Me Time

A book blew my mind recently. Books are great! I really should read more of them.

But, life with kids, right? It's a blur of cooking, finding creative ways to avoid cleaning, going to activities, helping with homework, and making it all disappear at the end of the day with wine and bad TV.

Anyway, back to the book. It was about Puritan family life in New England. (I was at my local library waiting for my kids to finish karate class. Selection was limited.)

I was struck by how much work those Puritan mommies did. Not just the running errands kind or the loading-things-into-machines-that-clean-them kind. I mean hard, physical labor. Planting, mending, keeping animals, churning butter, chopping wood, dragging poor quality water out of wells and boiling it to make it safe, cooking vats of stew over fires.

Of course, it's not news. Anyone who didn't sleep through social studies knows this. It's just that when you're a parent, you understand things in ways you never did before.

Like, why your mother drank.

Or how much work those Puritans--or any pioneers, for that matter--would have had to do to keep everyone fed, clothed, and mostly clean.

And I was also struck how many kids they had. As many as they could pop out within a lifetime. And guess what? It wasn't just to be fruitful an multiply. Most families wanted all those kids. No, it's not news. It's what small-scale agrarian societies do – because apparently kids can be helpful.

Between the cooking and the gardening and the scouring and the preserving and the birthing and the candle-making—not to mention the hours and hours of church—where was the Me Time for those moms?

I'd really like to believe that some of them sneaked away somewhere with a teacup-full of cider to have some “time with God.” And hey, maybe some of them did.

But I think their Me Time mostly came from living in small communities, with hardly any stuff, where you could go off and churn some butter if you needed some time alone. You didn't have to constantly supervise your kids. And you could rely on your helpful kids because it was fine to let 9-year-olds babysit six-year-olds, and six-year-olds care for two-year-olds. 

And those two-year-olds? You can bet they knew how to tend a fire properly.

Not my kids. My kids are like cute, disobedient pets. They keep rolling their eyes at my instructions. And when they do manage to do a job I sometimes doubt it's worth the $1.50 I promised them for it. They're lovely children, don't get me wrong. But as householders? Meh.

I know it's my fault. I haven't been a strict enough enforcer. I can barely enforce myself. Most of my efforts go into resenting housework and then writing about it--and even that's pretty limited. 

Finding ways to make kids do work is excruciating for me. Sure, they'll help me make banana bread or clean their room with me, but doing it on their own? It requires lectures on their changing responsibilities, job charts, stickers, keeping track, and all that planning and attention to detail.

I'd rather be churning butter.

Summer Camp

It's the dead of winter. So, time to look into summer camp! Other parents have remarked that it's early still to be thinking about camp season. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

Until recently, my husband and I couldn't decide where to send our soon-to-be-nine-year-old daughter for camp. 

"Send her to a Habonim camp!" said my dad.

When I was nine he sent me off to a Zionist youth camp. It was great! I loved the Israeli dancing, making new friends and the cute boys. I was completely oblivious to the politics, though.

Never questioned why we raised the Israeli flag every morning or sang Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem. Or why camp activities simulated kibbutz life: doing avodah (which on a kibbutz means agricultural work but at camp meant daily chores), Hebrew lessons, singing communist folk songs, intense political discussions, reenacting the Six Day War and the War of Independence, and camp “revolution," when the campers kicked out the counselors. 

That's what everyone did at camp, right?

It was only years later that a friend of mine, who had grown up near the camp, said she had "always thought it was a little cult-ish."

Not wanting to inflict the cult stigma on my own child, I figured we could be very Canadian and side-step the whole religious identity thing altogether.

My husband's camp sounded okay. Canoe-tripping camp, where my husband endured a variety of character-building activities, such as fleeing from bears, fighting off plagues of mosquitoes, eating cold beans from a can, starting a fire with wet wood and paddling upstream both ways in the rain.

It was a kind of enforced suffering for the noblesse oblige of Upper Canada, all done in the iconic landscapes painted by the Group of Seven. In other words, as religious as camp gets for WASPs.

When my husband tried to sell this camp to our daughter, her soft, pretty face crumpled in disappointment. “Okay,” she said, eyes downcast.

“But there are camps that have archery, Dad. And horseback riding, and climbing walls.”

“At tripping camp, you learn survival skills,” said my husband. “Navigation! How to build a fire! That other camp is like an amusement park.”

We almost had her. Our daughter, now only a little apprehensive about going to “Daddy's survival camp,” was starting to give in.

What we didn't anticipate? Miniature horses.

While we were looking at the web site of a camp my sister-in-law had once attended, my husband scoffed and pointed to the computer screen.

“Ha! Look at this,” he said. “Miniature horses, can you believe it?”

Our daughter's ears pricked up instantly. “Ponies?”

“No," said my husband quietly, instantly understanding his mistake. "Those--those really little ones." A listless look came over his face. A look that said, "I just promised my daughter a pony, now how do I take it away?" 

"It says here you can feed them," he said.

We were done. The price was about the same as the other camps, with just that one little thing—that miniature thing—that no one else had.

Next day, our daughter made a checklist of things she "really wanted" at camp. Just to help us make our decision. 

Top of her list? Miniature horses.

It was a genius move on the part of the camp. 

Can't you just picture the decision happening? Some eco-friendly board room, somewhere north of Toronto, by a lake. A couple of administrators sit around with the head counselor, scratching their heads, coffee getting cold.

“Our numbers are dwindling. We just can't compete.”

“We're an established camp, damn it! Think of our name! Think of our history. We've gotta do something!”

They work through the various options: Bouncy castle? Too young. Trampoline? Hello, head injuries! Ferris wheel? Too gaudy, and you need carnies to run it. Wouldn't go over well with the parents.

Things are looking a little desperate, until suddenly, a fist slams down on the reclaimed-wood table. “I've got it, yes! Miniature horses! Damn, I'm good. We will crush the competition!”

And they certainly did.

Spoiling the Baby

I know I've written about taking my son to Starbucks before. It's kind of become a big part of my life. It's just that I have this time lag? After I put my girls on the school bus in the morning, I have half an hour to kill until my son's kindergarten starts.

That 30 minutes is particularly excruciating if it's winter—since we have to remain outside until the bell goes—or if my son wants to play Teletubbies (a tedious game: he pretends to be Noo-Noo the vacuum cleaner so he can speak only in slurping sounds, which I then have to decipher).

Starbucks usually wins out. Or Second Cup. Or Tim Horton's.

My son has become quite the connoisseur, actually. He's not a fan of Starbucks because “it's too fah, too cwowded and da whip cweam is too small.”

Second Cup is his favorite, because the women who work the morning shift give him mountains of whipped cream with chocolate shavings on top. And they have the best window for playing “I spy.”

Tim Horton's also has a good “I Spy” window, but no whipped cream.

After two or three days in a row of hot chocolates--when, belly bursting with warm, sugary milk, chocolate shavings and whipped cream--he flops over a chair and says, “I need a nap,” and I think maybe all that sugar in the morning isn't such a good thing.

The next day, when he asks to for hot chocolate again, I stand resolute. 

“We really need to watch your whipped cream intake, son,” I say, feeling like a much more responsible parent.

“OK, Mom,” he says. “Let's go to Tim Horton's.”

Rumble in the School Parking Lot Jungle

Yesterday I hit a new personal low. I found myself arguing with the parking lot attendant at my son's school. 

It wasn't just any parking lot attendant. This woman's job is to make sure the buses for the kids with disabilities can get through.

I was having a particularly angry day. I was mad at my husband for something from the day before. Dishes, garbage, I can't remember. Something had needed doing and he hadn't done it. He had sat with the kids and played games on the Playbook instead. He just didn't care!

So I was still stoking the embers of my anger from the day before. Not sure why. To top it off, it was cold, windy and rainy. I didn't get much work done. I was coming down with a cold. 

I decided to head to school an hour before pick-up time. If I couldn't be productive I could at least secure a parking spot. Besides, the lot would be crowded later because of the weather.

But when I got there, the lot was already full.

I decided to park on the boundary between the regular parking and the lane where the buses come to pick up the students with wheelchairs, leg braces, prosthetic limbs and all the other equipment our kids think is totally cool.

(Our four-year-old son's latest song is called “My Wheelchair Does Loop-de-Loops” and is a lengthy ballad featuring a wheelchair with lots of buttons and turbo power.)

Anyway, back to the school, where I had parked in a dubious spot, at 3 p.m. Dismissal is 3:25, and a bit earlier for the handicapped students. 

I sat in the car and read my book. Around 3:15, something caught my eye. I looked up and saw a teenaged girl with cerebral palsy wheeling back and forth in the school yard.

“Good for her,” I thought. “She has a non-motorized wheelchair. So she can get her exercise.” Then another thought briefly occurred to me: maybe I was becoming an asshole without even knowing it. But I swept the thought away.

The girl kept wheeling back and forth, back and forth, and it slowly dawned on me that she might be trying to get out of the school yard—but my minivan was blocking the exit.

I looked out my front windshield and saw the parking attendant was already on the case, jaw steeled, making her way toward me.

“I can move, I can move!” I said. “But where should I go?”

Why? Why did I ask her that? She's not a valet. She's there to make sure kids with disabilities get onto their bus safely.

“Look, I got four buses lined up here,” said the attendant. I glanced behind me and cringed. I was an asshole. I was blocking four buses. For kids. With disabilities. And I didn't even apologize. I just kind of crumpled into myself and got angrier.

“I think there are a lot of people who park here who shouldn't be in this lot!” I blurted. She gave me a look that said, “That would be you!” But of course I was referring to the other assholes, people who park in our school lot to go to the nearby gym or shoe store.

I skulked away, full of directionless rage.

Then it hit me. That lesson my husband keeps trying to teach me. Inadvertently of course. By example. By doing things like playing on the Playbook when he should be emptying the recycling. What's the big deal? It's only parking. So what if I get a ticket for parking on the street this time? Maybe walk next time. Whatever. Sometimes to be better moms, we need to think like dads, and just care less.

Runaway Hamster

Our kids have nagged us for years to get a pet. Dog, cat, bird, goldfish. They don't care.

I keep trying to tell them I can barely handle the responsibility of three kids, let alone another creature in the house and all the demands it will bring. 

Blank stares. That's what I get from them.

Our eldest got a Fur Real friend one Christmas. This thing is a kind of robot cat. It has life-like fur and it responds when you pat it. It cranes its mechanized neck to look you in the eye and meow or purr. Leave it on and it will be silent for hours, meowing only when you walk by or come into the room. Eerie as fuck.

The next pets we had were Zhu Zhu pets—colorful toy hamsters which zoom around erratically, bump up against walls, chirp, sigh, and make silly noises. They have little toy motorcycles or carriages or strollers with even tinier baby hamsters in diapers to push around.

But as all toy pets are, Zhu Zhu pets were mildly depressing. At the time the robot cat came into our home--about two years ago--we had a nanny who told me it was a sin to build fake cats and hamsters. Mind you, as a kid back home in Morocco, she once hung a cat by its leg on her clothesline—but that was all in good fun.

Anyway, I started to understand her reasoning—about the fake cat being a sin, not about stringing up real cats.

Mother Nature really is best at constructing creatures. For one thing, she doesn't build them wearing tiny motorcycle helmets or diapers. Maybe it was time for a real pet.

Then, serendipity. While at a friend's one night, I met a woman who was trying to get rid of her kids' hamster cage.

“You can have it,” she said, “for free!” I swear there was a wild gleam in her eye.

I'd probably had a few too many glasses of wine. A hamster seemed like a great idea.

She was so excited to pass on this cage that she drove it to me all the way from the East end of town.

The kids too, were excited. They jumped up and down, discussed names. It was around Christmas time. We all piled into PetSmart together, and the kids chose their hamster. A caramel colored one with white spots.

“$12.99,” said my husband when he saw the price tag. “No vet bills.” We all left smiling. 

It was a girl hamster. They called her Butterscotch.

Butterscotch was pretty cute, even I had to admit. Until she just about bit off the top of our 5-year-old daughter's finger. 

"I never want to see her again!" screamed my daughter, blood from her finger dripping onto the bathroom floor. This was a week after bringing her home.

But soon enough, the kids all forgave her and loved her again. Mostly they pinned dress-up fantasies on her. "Wouldn't she look cute in a wedding dress?" one kid said. "Imagine if they made tiny bicycles for hamsters," said another.

A hamster's life is a pretty sad state. Those things are stuck in a cage that isn't always as clean as it should be, with only a precious hour or two outside each day. They gotta use that little wheel for exercise. Same food day after day. As a housewife, I felt a certain kinship with her.

Butterscotch figured out how to escape from her cage. The first couple of times it was kind of fun trying to find her, like a treasure hunt.

After one of her wild nights of freedom, we found her in a corner of the basement bathroom. She was curled up in a ball in her adorable, makeshift nest of granola bar crumbs, a couple of Cheerios, a cherry pit, some bits of cellophane, dryer lint, and a tiny plastic Kinder Toy. Yeah, you could say our basement was in need of a good vacuuming.

We put a twist-tie on her door to lock her in. She figured out how to chew through the twist-tie, and she has been gone for two days now.

We saw her once or twice, a quick little ball of fluff skittering by. Who knows where she is. In the wall, in the couch, under the fridge. My hope is that she escaped out into the great beyond of back yard, and will live out a rich and fulfilling 48 hours before a cat spots her.

Still, it's a little sad when our four-year-old son asks, “Mom, when's Butterscotch coming home?”

A friend of mine, consoling me over Facebook in his tough-love way, said it best: Butterscotch will come home when Butterscotch feels like it.

Mother's Little Helper

Many of us moms have our poison. No secret there!

A good friend of mine—it's a friend, it's not me— has little cigarette cases of pot stashed all over her house. Yet another formed a private, moms-only stoner yoga group. Other moms become masters of entertaining so they can regularly imbibe. Some don't even bother with the entertaining bit.

These are all great options, but in my opinion, nothing beats a Claritin high.

The active ingredients are loratadine and pseudoephedrine. I'm not sure if it's just the pseudoephedrine that makes it like over-the-counter speed, or if it's the one-two combo.

All I can say is, that is some good shit. And it's legal! And you can be on it all day and no one will notice!

I can focus, stay on-task. Gone is the semi-depression, the feelings of being overwhelmed by menial tasks, for not doing more with my life, for allowing myself to sink into an endless spiral of laundry, dishes, and groceries. Gone is the guilt when I ignore my kids in favor of doing chores.

On Claritin, stuff gets done.

In my normal state of mind, I often set a timer to do tasks so I don't get sidetracked. Yes, it is that bad. Fifteen minutes, say, to do the dishes and wipe the counter tops.

But then the inevitable distractions pile up—kids, chocolate, really important Facebook updates from my hilarious friends. Suddenly it's half an hour later, my timer went off long ago, and in the sink is a cold, murky pool filled with dishes.

With Claritin, I ignore all distractions, zip through the dishes in the target time or less, scrub the sink until it shines, wipe down counter tops, and suddenly know what to do with all the kitchen flotsam—plastic lids with no bottoms, jars with no lids, tiny bits of Playmobil—that can migrate around the kitchen for weeks. Garbage! All of it!

The meds are so helpful that I once asked my doctor if I could be on them permanently.

“You know, all year?” I said. “Even when I don't have allergies. They just make me feel...normal.”

She scrutinized me for a moment. It looked like she might push a big, red panic button under her desk.

“Nooo,” she finally said, using a tone fit for small children, dogs and the mentally unstable. “You really can't do that.”

Allergy season is waning now for me. It was about a week ago that I last took Claritin. Extra-Strength Non-Drowsy plus two espressos. I was pushing the margin. Feeling a little intense. Sweating a lot.

It's a bit of a blur now but I know what I accomplished from what the place looked like later that day. Closet cleared. Old bills shredded. Kitchen spotless. I killed it.

“Did the cleaning lady come?” asked my eldest when she came home from school later that day. We haven't had a cleaning lady in two years.

“No honey,” I said. “Mommy did it!”

She eyed me suspiciously, and went on her way.

Whining

At the beginning of the school year—kindergarten for one, grade 2 for the other—my girls used to set their own alarm clocks, get into their clothes, and go down for breakfast on their own.

Sometime during the dark winter months, their enthusiasm waned. They seemed to understand something about the bleakness of routine.

“Monday again,” I could almost hear them saying, with all the cynicism of a civil servant. If they could have taken a 30-minute coffee break at school, they would have. They began sleeping through their alarms, then not setting them at all. 

“School is great!” I tried saying one morning. “You're lucky to be able to go! Do you know that just 100 years ago, many children your age had to go to work to help their families? In Victorian England, kids used to work in factories from morning to night. They used to fall asleep on the job because their shifts were so long. They were often freezing cold where they worked. Sometimes the machines they worked on were hosed down with water, and the kids got hosed down too!”

“They got sprayed with a hose?” one daughter said.

“Fun!” said the other. They looked at each other and giggled at the thought. Probably they were picturing Victorian factories as places with lots of awesome steam engines and a Wet Banana.

I had to face it. They just didn't care about school. Sure, it was fine once they were there. But it was the getting there that was the trouble.

There began a slow erosion of all the good habits I thought were firmly established.

First they got cranky over spilling breakfast cereal to the point where they declared they couldn't pour it for themselves anymore. 

No, it wasn't as clear-cut as a declaration. It wasn't simply, “I can't do this, Mum.” It was, “I caaaaan't doooo iiiiiit,” in those little high-pitched drill voices.

Whining. Times three. Arms limp and uncooperative at their sides, eyes downcast, faces long with disappointment.

Then the oldest one rebelled against oatmeal, "It's just so musheeeee." So they all wouldn't eat it.

Next thing I knew, I was dragging each one of them out of bed, choosing their clothes, pouring their cereal and milk to a morning chorus of, "I hate schoooool," and "Why do I haaaave to go?" It was a full-on regression. My low point was making pancakes on a weekday morning to cheer them up. I even gave them extra maple syrup when they asked.

I'm not sure how it happened. It was all very subversive. But somewhere along the way I lost control of mornings and became a sort of reluctant maid.

Actually, I do know how it happened. It was the power of whining. I would do anything to avoid it. Scoff all you like, but think back to the last time you called a friend who had kids whining in the background. Did you want to stay on the phone and chat?

I'm still choosing outfits for the eight-year-old daughter. The last time I did it I got something wrong.

“Why didn't you bring me socks?!” she shouted indignantly.

I threw a pair of socks at her and thought, “I reeeeally shouldn't be doing this. This is baaaad parenting.” Even my own thoughts were whining at me.

“Not those ones!” she said, deeply offended by the striped socks I'd picked out.

I went into the middle daughter's room.

“I need tiiiights,” she whined. The temperature was close to 24 C at 7 a.m. and the high was going to be 30.

“You don't need tights today,” I said.

“But I'm cooold, Mama.” I went to the basement and got her tights out of the dryer.

I thought, “So this is what it is to crack up.” I just couldn't take the whining anymore. I would do anything to stop it. Give them candy, buy bubble gum. Pay them $5 to clean up their rooms. Let them off the hook when they whined that it was their sister who had messed up their room. Somehow give them money anyway. If they asked me in that voice to get a pony for the back yard, I probably would. They had won.

“Maybe they could kill me,” was my fleeting, early morning, pre-coffee thought yesterday. With that whine, anything seemed possible.“Nah,” I said to myself. But I knew I had to regain control of mornings.

I stumbled down the stairs, and prepared a full-court press against the kids. My only defense against the whine was the angry lecture.

"You kids need to learn responsibility," I began, pious finger raised. But I stopped short.

It was a miracle.

The girls had had the wherewithal to sleep in their clothes and woke up fully dressed. The boy, at just-four, was busy putting on socks with great effort, like an old man. It was the final touch on his outfit. Every single item including underwear was either inside out or backwards. I reveled in the fact that there were no kids to dress, and thus no whining for the moment, and left him alone.