my final word on the mommy-identity adjustment stuff…

i love Nancy White.

not the very cool online community guru Nancy White who’s chairing the community track at BlogHer this summer, though (ahem…loud bragging name-dropping-by-proxy alert) Dave co-presented with her in NY last fall and says i’d love her too. and i’d love to love her, but July in Chicago, alas…i won’t be loving her in person. not this year.

nope, i mean Nancy White, “Queen of the Topical Song” and CBC darling from my fine home fishbowl province of PEI, whom i have never met because even moderately semi-famous people don’t actually stay here, they need to work after all.. (only those of us with a penchant for government patronage, government handouts, or eternally opening and closing fishplant work are actually still left here. but we really like to claim our daughters and sons who’ve gone away and made good, therefore i am obliged by clan blood oath and such to mention that Nancy is from here. or at least associated with here. on her website she’s a little vague about her actual origins, probably to confuse cousins who would otherwise hang off her like barnacles looking for money).

so anyway. Nancy, in her fine and very funny semi-satirical children’s album Momnipotent (which i think should be a required baby shower gift) sings my pain. i suspect she thought it was her pain, but whatever. we’re both from PEI. we’re probably related.

and i was going to share her with you, but she’s not on youtube. and the CBC archives (for those of you outside our fair northern borders, think a cross between the BBC and NPR, on a good day) are scarier than Island drivers. instead then, i offer a few lines for you from “Leonard Cohen’s Never Gonna Bring My Groceries In”…

(if you hum along to the tune of “Famous Blue Raincoat” you’ll be in the right ballpark)
I was listening to music as I swept the kitchen floor.
I was needing a shampoo and I was pushing 44.
And I had one of those flashes that hits you now and then
About experience manqué and certain sadly missing men.
And I realized in horror as I stroked my double chin,
Leonard Cohen’s never gonna bring my groceries in!

I’ve a husband and a baby, there’s another on the way.
And, like Leonard, I am aching in the place I used to play.
But really, I’m enjoying all this domesticity.
Hey, I never have to deal with Warren Beatty’s vanity.
But there is one thing I regret, and my regret is genuine.
Leonard Cohen’s never gonna bring my groceries in.

Oh Leonard and me, together we’d be great.
Strumming our guitars and singing songs while it got late!
(Well, not TOO late, these days I kind of fold about eleven.
But for a little while it would be heaven, heaven, heaven.)
Oh, Leonard and me, we’d be so decadent.
We’d look at all those bottles, wonder where the wine all went.
(Well frankly I can’t drink it anymore, my head can’t take it.
But I know me and Leonard we could make it, make it.)

Nancy claims, in the liner notes to the song, that she wrote it at eleven months pregnant. i feel better now. thanks to all of you, and Nancy, i feel less alone. normal, even. with my medium hair, and my wistful confusion about how i got here, and my contentment with the frumpishness of it all.

back to your regularly scheduled programming, and me dreaming about my minivan.