The Gideons — not just for hotel rooms, apparently

I haven't been called a fascist by total strangers in what must be WEEKS now, so I decided to write a little post for Today's Parent on why in the H-E-double hockey sticks I will not be giving the Gideons permission to give my fifth grader a New Testament:

Sure: the Gideons don’t just hand out the Bibles any more — although they used to. Sure: I do understand that, nowadays, parents do have to give permission. But the fact that it’s even an option to give permission is problematic. Permission forms that come home from school aren’t neutral, no matter what anyone says. When my kids come home with permission forms, it’s understood that the default, encouraged answer is YES. Yes, Johnny can go ice skating with the class. Yes, Fatima can go on a field trip to the museum. Yes, I give permission for Enrico to join the chess club. Yes, Sook-Yin will take part in the public health dental program. Permission forms imply good things, wholesome things, healthy things, things you should participate in. Just by sending home a permission form, the school has already set itself up as suggesting that receiving a Bible is a good thing. And it may be, and it may not be, but it’s simply not a decision that a public school board should get to make for any of our children.

(Seriously — I can't believe that this practice is continuing at the Lakehead Board of Education. It's been discontinued at the public school boards that cover the overwhelming majority of Ontario's students: Toronto, Peel, York, Durham, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Bluewater, Ottawa-Carleton and Niagara district school boards, among others, as well as in most of BC, New Brunswick and in Iqaluit. Why is it still happening?)

So, you want to be a parenting writer? Prepare to be humbled. And maybe saved.

I never get tired of seeing my byline, gotta say.

Back in the summer, I got an assignment from Today’s Parent magazine to write a story for the “behaviour” section of the book. The topic? Ha. A thousand words on — wait for it — why kids don’t listen and how to get them to. 

You know, no biggie.

I’ll admit it: wrapping my head around that topic and writing a coherent article nearly broke me. Such a huge subject, so many perspectives, so few words, so much at stake. In a behind-the-scenes article for the magazine’s website, I talk about exactly why this article ate my emotional lunch, and what I learned from it:

I was … wracked with anxiety. How on earth would I ever do justice to the topic when I couldn’t even get my own kids to close the refrigerator door or come downstairs for breakfast? And how on earth would I even begin to approach a topic that enormous? Almost every parent I know could fill pages just listing the ways in which their kids ignore their seemingly reasonable requests: What could I possibly say that could make a difference? […]

I realized that I needed to rethink my whole approach to the subject—not to mention the way I interacted with my own children. Here are some things that I learned:

First, kids don’t listen to us, their parents, because kids are human beings with their own agendas. And sometimes—often—our agendas simply don’t match up with theirs. My agenda might be to make sure everyone gets to school on time. My seven-year-old’s agenda, though, might be to find and rearrange all the glittery rocks in his room into a three-dimensional collage that simply has to be finished right now, because that’s where his creative vision lies. My nine-year-old’s agenda, on the other hand, might be to read the book that he is reading, in bed, in his pajamas, even though, “Breakfast is ready, Rowan. Rowan, breakfast is ready. Rowan, if you don’t get up and get dressed right now and come down for breakfast you’re going to be late. Rowan—are you listening to me? I’m not going to say it again: You’re going to be late!”

[Ten minutes later: “Late!”]

You can read the rest here. The full article — with all its transformational tips and tricks and insights and good stuff — is out now in the magazine’s October issue (and online). Check it out! And fill free to leave me a comment with your best tips or your most maddening “not listening” anecdote. Or both.

Space

Lately, I’ve been craving vastness.

I’m blaming it on small-town (fine, small-city) life: not enough urban density, strip-mall architecture instead of cityscapes and soaring buildings, the same old same old round of a half-dozen restaurants and bars and cafés. I keep thinking of big cities, everywhere I’ve been in the last 12 months — San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles — and I’m chafing against the familiarity of this place, the way I can recognize the supermarket cashiers, the way everyone looks the same. I’m longing for somewhere big enough to be anonymous at the same time as I’m aching for my far-flung comrades. I’m chafing against the stark contrasts between home life and vacation life and my desire to integrate them, find some way to find the common ground between room service and no obligations or bedtimes and packing lunches and taking out the garbage and, oh, working for a living.

I’m blaming it on this parenting gig, the way it circumscribes my schedule, keeps me close to (closed in by) home as I navigate life with two small people in tow. Rachel is out of town, and so I am feeling acutely the pull and stress of amusing children, getting them to their various activities, the driving and the drop-offs and the back-and-forth of where are you and are you safe and can you wait to talk to me until your brother is done? It’s hard to leave the house some days with these two sets of often-competing interests, but of course staying home all day on a rainy Sunday leads to sure and utter disaster. The kids are alright, just fine, but I’m telling myself that parenting isn’t necessarily expanding my horizons at this very moment.

I’m blaming screens. I’m blaming the one I’m staring at right now as I compose this blog. I’m blaming the ones about which my children negotiate constantly. I’m blaming the tiny one that goes with me everywhere, its constant feedback or lack thereof both a lifeline and a stranglehold. Again, it's the problem of integration: how to come to a place of peace between virtual and physical worlds? How is it that the vastness of the Internet can fit into my pocket and give me tunnel vision? I had a massage yesterday, and my lovely, snarky massage therapist worked all the angry muscles in my neck and arms and shoulders and said, gently, “Do you think that you might look down a lot at your phone? Do you ever take a vacation?”

I’m blaming, I’m blaming. And even as I blame, I know that all this railing and blaming don’t particularly expand my horizons. And so what I try to do when things feel small, when my ribs constrict my lungs and my heart doesn’t have space to beat and pounds against my chest, is to stretch, find space.

On Sunday, that meant availing myself of a lovely friend to babysit and then getting on my bike and riding as fast as I could to the movie theater to see Boyhood — revelling in the big screen, in the Houston and Austin cityscapes and the hugeness of Big Bend Ranch State Park. Last night, it meant actually shelling out for a babysitter and watching (with the same friend) Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster, and Vanessa Kirby in A Streetcar Named Desire — even if I couldn’t be at the Young Vic Theatre in London, I could watch the live satellite stream of the production, and that was pretty amazing. (Yes, what I wouldn’t give to have been in the flesh-and-blood audience, but I’m trying here, people…). It means playing hooky from the obligations in my head to have a beer with a grieving friend on a weekday afternoon, and finding myself surprised by the intensity and emotion of the conversation that ensued at that bar. It means taking a chance on Tomlin, a new restaurant in town, and feeling life relax and melt over pork chicharrones and charred broccoli and grilled trout in a lovely space that could have been anywhere else I’ve been over the past year.

And, many days, making my life feel bigger means this: the Cascades. You walk a short distance through the woods and then end up on a vast, exposed chunk of the Canadian Shield, some of the oldest rocks on Earth. You can't get cell reception at there. Yesterday, a friend and I went there. We had planned for a quick walk around the neighbourhood to save time, but she showed up at my door and said, “I really think we need to go to the Cascades,” and I hugged her. And we scrabbled up and down the worn stone, next to the rushing water. And we talked — another one of those so many conversations I’ve had of late that brings tears, unexpected, to my eyes, nothing in particular so sad, just that everything right at this phase seems to bubble and rush to the surface.

And in that space, so big, so old, so primal, things shift — at least temporarily — into the proportions that I need. For a few moments, in this exact space, in this exact moment, life is the right size in relation to everything else.

I'm trying to learn how to hold onto that.