I'm no less of a Mom than you!

The house is dark and quiet.  My offspring are asleep.  I tucked in the last one (again) ten minutes ago.  It's well past ten, nearing eleven, and it's finally my "me-time".  I'm wasting it messing around on the computer.  I always have a mental to do list of things that I should be doing instead of checking Facebook or reading blogs, and when I "waste time", I feel guilty.  I guess that guilt is the "Mom thing."

I read a blog post tonight.  My cousin-in-law shared it on her Facebook page.  And my sister-in-law commented that she loved it. And somebody else liked it.  And somebody else shared it. But I didn't.  I didn't like it or share it or comment or even poke it. It just didn't work for me. And it shouldn't have annoyed me, but I guess its because I couldn't identify with it the same way that they could.  Both of them have something in common.  They have two children.  Their husbands have professional jobs and work long hours so they can have comfortable lives.  And they stay home with their children.

They are stay-at-home moms.

It was an interesting read, and at first glance, was very empowering and flattering to the stay-at-home mom.  But as I absorbed it, it bothered me.  I suppose I'm not used to reading things that call me out for the choices I've made.  Namely, the choice NOT to be a stay-at-home Mom.

I work for a living.  I have since I was 15 years old (13 if you count my paper route.)  But I've also dabbled in domesticity.  I've had almost four years worth of time off for maternity leaves.  I've treasured that time with my children and used it to hone my household abilities.  But it certainly never came naturally to me and I'd find myself bored and wasting time doing things that didn't make me happy.  I like working outside the home.  Using my brain for things other than playing with blocks and reading books with one word per page.  Or singing along to the Wiggles while I scrape dried yogurt off the chair legs.  I'm not saying that's all there is to the life of a stay-at-home mom... but for me, that's pretty much all there was.

Maybe if my stay-at-home years extended beyond babyhood, I'd find them more interesting.  With all of my children immersed in the public school system, I'd have the time to do all the things I wish I could do for them.  I could volunteer at my children's school as a playground monitor or hot lunch cook.  I could attend every sports day and be their best cheerleaders.  I could sew funky costumes for them to wear in the school Christmas concerts and I could adorn my house with decor that seasoned pinterii would drool over.  I could grow my own produce and serve them sandwiches made from bread I'd kneaded myself.

Instead, we eat a lot of packaged foods, we step over the clutter, my kids live out of laundry baskets full of clothes that rarely see the inside of their drawers, and my daughter frequently leaves the house with a jumbled rat's nest of hair on her head.

That's just how we roll, Monday to Friday.

I've been asked how I do it.  How I can possibly work outside the home with four young-ish children (although my oldest is getting pretty independent these days) to look after. And I can sense the disdain. I know I'm being judged for my selfish decisions.  We live in a community that is very traditional, very religious, and dare I say it, somewhat narrow minded.  There are a lot of families that believe that the woman's role is to raise the children while the heads of their households go out and earn a living for them.  Those are the women I get to know when I'm on maternity leave. Those are the ones that sing the praises of being home all day raising their children.  The ones that cast their judging glances or pitying stares when they assume that I drop my children in a daycare every morning.

When I'm not on maternity leave, and I'm living in my working world, I meet the other women.  The ones that don't have children or those like me who've turned our backs on what is the expected norm in our town. Those like me that chose to juggle a career and family.  Although I'm not really juggling. I do both at the same time with a minimal amount of fumbling.  My career and my family, they co-exist.  They are both halves of what makes me a whole.  The mom-me and the professional-me.

And these other moms raise their eyebrows when I tell them that my children are not in daycare.  That my children are not even being baby-sat. They're home with a parent every day. Because I can hold down a career while raising my children at the same time.  That's what I do.  And that's what my husband does too (although arguably he would NEVER say that his job was a career).  I work during the day.  He works during the night.  We share the childcare duties.  Neither of us is a stay-at home parent, but one of us is always home with the children.  It's a good system; not without its flaws, to be sure, that's been working for us so far.

Our daughters are going to grow up knowing that they can marry and have children if they want to, or they can have a career; or they can do both at the same time.  Our sons are going to grow up knowing that its okay for them to take their toddler to story time at the library and sit cross-legged in a circle  and sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" with gleeful abandon with all the other daytime parents.

So I'm going to say it.  Yes, your life as a stay-at-home parent is rewarding, rich, and busy.  You are raising the future generation and you are doing the most important work that there is to do.

But so am I.

Just because I work outside of the home, doesn't make me any less of a mother than you.  We have chosen different paths, temporarily, but we're going to end up at the same place, watching our children walk down that aisle to pick up their diploma and turn and thank us for being there for them when they were younger (kids do that, right?).

What's so bad about that?

Her perspective

I picked my daughter up from dance class after work.  It's an easy ten minute walk home (going her pace) and we've been enjoying the brief alone time that it gives us once a week.  Tonight as we passed by the same corner that we've walked past several times, she asked me, "Who lives in that big house?"

I replied (pleased to actually be knowing the answer) that it was the Safe Home.

"What's a safe home?" She asked me.

And once again I found myself thinking, is she really old enough to handle this kind of answer?  "Well," I said, "the Safe Home is a place where women can go to get away from men that treat them badly."

She considered this.  "What do you mean?"

"Well, sometimes there are men that hit their wives, and hurt them in other ways.  And its dangerous for the women to stay with their husbands, so they have to leave. And they need a place to stay where they can feel safe, where he won't be able to come after them."

"Do they bring their children?"

"Of course," I said, "the home has room for children too, so the whole family can be safe." I decided to turn this into a life lesson and I told her, "You should never stay with someone who treats you bad, even if you think you love them."

"Daddy's never mean.  Sometimes he acts too silly and tickles us and gives us horse bites but he's just being goofy."

I nodded.  "Yes, we'll never have to go to the safe home.  You kids don't have to worry about that kind of thing."

She nodded.  And then in all her five-year old wisdom, asked me, "So if that's the house for women, where's the house that men go when the mommies are mean to them?  There has to be a safe place for them, too."

And I stopped walking. And I thought about it.  And I didn't have an answer for her. So I told her, "I really don't know. I don't think there is one."

"Well, that's not good," she replied, gravely.

And I have to agree.  She has a very valid point. I know that there are men out there who are victimized by their partners, whether those partners are female or male. But I never stop to think about them.  To light a candle and march for them. To declare a day of remembrance for them.  They are the hidden victims. The unpopular ones.  My world view has been shaped by my white, middle-class, privileged upbringing, with hefty doses of socialism and feminism thrown in to the mix to make sure that I'm the right kind of activist.  But my daughter, so far, has very little of that. And I marvelled at her ability to see things with a different lens than mine.  Her world view, not yet clouded by the realities of all the evil that people do to one another, still sees things with innocence and open-mindedness not coloured by sexism, or racism, or homophobia she hasn't learned about yet.

And its humbling.

Alex's Christmas concert

And here's Alex's performance.  What a beautiful job!  Too bad you can't hear it over the cries of my baby who was done by this time in the performance.  :)

Connor's Christmas concert

My handsome little Connor singing "Canadian Jingle Bells"... cut a little short because I forgot to turn the camera on.  Oops!

Kirstin's Christmas Concert

My little girl singing "Mary Had a Baby"  --- she's a little under the weather, so that's probably why she's not smiling!  Pretty adorable, though! :)

My review of Windows 8

We replaced our hard drive when it fried,
The programs froze, the tower died,
Prolong its life, we really tried.
A dinosaur, or so they say,
Windows XP will no longer play,
Programs that are designed today.
I remember when DOS gave up the ghost,
Leaving a collection most,
of Cd Roms, completely toast.
We thought this one would last somehow,
Outlook Express, where are you now?
Send emails? I no longer know how.
My folders vanished to the abyss,
Sorting by groups, oh how I miss.
Try Windows Live Mail, it takes the piss!
Now it's apps, and apps, and apps galore,
Need a program? Try the store!
Want the start menu? Ha! It's no more.
At least, I can't find it anywhere,
I've looked.  I think.  It isn't fair.
It makes me want to pull out my hair.
Try Windows 8, said the salesclerk,
A pimpled lad of part-time work,
It's sleek, its quick, it has more perks.
We took it home, we plugged it in,
Updated it so we could begin,
To enjoy the world of applications.
Now, six months in, and I still don't know,
Why Windows 8 makes me feel so slow.
Windows 8 you really blow.
You make no sense, you're hard to use,
It's not fair, we didn't choose,
We just didn't know what we would lose.
I miss you already, dear Windows XP,
Your start menu was good enough for me!
Your newer son will never be,
As good as you, nay, I'll say it, great,
You're defunct and replaced by Windows 8,
An interface I fucking hate!

NaNoWriMo 2013

 Just sayin'...

Aah, November... my favourite month of the year.  But also a month when I'd rather be getting ready for Christmas and doing my Christmas cards... because now I'm down to 25 days until the big day and I'm just starting to think about it. So, really, this challenge should occur in January or February when spring still seems so far away and we've grown tired of the shriveled apples that pass as produce in the stores and I have nothing better to do with my post-bedtime quiet hours.

Regardless, this is the fifth time I've attempted write a novel in 30 days and the fifth time I've successfully crossed the 50,000 yard line (without actually finishing the story)!

This one was hard for me to write.  I think because I went back to work and my life is a bit chaotic now.  But the story has been percolating in my head all fall, so I plunged in without an outline or a plan. It's about a couple of kids who get kidnapped.  That's all I'll say. I skipped ahead a bit in the story last night so that I could I could write the conclusion, which I finished this morning while I neglected my children and let the television baby-sit (now if only the television could cook and do laundry), so the novel does have a distinct beginning, a middle, and an end. This one definitely has some gems in it; the stuff I wrote this morning to get to 50K is gold.  I'm very pleased and I typed out almost 4,000 words in no time!  But it also has a lot of crudworthy prose that I'm going to have to sift through as well, as there was more than one night where I fell asleep on the couch, laptop in hand, mid-type.  So, going back through for the re-read should be an adventure.

Maybe after I retire I'll get around to actually publishing something! :)