Author: Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Tomorrow is Labour Day, a day in which we celebrate the hard-fought victories of labour unions throughout history by taking the day off work.

Thank goodness all I have to do is:

• One dozen loads of laundry; one for every time my four-year-old got out of bed tonight.
• Reorganize the kids’ school clothes so that when they throw them all onto the floor and just wear the same basic thing every day, it’s easier for me to put them away again.
• Sort through the lunch containers and water bottles and slide into a mid-day existential crisis.
• Bake batches of muffins to be frozen for school snack for my snotty kids who are too good to eat the supermarket granola bars I pack them and curse the day we moved into this hipster neighbourhood.
• Teach my seven-year-old to tie her shoes in one day because we already bought the ones with laces and we are firm believers in the high-pressure/panic mode of learning.
• Reaffirm my commitment to high-pressure/panic as a motivational force as well as a mode of learning by meeting multiple work deadlines.
• Break for an emotional meltdown because the end of another summer means their childhoods are passing me by and all I want to do is spend every waking moment with my wonderful babies.
• Transition smoothly into a nervous breakdown because I can’t spend another moment catering to their whims; what about my dreams!? When do I get to work toward my own intellectual and creative goals? It’s like I’m a prisoner in my own home!
• Calm down by baking yet another batch of muffins.
• Try to get to bed on time. No, really. Okay, so I said “try.”
• Wake up in a cold sweat because, oh crap, won’t they need pencils?

I didn’t go to the tournament today. I didn’t go today, but I did go to most of the last one. I did go to half of the one before that and the one before that. And I will be there tomorrow.

But today her brother had a game here in the neighbourhood and since her dad is actually one of her coaches, that leaves me to take him. Besides, these tournaments mean long days for her little sister and there’s enough to get done this weekend without spending an entire day away from home.

She was mad. I knew she would be, but part of you needs to believe that one day they’ll behave like rational creatures.

“You’ve only been to half my games this year!” she yelled. “It’s not fair! You miss three of my games for one of his!” Clearly, this was my way of showing who I loved the most. Any fool can see that the number of games missed divided by the number of games attended and then multiplied by the magnitude of wrath incurred gives you your parental love factor. Never mind that as a family we easily spend ten times more time/energy/money on her love for baseball than her brother’s casual interaction with the sport; never mind that we scheduled our entire summer (camps, vacations, etc.) around her schedule; my staying behind today is obviously a sign of where my loyalty lies.

Okay, fine. The last time I missed a game, she hit a home run. But that’s not likely to happen again, right?

Nope, I’m holding firm. There are five people in this family and it is simply not reasonable to expect all of us to make it out to everything. She’s not the only one made a commitment by joining a team. My son has fun playing on his local house league and I also enjoy watching him play. I refuse to feel bad about it.

So, of course. Halfway through the day, he sends me a picture of my daughter beaming with pride and weighed down with a huge medal. An opposing coach had signaled her out as the MVP of the game.

And I missed it.

She’s going to be so mad.

Labour Day weekend is upon us. It’s a time to reflect on the coming new year. And, well, it’s going to go a little something like this. Sorry.

September

Back-to-school! About time! The kids are driving me bonkers. We’re so ready for a fresh start. We’re going to nail it all this year: lunches and homework and chores, bring it.

October

Well, this year is a bust. Lunches are last-ditch scramble every morning, the new homework stations are a mess, laundry mountain is back, and what??? I’m supposed to be signing their agendas every day?

November

WHY IS THERE NO HOLIDAY THIS MONTH?! Screw it, I’m taking American Thanksgiving. My ancestors landed on Ellis Island.

December

“Just hear those sleigh bells jingle-ing. Ring ting tingle-ing too.” Keep up the joy. Keep it up. The holidays are fucking magical and you will stay up until 3am baking cookies to prove it.

January

The kids are back at school. You’re a new woman now. All the resolutions. This year for real! Just. So. Hungry. And sober.

February

Snot should not be able to freeze to the outside of faces. Why do we live here? It’s so cold. So, so, so, so cold. There’s no end to the snow pants. Wrestling kids into snow pants is now your life. It’s what you do. Just accept it. Suck it up.

March

Seriously?! Is spring never going to come? At least there’s March Break. Let’s staycation! We don’t need to travel to overpay for insanely crowded attractions and meltdowns on public transit.

April

Oh god, the school year’s almost over and have the kids even been doing their homework? You’ve been running on steam, pulled in a million different directions. There’s only one thing to do. You have to seize onto this one random math assignment and freak the hell out over it. You ARE a good parent.

May

Winter sports meet summer sports and now dinner is eaten in the car and lunches are stale crackers, raisins and that stray cheese string you found in the back of the fridge. Almost at the end.

June

Sob. I just need a break. I’m so done with the daily grind of homework, lunches, sports, music, laundry, dinner, repeat. We’re falling down at the finish line here.

July

What the hell. This new routine is STILL a grind: camp drop offs, more lunches, sunscreen, hats, water, and wet swimsuits.

August

What a great vacation. We didn’t sit still for a moment. I’m exhausted. And broke. And way behind on work. I need a vacation from my vacation. lololol

These past two weeks are like a throwback for me. They’re a throwback to a time before school, when I had my kids with me nearly all day, every day, juggling work deadlines with domestic duty, all the while trying to keep a careful and loving watch over my children.

It not quite the same, of course. I no longer have toddlers likely to careen head-first down a flight of stairs or to run blindly out into traffic. I don’t have infants to hold and nurse every two hours and to gingerly, frustratingly try to coax down to sleep. Perhaps most critically, my kids are now almost entirely independent in the toilet department.

At ten, seven and nearly five, in fact, you might imagine children who can prepare a reasonable lunch for themselves, pick up their things, play games together and only really need a cursory supervision. I imagined this and it’s the reason I thought, eh, it will be all right. We can hang out for a couple weeks after the family vacation while I catch up on work. They’ll be fine.

But I can’t really just let them languish in front of the television screen for days on end. One child has a couple hours of tutoring in the morning, for one, so it’s a process just to get them all fed and dressed and out of the house. Running into a store to pick up some groceries is like an epic adventure. How had I forgotten that?

The five-year-old is still headstrong and loathe to leave her own imaginary world at any given time; dismissive of the rest of the world’s desire to (if not quite keep to a schedule) at least finish tasks within a reasonable time frame. They still need time for running around outside and connecting with friends. There are baseball games and practices to attend and dinners to prepare.

My biggest sense of déjà vu is when I find myself feeling suffocated while lounging at the park on a lovely summer afternoon, chatting with neighbourhood friends. Or maybe I’m watching over five-year-olds as the roll around in the grass while their bigger sibs play baseball. These are relaxing and enjoyable moments; arguably one of the great perks of parenthood. But I can’t fully relax, constantly playing in my mind all the million other tasks that need doing, that I can’t get to because I have been forced to spend the afternoon at the park. It’s like someone barging into a productive office and decreeing a mandatory two-hour recess every afternoon: nice idea but what about all the work that needs doing?

And just to make sure I’m fully ready to send them all off to school next week, my two girls spent the better part of last night bent over the throw up bowl. I’d rub one’s back and wait for her to be done, wipe her mouth, get her a drink of water, and watch her settle back into sleep. Then I’d rinse out the bowl and place it back beside her pillow just in time for the other girl to wake up with start and begin the process all over.

So I’m calling it a sick day, even though they both seem fully better now. And on sick days they do get to lounge in front of the television for hours on end and I’ll see if I can’t get caught up just enough to make it through until next Tuesday.

My baby brother was the first person to try to get me to give a shit about Pokémon. It must have been right before I moved out of my parents’ house; I was 19 or 20 years old and he was 7 or 8. He used to watch the anime series and sometimes I was in the same room when the TV was on. I learned there was a little yellow Pokémon named Pikachu. And that was the very last thing I ever learned about Pokémon.

“Hey, Becky! Who would you rather have? Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Leavanny or Charizard?” Oh god, kid, I don’t care.

Then there was a blissful interlude of a dozen years or so with nary a mention of a Snorlax or a Zapdos.

My son was probably around five when he got his first Pokémon cards. I don’t know how he got them — I certainly did not buy them for him. I don’t know and I don’t care. But he poured over those suckers, cementing his early reading skills by sounding out such nonsensical words as Scizor and Blaziken. He would show them to me, his sweet angelic face eager for my approval, and my eyes would glaze over, my voice like a prerecorded message. “That’s nice, sweetie.”

As the years passed, I might have hoped that my son would outgrow his fixation with Pokémon, but I simply couldn’t care even that much. So he went on collecting ever more cards. I’m sure I used them as occasional bribes and he also got them from various people as birthday and holiday gifts. He traded some for others with friends. Parents at the school were alarmed because sometimes older kids or smarter kids or more cut-throat kids would trade cards with little-to-no value for rare, powerful and highly sought-after cards. Rules were put into place. Kids weren’t supposed to bring their cards to school any longer. I saw my son sneaking stacks of cards into his backpack anyway.

I didn’t care.

He rediscovered the animated series. Maybe it’s on Netflix or something, what do I care. So now his younger sisters watch the show too, and look at the cards, and learn the names of Pokémon. “Mommy,” someone is always saying, “who’s your favourite Pokemon? Who do you like more, Alkazam or Dragonite? Would you rather have a fire-type or a electric-type?” I just smile, “Oh children, I’ve already told you this. I don’t care about Pokémon.”

Then one night a couple weeks ago, my husband says, “Have you been hearing all the hype about this new Pokémon Go game?”

I nearly slipped into a coma.

Eventually the hype caught up to me. I’d log onto Facebook and people were debating whether or not this was a good thing. On the one hand, the game was encouraging people (kids, adults, families) to go outside and explore. On the other it was still a video game and can we not even go for a walk anymore without being glued to our screens. I thought about forming my own opinion for a brief second. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…..

But I was awakened from my Pokémon-induced slumber when the discussion got heated. Oh, mom bloggers, you never cease to disappoint. Anyone questioning the merits of Pokémon Go was accused of being a killjoy, a judgmental and snobby killjoy that should just mind her own business and stop with the sanctimony. The mom enthusiasts were accused of letting their kids roam around in potentially dangerous areas and risking injury through distraction, or of glorifying what was simply yet another video game designed to suck us in.

It didn’t take long before comedian Dena Blizzard came up with her spoof: the Chardenay Go app for moms. Because get it? We can’t get through a day of parenting without reaching for a glass of wine. I cannot get enough drunk mom gags. Alcoholism is so funny! Don’t worry, I’m not offended; just bored.

You can love Pokémon Go or you can hate it. It doesn’t matter to me.

I simply don’t care.

Image credit.

There is a widely shared article on Quartz.com on how we’re over scheduling our kids (shocker, I know) and depriving them of the precious boredom they need to learn how to entertain themselves. It closes with this quote by the philosopher Bertrand Russel: “A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.”

With all due respect to one of the greatest intellects of the past century, Bertrand Russel, (and I definitely agree that a good amount of “fruitful monotony” must be endured to to even begin to understand Principia Mathematica, his greatest work) I still think I’ll take my modern-day parenting advice from someone born sometime after 1872.

Of course, as the Quartz article (and many others) show, there’s no shortage of modern day psychologists and other experts who argue our kids are over scheduled during the summer. The gist of the argument seems to be that being bored is a good thing. It’s necessary for learning how to entertain ourselves, developing creativity, and learning self-motivation.

All of this is fine and good as a general observation. But I hate the way it’s often framed as yet another parent fail. There go these modern parents again, over scheduling and hovering over their kids. Do they think we hate having down time? I like nothing more than sipping coffee and reading while my kids entertain themselves. Time to just relax and be together as a family is something everyone wants.

We don’t sit down and decide how to schedule our kids every waking moment. What we do is pay for camp which is basically child care so that we can work. Families whose parents get some time off during the summer don’t put their kids in camp for the entire summer. And kids who do go to camp usually still have time on evenings and weekends to flop around feeling bored. It’s not all or nothing, and it’s probably for the best.

I didn’t have any summer child care (camp or otherwise) for eight years. Did my learn to entertain themselves? Sure. Long-form narrative-driven creative play using every single toy in the house and whatever else they can turn into a prop is something my children are very good at. But they also watched way too much TV, completely trashed the house, and interrupted me endlessly to beg for snacks while I tried to get some work done. I need to weigh the benefits of boredom against my own sanity. So now my kids go to day camp for half the summer. We’ll take a family road trip and then bum around here for a couple weeks at the end — just long enough for me to cry tears of joy when the school year starts again.

As Leah Maclaren wrote recently in her Globe and Mail column, “For most kids, boredom is real and contrary to the “experts” on your social media feed, unstructured hours and empty days are not a magical portal into a nostalgic landscape of summers past. Having no camp, cottage or summer activities planned and paid for means endless hours of screen time because the local library is 10 blocks away and books and movies tickets are expensive. It means cereal poured from a box for breakfast, lunch and dinner while Mom and Dad commute back and forth to work.”

Could I let my ten and seven-year-olds go to a local park on their own instead of bumming around the house? (Of course, that still leaves me with a four-year-old to care for. But let’s pretend she’s somewhere else.) Sure! I would love nothing more than to open my door and shoo the kids out. Come back for dinner! But I don’t because traffic is a menace in this city. Shawn Micallef notes in a recent Toronto Star column, “Just last Monday alone eight pedestrians were struck by cars, one in Rexdale fatally, and four cyclists were hit.” I was about to leave my two oldest kids at a local parkette, just two sides streets away, last week while I went home to get dinner started. But a steady stream of cars, trucks and SUVs whipping around the corners of those side streets changed my mind. I made them come home with me. Maybe next year.

All this talk of kids roaming free and making their own fun smacks of a naive, privileged never land. It’s as though kids are being plucked out of lovely gardens with nannies on hand to provide nourishing snacks throughout the day and made to endure the rigours of a day spent playing capture the flag and swimming with teen counselors. Can we admit that the alternative is much more like Maclaren paints, kids bumming around watching TV, playing video games, exploring the internet and snacking on prepackaged food?

What happens when a working parent does try to “let them be bored and spend time outside”? Remember the McDonald’s mom from two years ago? The one who let her nine-year-old spend the day at the park rather than looking at a screen? That’s right, we get charged with neglect.

Summer vacation is a serious challenge for most parents to figure out. (I recently discussed this very thing with Brandie Weikle on The New Family podcast, too.) So let’s just give ourselves a pat on the back for getting through it.

I truly don’t believe in forcing kids to do things they don’t want to do.

“Get your boots on, sweetie, it’s time for your hockey game.”

“But I don’t want to go. I HATE HOCKEY. NO, NO, NO!”

“Get your boots on and get in the car and I don’t want to hear another word about it. Do you know how much money this costs?”

I look at other parents sometimes and wonder who they’re really doing all this for. Who’s dream is this? Because it certainly doesn’t seem to be their child’s.

“Okay, honey. Hurry up and eat your dinner because you’ve got to go straight out to t-ball practice after.”

“I don’t wannnnaaa go.”

“I know you say that now, sweet heart, but remember how much fun you had last time?”

“No, NO, NO! YOU CAN’T FORCE ME. I HATE THIS STUPID TEAM.”

“Your father is spending time and energy coaching this team and he is doing it for you. He is counting on you. Your teammates are counting on. Get. In. The. Car.”

I think it’s important that we listen to our children and respect their personal agency. There’s nothing to be gained from forcing a child to do an extracurricular she hates.

So I guess I’m a liar. Or, you know, real life is messy and full of contradictions. I do think it’s important that we listen to our kids and give them the power to make some choices for themselves. But we also know our kids and see that sometimes, for some kids, a gentle shove (or a full-on screaming match, whatevs) is exactly what they need.

Because for a long time my daughter never wanted to go any practices or games. She was happy to be signed up and to shop for equipment, of course, but actually leave the house and go? No way. Unh uh. Not going to happen without a fight.

But she did love playing. The girl thrives on physical competition. You could see it in her face. You could feel the pure joy radiating out from beneath her pink hockey helmet; it would shine through her face mask, through the glass, and warm you right through as you sat watching in those ice cold stands.

So what was it then? If it wasn’t the actual sport. Part of it could be laziness, sure. Who does want to get up first thing on a Sunday morning? But the truth — and the reason I insisted she keep playing — is that her reluctance stemmed from insecurities. She was afraid she wouldn’t know what to do. She was afraid she wouldn’t be any good. (The girl plays to win.) She was afraid she was a girl playing a boy’s sport.

She was afraid, basically.

Loving the clothes. Hating the camera.

A couple weeks ago, we attended a media event hosted by ivvivva (lululemon’s girls’s line). And while it was absolutely fun to shop for clothes for my girls, and even though I loved the amazing clothes that are designed to move and breathe and support young women while they go after their dreams, that wasn’t what I loved the most. What surprised and impressed me most was how much my seven-year-old daughter got out of the inspiring talk by Olympic skier and medalist, Allison Forsyth, a workshop on her dreams and inspirations, and the in-store dance lesson. (You can check with a  location near you to see what free in-store classes they have coming up.)

Olympic medalist Allison Forsyth inpsires the girls

My daughter is a kick-ass, driven, athletic competitor, but she needs that extra encouragement. Her confidence still needs nurturing. And she craves community and belonging.

This should really be no surprise. Because this baseball season we haven’t gotten into a single argument. She runs upstairs to get into her uniform. She’s the first one out the door in cleats and a glove. She’s the one nagging her older brother over and over again to go out and play catch. She beams with pride when she talks about her throwing arm.

Cheering on their teammates from the dugout.

This is because she has found the encouragement, coaching and community she needed with the High Park Diamonds, an all-girls t-ball rep team that competes in tournaments in Southern Ontario and love nothing more than showing a team full of boys what it means to play like a girl. Being on this team has transformed her attitude about sports in general. She loves playing on her co-ed house league teams too now. And, to my surprise, has made me a huge advocate of girls teams and girls leagues in sports.

We’re all trying to raise confident girls here. And that is something worth fighting for.