Has it already been a month since I last wrote anything down here? Wow. That went fast. However, looking at the last picture of Maverick there I can see very little resemblance to the dapper adolescent goose we now have as part of the family. Today he figured out how to hop out of our inflatable pool to join us on the deck and this is one more step to independence. Unfortunately he still requires protection from some of the more aggressive animals on the yard - namely Jetta. She sizes him up if he gets too close and then begins a very freaky acceleration as if to stamp out a cobra. She could do it too. So we have to scoop him up, all protesting and get him out of her sights. He in turn cannot stop heading straight for her. I think those four black legs just really trigger a following instinct in him as it was our walking legs that seemed to imprint on him. Storm has pretty much decided he is not a snack but another animal to be allowed (regretfully) to live with us. I don't really think the cats would take him on but you never know. They are just killing machines.
So it is coming up on my 42nd birthday. That is distinctly middle aged. I actually never ever thought that I would live this long. When I was a kid I was very romantically inspired by tales of missionaries and pioneers of social justice and wanted to open an orphanage in some dangerous hot country - preferably Saudi Arabia (yes, that was so realistic!). I wanted to help kids by providing health care and nurturing and so on that would otherwise not be there. I also wanted a tastefully decorated adobe hut. I did not want to live anywhere where I would have to eat bugs. I figured my lifestyle would probably not allow me to marry as most guys I knew did not seem to want to deprive themselves appreciably unless it meant they would be able to buy a car soon. So I thought I would be single and probably work myself to death by around age 40. If I didn't die, I thought it would be appropriate to have someone at that point throw me a huge non-wedding where I would get to wear a great dress and everyone would give me presents. This would only be fair seeing as just getting oneself married didn't seem to me to merit any special attention from the world, but reaching 40 should. The absolute last thing I ever expected was to reach this age in Canada. I never for a second expected that I would remain in such a privileged, over-indulgent, spoiled society for my actual life's work. To do so seemed actually completely redundant. It was clear that no matter what type of health care I trained in (which was what I had narrowed my interests down to), I would not be very needed here, whereas it was also clear to me that vast areas of the world desperately needed trained professionals in any sort of useful field (useful as opposed to useless, like, hmm, say, an advertising exec).
So here I am, smack in the very centre of Canada, having successfully reached past 40, and living a fairly non-heroic life that involves eating enough, sleeping enough, having access to excellent health care, and the use of a dishwasher. This is not at all what I expected.
On the other hand, I did train in health care, and I have spent the last decade working in a field where there is an acute shortage of professionals (especially in Saskatchewan!!) even though this is Canada. The parents I have met have not usually expressed that their children's needs are adequately met in the current system - no, quite often they are desperate for help. I have felt often stretched far past my own limits emotionally, mentally and physically. This was exactly as I expected so I didn't ever really respond the way that a normal self-preservation instinct would suggest I should. It felt right to be stretched. The needs of the planet are so insurmountable, should we not all stretch to our utmost? What else can a sane person do, faced with the scale of suffering that exists?
But that isn't really a sustainable way to live, and somehow, having married and borne three children, burning out totally is not such an appropriate response to anything. So here I am, on a year long "retreat," rethinking and re-evaluating my entire basic assumptions about everything I have ever done or tried to do. So many of my motivations have been set by my 10 year old brain, responding to stories that tore my heart at the time. Subconsciously they have directed almost every decision I have ever made and here I am, looking back at my 10 year old self with a 42 year old perspective and having compassion for her and admiration for her and yet realizing that a 10 year old just does not have enough information to pour her ideals in concrete quite yet.
I have really been thinking a lot about the concept of family. It is so simple and so overlooked and yet such an elegant and thoroughly workable solution to healing a community, a society, a nation, a world. And I know that we continue to broaden our definition of family from the 1970's nuclear picture of 4. However, there is a lot to be said for the balance of male and female authority figures. There is even more to be said for the very distinct types of care that males and females can provide each other when faced with the super-demanding tasks of parenting. There is much to be said for children of both sexes growing up with almost constant access to a role model, a mentor, even an alter-ego example of ways not to live, of the same gender as themselves.
Our culture has glorified sexual fulfillment to an almost unbelievable extent. It seems to me that the value of doing whatever one wants to do (as long as no one gets hurt and everyone is consenting of course) is lovely in fantasy novels but really very impractical in the real world. Sex is amazing and a great gift as well as necessary for all sorts of mundane reasons. However, just like eating, it can be blown out of proportion in terms of trying to fill voids that it was never meant to fill. So saying that "family" just means any combination of people who are happy together is nice but not necessarily the whole picture. "Family" has a lot of work to do. If we were to actually consider families the building blocks of a healthy world, then there are a lot of roles that families should be supported in doing that we currently do not seem to pay much if any attention to (such as teaching children to cook, providing a level of protection from disturbing images that are everywhere in our media, and teaching cross-gender communication, which is probably impossible for anyone to really master :).
This is all still pretty nebulous in my head. It's hard to sort out the unhealthy stereotypes of paternalistic and sexist models of family from the thoroughly selfish and self-absorbed models that also exist and seem to be somewhat glorified today. However, I am currently very interested and somewhat shocked by how much I am relying on my husband to make up the difference in resources needed to care for our children. This is not just financial, but emotional, physical, and mental. He knows things I don't; he can do things I can't, and he is able to "put me back together" just in time for tackling another day. I didn't expect to ever need another human being so much and it feels very wrong. It makes me feel vulnerable and like I am letting my gender down somehow. Like I should be able to do it all, all the time, just in case he abandons me.
In fact, abandonment is wrong and the results would be catastrophic to us all, as they should be. The fact that it happens so often is a huge symptom that our culture is not in any better shape than the poorest newly minted democracy in Africa. Because I can't do it all, and pressuring myself to be able to is monumentally unfair. Neither can he do many of the things that are easy for me, and our children benefit from watching us and experiencing an interplay of dependence that is not shaming or devaluing. We need each other and families could be living, breathing, messy greenhouses that grow kids up to know how to depend on others and be dependable. But it's so hard!!!
In this "retreat" from work I am concentrating my considerable energy and intensity on just three children. Mine. This seems selfish and inefficient to my 10 year old self, but the more my 42 year old self reflects on this, the more sane a solution this seems to many many problems that seem to multiply with human development. My three children will each affect one classroom a year. I know just how much one child can affect an entire classroom. Not to mention a teacher. They will grow and have a network of friends and friends' families that they enjoy and do things with and also affect as friends do in those formative adolescent years. They may marry. They may train in careers that broaden their world and sphere of influence even more. What if, doing all that, they were not destructive people but constructive people (not perfect, of course, but in general)? How incalculable would our (their parents) influence be if we were able to provide the security, the education, and the mentoring that would set them on that path?
Further to that, what if our society did not try to directly "fix" kids but focused on supporting parents to have the energy and resources to do what they really want to do anyway? I know I'm starting to sound unbearably conservative here so let me hasten to say that universal access to daycare seems to me to be a support to parents that would be just great - not a threat to stay at home moms. Moms (as I know intimately) sometimes need to work for their own mental health, and I am convinced they are better moms as a result. But they should be able to go to work with peace of mind about their children's care, and a two parent home with outside supports does make this infinitely more possible.
Simplistic and naive. Yes. But then, is life really working out well for families at the moment? I don't know about you, but for me the external pressure to have, to do, to achieve, and to do it all while looking fabulous and being completely self-sufficient while in an intimate relationship but not too intimate and loving one's kids but not being tied down by them - well, that pressure is ridiculous. I don't want to flip that to pressure to be a perfect little cardboard family. That's even worse. The 50's were not really very good to most people. But the fact remains that the concept of a family as the essential and most valuable cell of a living breathing society is actually looking pretty good to me right now. It's achievable, at least if we could imagine it in an achievable, sane way. I guess that's the trick. We can take any concept and put it on the cover of a magazine and make it instantly unattainable and there you go. Just like weight loss, it doesn't end up actually happening.
Okay, that was a nice retreat from my actual roles here in my actual family. Now I need to figure out lunch, do laundry, balance the checkbook and weed the garden. And clean off the deck from the storm last week and find a place for four large rubbermaid containers of hand me down clothes that will someday fit my kids. . . and so on.
