Mama Bean knows Papa Bean is a complicated man

The other day, I broke the stove. I had the coffee maker plugged into the stove-top outlet, and then I was cooking some soup, but I turned on the wrong element, and it zapped the coffee maker cord and the outlet (and the lights for the oven.) (No lectures.) (Even PB didn't lecture me when I told him. He knows lectures don't work for me. They just make me feel like shit and mope and cry and mope some more.) In fact, what he did when I told him is calmly reach over and open the top of the panel, which I didn't even know could be opened and pull out the fuse (or, fancy lightbulb, as I call it in my head) that was blown, so we could buy a new one.

How did he know that?!?

Secret man knowledge, I tell ya. Like his man hands. I like to think of myself as a fairly strong person, with strong hands, too. I work with my hands all day. I'm an accomplished pianist. I have strong hands. But I cannot lift furniture by just, like, gripping it with flat hands and carrying it around. I don't have hands like that. I call them Papa Bean's man hands, and when he expects me to just pick up a piece of furniture with flat side and no little ledge to hook my fingers under, I just mumble manhands under my breath. And when he flips open parts of appliances I have broken to fix them with random bits of machinery, I whisper manknowledge.

Okay, but then tonight I shared a kpop video on his facebook wall, because I know he likes kpop. It's not often I run across the stuff in my internet perusing, because my web-tribe just ain't into it, but anyway, there it was. And I was so tickled to share it, because even though I don't like it, I like to show that I love and care for his kooky tastes. (Turns out the song was even worse that that tripe usually is.) So he meanders over eventually and then says, "Would it be kinda sad or totally awesome if I told you I already know that song?" 

A complicated man, my husband.

Mama Bean didn't know how painful parenting would be

What a loaded title for a post, eh?

Don't worry, this isn't heavy today. This isn't about how parenting is so emotionally weighty, how there are pieces of our hearts transplanted into these tiny, fragile bodies, wandering around outside our bodies, bumping into crap and making mistakes, etc. This is not about that.

This isn't even about how Bean is a physical toddler who needs to run and jump and throw and push and hurt things and people because he has no impulse control and can't always make himself understood and probably wonders if anyone in his life really loves him. This isn't about getting beaned in the head with cars and books and other hard objects periodically.

I just didn't know how much their little bodies would end up colliding with mine, accidentally, but nonetheless, painfully. How they will constantly, with perfect timing, throw their heads up just as you are bending your head down, to connect poignantly at the bridge of your nose, where the burning blinding pain will last for minutes, but no matter, you can't stop, you still have to put the shoe on/pick up the dropped food/kiss the scraped knee. Or how their sticky little feet would shudder like a "snakebite" across your bare leg or arm, as they step on/over you for hugs, for better access to the book, to reach the car you just took away and put on the windowsill. Or how pointy their limbs are, their elbows and knees and feet and even their funny pointy bums, digging into your ribs and legs and arms, as you dress them, hug them, comfort them, wrestle them, or just lie on the floor in exhaustion and allow them to climb all over you, it doesn't even matter anymore.

It's just a little bruising, is all.

(When I shared this with a patient of mine, an older mom whose children are grown and married and almost parents themselves, she kind of said, "Oh, I guess I just didn't let my kids, like, do that." And then she had the grace to stop herself, because I guess she realized how unhelpful that was.)

Mama Bean has straight hair, if you're wondering

You know that old adage, women with straight hair want curly, and those with curly wish it were straight? It's true, right, on both sides of that fence, we spend ridiculous amounts of money to get the hair we don't have. It's funny.

Or, you know the other one, smart women wish they were beautiful, and beautiful women wish they were smarter? I think that was on Ally McBeal once. It's a truism, too, in its own way. Many people have written many doctoral theses that treat the topic with more finesse that I can in a little blog post. I'm just running off the ones I can think of off the top of my head. 

The other day, after talking with my best friend (on a glorious one-night respite in the southeastern corner of my fair province, roughly halfway between our two homes), I thought of another one. Crafty moms wish they read more, and reading moms wish they crafted more.

Or, you know, fill in the blanks with whatever significant or insignificant mommy-war dichotomy you wish. Moms who commit their time and effort to A wish they had leftover time and effort to also do B, and vice versa, because lord knows we all have to bend over backwards to Do All and Be All in our effort to martyr ourselves on motherhood's doorstep for the sake of our children.

We live in a grass-is-always-greener kind of world.

I was thinking about this in relation to my work-life balance (oh that elusive beast...) I stay-home and work-out-of-home, both. Only it doesn't count, either way. Because I don't stay home all the time, so I'm not a real SAHM, and I have no authority or right to make commentary as though I have any clue what being a SAHM is really like. Obviously. But I'm also not out of the home all the time, I get to be home sometimes, so I don't really know what being a WOHM is like. I can't talk about any challenges I feel from SAHMing because I'm only doing it halftime. I can't talk about any mommy-guilt or professional-consequences I face from WOHMing because I'm only doing it halftime. This is the I-get-both-sides-of-the-grass scenario. It is not green.

Anyway, I don't know why I felt the need to write that down. My hair is straight, and I do wish it were curlier. I am smart, and I feel beautiful 4 or 5 days out of 10. I craft (less than I'd like) and I never have time to read (do blogs count? lol) And I'm a SAHWOHsomesuch /sigh. Mommy wars are pointless.

Mama Bean is a Narrative and a Statistic

You know what's great about the internet? No matter what your Weirdness, someone else has it, too. And they've got a blog or a tumblr or a pinboard, and inter-kismet will bring y'all together. It's the way of the (brave new) world. The internet makes bell curves come alive - your weirdness is just the centre of some weird bell curve, populated by a bunch of other weird people who are all, on average weird like you. Bell. Community. Interwebz are Love.

As a new mom, a young mom, and inexperiencedandbaffledandtired mom, finding my Self on another's blog, seeing myself in a meme, hearing my voice in someone else's post, holy shit was that a relief. Like whoooooosh   ...   relief. And then? I get to interact and comment and like things? I get to have a voice, too? And you're gonna agree with me? And affirm me? Wha? Ohshityes, sign. me. up.

But it doesn't stay that way. Or rather, this brave new world, this virtual group parenting, this Cloud Parenting, it's a double edged sword. Because, even when we share weirdness, we remain individuals. And in one way or another, there will be clashes, differences, confrontations. And there will be Trolls.

I was chatting with a friend about how frustrating it is when someone extrapolates their parenting experience out to the Whole. I'm not talking about the Well-meaners offering (unsolicited or not) advice. I mean the people who seem to misapprehend that the way they are living Parenthood is not the way everyone lives Parenthood. That, in fact, every child is different, and every mother, too, and every family and community beyond that, too also.

It starts to feel like you're being judged, because your experience doesn't look like theirs, and for whatever reason (familiarity?) they'd prefer if you looked like them. The scientist in me wants to scream at them (a little, just a little), "You have a sample size of ONE! That is not actual evidence. Anecdotes are not CONCLUSIVE!"

This is the paradox of Cloud Parenting. On the one hand, this blessing, this relief of finding your Tribe, where you feel your choices and preferences and experiences are accepted, where you belong. On the other hand, this struggle to assert your individuality, and its worth, to hold up your Story over and against the bell curve. It's a tension, and this generation of parents has to learn to navigate it in ways the grandparents did not.

I'm just saying, when I feel like myself or my kids are being outliers in some worrisome way, I am grateful for the opportunity to find some corner of the internet that affirms we are just plain normal. Or at least, we are statistically Within Range of normal. But, the power of the Cloud doesn't negate or lessen or cheapen our Shine - we are still sparkling shining snowflakes of specialness. And so there, I am grateful for the opportunity to just smoodge all over myself about our Sparkle in my corner of the internet. But I shouldn't fear that anyone's particular story sets a statistical standard for me to live up to.

I don't feel like I'm getting this out very well. I just wanted to say that there's a tension between the opportunities provided by the Internet to a) express one's (parenting, religious, whatever) Narrative as unique and special and b) find one's (parenting, religious, whatever) Group as inclusive and homogeneous at the same time. It's a tension that didn't exist for previous generations. That's all I'm saying.

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (without the Inadvertent Farmer this year)

The Inadvertent Farmer has gone MIA, so she's not hosting the KinderGARDEN blog carnival as in years past, but I still have a garden and I still have kids, so I'm carrying on the spirit of it, and praying everything is alright in her neck of the woods.

This collage shows (clockwise from top left): yellow zucchini, onion flower, teeny tiny beginning cucumbers, thinned carrots, Papa Bean watering the jungles, mini brown pepper, Hungarian yellow wax pepper, green zucchini. PB is watering the potato bed there, which also has the cucumber plants that are unfortunately shaded by the potato plants. They are very short, but with lots of flowers, so hopefully they still fruit. The middle bed has a tomato jungle that I cut back (drastically) tonight, tying up escaped branches and centering tilting cages - I will never underestimate indeterminate tomatoes again, we are concocting some sort of crazy heavy duty cages next year. There are also green beans in the middle bed, which we ate stir fried with shrimp for dinner tonight.

 

This is the third bed. The peas along the trellis are pretty much done, they were sweet and lovely, little Sprout loves to pick them one by one out of the shell. She also loves when mommy takes a pile out of the shell and she can stuff them all in her mouth at once. Bean kept asking for peas, but not really eating them. There are four out-of-control tomato plants at the end, and then rows of carrots, lettuce, parsnips, and beets. I have taken out the two rows of spinach because they bolted before I could eat it. If I ever try to grow spinach again, I'm planting it somewhere really shaded, summers are too hot here otherwise.

 

Here's a parade of my tomatoes, of which I am ridiculously proud :) First are the Green Zebras.

 

These are called Hawaiian Pineapple. They are oddly pale, and multi-lobulated (?)

 

This is the Nyagous plant, which has the most tomatoes by far of all the plants. It has crazy escapee branches going all over the place, trailing on the ground. I'm worried the tomatoes higher up will weigh the branches down too much, I'll be watching this plant very closely.

 

Black Cherry. I am fascinated at how, even as unripe green tomatoes, they all look so different.

 

This is called Japanese Black Trifele. I love the unique pear shape.

 

These are Green Bulgarians, they look a lot like the Green Zebras.

 

Tomatoes not pictured: Persimmon, which has no flowers or fruit on it yet :( Carbon black, sungold, sun sugar, and sweet 100s. If anyone from KinderGARDENs still reads here, please leave and comment with your own gardening post, I'd love to catch up with your gardens and kiddos this year!

Mama Bean is flipping the virtual bird at that creepy guy...

Today, I did week 5 day 3 of couch-to-5K, which is jogging for 20 minutes (or 3.2 km). When I was about halfway, I turned at the corner into this little parking lot that opens onto the end of a field across from our community centre. There was an SUV parked there, young 20s-ish guy sitting there with the window open. I jogged past, and he gave me a really creepy once-over, with his hand over his mouth in the universal gesture for I'm-a-super-creep-who-sees-you-as-an-object. (It's sometimes used by handsome actor types when they're trying to be sultry-meets-bashful, you know, the Canadian Ryans - Gosling and Reynolds - they're masters of it. Now you have it in your mind? It was creepy.) I jogged across the parking lot and field, cut across the alley and open lot onto the road by the school, and back up to the community arteriole (not quite a main drag, but those that live in the community use it to avoid the traffic on the main drag, you know?) About two blocks down, I feel before I see the same SUV drive slowly up behind me. And then he paces me. Just driving next to me, looking out his window, waiting for me to acknowledge him. I sort of just looked at him, and he did a weird nod, and kept pacing me. I was really scared. And then he turned at the next intersection away from me. And I remained scared all the way home.

I think the adrenaline of fear is the only reason I made it all 20 minutes. And for the first time since we've lived here, I found the quiet peacefulness of our street ("Oh what a nice quiet street!") to be threatening. Too quiet. Too alone. I have never been more relieved, for reasons totally unrelated to how tired my legs might be, to walk into my garage. And lock the door behind me.

You know, when I saw him sitting at the opening of the parking lot, I should have jogged straight to Main Street, a block away, and jogged home the long way along it, the busiest road in the city. I should not have cut through the empty lot. I should have stayed on the side of the side street with houses, so I could easily run up to a yard or front door, should he have re-appeared, instead of running on the side with the school. I should have looked at his fucking license plate! I should have flipped him the bird, or asked if he needed directions. I should have taken my ipod off so I could hear what was going on around me. I should have stopped that women with the two big dogs and asked her to turn around, out of her way, and walk the rest of the way home with me. I should have, could have done so many things differently.

And now I'm left shaken, agitated. Worried about going jogging again, in this neighbourhood I've always felt is so safe. I run when it's light out. I don't take the same route every day (I do three days/one week along one route, and then switch it up.) I resent that I feel the need to make these precautions, because I'm a woman, because I'm a target. I resent it but do it anyway. 

All before I even consider that this creepy guy exists in a world where my perfect, innocent children also exist. And then my head and my heart implode, and I have to stop thinking about this... sometimes, I hate this world.

Mama Bean spends too much time thinking about her garden late at night

 

We grew our first garden in the summer of 2009, when I was pregnant with Bean. This is our fourth summer of growing, and I am starting to feel like a Real Gardener! The best parts of this year of gardening will be: a) no more community plot and b) children who aren't babies anymore. We loved the community garden idea, but in practice, it was impossible to dedicate enough time to keep it even slightly weed free, and there were frustrating time constraints imposed by the communal nature of it, instead of imposed by, like, Nature. And with a baby each summer, having to travel to the garden wasn't working. I grew more food in my little 48 square foot bed out back, because I could tend it during naps and short breaks, and mornings and evenings, without having to drive somewhere, or make sure another adult was around to be with the kids. So, we've built two more beds, we have kids who play relatively independently, though Sprout has an unfortunate predilection for eating topsoil, and we have three years of gardening experience that lets us make somewhat more educated guesses about what will fit where and grow satisfactorily in our various flower beds, too. I want to do a sort of info dump post, more for my own reference, because we've already done a lot of work this year, and I want somewhere to remember it. Sorry if it's boring!

 

This is the original raised bed. We are growing peas along the south edge, and then short rows of carrots (3 varieties, including purple) lettuce, parsnip, spinach, and beets. I've planted two successions so far, you can see the first group at the end. I ended up with too many tomato plants (more on that later) so I've stuck four plants at the near end of this bed, which means I won't plant the third succession of greens/roots as planned. It will probably be okay, because we don't necessarily eat that many greens, but I will find creative ways to get more carrots somewhere, possibly the potato box. The tomatoes in this box are sun sugars, a delicious orange hybrid cherry that I searched high and low for, a carbon black tomato, and supersweet 100 (another cherry).

 

This is what is happening to my greens, especially my spinach - it is being devoured by the rabbit that lives in or near our yard *very very angry* It has eaten my spinach, lettuce, some peas, most of my soy, and some beans. I bought more of the dog gone coleus to stink them away, but they don't seem to care (more on that later). We may end up just building a fence around the whole darn assembly :( Harumph!

 

This is the primary tomato bed, there are eight plants: green zebra and green bulgarian, persimmon and hawaiian pineapple, sungold (a parent plant of the sun sugar hybrid) and black cherry, Japanese black trifele and nyagous (both black tomatoes). These are mostly heirloom types, and I got them for free from a lovely retired gentlemen who grows them for fun and gives them away, simply to keep the heirloom varieties alive. I would spend a fortune on these plants in the greenhouses, so I was tickled to get them, have nursed them very very diligently, and will probably keep the seed from them, too. He also gave me a red bell pepper, mini brown pepper, and hungarian yellow wax pepper, which I've planted in pots, and already have flowers (!) (He also gave me a ground cherry plant, but it's not doing so great in the flower bed where I found room for it, I don't think it's getting enough sun.) 

Next to this bed, you can see our third raised bed, which has a row of cucumbers along the northern edge. These will be trellised up that black fence looking thing, which is actually our broken futon frame that we took apart and re-purposed (and I think it looks really handsome.) The rest of that bed is potatoes: purple viking, alta blush (an Albertan variety!), and red norland. Eight plants of each. I think I will encircle or sprinkle freely carrot seeds around this bed, because we like our carrots. Unfortunately this bed is riddled with quack grass, I don't think it grew up from under the cardboard we laid down at the bottom of the bed, I think seeds were in the clippings/leaves we threw on there to compost during the winter. Hopefully digging up the potato harvest will also dig up all the grass root runners in the fall.

 

This is not a vegetable bed, I call it my fairy garden. Along the back are my stolen ferns which have flourished to nine plants this year (despite nearly drying to death in last year's hot summer when I completely neglected them), then some lamium, irises I just transplanted this year, and hostas that went crazy and spread I don't know how, and a new bugleweed plant I bought to fill in the front. I used to have lamb's ear there, but it died this winter, and I also used to have phlox there, but it also died or got choked out by grass. I want to get a few gnomes or fairies or something to go with my hippo friend (in the bottom right corner).

Our other flowers beds have giant mutant rhubarb plants, hostas, peonies, raspberry plants, alium and lilies, chives and irises, and I planted some zucchini. One section of irises needs to be thinned, not sure where to, maybe along the alley, maybe to the front? Our lily bed is being over-shaded by a lilac bush, and the lilies are being eaten by the scarlet lily beetle, which only just made inroads to this province recently. I may move them to our front garden beds, if I can find room (!).

 

I found seven baby rabbits in a shallow nest under my phlox in the shaded bed by the lilac bush. The same stupid rabbit built a nest in this phlox last year. It may in fact be two rabbits, male and female, though I didn't think they raised young together, but why would two females be tending the same nest? (I watched them explore the destroyed nest, the one seemed distinctly more frantic then the other, at one point it turned on the other one, and sort of scratched the top of its head, and then they both ran away.) They are not afraid of me, particularly when it comes to protecting the nest. They both brazenly jumped into the bed with the spinach while I was working at the other end planting tomatoes, as though to announce, here I am. And then one of them hopped through the potato bed right next to the coleus plant, so it obvious doesn't stink enough to really bother them. GAH! As far as I'm concerned, they are the same as vermin. I tried laying some thorny branches from our rose bush over the spinach and lettuce rows, only to look out later and see the #$&^$ creature sitting pretty between the branches, eating more of my spinach. GAH AGAIN! Not sure what to try next, likely a fence, but worried they'll just dig up my lawn to get under it.

In the front yard, we have two flowers beds on either side of the front steps. To the left (facing) there's a large rose bush we finally trimmed and tied back. Papa Bean evened out the top soil we unceremoniously dumped on the beds and weeded, too. We trimmed the scary bush, and I moved the lilies and mountain bluets forward, away from the cramped bush's branches. Then I planted some delphinium and hollyhock seeds to grow tall in behind. The irises are already blooming on that side, and the peony is about to. I moved the hens and chicks in two pieces to the new bed under our spruce tree. We will also have butternut squash growing in this bed. On the right side, we have some type of stonecrop/low-lying sedum and lamb's ear in front of the bush, then more lilies and irises which I shifted around today, and a sedum. I took out the spirea bushes, they weren't really growing well anyway. I planted more delphinium and hollyhock, and our pumpkin will grow on this side. In the bed under the spruce, I have planted three types of hens and chicks (spiderweb, a purple type, and the standard green ones), some pink poppy seeds and forget-me-not seeds from my mom (hope they'll still grow, she sent them last summer or the year before). Will also be growing snow-on-the-mountain, snowdrops, lily-of-the-valley, and whatever other hardy perennials I can get for free or cheap that will do okay in dry acidic soil. PB heard bleeding hearts grow well under spruce, so if I can mooch some plants or get near-dead ones for cheap, I'll give it a try. I may also try the spirea I dug out of the other flower bed under there, but not sure it will get enough sun. Okay I think that's my update, I'll definitely get more pictures up as things grow!