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Having fun with lyrics

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I usually listen to the CBC in the car but I am sick of hearing about soccer, Israel and the oil spill. I don’t care about soccer, the coverage of Israel is superficial and one-sided and I don’t want to hear one more thing about BP until somebody admits that we need off-shore drilling to maintain our cheap-stuff addicted economy. Mark my words: we will feel sorry for the birds until the next gas price hike. Let’s see how quickly we cry for off-shore drilling when the litre of gas goes over $1.30 again. But I digress.

Have you listened to pop radio lately? The nice thing about pop radio is that it generally steers clear of too much talk and politics. A little bit of soccer maybe. Definitely no Israel and they may have mentioned the oil spill in passing… as in “Have you guys seen to cool pictures of the oil spill on Google earth???” Pop radio is also entertaining for the relationship snapshots also known as pop songs. Maybe I’m getting old (I’m on the downhill side of 35) but things ain’t what they used to be. When our grand-parents were young, they met, dated, fell in love, got engaged, married, had sex and finally had children. When our parents were young, they met, dated, fell in love, had sex, got engaged,  married and had children. When we were young (well, some of my peers are still “young” by that definition) we met, had sex, dated, got pregnant, fell in love, maybe had children, possibly got engaged and may or may not married. And I thought THAT was complicated. But my children, if this song by Down With Webster is any indication, will have sex, meet, date, get famous, and marry:

Two months ago I saw your face, two weeks ago I’m at your place, two days ago I had you by the waist, the next thing you know we hit the floor, two days from now you’ll be my chick, two weeks from now I’ll make you famous, two months from now you’ll be my Miss, and we’ll throw it down, like we do now.”

Girls, marrying only two months after he’s made you famous is Just. Too. Early.  That’s my relationship advice.  And speaking of hitting the floor with strangers, here is another piece of precious relationship advice, this one inspired by Katy Perry’s summer smash hit California Girls: Waiting to have sex until you are (a) old enough; and (b) in a committed relationship, ideally married, means that you will be able to do it in the comfort of your own home. Not in a public place with your shoes on. *Cringe*:

Sex on a beach
We get sand in our stilettos”

Is it me or in real life, walking the beach in stilettos would earn you more laughs than indecent proposals??

Making waves in the cartoon section

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I learned how to read at an early age reading Tintin’s Les bijoux de la Castafiore. Since I am openly pro-life  I can’t quite say that I turned out all right. Maybe this steady diet of Hergé in my formative years is responsible for making me the angry ol’ white male mysoginist I have become. Still, I allow many of the books in my house, including Tintin au Congo, which is making waves this week in Hergé’s homeland.

How timely. My 13-year-old son — who also learned to read using subversive material like Tintin, I’m passing it on — was just mentioning the racist undertones in Tintin au Congo. When asked what he thought about it he shrugged and said: “That’s how they thought at the time, now we know better.” Yes indeed. I asked him: “Do you think we are passed that? What do you think we are doing now that our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will look at with scorn and say: “That’s how they thought at the time. Now we know better…” I think that our treatment of the unborn will shame us. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it will.

The fact is that the human species has a dismal track record when it comes to arbitrarily deciding what is deserving of moral status (or personhood) and what is not. We are on the winning side of this issue.

Sex-education in Ontario

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The latest round of sex-ed curriculum letters and columns in my local paper reflects some puzzlement at the McGuinty government’s whiplash-inducing flip-flop. For the record, regardless of the merits of the ex-new sex-ed curriculum, McGuinty should be voted off the island just for not seeing this coming. I have been receiving emails and invitations to protest the new curriculum since December. I’m sure Dalton has too.

What I should have seen coming was the portrayal of parents who opposed the changed to the Ontario sex-ed curriculum as knuckle-dragging right-wing bigots. Read the comments here , here , and to some extent here .

Count me in I guess; although anyone who has followed my posts about the birds and the bees knows that my children ask a lot of questions and I don’t sugar-coat anything. But believe me, when one of my pre-teens asked me how homosexuals conceived children since they couldn’t have intercourse and what’s the point of marrying someone you can’t have sex with, I wished I had a habit of making things up. Oh, look at the time… Anyway, these letter-writers all miss the point. I have no issue with my children knowing that their genitals won’t fall-off if they touch them or that homosexuals are not psychopaths. I don’t think that sex-ed is corrupting. I am not anti sex-ed, I am anti sex-ed curriculum. My kids’ sex-education is no government’s business. Sex-ed and curriculum are two words that shouldn’t go together. Like Public and Toilets.

But while letter-writers and columnists don’t get my point, I do get theirs and, believe it or not, the government’s. Unfortunately, many children do not get proper sex education at home. It’s like religion in Catholic schools: parents want their kids to have it, they just don’t want to teach it. Some children — yes, they are still children — are sexually active in grade 7 and 8. The hoopla over the HPV vaccine was based in part over the fact that grade 4 girls were vaccinated because after that we couldn’t be sure they were not already sexually active. That shows immense failure on the part of the parents, not the system. How are parents failing their children when it comes to sexual education? Is it MTV? Is it pop radio? Is it La Senza Girl? Is it American abstinence-only sex-ed policies? Honestly, I don’t really know. But I will grant my detractors that the rate of teenage pregnancy and abortion, and STD transmission is outrageous and no flattering reflection on parents or the state’s ability to handle the topic. It’s easy to blame your opponent when stats increase regardless. But while we’re talking, we are still failing our children.

Dalton, Dalton…

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Ontario Premier defends sex-ed curriculum. No big surprise there. But I had to give my head a shake (or two) when I heard this on the radio:

I think I speak with an understanding of the information available to children today. They are going to get this information. We [can] provide it in a format and in a venue in which we have some control, or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources like their friends at school.”

The revised curriculum, which will be implemented in Ontario schools beginning in the fall, will see Grade 3 students being taught about gender identity and sexual orientation. This is the first time this topic has been specified in the sex education curriculum.

Students in Grade 6 will learn about masturbation and wet dreams while those in Grade 7 will be taught about oral and anal sex.

I won’t argue that more sex-ed happens in school buses than I care to admit. However, there is a marked difference between a 7-grader telling her schoolmates about anal sex and learning about it in a classroom from a teacher. Being taught in school gives it a legitimacy that school-bus discussions do not. My children have heard things in the bus that I would never have taught them myself but because they had received this information from unreliable sources, they asked us parents about it.  This is where the school should not usurp the parents’ better judgment, beliefs and values. My children, my house, my spin. Or is this what Dalton really means when he says “uninformed sources?”

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Brigitte wonders: So, what’s the next logical step? If we really do care about children getting as much accurate and reliable information about sex as early as possible, why aren’t they staging live demonstrations (along with practice sessions) supervised by licensed experts right there in the classroom?

Left, right, and centre

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I really enjoyed this column from Leonard Stern in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen.

I always thought that the environment — in this case the development of sustainable communities that are not so car-dependent —  shouldn’t be a matter of right or left. I really get going when science gets tossed right or left. Granted, politically-motivated scientists are largely to blame for placing climate change on the political spectrum. However, in theory, the scientifically measurable effects of suburban sprawl  shouldn’t hinge on one’s political views. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that these issues are beyond debate. I just have an issue with those who hold that you can’t believe in climate change — for instance —  if you are conservative, you can’t doubt climate change if you are liberal. Wait a minute, one has nothing to do with the other except the color of the bandwagon.

It’s like abortion. Does it matter to the humanity of the fetus whether you are right or left? Does the fetus feel more or less pain if you are conservative or liberal? The fetus is alive or it isn’t. It feels pain or it doesn’t. Get your facts straight, then make a case.

Two mothers, really?

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Today’s papers are reporting that two-mother embryos may help to end hereditary diseases. Nice headline but not quite true. Before you jump to conclusions and set your hair on fire, be aware that women are not about to start self-reproducing and vote men off the island. This two-mother gig still starts with a sperm-fertilized egg. So really, the embryos are mother-father-then-add-another-mother fertilized. Read on, from the National Post:

The scientists take a fertilized egg from a mother with malfunctioning mitochondria, and extract the healthy part of its DNA that contains all the information on how her child will develop. Then, they take a fertilized egg from a donor mother which is stripped of almost all of its DNA, leaving just the shell containing its healthy mitochondria “battery.”

And it should probably be added that the touted elimination of hereditary diseases is for that particular egg only. Granted, if enough babies are fertilized in petrie dishes without hereditary diseases, the diseases will eventually be uprooted. But my uneducated feeling — watching music videos and listening to pop radio and occasionally browsing entertainment news and teen pregnancies stats — tells me that there is still plenty of sex happening the good ole’ fashioned way.

Brave or nuts? That is the question

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When I read this article about having children and career, it was like the journalist had picked my brain (wait a minute, I don’t have any left…) during my sleep (er, what sleep?). In fact, I started writing a blog post raising the same issues a month ago. But my frustration got the best of me and after 1500 raving-ranting words, I decided to spare PWPL.

Where to start? First, she is right. About everything. About gaping resumes. About “doing time” in jobs for which we are overqualified. About having to gain the trust of our employers after putting our family first. About refusing promotions for unclear reasons.

What does this all mean? Does it mean that raising children is not valuable, productive work? Why is it so wrong if maternity and motherhood affect women more than men?

Well, it’s a question of measure. What the author takes issue with — and what I certainly have a bone to pick about — is not so much that young children cramp our style for a couple of years but that these years seem to extend way past early childhood. Motherhood marks you in two major ways that are not directly related to the demands of young children. First, motherhood leaves a gap of productivity in your resume. This gap  has nothing to do with actual productivity while your career is slowing down to a crawl. It only means that this new kind of productivity and life experience is not recognized by the workplace. Secondly, motherhood marks you because you are assumed to be unable to take on as much as your child-less or male colleagues. I had this discussion recently with my child-less male colleague: maybe I cannot take on as much but it should be my choice. When have I not picked up my Blackberry on evenings and weekends? When have I missed a deadline? And last night at 1 am, when I was touching-up some communications material for a morning announcement, it was my sleep I was sacrificing. Not my colleague’s, not my kids’, not my boss’.

What frustrates me is not that motherhood makes a difference but that it doesn’t need to make as big a difference as it does. With today’s communications tools, why do I need to pass up a promotion because I cannot make the 7 am management meeting? Or because I cannot travel for meetings? Why do the years spent at home managing not-for-profit sports organizations, school meetings and family vacations count as “productive gap”? When I get up at 5:30 am every morning of every week and manage to feed 8 people three square meals a day, run 20 km a week, work 40+ hours and keep the sanitary authorities from closing down my kitchen and bathrooms — and much more — I don’t feel unproductive, far less! Why does the job market see me as a slacker?

Why?

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Andrea adds: Let’s stir things up a little, shall we? Let me take the perspective of the single, childless sucker who can go in early, also stay late, make every meeting, put in overtime, do the weekends… and does not get the joy of children in his/her life, in fact goes home to eat cereal hunched over the sink for dinner…Should someone who needs negotiations and special deals, can’t be present at various meetings and may or may not need to take off at a moment’s notice to care for child X, Y or Z  get promoted over that person? Maybe. I don’t rule it out. But the point is the workplace doesn’t owe any of us anything. We earn the right to be there. If I happen to realize I work for Ebenezer Scrooge who won’t let me get a new coal scuttle, I leave. Or I choose a workplace with rules I like. Or I create the work environment I like by starting my own business.

I just think we as humans make choices and generally speaking, we can’t do it all on Tuesday.

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Véronique adds: To this I would reply that it is not about making it to X,Y, Z  commitment or letting your child-less colleague pick-up the slack. Of course, if you do the work you shouldn’t be passed-up for promotion by someone who doesn’t.

But the problem arises when you do the work and are passed-up (or not even considered) for promotion because you have children or because you took time-off to stay with your children when they were young. When you start questioning the status quo, you realize that many hiring/staffing rules don’t make sense; it’s just the way things are. For instance, I recently had to pass-up a great job for which I was perfectly qualified but lacked experience. I was sure I could figure it out quickly, given my life experience. And if anybody had given me an interview, they would have seen it too. But I wasn’t even considered. Why? Because I was home for 2 of the 5 years of required experience. That’s what gets me. So now I am “doing time” in a job for which I am so overqualified, it’s not even funny. I am so overqualified that I don’t even get considered for interviews: people know I am just “passing by” on my way to something better. Truly, I am just about to drop the Masters’ degree in law and the University teaching experience part of my resume. It scares employers.

As for leaving a job you are unhappy with or choosing a workplace with rules you like, come on! Have you looked for work lately? My job is paying the mortgage on the house that shelters my 6 children. I am not about to get fussy about the new coal scuttle!

Overqualified and all, I like my job: I have the best boss and the best colleague. I am not bitter, just frustrated.

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Andrea adds: But this is my point! Those childless suckers “did the time.” They spent the hours getting other people coffee. Fact checking until 3 am. Being available for more and more work that was “below them” too. And then someone else enters the scene: someone with experience but of a very different kind. And if they are never given the chance to start where said childless sucker did ten years ago, then that is wrong. But if they aren’t willing to start where said childless sucker did, years ago…then that is a different question. My point here is that life looks differently–could a woman or man who takes ten years out of the working world possibly be in the same position as someone who didn’t? How would that be fair?

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Veronique adds:  You are misunderstanding my point. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair. I am not saying that mothers shouldn’t expect to bring their boss’ coffee. I have no problem with “doing time” and I don’t consider my work to be “below me.” I take pride in doing the best job I possibly can getting my boss’ dry cleaning. My problem is when “doing time” is as good as it gets. Mothers do the time – the fact checking at 3 am, the coffee, the dry cleaning run – but don’t get ahead because they have family obligations. Even if these obligations don’t get in the way, even if they get the job done.

I was thinking about this whole issue while making supper tonight. Returning to work after having children is like being an immigrant in a foreign land. You used to be a doctor or an engineer. You leave on a journey to another country. When you get there, your diploma is no longer worth the paper it’s printed on. Your credentials are not recognized. Your experience is not acknowledged. You tell people that a broken arm or the laws of physics do not change essentially between two countries. Nobody believes you. Or they pretend to believe you but never give you the chance to prove it. When you finally find work sweeping the floors at a clinic you tell yourself that you will move up and show them what you are capable of. When you apply for the receptionist’s job, they tell you that you don’t have the appropriate experience. You try to explain that you have been sweeping the floor in the receptionist’s office for 5 years, you know you can do the job. Nope. You ask if you could help the receptionist and gain experience. You are told that people in your country of origin are known to have long afternoon naps and since the receptionist works afternoons, well… we don’t think you’ll be able to pull it off. It sounds extreme but I have been in jobs interviews like that.

Making us proud

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Today on Parliament Hill, Conservative MP Helena Guergis faced a barrage of criticism during Question Period over a letter-writing campaign initiated by one two of her constituency staff. You can read about the incident here. Among the niceties heaped on Guergis during QP were accusations of shaming all women by her callous behaviour. I don’t remember who these “questions” came from but they were from the general vicinity of the cheerful abortion bunch. You know, the “abortion-saves-lives” ladies?

Am I ashamed to be a woman because Helena Guergis has well-meaning-yet-misguided staff? Not really. Am I ashamed to be a woman because Helena Guergis had a hissy fit at an airport? Bah. No. There is more to being a woman than getting a grip on one’s temper. I mean, is a man with bad B.O. a dishonour to all men? Didn’t think so.

But if you want to speak about women doing disservice to all women, why don’t we look at more substantial issues. Like last week’s comments by Carolyn Bennett, And if you think that this attitude is isolated, what do you think of this one by Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo:

… look at the vast majority of folk who take time off on leave to look after their children. The vast majority of them are women. In their most productive professional years they have to take a year off, or sometimes more-many women take more-when men are still working. And those productive lags are what hurt women.

Thank you for reiterating that motherhood is not real — productive — work. Maybe what hurts women more is not the productive lag but the people, like MPP diNovo, who keep reminding the world that mothers are only worth as much as their paycheque.

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