Expectations

 I’m not actually sure where I’m going with this one. There are two things roaming around in my brain, similar themes, but slightly different situations. I am a counsellor. I work with women. Often women who are parents. We talk a lot about expectations of the role of the mother. Father comes into it as well, but because I work mainly with women, we talk mainly about the mother role. I guess for guys reading this, you can change the female expectations to male expectations.

 When people become parents, there are a lot of expectations, from society, from family and friends, but mostly from themselves. Expectations of how they should be as mothers, wives, home makers. Often, particularly with the first child, are at home full time, having quit work.

 We see our societal images of the “mother”. She is all caring, all nurturing. She runs a tight ship. The house is always extremely tidy. The children always neat and clean and well behaved. We see images on television of the women who work full time, have a house full of children, and everything seems rosy.

 Mothers (and fathers I expect), see these images and see themselves as wanting in some way. To keep the house at the level that women see in your House and Garden magazines is a full time job. To add a baby, sleep deprivation, and a schedule which is demanding and totally absorbing, makes each job just that much more impossible. Many women fight with these demands. Why can’t I cope like other women do? Why is my house so messy and others are so tidy? My child will get sick if I don’t keep the house clean and germ free? Other women do. Why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?

 Expectations are shoulds. Things we feel we should do. Things we believe are essential to not only our own well-being, but the well-being of our children and our partners. So the mother gets lost in amongst all the shoulds she believes are part of her job as a mother and home maker.

 Nowadays, the expectations for women have increased. We  now have the expectation of work on top of being a mother. Many women fight with these roles. I should work. I should be able to manage both work and being a mother. Other women do. Why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?

 The reality is: There is nothing wrong with you. You are one of millions of women who feel this way.  Being a mother is a full time job. Unpaid. Your roles are many, demanding and never ending. There are few holidays for mothers. Even your holidays are taken up looking after the children and making sure they are safe, fed, watered and bedded.

 Myths abound. I started to do an internet search on the myths of motherhood. What I found was myths around:

• The pregnancy (you will glow and radiate throughout the pregnancy etc)

• Giving birth (a vaginal birth is the best)

• Breastfeeding (definitely the best, easiest. Your child will be smarter than most)

• Ensuring you bond with your baby (critical for your child’s future psychological health)

• How you should deal with each stage of development (if you get it wrong, you have scarred your child for life)

• How mothers are constantly happy, just being a mother (of course they are. This is your predestined function in life)

• If you work hard enough you will get your svelte figure back after the birth (it’s just laziness if you don’t)

 And so on. I would be laughing right now if I didn’t know the serious consequences for mothers if they “fail” in any one of these areas.

 There are myths about how you “should” have a baby. There are myths around how you “should” breastfeed. There are myths around how the baby “should” be when you get her/him home.

 Each time I wrote the sentences above, I can remember people telling me stories about how everyone knew what they “should” be doing to fix whatever problem they had. Motherhood is one of the few jobs that everyone else knows what you “should” be doing.

 Let go of some of your expectations. I know children who were bottle fed. They are just normal adults now. My son was bottle fed. He is a very intelligent young man. Maybe if he had been breast fed, he would be a genius. Who knows. Who can say. I know children born by caesarean. They have turned out fine. I know women who were sick for the whole 9 months of pregnancy. I know women who glowed all through their pregnancy. My first response to seeing my son was not love and happiness. It was exhaustion and simply glad that the labour was finally over.

 As you can see, there are no rights and wrongs about being  a mother. Over the years I have seen so much change in the expectations of mothers. Nowadays, our expectations are much higher than they were when I had small children. There is almost too much information out there.

 Babies and children are incredibly strong little tackers. It is part of the survival of the human race. All children grow up with issues and baggage from their childhood. That is a given. All any mother can do is the best they can with the skills and emotional wherewithal at the time.

 A bloke called Winnicott talked about good enough mothering. He talks about a range of parenting which fits in the good enough range. If, overall, your parenting fits in the good enough range, your child will be fine. Some days, your parenting will be at the lower end of the range – days when you are sick, when something happens in your life. Other days your parenting will be at the top end of the scale – the days when you wake up in the morning and life is good. Most of the time, your parenting will be in the middle somewhere.

 And that is good enough.

 Madeleine

Sunday, 19 March 2006

Political correctness

 I’m listening to the radio and all the Irish jokes this morning. It’s St. Patrick’s Day.  For some reason the world has grabbed onto this day as an excuse to wear green, and get drunk. As I’m listening to the jokes (and some are quite funny), I’m reminded of the jokes as a young person in Canada. Newfie jokes were the “in” thing. People from Newfoundland were the butt of our jokes. There was no such thing as “political correct” in the early 1960’s. Any group of people was likely to be made fun of.

 Nowadays, we have “political correctness”. I remember being away on a weekend with friends and we had a session of politically incorrect joke telling. We had a hilarious night.

 So what makes a joke politically correct or incorrect. It’s okay to call the Irish stupid. It’s okay to make fun of blonde women. It is not okay to make jokes at the expense of African Americans or Aboriginal Australians. These are considered “bad”. Jokes against women and men are often PC or not PC depending on the company you are keeping. I know women get together and tell jokes against men and I’m sure men do the same thing.

 So what makes a joke politically correct or incorrect? Is it the number of people who complain about it? Is it the current “politically correct” issue for the day? Cause PCness changes over time. I can remember listening to jokes against women and finding them hilariously funny. Now I don’t. What has changed. I guess my own personal beliefs changed with the times.

 I still have not answered my own question. I don’t have an answer. Have we gone too far with political correctness? Or have we not gone far enough? I do know that humour can devalue people. However, are the Irish devalued by the jokes at their expense? I don’t believe they are.

 So why is it politically incorrect to make jokes about some groups of people and politically correct to make jokes about other groups of people?

 Madeleine

Friday, 17 March 2006

Fluffy dogs and fluffy dog owners

 Walking my dawg tonight I met a man with a couple of little beauties. As we were walking and talking, the dawgs getting to know each other, along came a fluffy little dog. One of those little white fluffy things.

 This wasn’t the dog but this is similar

.

  All four dogs got stuck into it, not fighting, just playing, getting to know each other. At some stage, little fluffy yelped as if he/she was in pain. Her owner freaked. There was a delightul melee while two dawg owners tried to corral their dogs. As fluffy woman caught her dog, my dawg started to grab the opportunity to sniff her bum, as all good dawgs do. I got an awful dirty look. I commented that this is the way that dogs get to know each other. She fussed over her little fluffy, and did not appreciate my: “She’s fine, just a woose. She was not hurt at all. Just making a lot of noise over nothing” as she was examining her little fluffy for major wounds. Which of course, didn’t exist.

 Oh, dear, I’ve put my foot in it again.

 Madeleine

Sunday, 26 February 2006

Dyscalculia

 I’ve known for some years now that I have a problem with spatial concepts and with directions. I can’t imagine how things might look, I have to place them and actually see them in place to judge whether they will fit or look okay. With directions, I don’t know my left from my right. I can often get lost in familiar routes. I will be driving on a familiar route and suddenly I don’t know where I am. Friends have got use to my hand signals when giving directions and know not to trust the words that go with the hand signals. I also don’t seem to know where my ends are. For instance, I constantly bump my fingers, elbows or whatever part of my body sticks out the most. When my son was a baby, I kept bumping his head because it stuck out from my ends.

 Over the years I have learned strategies to cope with these things. I was told once that I move like someone who has had 50 years of learning strategies for coping with physical problems such as mine.

 Now a new dimension has been added.

 For a number of weeks I have been struggling with something at work. We have been told that we have to report to our funding body giving different statistics. Now I’ve known for a long time that I am mathematically challenged. I fight with numerical concepts. Because of the profession I’m in, I mostly managed to avoid mathematics, but with this new aspect to my job, statistics is part of it. So for the last few weeks I have been trying to get my brain around how we have to present our figures, and to devise a method of gathering these new statistics in a manner that will be meaningful come the end of June.

 After speaking to someone who specialises in children with specific learning disabilities, they mentioned the word dyscalculia and that maybe this was what was happening for me. So of course, off to the internet we go.

 Suddenly it all became clear. Suddenly I have a name for what happens to me when I lose where I am. Suddenly I understand the blankness when people talk about numbers, left and right, horizontal and vertical, when people use a 24 hour clock (I can pretty much use a normal one), why I can’t automatically visualise how much time there is between 3:10 and 3:40. And when someone gives me a time in the 24 hour clock, forget it! I have to use paper and pen to work out what time they are talking about.

 One of the exercises suggested it to look at a number of coins. A normal person looks at coins from 2 to about 5 or 6 and can immediately tell, how many there are. I did this and was aware that I was mentally counting them, not just looking at them. Another strategy that I have unconsciously taught myself without even knowing I needed to.

 It fits for my problems with mathematics, with my spatial problems, with my difficulty with left and right,

 Here are some of the symptoms. I have left out the ones that don’t apply to me (and there weren’t many).

 Difficulty with the abstract concepts of time and direction. Inability to recall schedules, and sequences of past or future events. Unable to keep track of time. May be chronically late. Well there you are. Working out 24 hour clocks, the difference in time between one time and another.

Mistaken recollection of names. Poor name/face retrieval. Substitute names beginning with same letter. I definitely have trouble remembering names. I have to be very careful working with my clients. If I get the name wrong the first time, chances are I will continue to do so and that is very embarrassing and not very nice for them.

Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Poor mental math ability. Poor with money and credit. Cannot do financial planning or budgeting. Checkbooks not balanced. May have fear of money and cash transactions. May be unable to mentally figure change due back, the amounts to pay for tips, taxes, etc  I can use a calculator and get three different answers when adding up a column of figures. Nowadays I use Excel for everything and don’t even bother with a calculator. I have never been able to figure out my change or work out how much to give for tips. Give me figures bigger than 1 number at a time and I revert to paper ad pen, calculator or computer.

 Absolute hell when cooking, trying to work out how to make a recipe for smaller or larger quantities. Could never work out why I could never a. work it out without a computer and b. remember what I had worked out.

May be unable to comprehend or "picture" mechanical processes. Lack "big picture/ whole picture" thinking. Poor ability to "visualize or picture" the location of the numbers on the face of a clock, the  geographical locations of states, countries, oceans, streets, etc. You’ve got to be kidding!! Visualise where something is geographically? I have enough trouble working out whether I live north, south, east or west of the river. It doesn’t matter how often people tell me, I just can’t seem to remember.

 Our local shopping mall has made major changes. I have to make sure I know where I have parked my car so I can find my way out again. Again, the sense of anxiety, fear that I will get lost and not be able to find my way out again.

 When I go into shops I often get confused as to the direction I came in and the direction I need to go coming out. Even in familiar grocery shops, I often come to the end of an aisle and have to work out the direction I was going. I have often turned the wrong way and realised that I’d just been down that aisle.

 May experience anxiety when forced to navigate under time pressures.  When I am going somewhere new, I always write down my directions (left here, right here) and mentally visualise turning left and right before I leave. If there are landmarks that I know, I will imagine them in my head while I writing my instructions. If someone gives me a mud map and verbal directions, my brain switches off and I’ve got no idea where they are talking about. If I have to go somewhere new unexpectedly without having time to process, you can guarantee I will get lost.

 Has difficulty discriminating left from right, and north, south, east, and west. People don’t understand when I can’t work out whether I live north, south, east or west of the river. This is confounded by the fact that I was born in the northern hemisphere and managed to learn some of that in Montreal where I was born. I then moved to London in the UK and that was just plain forget it – I never did learn about east London and where it fitted with the rest. When I moved to Brisbane, Australia (east coast), everything was backwards, but managed to learn somewhat about east and west etc in Brisbane. Then I moved to Perth (west coast), and suddenly west was east and east was west or some such thing. Now I don’t even bother to try. I just ask someone. And I had to think about my easts and wests when I wrote the last bit. Perth people often talk about the “eastern states”. That phrase sticks in my mind. I then think, the opposite of east is west, and then I know I live on the west coast of Australia. Now even as I’m writing this, I’m doubting my own thoughts. Interesting!!

 I also get lost sometimes in my documents, like I am now. I’m trying to work out where I said something earlier (or later) in this document and I know I’ve done it, but can’t quite put it together as to where. My strategy for that one is to let it go. Consciously let it go and know that it will come back to me eventually. And that is exactly what happened.

Has poor memory for remembering learned navigational concepts: starboard and port, longitude and latitude, horizontal and vertical, and so on. This one gives me the giggles. I have never had to learn starboard and port, gave up at school on longitude and latitude, and as far as horizontal and vertical, sometimes I can get it, sometimes I can’t.

 Despite good muscle tone and strength, may have only good to fair athletic coordination. Little coordination for athletics. Gave that one up years ago. Just don’t even bother any more. Maybe one of the advantages of getting older.

Has difficulty keeping up with rapidly changing physical directions like in aerobic, dance, and exercise classes. Difficulty remembering the physical sequences required for routines, karate moves, dance steps, and "sports plays."   I did bootscooting for many years. Really enjoyed it, but really had to concentrate and learn the steps. Following onto the next one, I could never, ever do the dances alone. Once I had someone beside me, I could follow them most of the time, but could never begin a dance on my own nor remember them when I was at home no matter how much I practiced.

 I tried aerobics once, but gave it us very quickly. As I’ve gotten older, I seem to have learned techniques to help me follow things better. So I was able to do water aerobics and follow more or less. Something about getting older, maybe I am learning new techniques, maybe I am more relaxed about making mistakes than when I was younger. Interesting thought.

The interesting thing is just how many people think they have the same problem. Up until recently (i.e. today) I was only aware of the spatial and directional problems. The others just felt like I was being stupid. I am an intelligent woman, other people can do this. Why can’t I? Stupid, obviously. Lazy, quite likely. Not putting enough effort in. Definitely.

 Last night I found a forum for people with this problem. What an insight !! What a relief !! There are people out there just like me. Normally abnormal. I still have to talk to my boss about my problem and there is a strong anxiety about it. The old messages are still there – you are stupid, you should be able to do this, you are supposed to be intelligent, maybe you’re not as intelligent as you think you are. But at least now I’ve got something to work with. I do know that over time I have become more comfortable with my spatial and directional problems, am learning conscious strategies to deal with them, and the old messages don’t come in as often as they used to. Adding this new dimension will take time, but I know I can do it.

 Madeleine
Saturday, 4 March 2006

Feminine beauty?

 I put the question mark there deliberately. Was just talking to a friend who is about to get herself waxed. Why?

 Why do women do things like this for the sake of beauty. As a teenager, big hair was all the rage and I would sleep like this (minus the face mask):

 

Imagine how uncomfortable THAT was.

 Do women do this for themselves? Or do they do it to be attractive to men? Do men do such silly things to themselves? Or is it just women?

 Why?

 We have to be thin, which means diets. We are expected to wear make up because we don’t look good enough the way we are. High heeled shoes. Anyone who has ever worn them knows just how dangerous they are. I know, they make us poke out our breasts and look sexy. But hey, have you guys ever tried wearing them for any length of time?

 We have to have “plump”  lips that “feel firmer and velvety smooth”  You can buy “lip plumpers” to help do this. We have to “Exfoliate” our skin in case we happen to let one of those tiny little skin fragments go somewhere it shouldn’t. We should have “perfectly arched dramatic eyebrow”, which means waxing or shaving  our eyebrows to make them a certain shape and size. We have toothpaste that makes our teeth whiter. I wonder what’s in some of these products.

 AND when you start to age (around about 25 I reckon by the ads on television), that’s when you are really in trouble. No lines, no signs of ageing, no collagen, no “age spots” whatever they might be, are allowed. We have to “Get rid of Melasma, age spots, freckles, dark underarms and other hyperpigmentation problems”. Why?

 There are even photo imagine programs to make you look better, younger etc.

 This is not even going into the area of cosmetic surgery, botox treatments (which are working really well for children with cerebral palsy – I think a much more important use of such treatments), liposuction, books like “The Lowdown on Face-Lifts and Other Wrinkle Remedies”. What’s wrong with my wrinkles? I’ve earned every last bloody one of them.

 When I take off my hat: “Next time you take your wooly hat and wind up looking like Cyndi Lauper…pump up the volume. Go big by spraying a fine mist of volumizer on roots. Then flip your head over to work a dime size dollop of cream wax to ends.” So I need volume to my hair.

  I could go on about this for days, weeks even.

 I remember an aunt, many years ago, giving me all these tips about keeping myself beautiful, and even then, me wondering, why?

 Aren’t I good enough as I am?

 Madeleine

Sunday, 26 February 2006