National Donor Sabbath
Posted
November 10, 2006 at
9:03 am by
Andrea
One of the undeniably good things to come out of blogging, for me, has been my friendship with Moreena of falling down is also a gift, and a few other places which may or may not be competitors of Imperfect Parent, so I won’t link to them directly. Regardless, Moreena is a compassionate, intelligent and generous person whose posts often make me cry at work (which is embarassing when you’re out of kleenex and are reduced to using an old receipt from the bottom of your purse, hoping that you’re not spreading ink all over your reddened, tear-stained face).
Moreena’s oldest daughter, Annika, has had two liver transplants as the result of a congenital disease called Biliary Atresia; she is about to be put back on the waiting list for a third. She is six.
And as she reminded me lately, this weekend is the National Donor Sabbath, an interfaith event and celebration to increase awareness of organ donation.
So many of you will hear this information already this weekend; but for those of you who, like me, rarely darken a church door, here is information about how to become an organ donor and frequently asked questions about organ donation.
And if you have a blog or website and would like to increase awareness of this incredibly important issue, here is a button you can use (right-click, save as, and upload as required):
?‚? 
Conference Update
Posted
October 29, 2006 at
10:21 am by
Andrea
My presentation on Friday was part of a panel about mommy blogging. There were five of us; the other four covered mommy blogging as a genre, how blogging about mothering publicly can affect your mothering, mommy blogging as folk art, and how advertising is beginning to affect mommy blogging. My topic was the experience of writing about mothering a child who is, in some way, different–whether it be disability or illness or just an undiagnosable genetic syndrome–on the internet.
In one of those moments of serendipity–or perhaps sensitivity after exposing myself to this issue for a few months–yesterday there was a section in the Toronto Star about access to post-secondary education for students with disabilities, and how attitudes are slowly changing. The articles gave me a great deal of hope–perhaps we, as the last generation to expect students with differences or issues or delays to be segregated educationally, are the last of the dinosaurs, the last to feel uncomfortable in the presence of a child not regularly featured in Parents magazine. Perhaps stand-up comics who can’t stand up and PhD students who can’t spell without assistance will simply be accepted, normal parts of advanced education for our children, and workplaces will automatically accomodate them because schools have automatically accomodated them, and they expect the world to work that way.
Perhaps it will be like the second wave of feminism–not perfect, not fixing everything by any stretch, but accomplishing nonetheless such a sea change that the way things used to be, the world of lowered expectations and isolation and segregation, is no longer imaginable.
I hope so. Because when, after finishing that, I find this letter about the death of a man with primordial dwarfism, I dread the world my daughter will live in.
(I’ll come back and write about the actual panel and how it went once my co-presenters have had a chance to decompress and post their own talks, so that I can point to them. And parts of this post will end up on my own blog tomorrow–but I didn’t want anyone to think I’d had that heart attack. It actually all went very well.)
Ack!
Posted
October 25, 2006 at
11:16 am by
Andrea
I feel like a cat with a fur ball. Ack! Ack!
It’s all I can say this week, because I am dying with excitement (ack!) and anxiety (ack!) over talking Friday at the Motherlode conference in Toronto about my experiences blogging about a child with physical differences. (Ack!) The conference is featuring mothering authors such as Andi Buchanan (who wrote MotherShock) (Ack!) and Ann Crittenden (author of The Price of Motherhood) (Ack!). I am sharing panel space with several well-known mother bloggers, including MUBAR, Postcards from the Mothership, Hello Josephine, and the Mother of All Blogs’ Ann Douglas. (Ack!) People have already been signing up for our session (ack!), which the organizers have been promoting on the materials mailed out to registrants (ack!); I splurged on new shoes, even (ack!).
Only to find this in the Toronto Star a few days ago. OK, scroll past the brilliant part at the beginning where the author describes how society is all talk, no action about supporting motherhood to where she writes about the Motherlode.
Do you see this? This part right here?
But O’Reilly says this year’s event takes it to a whole new level. It features 200 speakers from around the world on such diverse topics as teen mothers, raising bi-racial children, post-partum depression, mothering children with disabilities, and mommy blogs.
Mommy blogs! That’s me! I mean, us! Ack!
I’ll be here afterwards to blog about it; and if I’m not, call the ambulance. I probably had a heart attack.
Ack!
Fabulous. Thank you so much.
Posted
October 23, 2006 at
9:23 am by
Andrea
Because Canada really wants to accept America’s pedophiliac exiles. I mean, Canada’s children are surely so undesirable that he won’t pose any kind of threat here, would he? So allowing him to remain free as long as he has no access to American children is clearly proof that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds.
Another reason to throw out that “Math is Hard” Barbie Doll
Posted
October 20, 2006 at
7:25 am by
Andrea
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have reported on an experiment that demonstrates that when girls are told they are naturally worse at math, they perform worse on tests.
As one researcher said:
“We told one group of women a made-up story about scientists discovering a math gene on the Y (male) chromosome, and those women got only half as many answers correct as the others ???‚¬??? possibly because they choked under the pressure,” said UBC psychology professor Steven Heine, whose study with PhD student Ilan Dar-Nimrod was published yesterday in Science magazine.
“But the women who were told there is no genetic difference in math ability between men and women did better, possibly because it’s liberating to learn you don’t have a genetic disadvantage.”
CNN also reported on the story (see? I do read news sites besides the TO Star!) and had more details on how the study was administered:
Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
The women were given a math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam.
In two groups the women averaged between five and 10 correct answers out of 25 math questions. In the other two they averaged between 15 and 20 correct.
The women in the lower-scoring groups read essays that either contended that there is a genetic difference between men and women in math ability, or discussed the images of women in art — a reading which did not discuss math but was designed to remind them of being female.
Those two groups not only fell short of the other women, but their performance declined between the two math tests, meaning they scored lower after reading the essays than before.
It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”
What does this mean for parents? In yet another case of Experts Telling Us What We Already Knew, don’t tell your children that they can’t do such-and-such because of their sex. Or their height, or their eye colour, or their skin colour, or whatever. Being reminded of a stereotype that claims one is innately incapable of performing a particular task tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if your kids are exposed to these stereotypes from other sources (TV, books, magazines, schools, friends), work with them to understand that the stereotype isn’t true, and even if it was, it wouldn’t necessarily apply to them.
The Token Witch
Posted
October 19, 2006 at
7:17 am by
Andrea
Everything that follows is solely my own opinion. Even moreso than with most religious discussions, because wicca is so new and so varied that you could ask ten witches (if you could find ten witches) what their beliefs are, and you would get ten different answers.
What follows is the basic stuff that most of us agree on. ?‚? I thought about including my own beliefs and the tradition I’m part of–but that would take years. But if anyone has any specific questions, I’ll try to answer them.
Most witches (I’ll use the term interchangeably with wiccan for this, though for some folks they’re separate) are panentheists, which means that deity is in the world. Everything material is a manifestation of the divine, from the smallest microbe to the universe itself. The wiccan concept of deity holds that god/dess is destructive and creative, good and bad. Death is considered part of life, and destruction the necessary precursor to creation.
The divine is personalized as both a god and a goddess, who are two manifestations of a single nameless deity. The names of the god and the goddess vary by tradition; and in many traditions, they are also considered to have a thousand faces–the minor gods and goddesses.
There are two basic sets of beliefs regarding the god and the goddess. In one, they are equals; in the other, the goddess is primary. The latter is also sometimes referred to as goddess worship or Dianic witchcraft/wicca. It is more common so far as I know to regard them as equals. Because there is a god and a goddess and they are considered equal, witchcraft believes in sex equality (though perspectives on the differences between the sexes can vary greatly).
It is also an earth religion, which means that practice is based on where you live. Religious observations depend on the phase of the moon and the season. So, for instance, on Ostara or Eostre (the spring equinox), observations include fertility symbols that reflect spring and burgeoning life, such as eggs, rabbits, flowers, etc. If that sounds familiar, it should; when the evangelists say that Easter is based on a pagan holiday, they’re right. Yule, celebrated on the winter solstice, celebrates life in the midst of death, because while it is the darkest day of the year, it is also the day when the light starts to return; evergreens, holly berries, gifts, bonfires are all features of the holiday. Again, this may sound familiar.
Because wicca/witchcraft is an earth religion, and because it’s panentheistic, environmentalism is very strong. Other living things and their habitats are considered sacred. Which isn’t to say that nothing must ever be cut down or destroyed, but that if it’s going to be, you have to have a very good reason.
The stickiest issue is magic and spells. It’s true that witches cast spells; but it’s not a solitary person with a vendetta twisting the arm of reality to make a dishonest buck. The definition of magic most often used is “the art of changing consciousness at will”–not reality, consciousness. The focus of change is explicitly on the self. And spells are most like prayers, only instead of words, you use objects–candles, or paper, or plants, or whatever. You are asking the universe or god/dess for what you want; but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it.
I know the bookstores are full of crap in the wicca sections with bright pink covers and titles like “how to turn your boyfriend into a frog,” but this drivel has as much in common with wicca and witchcraft as books about how to use your guardian angel to become wealthy have to do with christianity–which is to say, not much.
The last thing worth pointing out is that witchcraft is not evangelical. We don’t believe that there is one True religion; all of them are equally true, so to us/me, it really doesn’t matter what faith you believe in so long as you’re not trying to interfere with my rights to practice my own. Every once in a while, someone goes nuts over the perceived subliminal intentions of books like The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter, believing that they are a sneaky way of getting young people to adopt wicca. Trust me when I say, first of all, that they have nothing in common with our beilefs, and secondly, we have absolutely no interest in doing so.
Labels
Posted
October 12, 2006 at
12:12 pm by
Andrea
(This is, in part, written as response to a post below–since this went way too long to be a comment–and in part a beginning?‚? answer to the?‚? question from an older post of my own, ‘What makes you a witch?’ Not a very interesting answer, to be sure; but I’ll get there eventually.)
?‚? I’ve spent a good part of the last fifteen years of my life collecting labels the way some collect baseball cards. I gather it’s not the in thing to do.
I’ve wondered (and please don’t take offence) if people who react to labels are themselves so thoroughly part of the cultural mainstream that they have no need of them, and don’t realize how life-saving an appropriate label can be. For instance, I’m diabetic. I do eat cake and chocolate, if you’re wondering; I also poke myself with various shaped pins many times over the course of a day. This keeps me alive. Rather than explaining to each person who stares with fascinated horror as I plunge a two-inch pin into my abdomen that my pancreas doesn’t work due to an autoimmune disease and without these injections of insulin?‚? I’d die, I can say “I’m diabetic.” Much faster. The fascinated horror changes and the conversation turns to somthing more interesting.
Or “asthmatic.” Another label, but it sure beats describing the function (or lack thereof) of my lungs when I take the cigarette out of your hands and stamp it on the ground. (That was a joke. I’ve never stomped on anyone’s cigarette. They’re expensive, aren’t they?)
Several labels in my extensive collection never raise an eyebrow, and I have never heard, while using them, “Why do you want to label yourself?” Writer, for instance. Mother. Wife. Civil Servant. Baker. Reader. Blogger. No wrinkled noses, no pointed objections to the use of certain words to hem people in to a certain kind of existence. In fact I’ll bet that if I were to avoid calling myself a mother (though it is certainly a label that comes loaded with all kinds of baggage and associations) and insist on describing my relationship to my daughter in more personal terms, most people would find it bizarre.
It’s the other labels that make people uncomfortable: Feminist. Witch. Anarchist. Environmentalist.?‚?
I’ll bet at least one of those loaded words comes equipped in your mind with a pre-cast image, complete with age, sex, relationship status, wardrobe, hobbies and intelligence level. Perhaps one of those labels you consider incompatible with another, or perhaps not. Perhaps they seem incompatible with a label on a previous list: can a wife be a feminist? Can a civil servant be an anarchist? Can a witch be a mother?
That is why I embrace these troubled words and their difficult history: I want to confront people’s expectations. I want them to have to consider me in relationship to their stereotypes. I want them to have to bust that stereotype in their head wide open, so it can contain me.
There’s no photograph associated with my posts yet (sorry, Jessica; the only one I can find where I don’t look like a drooling idiot is two years old. Is that recent enough?), so let me describe myself. I am 31, 5′8″, 145 lbs. Today I am wearing a grey knee-length straight skirt, a leaf-green snug sweater with a v-neck, black tights, and a cute pair of kitten heels. My hair is mousy brown and about collarbone length. I never wear black, except for socks, tights and shoes–I prefer bright colours. I spend most of my spare time reading voraciously from almost every genre and category. I’m straight as an arrow, unfortunately. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about my intelligence.
Every noun in the English language is a label. Imagine living the rest of your life without the word ‘apple,’ or ‘cookie,’ or ‘bicycle,’ or ‘athlete.’ We use nouns–labels–to communicate efficiently and effectively with other people. We label ourselves to communicate who we are in the fewest words possible (though some, like ‘witch,’ tend to require a fair bit of backstory). As far as I can tell, we resist labels when we perceive them to be derogatory. “Why should I label myself?” we cry; when what we really mean is, “I don’t like the stereotype of that label.”
I believe people have the right to name themselves. I would never force a label on someone who rejected it; it would be disrespectful and rude. Not everyone has to spend their lives confronting the prejudices of other people in deeply personal and potentially hurtful ways. But I do think that rejecting a label because of its stereotype only strengthens the stereotype, which in most cases is unfounded. We’ve essentially lost feminism as a useful word because right-wing talk radio hosts associated it with fanaticism, hatred and intolerance. Calling myself a feminist is my small way of confronting those ugly prejudices with the truth.
Witch has been lost to a millenia-long propoganda project, tying it together with devil-worship, blood sacrifice, and immoral practices. Not to mention general physical hideousness. Before you give much credence to those stereotypes, you might want to know that christians in the early centuries were accused of the same acts.
Names are powerful. Words are powerful. I won’t cede that power to someone who hates me (as the creators of ‘feminazi’ or the infant-blood-drinking witch image certainly do). I won’t abandon an accurate label because someone has misdefined it as a deliberate act of social control. When I name myself accurately–when I?‚? use the right label–I sometimes see that someone has had to change their conceptions of what those names mean because it didn’t match who I am. There is a small crack in that stereotype where it used to be seemless; and that crack gives me immeasurable joy.
PPD and Infanticide
Posted
October 9, 2006 at
9:12 am by
Andrea
I’m not sure how far news of this has spread, but recently a young mother in Barrie was accused of killer her toddler and infant daughters. It has launched the usual firestorm of controversy: What is postpartum depression? How much is a PPD sufferer responsible for their actions? How much is her family and/or partner responsible for not recognizing it and taking steps to prevent such an act?
?‚? According to an article in the Toronto Star (I promise; I do read other newspapers) not only is Post-Partum Psychosis incredibly rare, afflicting only one out of 500 or 1000 postpartum women, but of those women only about five per cent will go on to attempt to harm their children. What will tip that small percentage over the line?
?‚? One stressor that doesn’t get enough attention, he says, is sleep disruption. Lack of support is also a factor.
“I can’t underestimate (the importance of) the environment or circumstances,” says Brizendine.
What may send a woman predisposed to depression or bipolar disease down one path rather than another after childbirth, she says, is support from husband and family or lack of it.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to see an article that mentioned motherhood itself–the sleep disruption, change in role and extra work–as a significant stressor in and of itself. When Frances was born one month early and with reflux disease so severe I couldn’t put her down for the twelve hours of each day my husband was at work, when she woke every forty-five minutes at night for weeks on end, refused to nap unless in physical contact with me, and refused bottles, to be told that the resulting strain and depression were due to hormones was insulting and infuriating.
?‚? If only they had stopped the article there, and I’d never read this:
?‚? Symptoms of postpartum mental illness include changes in behaviour or personality and inattention to personal hygiene or household organization.
?‚? Household organization? Household organization?
?‚? Then we must all be ill, because I don’t know a single woman whose household remained organized after the arrival of a new baby.
Part of the Job
Posted
October 5, 2006 at
11:36 am by
Andrea
Can I admit to you that I am terrified of raising a daughter?
When a man breaks into a Denver classroom, chases out the boys, binds and sexually assaults the girls before shooting them–when another man breaks into an Amish one-room schoolhouse (apparently because it would be easy) and forces the boys out to bind and slaughter girls–then I think of Casey’s post at Expectant Waiting:
If my daughters are lucky, they’ll grow up with a vague awareness of the hate that surrounds them.
If they’re unlucky, a man will bust in on their classroom, rape them, and execute them.
And just in case I think I’m safe here, with those killings so far away, I will read about two boys in my own town who pinned a twelve-year-old girl to the ground and set her on fire with lighter fluid–as a lark.
I want to keep Frances safe; I also want her to be a full and self-confident person who will fearlessly find and demand her own place in the world. I can’t do both. It makes me crazy.
Finding an acceptable level of risk is, for me, the hardest part of this motherhood thing so far. According to some, no level of risk is ok: I’ve seen newspaper articles instructing parents not to use mechanized baby swings (they can trigger frenzied rages in dogs and cats, apparently), to bolt televisions to the stands, and to stay within arm’s reach of your children in a swimming pool or lake at all times. This seems extreme, but certainly by not doing these things I am accepting a slightly increased risk of harm.
This is hard enough–when I feel like I can assess the information and the probabilities and make a reasonable and informed choice–but hate? How do I control for hate? How do I assess the chances and outcomes of hate? I can’t. I can’t, and short of locking her in the basement (which would surely be more harmful to her than almost anything the world could do) there’s nothing I can do. Somehow, someday soon, I’ll have to open the front door and let her walk through it on her own, to find friends and make choices and work and build a life and possibly confront hate and be gunned down by a madman with a grudge against girls. Or lit on fire by her friends. I don’t want her to fear the world, so I will hold the door open for her with a smile.
And work, work, work my whole life against the hate that makes the world dangerous for her.
Newspaper Agrees: Andrea is Real
Posted
October 3, 2006 at
8:35 am by
Andrea
Hallowe’en must be coming; I saw the annual “say, did you know that witches are real?” article in the travel section of the weekend newspaper. I’ve read these articles every year in a variety of publications from teen magazines to serious newspapers with the same mix of bemusement and frustration: I am a witch. I know I’m real.
It’s true! I’m not just a collection of computer-generated random words.
Still, I suppose it’s nice to get the public exposed to the idea that witches aren’t just black cardboard silhouettes of a woman in a pointy hat riding a broomstick.
I have a deep ambivalence to the Hallowe’en caricature: I know where she comes from, I understand that people enjoy her, and very few would believe that witchcraft-the-religion as I (and a few million other people) practice it has anything to do with this hoary old stereotype. I don’t want to get rid of her; I don’t even necessarily want people to stop calling her a witch. But it does make life complicated.
On the weekend, I bought my daughter some Hallowe’en-themed foam-shape stickers so she could make some cards for her friends (she likes foam shape stickers, so really it was an excuse to spend a few dollars knowing that it would get her to sit quietly at her arts table for an hour while I read a book). Her favourite shape was the circle, which she insisted on calling “suns,” probably because it was the simplest. The others required explanation before she would use them–the bat, the moon, the hissing cat, the ghost, the jack-o-lantern, and the other one.
“What’s this shape, Mummy?”
“That’s a … a witch.”
She’s too young now to understand or care, but one day sometime around Hallowe’en she’s going to look at me, the woman who wears blue jeans and a ponytail and hardly ever touches a broom even to sweep the floor, and this creepy bogeywoman, and wonder how we can both be called the same thing. And I have no idea what I’m going to tell her.
Maybe between now and then something magical will happen. Maybe one day I’ll open a magazine or a newspaper and see an article about Wicca or witchcraft. Maybe it will neither accuse me of slaughtering babies to drink their blood nor decry the intolerance of various governments who believe that my faith doesn’t require constitutional protection. Maybe it will have nothing to do with Harry Potter, Charmed, The Craft or The Wizard of Oz. And maybe it will even be published while Hallowe’en costumes aren’t hanging in the local grocery store. Maybe I’ll be reading it in July.
If that ever happens, I’ll know we’re getting somewhere.
My Choice
Posted
September 29, 2006 at
7:03 pm by
Andrea
This week, I got my first Choice in Child Care cheque.
Choice in Childcare–the Conservative New Canadian Government’s bribe monthly child-care subsidy of $100.
The payment is not taxed directly, but will be taxed as income at tax time; so it’s not actually $100. I put it in our savings account, and am now trying to decide what to do with it.
Frances’s daycare costs over $700 per month. When she was an infant, it was over $1100.?‚? We’ve already budgeted for that, so there’s not much point in putting the money towards it.
I don’t want to spend the money, since we don’t get to keep all of it.
So it’s sitting in our savings account. Most likely, around January, we’ll put it into my RRSP (registered retirement savings plan, equivalent to a 401k I think). Then we won’t have to pay tax on it, because the tax deduction will be equivalent to the income.
So my family isn’t calling it the Choice in Child Care Allowance.
We’re calling it Andrea’s Pension Fund.
Parents: Don’t Insult Your Kids!
Posted
September 25, 2006 at
7:16 am by
Andrea
My mother knows a woman who offered her a child a two-thousand dollar Christmas bonus if she would grow six inches one year.
I’ll wait until the sounds of shock and outrage simmer down a bit….
This anecdote is one of the reasons why I didn’t immediately file this story from the Toronto Star in the “once again, we’re paying experts to tell us what we already know” category:
Make no mistake about it parents. You can defend it as being “helpful” or “honest.” But words ???‚¬??? and especially comments about a child’s appearance ???‚¬??? do damage. Even more so when aimed at impressionable tweens or young teens.
A stream of recent studies supports the notion that a healthy self-image begins at home, including an August article in the journal Pediatrics which concludes that family criticism “results in long-lasting, negative effects.” But anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of critical remarks about their weight or body shape doesn’t need an expert to tell them that.
You don’t say?
It wouldn’t seem even helpful to link to or discuss, except that I know (and I’m sure you all know too) that there are parents out there who believe that insulting their child’s body size is the best way to get them to adopt healthy habits. The mindset escapes me–would a parent tell their child how stupid they are to get them to study harder? Would they tell them how lazy they are to get them to help out around the house? So why call them fat?
(It hasn’t escaped my attention that these studies are coming out hot on the heels of the ones saying that most parents can’t even tell when their kids are overweight. This leaves parents with a fine line to tread: correctly assess your child’s size, but never mention it; if you are concerned, focus on diet and exercise, not weight. This makes perfectly good sense, but like many things that make perfectly good sense, it’s a great deal tricker in practice than in theory and I’ll bet most of us make a right mess of it from time to time.)
At any rate, no matter where you stand on this issue or where on the spectrum your own behaviour falls, you can comfort yourself with one thing: At least you’ve never tried to bribe your child to be tall.
The world is a strange and wonderful place, but mostly strange
Posted
September 19, 2006 at
11:43 am by
Andrea
When I saw a link from And We Shall March to an article titled, “She’s her own twin,” I had to click on it.
Fairchild’s fight for her kids began when she was 26-years-old, unemployed and applying for public assistance in Washington state. Everyone in her family had to be tested to prove they were all related.
The Department of Social Services called Fairchild and told her to come in immediately. What Fairchild thought was a routine meeting with a social worker turned into an interrogation. The proud mother was suddenly a criminal suspect.
“As I sat down, they came up and shut the door, and they just went back and just started drilling me with questions like, ‘Who are you?’” Fairchild said. The DNA test results challenged everything she knew about her family. Yes, her boyfriend was the father of the children, and, yes, they were all related, according to the DNA, except for Fairchild. She was told she wasn’t the mother.
What do you know–she’s her own twin, the result of a rare medical condition called chimerism which results when two fertilized eggs fuse in the womb and grow into one individual. And because of it she almost lost custody of her own kids; at the eleventh hour, her lawyer found out about this condition from independent research and had her tested for it.
The state was still so suspicious of Fairchild that when she gave birth to another child, a court officer stood in the delivery room to witness an immediate DNA test.
“They took DNA from the baby and myself right then and there, after birth, and it came back that there is no way possible that baby is mine,” Fairchild said.
Even though they’d witnessed the birth, officials believed she was acting as a surrogate, possibly bearing a child for money.
Fairchild’s attorney was determined to solve the mystery. That’s when he came across Keegan’s chimera story in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“I asked the judge to postpone the case until these tests could be done,” Tindell said.
After the tests were done, there was proof that Fairchild was her own twin as well. The judge finally believed Fairchild was the biological mother of her children and dismissed the case.
“I probably wouldn’t have my kids today if they didn’t discover her situation. They wouldn’t have known to even consider me as a chimera,” Fairchild said.
?‚? Is science the villain or the hero of this story?
Real Problems
Posted
September 16, 2006 at
2:50 pm by
Andrea
Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective:
Around 9:30 p.m., when most families are getting ready for bed, she escorts her two sons, aged 6 and 13, down a narrow carpeted corridor in their concrete highrise. Clad in flannel pyjamas, backpacks over their shoulders and sleeping bags and pillows in their arms, the boys wilfully, though not eagerly, accept the journey as part of their routine. They reach a doorway and, with a final hug, their mother leaves them in the care of a neighbour for the night.
Outside on the deserted rain-soaked streets near the intersection of Martin Grove Rd. and The Westway, she catches a city bus and travels north. She transfers to another bus further on, one that eventually drops her off at a condominium where she will mop hallway floors, empty garbage and scrub toilets from 11 p.m. until dawn.
“My sons, they always say, `Please stay with us.’ But I can’t,” she says with a mix of sadness and regret. “I have to leave. I have to work.”
As I read the cover story of today’s Toronto Star, I am even more conscious than usual of the spaciousness of my home, the computer on my lap while my husband plays on the xBox in the basement, my little girl surrounded by a heap of electronic toys.
Too often those of my economic class defend the differences by saying, “I worked hard to get where I am.” I defy any one of them to tell me that they work as hard as Puvaneswaran:
For her labour, Puvaneswaran earns no more than $1,150 in an entire month, often less. The rent for her small one-bedroom apartment is $849.
Puvaneswaran, who is paid $8.50 an hour, borrows money from friends to get by. She has relatives who sometimes send clothes from England. She rations food during the week ???‚¬??? one glass of milk for each boy at morning and one at night. She won’t allow herself any. After 3 p.m., she lets her sons have some fruit, a banana or apple.
Their main meal of the day alternates between rice (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and pasta (Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays). On Sunday afternoons, they look forward to a hearty meal at the Hindu temple where they worship. In short, she pays a hefty price to live in the country’s largest and richest city.
So why ???‚¬??? 13 years after settling in Canada ???‚¬??? does a hard-working mother still live in poverty? How many more years will she be expected to live and work like this?
Last week I posted about how the mother’s movement rhetoric too often surrounds the lifestyle choices of affluent women who can afford to decide whether or not to work. Sometimes it helps to have a good stiff kick in the pants to remind us what “tough choices” really look like. I have volunteered with children who live in similar circumstances; anyone who says that a middle- or upper-class child in daycare is suffering for the lack of a full-time mother has never seen what real suffering looks like.
There are hundreds of thousands of children in Canada whose parents were two or three jobs each and who still can barely afford to eat, never mind amass large quantities of battery-hogging toys. I hate to move the conversation beyond their suffering, since that alone should be enough to motivate people to work for change; but human nature being what it is, I’ll point out that the children who grow up in these homes, chronically undernourished, understimulated, with no enrichment opportunities, will not grow up to meet their full potential and will not be able to contribute to our society as productive and engaged citizens (and honestly, why should they?). This will damage the world our children will grow up to live and work and make families in, making it less secure, less peaceful, less just.
Besides supporting the local food bank (which is necessary, but also conveniently lets government off the hook for changing the systems that keep people in such deprived circumstances), I also support a variety of organizations committed to ending poverty in Canada, among them the National Anti-Poverty Organization–itself always struggling to make ends meet, ironically.
If you know of and support a similar organization where you live, please leave the name in the comments below. Maybe someone who reads it will be motivated to take some of their own affluence and put it to a constructive use.
If you or your family are currently benefiting from the work of a particular organization, please also feel free to plug them in the comments section. Oftentimes the most helpful and forward-thinking groups don’t receive the attention they deserve in mainstream circles.
Climate Change and Parenting
Posted
September 12, 2006 at
7:37 am by
Andrea
For my early twenties, I was a diehard climate change skeptic–small humans, big planet, what harm could we really do?
I remember the moment that changed, at a climate change conference I attended for work, when some representatives from northern Canada spoke of the hardships they were already experiencing as a result of global warming: ice roads weren’t lasting for the whole winter anymore. The communities were too isolated to have real roads, and roads over the permafrost and frozen water bodies were the primary means of getting goods in for most of the very long winter. With that no longer a viable option, they were forced to fly in needed food and medical supplies, increasing the costs beyond what most people living there could afford. (A colleague of mine recently went on a business trip to the far Canadian north, and reported in shock on his return that a bag of milk cost $12.)
I am an environmentalist in my ‘day job,’ so keeping up on the trends and changes is part of staying current in my field. I don’t like any of the news I get these days: migration patterns already shifting in response to a warmer climate; the jet stream shifting north and south away from the equator, increasing the size of the tropics and the area potentially afflicted by tropical diseases; sensitive species going extinct; robins migrating far enough north that the Inuit who live there have no words for them; oh, and the permafrost is not only melting, but holds a vast store of carbon-equivalents which will be released as they melt, further increasing the rate of climate change.
For the past 40,000 years, nature has locked its own storehouse of greenhouse gases in the frozen Arctic permafrost, which global warming is just starting to melt. The thawing releases these gases into the atmosphere, creating the potential for a vicious cycle in which faster global warming leads to an acceleration in permafrost melt.
What the research shows is there is far more carbon trapped in the permafrost than scientists originally thought. Much of it is methane, which is 23 times worse than carbon dioxide in its effect on climate change.
Fabulous.
I wonder if I will even recognize the world my children grow up in?
I remember the outrage felt among my peers and I when we realized how badly our parents’ generation had screwed things up–the ozone layer, smog, acid rain–and the inadequacy of the responses to those problems. How great will be our children’s response when they realize that we permanently changed the climate of planet earth in potentially catastrophic ways so that we wouldn’t have to find a replacement for fossil fuels?
Maybe it’s time to shelve the debates over CIO and formula vs. breastfeeding, and put some of that energy towards an issue that will have much deeper and more far-ranging consequences for our children. If we could take even part of the outrage regularly flung against any mother who chooses a five-point IQ drop for her children in the form of formula-feeding and channel it instead towards the politicians and corporations who are heedlessly pursuing a course of action that could result in an additional 6110 deaths annually from heat-related causes by 2060 in the USA alone, not to mention increased desertification, reduced crop yields, etc., we could help to make the world our children live in and the world they will become parents in a safer and better place to live.
Five Years
Posted
September 11, 2006 at
7:28 am by
Andrea
Five years ago today, I was one week into a new job in a centre tangentially related to emergency response. The television was kept on, in case one of the emergencies we dealt with was on the news. So when a plane flew into the World Trade Center in New York City, we were all there, glued to the screen.
Five years ago today, we watched the second plane fly in. We saw the towers fall in real time, saw people running panicked in the streets, heard rumours of downtown Toronto office buildings being evacuated. Normally our phones rang off the hook, but that day they were silent. When one did ring, and we answered it, the voice on the other end would say, “Did you see? Do you know? What’s happening?”
Five years ago today, when the second plane flew in, when the second tower fell, I thought, the United States is going to war. They’ve never been attacked on their own soil and not gone to war.?‚?
In the five years since, I got pregnant and then became a mother. I willingly brought a child into a world that holds miracles and joy and opportunity for some, and unimaginable brutality for others. Does this make sense? I still don’t know. As I planned the pregnancy, and then the birth, and then watched my daughter grow, 8,587 Afghan troops, 3,485 Afghan civillians, approximately 42,000 Iraqi civillians (some estimates put this number as high as 200,000), 3,000 American soldiers, and 450 coalition soldiers have also been killed, for a total of over 57,000 people, not including the wounded. That is the equivalent of a WTC attack every three months for five years.
My daughter has lived her entire life in a world at war.
Last week, I caught part of a funeral for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan, in a mission that is looking less like peacekeeping and more like war by the day. This soldier left behind a wife and two sons, one 13 and one 11. When the younger son approached the hearse to put a flower on his father’s casket, his face cracked and he cried, and I sobbed. For him, a young boy who will have to grow up without a father; for his family, for his father; for the?‚? three thousand?‚? people who died in the original attacks, and for the fifty-seven thousand who have died since then, as much the victims of the terrorists as anyone who stood in the WTC that day five years ago and had to decide whether to jump or burn. And for their families, their children, their spouses, their partners, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their cousins. For the wounded and disabled, and for those whose bodies are whole but whose minds have been broken.
Today is not Remembrance Day; but I will take time anyway to think silently of those who have already been lost and those we have yet to lose, on all sides. Today I will ignore the political browbeating of both sides, and think simply of the human toll, the sheer loss. For one day, for this anniversary, I will not think about whether the war is right or wrong, the response justified or not, the objectives met or failed; for one day, I will grieve.
The Cannon Fodder of the Mommy Wars
Posted
September 9, 2006 at
3:41 pm by
Andrea
At least once every two weeks, I revisit the family budget and try to figure out a way to scale my hours back to part time. I’ve done this since returning to work after maternity leave twenty months ago. That makes forty budget sessions, minimum, and every one is the same: if I reduce my hours, we go in the red. The difference in cost between part-time and full-time child care is so slight that a reduction in hourly earnings would not be met with a reduction in costs, and the result would be a monthly budget deficit that could only be eliminated if we cancelled the cable, the phone, the cell phones, the internet, all disposable income and reduced our monthly grocery bill by about $100. And that would be, mind you, with me working part-time. If I were to stay home, we would have to sell the house and rent an apartment instead.
So I’ll admit to feeling a tad fed up with the constant media flood of stories about women who actually have the choice of whether or not to work. The women I know who work, work because they have to–they are the sole or main breadwinner in their families, or without their income their families wouldn’t eat. Most of the women I know who don’t work for pay, don’t because the money they could earn wouldn’t cover the cost of childcare. Yet newspapers and magazines seem entirely preoccupied with stories about the five percent of women whose husbands earn enough money that they can realistically decide for themselves whether or not they want to work.
Or, as this wonderful article from today’s Toronto Star put it, “The average woman gets up and goes to work. She doesn’t have time to wring her hands about it.”
The result? Policy proposals that come out of these discussions tend to be in the interests of those who can afford to trade less income for more family time.
While flex-time, shorter work weeks and more part-time options are often cited as family-friendly solutions for working parents, the just-released 2006 Ask A Working Woman Survey by the giant U.S. labour federation, AFL-CIO, shows different priorities. Top concerns among the 25,000 respondents included inadequate pay rates that don’t keep up with cost of living, lack of retirement security and inadequate benefits.
The biannual survey has consistently shown women would rather have the opportunity to work overtime than reduce work hours. In 2006, 38 per cent said their earnings comprise all or almost all their family income; 75 per cent said their earnings comprise half or more than half.
You might think that after thirty years of the same criticisms–that the problems of upper-middle class women are not actually representative of the problems of women as a whole, and that real feminism explores solutions that work for women who are among the working poor or just-plain-poor and not only the rich–that we might see some change. Instead, the media remains consistently fixated on the so-called “plight” of women with options and ignores the struggles of women without. Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh put it, afflufemza: “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism.”
And you know that if this is true for me–a university-educated woman with a comfortable middle-class income and an employer who technically offers options such as part-time work and flex-time, but who can’t afford to use them not because my income pays for fancy vacations or nice cars but because it pays for the groceries–then how true must this be for the majority of women, who are not university-educated and who don’t have comfortable middle-class incomes?
Today, the wealthiest 20% of North Americans own approximately 80% of the resources. They also seem to get about 80% of the air-time. It’s a crying shame.
