When we want what we can't have

When I was growing up we lived in a house I absolutely adored. It was very small brick house with green shutters and overflowing with beautiful trees, big and small. I had my own room with all of my favourite things tucked away in their place, a kitchen filled with delicious food, and a quiet street that was always available to play on. It was a great life, and most days it didn't seem to matter that almost all of my friends had more. My friends loved visiting our house.

But most of my friends had enormous houses, filled with rooms we could explore for days. Some of them had pools, garages filled with ski equipment, pianos in the living room, and what seemed like an endless number of toys. (One friend had Cabbage Patch Dolls in the double digits. Can you even imagine?) There were kitchens with two fridges to hold all of the food and bathrooms with cavernous jacuzzi tubs I secretly always wanted to try. Many friends had nannies at home with them, or women that cleaned their house every day. They went on trips to Disney or Whistler every year and spent summers at their cottages.

I was different from these other friends and I always knew it. What I can't remember is how it felt to be different. Is it because of these big houses and expensive clothes that I never felt popular? Is it a coincidence that my closest friends, friends I still hold dear, had families more like mine? I do remember coming home from days spent at my friends' houses or stables (yes, some of them owned their own horses) and going on and on to my mother about all the things my friends had. But was I upset with my parents for not giving me these things, too? Did I ever resent the middle-class-ness of my family? Was I grateful for the things I had?

I had plenty in my life. I had pretty clothes, ballet lessons five times a week, and books and toys for days. But did it feel like enough at the time? I just can't remember. I remember feeling envy sometimes, that seems perfectly human of me. But did I struggle with it? Because Alyce does, and it is eating away at her. 

Alyce is seven and generally loves everything about the world. She's shiny and bright and still skips or bounces as her primary mode of transportation. But lately she's been struggling with her second grade world. Like my family growing up, we are middle-class parents, earning enough to pay for the things we need, but not often enough to pay for all the things we might want all the times we might want them. We are an amazingly fortunate family. We eat good food, buy clothes when we need them, pay for medications when we need them, and we rent a home that is warm and comfortable. I have gratitude for miles and miles. 

Yet at school Alyce sees a world with so much more. So much. We live in a very wealthy part of Toronto and Alyce attends school with the kids of my own childhood. They take regular trips, have extra-curricular activities every night of the week, and I could go on and on about the things they have or do that we don't. I know these things because Alyce won't stop complaining about it, and of course, I see it, too. She feels very deeply that we belong to the have-nots while her friends have, have, have. Why don't we ever get to fly on a plane? she bemoans. Why don't we have stairs in our house, or a basement filled with toys? Or a trampoline or a cottage? she cries. She tells us that she hates our house. She asks me how much money we have in the bank. (One of her little friends walked into our house for the first time and asked me the same question.)

She wants things she doesn't have, no big surprise. Don't we all want things we can't have? I think these thoughts as I try to talk with her about her feelings, as we try to show her the meaning of gratitude and contentment for the things we do have. I try to channel the language of all those minimalist living blogs I read all the time, but I don't know if she hears a word we say in these moments. It wasn't until today that I realized why. 

At the end of the day I think Alyce is unhappy because she feels different, and feeling different can hurt. In a world filled with seven-year-olds trying to negotiate social status and the (unfortunate) hierarchies that develop, Alyce feels alone. She watches her friends find familiarity in the things that they share and she feels excluded. I get that. Sometimes I feel excluded when I think about other families that have more financial security, own their own home, or go on regular vacations. There are days I long for these things, too, except most days (not every day) I return to a place of gratitude for the life we have because I love it. Comparing ourselves to others is a normal human exercise, but it rarely feels good.

How do we learn to be thankful for the things we have? How do our kids learn to feel comfort and gratitude for the life they are living? (Someone please tell me.) The truth is I know what to do. I can't force Alyce to feel grateful, I can only help her to practice it a little bit every day. Each night before bed we all share one thing for which we are grateful, and sometimes Alyce contributes and sometimes she doesn't. (Shira is usually grateful for either me or candy.) We talk as a family about the different lives people live here in Toronto, that not all children attend a school like hers. Once I explained that there are children in our city who don't have enough food to have breakfast in the morning. That one seemed to sink in. 

At the end of the day all this practicing gratitude will slowly help to strengthen her, but it won't fix her feelings of being different now, and that's what so hard as her parent. I want so desperately to make her feel better today. I want to run out and buy her things and take her on airplanes. But I can't and I won't, not for these reasons. I want to let her know her feelings are normal without confirming her belief that she is always going without.

Any suggestions? 

Be well.

xo

Sleepovers as Medicine

Do you remember the first time you invited your friend over to your house for the entire night, all the way until breakfast the next morning? I don't mean that time your cousin slept over when you were four, but later, when you could choose your person, your best friend for a sleepover. As a girl sleepovers sent me over the moon with excitement. My mum would always say yes to having a friend sleepover, probably because she kind and generous, but also to give herself and my father a break from entertaining me, their only and probably very demanding child.

I was never the popular girl, never a girl who thrived in big groups of friends. While I had many friends, the perk of attending a small school where we moved from year to year together as one class, whenever I was immersed in a big social group I always felt like my place was on the margins of the group, one foot in, one foot out. But I like to think I was really good at being someone's friend. Friendships, just the two of us, that I could do. I was loyal and patient and I cared deeply about the people I loved. I still am all of these things.

So a sleepover was a Big Deal. It was a chance for me to spend time with a good friend on the terms I could understand. It wasn't about fitting in. It wasn't about being pretty or good enough at sports. For me it was about spending time with friends who got me, or as Anne Shirley would say, with kindred spirits. In big groups I often felt judged by others and by myself, but one on one, that part of me slipped away enough for me to relax and just play. Even in grade two or three I felt this very powerfully. This seems to remain my experience even now, though I'm getting (sort of) better at quelling the self-judgement. But what hasn't changed is my love of spending time with my close friends. And I still look forward to sleepovers.

Alyce has had a rough year at school and it breaks my heart. I'm hesitant to say too much about her time at school this past year because she's getting old enough to tell her own stories, to share her own feelings, and I don't want to speak for her here. It's enough to say that she's struggled all year as a result of a bad fit with her teacher and the ups and downs of being a seven year old girl, with all the complicated social struggles that go along with it. She navigating the good and the bad of being a person out in the in the world and I'm learning alongside her how to help her the best that I can. It's so hard to watch her when I just want to fix everything, to declare who her friends and teachers ought to be. But I can't, I know that. Isn't it funny how parenting small children feels so difficult and then they start growing up and you begin to long for the days of toddler tantrums and hurt feelings that could be fixed with, let's be honest, boobs?

Alyce is also a good friend. She adores her friendships, holds on tightly to those around her who light up her world. And this weekend she reached the sleepover milestone. Her best little friend from school came to our house on Saturday for a night of fun. They were up past midnight and exhausted for two days after, but I'd wager it was worth every lost hour of sleep.

So I will leave you here with a list, written by Alyce in the painful hours waiting for her friend to arrive, of all the things she wanted her first sleepover to be. It's a long list, perhaps a little too eager, but they managed to pull much of it off.

• do crafts*
• watch a movie with candy and popcorn*
• make bracelets
• play board games
• do Just Dance*
• read books*
• have dinner*
• play some more*
• paint*
• listen to music*
• build Lego*
• build puzzles
• watch T.V.
• play with Shopkins*
• play on the computer
• draw*
• dance party
• pillow fight*
• spooky stories*
• read again
• play  more*
• look at my money
• read more books
• have gum*
• go to sleep in the same bed*

*Indicates successful completion.

Be well!

xo

To Matty, on your birthday

It's Matty's 39th birthday! On this special day, here are five things you might not know about him:

1. He's from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
2. He once went ten years without eating a vegetable. (And then he met me.)
3. He proposed to me after dating for three weeks.
4. He once used his own sock as a napkin.
5. He often falls asleep at night tucked in with a good book on minor league baseball stats.

He's also funny, kind, big-hearted, and handsome. Happy Birthday, my love.

Days like these

I wonder what I used to do all day before I had children. I can't even remember, though I expect that I felt very busy. Now, with two young children, my days are so full with outings, adventures, and general chaos, that I sometimes find myself daydreaming about my life before. Did I go for brunch on a holiday Monday (like it is today), maybe after having slept in a few extra hours? Did I stroll places, in a leisurely fashion? Would I have cared that my neighbourhood was filled with ear-crackingly loud fireworks at the exact moment children are being tucked into bed? I'd wager I didn't give it much thought, unlike tonight when I'm writing this, where you will find me cursing the damn fireworks while requesting politely* that the girls kindly get back into bed and ignore all those pops and bangs outside their window.

We're winding down eleven days of girls-only time at home while their Papa has been away  in Greece. He will tell you he's working, supervising university students while they explore Athens and Crete. I will tell you that he's on vacation.

We had the entire day before us on this holiday Monday, with the girls home from school and me done with placement. After watching Mrs. Doubtfire together (after waking up at a very unholiday-like time of six in the morning), we decided to take a walk to the bagel store, both as something to pass the time and to solve my problem off not having much food in the house to pack school lunches this week (bagels and cream cheese it is!). It was a delightful walk, filled with excited declarations about snails and flowers. We even met a cat on our path who chaperoned us through at least whole three blocks. We named him Marshmallow and decided not to take him home with us. Four cats are enough. (Frankly two cats were enough, but we're slow learners.)

Next we met some good friends at one of Toronto's best parks, Dufferin Grove. Though we have named it the Mud Pit Park, because it offers the most enormous sand pit children could ever dream of, complete with water, shovels, and stacks of wood for building bridges and other necessary structures. My friend, the smart one of the two of us, packed a change of clothes and a towel for the necessary clean-up at the end of our three hour visit. I did not, which worked out less well when it was time to leave and Shira was covered it dirt from head to toe (she explained calmly that she needed to lay down in the mud, obviously). But I did remember snacks because I am not a complete novice.So after our fun we packed my dirty children and my friend's more presentable children and went, of course, for ice cream.

These kind of days feel so familiar to me, though it has been a long time since I've had one. With the summer coming up, and my recent (temporary) break from midwifery school, I'm going to have a lot more of them. It feels good. Really good. In our house we don't do a lot of structured play time. Rarely do we sign the girls up for camps or activities, which makes us the black sheep family of the girls' school. There are days I wonder (loudly) why they are home so often, and then I remember that I want this for them. I want days filled with playing with friends, and of course, ice cream.

Let the break begin.

Be well.

xo

*Mostly politely.

Pause

Do you ever find yourself looking for a pause button? That things are getting a little out of control and you need to stop, drop, and take a moment to catch your breath? Not the stop button, that's not what you're searching for, but just a breath, a moment, a pause. 

I just finished my first clinical placement in the midwifery program. Four months of following midwives around and being thrown into as many learning opportunities as (superhumanly) possible. I took blood, started IVs, performed vaginal exams, read lab reports, palpated bellies, examined tiny, minutes-old newborns, listened to fetal heartbeats, and, oh right, I caught babies. With my own two hands. As in a woman pushed her baby into the world and I was there to catch its round, soft head in my hands, asking her to push just one more time so that I could reach the baby's shoulders, and then, after the baby swam the rest of the way out into the world, I did my most important job--I lifted to the baby to its mama. I'm going to tell you a secret: it doesn't get much better than that.

I'm two years into my midwifery education program now. It's hard to believe that I'm here at this point, the point at which I can stand in the middle of this enormous, life-changing program and look back to my eager, excited, and wide-eyed first year self. The thing is, I'm still eager, excited, and wide-eyed, these two years later, probably more so now that I've dipped my toes in clinical practice.

It's only been two weeks since my placement ended, and it's still a little too fresh in my mind for me to talk about all the feelings, feelings that are still swimming around in my head, deciding where to land. I'm trying to navigate around the ups and downs of learning how to be a midwife, from the highs of being a witness and a participant in the birth of a human being, to the lows of sleep deprivation, to the complicated middle place of being challenged/judged/evaluated/supported as I learn my way around caring from women and their babies.

It's intense and amazing. Let me leave it there for now.

Sometimes we pause. Or at least, sometimes I pause. I'm pressing the button, just for a short while. For the next year I am taking a medical leave from my program, because while I've been in school these past two years, I've also been figuring out how to cope with fibromyalgia. I was diagnosed a few months before I started midwifery school and frankly I didn't quite know what to do the diagnosis. It felt (and still feels) like this fuzzy, catchall for someone who is depressed, exhausted and in chronic pain. I was diagnosed, like most people, after no other disease or syndrome could be identified, a sort of last-minute declaration that since it isn't all these Other Things, it must be This Thing. Truthfully, I've never really done much with the diagnosis. I've made half-efforts at caring for myself with my diagnosis in mind, but it's always come second, third, tenth behind all of life's other responsibilities: parenting, working, and midwifery school.

I'm reaching for the pause button because I need to finally pay some attention to my own health. As first year midwifery school turned into second year and clinical placement, my health strategy of sticking my head in the sand declared itself to be a shitty plan. My exhaustion got worse (no big surprise), my body ached, I moved slower and slower, became more and more depressed, and I gained weight (because I needed another thing). Through all of this I was willing and able to do the hard work of clinical placement, motivated by the all those eager and excited feelings I mentioned above.

Now, I'm depleted. I need some time. I want to take a moment, sit awhile, and come to terms with the fact that my health sucks. Most days I feel like I'm one hundred years old (and not one of those spry and youthful hundred year olds we read about on facebook. I'm talking bent over, shuffling, declaring things like "Oh! My aching back!" kind of centenarian). Grumpy, too, just ask Matty. But the thing is, I'm not 100, I am 37, and I want to feel that way. I owe it to myself, to Matty, to my girls. And most importantly I think, with some hard work I can feel more like the healthy almost-40 year old I know is hiding behind all the fibro symptoms. But I can't do this without a break from midwifery school. I just can't.

And so I stop and take a breath. For the next year (the duration of my medical leave) I will make it my business to discover what I need to feel vibrant again (and my vibrant might look different from your vibrant, but the point is that I am desperately craving some lightness and sparkle). Here is to my year of health! And to me oversharing about it! Yes, I will be blogging about my adventures in learning how to leap and cartwheel through my days, rather than hobble my way through another unbelievably busy year. Knowing what I know about my (un)health habits, I truly believe that I can find a point at which my health doesn't stand in the way of my thriving as a student midwife.

I'll see you around then.

Ready, set, pause.

xo

Be well!

P.S. I caught that baby.

(Photo used with permission.)

Ten things my mother taught me

1. To peel off the stickers and price tags from everything, no matter how time intensive.

2. To always adequately salt the potatoes.

3. How to pour a glass of wine.

4. That it is okay to make mistakes. (I’m still not good at this one. I’m a slow learner.)

5.  How to apply mascara.

6. How to read.

7. That gold really never goes out of style.

8. Not to let them see you sweat.

9. How to make buttercream icing.

10. To love my children.

Happy Mother’s Day, you gorgeous woman.

I survived the semester

So I'm mostly here to tell you that I survived the grand catastrophe known as clinical skills, reproductive physiology, and pharmacology. I did it. Passed. Done. Over. Survived. It was truly the most work my brain has ever done, and I say this as someone who has been in school since the dawn of time. I learned so much about fetal heart beats, placentas, and the use of medication to control postpartum bleeding (in addition to about a billion other things) that my brain is ready to explode. And explode it shall when I begin my first clinical placement in two weeks!

That's right. In two short weeks I will begin a little less book-learning and a lot more hands-on baby catching! Can you even believe it? I know I can't. I have my stethoscope at the ready, my pager is warming up, and I'm (sort of) ready to go. Do you want to know all the feelings I have about starting placement? Here's a sampling: giddiness, panic, trepidation, delight, anxiety, and exhaustion (that's a carryover from this past semester of superwork).  I think more than anything I'm excited that I'll be able to use my hands. I remember my own midwives' hands on my body, on my baby, and I want my own hands to learn that skill and attention. My hands are always warm, so that's a start.

Life is about to get real in an entirely new way. I will be on-call 24 hours a day, with only a handful of days off each month. I will be called away for births and appointments at moment's notice. Did I mention I have a family, with two young children? How will this work? Will they miss me? Will they feel left out of my new life? Will the girls be cared for in all those times I'm working? (Of course they will be, is an answer to that last question.) To this point I've been busy and chaotic and overwhelmed, but all of that has taken place within a framework of regular schedules and flexibility. But last I heard, birth with a midwife is unscheduled. I've known about this part of my student midwifery life for years, but now, now it is here. I'm talking to my children and to Matt, explaining how I think life will be for the next 18 weeks, but who are we kidding? I have no idea. Mama will sometimes leave in the middle of the night and only time will tell how that impacts the girlies.

Can I tell you about how nervous I am about this transition? I think I'll make a good midwife one day, but am I ready for this? Will my hands learn? I am an anxious sort by nature and I'm having to work really hard to just keep breathing. Am I strong enough for this? I really do think so.

In these last two weeks before placement I plan to have the girls help me to prepare for all these big changes. We're going to make notes and drawings to carry with us, to peak at when we're missing each other. I'm going to ask them to make a sign for my bedroom door that says "Mama is sleeping!" for those days I'm catching up on sleep from the birth. I also feel the need to plan everything at home, which of course is pretty ambitious considering the next two weeks are filled with holiday dinners, marking, preparing for placement (translation: taking everyone's blood pressure). But I also want to wash my floors, sort my clothes, write up a meal plan for Matt and the girls, make food to keep in the freezer, and sleep. I'm nothing if not eager.

I also want to blog. What are the chances?

Be well!