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By rebecca, November 25, 2009 1:21 am

The holidays are here again, so brace yourself for the inevitable tug of war between charity and commercialism. The Christmas season should be about giving to others, we all know that, but we also want to give to our own family. This Christmas Colum is old enough to really look forward to the loot, to write a letter to Santa and to be wowed by the presents on Christmas morning. And I really want to wow him. So I think, sure I’ll give to others after I have taken care of my own family. I think, I support giving and charity, I do, and it’s really great that other people are so into that kind of thing. They must have more money and time and fewer responsibilities than I do.

But then I think of my mother and my mother-in-law. These are two women who have raised four children each and worked full-time jobs and balanced budgets and somehow managed to put food on the table and shoes on our feet no matter how scarce money was. They also managed to be everywhere at once: the skating rink and ballet classes and school plays and baseball games. From the PTA and Boy Scouts (Donna) to nursing relatives on their death beds and sitting on the floor of a Greyhound bus while eight months pregnant (Mom), there is nothing these women wouldn’t do. Their entire lives have been guided by a sense of giving and self-sacrifice. They volunteer their time and energy and money as a matter of course, never stopping to wonder if they have enough to spare. Whenever and wherever a need arises, these women automatically ask themselves, “How can I help?” (Not “Should I help?” or “I wish I could help.”) And then, swiftly and quietly, they do.

So when I started seeing initiatives that encourage bloggers to use their corporate and social networking connections to pay their good fortune forward I thought, good. I mean, after the recent scourge of name calling and finger pointing that has been dominating mommy-blogging circles in the lead up to and the wake of the new FTC regulations (the assumption that we are all corporate whores, essentially, willing to give it up for free crap), this is a breath of fresh air. Initiatives like Her Bad Mother’s Give Good Blog or Mamanista’s Bloganthropy encourage bloggers to champion a cause and to exploit any corporate contacts in doing so.

Yeah, bloggers should totally do that, I thought. I would too if only I were more widely read and had more companies knocking at my door. But wait. I did use my blog to host an online raffle for breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. And I did reach out to family-oriented businesses, many run by moms who are friendly with the blogging community for awesome donations. And they did come through. I actually used my blog to raise over $2000 in personal donations to the Weekend To End Breast Cancer. When my good friend Gillian lost her baby, I blogged about that and made up a button that links to the Sick Kids Foundation’s donation page and stuck it at the bottom of that post and in my sidebar. Huh.

Maybe I can do something after all. So then I emailed Kathryn Easter from Mom Central Canada and said, Hey. You know that giveaway we’re doing for Disney on Ice? What are the chances we can get another set of tickets to give to a family that is spending the holidays at Interval House, a safe haven for abused women and children? And Kathryn said, Let’s do it up. (I’m totally paraphrasing, you know.) And so we are.

I tell you all this not to toot my own horn. (Although I guess that is the biggest effect, isn’t it?) Mostly I tell you all this because if I can actually do some good with this blog and its regular readership of my family and friends and the hundreds of porn-bot followers I have on Twitter, then imagine what you can do. You don’t need a hugely successful blog to make a difference. You don’t even need a blog at all.

My mother and mother-in-law didn’t have blogs, after all. Hell, they didn’t even have Facebook. (I know!) And they still managed to find a way to do good things for people in need. So if we all just try to be a little more like them, then we don’t even need a formal declaration. We just need to act.

On that note, let the holiday season begin.

(Image courtesy of saxon on Flickr.)

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By rebecca, June 30, 2009 5:25 pm

By the time I was old enough to start listening to Top 40 radio and to buy records (er, tapes), Michael Jackson was already becoming a punch line. “Black or White” topped the charts when I was in Grade Seven and Jacko was more of a freak show draw than music icon throughout my high school years. Then there were the child molestation charges and it looked like the King of Pop would end up irreparably tarnished. He was acquitted of those charges, though, and people started to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, if there is one person who was so completely divorced from the standard norms of behaviour and so completely outside our collective realm of comprehension that he might innocently share a bedroom with a young boy and be surprised at the outrage, it was Michael Jackson.

A few years ago, though, I started to hear it: the odd M.J. song. We played Billie Jean at the bar where I worked when I was pregnant with Young C and some of the first fetal movements I felt were in time with this pop classic. Many of those early songs are good. They hold up. There was a bit of a Michael Jackson resurgence going on and people wondered if he had anything more. People were talking about the music, not the bizzaro personal circumstances surrounding the man. Continue reading 'Growing Up in Public: Michael Jackson and Us'»

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By rebecca, March 17, 2009 11:18 pm

Lest my readers mistake my fast and flippant tone for serious criticism, I think it may be time to lay forth some basic Playground principles. One is that this is not a blog about how to parent well or properly. I don’t pretend the circumstances of my life have somehow landed me at the pinnacle of parenting know-how or that I have any universal knowledge on the topic at all. Most of my understanding of children and child-rearing is drawn from my own personal experience as a mother of two, big sister to three, first cousin to twenty-some-odd, and very brief foray into the world of professional nannies. This is augmented by countless books, articles, websites, and blog posts about pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing. So I speak the language; but put me at the corner of Pacific and Dundas with my own screaming toddler and newborn baby and I have no idea what to do.

This is a blog about how it feels to be at that corner. About what I’ve tried and what works and what doesn’t. About what’s going on in the wider world that might impact our lives as parents. About what kinds of stuff might be worth getting and what’s garbage. I’ll complain about my kids and I’ll brag about them. I’ll bitch and whine and gossip. Blogs are of a transient nature and what’s bugging me one day might not bother me in the least the next.

Still, insofar as all the content is filtered through my perspective it might behoove me to make clear any biases I have. I am not interested in any stay-at-home versus working mom arguments. (Though I thought I might be for a short while; it is all so stupid. Here’s the best rant I could find on the internet on the subject and it’s not even written by a mother.) I think any suggestion that women should participate less vigorously in the workforce than men, for whatever reason, is complete nonsense. But choosing to work at home caring for the children is just as admirable as working anywhere else. I do not have a fulfilling and promising career to return to. I probably wouldn’t even be able to get a job (especially in this market) that pays much more than full-time childcare for two kids costs. I enjoy taking care of the kids and I generally dislike work. But I cannot, simply cannot, bring myself to identify as a stay-at-home mom. For one, I’m almost always working some part-time gig or another to make ends meet. (I even worked full-time throughout the last half of my pregnancy; note the complete lack of blog posts during that period.) But it’s mostly because I want to work. Not full-time for now while the kids are young, and not doing menial tasks for someone else. But I need some external validation and a role to fill when the kids begin to need me less. I am jealous of both worlds: the moms who tuck their children in and fold the rest of the laundry and go to sleep satisfied that their day’s work is done, and the moms who love their children just as well all while contributing to the working world and the family’s finances. There is no right way.

Other biases include a procrastinating perfectionist’s attitude to housework. If it’s not going to be done right, then don’t do it at all, I say. That isn’t working around here so well these days as nothing is really getting done. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then I’m on the highway to hell. There is absolutely no moral rectitude involved in scrubbing your bathtub; if you can afford to have someone else do it, by all means. I tend to be fiscally left-wing, but a social libertarian. I think I might be agnostic, but still identify as Catholic. I have no ethnic identity, though, beyond my Canadian-ness. I drink a lot, a lot, of tea. And I have lately started to wonder if I shouldn’t have kept with the Latin and become the definitive modern voice of the classics. Puer puellae rosas dat. The boy gives the girl the roses. A boy is giving roses to a girl. You see? There’s so much room for interpretation … this will undoubtedly cast the longest shadow across my blog.