up landmines or to contribute to the Foodbank, as the only reason to ask for money is for a good cause, right? And (this is the part where my faith gets me into a bit of trouble, and Dan looks at me accusingly), she said “Mom says to greet every person as if they were Jesus.”

Dan explained that the man was probably looking for money for drugs or alcohol (Jessie’s eyebrows raise in horror) and that she was NOT to greet every person as if they were Jesus—at least not on Rideau Street and certainly not when she was alone—and that he would discuss this with me when they got home.

Which he did.

Which is why we are re-street proofing Jessie and I am re-thinking exactly WHAT Jesus would do. Or what he would do if he were a middle aged mom trying to balance risk with independence in a twenty-something young woman with a disability and a social conscience.

A Short Bit About Being Alive, or Life, Death, Buses

Fall has set in and Jessie is fully engaged in all of her activities—including Propeller Dance, hip hop, music, drama, and teaching dance—in addition, of course, to school (where she will be doing a work placement at the Food Bank starting later this fall). She is managing her schedule incredibly well (although that’s never really been the issue, the problem is usually how I am managing it!), including learning two new bus routes so she could get herself where she needed to go independently while I was away at a 4-day retreat with a trip to Montreal tacked on to the end.

While not a novel observation by any means, the more responsibility she is given (where there are few to pick up the pieces—except all those neighbours and friends we have co-opted as back-ups and guides) the more she rises to the occasion. While I was away, Dan said she did a great job taking care of herself and supporting him in what he had to do. I know there were probably many glitches, and probably many snacks that might not make it on the nutritionist’s list; however, she not only survived, but felt a proud sense of stepping up to the next level.

This will probably be important as we head in to this fall, as I might be away at unpredictable times; my father (Jessie’s beloved Grumps of the two-stomach fame) was just diagnosed with cancer. While it was odd to go straight from a 4-day silent retreat to a meeting at the oncology department, Jessie’s response put it all into perspective for me. When I called her later that afternoon and shared the treatment plan with her, she was ecstatic. I tried to tone her excitement down a bit, not wanting her to hold on to magic cures (my Dad is, after all, 80 years old, and as I told Jessie, likely to die in her lifetime), trying to keep her focused on a reasonable reality.

“But Mom!” she said, as if I had totally missed the point, “Today he is ALIVE!!” That he is Jess. That he is.