My Mother in Miniature

The top photo is one of the few I have of my mother as a small girl: the second is of my granddaughter, taken about a year ago.  If you darken Little Stuff's eyebrows and hair in your imagination you should see a resemblance.

It is more than just the facial structure and mouth.  I watched Little Stuff at her gym meet this morning, sober, focused, determined.  And I saw my mother, in miniature, in so many ways.

And Little Stuff did her stuff, too.  She stuck every apparatus, did every move as perfectly as she could, ignoring the crowd and the cameras and the action all over the gym.  She got great scores and was very pleased with herself.  As were we.  I only wish my mother could have seen her.

It's a JOAT's Life After All

Image borrowed from Wikipedia

I spend far more of my time than I would wish trying to flesh out acronyms and so I am sitting here laughing at myself as I title a post with one. I first ran across 'joat' in Heinlein's stories, I think, and loved the word. It means 'jack-of-all trades' and he used it to describe someone who could turn his hand to anything as needed. But I have always thought of it as the perfect description of a housewife and mother (or, to be politically correct, a house-husband and SAH father too.) Chief cook and bottle washer, laundress, chauffeur, chief procurement officer ( of food, silly), safety inspector, chambermaid, librarian, early childhood educator, gardener, handyman, dog walker, book-keeper, gate-keeper, practical nurse and practically everything else. With a lot of us working outside the home as well. Not to overlook the amount of energy it takes to make the personal part of marriage work. It doesn't surprise me at all that vitamins sell so well.

There are a lot of joatish aspects to running a home even after the kids have left it for good -- and even after they have, you're still a mother, there at need, and eventually a grandma.

As for me, I am a quintessential joat and have been all my life. I'm the kind of person who can turn my hand to a lot of things, from being the body on the other end of the cross-cut saw as an eight year old to the person who could think up skits and draw or make decorations for school dances, chair an obstreperous meeting, make costumes for the gymnastics team, run a parents' lobby group, read and correct a PhD thesis, work puppets (and make them), design posters or look after an evaporator. As I write this list, I realize that I could make it longer: good for a person's ego to look back and think about things that have been accomplished.

There's an underside to this rock, however. Or there is for me. In the course of doing a bit of everything, I have never spent the time and energy to do one thing well. I've been reading The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is an analysis of why some people do amazingly well at what they do - Bill Gates is one of his examples as are star hockey players - and he postulates that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to learn to do something exceptionally well. Putting in that amount of time is not something that a joat will do, being too busy doing an adequate job for ten hours at a thousand things. After I put the book down, with a sigh, I thought a bit about that ten thousand hours. And I realized that I have, indeed, put that amount of time in at something. Reading. I have known how to read for 62 years. That's 22,630 days. And I have probably read something for at least an hour on more than half of those days. I'm eligible to be an elite reader. Woot.

Somehow, this thought is not as comforting as all that. It would be nice, she whispered, to be really, really good at something that other people recognise as amazing. Even nicer if that thing generated income, but, for me, the important thing would be to have some confidence that the thing I did (whatever that would be) would turn out superlatively well. I wonder, though, if the kings (and queens) of their kind really feel the kind of confidence that I long to possess. Did Gretzky take the ice knowing he could and would score or did he start every shift in terror that this time it wouldn't happen? Or the Beatles wake up in fear that they wouldn't come up with anything new that day? Strangely enough, I can launch into an activity that I am 'good enough' at with some confidence and make adjustments on the fly to make it work.

But when it comes to something that I would really like to be an ace at, like writing in this blog, there are a lot of false starts, erasures and angst. (Wait, should angst be a plural noun to keep the cadence? Is there a plural of it? If so, what is it? Mmm. Better pick another word.) But when it comes to something I really want to do well, such as writing this post, I make a lot of false starts and erasures and suffer a lot of anxiety.

Every once and a while, though, the words will fly and I will fly with them, higher, faster, stronger, and what ends up on the page is all I wanted it to be. And some day, maybe, I will have written my ten thousandth post and it will all come together. Until that day I jog along, a happy-enough joat, using my highly honed reading skills to admire the work of my friends. And life is good.

An Old Wife's Tale about Breastfeeding

In September of 1967 we decided to visit the Centennial Expo in Montreal; our younger daughter was two months old, a sturdy, easy, breastfed baby. In all of that huge site there was one (1!) 'changing station' for babies. The YD was a happy little lump in her knapsack, packed in with diapers, until she got hungry. Once she decided she needed feeding, she became very noisy. So she got nursed in some peculiar places.

One day at noon our best option seemed to be a huge cafeteria beside the Russian Pavilion; it was almost empty and we could all eat while she did. So I established myself at a table, unbuttoned my jacket and blouse and fed her. My husband and his parents went through the cafeteria line and brought the food over, giving me a carton of milk, with a straw. Just then the YD, who was very hungry indeed, gulped some air, air-locked and shrieked. As I hoisted her up onto my shoulder to try and get the bubble out a waiter came over to see what was up and, looking at the milk in the carton, cleared his throat and asked if he could warm up the baby's milk. My husband and FIL, a wonderful guy with a big sense of humour, both grinned widely. And then the poor waiter must have realized what was going on because he turned a fine shade of scarlet and slunk away. My FIL told the story for years.

I'm not sure why I decided to breastfeed my kids. It was not common to do that in 1966. I had some problems nursing the firstborn and ended up switching her to a bottle at about five months. My doctor advised me to feed her rice cereal before I nursed her and spread the feedings out to every four hours; you can imagine how well that worked. But the next baby I took successfully to drinking from a cup. Mind you, she was what was called an 'enthusiastic nurser' then. Industrial level vacuum system was more like it. And, in the sixties, the received wisdom was to start solids with rice cereal at six weeks, adding fruit and vegetables starting about three months. With all that in their little tummies, I think babies in the sixties slept more and longer. We won't talk about the diapers, please.

Your mother might well have breast fed you and your siblings but when I decided to breastfeed I did not know one woman who had successfully done so. Women in my family swore by bottles. My friends with kids? All using bottles and regarding me with a very sceptical eye. Between my first, born in April '66, and the second in July '67 (yes, the second pregnancy was planned. Did I ever say I have any common sense?) a La Leche league formed in the city where I lived and I at least had some peer support. And, thanks in part to things like La Leche, by the early '70s breast feeding was much more common. By the '80's many, many women were breastfeeding successfully. As my peer group left their bearing years behind, though, I stopped paying attention.

When my granddaughter was born and I started to be interested again, I found that the landscape had changed. There were all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, lactation consultants, support groups, books and pamphlets. And there was the Internet and mommybloggers. Advice, support and success stories on all sides. It was a steep learning curve for me. How do you offer advice on 'a good latch' when you have never heard of the term? I watched the ED popping the baby off the nipple and reattaching her with unbelieving eyes. The nurse who handed me the ED just simply checked to make sure I wasn't going to drop her and trotted away.

I have been reading mommy blogs, including the nursing mothers' posts, for two years now. Nursing stories are thick on the ground, as are opinions about the value, spiritual and physical, of breast milk and bonding. I have learned a huge amount about the things that can go wrong, the sheer intense sleepless labour of raising a baby for six months on breat milk alone, the tricks and travails. Some things are still the same. I can trade bitten nipple stories with anyone. But....but...it all seems so complicated now. So much to learn, so many things to watch for. So much to do! So many voices raised in praise and sometimes overdone advocacy. So much shame if nursing doesn't work out.

The only thing that bothers me about having switched the ED to formula is that I got bad advice. Some of the mothers of today, however, sound so desolate, so shamed, if they can't nurse their babies successfully. They believe that they aren't good mothers. I think that's sad.

Breast feeding is cheap, convenient and if it goes well, very rewarding for both mother and baby. But in my observation you can be just as good a mother holding a bottle. And your baby will do well.

This post appeared first at Canada Moms Blog, where I am on the roster of contributors. I would like to direct you to the post there. However, probably because the site is still under construction, I cannot seem to access an archive and find that post. And so I am repeating it here.

Milestones, Rites of Passage and Earth Shaking Events

A week after the event I am still amused by Little Stuff's huge excitement over losing her first tooth. She wasn't nearly as excited about it's arrival, having been a baby who cut teeth fairly easily. I don't remember her mother and aunt regarding the loss as a Big Deal; in the case of the YD, she had fallen on her face at the tender age of eleven months and knocked out one of her three teeth. She had the gap toothed grin for years. For her the milestone happened when her two adult teeth finally grew in and she could chomp down a row of corn on the cob as fast as the rest of us.

I look back and remember the events that were important to me, some of them, I am sure, common to all of us. Menarche for me was a very big deal. I was younger by a year than most of the other girls in my Grade 8 class; I did not have my first period until late in the spring of that year, long after most of my friends. I remember being elated when it finally happened. And I have often thought that there should be a celebration for the event, a puberty fête, a way to mark the day. A rite of passage. My father would have been incoherent with embarrassment, I suspect.

Although, maybe not. The day before my wedding he took me aside and haltingly tried to explain to me that a man might be prone to performance anxiety on his wedding night and that I should not expect too much. I had already found this out but that was not something I could tell my shy and formal father. What I did tell him was that it would not be a concern because I had my period. He took this information fairly well and went on to buy for me a very sweet and lacy pair of pajamas for the event. My poor father.

In fact my wedding was a somewhat strange rite of passage. JG and I were both undergraduates at the time; he and a room mate shared an apartment and I was living in a boarding house. (People did not routinely live together before marriage in 1963; at least not people we knew.) We planned to be married in the spring after his graduation. It soon became obvious to me that JG was dreading the formal event that my father would expect, the walk down the aisle, the many friends of my parents who would be guests and strangers to him. One Sunday morning as we had breakfast, his room mate having been banished for the weekend, I said to him 'For two cents I would phone my parents and tell them we are getting married right away'. JG solemnly handed me two pennies and I picked up the phone.

Our parents received this news as might be expected. My mother said 'I will have to talk to your father,' and hung up on me. His mother said 'What's your hurry?' in a voice that would have frozen lava. They came around, however, and arrived the next weekend to join us in the University chapel where the University padre married us. My mother brought a white dress and hat for me to wear; my father gave us the money he would have spent on a big wedding for our wedding gift. In thousand dollar bills, two of them. A lot of money in 1963; we paid off JG's student loans and still had some left over. The thing that made my mother-in-law the happiest was the fact that our first child was not born until three years later.

For a milestone, rite of passage and earth shaking event all in one, I believe the birth of the first child qualifies on every count. When the Eldest Daughter was born I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had dealt with a tiny baby. I did not know anyone who had successfully breast fed. I had been weeks overdue, I was in labour for two days and there was not a family member living close enough to help. I recall pacing up and down the kitchen with a can of Enfilac in my hand weeping because the baby was not gaining weight and maybe I wasn't breastfeeding properly. I remember being totally stressed because she wouldn't stop crying. What saved my sanity was my husband who had been fifteen when his brother was born and who was quite calm about the whole baby thing. That and the fact that the ED was a calm, strong baby who slept six hours at a stretch and rolled over on her own at six weeks old. She also had the most wonderful smile in the world. For me. And we both survived my inexperience.

Milestones. The first pay cheque, the first boyfriend, the driver's licence and access to a car, graduation, buying your own furniture (not early relative hand-me-downs), the first time your baby says 'mum' and means it (the ED's first intelligible word was 'bugger'), the first legal drink in a bar, the first new car you can afford, the first home you (and the mortgage company) own, the first passport and trip overseas, the first sale of your work, the first gray hair (age 29, sigh).

Rites of Passage: for me, confirmation, wedding, the first orgasm, leaving home for University, wearing maternity clothes, the YD's first day of school (two and a half hours of time of your own!), the YD's departure for University (she never lived at home again), the day the husband retires (and you realize that time on your own is a thing of the past), the last time you use hair dye to cover the white, the day you are told you are going to be a grandparent, the first Canada Pension Plan payment, the funeral of the last relative of your parents' generation.

Days the Earth shifts under your feet: the first day alone with the baby, getting fired from a job you love and think you are doing well, the day your mother is diagnosed with dementia, the day she dies, the first time you look at a photograph of yourself and you see an old woman.

Milestones and rites of passage and days when your life changes. So many, some wonderful and some endured only because there is no alternative but to endure. Days you wish back again so that you could do better, days that you would like to live over again. Days that shine in your memory and days that you only want to forget.

The moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on. nor all your piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.

A few bricks short of a load.

Two blog posts came up on my 'following' list this afternoon that at first reading seemed very different. One is a heartfelt but semi tongue-in-cheek complaint by a mother about whining kids. The other is a sad and serious report by a daughter of her mother's misery and helplessness following a severe stroke. I thought about them most of the afternoon as I slogged along making a brick border around a flower bed. And the two voices met in my mind and became one voice, the voice of a woman trying her best for dependants under her care. I heard in that voice that the task of making those dependants happy is thankless, unending, almost impossible. Yet most of us, at some time in our lives, identify it as something that has to be done and that we have to do.

I've been there. Whining kids? For sure. As much as we try to laugh it off, that whine is something we have to deal with. I think that the whine is innate in small mammals; puppies for example, as well as human children. It's a sound that does not carry well, making it safer to use when there are predators around. It gets attention, that's for sure. Because it is innate, training the offspring out of it takes a lot of time and effort And telling the child to defer or change tone does not work because her woes are immediate and serious, trivial as they seem to adults. A small child lives in the moment and one Brussels sprout on the plate is an overwhelming tragedy.

Adults who have suffered damage to the brain, whether it comes through a stroke or dementia or trauma, returns to that same state where small things become mountains of misery and everything, once again, is immediate and tragic. Like the children, they have no sense of proportion. Like the children, they turn to what they see as a source of relief. But there is no relief and so the misery they feel gets directed onto the caregiver. I've also been such a caregiver, putting every skill and every effort into trying to alleviate that pain.

That pain is the pain of the caregiver as well as that of those in her care. When the child is tired and stressed by a big family party, removing the offending vegetable will not solve the problem. Something else will soon become a tragedy. All the patience and vigilance in the world will not prevent the next whine. Nor, when your loved one has suffered an irrevocable decline in health, can you restore the health and the adult competence that would allow the sufferer, and you, some peace of mind.

We all feel guilt over this. If I were only a better, more patient, mother/daughter/sister/wife, we say to ourselves. If I had more strength, if I didn't let it bother me. It's exhausting, this task of mothering, caring, tending. None of us can step back, either, and let it go, because they need us. They need us.

I've been in both these wonderful bloggers' shoes. If my experience is worth anything at all, it taught me that I didn't have to be perfect. It turned out that it was okay to be a good enough mother, a daughter who did her share but left some things for others to do. If I kept my own sense of proportion I could, and can, live with that and be at peace with myself.

I haven't said this as well as I had hoped to, but I am going to post it in the hopes that it is good enough.

And tomorrow I will go out and redo the bricks around the flower bed in a more frugal pattern because I ran out of bricks before I finished.

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?

Every Time You Say Good-bye

I still, after almost forty years, have a vivid, visceral memory of taking the YD to kindergarten for her very first day. I can see her, stamping along the sidewalk in front of me, each step signalling her annoyance that her mother was going to school with her, when the other kids were going by themselves. My explanation that I had to turn in her birth certificate and health card and sign her in did not cut it. She was ready for school. I wasn't ready for her to go, not really. Torn between tears and laughter I deposited her with her new classmates and slunk off to the office with the despised paperwork. On my way home alone, the tears won out.

I still, after almost twenty five years, have an clear, etched in memory of taking the YD to her University for the first time. Gritting my teeth as she drove, too fast, into the city, and navigated, with my scarcely voiced directions, into the parking lot of her residence. Watching her unload with unholy rapidity and, knowing that she really wanted me gone, insisting on taking one load up to her room so that I could at least see it. On my way home, alone, I drove out of the city torn between tears and laughter, remembering my own much earlier manouvres to get my parents to Just Leave but feeling as if I had left my heart behind me.

Since then I have said goodbye to both my daughters many times, as they left for graduate school, jobs in different cities, jobs overseas. I have been very lucky, really, as her sister, the ED, finally settled in a city only an hour away, has a permanent job there, is raising a family there, giving me good access to her and to Little Stuff and her brothers. The YD has her permanent residence there, also, but her job entails working out of the country for several years at a time.

This morning, after a frantic effort to pack up her life, she launched off again, car stuffed with immediate necessities, including the white water canoe tied to the roof, for her next out of the country stint. And once again I am torn between laughter and tears. Laughter because there are wonderful cast off clothes in my closet, the usual orphaned plants on my porch, strange pots of stuff from her frig and cupboards in my kitchen and bits of unfinished business scattered around for me to clear up. Tears, I am not sure why. She always comes back, after all.

I guess I will never, really, be comfortable with my empty nest, even one festooned with shed feathers and a bit or two of discarded shell. I'm a failure at letting go.

Under the Mad Hat's posts on parenting often make my mind work overtime. She put one up recently titled One Kind of Parent I Want to Be. It is a thoughtful, and thought provoking essay. And so I am going to riff off it and write a post about the kind of parent I tried to be, first informing you that my daughters are just perfect adults, of course.

A little bias there? Nah. Not me. Seriously, though, by most measures of success, I think my daughters rate way up there. Well educated? Check. Successful careers? Check. Satisfying family and friends? Mostly. Well rounded? Sports and outdoor activities, check. Involvement in the arts, spotty. Readers, yes. Current events and community aware, yes, in different ways. Contributors to society, yes (they both have a collection of awards and honours). Happy? Some of the time, as I see them. Too busy to draw breath? Yep. Well, so are all of us.

I had a bit of a conversation about this with the YD yesterday because she came out from the city for the day to help her father clear trails. She was talking about being comfortable in the woods, and how a friend of hers with whom she had gone cross country skiing was not because she did not have a sense of where she was and was nervous she would get lost. The YD and her sister, from the ages of eight and nine were allowed to roam loose in the woods around our weekend cabin. We taught them how to find their way, how to make a fire if they needed one, gave them whistles to use if they got lost and, mainly, allowed them to go where they pleased. Later they had a boat of their own that they were allowed to use by themselves (once they passed basic swimming competency level) on the marsh and streams near our property. And they trotted off to play by themselves when they weren't needed for chores.

You see, when they were seven and eight we bought recreational land, built a four season cabin on it and spent almost every weekend there, year round. We started with 100 acres and ended up with 300, including a sugar bush and miles and miles of old logging trails which we cleared for hiking and skiing and JG's ATV and snowmobile. I taught them how to start and manoeuver a snowmobile when they were so small that it took both of them to steer properly. A matter of necessity, as I saw it, because if they were with their father and he got stuck, they would have to be able to get back and summon help. So they learned to love the woods and to love to ski. We skated on the beaver ponds. We hiked for miles. And, because the cabin had no electricity, after dark the amusements were reading and playing games.

It worried me. I worried that they were losing out on the scheduled weekend activities that their peer group was getting -- things like organized soccer. I fretted about their not having the access to the weekend television programs that all their friends would be talking about. I tried to get them the sort of lessons and skill training that I felt they should have, things like swimming lessons, music lessons, Brownies. They got Bible stories but not Sunday School. I also worried that they were missing out on opportunities to learn about the arts -- another area where events often took place on weekends. I tried to get them to concerts, to plays, to show them what was available. We went to see the D'oyle Carte do the Pirates of Penzance, I recall. To see the Lippizaner stallions. Their grandparents took them to a Toronto performance of Guys and Dolls one summer. One girl joined a city wide children's choir which performed some pretty serious music.

But all of this had to be scheduled for weekdays after school, not weekends. They both started gymnastics lessons and for one girl it became a passion. She took it up at school but until she was in secondary school, it was still a weeknight activity. The other girl tried different sports and activities and finally settled on one that could, until she was well into her teens, be carried on on Friday nights. But in some ways, I figured they were losing out, especially on the time just to hang out with their friends unscheduled. And if it happened on Saturday night or Sunday, we did not go.

By the time they were in their upper teens, I felt confident about leaving them in the city if there was something important going on. They got driver's licenses as soon as they could and got themselves to their own activities in my car or by bus. I gave them a lot of independence, in fact. I guess I always favoured letting them do things, from boating by themselves to taking a plane solo to their grandparents' city. They had bikes which they rode through city traffic (my mother was horrified). I never restricted what they read. I tried always to be respectful of their opinions and needs, with varying degrees of success, I suspect.

The limiting factor was that they had to fit their activities and lives into our lives. We did not schedule around them; we did not become parent supporters. Frequently they got themselves to their own activities and, as they got older, did things themselves, singly or as a pair. (They went to Disney World as a pair in their teens on a trip one of them won; wild horses could not have dragged their father there.) I do not know, I will never know, whether I could have done better for them. But that doesn't matter. I think parenting contains a paradox: you only get one chance to raise a child but you get a new chance every day. And so we all have to play it by ear, and to a great extent trust our instincts, our sense of what feels right and of what is valuable. For ourselves as well as for them.

Hi, Me.

I'm answering five questions from Julie Pippert at Using Your Words. Here are questions four and five as she gave them to me.

4. What do you appreciate about your relationship with your children and what do you wish you could change?

5. If you were to mentor a young woman (say college age or thereabouts) in what area would you mentor her and how would you guide her.

These two questions tie themselves together in my mind, as my children are two daughters, now forty and forty one, so I sailed with them through that age range. 'How did you mother' and 'how would you mentor' are pretty close to the same question although mentoring young women not your daughters is in many ways easier than dealing with your own. (Speaking from experience, here.) They're less likely to think you know nothing, for instance.

The thing I appreciate is that I do have a relationship with my daughters, a good one. The phone rings and a voice says 'Hi, it's me'. Although they are not and do not look a bit alike, their voices are very similar on the phone and so my stock answer is 'Hi, me.' And we laugh. It's a ritual. They might be phoning with an invitation to dinner or lunch, with a request for babysitting or a mock plea for help ('I need to sort out my closet. Come and help me?') Or just to chat or to talk something over. They enjoy family meals chez parents on occasions like Thanksgiving, they come out from the city for a day to walk or cross country ski or help their father in the woodlots. And I haven't had an argument with either of them for a very long time. We laugh together when we are together.

I'm almost fatuously proud of both of them. They're clever, athletic and well spoken. They have amazing careers. They're funny and thoughtful and good citizens. 'A credit to you' would have been the comment in former generations. But they've really done it themselves, capitalized on their opportunities, worked hard and intelligently. If I could change anything it would be the old 'mother instinct' thing -- I wish they didn't have to work so hard to succeed, take crap from time to time, have problems. I would remove the pea from under the pile of mattresses, bumps from the road, stress from their lives. Except that they seem to thrive on stress. I well remember my mother carrying on about how hard I worked at that age, how much I had to do, and I remember thinking she was making far too much of it. So I keep my mouth shut (or try to), even when they are up to their asses in alligators.

My mothering when my daughters were small consisted mainly of supplying them with opportunities to learn, both about themselves and about the world around them, providing them with clean clothes and snacks, taking them to hospital when they broke something, and keeping an eye on them. When they turned into teenagers I continued to do these things, sat through their drivers' tests and restrained myself from screaming or laughing at inappropriate moments of teenaged angst. I also delivered occasional lectures which were received about as you would expect. Although the YD, in particular, used to turn up when she was in her twenties from time to time and say things like 'Remember when you told me drunken women were repulsive? Well, you were right!' Validation. Hah! I lost my temper with them about the usual number of times, threatened them with hanging by their thumbs from the clothesline more than I should have, and loved them. A lot.

As for mentoring -- I always felt that you do that along with the mothering. Life skills 101. I told the girls many times that they needed to learn a skill with which they could support themselves (boys are always told that, aren't they?) so that they never would need to batten on to some man to look after them. I would give a young woman the same advice today, but with a different emphasis. Too many young women (and young men) find themselves, after they graduate, locked into a job that demands a huge investment of hours and effort and erodes their private and family life. I hate it that young women seem to have to put off having children until they are established in their careers. To fix that we need to change the whole corporate ethic in the 'developed' world. But in the meantime, girls, in particular, need to develop a range of skills and interests so that they can look after themselves (and more easily juggle career and family) without getting locked into either a high pressure office or a series of low paying jobs.

I hate to see 'college age' girls so preoccupied with a boy friend that they neglect the benefits of things on campus such as late night bull sessions, cultural events, volunteering opportunities or sports. And they should run like a rabbit if the boy friends want them to curtail their educational choices and activities. I also hate the sexual flaunting and risky promiscuity that are not new (I went to University in the sixties!) but seem to be more widely publicized if not practiced. I still think drunks are disgusting. My major mentoring advice would have to be that a young woman not let herself get talked into doing anything she really isn't sure she wants to do, whether it is a course choice, sex or a stunt on a motorcycle. To learn her strengths and apply them. To stop worrying about things she doesn't do quite as well. And to expect to have to be flexible.

I'm presently reading a book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson, where she writes in an essay called 'Somebody's Baby'

Who really understands what it takes to raise kids? That is, until after the diaper changes, the sibling rivalries, the stitches, the tantrums, the first day of school, the overpriced-sneakers standoff, the fist date, the safe-sex lecture, and the senior prom have all been negotiated and put away in the scrapbook?

She's right on, but what I would add to that is that the scrapbook only contains material pertinent to the kids you have raised; it doesn't make you an expert on child raising. The best I can say is that I had really good material to work on and that I didn't screw up.

I read a post about poop a couple of days ago. Mommy found her little guy waving his legs in the air, with his diaper off and a really big log of poop lying beside him. I *really* wish that I could remember where I read it. (Help, anyone?) I laughed so hard I cried. And half of what I was laughing at was a memory of my own experience with toddlers and turds.

My elder daughter wasn't easy to toilet train. We got the pee organized at about the average time, but she didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of sitting on the pot until she pooped. She wasn't particularly regular, she didn't seem to have any feeling that it was about to happen, and there were lots more interesting things to do. The whole process became an issue. She wanted underpants thank you, no more diapers for her! Only, big girl pants do not catch poop. I was reduced to dressing the top of her and leaving pants, socks and shoes off until she did go. Then she had a hissy fit, we cleaned her up and she got dressed the rest of the way. Neither of us was too happy, to say the least.

One morning I was marking essays at the kitchen table, which had a small two piece lavatory off it. The girls were safely enthralled by Mr Dressup, and I was ripping apart some kid's take on King Lear (or whatever) when a small procession appeared in the kitchen doorway heading toward the toilet. At its head was the ED, carrying a large hard log of poop in her cupped hands. Behind her came the YD, toddling along with her big sister's pants held out in front of her. And last came the dog, sniffing hopefully, with tail wagging. The parade disappeared into the bathroom and sounds of splashing and flushing ensued.

I just sat there. Bemused. I might have said 'Remember to wash your hands' in a quavering voice. And then I lost it. I just sat and laughed. I don't think the underpants went down the toilet. That time. I hope they did wash their hands.

At the time it happened, I would not have told anyone the story. Bad Mothering! Unsanitary! And I haven't told the story.

Until now.

I love this place where you can talk and laugh about stuff like this. Over at BlogRhet, we're talking about empowerment. And for me, this is a part of it.

Parenting Styles

I read a post from The Process of Becoming Dr. Jenny G in which she discusses her way of parenting and comments she has had that imply she does 'too much' and is letting her relationship with her husband and her time for herself go while she baby tends (to excess). I did not think it appropriate to put this huge lump of discussion into her comments, so I'm posting what is, in effect, an answer to her question (Do you find my parenting style self-sacrificing to the point of bizarre?)

It's a subject that I've thought about a lot, both while I was baby wrangling and for many years afterward, observing my friends and my nieces and then my daughter deal with their babies. The thing about overdoing it is not confined to baby tending, either. When my mother was dying, demented and in pain, the kindly folk in the hospital placement department kept urging me to take a step back, to take time for myself, to remember that I had other family who needed me, yada yada. In a way it was my 'parenting' that they were critiquing, as my poor mother was about two years old mentally at that time. She needed to see me beside her so that she could feel safe and so I was sleeping on the floor beside her bed with a lamp shining on me. Pretty equivalent to co-sleeping and not letting them cry it out.

I was a pretty clueless mother with my firstborn. The only babies I had observed being brought up were my cousins and my mother and her sisters believed in doing it by the book and they advocated scheduled feeding right from the start -- in fact, scheduled everything right from the start, (this is still with us) and letting the baby cry it out in her crib so that she would learn to sleep alone. And I did do some of that, in spite of my gut feeling that it was not working. I remember pacing the floor with a yowling newborn, watching the clock. Luckily the Elder Daughter was a champion sleeper, going six or seven hours at night right from the first, or I would probably have gone right over the edge. Did it buy me time for myself? Not hardly.

When I had Younger Daughter fifteen months later, I had learned enough to grab on to a new program at the hospital called 'Rooming In' where you kept the baby with you instead of having her delivered from the nursery at four hour intervals. I got a baby sling and then a carrier and she went with me everywhere. She did not do naps, but she was also a champion night sleeper once I managed to persuade her that her long sleep should take place at night. I spent a lot of time nursing her with her sister sitting on my lap at the same time and being read to. It worked a lot better.

Parenting by the clock is not, I think, 'less work' that your way of doing things (babywear/breastfeed/co-sleep/comfort them when sick at night/nurse at night/play with them all day/ and so on). I can't imagine not listening for an infant to wake up. A toddler in a playpen, left to get on with amusing herself, can generate a deafening level of noise when she gets bored. A free range toddler is scary as hell -- when the noise stops, a sensible parent had better find out why. ('no, no, sweetie, do not chew on the light cord!) Easier to play with them. There is no way to get 'more time for yourself' in the first few years other than to leave the kid with someone else. Bless the man, but I would be astounded to learn that Rafael had ever tried these strategies you and he discussed. (letting them "learn to self-soothe" when they are sick or whatever and that I would, then, have more "time for myself" and the kids would still be fine.)

I did carve out time 'for myself'. Daddy babysat and I did course work at the neighbouring university. The ED, age 5 months, howled when I left for the first few lectures and sulked at me when I got back. She got over it. They both got deposited with grandparents and babysitters and friends so that their father and I could go out on a date. They slept in their cribs. If they were sick and miserable, I sat by the crib or rocked them in the nursery rocker. When they both took naps (non negotiable, although the YD had to be literally held in place until she conked out) I napped with them. I ran out of milk for the ED at the six month mark (feeding with solids by the clock does not help the milk supply) and so she and her bottles could be left with her aunt while Daddy and I went on a short holiday. And, as your husband says, they were fine.

I have gone into all this detail to demonstrate that I do not think the 'babywear etc.' parenting style is either 'too self sacrificing' or 'bizarre'. 'Bizarre' is crawling around on the floor after the kid, bowl and spoon in hand begging the little tyrant to have 'just one more bite'; bringing her toy after toy as she rejects the first few offered; refusing to let anyone else take over for a few hours because she may get upset; padding every hard surface in the house as she learns to walk. These kids are not 'fine', and when they are catered to like this they may become impossibly demanding as they get older.

My husband and I could have been called selfish about the way we dealt with our kids when they got older. We had a life style and their activities had to fit into it. Their lessons and clubs and activities had to be fit into the week because every weekend we left the city for a weekend (winterized) cabin 'in the bush', with no TV. They had a boat that we let them use themselves. They had several hundred acres on which to roam. Evenings were devoted to activities like books and board games and cooking experiments. Since they have grown up, they have said that they learned to value the two days of peace and family time. And I think they have turned out pretty well.

Portrait of the Artist's Mother -- Part I

Because this came out so long, I have posted it in two parts. For the second half, look below this one.

It's the run up to Mother's Day, right. Good time to write about your mother, since every other day of the year you are writing about being a mother. Yeah, I know it's commercial crap and all that, but I want to write about my mother anyway, so indulge me, okay.

First off, if my mother knew that I was out in public writing like that she would be a bit peeved with me. Her writing could be informal, but it was never colloquial. All her life she was a student and a reader, with a mind like a steel trap that retained everything she read. She read voraciously, she wrote the world's most amazing letters, she could discuss anything under the sun in meticulous polysyllabic periods or in plain words, she could produce apt quotations at the drop of a hat. She told wonderful stories, her sense of humour was rapier sharp but could be fired up by almost anything and she never descended to malicious gossip or mindless chatter. All of this she tried to pass on to me, with limited success, although I did get one of the two big words in this paragraph spelled correctly the first time. She was in love with language.

It was not easy for my mother to make herself into an educated person. She was sick a lot as a child, with rheumatic fever among other things, and missed a lot of time in the one room school she should have been attending. But she 'passed her entrance' at eleven and, because her father had decided that education for his daughters would go beyond Grade 8 (and this was unusual in 1921), she rode a bike and then took a tram from the family farm for the eight mile trip into the city to attend a Collegiate Institute. Here she was an academic success although, as a self described country mouse, she took a lot of teasing. A very bright eleven year old in sausage curls and a home made dress is going to get attention, especially when she uses big words and always knows all the answers.

This photo is from her high school yearbook -- tennis team -- mother is on the right.

Continuing to know all the answers, and getting healthier from all the exercise, she cut a brilliant path in both academics and sports through five years of secondary school and earned a good scholarship for university. Here my chronology gets a bit vague. She enrolled at a good university about 120 miles from where she lived. My grandfather was a skilled farmer and good manager and was able to help her with funds for her board and expenses. She passed her first year with excellent marks and went home for the summer to help him tend a big crop of specialty tobacco, the sale of which would pay her expenses for her second year. But there was a mini depression before the big crash of '29 and my grandfather had to sell the crop at a loss. She could not go back to university.

My mother was nothing if not determined. She took the remainder of her scholarship money, enrolled in a business course in a local school, graduated with top honours and managed to land a job as a stenographer in 1929. Although there was no university in her small city, there was a college, affiliated with her university, where she could take courses. Which she did, and took more by correspondence and managed to get both her BA and an MA, majoring in English, over the course of the next ten years, while holding down increasingly responsible jobs and putting her younger sister through Teachers' College. Mother as a babe, circa 1938, while dating my father

MA graduation photo, 1940

My father's BA grad photo, circa 1936

She had known and had been dating my father for some time, but with the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, he decided to join the armed forces. This took some time to arrange, but he was successful and they were married just before he reported for RCNVR (Navy) training to Royal Rhodes. As a married woman in 1940 my mother was asked to resign from her job. She never talked much about those years. Naval officers get back to their home countries for short stretches, unlike the army, and I was born in 1942. My father saw me when I was three weeks old and not again until I was three years old. He was posted first to corvettes and then to destroyers and fought in the Battle of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. He was returned to inactive status in 1946.

He came home a changed man. My mother once said that the man she married did not come back to her. By all accounts he was what was called a 'golden youth'. Bright and articulate and fun loving, he took a degree in economics and then went to law school. He was working as a solicitor for the city when war was declared. After the war he decided he had to make up for lost time and set up his own law firm. It prospered and my father set out to provide his family with economic security and himself with a good reputation. We didn't see much of him. And my mother took on the role of the wife of a professional man (we're talking late 1940's and 1950's here). She said to me many times that women's rights went backward after the war. It was picket fence and pearls time.

Mother and daughter, circa 1944

As I remember her, there was nothing my mother could not do and do well. She could sing. She knew the names and habits of birds and plants and baseball players and all the neighbours. She was a whiz at first aid. She could run and play tennis and make amazing pickles and preserves. And move house. We did that a lot. We started out in a 'war time house', but as my father's client base grew we moved, and moved again, ending up in a big brick home in a 'good' neighbourhood when I was eleven. My mother sewed and gardened and joined the Home and School, ironed endless starched white shirts and read. We went to the library every week and came home with as many books as we were allowed to borrow. Neither of my parents wanted the golf club, bridge club kind of life. So my mother's world was my father and me and her home and neighbours and sisters. And her books. Compared to what she had done and whom she had been, however, I think she saw her life as a cage. (See last para of this reference)

Portrait of the Artist's Mother - Part II

I can't remember when I didn't know that my mother was unhappy. I think she was bored and mourned the waste of her education and skills, but believed it was not appropriate to break out of the mould as unusual behaviour on her part would have done damage to my father's reputation and thus to his livelihood. She 'had everything a woman could want', didn't she - a good home, a husband who was a good provider and a serious man, a child. Maybe she would have been more fully occupied with more children, but my delivery had been botched and she did not conceive again. I became her full time project. I was to be healthy and happy and free, in a way she thought she could never be again.

Don't misunderstand, please. I loved my mother dearly. But from and early age I knew, at first almost from instinct, that to help her cope I had to do well in school, do well in sports and activities, be polite and charming and sunshine happy. I learned big words, I self corrected my speech, I was never any trouble. I didn't complain or sulk. My manners were impeccable. Fortunately, myopia excused me from being the star of the baseball team and tennis court as my mother had been and I loved story books. My one rebellion was a refusal to take piano lessons. Sad, that, as I later learned that my mother, who could play well, would have loved a piano but would not justify buying one just for herself if I were not taking lessons.

By the time I was in my teens, my mother was menopausal, depressed and physically ill. An inspired doctor recommended that she take up a hobby, and my mother pulled herself together, rejected ceramics and dress design and enrolled in what was by now a full fledged university in the city. And she soared. She ended up by taking a second MA, this time in Dante studies, and only stopped after this degree because she had been asked to be a lecturer in the English department. She threw her whole heart into it. Several of my friends took one of her courses and still remember it as a high point of their university life.

And then it all crashed down on her. Her eldest sister killed herself and left her young daughter to my parents to care for. My father had a massive heart attack. And my grandmother became very ill and progressively demented and required more and more care. I was away at University by the time this all happened. And then newly married with a husband whose job kept us 600 miles away. Mother resigned her job, took on her very damaged niece, helped her husband pick up his life again and looked after her mother. By the time this all got squared away she was worn out.

With her first grandchild. Age 56

I wasn't much help. But I did provide her with two grandchildren whom she adored and whose antics and bad grammar and deportment and clothes and shoes provided her with a lot of pleasure. She helped with their projects and essays by mail and phone, bought them lovely surprises, and she and my dad gave them wonderful vacations. She glowed when they did well in school. I wish she had been well enough to appreciate it when the elder daughter graduated first out of her university, earning a Governor General's medal and a scholarship which took her to Cambridge for graduate work. But by then her mind and body were both letting her down and she died shortly thereafter.

I also wish sometimes that she could have been born even ten years years later. Friedan and her peers would have had a strong colleague. She said of herself that her life had not been a waste since out of it had come these remarkable grandchildren. The night elder daughter's daughter was born, I remember looking at the stars and wishing my mother could know that another generation was launched. Her family was so important to her. Almost as important as her beloved English.

I miss her often. I tried to be the daughter she wanted, but she sure was a hard act to follow. On top of everything else, she was always beautiful, everyone she met became her friend and she was cracking jokes about Dostoevsky while wheeling her IV down the hospital corridor a week before she died. Hey mom, if you're listening. Little Stuff is still making an 'ƒ' out of the 'θ' in 'three' but she has a huge vocabulary, she can sing in tune and remember all the words and she's a champ at breaking eggs. And sometimes she reminds me of you.