Life Hacks

I love life hacks.  I especially love practical hacks in Popular Mechanic-esque type of magazines.  Maxim had an article, years ago, on how to win a sword fight.  I thought that was a great article.  We all harbor the need to have survival tips in our back pocket in case of the next zombie/climate/nuclear/asteroid induced apocalypse.  While we wait, let us focus on some tips you can use in day-to-day life to win back precious time and let you focus instead on enjoying your latte while reading celebrity gossip on your smart phone.  Let’s begin:

1)Pee in the pool.   I fessed to doing this in front of a group of parents and it was the only time I have been truly judged and found wanting.  My husband even let out a small groan after I said it.  The former lifeguard/now mother was particularly appalled.  Since then, I’ve given it more thought after a self-imposed year off from peeing in the pool.  After many times of dragging my cold and wet self, and that of my young daughter, to the pool bathroom and diligently peeing in the toilet and getting toilet paper stuck to our wet bums I reached this conclusion:  I had been walking from the bathroom with untold bacteria picked up by my feet and washing them in the pool.  99% of pool bathrooms are disgusting.  Change rooms are where everything on our outside shoes comes into contact with pool drippings. It is like a gravy concocted of feces, bacteria and mold and the bathrooms are where it happens best.  Everyone either pees before or after they change and nine times out of ten, people are wearing their shoes – because the bathroom floor is so gross!  So, no thank you, I no longer trudge myself to the bathroom to pee, instead  I  envelope myself in the wonderful warmth of my urine and then swim away as it churns and mixes with all the other urine and chlorinated waters.  What doesn’t kill us, only makes us stronger.

2)Dress your kid in the next day’s clothes for bed.  Admittedly, this only works for about the first five years of their life because most of the clothes for babies and toddlers look like pajamas anyway and your kid is a total buy in because they hate getting changed in the morning too.  Kids get it:  wearing your pajamas all day is awesome!  Let’s be honest, changing those rascals in the morning is worse than pulling out your own hair and who hasn’t threatened to take away their cute stuffy if they don’t comply?  Like yourself a lot more by dressing them the night before.  On an extremely happy note, you’ve just bought yourself 2 hours!

3)Macaroni and cheese from the box.  I know, some of you organic, non processed parents out there are freaking out right about now.  Don’t!  I chop up some chives and maybe throw some fresh cucumbers and tomatoes in it and voila, a main with  salad!  Yay, us!  If your kids are assholes and won’t eat vegetables, tell them about the pitfalls of scurvy.  I did, and I have never looked back.   Even a 3  year old can comprehend the downside of bleeding gums and scaly skin.

4)Set the bar low for birthdays and Christmas.  I had a friend years ago that was diligent about remembering birthdays and trying to give the perfect gift.  She enjoyed it, I think, but she was setting herself up for a world of pain later on in life.  I have found you can never manage people’s  feelings or reactions but you can manage their expectations.  Case in point: I forgot my husband’s birthday a few years ago.  He lightheartedly teased me about it but what he didn’t realize was from that moment on, I could pretty much give him the lamest gift and he would be happy because at least I remembered.   It had great spill over affects at Christmas because I was able to do all my shopping for him at Mark’s Work Wearhouse.  When he opened up his presents, he was happy to receive a down vest, wool socks and  fire retardant long johns (I especially remember that gift because I  emphasized the awesome safety feature of his thermals).  I didn’t have to spend long hours at the mall fussing about his gifts but instead found that I could create thematic gift giving with one stop shopping!  I did this one year at IKEA too.  Everyone in my family got pretty Swedish coffee cups, plush bath mats and practical kitchen gadgets.  I miss my parents’ birthdays, my sister’s birthdays, my friends’ birthdays and then, bam! I surprise them with a thoughtful gift.  I average about one gift every three years for people.  Years ago, after completing my first year in the Faculty of Geology, I gifted family members with dusty samples of rocks. I used black permanent marker to label the rocks with  the chemical formula of the minerals found in the rock.  After that, they were happy to receive a tea towel.  Set. The. Bar. Low.

I have one caveat for this hack – don’t ever forget your child’s birthday and make sure Santa pays a visit.  They are awesome little creatures and the best gift I ever received.

5)Buy toilet paper in bulk.  There is only one thing in your house that would make you suffer to go out at some strange hour, in a cyclone, to get it.  Unless you have a pile of rags lying around and an outhouse out back, you need to get yourself to Costco and buy their Kirkland house brand 36 roll extravaganza of bulk toilet paper.  Buy two packages.  Buy three packages!  It doesn’t go stale, it is literally 50-100% cheaper than any other brand IN THE WORLD!  I know, because if you have read a previous post, you know I have actually stood in the toilet paper isle at several grocery stores and figured out the best damn deal in the world for toilet paper.  Why?  Because I have too much time on my hands from all the great life hacks I utilize.  My household has never run out of toilet paper and it never will.  This is the greatest life hack I can offer you.

Now, go to your nearest coffeehouse and buy that beverage that you deserve.  Enjoy licking your lips softly, savoring the aromatic essence of your favorite liquid.  Before you leave, go to the bathroom, sit down to leisure in your throne time and when you reach for the toilet paper, chuckle softly at first and then burst into laughter once you realize those bastards have run out of toilet paper.  Apparently, they can’t hack it (pun intended!).

 

I need to let go of lost socks

I was folding the laundry the other day and I tossed a few uncoupled socks into my lost sock basket.  Then, I paused to  stare long and hard at the basket that had been slowly accumulating lonely socks for years.  Various ones had begun their desperate climb for freedom, standing on the toes of the fallen and beginning their accidental accent over the lip of the basket.  Their tragic limbo beckoned me to begin the arduous task of trying to find their lost mates.

Twenty minutes later I had created two piles:  a small one where rediscovered twins embraced in mangled balls and a much larger one that held a jumble of sizes, colors and fabrics.   I kneeled in front of my bed to behold my past.  There were my older son’s black & white, black & grey, striped, and white socks that had anti-slip lettering embossed with T4-T5 and which were now being used by his younger sister.  A few of his present day socks presented the same sad engendered palette of black but with daring blues and reds on the heels and toes.  There were her socklets with ice cream cones, flowers, decorative ankle trim in hues of lavender, green, pink and orange.  I was baffled how a multitude of highly eye catching socks could go missing.  Did our dog have a penchant for purple? My husband’s single sports socks were a timeline of his changing tastes: black calf socks had given way to black ankle socks and finally to black below-shoe-rim socks,  a shortening struggle to avoid the fate of being yet another old man wearing calf socks with shorts.  A few of my socks were thrown into the mix but not many:  I tended towards more color and patterns and these were always sold in singles such that upon discovery of a hole I often chucked the pair.  I also habitually wore my husband’s black socks since my ‘nice’ socks never lasted long.  His rapidly changing taste in style might have been a subversive attempt at dissuading my borrowing.

There the pile sat and taunted me with an overwhelming question:  were these single socks a metaphor for all the leftover items in my past that I had failed to discard?  Was I hoping I would find the elusive missing part to the whole; would I find resolution to relationships and events that had ended in whimper? These thoughts flowed over my consciousness on a particularly grey and snowy day (if it had been sunny and warm, I would not be writing this blog.  I would have ignored the sock basket  and gone for a walk instead).

Socks are a funny covering for our bodies.  It absorbs our foot sweat and odor and is an intimate olfactory trace of our existence.  This might explain why our dog rifles through the laundry looking for socks to parade around the house.  She is either getting sensory  comfort from her pack’s smells or she is thumbing her nose at our authority by reminding us we shit, eat and smell just like her.

Unlike underwear, we freely flash an odd assortment of patterns and colors on our ankles and for reasons I have yet to fathom, they appear to be an acceptable flamboyance on buttoned down men.  Whenever I have sat through a terribly long and boring meeting, my gaze  inevitably wandered to the foot and sock wear of the attendees, trying to ascertain some hidden character traits I may have overlooked, followed by a skittish attempt to hide my own socks, which were often black and borrowed from my husband.  Based on my own boring proclivities and an unimpressive collection of practical cotton underwear, I assumed anyone with fabulously colorful socks must harbor kinky tendencies – at least that is what I imagined to get me through those terribly long and boring meetings.

Imagining the character and history of people and their socks probably led to my soul searching on that fateful laundry day.  Letting go of socks with holes is easy:  it has obviously come to its demise through ample contact, you may have even let it go on  a bit too long because the hole wasn’t too big and wasn’t too worrisome, and one day you realize some part of you is being strangled or exposed by the irregularity and raggedness of the hole.  I think the metaphor is self-explanatory: abusive or annoying people that are black holes, sucking the light from our lives while emitting harmful radiation until they themselves evaporate and disappear.

Missing socks are another matter.  They are the epitome of unfinished business.  Should I wait for their return?  Should I try to improve their functionality by creating a mismatched pair?  Will people judge me because I am wearing one striped sock and one polka-dot sock?  Or does the idiosyncrasy of the mismatch prove charming?  There are no easy answers to the dilemma but I think for each one of us, the answer is in the basket.  On a quiet laundry day, lay out those burdensome socks on your bed and look, I mean really look at the possibilities and the dead-ends.  Don’t be afraid to throw away those dusty socks that have no wearability – neon yellow was just a passing fancy but a bold move nonetheless, the Eiffel Tower motif was super cool in the gift shop but this year we are traveling to new sights unseen,  gray is just so….gray and can’t be mismatched successfully with any of my husband’s black socks.  Today is the day of reckoning and once the pile has been cleared in fitful starts and stops of anxiety and pondering, wander to the garbage bin and finish the job.  Then, take your wonderful self and go shopping for a new pair of socks.  Nothing is more cathartic than starting fresh.

 

 

Please Leave Me Alone Unicef

How do I write this blog without coming off as a complete jerk?  This is basically a rant about donor fatigue.  I hadn’t realized June was hit-up-everyone-on-earth month for starving children, uneducated children, children needing Bible studies, mother’s against drunk drivers, mother’s against pedophiles, mother’s against pedophilic drunk drivers, people with cancer, people with MS, people with diabetes, 15 people with an incredibly rare disorder that no one can pronounce,  a foundation that gives free books to poor people, a foundation that gives free shelter to poor people, a foundation that gives free food to poor people, a foundation that gives free manicures and pedicures to poor people.  This month I’ve had four fundraising drives come to my door, three robocalls, not to mention the cashier at the Safeway, the Co-op and Old Navy that asked in front of the attentive ears of people lined up behind me if I wanted to donate.  I felt like an asshole every time I said no.   At this point, I’ve begrudgingly accepted my fate as the lady-who-won’t-donate-to-save-poor-orphans-in-a-country-no-one-has-heard-of-until-it-hit-the-news-last-month.

I do donate.  Not the hearty 10% of our income stipulated by tithe.  We opted to insert money into the kids’ RESP (registered education savings plan) because we don’t want our kids to be a charity case when a Bachelor’s degree costs $1,000,000 in the future.  Also, I bought a really comfy swinging basket chair that someone in India weaved together.  We send a few thousand a year to whatever charity tugs our heart strings or to the fundraising page of one of our family, friends or coworkers that could totally afford to donate their fundraising goal but are blackmailing themselves into running, walking or biking to their ideal weight.   I, infrequently volunteer in my community or for an organization whenever I am called to do so but I volunteer full time raising my children.  Yes, I volunteer.  No one is forced into being a parent – just ask deadbeat moms and dads.  My priorities don’t play well on social media.  LinkedIn tells me future employers more readily hire people who list their volunteerism or ’causes.’  Polishing your brand entails a sheen of non-profit or at least a few stretched contributions in that direction.  Hell, I can play that game too.  I volunteered at Habitat for Humanity for one whole day painting a play house they were auctioning off back in 2002.  I guess that means I now volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.  Who’s going to check attendance?

I’m tired of the barrage.  I can’t approach a street corner without some idealistic twenty year old giving me their most toothy grin and expounding on the virtues of goats or water wells or microloans in third world countries.  I can’t go to the grocery store without the cashier plugging for the corporation’s charity of the month.  Even purchasing a $20 soccer ball I am asked by the cashier to fund youth sports for the disadvantaged. Do I give 10% of my purchase price?  20%?  That would be  a lame $4.  Or do I give them $20 because that seems like a half decent donation amount.  That means my soccer ball just cost me $40.  If I keep this up, I won’t be able to afford the new swimsuit I so desperately need.  Should I forget swimming altogether (cause saggy swimsuits with no elastic support are so not cool – you know who you are) so I can give some poor disadvantaged youth the $80 instead?  I’ll get fat and unhealthy but at least I’ll have given some kid the chance to run around in a shiny new jersey instead of running around in a cotton shirt.   Hell, I can’t even get drunk anymore without a guilt trip.  All the outings with friends seem to involve charity balls or a fundraising event that someone scored free tickets.  No one scores free tickets to a fundraiser.  They are handed out like candy and you arrive to not dinner but hors d’oeuvres that run out in the first ten minutes and then you’re paying $15 for a glass of boxed red.  They get everyone liquored up on empty stomachs and suddenly you’re bidding $500 on a Fitbit.  The next morning you feel dirty and used except you didn’t get laid just f**ked.

Having school age children opens up a whole universe of fundraising activities.  They send leaflet after leaflet asking to please sign up for  meat orders, chocolate orders, Christmas plant orders, spring plant orders, coupon books (which I forget to use), book orders, frozen cookie dough orders and any other business scheme that relies entirely on school fundraisers to turn a profit.  I would happily write the school a check that would be equitable to all the money I spend on fundraisers our family is socially pressured to commit.  We’d unfortunately cut out the middle man economy which I suspect employs thousands of people.  When I lost my job and I was attending career transition meetings with similarly forlorn people, the coaches kept telling us uplifting stories of people who had found their true calling in the non profit sector.  I kept thinking it was strange there was a large employment sector for non-profits.  I’m still trying to find a job in the pillage-the-earth for-profit oil and gas industry so I guess I’m the fool.

Now what?  Well, if you’d kindly donate to my blog I can sustain myself on Oreo cookies and Cheetos so I can continue to write these pithy and astute essays.  You can feel oh so good knowing you helped support a starving writer or at least a writer starving for unhealthy snacks.  Or, I can just forego the snacks.  It’s up to you.

 

 

 

 

The Easter Bunny Died On A Sunday

I wasn’t ready.  No one is.  I was sitting across from my 9 year old son in a breakfast diner.  I had just slurped down a welcome bit of coffee and was waiting on my waffles.  Suddenly, he said, “Mom, okay, you need to be a 100% honest with me:  Is there really a Santa?”  This was in May.  What kid asks this question in May?  Maybe November when thoughts of sugar plums begin to dance in their heads but not May.  This wasn’t the first time he had asked the question but I’d somehow dodged the bullet.  That was in December, closer to the ubiquitous thoughts of Christmas and I was ready for it.  Or at least, I was wondering if my then eight year old still believed in Santa.  So, I had a rough answer prepared.  But the May query caught me off guard and so, I decided in the space of 2 seconds a sacrifice had to be made to throw him off the trail.  So, I looked him dead in the eye and said, “Santa, is totally real.  The Easter Bunny is not.”  My husband, startled, looked up from his smart phone and gave me a look of what have you done ?!?!?! Which was followed by my son saying, “What?! But, everyone at school thinks the Easter Bunny is real!” Are you kidding me?  While everyone was discussing the existence of Santa in his Gr. 4 class, apparently  the Easter Bunny was off the discussion board because a 7 ft bunny that randomly hides chocolate for the amusement of children for no apparent motive, unlike Santa who has a moral undertone to his actions, is without question real in the minds of nine and ten year olds.  Go figure.

I guess a kid in his class had found unopened toys identical to those later received under the auspices of “Santa”.  He threw the class into a tizzy with his suspicions and I was left dealing with the aftermath.  I had sincerely thought the first mythical creature under suspicion would be the Easter Bunny because of the gaping hole in his back story.   Santa and the Leprechaun have loads of tales to corroborate their existence but the Bunny seems to pop out of nowhere and he has absolutely nothing to do with the spiritual gravitas of the coinciding Christian observances.  The Easter Bunny is just fluffy lore to pun it nicely.  Mental note:  children are easily fooled or at least their reasoning can be abducted with a few tasty morsels of chocolate; plan to lay out more chocolate around Christmas.

At this point you’re probably wondering what I told him to make him believe in Santa.  Well, it wasn’t that hard because some part of me really does believe in Santa.  The story I told him was evidence of some grander magic embodied by the man in red and it began like this:

When I was ten years old, we were living in a trailer on a First Nations reserve in Alberta.  This trailer was on loan to any teacher that wanted to live on reserve while they taught at the school, which my Mom did.  She was teaching special education, meaning they had cleared out a storage closet, stuck some desks in it and she tutored any student that had special learning needs.  The teacher trailers, as they were known, were relatively cheap to live in compared to the nearest town or city, which was Lloydminster, an hour drive away.  The major downside to these derelict trailers were the infestations of mice.  The trailers had never been properly sealed or if they had, there were now multiple entry points from the outside.  Trailer row was occupied by only one staff member from the school, that being my Mom and the rest of the trailers were occupied by band members since no roof was to be left unoccupied on a reserve with chronic housing shortages.  It was a testament to my mother’s economic situation which was more distressed than the average teacher at the school.  My step-dad was chronically underemployed and she being the only earner, we lived paycheck to paycheck.  The cheap rent made the money go further, even if the extra cash went into my step-dad’s pocket to play Bingo – one of his few pleasures and social outings that didn’t entail binge drinking.

Anybody who has lived in a mice infested home knows the first thing one learns is to never, ever trust a box of cereal or crackers or anything that can be chewed through by hungry mice teeth.  Upon pouring out the cereal into one’s bowl, you find a disappointing array of rice shaped black droppings and you curse yourself for having left the box lid opened.  One morning I found a half drowned mouse in the left opened honey container.  Being ten, I took this opportunity to place the distressed mouse in a cage we had kicking about and decided to give it water, some food and grass to bed on.  The mouse spent a long time trying to clean its fur but the grass kept sticking to it and it was a miserable mess.  My mother came home and demanded the mouse be returned outside which I dutifully did.  The reserve had various packs of roaming dogs, the teacher trailers being a popular spot for one group because of the readily available scraps pitched by a concentrated group of inhabitants.  Most homes at that time were built several miles apart but as the number of people grew and the economies of running infrastructure to groups of homes made more sense, rows of homes became more common.  I remember putting the sticky, sweet mouse outside and the pack of dogs sniffing and following the curious bonbon.  I didn’t wait around to see what happened.

I had a curious dream at that time, one that entailed my head being entangled in something and me trying to disentangle myself.  In the morning I found mouse droppings all over my pillow.  The mice were getting bold.  I decided I would try to catch them.  This was more for fun and to rid myself of boredom.  I propped a box on a stick with a string tied to it, left some food under the box and waited on the other end of the string.  My trap was set in the middle of the kitchen floor.  This usually never works because mice try to stay to the perimeter but by this point they had the run of the house.  I caught one, two, three, four, five.  It stopped being fun and I went to bed hoping they wouldn’t join me.

Christmas was on the horizon and that year my niece came to stay with us.  My step-dad had a daughter in her twenties and she had a four year old daughter.  It was fun having a younger kid to play with after my older sister had left home the year before.  It also made Christmas seem more exciting because Santa would have two reasons to visit. On Christmas morning, we had a plethora of gifts and the most memorable were the 4 ft cloth dolls we each were given.  I’m pretty sure that Christmas was special for my niece too because if I thought my life was hardscrabble, it was nothing in comparison to what she had and would eventually experience.

A short time later, I don’t recollect how the conversation started, maybe I was asking my Mom if Santa really existed, my Mom admitted to me there had almost been no gifts for Christmas.  She told me that as we sat in the motel room in Lloydminster, the load of groceries bought and the overdue bills paid, just a few days away from Christmas, she had just $30 left.  We were driving home the next morning so she decided to give my step-dad his Christmas present – the last $30 to play Bingo.  There was probably two reasons for this, one to keep him at the motel for the night so he wouldn’t ditch us to go drinking and two, to chance a bit of luck.  Well, he got lucky – twice.  He won $700 that evening and so they decided to keep the room another night so my Mom could buy presents the next day.  He went back to play the next day and won $500.  This was 1988 and that was A LOT of money back then.  My step-dad had also lost a lot of money at Bingo but that one time, the most important time as far as I’m concerned, he won.  As my Mom told me this story, as disturbed as I was that our fate could have been much worse and that it also implied Santa had not directly given us these gifts, I felt – no I believed powerful magic had enabled my step-dad to win.  From then on, my understanding of Santa matured from the jolly fellow that swoops down the chimney to the spirit of something much larger than ourselves, the cumulative understanding of something good and holy that pushes us to do better and create magic for the downtrodden and vulnerable.  We were not a Christian household, so the birth of Christ never factored into this epiphany but as I’ve grown older, I recognize the spiritual duality of Jesus and the Santa lore.

When I told this story to my son, he nodded his head knowingly and looked relieved.  Children understand magic.  They understand it inherently and we have to protect it  when we are trying to make sense of the world.  I feel a bit bad about killing the Easter Bunny.  My husband secretly admonished me that night, after the kids had gone to bed.  He told me he believed in the Easter Bunny for a long time.  I think a tiny part of him still does.  In future I need to be more careful in guarding those mythical creatures that inhabit my home for they also inhabit my family’s hearts where they embolden the imagination and fortify against despair.  For what is more precious than faith whether it be in a God, the universe, or in a red nosed, grizzled old man?  Who am I to judge.

 

 

 

We Got A Puppy

I haven’t had the wherewithal to publish anything in a long time.  I got depressed.  And sick with some horrible flu virus that made me understand how the flu could possibly kill someone.   Then there were the deaths in the family.   First my mother-in-law and then my step-dad.  Oh yeah, and my father had a couple of convalesces at our home after hernia and hip surgeries.  I basically hit a wall and started crying – a lot.  Then I lost my appetite, whether from the flu or from depression I’ll never know but I got locked into a horrible spiral so that I lost 20lb (best diet ever!) and could barely ingest the same amounts of food as my 3 year old.  I bought powders and canned drinks they give old people to gain weight.  I ate a lot of ice cream.  Like I mentioned above, best diet ever.  After my step-dad’s funeral I started shaking.  I thought:  Oh fuck,  I got bit by a tick and now I’ve caught Lyme Disease (sidebar: Lyme Disease creates neurological damage and is often misdiagnosed as MS).  Except, the shaking was psychosomatic because I’d shake when I was agitated and never when I was seated or resting.  Skip forward to the dreadful month of February and the doctor puts me on anti-anxiety pills.  I thought, “Great, a pill that fixes everything!  Sign me up.”  Except, it didn’t.  I still needed to go to a counselor and realize that my family was, is and will always be neurotic, eccentric and draining.

Fast forward to April.  My kids and husband had been cooped up with me for a very dark winter and I decided my priority was to create happiness for myself, my kids and my husband.  We began going for hikes again and going to the swimming pool.  We spent a weekend at a fancy hotel in the same city we live in and ordered room service and luxuriated in the hotel’s marble pool.  We started remembering what it was like to be happy and then we bought a puppy- a teeny, tiny puppy that will grow into a small dog.  It’s a ShitsPooPoo – a Shitzu, Pomeranian, Poodle cross and her name is Bella.  My husband and I had been mulling it over for a couple of years while we recovered from euthanizing our Chocolate Lab in 2014.  He had grown old, something for which I wasn’t familiar because of premature deaths of all my childhood dogs and cats.  Reasons for early death of above mentioned dogs and cats:  falling from a tree during winter (cat), getting run over (dog), accidentally being stepped on and then dying from a broken back (cat), getting run over again (dog #2), and my most loved pet, my dog Chico, being passed on to another family because we were moving households every year.  Having a dog survive to old age was a sign I had graduated from the family dysfunction of shoddy husbandry and a disruptive home but it was bittersweet.  The old boy suffered from advanced arthritis  that received little respite from pain medication and in his final year he couldn’t bear to suffer the agony of getting up to plod down four steps and squat to take a shit.  He’d sprawl on the kitchen floor and a few seconds later a couple of warm logs would roll from under his raised tail.  He’d give us a look so sorrowful and resigned that we gave up scolding him and began the reluctant conversations of when it was finally “time.”

Having a puppy is about joy; having a puppy is about pee everywhere in your home.  I’m going to give you some good advice right now:  never ever buy pee pads.  They have become ubiquitous in the last 10 years and they are totally useless because you are teaching your dog it’s okay to pee inside.  If you have a yard, let your new bundle of joy spend lots and lots of time in it so the outside becomes a natural part of their habitat and by extension, their toilet.  They’ll soon realize the green carpet outside doesn’t elicit the same groans of agony or yelling the (formerly) white carpet inside does.  If you live in an apartment: what the hell were you thinking?  Go buy yourself a house.  Better yet, a country acreage.

Back to joy: puppies have three basic tenets and they are eating, sleeping and playing.  They will do all three with you if you let them and let’s be honest, you will.  A bit of scrambled egg at breakfast never hurt anyone now did it?  The crate seems comfortable but your bed is soooooo much better.   Besides, it’s too cold in the winter to sleep on the floor even if it’s on top of a $100 feather dog bed from a boutique pet store.   And you’ll realize throwing things over and over and over and over and over again can be fun!  Especially the part where you have to play capture the ball or rope toy between every single toss.  It never gets old.  Really.  I promise.

When you bring a new creature into your home the best parts are the unexpected moments, those times you could never have imagined in your adorable baby animal fairy tales you were playing across your mind while you were psyching yourself up to make the purchase.  It’s only been two months so far but the two most memorable things about Bella are 1) when holding her she likes to lean her head back over your shoulder and nuzzle into your neck and 2) when you are pooping on the toilet she runs into the bathroom and starts sniffing the toilet bowl, scratches at the crotch of your underwear and gives you a startled look every time you grunt.  I’ve never felt so scrutinized as when I try to defecate in my own home now.  I guess it makes sense it would be your canine family member that would have the most judgement pertaining to your rear end considering this is where the meet and greet ensues at every dog park.  Still, I wonder how I stack up against the Labradoodle on the next block.

Every day with my family, including our newest member, Bella, I’m remembering what it feels like to have parts of my day injected with pleasant surprises.  This blog isn’t advocating buying a puppy every time you fall into depression.  It’s just a story to remind myself that changing up the pattern in the fabric of our lives (yes, I know this is a super cheesy catchphrase) might be what’s needed to freshen up one’s perspective and catch a few more rays of sunshine.

 

Christmas Vacation

My son is a holiday dictator.  I mean that in a good way.  He has taken our playful observances of Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day and Christmas and imposed a strict timeline of decor, tradition and excitement.  He can be depended on to initiate and sometimes completely take over decorating for the holidays and only due to his short stature are we obliged to hang lights above 4 ft or help with the stove and measuring if baking is required.

Since he was old enough to talk he would come outside and help me in any way he could to prop, hang and dig our Halloween decorations into place.  It didn’t help that I would talk about Halloween starting around the end of August and build the momentum until we had baked Halloween cupcakes, bought more Halloween decorations to add to our growing collection, tried on and played with our tickle trunk of costumes for several weeks and slowly overtook the end tables, mantle, walls and coffee table with an assortment of kitschy Halloween paraphernalia.  My husband eventually imposed an October 1 start date on our Halloween madness so that no planning or purchase of  goods or early decorating could be mentioned so as to minimize his growing ire with our enthusiasm.

Valentine’s Day was forever imposed on happy memories when we took our 14 month old son to a fancy restaurant on a ‘family date.’  Most people would think us insane to attempt it but we were on kid #1 and we wanted to maintain some sort of normalcy in our relationship.  Our son recognized our attire and decorum had changed in the candle lit and flowered setting.  He similarly put on a charming display of smiles and goodwill as he wolfed down mashed potatoes and braised beef in a wine reduction sauce.  The delicate desserts of chocolate encrusted confection impressed him as much as it did us.  The crowning moment came when we handed our Valentine’s Day cards to one another which we alternatively gushed over and then handed an envelope over to our toddler; he opened it to discover a card embossed with a smiling truck and large billowing hearts.  He was over the moon to receive it and he kept opening and closing it, each time looking up to express his amazement.  Every year we go on a ‘family date’ on Valentine’s Day and believe me, kid #1 and #2 love getting their cards and sometimes a few red, shiny knick knacks to go with it.

Easter is of course the time of the Bunny and all the tasty treats waiting to be found.  St. Patrick’s Day found a foothold when the year long ban on sugary cereal was lifted by a rascally leprechaun who left an opened box of Lucky Charms and wee little gifts of tiny handwriting and a forgotten shoe (the shoe was taken to school the next day for the other children to marvel at and is now in storage in a treasure box hidden somewhere in my son’s room).

Nothing quite compares to my son’s reverence for the tradition of Christmas.  By the time December 25th had been realized this year, my son had made laborious attempts at creating a magical feeling in our household.  He was adamant about purchasing a 12 ft blow up Santa with his own savings of gift and allowance money but his father and I demurred and made the purchase ourselves.   He strung the tree with lights before I even knew he had finished and he brought up the ornaments from the basement with the fervor of reclaimed memories.  Despite the Christmas music and his little sister’s drunken delight in the glass balls and delicate figurines, he grumbled the tree was perhaps too haphazardly assembled and would require some better coordination of lights, garlands and ornamentation to be truly beautiful.   He then could not stand the hollow beneath the lowest branches and proceeded to wrap the presents he had purchased at the school Christmas flea market and even hustled to make some drawings carefully folded and wrapped so as to add height to the first stack of shiny papered packages.  Surfaces were claimed for singing dioramas of polar bears and penguins and removable hooks were attached to the walls and mantle to string even more lights.  His little sister got on the wagon of festive cheer by insisting beautiful cookies were to be made for Santa and our friends.  On Christmas eve the four of us sat around the table for several hours dabbing the final edible beads on our iced sugar cookies of trees, snowmen and snowflakes.

What happens to a boy as he grows up each year with another layer of memory and fondness for the warm glow of family and magic?  Four Christmases ago, when his little sister was just 7 month old and I and my husband were straining under broken sleep, the reality of searching out a live tree was too daunting.  The family in Saskatchewan, 7 driving hours away, was anticipating our visit and the new baby for Christmas so we told our son that we would forego a tree that year.  Our son had just turned six a few days before and he made a remarkable decision.  We had a three foot plastic tree in a weighted decorative pot with white lights meant to decorate the outdoor threshold of a home.  He asked that we bring it up from the basement and use it as our Christmas tree.  We thought it was a great idea and decided the white lights would suffice for decoration.  But, over the next several days while we were distracted with the usual baby/household demands, he dug through the Christmas boxes and finished decorating the humble tree by himself with a plethora of ornaments.  It had begun.

To give you a sense of what awaits our family you need only to watch “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” circa 1989.  Chevy Chase stars as Clark Griswold, the torch bearer to all hopes and dreams of Christmas past and present.  Hours are spent on a confusing array of string lights, ladder and staple gun to bring messianic splendor to his home’s and family’s exterior.  An epic crusade to the forest finds him the perfect tree which induces his daughter’s hypothermia and overwhelms his living room.   When it is destroyed by neglected watering and a reckless cigar, he is driven to a temporary insanity which finds him hacking down a front yard evergreen.  Two thirds through the movie I had my epiphany – all Clark Griswolds were once little boys who embraced the holidays with overzealous dreams and lofty ambitions.  They were the boys that hauled the boxes two times their weight up from the basement and began the decorating in earnest while mom and dad drank wine and played cribbage.  These were the boys that grew up to be men with synchronized Christmas music and light shows that choked up neighborhood traffic and were later posted on YouTube.  I saw all of it clearly and in the midst of the movie I turned to my son and jokingly said, “That’s you.  That’s you when you’re a dad.”  Except my son didn’t laugh.  He turned back to the screen, took in the frenetic joy of chaos, lights, family and eggnog and gave a knowing nod in agreement. Damned if I hadn’t raised our torch bearer.   He would surpass even my own aspirations of holiday grandeur.  Now, I just had to survive several more years before he relinquished my home and decorations in exchange for his own.  It’s a wonderful life when you got family like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Am Nine Years Old*

I just had the January 2017 National Geographic delivered to my house.  It is a special issue on “Gender Revolution” which examines our entrenched and evolving biases towards males and females.  Page 30 is titled “I Am Nine Years Old: Children Across the World Tell Us How Gender Affects Their Lives.” A cultural cross section of nine year olds from 80 households across 4 continents are asked seven questions pertaining to gender because “Children at this age are unquestionably taking account of their own possibilities-and the limits gender places on them.”  I was intrigued by the questionnaire because my son turned nine on December 12.  He can be a soulful little kid sometimes so this morning after he made us pancakes (I woke up to him whispering a question of how much flour and baking powder is needed and after I jotted down the recipe he measured, mixed and fried up the pancakes) I asked if it would be okay to ask him seven questions.  Here are the seven questions posed in National Geographic and my son’s answers:

1)What’s the best thing about being a boy?

70% of the time boys are more athletic than girls.  We’re very athletic.

2)What’s the worst thing about being a boy?

People make fun of us if we wear girly clothes like dresses, lip gloss, nail polish.

3)How might your life be different if you were a girl instead of a boy?

I wouldn’t be made fun of for girly stuff like dresses, nail polish, lip gloss or dolls.

4)What do you want to be when you grow up?

An engineer or geologist because I like learning about minerals and the value of gems.  An engineer because I like building stuff and creating stuff.

5)What is something that makes you sad?

Grumpy and harsh parents. People bullying me – but it also makes me very angry.

(Me in my head:  Ouch.)

6)What makes you happy?

Family is number one.

(Me in my head:  Thank God.  I haven’t messed you up too much yet.)

7)If you could change something in your life or in the world, what would it be?

Better care of the environment.  Invent new stuff that will keep the environment clean like electric cars, solar panels, electric scooters or bikes.  Keep people from using that stuff in spray cans that wrecks the atmosphere.

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Just for fun I decided to ask my three and a half year old the same questions.

1)What’s the best thing about being a girl?

Sliding on a crazy slide.

2)What’s the worst thing about being a girl?

Going on a creepy slide with ghosts and zombies.

3)How might your life be different if you were a boy instead of a girl?

I would be grown up.

4)What do you want to be when you grow up?

A princess.

5)What is something that makes you sad?

Parents.

(Double Ouch. I sense a theme here.)

6)What makes you happy?

Happy parents.

(Okay.  I get it.)

7)If you could change something in your life or in the world, what would it be?

I could change into a butterfly.

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After these insightful answers from my nine and 3 1/2 year old I’m led to believe they will buffer society’s expectations only as well as the padding of love and support I and their Dad offer them.  My daughter believes ghosts and zombies won’t torment her specifically because she’s a girl.  Rather, they are scary for girls and boys alike because childhood, whatever setting or context, is a shared experience.  Parents will passively or assertively influence the choices that are offered whether it be dolls, guns, domesticity or education because we’re not perfect specimens of parental nurturing.  We are constantly taking the temperature of gender equality and pushing our offspring to categorize themselves in the roles on offer-preferably highest in the hierarchy.

When my son went to daycare, I was blown away by the partitioning of interests among the majority of boys and girls.  Up until that point, I thought gender neutrality was possible.  I was wrong.  The girls liked dolls and playing house and the boys spent inordinate amounts of time vrooming.  They occasionally dabbled in other spheres:  my son would play the baby when the girls played house.  He sometimes wore dresses and frequently wore my Mardi Gras beads and gaudy faux diamond bracelets.  Eventually, the three year old girls asserted only girls could wear jewellery.  The boys didn’t care and I could point out several male rappers that blinged while they swaggered.  It seemed there was a gender partition of interests but tastes were imposed.  Unlike the body paint and finery of men in tribal cultures, many men and boys have few options to add striking color to their mundane palette.  No wonder mossy oak camouflage is so popular among white males in patriarchal communities.  Is the camouflage nature of their fashion an unconscious nod to their stylistic suppression?

My parents told me and my sister we were amazing when we forgot and we forgot frequently from the ages of 13-23. We were reminded enough to make us believe that we were capable of anything.  I’m not a perfect parent and I’m sure I’ll stumble along to get it right just like my parents did but I’m also pretty sure my kids will never doubt I and their Dad are their biggest fans.  The balance will be found in recognizing and supporting their gender differences while giving them freedom to explore and find comfort in whomever they need to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ladybug Monster

There once was a very dangerous monster.  He would eat ladybugs all day long – chomp, slurp, gulp, chomp, slurp, gulp.  The more he ate, the more his slimy skin would deepen to red and the darker the black dots would become over every lump and scale on his body.  He did this because he desired to be beautiful and from the land of monsters from which he came, all the monsters fought and preened and bragged to be best among their kind.  There were monsters of hazy blue and grey like the Blue Jay birds upon which they feasted.  Other monsters of shocking yellow crunched the heads of sunflowers all day long.  Yet a third kind had the strongly contrasted orange and white stripes like the Clownfish they hunted among the coral reefs.  Despite their beautiful markings they were a nasty bunch for vanity had rotted their hearts.  They lay waste to the flowers, birds, insects, trees, reptiles, fishes and animals in pursuit of their beautiful colors but nothing could distract from their hideous heads and fearsome bodies.  Two fleshy tentacles dangled on either side of a gap of sharp teeth.  Their eyes were like pools of black oil.  Their fingers were long and pointed and a large hump protruded from their backs.  A lizard like tail dragged behind them and yet they walked on two legs like a man.  The only thing that made each one distinct were their colored patterns.

The Ladybug monster was perhaps the most dangerous because children are very fond of ladybugs.  They are the first and the best of all things that children discover in their backyards and forest.  They are harmless, very pretty and children make a great game of finding them.  They embody the joy of innocents and for that reason, the evil monster gained strength in destroying them.

Now what happens when a little girl loves wearing her ladybug dress?  For there was such a girl.  She was three and a half years old and every day she wore a lovely dress of red with large black dots all over.  The two antennae made up the two straps that curled over her shoulders and the eyes blinked out from the top of her round little tummy.  Her Mom was sure to wash it every night so it would be fresh for her daughter the next day and magically, the dress never faded or tore.

One day, during the first days of autumn when the warm sun glistens on the first yellowing leaves, the little girl was in her backyard playing.  Sure enough, she found a ladybug on the underside of a newly fallen leaf.  She picked it up and began to sweetly talk to the little bug.  She was deep in conversation with her new friend when a low growl could be heard behind the tree.  The little girl looked up to see the Ladybug monster.  At first her eyes were confused by what she saw for the pattern of red and black was so overwhelming to her eyes that she did not see his snarling teeth, long claws or the tail that swished and disturbed the fallen leaves.  The Ladybug monster, for his part, failed to see the little girl swathed inside the garb of a ladybug.  What he did see was a very large and very tasty ladybug and he cackled inside himself thinking what an amazing transformation awaited his foul body once he consumed it.

The little girl finally adjusted her eyes and was so terrified by the Ladybug monster that she was mute, unable to scream for help.  The Ladybug monster approached and opened his jaws wide.

It was at this moment, in the very same tree that had expelled the leaf from which the little girl had found her ladybug friend, that a crow rested upon a branch.  He was an unusually big crow and among his very large family he was the blackest, the shiniest, and the bravest.  He glanced down and was shocked to see a peculiar looking monster about to eat a little girl.  With only a moment to spare before the beast was about to close his teeth around her, the crow let out a tremendous “CAW, CAW, CAW.”

Have you ever heard a crow?  It is quite a startling sound.  To some ears, it is a low and menacing sound.   Which is probably why in all scary movies, just before something really bad happens, you hear a crow cawing.  This time, however,  it stopped the Ladybug monster right in his tracks.  In fact, it did something very remarkable.  The monster started to shrink.  The change was very small at first but the crow kept on cawing.  With every burst of sound from the crow, the monster shrank even more and soon the monster was only as high as the girl’s shoulders. The thing about the CAW of this particular crow was that it came from the growly depths of a very brave bird.   He was known among all the flying creatures to peck at hungry cats that threatened to catch and eat the sparrows, robins or baby birds newly hatched.  He once snatched a baby squirrel away from an eagle just as it was about to be carried away for dinner.  He gently laid it down on a branch and it scurried home.   Monsters thrive on others’ fear and so bravery is the surest way to weaken them.  Bravery can take many forms: telling the truth under threat of harm or embarrassment, protecting the weak, or simply making enough noise so the monsters know they cannot scare you.  Because monsters are only dangerous if we let them scare us.

The loud cawing from the crow managed to wake the girl from her fright and she realized the crow was helping her with his mighty voice.  Here’s a handy fact: besides being friends with ladybugs, the girl happened to be fantastic at bird calls.  In addition to learning how to sound like a chickadee or a prairie grouse, her mother had taught her how to sound like a crow.  Every time they would see a group of crows cawing to each other, they would join in, cawing and calling out to the others.  The crows would caw back and this would go on for several minutes until they flew off.  The other handy thing about the little girl was besides being good and kind, she was also terrifically brave.  No tree was too high to climb, no slide too fast to go down and no swing too tall that she wouldn’t sweep upwards as high as she could.  Her parents feared for broken bones or a fractured skull, but magically like the dress, she was never harmed or even suffered a tiny scratch.

The little girl added her own cawing to that of the big black crow in the tree and soon the noise shrank the Ladybug monster to no bigger than a tiny bug.  In fact, if you squinted your eyes, the red and black dotted monster looked like a ladybug.  The girl picked up the monster and the crow flew down from his branch to land at her feet.  The girl bent down and with an outstretched hand offered the Ladybug monster to the crow.  The crow gave a happy sound, picked up the little red and black morsel and swallowed him in one gulp.

Since that day, ladybugs have been free to roam without fear.  The little girl grew up to be a world famous bird photographer and so it was quite useful she was talented at mimicking bird calls and also an expert tree climber.  She could often be found perched on the highest limbs of trees calling to rare birds that would happily flit over to her for their photo op.  The crow became a great warrior; he flew around the world, cawing and shrinking and eating all those nasty monsters.   It turned out despite their slimy skin and ugly features they were very tasty, so the crow lived a long, contented life on a diet of monsters until no more existed.  From that time forward the plants, insects, birds and animals lived happily in peace.

Postscript:  My sister asked me to write about the Trump win to formulate into words what my family and friends were feeling.  I came up with this story.  I suppose in times that evoke fear or apprehension or just unknowing, we must amalgamate our thoughts into stories if not to protect us from reprisal but to also simplify our understanding of events.  I have no idea how Trump will perform as president, all I know is that “history doesn’t forget, people do.”  So we wait to see if the people of the United States have repeated the mistakes of the past.

Hillary vs Trump

I can’t belief I’m writing this post.  It seems a ridiculous topic because everyone and their dog has weighed in on this political drama.  I’m not even sure what either party is stumping anymore.  Full disclosure: I’m Canadian.  We have boring politics.  We voted out our last prime minister because he became too cloak and dagger with his policy decisions.  We voted in Trudeau because a) he’s handsome (yes, really) b)incredibly idealistic and c)naively optimistic; everything a prime minister needs to be righteous.  We love righteousness with a dollop of humble pie.  That is where American and Canadians are fundamentally different: we conceal contempt in favor of a begrudging handshake because we hate being the moral underdog.   Americans express contempt by right of moral authority.  Which one is the hypocrite?   It doesn’t really matter.   This post isn’t about the best approach to being heard.  It is about women in politics.  YES!  A feminist rant.  Please brace yourselves.

Here is the backstory.  My daughter and I have being going for about a year to playgroup hosted by a Baptist church as part of their community outreach.  I’m not Baptist.  I’m not Christian.  Or Muslim.  Or Jewish.  I grew up on First Nations reserves and I would say I’m closest to being an animist: the belief that all living things have a spirit and that we must peacefully coexist with Mother Earth through an acceptance of our humble place in its inspiring dynamics.   I go to the playgroup because they have excellent coffee, lots of snacks for the kids and parents and the conversation is good.  I’ve never hidden these facts and they know I won’t be attending  bible studies  anytime soon.   Every week the playgroup is hosted by the church coordinator, a lovely woman in her 50s that is always generous with her hugs and has an easy smile.   I’ve never had reason to be wary of her opinion or judgement.

Two days ago, a mother wanted to kick up a quick conversation by asking me if I’d watched the second televised debate between Hillary and Trump.  No, I hadn’t.  I stated:  I have no desire to watch Trump speak; he does not speak with meaning or purpose but only with vitriol.   The mother concurred and thought he was possibly crazy.  The church coordinator piped up:  no one should vote for Hillary; she cannot be trusted.  Which meant:  the Americans should vote for Trump.   I said a few more things on the subject, well aware the church coordinator was not speaking due to her disagreement with my favored choice for president.  I left the room to finish packing away some toys, thinking no more of it.  When I returned a few minutes later,  I entered upon the last utterance to the mother:  no woman should be a world leader.   The church coordinator immediately changed the topic upon my reentry into the room and thanked me (twice) for my help.  A classic Canadian moment.  Bleh.

If I had to describe the line drawn in the sand between Hillary and Trump, I would say it is the demarcation of two perceived crimes:  a husband’s adultery and the triumph of a woman scorned.  If ever there was a reason to elevate a woman’s transgressions to the crimes of her husband, I naively calculated Hillary’s post coital loyalty to her husband to be cancelled out by Trump’s own philandering.    How wrong I was.   It seems that adultery is a crime that doles out justice on a sliding scale; men may be forgiven but a woman is bonded in perpetuity to her own foolishness, either as victim or wrongdoer.

Hillary can and should be a world leader.  She is smart and politically savvy and tough as nails.  She does not succumb to outbursts of emotion under extreme verbal assault and doesn’t flinch from over inflated threats.  She is a class act.  It is ironic that her adversary is unable to exhibit the same restraint and whose histrionics undermine his legitimacy to pass judgement on women.  I’m only disappointed that other women would attempt to do the same.  In 2016, the disparity in moral indignation towards men and women for equal crimes is hard to behold.  As a good feminist or maybe just an idealist, I’ll have my champagne ready on election night.  Good luck Hillary and may your good fortune sweep forth the winds of change.  It seems the moral righteousness of men and women, American and Canadian alike, could use a good dusting.

Petulant Daughters

I love my kids.  I love my son for his zombie humor and his older-than-eight-years introspection and thoughtfulness.  I love my three year old daughter for her complete and utter belief in the empowerment of little girls and in her superhero awesomeness.  They are fascinating creatures to watch – better than television.   At this stage of the parenthood game I have a few tricks up my sleeve and a well of patience I’ve dug from the multitude of traumatizing experiences of being a parent: public tantrums, pale yellow torrents of diarrhea that signal impending vomiting, horrific embarrassment after your child ‘truths’ you out to your friends (yes, I think your kid plays too many video games), and of course the epic fail of realizing the movie you watched was totally inappropriate for your 3 year old and she tells everyone she meets about the “monster sucking out the man’s eyeballs and eating them.”   When you’ve committed $60 to the movie tickets and the snacks, your moral compass gets hocked.

For all my procreating hubris, there is one challenge that I have yet to meet eye to eye – that of the petulant daughter.   Our family doesn’t have the best track record of mother-daughter relationships.  They are fraught with narcissism and in some instances, mental illness.  Sons seems better adept at rolling with the punches – thank you Oedipus and the simplified social gratification of men.  Women’s brains are hardwired for mapping out the circuitous routes of hierarchy and alliance.  We are by nature striving for the perfection of give and take and so we are incredibly perceptive of imbalance.  It only took several thousand years to begin balancing the scales of housework and career with our spouses because as you know, women have the ability to hold a grudge for a very, very long time.  It drives us to betterment. Or at least pushes us to take a step upwards on the ladder of whatever social contrivance we are trying to best.  I suppose it is no small wonder our daughters’ first rung in on the backs of their mothers.

My daughter wants power to do as she pleases.  My job is to temper her enthusiasm with facts.  Yes, you must wear a winter coat, it is -10C outside and you will catch a cold if you don’t.  Yes, you must be kind and gentle to other children because no one will play with you if you yell at them.  Yes, you must hold my hand while we cross the street because the odds of being hit by a car climb substantially if you run out on your own.  I have to remind her daily it is my job to keep her safe and teach her the social customs that will allow her to get along with the world.  I have had the same conversations with my son and he accepts these truths  wholeheartedly.  My daughter begrudges my interference.

What is a Mom to do?  Alas, I have been a petulant daughter, myself.  Inevitably, daughters will cast off what they will and accept what they wish.  It is a process as old as fermentation.  Sometimes you get a wonderful byproduct such as bread and beer and sometimes it is a rotting mess of a science project gone awry.  There is a certain comfort in knowing you are raising the next matriarch.  She will take over the planning and preparation of family feasts and will ensure the connectivity of her brethren.  It is innate.  I must remind myself to step back, step back and watch.  My daughter needs the freedom to explore her superhero awesomeness.  Today she will leap from her bed onto a pile of stuffies, gaining mementos of confidence and tomorrow she will argue and provide counterattack to perceived parental injustice.  She must do this because in the future she will battle greater foe than I.   In the meantime, I will provide her with the best memories I can (sorry about the eyeballs), keep her safe and love her with every ounce of my soul and heart.