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Thursday 31 October 2013

Mean Girls


We went on vacation to my hometown. Over the course of two weeks, Cookie was forced to play with many strange children, most between the ages of two and five, most girls. (Cookie’s three.)

Normally she plays with two boys a bit younger than her. She’s a calming influence, they look up to her, and the three have learned about sharing and gentleness together over the last year and a half. Apparently she’s had it easy.

Most of her play dates on her vacation were violent and nasty and sadly traumatic. There was much slapping and pulling of toys and snarky comments. Cookie’s no angel, but she’s pretty reserved and she was not on her turf, so she was never the instigator. It was somewhat heartening to see her gradually build up nerve and learn to pull back and reprimand, but mostly heartbreaking. There were many tears. Some were almost mine. Very rarely did Cookie break down and say she didn’t want to play with the raging toddler bitch of the day, but I could tell she always wanted to say it. But in all cases the parents we were visiting were friends, and we couldn’t exactly leave because their children weren’t playing nice. So Cookie learned to face each encounter with grim fatalism.

The worst part is that I had to be diplomatic and I couldn’t parent other peoples’ kids, so I ended up defending the other kid’s behaviour to her. I had to tell her to share. I had to explain that the other child was still learning to express emotions, so Cookie had to understand why they were abusing her. I hate this. I remember this, the feeling that my mom wasn’t on my side. I still feel that. I don’t want Cookie to ever, but I’ve already done it, and it kills me.

After a day spent with two particular girls and their cousins, two boys, another day with the girls. Cookie asked, “Where are the boys?” The boys who were gentle and helpful and sharing. At this age, boys have yet to make her cry.

I recognize and remember this experience. Girls were always competitive and jealous. Boys could care less about that shit; they just wanted to play. Then, for a few years they were just as bossy and even more aggressive, but then the pre-teen years hit and they were the fun ones again. I always had girlfriends; I learned to play well with others, but my friendships with guys were much less complicated (until they weren’t).

I want my daughter to have simple, generous, loving relationships with girls, as she does now with her two best friends, the boys. I knew in time this mean-girl stuff would come, but it breaks my heart to see how nasty girl relationships are from the beginning. Is this just the way kids are? Is there anything we can do, other than explain, “She’s still learning to share,” “She doesn’t know how to say that she’s sad or angry or jealous,” and “She needs you to show her how to play together”? Is there another way to get her to love other girls, other than taking their side rather than hers? Surely not, but I haven’t googled it yet. I’ve been too busy visiting my lovely girlfriends and their bitchy daughters.


East End Mama


[image: Little girls by Lydia Coventry]

Friday 25 October 2013

Things that Made Me Happy Today



Here’s another round-up of crazy and/or useful links to brighten your day.


Admit it: you wonder too. Cookie sings this at daycare. (Except, I hope, the part where they sing “What the fox say?”) The video’s just a tad creepy, so I wouldn’t recommend it for kids. But if you haven’t heard of this yet, you will. Recorded as a joke by two Norwegian talk show hosts, “The Fox” made it to Billboard’s Hot 100 top ten. Seriously.


Definitely not a kid-friendly site, but the archive is full of kid-friendly goodness for their tummies. Thug Kitchen has brilliant healthy recipes, mostly vegan. Just…if your kid can read, don’t open this in front of them. I am so trying these peach pancakes this weekend, if I can find decent peaches in October. Which is a challenge, admittedly.


I’m stealing some of these. I may have already used the rope/swing/Muskoka-chair-with-beer trick.


Not terribly SFW. Most of us here are well past the point of throwing bachelorette parties. Unless they’re second marriages, that is. Or sometimes third. Sigh. But just in case you’ve thrown a rockin’ bachelorette and for some unfathomable reason have a barely used penis cake pan that you’ve no idea what to do with, here are some brilliant suggestions. Here’s another one: Kijiji that shit.


Every once in a while I forget that STFU Parents exists, and then I hear something about placenta printing and I remember. Well, it’s that time of year at STFUP, the time when the scariest, most nauseating things that parents post on social media (like, say, placenta prints) are shoved to front and centre for us to point and laugh/cringe at. If you can get around the ads, that is. The fun is just starting, so check back often.


For the first time in my life, I clicked on a sidebar ad. Crazy, I know. Why would anyone do that? Well, I’ve had a picture of a pair of boots hanging on my bulletin board for literally years now. Like, it moved with me. And then one day, there were almost the exact same boots flashing at me in a sidebar ad. So I had to.

Turns out they were on a site called JustFab. They’re not real leather, but that’s okay because no matter how well I take care of boots, they really only last me one season anyways because I wear the hell out of them, so I’ve started buying cheap ones every year. Not ideal, but oh well. But get this: they were $40 (plus S&H). And they were on my doorstep the next morning.

The catch is that it’s a subscription service. Every month you get an email with a list of things you might be interested in, and you have to either purchase something or opt out by a deadline. They sell footwear, handbags, jewellery, and denim, so the selection is a bit limited. But it’s pretty of the moment, and the quality’s not bad for the price. Most things are $40, although there’s a leather collection that tops out at $90. And did I mention I got the boots the next morning? Crazy.

Since I saw those boots, I’ve opted out one month and bought a second item the third month. It was another one of those inspired moments — angels sang and a beam of light shone on my laptop. Years and years ago I had a dream in which I was wearing pinstripe jeans, like I had in grade seven, and the next day I thought, “I miss pinstripe jeans,” so I went to a few vintage shops but came up empty. No one had pinstripe jeans. Even now I mention them to friends who are the same age as me and they have no idea what I’m talking about. I didn’t imagine this, people. Pinstripe jeans were a thing, I swear.

And then, in my latest JustFab email, there they were. Pinstripe jeans, like I’ve been searching for for almost a decade. The very next morning, on my way out of the house to drive Cookie to daycare, I tripped over them on the doorstep. They fit perfectly. There are so many other ways I’d rather shop and so many businesses I’d rather support, and I really don’t want to be a shill for any company. But time is money, right? Plus, this just seems to fill a particular need of mine insanely well.


One of us is pregnant and wondering what she’s going to dress up as for Halloween. I said, “Pregnant nun, obviously.” So classic. Or sooo done, depending on your perspective. Turns out there are lots of brilliant options. My favourite is Marge from Fargo. Really feeling robbed that I was only barely pregnant on Halloween.
(Note: Linking to a pro-life site doesn’t constitute an endorsement of its views.)

East End Mama

[image: via pregnant chicken]

Friday 18 October 2013

Lunch with an Old Friend



An old co-worker of mine was in town and called me at the last minute for lunch. “Sure!” I said. Twenty minutes later we were chewing kimchi and doing a twenty-minute round-up of the last three years of our respective lives. It was fun, and quick, and for a few minutes before we paid the bill LouLou allowed my friend to hold her.

Loulou is one of those babies who seems to make women yearn to be pregnant. She is that perfect age — she has a huge head, a round belly, a big six-toothed smile, and no words to argue with yet.

My friend — single, early thirties, climbing the ladder — says, “If this doesn't happen for me soon [squeezing LouLou’s thighs], I’m going to do it alone.” She was kind of joking...I think. She has always really loved her career — she will move, she will travel, she will miss family events — whatever it takes.

So I managed to not completely quash her dreams (and possibly our friendship!) by stopping myself before I said, “Don’t do that.” As in, don’t choose single motherhood. Don’t idiotically proclaim you will still be you, just with a baby! She of course is not an idiot. But I have been thinking about this little conversation since we parted ways — her to buy heels for a last-minute event and me to buy a rotisserie chicken for dinner. Why did I immediately want to dissuade her (maybe protect her) from motherhood? It wasn’t a very kind response.

Here are the reasons I have come up with so far:

·       Being a mother is hard.
·       Being a single mother is even harder.
·       Being a single mother with any semblance of a meaningful, respected career appears to be almost impossible (except for Sheryl Crow).
·       I think artificial insemination would be expensive.
·       And, perhaps, I think she likes her current life too much to really grasp what it is to give it ALL up. And without a partner — yeah, bye bye cocktail parties...

I really try not to scare women off of motherhood or giving birth, and luckily once again I caught myself today. But I am still left thinking: Why when a woman says that she is longing for a kid, and is even willing to go it alone, is my reaction not just simple joy for them?

Tightrope Mama

[image: Mom and Baby Giraffe by by Ashley Bridger]



Friday 11 October 2013

Rasta Girl



My hairdresser told me once that I have perfect hair for dreads. It’s so fine, it would bunch together easily. I’ve stored this information away, in the event that I ever want to drop out of society. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant to my life. Or is it?

When I was a child, my hair was short. There was a brief period around grade four when it reached below my shoulders, but until grade eight, after I’d seen Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and said “I want that” (really?) and my mom decided I was finally old enough to have an opinion about my hair, it was for the most part brutally short. Braces, glasses, boy hair. Winner! So of course, after my hair started to creep its way to my shoulders, thanks to Jennifer Grey, I never looked back. Except for a notable period after Cookie was born, when all she was doing was puking in my hair. Plus, we were showing our home in order to sell it just when my hair started to fall out post-pregnancy, so every day, in addition to tidying toys and dabbing puke stains and hiding the microwave, I had to sweep up giant roaming hair balls. While nursing pretty much constantly. I opted to cut my hair rather than abandon my child or pretend we had enough counter space for a microwave. So in light of my relative hair freedom now, I always wondered why my mother made me have short hair, why I had to pin a tea towel to my head to pretend I had long hair when I played dress up, and why my mom endured epic screaming matches every time she took me to get my hair cut. Why not just leave it?

So I vowed that I wouldn’t cut Cookie’s hair. She’s been for one haircut, where we had the frazzled ends that she’d been sleeping on since birth trimmed, but other than that it’s long. It’s not stylish. Suri Cruise would not approve. It’s just a mop, now two distinct layers thanks to the earlier cut. But it’s long, and that’s what both Cookie and I want.

Except…well, when Cookie’s hair was starting to grow out in her second year, my dad told me a story. When my sister was three — Cookie’s age now — she had soft golden curls that were just beginning to stretch down her back. And every time my mom tried to brush her hair, they fought bitterly and fiercely. Tears were shed on both sides. It was a never-ending battle. And then my mom went away for the weekend, and my dad decided to take matters into his own hands. He got my sister’s hair cut. Problem solved, right?

When my mom returned from her girls’ weekend, she was horrified. What had he done? Why? How could he do such a thing? My dad was confused. Hadn’t he actually fixed the situation? But guys just don’t get it.

The curious thing about this story is that my sister is younger than me. My mom took the easy way out with me, but when my sister came along five years later, apparently she chose vanity. I kind of take heart from that, because my mother is not a vain person. But even she had her weakness in that regard, and that was my sister’s hair.

The other curious thing about this story is that I didn’t learn anything from it. Not at first, at least. But trust me, I’m learning now.

Cookie and I have fine, thin hair, her even more so since she’s a toddler. Pictures of my sister at that age look much the same, so I imagine her hair was also fine and thin. I know lots of other moms who have worse problems with their children’s hair. I just spent a weekend with a four-year-old with tight, wiry red curls that are almost impenetrable. But Cookie’s hair doesn’t tangle, it mats. You could make felt from it. Or, of course, dreads. When my sister’s cat gets that matted, she takes it to the vet and gets something called the “lion” cut. They shave off all its body hair, leaving only its face and tail untouched. They have to sedate the cat for this procedure.

Brushing Cookie’s hair is an ordeal that involves screaming and restraints (kidding!) and bribery and coercion. TV is almost always involved. We are all sticky with detangler by the time it’s done. We can only do it every other day, for our sanity, but that’s probably not helping the situation. The back of her head resembles that of a beginner Rastafarian’s by day two. I’m proud to say that I’ve only once broke out the scissors, and that was after two weeks when we couldn’t brush a patch of her hair because she had staples in the back of her head. But if I could legally sedate her, I would. I’ve tried brushing it when she’s sleeping. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Part of the coercion is the threat of cutting. She wants long hair, she wants to be able to swing it, and she hates pigtails because she can’t feel her hair move. I want her to have long hair because I wasn’t allowed. So my threats to cut are empty, but they are effective. I don’t know how many times we’ve gone past the “three strikes and we’re going to the hairdresser” limit, but who’s counting? She will be soon, I’m sure. Crap. Till then, I can only hope that she understands that the limited pain is worth the gain in length. Or pride and vanity. Ha! I’m sure there are positive lessons here, but right now I just want long hair.

By the way, every time I brush Cookie’s hair, I can’t help but wonder how those moms on Toddlers & Tiaras do it. I bet there’s sedation involved. I don’t want to know, I swear I don’t.

East End Mama