I woke up to snow outside today

I live in Toronto, and we get snow.  Sometimes, so much snow that our mayor decides to call the army.  Well, a previous mayor.  Now, when people think of Toronto mayors, they think of a different kind of snow.

I shivered all day, and now I'm pretending it's not winter by remembering a few of my favourite moments from this past summer.

My daughter Maddie at the cottage.

My son Cal, during his very first swimming lesson, spontaneously deciding to do something cannonball-ish.

And my daughter Melanie, looking very, uh,  intellectual. :-)

Prompt: A blog post you wrote but decided not to publish

I was reviewing some old never-been-posted files recently and came across this one.  It's not complete, but you get the idea where it was going.

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A love letter to my daughter, or why Mel almost got grounded from Facebook 

Dear Mel,

As you know, I've been a member of the Mean Moms Club since you were in kindergarten.  You and I would walk home with A and her mom, and the two of you decided early on that you had The Meanest Moms Ever.  Her mom and I used to joke about how we ought to come up with a logo and put it on the back of our jean jackets.  You were always pouty and petulant when you said it to me, and it always used to make me smile, because later you would whisper to me you didn't really mean it. While I've never expected that you wouldn't at some point join the generations before you who have played the time-honoured game, "My Mom is Worse Than Yours", I didn't expect that our smackdown would come about as a result of Facebook.

You know that over the years, especially when we were all still living in ***, that I made some unpopular decisions as far as parenting went.  Your nana and I repeatedly butted heads about my letting you go to the park by yourselves, or letting you stay there on summer nights until the street lights went on.  She was convinced I was just asking for the group of you to get abducted by pedophiles.  I was more concerned that you knew how to cross the street safely, because I thought, and still do, that on average it's more likely that you will get hit by a car than abducted or molested by a stranger.  Your auntie K actually defriended me on Facebook and in real life for the same reason...when your cousin came to visit us a couple of summers ago, I permitted him to go to the park with you, Maddie and Cal and the rest of the usual suspects.  I pushed back instead of backing down when she questioned my parental judgment.  I stood by my judgment, and held you and your siblings up as proof....my kids are bright, curious, courteous, they do well at school, they are well liked and well adjusted, so it doesn't seem like I'm making a whole slew of bad decisions.

I wanted you and your brother and sister to be able to play freely at the park with your friends without me hovering anxiously, calling out every few seconds to be careful.  To climb trees and have that dizzyingly good feeling that you were doing something daring, maybe even dangerous.  To go biking by the creek, knowing you would roll your jeans up to your knees and dangle your feet in the water and look for crayfish under the rocks, and then come home & swear you stayed on the path without me challenging you, because I used to do the same thing at the same age with my friends at the creek on the way to school or back home.  To explore, in a reasonably safe environment, the parameters that allow people to develop their own good judgment and to be able to think for themselves.  I did not want to keep you in a glass box, to restrict you so that when the time came when I could not confine you anymore, that you had already tasted some measure of freedom and had the tools to make good decisions without going too crazy.  

One of the conditions I put on you having Facebook was that I would observe and had the right to impose restrictions when I felt they were necessary.  Up until the photos a couple of weeks ago, I haven't.  I've wrinkled my nose a few times at the things you've "liked", winced at some of the language, but to me, those things were all within the parameters of you at your age...it would be stupid for me to be an oblivious prude and pretend that you aren't aware of the crude and the vulgar.  More importantly, those posts gave me some insight into the music you were listening to, the interests you have, the friends you interact with most regularly.  A few weeks ago I was concerned about some photos you and J had posted and tagged on her profile, and that was the first time over the course of the year you've had an account that I have had occasion to raise a red flag.  

When we talked about it, and if you recall, it was actual talking, without yelling or demanding, I explained why I felt the way I did, and you seemed to accept my reasons for feeling that way.  You complied with my request to ask J to remove the photos I was both uncomfortable with, she did so, and I was happy with that.  I was proud of the fact that while you had made what I considered a bad decision, you apparently recognized my perspective and corrected the problem.  I'm now guilty of one of the oldest crimes in the book...pride goes before a fall.

I was taken aback when I saw a picture of you two or three days ago, same flavour as before, tagged with your name.  I sent you a message on Facebook, please untag yourself, we've talked about this already, I love you and I can't wait to see you on Friday.  Your response was angry...what's wrong with the pictures, I promised if I didn't like something I wouldn't let her post them...not all of them.  Within a minute, another message dropped into my inbox, one which you did not intend to send to me, but to J.

"My mom is fucked in the head.  She pretty much hates the pictures we take."

I can't tell you I wasn't stunned and hurt, and angry, when I read your words about me, but I moved past those reactions pretty quickly, and made a decision about how to respond to them.  

My first and strongest reaction, which is a gut parent thing I don't expect you to understand, is the same emotion I had to defend myself against, both to your nana and to your auntie K.  I experienced the same thing pretty strongly this past summer, walking to the store to get ice cream and passing a couple of older teenage boys on their bikes riding in the opposite direction.  I watched them looking at you, lanky and slim and still innocent in your cutoffs and tank top,  with predatory and covetous eyes, and had to swallow the mama bear reaction...she's only thirteen, keep your eyes off my daughter!  All parents react this way.  It's part of the manual when you take delivery of your daughter.

Understand, I could remove your profile from Facebook without a qualm for that reason alone, because I don't want strange boys looking at you online and coveting you, or because I could work myself into a frenzy about how complete strangers COULD stalk you, but that's not realistic, according to my own longstanding beliefs.  And, it wouldn't help you understand why I need to make you think about this.

I always believed that letting you have a childhood unfettered by paranoid restrictions would give you a sense of independence, and I wagered, if I can use that expression, that that independence would stand you in good stead when it came time to standing up to peer pressure and refusing to give in to the demands of the herd.  I believed you would make good decisions when it came to teenage issues like smoking and skipping classes, sex and drugs, anything anyone could bully you into doing or trying.  

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That was three years ago.

I had intended to ground her from Facebook.  No fanfare, no punishing post on her wall for her friends to read and gleefully post, "HAHAHA YOU GOT PWNED BY YOUR MOM!"  Just, a week off to think about our discussions, and for us to talk more.

I didn't end up grounding her.  We have always talked about internet safety, and my main issue was that she challenged me about the photos I objected to, saying no one would see them except her friends.  What I did instead was, on a computer that was not mine and therefore with no prior connection to my own Facebook account, in front of her, set up a brand new user account, let her pick the name, and then looked her up to see what her public settings were, what was visible to complete strangers.

To say that she was shocked was an understatement.  Seeing what she thought of as some fun photos she had let a friend had taken were not, in fact, anywhere close to private, because of her friend's privacy settings.  The friend in question was someone I would have preferred my daughter not to hang out with, and with an oblivious dad in charge, I felt really helpless to prevent things from going from bad to worse.  

I could have lived without the super-provocative poses, or the set of pictures featuring my thirteen year old daughter in a bikini in the snow, draped over the friend's brother's motorcycle with her finger in her mouth.  I could definitely have lived without the friend encouraging her to smoke, or cut classes, or that it would be more fun if my daughter dropped down to hang out with her in some of her applied-level classes as opposed to in the academic stream.  The part that really sent me over the edge was the day she tagged Mel in a post saying they were"going down to the creek with a couple of grade twelve guys, to...you know", with a smirky icon.

There was a happy ending of sorts.  Mel recognized, without my having to spell it out for her, that her friend was bad for her, as much because she wouldn't take no for an answer as because she did things I didn't approve of and didn't want my daughter participating in; that while fun, kinda-sexy selfies are totally okay with me, the ones J was tagging her in for the whole world to see weren't.   

More importantly, she understood WHY.

Grounded, then, but in a better way.  The way I always hoped she would be.

In lieu of a twee title about seas and monsters...yeah, I've got nothing

I had a lovely little moment with my son yesterday.

I tend to post more about my daughters.  They're older, noisier, and have some of the same interests that I do, while my son tends to prefer flying under the radar. Being a girl myself, sometimes it's just more intuitive to relate to my daughters. They love internet memes, music, books, clothes, makeup, nailpolish.  They're interested in my knitting and jewellery-making, and quite often just want to sit on my bed and have girl time with me, which I adore.  My son is quieter, tries to stay out of conversations, doesn't ask too many questions, loves to help but doesn't like making decisions. He is still my baby, at eleven, and I flounder, sometimes, trying to connect with him in a way that respects him getting older with interests of his own, without falling into talking about video games I wish he didn't play or television shows I wish he didn't watch, in order to keep him talking.

***Redacted from first draft - a rant about videogames and television shows that are inappropriate for eleven year old boys combined with parental inattention and indifference.  Trying to stay on topic!***

Unlike his sisters, Cal is more of a gamer than a reader.  I've tried to find things that interest him, with some success.  We went to meet Dav Pilkey, the author of the Captain Underpants books, at Indigo when he came to Toronto last fall.  Cal has read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, some of the Junie B. Jones books.  He tried some Roald Dahl, some Gordon Korman, the first Harry Potter book.  He loves manga, so we loaded up on Naruto and InuYasha.  He loved the Lord of the Rings movies, so I got him a graphic novel of The Hobbit, with gorgeous photos.  He's definitely game to enjoy a good story.  It's just not as easy as I think it would have been, if he lived with me.  There would definitely be less videogames, more reading.

Steph took it upon himself on Saturday to invite Cal to go out to run some errands with him, and they stopped in at BMV Books.  It's one of the larger used bookstores in Toronto, and while they have a couple of locations, the biggest and best is on Bloor Street West in the Annex.  It's three floors, with the top floor being the main place we buy manga - it's all graphic novels, comics and mangas.  Cal came home with a book of short stories about dragons, and spent they first hour of Sunday curled up with a cup of hot chocolate and a blanket on the couch, engrossed in a story by George R.R. Martin.  That made my day.

The exception to Cal's feelings about books and reading is the Percy Jackson series.  He got the box set from Steph's parents last year for Christmas, and while he was slow to pick the first one up (not till the end of August, when we went to the cottage for a week), he read the first one happily, and is now well into the second.

Our Saturday night ritual is to have dinner together and watch a movie.  Steph usually downloads a few to choose from, and while we can always choose any others from his huge collection, he had specially downloaded Sea of Monsters thinking Cal would want to watch it.  Surprisingly, Cal balked very strongly, because he hasn't finished the book.

Before I continue, can I just savour having written that sentence?  Didn't want to watch the movie because he hasn't finished the book.  How much do I love that?  A lot.  A LOT.

Maddie was irate, and said so, because she read the books a couple of years ago and knowing that this movie was available, insisted that it was unfair of Cal to hold us all hostage just because he hadn't finished reading it yet.  I brokered a deal where the girls could watch Sea of Monsters on Sunday morning while Cal was otherwise occupied.  Sadly, things didn't work out quite that way, and it wasn't until just after lunch that the girls said, okay, let's put the movie on.

Cal tried very hard not to watch.  He declared his intention to watch some Minecraft videos on youtube, and put on headphones.  My computer does that thing where it shuts down periodically while on youtube.  I've replaced my fan, run scans, updated my drivers.  It still happens.  And it happened over and over to Cal during the first half hour of the movie.  Eventually, he gave up on youtube and settled into the beanbag chair, saying he would watch the movie until they got to the part he'd read up to, and then he'd leave.

Yeah.  That didn't happen.

SPOILERS.

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I was trying to find a board that would tell me what else I could do to address the spontaneous shutdown of my computer, and suddenly Cal was standing beside me, big tears rolling down his face.  

"I need a hug," he struggled to say, before bursting into full-on tears.

I took him into my room and cuddled him while he cried.  I rocked him, rubbing his back, stroking his hair, crooning wordlessly, and whispering, tell me what happened, buddy, until he choked out, Tyson died.

Tyson is Percy's only friend at school.  In the book, he's a street kid that Percy's school has taken on as a charitable thing, and he is widely regarded there as a freak.  He is eventually found to be a half-blood, like Percy and his friends, and goes on a quest with them from Camp Half-Blood.  Last weekend, when Cal brought his book and asked me to read to him, I enjoyed listening to him telling me about how if Tyson was at his school, there was no question that he, Cal, would be Tyson's friend.  That he sympathized with Tyson feeling like an outcast, and said that sometimes he feels that way too.

Tyson died.  Awesome.

Both of my daughters have friends who have lost parents.  Two for Maddie, this year, the circumstances of one of which I want to blog about very soon.  They were small when my grandmother died, and had never really met their half-sister's mom before she died abruptly of heart failure while driving.  Messy and ugly.  Grief is something that is really outside of my son's life experience up to this point.  The only people he has lost have been characters he has become attached to, in books or movies.  Don't even get me started about Wall-E, or the first five minutes of Up.

I blundered through about five minutes of talking about how sometimes a really good writer can create people that seem so real that they become friends, and it hurts to lose them every bit as much as it can to lose someone you love in real life.  I told him it was okay to cry when you were sad, even if his sisters made fun of him, and ventured the suggestion that sometimes it was good to have a kind of a practice run at experiencing emotion about something in a book before you go through something in real life.  I almost told him that this bit of wisdom was much more elegantly presented in my favourite Robertson Davies novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, but I refrained because TOO MUCH TALKING MOM.

I stopped rocking him and shifted so I could see his face.  His eyes were closed.  I touched his nose, and he smiled at me, my blond angel boy.  Thanks Mom...I love you for always trying to make me feel better, even if I don't understand all the things you're saying.  I'm still sad about Tyson, though.  I wish he hadn't died.

We rocked for another couple of minutes, and he said he thought he wanted to watch the rest of the movie.  I raised an eyebrow, and he laughed.  I'm still going to finish the book.  In the living room, Maddie mocked him gently for not remembering that Tyson was Poseidon's son, and that it was unlikely he would drown.  Cal's eyes lit up, seeing Tyson on the screen and none the worse for wear.

I can't make him love books the way his sisters or I do...but I want so desperately to find ways to relate to him.  Even if he doesn't understand all the things I'm saying.

And I MAY just have ordered the Percy Jackson game for Nintendo DS.  Just because it doesn't always have to be about books.

No internet, and no dignity

I have had no internet for the past two days, between work and home, so I'm one post behind after this one.  Sneaking a weak wifi signal from a neighbour.

My daughter's iguana decided to climb up Stephen's arm and end up in his hair this morning.  Prior to coffee.

He acknowledges there is no dignity left for him.

Something old, something new

I’ve never been a clothes horse.  On any given day, I really couldn’t remember when the last time was that I went clothes shopping.  For months, I have sat on the edge of my bed when it comes to the time in the morning where I have to get dressed, and I have grumped at Stephen.  Spring, summer and fall, I have had the same complaint.

“I hate my wardrobe.  My clothes suck.”

Most of my wardrobe has been fairly casual up until recently.   Four years ago, when I was looking for work and most of my stuff was in storage, I went out and bought an interview suit.  It was a dark gray pinstriped jacket plus pants, with a coordinating black knee length skirt.  The three pieces cost me about five hundred dollars, and that was the most I had ever spent on clothes before.  I went to dozens of stores and tried on everything they had that was even remotely close to my size, but I was fortunate enough to have a friend with me who assessed every single thing I walked out of a change room wearing with an honest and helpful eye, and what I ended up was well made, fit perfectly and looked great.  Worth every penny.

Since then, I have added to my wardrobe in dribs and drabs.  As I’ve said before, I do a lot of thrifting.  I love jewellery and accessories, especially scarves, and if I’m going to spend real money, it tends to be more on shoes, because let’s face it, if I spend a lot of time running around for my job, my feet need to be comfortable.  I tend to be a little parsimonious on actual clothing, though.

Near the end of the summer, the decision was made at the firm that if we were stepping up our game, going for a wide break in terms of advertising, with an eye to expansion, that we also had to step up the game in terms of our dress code.  When I started, dressy jeans were cool with my boss.  Not anymore.  I had to dig out clothes I hadn’t worn in years and try to put together at least a week’s worth of outfits that would pass muster.  Early fall, not really so hard.  Once it got cold, I started to feel the gaps in my wardrobe.  Sometimes literally...it gets windy in Toronto in November!

As a result of last weekend’s thrifting expedition, I expanded my wardrobe by a total of eighteen items of clothing, which did not include accessories (scarves, jewellery, etc - add another eleven) or purchased for my kids, or Stephen (hello, beautiful dress shirt with interesting details, Guess, for five bucks).  Every day this week, I’ve worn an outfit entirely thrifted, or thrifted plus one item (not including shoes), and felt well-dressed, maybe even thought other people could be fooled into thinking expensively dressed, which is a novelty for me.

I took a break from writing this and tried to take a couple of pictures to give you an idea of how thrifting has enriched my wardrobe recently, but to style an outfit, you need to wear it, and to be honest, right now I’m in my pyjama pants and braless, and I can’t be bothered.  Instead, I leave you with a photo of one of the brooches I scored  - I collect vintage floral brooches, and this one just sang out for attention.  

You can see in the photo that it is missing one small blue stone centering a flower, but it is vintage Coro, stamped on the pinback with the mark they were using in the 1940s.  It was marked at $7.99., and I got it on the quarterly half-price sale day. 

I already know that I’m wearing blue tomorrow!

Happy birthday, Damo!

My son Cal turned eleven this past summer, on a Friday.  It was a big deal for me, because unless my kids have a birthday on the weekend that they're with me, I either get to celebrate the week before or the week after.  During the summer, I enrolled him in swimming lessons, so he was with me for much of the two months.  

He came in to work with me on his birthday, which was a big deal for him, because much of the time when he lives with his dad, he's home by himself.  His two older sisters have large groups of friends and very active social lives, and Cal is more of a loner, preferring the company of his Xbox or Teletoon.  We shared a pizza for lunch, and he met a couple of our clients, who all complimented me on having such a grown-up, well-behaved sweetie for a son.

Five-fifteen found us at Drift.  Kris and I took Cal over to meet Damian and the rest of the Friday crew.  I told Damian it was my son's eleventh birthday, and that we needed a piece of the homemade cheesecake.

Damian put the order in to James in the kitchen for the cheesecake, and said to Cal, "Ready for a birthday shot, buddy?"  He put two shot glasses on the bar, one in front of my son, one in front of him, and filled them both with Tropicana orange juice. The two of them said "Cheers!" and clinked glasses with each other, then with Kris and I.  Franco brought out a huge piece of cheesecake covered in strawberry coulis, with a big bright candle in the middle, and the whole staff, plus the few guests in the restaurant, sang happy birthday to my son.  He hid his tears in my sleeve, and devoured his cheesecake quietly.

My son still talks about his birthday party at Drift, and how awesome everyone there was to him that day, but he reserves a special smile when he tells people about his birthday shot.

Damo, I wish I could tell you sensibly how much it meant to me, that small gesture from such a big heart, and how long afterwards the immense happiness it generated, lasted.  I have always said, to anyone who would listen, I've been a patron of Drift since it opened, and being there is like being in my best friend's living room.  You and your crew have become my friends over the past couple of years, and Drift is one of my happy places.  You have a gift for genuine hospitality, and it shows, in small gestures and big ones.

Wishing you the happiest of birthdays, my friend.  Nazdrovaya.

Got sucked into that Facebook meme

Tameka gave me the number ten - here are that many random facts about me:

1. Cooked apples are an abomination. No apple pie, apple crumble, apple brown betty, applesauce for me, thanks. More for you.
2. I collect sparkly floral brooches and single teacups.
3. I was addicted to Turbo Jam for two years, and dropped forty-five pounds. Did P90X twice after that and dropped another forty. Stopped moving after I screwed up my knee and gained most of it back. Working on that again, albeit more gently.
4. I have never played a video game in my entire life, although I own a PS3 and an Xbox.
5. In the privacy of my kitchen, I dance Gangnam style. A lot.
6. Ren and I took ballroom lessons for many months before we got married. I could probably still fake some of the jive, but the rest of them are long gone.
7. With the exception of recently seeing the All-Blacks defeat Canada, I have seen upwards of forty pro-level sporting events (primarily the Toronto Maple Leafs, but also the Blue Jays, the Argonauts and the Rock) and I have never seen the home team lose.
8. I wear a Celtic cross that I got when I was at uni in Wales. It is my signature piece of jewellery and I rarely take it off.
9. I can't skate backwards.
10. If I were ever going to be one of those people who learned a movie dance for my own wedding reception, it would be the one from A Knight's Tale, to Bowie's "Golden Years".