I just couldn't write what I wanted to write

I should have known that baking cookies would do it.

I've been quiet around here for the past month. Some of that has to do with our big move to Toronto, not an easy feat with two young children. (We say that a lot, don't we? That things are made more difficult with the addition of young children. It's true that little ones are pure chaos sometimes, and their schedules often make planning life a challenge, and their whining can drive you to madness. But I do want to come right out and declare that life is made infinitely better when you throw young children into the mix, and I wouldn't have it any other way.) I've been busy readjusting to how this new life fits. So far I'm happy with our choice.

I've also been busy teaching again, an online course at a nearby university, and this just makes life very full. I'm learning a lot as I reintroduce myself to my course after two years off, including how to run a course in between all the events of my days at home with the girls. It looks something like this: get up and return emails. Read some posts from the discussion forums. Make breakfast for starving children in my kitchen. Return another email. Take children on new city adventure. Eat a popsicle. Do a tiny bit of grading during Shira's nap. Unpack. Chase children around park. Tuck them in after dinner, collapse, and then peel myself off the couch to start actually working for the night. Rinse and repeat.

But I'm always busy. We're all always busy, yet we still find time to do the things we love. I love writing this blog. What's stopped me from finding the time hasn't been all this other stuff, busy as I am. I could post three times a week instead of five, or one time instead of three. There are always ways to readjust (and I'm already doing a lot of readjusting this month). Nope, I'm quiet because I'm afraid. I'm suddenly feeling exposed and vulnerable here on the internet. I love the internet, love it a lot, but all of a sudden I'm feeling awfully open. A big part of this comes from my return to teaching. I know some of my students have read my blog, and this kind of exposure is a first for me. I've always been an open person and it's translated into my style of teaching. When I teach in-person courses I learn about my students quickly, and they learn about me. I don't hide my love of cooking, or my enthusiasm for Sookie Stackhouse novels, or that my American husband just doesn't get the CBC. But my academic mentor always taught me to keep a distance from my students, even when you share parts of yourself as you teach. I remember when an undergraduate student asked her religion, and she emphatically explained that it was None Of Their Business. Her interaction with the inquiring student left a mark on me, because my mentor shared so many things with her students, even her home sometimes, inviting us over to share a meal or an extra lesson. But there was a line, she taught me, and it was critical. The space of the classroom, it seemed, had boundaries.

On this blog I write very explicitly about breastfeeding, my religion, how it feels when I lose my patience with my children, and the devastation I felt when I wasn't accepted into midwifery school. The space of my classroom has changed a lot from the days with my mentor. Of course blogs don't reveal everything. I am always choosing to tell a very particular story in my posts and details are overlooked (I hope, the very boring and the parts that involve another person's privacy). But when I write I'm not trying to deceive anyone, and at the same time I'm intending to share some very honest, and traditionally private, feelings and ideas. It's this kind of exposure that makes writing and reading blogs both so exciting and so overwhelming.

Teaching and blogging, at the same time, has forced me to think about what I want to share on my blog. As soon as I realized that students were reading I felt paralyzed, caught in the act, if you will. I would jump up to write a post, or be brainstorming in the shower, and instead of wondering how I would tell a story in a way that was honest and interesting, I was worried about how a student might think of me after reading it. I immediately began censoring myself. If I wanted to write a post about how much my breasts were hurting because my two year old was enjoying yet another renewed fascination with nursing every two hours, I held myself back. No one wanted their paper graded by someone who had just moments ago complained loudly about her breasts. Or if I wanted to write a post about postpartum depression, my own included, I withdrew the idea before I could even consider how to write it. Writing about how to cope with the stress of multiple deadlines while parenting two little ones? Forget it. If I'm not perfect, I'll lose their respect. Or so I thought.

It turns out that I have no interest in writing about my life if I can't be honest. I don't want to write about my trip to the museum if I can't also write about how many times my toddler pulled my shirt up to nurse. I can't share with you how hard it is to balance all the competing demands of my wonderful life if I can't permit myself to admit that re-learning how to fit in grading papers is hard sometimes. If I was so concerned with censoring my posts, I felt pretty sure I didn't want to blog anymore.

Nah. I won't stop. I just don't want to. And I've reached a decision about how to manage my concerns about exposing myself to my students: they'll get over it. Or they won't. Either way, it's fine. I'm not doing anything scandalous here (hardly). I'm not inappropriately discussing my course or students. I'm just writing honestly about how I spend my time, how I choose to carve out this life of mine. I'm a parent. I want to be a midwife one day. I want to be a doula right now. I love to teach. And I bake a lot. Nothing too crazy.

So when I was baking today with Alyce and Shira, the first real baking adventure in our new kitchen, and Shira's first time as sous-chef, I wanted to share it with you right away. I took their picture, the two of them bickering over who would sprinkle the baking soda into the bowl, and I wanted to share with you how glorious it feels to have our own space again. I wanted to tell you that I felt comfort baking with my girls, while Matt chatted with us from the other room. I wanted to tell you that adjusting to our new life in Toronto, as happy as it makes me, is sometimes hard, and that some days I spend a lot of time worrying about how we'll make ends meet or where we'll end up a year from now, but that no matter how much I worry, that baking with my daughters makes everything ok. That makes me human. I think my students already knew that. You already knew that, too.

So, I'm back. Let's get this going.

See you back here tomorrow. Let's make it a good Monday.

You get what you get and you don't get upset. On second thought, scrap that.

It's Friday, let's do this. I haven't posted for a few days and I just spent the last twenty minutes crafting a depressing post about something or other, but I scrapped it in favour of not being a downer at the start of what could be a wonderful weekend! Who wants to read a sad post about how lonely it is to grocery shop at ten o'clock at night? Not me. I'm depressed just thinking about that post.

Instead I thought I'd share some photos from our day at the Royal Ontario Museum this week. Alyce had an appointment in Toronto Tuesday afternoon, so we all headed to the city with Matt in the morning (since we only have the one car) and me and the girls needed something fun to keep us busy. A museum! I miss the Philadelphia Please Touch Children's Museum so much (so much), and I've been grieving its absence for a year now. The ROM, while no Please Touch, was everything Alyce and Shira needed. Its hands-on, discovery exhibitions kept the three of us busy for hours. We dressed up as queens (Alyce), knights (Shira), dragons (me and Alyce), butterflies (Alyce and Shira). We dug up dinosaur bones. We watched bees make honey and fish swim. It was a good day.

The depressing post-that-almost-was has gotten me to thinking about what I want this blog to be. I've been writing and posting for a year and half now, using this blog as venue for conservations about parenting, breastfeeding, eating, baking, being married, leaving graduate school, and starting over. I've urgently pointed you in the direction of so many of my favourite recipes that I've had friends suggest that I might need a food-related intervention. (By the way, no intervention needed. What I could really use is this cookbook. And maybe this one, too.)

Everything lately feels so out place. And I mean everything. When I wrote about having lost my sparkle I think I was on to something. It's a serious claim, to have lost one's sparkle, but I've given it a lot of thought, and yes, I'm a bit dull. Subdued, maybe. Holding myself back. Spending the day in the city with my girls, however, made me feel a bit shiny. Since we'll be moving to Toronto in five weeks I'm going to go ahead and say right now that I'm completely over-the-moon-excited to start fresh in the city. This move will mean a lot of things: that we have are both employed, we will have our own space, and that we'll all be starting something new. The move feels like one enormous opportunity to sparkle again.

But. I think we're often too quick to look beyond the opportunity that is already sitting right in front of us, right here in the actual present instead of five weeks into the future. So I will not wait five weeks to brighten up. I will start now. A very wise woman suggested the other day that you won't get what you want unless you know what you want. This piece of advice makes me think of Alyce, who repeats on a daily basis something she learned at school this year: You get what you get and don't get upset. At first I loved this lesson of hers, something to help her to manage her four-year-old disappointed feelings when such tragedies occur as not getting the pink plate at breakfast, or having to eat a cookie without chocolate chips. But no, no, no. This is truly terrible advice. I will get upset, thank you very much, and I'll channel my own disappointment into something good for this year. For many, many years.

When I read Helen Jane's advice I was both relieved to realize that yes, of course, I need to figure out what I want if I want that sparkle back, and exhausted by the knowledge that this is going to take some work to figure out. Thank goodness I like lists so much already. Next week is devoted to making lists in attempt to bring some of that good focus to my life. Less complaining, more sparkle. Vibrant, even. Lucky for you (maybe) this blog is just the place to figure this all out, a good place to find some of that focus I've been craving. That, and also what I'm going to cook this week. No matter how I envision my blog and my writing, I just can't leave out food. It is simply too important a detail to ignore.

Our day at the museum did more for my motivation than anything has in ages. I can't tell you why or how, but I can tell you that it felt good. I can also tell you that it felt good enough that we're getting a family membership.

P.S. Stay tuned for another interview this coming Monday! I'll give you hint: he's devastatingly handsome, has two daughters, and he's my husband. Tune in Monday to see if you've guessed right!

Authentically speaking, I'm often afraid of authenticity

 This is the real me, and my real Alyce.

I'm not really sure what "being authentic" means. The word "authenticity" is thrown around so much that over the years I've become suspicious. It seems that we're encouraged so often now to be "authentically who we are" and to "live an authentic life."  Certainly this sounds ideal. I don't think anything good comes from hiding our thoughts and dreams behind a facade we think is more socially acceptable, and I know some of the most exciting conversations happen between people (or a person and his or her internet) when we tell the truth, when we put our feet down against what we think people want to hear.

Isn't this why so many mothers started blogging in the first place? To tell other mothers and whoever else was listening that motherhood was so much harder/exciting/exhausting than had been publicly discussed, and that motherhood is complicated because we're all actually different human beings with different experiences? Hell, yes. We outlined our hopes and expectations, the day-to-day challenges, and reflected on what did or didn't work. We did this to vent, to make other people laugh, and to offer some support to other mothers and parents. This, too, happened to me. And I survived. Or, I feel this way and I'm still a good parent. One way of understanding these new narratives of motherhood is to consider these perspectives as an attempt at authenticity. No longer would we talk about our transitions to motherhood as seamless, or dismiss time spent at home with children as unimportant.

So why am I suspicious of the term? Like I said, I think it's because I don't quite understand it. My only experience with it comes from my liberal arts background where I was surrounded by teams of people arguing for an "authentic" view of the world. They were right: too many of our stories have been told by the same few people. We needed to deconstruct our assumptions about the world, to ask the right people the right questions, and most of all, we needed to listen to their answers. But looking for authenticity--for the real story, so to speak--seemed to spiral into an identity politics that plagued my academic world. Every statement, every research question, became a competition over who had the right to speak about a given historical experience. While I am grateful that the status quo of academia got knocked down a few pegs, at times I was frustrated when valuable conversations about gender, for example, were paralyzed over arguments about who could authentically speak to a given issue. It's one of the reasons I lost interest in my research.

When it comes to blogging, I wonder sometimes about how much our pursuit of authenticity is really about how we want to appear to each other, rather than truly representing ourselves. I have been moved to tears reading about the experiences of other parents, seeing my own struggles in their words. And I've mentioned before how my isolation as a new parent in new country was softened by my discovery on this online community of parents, and of mothers in particular. But sometimes I wonder if so much of what I read online is actually prescriptive, rather than descriptive, especially when it comes to living and parenting authentically. Are the descriptions I read about days spent playing and crafting with kids, making mountains of food for growing children, and political statements about how and what to buy for our families about what really happens in our home, or about what we want to happen in our homes? I love staying home with The Children, including the cooking and crafting and chaos, but my home doesn't always look the way homes sometimes do in blogland. When mothers reflect on their own authentic living, are they telling us how they live, or how they'd like to live? Because I'd like to the live that way, too.

I think I'm over-thinking this. I know, you're shocked. I've been hesitant to describe my own writing as a quest for authenticity because my graduate training left me a little shaky. But when I quiet those voices in my head (still quoting Foucault and Butler) and ask myself what I'm doing with this blog, I am sharing my life as I understand it. I talk about loving my girls because these are my days. I am sharing a part of myself, and while it isn't the whole me, it is still me, still authentic. And when I tell you things about my life that still only exist at the level of ideals, this is still part of me, even if it isn't fully realized yet. This doesn't make me inauthentic, it just means I'm in process. And the same goes for other bloggers and writers.

Do you read A Cup of Jo? Joanna Goddard writes a beautiful blog (and her Friday links are the best around), and today she posted about her own thoughts (and fears) on authenticity. She is ready to reveal something about herself and in the process she is a bit afraid of the whole thing. Naturally, it is scary to share. We are vulnerable, defensive, and downright petrified. For the time being (she hasn't made the big reveal yet) she is sharing some encouraging words from her mother:

"It seems to me that being authentic is being brave enough or just candid enough to be honest about what you are experiencing or who you are, whether it is popular are not. A person gives a gift to other people when they say, 'This is what happened to me or this is how I truly feel, no matter what the popular belief is about what I should feel.' Whenever you are honest, you are speaking for a thousand silent people who don't have the voice to say what they really feel or are really experiencing. So, if you ever talk about [the thing you went through], you will touch a million hearts. Because you are speaking for more than just yourself. You are never alone in what you are feeling. I love you."

Find the rest of the post here.

Joanna's mother's description of authenticity makes sense to me, takes away some of my suspicions. Because this is exactly why I share my experiences about motherhood and life as a post-graduate student-teacher-soon-to-be-midwife-I-hope, and why I share in others' experiences about life as mothers and parents. Life feels decidedly less scary when I know I'm not the only one. Although she doesn't plan to share this particular experience until next week, for today Joanna invited us to reveal something true about ourselves, big or small. You can find hers here.

Here are some of mine. I promise they are authentic:

• I've struggled with depression for a long time.
• It takes me weeks to put away laundry.
• I am terrible with money.
• I often forget birthdays. Or I only remember at the very last minute.
• I've never read anything by Charles Dickens or a Russian.

What about you? Do you have anything to share?

I'm not the only one

I discovered a new blog last week and it's a good one. Besides my general coveting of her New York City life (it is on my list, you know), it seems we are both in the same position of trying to find work, with a humanities degree in our pockets and some beautiful children to show for our time off. Among other things, nyc taught me is a place for Sharon to chronicle her job search, and share some of the tips she's received along the way. So in other words, rather than just complain about not finding work, she's actually doing something (in my defense, however, my complaining comes from a place of needing to pay rent)! When I read Sharon's opening description of her job search I realized we were kindred spirits:

My newest lesson: NYC Taught me that no one wants to hire anyone without professional experience.  The real kicker for me today was when I got rejected from a temp agency. I get it. I've wasted my twenties by having babies. But look at how good I am at it! I'm a baby making machine!

Find the rest of her post here.

 
So please do check it out and send your best job thoughts to the both of us!