remembering

He’s told me this story before.  It’s the only story of his time serving overseas he has ever shared with me. Working in heavy machinery, he doesn’t have thrilling tales of firefights or diving into foxholes, no daring accounts of storming stoney beaches with surf thundering around his waist and bullets whistling overhead. And I am glad. I want a lifetime of safety for my grandfather.

The last time he told me this story I was a child. He laughed. We all laughed.  He told the tale as a joke, a humourous memory of one late night in France. But now I am older, he is older. No longer a child, I am now a mother with children of my own. And my grandfather? He is now older than nearly everyone I have ever known, older than his neighbours, older than most of the people at his church and mine. He has lived longer than most people are able, a fact which fills me with pride. My gloriously old grandfather. My strong grandfather. Full of days.

But he tells me this story again, but without the laughter. This is no joke, no happy memory. His wrinkled face grey with remembered fear, his eyes looking back over an ocean, over years, over lifetimes of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as he recounts for me again that night. How he and two buddies had left where they were stationed to go to the local bar. How he and one of the buddies had to carry the other back to his bunk, he was so drunk. How there was a small bridge over a shallow creek between them and their destination.

How the air raid sirens blared as they were crossing the bridge. How they heard the roar of the engines of the Luftwaffe overhead.

How they both dropped the drunk buddy in the middle of the bridge and each dove off a side.

How he thought he was leaving his buddy to die, because he could not save him, and himself.

It was a nuisance raid. He wasn’t fired upon. They pulled themselves out of the creek bed, damp and muddy but uninjured, picked up their friend and continued back to their bunks. Just another night out in France during the war. And he laughed about it for years.

Until he couldn’t. Until the weight of knowing how close he came, of knowing how easily the story could have ended so very, very differently proved too great. And he does not laugh as he tells me the story now.

As a child, at school on Remembrance Day we sang songs written by flowerchildren – Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and One Tin Soldier, and How Many Roads – and we watched videos from WarAmps declaring “Never Again” and we stood solemnly. I tried to remember. I tried to muster up feelings of sadness for this annual national funeral. I tried to think somber thoughts and really remember, whatever that means to a child of 9 who has never seen a war, never lost family to conflict, never experienced violence. I fought to find tears of grief for a grief inconceivable to me. After all, my grandfather came back. I am here because he survived.

Now, I have watched footage of Canadians in Iraq and Kuwait, in Bosnia, in Somalia. I have watched us participate in the invasion of Afghanistan. And I have watched Remembrance Day change. It no longer feels like the national funeral it once did, a national day of mourning not only the dead but the sheer senselessness of war, the utter absurdity of rallying scores of people to die violent deaths and return that violence with violence. In our attempt to stand in solidarity with our servicemen and women we have lost the songs of flowerchildren, the knowledge as clear as the keening of birds that war is always terrible, always a sign of our human failing to live as humans should. We have come to the mistaken belief that it dishonours our current servicemen and women to decry the horrors of violence and war, that in order to stand in solidarity with them we must clasp and raise and shake our hands, crying out at the might of our nation. But we dishonour them when we dismiss what they have done and seen, things that can not be unseen, which cannot be forgotten.  We dishonour them when we cry out that we must make more war. We dishonour them when we forget the lessons past generations spent so long teaching us.

I no longer fight to find the tears. They come easily and unbidden and I fight to hide them.  As my grandfather fights to hide his tears as he tells me his story, his lasting memory, raw and unforgettable, while his great-grandchildren laugh and play on the other side of the room. Seventy years later, he has not forgotten. We must not either.

early years at home with mommy

Canadian news media have been picking up on a recently published paper which, ostensibly, addresses changing and ever-pressing childcare needs. The Early Years Study 3 of 2011 promises to address "the social, economic and scientific rationale for increased investments in early childhood education." 

But make no mistake: this paper is not entirely focussed on early childhood development. This paper has an agenda, one cleverly couched in language of parental and feminist guilt.

The gist of the proposal found here is this: formalized education can and should start as early as age two. Toddlers should be in a classroom setting. One of the co-authors of the paper, Dr. Fraser Mustard told the Toronto Star, ""I would come down to three-year-olds, then two-year-olds and one-year-olds."

Yes. 12 month old babies in a classroom.

Studies of this sort make my brain hurt. They make my very heart and soul hurt. Because while some have responded to this, saying, "Good: something for those of us unfortunate enough not to be able to stay home with our kids," that is not what this paper is about. To those who say, "This will support a woman's choice to return to the workforce after maternity leave!" I say, "Bullshit." This paper is not about supporting choice: this paper is about making choices for parents. This paper doesn't have a feminist objective: this paper is the very antithesis of feminism.

This paper is anti-family.

The authors go so far as to say that families with only one working parent are bad for the economy. This is hard enough to hear at the best of times but in the midst of a global recession it is positively dripping with guilt. The authors even condescend, stating, "Most women want to work." They repeatedly talk about growing children to be "contributing members of society" while positing that opposite the elderly (who are a terrible financial drain, they note) and at-home parents, particularly mothers, who do not earn, therefore do not work, therefore do not contribute.

The authors of this paper note the prevalence of maternal depression but then argue that a key to reducing the rate of maternal depression is social time with others and a comfy chair. Seriously. So thank you, dear researchers, thank you. The cure to my PPD is not vitamins and minerals or prescription medication: the cure is a comfy chair a good chat with some 'gals' at my local school. And I should get right on that since, as they make a point of noting several times, stress "drips down" onto my children, and a stressed or depressed mother isn't good for her children. If my PPD hadn't already made me worry about the quality of my parenting this paper certainly cleared things up for me: now I feel like a downright failure.

But what about the children, you ask? Yes: what about the children. The authors use anecdotes to describe two year old children who haven't yet learned to regulate their emotional responses to stimuli as an example of...well,they never come right and state the purpose of that particular little story, exactly, but when viewed within the context of the paper as a whole the implication is clear: our children might just grow up 'wrong' if a trained professional isn't there to manage their development.

The phrase "levelling the playing field" has been tossed about in describing the objective of this paper, but such a claim holds no water. The authors make it very clear in the first chapter of the paper that the children about whom they are most concerned are not the very poor or otherwise typically disadvantaged: the children families they are primarily targeting are middle and upper-class households. 

So what is the purpose, then, if it isn't to assist already-struggling families? It's to get parents - fathers, but if we face facts, mostly mothers - like myself out of the home and into the workforce. The only reason I'm home with them is because I don't have access to a viable and reliable option for childcare, yes? The only reason I'm not contributing is because I'm stuck at home with the kids.

No.

My children are home with me because they belong here. I am home with them because I choose to be, because my partner and I know that it is the right choice for our family. It may not be the right choice for every family, but it is for ours. I do not begrudge the women who dedicate years of their life and enormous effort to achieving the career for which they feel destined who then feel compelled to return to work after a few months or at the end of their year of paid maternity leave (as we have federally legislated in Canada). Not at all. Had I had a career to which I was dedicated, to which I felt drawn, which was vocational, my choice may have been an entirely different one. 

This is what so thoroughly enrages me about this paper. Though they couch it in feminist language ("if [women] did not work, the economy wouldn't function'), the assertions are most definitely anti-feminist. My feminist foresisters worked long and hard to have the value of women recognized. Before women were routinely employed outside the home, that was the goal: for women to be valued as contributing members of society, not because they generated income but because we are people and people are always valuable.

While it may seem commendable that the authors of this study show such concern about the development and care of the children in this nation, they do so at the expense of mothers, of women, and indeed of the children themselves. In discouraging at-home full-time parenting they are demonstrating the lack of value they place on such a role. And who typically fills that role? Women. There are lots of stay-at-home-dads out there (I know a few myself) and I applaud them uproariously for turning those hetero-normative gender roles on their ear and caring for their children. But the fact is that there are more SAHMoms than SAHDads. As far as we have come in attempting to equalize the genders, the fact is that biology has a leg up in this situation. I lactate: my husband does not. While that doesn't entirely preclude him from being the full-time parent, it certainly simplifies the question for our family. In their dismissal of the importance and value of at-home parenting, in their argument children as young as two years old should be in school lest they be "disadvantaged" for life, in their implication that children who are at home with a parent before attending kindergarten are less likely to graduate high school, they are demonstrating the sheer lack of regard they have for a role typically filled by women.

How dare they? How dare they shame women and families? How dare they fear-monger, all while backhandedly saying that at-home parents "perform quiet acts of heroism, day in and day out"?

A woman's place is wherever she damn-well feels like being, including in the home caring for her children if that's her choice.

And it sure as hell is mine.

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ” 

― C.S. Lewis