Life Partners

A pair of mallard ducks just drifted past my window on the lake, and somehow it reminds me of my life partner and husband.

You've read the stories of geese who mate for life, and how they follow each other - if one is injured or takes a rest during their long migration, the other one follows.  And how they take turns leading the V shaped flock so that no one bird has to fight the headwinds alone all the time.

Partners for life - it used to scare me, before we got married 25, almost 26 years ago (May 19, 1984).  We lived together in an apartment for a while, just to stop the crazy making back and forth in the mornings, getting changed for work at two different places after spending the night together.

Marriage was on the agenda, and I was promoting it, oh yes. But secretly, I was struggling with the idea of 'eternity' and 'forever', all those diamond ring ads boast about.

Forever seemed too long to make a commitment, even if we were head over heels in love.  So I came up with a plan that I had devised in a high school social sciences project: 5 year contracts.  We would renew our vows or contract if you like, every 5 years.  That way I could manage a smaller chunk of eternity at a time. It made it seem more manageable.

5 contracts later, it seems to be still working.  Through miscarriages and loss, through going back to school (both of us, one at a time), through babies, strollers, sleepless nights and now teenage years, through stresses and strains and midlife restlessness and even through menopause and andropause, we are still drifting together down the current like that pair of mallard ducks.

I'd like to thank my life partner for just being there, for kissing me on the back of the neck every morning on his way to the office, for bringing me into such a wide and love-filled family, for helping me prepare an Easter brunch that lasted till dinner last night and beyond, for playing music with me, for being in harmonious synchronicity most of the time, and for just being who he is, a loveable guy.

back to work people,
luv
jenn/musemother

Mothers and Sons

OK so I've never written a blog about my son yet. but here's a good reason to for one:

A letter to my son who is heading off to Europe with his buddies for 3 weeks.

We know you are a responsible, wonderful almost 19 year old, and don't need advice from your parents, but here goes anyway:

Don't keep all your money on you, even in the money belt. Either lock it in a locker, or keep it at home in your bank account and use your Visa card or interac card to access it through a bank machine. They're everywhere.

Do keep your wits about you, and have a map so you can find your way home, even if your faculties are slightly impaired (you know what I'm talking about!)

It is a myth that 5 guys stoned or drunk are equal to one guy sober and aware. Travel in groups is wise, but being conscious of one's surroundings is even more useful.

Don't pack the beer bong.

Mom and Dad would love to come rescue you, but you pay our flight costs if we do!

Enjoy some museums and cultural stuff too, it's not all about the open drug laws in Amsterdam.

Explore, enjoy, and come back home safe and sound, that's all we ask!

This is a trip you will remember all your life, with memories galore, pictures on facebook, but don't forget to email us when you change cities. We are still attached at the umbilical cord, until you leave home for good (and even then....)

your loving parents,
mom and dad
ps I packed some condoms with your toothpaste - don't leave home without it

What Mommy Wars?

Read an article today in G&M Life pages, "Mommy wars" - whether full time daycare is ok for children, now that Ontario wants to offer it, is at the basis of this article. The title is so old, however, because mommies are just trying to do their best, it's not about which is better, full-time care with at home mommies or day care and working mommies. It's not a black or white issue.

Isn't it always about choice? whether the issue is birth control, abortion or full-time day care, parenting at home whether by fathers or mothers, it's all about choice. Women want to do what is best but they sometimes can't decide what that 'best' is.

Some of limited economic means feel they have no choice - between working and putting kids in day care and not eating, they choose working. The limited options for working parents (outside of Quebec's subsidized day care) are more of a problem than the working mother's guilt at not seeing every rite of passage unfold before her eyes. It isn't simple. And it isn't the same for everyone. See the recent blog about daddies at home, some due to job losses, some due to choice. It's not only about isolation versus self-fulfillment through work, either.

As a mostly stay at home mom who chooses to work from home, with workshops and retreats bringing me outside part-time, I have the best of both worlds. It has always worked best this way for me, hiring part time care when I needed it. When the kids were little, I both wanted to be with them, and wanted a foot outside of the house in my own creative world of writing. Now that they are teens, they need me less, but I'm still around when they do.

When they were little, the options were easier for me to afford. I tried full time daycare and lasted three days, when my son was one year old. I opted for home-care three days a week with a nanny. Even though my home office was just upstairs, which made it difficult to not intervene when there were tears, I did have the time and mental space to mark papers, prepare teaching plans. The biggest discovery was a shared office in a dingy university English department with rundown furniture and a tiny space-- that felt like being on vacation compared to being at home with two small kids all day. Yet I was there to see the first teeth fall out.

The hardest challenge I faced was graduating from university and no more teaching position - graduating to a full-time mommy role, albeit with pre-school and kindergarden schedules filling in for some of the time. Still, I don't think my life was any easier, or harder, than my sister's lifestyle. She went back to work after trying to stay home full time with her second baby. I think she lasted three or four months before she knew it wasn't good for her mental health to be cooped up at home. She missed her work, she missed the stimulation of a job and co-workers. But then, she had to drop them off in winter at the homecare around 6:30 am and pick them up after dark in the evening. When they got older, they prepared their own meals some nights and she'd arrive in time to take them to Tae Kwon Do twice a week.

My solution to the 'going crazy feeling' was to keep active in the writing community as a volunteer, organizing readings, meetings, writing a newsletter, going to see other writers read, reviewing books, working on projects I could do from home. I also joined mothering groups, mom and tot groups, and volunteered at their schools. I kept busy, fought my lack of patience and mounting anger with therapy sessions, wrote about my lack of patience and anger at being the only one they called out to in the middle of the night, explored the issues that came up for me so intensely in a book called "Little Mother".

In my experience, the Mommy wars have been inside of me, not with other women. I appreciate that staying at home is very difficult unless you build a network of friends to support you. I appreciate that working full time means you only get to see your kids between 6 pm and bedtime, which at some ages means an hour and a half of get supper ready, get pyjamas on, and hop into bed. There are advantages and disadvantages to both choices.

Can governments support working parents better? yes. Can we give stay-at home parents more tax breaks? Yes - Penelope Leach's 1994 book "Children First" makes a very strong argument for government support and family friendly workplaces being good the the economy and for families. Let's give parents more options, more choice.

Two other excellent books about the pitfalls, challenges and joys of mothering: The Mother Zone by Marni Jackson, and The Myth of the Perfect Mother, Parenting without Guilt, by Jane Swigart. Both these books help us see mothering as something outside of the stereotypes we have unconsciously swallowed. The emotional reality is that it draws out the best and the worst of us, and yet, without children the 'world' would cease to exist. The reality is that parenting work is "heroic". It takes courage to give a child what they truly need.

nameste
musemother

September Nights

A short story

September is a month of abundance - flowers, foliage, full moon...and tonight the pale orange Harvest Moon looms large on the horizon – Katie and I are in the back yard at dusk. "Let’s write a story about the moon wearing a Pumpkin mask for Halloween," I say. "It should be in October, that pumpkin moon, shouldn’t it, mom?" says Katie. With cooler nights yet still warm days, September sun gilds the air. Brown-eyed Susans, purple coneflower and pink-tinged hydrangea are drooping under the weight of such fullness (a bumper crop, a bellyful of flowers, if we could eat them).

The garden this time of year is riotous with purple Sage battling the cucumber vines growing up the cedar hedge, and something brown I thought was yarrow. The garden is too full of bees buzzing so my girl won’t dine outdoors. ‘But it is the best season, the finest weather’, I say, but she refuses to eat on the patio.

‘Come join me on the swinging chair,’ I call to her now, but she only alights a moment, jumping over the wet grass in her pristine white socks, then flits over to the trampoline. Ugh, a fat spider sits weaving. She screams and goes indoors.

‘Mom, you are my idol,’ she says later that night when I invite her into my bed for a snuggle. When I ask why, she says ‘because you have everything I want – a nice house, two kids (gorgeous kids like me) and a good looking husband’ (he is cute, isn’t he, I said) ‘and you’re so full of love’ – (‘Oh, but I whisper under my breath, you will be less cranky and impatient than me.’ ‘Yes, of course’, says she.)

Kissing Katie good-night is never short and quick -- she kisses my left cheek, then my right cheek, reaches up and places her arms around my neck in a deadlock, plants another kiss on my lips then up to 30 more kisses if I let her -- all over my face. Butterfly kisses with eyelashes, Eskimo kisses with noses rubbing. Nine-year-olds are good kissers. Sometimes I get impatient and want to get to my own bed where glorious sleep will envelope me. Sometimes I sing, K-K-K Katie, beautiful Katie....

Her other favourite drawing-out-bedtime routine is “Guess how much I love you mommy?” where we outdo each other with incredible numbers – as many as there are stars in the sea, as many as the blades of grass in the whole planet, as much as the distance from the earth to the moon. This usually goes on for as long as I can stay awake, standing in the doorway with one foot out the door, or until my exhaustion starts to show and I try to ease out with a quick good-night.

Earlier in the swinging chair, I had bowed my head, tired after battling insomnia the night before, and said a silent prayer of forgiveness to my mother, having suddenly come face to face with my own similar shortcomings – and not having the heart anymore to condemn us both to coldness and bad feelings for the rest of her life. Thus, I assuage my guilt about being a rebellious teen-age daughter, and hope my prayers for her happiness will ensure my own happiness, and that of my daughter as she enters the pre-teen years.

Just for tonight, I let myself be cajoled and held by Katie. I know she fears being alone at night in her own bedroom. Even though she is supposedly big enough to sleep alone, I am too tired to fight her off and send her back to her room. All day she has wooed me in a flurry of drawings, poems and scribbled notes on scraps of paper: Je t’aime maman! Passionate, headstrong Taurus foil to my passionate, stubborn Scorpio. So just for tonight, I let her stay a bit longer, hug her and tell her that she’s gorgeous!

By the time she’s fourteen, I know those kisses will be rare. We'll be missing that abundance.

Mothering the Monster

Sometimes I imagine I am writing a column that will be read by thousands of women. I read a few articles in the new Chatelaine magazine which focus on mothering, natch because it's Mother's Day in May. It makes me feel like I would love to find that kind of knowledgeable yet slightly snarky voice some of the women have.

Particularly one article about the dark side of mothering. First time in a national magazine that I have read something dealing so honestly with a mother's inadequacies - she admits that she felt she was losing it, describes how she locked herself in the bathroom so she would not harm her two little daughters, one of whom was screaming and banging on the locked door. I think she actually left the marriage and the children temporarily.

I rarely felt it that extremely, but there were definitely times (still are? but rarer) when the screaming ogre, the PMS monster, the mommy-from-hell is at the helm ranting and losing it. When they were really little, I remember trying to meditate one Saturday morning, while little fists banged on the door, crying to come in; and silly me expecting my husband to pick up the slack since it was 'his turn' to care for the kids that morning.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a mask you could put on and take off, the Mommy Monster Mask, and after you acted out your frustration with the mask on you could take it off and reassure everybody that it was all just a play, not for real, that nobody would get hurt. Unfortunately, I think the tiny humans in the house would still run for cover and be extremely afraid.

Love-hate, light-dark, the shadow side of mothering is all too present some days. Most of the time it stems from lack of self-care, I think. The days when the cup runneth over, not of joy but of frustration, are often days when lack of sleep and jangled nerves from too much stress do us in. An article in the G & M newspaper this a.m. says stressed parents affect the health of their kids (DUH!). As if we need a scientific experiment to tell us this....

So harried and harassed moms and dads, please heed the shrill breaking of your nerves and get help! there are herbal remedies, there are breathing exercises, even just going for a run may help you get back on track. Don't neglect yourselves. Mother yourself, baby yourself with little kindnesses regularly. Keep the stress level down - I'm telling myself this, obviously, because when I am stressed my teens start snarling back at me and we all get out of whack. Why am I so hard-headed?

It's taken me this long (and I need reminding) to realize that my energy can shift, and then their energy shifts, and we're happy again.

Sigh, parenting is not about perfection, nor about 'getting it right'. It's about learning. It's about self-acceptance, the darkness and the light. Knock my head on the wall again to find out it hurts. Oh yeah, and naps are a really good way to change the energy to softness, for me.

I'm going away to a conference for 5 days, but will write when I get back.

lots of love,
musemother