November 23, 2011

What to expect

“They named me Ruth Frances Beatrice Brennan, and took me home. They days blended together, one into another with no distinctions. The crying, the feeding, the changing, the chafing, the washing, the soothing, the burping, the singing, the sleeping, the waking. As new parents, James and Elspeth were surprised by their fatigue, as well as my dismissal of it. If someone had told them what to expect (and no one had), they hadn’t taken it in, and now, rather than forging ahead, they were rolling and rolling.

Sometimes Elspeth hung over me with smears of purple under her eyes, the skin there loose and fine, like something that would tear easily. She begged me to understand, though she knew she asked too much of me. Just as I asked too much of her, and him, and they of each other. James formed a habit of going to get things before they were needed, because it made him feel helpful and also allowed him to escape, just briefly, what he’d never expected to have to endure.” –Kristen den Hartog, And Me Among Them

November 10, 2011

"I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines."

Before I had a baby, somebody told me how she wished she’d played with her children more. That she’d spent their childhoods rushing from one thing to another, and never took the time get down on the floor and engage with what they do on their own level. So I decided that her experience would be a lesson for me, just like I’d decided that any sleepless nights with my new baby be an opportunity for me to revel in her nearness. And then my baby was born, an occasion I came to define as “the day I discovered all my limits within arms’ length”. The sleepless nights were an opportunity for me to imagine murdering my husband, more than anything else. And it would turn out that when it came to play, I wouldn’t do much better.

Now just being with my daughter, I can do. Ours is not a particularly harried pace. We spent a lot of timing talking over pancakes, and lying sprawled on the floor staring at the ceiling. I like our conversations, I love brushing her hair, I think that holding her hand as we walk down the street is perhaps the great privilege of my existence. I really do like to be with my daughter, but I find playing insufferably dull most of the time. It’s boring, and after about five rounds of “playing farm”, “making a cake” (which involves piles of crayons), or “playing doctor” (whose stethoscope is actually a USB cable), I tend to drop out. I find her play absolutely fascinating to watch, but not to engage with it. Which is a huge reason why I appreciate picture books and stories, actually, and why we read so many of them– it’s the one activity of which neither of us ever tires.

In a recent interview promoting her new book Blue Nights, Joan Didion notes that as a mother of a young child, she had been “totally wrapped up in keeping some time free for myself.” And I read that and thought, yes, that is precisely what motherhood is. Because once the baby’s arrived, she’s there, and there’s no fighting it– there’s no need to be wrapped up in that. How much I am enjoying the experience of motherhood has always been directly proportionate to the time I have to spend away from it. And to be totally wrapped in keeping this time free is not the same as being a bad or neglectful mother. To be so wrapped up is to be going against the flow, of course, swimming upstream, yes, but you’re still in the water. You’re always and forever in the water, which is precisely the point.

(I always think of the son in JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, whining at the bare silence of his mother’s office door. And I’ve always thought that the son was a bit of an asshole, since I read the book, which was long before I had a child of my own. I’ve always thought that learning from an early age that one is not the centre of any universe, let alone his mother’s, is probably a healthy thing for anybody.)

Love pours out from the pages of Blue Nights, for the difficult Quintana Roo from her even more difficult mother. Life is like this. Motherhood is also like this, as Didion examines old photographs of her daughter growing up in Malibu: “The clothes of course are familiar./ I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window./ I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines./ Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.”

We had a wonderful morning at our house today, a backyard buried in leaves presenting the greatest opportunity. To be outside together working on a project we would both equally enjoy, the best mix of practical and whimsical, and neither of us would be bored. We filled two big bags with leaves, and there will be much more of this in the days to come, as the tree appears as fully dressed as ever. And then we walked to the grocery store to pick up some milk, which is rare because we usually stroller-it everywhere. I am usually in too much of a hurry, but not this morning, this lovely, leafy, golden morning. And just when the walk home appeared to be taking forever and the end of my patience was in sight, Harriet demanded to be scooped up and carried, which was fine with me, however awkward in coordination with 4 litres of milk, but these are the things we manage. We got home, and made a batch of Carrie Snyder’s granola bars, which are delicious. The whole arrangement sort of glorious, because it felt like we were two people rather than parent and child, relating on a somewhat-even keel, in spite of the disparity in our heights.

But see, she’s sleeping now, and I’ve got a cup of tea, and the time and space to write it all down, and therein lies the key to my happiness.

October 31, 2011

Tricks and Treats

Harriet was Tilly Witch for Halloween this year, which was a grand success, except for the blip around 4:30 when she decided that she going to wear her Easter Bunny ears instead of the witch hat, and I had to go upstairs and have a moment to myself in order to avoid murdering her. By the time I’d calmed down, the bunny ears were abandoned, and the rest of the evening was splendid, resulting in a bucketful of treats.

Over at Canadian Bookshelf, I’ve written “I am Not At Peace: Ghosts and Haunting in Canadian Fiction”, exploring the spookier side of CanLit. And if you’re not subscribing to the blog, you should. There’s great new stuff up three days a week.

October 3, 2011

Caspian really loves his books

First, I have noticed the way that all parents says things like, “Caspian really loves his books. He just can’t get enough off them. He turns the pages, and loves the pictures, and chews on the spine, and laughs at the funny bits.” I’ve heard this kind of bragging so often that I think book-loving must be a thing that most little kids just do, like crawling and growing teeth. My daughter really loves her books too, and it’s one of the most delightful things about her, but maybe this is just one of the things we can take for granted when we’re fortunate enough to be literate, and have a love of books to share.

Second, I can’t believe I once wrote here in awe of such things as, Harriet can actually wave (without prompting, even!), and I’m sure that if we go back far enough, I wrote about how thrilling it was when she could finally hold her head up. Blah blah blah. And so I hope that myself a few years down the line will forgive me for posting the following (and that all of you with older children who know how boring and ubiquitous such things actually are will humour me for a moment): yesterday, Harriet read me a book. Yesterday, Harriet flipped through the pages of Olivia and the Missing Toy and more or less told me the story, beginning with, “One day, Olivia was riding a camel through Egypt…” In her funny little goblin voice, and Olivia is called Owivia. Some of the text is hard to decipher, but I like that she never forgets the pages on which Olivia’s mother calls her, “Sweetie Pie”. Being read a story by Harriet was really one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Harriet reading in bed. Yes, she still has a soother and sleeps in a crib. Do you want to make something of it?*

We do live a bookish life, reading our favourites over and over. We get about 15 books from the library every week, which mixes things up a bit. For some reason, we keep getting books about wolves though, over and over. Harriet keeps telling us things like, “The big bad wolf is in my room,” and then informs us that, “he’s teeny tiny.” Today she cried because we didn’t get a Katie Morag book from the library, and so we had to go back. (Actually, today was kind of annoying, but that’s another story…) Lately, she loves Little Bear, Charlie and Lola, Elephant and Piggie, Alfie and Annie Rose, Stella and Sam, Arthur and Franklin. Also Curious George, whose books are so long that reading them over and over gets to be a little tiresome. Don’t tell anyone I said so.

It’s Children’s Book Week this week at Canadian Bookshelf. First post went up today about the TD Grade One Giveaway, which is quite a cool program. Check the blog for new posts all week, including great ones by Sheree Fitch and Kristen den Hartog.

*”Do you want to make something of it?” is actually a quote from Judy Blume’s Superfudge, as delivered by Fudge’s best friend Daniel Menheim. As in, “I’m Daniel Manheim. I’m six. I live at 432 Vine Street. You want to make something of it?” Superfudge may be the only cultural reference point I allude to as often as Wayne’s World.

September 23, 2011

Weaned

At the age of 2 and one quarter and a bit, Harriet is now officially weaned, which I’m telling you now for a couple of reasons. The first is that I truly enjoying horrifying the kind of people who become horrified by the fact that I’ve breastfed for so long. The second reason is because it’s quite a milestone, and I don’t like the idea of breastfeeding having to be a private thing, business that I keep to myself for fear of horrifying somebody (except when I want to horrify someone, as previously noted), because it really is of the mundane essential stuff of life that I write about on my blog all the time. And the third reason I raise the topic here is because breastfeeding was always when I got my periodical reading done, and the loss of this reading time each day now means that I’ve got magazines piling up in my house at a terrifying rate. Plus it’s September, which means there is a new release out basically every day that I’m meaning to getting around to read, and the Victoria College Book Sale is this weekend (which is, as many of you know, the thing I enjoy in the world more than anything else at all except Afternoon Tea). So there will be books, books and more books, and now I’m a bit terrified at the prospect of my leaning tower of magazines.

September 19, 2011

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

The bad news about Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter is that she’s preaching to the choir here. My husband and I both read this book, and came away more than ever firmly entrenched that girlie/princess culture is bad news for little girls. And not just because of the limited nature of the princess narrative and her identity, but because underneath it lies the trap of rampant consumerism. The great news, however, is that we can’t afford to join that culture anyway, which also comes with its own parenting challenges, but will  make so many other things easier.

Orenstein does a great job of showing that “princess culture” is such a recent phenomenon, and that signing up is just to play into corporate hands (and to get those hands into your pockets). That these companies are not simply giving consumers what they want, but are also intentionally coercing children into wanting consumer products that are expensive, and detrimental to the development of their self-image. She shows that companies are out to make a buck by gendering children’s toys (thereby ensuring that parents will have to buy two of everything), and also by inventing stages from toddler to tween to “pre-tween” so that nothing ever lasts more than a season.

Orenstein’s writing is funny, engaging, and self-deprecating as she draws on her own experiences as a mother negotiating the labyrinth of princess-dom. She doesn’t take cheap shots, most notably in her chapter on the child beauty pageant circuits. Many of her subjects are really easy targets, but Orenstein writes about them with sympathy, and also shows how their preposterousness is only a magnified version of most parents’ experiences with princess consumer culture, echoing those same old excuses: “But we’re only giving her what she wants” and “It’s doing no harm.” From reading this book, it becomes decidedly clear that neither of these statements are true.

Anyway, what’s strangest to me is that the choir Orenstein is preaching to isn’t all that big. I guess if it was, we’d all have nothing much to sing about. For me, one of the biggest surprises of parenthood all along has been that common sense is such a relative thing. It reminds me of when writer Carrie Snyder wrote about no-gift birthday parties in her parenting column (an idea we’ve since stolen), and got the most cruel (anonymous) responses, similar to those received by Orenstein herself when, as she writes, she first dared to suggest that princess-dom might not be doing our daughters a lot of good. Both mothers were accused of deprivation, which is not so unbelievable, I guess, when you consider that so many people think shoe shopping is exercising our democratic freedom (not to mention, how to be a feminist). Anyway, I guess what I mean is that these are the people who should be reading this book, but they won’t be, and that’s depressing.

August 30, 2011

Here be (no) dragons

One day, after ages of it being beloved, Harriet suddenly refused to let me read Sheree Fitch’s Sleeping Dragons All Around. At that point, she was unable to articulate why, but it was still significant as the first time a book had been outright rejected (as opposed to, say, abandoned out of boredom, which is different).

She also wouldn’t let us read her The Lady With the Alligator Purse— we’re still not sure why. But by the time she’d gone off two books as various as Neil Gaiman’s Instructions and Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, I’d started detecting a theme. And by this time, Harriet had the words to explain: “Too scary,” she told us. Apparently it’s a fire-breathing dragon thing.

But how did she discover that dragons were scary? I’d certainly gone out of my way never to mention such a thing. In fact, I’d never mentioned that there was such a thing as “scary” at all, because little people are so open to suggestion, and I’ve been working hard on cultivating fearlessness. I don’t really do “scary” anyway, except when it comes to sensible things like diving off cliffs and tightrope walking. The closest thing I’ve got to an irrational fear is an extreme unease around dogs (which is not so irrational, I’d argue, because they’re equipped with teeth that could chew your face off), but I promise you that around a dog, Harriet has never, ever seen me flinch.

So this dragons thing has brought me to the limits of my powers, my powers of “cultivation”, and I get it that this is only the beginning of a very long education. And I get it too that it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that oversized fire-breathing lizards are probably best left undistubed between covers. (Interestingly, Harriet’s dragon aversion doesn’t extend to dinosaurs. She loves dinosaurs–plush, fossilized, wooden, Edwina, you name it.)

The thing is actually, that I fucking hate books with dragons (some excellent picture books aside). It’s true. I always have– when I was growing up, I never read a single book with a dragon on the cover. Which wasn’t really difficult to accomplish, because there weren’t many books with dragons on the cover. (My YA self would have been horrified by the popularity of science-fiction/fantasy today. And my adult self remains mystified.) A dragon on the cover was a kind of book design shorthand for “boring book for nerds”, and though I was certainly a nerd, I was the type of nerd who preferred books about pretty girls dying of anorexia or getting cancer.

Fantasy books: here’s another place where I’ve come to the limits of my own powers. I just can’t get into them, though I’ve tried. And I think back and wonder if I’d been less dragon-phobic in my youth, maybe fantasy-appreciation would come easier to me. There are a lot of things I wish I’d spent most of my life being a lot more open minded about, hence the reason why I want to make Harriet’s literary horizons broad from the very start. I want her to read better than I did, but then she persists in having her own feelings about things. She persists in refusing to be malleable, in having fears and preferences and in being a person apart from me.

But also a person who is very much like me, which I’m not sure is more or less disconcerting.

August 6, 2011

When I was a compulsive parenting expert…

Over at my friend Nathalie‘s parenting blog 4 Mothers, I’ve written a guest post about my career as a compulsive parenting expert:

‘I told them, “And be prepared to feel like a cow. Be prepared to cry, and cry. It’s going to be awful, I’m not going to lie to you. But you’re going to get through it, I promise. I sit here feeding my screaming infant and lecturing you as living-proof that one day everything is going to be okay. Oh, and by the way, I’ve gone through your registry and crossed off all the stuff you don’t need, and made a note about everything you’ve missed.”

It was a compulsion, I will admit, the way I insisted on hunting down women in their third trimesters of pregnancy, and horrifying them with stories of how terrible their lives were about to become. But really, I wasn’t responsible for my behaviour in their presence. The very sight of their burgeoning bellies, their innocent bliss, how they kept talking about looking forward to getting the baby out so they could finally get a good night’s sleep again—it would fill me with overwhelming dread, and I’d start displaying symptoms of PTSD.’

You can read the rest here.

July 15, 2011

On books, sharing, communal toys, and the playground

I am really not very good at sharing. Giving, I’m all over that, but sharing makes me wary– too often, the things I’ve shared have come back to me quite battered, and usually these things are books. Which is why now if you ask if I will lend you a book, I will tell you no. I will feel terrible about this, embarrassed at being socially awkward and ungenerous, but not so embarrassed that I could be persuaded to change my mind. I like to have my things where they belong.

Which is why I sort of understand when my daughter doesn’t do so well at sharing either. There were two watering cans in the pool yesterday, and she insisted on playing with the red tin one that Margaret was using. And I could understand why because the green plastic can is obviously inferior. The green plastic can is the one she will “share”, and the red tin can will stay with its rightful owner. (Thankfully, dear Margaret [who has been Harriet’s best friend since she was two days old] was civilized enough to go along with this plan). I’d like it if Harriet were a more easy-going person, but I can usually understand the reasons why she isn’t. She’s fierce and feral, but she makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes “sharing” seems a lot like having Goldilocks come to visit, and while I want Harriet to learn to be a good host and a good friend, where’s the fun in that?

Stuart and I got called out by one of the terrifying mothers at the playground on Sunday. We’d brought a bucket for Harriet to play with in the pool because Harriet insists on having a bucket at all times, and one of the communal buckets might not have been available. (Moreover, the communal toys at the playground are crap because nobody bothers to take care of them, but that’s another story…) Some kid came up and took the bucket from beside where we were sitting. “It’s Harriet’s bucket,” we told the kid, who gave it back, no problem.

But his mother behind us said to our friend, “The boys never understand when they go someplace and everybody has their own toys. They just go up and take them, and the other kids get upset, but parks are supposed to be communal. I mean, that’s the whole point.” (Man, would I ever make a really bad socialist. For someone who doesn’t own any property, I’ve sure got a lot of views about private ones.) So we considered ourselves chastised, and I was feeling badly about this, wondering if we were approaching the whole thing wrong. And then the annoying women’s two children (who were named Cashton and Thorston) started assaulting their friend with shovels, and the annoying woman yelled at the boy, “Walk away, Siegfried! Walk away!” while poor Siegfried got battered. So think that she might not have all the secrets to raising children after all.

It’s a tough call, and I’m still not sure how I feel. I know that I don’t like sharing my books though, which is something. We share snacks, we even share ice cream cones, we’d share a skipping rope if Harriet were capable of jumping. We take turns on the swings, we don’t rip toys out of kids’ hands, if there is a communal toy we want to play with in the playground, Harriet waits her turn. If we were at Margaret’s house and Harriet wanted Margaret’s prized watering can (as you do), I’d have to tell Harriet, “Tough luck.” To me, this is sharing.

We brought our bucket to the playground again on Monday, and a little girl picked it up, hurled it to the ground, and the handle broke off. Is this sharing? Because if it is, sharing sucks. But I don’t want to be a person who thinks that sharing sucks. And I actually appreciate all the communal toys at the park, but everything doesn’t belong to everyone, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing…

So no conclusions. But this is the kind of philosophical issue that I’m grappling with these days. I’m still not lending you my book though.

July 8, 2011

She could see that you might consume babies

“‘Why did the nuns expel you?” Kyril asked, venturing a little further, his head bent in an attitude so suggestive that Aunt Irene felt that, if he had been a stranger and addressing her, she would have emptied the orange pekoe over him. Sometimes she was so afraid for him with his reckless offensiveness that she felt sympathy for Focus’ [the cat] mother who, finding that the world had intruded and that strange human adults had fondled her kittens, had eaten the better part of the litter and was starting on Focus when he was rescued by Aunt Irene’s friend and thereafter raised on tinned milk dealt out by an old fountain-pen tube. She could see that you might consume babies when they were sweet enough to eat. At least you would know where they were. She worried about Kyril all the time, going about as he did in a world of fire and water, sudden concussions, cold steel and heights and depths, and taking so little care.” —The 27th Kingdom, Alice Thomas Ellis