Canada Moms Blog

The Cat And I

Lanes and alleyways run through my neighborhood and behind each block of houses. The alleys provide easy garbage collection, recycling and lawn clipping removal. The alleyways also provide space between neighbors, places to quietly exchange lawnmowers for old garden chairs, and habitat for critters like the raccoons, skunks and cats who use the alleys as thoroughfares for their nocturnal scavenging and  nighttime courtships.

My garden ran along the back of just such a lane. There was a big fence separating the blackberry brambles in the lane from my humble little patch of tulips, lavender and rhubarb.  It was a roughly five and a half-foot high fence that should have been the territorial boundary between the big ginger tomcat and I.

At first, we co-existed peacefully. Tomcat passed through my garden on his daily rounds. I pulled weeds, cut flowers, tended the blueberries and let him mind his own business. I was not particularly friendly. Nor was he. He vanished when I appeared. I watched him slink under the fence and allowed him his shortcuts without much fuss.

Then I began to find cat poop in my garden. Not even covered up, like most decent cats do, with a little discreet swish of dirt. No. Tomcat was brazen. He pooped like a graffiti artist, tagging my rhubarb leaves and the edges of the tiny pink geranium mounds.

Thank You Grandpa

I am the spider hunter in the household. The roommate who can deal with eek-a-mouse. The girl who is not afraid of creepy crawly buggy things.  In fact, I am a girl who rather likes creepy crawly buggy things.

A magnificent beetle recently turned up on my doorstep. He was a huge, with caramel coloured stripes and big black fuzzy antlers. Truly, a handsome fellow. I took him up from the sill where he risked being squnched, and in the absence of any immediate family members, showed him to the men working in my bathroom.

“Look! What an unusual beetle! What kind do think it might be? I’ve never seen one like this,” I enthused.

They looked up from their work with blank stares. Wondering, no doubt, what was the matter with this mad housewife and whether they ought to put the beetle out of its misery with some handy power tool.

Being A Parent Is Not A Verb

It is everywhere: there are books, magazines, articles, blogs aplenty, and endless discussion devoted to “parenting”. We are all supposed to be actively engaged in the act of parenting.

The culture of parenting involves ferrying our offspring about, organizing play dates for them, fretting over our capacity to deliver the correct doses of indulgence and discipline, the proper balance of activities and one-on-one time, acquiring the perfect baby sling to foster attachment and the optimal stimu-baby toys for brain development.

Being a parent is not a verb. When a child is born so too are parents made. You become a parent. You are a parent. You will always be a parent. Being a parent is not something you stop doing when you take off your running shoes.

Ode To Leonard

Hot is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Canada.

Canadian musician Leonard Cohen, however, is smoldering like the ash at the tip of a du Maurier. He has been on tour. Wearing a fedora and a suit, backed by an extraordinarily talented band and accompanied by three women with voices as deluxe as the cascade of classic curtains behind the stage, he came to Vancouver.

I knew I loved him already. He could have come out and taken the stage and sung his songs with little more than a bow and a flourish and I would have loved him still. But he came out and he romanced his audience. He preached, he wooed, and he prayed to his audience. He was indeed hot. He loves what he is doing up there with the other musicians and he loves the women whose voices lend his such depths.

There Was A Town

I read Beck’s post There Is A Town In North Ontario, and sighed. Sighed with contentment for she said it well. But also exhaled with a certain amount of longing. Her evocative post (and the subsequent comments) was a reminder of what we are losing when we aren't even looking. Or remembering to look.

My summers and winter holidays and every chance I had to be on my grandparent’s farm shaped the landscape of my childhood. There was a river at one end of the property and a big wooded area at the back. In between there were horses, goats, sheep, a barn and hayloft, an old farmhouse and grandparents who believed without talking much about it that it was healthy to go out and do your chores and then vanish into whatever real or imaginary adventures were there to find.

To live in a small town with plenty of wide open space is a great gift and a lifelong legacy for your children. I long for a smaller life. Smaller in the sense of community, and a longing for my child's boundaries to be safer, edged with nature instead of traffic. To instill a sense of wonder and respect for the natural world, to witness the birth of a foal, or tend a garden of vegetables, or help bring in a winter’s worth of hay is to understand your place in the universe just a little bit better.

We chose the city, but almost, so close my heart started settling in and unpacking boxes, chose an island.

Full Disclosure

In the interest of dull disclosure, I should inform you ……

… there will be no full disclosure.

I will share with you my ugly moments and my intakes of breath at the beauty and terror and swiftness of time’s passage through the house of motherhood.

I will share with you my battles with the messes of daily life. I will ask questions and vent about my concerns. I will, without a doubt, air copious opinions and blog about the things which make me go what? I will encourage and court and linger over your comments and even your criticisms.

I cannot, however, tell you the intimate stuff. I can’t tell you about my family’s daily life because they are old enough to read about it, and private enough to care. I feel deeply protective about that, and sometimes like I am walking a fine line.

But Not The GivingTree

I love children’s literature in all its various shapes and sizes. I read high and low and magical and humorous. Kid's books are near and dear to me as a reader, a bibliophile, and as a parent who reads passionately to my child. From early, almost wordless board books, to Winnie The Pooh and Winnie The Witch, on to Roald Dahl and straight through to Harry Potter, there are very few exceptions. The Giving Tree is one.

The book jacket from the HarperCollins imprint calls The Giving Tree a “tender story, touched by sadness, aglow with consolation.” This book offers me not one scrap of consolation. I have yet to read through its pages without a palpable sense of outrage. I have never read The Giving Tree to my child and I never will.

I know there are children and adults alike who love this book. Please, if The Giving Tree  holds a precious place on your bookshelf, stop reading now.  Or, if you feel up to it, read on and then tell me where oh where is the goodness in this tale of giving? Where, HarperCollins Book Jacket People, is the tenderness of which you speak?

What Is A Canadian Mom Anyway?

What does it mean to raise a Canadian child versus any other child? Of course we are all to a greater or lesser extent products of where we are raised - we all carry around a landscape, a taste for certain foods and countless nameless associations with the place we call home. 

But I have been wondering: what it is to be a Canadian Mom? I mean, here I am, supposedly writing about being one but what exactly is that? Is it putting in time at the hockey rink, serving real maple syrup and passing on a fondness for hurtling down snowy hills at great speeds?

Certainly my childhood held tastes that are uniquely Canadian: Mackintosh toffee in the tartan box, Smarties, Humpty Dumpty salt & vinegar chips. I spent far too many winters on freezing cold mountains with skis clamped to my numb feet longing only for the poutine at the end of the run.

The thing is, we Canadians don’t discuss our Canadian-ness readily. It isn’t  - as my parents called anything political, sexual, or intimate – “diner table conversation”.

Instant Sisters

My mother met her dearest lifelong friend in the sandbox at the park with toddlers underfoot. They bonded in eachothers kitchens over egg salad sandwiches and cigarettes. They were eachothers staunchest ally and closest confidant. The children played and grew and fought, caught chicken pox and got in trouble and families divorced and re-made themselves but the friendship my mother and her friend shared sustained them throughout their lives. 

So when I in turn became a mother, I thought I would find a community, friendships, and instant sisters in arms. Instead I wandered the slopes of that first clearcut year of sleeplessness and delirious joy unaccompanied by anyone other than my husband.

Of course, there is no one whose company I wanted more than the person with whom I miraculously made this humbling, astonishingly perfect and perfectly exhausting baby. But there are things we don’t want to say about our crotches in front of our husbands.