What are women about?

I haven't blogged for a while because basically I've been back at work.  I've even taken a giant leap and taken on a NEW CAREER PATH !  You know - its all the rage for people my age (and more).  Apparently its quite common and we can expect to do it more than once in our lifetime.

Well, barleese!  I know now why I should have worked harder and been better focussed when I was in my early 20's and studying at uni.  It's SO much harder now !!  I have less energy than back then, and I have a million more distractions (like husband, kid, house to manage etc). 

Some days I'm really proud of myself for achieving what I am, and doing something proactive to improve myself and my prospects etc...

And some days I'm just really sad that I can't be the person I really want to be - the kind of work I really want to do doesn't pay !! (parenting, volunteer committeee work, volunteer sports coaching and umpiring, fostering kids etc...)

I used be be a raging feminist - spouting off about equal rights and women and do anything !  Now, I wonder if the feminism movement hasn't just made life harder for women.  (Of course, there have been some huge benefits too - can't deny it). 

Is it just a case of the grass being greener?

On the fly....

photo by Bombardier

Previously I put forward the argument for staying at home for your kids (at least for the bulk of the time) and putting your major focus and energy into being there for them. Whilst I certainly believe in the merit of this, I also see the possible dangers. One of them being – living for your kids / through your kids. And failure to let them do their own living.



As our kids get older we must keep in mind our number one goal… which should be something along the lines of “raising a happy, independent, functional person”. Key word in this discussion is independent. Independent of what makes us happy sometimes.


I know some lovely people who are great parents generally, but ho have fallen into the trap of being too attached to their children. Attached and unable to unattach when required as the child grows. It hurts when child reaches a certain age and suddenly doesn’t want to hold your hand to cross the road, feels uncomfortable hugging you (especially in public), wants to hang with mates or girlfriend / boyfriend instead of you most of the time. This is a normal response. Good parenting. Allow the feeling of hurt, and go with it. Don’t hang on and try to avoid this feeling. This feeling is a sign of success in your parenting. A sign of growth and independence in your child. Thwarting it, forcing the togetherness, stifling their need to stretch, only damages and undoes all the good work you’ve done.


Example: Independent thinking, ambitious, young 15 year old wants to go to a specialist school to follow her dreams. School is 4 hours away and she will have to live away from home in boarding house. Ouch!! And at the same time – congratulations !! Initially she rings you constantly, is homesick, comes home to visit as much as she can…. Then suddenly, she forgets to call, is too busy to come home this weekend, etc. DOUBLE OUCH !! and yay !! – she’s settling in and getting closer to her dreams. Time for mum to get a hobby or dream for herself.


TIPS for surviving the growth of your children…


1. Accept that parenting is a constantly changing role… be ready for that next stage. In some ways, it’s just a series of short term contract jobs. Getting more and more part-time along the way.

2. Don’t forget you ! If you don’t have time for your hobby or your work or your dreams, at least keep thinking about them and add them into your life as much as you can fit. Having a dream for yourself keeps you sane and keeps you from holding them back.

3. Look after your other relationships – your partner, friends, parents, nieces, nephews. Don’t need your child to “need” you in order to feel wanted. Don’t have other relationships ? – try community work, get involved in helping others. (It’s a great role model for your kids too).

4. Remember that you are some-one’s child too. They wanted the best for you as you grew up – just as you do for your children. So don’t give away your dreams anymore than you would like to see your own child do so. (Again –be a role model in this area).

5. Don’t take it personally. When they move their life away from you, its because that’s what healthy growing children do. And likely, they’ll come back eventually in a different sort of format.

“If you love something – set it free.

If it comes back its yours.

If it doesn’t, it never was. “

I LOVE... my new fridge

For quite a few years now, in fact, ever since I moved in with my now hubby, we’ve had a fairly small fridge / freezer. We eat a lot of fresh veg and we are not the sort of people that have a fridge with not much in it… so eventually, finally, we have moved onto something bigger and this time I’ve gone for all fridge. We have a small chest freezer in the garage – where we keep excess veg, bulk supplies of bread etc – so didn’t have the need for freezer access on a daily basis. But with limited space in which to put the new machine in, we had to do something different in order to get the volume size I wanted.


We finally got this one – a F & P 420litre, and I love it. A big part of why I love it is it’s great energy rating. It’s 5 star rated which means it is VERY energy efficient.

In fact, we’re told it will only cost about $60 a year to run!! Terrific. But even better, it will do less damage to our environment. In fact, about as minimal damage as we can do while having a fridge in the home.


I feel greener already!



 
 
 
 
 
pic by by Stephen Barnett

Becoming a veg head

At age 12 I chose to become vegetarian – what a blow to my parents. They were farming people. They raised me well on a meat & 3 veg kind of diet. I’d loved my chops & my sausages as any other kid does. They had no reason to expect this backlash of rebellion would come. But it did.


At first they tried to accept and laugh it off (“she’ll forget by dinner time”). Then after a few weeks it started to annoy them. Hardly surprising – it was almost a slap in the face with regard to the lifestyle they had raised me with and expected me to join. Mum started to serve me up a piece of meat with each meal, and demand that I sit there until it was eaten. Unfortunately for her, she had raised me to have a keen sense of my own self and I steadfastly refused.


After some months, they settled back into a disgruntled sense of acceptance, but they spent many years with a tinge of anger hovering over the subject, and even as a young adult I was treated to the occasional sarcastic barb about my “freakishness”. Their refusal to fully accept this part of me still had the power to hurt me well into my twenties.


Somehow, time has mellowed us both. They no longer see it as a personal statement against them, and mum can even sometimes see the merit in a veg diet for health reasons (although my reasons are ethical). Dad simply gets on with things and doesn’t mention it – in fact I don’t think he gives it much thought at all these days. On my part – I can finally see how it might have hurt them on a personal level – although it was a good many years before that even occurred to me.


Now I have raised my son as a vegetarian. It’s only normal that we raise our children in the lifestyle we have chosen for ourselves. Obviously we think it the best.


Will he choose to eat meat? Will it strike me in the heart as my choice struck my parents? Will I accept his choice and cope with it better than they did? I hope so. I hope we can learn from the mistakes of the generations before us… And in the name of a good relationship with my son, I hope I can avoid the trauma of trying to hang on to a dream or belief that might be mine, but may not be his.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by OakleyOriginals

Yes, I’d love to play…… with you

Yes, I’d love to play…… with you


Teenage terror had a mate over for the weekend just gone. A whole weekend, so they went beyond their usual x-box games, movies, soccer, and general teenage hanging out stuff they would do during a short term visit. And then I did the nasty mum thing… “please turn the x-box and tv off” for a while and find something else to do.”


Uh- oh – looks like the damage could be fatal. They are lost, they are miserable, they are wailing with the injustice of it all… They’ve got NOTHING to do, they’re bored, they don’t want to do x, y, or z because they’ve already done it or its too hot / cold / energetic / blah blah for them.


I suggest a game, monopoly?, cranium? No – too boring! How about some cards, perhaps…. OK, they’ve settled on cards. But will you play with us mum? It's much better with 3.


Will I play? Will I take out a few hours of my precious weekend to sit with some rowdy boys to play some game I probably don’t like and probably won’t understand their version of the rules and how they change constantly… well. Let’s see. I had planned to: clean the kitchen, do a load of laundry, go for a walk with the dog while the weather is nice, plant those peas before it rains, go to the gym, read my book, relax, socialise with grownups…. Hmmmm looks like I didn’t have anything important on. Who would’ve thought it?







Of course,YES - I’d love to play cards with you !!

So we play some cards – some games that I don’t particularly enjoy and then I teach them a new game (Switch - old fashioned UNO before they decorated the cards and wrote instructions on them). Wow – they love it! And I win !! Then I win again!! Don’t feel bad boys – I tell them, I am the switch playing champion of the world after all !! Aha!! The challenge is on. They start to work together (Cheats!) to do anything to beat me, to kill, me to "own" me!! And finally they do. Yay – success!

All are happy (even me – while nursing my now bruised ego).



Time to pack it up – we’ve got to .. (get dinner, go out, do x, y, z…)


What? No, let’s keep playing – they say. Pleeeeease.

And that is why I say yes to doing things that the kids want to do.. even when it’s not my first and natural choice to.

PS... I also say yes frequently to playing cricket (yuk), watching kid's TV and movies like - Ironman & Spiderman, playing X-box games (sometimes), playing monopoly, playing tennis, playing soccer, playing squash, swimming in the ocean, doing the obstacle course at the pool !, going into town, picking up friends, having kids over, visiting my family...etc  (btw  I don't necessarily not like all these things all the time...some of them I even do like !)

Wednesday is Gratitude Day:

I've read (and I have a sense of it myself) that remembering and considering the good parts of your life and being grateful for them is a healthy step to being and staying happy!!  SO... Wednesday is Gratitude Day.

Today I am grateful for… (my awareness of) the beauty of trees.


This one is a beauty that I look across at from down the road where I park to wait to pick up my son from the school bus.

Not sure what it is… (one of life’s future challenges is to find out !).

There is a line of gorgeous gums down the road from my parents house, and I want to recreate that beauty at my place.


Another thing I’m grateful for is the serendipitous way I got talking to a man I’ve never met before – about eucalypts! He had extensive knowledge, a passion and enthusiasm that I found contagious, and he’d even read…

Eucalyptus - by Murray Bail


Following my conversation with the man of trees, I now think my trees are lemon scented gums, although they have a pinkish tinged bark which caused me some confusion initially. I will take a pic and show you when I visit it in a few weeks.


Isn’t it fantastic when you meet some one with whom you share even just a tiny moment of having something intensely in common. And yet you know you can travel many hours and many miles before such a chance meeting will happen again. So I enjoyed our exchange – he even knew about eucalypt deglupta (otherwise known as “rainbow eucalyptus – wonder why?)

and how it is one of the very few eucalypt species that aren’t native to Australia, (I want to try to grow one !!)


and he explained to me the difference between salmon gum and lemon scented gums..

and how the colour of the trunks – although most distracting visually – can be a red herring as to species identification. Fascinating!!


Thank you Peter, for sharing your joy of trees with me!

Double Edged Sword

Raizo Ichikawa in Samurai Vendetta

© 1959 Kadokawa Pictures, Inc.

Watching your children grow up is a sharp and dangerous double edged sword. We do everything in our parenting power to prepare our children for independence and yet when it starts to arrive it stabs us in the heart. How hard is it to let go? Soooooo hard.



For a number of reasons.


• Timing – when is the right time to let go? Is there a certain age or stage that is best, or does it come and go in snippets.. no sooner do you think they are grown then they revert.


• Habit – we are so used to having them depend on us, perhaps in some way we sometimes depend on them to make us feel complete. Then letting them go is a scary time for us, because we now need to face the “who am I’ question and the answer is likely to be a shock!


• Fear – for them. It’s a big scary world out there. Have we taught them enough to get by, to do best, to survive the day even? Will they really do their homework (or equivalent) without prompting, will they eat properly, will they clean their teeth, shower frequently (this applies to boys!), be nice to their neighbours. We have a genuine sense of anxiety for them and about them – I don’t think we should feel guilty for this. Just be aware.


• Control – Let’s face it… as a parent we have a degree of control over our children and their lives.  Let's face it.  Control = a sense of knowing = a sense of security = safety. It’s hard to relinquish that safety. Human nature drives us to seek that safety. As a parent, we must first be AWARE that we have control, then seek to deliberately release the need for that sense of control. I recommend doing it slowly, piece by piece, with lots of time taken for consideration, reflection, self – reassurance along the way.



My boy is 14. I am feeling the edge of the sword quite sharply on occasion these days. And he is certainly pushing for independence on a growing basis each day it seems. I try to remember that it is his job to push for this, that it is my job to weigh the need with the ability and balance the difference. He is trying to establish a distance between us sometimes… nothing personal but important for him to develop independence. Time to allow him opinions that I don’t share, hobbies I don’t approve of, fashion that I don’t like. It can be uncomfortable – watching the change unfold in front of you.

 When things get hard, I try to think in terms of his needs for growth – not my needs for safety. That’s what good parenting is all about.


Ouch.