Parenting

Parenthood is Not a Project

I’m re-reading my favourite parenting book: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. This is the third time I’ve read it in under three years, and I love it because it’s funny, it’s relatable, and each time I read it, I’m struck by new things. So don’t be surprised if I bring up Druckerman’s ideas in more blog posts in future.

Today I was reading her chapter on “The Perfect Mother Doesn’t Exist,” where she talks about how American-style (and I’d say, Canadian-style, too) parenting involves an intense amount of “concerted cultivation” – in other words, parenthood is a project. Druckerman admits that as an American living in Paris, “my project is to make my kids bilingual, international, and lovers of fine cheese.” It struck me that perhaps one of the reasons I had great difficulty during my first maternity leave is that I too, thought of my time at home as a project.

I’m not surprised I viewed mat leave this way. Most of my life until that point had been a series of projects – from completing each class and each year of education until I was 22, and then continuing that ‘project’ mindset as I moved on through a series of contract jobs, buying my first house, and the nine months of my first pregnancy. All these experiences had definitive expiry dates, finish lines, and clear goals.

So of course I saw mat leave, with it’s defined months – six, in my case – as another project. I had an actual spreadsheet of goals, and I thought I was being very reasonable to only put one major item on the slate for each week. This didn’t work out so well for me. I did manage to check off most of my goals (probably because I had been so minimal with them in the first place), but I still felt like I hadn’t managed to accomplish much as my return to work neared.

Looking back now, I realize the problem wasn’t that I had tried to be organized, or that I had tried to ‘make the most’ of my brief time off work by having a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish. The problem was that the point of that time wasn’t leave from work. The point of that time was my entrance into motherhood. I had been thinking about those six months as an isolated block of time, rather than as just the beginning of a lifelong experience with no expiry date, no finish line – the experience of being a parent.

Of course I felt I hadn’t “accomplished” anything – because my relationship with my child, my motherhood, my family, isn’t something to be “accomplished.” It’s something to be lived.

This isn’t to say I can’t have goals while I’m away from work this time around – I can, and I probably should, to keep connected to my independent adult self, who loves to-do lists and accomplishing things. But I won’t tie those goals to the finite period of my mat leave; instead, they’ll just be part of my life while I happen to be home every day, and they can and should go beyond my return-to-work date.

As I thought about this, I set aside my book, rubbed my big round belly, and promised baby #2 that this go round, our time together won’t be a project. We won’t try to accomplish things over the next year. We’ll just experience living with each other, getting to know each other, and cherish the fact that we have so much time to devote to the start of this new relationship that will last forever.

Motherhood is not something to be accomplished. It's something to be lived. (1)

 

Confessions of a Hot Mess: Hamster in a Wheel

hamster-wheel-03-600Hello, dear mamas. Long time, no see. Once again, I have been remiss and Lindsay has been holding down the fort here at Raise a Mother. She’s been doing a fantastic job, I’m sure you’ll all agree. If you haven’t yet read her post “Letter to my Post-Partum Self“, do. It’s lovely and thoughtful, just like her.

Lindsay also wrote recently about bonding, and about how many of us are allowing ourselves to become “too busy” to connect with the people in our lives, instead collapsing at the end of each day in front of a screen. Reading this post made me feel uncomfortable and guilty, though I know that wasn’t close to Lindsay’s intent when writing it. You see, I am the hamster in that wheel.

Ladies, I have a confession to make: I am a hot mess. I eat more than I should, drink more caffeine and wine than I probably should, and weigh more than I should. I don’t sleep, or exercise, or floss as much as I should. I may or may not have finished the last bits of peanut butter from the jar by pouring in some chocolate chips and then scooping it out with a spoon (I totally did).

My absence from this blog comes down to one thing – I am terrible at taking time for myself. I work through my lunch break on a regular basis. I feel a compulsion to make sure that all my chores are done before I do something fun. Of course, with a toddler around, my chores are never done. They’re on an endless loop. I constantly feel “too busy” and collapse on the couch at the end of the night.

Here’s the thing, my lovely mamas: all things considered, I’m doing ok. I might personally feel sometimes like a human disaster, but I know my son, my husband and my family feel loved. I do need to do better on making time for myself, and I am working on it. At the same time, I know that my slightly OCD tendencies mean that I need my house to be tidier than many people need their houses to be in order to feel truly relaxed.

I know I’m not alone. We all have our quirks that shape the challenges we face in balancing our lives. I’m sure I’m not the only one of us to feel like I’m currently on a bit of a merry-go-round.

And so to you, my fellow hamsters, I say: You are not alone. You are doing a wonderful job and your kiddos love you. This particular marathon won’t last forever, so just do the best you can to make it all you want it to be. In the meantime, I’m waving from the next wheel over.

Mom Things I Learn During Yoga #2

Recently, my husband and I were at partner prenatal yoga. The last class of each eight-week session is always offered as a partner class, which is just one of things I love about the yoga through Rebirth Wellness Centre here in my hometown of London, ON.

In this particular class, the teacher was directing the partners to massage the pregnant yogis as we lay in relaxation pose with our eyes closed. We had been having a pretty standard yoga class experience – calm, focused, quiet. And then my husband decided to mess with the calm: when the teacher encouraged the massagers to touch their pregnant partners in “the way that feels good,” my husband stuck his hand down my shirt, and nudged his other thumb into my mouth, just for a second. I couldn’t help cracking a smile, and had to do my best not to laugh so as not to disrupt the other participants.

In that moment, he had broken the yoga code, since we were supposed to be all zen and focused. Often, this might have irritated me, as I really like to maintain the calm and quiet of yoga, the soft, introspective nature of the practice. But somehow, it didn’t bother me. And for the rest of the class we kept being a little bit silly: silently high-fiving when balancing in partner tree pose, grinning with mock-risk that we might fall over when sinking down into a partner squat.

My husband reminded me in that class that it’s important not to take things too seriously, and that even if I usually like something one way – a calm, focused yoga class, for instance – allowing myself to enjoy a shared experience of that same activity in a different light is not only okay, it just might even be better sometimes.

As a parent, this applies to lots of activities, especially with a toddler. While my impulse might be to try to introduce my kids to life experiences in the way that I have always enjoyed them – dancing to a certain kind of music, noticing certain things on a walk in the woods, or tackling a household chore with a certain focus/drive – it’s also important to sometimes let them take the lead. Because trying those same experiences with them the way they want to feel them, and the way they want to learn, might open up a new experience for me, too.

The Professional-Me and the Parent-Me

It can often seem like our professional-selves and our parent-selves are two separate things. When we think about how these two identities intersect, it’s usually in the context of “work-life balance” (that dreadful catchphrase of modern life!), laden with implied meanings about the incompatibility of these two constantly-battling halves, as inevitable as the push between ego and id.

But laying this usual dialogue aside, I’ve been thinking about a different angle on how work-me and mom-me interact: how does who I am and what I do professionally impact my parenting priorities and values?

For some professions, tangible connections are easy to see between work-and-parent identities. My dad, for example, an intensive-care pediatrician, could always be counted on for a valuable (if not always welcome) dose of perspective when one of us was losing our minds about a minor cut or scratch: “Are you bleeding? Do you need surgery? Then no, you don’t need a band-aid; it’ll be fine.” Pretty obvious correlation there.

For some of us, though, the connections might not seem so noticeable, so I’ve been thinking more big-picture, about how what I do in the environment where I spend 40 hours per week impacts my outlook on the world:

  • What beliefs do I have about how the ‘real world’ works?
  • What life skills seem to be most important for everyday success?
  • What principles/attributes are reinforced for me as normal and valuable?
  • What is reasonable/appropriate in interpersonal interactions?

 

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The answers to such questions will surely influence how each of us parents our kids as we try to raise them ‘right’ (whatever that means!). And I can’t imagine that the place in/tasks on which we spend so much of our waking hours don’t affect our perspective. So how do we know that we’re parenting thoughtfully and deliberately, rather than just being consumed by our own work ‘bubble’?

A few issues related to my field, university academic counselling, have been popping up in mainstream media lately (and they seem to be simply everywhere in the news streams and blogs I follow professionally): increasing mental-health crises, a lack of coping skills/resilience in young people today, and a rising collective sense of entitlement.

I realized, as I was ranting to my partner last night, that living in this particular work ‘bubble’ for the last three years, and working on some specific projects/problem-solving of late that’s directly related to these issues, has had a huge impact on my thoughts about parenting:

  • I’ve come to believe that in the ‘real world,’ young people are increasingly incapable of dealing with disappointment, frustration, anxiety, or stress of any kind, and that this rings all kinds of alarm bells for a future full of fragile, helpless adults who will not be up to the task of solving big-picture problems of the world if they can’t even deal with the run-of-the-mill stresses of everyday life.
  • Resilience, self-organization, and the ability to form realistic expectations for oneself seem to me to be the most important life skills for my kids to have in order to succeed.
  • Entitlement seems to have been normalized, so self-management, initiative and gratitude are heightened in value.
  • My daily interpersonal interactions consist mainly of people requesting and/or needing things from me, and involve mainly those who are struggling – which results in a bolstered belief that it’s most vital for me to model and encourage self-sufficiency and resourcefulness in my kids through our interactions.

It’s easy to get sucked into my own little bubble, which, when I articulate it in writing, presents a pretty bleak picture of what I expect of my kids and of my priorities as a parent. Thankfully, among the recent avalanche of alarm-ringing, there are a few making cool-headed counterpoints (such as this article here, if you’re interested in the topic).  Finding these alternate perspectives really helps me to emerge from the echo-chamber of my work environment.

And while doing this reflection doesn’t change the fact that I still think teaching resilience, self-management, and coping skills for everyday stressors are still highly important in my role as a parent, it at least helps me to remember not to lose sight of some of the other goals I have as a mother: things like teaching my kids passion, joy, and kindness, which, unfortunately, are not so consistently reinforced through my everyday work.

Now I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this, dear reader! How does your experience of work influence your parenting outlook?

 

Trying Not to Let Hormones Best My Good Judgement

Do you ever have one of those moments where you feel like your emotions control you and not the other way around? Well, in this pregnancy I’m having those moments more often than in my first, and today’s particular hormonal meltdown led me to one important lesson.

The specifics aren’t important, the time, location, or parties involved. What is important is that I let the hormonal meltdown dictate my behavior. I acted in a way that I would never normally act,  and sent information about my feelings  via text message, a mistake I thought I had learned long ago was never a good idea. I was immediately embarrassed about this, and tried to retract my behavior to the injured party, but the things I wrote had already been recorded, already received, already interpreted, already reacted to. In normal communication behavior, I know it’s vital for me to step back and reflect on what it is that I truly want to say, how I truly feel, and take the time to let the hormone wave pass to determine if it’s a good idea to articulate that particular sentiment out loud. And if it is, I know in person conversation is always better than a text message.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t think it had a lot to do with motherhood, other than the fact that my meltdown was spurred by pregnancy hormones. But maybe it was also just one of many small experiences that serve to remind me of one of the key skills of parenthood. There are a lot of stressors that come up as a parent – overlapping worries about your child, the demands of balancing work and home life, the strain that feeling like you have much less time than you used to can put on your relationship with your partner, etc. But one of the key skills, I think at least for me, is learning to not let the emotions that arise along with those stressors dictate my behavior. Learning to model for my kids that we are each capable of making conscious decisions about how we behave, even in times of duress. Of course, I’m going to slip up. We all do. And if we’re lucky, we have people in our lives who will embrace us even in those moments where we let the hormonal wave wash us away, against our better judgement; I know I am. And I know I will try to be that person for my kids, the person who will help them stand up again when they’ve been knocked down by the waves, but also show them how to stand stronger the next time.

Mom Things I Learn During Yoga #1

This morning was not a good morning. I woke up with worries about parenting, and was overtired from the moment I opened my eyes, which never helps. I started to express these worries to my husband in the early morning light, and he said gently, “Lindsay, we’re trying our best, and he’s healthy.” I found myself saying quietly, “Yes, when he was a newborn that seemed like that was all that mattered, but at what point is that no longer enough?”

I had the good sense to not continue the discussion at 6:20am, and instead decided to leave my son with his morning bottle snuggled up with his dad while I got out my yoga mat in another room, dim and quiet. Usually when I sit silent, eyes closed, some of the things my yoga teacher often says run through my mind: There is nowhere else you need to be right now, nothing you need to be doing… Calming things. This particular morning, what came back was a mantra I repeated to myself a lot in the early months of my son’s life: Sometimes it is necessary to let things go, simply for the reason that they are heavy. Thinking about this, I felt my shoulders relax, my lungs expand, and the tension melt out of my hips and back.

Sometimes it is necessary to let things go, simply for the reason that they are heavy.

I have many pressures and worries that have arisen through the learning curve of mothering. The tide of overlapping possible concerns doesn’t really seem to ever go away. But a few cheesy, poster-worthy thoughts ring true when I stop to reflect on an anxious moment: Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no chaos, but in the midst of chaos, to still be calm in your heart. Or my my counterintuitive favourite: Relax… Nothing is under control. It’s a struggle each time another wave of worry comes along, but remembering these little nuggets allows me to sit there in my living room and let the waves wash over me so I can move on with my day, instead of getting the wind knocked out of me by each crash.

So if there’s a worry or sadness that’s weighing on me in the days to come, I’m going to try my best to remember to just let it go, even if for no other reason than that it’s heavy. It might not go away, and I might still need to pick it up later to deal with it or it might sneak back up onto my shoulders all on its own, but if it feels unbearable, it’s okay to just leave it there on the carpet for awhile instead.

A Gratitude Journal

piglet_gratitude_winnie_the_poohYears ago, Oprah Winfrey began a recurring segment on her talk show about keeping a gratitude journal. The concept is simple: each day, you take a moment to write down a few things in your life for which you are grateful.

As a young pre-teen, I started keeping a gratitude journal alongside Oprah, and kept it up for a few months. At the time, I found it to be a great way to take a mental “re-set” and re-gain some perspective after a rollercoaster-y day of adolescence.

With everything that’s been going on for me professionally — and with American Thanksgiving just around the corner — now seems like the perfect time to start keeping a gratitude journal again. So, here are a few of the things I’m thankful for today:

  • My husband – who is kind and supportive, and who I love watching with our son.
  • My son – who brings light to each day with his smiles, kisses and ever-expanding gibberish vocabulary.
  • The comfort of warm blankets on cold nights.
  • Friends who send you messages “just because”.
  • Chocolate – especially mint chocolate.

Have any of you kept a gratitude journal? What are you thankful for this week?

Teaching Our Boys About Sex, Consent, and Respect

I seem to see a LOT in the media these days about sex and consent – specifically, about teaching boys about consent as a way to reduce/prevent instances of sexual assault and rape. I work in a university, and there’s a LOT of news in our field about various institutions constantly upgrading and re-visioning their approaches to sexual assault – everything from peer education programs and helplines to better processes for reporting assaults and supporting survivors.

More attention to sexual assault and efforts to prevent it are GOOD. There’s no doubt about it. And as a mom with a son (even though he doesn’t understand such topics yet), I’m grateful that this push is happening.

At the same time, I can’t ever escape the feeling that no matter how many articles are published about the importance of teaching boys consent, no matter how many clever cartoons or YouTube videos go viral for explaining why the issue of consent should be a no-brainer, no matter how many universities, school boards, and public health organizations ramp up their efforts to address this issue… we still have a rampant rate of sexual assault and rape in our society. And that’s just CANADA. NORTH AMERICA. Places that are (supposedly) ‘advanced’ and ‘civilized,’ with ‘equal rights’ for men and women, where the work of feminism has already brought us to ‘the good life.’

Unfortunately, I don’t think all of these efforts are tackling the real root of the problem. Because the real root of the problem is not that many men think they are entitled to women’s bodies. The real root of the problem is not that women have been shamed for centuries anytime we express sexuality outside of a very narrow (yet precarious and shifting) set of boundaries that we are always in danger of transgressing. The real root of the problem is that our culture as a whole has never really been willing to address or challenge the core belief that ‘men are better than women‘. That masculinity is superior to femininity. That the traits commonly associated with men – rationality, physical strength, self-assertion, and self-preservation – are somehow inherently more valuable than those assumed to be their opposites (and therefore associated with women) – emotionality, physical nurturing, cooperation, and vulnerability. And worst of all, that this value system actually does mean, even to people who don’t want to admit it, that those who possess the former have more ‘right’ than those who possess the latter. (Sure, there’s a lot of talk around increasing the value of typically feminine traits, but I feel this is usually framed with an attitude that feminine traits are a nice, politically-correct side dish to the main course of masculinity, which just needs a little tweaking, rather than a full overhaul.)

So we need to address this problem, at its root. As a mother, this means teaching my son that cooperation is just as valuable as self-assertion – and that a balance is the best route to leadership. Teaching him that emotional understanding is just as valuable as rational thought – and that a balance will allow him to make sense of his experiences in a fulfilling way. Teaching him that vulnerability is just as valuable as self-preservation – and that a balance is necessary for successful relationships.

In a more tangible sense, it means never reinforcing for him (even indirectly) that it’s reasonable to write women’s feelings or perspectives off as ‘crazy.’ Never modeling for him that it’s ‘funny’ (even by remaining silent) to demean a male by calling him a female. Always encouraging him to see the value in other people’s perspectives – especially those that tend toward the feminine (after all, he’s going to get reinforcement of the value of masculinity from everywhere else). I will also have to talk to him about consent, sexual assault, and feminism. But those talks will make a lot more sense to him if he doesn’t have the subconscious belief that really, he is better than his female peers (for all the reasons above).

Only when we actually don’t believe in this binary hierarchy of values anymore – deep down in our collective, human, subconscious, most secret don’t-want-to-admit-it heart-of-hearts – will we be able to make a meaningful impact on issues like sexual violence, consent, and respect.

“A New Normal”: At Once Scary and Comforting

In the midst of a painful transition, an overwhelming change, or a period of limbo – all situations where what has been “normal” either has suddenly vanished or seems to be slipping from our grasp – loved ones will often try to ease the difficulty by telling us we’ll find a “new normal.”

I’ve heard this more than once in the past few weeks, as I confided to close friends, family, and finally, the general populace of the internet through this blog, that I’ve been going through an overwhelming transition of my own. So I’ve been thinking about this idea of a “new normal” a lot lately. Sometimes the notion is a comforting one: eventually I won’t feel like this anymore, and things will be familiar again. At other times, though, this same thought can be terrifying: this painful period IS the new normal, and eventually I’ll just become resigned to this discomfort/sorrow/stress/fatigue/insert-your-own-unpleasantness-here.

My sister recently told me about a friend of hers, who was going through a particularly agonizing professional schedule and complete absence of “work-life balance.” What helped was someone gently suggesting that perhaps this person had forgotten that this period of heightened stress wasn’t, in fact, “her normal,” reassuring her that it was simply temporary.

This simple wisdom brings to mind one of my favourite thoughts from Jeanette Winterson (and as I’ve loved several of her novels, this is saying something):

JW Quote better

It’s easy to forget, especially when we’re in the depths of our uncertainty, anxiety, or just complete weariness, that “this too shall pass,” that the difficult moment itself isn’t the new normal that we’ll find. Time, and life, march on, and if we can see our discomfort for what it is – a natural symptom of change – then maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so scary.

Now, parenthood may not be precisely like some other common hurdles, in that it appears (at least in my limited experience so far) to stretch out as a never-ending parade of transitions. Once we wrap our heads around toddler-tantrums, it’ll be time for starting school. The awkward transition of pre-adolescence will be closely followed by the quest for independence.

In this way it’s more on the scary side: how will I ever find that new normal if the parenting game just changes all the time? But I still have hope, too, hope that with each transition, I’ll become better at this process of change: my perspective to see it for what it is will quicken, my resilience to laugh through it will strengthen, and my ability to be kind to myself as I face it will grow.

The Importance of My Village

I came across an article at work the other day noting a recent study concluding that ‘less happy’ new parents are more likely to have smaller families. While this doesn’t seem all that surprising, the general modal number of originally “desired children” is two. This already seems like a ‘small’ family relatively speaking, so it is interesting to try to find out why, comparative to the earlier desired number, many people end up having only one kid.

What the study found was that over 70% of new parents experienced a decline in overall happiness in the first year after the birth of their first child.  Of course, as the authors acknowledged, “it is taboo for new parents to acknowledge feelings of unhappiness about childbearing;” there’s a lot of pressure for new moms (and dads) to feel happier, and to project that happiness to the world, which can only exacerbate negative feelings like depression, failure, and worry.

It’s difficult to acknowledge feelings of unhappiness post-birth even to ourselves, because at the same time as life is unbelievably challenging in ways we couldn’t have imagined, there have also been, or at least there were for me, moments of unbelievable joy and love that I never knew before my son was born. There can be a pressure to focus on only the happy side, the wonderful side, and tell ourselves to ‘suck it up’ when the unhappiness rears its ugly head, because after all, this is what we signed up for and we know we should be grateful for all the blissful bits.

I’m personally still in the ‘two desired children’ camp, but when I look back on this first year, I know I’m probably only here because of my village. My village of people, mainly women, but with some pretty fantastic men in there, too, who sometimes felt like the only thing holding me together – like a trellis keeping a fragile, ragged vine from withering.

My village kept me sane. My mom and mother-in-law taking my babe for naps in his stroller or just holding him in the living room for an hour so that I could have a shower or a sleep. My husband telling me (even when he had to repeat himself and raise his voice to get me to believe it) that it really was okay if I just needed to leave the house and go for a walk; he had things covered. My sister talking to me every day, also on her mat leave, and being my daily contact with another grown up on days when I didn’t make it out of the house.

My village kept me safe. The mothers of a previous generation who were living proof that things really would be alright, but who still listened with sympathy and a shoulder to cry on. The few courageous friends who shared with me the details of their own dark, twisty motherhood times as well as their moments of light, letting me know that the roller coaster I was on didn’t make me a bad mom, but was just part of my ride. My husband who, even on the really, really, REALLY awful days, the kind when we were both at our worst and it was hard to even look at each other, was always there bringing water while I breastfed, making dinner, or calling me from work to see how my day at home was going.

My village kept me connected to who I had always been long before I became a mother. Friends came to dance class, encouraging me to get out and shake it off even on nights when I was tired or overwhelmed. Non-parent friends listened about the trials of birth and mothering the way they would have talked to me about any other topic before my life changed, even when I gave gory details they probably didn’t want to know. One particular non-parent friend called on me for urgent love and support when she was in her own dark place, giving me the gift of still feeling that I had something to offer my friends in return, that someone other than my baby still needed me, too.

Being a new parent can be really, really, fucking hard. It’s often said that we mothers have an inner strength that gets us through anything with a newborn because we simply have to, and I suppose this could be true, but for me, my village has been the difference between coming through able to believe I can thrive again, instead of just barely holding my head up.

~ Lindsay

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