What I did on my summer staycation

Summer's officially over and in true Canadian style, we sure found lots of reasons to complain about it. Perhaps it was too cold, or too rainy. Then it was too hot to move. And now (sigh) it's over.

I thought I'd reflect on what was good about summer 2009.

	Lucy turned two My daughter turned not-so-terrible two at the end of August and I am enjoying this stage so much more this time around. I'm amazed that we can laugh at her throwing herself dramatically on the couch when she doesn't get her way, but having a casual attitude about it means the tantrums are over in seconds.
	My little tomboy is blossoming into such a lovely girl, wanting to hold her "baby" when it "ciyes," learning how to make daddy do just about anything for her, or making me spend an hour picking and blowing dandelions. I am in love.
	Watching Nate's friendships blossom  Witnessing your baby grow into a social being is quite the head trip. It's made me realize how short all this neediness is and I've truly come to appreciate my role as a mother. Soon they'll be going off with people whose company they enjoy more than mine. (Bwaahhh!)
	My son is so gentle and so imaginative in his play. This summer he's had to learn that not everyone likes Batman and that sometimes you have to adjust your play to suit your pal. I think there's a nugget of wisdom in that we could all learn from.
	Days at the beach Whether we were at the Toronto Beach (an easy, effortless family day) or at our favourite camping spot, time stands still on the beach it seems. My kids learned to play with each other and make each other laugh, which in turn made mom and dad laugh.
	Hope your summer was as fun as mine. I have turned into "that mom" -- the one who just wants to talk about her kids all the time.

My Homework (Part 1)

So I'm under strict orders to digest the past and then shit it out and be done with it. Flush away the resentment and the hurt, tuck my reading material under my arm and get on with it. Move forward. Yes, that's right, it's time for your weekly dose of me working through my therapy online.

The summer I turned 13 began with me being blissfully unaware. I was a TEENAGER! Finally! I had already learned the awful lesson that having your period wasn't something to get excited about, share at a sleepover, or wax poetic about in a Judy Blume novel.

I'd also figured out that dandruff, bad hair, acne and braces were not a winning combo for securing dates. But hey, I could still fantasize about River Phoenix. I was THIRTEEN!

I rode my bike through laneways and around cul-de-sacs, spending my allowance on Big Macs and a Tuesday showing of A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon or Who's That Girl? at a TTC-accessible mall-theatre of choice.

I was also in summer school. Not for dummies, but for enrichment and free babysitting. It was the first summer in my entire life where my mom had a job outside of the home.

The classes weren't at our local school, so my dad would drive me and my sister there and back. I took Computers (which meant waiting for my turn to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) and Drama (which was just the beginning of my future drama nerdness).

My dad had been acting stranger than usual as of late. He'd insisted my mom go back to work. He was working two jobs himself and he was tired and cranky much of the time. My parents seemed distant. When we asked my mom about him, she would tell us he was still heartbroken over his father's death, or he was very tired. I think she knew -- she must have known -- but the truth was too scary, too horrible to face.

He was driving us to summer school one morning, exhaustion dripping from his face. I was oblivious, flipping between Top 40 stations trying to find Jody Watley. He hit the brakes -- HARD -- and the car jerked to a stop at a crosswalk in front of St. Aidan's, a startled school girl looking right at us.

"Oh my God. I almost hit her," he said. I remember nothing else. Not whether he was shaking, not whether he swore; all I remember is that I didn't think it was as big a deal as he was making it. He'd stopped in time after all. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

The phone rang at 1 am that night. It woke us in our teeny house. The details are fuzzy, but I must have asked my mom if everything was alright. "Your dad says he's too shaken up over almost hitting that girl today. He's going to his friend's cottage."

He worked nights, leaving just after dinner and coming home while we were sleeping. But it was the first time in my life where I was conscious of his absence.

We'd been hearing about this "friend from work" in recent months, but frankly, I was excited that my dad finally seemed to have a friend. He was a loner mostly, preferring books to people, and though I craved some positive attention from him, some validation, I'd come to accept that in some broken way.

The idea of my dad having a fishing buddy, like the dads on TV, brought joy to my naive heart. Sure, I wished it was me he was taking fishing. Heck, I would even gladly share that outing with my sister, but if nothing else having a friend showed that he had a heart and some promise as a "normal" human being.

Then came the day he announced we'd be going to his friend's cottage...

To be continued...

The Chinks in My Armor

If you came here for laughs or random hand job talk, click away, because I'm dishing out more introspection. It's not for everyone, but it's important to me to document my new outlook and how I'm getting there. If you want to be happier in life, stick around, you might find a nugget that applies to you.

So I've been seeing a Life Coach. Particularly Carly Cooper, who writes for me on SweetMama. I wonder if this is a weird conflict of interest, but I needed help and Carly was approachable, a woman and a mom so I thought it would be worth the risk. It absolutely has been. I have learned more about myself in the past month or so, than I have in 5 years of blogging my deepest thoughts. And now I even know why!

Tonight I did an exercise that required going through a list of fears, identifying which ones apply to me and then writing down when that fear started, what negative/self-sabotaging behaviour does it cause, and what would be the worst thing that could happen should that fear come true.

I got through a quarter of the list.

A huge part of this involves examining the past to find the reasons I do things the way I do. By far the biggest revelation has been the perfectionist/procrastinator/self-sabotager one. If I can't do it perfect, why bother? Are you like that too?

The other one is the Fear of Humiliation. When I first read that I thought, nah, not me. Why I humiliate myself for laughs regularly on the interweb! But then as I thought about it, I realized that I humiliate myself to beat others to the punch. Get them laughing with me instead of at me.

My best friend has the same fear, but the opposite tactic. She wants no one to notice her. In her house, getting noticed meant getting the beats from her dad. In my house, getting someone to laugh might have saved you a beating.

Instead of noticing I'm being noticed by surprise, I want to control that element. By saying, "Look at me! I'm a goof!" I feel like I'm somewhat in charge of the outcome. Holy motherfucking cuppa crazy!

Actually, my mom's right. I should stop referring to myself as crazy. I'm not crazy. I'm human. I am a puzzle put together by events in my life, events I'm trying to understand now so that they no longer make up who I am. There's more to me than abuse, bullying, separation and eating disorders.

Going through this process has made me more confident as a mom. Oh, I am going to fuck those little shits up regardless -- and they will have phases where they will hate me regardless -- but at least I feel like I'm fucking them up slightly less. It's not a competition or anything, but if you were beaten as a child and you DON'T beat your own kids, I feel that's a heck of an improvement.

Just a note here that it is not my intention to malign my parents in any way, though it may seem like that. I know they'd both get defensive if they read this. I know they did the best they knew how and I've forgiven them for a lot of their mis-steps. I love them dearly and am grateful for their help in raising my kids. They've also grown a lot as people over the past 35 years.

I am no longer expecting them to accept responsibility for their wrong-doings. I'm not waiting for some crazy confession of guilt. I'm over it. But I want to process the past so I can live in the present. I need to be done with it all, but first I must learn to undo what's ingrained in my brain that's holding me back.

Here's to that.

Oh for those who were still hoping for a giggle, we went camping last weekend. Funny photolog to come....

Boys II Men

My first baby went off to Kindergarten last week. And like many moms, I cried about it and reminisced about my journey as a mother.

From the beginning, Nate was a surprise to me in so many ways. For one thing, he wasn't planned. For another, I was convinced he was a girl. What would I do with a son?

In the beginning I somehow was foolish enough to believe that my son would like whatever I exposed him too. I always thought that boys liking cars and trucks was somehow due to parents buying boys, well, cars and trucks. But I can clearly recall the first time he noticed a fire truck, how his body shook with excitement. "Caaa!" and "Truuuuh!" were two of his earliest words.

Clearly my Sunday morning Coronation Street marathons were having no effect. My boy was a boy biologically and no amount of nursing him in the restroom at Holt's was going to change his character. (Though it may have given him the amazing fashion sense he has today. He picked out this outfit entirely by himself!*)

I never thought I'd have a PHD in Thomas and Friends trains (my daughter surprisingly has an attraction to Thomas too). I never thought I'd have my own favourite Hot Wheels® (I'm partial to the vintage muscle cars). I certainly never imagined myself careening down the highway to catch up to a red Ferrari. But being the mother of a son has made me appreciate a lot of things that I would not ordinarily have taken a second look at.

I Am Not Me

I've been chanting a line I heard Eckhart Tolle say to Strombo on The Hour:

"You are not the sad story in your head."

It's likely paraphrased, adapted after watching the clip into a language that would work for me. But it's working. I am not my mind. Therefore I don't have to let my mind be an excuse anymore.

I'm far from being healed, or enlightened on a Buddha level, but I feel like I've had a breakthrough.

*********************
I've had a weird week. I've gone from thinking that there is no way my marriage will survive, to finding a way back to love again and celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary with a renewed commitment to making it work.

A week or so ago we were bickering in front of Nate and his cousin. Nate turned to his cousin and said, "My parents are always fighting and I don't know why." This was a pretty big wake up call for me. I thought all our petty snipping would show him that we're not perfect, that people can disagree and still love each other. But I realized it made him feel unsafe, because we've been venturing into some scary territory.

Plus my sage four-year-old is right. What the heck ARE we fighting about? Then BOOM! I got news of several women I know having their marriages break up. All of them with two kids or more. No one wants to say it, and no one knows what the outcome would have been without them, but it's hard not to look at the having children part of all this and wonder how much it has to do with the downfall of a marriage.

As one woman put it roughly in an email, "...it is inevitable I think, it's not their fault, but it does place so much stress." It's completely true of course, but the thought of my dear sweet children, who were both created out of great love, being the cause of that love's demise breaks my heart too much. I can't give up yet.

There's another phrase that's been going around in my head. Something along the lines of "Every horse thinks his load the heaviest." I would say that thoughts like that account for a lot of the discord in co-parenting right there.

Of course that's not all that I have to say on this subject. I'm working through a lot right now and (not to get all Oprah on you but) I've had a few "a-ha" moments. I've had to lay low, be quiet around here until I understood what was going on. Normally I would just spew, but I have to take into account the potential feelings of the three other (human) members of my family.

(Not Scout. Scout could handle it. She'd just look over at me and continue licking her puckered asshole. But I can't suddenly turn this into a cat blog.)

*********************

I've just spent two amazing days with my beautiful kids, revelling in their blueberry muffin batter scent, big brown eyes that engulf my heart, giant mouthed smiles and bedtime giggles. They are so sweet with each other these days.

I lived through my parents' mis-steps. It is the sad story I've played in my head forever, wearing it like a security blanket, thinking I had to carry it to identify myself. I would say it made me who I am today, but that would be wrong. It made me who I thought I was for a long time; the person I'm working very hard to shed now, to separate myself from.

The idea of separating from myself might sound like weird hocus pocus, but it's the key to keeping me from separating from my husband. I know for many couples there are few choices and this is not a comment on anyone else. I can only speak to my own experiences.

No one ever wants to break their children's hearts, or to let their children watch as their mother's (or father's) heart gets broken. I'm sure my mother had no such intention, but couldn't stop herself from falling apart in front of us. (My father on the other hand was too sick with midlife crisis in the brain to notice the consequences of his actions.)

When Sly Stone sings, "It's a family affair..." it's always held a different meaning for me. Every choice we make as adults impacts the lives of our children to some degree. Maybe because I watched my mother fight for, and then forgive my father, I am hard-wired to keep going. Maybe because I didn't like seeing them act like children, I am forced to finally grow up for my own small family. These are stories for a book, or another day.

Regardless, I'm not carrying those old wounds with me anymore. I don't need them. But I need to fix this, fix me, for the sake of my kids. That's the only truth I've got right now.