By Wendy Litner

I once had a question on an ethics exam which asked, “if your father and the man who had the cure for cancer were both drowning in the lake and you could only save one, who would it be?”  I chose my father – he paid for my swimming lessons.  This, however, has become a particularly loaded question for me in recent years as my mother died of cancer after hers and my father’s divorce.  Answering now would be like choosing who I want to live with post separation.   

My husband, blessed with a very healthy hubris, doesn’t understand why this question is even an ethical quandary at all.  According to him, he would just save both his father and the cancer curer.  It is no matter that he doesn’t even know how to swim.  Given his self-identified talent for multitasking rescue, I posed to him a modernized, particularly self-interested, version of the question: “If I and his iPhone both fell on to the subway tracks and he could only save one of us from the oncoming train, which would it be?”  My husband chose his iPhone without hesitation.  This, to my mind, means that Steve Jobs is now personally responsible for picking up my husband’s underwear off the floor and putting them in the wash. 

While righteously indignant at first, I couldn’t really bemoan my husband’s loyalty to his toy.  I have been known to prioritize my cat over my husband, and, as my husband is quick to point out, she has far fewer applications.  Weeks before moving in together my husband flatly said that either he or my cat were moving into our new apartment, not both.  I chose the cat without hesitation, but wished him well in his future endeavours.  I realize that choosing my sleepy Burmilla over my partner may seem outrageous to some, but in fairness, you haven’t met my cat.  She’s adorable.    

I was recently reminded of these Sophie’s Choices while reading Ayelet Waldman’s infamous essay “Motherlove,” where she boldly declares to love her husband more than her three children, who, she writes, are “satellites, beloved but tangential.”  Sanctimonious mothers everywhere debated whether Harvard lawyer Waldman, who gave up her brilliant career to raise her children, was a “bad mother.”   Despite the venomous outcry, I don’t think Waldman is a bad mother at all.  I think her premise is so poignantly realistic it catches my breath.  Waldman isn’t really advocating for a hierarchy of affection; what she is really advancing is a measure of balance and proportionality between all that we hold dear.  There is no reason why we need to quantify and distribute our love in marked boxes, or polarize our love into hypothetical extremes.  Tenderness, of any kind, is just not mutually exclusive.  That can sometimes get lost as we find a way to make our jobs, our families and our lives, work.   

My husband’s first answer, while unintentionally caring, is exactly right.  It’s not an ethical quandary at all.  What I have learned from my father’s remarriage, though painful at first, is that you just can’t have too many people who love you.  And as my siblings and step-siblings continue to multiply at a biblical pace I am also reminded that you can never have too many people to love.  While it may be difficult and tiring to devote the time and attention to all those in my life, I am thankful for the challenge.  I adore each new niece and each new nephew, just as I adore the new puppy that my husband and I brought home together.  I hold close each new, special person, who comes into my life along the way, by whatever means, and adds a measure of shared joy and companionship.  And if they, my husband, my cat, my puppy, my father, and the man who had the cure for cancer, were all drowning in the lake or had fallen in front of a barrelling subway, I would just save them all.  Each and every one of them. I wouldn’t even hesitate.  But I may be inclined to throw back my husband’s iPhone, he is just on that thing way too much.

By Wendy Litner

I used to think that I had a really fast metabolism but it turned out I was really just in my early twenties.  As I approach my thirties, I have sadly noticed that I can no longer maintain my five-to-one junk food to exercise ratio.  The only problem is that I like junk food a whole lot more than I like exercise.  Every day for the last year I have vowed to get up and jog before work, but find myself negotiating one snooze after another with my bitch of an alarm clock.  But while I am still working on forcing myself to go for just a leisurely morning stroll, my peers are so passed walking they are running.  Endurance running to be more exact.  It seems that once you marry, establish a career and buy a home the next logical step is to run a 10k marathon.  And then post your ungodly speed on facebook.  It was clearly time to stop sleeping my figure away and pick up the pace.  

Despite my new found enthusiasm, when my sister-in-law, Michelle, proposed that I train with her for a 5k run at the Toronto zoo, I was seriously worried about my chances.  The last time my husband and I endeavoured to jog our way into shape together, we ended up walking to the Dairy Queen up the street instead.  Our most intensive exercise to date has been to buy an ice cream flavour called chocolate peanut butter iditarod.  

Working a full-time job, keeping house and raising two beautiful children, sans nanny, Michelle is a paragon of dedication.  And while I also work and have a house to keep, one small dog and one smaller cat are all I have to speak of in terms of parental responsibility.  My arduous office hours were no longer a reasonable excuse.  It was time to start running. 

Failed morning jaunts aside, Michelle insisted that with proper pacing and training I could become a marathon runner in no time.  I wasn’t going to take this lightly.  I was going to be fully engaged and committed to running.  I would be partaking in the Iron Man competition in no time.  

Step one, of course, was to pull together a cute little outfit.  As my mother used to say, “In order to be good at something you need the right tools.” (And although she made this statement in the context of criticizing my tired makeup brushes, I firmly believe it still applied.) 

Step two, was to run.  When I arrived at Michelle’s for my first day of training in my new pants, fresh exercise tank and matching sweat band, I was ready.  And fabulous.  We started off down her street at a light pace and I felt more energized than I had in a long time.  Buoyed by my feet bouncing rhythmically off the pavement, cushioned in my pink exercise socks, I felt light as air.  I basked in the early morning sunlight and savoured the slumberous sounds of the neighbourhood before the houses began to stir.  My legs feeling increasingly limber, I began to pick up my pace, propelling myself forward with the wind at my back. 

And just as we turned the corner at the end of her street, approximately 1.5 minutes from the starting line, I started to wheeze.  Heavily.  My lack of breath quickly developed into a full blown asthma attack, which naturally progressed into a firmly held belief that I was dying.  Hunched over pathetically with hands on knees, I pleaded with Michelle between gasps to go on and save herself.  Undeterred by my desperate panting, she heroically agreed to walk with me at a light pace the rest of the route home. 

As we walked together I was comforted by her sisterly promise to tell everyone I ran the whole way, but found myself nevertheless fighting a rising wave of frustrated shame.  While the majority of my day is sedentary, I had no idea just how out of shape I had become.  Had I sacrificed my figure at the expense of my career?  I had thoroughly convinced myself that the only thing standing between myself and my former physique was just a little motivation.  Motivation, however, clearly needed to be paired with hard work and I wasn’t entirely certain I had the time or the wherewithal anymore for such laborious efforts.   

As we rounded the last corner and headed home my breath finally began to slow and as my chest eased so too did my grief for my formerly fit self.  I can’t just give up after one go!  After all, if Confucius is right and every journey really begins with just a single step then I am well on my way.  If I can just keep one foot in front of the other then I can keep on moving forward.  And with just the right amount of gumption and trendy attire, who knows, by next summer I might even make it a whole two blocks.

By Wendy Litner

The notion of survival of the fittest terrifies me.  My fear isn’t of the theological kind, borne out of any deeply held belief in the dogmas of creationism, but rather it is because I am just not very fit.  When learning about the Bubonic plague and other historical human disasters, I have always been certain that I would have been one of the first to go.   In fact, my picture likely would have made it into the textbooks as figure 1.1,  an ‘extreme case.’   It’s as if I was made with cheap, foreign parts in the eighties that have since been ubiquitously banned by international health authorities in the new millennium.  As a result of my sub-par constitution I generally have the immune system of a gnat, even suffering from seasonal allergies, in every single season.  According to my allergist, I am allergic to trees.  As a species. 

That I am going to get the swine flu this season is therefore a certainty and it seems particularly unfair as I have recently become a vegetarian.  Notwithstanding my dietary allegiance to the pig, that bug is gunning for my poor asthmatic lungs, I just know it.  I intend to stand in line for the shot just as soon as the high priority patients have been treated but am convinced they will run out of the vaccine just as soon as I get to the front of the line.  My luck is typically as good as my immune system. 

This flu frenzy has confirmed my childhood fears that natural selection, if given the chance, would pick me last to be on its gym class dodgeball team.  But as I am on heightened alert for flu like symptoms, I begin to wonder: why do I have to wait for natural selection to pick me?  Why can’t I be captain of my own awesome team?  With plenty of vitamin C and a conscious effort to stay calm, maybe, just maybe, I can put a couple of points on the scoreboard and keep H1N1 at bay.  After all, doesn’t everyone love an underdog story?

By Wendy Litner

Strawberry Shortcake and I were officially on the outs.  It wasn’t that we had a fight, or anything dramatic like that; it was just that time had taken its natural course and after adorning my walls and sharing my bedroom linens for thirteen years, it was time for us girls to amicably part ways – or at least get our own rooms. 

I was ready to take adolescence by the horns and live in a bedroom that was more reflective of my now sophisticated palette, something with posters of Milli Vanilli or Kirk Cameron.  My mother agreed.  It was time for a change.  And so it was that we decided to redecorate my room, together, when I came home from overnight camp that summer.

When the August day finally arrived, I bounded up the stairs, ready to start the metamorphosis.  Throwing open my door I was blinded by an overwhelming lime, green luminescence radiating from every corner of my room.  My mother had decorated my room in produce.  My room had been completely apple-fied: wall paper, lamp shades covered in apples; an apple shaped rug at the foot of the bed; apples nestled on my comforter, perpendicular to a large apple-print headboard; tiny apple pen toppers in an apple-print cup, with plastic apples in an apple-shaped bowl.  “It’s an apple room!”  beamed my mother.  Clearly. 

Seeing the vast amount of work, energy and money my mother must have poured into this project with all her heart, there was only one thing to say: “I hate you!” I cried, “It’s what I had before!”  “What?” she shouted in disbelief, “You’re comparing apples to oranges!”  Or strawberries, in this case. 

The apple room was so overstated, so over-the-top, that it became a never-ending source of humour.  High-school friends wanted tours; university friends begged for pictures of the infamous green Mecca.  So much so that when I finally moved into my own home, I was desperate to create my own room and make my own mark.  I read countless magazines for cutting-edge style tips and my husband and I breathed a satisfying sigh as we placed the last muted throw pillow on our chocolate brown bed.

But sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and find myself under my Gluckstein, hound’s-tooth duvet, in my earthy coloured room, I can’t help but admit that the grown-up room I have built is not nearly as warm, and not nearly as delicious.

By Wendy Litner

I don’t think I’m ready to have a baby, because I only want to be pregnant on the weekends.  On Saturdays, I long for that expectant glow and that little bump in the belly of women growing new life inside them.  Not the ninth month ‘my back hurts, get this baby out of me now’ bump, more like the sixth month ‘I’m just starting to show and isn’t my fetus adorable’ bump. 

But standing on the subway on cold Monday mornings, the only really tangible benefit that I can see to being pregnant is possibly getting a seat on crowded public transit.  And now that women have rightfully achieved pay and social equity, people hardly offer up their coveted seats unless a woman is actually giving birth on their train. 

I know I want to raise children and have a family but my disparate feelings towards pregnancy, the biological mechanism by which these lofty goals are achieved, have started to worry me.  How will I know when I’m ready to be a mother?  When will I want to have a baby on weekdays?

As I approach my thirtieth birthday, it seems that self-satisfied mothers are continually reminding me of my ticking biological clock and egging me on to begin procreating immediately as they have.  I believe the pun is intended.    

As someone who views anxiety as a pastime, I do worry about the functionality of my ovaries.  But amid all the peer pressure, genetic testing, folic acid, and basal body thermometers, I have to admit that I am more fearful of motherhood.  Is my hesitancy, though, an indicator of a lack of maternalism.  It terrifies me that I may not have the Mommy genes, only Mommy jeans. 

It is this worry that consumes me while I baby-sit my nieces, lingering in the crevices of my mind as we eat gummy-worms in our pajamas while singing and dancing to Grease tunes with ballpoint pen microphones.  It is this nervousness that tugs on me while I read them bedtime stories, and tuck them into their warm and cozy beds.  I hide my angst behind funny voices and distracting tickles but wonder if they can tell.  I wonder if kids can instinctively sense an inability to mother. 

And just as I am breaking into a nervous sweat, my increasingly frantic thoughts are interrupted as my niece throws her arms around me, kissing my neck and declaring in the sweetest six-year old voice, “Goodnight Aunty Wendy”. 

And just like that I know.  I know that I’ll know when it’s time.  I know that I’ll know when I’m ready.  In the meantime, I am going to savour the thrill of finding an empty weekday subway seat, always being sure to give it up to any women with an expectant glow and little bump.

By Wendy Litner

While I have become indifferent to brand name labels when it comes to fashion and food (by indifferent I mean I can’t afford them), I am ashamed to admit that when it comes to my aches and pains, I really love a good label.  Preferably a multi-syllabic, hyphenated one.  When you are as proficient at worrying as I am, diagnosing yourself with a common cold is just simply inadequate.  I mean, I could phone in a worry about the sniffles.  I need something grimmer, something that can really keep me up at night. 

Thankfully, with the help of the internet, I can type in the most ordinary of symptoms and diagnose myself with horrifying maladies which have never previously targeted my age group, ethnicity or gender.  Despite these irrational inconsistencies and my lack of any medical training whatsoever, I become completely convinced that I am Patient Zero who will not only suffer science-fiction like symptoms but will also be responsible for infecting an entire population of poor, unsuspecting subway goers who are forced to incubate with me on my commute to work.  My family will have to issue an apology in the Metro to the entire Bloor subway line, paying extra of course for the number of characters in the spelling of my rare disease, thereby literally adding insult to injury. 

While I used to have sudden onset of symptoms, resulting in intense googling trysts as I diagnosed my ‘disorder de jour,’ my symptoms as of late have become even more pronounced and communicable.  For example, I abruptly awoke the other night at 3:00 a.m. to the distant sound of click-clacking that I couldn’t quite make out.  While my initial reaction was of course to diagnose myself with Misophonia, a disorder characterized by extreme aversion to selective sounds, my rational self realized that it was more likely that I was suffering from Rubella, or other diseases preceded by hearing loss.  As I made my way to the computer however to confirm my diagnosis and secure my enrolment in promising clinical studies, I found my usually calm and collected husband fussing and fidgeting over the keyboard. 

“I have tetanus,” he proclaimed, with a furrowed brow, pointing at the computer screen’s list of tetanus symptoms.  “I have a headache and it’s totally tetanus.” 

This was clearly ridiculous.  His headache was obviously a result of his deflated pillow which I had begged him to replace weeks ago.  I mean, really.  Who, in this day in age actually suffers from tetanus? 

But as I chastised my husband for his absurd alarmism, it became clear to me that I was in fact suffering from a horrible disorder.  After months of internet searching, my epidemiological research had finally come to a head: I was suffering from a most debilitating form of Googleitis. A disease described by the urban dictionary as “an obsession with self-googling or otherwise using the Google search engine to answer all of life’s questions.” 

Oh my goodness!  I was clearly suffering from Googleitis!  And a strain so infectious that my husband had caught it!  While perhaps I could withstand being a host for this virulent bug by myself, the thought of it afflicting my previously even keeled, and frustratingly normal husband, was simply too much to bear.  I had no idea my actions were so contagious.  I had to stop.  I couldn’t let this powerful virus worm its way into my family.  After all, if I am so sure I am on the precipice of a health disaster, shouldn’t I really be enjoying the time I have now?

There was only one thing to do. 

“Move!”  I begged my husband as I lunged at the computer, deftly pushing him out of his chair, “I need to google overcoming addiction.”