Parenthood

R*E*S*P*E*C*T


I think it is interesting, at times frustrating, to ponder why we loathe to be labeled as “mommy bloggers” while at the same time demand to be respected as “mothers”.

I ran across this sentence via a comment to a post on a blog written by Jessica Gottlieb that pondered the uncomfortable nature of blogging and being recognized. The commenter blogs anonymously, which is something I find fascinating but wonder at its feasibility in the long term. Regardless, her musing intrigued me because I don’t like the mommy-blogger label or the fact that as a woman writer, who happens to blog, that I have to be a mommy blogger in order to find outlets on the web. It is a social media glass ceiling of sorts that condemns women to shilling for wampum by trading their cute kid stories and making fun of their husbands.*

How?

Because I’ve put my uterus to work just the one time, this has somehow made what I think about anything not related to child-rearing, housekeeping and female related consumerism irrelevant. My experiences and perspective are tainted by marriage and procreation. I am clearly not in my right mind.

Clearly this would have been the case anyway, but the second part – about needing to demand respect for the whole luck of the sperm bagging an egg thing – is not something I can wrap myself around.

Because I don’t care.

When I was teaching, I had occasion here and there to point out to a recalcitrant child, or classroom full of them, that teaching was not a democracy. I would not be polling them for input nor did I need their approval. Teaching them was my job. My decisions were in the best interest of their learning, and sometimes they would not agree and that really didn’t matter.

Parenting is not a democracy. Polling others for what they would or wouldn’t do with your child is something that adults charged with rearing babies to competent, independent adulthood shouldn’t do very often, if at all. What you think of my parenting is your business because my business is raising my child with the values and skill sets that my husband and I have decided upon. Other people don’t get a vote.

And there is also the fact that creating a baby is something that almost everyone can do without too much instruction (although I couldn’t but that’s another story) and that some of dumbest people I have ever met have created, birthed and sort of raised children to a tenuous independence or even a brilliant state of grown up. It’s not quantum physics. Which is probably a really good thing.

I suppose though that there is a kernel of truth to the idea that there are those among the parenting set who feel disrespected for their efforts and zeal, but respect can’t be wrung out of those who wouldn’t have made your choices in similar circumstances. The eye of the beholder  looks in more than it looks out.

An interesting perspective.

*I can tell a cute kid story with the best of them, but zinging my husband? Seriously? What material object could possibly be worth your marriage?

The Adventures of St. Nick*


Just about everyone we knew as kids celebrated St. Nicolas day but us. The leaving of small toys or treats in children’s shoes was not a tradition my dad had any interest in. If he or Mom were St. Nick recipients as wee ones, I can’t recall a single tale. Mom came from a fairly well-off background by comparison, but her father was a skinflint, who I highly doubt participated in the consuming side of Christmas any more than he was forced to. Dad’s family was dirt poor. Great-Grandaddy Christie lost the family farm in the bank crash after the first world war and Grandaddy and Gran were essentially the poor relations, who tenant farmed for years before winding up farming Gran’s family farm for first her father and then her sister. One Christmas, Dad and his four siblings got a single pair of skis which they took turns with until Uncle Leo ran into a pig and broke them. More than once I can recall Dad and his second oldest sister discussing how they each got an orange apiece in their stocking and that this was a rare treat. So, St. Nick? Not so much.

I may have put something in Dee’s shoe when she was two or three, but keeping track of holidays I didn’t grow up celebrating was not long on my list of necessities, so that good intention died before it had chance to take root. My sister, DNOS, however, has managed to instill the specialness of the day into N2 (Nephew2).

“But he slept over at Mom’s Saturday night and I forgot about it completely, ” she confided to me on the phone. “I hoped he would just forget about it, but nope, we were in the car on our way home from school and he wonders why St. Nick forgot him.”

“So what did you tell him?” I asked. DNOS is a great one for covering up parental faux-pas with stories that only an 8 year old could possibly believe. I admire that.

“I told him that St. Nick visits houses alphabetically and that he probably hadn’t gotten to the O’s yet.”

And N2 bought this as reasonable as any third grader would because “alphabetical” is how the world works.

After they got home from hockey practice later that evening, DNOS hustled N2 downstairs to strip him of his gear and pop him in the shower. According to my husband, hockey gear takes on an odor of its own and so, I imagine, does the child wearing the gear. As N2 showered, his father snuck upstairs and began stomping loudly about the living room. It’s a little house and BIL is a big guy, so let’s imagine timbers rattling.

“Mom,” N2 pops out of the shower, “There’s someone in the house!”

Eyes as big as saucers and shivering with chill and fear in his birthday suit, he began yelling for BIL.

“Dad! DAD! There’s an intruder upstairs.”

BIL has stealthily slipped back downstairs without notice and asks, “Are you sure, N2?”

“There’s an intruder!! Dad, get the gun!”

BIL hunts. He keeps his arsenal in a locked cabinet in the basement and he dutifully went for a shotgun and went upstairs to “look around”.

“Oh my god, Mom. There’s an intruder! And I’m naked!” N2 was literally beside himself with horror at this point and how DNOS and BIL live with the guilt is beyond me. They are great actors though and neither one cracked so much as a smile, let alone snickered.

“I didn’t see anything N2,” BIL reported when he returned.

“Get the soap out of my hair, Mom! I need to get dressed!”

A few minutes later, sans soap and pj’d, N2 charges ahead of his parents to the upstairs.

“Hey Buzz, nice of you to go first,” BIL calls after him and N2 freezes in mid-step.

“Mom, you go ahead of me and Dad you go ahead of Mom,” he said.

They crept through the kitchen and into the living room to find, not an intruder, but three St. Nick’d shoes. N2 took the contents out and distributed them and sat heavily on the rocker, clutching his small toy.

“Mom. Dad. I have to say this how I have to say this,” he said.

And they waited with bated breath.

“Dad, you almost frickin’ shot St. Nick! He’s Santa’s brother, and I wouldn’t have got anything this year if you’d killed him.”

And no, they didn’t laugh. They are that good.

*This tale is told with the permission of DNOS, who I am sure recognizes that I didn’t get it word for word as she told it because I am not the story-teller that she is.

Things in The Night Pt. 1


I know it’s Tuesday and from a fresh news perspective Dee’s first day of school yesterday, the “growing” push for Texan succession and the latest Glenn Beck YouTube parody – except it’s really him and not terribly funny – will all pass the smell test and what I want to talk about won’t. And I’m sure at least half of you are tired of the blending and the widowy, but things come up. They run around the rooms in my mind before burrowing in and blossoming with the rapidity of qwack grass after a soaking rain.

Saturday was the hamlet wide garage sale and hockey swap meet. There is nothing like a dozen or so neighbors displaying their junk and the lure of hockey equipment to bring out the crowds from The Fort. Rob and I, being us, worked until after 10 on Friday night setting up. Other people toss their unwanted onto tables and are done. We treat it like it’s a real business or something. Consequently, other people get more sleep than we do.

By the time we’d cleaned up and were in bed it was after midnight and the plan was to be up by eight to finish the remaining pricing.  At 4:30 I woke. My right leg was stretched across Rob’s side of the bed and the toes were dangling off which is something that can only happen if Rob is not there.

The dimmest bit of light was straining to lift the blinds and I headed downstairs in search of my husband (and to use the toilet because I am old).  At this time of day the sky is bruised by the indirect light of a sun still too far east to do more than send word of its impending arrival. Such a difference from just a few weeks ago when the sun never seemed to set at all.

I found Rob wrapped in our old comforter on the couch.  He was grumpy from lack of sleep and the fact that the sadist train engineer had just crawled past the hamlet with the whistle at full throttle.

“I’d just managed to fall asleep too,” he said.

He’d been up since two. For reasons he didn’t explain until much later, he was up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. He hadn’t wanted to wake me tossing and turning, so he’d gone downstairs, fiddled about on the ‘Net until his eyes burned and tried to catch a few winks on the sofa.

I got him to come back to bed. He was so exhausted by this point that he fell asleep quickly, but I was awake. I got up at 5:30 and was out in the garage by 6:45 and that is mostly where I remained until 3P.M.

But I did come in a bit before 8 to wake Rob who thought perhaps I had a birthday present  for him despite the fact that he’d issued a no present edict earlier in the week. The next day he would say,

“It was probably one of the worst birthdays ever.”

So much for birthdays not being a big deal.

We’d planned dinner in the city with the older girls for seven that evening. It should go without saying that neither of us was energetic enough to really be looking forward to the 45 minute drive – each way – but the sitter had been booked. Last minute sitter cancellations can lead to difficulty finding willing sitters, so we headed into the city.

Let me digress a minute. Earlier in the week, Rob noted that I had been commenting a bit more on widow blogs. He wondered if I was okay. I was heavy into the memory mode with purging old things for the garage sale. On the surface I felt fine but after a bit of reflection, I realized I was a bit blue about Rob’s birthday. Not that it was his and not mine. I actually love planning parties for other people more than I like celebrating my own birthday. It came down to the fact that we were having two celebrations to accommodate the children. We took Dee out for dinner on Friday night and had cake upon returning home. Saturday was with the older girls because their adult schedules sometimes make it too difficult for them to always be traipsing out to the country.

The thing was that Rob has three daughters, but I have one. As much as I love Edee and Mick, they are not my daughters. I am not their mother. My birthday doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Which is not to imply that I think it should or that they are not wonderful or that we have a contentious relationship. But where Dee becomes more Rob’s child than Will’s, they remain Rob’s daughters.

It’s not something I expected to bother me. I knew perfectly well that, with their being adults, we would not have the relationship that Rob and Dee have formed and will continue to form. And I get it. I really do. One of the reasons I have shied away from searching for my birth parents – my birth mother in particular – was that I didn’t want to feel bound to love her like I love my mom or to have expectations of any deep connection.

And though we get along quite well and the girls are genuine and warm, I know they struggle with just who I am in their lives.

The word “step-mother” is not used. I am introduced as “Ann” or sometimes “This is Ann, Dad’s wife.”

And to clarify further, no one uses the “step” prefix in our family aloud really. Dee doesn’t even know what a step-dad or step-sister is.

I am ever conscious of my actions and words. I don’t want to push or encroach or presume or give the impression. I walked into this with more knowledge than Rob, who at one point declared himself willing to be Dee’s father figure but that he could never be her father father.

We stopped by Edee’s to pick her up. She’d been home with her cat, one of Bouncy’s brood if you recall, who was at death’s door from a blood parasite she’d picked up. And I mean the literal door. Pandora was at a point where she was using her reserves to try and crawl away from wherever Edee put her – looking no doubt for a place to die. Even I know enough about animals to know that.

Dinner was back and forth between pleasant conversation and tearful worry. There was hugging and reassurance and I never know when I am doing too much or not enough.

We’d told the sitter we’d be home between 10 and 10:30 and it was 11 because after dinner at Edee’s poor Pandora was no better. We finally left after assuring Edee that whatever she decided to do concerning Pandora’s care  we would support. The naturopath vet had prescribed an antibiotic with herbal back up and instructions to bring the cat in on Monday if she was no better but still alive or a trip to the emergency vet clinic, an expensive affair that makes a jaunt to the human ER in the states look affordable by comparison.

Rob called me from the car after dropping off the sitter to let me know that Edee had texted him and needed him to go along to the ER with her and Pandora. He didn’t get home until about 2:30 where he found me still awake.

Why? The ghosts are back … but then he already knew that.