Should have been a snow day

Yesterday was a snow day. It’s rare that we get enough snow to close the schools, but yesterday we did. What doesn’t make sense, though, is that we have even more snow today and the schools are open. This is what our road looked like at 8:00 this morning:

Note our neighbor’s car, which got stuck when he tried to turn it around. It’s been snowing on and off since Saturday and we haven’t seen any sign of a salt truck or a plow on our street.

So who decided that it was a good idea to open the schools and cause thousands of cars to be on roads like these? Obviously not a mom. Is one day of instruction really worth the effort it will take to get all those kids to and from school, or the potential for bodily injury, since Vancouverites are notoriously bad drivers in the snow?

Lucky for me, my husband usually drops Child One off at school on the mornings he has early band practice. I sent Child Two with them, figuring that it would be a blessing to everyone if this particular driver wasn’t on the road. And also lucky for me, my husband has new, super-duper snow tires—the very ones I scoffed at when he bought them a month ago, thinking they were overqualified (and overly expensive) for his little 10-year-old car. Those are his super-duper tire tracks in the picture. He and the kids made it safely to school, but just. They almost got stuck twice on the way.

If the plow doesn’t come through before long, I will have to walk to the school to pick them up. We live within walking distance of the school on an ideal day. When the weather’s nice, it’s a strenuous but pleasant 20- to 25-minute walk, down a little hill, up a very steep hill, then down a very steep hill, then up another very steep hill. But today it will be a slog through the snow—about a foot deep in some places. Too bad I don’t have any snowshoes. I wonder if I can build a makeshift sled and harness the cats up to it?

On the funny side, when my kids grow up they can honestly say to their grandchildren, “When I was your age, I had to trudge through the snow to school, uphill both ways.”

We didn’t have mail delivery yesterday and it’s looking like we won’t have it today either. It’s torture for Child Two, who is patiently but desperately waiting for two birthday presents that haven’t arrived yet. And for somebody as postally obsessed as me, the lack of mail is even worse than the mountain-climbing expedition it’s going to take to get to the school.

Improg word: Challenge

To the hundreds of dozens of five people reading this: Please feel free to leave a comment. I read a lot of blogs and leave almost no comments, but now that I have blogs of my own, I would love to know who’s stopping by. If you’ve got nothing to say, just tell me what the weather’s like where you are or what you had on your toast this morning.

The first slip of paper I pulled out of Hayley’s envelope this morning said, “Hi Susan! Have a great day!” Somehow, even from 1200 miles away, Hayley knows when I need a cheerful wave. It also said, “Pick another one!” so I’m not off the hook.

Today, Hayley has challenged me to write about challenge. Appropriate, because it’s been a very challenging week so far (and it’s only Tuesday morning).

Of course, language nerd that I am, the first thing I did was look up the meanings of challenge. There are several, including “a call to engage in a contest or fight,” “a demand for an explanation,” “a test of abilities,” and “a demanding but stimulating situation.” It was the last one that had come to mind when I pulled out the improg slip.

It seems to me that, like grin and bear it, even this single definition of challenge has different connotations; it can have a negative twist or a more positive one. There’s the what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger kind of challenge—something that you endure.

One mother on the playground: “See that boy covering his sister in bark mulch? He’s a very challenging child from what I’ve heard. He once had to go to the emergency room because he’d stuffed green beans up his nose.”

Second mother: “I’m sure glad he’s not mine.”

There’s the just-getting-through-every-day category: figuring out how to get your kids to their conflicting activities when time travel isn’t an option; preparing a meal that includes at least one item that each member of your household is willing to eat; finding a new winter coat for the child who was disorganized enough to have a growth spurt in January, when the stores are stocking flip flops and bathing suits despite the fact that it’s still winter. These are not so much stimulating or negative as just necessary (but still difficult).

Then there’s the exciting-opportunity-for-growth kind of challenge—something that you embrace. Maybe you’ve challenged yourself to paint an 8-foot-square mural of your stamp collection or to break the world record for hula hooping. These kinds of challenges aren’t easy (they wouldn’t be challenges if they were) and perhaps not every minute of them is enjoyable, but you undertake them because you want the experience or the results.

Right now my life is all about challenge—good and bad, voluntary and involuntary. In the green-beans-up-the-nose-category are a couple of personal situations that I probably won’t be writing about here (they’re personal, after all). There’s not really any way to look at these challenges as stimulating. Demanding, yes. A test of my abilities, yes. But not stimulating, unless you count being so stressed that you tear your own hair out as stimulating.

Then there’s the middle category: learning to improve my work scheduling, driving in the snow (this used to be a green-bean challenge for me, but I’m improving), finding time to get the housework done before we are all killed in a terrible dust avalanche.

Last year I realized that most of the challenges I faced were of these two types. My life was more about endurance than enjoyment or growth. So I actively set out to find some embraceable challenges. Some I made up myself: the Year of Living Differently, which is part of my Getting My Shit Together Project, is full of them. Some, like this improg project, were the ideas of others (usually Hayley). And the green-bean challenges, while negative in themselves, are proving to be a source of more positive challenges, like learning to take care of myself in the midst of a difficult situation and to take control of the things I have control over and leaving the rest alone.

I’ve learned from watching someone I know that if you live without embraceable challenges, your whole life can become an endurance challenge. And I’m learning through my own experience that once you start looking for and embracing positive challenges again, even the negative ones get easier.

Turning 10

I am the mother of a 10-year-old. Not big news, you might think. After all, I’ve been the mother of a 10-year-old before, two years ago. But the other day my younger child turned 10. I didn’t have much of a problem with it—a little pang, maybe—but, for the first time, she did.

When Child One was younger, he used to cry the night before each birthday and on the last day of school each year. He had had such a good time being four or five or in first or second grade, and he didn’t want it to end. Child Two, however, has always been a very adaptable kid, taking life as it comes along, happy to move from one year to the next, so her sadness at turning 10 came as a big surprise.

This school year has brought quite a few changes. She’s in fourth grade now, which, where we live, officially makes her an intermediate student rather than a primary. This means the start of homework and letter grades (her brother, who did his earlier years of school in a different system, has had homework since kindergarten and is disgusted that she’s gotten off scot-free all these years). But, while a bit stressful, these changes haven’t bothered her much. So why the sudden crisis?

She’s worried that her real childhood is over now that’s she hit double digits. She doesn’t want to be a preteen, and she’s certainly in no hurry to be a teenager, with all the changes that will bring. She’s seen how some of the kids in her brother’s grade have changed as they’ve gotten older—they’re so mean to each other and they care more about who’s going out with whom than anything else. She sees the beginnings of this in her own circle. She was betrayed by a friend for the first time a few months ago. The crushes are starting. She has always had close friends who happen to be boys and she’s not interested in those friendships turning into “that other stuff.”

She’s happy being just a kid and she wants to stay that way.

On her birthday, I got some hints about the kinds of things that are on her mind. First, her wish for the day was that there would be no arguments. This was brought on by the increased friction between her almost-teenaged brother and her dad (really, sometimes they remind of two head-butting goats). She knows that this is an inevitable part of growing up and becoming independent, and I think she’s worried that soon she’ll be head-butting too.

Second, after she had opened all her presents, she told me with obvious relief that she had been worried that one of them would be a bra. I assured her that (a) when the time comes, I won’t buy her a bra as a birthday gift and (b) if she’s anything like her mom, that time is not going to come for at least a couple of years. When I was younger, I was so flat that the cooks in the restaurant I worked in would tease me unmercifully whenever one of my customers ordered two eggs sunny-side up. I didn’t even qualify for a bra with a real cup size until I was a few months pregnant.

I dread the day that Child Two stops seeing her body as simply the part of her that allows her to sprint down a soccer field or leap across a dance stage, strong and capable, and starts seeing it as her enemy—too fat or too skinny, too short or too tall, not good enough. I wonder if she will go from being a confident, happy kid to someone full of doubts about herself.

People who knew me when I was a kid say that she’s the spitting image of the younger me. It’s true that there’s no mistaking us for anything other than mother and daughter. But while we share many traits—physical and otherwise—until now Child Two has differed from that younger me in one important respect. She’s always had a realistic picture of herself: not perfect, no better than anyone else as a person, but capable of a lot of things. She’s seen herself as a whole person and she’s defined herself on her own terms, based on the things she can do. She’s an artist, dancer, athlete, musician, student, animal lover, reader. I, on the other hand, usually felt that I was a fake, a façade with not much behind it. I defined myself in terms of how others saw me and what I could not do.

I’m starting to see some cracks in her confidence. More and more often I hear her say things like “I’m not a good artist anymore” or “I’ll never be able to whistle” or “I don’t think I can do that.”

Now that she’s been 10 for almost a week and hasn’t suddenly turned into a bra-wearing, boy-loving, argumentative preteen, she’s relaxed a bit. But I’m much more sensitive now to her fragility. I want her to be happy being just a kid for as long as possible.

Making do

I've started a new blog. Called "Making Do," it's for my creative stuff. Well, my other creative stuff, since writing is creative. I love reading craft blogs, seeing what people are doing, finding out a little bit about their lives, and stealing their ideas learning from their posts, and I've long wanted to start one myself. I decided that for me, having two blogs was best, one just for writing and one for all the other creative things I like to do. Knowing me, though, I may change my mind.

Yes, I realize that I haven't even managed to get my profile completed and this blog all set up. Starting a new project before I've finished an old one? Me? How unexpected. (Lucky for me, you (all two of you who read this blog) can't come and look in my closets.) I will get to that, but today I thought that rather than fight with Blogger over my career choice, it would be more fun to post pictures of cats and a hat (but not cats in the hat).

Improg word: Mix

After pulling this word out of Hayley’s envelope, I spent a few minutes muttering under my breath, cursing her for emphasizing the challenge aspect of this writing challenge. Mix? What the hell can I write about mix?

Phrases started popping into my head, as phrases do. Cake mix? No, I can’t write about my utter inability to make cakes—it’s just too painful. Mix and match? No, that makes me think of articles about the 10 must-have pieces to buy this season, and I’m definitely not qualified to write about fashion. Mixed bag?

That was the phrase I needed. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend about how we see our lives. When I was a teenager, I used to complain to my brother about my dull and boring life. Until my friend and I had this conversation, I had never updated that opinion.

I haven’t traveled much and the traveling I’ve done has been—except for one nightmare trip to England with my mother—close to home. I haven’t had a proper career; for many years I haven’t even had a “real” job. I’ve never been in the newspaper, apart from a story I wrote in about 5th grade (written from the point of view of a Christmas tree that no one wanted). I haven’t done anything big to change the world. Pretty blah, I’d say.

But my friend sees my life completely differently. Apparently, I’m one of the most interesting people she knows—and that’s not because she’s a hermit who doesn’t get out much.

She’s lived most of her life in one town. She sees this as boring; I see it as having roots. I’ve lived in four cities—five if you count the one I was born in, although I don’t remember it at all, or six if you count another that I lived in for just a month. I’m a citizen of two countries and through high school I spent the school years in one and the summers in the other. I see this as having no true sense of home; she sees it as having a wider view of the world.

We both went to university. She did a teaching degree, which I see as following a passion. I went to university for 15 years (yes, that’s 15 years) and did four degrees in two fields. Avoiding the real world? Unable to find my passion? Not according to her. She sees me as having a wide range of interests and being willing to pursue them (and a little crazy for going to school for 15 years).

Before having kids, she was a very successful elementary-school teacher. Now, years later, she runs into teenagers who tell her what an impact she had on them. I’ve worked as a nanny, a waitress, a bookkeeper, a secretary, a tutor, a university instructor, a writer, and an editor—and that’s just what I’ve done for pay. As a volunteer, I’ve worked in libraries, managed the production of a monthly newsletter, served on boards, run fundraisers, led a kids’ community service club and a troop of Brownies, and piloted a reading program at an elementary school. In my current work as an editor, I haven’t followed the often-advised path of specializing in a niche market. No, my work is all over the map (literally). I never know what kind of job I might be doing next: wine labels, journal articles on fuel cell technology or dementia, a book on food allergies or the Canadian political system or finding your soulmate, a children’s story. Who knows what the next email or phone call will bring? I’ve thought of myself as scattered, unable to follow either a single path or the rules. She sees me as well-rounded, willing to take advantage of opportunities that come up, and able to do a lot of different things.

This friend loves to hear stories about my past. I never thought of myself as having interesting stories. But when I stop and think about it, my childhood was full of experiences that most kids don’t have, from working in a soup kitchen to being best friends with one of the daughters of the first African American family in our neighborhood (at a time when that was not considered a good thing) to moving a thousand miles away from one of my parents. And I had rather a . . . um . . . colorful adolescence. Then there’s my extended family. You could make a three-part miniseries about us—adventures, accomplishments, doomed romances, traumas, illnesses, and more than one skeleton partying in the closet.

A mixed bag—that’s what I am (with the emphasis on mixed, please, not on bag). I could look at myself as someone who has no real home; who has failed in doing what she was supposed to do—climb up the academic ladder to that tenured professorship; who has lived a dull and boring life, doing this and that but nothing in particular. Or I could look at myself through my friend’s eyes.

We’re all mixed bags of circumstances and experiences, which, combined, give us our stories. And whether those stories are part of an interesting adventure book or a dusty, boring tome is really just a matter of how we look at them.

Sleep deprivation

I used to sleep. Nine or ten hours a night, sometimes, with a nap during the day. But I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve slept through night in the last twelve years.

I grew up in a house under the flight path to San Francisco International Airport. I’ve lived in apartments that overlooked the El Camino and a major highway. I’ve lived on one of the main streets (and bus routes) of Victoria, with the driveway to the parking lot running right past my bedroom window. I used to have the ability to sleep anytime, anywhere, through any noise.

Then I had a baby and my sleep patterns changed. Actually, changed seems too weak a word to describe what happened. Disintegrated, maybe? Went to wrack and ruin—that works. While neither of my children were good sleepers, my husband sure was (or pretended to be). So from the beginning, I’ve been the nighttime parent, and not just because I had the right equipment for feeding. If the kids woke up for any reason—hunger, nightmares, illness, the sudden need to hear Kenny Loggins’ Return to Pooh Corner for the 342nd time that day, the inability to go the bathroom alone at night even though they were capable of doing so during the day—it was me who got up.

On the rare occasions when my husband did get up to help, he was so inept that he just made the situation worse. He’s a smart guy—I mean really smart. How can someone so brilliant during the day be so useless changing a diaper in the middle of the night? On the worse nights I wondered if he didn’t bumble on purpose so that I’d give up asking for help. (Asking, I’m sorry to say, is also too weak a word to describe what happened on some nights. I once kicked him—literally—out of bed. But when you’re dealing with a premature baby and are sleeping only half an hour at a time, you get desperate.)

Then he did something that made my nights even worse. Child One slept with his favorite teddy, Friend Bear, every night. One day my husband put one of Child One’s t-shirts on Friend Bear. Very cute. Child One decided that Friend Bear must wear the shirt all night, every night. Also very cute, except for the fact that the shirt was bigger than Friend Bear’s entire body and fell off once, twice, three times a night. Although it made no noise, it somehow woke my son up. In addition to my regular nighttime duties, I now became the official put-the-shirt-back-on-the-bear parent.

My children have slept through the night for many years now. Unfortunately, my cats don’t, so neither do I. Dottie gets lonely and wants company. Her tactics for waking me up include tipping over the wastebasket and taking everything out, scratching at the magazine and book baskets, and bringing me her string. My before-bed routine—when I remember, or my middle-of-the-night routine when I don’t—includes putting the wastebasket in the closet, covering the baskets, and hiding the string.

Jamie is a perpetual toddler and his favorite activities are knocking things off of flat surfaces and carrying stuff around. During the night he gets up on the dresser and knocks down whatever’s there, one item at a time. And he brings me things. Knitting needles, Lego, ponytail holders—if he finds something interesting, he wants me to know about it, no matter what time it is.

He loves to sleep on me or next to me. Little Bit likes to sleep next to me too, but because she doesn’t like Jamie much, she sleeps on the opposite side. When I try to turn over, I wake up realizing that I’ve been stuck between the two of them for hours and I’m now too stiff to move.

Little Bit’s favorite place to sleep, though, is under the covers on my husband’s side of the bed. She touches his face with her paw until he wakes up and lets her in. And unlike me, she won’t give up. When he complains about the sleep he loses, I bite my tongue and give her a kitty treat. A little payback is a sweet thing.

Now with picture!

I was hoping to be able to write "Now with pictures!" but apparently I'm not Blogger-literate enough to do that yet. I've managed to add a picture to a previous post, which, given the fact that my Internet connection cuts out regularly, is an accomplishment in itself. High-speed my connection might be when it's working, but if you take into account the time I spend waiting for pages to load when it's not, I'd be better off with a good old-fashioned dial-up.

But for some reason I can't get a picture into my profile. I tried uploading one from my computer--no luck. So I tried linking to one that's already online, but that's not working either.

In fact, Blogger seems to have its own ideas about what my profile should contain. No matter how many times I try to change my industry, it says I'm in accounting (and yes, I did hit "save"). Many years ago I thought of going into accounting. I took some courses and I worked in an accounting office for a summer. In addition to basic bookkeeping, my duties there included typing, answering the phones, making the coffee, and taking the owners' miniature poodle, Pixie, for walks. Pixie had his own Inspector Clouseau-type raincoat, complete with epaulets, pockets, and a belt, and his owners absolutely insisted he wear it in the rain. Since it was summer, you might not think this was a problem for me, but this is Vancouver. I would hide under my umbrella, hoping my ex-boyfriend, who lived and worked close by, didn't see me.

"Man, I'm glad I dumped her. Even dogs dress better than she does!"

I decided that accounting wasn't for me, but Blogger has me wondering. Is this a sign that I've made the wrong career choice?

Now I have to get back to my work--which involves no balance sheets, coffee machines, or dog coats--so I'll have to leave my profile until later. I can't wait to see what Blogger has to say about my favorite movies, my interests, and my gender.