Archive for March, 2009

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Installing Try 1.0

Friday, March 27th, 2009

It’s a difficult puzzle, finding the right way to instill a work ethic in children. You don’t want to Instill A Work Ethic the way it used to be done, through fathers who worked ridiculous hours and were never available for their kids, or through mothers grinding themselves into an early grave through sheer exhaustion.

There must be a balance between work and life. I’m not sure how that balance works, to be honest, but I know it’s out there, and I know it’s the brass ring.

Children rarely seem to require any instructions for the life part of the balance. They know how much fun it is to play, and they know that play is easy - if you get bored with one thing, you simply move on to the next.

But work? Work is sticking with something. Work is honouring your commitment. Work is your responsibility. Work isn’t so much fun in and of itself - but it does offer the joy of completion as its reward.

So instilling a work ethic. Buddy and I refer to it as installing Try 1.0 - hence the blog title.

Our current downloading venue is Juniper. She’s an incredibly bright, intelligent and good-natured little girl - even without my bias, this is fact.

The trouble is, she doesn’t like to do things that involve trying and failing. Can’t really blame her - no one likes to fail at anything. But our goal now is to get her to realize that some things cannot be avoided or left out or rejected, even if they do involve multiple attempts. She needs to keep trying, even when things are hard or confusing.

I keep telling her that there are no shortcuts - that some things just have to be done. And that we’ll help her keep trying until she succeeds.

I can see why so many parents end up avoiding things that cause children to try and fail. It’s not easy to watch them fail. It’s not easy to keep putting them back in those circumstances.

Somewhere out there, I believe there is the balancing point between helicopter parenting and setting children up for failure. I’m just not sure I’d know I struck the balance, even if I was standing on the line.

Damnit, where did my parenting map go?

Posted in In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Juniper, buddy, family | 5 Comments »

Hardy. Har, har.

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

You know? We’ve been lambasted by Mother Nature, in the form of nearly eight inches of snowfall in the last two days. Which has been fun, not only because it fell on two days worth of rain, thusly causing ice to form under snow, but also because it’s contributed to an already grim flood picture for my fair province.

Mother Nature likes to kick the snot out of Winnipeg. Almost as much as people in other parts of Canada enjoy gloating about their weather being better than ours.

No kiddin’.

However, despite the fact that the side roads are just this side of impassable, and despite the fact that the major roads are so stacked full of snow that people’s cars are creating tidy flat ridges of snow, with their accompanying wheel ruts of doom* - we all made it into work. Moreover, most of us made it in to work on time.

Say what you will about our city, our weather, our people or our sanity - we’re a hardy lot. We get on with our lives under circumstances that would have most cities frozen in chaos, barely hanging on to civil rest.

Today, I am proud to be a Winnipegger. Because we may be crazy to live here, but we’re also crazy enough to be able to function here, too.

And that’s worth something.

On our next edition of Civic Pride, we can talk about the awesomeness of IKEA.

Until then - booyah, world. We’re tougher than you.

*Which is to say, ruts of doom if your car even thinks about straying out of them.

Posted in Odds and Sods | 5 Comments »

Why girlie bits and humour don’t mix.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

I can’t say I was very engaged in the story of Jade Goody. Not that I didn’t appreciate what she was doing - using publicity to make enough money to support her sons after she died - or that I wasn’t sorry that terminal cancer was happening to her, or anyone.

But it really only caught my attention after she died. After she died and I realized that she’d died of cervical cancer.

I had a bout with pre-cancerous cells back in my early twenties. I know, I know, we don’t like to admit these things, because it’s been medically connected with HPV, and HPV means that we’re somehow bad girls, right?

Except . . not really - you can contract it at birth, you can contract it from your first and only time having sex - and if you do . . . well, guess what? You’ve joined the overwhelming majority of the population.

It’s not a secret and it’s not a mark of any moral value - it’s a medical reality. And it can kill.

So while the vaccine is out there, having the bugs worked out and the kinks sorted through, we’re all obliged to look after ourselves, physically. And since I’ve had experiences in this department, I really oughta know better than to lapse on my annual check up.

If Jade Goody’s ancillary intent was to raise awareness about cervical health, it worked quite well for me. I was reminded that I’ve been remiss. But you see,  I hate the process. I hate the speculum. I hate the rummaging, the small talk and the counting of ceiling-tiles.

Hate, hate, hate.

And yes, I suppose, on some level, I’d rather just be ignorant and assume all is well. But then I think about what might happen if there were something wrong and it wasn’t caught in time.

Yeah. Small children without parents. Always enough to make me weep. Between Jade and Natasha Richardson’s totally unrelated (except that she was a mother of young teenaged boys) deaths, I have had plenty of nudges from the fates to remind me that I need to take care of myself - if not for me, then for my girls.

So I called to book my appointment. We had a nice formal chat about when would be convenient to do this, and we settled on a date. April 1.

Me being me, I cannot resist.

“Is that a joke?” I asked, innocently enough.

Long pause . . . awkward silence.

“Erm. April first, right?”

Thankfully, she caught on at this point, and laughed, citing lack of caffeine for her slow-on-the-uptake response. Note I’m more relieved about the fact that she laughed than the fact that she caught on at all.

Because cervical health is no laughing matter.

Even if you’ve scheduled your appointment for April Fools Day.

Please to be noting: There is now photographic evidence of my aioli glee! It’s been added to yesterday’s post.

Posted in Being a girl, Health | 14 Comments »

Strike a light.

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Buddy and I have been working hard for quite a long time. We’ve dragged the girls to swimming lessons in the darkest part of winter. We’ve cleaned up vomit, we’ve doled out medicine, we’ve entertained, we’ve amused and we’ve made crafts until our scissor hands ache with it.

And you know? We don’t mind. We want the girls to have a good childhood, and we’re focused on doing what’s necessary to make it happen. And hey - we love them. They’re fun little beings to have around.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have those days. Those days where you might find one or both of us pressing our noses up to the glass doors, staring mournfully out at the big old world. Waiting, wondering, hoping - daydreaming about adventures of our own.

Cue Dragon Mother.

As is our usual, we were chatting yesterday about our weeks. How’s Juniper? How’s Rosebud? How are you guys?

I gave my responses: Good. Good. Grinding a bit. (Okay, this is an oversimplification. If I ever gave this level of non-response to my mother, she’d likely make a special trip over to swat me. But you get the idea - and *you* didn’t ask for the gory details of the weekly update.)

Grinding a bit? Well, yes. It’s just been a bit of a long winter, and the routine has been getting a little tired.

It was at this juncture that a ray of sunshine came down upon my head, lo, though I was in the house, and yea, there was no sunlight yesterday.

“Wylie,” she said. “Why don’t you and Buddy plan a getaway for Easter weekend?”

I admit, I was so entrenched in the routine that I honestly thought about saying no. What on earth would we do with two nights away from home?

. . .

No need to call me on my mental stability. I’ve recovered from my bout of temporary insanity.

So . . . guess what? G’on. Guess!

WE’RE GOING AWAY!

*dancity, dance, dance*

We’re going to take a short drive to a little cabin. We’re going to hike, sleep, draw (him), read (me), and generally take two days of rest.

And this fact? This fact has reenergized us both. We’re downright perky. We keep giggling like kids getting away with something.

So, in case you have a wonderful benefactor offering you time away, and in case you’re so deep into the doldrums that you’ve considered refusing - here’s my little reminder that you should hug your benefactor, do a quick jig around your kitchen and book a place to stay as quickly as you can.

Your sanity will thank you.

——————————————-

Another highlight of the weekend? I finally (FINALLY!) made a successful aioli. I’ve tried it a few times, and I always manage to break it* right at the end.

I had a moment of absolute smuggery, when I stopped my whizzing stand blender. I confess, I spent a fair bit of time admiring the soft peaks and rich appearance of a well-made aioli. I even made Buddy come over and admire it with me. More than once.

Anyway, it was wonderfully tasty on top of the pulled pork in coconut tomato sauce and the caramelized onions. I think I’m going to dollop some out tonight to go with our sweet potato fries and burgers. And I may fall asleep dreaming of ways to use up the remainder.

*Broken aioli, for the record, is watery, suspiciously grainy, and nowhere near as tasty as it ought to be. Aioli done right looks like a slightly yellow/green (depending on the quality of olive oil you use) variant of mayonnaise. Only it’s a drop of garlicky heaven instead of gloppy spread of darkness.

aioli

Posted in Happiness, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, buddy, cooking, family | 6 Comments »

As the parents turn . . .

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

I’ve rather shamefacedly realized lately that Buddy and I have a problem. As far as problems go, this isn’t an earthshaker. In fact, it’s probably not even all that noticeable to people who aren’t us. But now that I’ve noticed it, I can’t shake the knowledge.

See, Buddy and I? We’re irredeemable gossips when it comes to our children.

But Wylie, you say, we all talk about our children.

Sure you do. You wouldn’t be a parent if you didn’t talk about them. You sit down with your loved one and have a nice conversation about the State of the Children, and come to nice, polite and tidy resolutions about how things ought to be.

Us? Well, we occasionally have those conversations. The serious conversations about what Ought To Be Done.

But really? The majority of our conversations about the girls revolve around gossip. For example, an average conversation of this nature would start with something like this:

Did you see the look on her face when  . . .

Did you hear what she said after . . .

How hilarious was it when they . . .

Can you believe they . . .

Truly, we gossip about our girls all the time. Mostly, we’re kind enough to confine the intense minute gossipy bits to ourselves, only breaking out the big news to others. But I’ve realized now that we’re bordering on compulsive with our gossip. It’s like they are the mega-stars who live next door. We are constantly amazed by the little things they do, and we dissect these acts with a mania bordering on obsession (okay, maybe we’re not *that* bad. Close, though). We compare notes, exchange theories and laugh hysterically when the story is right.

I guess that means we enjoy our girls. Or we enjoy gossip more than is really healthy.

Posted in Being a girl, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, family | 2 Comments »

Scratching the fic-itch.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

I have been reading. Devouring books, actually. Distracted, dip my braid in your inkwell, mooney-sue daydreamingly bookish.

And it’s teen lit. Something I swore I’d never read, my purist’s nostrils flared with indignance.

Okay, so I read Harry Potter. In a week.

Maybe I’ve also churned through Golden Compass, though it lost me after book two.

But now, I’m reading teen fic. of the romantic persuasion. Vampire romance.

And I absolutely cannot stop.

Damn you, Stephenie Meyer.  My family suffers grilled cheese sandwiches and wrinkly clothes because of you.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Candy coated questions.

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Nenette over at Life Candy has been kind enough to issue some interview questions for me, and now I get to respond! As follows:

1: When you write your memoir, what will it be called?
Right at the moment, I think I’d probably go with the title of my blog, though I’d subtitle it. Would read as something along the lines of: Still Life - and still worth it. Probably because I’m surprised that I’m still here, and partly because I think that as long as I am, I’m doing pretty well.

2: If you were forced to live in Europe, where would you live and why?
Mmm. I’d be torn. On the one hand, I’d love to live somewhere that has a soul-deep connection with food, like in the rural areas of France or Italy. But the coward in me knows that I’d avoid the language barrier like the plague, so I’d probably end up somewhere in the United Kingdom though it would still be semi-rural.

3: What is the WORST job you’ve ever held?
Wash and fold service at a Laundromat frequented by pipeliners and assorted dregs of society. They fired me once I discovered I was unable to mop up regurgitated aqua velva. They actually said I didn’t have the constitution for the job. Yyyyeah.

4: You’re at a dinner party with Brad Pitt, Oprah, Bill Clinton, Stephen King, David Suzuki, Clive Owen, George Clooney, Ellen Degeneres, Julia Roberts, and Lindsay Lohan. You only have time to chat with four of them. Who do you snub, who do you befriend, who intimidates you too much to approach, who do you smuggle out the back door for one night of passion when the sweetheart’s not looking?
The four who’d have my undivided would be: Oprah, David Suzuki, Ellen Degeneres and Stephen King. You just know that these four would be fascinating conversationalists. I’m not so sure I could say the same of all the other choices.

And I’d have to be dead in my tracks to pass up a chance to have a kissyfest with George Clooney (sorry, Buddy! I had to pick one! *blinks innocently*).

5: If you were a character on Friends, who would you be and why?
Sex-change operation aside, I’m absolutely Chandler Bing. Sarcastic, big with the job-stability, forever making jokes in the face of disaster. If I’m given a choice between laughing or crying, I’ll always go with a laugh.

If you would like to participate in the ME interview, here are the rules…

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave me a comment that says “Interview me”.

2. I will respond by emailing you 5 questions (I get to choose the questions).

3. Update your blog with the answers to the questions and let me know when you have posted it.

4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The laundry list

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I hate laundry. I hate doing laundry, I hate seeing laundry, I hate folding laundry and I hate putting laundry away. If there was ever a disposable onesie made for adults that could be pried from the package in the wee hours of the morning and chucked out after a day’s wear, you’d never see me sport anything but that there fresh-from-the-package onesie ever again (provided said onesie didn’t gather unflatteringly at the crotch).

I have always hated laundry, since I started doing my own at the age of ten. And during my poor student years, I managed to get a wardrobe together that required me to do one tiny load a week, with a monthly washing done at some charitable friends’ home - friends with washers and dryers that don’t require quarters or loonies or the manual (non-vehicular) hauling of bags from one place to another. This wardrobe management required a stupendous number of socks and underwear (Because they cannot be recycled before they’ve been spin-cycled. At least, not in my world), some careful spot cleanings, and a lot of crafty avoidance.

Because I hate doing laundry. Really. Lots.

Thankfully, I live with a Buddy who does half of the laundry (the grown-up half), which leaves me with only the girls’ laundry to do. Which should make the world a better place, right? Except that I’m forever in some version of halfway through it - clothes in the dryer, clothes folded and ready to be put away, clothes sitting and wrinkling before my very eyes, all unfolded and shoved into a basket.

Or the very worst - dirty clothes piled incriminatingly high in the hamper, waiting to be washed.

Laundry - not my favorite task.

But then again - what would happen if I couldn’t do laundry? What would happen if my entire life fell apart before my eyes? If my house was picked up by some massive fingers of wind and simultaneously relocated to twelve new plots of land? Or if I woke up in a puddle that wasn’t of my own drool, and further discovered that my entire house was one giant puddle?

What if I was living in a gymnasium with dozens of other fortunates in similar circumstances? What if my new job involved picking through rubble to find things that may or may not belong to me and mine? What if all I had at the end of a hard day’s labour were a dozen pairs of filthy sweatpants, a lone sock and two precious jackets, only mostly soiled with mildew and grime? And what if this, aside from the clothing on my back, was all I had to clothe my family?

No problem, right? Just fish my money out of my pocket and hightail it to the nearest laundromat with the other dozens of fortunates, right? Make it a laundry party!

Only - the laundromat is underwater, or exploring it’s own dozen-odd new locations. Or wait - I could do the laundry, if only I could find more than the torn off handle of my purse with which to pay for it.

Yeah. That’s the dilemma. Sure, it’s easy to see the immediate needs of disaster victims, and respond to those. Water. Food. Shelter. But there are dozens of other needs/wants/comforts - all of which go unmet because disaster victims are meant to be contented with survival, for as long as it takes for them to get there lives back together.

Except in some cases, the time required has been longer than a couple of days. In some cases, it’s been years.

So who is going to step in and provide comfort and, in this case, clean clothes?

I’m happy to report that there’s a lovely corporate citizen out there who recognized that they were uniquely positioned to respond to this problem.

Tide has, and will continue to provide washers, dryers and laundry soap to disaster victims. They’ve created a lovely mobile (free!) laundromat that will travel to disaster sites to offer some friendly faces, and freshly laundered clothing to people who have effectively lost everything.

Don’t kid yourself - if you were facing disaster of this proportion, you cannot tell me that a fresh, dryer-fluffed towel to use post-communal shower wouldn’t make your world a better place.

To support the initiative, Tide is selling some funky and fun  t-shirts to the non-disastered public. So g’on - check ‘em out, and help someone wash the lone sock, the dozen dirty sweatpants, and the scabby towel that may well make the psychological difference between disaster victim and disaster survivor.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Family and love – at least they’re not mutually exclusive.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I was chatting with someone *waves* a couple of weeks ago about personality differences, and how some people interpret assertiveness as aggressiveness (especially when it’s a woman who’s being the assertor), and how some folks are better with confrontation than others.

During the course of the conversation, we talked about confrontations with family. I observed that I am much better at being assertive with people who aren’t my family. She said, simply “I don’t worry about it. They’re my family. They have to love me.”

And that’s when I realized that I don’t make this assumption about family. I don’t assume that they have to love me. In fact, I think there’s a part of me that assumes they’re imminently about to stop loving me.

It would be easy for you, as a reader of my blog, to imagine that I’m just being paranoid if I think my family won’t love me no matter what. But then, you kind and well-meaning folks wouldn’t know that I’ve had people I call sister, brother, mother, father and partner all leave my life at some point or another - never to return. And oddly, most without really seeming to care one way or the other about leaving ‘family’ behind.

As I said at the time of the conversation, I truly don’t carry all this grief and loss around with me like a cloak. I do feel like my life is a happy place and I’ve made peace with all the negative things that were part of the process of getting me from there to here. It’s just that, every once in a while, I stumble across these unforeseen long-term side-effects of the negativity, and it surprises me. It probably wouldn’t be a surprise if I was still holding on to the pain and anger. So I guess that’s a good thing.

The flip side, and something I’ve known about myself for quite a long time, is that I will put up with far more from the people I love than may even be reasonable. It has gotten to the point, with some folks, where I think they honestly believed I had no boundaries at all. That I’d tolerate any kind of bad attitude, crap, laziness or absence forever.

I recall my mother (bless her heart) at the time of my divorce saying very directly to me, “Ex has clearly forgotten who he’s dealing with.” At that moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. Even I’d forgotten who he was dealing with. But she knew.

Because once he’d passed those boundaries, those distant and misty limits - so far away as to be invisible to the naked eye - that was it. I was done. I ruthlessly proceeded to divest my life of all trace of him. And I don’t regret it. It was almost like there was a little elastic “ping” in my brain, and then I was free.

The point of this post? Not much, really. Just making a record of the things I learn about myself, more or less as I learn them.

Posted in Being a girl, Getting older, Happiness, Thunks, family | No Comments »

Why children should rule the world.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

On our way home after picking Rosebud up from Our Lady of Daycare, we were conversing (Conversating? Someone actually used that in a public speaking moment last week. Conversate? Really?) about one of the other children, and the fact that this little one was picked up by someone we didn’t recognize. Another man, not the child’s father. We were idly puzzling over this when Rosebud piped up from the back.

“Maybe she has two dads!”

My mind immediately went to the concept of same-sex marriage, and I marveled at how advanced the simple view of a child is. Two dads? Well, why the frog not?

While I mused, Buddy responded with, “Lucky girl!”

Quick as a flash, Rosebud offered her own retort, “I have two dads!”

Whoa.

There I was, eyes welling up, love in my heart and amazement in my brain. My little 3-and-a-half year old daughter had arrived at this realization - utterly unprompted and much earlier than I imagined possible. Another one of her crystalline moments - those moments that remind me that what I see as complicated and challenging, she sees as natural and normal. What I imagine as fraught with emotional difficulty, she takes in stride.

Such a simple statement, and such a sweet one. Rosebud has two dads. Sha. Doesn’t everyone?

I’m welling and fluttering, but Buddy is more cautious. He needs to ask. “Who is your other dad, Rosebud?”

“Well, you are, Buddy.”

And if there was a suspicious moisture around his eyeballs at this juncture, he could be forgiven, right?

Posted in Happiness, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rosebud, buddy, divorce, family | 3 Comments »

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