Of course the streets were full of people in green hats eating green popcorn, but there was a band on the stage with guitars and fiddles, and its name was “The Whiskey Dicks” which sounded promising.
But then we got close enough to hear the music.
Owl had a good time dancing, at least… in a marching stomp to the TOTALLY NOT CELTIC MUSIC.
I grew up singing Barra Macneils songs.
Our neighbour used to stand out in his backyard practising his bagpipe every afternoon.
When I was pregnant, I was obsessed with listening to Great Big Sea.
This music is important to me, and Vancouver can’t do it right EVEN IN A CELTIC FESTIVAL.
We decided to go to Tom Lee Music because there was supposed to be a sort of jam session with Mairi Rankin there. The problem was that it had started at 3, and by the time Owl woke up from his nap and we got down town, it was 4:30.
Happily, the people at front of house let us sneak in for half price, so we crept in for the last twenty minutes of the session.
Inside was a small group of people clapping and stamping their feet to real fiddle music – like a secret conclave of actual Irish/East Coasters, hiding from the Vancouver rabble in their shamrock hats while singing about colcannon and teaching each other Irish love songs.
Owl listened in fascination the whole time.
This morning, he took his two plastic hockey sticks and walked around rubbing them together telling me “I play fiddle, Mommy.”
I am not, by the generally-accepted understanding of the term, a feminist.
I would love to be a stay at home wife and mother. I like it when my husband brings me flowers and opens doors for me. I don’t get angry and aerated by the fact that most executives are men, or spend much time ranting about the glass ceiling (not that I like the glass ceiling. It pisses me off, too. I just prefer to rant about grammar).
In short, I don’t get upset when women are not treated the same as men.
But the more time I spend with Perfect Husband, the more I spend thinking about men and feeling bad for them, because they aren’t treated the same as women.
I don’t think PH actually likes men, much. All his friends are women. The ones who aren’t biologically women are transgender women, or married to his female friends. Or both.
PH thinks that women get a bum rap because feminine things are still not really being put forward as desirable or likeable.
The inherent sexism in our society is everywhere, and I hear a lot about it. Commercials like this one tick PH off to no end:
A basic summary of this commercial:
Man wants Klondike Bar. Man is willing to go through a difficult ordeal to get Klondike Bar. Man is told that he must listen to his wife for FIVE WHOLE SECONDS. He then makes an effort to focus on his WIFE (you know, his so ul mate, whom he committed to for life) for a matter of mere moments while she tries to talk to him about decorating the house (you know, because that’s all women talk about it and if men have to think about paint swatches, they’ll die). When the five second buzzer rings a party appears, thrown by several women who are much hotter than his wife. He starts dancing with them while the wife looks completely baffled.
TERRIBLE.
PH is furious because he thinks those new Mint Klondike Bars look really tasty, but NOW HE CAN’T BUY THEM because all he can think about is how offensive the commercial is.
He can’t buy the new Dr Pepper, either, because apparently it’s “not for women” (seriously. That’s their tag line. WTF? Way to knock out half of your potential market there, geniuses).
The fact is that feminism has been so focused on getting the same rights as men, that we have made absolutely no headway in convincing men that being feminine is actually desirable. After all, men must wonder, if being a woman is so great, why do we want to leave the kids at home and come to work in pants, anyway?
Womanhood – so awful, even women don’t want it.
That’s a tagline worthy of Dr Pepper.
Women have spent years fighting for the right to be treated as equals to men, and that’s good. Thanks to them I can vote, I share equal ownership of my house and finances with my husband, and I can learn anything and be anything I want to be.
But no one has been fighting to give the men the same options.
Take names.
Girls keep stealing the boy names, and then mothers of boys can’t effing use them.
Girls can be (and frequently are) named things like Carson, Taylor, or Ryan. Hell, I could probably name my daughter Gary or Fred and people would tell me “oh, I love that for a girl!” But when you are looking for a name for your son, do you consider Stacy, Leslie, or Shirley?(note: Anne of Green Gables named her son Shirley – have we gone backwards socially?)
It’s not fair.
As it is, even names like Alex, Cameron, Jamie, or Sam are considered borderline. Once the girls appropriate it, the boys can’t use it any more. Why?
A little girl can go dressed up as Batman for Hallowe’en, but why aren’t there more little boys dressed as Catwoman? I can go to work in pants and sensible shoes, but what if my husband showed up for work in heels?
That’s PH’s big beef.
Not that he wants to go to work in heels (after all, he takes an hour and a half of transit each way. That’s a lot of walking) but it strikes him as wrong that men CAN’T (by the same token, if someone said I couldn’t wear dresses I’d get ticked off, even though I hate the damn things).
Men are just as constricted by gender as women are, really.
Canada offers ‘parental leave’ to either parent, usually at a rate of 55% their regular pay. Some companies, like the one PH works for, will “top up” women’s maternity leave, providing the extra 45% so the woman gets full pay. It’s a benefit they offer, but they only offer it to the women. If PH had chosen to go on parental leave, not only would he have been under some serious scrutiny by his bosses, but he would not have been eligible for the top-up.
Of course that, in turn, limits women’s choices, because it meant that it basically wasn’t a financial option for us for PH to stay home. That was fine with me, but what if I had wanted to go right back to work?
Even with that in consideration, the fact is that I can wear men or women’s clothing, I can work or stay home, I can vote, and I can get elected to public office. I can call myself Ryan, I can do any and all things that men can do, AND I can bear children and breastfeed.
Men can’t.
Men can’t wear dresses unless it’s Hallowe’en or unless they want to be the butt of a lot of jokes (PH once heard two coworkers joking about “she-males” and nearly ripped them new cloacas). Men can’t have feminine names. Men can’t stay home with their children without being penalized financially and socially more than women. Heck, the idea of a male childcare worker is so strange to us that it was the focus of an entire Friends episode.
Jason Alexander, in a recent apology for his joking that cricket is “gay”, asks us why accusing something (like sports) of being effeminate is still considered so offensive.
There’s no good answer, except the truth:
We still think that it’s bad to be effeminate. It’s associated with homosexuality, which is stupid – after all, most cross dressers are completely straight – and homosexuality is still considered bad, too.
“Gay” is an insult.
“Girly” is an insult.
My old boss used to tell dogs who weren’t tugging on their tug ropes hard enough that “that’s a little-girl tug!”
Men who can’t pitch are told that they throw like girls.
This is the society that we are bringing Owl into, and it concerns us.
It doesn’t concern Owl, yet, though.
He so far hasn’t really figured out that he is male. When I call him a “little boy” he looks at me like I’m an idiot, points to himself and says clearly, “BA-BY!”
He knows he has a penis, but he isn’t too concerned by the fact that I don’t. He seems to think it’s tucked up in my belly button somewhere.
….And about twice a week, when I show up at daycare to pick him up, he’s in a dress.
This is how I roll
Not just any dress. It’s a sparkly blue fairy princess dress. The boys wear the blue one, because blue is for boys, don’tcha know. The girls get a purple one.
I rarely see any other boy in the blue dress, though. It’s mostly Owl’s.
Apparently he drags Daycare Lady or her daughters to the place where the dresses are kept, insisting “dress, dress” until they put it on him. Sometimes he won’t take it off when it’s time to go home, so I just bring it back the next day.
The other day he spotted it on the shelf the morning after one of these comes-home-in-a-dress days and screeched until Perfect Husband put it back on him.
Then he walked around going “pwetty, pwetty.”
I feel pretty, OH SO PRETTY
The neighbours say “is he in a fairy dress??” and we all have a good chuckle. I make it clear that he chose to be in it, so they don’t think that I’m one of those weird parents who try and de-gender their child. Gender isn’t bad.
The funny thing is, I would have been horrified if I had a girl and she had turned up in a princess dress. I’m afraid for a daughter – I wasn’t a girly girl and I don’t want my future daughter buying in to the look-pretty-for-the-men media crap.
But that dichotomy made me re-examine my own biases. Owl isn’t acting on any kind of media pressure, so neither would a little girl at this age.
This is purely about a small child liking something pretty, and not realizing that society has deemed it unfit for him.
I know that one day he’ll realize that he IS a little boy.
I know that one day he’ll understand that dresses are for girls.
I know that the day will come when he will reject all things feminine, and scorn them as he has been taught to do by his peers and by the media.
When that day comes, I will sigh and feel sad. But in the meantime I can pretend that we live in a better world, and my neighbours can continue to get a good laugh.
Canada prides itself on being a “salad bowl” (as opposed to America’s “melting pot”). We don’t strive to assimilate. We believe in leaving each other alone.
And so, there are pockets of Vancouver where people don’t bother to use English signs, and despite the fact that our official languages are English and French, a working knowledge of Korean will get you a lot further if you live in Richmond, BC.
Child rearing is the same.
We all just raise our kids the way we see fit, from the yoga-pants-wearing-stroller-moms, to the Japanese mom I met at the airport whose 10 year old son still slept with her at night – totally normal to the Japanese.
There are certain pressures levelled at us, mostly around the time of birth, from the government. Since we all contribute to a government health plan, and all our medical bills are paid out of that, the government takes an active interest in whether we breastfeed, whether we let our child sleep with blankets, and so on.
They know that a formula fed child is more likely to have ear infections, allergies, asthma, and so on. In other words, they know that a formula fed child will cost them more money. So they push breastfeeding pretty heavily, from the forms you have to sign acknowledging their lectures, to the massive posters all over the hospitals.
They also know that a baby who sleeps away from his parents is more likely to die of SIDS (and therefore not become a contributing tax payer someday) but that a child who sleeps WITH his parents may be smothered, so they push the “near-you-but-not-in-bed-with-you” sleeping arrangement.
They give mothers a year (or fathers six months) off of work on unemployment insurance benefits to care for the baby.
They push vaccines.
But none of that seems to have really made much impact on our culture… er, cultures. Some women breastfeed. Most try, at least. But the ones who were pretty sure they wanted to do formula usually do switch to formula shortly after leaving the hospital. Many, like me, discover that co-sleeping is easier and just take care not to smother their baby.
Basically, we go back to doing our own thing.
In a way, this is nice. It’s nice to be able to raise your child the way you want, without much interference.
On the other hand, there’s no cohesive bond. We have no collective set of childrearing rules, so what do you do when someone else’s child starts misbehaving?
I once saw a passing old lady grab a teenage boy by the ear when she spotted him littering. She made him pick it up and take it to the garbage – a total stranger.
Once upon a time, that would have been normal. Everyone disciplines everyone’s children based on a mutually agreed on set of rules. If your kid is out of sight, you can bet that whatever adult is around will continue to enforce standards of politeness and appropriate behaviour.
We don’t have that now.
Now, I don’t know what to do when someone’s kid walks up to me and says something insulting, while the mother smiles indulgently.
Now, I have to worry that someone will let my own kid do the same some day, when I’m not around to stop it.
I want my child learning sign language, and not watching TV. The people across the road, who are awesome, don’t care about their toddler watching TV and can’t be bothered with sign language.
Neither of us are right, or wrong.
But it can make conversation awkward.
We are all raising our children in Canada, but what culture are they being raised in?
Do we even have one?
Do you have something to say about motherhood in your country? Join the World Moms Blog Link Up, this Nov 2-4!
The smells of wood smoke and cooking fill the air as a new day begins. The women of the village join each other in the morning sun and start their work, all the while breastfeeding, chatting, laughing, arguing. Their children play around them as they grind grain, weave baskets, and stretch leather. They chat about their work, the weather, their men, their children. They gossip and scold and sing as their breasts swing and sway to the rhythm of their toils.
The one thing they don’t talk about, however, is how to parent their children. They don’t discuss the pros and cons of breast vs bottle feeding. They don’t fret over co-sleeping or how to stimulate their children’s cognitive development. They don’t dicker over methods of discipline, or the latest research on child psychology, because here in this place, they do as they have always done.
We have children. We raise them. We bring them up to share our values. When a child misbehaves away from his mother, his aunt or his grandmother or his neighbour will step in, because the rules are the same for everyone.
Parenting, here, is just an organic part of what is.
where he belongs
Here, women don’t wonder how to divide themselves between their roles as parents and their roles as members of the community. There is no need to choose between motherhood and productivity. Your children go with you, because they are a part of you. Motherhood is not a sideline, or an interruption of one’s career. Nor does motherhood define you. Motherhood is blessed, and womanly. Motherhood is life.
The village is filled with helping hands who will hold your baby, teach your toddler, and chide your cheeky child. There are no play groups: just step outside and your child’s siblings, cousins, and friends will go running by. There are no “Mommy and Me” classes. Every woman is a mother, here.
In the village, children are valuable resources, not expenditures. There are no diapers to buy, no bottles to fill. There are no strollers, no toys, no music lessons, no college funds. Children cost next to nothing, and they can herd the cattle, sweep the hut, and watch the younger children. When they are grown, they will provide for their ageing parents. Children are a retirement fund. Children are gifts, never burdens, even as they ride on your back, or hang on your hip, or lag behind and try to snare your shadow with stomping feet.
Here, babies curl into their mother’s bodies at night, nursing as needed all night long. Sleeping through the night is not discussed or thought of. If he wakes in the night, you can sleep longer, or go to bed earlier, because here there are no alarm clocks. In fact, there are no clocks at all.
…Now, I know, intellectually, that this village comes with a price. There is no medicine, no clean water, and no birth control beyond breastfeeding. There is sometimes famine and hardship, and often babies die. There are no books, no movies, no video games. There is no take-out for when you are too tired to cook. There is no warm bath to soak in after a long day. There is no room for people who are different.
I believe in medicine for the sick and that everyone has the right to clean water. I am grateful for antibiotics, and epidurals, and sterile suture stitches. I revel in science, and children’s literature, and Nanaimo bars and diet Pepsi. I believe in women’s rights, and children’s rights, and marriage for homosexuals. I believe transsexuals deserve sex reassignment surgery, and that religion is a personal matter that has no place in government policy. I believe in multiculturalism, and social programs, and anything starring Hugh Laurie or Colin Firth.
But my bones believe in more ancient things. They don’t understand about science, or social freedoms, or new episodes of Glee. I am controlled by genes that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years; antibiotics and astronomy and A.A. Milne are but tiny blips in the time line of my ancestry, and my DNA knows them not.
I believe in vaccinating my baby, and baby-proofing my house. I read him books and give him toys that beep and dress him in cute outfits. I will put him in daycare and go back to work when he is a year old. I own a crib, and a stroller, but neither of them gets much use. I prefer to carry him on my hip in a wrap, and I fall asleep with his head pillowed on my breast in the middle of the night. I don’t want to leave him with a stranger. I want him by my side.
My brain is at odds with my body. I know I am fortunate to have clean water, and low infant mortality rates, and electricity and indoor plumbing and chocolate. I know that day care and milk pumps and traffic jams are a small price to pay for a life of such immeasurable luxury.
I know.
But my heart and bones remember a village, and that part of me will always be homesick for somewhere I have never been.
I’ve just had it hammered into me for so long that it seems like a ridiculous question, like asking “Would you jump out of a plane without a parachute?” or “would you feed your dog a big hunk of baker’s dark chocolate?”
Since middle school they have been telling us over and over again, “no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy”. So it just becomes part of the collective unconscious – pregnant women don’t drink. The image is incongruous, like a camel drinking a martini. And it’s not just me who thinks that way.
For example: I love champagne. That’s my drink of choice. We had a big bottle of Baby Canadian in our fridge last year and the occasion to drink it wasn’t coming up.
Me: We’ll just save it. *with a grin* Hey, maybe we can pop it to celebrate when we find out that I’m pregnant!
Perfect Husband:*sliding off his wedding ring* Get out of my house.
I had a few glasses of wine over Christmas, before I knew I was pregnant, mind you. It’s ironic because my grandmother kept thinking I was pregnant whenever I went to visit her, and I was talking about this with my parents over a glass of Zinfandel.
Mum: Your Nana doesn’t know something we don’t, does she?
Me: Uhh, considering that I’m drinking a glass of wine right now, clearly if she does, I don’t know either.
I guess the joke was on me.
But I’m beginning to realize that not everyone has had this belief drilled firmly into their heads. Quite a lot of people on the Dooce Community admit to drinking the occasional glass of wine or beer while pregnant. Do I judge them? Not really. I mean, the chance of a glass or two hurting the baby is pretty slim. I haven’t lost much sleep over those glasses of Zinfandel. But knowingly drinking alcohol while pregnant baffles me, because there’s always the risk. The unpredictability of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and the fact that they can’t seem to establish a “safe” zone keeps me away. I felt the same reaction when reading NewScientist’s Bumpology articles. The author has discussed that alcohol can be harmful. How studies showed that fetuses born to mothers who just a glass or two a day during the third trimester are born with a taste preference for alcohol. But she still seems annoyed by the whole “no alcohol” recommendation.
And it is her right.
But I’m like, “Bwa??”
It’s just not on my radar in the slightest. Why would I take the risk? Nor could I manage to do so without having a major blow-out with my husband. YOU suggest to him that I have a glass of wine. See how he takes it.
Those three bottles of Smirnoff Ice in the fridge drive me crazy, especially on hot days. We have friends coming by to put in baseboards for us tomorrow. Maybe I can pawn them off of them.
As someone who lived internationally as a child, I have a special relationship with my homeland. Canada was the place of my birth, the place of my ancestors, the place I was somewhat unfamiliar with. We returned to Canada when I was 13 and I began to discover it outside of books and summer visits to relatives. I have lived in four provinces, and visited four others.
So what defines Canada?
In a country as large as ours, unity is difficult. America fights dissension with the “melting pot” principle. An American teacher once explained to our class that the American curriculum was actually designed to promote ignorance of other nations, ignorance of world geography and politics, and promote pride in being American. He pointed to the problems Canada has between Francophones and Anglophones, rivalries between provinces, and even arguments between Indiginous and Non-Indiginous peoples. America fights that in their curriculum by telling the kids over and over “You are American, and America is the best”. They don’t want any more civil war.
That doesn’t fit the Canadian mentality, which seems to be much more “now, kids, can’t we talk about this in our indoor voices?” when it comes to mediating internal disputes. Even when Quebec clamors to separate, we simply let them put it to a vote and pray like heck that over half of them will prefer to stay Canadian. Civil war is not in the cards because it’s too cold up here to get riled up about things.
Canada is a large and varied nation, and culture varies from province to province, and from city to city. Halifax and Vancouver don’t feel like the same country sometimes. Quebec certainly does not. But all of it is Canada.
Canada is the fresh, open spaces of the West, with brand-new cities just beginning to sprout up in the shadows of the mountains, and largely populated by immigrants from other countries. In a way, the West in Canada is still being colonized.
Canada is the stiff, salty winds in the East, echoing the shouts of days long gone – privateers and fishing boats being wrecked along the rocks.
Canada is not American.
Perhaps this is how we define ourselves best – Not American.
After all, much of the population of Canada was once made up of Royalists: people who didn’t want to have a revolution with the British, but didn’t want to BE British, either. They moved to Canada, all of these indecisive in-betweeners, and they live here still. We don’t want to be British, but we do like to wave at the Queen when she graces us with a visit. We certainly don’t want to be American, but you aren’t really considered famous until the Americans can recognize you, too. We want to be free of stuffy British conventions, and free of America’s obsession with personal freedom, which seems to largely involve infringing on other people’s personal freedoms.
Canada wants to live and let live.
But I think that as long as I live out West, I will still think of Canada, of home, as being the East. The Rocky Mountains are part of Canada, sure, and even the babel of other languages I hear in the grocery store is part of Canada – our blessed salad bowl, where everyone can live in peace and continue to pretend that they are living in the country they just left.
But my favourite Canada is in the sight of sun-bleached lobster traps piled on a dock. Canada is the sound of bagpipes accompanied by the roar of waves at Peggy’s Cove. Canada is the sight of tall ships gliding into Halifax Harbour. Canada is in the whimsical accents of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Canada is in a culture so rich that the death of Alexander Keith is considered still worth celebrating, and a country so young that our history has not yet been buried by time.
The words of Stan Rogers say it for me…
It was in the spring this year of grace,
with new life pushing through
That I looked from the Citadel down to the Narrows
and asked what it’s coming to.
I saw Upper Canadian concrete and glass
right down to the water line,
And I heard an old song down on Fisherman’s Wharf.
Can I sing it just one time?
…
“Then haul away and heave her home.”
This song is heard no more
No boats to sing it for.
No sails to sing it for.
There rises now a single tide
of tourists passing through.
We traded old ways for the new,
old ways for the new.
Now you ask
“What’s this romantic boy who
laments what’s done and gone? “
There was no romance on a cold winter ocean
and the gales sang an awful song.
But my fathers knew of wind and tide
and my blood is maritime,
And I heard an old song down on Fisherman’s Wharf.
Can I sing it just one time?
…And now, Perfect Husband and I will celebrate Canada Day on the West Coast by… visiting Point Roberts.
