parenting

Let It Slip


Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip? 

Lose Yourself by Eminem

Not quite the scenario I’ve been presented with but an apt lyrical representation in some ways.

The studio where I study and teach shuts its door at the end of the month. My friend and teacher, Jade, has chosen to step away and spend more time with her children and seek saner employment opportunities. She offered those of us who teach there the opportunity to take the studio over, and regretfully, I passed.

Timing is one of those serendipitous things. It introduced Rob and I to each other and brought Dee and I to Canada. It has afforded me with writing opportunities and yoga study and teaching opportunities that someone with my background shouldn’t likely have had. But it didn’t show up for this one.

I love the studio. It’s compact, elegant and well-situated. Sitting above a used bookstore (yes, the one I toyed briefly with buying) and sandwiched between a seedy pub and a liquor store, it fits the stereotypical ideal of city yoga studios everywhere. How often have you run across yoga springing forth from the seedy remains of crumbling downtowns like saplings stubbornly taking root in the cracks of sidewalks.

Even as strip malls and newer shopping plazas spring up on the other side of the highway, the town is determined to lure folks back to the former city center with a massive overhaul, repaving the streets, putting in wider sidewalks and creating a pedestrian plaza just a block away. The area improves with each year and there are signs that small businesses, at any rate, have taken notice and are moving into the empty retail slots at a heartening pace though not all have succeeded.

So location? The studio has that covered.

The rent, though I didn’t ask, is probably reasonable based in the information I acquired when I was checking out the bookstore.

And there is a need and a student base, but I am not naive about either. The former fluctuates with the weather, and the latter is a personality thing. Jade has a loyal following but it wouldn’t necessarily switch allegiance. When you are the product in a sense, you can’t “sell” that along with the physical aspects of your business.

Why not then?

Because any type of “fitness” oriented business is subject to the time constraints of those who use it. Shift work rules around here, so early mornings and evenings are prime time. I have a husband and child who expect me about in the early morning and evenings to accommodate them. As it is, teaching just three nights a week this past nine months has been strain enough. If I were to add more?

Rob’s enthusiasm factors as well and he couldn’t offer much when I told him about the studio.

“You’re not thinking about doing it, are you?”

He is my most ardent supporter, but he can be forgiven his self-interest. My working hinders more than it helps our bottom-line and that was never more evident than when we filed our Canadian taxes this year. And my not being around in the evenings shifts the burden of Dee’s activities to him alone in terms of carting her about and cheerleader duty.

One of the reasons behind Jade’s decision was the fact that she was missing hockey games and that precious four hours from the time kids get home from school until they are tucked in for the night. I know that many two income families live quite happily in the nano-bits snatched in the before and after school allotments. They pack everything that doesn’t conveniently fit into the week into a 48 hour weekend, but as I remember that life – it takes a toll.

And then there are the crucial factors. I don’t know anything about running a business, and freelancing more seriously this last year has taught me that the rules, which govern me from afar, are more complex and onerous than I knew.

Finally, I don’t know that I am ready to “be the teacher”. Sure, I teach yoga, but under the umbrella of the studio, which affords me credibility. I am unsure that I possess the experience and knowledge – or radiate the gravitas –  that one needs to in order to “be the studio owner” – to be THE teacher.

Regardless, it’s hard to let this one slip even though I know that there are good reasons for doing so.

Doing It By Hand


Sewing tools

Image via Wikipedia

Spent much of last evening torturing myself with needle and thread. Literally. I learned to stitch by hand when I was about Dee’s age, and I am no better at it forty years later than I was then. I would have died a dependent spinster had I been born even fifty years earlier because a woman who can’t even mend clothing is just short of useless – especially if she’s not an enthusiastic cook in the bargain.

Dee’s Brownie troop leader likes to save herself postage by ordering all the girls’ badges by bulk, so Monday Dee came home from her meeting with a baggie stuffed with the fruits of her gleefully diligent labor dating back to September.

Dozens of patches testifying to her ability to color, cut and paste, be cooperative and attentive and generally enjoy arts and crafts.

They all now need to be sewn to her sash, a thick material that dares needles to penetrate. The patches themselves range from moderately easy to poke through to industrially reinforced with stiff gluey backs layered with embroidery. For all my hours of work, I have sore fingers, thumbs and a sash with just three badges attached.

I remember learning to embroider. Santa brought me a pink sewing basket with thread, needle and all the fixings the Christmas I was nine. Gamely I approached the cross-stitch and created a few wobbly looking pieces, but it was dogged obstinacy that drove me. I couldn’t stand not being able to do something that looked like it should be easy.

A couple of years later I learned to sew through 4-H. They started us with the obligatory book bag but eventually, I made a dress and a few shirts.  As a result, I learned to measure the body, select and cut patterns and sew a mostly straight stitch.

I didn’t learn to love it however. As with cooking, I viewed it as just one of those gender default pieces of knowledge that the universe was content in its wisdom to insist that I know based on the XX thing. Why my father insisted that I add lawn care to the list, in clear violation of the “need to know” rules, I still don’t know. Regardless, when I left home, I could sew, cook, bake, clean, do laundry and shop with efficiency. I could also take care of a lawn and balance a budget. If I’d been born in India, Dad might have been paid for me instead of having to pay someone to take me off his hands – I was pretty useful.

“Why don’t you use a thimble?” Rob asked as I massaged my tender thumb pads.

But I could just as easily stitch a patch using my teeth and toes as I can perform a proper whip stitch using a thimble. They just get in the way of an already tedious picky task.

I don’t help myself much either. Whip stitches are easy. The lighter weight, smaller in diameter badges, are not as difficult as they are just boring. But I hamstring myself with the need to match the thread to the patch, and I have no orange thread, which means I have to go out of my way today to pick some up.

Do the colors have to match? Really?

Yes, they do. It’s important because Brownies is important to Dee. Some mothers staple the badges to the sashes or use hot-glue guns/fabric glue. The lack of respect for your daughter’s interests shows through and will be noticed as each badge tatters before finally falling off.

I didn’t get past Brownies. I found the whole thing to be merely an extension of my home-training, which was geared towards turning me into “just a another girl” for “some boy” to marry. 4-H was much the same.

Dee likes Brownies. She is attracted to the order and the task-oriented nature of it. She is good at it, and for a child who struggles mightily at times with a world that is too loud and rough around its edges and unfair in ways she will never fully resign herself to, sewing these patches and ensuring that her sash is presentable is probably one of the smallest mommy tasks on my list though I would not call it “the least that I can do”. Staples and glue would be the least.

She was her troop’s top cookie seller this year. She has earned badges for friendship, party planning and community – among others. She has a sleep-over badge and one indicating her concern for and willingness to help out those who go hungry more often than she ever will. These are accomplishments that deserve to be displayed with pride. Sore thumbs and pricked fingertips are nothing by comparison.

The Descent Into Hell


Ary Scheffer: The Temptation of Christ, 1854

Image via Wikipedia

A friend’s Facebook status reminded me that today is Easter’s infamous vigil. It’s the Christian equvilant of the Jewish tradition of “sitting shiva”, which is the mourning period for the dead. Instead of a person, however, Christians today mourn/anticipatory celebrate Jesus’s death and descent into hell.

I am not versed in how this day goes in any other religion except my natal one, Catholicism. My friend is of the Eastern persuasion, and her recollections on Easter differ from my own as they spin Holy Week in a more positive way than the gore, guilt and unworthiness focus of my Catholic youth.

But as I remember the lesson from my Catholic schoolgirl days, Jesus died on Good Friday and descended into hell. There, he rallied the souls of the faithful departed and led them to heaven. It’s a zombie version of The Rapture. The gates of heaven were locked against humanity after some snit God had in the Old Testament. Christianity, as a whole, makes a lot less sense when the Old Testament is examined too closely, and the nonsensical idea that God is anything other than capricious and scary as … um … hell, can be found all over the bible’s earliest books.

I bring this up because of a conversation I overheard Dee having with a friend who stayed over the other night.

Her little friend is Catholic and Dee herself was baptized in the faith back when I still entertained ideas of leaving her belief system up to the tutelage of others. I didn’t catch the opener but as I walked by her bedroom, I heard an audible gasp and then,

“But you have to believe in Jesus!”

I cracked the door a bit and observed Dee’s friend staring at her as though she was possessed and spewing green bile.

“I don’t believe in Jesus,” Dee assured her with a calm and determination that made me proud and a bit awestruck.

Later as we were driving the friend home, I caught a whispered conversation as the little girl tried to convince Dee of the consequences of not believing.

“If you don’t believe in Jesus, there is this place you go to after you die that’s not nice,” she said, quite earnest and clearly concerned for Dee’s afterlife.

“I don’t believe in this,” Dee said, again with an assurance that seemed a bit too large for her tiny 8 year old self. “I believe that when we die, we go to the underworld and our souls are weighed with the feather of truth.” (she did not add the part about the hippodoodel that eats the wicked who wasted their lives and then try to lie about it – and it’s interesting to note the Egyptian that has crept into her Greek mythology).

“How does she square this with her idea that her grandfather and Daddy Will are in heaven?” Rob asked me as I related the story to him later.

“I have no clue,” I said, “but it’s not any worse spin than most Christians employ trying to reconcile the inconsistencies in their beliefs.”

There is a tiny residual bit of Catholic in me that worries about what I have wrought, but mostly, I was really proud of her. She wasn’t the least bit worried about what her friend would think of her beliefs. They were her beliefs and she held fast.

Rob and I are doing a far more awesome job than I realized with this raising a kid thing.

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