I got my first real six-string

Bought it at the Five and Dime

Played it til my fingers bled

Was the summer of 69…

If you were a Canadian kid growing up in the 80s, you had a teenage-girl-crush on one of two music artists. You were either going to marry Corey Hart or Bryan Adams.

The reason there were only two was because of a little thing called Can-con, which meant that local radio stations gave preferential treatment to Canadian artists even if their music sucked. This gave rise to bands such as the Parachute Club and Jane Sibbery, both of whom produced unique if quirky music and both of whom wouldn’t have stood a chance under today’s onslaught of manufactured pop tarts. But I digress.  Because of Can-con, your teenage crushes in 1985 were necessarily directed towards one of two homegrown artists: Corey Hart or Bryan Adams.

If your crush was Corey, you were a romantic. Corey was sultry, his music deep and moody.  It didn’t matter that the line “Don’t Switch The Blade On The Guy In Shades” made no goddamn sense. We still belted it out at the top of our lungs at junior high dances, prancing awkwardly back and forth in our sock feet and giggling with our girlfriends next to us, pretending the bewildered boy who was supposed to be our dance partner didn’t exist.  If you were in celebrity-love with Corey, you were the sensitive type.

If, on the other hand, you had a crush on Bryan Adams, you liked the hard rock party guy. The guy with the t-shirts and jeans, the guy who probably drove a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back. The Bad Boy. “If the feelin’s right I’m gonna run all night, I’m gonna run to you.”  (Tell me you didn’t just get a total Video Hits Every Day At 5 PM Flashback.)

We swooned to their music and their posters on our bedroom walls. We waited anxiously for their new records at the mall or for their songs to come on the radio so that we could hit “record” at lightning speed on our tape recorders so that we could listen to them whenever we wanted. We were total fangirls.

The years passed and slowly, eventually, inevitably, we all kind of got over our Can-Con inspired celebrity crushes. We grew up, the 90s came with its flannel and angst and Nirvana, and we kind of forgot Corey and Bryan.  But then, even today, if you ever happen to stumble across Straight From The Heart or Never Surrender on the radio you can still belt out every single word at the top of your lungs, even though it’s been over 25 years and counting and we are old(er) and married and have kids and mortgages and the dreams we had of marrying a rockstar to live a life of glamour and fame have (mostly) been left behind for the sake of the life we finally decided was going to be a whole lot better than that dream world – and we were right.

But still. Even though we’ve  left all that far behind, the sight of Bryan Adams with his teeny baby daughter – and still, still wearing that same white t-shirt and jeans – still kind of tugs at my heartstrings. Your first celebrity crush is, after all, the one you never forget.

And I’ll just bet: He’s a Bad Dad. Welcome to the club, Bryan.

Bad moms, bad dads, bad grandmas, bad aunts, bad neighbors, bad EVERYBODY – and also everybody who hasn’t yet embraced their inner badness, which is to say, EVERYBODY, full stop… GO VOTE.

Voting is the new good. Voting is also the old good. Voting is NECESSARY.

Go do it.

9,748,546.

That is not the balance on my credit card. That, my friends, is the number of eligible voters who did not cast a ballot in the 2008 election.  Almost 42% of us. I guess we decided we had something better to do. We stayed home in droves.  In fact, more people did not vote at all than actually voted for any political party.  In 2008, the Conservative Party of Canada got the biggest chunk of the popular vote: 5.2 million. That is 4.5 million LESS than stayed home, ostensibly wondering which thumb to sit on. The overwhelming winner in the 2008 election: Apathy.

It’s understandable. Our government is a trainwreck. We have a governing party who spends most of their public relations time and money on attack ads while at the same time they refuse to answer too many questions from the media on exactly what they’re doing while they run our country. We have a question period that’s filled with raucous jeers and name calling instead of anything that vaguely resembles reasonable discussion about the issues – big ones – facing our country. We consistently vote in minority governments, then throw up our hands in frustration when they refuse to work together. We ousted the last Liberal government after a nasty spending scandal but we’ve never quite trusted the current Conservative government enough to give them a majority – for good reason.

It’s no wonder we feel like our votes don’t matter. Nobody in Ottawa seems to listen to us. They just seem to want to carry on, players in their own theatre of vanity. It’s almost as if we feel that if we participate we’re all just reinforcing the madness, feeding the gigantic political gong show.

So we tune out and go about our business and ignore what’s happening in Ottawa because really, we figure, they’re going to do whatever the hell they want and I can’t do anything about it anyway.

But something dangerous happens when we do that.

While we tune out, the world carries on.

Us tuning out doesn’t mean our debt isn’t growing, or that people aren’t dying waiting for health care, or that gas isn’t $1.47 a litre, or that landfills aren’t growing while our national resources are depleting, or that our reproductive rights aren’t under threat, or that our soldiers aren’t under fire on the other side of the world, or that we aren’t destroying the planet.

All of these things are still happening.

And in 20 years or so, my daughter is going to turn to me and ask me Why.

Why did we do it?

Why did we let it get to this point?

Why did we sit back and let it happen?

And if I don’t vote, what will my answer be?

“I was tuned out. I was annoyed. I was lazy, so I stayed home. When my country asked for my voice to be heard, I made lasagna instead, because that was more important.”

My daughter, not I, will bear the burden of the decisions we make today. And for her sake, for the sake of her future, for the sake of her health and her safety and her opportunities to change the world, the least, literally the very least I can do, is take 20 minutes (or 3 hours, or whatever it takes) on Monday and go to the polling booth.

Because I need to be able to say, I didn’t sit back.

I have one vote. One. And so do you. And if every one of you reading this votes, this isn’t just one vote anymore. It’s dozens. Hundreds. More. Suddenly, we’re making an impact. Suddenly, our voices get heard.

I have a voice. On May 2, I am going to use it. Are you?

Hockey has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I didn’t play it as a young girl, no, and not just because it wasn’t heard of in the eighties. I was not what you would deem to be an “athletic” child, unless you’re counting the speed at which I was able to devour a plate of nachos. (For the record: this all changed back in my twenties and I’ve even signed up to run my first 10K race. Eep!)

Back to the topic at hand: HOCKEY. My Dad played it growing up (and lost a few teeth along the way) and his brothers played alongside of him (and lost a few teeth of their own) as well. My brothers (all four of them)(it’s a story for another day) all played it as they grew up, too. Hockey is as much a part of our family and heritage as our love of maple syrup (and beer).

I remember spending many a Saturday night sitting on the couch with my Dad watching Hockey Night In Canada. Don Cherry in his ridiculous sports coats and doing his shouty rants and Ron MacLean looking amused the entire time. I have no idea how football works (aside from the bum patting) and could care less about soccer, but I know and love hockey.

I married a man who did not grow up in a hockey family and who is a local basketball legend, but he loves watching the game as much as I do. When we lived in Vancouver we’d go to Canucks games and now that we’re in the Okanagan we’ll take in some of the local Junior A and Junior B games. There’s just something about a live hockey game – you can feel the electricity in the air. Our three kids have caught the hockey fever and yell even louder than I do, which says a lot.

I don’t get quite the same feel when it comes to watching hockey on T.V. until we get to the playoffs. During the regular season I just catch the highlights on the news but when the playoffs hit? My schedule is cleared and I position myself in front of the telly (and Twitter, so I can commiserate/cheer/yell with other hockey fans). Which is where I will be tonight, cheering and shouting and praying and Twittering during game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series.

GO CANUCKS!

It’s election time in Canada and there are plenty of highly criticized tools, like CBC’s Vote Compass, that you can use to figure out how you should vote. If none of those do it for you and you still don’t know where to place your X on May 2 (you are going to vote, right? right? RIGHT?), maybe this post will help. Just figure out which party’s platform is the closest fit with your parenting style and you’re good to go.

Conservative Bad Moms

You do the crime, you do the time. These moms believe in maximum punishments for deviance and plan to keep increasing the length of time outs.  Punishment is prevention for these moms…no need to create an environment where crime rates would be lower, just punish, punish, punish. That’ll teach ‘em.

When their old car is falling apart, Conservative bad moms go down to the SUV dealership and buy the biggest, safest-looking SUV on the lot without comparing the prices or features with other available models to get the best value for money. School buses aren’t safe enough — these moms drive their children to school and pick them up every day in the Hummer. They will brag to their friends and neighbours about the great job they are doing keeping their family safe with this expensive new car. They may even set up an “I Love My Hummer” Facebook page, provide daily updates on how great it is, and block anyone who says anything to the contrary.

Allowances are kept to a minimum. These moms expect their kids to get a paper route, start up a lemonade stand, or find some other way of earning money outside of the home if they want or need anything. The price of school lunches is going up, but there are no increases in the kids’ lunch money. They are expected to eat less or make up the difference by getting a job.

These moms are secretive and evasive, e.g. “Never mind why you can’t go on the school trip…I said no (by inserting “not” on the permission form your dad signed)…and that is that…discussion over.” Conservative bad moms spend a lot of money on whatever they want, but don’t give anyone else in the family any say over family expenses.

Liberal Bad Moms

These moms tell their kids they can be anything they want to be. They help their kids with their homework, take care of them when they are sick, and take them on international vacations that allow them to learn about the world and understand their place in it. They serve healthy meals, ensure their kids get enough exercise, and limit access to junk food. They use flash cards and memory games to keep their kids’ minds sharp.

Liberal bad moms tell their kids that if they get good grades, they can go to university… but there is a catch: they’ll only cover a tiny fraction of the cost. The part that they do cover is going to come directly out of Dad’s golf money, so the kids had better stay clear of him on Sundays. The rest they’ll have to figure out on their own (perhaps they can create a high-tech start-up in the basement like that kid from Facebook).

Checking and re-checking the budget is a priority for these moms. Saving always comes first and planned family expenses and indulgences will be canceled to ensure the bills can be paid (poor Dad won’t be getting those new golf clubs and the European cruise vacation will be replaced with a 3 star hotel in Punta Cana).  If the family finances do come out ahead, mom will pay down the mortgage, replace the water heater or install solar panels on the roof instead of reinstating privileges.

These moms are open and happy to discuss any issue with their kids. Liberal bad moms also constantly remind their kids how much nicer they are than the evil mom next door. She is ruining her kids’ lives and this mom ensures that everyone knows it.  

New Democrat Bad Moms

Recycling, cutting energy use, and reducing their impact on the environment are big priorities for these moms. They drive compact cars or use public transit and are known to frequent the local farmer’s market. They make their kids wear hand-me-downs and when they do buy new, they buy “made in Canada” products. Instead of buying the latest Disney movie for their kids, they buy arts and crafts materials and encourage the kids to make their own puppets and theatres to create home-grown productions.

These moms believe that all of their children deserve a fighting chance and they may take away from the more talented, beautiful, intelligent children in order to give more attention, gifts, or opportunities to the less fortunate children in the family to help them succeed and overcome their difficulties. The talented, beautiful, intelligent children will resent their mom and their siblings for this forever.

The kids are all expected to help out around the house and are compensated for doing so. Chore assignment and allowance rates are established through bargaining at family meetings that take place at least twice per year. Coming to a consensus on priorities is important to these moms — successful families are those that work together. The kids get some of their allowance money now, but some of it is also put away for them to help them establish themselves when they move out.

Instead of focusing on punishment, New Democrat bad moms arrange for appropriate supervision (parents, babysitters, teachers) and ensure that their kids don’t start hanging out with the wrong crowd.

Green Bad Moms

These moms always have a positive outlook on life and are very focused on investing in the family’s future.

Green bad moms realize that the lemons the kids are buying for the lemonade stand cost almost as much as they are earning with their little venture. Because of that, and the pollution from idling cars lining up at the“drive thru” counter,  mom has decided to stop investing in the lemonade stand and is encouraging the kids to come up with more environmentally friendly business ideas.

These moms believe that everyone in the family, kids included, deserve to be treated with dignity. Everyone in the family gets a say in things like vacation planning, menu planning, educational choices, and so on. All voices are equal and even the smallest and weakest family members have an equal say. Information is shared freely in the family at the dinner table, through family calendars, and family meetings. The family values focus on making decisions that benefit the whole family and that demonstrate leadership in the neighbourhood.

Community is extremely important for these moms. They discourage their kids from signing up for competitive hockey. Instead, they would like their kids to spend their free time helping out elderly neighbours and weeding the community garden. Green bad moms think it is extremely important that everyone be on their best behaviour all of the time and set an example when it comes to reducing, re-using and recycling.

Bloc Quebecois Bad Moms

Family traditions and culture are very important for these moms and they work extremely hard to protect their children from outside influences and mainstream culture that may erode their own culture.  These moms only speak French to their children and refuse to answer when their children speak to them in English.

Bloc Quebecois bad moms have been threatening a divorce for years and dragging the kids through the mud the whole time. The problem is, mom hasn’t figured out how to divorce dad without giving him some access to the kids. So in the meantime, she’s staying married and fighting for what she thinks is right for the kids at the dinner table each night. Dad desperately wants to stay married and alternates between pretending to pander to mom’s every whim and desire and telling her that if she doesn’t want to be part of the family, she doesn’t get a say at all.

These moms try to control as much of the family budget as possible. They have interesting ideas for investing in the family’s future, but they are costly too and they need to retain control over the purse strings to make things happen.  For example, Bloc Quebecois bad moms really want to get rid of the old gas guzzling family van and replace it with an electric car. They also want to invest a lot of money in improving the family home and property.

Square Peg, Round Hole

When it comes to parenting styles, there is rarely a perfect fit between a mom’s chosen approach and a by-the-book parenting style. The same goes for political parties. It is rare to find one that meets all of your expectations. With parenting, we can pick and choose what we like from one style and combine it with another. We can also slack off a bit, “bad mom” style. When it comes to politics, however, we’re only allowed one X. It isn’t a perfect system, but being able to choose from a variety of imperfect political “bad moms” is better than being stuck with the worst of the bad moms (whichever one you think that is), isn’t it?  VOTE!

Note: This is intended to be a fun post on an otherwise serious and often contentious topic. The political “bad mom” write-ups are my quick interpretation of the very long and detailed platforms of the political parties (which I would encourage you to read). Please do not take the characterisations too seriously! If you do want to learn about the real issues facing families, tune in this week at PhD in Parenting as I dissect the family, parenting and women’s issues in each party’s platform.  Also, don’t forget to check out the Mom The Vote facebook page to discuss election issues with other Canadian moms.

I don’t know about you, but at my job, I get 20 paid vacation days and 5 paid sick days per calendar year. If I were still on mat leave or a stay-at-home mom, that number would be reduced drastically – like, to zero.

So how many days off should our politicians get?

How’d They Vote, a website that touts itself as a resource for political accountability, catalogues and categorizes the voting statistics of every MP in the 39^th and 40^th parliament, and includes some pretty juicy information, including parliament absenteeism and the number of motions that each MP has put forward.

The site takes a bit of navigation, but click on MP Statistics to get a good read on where the person you elected stands. (If you aren’t sure of who your MP is, click on Find your MP and enter your postal code. You’ll get a nice breakdown of their parliamentary action/apathy) There’s some revealing information here. For instance, the accusations regarding absenteeism levied against Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff are true – he showed up for Parliament less often than any other elected MP. That’s not to say that he wasn’t working when he wasn’t in Ottawa, but let’s face it – if an MP is not there to put forward or vote on motions, how effective can he really be?

But it’s not just Iggy missing from Ottawa – there are big names in the top 10 most absent.

A breakdown of the top 100 most absentee MPs would look like this (keep in mind that seats are not distributed equally and there are a lot of ties):

Liberals – 59

BQ – 20

Conservatives – 15

NDP – 9

Independent – 2

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing the MP’s time sheets. I can understand that the PM might be away from Parliament for some foreign diplomatic reasons, but should he miss 82 sessions? What about Ruby Dhalla (don’t even get me started) or Helena Geurgis (insert hooker and blow joke here)?  Hell, Jack Layton was being treated for cancer and a bum hip this past year and he missed less work than I did.

By voting for someone we expect them to work on our behalf. We kind of become their boss. My boss wouldn’t put up with absenteeism. I don’t know many that would. So let’s stop putting up with it in our elected officials.

It’s -29 outside.

Twenty Nine Degrees Below Zero.

That’s Celsius, but really, who cares. -29 might as well be -400. Either way, I’m sure as hell not going out in it.

It would be one thing if it was just me. I can suck it up, put on snow pants and my enormous fluffy parka and mittens and hats and brave the inside-of-nose-freezing-up-grossness and figure out how to strategically park the car so that I am outside for the least amount of time possible.

But I have a toddler. And when you have a toddler, all bets are off.  Because putting a toddler in to winter gear is for moms braver than this one.

Honestly, trying to get them piled in to a snowsuit seems to me an exercise only undertaken by  the idiotic or the desperate. It’s not just that you’re trying to dress someone else. That would be easy. Putting a snowsuit on a toddler is, in contrast, like trying to put a snowsuit on soup. I lift her completely uncooperative limbs and try to stuff them in to the legs and they just slide right back out. One arm gets in a sleeve, and by the time I get the other arm in the other sleeve the first arm is out, flailing, mocking.  If by some miracle I manage to get the snowsuit on her and zipped, it doesn’t matter because if I even try to come near her with a hat, she takes off, shrieking at the top of her lungs because this? Is a grand game. Were I to get the hat on her head, it would be off in 4.3 seconds.  Same with mittens. She’s fascinated by the process of putting the mittens on  – and by the process of taking them off. Her mittens will keep her hands warm to -40! If she’d only wear them. If I clip them to her jacket tightly enough that she can’t pull them off, the screams then cause the neighbours to wonder if they should call CAS.

There is simply no possible way to get out to the car with a hat, mittens, boots and snowsuit on the child. At most I can get the last two, but it’s not enough because in these temperatures, her extremities will freeze because the hat and mittens will. Not. Be. Left. On.

And I think about it and I wonder, well, will she get frostbite if we walk from the house to the car with no mittens on? And then the wave of Mommy Guilt overpowers me like a tsunami and I hear the voice of the Bad Mother Patrol (which, oddly, speaks somewhat like the Incredible Hulk.) BAD MOTHER. NO MITTENS. BIG TATTOO ON FOREHEAD SAY YOU BAD MOTHER, MAKE OTHER MOTHERS SAY TSK TSK.

Ugh.

So I think, well, if it’s not cold enough for me to need mittens it’s not cold enough for her to need mittens. Right? So then I go outside without mittens and my hands freeze solid in 4.3 seconds. My big adult hands. Never mind her delicate tiny toddler hands. They’d be popsicles. Fingerless stumps in seconds.

Never mind, I think. Forget it. We’ll just stay home today. Again.

But then the opposite bad mother guilt hits. BAD MOTHER. NO LEAVE HOUSE IN THREE DAYS. CHILD NEED STIMULATION OR WILL TURN IN TO COUCH POTATO AND HAVE NO FRIENDS. KIND OF LIKE YOU.

Sigh.

The cold snap is supposed to be gone by tomorrow. It’ll be a positively balmy -9. At which point I will only *look* like a neglectful mother when she flings her mittens out of the car instead of actually being one. Tomorrow’s close enough. We’ll go out then. Today, I’m staying inside with my furnace and fleece pyjamas. Bad Mom Win.

I spend waaaaaaay too much time on Twitter but truth be told, Twitter seems to be more my medium than does my personal blog. 140 spaces seems to suit me well and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m wee in stature and therefore correspondingly brief with words* or because I love a good challenge. Whatever. It doesn’t matter because I *heart* Twitter.

One of my favourite pastimes on Twitter is looking for fellow Canadians who know how to be succinct AND witty. Most of the time I discover them by accident and each time I do it makes the maple syrup coursing through my veins tingle with joy.

Because anyone on Twitter knows that Twitter is only a good place when following, mixing, and mingling with the right people. So this is where I turn to you: who are your favorite Canadian Twitter folks? Is it you? Is it your international ex-pat buddy? We -  @herbadmother and @motherbumper – think that it’s high time we had a list of The Bad Moms Club Favourite Canadian Tweeters just like our Bad Moms Club Favourite Canadian Moms Blogs but making up a list like that isn’t fun to do alone. We need your help.

So join in and leave your favourite CANADIAN Tweeters below – Twitter handles, please, so we can find them easily – and we’ll compile the results, and it will be MAPLETASTIC AWESOME.

Last week, the lovely Erica Ehm passed along an email to me. It was from a young single mom named Nicola. She has a little boy who, like Tanner, has Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. This is what she said:

I am 21 years old and I have a 4 year old son who’s been diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. I recently found out that he is in need of a foot brace and I hadn’t placed my name on any funding list to have the braces funded by the government. I am a single-mother and York University student and I decided that I wanted to throw a fundraiser to help raise the money for his foot brace. I am also in the process of starting an organisation with my partner Sean to donate money towards kids with Duchenne’s to help find other resources other than steroids to aid these children with the progression of the disability. We are inviting you out to this fundraiser as this is our first fundraising event for this cause. The event will be taking place Nov. 12th 2010 from 6-8 at 1900 sheppard ave west. Lower level. The building where I reside is a building for strickly young mother and their children. This event is an interactive informational session to give people an awareness as to what this disability is and how we as a community can help support the families who have children with this disability. There will be a raffle for different items as well as food and beverages for sale. To make the night that much more enjoyable we are having performers such as singers, and poetry and perhaps even a piano performance by me-as I am a piano major. (emphasis mine.)

I cried. And then I got in touch with Nicola directly. I told her that I wanted to do whatever I could to help her get the word out about her event, and to raise money for that leg brace, and to just, you know, support her somehow.

She needs $700. So little, and yet it means so much. I’m going to throw in, but I’m also putting up a widget, one specially for her and her son, in case, you know, anyone else wants to help out.

(I bumped up the amount a little. She’s a single mom, and a student. She needs it.)

I’m going to go to her event next week, in a tutu. I’m hoping that I can get a whole bunch of you to come, too, so that she can see how much love and support is out there. So that she can see that she isn’t alone. So that I – that we – can fulfill another of Tanner’s wishes, the one about seeing other boys like him get some wishes fulfilled. So that we make the tutus earn their keep.

Let me know if you can come. Maybe we can co-ordinate transportation from subways and the like (it’s not exactly central, but then again, Central Park wasn’t exactly central either, if you’re Canadian.) I’m going to post more of their story at HBM, when I can contain my tears a little better, but in the meantime, will you come? Will you help?

Nov. 12th 2010 from 6-8 at 1900 sheppard ave west. Lower level. I’ll bring extra tutus.

We do, we really do love our Canadian stuff. My childhood (and probably yours) wouldn’t have been complete without the following Canadianisms to shape and influence our growing brains:

The Mighty Hercules: HERC! HERC! Who didn’t want to punch that little centaur Newt right in his centuarian nuts?

Rocket Robin Hood: Don’t try to make sense of it, just run with the classic Robin Hood characters in um… outer space? Hey, that’s what we get for having free heath care and affordable drugs. The drugs are obviously really good up here in Canada.

Degrassi in all it’s incarnations (Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, Degrassi: TNG). Need I say more? Oh yes, EVERYBODY WANTS SOMETHING THEY’LL NEVER GIVE UP. Long live The Zit Remedy!

The Beachcombers: Can you hum the opening sequence and describe Molly’s Reach without having to look at a picture? That’s what I thought. You’re welcome for that ear worm. Bruno Gerussi FTW!

Of course The Littlest Hobo (another ear worm!) but didn’t you want London to be your dog too?

Kids in the Hall shaped my young adult years most certainly. The Chicken Lady and crushing your head still make me grin like an idiot.

Wow. I could go on for days. Please share yours and like I said earlier: HAPPY CANADA DAY!