Where do I even begin, dear readers?
How about with the basic grammatical convention of only using capital letters to begin a sentence or to demarcate proper nouns? Uppercase letters are not sprinkles. You don’t scatter them willy-nilly throughout your sentences.
There’s a minor spelling error. “Maks” should obviously be “makes.” No biggie. Proofreading is clearly for schmucks.
Have I ever got the perfect Mother’s Day wish list for all you mommies out there! Let’s make this Mother’s Day, or, as we like to call it, Mommy’s Special Day, the best ever. Mommy, mommy, mommy!
I let the kids watch the first period of the Leaf’s game before bed last night. And really, no child should have been exposed to the carnage that was the second period, so it was for the best.
At some point, a Walmart commercial advertising their Mom of the Year contest came on. They were both immediately drawn in the way they always are whenever advertisers and marketers are able to weave their way past all the screens I set up and burrow into their impressionable minds.
As the commercial went on to explain that Walmart wants people to nominate someone they think should win Mom of the Year, Colum’s eyes got wider and wider. He turned to me and his face lit up in a giant, gap-toothed grin.
“You should enter that contest!” he said.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’m really a good enough mom to win Mom of the Year,” I said.
Now he was standing up, smiling and beaming. “Yes you are!” he said.
He came over and threw his gangly limbs around me in a hug and then Irene said, “Yeah!” and piled on.
And that’s the story of how a stupid Walmart commercial made me day.
A reporter from the Toronto Star interviewed me a couple weeks ago for a story about mom bloggers and Mother’s Day. The story was printed on Friday and it’s a pretty innocuous Q and A piece with four Toronto-area bloggers. But this is how I’m introduced:
Rebecca Cuneo Keenan, a 34-year old stay-at-home mom, blogs about motherhood at Playground Confidential.
I’m the only blogger who is described as a stay-at-home mom even though I did talk about the other freelance writing I do in addition to blogging. The reporter even asked me about being a stay-at-home mom and I launched into a spiel about how I don’t think I know any stay-at-home moms. There are some, I’m sure, but everyone I know who is at home is working some kind of side angle. I said, paraphrasing myself, that, “It’s less about staying at home and more about trying to work in some flexibility.”
This article in The Star isn’t a big deal and I’m not actually upset or put off. But I can’t help but feel like my childcare costs are unnecessarily high for a stay-at-home mom. I mean, I would have booked a pedicure if I knew I didn’t have to work.
The truth is that I didn’t come right out and say, no, that’s not right, I’m a “work-from-home mom,” like Lena did. I didn’t clarify that I’m only home with the kids part-time or that I’d really rather be described as a writer.
Why not?
Partly because I was being interviewed as a mom blogger. Mom blogging, in fact, has been a great platform for my writing and has helped me secure a lot of other, non-blogging work. (See this Mom-101 post for an excellent discussion of what kinds of doors blogging can open.) Insofar as this was an interview with mom bloggers about Mother’s Day, I didn’t want to diminish the fact of my motherhood. I am home with my kids a lot. I write about being home with my kids and I identify, at least in part, as a mom blogger. Sure, fine.
But I also can’t help but feel like an impostor. Does the fact that I work from home, with only part-time childcare, around nap schedules, late into the night and on weekends somehow make me less of a professional? Is there a reason someone who knows that I maintain a blog and write for other publications still calls me a stay-at-home mom? I feel like I’m just a mom who is managing to do this cute little writing thing on the side and that’s nice dear.
So the question remains. What exactly is a stay-at-home mom? Do I qualify? And if I do, why does the term rub me the wrong way? Not that there’s anything wrong with it!
I’ve talked about this before on the blog and on Facebook. I never know what to say when people ask if I work outside the home. I mean, no, I work from my basement for the most part. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean to ask if I do other work than (the all-consuming and exhausting, yes) job of raising my three kids? I do. But is there a threshold where one crosses over from stay-at-home to work-at-home to plain old working? Is it hours logged? Or number of invoices? Or how much I get paid?
This much I know. For four months, when Colum was just over a year, after my mat leave ended and before I picked up a couple serving shifts, I earned no money. Other than that, I have always contributed a part-time income to the household. You know, mad money! Like the kind you use to buy groceries and shoes for your kids and to pay for hockey, swimming, t-ball, chess club and piano.
I also know that I don’t work full-time. I did hold a proper office job for a brief stint right before Irene was born and I still fantasize about those peaceful lunch breaks. Notwithstanding the lunches, though, working part-time from home is definitely not nearly as demanding (on the work-for-pay side of things) as a full-time position outside of the home. I get that. But isn’t it still work?
It’s hard for any parent who is home with the kids, fitting in work where they can and trying to make things happen. But I also don’t think anyone called my dad a “stay-at-home” when he was our primary caregiver and writing his PhD dissertation. Members of our working class family might not have understood exactly what it was that he was doing but they were pretty sure it didn’t involve homemade bread and paper mache crafts.
The image of a housewife or stay-at-home mom is still culturally ingrained. And like the off-the-mark description of Rebecca Woolf and her blog Girls Gone Child in the New York magazine Retro Wife article illustrates, mom bloggers are even harder to figure out. Woolf is obviously a full-time working mom with a nanny and a top-ranked blog and a gig with HGTV. But because she blogs about motherhood, because she documents the precious moments of her children’s lives, she is depicted as a throw back housewife.
Let me say this. No blog that is worth mentioning is mainstream media is going to be written by a stay-at-home mom.
There are blogs that are merely hobbies, for sure, and they can also be lovely and brilliant. (Or, as often as not, they are unbearably self-involved, meandering and boring.) But they are inevitably intermittent or short-lived. Nobody sits down three to five times a week for years on end to write consistently top quality posts if they are not treating it like a job.
I write something every day. These days, I typically publish three or four posts on this blog and write one or two op-ed posts on a wide range of topics for iVillage.ca every week. I also like to have at least one other freelance project on the go for Today’s Parent or some other publication. Then I have the entire other job of dealing with the administrative and technical tasks that are part of running your own blog and freelance writing business. I also attend PR events when they are relevant, spend hours scouring the internet for relevant topics and attend “mommy” business trips (aka blogging conferences).
So what do you think? I guess I can start losing the stay-at-home descriptor. Fair enough?
This weekend is it.
Toronto’s High Park cherry blossoms are expected to be in bloom and will last for about a week. Most of the trees were a planted as a gift from Japan’s Sakura project in 2001. That explains the frenzy around the blossoms in recent years after I’d never heard of them for most of my life. (Leave the car at home, or at least a couple blocks away from the park, if you do go this year because parking is impossible.)
There is a tradition of picnicking under the blossoming cherry trees in Japan that has spread to North America (and wherever you might find the trees, I imagine). If you’re not in Toronto, there’s still a good chance there are some of these cherry trees near you. The timing of the blossoms changes, however, from year to year and from place to place according to the weather, so you may have already missed your chance for this year.
But High Park goes crazy for these blossoming trees. Last year was the first time we visited them and it blew my mind. I expected a few pretty trees, but there was a whole surreal vibe going on. Hundreds of people were walking around. There were dozens of picnics, hammocks, musicians, dancers, drum circles and the like. It was a total trip.
We went in the evening, just before sunset, and it was simply magical.
Here’s a map that shows you where they are in the park.
I don’t usually do mushy birthday posts on here, preferring instead to publicly recount my humiliations and catastrophes, I guess. But Colum just turned seven and something weird keeps happening in my chest. It’s like a squeezing sensation that’s accompanied by a lump rising up in my throat and suddenly my eyes get all wet.
What is it about seven that feels so different?
It’s his second season of t-ball. He’s rounding the bend on Grade One. Next fall he’ll be in an older hockey division. He told me that even though he still likes Dora okay, other kids in his class don’t and he gets that he’s almost too old for it. (Not that he’d ever watch anything but sports and Power Ranger reruns anyway if it weren’t for his sisters.)
He’ll reluctantly hold my hand crossing busy streets but pulls away as soon as we reach the other side. He is about to learn to tie his own shoes and ride a two wheeler, I swear! (He’s more than ready, but someone has been too busy to properly teach him.) He pours his own milk and throws his clothes in a heap on the floor just like his dad does. Sniff.
He’s not little anymore is the thing. Seven feels like the threshold between little kid and big kid. He’s still a kid, of course. He still needs supervision and help and prodding, and he’s not yet completely and utterly humiliated by my presence. (I am working on it!)
But I can’t easily pick him up anymore. He spends much more time apart from me than he does with me. His French is already better than mine after two years of French Immersion and he definitely knows way more about Star Wars than I ever will.
In many ways these next few years will be even better. Not being needed as much (or in such a time-consuming way) is liberating. He’s great company and bedtime reading is so much better than it used to be. No offense, Goodnight Moon. He’ll become ever more independent and responsible and is already able to help out with his little sisters.
It’s a good thing, I know. But if the past seven years have gone by in a blur, can you imagine the next seven years? By this time next week, he’ll be 14 years old and his voice will be changing and he’ll be the one who can pick me up.
Oh dear. Now the wetness from my eyes has spilled down my face. I’m okay. I’m okay.
I just need to remember not to wish away any more moments. They are fleeting enough as it is.
I was stretched out on the couch with a cup of herbal tea Sunday night. I was going to watch the new episode of Mad Men and then head to bed when it was over at 11pm. Early for me. Ed paused to say goodnight and I stopped him to say, “Thank you. Thank you for this weekend.”
He looked confused. I could see him mentally thumbing through the weekend’s activities: nursing one last kid through the final stages of a stomach bug, bickering about housework, writing up a new list of chores for us to ignore, grocery shopping, the tyke hockey finals, brunch with his mom, a trip to Canadian Tire for t-ball gear and a scooter, cleaning up the yard a bit, burgers for Sunday dinner, kiddie bath and bedtime. Pretty uneventful, all in all, and I was damned happy for it.
Because two nights earlier I was brought to tears trying to cook chili for dinner while all of the children ran around screaming like banshees and time marched mercilessly on.
You know how everyone tells you to take time for yourself? To make sure your basic needs are taken care of so you’ll have more to give? Yadda yadda yadda. Whatever, I always thought, I have super endurance powers. I don’t need sleep.
I could drive the entire five hours from Ottawa to Toronto while Ed naps because he needs to rest. I could then stay up late writing a well-received post that I was also vilified for because I was too bleary-eyed to properly consider how people might feel. I could wake up early and spend my morning’s worth of paid childcare dealing with that flack and thus have to stay up late again to catch up on work. I could then squeeze a haircut into my childcare window so I might look half-decent for a meeting with a Toronto Star photographer and then realize at the last minute that I don’t have the car key to drop off the kids at my parents and have to walk the girls to the bus stop to get Colum and frantically text the photographer and my dad and figure out how I’m going to make it there.
I could pretty much run on adrenaline for an entire week, I figured, trying to juggle a million different responsibilities and look good doing it. New haircut!
So there I was trying to defrost ground beef at 5:45pm because some kid asked for chili last week and dammit, I should be making more home cooked meals, what’s wrong with me, why am I so lazy? And the kitchen was a disaster zone and I kept yelling for Colum to go upstairs and do his homework and Irene was crying about wanting more TV and the toddler was running around wreaking toddler havoc and the ground beef wouldn’t cook fast enough and I couldn’t even get the cutting board washed to chop up the cauliflower I always add and the dishwasher needed to be emptied and filled and I was tripping over toys and papers and play jewelry and stray socks and odd rain boots and I said, “NO, YOU CAN’T PLAY WITH THE TABLET.”
My brain was running at some souped-up, caffeine-addled frantic speed and all the things I’ve ever wanted to get done kept looping through with the utmost urgency. Emails to write, parties to plan, shopping to do, bills to pay, posts and stories and novels to write, laundry, dishes, toys, window washing, gardening, home renos, baseball games, swimming lessons, book proposals, grocery shopping, pest control, taxes, homework and cooking dinner. Why would it not cook?!
I was sobbing over the stove.
Mercifully, Ed came home then. He kept the kids away while I finished dinner. I served it two hours after I started, at 7:45 pm, only 15 minutes before kiddie bedtime. And then I left the room, went upstairs and passed out.
I slept. I slept and I slept and I woke up when Irene threw up in bed and changed her sheets and brought her a bowl and went back and slept some more. It was wonderful.
It turns out I’m not supermom after all. I think I’ll try to remember this for a couple weeks.
We were on the road yesterday when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. Ed learned about it on Twitter at a rest stop and then we caught the odd update on the radio as I drove home to Toronto from Ottawa. It felt strange to be so disconnected in the midst of such of a scary tragedy. I’ve gotten used to immediately tuning in to Twitter to see the reactions or, more often than not, learning about the news on Twitter itself. But in a way it was nice. It was nice to be able to dwell on the enormity of the events quietly with my family. (Whispering to Ed while the kids babbled obliviously in the backseat.) It was nice not to have to wade through all the knee-jerk editorializing of every person I’ve ever connected with. It was sad and lonely and it felt right.
Alas, we arrived home.
Checking in with Facebook I found this thread on a private group for Canadian bloggers that I belong to.
Update: Members of the Facebook group have asked that I remove a screenshot of the conversation (although identities were protected). I hadn’t considered that I may have been breaching anyone’s privacy and I apologize.
So, in a nutshell, someone posted the following suggestion: “If any of you run automated tweets/updates, you may want to consider turning them off out of respect for the Boston tragedy.” There were four or five replies right away that suggested they didn’t see any reason to stop auto tweets.
A simple and courteous reminder to think about any automated tweets you may have going out was met with defensiveness and disdain. OMG, they basically said, how are we supposed to wade through the ceaseless string of tragedies and know when to stop tweeting about our toothpaste giveaways? The show must go on!
It was a consensus with the exception of the person who posted the original question and continued to stick to her guns and the eminently reasonable and ethically astute Emma Willer, who said:
Why would you delete the thread? This is an interesting conversation to have. Do you proceed with scheduled tweets about funny cat photos and the latest cereal brand when something kind of bad is consuming people’s thoughts? I can see both sides of the debate. I might want to click on the cat photos as a distraction. But a twitter party about cereal would really bug me right now. Debate is healthy. Different approaches in these circumstances are interesting.
It’s too much to ask, it doesn’t matter and who’s to say that one tragedy is worse than another anyway? That was the basic sentiment.
So of course I had to chime in:
That really got them going. Unfortunately, now backs were up against walls and chips firmly planted on shoulders. Everyone dug into their position and it didn’t take long for people to start crying about being judged and wondering why we don’t just support one another. (Even though the original post was just as helpful and supportive a piece of advice as I could ever hope to get.)
Finally, Laura O’Rourke of Mommy Miracles chimed in with the perfect balance of reason and diplomacy. She said what I should have said:
Because here’s the takeaway.
It is crass to knowingly continue to promote irrelevant content in the wake of a tragedy, especially sponsored content and branded Twitter parties. It is off-putting and makes you look bad even if it was an oversight. In fact, there is a very good case to be made against automating any social media content for this very reason.
Tragedies that happen in our own backyards are going to hit closer to home than those that happen across the world. Our social media backyards are bigger than ever, but there are still cultural ties that bind our networks. These deaths are not more important per se than those of children in war-torn countries, but we care about them more. They could have been us. And the socio-political implications of terrorist attacks in the United States scare me more than those happening in the Middle East (even though I’m Canadian). They just do.
If you are not sure if a given tragedy is important enough to cancel a Twitter party (and I do understand that a lot of work and planning go into organinzing a successful one) or to suspend your auto tweets, then just look at your own feed. Take the temperature of your network because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if it feels wrong to you. What matters is that it feels wrong to others.
THAT’s what is going to make you look like an asshole.
I’m not sure if you heard, but we didn’t have cable for a long time. We went over four years without cable until finally my husband caved we decided as a family that we would really like to be able to watch sports again. So up until a few weeks ago my children have been utterly deprived, only having TVO and whatever DVDs we got from the discount bin to choose from. They are only now starting to realize how deprived they were, gorging on countless cable channels and On Demand programs and Netflix until I turn it all off and they are forced to contend with the bleak reality of life. Thus is the fate of mankind … Ahem, kiddie TV, right.
We attended the launch of The WotWots new DVD recently and they were YET AGAIN reminded of how deprived they were. Spotty and Dotty WotWot are utterly endearing aliens who marvel at all the discoveries they find here on earth. It’s actually a very charming show and all of my kids (even the one who should be too old for it) really enjoy it. Mary was totally engrossed. Finally, something that will hold her attention for fifteen minutes while I finish dinner! And Irene was over the moon about the whole experience.
Of course, you probably already know all about this because you have cable and catch these guys on Treehouse all the time. But just in case you don’t! Or if you ever want to put on something you can feel good about, take on a road trip or bring to Grandma’s … Then WIN both of The WotWots DVDs right here on this blog. (Or, you know, buy them for a reasonable price, but that’s not as exciting.) (But they’re only going to be available in stores for another couple weeks, so don’t waffle about it too long either.)
Contest closes Friday, April 19 at 11:59pm. Canada only.
Mary had her 18-month check up last week and other than the frenzied car trip through rush hour traffic that had us arriving a full 30 minutes late and the frantic series of phone calls I made to make sure someone would be able to pick Irene up at the school bus, it was pretty uneventful. Her height, weight and development checked out okay and she took her shot fairly well.
So when she woke up with a fever the next morning, I was pretty sure that’s all it was — a side effect from her vaccination. When she brought up a thin dribble of milk at breakfast I still thought it was because of her needle. She’s not really sick, I thought, but I’ll keep her home anyway because she’s pretty tired and clingy.
Needing a refill on my morning coffee, I went into the kitchen to rinse out my mug. I moved a pot from the night before aside and found a DEAD MOUSE lying in the sink. I repeat, there was a dead mouse in my sink, wallowing in all his germ-laden lifelessness. Yes, I screamed. I’m pretty sure I did a quick tiptoe rendition of the River Dance, too.
I decided to skip the rinse, go directly for the coffee refill and get myself and my fevered toddler out of the kitchen pronto. I gave my heebie jeebies further outlet on Twitter with an excessive use of all caps and OMGs. (Sorry about that.) How could I even begin dealing with the dead rodent in my kitchen sink with a clingy toddler and a kindergarten kid due home before long.
Then I did what I always do when the going gets rough. I resolved to get take out.
I put Mary in the carrier and headed out to pick up Irene. It was actually a lovely day and we strolled along Dundas, deciding to stop in at a little cafe. All Irene wanted was a bagel with cream cheese, so I ordered one figuring we’d sit near the window and she could tell me about her day.
I was chatting with the owner of the cafe whose children go to school with my kids when suddenly Mary threw up a little. “Oh my,” I said. I took a couple napkins and dabbed at her face and at the small stain on the carrier.
Then she threw up again.
I grabbed more napkins. Again, she threw up. Now she was hurling vast quantities of chunky and sour puke all over my coat and her own and down our shirts. The owner handed me a roll of industrial strength paper towel and I did my best to get up the worst of it. Miraculously none of it got on the floor. It all landed on us.
I opted to take the bagel to go at this point. I still feel good about that call. We walked back home, enjoying the bright sunshine and the warm vomit nestled within my cleavage.
Post script:
I did finally dispose of the mouse that afternoon using a foam coffee cup, a paper bag and a sophisticated scoop and bag system. It’s little grey body was already stiff, the sight of it’s tiny little whiskers and toes still haunt me.
Post post script:
Irene came down to find me plucking away at the computer late last Sunday night with vomit smeared down her face. Poor thing. I cleaned her up and changed the sheets (which I had only just changed that day, OF COURSE), went back to work, changed them again, and so on. I guess it wasn’t the vaccination after all.
And thus concludes this tale of mice and vomit.
Themocracy