It was a clear, cold night…

This is how the story of my birth always starts. A clear, cold February night. My mother’s water breaking at 2am. Her excitement. A long coat with a fur collar. An orange Honda that might as well have been a coach with four white horses on its way to the hospital because my mother felt like a queen.

Food, Confusing Food

A few months ago, my LH (Loving Husband) and I started going down the nutritional rabbit hole. By this I mean we started reading books and watching oodles of documentaries about food. This is something I had avoided in my …

Blackberry Honey Protests

When I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to be a hippie. I burned to stand against war and injustice, to march in protests and go to sit-ins. But when I was that age, there didn’t seem to be a …

Spring, Spring, Spring!

It’s spring! In Vancouver, the buds are popping open, birds are singing me to the Skytrain and I have a desperate need strong desire to tell everyone all about it. This is a thing with me. Every year, I watch the awakening plant …

Join the Conversation: Is there a dream you will never get to fulfill?

I expected this month’s salon conversation to go something like this: we share an unrealized childhood ambition; of being a painter, a poet, a police-woman. In the course of discussing these dreams, we realize they could actually be fulfilled if …

Join the Conversation: January Edition

It’s a brand new month, which means it’s time to pose the next question in our Mother Sugar Salon: Join the Conversation. And, we’d like to brighten-up your post-holiday blues by doing our second Mother Sugar giveaway! So, draw up …

Join the Conversation: What was the best money you’ve ever spent?

The pointer on the computer screen hovered over the word “Submit”. Ninety dollars seemed like a lot of money. When I had thought of it as $30 per month for three months, it hadn’t seemed so bad. I thought I’d …

Cold Kickin’

I don’t get sick. I normally scoff at any discussion of “flu season” and sail through the winter without so much as a stuffy nose. On the rare occasions I do catch a cold, I may have a few, mild …

Strong Legs, Open Heart

The Barbie doll was blond, just like Jacqui (not her real name) who had been our friend.  And blond like the girl in Heathers who died after being tricked into drinking Drano. In the movie, that blond girl is found lying on her bed with blue lips, her hair spread out on a pillow. We’d all watched the movie obsessively at a sleepover and started styling ourselves as thirteen-year-old versions of the various Heathers. They were popular, beautiful and cruel; the villains. And yet, they were the ones we wanted to be like.

Free Range

“Chicken! Chicken!” My husband nudges me. “Shit!” I mumble under my breath and scramble to turn on my camera, but it’s too late, we’ve missed another one. I sigh and wonder if we’ll ever get a good chicken picture. We …