Systemic Racism in Canada

Racism in Canada is a fact. No one is denying that or arguing about it with the possible exception of Rex Murphy. Link https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-canada-is-not-a-racist-country-despite-what-the-liberals-say. I believe that it is also a fact that open prejudice is less overt in Canada than it is in the United States. We are a politer people, for one thing. Instead of calling Michelle Obama ‘an ape in heels’, she gets the label ‘callipygian’. Conrad Black was the perp in this case and I have despised the man ever since I read that column. Link https://themsmysentiments.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-than-just.html

 I am white, middle class, well educated, in my 57^th year of a solid marriage and damn lucky to be Canadian with roots here that go back some generations. I am also lucky to have grown up in a community that was, to an extent, mixed race. I went to school with black kids, socialized with black kids and was unsurprised that my parents socialized with black professionals. And I got my education about racial epithets in Grade 3, when I repeated a comment my teacher had made to a classmate, calling him ‘her little chocolate drop’, and the classmate pushed me down a set of stairs. I liked chocolate and I liked George. He neither apologised or explained, but his hurt was clear. The lesson stuck.

 All my life I have believed that all the kids of whatever race and religion got the same schooling in my home community, with the exception of the Catholics who had a separate school system. As they still do, in Ontario today. The black kids were more heavily represented in a couple of the high schools, but as far as I knew, got exactly the same courses and calibre of teachers. I was smug, in fact, about how my community handled race.

 After writing that, I wondered just how good my recollection was. I have been looking at photos from a Windsor History website and it hit me that almost all the photos, elementary and secondary, were of white kids only.  And so, I did a quick literature check. Guess what!  Link https://www.tvo.org/article/the-story-of-ontarios-last-segregated-black-school?fbclid=IwAR2D9ptY035ZrBaTvvDkuaQNDFgJG5vDMwH-7PILtdOUXEKG7K57J-pijZE. I also found a nicely structured timeline of blackhistory in my community. Descriptions of actions in the 1940’s and 1950’s reveal a mixed bag of prejudice and fight against prejudice. See https://www.publicboard.ca/Programs/K-12/africancanadians/Documents/Roads%20to%20Freedom%20Sec_Feb%202011.pdf 

 I left my city to go to university and have never lived there again. Looking back at that time (and the yearbooks) I realize that there were very few black students. At the time I was oblivious. I recall going to a movie with a black male classmate and being puzzled at the glare I received in the lobby from a friend. I was engaged to be married to a guy who was not at the university and if I thought anything, it was that she believed I should not be with another male.

 I tried to teach our daughters not to let race get in the way of friendship and fellowship. I probably overdid it. My younger daughter tells me that racial prejudice and epithets were a factor in her schooling. If she told me that at the time, I probably told her to ignore the perpetrators as not worthy of attention. If I thought anything, it was that these creeps were too few to matter. I followed with interest the efforts to overcome racism in the USA, but I was a young mother with money to earn, kids to raise and a house to manage, and it did not appear to me to be my fight. After all, I thought, overt prejudice is illegal in Canada and those experiencing it could have recourse to the courts. Police beating up African Americans for no reason? Only in the States. Even a stint on the city’s Board of Education did not teach me much. Kids of all races were in trouble for various reasons. A few years working in the Board’s Personnel department did not cause me to count the number of blacks in positions of responsibility either. We had black teachers. So, no problem.

 I am white, middle class, and, I have come to realize, a stupid person. Over the last few years, I have learned more and more about the ‘racialized’ experience. And it just makes me sick. The fact that I don’t think I contributed to it is pretty lame. By not noticing, yeah, I have been on the wrong side. What was I thinking? Well, that the LGTBQ community needed some support. That agism needed fixing. That women are second class citizens (both of these latter from personal experience). But that Canadian blacks were routinely being subjected to hassle and worse from the police just went under my radar. I read about what I assumed were isolated incidents and also assumed that this would be dealt with. That the First Nations people were also hassled and worse is something I knew from reading but also assumed that the assurances from our politicians that this was being remedied were true.

 What I have just had shoved down my throat is that we cannot trust the police force not to use force when it is not needed. That police seem to be allowed to act on biases without penalty. That quite a few of our institutions are systemically unfair and that nothing has been done to change them. And that all this has happened and is continuing to happen because people like me, and including me, have not been paying attention and have not been enforcing change.

 Demanding change is not the same as getting change. I learned this in a very minor political position, on a Board of Education in fact, where, once elected, I quickly found out that as an elected official I was doing the equivalent of riding on an elephant with no reins. If you whacked the animal hard enough with a goad, you could get a minor change in direction, but the minute you stopped whacking, the change stopped happening. Why did this occur? Because the majority of the people in positions of responsibility were content with things as they were. Most of them, like me I suppose, were people of good will who thought that the bad stuff was aberrant and could be dealt with case by case. Bullying in the school yard was normal, always had been, and was relatively innocuous and besides, the kids would grow out of it. Or toughen up. Or you put a program in place and your elected official bogs off, happy. And never stops back to ask if the program is working or still in effect, even.

 Someone should ask if the school yard bully has grown up to be a person who will kneel on someone’s neck for eight minutes, ignoring pleas for air. Has the kid who teased someone about skin colour turned into an adult who blocks access to medical care at a reasonable price for ‘those’ people because they don’t look after themselves and don’t deserve it? Have the ‘elite’ groups of middle school madness become adult NIMBYs? And, equally frightening, what are some kids learning at home and internalizing. Because, don’t believe that little kids are innocent and are taught bias. Kids are inherently biased, like chickens pecking the one that looks different, and have to be taught, carefully taught, that all people are equal. When they see adults literally getting away with murder, what do they learn?

I am convinced that any of this is not going to be changed by a top down fix. That there are laws on the books and a Charter of Rights is nice, but not good enough. The elephant just keeps clomping along and here we are still sawing at the reins. Any change will only begin when a majority of people demand it and keep demanding it. Starting with sorting out the police, ditching politicians with tin ears and being aware, on every street, in every office, classroom and store, of prejudice in all its many subtle and overt forms. And calling it out, then and there, as it happens. In fact, by stopping being stupid and complacent and enabling. Yes, all lives matter, but the priority for our ‘racialized’ brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, matters more.

Note to readers: I am trying out 'New Blogger' and not getting the links to work. I have therefore included the URLs.

Old Movies

JG got a set of old war movies as a Christmas gift and last night we watched one of them - Twelve O’Clock High. To refresh your memory - this is a story about the first group of American daylight bombers (1942) to attack Europe. Starring Gregory Peck, it tells of his efforts to turn around a squadron of these bombers plagued by 'bad luck' and shows how they became an effective unit. Peck's character challenges the air crews to 'do their duty' to 'become adult and take responsibility', and in so doing he leads them until he is overcome by the weight of his responsibility and cannot function. He becomes catatonic but when the squadron comes back successfully from the mission he could not lead, conducted instead by the worst of the 'slackers', he recovers.

It got me thinking, this portrayal of dedication and duty. For one thing, we don't see a lot of this type of film any more. The Vietnam war produced a genre about how the men in uniform were broken (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter) and how they healed (I've forgotten the title of the film I want to cite here - it had Jane Fonda as a soldier's wife who encounters a maimed vet in an army hospital). Later we had 'operations' films from places like Afghanistan that are mainly concerned with the futility of heroic belief and action. The closest modern film to this 'dedicated hero' type that I can remember is not a war film but rather The Lord of the Rings trilogy that was, in the main, written during WWII.

This line of thought intersected another one, the product of several articles this weekend about a Yale professor's take on mothering - she describes her attempts to make her daughters excel in all they undertake. One response to her book has been a heartfelt howl from the proponents of nurturing (Western style?) parenting. The 'Dragon mother' has been accused of child abuse by several voices.

At close to seventy I obviously belong to the 'duty and rigour' side of the argument. I am not even a baby boomer, born as I was in 1942 while my father bobbed around in the North Atlantic in a corvette fighting submarines. I was brought up to believe that you keep your promises regardless of the cost to yourself, you do your duty no matter how unpalatable, you put the welfare of your community ahead of your own. I do not see much evidence that public figures  follow these values much of the time these days. Sarah Palin, for example, lost all credibility for me when she quit as Governor of Alaska part way through her term. The parenting style of the aptly christened 'helicopter parents' is practically incomprehensible from my cobweb draped seat in the bleachers.

Some remnants of the 'duty' morality, mind you, also strike me as weird. A politician in the USA can be and is pounded into jelly for personal infidelity but can get away with huge amounts of patronage. Serial monogamy is not even questioned - Liz Taylor's seven (I think) marriages are regarded with indulgence. A person whose first question is 'what's in it for me?' is given a straight-forward answer. I have no patience, either, for people who squawk about having to pay taxes to provide community services and aids for disadvantaged kids.

I should be stuffed and placed with the other dinosaurs, perhaps.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that in the world I see now the hand has moved from the rigid morals of Twelve O’Clock High to the deep-sixing, by the 'Me' generation and those following, of many values and customs that make our society liveable. Courtesy. Courage. Responsibility for our own actions. Principles. And a little bit of putting the other guy first.

Tangles

A while back my daughter and granddaughter presented me with a Martha Stewart magazine of Halloween projects. Along with the maximum labour pumpkin faces and other décor ideas, there were some pages of costumes for the big day. Adult costumes, and very elaborate. And on one page was a photograph of a woman about my age, dressed in white perfection, holding above her head an umbrella that had been crafted to resemble a jelly-fish. Seven year old Little Stuff was fascinated by this and asked if, maybe, I could make her one like that, big brown eyes staring imploringly into mine.

'I have a cloche umbrella just like that one,' said my daughter, cheerfully.

I know when I'm outnumbered. I promised LS I would make her a jellyfish umbrella.

Yesterday she and her mother came out to our place from the city, lugging big bags of bubble wrap, rolls of cellophane and tape, the umbrella and the illustration. I read the directions beside the photo. I read them again. Not a lot of help there. And so ......... we propped the photo up on my desk, plugged in the glue gun (but forgot to turn it on) and started cutting strips of bubbles, diagonally across the large size bubble wrap. Not a fun job, that. If you are not very, very meticulous in your cut, you can nick the side of the bubble and it goes foof. LS was getting frustrated and grama was starting to perspire, gently. We developed a technique where we cut only every second line of bubbles, in strips. Not perfect like the ones in the photo, but possible.

Then we had to make the handle and edge of the umbrella white, while taping the strings of bubbles to the edge. White book tape - miserable to stretch out and impossible if it touches itself - was laboriously applied and the bubble strings untangled. And untangled again. Next we had to make the umbrella sections look like turquoise jelly.

The instructions said "Cut 8 same-size strips of lightweight iridescent cellophane; sandwich each between 2 bubble strips; hot-glue smooth edges of tentacles to umbrella spokes. (Plastic will melt.)"  We made a pattern. We cut, fringed, pasted, untangled the strings of bubbles, untangled the fringe and repeated. Two hours passed while we did this, again and again. Little Stuff was indomitable and hung on for the whole time, with one digression out to the swings while I put the roast into the oven and one small pause for a snack (and coffee for grama) when we discovered the glue gun was still cold.

The pattern cut from the newspaper had most of a photo of Muslims at prayer on it - down on their knees with foreheads on the floor. "What are all those people doing, grama," said LS. "Praying," says I. "They look silly," said little Miss. Oh, dear. While I tried to get bubble wrap to stay square, not drip the glue all over and untangle the strings of bubbles, I also had to carefully pick my way through the minefield of discussing tolerance of one another's differences with a judgemental child.

I asked her what she would do if a friend wearing a dress she loved but that looked ugly to Little Stuff asked LS what she thought of it. LS allowed that she would not make her friend unhappy by saying it was ugly. Same with what people do that looks strange, I tried to explain, especially their religions, because that is something that a lot of people feel strongly about and it is both wrong and easy to hurt someone's feelings. After some discussion of this, LS read the caption under the photo, which accompanied a story on the firing of Juan Williams, "Remarks over Muslims cost top US radio host his job."

To the tangles of bubble wrap and strings of glue, we now added the tangles of political correctness. We got into 'jihad' from Williams' statement that Muslims on a plane madehim nervous. I finally wiggled loose after explaining that some people misinterpreted their religion and were very wrong. I clearly recall, in another post, saying that I was thankful that theology and all its ramifications were the province of parents, not grandparents. And after this I shall make sure that we make newspaper patterns with the comics section of the paper.

The umbrella looked quite handsome when it was finished.

There's More Bugging Me Than Blackflies

 A Red Maple in Flower

The sky is a bowl of Delft blue, a mad young spring wind is whipping through the trees and making our wind chime dance with joy, the daffodils are dancing too and everywhere, in every shade of green, spring is here.  And where am I?  Not out enjoying the wonderful day, that's for sure.  I am sitting at my computer alternately looking wistfully through the window, writing this post and trying to fill in and make persuasive a 38 page grant application. 

The application form is a provincial government creation and, besides being in two different fonts and a rainbow array of colours, covers every possible question any size or type of applying organization could possibly be asked.  In excruciating detail.  Since our organization is small, runs on fumes and has very little administrative structure, it falls to me as one of the volunteer board members to try to get what we want and why we want it into the shape they require.  And it is making me furious.

I could write a one page submission that would include the financial stuff in one small graph and tell them all they require.  But failure to fill in their impossible form correctly causes them to throw out the application.  He who holds the money calls the tune, for sure.  I expect the department dispensing the cash hired an expert to design this form - it has all sorts of bells and whistles and came to me 'locked', for goodness sake.  Cute little boxes to check.  Five column work plans to fill out.  I need some headache medication and probably a blood pressure check.  And more coffee.

That was written on Wednesday and it is now Friday.  I spent yesterday on a mad treasure hunt from place to place gathering all the documents that the Gov't demanded accompany the grant application, with a final careen into our local town where I navigated through the road reconstruction from hell to get to the courier and get the wad of paper sent off in time to be in under deadline, at astronomical cost.  Enough!  The next time someone mentions a grant application I am going to do the 'duck and cover' I learned in grade school.  You know about that?  The one where you curled up under your desk with your elbows up over your ears as protection if someone dropped an atom bomb?  More than many things I was taught, this is useful in the right circumstances, as in board meetings where someone is needed to do something time consuming and trivial.

Ah well.  We might, long chance, even get some money.


And we need it.  The grant was applied for by the ASK steering committee that I think I have written about previously (only I can't find it!)  ASK is a group of seniors that co-ordinates and runs various beneficial activities, things like line dancing, bocce parties, Wii bowling, in the various halls in our sparsely populated and spread out township.  (AS stands for Active Seniors and the K is for koalition, to make a good acronym, sigh)  We got money from our local Ministry of Health body called a (LHIN) under a funding structure called 'Aging at Home'.  The theory is that if you keep seniors active and connected to the community, they will be healthier and cost the health system less. 

Originally we got three years' worth of funding for a .25 co-coordinator's position and money for equipment.  One year into the project, when we are experiencing a 35% increase in attendance, the LHIN pulled the funding.  Seems they needed the money more for 'home care' for fragile seniors.  In fact, the organization that supplies 'home care' went into the red and had to pull the case workers.  And the LHIN had to bale them out and grabbed back our money to do so.  Or that's what we figure.  Talk about short term thinking!

At the moment, our co-coordinator is continuing unpaid and the rest of us who volunteer are trying to lighten up her load.  Thus Mary G inside on one of the nicest days this spring.  And now, having vented all this steam and had fun calling the provincial government a bunch of anally retentive stupes, I am going outside to pull raspberry canes out of my iris bed.  In my bug shirt.

Headlines. And a Mission

The Painted Maypole hosts a writing group at her site called Monday Missions. Yesterday's mission was to write a post in the form of headlines. The assignments are a lot of fun and I learn a lot from the writers that take on a mission. We all learn from one another. To see the latest MM, go here.

As often happens, I am getting to the mission on Tuesday and twisting its tail. A lot. Because after I slithered down the lane to the mailbox and picked up our papers this morning, all I could see were the headlines.

CHAOS RULES IN PORT-AU-PRINCE and

Disaster in Haiti.

To the horror of the earthquake and the heart tearing frustration of the slowness of arriving help has now been added the violence and fury of looting. It is hard to watch; it must be maddening to try to manage and terrifying to endure. I do not find it hard to understand. When I was taught to be a lifeguard, we were warned and taught how to deal with drowning victims who might be so frantic, so panicked, that they would grab their rescuer and prevent the rescue. We were taught how to approach from behind, how to break a stranglehold under water, how to choke a victim enough to stop the flailing that would prevent us towing him to safety. Tough love, in fact, in the extreme. And I think the people of Haiti are like those drowning victims. So without hope that they see no help, no rescue and flail out at all around them.

I am afraid that the tough love solutions are what is needed now. The rescuers are going to have to defend themselves, to ensure their own safety, before they can rescue. The American group running the airport is going to have to prefer landing for munitions and soldiers over medical aid and supplies. Canada may send peace keepers; as a Canadian I would demand that such young men and women be armed and allowed to defend themselves and the aid workers they support. Of course this slows the aid and limits its delivery and so more people are going to die or go so long without treatment that they will end up with amputated limbs or chronic debility.

The root of it, as I see it, is the poverty in Haiti, a poverty that leads to hopelessness and a hopelessness that leads to rage and amorality. We don't experience that kind of poverty in North America; not even the worst of our slums, the most lost of our homeless, have no one, ever, to reach out a hand to them, have no expectation of ever being helped. Our government works, even when Mr Proroguey is running it, our safety nets are there, stretched thin in places, but there. But in Haiti the government and its programs are sometimes so corrupt that they are part of the problem and not of the solution. So it is a country of grinding poverty in which a disaster brings a situation where it is every man for himself, where morality is a luxury and the ability to fight for it ruthlessly is what gets you food and water.

I am sure that the majority of people in Haiti are, like all of us, a mixture of good and bad, noble and venal. They deserve peace, order and good government, as all of us do. So, I am happy to give money to emergency relief. But I would throw my heart behind anyone who knows how to make that relief effective and who has the skill, the knowledge and the power to clean up some of the basic problems that have made a natural disaster into something so much worse

Who Let the Dogs Out?

I have an on-line acquaintance whose kindergarten aged daughter has a mordant fear of dogs. As her mother describes it, it is a phobic fear and the poor kidlet panics whenever she is in the presence of a dog. She is too young to have this intensity of fear addressed by a psychologist and therefore her mother cannot take her anywhere that the child might encounter dogs closely. No jaunts in the park, no trips to the market, no place where people might bring their pets. Of course, she will grow up and reach a cognitive level where this fear can be addressed, but in the meantime her mother has a lot of problems. She tried to take Miss M to see the Olympic torch run, but people had their dogs there and she had to leave. When the 'Leave Your Dog at Home' site went up, the mother was afraid that the little girl would not be able to tolerate going to the Santa Claus parade.

In my mind, dogs don't get a lot out of Santa Claus and it would not spoil a treat for them if they were left at home. Miss M, on the other hand, is at a perfect Santa Parade age.

When my husband was a little boy he was horribly afraid of dogs. He remembers walking home from somewhere with his sister and hiding behind her because of a dog. He clearly remembers the terror. When he was old enough, his parents got a puppy and he learned to overcome his fear. But even as an adult he still feels very uncomfortable around strange large dogs.

When my daughter was a toddler, she too began to evince fear of dogs. We got a puppy and she bonded with him enough that she now does not remember the fear. I remember the hassle, oh yes, I do. I had a two and a half year old toddler, a year old baby and a puppy and not enough arms to cope with all three of them at once. I clearly recall having the two kids in a pull sleigh that winter and the dog on a leash and hitting a patch of ice as I walked. Sleigh went one way, dog the other and I did a perfect cartoon rendition of feet going faster and faster and going no where. Thud! Not to mention the time the little ones let him escape one spring evening a few years later and he became a father. But all of the trouble and mess was worthwhile to prevent my little girl developing serious dog phobia.

I know that for some people, their dogs are their companions and support. That if you live alone, a pet is a lifeline. I have a daughter who has a dog that she has named 'Friend' in Shona. She takes her dog a lot of places with her and loves her very dearly. It would probably never occur to her that her shy, sweet-faced, mostly well-behaved pet could evoke terror in a child just by running into the same park with her. But I remember her sister's terror and I have seen the evidence of a similar long-ago terror in my husband.

There was a big hassle about dogs running loose in parks reported on the radio not long ago. And a pet owner was interviewed saying that it was inhumane not to allow dogs to run sometimes. That dogs need to run and play. And I think she was right. But there are a fair number of kids out there, like Miss M and my husband, for whom the dog's freedom creates terror. And that's not humane either.

There's no easy answer to this one, for me. Do we have enough parks to split them so that some are for dogs and some for children? Even children who love dogs should not be playing on ground that dogs have shit on, however carefully the owner scooped the poop. In Barcelona, Spain, they have dog runs set aside -- children are not forbidden, but the dogs come first. In all my exploration of the place I did not find one play area for children where dogs were forbidden and as I was minding my three year old granddaughter, I was most persistently looking for children's play areas. I was in a big shopping mall in France some years ago where dogs were allowed and left deposits on the sidewalks, unchallenged. I question the priority setting, I really do.

Both children and dogs can be pestiferous little monsters and people like me, accompanied by neither, can be heartily sick of both. My rule would be to keep a leash on the whole whining, blundering lot of them, frankly. Kids need company manners. And dogs do not belong at a Santa Claus parade.

A Voice from the Back of the Queue

As a healthy person over sixty five, I am at the lowest priority for an H!N1 flu shot in the ranking identified by Canada's Medical Officers of Health. A few days ago I read an op ed piece in our local paper honouring the veterans of WWII and the Korean war, and complaining that these seniors, who have deserved praise and service from their countrymen, are, many of them, also assigned to the end of the line. They deserve better of us and since, as frail seniors, they are more likely to die from flu if they contract it, the writer argued that they should receive the vaccine at the same priority as our serving soldiers. It was a nice thought, but I don't agree with it.

The H1N1 virus is doing some strange things. For most people, it acts like a normal flu but every once and a while it attacks so strongly that it kills adolescents and young people in a very short length of time. My daughter and her partner are mourning the death of a colleague on Wednesday, a fit and healthy man of thirty-eight who will be a great loss to his community and his young family. It is quite clear that no one can really predict whom this flu will hit and how hard.

The dead man's wife is a doctor; I am quite sure that she did all the right things to get him help when he became seriously ill but all of our very competent medical knowledge was not enough to save him. At almost the same time a friend of mine, of about my age, was admitted to hospital with serious heart arrhythmia. She was fitted with a pace -maker and is home again and feeling well. The young (to me, anyway) professor's death hit the front page of the paper; my friend's quick rescue and recovery is not news at all. I think that because we expect so much from our health care providers, and they so often deliver flawlessly, we are seriously frightened when they do not have instant and positive answers to a problem.

And so, we second guess them. Veterans should have the flu shot early and if they don't get it, cries of ageism are heard. People get frightened and are ill informed. They jump the queues and cause serious damage to the plan for vaccine delivery. They get angry. The press has lovely dramatic stories to tell and thus fan the flames. People make money standing in for others in the waiting lines. People behave badly, in short.

I have no problem with the priorities that have been established for delivery of the H1N1 shots. And I am saying that from the very end of the line. If it is a choice between immunizing me or immunizing my children and grandchildren, I am quite content to let them go first whether I have partial immunity from the 1957 version or whether I do not. From my limited perspective I can speculate that it might have been better to give the shot to children and young people in schools and universities, and to their teachers, at a higher priority, in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus through these dense populations and then home to their families. The argument has been that it is a hugely complicated and potentially unfair logistical problem to get the clinics to schools; if so, it is a problem that should be explored and a plan developed for future use. Equally, the problem of stopping people from ignoring the priority instructions and arriving at the clinics, thus clogging the system, should be solved.

But in the meantime, you will not find me in a H1N1 shot line-up until I am called and told that my turn has come. And I am perfectly happy to take my chances.

Even though the skin on my hands is all crackly from using hand sanitizer so much.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day in Canada - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month time is supposed to stand still for a minute or two minutes while we remember our soldiers, alive and dead.

There is a lot to remember these days. Both my father and my father in law fought in the second World War; both came home alive and more or less well but many, so many, did not. There were so many servicemen from that conflict that there are still, although most of them are now in their eighties or better, many of them to march slowly past the cenotaph or sit in wheelchairs and watch the youngsters parade. The Korean war vets are somewhat younger and most of those who stayed involved with the military after their term was up will still be marching with tummies sucked in and regimental badges on their tams. Canada has very few Vietnamese veterans - that conflict seems to us to be reserved to the Americans to mourn. But for our size, Canada has a lot of veterans.

As well, for many years Canada has sent young people off on 'peace-keeping missions'. We have been proud as a country to offer highly trained and skilled military people to work for the United Nations or NATO, enforcing cease fires or containing - or trying to contain - disasters. Some of them have been wounded or killed; all of them have been exposed to danger and uncertainty.

For the last few years we have young men and women to honour and commemorate who are fighting an active war; they seem like kids to me, these veterans of Afghanistan. I could have grandchildren among them, although, thankfully, I do not. Canada has sent them off to a foreign land to fight an invisible enemy for a cause not well defined and they have done remarkable things. And died well. I wish I could think that the war against fundamentalist rule was being won but I can see little evidence of that. I was glad when we sent fighting forces because I thought that at least women might be freer under a secular state, but the present government seems bound and bent to uphold some of the worst excesses of the Taliban regime and enjoy continuing graft and corrupt practices. It is not the fault of our soldiers over there but I think they must feel as if they are pushing the proverbial rock up the proverbial slope and too many of them are being wounded and killed.

And so I shall use my time of silence tomorrow to think of these young people living in danger and vulnerable to a hidden enemy. All of them, the living, the wounded and the dead. The lucky ones will be the ones who can come home whole in body and whole in mind. They deserve all that we can give them, of respect, of resources to help them recover, and in sorrow, our profound thanks.

Cliffs of Fall

I am feeling trapped in, this last few days. The return to standard time brings the dank November dark an hour earlier, pushing me into the warmth of the house with its foggy fingers. The air is cold with the damp and, as I write, the first snow is falling in wet fat flakes and clinging to everything. It will melt, but it is a harbinger of things to come, nasty things like icy slippery roads and icy slippery steps that challenge my driving skills and my arthritic joints. As well, it is hunting season and the woods and fields are dotted with figures in 'hunter's red' ( a nasty shade of glowing orange) shooting at and spooking the deer. We all have to drive with extreme caution because you never know when one of the wretched beasts will materialize on the road in front of you. It makes me think twice about leaping into the car and zooming off in any direction, especially after (the very early) dark.

I am also feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings I have scheduled this month. Meetings I cannot miss, having taken on the job of chair of the board. Meetings that I have to drive on the dangerous roads in the dark to attend. I can do it. I do do it. But more and more as I grow older, the effort is greater. I can see the time coming when my own fears may become disabling, a prison that I will build myself.

Confined in the Tower of London, Richard Lovelace wrote the famous lines:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage.

A fine philosophy, that. But recite those lines to a young mother, tending toddlers in a home far from any public transport, short of money, and you will provoke her, at best, to derisive laughter. The expectations of our community can confine us in the adamant constraints of others' ideas of how we should live and what we should be. Poverty builds walls of cold iron around us, walls with very few, very narrow exits. However, for many of us it is more our minds than our circumstances that trap us into prisons more grim than a stone walled cell. Our expectations of ourselves can become the most stringent prison of all. Depression, illness, fear and grief are the cold, weeping stones that form these prisons and sometimes there is no door, no window, not even an oubliette, to bring us hope and news of the world.

There's a debate going on in Canada just now, in the intervals of the latest chatter about H1N1 anyway, about euthanasia. A bill allowing some types of assisted suicide is being debated in the House of Commons. It's not a simple question. The medical association in Quebec wants some guidelines to help them deal with uncontrollable pain in terminal patients. The various associations of disabled people want the value of their lives acknowledged and protected. The non-religious majority (52% of Canadians, the last poll I saw) want freedom to choose a dignified end. Courageous souls with debilitating diseases are requesting legal suicide options. I am certainly not alone in worrying about the effect an open-ended legalizing of suicide would have on the many people whose minds, not innocent or quiet, cause them constant pain.

It's not a simple question. The young man, paralysed from an accident, can fight his way through the pain and become a contributing member of society. The depressed new mother who throws herself in front of a train could have been helped, cured perhaps. Even Tracy Latimer might have been helped although I understand, I think, why her father killed her. There are no lines to divide physical and emotional pain and not all pain can be 'managed'.

Here's my personal dilemma. I smoke. I do so knowing that, although I have not so far cost the state any money from smoking-related illness, sooner or later I may develop lung cancer or have a debilitating stroke that will reduce me to a vegetable to be a burden on my family and a huge cost to the taxpayer in medical care. Would it not be both fair and simple to issue me a lethal dose of something when the disease in my lungs is drowning me or to use on my mindless, stubbornly breathing hulk? Would not that be more dignified, less costly in both emotional and monetary terms? A release from the prison my stubbornness has built for me?

Or, I could just go and drive down the county road too fast, hoping that the deer I hit would be big enough to kill both of us.

Would you like to live in a world where you turned over every penny you made to a husband who had been chosen for you, where your main duty was to 'live in harmony' with him and with your sister wives, where you had no access to birth control, you were forbidden television and newspapers and your children could be beaten? That is the life that women live in a sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). This sect is a 'radical offshoot' of the Mormon Church; you may have seen pictures of the women of the sect in, I think, 2008 when a compound belonging to the sect was raided after a complaint of sexual abuse was made by one of the young girls there. The women all wore their hair in a complicated braided style, wore long sleeved and skirted dresses, and were accompanied by lots and lots of small children.

I have just finished a book written by Carolyn Jessop, a woman who managed to leave the strict control of her husband and community. The book is called "Escape" and describes how she grew up in the FLDS, how she became gradually disillusioned with it and how she managed to get out, taking her children with her, and build a new life. The book is riveting, sometimes horrible, sometimes amazing. One of the most saddening parts is the description of her eldest daughter, a young teen when the family left, who went back as soon as she was eighteen and has now become a spokesperson for the sect and is, I gather, quite critical of her mother's decision and book. The book is not objective, how could it be, but I think there is enough in it to make it very believable.

I don't have any problem with plural marriage in the abstract if it were to be as advertised; sister wives helping one another and supported by a man who was even-handed and just to the whole family. In fact, when my children were babies and I had to work at least part time to put food on the table, I often wished there were two of me, or even three. One to satisfy the husband, one to care for the babies, and one to work and look after herself. The situation Carolyn Jessup describes was not like that at all. The family was at war with itself, the husband did things that were lazy and uncaring and the family and community were toxic with fear.

I do have trouble with religions that rely on a 'prophet' (or bishop or imam) to direct the whole community. I have trouble with religions that restrict what their adherents can read or listen to or learn, and that limit their children's schooling. The argument that the children must be kept 'pure' is, for me, a specious one. Children are not 'pure'. They are innately curious; they need to have their world explained to them, using language and examples appropriate to their age level of course, but never talked down to or ignored. And they should never, never be beaten into silence and 'good behaviour'. They should never be persuaded to be afraid.

Carolyn's description of her childhood is full of examples of how the whole community was taught to believe that the rest of the world was malevolent and threatening to them. The children were routinely slapped and spanked to improve their behaviour. Nonconforming wives could also be beaten. Even worse, for me, was the doctrine that to be admitted into Heaven, the children had to please the adults and the women their husbands, to conform to a very stultifying norm, to be unquestioningly obedient. It's a long way from the doctrine of free will.

When I went to my confirmation, as a child of twelve, I was convinced that the Holy Ghost would descend to me and that I would become a good person, inspired by the love of Christ. It did not happen that way and I was horribly disappointed. I remained within my church for many years thereafter but gradually drifted away from all organized religion, finding it patriarchal and top heavy and increasingly irrelevant to the life I wanted to live, a life in which service to my family and community was balanced by self growth. It did not help that as we moved from place to place each new church I joined asked me for money pretty well as the first thing they did to welcome me.

Over the course of many years I have come to understand that no one can be the keeper of my conscience for me. Rules that make little or no sense, tenets of belief that are not clear or helpful, dictates from on high, are all distasteful to me. And it seems to me that a lot of organized religion, of whatever form, thrives on these things. The FLDS is an extreme example; while I read her book my heart ached for Carolyn Jessop and her long journey into a life she could shape for herself.

Monday Mission - Dear Sir,

Dear Sir,

The regrettable early prorogation of Parliament was so disappointing to us that we are sending this letter to all of the political parties involved in it, in the hope that if you hear enough complaint you will see the necessity of amending your party's behaviour. Our organization, Lanark Health and Community Services, works in a rural community where, at the best of times, poverty and the illnesses caused by poverty are prevalent. In a time of economic downturn, when the most urgent business of the government should be protecting its citizens, you failed to do so.

We are a community governance board of an organization whose purpose is to provide health care and support to people at risk. Some years ago we decided to manage ourselves not by Robert's Rules, a method that sometimes encourages an adversarial approach, but by consensus. This method requires that we work together, that we hear each other out and that we strive to reach an agreement that is at least acceptable to all of us. It works best when we trust one another to be honest, straightforward and flexible. We make it work because to do so serves the interests of the people to whom we are responsible.

While we do not believe that you will abandon hundreds of years of Parliamentary tradition, we do believe that you should adopt some, at least, of the attitude that we find serves us best. The people of Canada need representatives who care more about the welfare of the country than they do about their own status and personal agendas. Representatives who will set aside an adversarial approach and work together.

We earnestly hope that when Parliament reconvenes all members can decide to do the work for which they were elected and cooperate in the interests of the people of Canada.

Yours truly,

Chair, LHCS

Note: this is the first draft of a letter that we actually sent to all of the Party Leaders after the mess last fall. We got one answer, from the Liberal leader, saying he was pleased to hear our views, obviously a form letter. But it made us feel better to send it.

True Days

Chani has a very moving post up - about saying the truth and being the 'real you'. Also links to another blog that inspired her. She is suggesting that people who want to do some soul searching with support might wish to put 'True Day' in the title of a post about their authentic feelings about something.
I have a neat little sketch that might make a 'button'. It is this. It is by William Thakeray, called 'Vanity' and I believe it is public domaine.

Sauce for the Gander

Afghan Shi'ite Muslim demonstrate Wednesday in favor of a new law that would require Shi'ite women to get their husband's permission before leaving the house and would legitimize marital rape. A smaller group of Afghan women staged a rival demonstration opposing the law.

Omar Sobhani/Reuters

(Copied this from the Christian Science Monitor)

When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would not write about sex. Lots of people doing that, I reasoned. No need for a wrinkly to get into it.

I have just changed my mind, after reading about women in Afghanistan protesting the proposed law that would, among other things, require Shiite women to agree to sex with their husbands every fourth day.

Every fourth day? Could it be that this requirement is set up for a man with four wives, as I believe is allowed under Shiite law?

Pierre Trudeau famously said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. That covers it for me as far as adopting Sharia law as the law of the land; obey the tenets of your religion by all means, but do not enshrine these tenets in the secular laws designed to make the state a place of law and order for all. Frankly, I feel the same about any law enacted to enforce the tenets of any religion, the 'Close on Sundays' laws that until a few years ago forbade shopkeepers of any faith to open on Christian Sunday being a case in point.

When I was married, I took vows that I feel honour bound to keep. These promises I understand to include the right of each partner to have sex with the other one. Implicit, but there. With no three days off, either. And I recall, vaguely, reading that in Orthodox Jewish law a man is required to have sex with his wife once a week. Not sure of the detail, but the way I remember it would see that requirement as being for the wife's benefit.

And as I was doing housework this morning and thinking about it, I started speculating what would happen if the proposed Afghanistan legislation was an enjoinder on both sexes, a requirement for both a man and a woman to agree to sex once every fourth day. If a man had four wives, that would work out to sex every day for the man. Do you think that the men in the legislature in Afghanistan would rise to the occasion and pass such a law?

Because I don't.

A Sad Little Story

I went to get my hair cut at one of those walk-in places last week and ran into a situation that just made my heart ache.

There was a family group ahead of me composed of a woman in her late forties, at a guess, her married daughter, the daughter's husband and toddler and a second daughter, at least eight, whom the mother referred to as 'my youngest'. When I got there the toddler's father was having his hair cut and the young mother was trying to persuade the little guy to have his done also. Toddler was having none of it, screaming 'No, NOOO!' and trying to pry the door open to escape. The little girl was next, before me, and she was acting so much like the toddler that it was hard to tell the difference. Her mother was trying to persuade her that she should have her hair layered and trimmed but she had selected a very extreme cut from a magazine and wanted nothing but that.

As her mother tried to persuade her, she hauled open the door and stormed out. Her mother shrugged and asked the hairdresser to hold her place while she tried to persuade her. So, we waited.

After a bit, little miss came storming back in with mother, still arguing. She refused to get in the chair. By this time other customers had come in. The poor, beleaguered hairdresser signalled for me to sit down and started cutting my hair. Little miss demanded to have hers cut; her mother said that her bad behaviour had caused her to miss her turn and that she would have to wait. While my hair was cut, the argument continued, with little miss now thumbing through the sample books looking for another style and mother insisting that she was to have 'layers and a trim'. Another hairdresser finished a client; little miss refused to have her do the cutting.

Little miss was also consuming a steady stream of the suckers that children get after their hair is cut, taking them out of the box on the counter herself, in spite of her mother's orders that she stop.

Mother did not enforce her orders. She did not try to stem the behaviour. She seemed to be uninvolved emotionally. In fact, she chatted with her other daughter and with us while this was going on, but without referring to the girl's actions, other than to say that she, herself, was a hairdresser but preferred not to cut the girl's hair herself as it was 'too much trouble.'

When I got out of the chair, mother directed little miss to climb in. Little miss refused and continued to look at the books and magazines. Mother then said that since the girl was not ready, they would leave. Little miss screamed, stamped and banged the books around. Her mother stood with the door open, saying that they were leaving, and went out. The girl stood in the doorway and screamed at the top of her lungs. Just a series of shrieks.

Perhaps the little girl was behaviourally challenged in some way; certainly her actions were far more characteristic of a two year old than of an average girl of her age. Her language level and ability to read would indicate, however, that she was of normal intelligence. That would not preclude ADD or autism spectrum disorders. Whatever, her mother was certainly not helping; she was confrontational, uncompromising and seeming uninvolved in and unembarrassed by her daughter's over the top display. If the girl was simply an uncontrolled average kid, her mother was totally at fault, in my estimation. In either case, I think she should have been taken out of the salon when she started to create and, certainly, have never been brought back for a second try.

I felt very sorry for both of them, but my heart really bled for little miss. Judging by the twenty minutes or so during which I watched the action, the girl did not know the boundaries of appropriate behaviour nor have any method of getting what she wanted other than disobedience and screaming. If she was a child with a disability she should not have been handled that way; if she was a normal child she had, very obviously, never been given rules or boundaries. And it seemed to me that her mother did not care.

Kids, I believe, need rules. Boundaries to their behaviours inside which they can feel safe. Techniques (good manners with strange adults, for one) that they can trust to work and to make them likeable. How to bargain for what they want badly. Structure. Support. This poor little kid did not seem to have any of these things. She was angry and, I think, frightened of her own anger. She was frustrated and had no way to express the frustration other than to scream.

There are a lot of children with behavioural problems who need skilled help. She may be one of them. In our province many of these children are presently waiting to be diagnosed at the request of teachers whose access to services is ludicrously small. Even when the children are diagnosed, ever growing numbers of them are on waiting lists because the service providers have no funds to hire staff to deal with them. There are caps in this year of economic downturn on a lot of the programs funded by the Ontario government through the Ministry of Health and Social Services; no money is available even for the programs that are up and running.

There are also a lot of average children whose behaviour is out of control because no one in their life has consistently tried to teach them how to act in a way that will bring them success. No one has helped them learn to govern their tempers, to share, to have patience, to get along with other people. No one has, if you will excuse the plain speaking, civilized them.

Both of these lacks are sickening, because it is the children who suffer in the long term, not the adults who fail to provide the help and support. I ended up wishing that someone would pour a pail of cold water over the head of little miss screamer. And that's horrible. Because I think every adult in the hair cutters' establishment was thinking much the same. While, in fact, she was suffering a lot more than we were, poor thing.

One Big Question -- One Long Answer

This post is part of the Five Question Challenge. For the other four questions, see the post below this one.

3.You live in a country bordered by the biggest and most culturally invasive (in the nicest possible way!) nation in the world. What do you like most and least about your neighbour, the USA?

Um, you might want to get yourself something tasty to drink and settle in for a while, because this will be a long answer. And not because I don't have the time to write a short one. Rather, the subject is one dear to the heart of each and every Canadian including, I expect, those living in Iqaluit, who only get American satellite television feed and have to miss the CBC news.

I'm sure you've heard the saying about sleeping next to an elephant -- that you have to understand when he is going to turn over and be prepared. America is the elephant (and Canadians get really snarky when they are called Americans, even though they are North Americans, because we think of ourselves as Not-Americans). Canada is the mouse and never has mouse watched cat more carefully than Canada watches the USA. And copies it, talking about cats.

When I was a girl and young woman, it seems to me looking back now, that Canadians really did build self identity around being not American. Several successive governments tried things like banning American magazines at the border, refusing to test missiles (rendering our participation in NORAD more ludicrous than usual), talking up images of Americans as loud, insensitive, uneducated and uncaring. Even fifty years later there is still a lot of that. Look how proud the Chretien government was of refusing to get involved in Iraq. (While at the same time taking a heavy role in Afghanistan?)

As a girl and young woman I bought into it. I remember being quite upset when the government of the day replaced our dull green Royal Mail boxes with the Queen's crest on them. Instead we got bright red boxes saying Canada Post (equally inane in both English and French). I just knew that having a queen and a parliament was a Big Thing in not America-ing. Huge Canadian angst over national identity, for so many years, fuelled, I now think, by jealousy of the obviously strong American identity and brand.

And this is weird because as I have visited parts of the USA I have found charming diversity of culture, of accent and cuisine, wide variance in architecture, in the way people look and talk. I think you see the same thing in American literature, for all that they are proud to be a 'melting pot'. While in Canada, the great multicultural experiment, I have found less diversity from sea to sea to sea.

I suspect that what Loth is asking is tied to the USA's exported culture -- the lowest common denominator coke and cuties stuff, the inane television and occasional visible loud and obnoxious tourist. The bad tourist rap has some truth in it. I was once in a lingerie shop in Paris where two American women were repeating themselves in ever louder voices to make the vendeuse understand what they wanted. I stepped up with my English Canadian French, got them sorted and after they left the store the vendeuse thanked me and commented on them in very good English. (There's truth in the 'nasty Paris salespeople' stereotype, too.)

Oh shoot, I just went on to my second page of text and I'm barely started.

I would have identify that exported Mickey Mouse stuff as one of the things I like least. You see, I grew up almost American, being born and raised in a border town, Windsor, opposite Detroit, "Mo Town'. I grew up with American radio, knew lots of American kids whose parents had summer cottages in Canada, shopped in wonderful stores in Detroit (and, sadly, smuggled the shopping home). My mother did her Master's degree at Wayne State, my aunt took art there and the campus, library and fine arts holding there were impressive in the extreme. The sheer Yankee in-gen-oo-ity of the auto assembly lines was admirable. The pop music culture, which came to us Fifties kids via radio, was amazing. The Detroit skyline was and is beautiful. All of that is genuine American culture, of the kind they have at home. Yes, they created Disney World. Yes, they produced Madonna. They also produced Mia Angelou, and the first National Park scheme in the world.

On the downside, again. Mo'town. I don't know how many of you who are not Canadian will have heard Gord Lightfoot's 'Motor City Madness'. My father sat in Ambassador Park on the Detroit Riverside, that evening and night in July, 1967 and watched Detroit burning. Some of the ugliest race riots ever took place over several days at that time. Soon afterwards schools started to desegregate, and real efforts were made to lessen racial prejudice. Meanwhile, on the Canadian side of the river not only I but also my parents had attended fully integrated schools and had Black colleagues. Windsor and area, one of the terminals of the Underground Railway, had, for Canada, a big African American population. I hasten to add here that the Canadian record holds lots of instances of racial prejudice and ugly treatment of minorities and is not something we are proud to own.

In fact, I do not believe at all that wearing a maple leaf pin or Canadian flag pin is a signal that you are a Good Guy... it's just nice for Canadians to believe. Besides, Americans have now caught on and are buying little Canadian flags to wear abroad. Truth. I heard it on CBC.

What do I like about the USA? So much. The Smithsonian. The wide, beautiful roads and glorious bridges. Cotton knit and denim. The clean, well planned stores (shops, Loth) where you can buy nice things at good prices (and yes, I include Walmart). Inventiveness and drive. The funny little western museums where they preserve their hundred year old pioneer history with a mad lack of selectiveness. St Augustine, Baton Rouge, San Francisco, Philadelphia. The waitresses who call you 'honey' and stare when you ask for vinegar with your French Fries. (They do the same thing in Holland, but they bring the vinegar in a little bowl and watch you pour it with bemused expressions.) The well dressed, hard edged women entrepreneurs. Their very free press. Their confidence and joi de vivre.

America and its citizens can be obtuse, narrow minded, insular, tasteless, cocky.......ugly. (But they do not hold a patent on being those things.) The gun worship sucks. They can also be generous, funny, courageous, marvellously creative. Without the USA, we would have no internet in its present form. In the end it comes down to the fact that so much of what they do is bigger than life, addictive or just plain fun. There's a reason that what they do is copied all over the world. It works. Strange as it sometimes seems to outsiders, the United States of America functions very well, hanging chads and all. And we all watch them, learn from them and, sometimes, take the bad with the good.

I've been in parts of Africa where the only clean, cool drink you can get is Coke. And I hate the stuff, I really do. America the Beautiful scores again.

Resolution in 2009

The failure of our civilization to deal with the well being of a good part of our citizens is not political. It’s something which can, in fact needs to be, talked about by every citizen in an apolitical manner because it concerns every single one of us.
-John Ralston Saul

A lot of what I have been doing this fall when I have not been blogging is work for the non profit organization of which I am chair of the Board. This board, recruited from a cross section of the population of our county, runs a Community Health Centre and three satellite CHC's in a neighbouring county, a Mental Health Support Group, a collection of programs for families with children (aged prenatal to six) at risk, and another collection called Lanark Community Programs that provides services for children with physical and mental challenges, as well as directing provincial government support to their families below the poverty line. This fall we held a workshop on poverty as it affects our community. The quote above is one of a series we used in the workshop; I have committed to make the series into posters to boost awareness of poverty in our staff and clients.

One of the things we do is promote good health. This means working on the things that help people get and stay healthy, rather than relying on treating the sick. The 'determinants' of good health include food security, a healthy environment, a stable community and much more. Our community here includes many, many working poor and the levels of unemployment and poverty are, given the present economic climate, growing rapidly as local industries shut down. The call on our local food bank is increasing at a terrifying rate; the price of heating oil is high and that causes terrible hardship in our climate where you cannot be without heat in winter. The lack of proper clothing for the cold or appropriate clothes for school is a huge difficulty for children. Something as simple as not using sunscreen because it is too expensive can lead to damage that will last a lifetime. Just as pernicious is a lack of hope.

My resolution for 2009 is to be aware, to look for, problems in my community and try to help. I ask all of you who read this to join in. I ask you to look for evidence of suffering and hardship and to do what you reasonably can to amend the problems you see. Something as simple as donating your children's outgrown clothing and toys to an organization that deals with families at risk could make a real difference in a child's life. Look close to home; is the woman ahead of you in the grocery line putting things back because she hasn't enough money? Look farther afield; is your province or state cutting back on funding for something like teachers' aides or seniors' support? Often a letter writing campaign can rearrange priorities at the funding source.

I'm lucky to have the time and the financial security to do a fair amount of work pro bono in my community. I couldn't have done so when my children were small and we needed my income. But awareness and mindfulness can be done in small increments of time and support does not need to be monetary. I know I am preaching to a lot of the already converted here. So many of you are already aware and working in many areas. But I hope you will, with me, continue to be mindful. I think we have tough times ahead and the tough will need to get going.

Best wishes to you all for 2009.

Yes He Did

Baggy eyed from staying up too late, I dealt with my email this morning and decided to indulge myself with a tour around my favourite blogs before attempting to write anything myself. And the first thing I found was this post by Bon which captured so beautifully a lot of what I felt last night. Andrea captured, in her usual incisive way, some of my concerns as well as the pleasure so many of us felt. Sarah talked about Obama's speech and how it and the victory resonate with her and captured the moment so very, very well.

Ewe are Here, who is an absentee American, has posted some very telling comments about American politics and what Obama will be facing in Congress. I, too, recall how Carter's promise was lost in the morass of Washington's political games. There's a happy little word dance from Alejna, posted last night just after the 'call'. There's an heartfelt statement from Painted Maypole on how she felt the tug of history being made. Breed 'em and Weep's post is an euphoric chant.

I am sure that I have missed many other great posts in honour of the occasion. Or Honor, for our American friends. Lawyer Mamma was working the polls and I just caught up with her blog. She has a super map, if you're a who voted how junkie. There are some superbly thoughtful comments on the blogs I have listed, as well.

What is left for me to say? Yes, I also listened to Obama's acceptance speech with tears running down my face, relishing the occasion, simply admiring the man's gifts. As he spoke the cameras panned over faces in the audience, rapt, uplifted, thoughtful or wreathed in grins a yard wide. Faces not grouped by age or colour, faces simply American. United in accomplishment; united in purpose for the future.

On November 22nd, 1963 I was in a train station when the announcement came over the Tannoy that JFK had been shot. That was my generation's seminal moment. I was twenty one. There was no person there whose face did not show horror and sorrow. We had all felt secure, prosperous, hopeful, in spite of the temporary terror of the missile showdown two years earlier. We felt that the world was on the right track and that righteousness was in charge. A few days later I watched on television as the cameras panned over the crowds keeping vigil as the funeral cortege passed by and took note of faces made similar by a great grief. And it happened again, Robert Kennedy, and again, to Martin Luther King, Jr. I think the outrage of the assassinations helped to fuel the civil rights upheavals that followed.

From those days to this has been a long journey. I'm a long way from the young woman I was, a young woman whose world seemed so ugly. I really like the idea that somewhere in that crowd there is a young woman of twenty one whose values have been affirmed and whose world will, please God, now be on the right track with a righteous man in charge.

Career Choices

A few days ago I found myself answering a questionnaire that asked, essentially, 'why did you have children?' And I was brought up short, fingers poised, mouth falling open, because I could not come up with a cogent answer to this question. I am still thinking about it this morning. Why did I?

I had birth control. It was 1965 and, distrusting the then almost untried birth control pill, I was using a diaphram. A diaphram is not a method that is conducive to spontaneity, and one night I got involved and forgot to put it in. Result, the elder daughter. That's the simple answer.

That's not the whole answer, however. I was using birth control because my husband was in grad. school and we had decided to wait to have our family until he was finished. Jumping the gun like that was bad for me because it meant that I wouldn't stay in my teaching job long enough to get my permanent teaching certificate (it was simply assumed by the school board I worked for that if you got pregnant you resigned. Period.) After an initial reaction that could be described as mild annoyance, I felt pleased about oncoming parenthood. It was what I had signed up for, after all. You got married, you had a family, you acquired a house with a yard, your husband got a job that funded all of this. After the kid(s) had grown enough you might resume your job, perhaps part time, but it was a job and not a career. Your career choice was wife/mother. Being pregnant confirmed your status as a full adult.

I was not a baby lover. I had done the usual stint as a teenager of babysitting (and toddler and child sitting) and had been bored silly by the little darlings. I spent a few mornings looking after a breast fed baby about six months old and handled him with much the same nervous respect as I would have done a loaded gun. I had spent a weekend looking after a ten day old cousin and his three year old brother and did not remember that experience with fondness. When my mother and grandmother went gooey and cooey over a new baby, I would stand back and wonder what the fuss was about. Unless they were old enough to have a conversation with, kids were not my thing.

So why would I want to be saddled with my own? Good question. As I try to reconstruct that long ago self, the best answer that I can come up with is that I thought it was inevitable. My husband wanted children. Our parents expected grandchildren. My friends all planned to be parents. Society granted mothers a status that single women or childless married women lacked. For anyone who has grown up with the wider expectations and less homogenous society of the seventies and later, it must be very hard to realise just how rigid a social structure I had been raised in and how little I questioned it, even while I watched my mother and my aunts beating their wings against the bars of their respective cages. But that's another post.

In preparation for the arrival of the baby, we moved from our flat in the heart of a wonderful small town to a suburb where we could afford a house with a yard. I had no car and the bus service was poor. When elder daugher arrived, I did not feel the instant attachment that my reading had described. I was issued a fair skinned, diaper rash prone ectomorph who, born at 7 lb, 8 oz, weighed in at a month old at 8 lb. I had little to no knowledge about breast feeding and not much more about the sleep and wake patterns of newborns. I fretted and worried and wept. Fortunately, the ED was about as fragile as a faceted diamond and we both survived the newborn period. When she started to smile at me, I fell in love.

The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want my precious blossom to be an only child. And so, when she was five months old I weaned her to a bottle and got pregnant again on the first try.

Ten months later I found myself trapped in my suburb with two infants, one precociously mobile, and with access to a car only if I packed them both up early in the morning and drove my husband to his university. In the meantime husband had switched his sights from a Master's degree to a doctorate (with my encouragement, I should add, in fairness) and we were in for several more years of penniless grad student existence. The YD was even more precociously mobile, and my days were a blur of feeding, chasing and cleaning up after both hurtling toddlers and the dog we acquired to make the menage complete. My brain turned to mush and my marriage just about tanked.

And then, one wonderful day, I started to be able to have conversations with the terrible two. They grew fascinating personalities. They slept all night, every night. I have the most precious memories. Walking into the kitchen to find the ED spinning her sister in my big spaghetti kettle. 'What are you doing?' I said, bemusedly. 'I be cookin' Wen'y', the little person answered.

Every sleepless night, every miserable dragging day of post partum depression, every frantic search of my dog eared copy of Doctor Spock, all worth it. All repayed a million times, in the years since. I still regard other people's noisy infants with a somewhat wary eye. I still far prefer to deal with kids old enough to communicate, thank you. I've gone on to have not just one but several careers. If you ask me who I am, though, I would answer a wife/mother. Without regret.

If you were asked why you had children, if you wanted them, what would you answer? Would it be an easy answer, or a struggle like this one?

The Joy of Clothes

Lately I have been scanning and cleaning up old photographs. I have a huge, huge pile of them -- my mother took a lot of photos of me and got reprints done for both my grandmothers. I now have all three sets of prints. And so I am sorting, throwing away duplicates and retouching as I go, balancing the light, taking out the dust and scratches, trying to put dates and places on record. And as I do this, I am reminiscing a lot and thinking about the differences between how I was dressed and trained as a little girl in the forties and fifties and how Little Suff is being brought up.

Here's a pair of photos that are telling. I always had a Sunday Best outfit. It was called that. I wore it to church. I got a new outfit for Easter, with a coat and hat if Easter came early or just the dress if it fell later in the spring. In the photo on the right, Easter was late and I have a straw hat and smocked dress, the later having been made by my mother. I was five or six, I think, which would make the year '47 or '48.. In the snap on the left I was, perhaps, eleven, so 1953. Since I was older, I had graduated to a suit for church, also made by my mother. I remember the hat vividly. It was woven fabric, slippery, and had a horrible habit of slipping forward over my nose if I bent my head. You will note the socks and with the Mary Jane strap shoes. More about socks later. When I wore these clothes, my behaviour was supposed to match. I had to sit like a little lady (exact quote!), not run and, most important, stay clean and neat. Not my favourite things to do.

My mother made almost all of my clothes, in fact, until I started high school. Including my winter coats and leggings. The proper thing for little girls to wear in winter with their coats was long white woolen stockings, held up by a garter belt. I rebelled. No way was I wearing those stockings. They itched and the garters popped off and they wrinkled. My mother, who had also suffered with similar stockings, relented and made me pull up trousers or leggings to wear with my coats. I was the envy of all my friends. I also had a snow suit, also wool and made by my mother, knit when I was very small and sewn as I got older. This outfit was for playing only -- skating or making snow forts. It was not worn otherwise, any more than the dungarees that I was allowed to play in could be worn away from home. If we were even going to buy groceries, I wore a skirt and my coat and leggings. And my mother changed her dress, put on her second best coat and hat (best was for Church) and gloves.

In the photo above, I am five (1947) and have just graduated from hats with itchy chin straps. That's my Easter hat with just an elastic. On the right it's 1951 and I am nine. I loved this coat because of the hood. It was fawn coloured wool and the velveteen trim and leggings were dark brown. For once, I am not mugging for the camera, either.

In summer I wore cotton dresses. When I was eight my parents bought a summer cottage and at the cottage I was allowed to wear shorts (!). My mother made the halter top (she had one that matched). But the shorts were purchased! On my feet are cotton and rubber 'sand shoes' which I had to wear unless I was actually swimming. I am, perhaps, ten in the shorts and top shot and eight in the other. The dress I am wearing on the right was my summer Brownie costume, that I wore to go to Brownie camp. It was pale green and had a matching hat which was fastened on with a bobby pin. The accessory is my aunt's cat, whom I adored. My mother thought that the regulation fabric she had to use to make the dress was shoddy.

Definitely not shoddy was my red velvet Christmas dress. It was real silk velvet, not velveteen, and had, as you can see, a lace collar which detached. I adored that dress and didn't even mind the 'don't get dirty' injunctions that came with it, as any spots I got on it had to be cleaned off with naptha and then the dress didn't smell so nice.

What's the point of all this narcissisism? Well, not a lot really, except to say, horray for rip stop nylon and Goretex and permapress and cotton knit and velcro and a world in which a Little Stuff can wear tough play clothes when she wants to and girly, whirly skirts when she wants to and wool stockings and garter belts are in museums.

Where I will someday join them. In my pantsuit and wind jacket, I hope. And without a hat.