Canada Moms Blog

Thunderstorm Lullaby

My great-grandmother, a tiny bird of a woman who was nevertheless made of surviving-the-war strength, was afraid of thunder. Because she did not want her children to shake with fear as she did during thunderstorms, even from the deep sleep of night she took their hands and led them to the windows to watch the lightning slash the sky.

 “Watch,” she would tell them. “Isn’t is glorious?” Swallowing the fear in her throat, she smiled for her children so they would grow up braver than she.

 Was it her legacy that led me outside during storms? Perhaps. Even as a small child I never felt fear when the dark clouds closed over the sky. I reveled in the electrical air, watched for the next lightning flash to crack into life, curled on the old musty porch swing and soaked in the rush & cool & currents & rumble. I loved the lull when it was done.  Loved inhaling the wet, cool air, the gritty smell of rain-washed cement after heat.

Regarding The Birds And The Bees

Our kids are receiving sex education as early as kindergarten. In British Columbia, that meant a notice folded into the papers which came home with the year’s curriculum regarding in-class discussion of appropriate and inappropriate touches and how to say "no" if the children felt frightened or uncomfortable. By grade 7 they are being taught how to put a condom on a banana.

While I struggle with the reasons behind the need for such discussions, especially at younger and younger ages, I am entirely comfortable with giving children, even very small ones, a vocabulary for making safe choices.

What I am having difficulty with is conversations regarding the birds and the bees. The real ones. The small creatures who do the critical dance of life with our fruits, vegetables, trees and flowers are dying. I am struggling with how to speak honestly about this.

Dinner Mutiny

Every summer my father went fly-fishing in the rugged Canadian wilderness. I dreaded the years he returned with fish. A good year meant not only smoked salmon, which was a special item too good to be wasted on the children and thankfully reserved for cocktail parties, but also fresh fish brought triumphantly home.

Salmon are not small. One or two big fish could make for a freezer full of salmon steak dinners.  I distinctly remember the sight of one freshly vanquished specimen, on display in the kitchen sink: so large it was draped, head and tail up, a silvery u-shaped accusation all scales and smell and dead round eyes lounging in the sink.

I knew, the way a child knows such things, that we were supposed to admire the fish. There was a whiff of conquering hero in the air when the fish steaks were brought in from the barbeque. We were to admire not only the fish, but my father for catching it. What’s more, we were supposed to eat it with a smile.

Ours was a typical Canadian home: of largely WASP extraction, children were expected, when allowed to eat with the grown ups, to earn their place at the dinner table with good manners, elbows tucked in and food gratefully eaten.  The nights when the dreaded salmon was served were a misery for me.

Now a grown woman serving dinners of my own, I find myself from time to time in that dinnertime ghost town of my childhood, plates drawn, the words “sit up straight and eat it” shooting unbidden from my lips.

An Unabashed Flag

Being Canadian, I am not prone to overt displays of patriotism.

The FLQ Crisis cast a long shadow over the Quebec in which I grew up. Speaking openly about being a proud Canadian… well that was just asking someone to spit in your poutine.  We were a divided province for many years, the Oui and the Non votes broke neighbourly fences, many of which were replaced with brick walls and empty windows.

I grew up cautious about speaking politically, preferring to stay friends and classmates rather than have to choose a side of the street, schoolyard, province or country.

Nevertheless, I am an ardent Canadian, proud of our diverse and complicated heritage, our imperfect democracy, our home and native land. I just don’t talk about it much.

So the quick bursts of red and white pride which I have felt bloom in my chest upon seeing Canadian flags displayed in Olympic enthusiasm all over Vancouver have been something of a surprise. 

The first of these was on the morning run to school - we passed a hedge, a typical Vancouver high laurel hedge, but untypically, it was draped in Canadian flags, white and red lights in the shape of the Olympic rings, and a banner. I did a double take, and then just about teared up. We don’t do that sort of thing here.

Rhymes With Life

There is a movie called Frantic in which Harrison Ford starred as a husband desperately searching the alleys and apartments of Paris for his missing wife. He’s intent, rumpled, equal parts angry and confused. He doesn’t speak French but he tries urgently to get the police to believe him, believe that his wife wouldn’t just disappear. They shrug, roll their eyes, imply that wives do this sort of thing all the time. Especially in Paris. It is a good movie, or seemed so to me at the time as I watched with my then-boyfriend while Harrison raced through the streets and seedy bits of Paris in the company of a punk ingénue.

As I began to write the paragraph above I paused, fingers poised above the keyboard, tipped back my head and yelled up the stairs:

“What was that movie with Harrison Ford in Paris?”

Needing no further explanations for our now mutual vocabulary, my husband seamlessly answered: “Frantic”.

When we saw the movie, I was much closer to the ingénue than I was to wife. Or at least styled myself so. What struck me most about the movie, despite being in the early days of a relationship with my funky rose tinted glasses firmly in place, was the way Harrison Ford spoke, the words “my wife.” Whether he was imploring, insisting or snarling, the emphasis was on the word wife.  He filled the word with such value and integrity, such unshakable faith, that for the first time I heard “wife” not as the butt end of a joke, not as an apron clad cliché, but as a word that could mean an entire life to another person. 

Lessons From l’École Polytechnique: What Do We Tell The Boys

Where were you when you on Dec 6, 1989, when you heard about the Montreal Massacre?

I was on campus, at University of Toronto. It was like a convulsion. Everyone was reeling. I did not yet have children, but the news rocked my deeply held sympathies and strongly felt convictions.  I was devastated.

As a Canadian:

This doesn’t happen here.

As a young woman:

I am not safe.

As a daughter:

Their mothers. Their families.

As a student:

Academics offer no shield from that which is irrational.

It was violent.

It was hateful.

None of it made sense. 

The only reaction I could do anything about was the outpouring of grief: I would attend a vigil for the lives of 14 young women. I could hold a candle up and stand in the December night in solidarity with other Canadians, other daughters, other students, I could show the families of those women that we noticed, that we cared, that our country as a whole would not allow their daughters to go unmourned or the tragedy of the event unnoticed.

Then I learned the vigil would be for women only.

Which is when the deaths of 14 young women at l'Ecole Polytechnique shattered one more of the beliefs I held dear: all feminists believe in equality.

The Ergonomics Of Homework

Like a landmine, the backpack is deposited in the front hall after school.

“How much homework do you have?” I ask, after the welcome home. Careful to keep the stress out of the question, I smile and hope fervently for a fleeting hug, some carefree chatter, a lighthearted entrance.

Most days, her shoulders can barely shrug, pulled as they are by the weight of the load as the backpack slips off and lands with a resounding thunk. The reverberations often resonate right through to bedtime. 

A preliminary online search using the words the weight of school backpacks reveals websites from Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the UK all showing studies, articles and reports about oversized, overweight backpacks. Our kids are struggling under too heavy a load.

The weight of the backpacks is not only a physical load - my kid walks like a top-heavy hermit crab when carrying her padded-strapped, two shoulder wearing, sensibly designed school backpack. Including textbooks, binders and water bottle it weights almost half her own mass and if the wind blows too hard, I am certain she’ll tip over  – the contents of the backpacks are an immeasurable burden on home life.

The Tongs of Optimism

 
Each generation has its social mottos:

Make Do And Mend

Keep Calm And Carry On

Spend Spend Spend

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

This generation of children is well-versed in the virtues of reduce, reuse and recycle. They have to be. They will carry the burden of our industrial successes and commercial excesses. 

I worry it is an unmanageable burden. I believe in the wisdom of the 3 R’s even as I fear their implementation is inadequate to the task at hand and greater than our individual efforts can affect.

Nevertheless I diligently put out my blue box of recyclables, storing, saving, rinsing and recycling my way out of the funk can descend when thoughts of the vanishing salmon and dying bears intrude on my efforts.

It is not only the salmon that spur me on; it is the belief that we have an obligation to set a tone of optimism and solution-based thinking for our children. How else will they get on with the work that needs so desperately to be done?

In that spirit – ok, maybe not quite that spirit, maybe in the spirit of desperate hopefulness, combined with a momentary lapse in judgment – I became the Recycling Mom at my daughter’s elementary school. A public school, which was constantly inserting the phrase social responsibility into their every message, they had no recycling program for the juice boxes that came to the school in over 400 lunch kits every day. On one of those days I stood in the playground surrounded by discarded tetra packs and I was overwhelmed: all that litter was going straight into the garbage, into the landfill, and eventually back into the drinking water, the soil, the air…

How Did I Get Here

Picture a beach. Long shadows as the afternoon relaxes toward evening. Children, happy, damp, beginning to tire.

Picture mothers savouring this slow time, this sandy moment before the dinnertime, bathtime, the bedtime rodeo.

Picture dogs frolicking, for this is the beach where the children and dogs can run free and no one minds the noise. Some of the women have long outgrown the sand toys and beach blanket stage, but they are here, amidst the shrieks, in their beach shoes and sensible pants throwing balls again and again for their happy, soggy dogs.

Picture another woman there, in her flip-flops with all the rest. She has her dog and her hat for being sensible, a cell phone peeking out of her pocket in case there is a chocolate-chip cookie baking disaster she needs to rush home and extinguish.

It occurs to me, this woman who I have become, that this should be my tribe. I should be feeling a sense of belonging. Instead I am feeling something like panic.

The Geography Of Home

We live in a spectacular place. Whenever I express (regularly) my awe and breathless wonder (“we live in a such beautiful place”) to my family, my enthusiasm is met with indifference and more often by impatient let’s just get going-ness.

In the morning you can go for a walk in old-growth forest, in the afternoon you can hit the beach, or go fit in a few ski runs on the local mountains during the winter. We pay a price in rain, but mostly, I look around and catch my breath. There are mountains, vistas, eagles, and, should you tire of those, there are also fancy glass towers and cafes that serve coffee as an art form.

My own childhood city was beautiful in its own ways -  an older, elegant city, with stone and brick houses settled onto and around a gentle mountain by a wide river – but I failed to appreciate its charms even as I grew up in its embrace.