Month: May 2007

Shaking it off

Well. That was an unpleasant little trip through the dark corners of my psyche. Thanks to all of you for your comments of support and solidarity. It’s edifying to hear that a lot of you think the whole daycare-crapout situation was ridiculous – at least it wasn’t entirely me!

I spent quite a large part of the long weekend trying to wrest control over the things I can, and looking for the courage to accept the things I can’t. Cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed, washed the floors. Boxed up our winter boots and hauled them down to the basement. Threw out half the stuff in the funny-shaped cupboard in the corner that barfs out misbalanced stacks of lidless tupperware and disposable aluminum pans and stray paper plates every time you open the cupboard door. Bought a new battery for the cordless phone that dies if you leave it off the cradle longer than an hour or deign to talk more than 15 minutes. Mowed the lawn, front and back, AND hauled out the weedwhacker to do the edges. Bought a funky new Hound Dog dandelion puller after reading a review of it in the paper (and it was worth every penny of the $25 I spent on it. I filled half a bag of dandelions in less than an hour! Disclosure: link built through my Amazon Associates account.) Bought a bleeding heart perennial to fill a gap in the back flowerbed.

In short, I tried my best to eliminate as many things as possible that have caused me some form of grief in the last little while. And still found time to read a chapter or two of a good book on my new swing. AND watch that stellar hockey game on Saturday. Thank goodness for long weekends.

This post may well qualify for induction into the “Boring Posts Hall of Fame”, but I’m trying to cram something in before bringing Tristan to school. I’m home with the boys today since we are newly caregiverless, and I have to tell you, on a sunny May day it’s not a bad time to be out of the office.

Sincerely, thank you to all of you who offered a word of kindness in the last couple of days. The good news is, I think my words are unstuck again, and I’m feeling a lot better about the chaos that wasn’t banished over the weekend. I mean, life without at least a little bit of chaos is kind of uninteresting, right?

Thanks, friends.

She quit

I lay in bed for quite a while this morning, trying to force myself to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t quiet the voices that have been harranguing me all weekend, so I gave in and got up.

I opened the front door to get the morning newspaper and saw an envelope sticking out of the mailbox. The caregiver had snuck by in the night and left a letter informing us she “felt it necessary to terminate our contract effective immediately.” And a cheque refunding our deposit.

I am furious. I’m annoyed as hell about the actual quitting, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. But I am shaking with hurt fury at the cowardly way she went about this without even talking to me. She says her reasons are “Tristan and Simon need much more care than I can give them without jeopardizing the other children, the lack of communication from both you and [Beloved], and the safety issues that have arisen.”

And by lack of communication I wonder if she meant the one phone call on Tuesday and two on Thursday I made, checking to see if everything was okay? Ugh. “Children do not learn respect and rules overnight, rather it is a continuous process.” She says I was not up front with her because I didn’t tell her that Tristan had finished 10 days of antibiotics the night before her first day with them and it was a safety issue and I should have told her. WTF?

There is, of course, absolutely nothing I can do. I’m certainly not going to force her to take my kids for two weeks to honour our ‘contract’ when she’s behaving like this. I’m torn – I feel like there should be some sort of consequence, that I should at the very least give her an earful; but, there is nothing to be gained there.

So off I go to find a new caregiver. Again. I’ll at least have to take Tuesday, probably Thursday as well, off work because Beloved is in exam season. Thank small mercies that this happened now instead of in January, and that in a week or two at least he’ll be able to stay home with them full time until we find someone.

I told Tristan that Joanne couldn’t take care of kids anymore, and asked him if he’d rather go to a new caregiver or back to his old caregiver. At least I know his old caregiver loved both boys, even if I had some concerns about the other stuff and I was willing to eat whatever crow I had to and approach her again. But Tristan said he would like a new caregiver, bless his heart. How can I argue with that?

Oh, and remember the nursery school, the one I was so excited about? Yah, the chances of me actually being able to find someone who will shuttle Tristan to and from school and Simon to and from nursery school? What do you figure my odds are on that one?

Excuse me, I have to go start searching the daycare listings. Staring from scratch. Again.

Bad days

This is not the post I wrote today. I wrote two others at various points today, trying to relieve some of the pressure in my head. The first two are tucked away in the draft folders, too raw to be published. Hopefully, just getting them out of my head and into the computer is enough.

It hasn’t been the best day. It hasn’t been the best week. Matter of fact, we’re going on two weeks that I’d pretty much either do over or erase from memory.

When I went to see the doctor 10 days ago and she diagnosed the pneumonia, the symptom that was bothering me the most was not the cough, or the fever. It was a much less quantifiable, “I don’t feel like myself.” The antibiotics quelled the cough and broke the fever, but the emotional malaise lingers, amplified by the criticism and concerns raised by the caregiver.

I’m tired of listening to the various voices in my head. One of the other two posts I wrote today tried to capture the ongoing conversation – no, debate – in my head over the past three days. The voice of comfort tries to tell me I’m doing a good job, I have a great life and very little to complain about on a relative scale, and that this too shall pass. The voice of the critic is less charitable, and makes me feel inadequate and overwhelmed as a parent, as a wife, as an employee, as a person.

Overwhelmed. Inadequate.

Breath in, breath out. Try to find your bliss, try to find just a granule of peace to tide you over.

Right now, I can’t think of anything that would make me feel better, which is a kind of desolate place to be. Often, I’ll be able to cheer myself up with a meal at a favourite restaurant, or an afternoon of shopping indulgence, or just an hour with a bowl of chips and a good book. Meh. None of those things appeal to me.

The malaise coalesces every now and then into a flare. A flash of temper, a raised voice, tears. And then I feel bad, because my life really isn’t so bad and I don’t know what the hell has gotten into me. But the negativity is strong, and I look around and see faults everywhere. That was the other post I wrote, trying to capture my vacillating feelings about the boys right now. After the caregivers comments, I’m suddenly hyper-aware of their faults, of my failings. They ARE restless, and relentless. They DO need to learn to listen the first time. They DO talk back a lot, oh my god the arguing and bickering and complaining. Simon really is a handful right now, and I’m honestly out of ideas of how to discipline him. I know they’re just going through a phase right now, but their relentless testing feeds my growing ennui and I’m overwhelmed – with worry, with guilt, with anxiety. What if I am screwing this up? What if it’s too late? Why can’t I do this? Why is it so hard? Why is it so goddamn hard?

So I start to make plans, to compensate. I’ll make up charts with reward stickers for good behaviour, limit computer time, make myself more available to them. Except, I haven’t washed the floor in two weeks and the toilets in I don’t know how long and the grass in the backyard is nearly to my shins. And suddenly two days have gone by and I’ve been doing menial tasks all weekend with the voices arguing in my head and noticing every. little. thing the boys have done wrong (and, to their credit, a good number of the things they have done right) and I still have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’m not doing a good job anywhere in my life right now. And I just want that feeling to fuck right off because I like it much better when I’m happy and oblivious to the mess and the chaos and I wonder what that says about me.

Breath in, breath out.

I don’t know whether I want to publish this post or not. It seems to me I’ve been doing more than my share of whining lately, and I keep coming to you asking for your feedback, for your endorsement, for your support. That’s not what I want, not what I need. But maybe if I tell you that I’m having a hard time, it will make me feel better, and make it easier for me to not be having a hard time anymore.

Dangerous Book for Boys redux, now with more free books!

Did you think I forgot about the draw for the Dangerous Book for Boys, the one to compensate for the fact that Canadians couldn’t enter the Harper Collins contest? Of course I didn’t!

There were 22 comments on the thread as of Wednesday morning, one of which was me and one of which was a duplicate. I assigned everyone a number for the order in which their comment appeared and got totally sucked in playing with the Random Number Generator. Why I find random numbers so compulsively interesting is beyond me, but then, I also get lost playing in the thesaurus.

Anyway, twenty minutes later I remembered that I was there for a reason I was playing with the random numbers and got down to business. Since I couldn’t get hold of anyone from PriceWaterhouse to validate the contest results, you’ll have to rely on this screen capture and my word that the results are valid.

Congratulations to the 10th commenter and winner of the free book, Batman!

But wait! There’s more! I’m pleased to tell you that there is yet another chance to win your own free (and autographed!) copy of the Dangerous Book for Boys, courtesy of the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza. For today only, you can write a post and join the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza in support of the Dangerous Book for Boys, and everyone who submits their link to MotherTalk before midnight tonight (May 18) will be eligible for entry in the draw for the free book. Plus, you get to play along with a fun bunch of literate bloggers AND get some traffic to your blog AND maybe find some excellent new blogs to read. There’s nothing to lose! Full details are on the MotherTalk blog.

I was all ready to write a post today about raising ‘dangerous’ boys and how raising boys has changed my perspective on gender roles. After yesterday, though, I’m still feeling a little raw, and second-guessing whether my “boys will be boys” attitude is maybe a little too laissez-faire.

So instead, in this post that lacks any sort of structure whatsoever, I’ll turn over the microphone to you. Tell me what ‘dangerous’ means to you. Is it important for boys to be dangerous? Is it something you encourage, or something you repress? Does being a ‘dangerous’ boy somehow affect the sort of man he will become? Do girls need to be dangerous, too? Should we tolerate dangerous behaviour more from boys than from girls?

Speak, bloggy peeps! (And, if you decide to post about this as part of the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza, make sure you tell Miriam at MotherTalk so she can link back to you.)

Just when you thought the daycare thing was resolved…

Remember that new caregiver? The one that took me four months to find, the one I waited more than two months for the boys to start, the one who was ‘ideal’ and was going to help us send Simon to nursery school?

She wants to quit. Well, she has ‘serious reservations’ after spending two whole days with my boys. I could cry.

I knew Tuesday had been a rough day. Simon was upset (he cried for the best part of an hour after Beloved left) and he was a real handful after I brought him home. He simply didn’t handle the transition nearly as well as I had hoped and expected.

But this morning, Beloved and I were floored when the new caregiver said if she didn’t see some improvement by the end of the day today (only the second day she’s seen them), she might have to ‘reconsider.’ When I called her this morning, she had a laundry list of concerns, most of them boiling down to the boys being, well, boys. She felt they were not listening to her, were being too rambunctious, kept asking for TV and video games. She kept talking about how important it was to get a good ‘fit’.

I called again this afternoon, and while she had another laundry list of concerns, she’s given us a reprieve of sorts, saying she never makes a decision without thinking about it and that she would ‘see how it goes after the weekend.’ Not sure exactly what this means, except that I get to keep this gnawing lump of anxiety near to my heart for the duration of the long weekend now.

I’m trying not to be bitter, I really am. I get that she’s concerned because the boys aren’t listening to her as well as she’d like, but to me it’s her job to command that respect. They’re coming from a day care environment where they had too much freedom, in my opinion, which is why we changed in the first place. And while I’m the first to admit that my boys are not angels, I have a hard time swallowing the fact that they are the bad influence that she seems to be insinuating.

I could refute her criticisms and concerns on a point-by-point basis, but to me it basically boils down to the fact that they need to respect her authority and get used to her style – two things that it will take more than two days to resolve. I’m just flabbergasted that she’s being so quick to consider bailing out on me. While of course I would rather she be open with me from the start, I can’t help but think this is a huge overreaction on her part. I’m willing to listen to her concerns and to work on the behaviours that are most troubling to her (which seem to revolve around listening and helping to clean up), but it will still take me more than four days to get things turned around.

It’s hard not to take this whole thing personally. Aside from the nauseating idea of potentially losing the nursery school connection and having to start the whole day care search over again from scratch, I don’t take criticism well on the best of days – but I am especially thin-skinned when it comes to my boys, and my parenting skills.

I can’t help but compare this to when we got called in by Tristan’s teacher after only eight days last September. She too had concerns about Tristan’s behaviour that she wanted to bring to our attention – and we worked with her to improve the situation. The irony is that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he’s now one of her favourite students; she’s always very favourable to him now and she hasn’t expressed a single concern since then.

Bad enough this is undermining my confidence in my choice of a caregiver, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I’m one of those parents who are oblivious to the hellions they are raising. I just want to crawl under my desk and cry…

Birth of a hockey fan

So we’re not exactly sporty people. Beloved, bless his literate artsy heart, couldn’t care less about the difference between an infield fly and a hanging curveball. The athletic education of the boys has fallen largely to me, which, if you know me at all, is pretty darn funny. Pity my poor boys, who are just now learning how to catch and have yet to have their first experience standing on ice skates, let alone actually learning to skate.

But this exciting spring, with playoff fever spreading like malaria through the capital, I’ve taken it upon myself to teach them the finer points of bandwagon hockey fandom. I’m a professional in this particular sport. I can count on one hand the number of regular season hockey games I’ve watched in their entirety, but each year as the lilacs bloom I find myself glued to the screen, cheering on the home team. (In no small part, I’m sure, because in my heart Sens playoff hockey is hopelessly tangled with one of our best family memories.)

I’ve never lived in a city with a championship team before. I was a rabid Blue Jays fan in 1992 and 1993 when they won the World Series – I barely missed a single game of the entire 162 game regular season in 1992 – and when they won they weren’t just Toronto’s team but Canada’s team. But we were still five hours down the road from Toronto and although I made my way downtown to the massive victory party in the Byward Market when they won, it still wasn’t quite the same.

There’s something charming about how a winning home-town team brings the community together. The plethora of cars with Sens flag whipping in the wind, the home-made signs on lawns and windows, the otherwise staid civil servants wearing hockey jerseys over their business suits. The Sens are within a single victory of their first-ever Stanley Cup playoff in modern history; how could an irrepressible joiner like me resist feeding off of – and feeding in to – that energy?

A couple of weeks ago, when the Sens made the first round of the playoffs, I started talking to Tristan about hockey, and about the Sens. I knew his schoolmates would be talking hockey, and I wanted him to be able to join in the conversation. Yesterday, with the Eastern Conference final on the line, I asked they boys if they wanted to watch the game with me. (Simon used to be a Leafs fan, back in the day.) To my great entertainment, Tristan was beside himself with excitement, counting down the minutes to the puck drop.

We stood together in the living room, trying to sing along with the national anthem. Well, Tristan did a fine job singing along, but I could barely croak out the words around the lump of pride in my throat. The national anthem chokes me up at the best of times (I’m such a sentimental patriot), but standing there hand in hand with my boys, watching the Sens in front of the madly cheering hometown crowd, was just one of those moments.

The goal nine seconds into the game didn’t dampen Tristan’s enthusiasm in the least. He watched the first period with a rapt attention that surprised me, and in between muttering encouragement to the players on the screen he even composed a little song about the Sens winning. It was, in a word, adorable.

He only agreed to go to bed at the end of the first period after I promised to tell him the score as soon as he woke up the next morning. His disappointment at the loss was mollified by the promise of a daytime game on Saturday, one he could watch in its entirety.

Make room on the bandwagon – I’m off to see if I can find a Sens jersey, size extra-small.

My words are stuck

Even though I’m not a writer in the traditional definition of the word, I rely on the written word for my livelihood. I write communication strategies, news releases, web content, briefing notes and reports, among a long list of other things. My job is all about words.

The amount of finesse required and the level of care I take when stringing those words together varies day by day and product by product. If I’m writing e-mails all day long, not so much. But there are days when how I string those words together matters. Working for the government doesn’t give me a huge creative licence, but there is still room for artistry.

On the blog, I write every day. (Every damn day. It tires me out just thinking about it some times!) Even with blog, though, some days involve more effort and creativity than others. I’m not especially careful when I string together a meme, but I’ll often rework an anecdote for quite a while. The mechanics of good writing come naturally to me, but I like to pick at a first draft for at least a couple of minutes to reconsider the word choices and the rhythm and the resonance.

Lately, getting the words out has been a painful and difficult process. Whether I’m writing for work or for blog, for the past week or more the simple act of writing has been a struggle. Each sentence is an effort, wrested from some deep subconscious dungeon and dragged reluctantly to the light of day. Each paragraph is filled with false starts and abandoned phrases. My writing feels stilted and forced.

When it’s good, it’s very good. I love the joyous rush of being in the groove, of completely disengaging my brain from my furiously typing fingers and simply sitting back to marvel as the words assert themselves on the screen. I am my own biggest fan, and there are days when I go back and read some of the stuff that I’ve written and say, ‘Damn, woman! You can write!’ And then, of course, there are days like today when I look back at some of my finer writing and think, ‘That’s it, I’ve jumped the shark. I’ll never write that well again.’

It’s not a matter of being in a creative drought or lacking my muse; even when I know exactly what I want to say, the words themselves are the hinderance. Rather than flowing together, tumbling out in an enthusiastic and satisfying rush, the words are tangled and sticky and awkward, and each one has to be coaxed reluctantly onto the page. It’s exhausting.

Is there anything more excruciatingly boring than reading someone complain about how hard it is to string words together? Oh yes, definitely: writing about how hard it is to string words together.

P.S. On my screen, my sidebar seems to be taking a vacation in the sunny south. (Although it’s fine on the laptop at home.) I’m not sure why. It started doing that yesterday, but I haven’t added anything to it, nor do I have any content in the posts that would throw off the alignment. I’m hoping it fixes itself. Bad enough when the words are fighting back, but the technology is throwing a hissy fit, too. At this rate, I’ll be sending out blog posts via seminole semaphore signals by next week…

A new chapter in the caregiver saga

Today is the boys’ first day with their new caregiver. I think I can finally let go of this deep, anxious breath I’ve been holding for the past three months or so.

It’s been a melancholy couple of weeks, saying good-bye to our other care provider. She has been so gracious about the whole thing that I’ve been second-guessing myself for the last month since we told her that we would be switching. On the boys’ last day with her last week, she bought them each a little gift, and a little something for us, too, and she gave us a thank-you card thanking us for trusting her with our precious treasure. She’s a class act, that one.

I was in the middle of composing this post and about to note how well the boys are taking the transition when Beloved called and said Simon is now expressing anxiety about facing the new daycare by himself (Tristan will be in school this morning and joining Simon at lunch time.) My kids are generally pretty good with transition – much more so than me! – and I’m sure he’ll be fine once he gets there. I feel for him, though. Bobbie is the only caregiver he’s ever known, and even though we’ve spent a while with Joanne and her kids in the last little while getting to know them, change is always at least a little bit scary.

Tempering my guilty regret of the last few days has been exciting news from the new caregiver. When we first spoke, she had mentioned the fact that her three-year-old daughter would be attending nursery school in the fall, and if I wanted, she could bring Simon at the same time. I have always wanted to have the boys in some sort of preschool program, but up to now it has just been too logistically daunting. Last week, Joanne called and said that there was one space available in the afternoon class, if we wanted to register Simon.

I am absurdly excited about this, and jumped at the chance. If I could have, I would have registered Simon for JK this fall; I think he’s more than ready. He was nearly beside himself with excitement when I told him that in September, Tristan will be going to afternoon kindergarten and he’ll be going to his own big-boy school. Joanne said it’s an excellent program with arts and crafts, beginner science, music and – be still my heart – pageants. (I’ve been just a little bit disappointed by the lack of pageants during Tristan’s first year of school. Bring on the pageants!)

Now I’m all choked up at the idea of both of my boys being in school. What happened to my babies? Can we slow this whole thing down just a little bit? From soothers to school registration in the same week – I’m not ready!

1000 Islands, 1000 pictures

I remember back in the day, when a weekend away meant throwing a change of clothes in a bag and a stack of CDs into the front seat.

This is how we pack for a weekend at the cottage with kids:

It was an altogether lovely weekend to be outside. When we arrived, it was in the low 20s and humid, but the air became clear and cool overnight – perfect for campfires, but just a little too cool to take advantage of the campground’s inground pools and hot tub. The little cabin has a playground on one side and on the other side a lovely little rock outcrop, perfect for climbing and for admiring the giant trilliums.


The boys seemed to grow up before my eyes this weekend. They were able to play independently, running in and out of the cabin without overt supervision. They’re finally at an age where I don’t have to hover over them, fretting that they’ll slip on the rocks or fall off a climber. (It helped, of course, that the playground is easily visible from the cabin’s many windows, and that there was always a spare adult around to keep a benevolent eye out.)
There was a wagon ride, an ice-cream social, and a community hot-dog lunch. It’s really a lovely little KOA. I’m as impressed with them this year as I was last year.


I was struck by the friendliness of the children on the playground. (And boy, were there a lot of kids! I’m sure the campground was close to capacity, at least for trailer and RV spaces. It was still on the cool and windy side for tent camping.)

I loved sitting on the edge of the playground, watching Tristan and Simon play with the other kids and listening to the conversations going on. I worry sometimes about Tristan’s sociability, because he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends at school. But on this playground he was friendly and outgoing, and all the kids played together in one big gang. Tristan in particular seems drawn to the six-to-eight year old boy crowd, while Simon was a hit with the nine-to-twelve year old girl crowd. You’ve got to love a playground that comes with built-in babysitters!

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of the weekend’s other annual highlight, the family Texas Hold’em poker tournament. I really don’t know how the kids slept through the gales of laughter that reduced us to tears, gasping for breath. And for the second year in a row, my mother cleaned our collective clocks. She’s a shark, that one.

The best part? This is only the *beginning* of what promises to be a stellar summer.