Ironic Mom

I think a great gift for new parents would be stock options in Band-Aid. Let’s face it: if you have a young kid, Band-Aids are practically an accessory. They come in different sizes and skin tones – though I still have to wonder who has a Sponge-Bob-patterned epidermis.

In my early days of parenting, I was anti-Band-Aids. Tough kids don’t need ‘em, I reasoned. So I made a rule: no Band-Aids unless you’re bleeding.

No Band-Aids for You!

I thought this was quite clever, and it worked well enough when my twins were two. Our consumption of Band-Aids was below average. The rule enabled us to rake in a savings of about fourteen cents a month, enough to buy 1½ mojos.

When my cretins were nearly four, however, the Scrimp-on-Band-Aids, Save-for-College theory went south. One warm spring day, we went to the front yard where Vivian and William played with sidewalk chalk, which is the perfect craft for an Anti-Craft Mom like me since it involves no clean up (unless your kid runs onto the road and gets schmucked). But I digress.

So there William and Vivian were, playing hopscotch on their crooked squares. I think I was flinging grape-sized gravel off our lawn. And then came the screams. I don’t even remember which kid it was, but there was a knee injury. I inspected it, lest the screams make the neighbours suspicious.

“Mommy,” my child sobbed. “I need a Band-Aid.”

The knee looked like classic rug burn: pink and inflamed but not bleeding. “No blood, no Band-Aid,” I said.

I went back to flinging gravel pieces.

I’m not sure how much time passed until I noticed my kids were abnormally quiet.

I looked up and saw them huddled together, inspecting something closely.

I walked over.

Both twins were using their fingernails, scratching Twin A’s sidewalk scrape.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” they chimed, the mantra of the guilty.

“Are you picking the scrape?” I asked.

Four eyes looked up at me. One voice answered, “We’re trying to make it bleed.”

“So I can get a Band-Aid,” the other added.

Excellent. Another parenting strategy that failed. I am a mother who encourages masochistic behaviour. That’s up there with my plan to bring two kids to Build-a-Bear to buy one kid a stuffed animal.

Thankfully tomorrow is another day, which means there’s a small possibility that I’ll do things right and a large possibility that I’ll do something that fast tracks us to family therapy.

The Olympics are over. For me, this means I have to go back to parenting. No more abandoning my kids in front of a DVD player with the instructions, “Call me when it’s time for bed.” No more eating dinner in front of the TV in the basement, which we euphemistically call “having a picnic.” No more outdoing our neighbours with the size of our flag.

Canada's most patriotic garage door

Yesterday, after reading and commenting on Natasha’s post, “The Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey Scandal,” I started to think about gender and the 2010 Winter Games.

The statistics for Team Canada, at least, are impressive. Women made up 44% of Canada’s 206 member Olympic team. Fifty-six percent of our medals, whether individual or team, came from female athletes.

These stats are fantastic. I am encouraged that we are moving toward an even playing field for women in sports.

We are, right?

But what surprised me is just how many gender-related issues there were at the 2010 Olympics.

Consider this:

• The beer drinking and cigar smoking of the Canadian women after winning hockey gold proved to be controversial, sparking letters to the editor across the country. It still would have made the media if the men’s team had partied on the ice at Canada Hockey Place, but it wouldn’t have garnered as much attention. As a society, we hold women to a higher moral standard that does not include partying after being crowned the best in the world. It might be a strange thing to argue, but women have as much right to kill brain cells as men do. It shouldn’t be a story.

• If Jon Montgomery, winner of the gold in men’s skeleton, were female, the media – and possibly the IOC — would have been all over the sculling of a pitcher of beer in public. Instead, he’s lauded as the poster boy for easy-going Canada, which he deservedly is. I just don’t get why a man can chug sixty ounces of beer given to him by a stranger, but a woman can’t have a can from the locker room.

• Women were not allowed to compete in ski jumping. Apparently, the Olympic committee decided that female ski jumpers aren’t good enough to participate, never mind that they have their own World Cup. Yes, forbidding women to ski jump at the Olympic Games will really encourage more girls to get involved in the sport.

• Johnny Weir, US figure skater, was criticized by some media for being feminine. While it’s conceivable that the media might criticize a woman for being masculine, the implication would be different. Calling Weir feminine is to suggest he’s “lesser than.”

So what’s the lesson? There may not be one. But there’s still work to be done before our daughters and sons are full partners in this world of sport and media.

Now, it’s your turn: does gender bias still exist in sports?

This parenting thing baffles me. Generally I’m so lost in a labyrinth of fuzz that I don’t even bother to think about it. But today, I’ll wander back in.

A recent MRI of my brain (post-childbirth). Yes, my head is rectangular.

In many ways, I don’t have high expectations for my twins. I don’t expect (or want) them to be the top of the class, famous actors, or even Olympic athletes, although I have fleeting moments when I feel like pushing them down an icy luge track, with or without the sled. More than anything I want them to be normal, or (do I dare say it?) average.

This won't be one of my kids, unless I lose it and push them down the track

I think my own perfectionist tendencies fell off the cliff when I was pregnant. It was not an easy pregnancy – two bouts of mandatory bedrest in a foreign country, far from my own mom. After the first crisis (bleeding at nine weeks), I panicked. When our Thai doctor did the scan, I just wanted him to say the word “normal.” Or, as he said in his accented English, “Nor-MAALL” (to get the approximate punctuation, it rhymes with “Sore-GAL”).

Every appointment from that point on, I would come armed with a paranoid woman’s list of concerns and he would gratefully answer, “Nor-MAALL, completely Nor-MAALL”.

Later, my husband would imitate me, “Doctor, I’ve grown a third eye and there are mushrooms sprouting from my ears.” “No worries,” my husband would continue his impression, “it’s Nor-MAALL.”

It was then, during those stressful months, that my husband and I hung up our Going-for-Gold armchair parenting mentality and switched to something more lackluster. We weren’t planning to Own the Podium; we were hoping to cross the finish line.

Thankfully, we did. William and Vivian were born with Apgar scores that were good enough.

Now, nearly six years later, I still try to retain this Ode to Nor-MAALL. It’s hard, though. The current parenting culture seems to pressure parents to schedule their kids with activities that would rival the agenda of a CEO. It’s confusing, though, because in striving for Nor-MAALL I don’t want to raise underachieving kids who don’t have the confidence to push themselves.

What do you think? How hard do you push your children?

The Olympics’ theme song, I Believe, has been getting a lot of airplay. Makes sense, since it’s The Winter Olympic Games and all. If you haven’t heard it, you’re clearly living in a media-deprived world, which begs the question: how are you reading this blog?

I’ve posted the shortest version I could find. Feel free to hit mute.

Hearing the mantra “I Believe” sixteen times has made me think what it is that I believe, at least in that ironic sense of parenting.

Here, then, is My Parenting Manifesto:

I believe that children are our future my present.

I believe that if I think about my children and the future that I will hyperventilate.

I believe that my children will grow up to be pre-teens who wield sarcasm like a weapon.

I believe that I will be the recipient of most of the sarcastic blows.

I believe that my kids will not be professional actors, athletes, or models.

I believe this to be a good thing.

I believe that I will like the stage where my kids can clean the bathrooms.

I believe that this stage will increase our arguments and their use of sarcasm.

I believe that my children will continue to embarrass me by misbehaving in public.

I believe that I will return the favour when they’re teenagers.

I believe my children will talk to a therapist one day about how I messed them up (possibly by blogging).

I believe that they will talk to a therapist no-matter-what, so I might as well do it anyway.

Now it’s your turn: what do you believe? What should be added to this Parenting Manifesto?

There’s a certain stare-death-in-the-face quality to the Winter Olympics.

Figure skating involves blades that can slice flesh. The game of hockey combines freshly sharpened skates with 100 MPH slap shots. Then there’s downhill skiing: where speed meets the very real possibility of hurtling off a cliff, unless some orange-colored mesh fencing miraculously catches your Gumby body while it cartwheels through the air. If the polyethylene doesn’t stop you, you’re now competing in a different Winter Olympic sport: ski jumping.

Another Winter Olympic Candidate for Club MRI

If you take away the mountain and add a weapon, you have biathlon. Even in curling, the grandparent of the Winter Games, there’s danger: you can fall on the ice and suffer a concussion, all while someone who’s red in the face yells “harder!”

In terms of danger, the Winter Games are the UFC to the Summer Olympics’ hatha yoga. I’m sure running a marathon in under three hours is hard, but a momentary loss of focus is unlikely to kill you. To get the same possibility of death that exists at the Winter Olympics, the IOC would have to introduce new sports to the Summer Games, like combining synchronized swimming with archery, or adding 10-metre diving into a shallow pool.

Like This Looks Safe

Of the winter sports, skeleton is king of crazy. Any sport whose name is synonymous with death and decay has to be number one on the psycho list. If there were a Darwin Award for a Winter Olympic sport, it would go to skeleton. I mean, who in their right mind would dive headfirst onto a cafeteria tray and careen down a mile of ice at speeds close to 100 clicks with their chin a mere inch from the ground? One inch. That’s 25 millimetres, people.

Even the technical jargon associated with skeleton reveals how it’d fail any risk assessment. One of these terms is G-Force. In skeleton, G-Force refers to the pressure that keeps the athlete on the sled while it corners. So move over fighter pilots and astronauts; you’re wearing protective gear, not experiencing G-Force in a unitard. When Newton saw an apple fall from a tree, I’d bet he didn’t envision a human bullet propelling down an icy slide of death…by choice.

Rumour has it that, in addition to nutritionists and psychologists, several skeleton teams employ neurologists and receive front-of-the-line passes to MRI clinics. Play your vertebrae right (or wrong), and it just could be a gateway sport for entry to the next Paralympics.

It’s hard to imagine parents putting their child in skeleton. Then again, maybe not.

Still, you have to wonder what skeleton athletes (who I think should be called skeleteers) would do for a career if they weren’t donating their body to spinal cord research. I’m thinking crash-test-dummies. Perhaps Toyota could use surviving skeleteers to test sticky accelerators.

I have to wonder why Canadians do relatively well at these sports. Yes, there’s the climate argument: it’s cold and we need something to do. But as the stereotype goes, we’re polite with a side order of inferiority complex. Is there an edgier side to us or — more likely — do the Olympians represent a tiny fraction of our population, the same type of people who are likely to climb K-2 or play with hairsprays and lighters for fun?

Whatever the reason, the Winter Olympics are pure entertainment. And for the next two weeks I will yell at my children to be quiet as I marvel at those risk takers from the comfort of my couch. The only skeleton I’m going near is the one in my closet.

A Former Skeleteer Being Rescued from the Track

Let the games begin.

Will you be watching?

Photos used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike Lisence,

courtesy of Tsutomu Takasu, Profile Andjam79 & Tammra McCauley

I hate brushing teeth, whether they belong to me or someone else. At least when I scour my own, I get gratification after two minutes, running my tongue over polished enamel, falsely imagining how happy my hygienist would be.

With kids, there is little reward for many tasks, including brushing their teeth. Let’s face it, they don’t give you hugs and kisses like they do when you give them an ice cream sandwich. I’m also pretty confident that no middle-aged children giving a eulogy have ever proclaimed thanks to their mother for teaching good oral hygiene.

Thankfully, it's fluoride free.

Now, before someone calls Child and Family Services (or worse, my dentist), I will admit that I brush my kids’ teeth most nights. I approach it like I approach vacuuming: do it quickly, forget the corners, and put it away as fast as you can. But the two minute rule? I mean really. In order for me to brush my own teeth that long, I need to multitask. I used to walk around the house and putter, but that grossed out my husband. Now, I read a book while I brush, which passes the time brilliantly. It ain’t so easy with five-year-olds.

Exhibit A: Teeth Intact

When my kids were two, I asked my dentist if Will and Viv were old enough to brush their own teeth. She peered over her surgical mask and said, “No. Not until they can write their name really well.” I immediately regretted not giving them shorter names, like Jo or Bob. To rectify this, I started precision printing classes with them the next day. I have two problems with her answer, though. First, did she mean write as in print, or write as in cursive? I’m going to assume the former on this one. Second, what does “really well” mean? My brother still doesn’t print his name very well – and he’s forty-six. I know for a fact my mom doesn’t brush his teeth anymore.

When I was growing up, I don’t remember my mom brushing my teeth, ever. And I still have all my teeth. A dentist once told me I have good saliva, which I’m pretty proud of. I always meant to get the phrase printed and framed.

Exhibit B: Mostly Intact (except for the accident)

Well, my kids have a dentist appointment in a few weeks, so I better start cramming. I can always rely on both of them to be honest when the dentist asks them how frequently they clean their teeth, so I will attempt to manipulate the truth by brushing twice a day in the two weeks preceding the check up.

And I haven’t even mentioned flossing.

Or the fact that William regularly sucks the toothpaste tube dry.

I don’t read parenting books. And, at the risk of offending many readers, I don’t recommend reading parenting books. I’m fully aware of the irony of me – a mom writing about raising kids – telling people not to read about parenting. Hopefully by now, though, you’ve figured out that I’m the antithesis of an expert on anything. In fact, my blog is likely a how-not-to-parent treatise.

Here’s how I came to my Screw-the-Experts Theory of Parenting.

Six years ago, my international teaching career was going strong, and I was used to being extremely competent at what I did. If I didn’t know it, I googled it, I read professional journals, I eavesdropped on teaching forums, I quizzed colleagues.

When I became pregnant, I applied the same need-to-be-an-expert-and-research-the-hell-out-of-it strategy to pregnancy. I cross-referenced the prego-bible, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, with the more light-hearted, Australian Up the Duff. I read three books on raising twins, two on breastfeeding, and one on parenting, and I also lurked on babycenter.com’s forums. In retrospect, this was probably an attempt to feel less out-of-control of my body, in that Ripley/Sigourney/Alien type of way.

When my twins were born, I kept What To Expect in the First Year handy; I used it often as a reference, thumbing through it for info on fevers, green goo-poo, and to see how far behind my kids were on learning to smile.

By the time Vivian and William turned one, though, I threw out the books.

Bye Bye Anonymous Advice

I was worn out by competitive parenting. Maybe because I couldn’t win, I ceased to care about whose baby walked or signed first, whose baby was breastfed, whose sleep strategy was best. Middle-class-me was part of a generation of professional women who were used to a high level of expertise, information at their fingertips, and living far from their families.

What happened to relying on our foremothers to share their hints?

I started to recall events that had taught me the most; all of these involved witnessing or by listening to real live people.

• My mom, as I’ve mentioned before, can anticipate and divert a crisis long before it happens. Whenever she visits, she seems to instinctively know when Vivian is premeditating, plotting to steal William’s toy-of-the-moment. My mom, between sips from her cup of tea bottle of beer, manages to offer Vivian a seemingly better toy, before I can shift my butt off the couch. Read more…

Birthday cards are a problem for me. I can never find the one which contains a balance of humour and intimacy, magically revealing the personalities of the recipient and myself. I’m a competitive card giver, and someone else always finds a funnier, better one.

I also despise spending $3.95 on something that’ll be history in two weeks – though that doesn’t deter me from purchasing other items that render themselves useless in even less time, like lattes, gasoline, bridal wear. My cheapness aside, I seem to be incapable of going to a store and buying a card in advance, especially if it has to be mailed. So even if I do purchase a card, the task of posting it necessitates a scavenger hunt, where I search for the address, stamps, a pen, a mailbox. By the time I find those items, the bloody card has disappeared and remains in hiding for weeks, making it even more useless.

And then there are e-cards. I despise them. They may even be worse than sub-literate Christmas card letters. They are far too public: I always seem to open them at work when my volume is maxed out on a level guaranteed to damage hearing. And they’re impersonal. And goofy. And seem to contain jokes aimed at a preschool audience.

My husband has tried to help me. He buys cards at thrift stores. Most of them haven’t even been used. I’m pretty sure they are cards that were in the possession of elderly people who died. I can almost picture dutiful daughters-in-law finding these card collections in shoeboxes found in the hall closets, then putting them in the pile marked “Goodwill.”

Our Collection of Dead People's Cards

Our card collection has helped my go-to-the-store organizational problem. But while we seem to have many cards, the ratio of usable to useless cards is shrinking. Take last Friday. My daughter had to go to a birthday party for a five-year-old. So I look through our cards, bypassing the “For My Son on His Graduation” and the twenty-two “Get Well Soon” cards, and I settle on something semi-benign: a card with red birds on it…Because everyone knows that Kindergartners list “orioles” as their favourite animal. I think the card supported the Lung Association (or the person who bought it and then died did years ago).

Try selecting one of these for a kid...or even an adult

This lengthy rant is a preamble to an apology. I’m sorry I don’t send birthday cards to my friends. I’m sorry I give pathetic cards. And I’m even sorrier I haven’t sent one to my mom, whose birthday is tomorrow. Now she’s not expecting one – I’ve probably mailed her two in the past eighteen years – hence she’s conditioned, but I still feel bad. So mom, I’m sorry. Though we’ll talk on the phone, there’s nothing in your Arizona mailbox. There’s nothing in your Manitoba mailbox either in case you think I forgot which country you’re in.

But here, publicly, I can at least say, Happy Birthday, Mom.

Feel free to read Part 1 of What Reality Shows Can Teach You about Parenting, or feel free not to bother.

American Idol may not seem like a primer in parenting, but it is. Where else can you learn that everyone judges you? That lesson became apparent on a recent trip to IKEA. I had just plopped my children onto an IKEA dolly meant to carry flat-packed pieces of furniture while you search for a set of allen wrenches and 6000 screws. A woman wearing Ugg boots approached me. I noticed her footwear because I was looking down, trying to ensure the strings on my daughter’s hood didn’t wind around the wheel. No sense being totally irresponsible and hanging your own child. “Excuse me?” she says. “That’s not safe.”

With my back safely to her, I swear like I’ve dropped a sledge hammer on my baby toe, lessons that I’ve learned from Hell’s Kitchen. The kids will learn it anyway, so they might as well learn it in the safety of IKEA.

You think this is Fear Factor? Try Childbirth or The Years That Follow It

It looks like art till you have a newborn

The reality show that should be required viewing for expectant parents is Fear Factor. If lying down in a tub filled with snakes makes you up-chuck your crackers and brie, how are you going to clean diarrhea off your own pajamas? It remains a mystery how innocent newborns can consistently empty their bowels the moment you lie them on the change table, remove the soggy diaper, and raise their legs to wipe them. Liquid poo sprays from their anus to your pajamas, turning your nightgown into a canvas that resembles a Jackson Pollack painting. It ain’t art, though, if it smells like crap. I’ll take the tub-o’-snakes anyday.

Although it contains few bodily function references, The Amazing Race offers its own lessons for parents. Only unlike the actual show, the raising-your-kids version lasts at least twenty years and offers no million dollar prize. Roadblocks? You wanna talk roadblocks? Try driving with two-year-old twins across Canada …with no DVD player.  The fact that anyone on the car trip survived, especially the children, is in itself amazing. A second lesson this show teaches is about correlation: the more time a family spends together, the more fighting occurs. So, book a babysitter, and get some distance.

The adage, “Things Could Always Be Worse,” is easily learned from watching twenty seconds of Intervention or five seconds of Toddlers and Tiaras . At this point, it’s difficult to conclude which show is worse, but there’s something seriously wrong with making three-year-olds look like Lady Gaga, however cool she may be.

So, feeling morally superior, a switch to Intervention is in order. As you sit down with a well-deserved glass of Pinot Noir, you’re reminded that there are people suffering from serious addictions.  Then, when you realize your kids could become addicts, you turn off the TV and go back to the kitchen for a second glass. You take your wine out the back door to begin the search for the shoe your son lost. You step over Tonka trucks and skipping ropes, but trip over something, slopping your wine. It was the shoe, of course. As you head upstairs, you’re relieved: today’s reality shows are yesterday’s news.

As for tomorrow…

Photos courtesy of nugunslinger and Abby Lanes, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

There are things that scare me more than pregnancy, such as raising children or having a camera crew chase me around as I attempt to parent. But even after disasters such as lying face down on a golf course amidst a spectacular lightning storm (and I don’t even golf), pregnancy still ranks up there on my list of things-that-freak-me-out. It’s not so much the pregnancy itself, but my memory of being eight months pregnant with twins during the hottest season. In Thailand.

While Bangkok might be called the City of Angels, it sometimes feels more like the City of Smells. Waste disposal techniques include dumping sewage in the local canal so pedestrians (also known as targets) can smell it. Especially if you’re pregnant, the variety of stenches presents a multitude of problems, not the least of which is eating without upchucking. Imagine walking along Sukhumvit Road, one of Bangkok’s main arteries. The sidewalks themselves are an obstacle course. Not only does the congestion necessitate having to step over two-foot curbs, but also requires dodging vendors who are selling a range of goods, from pirated Shania Twain CDs and pineapple with chillies, to deep-fried bugs and sex.

If she were pregnant in Bangkok, she wouldn't be smiling this much

(cc) Roger Price, used under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License

If the partially decomposed bat clinging to an overhead wire doesn’t make me puke my Green Curry, maybe it’s the stench of rotting garbage or the sight of a Chihuahua-sized rat. And if my lunch hasn’t climbed all the way up my esophagus yet, then it surely will after seeing a seventy-year-old Westerner lip-locked with a sixteen-year-old Thai from upcountry.

Indeed, as I continue my waddle up the street, ignoring tailors who salivate over how many yards of fabric it’d take to clothe me, I feel a slimy connection to those tourists.

A Bangkok scene: Pregnant expat vs. Western tourist

(cc) baby-gaga.com, used under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License

Let’s face it, in Bangkok, pregnant women have a lot in common with tourists.

We both sweat a lot.

We’re both overweight.

We’re repulsed by Bangkok’s street smells.

We’re drawn to wearing ill-fitting clothes, perhaps to further tempt the tailors.

We trip on uneven sidewalks.

We long for a foot rub.

We’ll walk miles off course to search for a clean, Western-style toilet.

We look bad in a bathing suit.

We struggle to carry our extra baggage.

We realize the anticipation of an event is often better than the reality.

We both crave an ice cold beer.

And I didn’t even say anything about sex.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Bangkok, especially now that I no longer live there. Everything people say about Thai people is true. Heck, they’re even nicer than Canadians. And now that I’m  back in Canada with -40 winters, Bangkok is smelling pretty good.