Category Archives: motherhood

The Root of Road Rage

Posted on by Ann

 

A speed limit sign entering a school zone, alo...

School zone sign in U.S. In Alberta, the speed is 30km or about 22 mph – Calabasas, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

I am starting to believe that people who rage at other motorists are simply embarrassed about their own dickish driving behavior. Those who thumb noses at speed limits, consideration for safety when passing and view treat stop signs like yields and yields as though they were invisible are perfectly aware that they are cunts and resent having it pointed out to them.

 

Few things will provoke a fellow road mate to rabid rage like honking at them when they cut off your vehicle or pull out in front of you. It’s not that the driver didn’t know he/she was committing a transgression. He/she is angry at you for not ignoring it. You are supposed to just “take it”.

 

I drove Dee to school this morning because I’d been guilted into volunteering to help chaperone her field trip to the annual historical festival at the local museum. The trip was short parent volunteers and despite the fact that my loathing of field trips pre-dates even my years teaching middle school, it was important to Dee. So I sucked it up and said, “yes”.

 

Upside was sleeping in. Downside was driving her to school.

 

The elementary school is located on a rather well-used road in the older part of town. The speed limit during school hours is a mere 30km, which is even lower than the U.S.’s 25mph, and during the morning rush, you can see steam hissing out of the ears of every driver crawling past.

 

It invites stupidity as commuters jockey and nudge each other to go just a tad faster and knowing what a clusterfuck it can be with angry workers off to their day job slog, parents trying to drop off students and school buses pulling in, off-loading and pulling out to vex the already late for work – I am in extreme slow and cautious mode.

 

Traffic was slow today even before I hit the school zone and cars pulling from the side streets did so with a whip-it turn and gun it that speaks volumes about how spatially challenged most people are. Therefore, I was watching the side streets carefully and it’s a good thing because a car raced up, barely slowed and then pulled out in front of me.

 

So I honked.

 

Which is where I went wrong because Princess already knew that she’d pulled a fast one and was basically expecting me to be fine with it. She was in a hurry after all.

 

We were barely two blocks from the turn into the school parking lot and Princess, not being able to see Dee in my backseat, likely assumed I was on my way to work. Her reaction to being chastised for being a dick driver was to slow down and slow down and then finally – slam on her brakes.

 

Did I back off? No. I was never in any danger of hitting her. I was under the speed limit to begin with and her wedge manuever caused me to slow even more. But, I am in a truck and she is in a little hatchback-ish thing and I probably looked closer and more menacing than I was.

 

And as if attempting to get me rear-ended wasn’t enough, she flipped me off.

 

So I gave her the finger back.

 

“You what?” Rob asked when I related this to him.

 

“Gave her the finger,” I repeated. “Why not. She was being an asshole, trying to teach me a lesson by causing me to get rear-ended. There are somethings that need to be commented on with profanity.”

 

And then she sped up and signaled to turn into … the school parking lot.

 

I’d have given a lot to see the look on her  face when I signaled to turn there as well.

 

She quickly whipped into the aisle leading to the drop off lane while I went to the back row of the lot to park. I kept an eye out for her and was amused to note that she parked in the drop off and stayed in her car until Dee and I had walked half-way to the building before she started up and darted down the center aisle of the lot. I watched her roll slowly past and even turned around and walked backward as she queued up to exit. I was tempted to wave. No, not with my middle finger. There were children in plain sight who aren’t mine and I am only allowed to corrupt my own child.

 

Lately, I haven’t been shy about using the truck’s horn. I don’t sit patiently behind someone as they fiddle with their smartphones and the light has been green for longer than it takes to blink slowly several times. I am not patient with semi-drivers who think it’s okay to pull out in front of me because they are larger and are “working”, which allows them some sort of road dispensation. I don’t suffer idiots to endanger my life with their precarious passing prowess because – their lack of brains and spatial awareness should only rid the world of them and not me too.

 

There was an interesting conversation on a local radio station a few weeks ago about the so-called “passing lane on the major roads in Edmonton. It’s a widely held, though completely wrong, belief that the far left lane is for the “fast” traffic. And by “fast”, they assume that means license to exceed the posted speed limit by a margin and a half. When the on-air host pointed out that technically the speed limit is exactly the same in all three lanes and that the far left is only for those to use to get around traffic that is moving slower than the limit – he was roundly and soundly dismissed.

 

Which just proves that there are a lot of stupid people being given licenses to drive. Like Princess this morning. And that they don’t appreciate it when their self-serving disregard for others is brought home to them. More often than not anymore, I am disinclined to care.

 

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The “Mommy Wars”: Militant Attachment Parenting Edition

Posted on by Ann

Time Magazine jumped into the Mommy “War” fray this past week with a “provocative” cover story, which featured a good-looking millennial mom breastfeeding her big-for-his-age almost four-year old as the cover photo.

I am sure you’ve seen it by now. She’s garbed in the standard yoga uniform of the SAHM with one boob flashing a bit as her son peeks from behind it, his mouth firmly latched.

The outrage! How dare Time sexualize breastfeeding?! And how icky of them to use a hot looking mom as opposed to the dumpy beings we all know that moms are? And the kid? He’s a kid!! Kids don’t breastfeed! They eat. Lunchables and Happy Meals while drinking fructose infused juices and sodas. And finally, breastfeeding is all well and good for INFANTS (provided a woman CAN nurse … because you know, not all of us can. Failure to latch or lactate enough or you know, we have lives) but not preschoolers who can ask for a cup of milk and maybe even pour their own sippy cups. Pretty sure that sucking Mom’s teat (in front of people) isn’t something Jesus wants fully actualized feminists to do.

‘Cause Jesus loves the working woman.

Did you hear my eyes rolling on that last line?

Look, I breastfed Dee until she was a tad over four years old. Ask her. She’ll tell you that it was awesome and that breast milk is the tastiest stuff ever and she misses it … because she’s lactose intolerant and rice milk just doesn’t cut it for her, and I am mean and won’t let her have much cow’s milk. And no, she won’t be traumatized if someday her peers find this out because we have raised her to value what she knows over the often times misguided misinformation of others.

She slept with me too until Rob came along – because he is the world’s most finicky sleeper*. It’s the slippery slope that is “attachment parenting” for most of us who aren’t Hollywood actresses. Breastfeeding is an on demand thing and in pretty short order it occurs to most of us that letting the baby, toddler or kid simply latch on as needed while we sleep is the best way to not die from exhaustion.

As most people who know Dee can attest, she is neither emotionally impaired nor particularly clingy. She sallies forth into the world at her own pace, dictated more by her personality – which she inherited in more or less equal measures from me and her late father – and that no one would accuse her of being particularly effed up in terms of her ability to separate from Rob and I. She speaks up for herself. She doesn’t take crap from peers. She knows who she is and aside from her insistence that she is going to work at The Pottery Guild when she grows up (she is going to be an engineer because we’ve already decided that we can’t waste money on university without some sort of assurance that she will be employable and not destined to live with us for the rest of our lives), she is practical and – based on my observations of many of her friends – far more self-sufficient.

There is nothing particularly right or wrong about breastfeeding beyound the first 6 weeks or months. Once I got the hang of it, I found it much easier than messing about with formula and bottles. But I wasn’t slavish about it. I didn’t get the hang of pumping, so Dee took formula at daycare. Devilish smart wee one that she was, she figured out quite early that because she could nurse all she liked in the evenings and over-night, she didn’t need to take much formula during the day. More than once, a worried caregiver informed me that Dee had taken only 15 ounces of formula that day. She was too clever by half even as a 4 month old.

And I didn’t personally know anyone whose kid or kids didn’t take up residence in their bed. Honestly, I don’t know that forbidding this sort of thing promotes “independence” any more than letting a baby cry itself to exhaustion teaches them to sleep (which begs the question of how “sleep” – a natural human thing is “taught”). My parents forbade us to sleep in their bed. In fact, I vividly remember having to stand in the hallway outside their door and call to them ’til one of them woke up if I needed them in the night because it was literally taking life in hand to even stand next to their bed.

Most of the sanctity of the marriage bed thing stems, in my opinion, from the quaint notion that sex is why the bed exists in the first place and that a couple somehow loses precious bonding time when children “intrude”.  Aside from our days trying to conceive, the late husband and I rarely had sex in bed. And frankly, I am not at all sure how one bonds during one’s sleep. But given the fact that “bonding” for many couples consists of watching Game of Thrones on a flatscreen nearly as big as the bed – I am not really sure where the bed gets its sacred reputation. It’s a bed. Mostly you sleep in it and kids eventually will get tired of being squished and go find beds of their own. I don’t know a single co-sleeping family who is harbouring teens or 20 somethings in their beds.

Here’s what I think about the hysteria over the Time cover pic.

People project. A lot.

North Americas have  a puritanical streak wider than the Mississippi and twice as long. The media and the Pink Ribbon brigade has so twisted our notions about the female breast that we can’t see them and not think SEX. Breasts in our culture are about accessorizing, flaunting and power and not necessarily in that order. Men see breasts as enticing toys, and women pander to this view a lot more than is necessary.

Breasts are not just fatty tissue housing milk ducts, They are statements. Sexual objects used by everyone from the purveyors of capitalism to the pimps of the patriarchal religious right. More so than even our vaginas, our breasts are used to pit us against each other in pointless areola gazing.

Are you Mom enough? Time asks us. And by doing so is accused of stoking the next battle, but we willingly engage in one mom up-woman-ship all the time on our blogs, Twit streams and Facebook pages. Seldom have I witnessed Moms gathering (or women in general for that matter) where hierarchies aren’t quickly established with women knowing, without even asking, where they rank. Nothing about being female screams FEMALE as loudly as the endless competition we entered into at some point before junior high and continue to engage in to one degree or another until we drop dead (from breast cancer, if you are inclined to buy into the hysteria).

Time fed the distraction troll with this one. One could excuse it if one were inclined. I’m not. Nor am I inclined to cut much slack to the hysterical and squeamish who jumped into the fray while decrying it.

They are just boobs, doing what boobs are uniquely designed to do. I get that Mom on Time’s cover. Breastfeeders are constantly sent the message that we are freakish and should keep that shit in our homes – with shades drawn and maybe in a closet underneath a thick blanket. I’d have stuck it out there for all to see too had I been given her chance. And personally, I get a vicarious feeling of satisfaction knowing that cover is discomforting the judgemental and the timid conformers in every grocery and Target all over America. Take that, Mommy Clubbers!

Seriously, they are boobs and the kid is nursing. He’ll be fine. Get over it already and stop buying into your own manipulation by a media with a political agenda that is clearly not women friendly.

*I am lucky that I am allowed to share the bed with him because my tossing about has driven him to distraction on more than one occasion. And Dee is even worse than I am.

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Not Yet Summer

Posted on by Ann
Spring Flowers

Spring Flowers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tomorrow is the first of May. It will mark, or so I have read, the beginning of “occupy” season and the countdown to the end of the school year. The latter being a longer wind-down here than back in the States because – thanks to an interminable number of professional days – school won’t end until Canada Day is nearly upon us.

But, it’s like many things Canada. We have them but for shorter durations and after we’ve waited longer for them.

For me, tomorrow marks the beginning of the death march to freedom from the school year’s tyrannical focus on the child’s schedule. School. Girl Guides. Pottery. Indoor Soccer. Outdoor Soccer. Months where she seems to be on holiday more than she is in school.

Already the days are longer. The sun is up before I am. And I am up pretty damn early. It is only just setting when the child crawls into bed at 9 P.M. By some happy quirk of fate, this year marks an actual early spring, which is not early where I come from in Iowa but normal. Spring should arrive in April or even the tail end of March. Here it shows up in May, usually, and teases until June-ish, which is spring and not summer here.

Outdoor Soccer acts as my countdown calendar. Each game completed brings me closer to the day I don’t have to get up and make lunches, breakfasts and ensure the child catches the bus. Closer to summer.

Summer is an eye blink anymore. In my past, I enjoyed what seemed like endless summer, but here it’s over by mid-August and if we are exceptionally lucky it began in late June though typically it’s July-ish. All told? A month. Ish.

Fall, I will admit is lovely for the most part. Indian-ish.

So, in the season of Not-Yet-Summer, I endure. With more difficulty this year because it’s been hellish wet. Just enough rainy to trigger all manner of my non-allergies and non-asthma which aggravates my real migraines and keeps me trapped in my real indoors. Not enough sun and warmth to warm my imagination or spark my soul for the slog to actual summer.

Perhaps it has been too long since my last vacation?

It has been a while. And it’s been a long winter in spirit if not reality.

The stay-cation in March was not long enough. Our first real chance at a holiday is even longer away than summer thanks to a lot of conditions over which no control can be asserted.

But your life is just one long uninterrupted holiday, you say.

My life is a long serious of obligations and responsibilities, not all of which I find odious, but not all of which I would choose to do for just anyone. And because the setting is still a work in progress and some of the characters require more tending than others and particular characters have been a bit soul-sucking and even exasperating and I am forced to work in the evenings – when I work – I find myself more wearied today than I have been and waiting impatiently for summer.