On the Variable Nature of Time

Time is of such variable density. A decade may hold sufficient experiences to fill up a life; even several lives. Thirty-seven years might not contain enough to satisfy a vigorous person for one month.

When I think of Labrador, my remembrance shoots into those ten years liek a bird diving into a forest. It swoops on and on through turnings and changes, seasons and episodes. People appear, speak, act, their stories unfold. Labrador is limitless and never the same.

When I call to mind evens from my years as barracks master they all seem to have taken place on a single day. The weather, the grey ilght, is always the same. My ageing body inhabits its uniform in unchanging settings and routines...

From The Afterlife of George Carwright by John Steffler, page 260.

This reminds me of the difference between time on a holiday, and everyday life. How can we cram so much living, so many different activities, so much colour and light and beauty, into a mere 7 days! (I am thinking here, for example, of a trip to Cuba). A week at home is much paler in comparison.

This can also describe the difference between my recent student life and my office work life. The last few years of office work have been like a blink in the eye, in terms of their monotony. Student life, however, was continually opening my eyes. New discoveries, new faces, new spaces, new spatial alignment. Interesting...

Gee whiz, 456 pageviews and I've only ever put up 2 posts in the last 4 years?? Either my words are golden, or there are thousands of people clicking on "Next Blog" and thereby stumbling upon this.

Oh well, main premise of this blog is so so fabulous, but being a mother (brown, no less) means I haven't had a speck of time to update this blog. Which tells you a lot about being a mother (brown or not). Inidentally, I have a second little brown baby (just as delicious as the first), and am just as feminist and politically committed to babywearing, cosleeping, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, mm...and whatever the other tenets of attachment parenting are. Except for the home made organic babyfood - I can't totally get behind that, either because of the  "I can't be bothered" factor or because of the "I think our foodchain is prettty safe already" factor. So sue me.

I'd tell you all about the other stuff I am committed to but, um, I'm at work and I'd really probably better get back to it.

Happy blog surfing, darlings!!!

Dirt, and the nature of clutter

When last I left you, I was expounding on my theories of natural parenting. So far so good. But, while I enjoy these practices greatly, and while I adore organizations like La Leche League and magazines like Mothering, they don't entirely address other feminist concerns. These include: women's sexual passages through life, the division of labour in the household, and the global struggle for women's and mother's rights. There may be more items I add to this list, as my feminist mothering awareness grows, but that's all I can think of for the moment.

Of this list, the item I have been pondering the most lately is the division of household labour. This is nothing new for feminists, or for me. As early as Grade 12 (I was 17) I learned in a Canadian Studies course in high school that, even among couples who divide household chores equally, things get majorly out of whack with the birth of the first baby. With this change, women end up taking on waaay more (think 75-90%) of the household chores.

Now, things like breastfeeding can only be done by the mother (unless you use a breast pump, which I wouldn't suggest for the first few months, until breastfeeding is well established), and sometimes a baby will only be comforted by mother (this usually happens when the mother is completely worn out and would really like the papa to take over); but generally speaking, every chore in the house could still be shared. However there is just one little problem - the papas generally don't see any of the chores that have to be done, or else they use their "work" (paid employment) to get out of doing anything more.

Such was the case when I had my baby. I live in Canada and have a cushy job with the federal government, so I got a paid maternity leave - a luxurious one year at 93% of my pay! (sux to be an American woman - they get barely any maternity leave!) This was wonderful, of course, and due to the efforts of many women (and likely some men) who came before me and fought for women to have paid maternity leaves. On the down side, however, it meant that I was practically federally legislated to do all the housework and babycare in the house, cuz after all, I was getting paid to do it (technically speaking) while if my husband did these chores, he didn't get paid anything (of course, he has a start up computer company, so he still doesn't get paid, but that's another story).

So this is one of the dichotomies with which I struggle: paid maternity leave = excellent, feminist achievement. Forced to do housework and babycare = step back for feminism.

To be fair to my husband, he does take care of baby for an hour or so most days so I can have some rest, and now that I'm back at work, he takes him to the daycare in the morning, which saves me from having a nervous breakdown. He also does cook 3-4 times a night, and washes the dishes and tidies the kitchen around the same amount.

However, he won't do any of the other household chores: laundry, tidying, cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming, sweeping the floors, washing the floors, rinsing out the cloth diapers, and so on, unless I nag him significantly. And I'm talking 5-10 reminders along the lines of "have you vacuumed the floor yet? No? How about now? Now? Now? Do you have time now? When do you think you'll have time? Tomorrow? The day after?" And when that is finally done my new nagging refrain begins: "I cleaned the bathroom so can you please scrub the tub? Not now? Okay, so when? Now? How about now? Oh, you don't think it's dirty? Oh, well, I think it is dirty - you see that dirt?" AAAARRRRGGGHH! (I would use some stronger four-lettered words here, but I think you can understand my frustration without them).

And then there's the clutter.

Clutter is an unfortunate byproduct of our adorable babies. They don't create it, exactly, it just kind of coalesces around them. Clothes, toys, food bits, diapers, papers, strollers, baby carriers, plastic bottles...the list of detritus that collects is amazing. Now, my husband thinks all the clutter is my fault; that if I just had a better system for organizing things, OR, if I just put everything away the second I put it down, there would be no clutter. Such a viewpoint obviously ignores the realities of mothering, but then he's much better at theory than practice.

For example, if I come home and my baby is shrieking cuz he's overtired (no, I don't really know what his "bedtime" is) I am immediately going to pull off his clothes, change his diaper, wash off his hands and face, and hustle him to the bed so I can nurse him to sleep. Then, I am going to breathe a huge sigh of relief, eat some food, prepare my things for work tomorrow, prepare his diaper bag, watch a bit of tv with my husband cuz I like his company (despite all the unkind things I am saying about his household work ethic, and then start my own bedtime routine. End result: a clutter of clothes in the bedroom, diaper bag stuff in the living room, and who the heck knows what else in every nook and cranny of the apartment.

So this brings us back to my original problem: how to deal with all that clutter. As mentioned, my husband thinks I generate all the clutter, so he won't ever EVER EVER tidy the goddamn stuff up (okay, I just had to swear there). So that leaves intelligent emancipated sweet feminist moi with the clothes to wash, fold and put away, the bathrooms to clean, the floor to sweep and wash, the diapers to rinse, the cooking and kitchen cleaning to do (most, though not all of the time) AND the clutter to put away. Plus I have a full time job. Phewf! And did I mention I'd like to write a few books too?

So WWAFMD??? (catchy acronym for "What Would a Feminist Mother Do?") Mothering magazine has not yet addressed this for me (at least not in the issues I've managed to read. As you can tell, I don't have a heckuva lot of free time available).

I have a few options, obviously.

1) Ignore it all. A good option and one that many mothers espouse. Problem is, I like to have a clean house, tidy floors, clean clothes, and tasty food to eat. Plus I like my baby to have food to eat, clean clothes, clean diapers and....you get the picture.

2) Hire out the work. I am starting to lean towards this option. I could have a housecleaner come and clean the apartment, and I could take the laundry to a laundromat and have them wash, dry and fold this. I actually did this last week. I was scandalised by the price, however. Three loads of laundry would have cost me $4.50 in my apartment's laundry room. Instead, I paid $34.50 for it to be done! You could have knocked me over with a feather.... But, by way of comparison, it would cost me nothing to clean my apartment, and I would pay about $70 for a housecleaner to come for two hours. As well, what about the ethics of hiring other (low skilled, often immigrant) women to do what I don't want to do? It's a dilemma.

3) Nag my husband to do more. In an ideal world, I would be an orderly person and I would set a schedule for the weekend. My husband and I would do the household chores between 10 and 1 pm on Saturday, get it DONE, and then have the rest of the weekend to rest. We would then share the chores that have to be done during the week (cooking, tidying, cleaning the kitchen). But I'm not orderly; I often want to do other, fun things on the weekend, and even if I tell hubby we should do housework at a certain time, I get busy around that time and don't remember til later that I was supposed to do cleaning then. And he, naturally, is not about to remind me!

4) There must be a number 4. Can't think of it, though.

Now you see, here is another dilemma. I have spent about 45 minutes working on this post when I should have been: drying and styling my hair so I look respectable at work tomorrow (today my hair sure didn't!), replenishing my son's diaper bag, rinsing his dirty diapers, eating dinner, organizing my things for work tomorrow, planning my clothes for tomorrow, tidying the living room, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the food bits up so my son doesn't eat them off the floor and, lastly, going to bed so I can be up early tomorrow and not late again for work and daycare drop off and work as I was today (my husband was away this morning so I did the drop off). Sigh. Life is full when you're a mommy. Now, the question here again is, WWAFMD???

Here's a kiss for all the hardworking mommies out there - Smooch!

Feminist mothering?

Yesterday I experienced an upheaval in my psyche. Long held beliefs, thoughts, and emotions came to war with present day realities and challenges. To act, yes, that's what I had to do. But first, I have to think. I have to think about my place in the world, my condition and what it all means.

That's what this blog will be about.

To what am I referring? Being a feminist mother, of course. Is it an oxymoron? A contradiction? A virtue? Or a vice? Like every good feminist, I want to have it all: a loving relationship with my child (a sweet, perfect, wonderful son), a happy relationship with my husband, a well paying, satisfying job; I want intellectual and creative stimulation, I want to have fun, I want to dance, I want to write, maybe I even want to sing. I want to have pretty clothes, great hair, a slim body (ah, that's a pipe dream!) big breasts full of milk (yay!) and the luxury of keeping my head in the clouds. I want like minded friends (sigh!) and I want to change the world to make it a better place for my peers and those who will come after me. That's not asking too much, is it? No!

What Happened Yesterday: my son was sick so I took the day off to care for him. By noon he was better so I took him to his daycare, so I could have time to do some urgent tasks. One of those was going to the doctor, myself, as I have a lingering cough. I had to get away from home (was tied there for the last 3 days due to my baby's illness (an ear infection, it transpired) and was irritated due to the continued presence of a house guest - a colleague of my husband's, who always stays much too long, and takes all of my husband's attention away from me (not that it takes much to do that, alas). So I went downtown.

While downtown I went to the doctor (who prescribed antibiotics), had lunch at a favourite cafe (it was only okay) and then perused a local alternative newspaper. I was looking for a listing for an art exhibit showing contemporary Aboriginal art. I found the listing and planned to go there, but I also saw an ad for a feminist bookshop/porn shop called Venus Envy that I had thought about visiting (never mind why, more on that later, perhaps). So I decided to mosey by the porn shop, then go to the art exhibit. I was angry and confused, my head full of contradictions. I needed time to myself and these activities seemed self affirming.

I went to the bookshop and saw a shelf with a startling label: feminist motherhood. What? It seems like a natural thought, but I hadn't seen those two words juxtaposed ever before. Why did it matter?

I am a feminist, bien sur. And now, and for the last 18.5 months, I have been a mother. Being a mother is the most wonderful thing in the world. My son is so dear. He has such a cute personality and the biggest, sweetest brown eyes. I love him completely and always will, no matter happens. I will love him and care for him and support him throughout his life. I am his mother, and I am blessed to have been given this dear boy to care for.

But I am a feminist too. I want to fight for women's equality, women's rightful place in the world. Feminism makes sense to me. It is about choice. I support women's right to choose - to choose how we take care of our bodies, to choose to go to school, to choose work or staying home with our children. I support our rights to use our money and property how we choose, to wear what we want, to read what we want, and to think what we want.

During my pregnancy and motherhood I have been learning about a parenting philosophy that, for want of better terms, we can call "natural parenting" or "attachment parenting". To me, the pillars of this parenting style are:

1. Natural birth - women reclaim control over their bodies during the birthing process. Also makes breastfeeding and recovery from birth easier.
2. Breastfeeding - awesome, fun, free, and best for baby and mommy
3. Babywearing - keep baby close for cuddles and kisses. Also keeps hands free!
4. Co-sleeping - baby in bed = more sleep, better breastfeeding
5. Keeping baby close - I feel being close to me physically is good for my baby and for me
6. Cloth diapering - super easy, cheap, and best for the planet.

So far so good. I am confident and comfortable with these choices. And they are, all, feminist choices because they are choices that affirm mother's control over our bodies.

But when I saw this title - "feminist mothering" I felt suddenly there was something lacking up to now in my mothering. How can I explain something I haven't yet thought through? I can only start to try to, and it is linked to a feeling that there is something bigger I haven't yet thought. That my mothering needs to be connected to the old, multicultural feminist me. It made me realise I need to synthesize my old, single, unmommy self with the new, mommy, married me. I will try. I will think and figure and read and google. I will learn, I will become aware and, a little more me.