Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss by Beth Powning
new edition now available in paperback, Vintage Canada

"I never thought that the most important path I would walk would be the one that taught me how to love; or that I had to lose the chance to love in order to find my way, stumbling, tear-blind into it"

Shadow Child is a beautifully wrought exploration of selfhood, womanhood, and mother hood, and of the way life hones, pares, and humbles each of us. It is an affirmation that we are shaped by our pain as surely as we are shaped by our joy, and that there is beauty in both.

EXCERPT

"Sometimes I shape: sometimes I let myself be shaped. What I've had to learn is when to do one and when to do the other. Controlling, allowing, they're the plies of strength, they twist around one another like the wool with which I make our winter's mittens. Sometimes we are not meant to choose. Sometimes we are meant to let ourselves drift, be tossed, lie bereft, like driftwood that has no power of navigation. In old age, restlessness is replaced by patience. I feel it coming, and I know its strength."

~

"Life wraps around me like strong arms. I'm being carried, lost in the dark feathers of sleep. I rise and fall like a bird as someone's legs swing, steady as breath. I'm part of their rhythm, chest-clung, marsupial. I sleep, and yet know that I'm going somewhere. There are lovely dips and glides, voices at the edge of awareness like muttering thunder. Light burns coal-red on the insides of my eyelids. Creak of wooden stairs. My bed comes rising to receive me, a blanket grows up over my shoulders. Some sweet lips press my cheek, and then I'm falling, gliding, into the pillow and beyond, twirling headlong into my own darkness."