Awesome Mommy

As the holiday season rolls around and Movember comes to an end, everyone’s news-feeds revert back to reflecting their lunches, tales of failed blind dates and atrocious political opinions. Mustaches get shaved, mo-necklaces are tucked away, along with people’s passion to fight prostate cancer. Generally speaking, awareness campaigns as a means to itself, like the breast cancer coloured bra campaign, irk me the wrong way. Not because I don’t think it’s important to know that breast cancer exists, but because knowing and not doing anything about it is like having the cure and not telling anyone. Posting your bra colour on your Facebook status, sending a chain e-mail, liking and sharing a link, are all great examples of slacktivism. This is something that is fake. Not real. A half-a$$ attempt at change, knowledge, power, etc.

The real pleasure of making a difference is huge. Anyone who has ever done anything to feel this pleasure will know there is nothing like it. It is long lasting, satisfying and concrete. Only down side to it is that it requires you to actually do something other than click “like” on Facebook. It requires effort, putting yourself out there. It is anything but comfortable.

So what drives us to seek the counterfeit versus the real pleasure? Can’t be laziness, most of us get up every day at the crack of dawn to either go to work or take care of our kids. It can’t be the fact that we do not want to help the world, because again, most of us aren’t heartless, narcissistic freaks that don’t care about children with terminal cancer, people with AIDS, endangered exotic animals, healthcare and politics. We are just comfortable. Comfortable with our lives, our level of involvement and we do not want to ‘rock the boat’. We do not want to tip the scale in any way so that we will have to put out. We do not want our lives affected, be it for the good or the bad. We are content to settle for what we have as opposed to gamble for something more meaningful.

I guess I just want to say kudos to all the people who grew mustaches and actually raised money for prostate cancer research. Kudos to the people who ran in a breast cancer marathon. Kudos to everyone who has made a difference. And to everyone who hasn’t, there is still time. People are affected by things all around the year. You don’t have to wait till it’s something-awareness month. If you see a problem, make an attempt to fix it – shave your head (for money), run an event, make a YouTube clip, tell your story.

I’ve been on a kick to change the world since the shooting in Newtown and I promise to  get back to funny eventually, but something changed in me that day. I try to find the funny in the every day even though my mind wanders to those lost souls. I try to laugh when N, in response to me asking him what kind of cake he wants for his birthday, replies “a BIG one!”. But it crushes me to think that there were some  Newtown parents planning their kids birthday parties. It breaks my heart on a totally different level now that I have kids of my own. I have mixed emotions of guilt, despair, fear and anger, and slowly I’m trying to get back to normal. If you are a little messed up too, that’s okay, but if you found a way to make it better, spread it. We all need it.

This Sunday I was privileged enough to attend a seminar titled ‘Taking Charge of your Fertility’. It was presented by a good friend of mine to a group of women who as far as I know, were not having any trouble conceiving, but were simply interested in learning about the subject. The seminar re-introduced me to some very familiar pictures of the female anatomy and provided very pertinent information which my sex-ed teacher failed to tell me. I was shocked to learn about most of the things presented in the class and was horrified that I was not aware of most of them. Unlike ‘non-sciency’ people, I have an Honours degree in Biology, and therefore felt even worse about being in the dark about the array of information that I simply did not know.

In general, I find that people, myself included, only seek information about a certain subject on a need-to-know basis. For example, people read books about the art galleries and museums of Paris, only before going to visit Paris, read up about ADHD only once their child is diagnosed with it, seek marriage counselling once there is a problem in their marriage, and look into how their body works only once there is a problem with infertility.

I am very lucky to be a part of a circle of friends, and really the community at large, who seeks wisdom, whether it is on infertility, social media, the public education system, nutrition, parenting or match-making. I think that taking the time to learn about things that don’t necessarily solve an immediate problem for you personally, is a great way to change the world. President Obama said last night at a memorial service for the town of Newtown, Connecticut that he will do everything in his power to learn about the problems that are facing American youth in order to fix them. It is obvious that once you are learning about something in order to fix a problem, you are already behind. Trying to prevent something from happening, or at least taking the responsibility to be educated on a certain subject, whether it is for your own benefit or the life of others, really can make the world a better place.

I learned things yesterday that I have already shared with a bunch of my friends, drastically changing their lives. I did that by attending a 45 minute seminar that I was not obligated to go, didn’t get credit for going, and that my friend was not being paid to teach. I think that if we widen our perspectives on what it means for something to be ‘relevant’ in our lives, we can drastically impact the status quo.

I wish I could say that I have been MIA due to some cool reason like “I am writing a book” or “I have been selected to go to space on a top secret mission”, but I can’t, because, like most of you, I am not writing a book, and don’t have anywhere close to the strong enough gag reflex that is required by NASA protocol. What I will say is that I have been consumed by vicious colds, carpool, potty training, and taking care of nap-dropping little monsters. Every time there is a major halt in my day to day routine, I start to question whether or not I am happy with what I decided to do with my time.

The work or stay-at-home conundrum has been plaguing me ever since I decided to have kids and is exaggerated in my mind every time my kids get sick or are on vacation from school. Sometimes it makes me feel like an awful person, because my mother always says that she wishes she never had to work and could spend all her days with me and my sister. But I don’t feel like that. What’s wrong with me??

I decided to look further into this issue and found that after feminism really kicked in, in the 1930s, women were said to have penis-envy and were encouraged to be more feminine. Voila… Pleasantville and your typical 1950s housewife. That outlook only lasted about 10 years before there was an en masse return to work. No wonder men think all women are indecisive psychopaths – we can’t make up our mind. We have been flip-flopping backwards and forwards from home to career, back to home and then back to career. And the worst part about it is that we’ve never been perfectly happy.

Being a housewife could leave a woman thinking “is this all?” This is something that is very real for me personally, because people always tell me that I am wasting my education and my brain being just a mommy. On the other hand, a career these days has become a calling. A career choice is no longer what you do to make money, it’s who you are. Careers have gone from being a means to an end (money), to the end itself. The reason why I think people get so emotionally attached to, and therefore frustrated with, their jobs is that they are expecting it to fulfill them, actualize them and create within them a sense of identity and purpose.

Ok great so either way we’re screwed?

No…

I think that it’s important to have a balance, but not necessarily in equal parts. No one has to choose a static place on this mommy spectrum. Some days I am totally on the left side because all my kids are sick, and all I do ALL day is change diapers, cook meals and clean up messes, whereas other days, I leave my kids with babysitters and work all day. I don’t think the answer to being happy with what you choose to do is about WHAT you do, it’s HOW you do it.

Practically, I think that living your life with meaning, regardless of what you do, can grant you happiness. If you have that perspective in life, it won’t matter if you are a CEO of a Wall Street Bank or CEO of the kitchen sink… as long as you are directing what you do towards meaning. To positively approach your career, you just have to recognize that your job is not your identity. It does not define who you are; rather what you do with your income defines you. Trust me, you are not the only lawyer, doctor, programmer, teacher, social worker out there, but you defiantly may be the only one who gives 10% of what you make to charity, or shaves their head for a funky fundraiser. To stay positive at home, I think that one has to be as ambitious about their home-life as one would be about work. Staying in pjs all day, something I am totally guilty of, would never fly at work, so why would I do that at home? Taking your kids to the park, and then sitting on the bench and texting all day is just like handing in a very poorly done report. Just because you don’t have a boss breathing over your shoulder, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in the effort. And one last thing, don’t forget to use your talents! Are you a good singer? Then you serenade your kids till there’s no tomorrow. You’re an artist? You draw and make amazing art projects with them. You like to bake? Then you go and make the best damn chocolate chip cookies ever for your kids’ bake sales.

What I think that I, and most people, need to remember is to add on a Y-axis to the mommy spectrum – the meaning. No matter what I choose in the long run, each day has its presence on the spectrum, and as a result  each day also has a corresponding point on the more important axis, the meaning. At the end of the day, your happiness will not depend on which side you lean more to, but on how much purpose you choose to infuse into what you are doing.

Dear Knife Sharpening Guy,

I don’t like you.

You drive around in your dark grey pickup truck, playing your misleading ice cream truck music very loudly around my neighbourhood all summer long. You also seem to know when my kids are sleeping, because you, what seems like purposely, pick to turn onto my street at those precise times.
Not only do you wake my children, who are a pain to get to sleep in the first place, but you offer them false hope of a non-existent grand prize… ice cream truck ice cream.

Now let’s be clear here, I am not de-valuing your service. I am not actually sure what your service is exactly, mostly due to the fact that I have never gotten a chance to experience it for myself. Say I did, in theory, want my knives sharpened by a random stranger in a pickup truck, how would I go about doing that exactly? You are not like the truck full of goodies that parks on the shoulder for a few minutes in hopes of customers that will eventually trickle out of their houses in response to their kids’ pleas. You just mosey along driving at a speed that is inappropriately below the seed limit. Do your customers run out of their house and run down the street clutching dull-bladed knives? That, I can see being not only dangerously irresponsible, but bordering on insanity. I am pretty sure that if I saw a lady run out into the middle of the street with a knife, and was clearly chasing a guy in a dark pickup truck, I would call 911.

I think putting an ad in the paper is a better way to elicit business in your field.

Good luck with your efforts,

Slightly Angered Awesome Mommy