It’s been a rough couple of weeks at my house. The second half of January saw my husband and I being hit from all sides emotionally, professionally, and physically. I usually muster up the enthusiasm to bounce back up and blaze on, but for the first time in my life, I haven’t had it in me.

While watching my eldest child play basketball after school, my youngest child complained that she wanted a snack.

Her: I’m hungry!

Me: Well, I’m sad.

Her: Why?!?

Me: Because I had a rough day.

She teared up (she has a big heart, that girl of mine) and I wiped her eyes and told her not to worry. I get sad, just as she gets sad, but we’re going to be fine. We always are.

I don’t share the nitty gritty adult stuff that worries my husband and I (work, money, extended-family relations, etc.) but I think my kids need to know that I get sad sometimes too. I also get angry and I say I’m sorry. I get frustrated (and say I’m sorry). If I walked around with a smile on my face all day, every day, how would I teach them that emotions are normal? How would I teach them how to verbalize their feelings? How would I teach them that parents make mistakes, just like they make mistakes, just like everyone else on the planet makes mistakes?

I don’t know how else to teach them, other than by showing them that I am human, too. They’re going to figure it out eventually; I’d rather they heard it from me first.

Do you share how you’re feeling with your kids?

img Give Mom a Hug source

The house looks like someone picked it up and shook it. Deadline after deadline whizzes by my head, each one like a nuclear powered dragonfly armed with missiles. Emails sit unopened, telltale coffee rings adorn the countertop from when I frantically guzzled my almost-completely-cold coffee in one gulp just to get the caffeine in to my system. The single page of paper I’ve been using to frantically scribble notes to myself all day now looks like heiroglyphics, filled with scratchy and completely indecipherable writing. And just now, at 10 pm, I realized I completely forgot to brush my hair today. Or my teeth.

Welcome to “Husband Is Out Of Town, Day Two Of Five.”

I’ve seen a lot of flack around the internet lately from people who object to those of us who are normally partnered making a fuss about being a temporarily single parent. Even using that phrase – “temporarily single parent” – can, and has, gotten the knickers of many in to very significant knots. Apparently using the phrase “single parent” when you have a partner is using the wrong words, because I’m not technically single. Fair enough, but I don’t know what else to call it, and I’m too goddamn tired to think about it too much.

There’s too much angst around it. And I don’t get it. It’s not the Suffering Olympics, people.

It’s obvious that I’m not facing many of the same challenges a fully single parent does: for one, I have a very specific end date to my single-parenting.  But that doesn’t mean that while I’m a single parent, it isn’t a really hard thing to do. Being home solo with a sick and inconsolable and up all night badger and trying to organize everything like doctor visits and prescription pickups and whatever in order to get that sick badger better at the same time as trying to do everything I need to do as an adult and a grownup is hard, y’all. And if I say it’s hard, and if I say that flying solo this week is kicking my ass, it doesn’t mean I’m comparing myself wholesale to an actual single, unpartnered, parents by themselves all the time, never has any cavalry flying home to relieve them parent. You guys kick ass, and you rock, and you are awesome, and I am not pretending to be you. Seriously, people: I’m not comparing myself to anyone at all except to, well, me, me when my husband is home and the shit is not hitting the fan 24 hours a day and I actually feel like things are marginally under control around here. Right now they are not under control, not by a long shot, and part of that is the fact that this week, when the bottom is falling out of things, there’s nobody to clean the shit off the fan except for me. And that is a difficult place to be.

Right now is hard. A lot harder than a normal week.  And, swear to betsy: all I’m asking for when I say that is for you to say, geesh, dude, I bet. Let’s grab a drink when you have some free time!

I mean, you could say that any day, but you know what I mean.

So let’s lay off each other. If someone’s having a hard week, let them have a hard week without making them feel even worse about using the wrong words. And if you’re having a hard week: My sympathies. Let me know when to show up with a bottle of something only procurable in licensed establishments. Cause, I’ve been there.

"Hey! Can it, douchebag!"

You couldn’t avoid it last week. Even for those of us who couldn’t give two rat’s asses about any Kardashians, what they might or might not be wearing, how long their micromarriages might have lasted or how much they spent in Beverly Hills boutiques, it was inescapable. Huge headlines about how Khloe Kardashian’s father MIGHT NOT BE HER REAL FATHER!! HER MOTHER WAS A REALLY BAD LYING CHEATING BAD MOM!!! SCANDALZOMG!

And the whole thing made me nauseous.

Because despite the Kardashians being famewhores? Their private lives – whatever parts of them are private – are still none of our business.

In our fame-obsessed society, we seem to think that because someone is a public person we have the right to know everything about them, that they have no possible right to object to people digging in to their dirty laundry and airing it for the world to see. They invited the media in to their lives, in to the minutiae of their day to day and their relationships and their vacuity and all of it. And, the reasoning goes, because they have chosen to be public about some of their lives, they have therefore given up their right to privacy in all matters!

Is this really what people believe?

This is the kind of mentality that led to a newspaper in the UK feeling it was perfectly OK to invade the privacy of dozens of people by hacking in to their personal mobile phones to Look For Dirt. They felt they had the right to do so, because their targets were Public People (whether by choice or not).  Imagine having a child go missing and then, during your desperate search to find her, having a newspaper hack in to her voicemail and erase messages, making you believe she was alive. When she wasn’t. But you thought she might be, because someone else felt it was their right to hack in to her phone to look for a Story.

This is the same kind of privacy violation we’re talking about here. The belief that we have a RIGHT to know everything about everyone, no matter what damage is caused by revealing it. Newsflash: We don’t have that right. Even if someone lets us in to their life and shows us more than we feel is appropriate, they still have a right to privacy. They still do draw a line. And wherever that line is, that’s their line, and we have no right to go past it. None. Never.

Her father was the man who raised her, who taught her right from wrong, who kissed her goodnight and read her stories and the man she misses every day. End of story, unless she personally chooses to tell us otherwise. Quit digging for smut, go do something good for humanity, and shut up.

The least shocking news of 2012 broke this week, with deep South, deep-fat fryin’ down-home cooking guru Paula Deen admitting that she has type-2 diabetes, something the rags have been dishing on for years.

With signature recipes including Southern Fried Chicken, Cheese Biscuits, Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding and Paula’s Fried Butter Balls, as well as the admission in USA Today that she used to drink “sweet tea” from “… lunchtime … to bedtime,” I’m not sure how anybody – least of all, Paula, couldn’t have seen this coming.

Criticized heavily for promoting a fat- and sugar-laden diet – a diet which is linked to no shortage of health issues, from heart disease to obesity to diabetes – Deen famously once told Oprah, “I’m your cook, not your doctor,” and refuses even now to change her cooking show habits, insisting that she has always stressed moderation in eating.

Sure, Paula, and I’m sure that tobacco companies stress moderation in smoking. I hope Paula is ok, I really do, but the truth is, moderation would have put Paula out of business long ago. What does moderation constitute? Doing something 10% of the time? 25% of the time? I’m pretty sure that Paula would not stress moderation when it comes to people buying her heart-attack-waiting-to-happen recipe books, or the cooking implements she happily shills, which – the only real shocker here – does not include a signature deep fryer.

Also disturbing is the fact that Paula has kept the diagnosis close to her ample bosom for years, choosing only to come out of the deep fryer with her news as it coincides with her new appointment as spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that will be supplying Deen’s diabetes medication and implements. How quaint.

I am all for people taking responsibility for their own choices and for not playing the blame game when it comes to making the bad ones, but the critics have a point –Paula preaches a dangerous message to the throngs of the butter loving faithful.

It’s like Dr. Atkins developing heart disease, Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry’s) undergoing a quintuple (!) bypass, or the millionaire owner of Segway dying in a Segway accident – when you make your living dabbling in the unhealthy and stupid, it can eventually catch up with you.

It caught up with Deen, and as for the blame game, well, she has nobody to blame but herself.

My family and I are on a ski vacation, less than an hour away from our home. We had discussed going somewhere HOT, but once we crunched the numbers for our family of five to get away, it worked out to one month’s salary. Mine and my husband’s salary combined. After a morning spent debating whether or not we should do the tropical vacation, and looking for good deals to make it happen, I suggested to my husband that maybe we spend a week on the ski hill instead.

I’ve struggled a lot with winter in the past, so he wasn’t expecting that idea to come from my lips. I assured him that I was serious, and that it would be a great way to practice our skiing skills. We put our kids (and ourselves) in ski lessons on the week between Christmas and New Year’s, as we made a decision to take up skiing as a family, and what better way to get better at skiing than to spend a week up at the ski hill? (Side bonus: My boss gave us his cabin to use for the week. SCORE!)

In order to take this vacation, our kids are missing a week of school. This matter has been commented on by almost everyone we’ve talked to about our trip, or whom we’ve seen on the hill. The majority of the comments are just out of curiosity, and when I tell them why we’re here, they smile and tell us to enjoy. They also tell us how wise we are to hit the hill when it’s not the holidays (We pretty much have the hill TO OURSELVES). I’ve encountered a few negative reactions, which could have made me upset, but only made me laugh inside. Because, seriously?

Our kids are 5, 7, and 9. Kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. We talked to each of their teachers before going away about homework and the reply from all three of them [paraphrased]: “Have fun! They can just read every day and we’ll get them caught up on math and such when they get back.” There was also a comment about how they may be missing P.E., but that’s covered by being on the ski hill.

We’re having a great week. Skiing during the day, reading and watching movies at night. It’s a pretty great vacation, indeed.

Have you taken your kids out of school for vacation time?

We have really been enjoying our winter break.

I mean, really enjoying our winter break. In fact, winter break 2011/2012 may go down as being one of the best winter breaks we’ve ever had. Naw, we’re not spending it in Hawaii or on a picturesque mountain somewhere – heck, we haven’t even gone into the next the town.

In fact, we’ve barely left the house. It’s been perfect.

We grudgingly get dressed if company is coming or if we’ve (foolishly) agreed to go out visiting, but these last 10 days have been one relaxed, slow drawl of movies and games, books and crafts. When we’re not sleeping. We’ve been doing quite a bit of sleeping as well.

This is how our days have looked:

8:30 kids get up

9:30 I get up, get breakfast for the kids, get coffee for me.

10:30 the huz gets up (don’t worry, he’ll pay me back for this later), whatever movie kids were watching that allows me to sleep in, ends. Kids play. We drink coffee and read.

Noonish – lunchish

Afternoonish – bake, craft or go outside, depending on our mood. Nap with four year old (remember the payback? Here it is. Ahhh.)

Late afternoonish – wonder if we should have done anything more productive for the day.

Dinnertime – more often than not, with friends. This is when we get dressed much of the time.

Afterdinnerish  - games, another movie for the kids maybe

Too late – go to sleep after watching half a season’s worth of Californication episodes.

See? Perfect. Seriously, I have not been bored or hungry at any point over the last 10 days. I weep to think that this will soon be coming to an end and that somebody will expect me to have my kids somewhere before 9am. I weep.

So, how has your winter break been?

I know that this time of year is supposed to be all, happy happy joy joy, but the truth is, there is much about this season that just sucks. Between juggling family obligations, wrapping up school, work and all of those presents – which, of course you have to buy first, causing no amount of stress for well-meaning procrastinators like me – it’s enough to turn even the merriest of elves into a Grinch.

Add to that the emotional baggage that can come with the holidays – feuding families! Dead people we miss! Money we can’t spend! – and the season of joy can feel downright joyless.

But, since being in a bad mood for two weeks is no fun, and it kind of wrecks it for everybody else, I am here to offer a) sympathy and b) some easy ways to remedy the feelings of stress, sadness and punch-you-in-the-throat frustration that can so easily rear it’s muddled head at this time of year. Christmas doesn’t have to be blue.

Tips for Surviving the Holidays Without Ripping Anybody’s Head Off:

• Simply decide that you cannot and will not do it all this year. If making your own advent calendar and doing all the baking and making your kids’ stockings and cooking 175 latkes for the grade 1 Hanukkah party and hosting the holidays is going to kill you dead, cut something out. It’s ok, Martha – the kids will survive with store bought cookies.
• Pick your poison – and make sure you have it on hand, whether that means herbal tea, a bar of dark chocolate; whatever gets you through. I prefer coffee, with Baileys after six o’clock.
• Carve out a tiny bit of time for yourself. I know, this can sound ridiculous when you feel like you barely have time to go to the bathroom, but taking a few hours for yourself can be a lifesaver. Spend an afternoon at the gym or enjoying an evening out with your girls. Hell, a movie by yourself can be as relaxing as that spa treatment your husband had better get you.
• Remember the reason for the season. For me, that means family. The idea is to be together, to see people I don’t get to see often enough, to watch my children’s face light up when they open that present I stressed out about finding, paying for and wrapping. But whatever your reason for the season, try to keep it in mind.

I came from a home where I was spoiled rotten at Christmas. Auntie Kathy would send jammies, the other aunties would send toys and my Mom/Santa would buy so many presents that they came out a good five feet away from the tree. There were Cabbage Patch Kids and Barbie motorhomes and Pac-Man snow saucers, oh my! (It was years later that I learned that my Mom would take out a small bank loan to pay for our haul.)(Wait, what? Noooo.)

I married a man of Dutch heritage, but despite his genetic tendency to be cheap, Christmas can be a weak spot for us both. We want to buy them ALL THE THINGS. However, we don’t want our kids to have so many toys that they don’t know what to do with them (and we don’t want to have to purge crappy toys two weeks later), so we have them craft a list. The extended family gets first dibs, and then we will buy them two decent toys and a bunch of stocking stuffers of the Life Savers Book/crayons/Mandarin orange in the sock variety.

Though, back when they were preschoolers, these gifts would have been more than enough for them. (We have a utensil drawer that kept them entertained for HOURS each day.)

My kids do not lack for presents at Christmas, no, but I don’t think that we do it to excess. The holiday isn’t about the presents (OK, maybe a little), but for us it’s about baby Jesus and spending time with family and having time off from work and school to hang out together.

How do you deal with Christmas (or your chosen holiday)? Do you go all out, or do you set limits?

Twenty-two years ago, Marc Lepine walked down the halls of Ecole Polytechnique and killed 14 women,  for the simple fact of their gender.

That act, and this date helped define who I am, it made me embrace the word feminist when I had only taken a few tenuous steps in that direction. I was 20 years old and in second year at university and I was sad and I was angry. And I easily could have been one of those women.

Two decades later, I am struck by a naive, emotional article I wrote for my school paper. In it, I wrote:

Fourteen lie dead because of feminism. Feminism is about fear and it is about love. It is about the fear that every woman has when walking down a dark street, getting into an elevator, meeting a strange man being alone in a house. It is about fear of the future and about the difficult choices women have to make between a career and children, of being quiet or speaking out and calling yourself a feminist in a judgmental society.

We supposedly live in the post-feminist age, I’m not really sure what that means. But I  hear people say it all the time. I can see by the comments on my MSN.ca blog, that gender issues still dominate and inflame. And there are still a lot of angry, angry men out there.

Micah Toub recently wrote a piece in The Globe and Mail called It’s time boys learn the F-word.  The picture of the online world for girls was bleak — the expectations of their looks and their sexual lives fuelled by porn and photoshop. The silver lining was the quotes from the girls and boys themselves, all of whom seemed to have a good handle on reality. Toub’s assertion that feminism is having a renaissance after a 20-year hiatus is heartening, if true.

My friend Nadine also wrote about the need to embrace the F-word even though it may make us shudder a little.

I want my boys and daughter to think of themselves as feminists and to use their power wisely. I think know we are doing a good job of raising them with the ideals of equality and tolerance. I expect there will be some backlash along the way, but I want my kids to understand that feminism is about inclusion not exclusion.

Sometimes with all the sexy Facebook photos, the sexified 10-year olds and all the other sexist garbage out there, it is hard to remember that we are so much better off.  Not just women, but both men and women — it got women out of the home, and it got men into it. Our lives are fuller, more enriched and yes, more complicated.

Those 14 women didn’t die because they were feminists. They died because they were women. Remember them:

• Genevieve Bergeron, 21, was a 2nd year scholarship student in civil engineering.
• Helene Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her master’s degree.
• Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
• Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
• Maud Haviernick, 29, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials, a branch of metallurgy, and a graduate in environmental design.
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a 2nd year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
• Maryse Laganiere, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
• Maryse Leclair, 23, was a 4th year student in engineering materials.
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a 4th year student in mechanical engineering.
• Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
• Michele Richard, 21, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials.
• Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
• Annie Turcotte, 21, was a first year student in engineering materials.

photo credit: Seamesse on Flickr

What are your memories of December 6? Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Gordon Murray/AP

In a disturbing twist on the traditional Santa pics, an Arizona gun club is offering family pictures with Santa – and a few automatic weapons. Apparently seen as fun for the whole family, the club lets you pose with such Peace On Earth harbingers as a grenade launcher, a machine gun, a rifle on a tripod and something called an AR-15, which I’m sure many 8 year olds must have on their Christmas list this year. This just makes me think that Santa is a pussy. I want whatever Jesus was packing.

But wait, I’m wrong, maybe that’s not the worst Christmas card you could send out this holiday season. Here are a few other contenders:

Funnyordie.com

I think Dad would have looked better as Jasmine.

Listoftheday.blogspot.com

How many No Fly lists do you think Dadcat is on?

Killmydaynow.com

She looks … effective.

Pophangover.com

I see the resemblance.