The Unschool Bus

Over the past several months, Fisher has developed a very keen interest in machines. This past January, I couldn’t pull him away from watching a guy use a snowblower on the substantial driveway of one of our neighbour’s homes. And now he loves to watch trucks, buses, vans, tractors and even cars go by, and he likes to feel the wheels of vehicles whenever he gets a chance, figuring out how they work on his toys, already making engine sounds when he pushes his little cars along the floor. This interest comes straight from him; I have subjected him to all kinds of playthings, not just male-oriented toys. He still loves it when we read to him, and those sappy “Franklin” stories are among his favourite books, but he also likes to climb, pushing the threshold of his agility, and turning things over in his hands to see how they work.

My dad said that when he was a child, he would take things apart and try to put them back together. I think Fisher inherited this trait (as well as my dad’s ears!), and it’s fun watching the interest in his eyes as he figures something out. The best thing I can do right now is to let him take that interest as far as it will go because not only does it keep his attention, but it also builds up his thought processes and connections. And best of all, he’s getting really good at deciding where he should start to uncover the mechanisms behind machines.

Yesterday my sister and I took Fisher to a local mall for a bit of shopping. We passed these coin-operated rides, and Fisher enjoyed sitting in the car and pretending to drive. We didn’t have the right change to get it to actually move around, so when we took him out of it and promised to come back, he got really upset and tried for quite a while to escape our grasp and get back to the car ride. After some shopping, we made our way back to the rides with some Loonies in hand and eagerly put Fisher back in the car ride. We turned it on, but he was non-plussed by the experience. I then put him into the motor boat ride and slipped my coin in, and once we finally got it unstuck and moving, he didn’t seem to enjoy the time he spent there either. So with one more coin in my pocket, I tried to put him back in the car ride, and he would have none of it. He kept walking around it, turning the wheels and trying to figure out what was up with this completely unpredictable vehicle. I tried a couple more times to see if he wanted to ride the car again, and he simply refused. He wasn’t scared, he was just puzzled, and understandably so when you think about it. He likes to ride in the car and he likes to ride in his stroller most of the time. Both vehicles get him somewhere when he’s in them, with scenery to observe while he travels. The fake car bopped around (it was a jeep moving as though it were jostling through the jungle), but didn’t take him anywhere and didn’t make any normal car sounds or movements, leaving Fisher unamused and confused. This event reminded me of one important child-rearing tenet I take quite seriously: children, especially very young ones, are not easily fooled and we should never disrespect their innate sense of “rightness” by attempting to fool them. Eric has tried various times to trick Fisher into eating something that we felt was good for him, or just to eat something when he didn’t want to eat anything, and it has never worked. Not only that, but I myself felt the fool for thinking we could possible know what Fisher needs better than he himself does.

So, it seems that our unschooling experience with Fisher has finally and truly begun, now that he has shown real interest in something. And as hard as it is sometimes allowing him to lead the way when I have things like time constraints and my own interests to consider, I’ve already noticed a difference in my perspective. I mean honestly, I’m at home with Fisher and don’t feel I need to be cleaning the house every minute, so what else do I have to do but to raise this incredible child? Not a whole hell of a lot, I tell ya. I must admit that I still struggle a lot with my conditioned reaction of saying “no” when I feel the least bit of resistance to going along with Fisher’s needs/wishes, but I’m conscious of it and catch myself “in the act”, as it were. Often I’m saying “no” for really no good reason except that what he wants might be ever so slightly inconvenient (and usually it isn’t even that, I’m just saying “no” for apparently no reason at all), which is a remnant of my own upbringing. In the process of learning to become the mother I want to be for Fisher, I’m also a more forgiving of my own short-comings, which I want for him as well. With each day, we work at each other a little more, finding tiny paths to enlightenment as we grow in and out beyond our relationship.

Who am I, again?

I was watching a DVD with Eric last night, and during one of the previews a character says to her brother, “Maybe Dad didn’t abandon us, he just forgot who we were”. I laughed when I heard this statement, and immediately thought of my mother.

To say that my mother abandoned my sister and me is to exaggerate quite a bit. She never left us, per se, except when she went to work, and she kind of abandoned us only half way emotionally. I don’t want to be unfair to her, but to some degree my mother did forget us simply by keeping her thoughts constantly occupied with other things and rarely spending time with us just for the sake of enjoying our company. She left the house at 7am every weekday morning and came home at 6pm every evening when we were growing up, and shipped us off to language classes on Saturday mornings and church on Sunday mornings so that if she didn’t have time to spend teaching us something, at least she could allay her guilt a little by hoping that we were getting some good learning experiences somewhere else. Any time that we were all home together was used to clean the house (which was very difficult to get me to do), watching TV (maybe I should have put this one first), finding ways to amuse ourselves, or we would go on Sunday drives through the countryside because there’s nothing better than having two kids who can’t stand each other be confined in a car. We spent entirely too much time in a car growing up, and don’t even get me started on the drives across the country during summer vacation. And all of this would have been a little more tolerable had my mother not been so goddamn fake about everything. She spoke in an unnaturally high voice, always smiling and pretending that everything was just “great”. People with whom she associated outside the family thought she was the kindest, dearest, happiest person in the world, but I’m sure they must have felt that there was something off, that she wasn’t real. And in hindsight I see that most people didn’t really involve her in any meaningful interaction, and she was often hurt by people who basically felt uncomfortable with her phony niceness (though they didn’t know it) and didn’t respond to her the way she had expected when she was so nice to everyone.

But back to my childhood. My mother tried harder to be attentive with me, especially in the early years, than she did with my sister, and I can understand why, my being the first on the scene and all. But as the years went on, it seemed she could relate to me less and less, and given how unhappy she was with my father, how troubled she was with a past she couldn’t put to bed (though hardly talked about), and constantly worrying about every Tom, Dick and Harry’s opinion of her, it’s not surprising that the kids who came into her life quite late and only gave her more to worry about might be pushed aside for far more crucial concerns. Like housekeeping, like writing letters to relatives, and like falling asleep in front of the TV by 8pm. And like avoiding reality at all costs. She was incredibly tired by the end of the day, and it’s really no wonder why.

And you know, despite the tone of what I’m writing here, I don’t blame her anymore for what happened when I was her child. She kept her mind as busy as possible as a way of coping with the things she couldn’t deal with, and they were many. And the more the years piled on, the more there was to avoid as new issues came up and went unresolved, and the lurking pain deepened. I don’t think that what happened was okay, but since giving birth to Fisher especially, and as time has progressed since then, so has my sense of understanding and forgiveness.

Despite what she may have unwittingly expected from having a child, I wasn’t born to be my mother’s therapist, and while I take pity on her most of the time, I certainly don’t feel responsible anymore for the dysfunction that existed long before I did. My refusal to be put upon in that way is what has made only a superficial interaction possible between the two of us, and I still feel a lot of pain because of the strained relationship, since birth it seems, I’ve had with my her. But in slowly undoing my mother’s forgetting, I am remembering myself. And in remembering myself, I am assuring Fisher of a “present” mother who not only remembers who he is, but helps him remember, too.

Motherblogger!

I would like to take a moment to say that I detest the term “Mommy Blog”, which is used to label the kind of blog written by mothers about their children. To me it sounds condescending, in a “isn’t that cute, now she’s writing about her widdle kiddies!” kind of way. It’s almost as bad as the media-fueled “Mommy Wars”, a title which refers to the debate between mothers of the “working” and “stay-at-home” camps who find it necessary to prove the other side “misguided” in their choices. I think the latter is a satirical term that was dreamed up to mock a debate that many mothers take seriously, and like children who aren’t heard, the “Mommy Wars” designation only makes those who choose to participate that much more determined to fight the ‘good’ fight. Women prejudging each other; gee, now there’s something the world needs more of! Keep those presses running!

But back to the Mommy Blogs thing. I do write about my boy Fisher, and while I try to have a particular angle to my blog instead of just using it as a forum to vent about anything that comes to mind, I think this blog falls under the Mommy Blog label. What would be a better label? I’m still thinking about it.

And I read recently that there is some debate about how healthy and safe it is for the children of Mommy Bloggers, especially of those who reach a level of renown, to have their lives broadcast on the Internet. It’s like being the child of a celebrity, only stories of your upbringing are being openly shared with the world, often with accompanying photos. And what will be the fallout for those children of celebrity Mommy Bloggers, I wonder? I guess we can only wait and see, but I know that the bloggers in question don’t share all, or even most, of what goes on in their families’ lives, and if their children wished to no longer be discussed on the Internet, I’m hopeful that most of these mothers would stop doing so. But I have to say that while posting pictures of your child undoubtedly boosts ratings, and giving readers that “come have coffee in my living room” sense by giving away a lot of personal details helps keep that advertising money coming in, to me it’s not worth sacrificing your family’s privacy to pay the bills. Maybe I feel this way because I’m not looking to make money from this blog or to draw the entire world’s attention to my family (otherwise I would spend a lot more time posting regularly). Or maybe I’m just jealous of those mothers who have the confidence/megalomania/business savvy to say, “come look at me raising my kid, Stranger!”. Whatever the reason, I will never post pictures of Fisher (aside from the one in the header) on this blog because it’s really not important what the subject of my writing looks like. Unless you know him personally he’d be just another kid in a picture, and why degrade the special quality his image has for me by advertising that he is the kid I’m writing about, and who I’m writing about mostly for personal purposes. The only reason I post my thoughts on the Internet is in case there are a few like-minded/interested readers who would like to take a peek into my world and see how yet another person progresses through one particular aspect of her life. Communities are a good thing, even virtual ones, but it is possible to get too big and to lose sight of what we’re actually doing here, and that is to raise a child. I’ve always thought that my work should come second to Fisher’s interests, and blogging is no exception. And I want my writing to help you use your imagination, to think of Fisher as though he were your own child. By avoiding providing too many particularities (especially including his actual appearance), my words will mean that much more (or less, if my stories bear no relevance to your life).

I guess some of this argument stems from my distaste of seeing authors’ photos printed on the back covers of their published books. This may seem completely absurd, but seeing the face of the person who wrote the book brings up all kinds of judgments I naturally make about the person based on his or her appearance, and it kind of changes the content a little for me. It’s like falling in love with someone’s e-mails and then seeing his face for the first time on a dating service. You already have a picture in your head of what the person looks like, and you can’t help but be disappointed in varying degrees with the live person you then behold. I’m sure there are all kinds of arguments one can make about this stupid little point, but I can only say how I feel about it. So that’s why you won’t find a Flickr link on my blog, nor will it ever pay for my house. Too bad, really, but such is my take on the this topic.