Restart 2023!

I started this blog on January 1st, 2011 while on vacation in Thailand with my family. I am restarting today from a coffee shop in Beijing, across the street from my house. My daughter, Emily, and I are here to work (Though I’m actually going to consider this play for my part!), and spend some quiet time together. I love this way of bonding with my youngest daughter. I always get a few precious nuggets out of her, but with no pressure. It’s just easy and natural as we sip our coffees and do our own things. I’ve been editing the podcast I record with one of my besties, 2 Chit Chat Chicks, doing some journaling and ideating about my journey of reinvention that I am tottering on the edge of. 

In a year and a half, we will be leaving our international school teaching jobs (after our youngest graduates), and that puts us in a position to reinvent ourselves and do something entirely new, or related, or possibly do nothing at all. The nothing at all does not appeal, though, because we want to keep making money, but also because life is just so much more fun when you’re doing something that is meaningful and follows one’s passions. 

My word of the year that Eydie helped me find in this week’s podcast (Episode 107: Word of the Year) is transformation. I love that! I am so jazzed by the idea of parlaying the skills and talents that I already have into something new and fun and exciting. The teaching acumen that I possess (inspiring others, organizing, planning, speaking, writing, collaborating, designing, co-teaching, using technology (I have been online SO MUCH in the last three years!)) can be translated into an entirely new adventure, that I am thrilled to get started on. 

 Part of this venture is going to be exercising my writing muscles and sharing my thoughts with anybody who cares to read them. Mostly, though, it’s for me: to explore and understand myself more deeply and figure out how I can contribute in a meaningful way outside of my day-to-day teaching and parenting life.

 I’ll keep you posted!

A View from the Window

It’s a sunny Sunday and I am in my window-filled balcony off the bedroom, which has recently become my online classroom and place of refuge. I am listening to the wind squall, letting the blue sky imbue me with hope, and imagining those fleecy clouds as flotation rafts for my flagging body to rest on.

 

There are drooping sunflowers on my desk, mimicking my faltering spirit. Long-tailed birds flurry past, dipping their wings, echoing each other’s trills. I see several stalled yellow cranes as I look to my left, silent and swaying, on a break from rebuilding the Worker’s Stadium (工人体育场), a Beijing landmark of some import.

 

In front of me, I see The Holiday Inn Express, not something one would expect to see in a Beijing vista. Nevertheless, it gives me an infusion of joy each time I look at it because it is the hotel chain that my parents frequented and my mother loved. They would stay at the Holiday Inn Express by the Vancouver International Airport on a regular basis and then take the Skytrain in to the city: going to the public library, watching movies, walking alongside Canada Place and frequenting their favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants along Main Street or Kingsway or going to the Spaghetti Factory in Gastown, and then stumbling back to their home-away-from home after a long day on the town. Whenever my mother called to make a reservation, she would ask for the ”Erika Rempel Special,” which involved both a discounted price and an upgraded room due to their loyalty and how my mama regularly brought the staff homemade cookies and sometimes bottles of wine.

The red apartment is where we live!

I’m convinced that my now-deceased mama had something to do with the eye-level view I have of this hotel from our 6th floor apartment in a city of 21 million people. I wake up every morning and say, “Hi, Mommy.”

Just seeing this hotel logo allows gives me a shot of optimism that my mama was always so capable of giving. It enables me to buy the peonies in the store down the street that yesterday I thought were too expensive. It gives me the momentum to go into the kitchen and boil the potatoes and cut the dill and parsley for the potato salad I imagined making today, remembering how well-loved hers was. Though Mother’s Day was last weekend, each day I am given the gift of my mother’s generous spirit just by looking out the window.