Why I love them

I.

Why I love her:

Her bead work spills and runs all over the room, everywhere, everything wrecked, hours of work, destroyed, and:

Flora: Aaaaaaaah! There are not enough bad words in my vocabulary to express how I feel right now!

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II.

Why I love him:

Cinder: Want me to turn off Mom’s computer so you can learn a few new ones?

(He doesn’t. So I really love him. And he makes Flora laugh.)

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III.

Why I love him:

Sean: Oh, sweetheart. Want Daddy to help you pick them up?

IV.

Why I love him:

Ender: Moooooom! Look how brilliant I am! I am swinging from this rope, upside down, holding all my snakes with my feet! AND, I have a pencil in my nose!

Proof I love him: I take the pencil away. My wholesome neglect and permissiveness only go so far.

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V.

Why they love me:

Jane: I am in a piss-bad mood, stressed, and possibly completely insane. No one talk to me, and more importantly, for fcksk, no one listen to anything I say!

VI.

Oh, how they know me:

Cinder: Is it because I was a big buttsack* all day?

Ender: It’s because I peed in the garbage can, not the toilet.

Flora: I think it’s because Mercury’s in retrograde.**

Sean: I’m going to run out and get some chocolate.***

♥

* It’s a metaphor. Don’t think about it too much. Don’t. You did, didn’t you?

** Also, how you know we live next door to a psychic.

*** I really am that easy.

xoxo

“Jane”

P.S. So… apparently half of Calgary needed to read Tuesday’s After the flood: Running on empty and why “Are things back to normal?” is not the right question post. Thank you for the tremendous response. I’m on deadline and behind on everything non-billable, but yes of course you can share it, reprint it, reblog it, and photocopy it (although … wouldn’t it be easier to just email the link?). Thank you.

P.P.S. Flora was Cousin Itt. Cinder was–creepy. Ender was sometimes a dragon and sometimes a dinosaur–anyway, a reptile with an identity crisis.

After the flood: Running on empty and why “So are things back to normal?” is not the right question

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He asks the question with a smile, as a casual opener before we move on to “real” issues, and is shocked and appalled when I burst into tears because, well—I don’t cry.

“Are things back to normal?” he says and immediately wishes he hadn’t said it, and doesn’t know where to go from there. And I’m shocked too—I don’t know where the hell those tears have come from, because I’m fine, we’re fine, everything’s just fine.

Except, of course, it’s not.

We had this flood in YYC and Southern Alberta back in June, you may remember (my flagship post about it was unLessons from the flood: We are amazing, and if you want facts, visit the evolving Wikipedia entry  or the Calgary’s Herald’s The Great Flood of 2013 page), that devastated my neighbourhood and so much of our city. An army of citizen volunteers turned out in the tens of thousands to respond to the crisis. It was amazing. It was euphoric. It had us walking on air and out of crisis mode in a couple of intense weeks.

People were asking a week, two weeks after the flood—as soon as the rivers receded, as soon as most of the debris that was our basements, our houses, our possessions, our lives, was taken off the streets and into the dumps—“Are things back to normal?”

And in late July, August, euphoric, proud, we could smile and say, “We’re out of crisis mode.” And maybe talk a little about insurance, and the Disaster Recovery Program, and plans for reconstruction. And laud our mayor’s leadership and bitch out the provincial government and, you know, do all those “normal” things.

I’m not sure when “normal” got harder to fake. Maybe in September, when we’d reconnect with people we hadn’t seen for a few months, and they’d say, “So—did you have a good summer?”

Funny—we are so socially programmed to be inoffensively happy and placating, the autoresponse to that question, which the mouth starts to form before the brain has a moment to reflect, is, “Yes. And you? That flood thing? A minor inconvenience. Moving on. Going to Disneyland!”

I did not have a great summer. We did not have a great summer. And things are not back to normal. What does that mean, anyway?

I look at him as if he can give me the answer, but of course he can’t. And he’s never seen me like this before, or under stress before, but he’s spend the summer ripping out friends’ basements, and they’re none of them quite “normal” right now either. But they’re not talking about it. “We’re fine, everything’s fine.” So what’s going on? What’s up with us, what’s tearing us up, as we move into month five after the flood?

I struggle to put it into words.

The obvious answer is that reconstruction is not going well. The rip-outs, it turns out, were the easy part. Putting things back… Well. We’re all at different stages. Sunnyhill’s probably further behind than many others because of our need to rehabilitate all 41 damaged units simultaneously. But I don’t know anyone who was affected who’s totally “done.” Most of us—all of Sunnyhill—have been back home for a long time. But we’re living in reduced, scarred spaces. An eternal mess. That’s hard. I know every time I walk in and out of my front door, every time I see the ripped door casings, the dismantled walls, the hole where my hall closet used to be, my jaw tightens.

So. That kind of sucks. But—really—I’ve been through renovations before. Who hasn’t? We are, I tell him, the mildly inconvenienced. We know this. Bitching and complaining about naked joists, drywall dust and “what the hell did the contractors do now?” seems like such a First World Whine. And that’s the other thing.

We feel bad—guilty—over feeling bad. Because. India. Colorado. Fuck, High River.

That sure doesn’t help.

He refills my glass. He tells me about his friend, whose house is fine but whose rental property was devastated, and how guilty she feels that her own personal loss wasn’t greater. That she was, ultimately, only financially inconvenienced, while her tenants lost—everything.

Stupid, I say.

Human, he counters.

I start crying again. He gives me his napkin to wipe away tears, snot. I hide my face.

We’re exhausted, I say when I can talk again. I’m the mother of three young children who all went through severe insomniac stages—and I’ve never been this physically exhausted. And it’s not from physical labour, the way it was during the crisis. We were entitled to be exhausted then, right? But now—others are doing the work (or getting paid to do work the results of which we’re not seeing, I snarl, and I laugh, and he does too, because that’s “normal” for me, much more normal than these uncontrolled tears). We’re just doing the everyday stuff—well, a little more, and so much of the everyday stuff is more difficult, but… Not entitled to complain. Not engaged in heavy physical labour. And, frankly, letting a lot of the everyday stuff go. Never did one thing to the flooded garden this year. Cleaning windows? Ha. I barely clean the kitchen. And my kids have never eaten so much take-out, ever. So what are we exhausted from?

Living? he says, gently.

I shake my head.

Frankly—I look at him through the wine glass, and it’s the refraction of light through liquid that blurs his features, not the water still swimming in my eyes—frankly, we’re exhausted from being so fucking positive and amazing. We know we pulled off a miracle. We were awesome. We were strong.

And now we’re really tired, and we’re done—except, of course, we’re not done.

Because things are not back to normal.

But tears aren’t swimming in my eyes anymore and I heave a sigh of relief.

Jesus, that felt good, I tell him. And then—I’m so sorry. We were supposed to talk about…

He interrupts me, waves my apology away. And he tells me—how he’s been struggling. Trying to figure out how to be a good friend to his floodster (we don’t do the victim thing in YYC, and survivor’s a rather dramatic term, don’t you think?) friends post-crisis, and feeling at a loss. And how he needed to hear this as much as I needed to tell it. And how he will never ask anyone in any of the affected Calgary neighbourhoods “Are things back to normal?” ever again.

We laugh. Order dessert. More wine.

In this moment, although things are not back to normal, I’m fine. We’re fine.

Or, at least—you know. Functional.

• 

The writer engages in overt emotional manipulation, both to achieve a level of release and to communicate that which is hard to articulate. My family and friends won’t finish reading this post—they’ll be texting me in a panic before they get to the end of the first paragraph. Chill. Although things are definitely not back to normal—and for the love of any and all of the gods I don’t believe in, do not ask your flooded (or otherwise whacked by life’s events) friends and neighbours if things are back to normal, ok? Just don’t—life is unfolding as it must. And in my own beloved little corner of the flood plain, we are all doing what must be done. And—because we’re a community—we’re helping each other through it. (And possibly drinking too much wine, but. So be it.)

But if you’re on the hills and edges of the flood plains—if you’re on the edges of any life affected by a traumatic event—and you’re struggling to figure out how to help your friends who are clearly post-crisis but equally clearly not-ok, do this:

  • Listen. Don’t tell us how strong, wonderful, amazing, or lucky we are. Just listen. Let us feel bad, sad, frustrated, furious. Tired. We know we’re amazing. We kind of need permission to be… whiney.
  • Connect us to help. If you’re a local reader and you need to help a local floodster, a good starting point is the resource list provided by Alberta Health Services here. But babe, remember how I was telling you during the crisis to see the need and fill it, how saying “How can I help?” isn’t enough when people are in shock? Sending your friend the link or telephone number may not be enough. Walk the line between empathy and obnoxiousness as best as you can, but a “May I call and make an appointment for you?” is likely more helpful than “Here’s a link I thought you’d find helpful” email. For your hard-core entrepreneur friends who don’t want to do stress-relief acupuncture and roll their eyes at sacrocranial therapy etc. etc., the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has some hard-core resources—that include getting connected with counsellors if that’s what you need.
  • Recognize that we’re not as… full, or resilient as we used to be. And so—take less. In a way, take more—we’re not as patient or tolerant as we used to be either. Nor necessarily as rational. Deal with it. And, if you can, look for ways to fill us up. (Preferably not just with wine. Although that sometimes does do wonders.)
  • Invite yourself over. Our scarred houses are difficult to love right now. Sometimes, company is difficult to seek out. But isolation really sucks. Come on over.
  • Invite us over, or out. Our scarred houses are a little oppressive right now, but suck us in with all their demands. Get us out.

•

For my neighbours, who are awesome, and doing all the things. But who are also exhausted and running on empty, and need to have those feelings acknowledged and respected. (Especially my beloved L. So much love and appreciation for all that you’re doing.)

For my friends, who helped so much, and who are always trying to help. In the most creative, occasionally disturbing, ways. (Yeah, I’m talking about you. I’m not saying it didn’t work… but that was really weird. Still. Thank you.)

And, for myself. Cause I really needed to cry.

Cheers.

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“Jane”

Sat., Nov. 2nd P.S. You’re breaking my heart but also feeding my soul with what you’re sending to my in-box. Yes, you are free to share this piece wherever you think it needs to be heard. The private place to cry is nothingbythebook@gmail.com. Much love. J.

Share This: Unplanned Twiblings, a birth story of international adoption

It’s about to happen again, in Aisle 9, just as I successfully navigate the kids’ bulky side-by-side double-stroller, past the mountain of soup cans and stop in front of the supply of diapers. The stranger smiles at me and beams at the kids. Makes straight for us. And I know what she’s going to say before it comes out of her mouth, it’s what they always say: “Ooooh! They’re adorable! Are they twins?”

•

That’s the opening paragraph of the coming-to-motherhood story of one of the most amazing women in my real life, Evelyn Ackah, a Calgary business immigration lawyer. I met Evelyn when Ender was growing in my belly and when she was actively pursuing adoption as a single, black professional women. We were expecting together–and her “pregnancy” was much longer and emotionally much tougher than Ender’s merely biologically difficult gestation. I’ve been privileged to witness her story and as her babies turned two, we thought the world should really hear about her path to motherhood through international adoption, as a single, professional woman of colour. I reached out to one of my former editor at The Globe and Mail (that would be one of Canada’s national newspapers to my Yankee and global readers) who connected Evelyn with the fabulous Jane Gadd who edits The Globe‘s Facts & Arguments page. If you read The Globe, you would have seen Evelyn’s story featured on The Globe and Mail’s Facts & Arguments page  on the Wednesday, October 23, 2013 as Why my kids aren’t twins but twiblings.

Evelyn called the original version “Unplanned Twiblings,” and she’s graciously allowed me to share the full, unedited version here. Enjoy. May her story inspire you–and make you think.

♥

Unplanned Twiblings

by Evelyn Ackah

It’s about to happen again, in Aisle 9, just as I successfully navigate the kids’ bulky side-by-side double-stroller, past the mountain of soup cans and stop in front of the supply of diapers. The stranger smiles at me and beams at the kids. Makes straight for us. And I know what she’s going to say before it comes out of her mouth, it’s what they always say: “Ooooh! They’re adorable! Are they twins?”

I do what I always do. I smile. Nod my head. And thus, effectively, lie. Because they’re not twins―they’re three-and-a-half months apart, actually. I call them my twiblings. My beautiful, unplanned twiblings. But that answer has a backstory that’s too long and complicated to get into with a stranger in a grocery store aisle or that other mother at a playground, who’s pushing a stroller with “real” twins or the people in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.

They all ask. And, much of the time, when they ask―even though I usually do feel the question is intrusive―I am grateful, very grateful, that they do not ask, “Are they yours?”

Mine. They are mine, my children, my family. The end of my journey to become a mother, and the beginning of my parenting adventure.

I always knew I was going to be a mother. No question. The future held a child, maybe two. And when, in my late 30s, I had to accept that my body would not be the route to motherhood, my long-term boyfriend and I immediately looked to adoption. My vision of the future, in 2007 was clear at the time. We took the courses, underwent home studies and dealt with the copious amounts of paperwork becoming an adoptive family entails. I would be a mother. An adoptive mother. I was excited about the process. We planned to adopt from my native country of Ghana, West Africa.  Unfortunately, as Ghana is not a common destination for international adoptions, it was uncharted legal and procedural territory. Every step had to be discovered. And every step took much longer than anticipated.

In 2009, still unmatched in Ghana, I had to revise my vision of my future once again. My partner and I split up. I was 39, single, and with a very demanding career. What was I going to do? Pursue adoption as a single professional woman or give up the dream?  I had no illusions: I knew parenthood wasn’t all smiles and roses. I knew it was a lifetime commitment and incredibly hard work. Could I do it?

Could I afford to wait until I would not be alone?

In the end, I decided that my desire to be a mother was separate, or perhaps even greater, than my desire to be a wife. I was not going to put my adoption journey, already two years long, on hold and wait for the right man to enter my life before continuing. I would do it on my own.

It was, frankly, a difficult, terrifying decision.

But not nearly as difficult as what came after. Between early 2009 and the spring of 2011, I was matched with three children in Ghana. Each match fell through. Each one was heart-breaking and devastating. I was not sure how much I could endure.

I decided to look closer to home, at Canadian private adoptions. And I was shocked to find out how difficult it would be to be chosen to adopt in Canada as a single woman.

My continued research led me to the United States, where I found out certain states accept and encourage single parent adoptions. I settled on Florida as the best fit, both in terms of the legislative process and the fact that there were more children of colour available for adoption. I may have given up on adopting from Ghana… but I still wanted a child that looked like me.

Do you understand how important it is to me, when people see me and my children, that they don’t automatically make an assumption that they are “not really mine,” that they “must be adopted” because their skin, hair, eye colour is different? Think about that the next time you see a Caucasian dad with an Asian daughter, a white woman with a black baby. Don’t ask them, “Are they yours?” “Are they adopted?”  If you must say something, simply smile, and say, “What a beautiful baby or child.”

I was chosen by a family to adopt their fifth child within weeks of starting the application process. I was delirious. I skyped and talked on the phone with the family throughout the final few weeks of the pregnancy. The baby was born, a healthy baby girl. My mother and I had plane tickets booked to fly to Florida… and the day before we were to leave, the birth family parents changed their minds. They were going to keep the baby.

Another heartbreak.

I am a strong woman, truly. But this… I took to my bed. I could not work or think – nothing.

I booked a trip to Mexico for my mother and me to get me away. And again―the day before we were to leave for Mexico―the agency in Florida called. Another match.  A baby boy, born three days ago. The mother picked me, loved my application and album and was ready to sign all the papers immediately. Was I coming right away?

No.

I can’t quite put into words what was happening to me―I was mourning that little girl that I thought I was going to adopt. I didn’t even have nay boys names picked out. I was in such pain, I could not be happy about this turn of events. I was terrified I would be heartbroken again.

My mother and I went to Mexico. It was supposed to be a week on the beach―we lasted four days. And then, we flew to Florida.

And I met my son.

I fell in love with him―immediately and repeatedly. My world spun, and changed. I was a mother. I was a mother! I was sleep-deprived and living in an apartment hotel in Florida, doing all the final paperwork required to take him home. My plate was full. So full.

So of course, that was when I got the call from Ghana. A little girl had been identified. Four months old. Was I interested?

No. Absolutely not. I wasn’t even going to go there. Neither for another heartbreak, or for parenting two children as a single mom. No. Absolutely not.

But after a couple of weeks and lots of family meetings and promises of support, I decided to go for it―somehow it felt like things were meant to be―things had come full-circle.

I would not meet my daughter for another 14 months. I am still both regretful and grateful for that year. I was able to take her out of the orphanage and place her with my extended family in Ghana, so she spent that year surrounded by lots of love and attention. Both she and my son spent the first year of their lives effectively as only children, first children, and I am grateful for that. And I talked and Skyped with her constantly. But yet―she was so far, far away. And was she real? I knew how intensely I loved my son, the impact of his physical presence on me. Could I love another child this much, ever?

I learned birth parents often feel this way when expecting their second―yet she was the oldest child! And when I finally met my daughter, when she was 18 months old, my heart leaped out of me and into her and she was mine, as much as my son was mine. We were a family.

And now, I push a stroller with my twiblings, who are both well into the terrible―er, terrific―twos. I don’t want to underplay it or sugarcoat it: life as a single mother of two little people is challenging. The path to motherhood for me was hard and full of heartbreak and disappointment, and the real journey, the one that begins when the children came into my home, into my life, is emotionally and physically exhausting. And yet so worth it. These are the children I was supposed to raise.

My twiblings.

Evelyn Ackah is a business immigration lawyer with Ackah Law, a Western Canadian boutique practice focused exclusively on business immigration law. Born in Ghana, raised and educated in Vancouver, the one-time Torontonian now lives in Calgary with her two beautiful children.

• 

P.S. You can tell she’s fabulous just from this story, right? If you want a more detailed peek at her professional life, here’s a profile I wrote about her when she was “just” a source and not a friend.

P.P.S. Next week on Nothing By The Book, I think I’m going to tell you why I’m so tired of being an adult.

On wanting to eat cake, magic pee, fairies, adult temper tantrums, and sub-performing grey matter

I.

Flora: Blow out your candles, Ender, blow them out and make a wish! … And what did you wish for?

Ender: I wished that I could eat some cake!

See? Wishes do come true. And I suppose this is the point at which I should make the obvious sappy comment about how maybe happiness is just about … wanting what you can get.

Maybe. But how incredibly boring and safe would such a life be? If all you ever wanted was the cake that was put, that moment, in front of you?

II.

“To ensure peak performance, your mom needs eight hours of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep each night. This will never happen, but it’s important to set goals.”

“Remarkably, despite their size, moms can sleep on as little as three inches of bed. Science has no explanation of this.”

from M.O.M.* (Mom Operating Manual),
written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Laura Cornell
*batteries not included

III.

Flora: I really hate the people who think science explains everything.

Jane: Really? Why?

Flora: What about all the things science can’t explain? Like unicorns? And fairies?

Jane: Um… well…

Flora: Don’t you dare give me another evolution lecture. I WILL believe in fairies.

All right, my beloved. Believe. Believe.

IV.

My brain is slow. The hamster that operates the wheel is lazy. The machinery is worn out. I’m grasping for words, simple words, all elusive, out of reach. Clumsy sentences. Awkward paragraphs. Lack of motivation, desire, ability to finish, to start. Nothing is working. Nothing is right. I’m stupid. Incompetent. I poke at the keyboard. Stare at the screen. Howl.

Cinder: See, and this is why I don’t think it’s fair when you lecture me about getting mad at the computer when I play Minecraft.

Jane: I want you to be better disciplined and better behaved than I am.

Cinder: Probably not going to happen.

Probably not. But. We always hope, don’t we. We always want them to be better than their imperfect parents.

V.

“Should your mother be experiencing a minor malfunction, your best option is simply avoidance. Tiptoe quietly to another part of the house until the coast is clear.”

“If you cannot leave the room, camouflage can be very effective during minor malfunctions. Silence is key. … Take your surroundings into account. If you are behind the sofa, a tall leafy branch is probably not a great idea.”

from M.O.M.* (Mom Operating Manual),
written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Laura Cornell
*batteries not included

VI.

Ender: Mama, I did it! I peed in the potty!

Jane: Oh, Ender, that’s… there’s nothing here.

Ender: It’s imaginary pee. Flora can see it.

Of course.

VII.

I do all the things that need to be done. Always. I force that goddamn hamster in my brain to perform, no matter how lazy he’s feeling. Meet every deadline. Then, do all the things that didn’t get done while I was doing all the things that had to be done. Well, maybe not all of them. But—a few.

And now, I’m trying to get hamster to get this post across the finish line—even as he tries to convince me that his higher purpose right now is to have a nap. And that while he naps, someone—the fairies, maybe?—will come and oil his wheel and the rest of my machinery, and everything will magically work better soon.

I scowl at him. Eat cake. But then—choose to want more. Always.

Because life is supposed to be full. Interesting. Hard.

xoxo

“Jane”

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P.S. M.O.M.* (Mom Operating Manual), written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Laura Cornell is a brilliant picture book, targeted I would say at four to six-year-olds, but my entire crew howled as we read it. Check it out. If you’re in YYC, we’ll be returning our copy to the library shortly. But you probably don’t want to wait for that. It’s $14 and change at Chapters-Indigo.

*batteries not included

Any way they have to come: why you should throw out that birth plan and just have that baby

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The Ender turns four this week, and as my crunchy friends send him heartfelt birthday wishes, they also wish me a happy birthing day. Except, it really wasn’t. Happy, I mean. But it doesn’t matter. It was. And he came. And we were both healthy. And that was enough.

So today I give you my long, sappy and thoroughly unfunny birthing story. This is how Ender came. The way he had to come. I don’t give you the really unfunny backstory leading up to it–that’s mine to hold and process, only mine, even more than four years later.

If you’d rather experience (or, if you’ve been in my life since 2009, relive) the short version where I regain my sense of humour, it’s here: The last three minutes of Ender’s otherwise criminally long arrival on planet Earth. And if birth stories give you the heebee-jeebees–and I totally understand, baby, the miracle of birth is horribly gross, really, the things we do for the continuation of the species, crazy, utterly crazy–go read … um, how about the day Flora decided we were going to keep Ender, even though he’s not a girl? Yeah, that’s a good one, “He’s a Keeper.” And it’s short. Minimal time commitment.

But if you’ve got a little bit of time and glory in the full story… here we go…

This is the long version of Ender’s arrival, the last 12 or so hours, written for and published in  Birthing magazine.

As dawn breaks over Calgary’s first winter snowstorm in  October 2009, I’m 14 days post-estimated-due-date and on the parking lot usually known as Crowchild Trail, en route to the Rockyview Hospital for an induction.

“It’s a good thing you’re not really in labour,” Sean, my partner, says. “Or else we really would be having this baby in the van.”

Ha ha ha. I try not to get angry at my uterus, cervix, DNA code—whichever part of me it is that is not working the way I think it ought to. I try to be philosophical. They come as they must, and all that matters is that they come, healthy, safe. I almost believe it.

Continue reading →

The obvious correlation between crying over spilt coffee and potty training

Sean: Ender! Why did you spill Mama’s coffee?

Ender: I not spill coffee. I pour coffee out.

Sean: The question stands: Why? Why? Why?

Ender: I have to pee.

Sean: Of course. Let’s go.

Ender: No. I pee in coffee cup. That’s why I pour coffee out.

it's potty time!

Sob.

First published October 26, 2012 on Nothing By The Book. This happened more than a year ago. And is the Ender potty-trained yet?

Sob.

Sob.

Sob.

Waaaaaaaah!

“Jane”

P.S. I’m back from the land of the sun and the mouse. Mired in critical deadlines. So you’ll only see me around if the work isn’t going well. In which case, you need to look at me very sternly–in my IRL eye or my cyber-eye–and say, “Get back to work, Jane!” My clients thank you in advance.

P.P.S. Cloudy With a Chance of Wine, that’s the coffee cup you’re getting if you ever have the guts to visit my house. Ha!

Ferocious Five

Did you guess where I am? I should have packed more painkillers. Fortunately, there are drug stores and hot tubs everywhere. While I’m away–you know where I am, right? Figured it out?–a bunch of my friends have daughters who are turning five in the next little while. Here’s a recap of Flora’s Ferocious Five.

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2007. Flora is five years and three weeks old today—the three weeks is important, as important as the “half” was when she was four and a half. She’s just come off a very long—for our healthy, active girl—illness, almost two weeks of intermittent fever, sore throat and cough, sniffles and overall body aches, with two days of puking thrown in at the start just for fun. She’s physically well now, but weak. And fragile. Each of her nerves and emotions is exposed to the harsh air of every day life, and the smallest of life’s trials rub her raw and send her spiraling into misery.

It’s driving us mad.

We’ve been here before with her. She celebrated turning two by being sad for three weeks, non-stop. (Funny thing about time: at the time, we thought it was months. Perhaps an entire year. Fortunately, I keep records. It was three weeks on the dot, 21 days of almost incessant crying, over everything.) Between three and four—and especially on either side of three and a half—life thwarted her at every step and she barely survived (us too). At four and a half there was a brief—six days, but oh dear god what a six days—reprisal.

So this is Take Four of Flora being uber-fragile, and I’m trying very hard to approach it as a yet another opportunity handed to me by the universe to crack the Flora code. (We successfully cracked the Cinder code when he was two [this post is coming to the blog Archives soon!] and haven’t been significantly challenged in our interpretation of it since then; Flora is proving to be more complex. Perhaps we women really are.) However hard, each take has offered amazing insights and lessons. The first time around, when she was two and in tears, the lesson to us was simple. Happiness comes from within. We cannot make her happy or peaceful—it is not, indeed, our responsibility to make her happy. The best we can do is provide a certain type of environment, some coping tools—but the only one who can make Flora happy (or not) is Flora.

The lesson of Take Two was more nebulous, and it wasn’t really about Flora. It was about me and you (yes, you, the reading you, the you walking past my yard, the you I pass on the park path, the you paying a visit to my house while she’s having a meltdown). In a nutshell, it was: you don’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter, your reaction to Flora or to my reaction to Flora or to anything else that’s happening right now in Flora’s world doesn’t matter. Sorry. You don’t want to hear that, but I need to remind myself of it, throw you out of my mind, and focus on me and Flora. Then, I need to put me to the side—I’ll come back to me later, recharge, re-examine, ponder exactly why I was feeling the way I was and wanting to react the way I was, I’ll do all that, but later.

Right now, with you and me out of the way, I need to focus on Flora, I need to help her cope, work out some tools that she can use to help find herself, work through whatever inner turmoil she’s experiencing right now, and come back to a place of balance. This moment is all about her, and I need to surrender to that first. Only then can I help her… and maybe helping her just means being there while she can’t help herself. And then, when there is a moment when she wants and needs and is open to help—then, I step in. Without my baggage, without making this about me—much less you—but just her.

This lesson is much harder than calculus and I’m still studying it, reviewing it, intermittently failing it, because, at least some of the time, I want you to approve of my and my child and my parenting.

Flora—the current, five year old Flora—is stirring on the couch beside me now making whimpering unhappy noises as she wakes up from a quasi-nap, and I’m revisiting the second part of the lesson. Not about me. About her. What does she need? (Part of me says, a kick in the head.) Apparently, she says, her whole self covered with the blanket. Translation: control over her surroundings.

Take Three’s lesson was simple, so long as Take Two’s lesson was mastered. Repeat: it’s not about you or me. It’s about her. In capital letters: It’s about HER. Between three and five, children are as purely and completely selfish as selfish can be. They’re not psychotic, unsocialized, undisciplined: they just are. Purely, beautifully selfish. The world is all about them, and that’s all that matters to them.

This can suck to the rest of us having to live in the world alongside them. Until, that is, we realize that developmentally speaking, this is normal and inevitable… and it is possible to “work” with it. Asking a child in that stage to do something—or stop doing something, or, ha!, feeling something—because of the effect it has on other people is a recipe for frustration. They can’t comply: they don’t hear you. Oh, they can learn to fake complicity through coercive discipline. But they don’t get it. The world is about them.

At four and half, and into five, I know this. Flora’s world is all about her. In retrospect, on either side of five, Cinder’s world was all about him too. But he manifested it in a different way and it was easier to live with. It was all about doing stuff. For Flora, it’s about feeling stuff. Waaay more complex.

So, here we are in Take Four. Obviously, for me, part of the lesson here is a remedial review of Take Two. It’s not about me. It’s all about her. This part, I’m doing pretty well on. I need to work a little bit more on the fact that you don’t matter. And also, I need to flip the fact that it’s not about me on its head. I actually need to make it about me: that is, seize each of these moments as an opportunity to work on ME. MY response. MY feelings and MY expression of them. MY understanding. What am I doing in this moment and why, and can I be the me in this moment that I want to be? Can I be that me just a little bit longer? One more minute? Another after that?

People pay big money for transcendental moments like this: they go to workshops, retreats, read books, meditate… and lucky me, motherhood is delivering these life-changing, self-reflecting opportunities to me just about every day…

First published in Life’s Archives, January 27, 2007, with this note: I wrote this post more than two years ago. Flora is now seven and three and a half months—she could probably tell you her age precisely to the day, perhaps the hour. And while we are not in “Take Five,”  we are still learning our sensitive, fragile Flora. She’s learning us too—the selfishness of five is long gone, replaced by hyper-awareness to the feelings of others, and hyper-despair when they are negative. Sometimes, this hyper-awareness makes me long for the selfishness of five. But that’s a topic for a future post.

More like this: Searching for Strategies for Sensitive Seven and Emotional Eight 

Also see: Five is hard: can you attachment parent the older child?

 

How you know he’s his mother’s son…

I.

Sean: Ugh, it’s time for this test tube full of Scope to go.

Jane: No! Not in the sink over the dishes! It’s got urine in it!

Sean: You let Cinder keep a test tube full of urine next to our wine glasses? For how long?

Jane: It’s not full of urine, it only has a little bit of urine in it–it’s mostly mouthwash. And isn’t the point here that I stopped you from pouring it over our dishes, which if you had done, would have had you rushing out to buy new dishes before our next meal?

Sean: You are so my son’s mother.

Yup. To that end, I offer more proof:

II.

Sean: Is this test tube in the sink the urine test tube?

Cinder: I don’t know. There are lot of test tubes in the house. Odds are good someone peed in one of them at some time.

Sean: Someone?

Cinder: Well, ,when I say someone, I mean me. But if it makes you feel better, I don’t remember peeing in any test tubes recently.

Ender: I do!

Sean: I want my own sterilized kitchen. And none of you can ever come in.

Well. This is why I didn’t tell him about The Floor Peas.

Line art representation of a Test tube

First published October 8, 2012, Nothing By The Book

“Jane, why the re-run?”

“A) Funny as all hell, no? B) I’m travelling. Guess where? Guess where? Clues: critical items in the suitcase were good walking shoes, painkillers, and a hot pink bikini. PS Dear clients, also a laptop. Always, the laptop.”

Cease and desist!

To all the lawyers in my life,  proof that you’ve inadvertently warped my children:

Jane: Flora, baby, what are you doing?

Flora: I’m writing Ender a cease and desist letter.

Jane: You’re what?

Flora: I’m writing Ender cease and desist letter. Telling him to stop taking my pets and chucking them down the stairs.

Jane: Baby, why don’t you just ask him to stop?

Flora: Ask him? But if I just do that, what proof will there be that it really happened?

Pause.

Flora: Do you still have your old tape recorder?

First published July 18, 2012, on Nothing By The Book.

Re-runs. You know what that means…

F&E Best Author

Photo: When she’s not writing him “Cease and desist” letters, he’s her biggest fan…

The love is unconditional. The patience… not so much

Cinder: Hey, Mom, when I get facial hair, can I grow a little mustache like this? You know, like that evil Nazi Hitler guy had? It would be totally ironic…

Jane: Your face, your facial hair. Do as you will. I just won’t be able to go anywhere in public with you.

Cinder: What? I thought your love for me was… what? Unconditional?

Jane: It absolutely is. But just because I love you fully, totally and unconditionally does not mean I have to put up with, support or encourage your crazy.

He gets not what I say at all, but that’s ok—he’s not really planning to grow a Hitler mustache. I’m pretty sure he’s not. Anyway, point does not arise: no facial hair yet. Just another attempt to get a rise out of Mom.

We’re talking about unconditional love in the context of one of history’s most terrifying monsters because, earlier that day:

Ender: Oh, Mama, I love you so much when you do sweet things for me.

Jane: Oh, Ender, I love doing sweet things for you.

Ender: But sometimes, you don’t. You won’t do sweet things for me, or you do mean things to me.

Jane: Like what?

Ender: Like not letting me bother the girls. And when you don’t do sweet things for me, then I hate you.

Words. Isn’t it crazy how words from our little ones hurt? Even when we know that they don’t actually understand what they’re saying in quite the way we hear what they’re saying.

Words.

Jane: Well you know what, Ender? I love you when you do sweet things for me. And I love you when you do mean things to me. And I even love you when you say you hate me. I love you always, always, always.

Ender: Why?

Jane: Cause that’s what moms do. That’s unconditional love. No strings. No ifs. Just—always.

The not-yet-four-year-old does not get it. At all. But at this moment, Cinder walks by and…

Cinder: I find it really hard to love Ender when he kicks me in the balls.

Ender: I’m gonna kick you in the balls really hard for that!

Cinder: Mooooom! I seriously have to love Ender when he does that?

Jane: Yes. Yes, you must.

And the noise and the chaos moves away from me as the beast chases the beast-taunter. It’s hard to parse if the screaming is joy or anger, love or hate. It’s just… life, right?

And is there a lesson in all of it?

I think so. Because later that day, Cinder talks to me about unconditional love. Um, in the context of growing a Hitler mustache, but… that’s not the important bit. And yes, my love. It’s there, it’s always, always, fully unconditional.

But unconditional love does not equal… what? Perfection. Perfect patience. Perfect parenting. The perfect response to every situation.

It doesn’t even equal unconditional understanding or unconditional support.

Sometimes, I can’t understand. Sometimes, I won’t support…

But. I always, always love.

…

And isn’t it something how when they know it’s unconditional, they like to test it all the more?

So later that day, all three of them push and prod and poke, and I finally snap. And come up with the best mantra ever:

Jane: My love for you is unconditional. My patience, however, is very much finite. AND. IT. IS. DONE!

Like it? I thought so. Use it. Love–unconditional. Patience–not infinite. It sounds so much better when you yell it at them at the top of your lungs in front of witnesses than some of the alternatives…

You’re welcome.

xoxo

“Jane”

Brothers with Snakes

Photo: Cinder and Ender not kicking each other in the balls, but sitting beautifully and peacefully next to each other. It does happen. And yes, it does usually involve holding a reptile. 

♥

Interweb Pay-It-Forward: Cait Beauchaine (@theHonestMother on Twitter, blog @ The Honest Mommy) shared this awesome website on Twitter last week: Emergency Compliment. You know? For the days when you need someone to say something, anything NICE to you, and instead your toddler screams “I hate you because you’re mean!” at you sixty seven times? Click. It delivers. (The last time I went, it told me “You don’t get drunk, you get super-human.” I’m taking that to heart as I run away from the fam for a night of revelry and dancing tonight.)

##

“Want to see how my mom writes?”

Ruined papers 3

I’m standing at the kitchen sink working my way through the dishes. Forks, knives, spoons—Kee-rist, how many spoons? For what? When was the last time I made soup or bought ice cream? What the hell are they eating with the spoons? I pick one up and look at it hyper-critically. Peanut butter? No… chocolate syrup? Chocolate syrup!?!*

And the sunlight manages to come in through the greasy kitchen window and reflects off the surface of the spoon, and there’s a very pretty pattern, and suddenly I start to think about the Strategy Session I have to write for tomorrow, and the interviews play back in my head as I play with quotes and structure and look for the perfect opening sentence and…

CRASH!

The cast iron pan gets dislodged from the mountain of dishes and makes another crater in the soft wood floor.

I’m still swearing when I hear the pitter-patter of footsteps up the stairs. Flora and her friend Moxie poke their heads into the kitchen; then pitter-patter into the living room. I hear whispering, giggling. Turn my attention back to the sink. Attack the cast iron pan with a stainless steel scrub pad. Back and forth, back and forth—and I start to think… the quarter’s almost over, and I will have to weave a story for a client on what the capital markets have done this quarter, I have a conference call on that very topic scheduled for the day after, actually, and what have they done? Back and forth I scrub, and I think about this deal and that, and I see an idea, a thread… will that work? I chase it, follow it… it dead-ends, no, fallacious, weak. What about… another dead-end… but maybe…

Pitter-patter, pitter-patter. Giggle.

“Want to see something weird?” I hear Flora whisper. And I smile. Our house is full of weird, and I wonder what she will want to show her friend. The pronghorn antelope skull wrapped in wire she found on our last beach outing? The snakeskin she found in Whiteshell? Maybe one of Cinder’s disgusting science experiments? Sean’s dead cat?**

I rinse. Make new suds. Stare at them as they grow and pop. Actually, the thing about the capital markets this quarter—oh, yes. I grab a plate and scrub it. Stop. Yeah, that will work. And I lose interest, immediately, the problem is solved and it will just play in the back of my head and refine itself for a while, and meanwhile, I go back to the Strategy Session, which can’t open the way I was going to open it, because… and oh, actually, now, THAT’s a great idea for a post for Nothing By The Book, and—oh, fuck, yes, that is exactly how I’m going to frame that pitch, yes, why didn’t I think of that before, and I stop, and the dish rag goes flying and I spin around and stare, glass-eyed, at Flora and Moxie.

Giggle, giggle, giggle.

Flora’s holding a piece of paper and a marker and offers them to me. I grab them with my wet hands and lunge for the table. Water drips as I write down the bullet points, one, two, three, quick, quick, before they disappear, before Ender needs something, before anyone says anything, before life distracts me—there’s stuff that will stay in my head forever, ever, ever, and then there are those sentences, phrases, moments of perfection, insight, that come only once, and you have to get them down NOW or they will be gone, all that will remain is a memory, ever-fainter, and I will only find pale, unsatisfying imitations that mock me, remind me of the way it was supposed to be, but fail, utterly fail…

And—done. The marker stops. My hands smear the writing, they’re wet. I blow on the paper.
Legible enough. And now it doesn’t even matter: I wrote it down, I turned the idea into an artifact and activity, and now I will remember. Not all of it—but that perfect phrase, the punchline around which I’ll build the rest of the pitch, and it will work, oh, it already works. I smile. Sigh with toe-curling satisfaction. Go back to the sink. Grab another plate.

Giggle, giggle.

I turn my head. Moxie is laughing behind her hand, and Flora’s bent over her ear.

“And that’s how my mom writes,” she says.
“Weird, hey?”

xoxo

“Jane”

♥

Three beautiful things from the Interwebs ya’ might want to read:

1. Apparently, Dutch kids are the happiest kids in the world. Want to know why? Check out this piece on Finding Dutchland. 

2. Most insightful thing about the meaning of three (years old that is) I’ve read in a long time: I help you Mummy on Secrets of the Sandpit. 

3. Eight of my favourite bloggers collaborated on this fun post on What we didn’t expect when we were expecting. Read. Laugh. Commiserate. If you’re expecting, be mildly terrified… 

…wait, one more: if you don’t follow my Undogmatic Unschoolers blog (and there’s no reason you should, unless you’re an unschooling family too, in which case, why not? Get your clicking fingers over there now!), last week’s “I could never do what you do!” post is a) very short and b) has some really fun photographs from the chaos that is life with Cinder, Flora and Ender, if you want a peek.

* They don’t eat cereal. Good guess, though.

** Dead cat. It’s a technical term for a piece of absolutely valid and non-gross filming equipment. Honest. Google it.

Photo: That’s one of my manuscripts, not ruined by kitchen dishwater, but a victim of the flood. And unsalvageable. I think it was a short story I wrote when I was in a Korea. Possibly a short-story-love-letter-fusion. Or a page of a journal. Yeah, it still hurts. Yeah, I still mourn.

It’ll be ok. I’m making more…

##

I’m the adult: not burdening children with responsibility for fixing our black moods

I’m so angry, I’m vibrating. You know that feeling? When you’re not sure if it’s the world around you that’s shaking or your innards? I’m so angry, I want to scream, stomp, feel my fist crash into something hard and preferably breakable…

Instead, I get into the car with all three of my kids. Safe, eh?

Close my eyes. Take a deep breath. Sternly tell myself: “Thy truck is not a weapon and you will not feel better if you mow down an unfortunate pedestrian.” Take another deep breath. Try to get the world to stop shaking.

Fail.

Grip the steering wheel. Start driving.

The two little redheads in the backseat are oblivious of my mood. They’re talking to each other, over each other. Excited about where we’re going.

The older, messy-haired blonde in the front seat beside me… he picks up on every nuance. And he starts to talk to me, frenetically. About the Redwood Forest. The new Redwood biome in Minecraft about which he’s so excited. He offers story after story, asks question after question, trying to lure me out of my anger, hate, blackness.

I don’t realize what he’s doing, not right away. I answer monosyllabically, barely hearing him through my anger. And then, suddenly, something he says—or maybe the way he says, the pitch of his voice—breaks through the fog, the blackness, and I stare at him in horror.

He’s trying to fix me.

He’s trying to make me feel better.

He’s taking responsibility for making my black mood go away.

…and here you might think, Jane, what the hell? Why the horror? Why is this a bad thing? Oh, it is. Hold on. Read on.

“My beautiful boy,” I say, and I reach for his hand, and squeeze it. “I appreciate… I very much appreciate what you are trying to do. But it’s my bad mood. And I’m the only one who can get me out of it. Don’t—don’t take it on yourself.”

He frowns, doesn’t understand.

But it doesn’t matter. Me realizing what he was doing—enough. I grit my teeth one final time. Take one—two–three–more breaths. Wish I could close my eyes, but there’s a semi to the right of me and a cement truck to the left, so I just shake my head side to side.

I’m not happy, not tranquil or joyous. But. I am sane. The black fog of anger recedes.

At this precise moment, the two redheads in the backseat—oblivious to everything but their own interaction and joy—start up a chorus of:

Ender: Fox in box. Fox in box. Fox in box.

Flora: Moist. Moist. Moist. Moist.

…because they know just how to push my buttons. But, I’m sane again, so I just yell at them in the usual Mom way—not the psycho bitch from hell who will devour you alive if you say one more word you little beasts way. They giggle and fall silent.

Cinder keeps on talking about the Redwood Forest, but now only because he wants to, not because he’s trying to jar me out of blackness.

Not his responsibility. Never.

Do you understand?

Do you understand the danger of making a child feel responsible for taking you out of your foul mood?

Not for putting you in a foul mood. That’s different. I’ve got no qualms at all about saying, “Mommy’s pissed off because you dumped the potty over the balcony and stuck a crayon up the dog’s butt.”

But when when I’m unhappy—when you’re unhappy–when you and I are angry, black, broken, all those ugly, ugly feelings that come on all of us (and always at the most inconvenient times, no?)—it’s our job to work on ourselves and get ourselves out of that dark place.

Or–a therapist’s.

Not our children’s. It’s not their responsibility. Not their burden.

Never.

…

They’ll take it on, you know, if you don’t stay aware. And I’m not crazy or dogmatic: a little love and care from the people around you, even the little people, when you’re down, is a beautiful thing. Nothing like a hug or a bowl of chocolate chips put into a frazzled mother’s hand at just the right time to turn a hard moment around.

A little love, awareness, affection. A beautiful thing.

Taking on responsibility for fixing a parent’s, an adult’s blackness?

Not their responsibility. Not their burden.

Ever.

xoxo

“Jane”

♥

Cinder long messy hair unhappyP.S. Don’t worry, the black mood is gone, and I love everyone and everything again. Well, maybe not everyone. Or everything. But–all the important people. And enough things. But. Anger as a parent. A terrifying thing, is it not? Close your eyes (unless you’re driving). Breathe….

Photo: Cinder in an unhappy mood of his own. But, if I recall right, this was had a very direct cause: swarms of pre-flood mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds with the appetites of vampire bats.

P.P.S. My social media whoring outreach efforts continue, so if you love me, follow me on Twitter:  or like Nothing by the Book on Facebook–or both? Why don’t you do both?

Or, add me to your circles on GOOGLE+: Jane Marsh on

If you’re looking for the real me, or want to follow my YYC Twitter feed,  .

Ka-thunk. The sweet sound of Jane falling off a pedestal

Brothers wrestling 4

I.

Cinder: Moooom! There’s blood all over the bouncy house! Creeper has a bloody nose!

Jane: What do you need?

Cinder: Toilet paper and a responsible adult. Is Dad here?

Jane: No.

Cinder: Fuck. Nevermind—I’m going to go get Lacey!

There are consequences to too much un-helicopter parenting. Hoverers and smotherers, take heart. This will never happen to you.

II.

Jane: Great. That’s just great, Ender. So because you didn’t want to share the chocolate bar with Flora, when I took off a little piece for her, instead of enjoying yours, you threw it on the car floor and stomped it into the mat. That is just awesome. Fan-tas-tic.

Ender: Waaaaaaaaaaaah!

Flora: Are you going to yell at him?

Jane: I’m kind of yelled out, honestly. Yeah. I’m done. No more yelling in this throat.

Flora: Does that apply just to Ender, or to me as well?

Jane: What?

Flora: If I do something obnoxious and awful right now—are you so yelled out you won’t yell at me?

Jane: The question here, my love, is are you brave enough to risk testing that hypothesis?

She didn’t. She’s a smart cookie, that one. Just like her mama. Speaking of which…

III.

Flora: Dad, what does arrogant mean?

Sean: Arrogant… sort of someone who thinks they’re better than everyone else.

Jane: Or it’s what incompetent people who expect you to be all shy and self-effacing because you’re young and a woman call you when you tell them you can do the fucking job.

Flora: Dad? Is Mom arrogant?

Sean: Yeah, kind of.

Jane: The word is competent. Com-pe-tent.

IV.

Ender: Maaaa-maaa! I peed!

Jane: In the potty?

Ender: No. In my diaper.

Jane: Jeezus—Kee-rist, Ender, you need to start peeing in the potty. Please. For the sake of your only mother’s sanity.

Ender: I will never pee in the potty. But I will pee in the toilet.

Jane: Great. Let’s…

Ender: When I’m big.

Jane: My beloved, you’re already big.

Ender: When I’m big as you.

A. Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, Zeus, animistic spirits that live in trees and rocks—any potential deity in the universe—if you potty-train this child, I will convert. I’ll sacrifice a white bull, I’ll get a lame hair cut, I’ll wear a robe and dance at airports, I’ll hand out fliers door-to-door outlining the genesis of the great Ender-out-of-diapers miracle. Just. Please. Get him to toilet train. Now.*

B. Gentle reader, it is possible that at some point in the future, my arrogance will over take me and I will give you advice on toilet training. Don’t listen to a word I’ll say. Just don’t.

Have a kick-ass weekend. If you’re in YYC, join us at Beakerhead, especially the Suistanaval.

xoxo

“Jane”

*To effect the conversion, you must give me a clear and unfake-able sign it was you and not one of your competitors who effected the miracle. I’m desperate. Not gullible.

P.S. Two of the top searches bringing people to Nothing By The Book this week: “parents who don’t brush kids hair” & “kids hairstyle book.” Some of those people will be horribly, horribly disappointed.

P.P.S. Yeah, that’s our living room. We have crash mats, not carpets. You don’t have to ask why, do you? No, of course not…

P.P.P.S. I’m amping up that whole social media reach out thang, so if you want to connect, follow me on Twitter:  or like Nothing by the Book on Facebook.

Or, add me to your circles on GOOGLE+: Jane Marsh on

If you’re looking for the real me, or want to follow my YYC Twitter feed,  .

And now, a few words about parasites, getting ostracized, and serial communists

Ender on the Common a week and a half later. Massive clean up effort, by hundreds of volunteers. Thank you!

So here’s how it happened: I’m sitting on our beautiful unflooded Common* with some of my favourite people and wine is flowing and the fire is crackling and we’re talking about all the signs of “normal” that are returning to our lives: the police stopping speeders, peace officers handing out parking tickets, citizens complaining about “the City,” neighbours starting to rag on each other… And I start expounding, aided by the freely flowing wine, about how that’s THE thing about community that people just don’t get. That it’s messy and conflict-ridden and hard and…

… and I blather on, because this is a huge horse of mine in these post-flood days, and as I say, “And community IS full of assholes and parasites… and bitches and mean girls and…”—at that precise moment, I see the essay and I fall in love with it. Oh, yes. Community, such a fuzzy-wuzzy warm word, rose-coloured glasses and hugs and smiles and planting flowers and front porches and granola-making organic-gardening hippies—oh, yes. And the punchline of the piece—I love it, I feel my toes curl in anticipation of how I’m going to lead up to it—the punchline is going to be, “Community is full of assholes, bitches and mean girls. And parasites.” And I’m going to repeat it a couple of times in the piece, like a chorus, and I’m going to build it around the YYC Attachment Parenting Village, because oh-yes-oh-yes-the-contrast—the immediate association of baby-wearing-co-sleeping-gentle-discipline-mamas and the bitches and mean girls line, oh-yes…

So I write it, first in my head, and then on-line, and I touch a raw nerve, of course, but…

Fuck.

Not quite the one I intended.

Now, that doesn’t happen to me very often—because I am an extremely effective manipulator of feelings and reactions when I write, even on those rare occasions when I so fall in love with a phrase or a sentence that I build everything around that. But. Here, I own my failure. Clearly, if I feel so many of you—not so much those of you publicly commenting on the post on my blog, but those of you dissecting it in other fora and in particular those of you sending me emotive private messages about it—missed its key point, I’ve failed as a writer.

“Yo, Jane, first visit here. What the hell are you yammering on about?”

“Yo, welcome. This: Why you need to get off your shy, lazy introverted ass and start building your tribe RIGHT NOW. But you can finish reading this missive first before going back in time to misunderstand the first one… It mostly stands alone, after the next paragraph.”

So. I own my failure. Should have refined, revised. But. I think my failure is also part of this attachment to a utopian vision of community so many people buy into. D’you know what I mean? When I say tribe, community, you don’t think bitches, mean girls, assholes and parasites, do you? No. You think perfection, utopia, eternal friendship, unconditional love, and warm bowls of soup… and when you talk about building your tribe, finding your tribe you seek perfection and utopia—or at least a hell of a lot more of that than I do. And beloved, when you seek perfection in community, it will always, always, always disappoint you.

And I really, really, really want you to have a tribe. So I am now going to pick up a sledge hammer and whack your brain with it, very bluntly, three times. Ready? Three points. Hear them. Understand them. Or die alone.

Here we go:

1. Community is not selfless.

Community, tribe does not equal charity. Or unconditional help and support. Or love, peace and eternal grooviness. And, so, you see, community is not selfless. It does not act selflessly as an entity, nor do its members act selflessly as individuals. You get out of community what you put into it. But not in the way you think.

I’m not talking about quid-pro-quo/I scratch-your-back-your-scratch-mine kind of thing here. That, beloved, is called reciprocal altruism, and it’s an essential part of most social relationships. Social transactions in a community are more complex, and they work like this. Patty’s really sick, and so Anne watches her kids for weeks and Sarah pops in every few days with groceries. When Anne’s marriage starts to implode, Lucy steps in to watch her kids so Anne and her partner can go to counselling sessions. Sarah calls Anne every few days to check in on her. When Sarah has a new baby, Karen sets up a meal train for her… And so it goes.

That’s how community works. It’s a collection of bonds. See? That’s how you get out of a community what you put into it. Not necessarily—in fact, rarely—from the person you give it to.

Now… Sarah is not feeding Patty and checking in on Anne because she’s anticipating payback down the line when she needs it, of course not. She does all that because she’s just a good person, right? A good friend. She loves Patty. She wants to help Anne. But each of those acts builds her social capital. And when she needs it, the community will give it back to her. Patty may not help her out, because maybe when Sarah’s in need, Patty’s life will still be a mess. But someone will. Guaranteed. Because Sarah’s part of a community in which she’s invested.

But that community, it’s not selfless. Not at all. It only carries its parasites for a while. If Patty just keeps on collecting and never gives back—she starts getting less and less. And funny thing: it’s rarely a conscious, explicit decision. It’s not that the community gets together and says, “Patty’s a parasite and we’re done with her.” It’s more subtle. People notice, as individuals. And, as individuals, choose to send their energy and help elsewhere.

So, beloved. Don’t be a parasite. Give, contribute, build, help. When you can. Because you never know when life will force you to collect.

Reader freak-out: Are you calling me a parasite?

Jane: Maybe. Are you?

2. Community is supposed to ostracize.

Holy fuck, did you hear that? That was a thousand jaws dropping, rose-coloured glasses smashing into little pieces. And gentle readers unsubscribing en masse. But yes, beloved. You do not include without excluding. You do not define what something, some circle is without leaving someone outside it. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ALL-INCLUSIVE COMMUNITY. Every community, as it defines itself, defines who it includes within its circle and who it places outside them. Every community has rules. Articulated rules. And unspoken rules. And it punishes the members who break them.

Once, someone asked me to write up a piece on their little sub-community, and she wanted the dominant image to be “a diverse group of like-minded people.” Ha. You can be a tribe/community that values diversity up-the-wazoo—there will still be some type-a-thing you’ll exclude. Want to run a puppy mill in Sunnyhill? Get the fuck out. Not gonna happen. Crackhouse next door? No. Not part of what I want my diverse community to be, sorry. Joining an AP support group and looking for validation of your choice to sleep train your three-month old? Sorry. Wrong forum. A Richard Dawkins-loving atheist looking for affirmation in a creationist book club? Why the hell would you do that to yourself?

Community excludes and ostracizes. Rejects as well as embraces. That’s part of what it does.

Reader freak-out: You’re supporting ostracization and shunning and cyber-bullying!

Jane: No, I’m not. More on that in a future post. In the meantime, read the above paragraph again. Think about your tribes, communities and what defines them. What makes them what they are? Do their definitions truly exclude NO ONE? Really? Because I can give you a list of six people immediately that you would want to exclude out of your community, no matter how inclusive you claim it is. Community excludes. There’s no getting around that.

It totally sucks to be on the receiving end of that. Totally. Which brings us to sledge hammer point three:

3. It’s okay to leave.

We live in a really amazing, unprecedented world right now. For the first time ever, many of us get to choose our tribe, our community. We’re not stuck with the one we’re born into. We can work to change our community… or we can choose to leave. Find a new one. Start a new one.

This is an amazing, awesome and absolutely revolutionary idea. And it’s not true for all of humanity, and certainly not all of North Americans. But it’s true for me. All of my tribes, bar my extended family, are tribes of my choosing and creating. And I know it’s true for many of you. If you’re privileged enough to have access to the Internet and free time enough to surf and blog, you’re free enough to choose your tribe(s), your communities.

So. You can choose. You can leave.

As a new mother, I went through three different playgroups before I found one in which there was enough commonality between myself and the other women that I chose to stay and get to know them. As an adult looking for a “home,” I had two horrible misfires before finding my piece of beloved flood plane. As a fledging homeschooler, I’ve lost count of the number of on-line fora I’ve stumbled through before finding a couple that worked for me for a while… and then, decided to leave all those and start another that did what I needed such a forum to do… and no more.

You can choose. You can leave.

But… community is messy. And it takes time. And every, every, EVERY community has its assholes, bitches, mean girls, and parasites. So if you’re leaving all the time—if every time you encounter a community’s wart, conflict, friction, pain or dark side, you immediately run… oh, beloved. You will die alone and unhappy.

You will never find a tribe that works for you, my serial communist. Because… messy. Hard.

Worth it.

Reader freak out: Did you just call me a communist?

Jane: A serial communist, no less. What? You’ve got a problem with that?

xoxo

“Jane”

* What is this Common about which you keep blathering? The common green space onto which many of the units at our housing co-op back onto. My extended backyard. My world. The reason I can raise and homeschool three children in 1000 square feet of badly designed space. Where I meet my neighbours and entertain my friends. The most important physical space in my life. Do you have a Common? Get one. Make one. Turn your backyard into one by inviting friends over to hang and drop in—all the time. Take over a public park with friends—preferably at the same time each week, each day. Spread the word. That piece of green space in your neighbourhood no one uses it? Make it your own. Make it your Common. Community needs common spaces, and it needs them to be used. Loved.

PS Worth reading: The talented Katia Bishop, who usually blogs at I Am The Milk, had an article last week on MamaPop that really resonated with me: 7-Year-Old Girl Sent Home From School For Having The Wrong Hairstyle. Have a read… And a think. And if you haven’t yet read The AP Hair Style: I don’t brush my children’s hair. It’s a massive philosophical thing, really–well. Have a peak there too. But read Katia’s post first.

Sometimes a wrench really is a metaphor. Not for what you’d think, of course…

R&Maggie

Cinder: Mom? Can I go outside with a wrench? One of those really, really big ones? Or a crowbar?

Good to know: He knows where they are. He could just grab one. He’s asking to be told, ‘No.’

Jane: No.

Cinder: How about if I promise not to wield it as a weapon?

Jane: Um… No.

Cinder: Moooom! I promise, absolutely promise I will not bludgeon the girls with it.

Jane: No.

Cinder: Mooooom….

Jane: If you tell me I never let you do anything, I just might bludgeon you with it.

Cinder: Fine. Will you bake cookies?

Jane: Um… how about we bike over to Safeway and buy a box of Peak Freens?

Cinder: Deal.

What I’ve learned over the last 11 years of listening to Cinder: It’s really, really hard to say, “Mom, I’m feeling really left out of the game Flora and her friends are playing.” Much easier to say/do something that annoys the girls and requires an active Mother-intervention. Like chasing them with a wrench.

Always listen for the subtext. Even when you–like me–are inclined to take what is said as what is meant. Always. Subtext.

xoxo,

“Jane”

♥

From my newsfeed this am: My son wears dresses, get over it, by the brilliant Matt Duron.

From my archives: My sons don’t wear dresses anymore–or should I say right now, but they did; to wit: The return of the Princess dress.

Post of the week from my reader: Act Your Age? on the Tao of Poop. “Playdough has similar soothing properties to a glass of wine or Prozac,” she writes. And then just gets better.

What defines you as a parent?

It’s beautiful, hot and sultry, a day that belongs to the peak of summer and not early fall, and my children are running wild at a playground, shouting, laughing. Occasionally crashing and crying. And suddenly, Flora runs up to me, shaking with laughter, and:

Flora: Mom, mom, mom, mom, listen! I have a story, such a good story for your blog! O… what’s his name on the blog again?

Jane: Ender.

Flora: Yeah, yeah, yeah—Ender was just playing with that cute little girl, do you see her?

I look. Smile. Nod. Ender and another three-year-old are across the playground, solemnly engaged in filling each other’s shirts and pants with gravel.

Flora: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so she was playing there, and he filled a bucket with gravel and dumped it on her head. And she burst into tears.

I don’t like where this story is going. I will edit it considerably in the telling, I think.

Flora: And O… Ender said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I love you. Here, you do it now!” And look, they’re just dumping gravel all over each other all happy and everything. And the best part is, he’s not dumping gravel on me!

And I kiss Flora, and glance around for Ender’s playmate’s mother, to ensure that she’s one of those-type-of-mothers, and not these-types-of-mothers, but before I find her, I hear a voice out of the corner of my left ear:

Beautiful stranger: Excuse me… this is going to sound really weird, but are you Nothing By The Book?

Now, if you’re a fellow blogger about to go into swoons of envy, let me assure you that a) this hardly ever happens to me and b) I may live in a million-plus town, but the out-on-the-fringe-sub-culture community here is teeny-weeny and this isn’t as epic an event as it might seem to you—and not nearly as ego-gratifying to me as you might think. Or so I maintain, and I am the writer and teller of the story. Speaking of, back to the tale:

Jane: More or less.

Beautiful stranger: Are those your children?

And her eyes, and mine, go to Cinder—hanging upside down from a tree—Flora—dancing ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and whispering to herself—and Ender… filling his playmate’s shoes with gravel and then dumping it on her head.

I fight the urge to disclaim my relationship to Ender.

Jane: Yeah.

And suddenly, I know what she’s going to say before she says. Oh, yes, I know it and I brace myself for it, and she says:

Beautiful stranger: They look so clean!

And I swallow my laughter, and look at Cinder’s wild hair, freshly (self) washed and (self) brushed this morning, and Flora’s 12 tiny braids (“I want 24 mom, pleeeeeeeze!” “Not today, babe, that will take me at least an hour. Raincheck?”), and even Ender’s gravel-filled head looks pretty presentable, and I can’t help it, I say:

Jane: They’ve never had lice either.

But as I say it, I regret it, immediately, because it’s borderline-mean, isn’t it? I’m assuming she’s read The AP Hair Style: I don’t brush my children’s hair. It’s a massive philosophical thing, really and had one-of-those reactions to it, and she’s assuming…

Actually, you know what? I’m not going to assume what she’s assuming. Or even that she’s assuming.

I look at her thoughtfully. Introduce my real self. Ask her name. And which of the children are hers.

There’s a toddler, going up and down, up and down the slide. And a brand-new baby, sleeping in half-a-double-stroller.

And I feel, immediately, such a wave of affection and empathy for her, because she’s in one of those toughest, most draining phases, isn’t she? Toddler, baby. Erratic sleep patterns. Everything in life a constant adjustment, struggle. Never enough time. Barely a sense of self… Maybe still waiting for things to get easier… (Oh, beloved, do you still believe that lie?)

And then, a wave of fear and horror, almost repulsion, because she looks at me with anxiety and eagerness and eyes and a heart so full of questions and I clam up, dam up, because she’s looking for a guru and I fucking hate that.

And you think, you hypocrite, then why do you blog about parenting and children and child-rearing un-philosophies, and I answer—I’m a writer. Try to stop me from writing. Try. But this by-product, it’s, truly, truly hard to deal with.

I’m so busy clamming, damming I miss the question, and I ask her to repeat it. And laugh, as I look at her hairless baby, and not much more hair-endowed toddler, because she essentially asks me whether, if she believes that good grooming—brushed and cut hair, matched clothes, all of that—if she believes those things are important, does that mean she’s not an attachment parent?

She’s still on that hair post you see, and I briefly regret using the “AP” tag in it, because its meaning to me is historical and laden with more than 11-years of relationships and reinterpretations, and she’s brand new to the journey, and in the most vulnerable stage of it, and…

… and fucking hell, she’s looking at me with “enlighten me” eyes again, and I need to fix that, right now.

Without being mean.

I cast my eyes over Cinder-way, and send him a psychic message that now would be a really great time for him to… whack another child. Swear. Throw an age-inappropriate temper tantrum. Steal his sister’s hat and run off with it…

Instead, the brat retrieves a small child’s lost ball. Picks up a stray coffee cup and tosses it into the garbage. Strikes up a polite conversation with gravel-girl’s mother.

They never do what you want them to, do they?

Sigh.

Flora, at this age and stage, will be absolutely no help at all—she is perfect behaviour incarnate right now, however briefly—and while Ender’s could usually be counted to behave as a normal, and not aspirational-ideal child, he is currently too busy making gravel-angels with his future fourth wife (he has a list) to perform.

Fine.

Up to me.

And words.

I know what she’s really asking. It’s not about hair-brushing, anymore than my original post was. It’s about the big stuff: principles, philosophies, self-definitions. What she’s really asking me is this very simple, but very big question:

What is it that I do that defines me as a parent?

And what I want to tell her, very clearly, loudly, powerfully, is this:

Why would you ever let an Internet stranger define who you are or are not as a parent? As a person?

Except that’s not helpful, because I know the answer to it: it’s because she’s searching and self-defining, and how she’s defining and creating her story is in opposition to how her mother defined herself, and it’s different from how she’s seen her next-door neighbour do it and so different from her sister-in-law, and she’s uncertain, and it’s so hard… And so, as she’s searching, she’s also, sub-consciously, always searching for approval, from anyone, anything…

Even a mouthy Internet stranger. Even one whose position on hair-brushing kind of appalled her…

My mind’s scripting a long, complicated answer to what it is that really defines me—her—any of us—as a parent, and how it’s the same thing that defines as people and how being is more important than doing even though the doing is what people see—and I have this huge tangent developing about how bottle-nursing with love is better than breastfeeding with resentment and how Ender was never, ever “baby-worn” because I was so broken when he was born and how no matter how often I fail at any of my lofty aspirational parenting goals, no matter how often I fail to do what I want to do, what I know is right, none of that changes what I am, as a parent, as a person, because…

… I meet her eyes again. And she’s so tired. And so anxious. And she’s standing next to me, with no sense of who I am but some knowledge of what I do and too full of what I write. And she’s on such an early, fragile stage of her journey. And she so desperately wants approval. Re-assurance.

And I so don’t want to be a guru. On a pedestal.

But you know what? Fuck it. This moment isn’t about me. It’s about her.

“You,” I say, “are a really, really fucking amazing mother. I see it in how you look at your kids. It’s flowing out of every part of you. You are a great, great mother. All the things you do, or don’t do, that get labeled as—whatever, attachment parenting, permissive, authoritarian, helicopter—insert label of choice here—all those things that you do or don’t do? They barely matter. It doesn’t matter what you do, someone out there will criticize it, take you apart for it. But what you are—this amazing woman who loves, loves, loves and cares so much for them? That’s who you are, what you are—what defines you as a parent. Don’t let anyone ever belittle that, make you doubt that.”

The baby stirs and starts to fuss, and she goes to feed it. And while the little is latching on, the toddler stumbles and gets a bleeding nose and starts to cry. And she tends to one and to the other, and they’re both crying, because she’s pulled in two directions, and she’s already exhausted. And she pulls it together, and does what needs to be done… and they’re in the stroller, homeward-bound, where she has so much more, so much more to do.

An amazing mother.

An amazing woman.

Who should never, ever need the approval of Internet strangers. Or, god forbid, that of Aunt Augusta.

But when she does—when she comes to you, vulnerable and tired and aching for affirmation—give it.

How you treat her defines you as a person. As a parent.

Leaving soapbox—now.

xoxo,

“Jane”

P.S. Beautiful stranger: you know where to find me. Coffee, and a “thunk” off my pedestal are in order. If we meet with kids, I promise to yell at them at least twice, and if we meet in the afternoon, I can almost guarantee an Ender-meltdown.

♦

P.P.S. And what happened in the blogosphere this week? I haven’t a clue. Super self-involved this week. Oh, what a week. Month. Summer. But, on the day we were celebrating #yycpride in Calgary, I connected with Seven Little Mexicans on Twitter, and I think you should check out their super cool blog “because funny things happen when two girls try to make a baby.” New to Twitter, they are, so give them a follow at @7littleMexicans.

When I am an old woman, I’m not going to complain about young people

When I am an old woman, I’m going to wear a ridiculous string bikini when I go to the beach or a pool. My varicose veins, wrinkles, saggy bits or rolly bits offend you? Deal with it. I won’t care—all I’ll want is to feel the sun on every part of me.

When I am an old woman, I’ll dye my hair pink—or maybe old lady brown if that’s what I want—or maybe I’ll let be sparse and grey. Or maybe I’ll have a collection of wigs. Oh, yeah. Wigs. I could totally rock a wig collection. Beehives. Betty Boos. A Marilyn Monroe, and an entire shelf of Lady Gagas…

I’ll probably trade my collection of fuck-me heels for all sorts of sensible shoes—but I’ll paint my toes all the colours of the rainbow. And wear toe rings. Ha!

I’ll wear ridiculous costume jewelry. And a fannypack. Or maybe, I’ll finally develop a taste and passion for tiny purses. And purse dogs? Or I’ll have 12 cats. Anything could happen.

Frankly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure what kind of old woman I’m going to be—I’m unpredictable, or so I’d like to think—but there is one thing about my old age I can promise you right now—the promise I want to make, right now, today, to my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. And to yours, too. And it’s this:

When I am an old woman, I’m going to love young people.

Or, to put it another way: When I am an old woman, I’m not going to sit around talking about how young people today suck.

Children, grandchildren: I promise. I’m going to love you, and I am not going to slag, abuse and dismiss your generation, because it is different—younger—than my own.

Old people have always abused young people. You know? The so-called “traditionalists” hated the baby boomers. The baby boomers can’t stand millennialists; don’t understands Gen-X. “Young people today are no good!” “They know nothing!” “Ungrateful!” “Entitled!” “Spoiled rotten!”

Nothing new, of course. There’s graffiti from Ancient Rome to that effect, and I bet 40-year-old Cro-Magnons sat around their fires at night abusing the young ‘uns. “Those spears they insist on using! What the hell’s wrong with bludgeoning an animal to death with a stone the way we used to do it?” “I know! And have you seen how they’re stitching the skins together instead of just loping them over their shoulders? What’s up with that?”

D’you know how you know you’re getting old? It’s not a chronological thing. It’s when you start to hate young people. It’s when you start to say things like “children these days are so badly brought up,” and “what the heck are those mothers thinking?” and “don’t get me started on teenagers today” and “in my day, we used to know how to work.”

Yeah. D’you know why you’re saying that? Entire books have been and will be written about that, but let me boil it down to this: you’re peaking and passing your prime, and you see them coming up behind you, and into their power and it scares the shit out of you.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic—because, no matter how much you slam young people, no matter how much you belittle them and their values, the end game is this: you’re getting older and older. You’re gonna die. They’re going to take over.

And you’re going to spend your evening days bitching about how they’re mucking it all up.

Cause you—you’ve done such a stellar job of it in your time, eh?

Anyway. That’s not going to be me. Me, when I’m an old woman, I’m going to love young people. I’m going to think they’re amazing. Because, see, I already do. When I look at my children, and their friends: fuck. Blown away. These little souls think in amazing ways. Love in ways most of my generation is not capable of. When I look at my older friends’ children—their teenagers, their twenty-somethings who are coming into their own as adults right now: they rock. They’re moving into new frontiers, charting new life paths, taking career and professional risks their parents couldn’t have imagined. They’re amazing.

Not unilaterally amazing, of course. I’m not one of these fuzzy-wuzzy people who love all humanity, definitely not a natural-born humanitarian. I know my children’s generation is full of wankers, losers and assholes. But so is mine. And so, dear Great-Aunt Augusta, is yours. Frankly, you’re not such an awesome prize yourself, dear. You’re judgemental, narrow-minded, terrifyingly selfish and, how to I put it not-so-gently? Racist.

I’ll take the wankers, losers and assholes of my generation—and of my children’s generation—over the median of what defined “normal” and was acceptable in yours anytime.

And when I’m an old woman—I’m going to love young people. I might not understand their values or passions or technologies. I might not like their clothes and music. But I’m not going to dismiss everything they love, do and make as worthless or somehow lacking because it’s different from what I loved, did and made.

I’m going to love them.

Are you?

♥

Late last week, several of my beautiful blogging sisters participated in a parenting around the world carnival where they took on helicopter parenting. Their pieces were absolutely thought-provoking, each in a different way. If you didn’t read them last week, I encourage you to pop over and have a think with them today:

Deb @ Urban Moo Cow: I would rather he break his arm

Jessica @ School of Smock: Your Hovering Doesn’t Help: A Quiz and a Simple Step

Sarah @ Left Brain Buddha: CTFD: The Tao of Parenting

Stephanie @ Mommy, For Real: Advocating for Your Children vs. Being a Helicopter Parent

Carisa @ Carisa Miller: Do You Read Me: Giving My Children More Space

♠

For bloggers I love only (you know who you are): Triberr. Check it out. It’s a total time-saver. I’m at Ain’t Nothing But a Blog Thing with some of my favourite bloggers, and if you’re a homeschooling blogger, I want to get a Tribe going under Undogmatic Unschoolers.

For real people (ha! you know what I mean): I’ve got this project on the go that would benefit from the Very Important People involved having the perception that I have a social media presence that matches my stats, so if you don’t already follow @nothingbtbook on Twitter or like
Nothing by the Book on Facebook… do it. You’ll be able to say you knew me before I got stinking famous, and I won’t contradict you.

xoxo

“Jane”

The AP Hair Style: I don’t brush my children’s hair. It’s a massive philosophical thing. Really

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When my kids were teeny-weeny—but already hairy—my friends and I used to joke that you could always identify the attachment-parented kids at playgrounds and playgrounds by the “AP Hair Style.” That is—unbrushed. Unkempt. Wild.

Now, ya’ might think that’s a granola-hippy-natural kind of thing.

It’s not.

And you might think—goddamn lazy attachment parents, not with it enough to perform the simple task of running a comb through their kids hair in the morning.

Screw you.

Or you might think—if you’re a self-identified AP mama, perhaps—that it’s because… well, it’s not important. And there are more important things. Sleep. Play. Breastfeeding. Perusing the fair-trade-all-wooden-no-plastic toy catalogue. (I’m not making fun of you. OK, I am, a little. But–I’ve had that catalogue too. Chill.)

Nope. It’s actually really important. The not brushing even more so than the brushing.

Ready?

I didn’t brush—don’t brush—my children’s hair when they did not want me to brush their hair—because it’s their hair.

Hold on.

I’m going to shout it.

IT’S THEIR HAIR.

Part of their bodies.

I do not assault it, when they are unwilling, with a hair brush, any more than I would assault, do violence, on any other part of their bodies.

THEIR BODIES.

Their own.

Under their own dominion—not mine.

Their wild, messy hair? Part of the lesson that they’re learning that no one—not me, not nice Mr. Jones down the street, not that creepy dude in the park, and not their first, over-eager boyfriend—has a right to do anything to their bodies that they don’t want them to do.

This is a lesson our children need to learn, repeatedly, while they are close enough to us that they will learn it, hear it.

But we don’t teach it with words. We don’t teach it with scary lectures or with fear.

We teach with how we treat their bodies. From their nose to their toes, and all the parts in-between.

And their hair.

Think about that next time you wield a hair brush.

xoxo

“Jane”

COMMENTS FOR THIS POST ARE NOW TURNED OFF, so we can all have a peaceful weekend. And for those of you continuing the debate on other fora:  a not-so-gentle reminder that name calling is not debating. Criticize the idea. I want you to. No name calling or being nasty to other commentators though, ok? Not cool.

photo (3)

♥

Other People’s Awesome

For all the parents on the verge of *that* conversation with your daughters (and sons), here is a brilliant Dear Daughter, I hope you have awesome sex piece from the Good Men Project.

For the bloggers in the crowd having social media anxiety and overdose: Joel Comm’s I am leaving social media.

For the bloggers in the crowd who want an easier way to share my stuff and to have me share your stuff, come join me on Triberr, at Ain’t Nothing But a Blog Thing Tribe or, if you’re a homeschooling blogger, at Undogmatic Unschoolers.

My neglected (by me) blogging sisters have been turning out all sorts of awesome these last few weeks. Jean at MamaSchmama wrote a beautiful I can make it home  piece into which she sneaked some lovely introductions to some of her favourite (and mine—she is clearly a woman of immaculate taste) bloggers. Kristi at Finding Ninee wrote what I think is a love letter to her son titled Forgotten Loves  that will a) make you cry and b) make you hug that squirmy love in your live extra-extra-hard—and Rachel at Tao of Poop was clearly on the same page with I Used to Love.

And while I’m tugging at your heart-strings, let me turn you over for a few minutes to Jen at My Skewed View, who delivers a birth story so poignant I’m tearing up as I remember it, and I read it more than a week ago: Eight Years Ago Today.

Jessica at School of Smock wrote a great piece about why pregnancy books now piss her off  and Stephanie at Mommy Is for Real reminded us all why we never eat out anymore. With our children anyway.

And Sarah at Sadder But Wiser Girl was also full of advice last week. She tells you to always check your underwear (and then some… you might need to change your underwear after reading Sarah. Just a word of warning). Jenn at Something Clever 2.0 also made me pee this week. So maybe read this post before changing your underwear…

Deb at Urban Moo Cow made me really, really, REALLY happy I don’t have a toddler anymore. Can I admit that? I can. I’m good with that. I don’t want any more babies, either. EVER.

But I’m super-super-super happy that Stephanie at Where Crazy Meets Exhaustion is glowing. Really. (Note to my most beloved: Vasectomy. Now. No more babies. Ever. But that’s a topic for another post, perhaps…)

Last thing: new friends. I’m getting to know these people this week:

Dysfunction Junction

and you should come play with me.

-30-

P.S. Where the hell is your like button? I turned it off. Cause if you really liked it, I want you to tell me. And I don’t really need to ego stroke from the other. xoxo J.

Of cold wars, true love, and castration by crayfish

photo (1)

We’re walking along the beautiful, oak-tree shaded trail that winds along the marina of the little town of Pinawa, on the edges of Whiteshell Provincial Park, the kids running around maniacally, destroying enjoying nature, Sean and I engaged in an intense war. The Ender, racing ahead of us with his siblings, is… I believe the technical term is odiferous. Rancid even. The toilet training regression to end all toilet training regressions is in full-swing on this particular family holiday. There is a disgusting poopy diaper that needs to be changed.

And neither Sean nor I want to do it.

(By the way. I should warn you. This is not a toilet training story at all. It’s actually a Cinder-and-Ender penis story. I know you’ve missed them.)

And we know each other so well we don’t even have the

“It’s your turn.”
“No, it’s your turn.”

exchange. It has—have I mentioned?–been the toilet training regression to end all toilet training regressions, aggravated by the stress of travel and a diet not anally controlled by Mommy, and there is no use counting how many diapers I’ve changed, how many poopy bums he’s washed. We’re done. So done. As far as each of us is concerned, at this moment, the stinky three-year-old can sit in his own stinky shit for the rest of his days.

… all the while, each of us not-so-secretly hopes that the other will be the better, more patient parent and do the right thing, just one more time, just this once…

… as we walk along the trail… with no spare diaper or wipes left (toilet training regression to end ALL toilet training regressions)…

… the child, more odiferous and foul with each step…

… and finally, Flora yells, at the top of her lungs:

“Will somebody please wash Ender’s bum? It’s disgusting!”

… and Ender bursts into tears, and Sean and I look at each other, and he does one of those things that reminds just how much I love him and how right we are for each other and what a kick-ass parenting team we make no matter what other complications occur in our lives:

“If I wash him in the river, will you carry the dirty diaper?”

Oh, yes, beloved. Oh, yes.

(I know you’ve only read this far waiting for the penis story. Here it comes.)

So there is my beloved, washing our third child’s bohunkus in the once-pristine waters of the Winnipeg River. And Ender is furious and embarrassed and appalled. See, he doesn’t want to be in the toilet training regression any more than we want him there. It’s humiliating to be closer to four than three and be slung over his father’s knee—on a riverbank no less—getting his butt washed with icy cold water.

And my Sean, he is pretty much the world’s best father—I know you think it’s you, your husband? No, sorry. My Sean. Get in line. And so he looks and looks for a distraction and because it’s a river, of course there is one, and so:

“Ender! Look! A crayfish! Look at that crayfish!”

And the embarrassment and crying and humiliation are forgotten, immediately.

“A crayfish! Crayfish! Catch him for me, Daddy, catch him!”

And Sean reaches for the crayfish and skoot, it zooms away, and Ender reaches for the crayfish, and it scoots and snaps its claws at him, and Cinder and Flora come running to see what’s going on, and the bum washing ends in peace and, if not quiet, then certainly laughter, and we walk away from the river bank—me, carrying the dirty diaper—happy, laughing.

(The penis story’s coming. Be patient. This one requires build up.)

And Flora turns to Cinder and says,

“I can’t believe Daddy washed Ender’s bum on top of a crayfish.”

And Cinder turns to Ender and says,

“You’re so lucky, Ender, that crayfish didn’t nip off your penis. So lucky!”

And as Ender turns around to wallop his elder brother but hard in the testicles and as Cinder sidesteps so the fist goes flying into Flora and as Flora hides behind her Dad, Ender’s fist of fury makes contact with his father’s loins just as his father says,

“Don’t worry. The way your mom will tell the story, Ender will have had an almost-circumcision or an outright castration while I dangled his penis over a crayfish while washing his bu… Ah, fuck, what was that for, Ender?”

Karma, baby. Karma. For mocking the story-telling propensities of the mother of your beautiful children.

But… also, truth. By this time next year, this will be the “Remember how the crayfish tried to nip Ender’s penis while Daddy was washing his bum in Pinawa?” story. And five years from now, maybe it will have been successful. Ten years from now—there might even be a scar.

But for now—today, in this moment—this is the story of how Sean’s the best dad ever.

xoxo

“Jane”

P.S. I only had to carry that dirty diaper for about 500 metres before I found a garbage can. (In future versions of the story—5 K at least, I think.)

P.P.S. The walk took place Monday, August 5, 2013. The story’s been evolving.

P.P.P.S. What do you mean, “evolving”? Baby, I’m a writer. Nothing you read of mine is spontaneous. Never forget that.

♥

Still here? Just for you:

Great reads that popped into my in-box or newsfeeds this week:

If you’re feeling crafty, Rashmie at Mommy Labs has this awesome 30-Days of Leaf Art thing going. Gods alive all know I’ll never even try it… but my Flora’s all stoked.

US radio host Matt Walsh delivers the last word on breastfeeding in public. LOVE it: We must stop these crazed half-naked people from feeding their children in front of other people.

Ginny at Small Things says:  I’m a good mom because I love my kids, but not because I’m getting that much right, and yeah, that’s all there’s to it.

And for the unschoolers in the audience, from my LinkedIn network no less: Tomorrow’s entrepreneurs are playing Minecraft today

A day in the life

Strong start to the morning

Ender: Mama! I pee in potty!

Jane: Awesome! Way to go… um… if you peed in the potty, why is there a big puddle of pee on the floor?

Ender: I dump pee. Dump pee on floor. Hee hee hee.

Jane: Um… why?

Ender: Make footprints!

One day, he will be potty-trained. One day, he will be potty-trained. Oh, gods above, please, let him one day be potty-trained…

Gets even better in the afternoon…

Flora: Moooooom! Ender’s biting the dog again! Should I make him stop?

Jane: Well–yeah! Get him off her! Why are you even asking me?

Flora: Well–cause if he’s biting Maggie, then he’s not biting me. [Pause.] Or you.

Jane: That does make sense. … No, for Chris’ sake, get him off her. Poor dog.

[five minutes later]

Flora: Mooom!

Jane: Is he biting the dog again?

Flora: No, he’s dragging me around the floor by my feet. I knew we should have just left him biting the dog.

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Photo: Ender and Maggie. We should have gotten him a Doberman.

Interlude for a telephone call…

Phone. I’m the kitchen. I run. I lose.

Ender: Hello… Mommy? Talk with Mommy? … No talk with Mama. … I go have nursies now. She too busy! [Receiver slam!]

It’s the Vice President (Legal) of a Calgary investment banking outfit. Of course. At least it wasn’t the CEO.

Every day ends. Mercifully. And in the evening…

Jane (reading): “Holi is a joyous Indian holiday that comes at the end of winter. Holi is also known as the festival of colors. On this holiday, people run through the streets smearing strangers and friends with colored powder and douring each other with colored water. At the end of the day, everyone is decked out in all the colors of the rainbow.”

Flora: Oh, oh, oh, we could totally do that tomorrow to celebrate the Equinox. Can we, Mom? Can we?

Jane: Well, it would be very fun, I totally agree. But all our neighbours would pretty much hate us.

Cinder: They already think we’re the crazy people, don’t they?

Originally published as From the sitcom that is my life, March 19, 2012