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the morning of his second birthday, last week, i trimmed Oscar’s hair.

having spent my twenties fussily tending to my own bangs (when i had bangs), various boyfriends’ hair, and the occasional drunken friend’s plea to “do something with this mop” – the last of which admittedly often turned out rather awkward and regrettable once the gin wore off – i felt reasonably confident taking nail scissors to the back of a toddler’s curly mullet. i was sober, he was sober, and he hadn’t asked for “the Rachel,” or anything fancy…what could go wrong?

in fact, little did, amazingly. Oscar, who was strapped into the long-outgrown Fisher Price recliner in which we still tether him whilst we shower, was engrossed in Richard Scarry’s “What People Do All Day” and mostly uninterested in the brief proceedings. he did protest when i had to bend his head down towards his chest at an unnatural angle thanks to the fact that i’d chosen to cut his hair in a freaking recliner, but other than that Darwin-award-worthy aside, all went smoothly. golden ringlets went cascading into the wastebasket, and mummy got a little sniffy at the sight, but overall it took about one hundred and ten seconds and Oscar emerged slightly trimmed but still with his Richard Simmons-esque baby ‘fro intact, which was what i was aiming for and didn’t trust a barber to do.

i told myself i cut it because it was getting so long that the curls were starting to straighten out. this is true. the back of O’s hair has always grown faster than the front and the top, and the back has a much coarser texture from being slept on and tangled and broken on a regular basis. it had gotten to the point where not only did his mullet stray halfway down his back in the bathtub, but where even when dry it sometimes refused to curl and just frizzed instead, leaving Oscar with a rather misshapen halo of wild fluff. i knew that the trim would remove some weight and help the curls come back, and tidy up the overall madness of his ‘do.

but motivations in mothering never get to be that pure and innocent. a few strangers had told us what a pretty girl we had. my mother had mentioned a few times that really he was due for a trim, in that tone that makes me feel about twelve and very, very tempted to let Oscar’s hair grow until the cows come home and he rivals Celine Dion’s son in hirsute bounty.

except that reaction didn’t feel very mature, somehow.

the truth is, i dislike most ways traditional masculinity is expressed in our society (no real props for a lot of traditional, stereotypical feminity here either) and particularly the way these gender conventions and expectations are imposed on children. i dislike little military haircuts on boys who are still, essentially babies. i mourn the fact that Oscar is quickly growing out of what i perceive as cute little boy clothes and into sizes that seem to leave me with the option of dressing him as a) a drunken frat boy, b) a NASCAR enthusiast, c) a trucker groupie, or d) a member of the military. the prostitot offerings that inundate the little girls’ sections of stores, and the overabundance of pink princess items over on that side of the gender divide mean that neutral, primary-colour items are harder and harder to find these days. but i seek them out. at an end of season sale this February, i bought O a beautiful red wool duffel coat with toggles, which he wore until the snow disappeared i gave up on the snow disappearing and just moved him to his yellow raincoat in disgust. with the red coat and the curls, everyone seems to assume he’s a girl. i, on the other hand, think he looks quaint, charming – a version of boyhood from Winnie the Pooh rather than the WWE. i’d dress him in sailor suits if i could find ’em.

but this line is a fine one to walk. despite a lifelong longing for a girl, i’ve found having this boy to be all the delight i ever hoped for from parenthood, and more. in the ways O is ‘all boy,’ he is joy unexpected, discovery. i see his gender as a key part of who he is, and embrace it. he is a boy, a wonderful boy. but just as i would with a daughter, i balk at the idea of his sex being the primary factor in how i perceive him, and do not want it to be the sum total of how he perceives himself. he loves trains, it’s true, and his plastic airport with its things that go “wheeee!”. he also loves to paint, and listen to stories, and at the sitters’ with her daughters he runs around in pink sunglasses and thinks they’re beautiful. and i want this freedom in his own skin to last as long as it can.

and yet i want the freedom to be genuinely his, and that’s where i’m struggling. is such a thing really possible, given the power differentials between parent and child, given the way that gender and class biases emerge at every locus of consumer choice and every decision we make about what activities our child participates in? i do not want to use my child as a freak flag to flaunt my own unconventionality, or even my snobbish rejection of North American stereotypes of masculinity. i do not want to wear his hair in pigtails just to thumb my nose at social constraints i consider stupid. i do not want to treat him like a pet poodle. yet every single choice i make regarding what clothes are purchased for him and how his hair is cut and what toys and models and interests he has access to: all these things shape the gender identity he’s developing, and the gender identity people read on to him. like all social beings, he will forever be subject to people’s preconceived notions of what his gender status should mean, and how it should be performed. as his mother, i too will be judged on how i am shaping him to conform or confound with his gender performance, until such point as he is old enough to make such decisions for himself. (and likely long after, if the unflagging currency of pop-Freudian analysis of gay men and their mothers is any indication.)

i do not fear my son being a “sissy” – the feminized male is not a role i devalue, nor one particularly threatening in our family. Oscar will be who he will be, and a Marine would be harder for me to find peace with than a hairdresser, to be honest, but the choice is his.  i do fear, though, in this vulnerable period of childhood, him being taken up somehow as overly feminized, having his feelings hurt or confused by some stranger’s ignorant comments, because of choices i make for him while he is still too young to know different.

so i trimmed his hair, taking the easy way out, keeping it long enough to curl, short enough that it doesn’t look like barettes might be in order.

and i feel dirty, and yet in this muddle of raising children in a society that claims gender equality and enacts “equal but different” every time you glance at a toy aisle or a baby layette, i am not sure there is any such thing as clean, anywhere.

i figure, if you tally up the days i’ve spent in hospital due to complications of pregnancy and the ultrasounds and procedures i’ve had done due to complications of pregnancy and the NICU time and attention and machinery my offspring have hogged due to their early arrivals – which in turn were due to complications of pregnancy – you’d come to two logical conclusions: one, pregnancy is not my calling and i need a new hobby, and two, in a country that provides universal health care, i’m a frigging drain on the system and a threat to freedom everywhere.

or at least, the latter is the conclusion i begin to come to every time i wade into the soup that appears to be the American electoral conversation regarding health care.  and then i get down on my faithless knees and thank the good lord – in tongues and Esperanto and whatever bad French i can summon up from the nation’s shaky thirty-plus-year experiment in bilingualism – that i live where i do, and that some semblance of universal health care survives in Canada.

not that there aren’t problems with our system.  there are.  waits for family doctors and “elective” surgeries, even long waits for life-saving diagnostic measures like mammograms and MRIs, particularly in some centres.  my local emergency room parking lot fills up some nights and people wait, listless and in pain, for hours on end.  sometimes.  other nights i’ve been seen in ten minutes.  but when you’re the one waiting, it still sucks.

however, no one is turned away, deflected to another hospital further away in a crisis situation because they cannot pay.   everybody who walks in is seen.  there are no co-pays to tally, no lists of what is and isn’t covered, no dehumanizing rejections or anxious re-applications.  you present your provincial health card – even if you’re visiting from another province – and you take your place in the line, and once you’re seen you walk out…so long as your age or medical condition don’t preclude walking.  there is no exchange of cash.  if you came by ambulance or left with a prescription, there will be a bill down the road, from the province or your pharmacy, but that’s about it.  if you need physio, you get referred, and while the wait for hospital physio can be long, it’s free.  Oscar’s asthma clinic appointments?  free.  my hearing test last year when Dave was sure i was going deaf and not just, erm, not listening?  free.  the referral last year about a possible cyst in one breast?  free, and fast.  i was seen by the specialist in less than a week.  all was well.  and none of these were even complications of pregnancy.

when it’s come to my attempts to procreate, the Canadian taxpayers have been generous.  i guesstimate – though the billing numbers can admittedly be specious depending on how governments or corporations choose to subsidize or inflate the costs of running and staffing hospitals – that most adult, taxpaying citizens of my fair nation have likely spent at least 1.2 cents each on me and my universal health care over the last three years of this baby-attempting circus.  if this pregnancy leads to further hospital bedrest and, far more costly, NICU time for wee Hughloise, those costs could rise to upwards of 1.5 cents each.  Canadians, i thank you personally.  seriously.  i am your tax dollars at work, me and Oscar and the stitched-in one and the dreams that ended in an urn upstairs and a D&C in November.   i don’t know how to tell you it was worth it, in financial terms…but i can tell you even after all the heartache, i would do it all again.  does that count for something?  is it worth a penny and a bit’s lifetime investment?  i dunno.  to me the two don’t exactly make for a natural equation, because i am not accustomed to valuing human life and grief and joy in pure dollars.  and that’s why i’m grateful for universal health care, above all else.  because it doesn’t force me to contort myself until i begin to see that equation as natural.

if universal health care didn’t exist, Dave and i would still be nearly $100,000 in debt, with no real hope of digging our way out no matter how many fancy Masters’ degrees we conjure up on our home printer.  Finn was born fourteen weeks early, only three months after we moved back home from Korea.  we were substitute teaching, working our butts off to get a mortgage, and taking short-term contracts where we could.  we had jobs, but no insurance.  in Canada, this meant we ended up on the hook for $750 of a thirteen thousand dollar airlift, which outraged naive moi…and i just missed out on qualifying for the fifteen weeks of maternity leave pay i would otherwise have gotten from the government in spite of the baby’s death, because i hadn’t worked quite enough hours.  so we spent that summer broke and grieving and i had to hustle for a new job before i was really up for it and it was hard.  but…but.  i did not spend that summer contemplating a bottomless, hopeless, helpless pit of debt in hospital bills, the weight of them crushing.  i did not have to ask myself if that eleven hours was worth the cost of the desperate machines, the specialists, the medication, the wires, the tubes.  i only had to ask myself if i had the courage to try again.

and so i sit, agog, watching the vitriol spew from pundits and bloggers and BabyCenter board posters every time the subject comes up, and i shake my head, because i just don’t get it.  freedom?  um….has the word ‘free’ in it, folks!  seriously, if you want to talk freedom and health care in the same sentence, talk about freedom to.  freedom to see a doctor when you’re sick without worrying whether you can afford it.  freedom to focus on healing after injury or loss, freedom to try again after the death of a child without worrying that it will financially cripple you.   freedom to see specialists for your child without your husband having to take a pay cut to qualify for insurance because hers was cut off and she has a pre-existing condition.

i guess i’m just slow coming to terms with how scary this whole concept of socialized medicine can be for a lot of people.  i grew up in a country where most citizens take pride in our universal health care system, much as we love to bitch about it out of the other side of our mouths – heck, we still acclaimed our long-dead Medicare founder Tommy Douglas as the Greatest Canadian ever a couple of years ago in a national contest, and not because he’s Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather.  but i suppose, in the end, where a people’s collective sense of belonging and pride is located is a subtle, touchy thing…and it is in this one place that i see huge and real differences between the self-identified average American and the self-identified average Canadian.

so just let me say that i’m grateful to the True North, strong and free, while i sit here nursing the fishing line they hitched into my cervix last week, on twelve hours notice, gratis.  i am eating right, and working hard, and doing my best with your 1.2 cents, folks.  and if you ever need my 2 cents, well…help yourself.

in the old folk tale Chicken Little, an acorn falls on the head of a naive and gullible chicken, who jumps to the conclusion that the sky is falling. in a tizzy, she runs about the town shouting about imminent disaster, and whips the populace into mass hysteria…which an unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate the chicken and her fellow citizens to his own benefit. in other words, he eats them.
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it has come to my attention that i am a colossal, erm, fake.

i started the month – and the fresh new year – full of good, fine intentions. everything was coming up green. we were going to become more healthy hereabouts at the crib, and more earth-friendly, too. we were going to make a difference in our own lives and the world’s by eating less meat and more local foods, buying nothing that we didn’t actually, genuinely need (say, um, a helmet for Oscar’s premier venture on bob skates), using up what lurks in our freezer, and walking and generally exercising more. plus i was going to start a clothing exchange for kids’ stuff, or at least in my own mind, i was…i don’t think that plan ever made it to the public stage. but i was going to harness the power of teh internets, see, and bring people together and, you know, divide loaves and fishes and generally create a rainbow connection that would result in global harmony, a halt to climate change, and thinner thighs.

we are now approaching the end of month one of this fine venture. the community-building and clothing-exchanging end of the plan never even got verbalized properly. the exercycle saw a few minutes’ work but is now gathering dust once more. we flew to England and back, burning loads of jet fuel for half-empty planes both ways, and ate nothing but poor dead cows and lambs encased in pastry the entire time we were there. our deep freeze did get divested of some of its long-term inhabitants (yesterday’s near-province-wide power outage almost got them all out, and for good) and we have managed to eat the majority of the vegetables we bought this month, but i’ve also personally consumed about three boxes of leftover Christmas chocolates. Dave’s started leaving all the lights on again. yeh yeh. it ain’t easy being green.

and sometimes, with these kicks of better living i go on sporadically, i start to feel like the boy who cried wolf…shouting out “getting healthy! going greener!” and then, um, sitting down on my squishy butt and opening another bag of individually plastic-wrapped candies made out of pesticides and corn syrup. and worse, i begin to suspect that my green guilt and half-hearted efforts are the cornerstone of something even darker: that every time i fail to put my money where my mouth is i not only condone the illogic of rampant consumerism and blind, short-term societal self-satisfaction, but feed it and benefit from it like the fox in Chicken Little. every time i give in, i add to the chorus of cynical disbelief. every time i give up, i weigh in on the side of how hard it is to really be green, to live an earth-friendly life in this day and age. so i not only get to then enjoy the fruits of my unsustainable lifestyle whilst feeling virtuous for having made such a noble effort, but i lend my virtual voice to the general idea that this is all just to big and too hard for any of us to make a difference about, and that trying is just running around like Henny Penny, squawking foolishly.

but i do not believe that. and i do not want to give up. and so, with each new month, i will start again…Sisyphus pushing uphill, perhaps…but every so often, i may gain ground. and dear readers, you will keep me honest, whether you care about my personal Chicken Little saga or not. just because you’re there. and because i would hate for you to think i was a manipulative fake, even more than i hate to, erm, admit it to myself occasionally.
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one of the reasons i think i’m attracted to flights of fancy about my cyclically impending personal green revolutions is that i spent a great deal of my childhood in a family deeply governed by the Protestant work ethic and the scarcity mentality of the Great Depression. in my home, saving mattered. money was hard to save because it was hard to come by, but food and resources were carefully planned and accounted for, time was well used, and the act of making something “go a little further” was inculcated in me as an inherent pleasure more delightful than sunshine. we were frugal in a way that would have made every stereotypical Scottish ancestor in our clan lineage just bust with pride. saving was not just economic, it was moral. and waste was a source of shame that luckily, given our financial limitations, my mother and i simply did not have to stagger under in the way that others more burdened by excess did.

it does not take a psychologist to see how, in my banal middle-class adulthood, a part of me thrills to the idea of tightening my bootstraps and taking on the fine (ie. moral) challenge of reducing waste on all fronts, both commercial and environmental. i’m deeply attracted to the romance of scarcity, you see. when i was a kid i used to put myself to sleep imagining that i was trapped on a boat for a year and had to creatively, cheaply, and nutritiously stock the pantry with just the right number of tin cans. i like to imagine if any lard-ass North American can survive the projected apocalypses of oil crashing and seas rising…well, it’s gotta be me, right? i could make a case of beans last a year and Like It, at least in my own addled mind.

but a few things happened over the past week or so to point out to me what a crock of shit that little childhood hangover is. first, we spent three days last week in York, England. beautiful, historical, totally flooded York. i’ve never been witness to a flood before, not in person. and it struck me, standing on a stone bridge abutted by an 800-ish year old tower, well aware from my earlier trip through the Yorkminster crypts that the street level of the town has actually risen by at least six feet over the last millenium or two, that the fact that the water was completely covering the park benches on the riverbank really couldn’t be a good sign. and i noted that i don’t know how to swim. especially in sewage.

my survivalist daydreams were further disrupted yesterday when 90% of my province lost power for a couple of hours in the wake of an ice storm. i was at work. it was 12:0-something-or-other and i was really getting hungry and preparing to head to the campus cafeteria for pizza when the lights went out. by the time i dug my way out from the sudden blackout in the windowless, airless hole that is my office, it became clear that the cafeterias had, erm, shut. so i thought gamely, hell, i’ll drive to the sandwich shop! they have cold food! (note, i did not consider walking. but it was icy, so i excuse myself). Dave & i met up, got in the car, and drove to where the campus exits onto one of Charlottetown’s main arteries, which is still only a two-lane stree…normally pretty scantily populated by traffic at lunchtime. but yesterday, the whole city was on the move. lines of traffic snaked both ways as far as the eye could see, half the population piled into cars, aimlessly and lunchlessly steering towards where they hoped food might be. but nearly everything had closed and locked its doors, cold food or not…because all the cash registers are electronic.

it was like an eerie vision of a future i hope never comes. never before have i had hammered home to me how clearly dependent we all are on the constructions and fictions that make up this society…all of us like soft helpless sheep, driving in our little tin cans, using gas, money in our pockets…totally unable to feed ourselves as we steer towards the empty promise of open doors and possible hamburgers, unattainable.

i went home and ate rice chips and cheese, and watered my plants, and realized how odd it really is to be growing things in my home that i cannot eat.  because those plastic cards in my wallet?  untasty.

there’s been a birthing, folks. a really amazing birthing of community spirit and volunteerism, in celebration of a year of Just Posts in the blogosphere.

i couldn’t quite figure out what to bring to the baby shower. i thunk and thunk ’til my thinker was sore, but everything i could make or do seemed a size too small for this here baby Huey, this call to local action in our offline lives. i got daunted. and yet, i wanted to contribute (though somehow avoid leaving my house)…so i decided, heck, we all have our gifts. one of mine, thanks to Dave and his crew of merry webcasters, is drinking hospitality, of a virtual sort. so i decided to throw this shower a real, live party!

welcome to the baby shower, the first cribcast in a long, long time, and the first ever to involve the blogging community on a grand scale. see? here’s a paper plate bedecked with ribbons for your head…now enjoy.

if you don’t know what on earth i’m babbling about with all this baby shower nonsense, click over to webcastacademy.net/studio here to find out, live at 9 pm EST this evening. and if you’re already a fan of Mad & Jen, their marriage of true minds in the social justice sphere, and their Maid of Honour (and shower instigator) Andrea…then get on over and give them some love. pull up a chair and raise a glass, and join us in the chatroom as we celebrate our online community making a difference in our many real worlds.

but watch the punch…i think it’s spiked. :)

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the party was a success, and it was amazing to actually talk to Mad, Andrea, & Jen, live and (almost) in the flesh.

it was like old time radio…a community experience.

we had a rollicking time, with the host only steamrolling over her guests a few times, and the conviviality in the chat room was most entertaining. Jen’s phone lost power before we managed to get her to sing, but – right at the beginning – i prove every claim i’ve ever made that i am, truly, tone-deaf.

thanks to all who showed.  and if you couldn’t make it, or didn’t know…just click above to listen in.

i think we’ll do it again – new people, new conversation – in a couple of weeks.

there is no news from here, except that the doctor’s office called and want me to come in for more bloodwork Monday morning…and instructed me to go to the Emergency Room if i have any significant pain.

fair enough.

no one ever died of just the sheer misery of waiting, did they? funny.  i could swear this limbo is harder than just coping, but all my swearing – and oh, it has been copious…so pious am i in these times of frustration that the name of the lord is never far from my blaspheming lips – seems to make little dent in the state of things, as they are.

bloodwork, though. i hung up the phone with the doctor’s office and came and opened the email copied below.  the backstory: one of my most beloved friends, whom i lived with in college and who is this amazing, endearing, gawky redhead whom people can’t help but like, so charming and self-effacing is she, became an ER doctor.  two years ago, she took a leave of absence from her practice and spent six months in Darfur with Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders), living in a tent in a refugee camp and eating a lot of goat meat.  she came out with stories that curled my hair, and made me realize that for all i’ve travelled and lived hard and known sorrow with my joy, dude, i’ve not seen shit.

Susie gave up her practice in Ottawa this fall. she’s back in Africa with MSF, a one-woman doctor team in another camp for displaced persons, doing ALL the bloodwork for her patients.  in addition to treating them.  24/7, so far as i can tell.  and while i understand that comparisons is a silly game to play at…sometimes, when one is feeling all too beaten down by luck and wondering when one is going to catch a break, an email like this offers amazing perspective and a picture of a world that re-paints one’s own picture in different colours, a little less dramatic than one thought.  and the distraction of trying to imagine that life, that alternate universe?  fascinating.

i give you my (unwitting) guest blogger, live from Dogdore, Chad…my friend Susie.

I’m in the small town of Dogdore, which is in the very bottom, right hand
corner of a map of Chad (or Tchad, as it is written in French…not sure
where the T comes from, but I kinda like it and might start adding it to
more words: tchicken, tchilly, tchorkle, etc.).  Dogdore was just a little
sleepy town of 2000 or so residents, in the middle of nowhere, and 30km from
the border with Darfur.  Then about a year and a half ago ago, the fighting
between the rebels and government troops in nearby towns forced large groups
of people to move.  Roughly 30,000 of them settled in and around Dogdore.
In general, they arrived with the clothes on their backs, and maybe a
cooking pot or, if they were very lucky, a goat or donkey.  So I am working
with the same type of population here that I was in Darfur – IDP’s, or
Internally Displaced People, who are essentially refugees within their own
country.

In the meantime, I am keeping busy… and despite being a little tired, it
has been a good mission so far – I am learning a lot and meeting all sorts
of very interesting people.  It seems to me that the situation here in Chad
is not as horribly desperate as it is in Darfur, but it is still pretty
terrible for all the people who have been forced from their homes and
attacked again and again; living in little shelters and lining up for hours
for water and walking for days to access health care.  Once again makes me
realize how damn lucky I have been in my life. 

love, Susie 

…i got to see you speak, live, in person, yesterday.

you, who married Canada’s most flamboyant Prime Minister when you were only a 22 year old kid. you, who left him seven or eight years later and ran off – more or less, because we all know life is never quite as it appears in the papers – with the Rolling Stones. you, who had a son die, almost ten years back but the weekend still fresh in my mind, one of those jarring moments where tragedy comes to nest visibly in the golden houses of the land and icons are made vulnerable and exposed in the awful, unstoppable glare. you who have been in and out of the public eye intermittently since, partly for charity work that builds wells in Africa and partly for hospitalization in mental institutions.

you’ve lived quite a life, Maggie.

and you spoke about all of it yesterday, all of it wrapped up in a flowing, gracious narrative punctuated with some real humour and some rueful moments that i’m not sure i believe (c’mon, you really regret the Stones? dude.) and some heartbreaking moments of aloneness and grief – a few of which hit closer to my own raw spots than i’m comfortable experiencing in public and thus my eyes burned and i blinked furiously…i think my table-mates must have thought i found you awfully moving – and you spoke the words aloud that seldom get articulated at these fancy society-plate luncheons (except when they’re run by the Canadian Mental Health Association, of course): bipolar. mental illness.

Margaret, you’re cool. in kind of a froufy, earnest, endearing, slightly entropic way, yet with the poise that comes with thirty+ years of playing the political game and the press and the spotlight, the poise that comes of a lifetime of living in circles where you know the right fork to use. your father, a Scots immigrant, was a federal cabinet minister in your childhood. you were 18 and vacationing in Tahiti when you met the then-Minister of Justice, who was twenty-nine years your senior and – in my humble and entirely irrelevant opinion – dashing as old hell. your life has been one of privilege. easy? no. you have my respect, both for all you’ve weathered and survived, and most especially for standing up and owning your mental health struggles, openly and without shame, without hesitation. this tour you’re doing, and the attendant media blitz – all aimed at deconstructing the stigma and silencing and marginalization of mental illness – is really powerful work, and i actually think you’ll make a difference. your name still carries weight in this nation…and in many ways the self-image of the nation is still in part what your once-upon-a-husband made it. people will turn out to see you, even if just to verify whether you really do seem as kooky as they’ve privately thought for years. and you’ll hold your head high and speak with dignity about bipolar and about choosing sanity, choosing life over suicide, choosing to accept diagnosis and move forward from there. and that matters, a lot. and i applaud you.

but Margaret, seriously, did you really manage to talk for an entire hour on the theme of mental illness not just in your own life but in general, and appeal to your audience for greater understanding and acceptance, and not once acknowledge the dramatic ways that poverty intersects with mental health issues in an overwhelming percentage of people? did you really emphasize how lucky we are to live in Canada while people in Africa are poor, at an event intended to raise awareness of the single greatest common denominator among Canada’s homeless population? did you really just tell a $75 a plate luncheon crowd that your life turned around when someone in Ottawa, at a party, told you they had a job for you and how that job helped you find meaning again? i celebrate that, for you personally, and i realize that a former first lady working for $11 an hour after taxes had to be a bit of a life adjustment, to be sure…i get that, i really do. but did it, erm, occur to you that $11 an hour after taxes for helping new diplomats to Ottawa settle in and find just the right grocery store or drycleaners or whatnot isn’t necessarily the kind of job that the average person with a mental illness has fall into his or her lap every day? that actually most of us – whatever our mental states – don’t get offered jobs at parties at all, alas, just to keep us busy and fulfilled? i don’t mean to nitpick at you, Margaret…i really don’t. but you know, you left me heartsick there. because i think you just reinforced one terrible ancient pillar of stigma, however good your intentions; a pillar with a whole throng of tenacious roots in our societal pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps epistemologies. and that pillar is marked “those lazy fuckers just need to go get jobs”.

you have five children, Margaret. if you’d needed to raise them on that $11 an hour salary while struggling with your mental illness, you might have felt differently about the job. if you’d even been able to find one that well-paid in the first place. and if you’d been able to keep it.

you said you hated 24 Sussex Drive because you were trapped with a staff, unable to do simple things like cook for your family, or have any real privacy. and i sympathize, because as pleasant as the fantasy of never having to clean my friggin’ kitchen again may be, i cherish the sanctuary that is my home. and i wouldn’t want a staff, not really. but i can tell you that i’d prefer a staff trained to do my beck and call and clean up after me and my offspring to a staff struggling to find a shelter bed for me and said offspring on a winter night. and i don’t imagine there’s much privacy there, either.

Margaret, these things are not your fault, by any means, and i know that. nor do i fault you for your privilege, nor for any part of the life you’ve led. but if this banner is one you’re going to take up for the long haul, and i hope it is, then it is incumbent on you to take a good, hard look at the population for whom you’re speaking and advocating, in all its diversity. and to speak for all, not just those whose privilege mirrors your own, or who have resources on which to fall when they stumble. because an advocate and a stigma-battler is a teacher, first and foremost. and if you teach Canadian society only to love and accept the mentally ill who are like you, polished and financially secure, then i worry about what further stigma will be heaped on the heads of those left behind, those “undeserving” who do not only need our acceptance and respect but also, sometimes, our tax dollars and our goodwill and a sense of belonging to the mosaic of this society that may not be able to come from a job but is still their human right, under the Charter that ol’ Pierre worked so hard for.

please.

yummyeating

Originally uploaded by oscarcormier

time for a little standing up around here.

the League of Maternal Justice is standing up to the baffling “take your boobs back to the strip clubs where i can ogle them and stop offending me by breastfeeding in public already” discourse of idiocy so prevalent of late, and i want to stand with them. they’re having a Breastfest: livestreaming/linking posts/gathering photos of babies eating.  from their mamas.  oooh.  our virgin eyes!!!  how, erm, totally natural. 

of course, since O stopped nursing months ago and is now long in bed, if i were to actually webcast breastfeeding from my house in solidarity, my little fest would end up more on the side of the spectrum that Bill Maher apparently actually wants to see. i’m not so into indulging that fucker, thank ye, so all i got is the little old photo above, with Oscar four weeks old and me a little glassy-eyed. this photo, alas, has no boobies in it. not one. blame my photographer – i think he was afraid of me. :) but i didn’t want to let the day pass without also saying my little piece for the simple goodness of breastfeeding.

this entire controversy gives me whiplash – blew my naive little mind straight back from 2007 to 1964, with no warning. it’s not 1964, folks.  if you’re titillated by breastfeeding, that’s your issue.  if you’re offended, it’s probably the least of your issues. and in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of REAL horrors out there to get one’s knickers in a knot about.

would that cheapshot comedians would use their mics to rant about the real scourges of society, rather than boobs. Mad and Jen and Hel and Susanne have put up what has to be their most gigantic roundtable yet of Just Posts this month….Mad, uber-librarian, even alphabetized them. i wish our Just Post crusaders had Maher’s audience, but they’re growing, you know? and they’re shaping this blogosphere of ours, and all our consciousnesses, bit by bit. now, when i flit about from post to post, i think about whether or not someone’s words have made me consider issues of fairness and equity and a better world, and if ithey have…i know who to tattle to.

we are marching towards justice, inch by inch.

the conferences were a success, thank you muchly. we wrapped the last session by 1 pm this afternoon, hugged the world’s nicest webcast pioneer (and his lovely wife) goodbye, and made it downtown, O & i, for the start of the annual Run for the Cure, the Canadian run against breast cancer.

this is the third year that my mom and her friend Henry and i have walked the course together. Oscar’s been with us every time…the very first year, i was only a little pregnant with him. last year, he slept almost the whole way. this year, he was good company, fascinated, smiling and waving, toddling about beforehand trying to give all the dogs there a drink from his sippy cup.

i was happy that we finished up all the work stuff in time to go…i wanted to walk for Whymommy, as part of her team. and for my grandmother, my dad’s mother, who died in 1988. and like i said last year, for Oscar. in hopes that he will never walk alone in this run, this tradition of ours, in the throng of white and pink tshirts wearing a sign – like so many today that made my eyes blur, suddenly, with tears – that says “for my mom.”

those of you who live in Canada probably have heard, unless you are currently hibernating under rocks that shelter you from all media input. those of you who don’t live in our fair former dominion may not be surprised by the news even if it is news to you, since we’re all kinda hippies up here in the socialized medicine Great White North, after all. or something like that. except Alberta.

Canada’s 2006 census results came out yesterday, and the nation – or at least its media – is abuzz. it’s just not sure over what, precisely. shall there be celebrations? wailing and gnashing of teeth? general Canadian awkward politeness and obsequious expressions of tolerance? probably all of the above, from strange bedfellows.

in Canada, the married folk over the age of 15 are, as of this year, for the first time outnumbered by single folk over the age of 15. and the “nuclear family is in dramatic decline,” according to the same stats…with married couples with children being the only family grouping to experience a drop in numbers during the five years since the last census. the Cleaver model is apparently on the wane, at least as compared to same-sex family groupings, commonlaw family groupings, DINKs, and lone-parent families.

i preen for a moment, feeling terribly avant-garde. thinking me & Dave oughtta get married so as to maintain our cool, our separation from the herd, since all these unmarrieds are clearly just tryin’ to copy us. ;)

in seriousness, though, i don’t know what to make of all this…of what marriage means today, of what the shift signifies, of what’s really happening behind all these demographic slices and categorizations. are we realizing Trudeau’s vision of a just society, that vague rhetorical vision of diversity and equality in pluralism, or morphing into Sodom and Gomorrah? tea leaves can be made to tell almost any story you want them to. and if you squint your eyes up right and peer into the future of the Canadian family, these stats can probably speak to and support every single pluralistic instinct you or i possess, and every single reactionary prejudice that exists within us, too.

i giggled a bit when i realized that i, tied by sweat and bond and love and hope and word to my partner and to our family, count as single by the statistical definition. fair enough, by the strictest interpretation of the term…but surely there’s a problem somewhere with that definition, with the binary of choices it implies? i giggled again, more nervously, when i realized that much as i’d be pleased if our particular version of family were common enough that O would not be stigmatized by the indifference Dave & i have towards formal marriage, the preponderance of common-law families and lone-parent families doesn’t necessarily reflect a society of Bon & Daves. it reflects a whole mishmash of people, at multiple waystations on that path of commitment and responsibility that Dave & i (and the official “married” party line) consider our family to represent. others, of course, are on their own, different paths, entirely.

and there’s the rub. because i didn’t giggle at all when i acknowledged that i wince with what can perhaps best be described as class distaste each time i discover that a cousin or a half-sibling, much younger than me, with no completed education and a minimum-wage job, is pregnant (as seems to be happening a lot lately and giving my old-school, elderly “where did i go wrong?” grandfather heart palpitations.)

having grown up an immediate family composed of my mother, my grandmother, and i, i’m inclined towards a non-traditional definition of family. yet despite the relative glass house of my own upbringing and chosen cohabitational arrangement, i cringe a little at all these whispered announcements within my own personal extended family. because even if we all fit into the “new configuration of families” rising in numbers on the StatsCan charts, and even if we’re all blood, their choices make me uncomfortable, faintly patronizing, and worried. and maybe…if i’m honest…just a little envious. because for all i cannot imagine having made the last three years of my life – dramatic and traumatic as they’ve been – work when i was 20, or with any of the treat-of-the-month guys i knew when i was 20…it would have been nice to have found the sense of purpose motherhood’s brought with it earlier in life.

the only real arbiter of whether a family “works” is time, and these young relatives of mine may rise to their occasions and create happy, productive lives for themselves and for their children. i hope they do. but it’s hard to accept that not everyone who shares my census box doesn’t actually want to copy me, doesn’t see my version of subversion (too much education, underpaid work, proud and stringent fiscal independence, and the choice of partner – and my children’s father – as the most important choice in life) as the be-all and end-all of how to live. who wouldn’t want to be sparklingly original like me, i think?

and then i laugh at myself, and wonder if Canada doesn’t do the census every five years just so we citizens can have a Rorshach test in which to view our reflections. it appears, married or not, that i’m as traditional and conservative as June Cleaver and buttered rolls. and my own little version of the nuclear family, whether StatsCan is quite ready to recognize us as such or not.

i don’t like the world we live in, a lot of the time.

i don’t like the bitchy, vapid, rampant consumerism that passes for chicklit these days, nor the fact that chicklit isn’t itself an ironic categorization. i don’t like the sanctimonious mommy wars. i don’t like the veneer of cheap celebrity and snarky gossip that passes for public discourse, nor the fact that i have opinions on Brangelina despite the fact that neither Brad nor Angie would know me if they sat on me. i don’t like what image the combination of all these cultural bits and pieces makes of me as a woman, a female, a category…a person.

nor do i like what a sanctimonious, bitchy, tabloid-eating, mommy-warring pill i actually morph into whenever i consider the train wreck that is Britney Spears.

but what i really don’t like is when i go a step further and become the caricature of myself that all that misogynist pop culture would like to reflect me as, and buy into it, get lost in it. i think i crossed a line the other day when i came face to face in a grocery store lineup with news of Nicole Richie’s pregnancy. Nicole Richie, all 81 pounds of her, has miraculously managed to conceive and carry a child for four or five months thus far, and has already blossomed in the public eye from a rehab candidate on a variety of fronts to that blessed, anointed creature – the mother-to-be. the happy ending.

and my first thought? was cruel, and shameful. that little Miss My-Daddy-Was-Once-Famous does not deserve a healthy baby on top of all the bounty she’s already been given with no seeming effort or talent on her own part. that it’s really enough that she’s been stuck in front of our faces for years just because she grew up with with Lionel Richie for a father and the please-god-let-this-be-a-joke Paris Hilton for a friend. erm, enemy. erm, friend. whatever. that it’s really enough that young women struggling with eating disorders with no resources available to help them have had to watch her waste away in the public eye for waaaay too long now. that it’s really enough that people with normal adult body weights struggle to conceive, to carry…merely to ovulate, for chrissakes.

i have a truckload of empathy for all the people who are NOT Nicole Richie, and for whom watching her blossom her way through this pregnancy presumably without a hitch will be one hell of a bitter pill.

and i had a truckload of pity for me, who never had rehab available nor a tv show handed to me, nor…well…a happy ending with my firstborn.

but i had none o’ that for Nicole Richie.

because somewhere, obviously, i’ve bought the myth. that not only are celebrities open season, which – given the perks – may have some merit…but that they are actually NOT human beings, in need of common human decency. from me. that the world of glamour and privilege and apparent silver platterdom that they represent is a zero-sum economy: their presence in it is keeping ME out. their cakewalk is responsible for my heartbreak, or for the pimples on my thighs, at least. just for a second, i wished statistics would catch up with Nicole Richie. i wished her loss. i wished her crushed, like so many ‘real’ people have been, just so i could stop reading about her little miracle and the sunbeams suddenly emanating from her butt. so i could stop hurting in the place where the article was rubbing salt in all my old wounds.

and then i was horrified with myself, and ashamed. because i do NOT really wish that particular heartbreak on any human being. not one. certainly not just because they’re privileged, or lucky, or famous. there is no equation there.

and yet, in media and discourse we move more and more towards a cheap flippancy that encourages that equation, that fosters an ambulance-chasing fascination with celebridee foibles, for huge money. and the step between eagerly watching someone crash and burn, and wanting them to crash and burn, whilst licking our lips and telling ourselves they deserve it, is a very teensy one. i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the German word “schadenfreude” entered our pop culture vocabulary somewhere in the past decade or so.

and it’s ugly, taken to its extreme. it’s ugly, when i look at it in the mirror. it’s ugly, to take a real wound and make of it a hateful, blameful, dehumanizing cheap shot. and then to have a cultural bandwagon that in any way allows me to feel smug and “normal” for having such vitriol for a person who bears no relation to me whatsoever.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

i don’t think that either Nicole Richie or her unborn child will be impacted by my moment of bitter Grinch-heartedness and ill will…my superpowers, for good or evil, are not so impressive. but i will be impacted by that nastiness, if i don’t prune the branches of the tree it springs from. and Oscar will too. i have no problem with him learning to have opinions and pass judgements, even disparaging ones, critical ones. but i don’t want him to learn to discount other people’s humanity…even people it’s hard to see as people sometimes.

so when i came across Alpha Dogma’s post on schadenfraude and it’s opposite, mudita, last week…i was humbled. and hopeful. i’ve never heard of mudita – the altruistic joy of witnessing the good fortune of others – before. i’m not even sure i believe, precisely, in altruism.

but i think i’d like the world a whole lot more if it had more mudita going on it. if that was the lens we trained on those we choose to celebrate, whether in dumb tabloids or in our real lives.

So AlphaDogma…thank you. for something that was lovely, and opened up a window for me. for something that was perfect.

you deserve this.