You May Be Feeling

As my eldest son comes up on his 13th birthday, it strikes me that the following story, featuring him as a newborn, is an old one.  It must be out of date, irrelevant, belong happily for new mothers like I was in the ‘remember back when?’ files.  But hearing of a friend who recently had a baby and her own experiences with breastfeeding pressures, made me not so sure.  As a society, it often seems...

There are many things that we feel we should make our kids do that indeed we likely should.  Teeth brushing is a good idea, doctor’s appointments come to mind.  But many of these shoulds are just knee-jerk reflexes, repetition compulsions.  Things we just feel like we’re supposed to be doing, even though we’re not always quite sure why, which means they’re driven by tradition, conformity, social f...

I don’t really have any friends who are mothers. I know a few fathers, but their kids are way younger than mine, entrenched in phases I can barely remember.  Just being parents only buys so much bonding.  If I ever were to develop a friendship with a mother though, I’ve always imagined her not to have girls.  She would have to be stuck with boys like me.  It’s an assumption based on a suspicion: ...

I recently celebrated my 50th birthday.  I had my kids that day, but luckily, my brother came to visit too.  Else the occasion would surely have felt swallowed by the whims and wiles of my sons, by their age-appropriate, yet still insulting, levels of empathy.  For a very long section of our lives it doesn’t actually feel like we’re aging.  We’re getting older, but not aging.  And then suddenly we...

If boys aren’t playing video games or eating, they’re up in your face. Hashtag not all boys.  Fine.  But I’m always trying to dream up quiet, sedentary, non-screen activities that my sons will do independently.  A way for us to be around each other, but not actively engage.  Or speak.  Maybe that sounds awful.  But winter is long.  And my apartment is small.  On a rare occasion I’ll catch us accid...

I’ve always envied people who clearly have a simpler relationship to alcohol than I do.  Who can casually encounter a drink, with take it or leave it flair.  They always seem like elegant self-negating heroes to me.  But, of course, they’re not. New weight loss drugs, like Ozempic, are fascinatingly confirming that some people deal with a lot more food noise than others which makes resisting over-...

I’m not totally sure we just had Easter weekend.  I mean, I know I had two extra days off, making it a long weekend with my children, but because I’m not religious, I’m not really sure what Easter is supposed to mean.  As far as I can tell, much like Halloween, it’s basically about candy.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but parenting can give you this vague sense that holidays are supp...

My 10-year old recently picked out a cool new pair of running shoes.  Funky bright yellow and very him.  Breaking them in though, he realized they were challenging to get on, and likely wouldn’t fit him for that long.  Sigh.  He was depressed at the thought that he would likely outgrow these shoes faster than he would do them in.  A minor reckoning ensued around growing and losing, and it took me...

Like the luddite that I am, I still use a big ol’ fridge calendar to make sense of my life.  I’ve been known to even carry it with me to awkward places like meetings and the dentist’s.  Each month’s page is littered with little letter B’s written in green marker.  B is for boys.  The green B’s mark the days I have my sons.  The 50/50 custody schedule I share with my ex is simple and easy to rememb...

The longest I’ve gone without drinking – by far – were the two times I was pregnant.  The imposed sacrifice wasn’t something I enjoyed much, but it did teach me a few things.  Well, maybe one big thing:  ‘you can’t take the edge off, so don’t put it on.’  It was a recipe for living that had previously eluded me.  In the time since my children have lived on the outside of my body though, alcohol ha...

Whenever a health professional asks me if I’ve been pregnant before, it takes me a second to remember how many times.  I’ve had two children.  I had an abortion in my 20’s.  And I had a miscarriage before my first son.  That’s four, I’ll remind myself.  You’ve been pregnant four times.   The frequency of miscarriages is not matched by the amount of discussion they get.  Some estimates suggest that...

I’ve got a new pet peeve at the grocery store.  It’s those warning labels on packages announcing that the product is super high in sodium or sugar, or some other terrible ingredient. Being empowered to make “informed choices” sounds lovely until you remember that you live in a world that constantly crushes you with information and bombards you with choice. We are stuck in a food environment that i...

It’s hard to believe that the terrible reign of COVID-19 started 6 years ago.  The pandemic sometimes feels more like a world we went to than a time we lived through, and we don’t much like being reminded of that place or care to revisit it. Usually when the pandemic comes up in casual conversation, it’s all sighs and sentence fragments.  We shake our heads and swiftly shift gears.  It’s a lovely...

I’ve been separated from the father of my children for 6 years now.  At this point separation has become old hat.  Maybe too old hat cause I can’t really imagine myself in a relationship anymore.  Sharing space with another adult?  Being witnessed in my parenting?  Trying to collaborate with them in parenting?  Gah.  Sounds like a lot.  And a lot of relationships I see look like barely veiled co-d...

After the long months (or was it years?) of being cooped up during the pandemic, simply getting to roam free in the world again was thrilling.  I remember how, finally being out in wide open spaces essential for boy energy, my favourite thing to say to my sons was “run on ahead.”  It’s a line I’m sure many parents relish deploying whenever they can; the subtext is of course closer to something my...

Aside from handing back a ton of failing essays in my life, I’ve never had to deliver much bad news.  When parents decide to separate, having to tell your kids that their lives are about to be turned upside down and inside out, is terrifying.  You seek advice, you strategize about when to do it, what to say, what not to say, and try to imagine how such big news will possibly land in little lives. ...

Every semester as a teacher, I go through a distinct honeymoon phase with a new crop of students:  for a few solid weeks, we feel downright decently about one another, until I have to go and harsh the mellow by assigning grades.  Like awards, we want grades to matter when they flatter, and be irrelevant when they don’t.  It’s a cheeky relativism that shows our love/hate relationship with feedback....

A lot of my writing is about being a mother.  Which is kind of ironic to me, since the early days of parenting felt marred by mourning a creative life. These days my sons are wise to the fact that they provide much fodder for my work.   I can barely tell them about a new project before they’re doing some wacky math to calculate their cut.  Recently I did slightly better than breaking even on a sho...

One of the things I enjoy about my sons going to school in French is the random way that franglais, that fun French/English hybrid, winds its way into our Anglo home.  For instance, we consistently use the word “câlin,” for some reason, in place of its English counterpart hug or cuddle.  Words we never say.  “Do you want a câlin?” I’ll often ask at the sight one of my son’s upset.  And I’m curious...

Parents are people.  That might seem like a rather stupid thing to say.  But I think it’s easy to forget when you play such a huge role in the life of a dependent person with extensive, pressing and often loudly expressed needs, that you too are a human with needs.  Those oft-cited advisements to put on your own oxygen mask first, or fill your own cup, are typically followed by the rationale that...

I often try to imagine what parenting advice looked like a few generations ago, when it could only come from a few sources:  relatives, friends, neighbours, maybe a few books.  But that was about it.   And when I compare it to the firehose to the face that is the internet, where parenting advice is rampant, insistent and often contradictory, I can’t help but envy those days of yore. Sure, they cam...

I’ve often described the Christmas holidays as time spent entertaining a vague suspicion that you’re supposed to be feeling differently than you do.  It’s painful to have feelings you’re not supposed to have, but that rarely makes them go away.  Better, of course, to normalize them. Maternal ambivalence as a feeling can be pretty awkward.  Cause whether we admit it or not, we have strong beliefs a...

Intro to season 2!  

I’m old enough to know that New Year’s Resolutions are for suckers.  Sure, blank slates offer motivation, but never as much as we hope.  We’re lazy and it’s cold.  And that’s fair.  But I have been trying each Jan. 1 to pick a bit of a north star for the year.  Just a kind of experience that I want to say yes to.  I don’t rush to change any habits; I just keep this thing in mind. This year I found...

I ruminate quite a bit over our hyper-digitized lives.  But I also think a lot about gender.  I can’t help it.  I’m a 48-year-old woman, a separated mother of two boys, ages 11 and 8.  And I’ve joked before that if you tried to draw a Venn diagram illustrating the overlapping interests of middle-aged women and school-aged boys, you wouldn’t have a Venn diagram.   But I’ve come to see a connection...