Family Life

Blog posts about parenting and family life

I speak too!

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One of my favourite things in the world is public speaking. The topic doesn’t matter: if you invite me to speak and give me a topic, I’m your girl. If you don’t give me a topic, I’m your girl too. I have presented on my life as a mother of (fill in the blanks), on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (in my previous life), on budgeting and family finances, on raising virtuous children (yeah right I did), on discerning homeschooling (ouch…) and on some more esoteric topics of biomedical ethics and law. I even participated in the Ottawa Human Library twice where I got to give 7 30-minute talks in a row without knowing the topic of any given one (you can read about it here.)

In the past, I have volunteered on the organizing committee of a yearly parenting conference offered in Ottawa. One thing I know from experience is that good speakers are hard to come by, and when they do the price tag is often prohibitive for small groups and charities. I know that our group had a few cases of sticker shock after contacting some well-known speakers. We could barely cover our costs by selling out a 200-seat venue. If some people think that speaking to anything smaller than an arena or a fundraising shindig at $5000 a table is not worth the drive, more power to them. What floats my goat is speaking to smaller groups where we can really dig into the Q&As. I’m all about connecting with my audience.

Well, have I got an offer for you! For a $100 pledge to my Kickstarter campaign, I will come and speak to your group on a topic of your choice. Fun, brainy or both, I can chat my way through just about any situation. You give me an idea of the topic — or not — and I run with it.

What’s Kickstarter? Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform used to finance creative projects. It’s the “Amazon” of crowdfunding: it’s well-established and reliable. I am using it to fund the writing of my first novel by offering e-books, speaking engagements and other rewards in exchange for your contribution. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing proposition: if I don’t reach my fundraising goal by February 8th, you don’t get charged for your pledge.

Please talk to your mothers’ group, your book club or your church group and consider making a $100 pledge to my campaign in exchange for a speaking engagement. You can find my Kickstarter campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/790312039/chance-a-novel-about-medicine-law-and-the-people-i?ref=user_menu

Lunchtime! (Run!)

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It’s lunchtime!

I don’t often take to my blog to ask for help but this is a matter of extreme annoyance and one of the reasons I homeschooled for as long as I did: school lunches!

When we decided to keep the children at home, my first shock was to realize how much they ate and how often. No wonder they stepped off the school bus in a state of complete discombobulation: they never had enough to eat. Not that I sent them off with insufficient provisions: some of their snacks came home untouched. But the convergence of not enough time to eat and the state of some snacks after a few hours at the bottom of the school bag meant that the children ate what could be eaten and left the rest.

I find that packaged snacks are high in cheap carbohydrates — which my children burn through in a matter of minutes — and that fresh snacks don’t keep well. Fruits are nice and everything but they get smooched or go brown. If your children eat bruised and battered fruits, congratulations, your medal is in the mail. Mine don’t. Nuts are verboten, fish puts you on the no-fly list, egg smells, warm dairy is a germ broth…. It’s getting complicated.

On the eve of the children’s return to school, I decided to bite the golden bullet and take the advice of a few friends who recommended the Planetbox lunch kits. If my husband asks, the whole thing was $75. On day two, I’m happy to report that the boxes make packing lunches a breeze and that they return home completely empty. The Rover box is too small to pack an entire day’s worth of food for my children so I send their main meal in a Thermos. This is still early in the game but I think that the boxes help the children see what they can eat (as opposed to that smashed granola at the bottom of the lunch bag) and the stainless steel keeps it in one piece. If anything, the boxes calm my anxieties about my children going hungry at school and that’s worth money to me. That said, I’m still looking for suggestions on what to pack in said boxes.

So what do you do oh wizened parents? What are your greatest hits?

 

Kickstarter: What’s that?!

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Today marks the launch of my first Kickstarter Campaign. Whoa.

I’m turning to crowdfunding to finance the writing of my first work of fiction. Why crowdfunding? Last year I did a bit of research on the big bad world of publishing and saw that my chances of making it past the gatekeepers were as slim as can be. Why?

I’m not a cool kid. I don’t have a massive readership. I don’t have a viral social media account. I’m not a subject matter expert in anything a sales department would consider worth pursuing. I’m a 43 year-old mom who can’t dress, doesn’t wear make-up and has spent the last 20 years of her life having babies and seeing them through infancy, childhood and young adulthood relatively unscathed. I don’t live near a hub of book publishing. I don’t have contacts or anyone to champion me: I’m a one-woman-show with a 9-piece opening act.

What I do have is a committed core of readers, 5 years of compulsive writing, a high threshold for pain and a creative brain. I have a Master’s Degree relevant to the topic of my novel — law and biomedical ethics — and I completed said Master’s Degree with 5 children underfoot. In other words, I can write, I can absorb information and I can process it with one hand while caring for my family with the other. I don’t think I can convince a publisher that a stay-at-home mother of 9 children is a project worth backing but I know that you — my readers and supporters — know.

Please consider visiting my Kickstarter page. My goal is to raise $3000 to fund the writing of my novel. All the details and rewards are written on my Kickstarter campaign page. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing proposition: your pledges are only realized if I reach my fundraising goal. I created the $15 reward with my Fearless Family Life readers in mind: $15 backers get updates on the novel’s progress plus an exclusive copy of my e-book Unsolicited Advice: Essays from the trenches of parenting. This e-book was put together using blog posts on a variety of topics, from meal time to potty training, teenagers, attachment parenting, sleep and social media. These are some of my most shared blog posts, now available exclusively to my Kickstarter backers.

By my simple calculation, I need 200 people to commit to the $15 e-book to fully fund my campaign. This goal is ambitious but realistic: the Fearless Family Life Facebook page has over 400 followers, I have as many Facebook friends and close to 1000 Instagram followers. I can probably get 200 backers if I put my back into it. The challenge, of course, is that my written material has been available for free for the last 5 years. Convincing people that something they’ve been getting for free is worth paying for is an uphill battle. My hope is that my readers will see the value of the time, love and hard work I poured into writing these posts.

This is my appeal to you today: If I ever wrote something that touched you, motivated you or lifted you up, please try to put a dollar value on the insight you have gained reading my blog and consider pledging this amount to my Kickstarter Campaign. If you are not in a position to pledge anything, please share this blog post and encourage your friends and family to visit the blog and the Kickstarter page. The project backers are the tip of the reader pyramid: I need to reach a wide base of readers to get the 200 backers I need to push this project forward. If you cannot pledge your hard-earned cash, your participation in reaching this wide base of readers is worth more than you can imagine.

Here’s the link:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/790312039/chance-a-novel-about-medicine-law-and-the-people-i

Please check it out!

 

 

Suffer the children: A post for my Catholic readers who are just about fed-up

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The question of taking little children to church is one that most parents face at some point in their journey. Church and toddlers rarely mix, at least they don’t in Roman Catholic churches where we don’t do Sunday School and nurseries. From happy screams to whining and full-body-meltdowns, there is something inherently unnatural about sitting in a confined space for the best part of an hour, especially when you are around 2.

I have 9 children. The younger 4 have embarrassed me in church in every way you can think of and some you can’t even imagine. We’ve been asked to leave the pews. We’ve been asked the leave the narthex. We’ve been asked the leave the freakin’ cry room. When a couple explained to me that they took turns looking after the little ones on alternating Sundays, that spoke to me… And I’m a Catholic! Sunday church attendance is a precept of the Church: we have to go. I started going to Mass in 2000 when I was pregnant with my third child and I have been dealing with untenable toddlers ever since. You might think that going to church every single Sunday for 17 years might get children used to the idea but you would be mistaken: my children are determined to win this war. I have grown a pretty thick skin as a result and a different understanding of my role and expectations during Mass. It has helped me grow spiritually and that’s the spirit in which I am sharing this today.

We often expect Mass to feed us, and it is true that the Eucharist feeds us spiritually. Where our problems lie is that we often expect the Eucharist to feed us in the same way that normal bread feeds us, by giving us a sense of physical and emotional well-being. With the Eucharist, we are fed not so we can feel fed but so we can feed into the Body of Christ. That’s why we are expected to attend Mass every Sunday no matter how boring the homilies or how ridiculous the music or how mean the ushers. When we receive the Body of Christ, we become a moving Tabernacle, taking Christ into the world. Even when grumpy old folks behave like jerks, even if it’s too cold or too hot, and even if we can’t hear the readings from the parking lot where we have taken our screaming toddler. For many of us, Mass attendance falls squarely into the “sacrifice of praise” category: the idea that praise comes at a cost. My vocation calls me to raise little Catholics who understand that if we do one thing this week, it will be to go to Mass and partake in the Eucharistic celebration so we can take Christ to the world around us. The Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith, even when it’s hard, especially when there is sacrifice in the receiving, even if we are busy during the readings and we can’t remember what the homily was about.

The first thing I like to meditate on when things get crazy and I feel like giving-up is that Christianity, the following of Christ, calls us to push the limits of our comfort zones. The Son of God died on a cross, that’s our aspiration of self-giving. So what if we organize our lives in order to show-up to church on time, with our clothes on right, without anyone pushing our buttons, so we can sit and listen? Where is the growth? Where is the cross? Where is the gift of self? Or we can come with our toddlers and get pushed around, spat on, stared at, and tell God: “You know the depth of my heart, pour into it the Grace I need. I can’t even articulate a prayer but here I am.” Jesus is made strong in weakness. He doesn’t lie when He says blessed are the weak, the poor in spirit, the meek, the persecuted. Sometimes I feel like all of the above when I take my twins and toddler to Mass, especially when we attend Mass in a church where we are not known. We can “get fed” by listening to a good homily and sitting comfortably, or we can get a fire hose of Grace by walking all over our pride and personal preferences taking our toddlers to Mass. Sometimes redemption doesn’t feel all that redeeming, just think of Calvary.

“Without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace. The gift of grace increases as the struggles increase.” — St Rose of Lima

My “affliction” is healthy, happy, but spirited and loud children. Children blessed with a very strong will. These children will someday be leaders. They have everything needed to become productive members of society, committed to live by principles of integrity. Taking these children to Mass can be challenging but it’s ultimately small happy fry in the big scheme of what life can throw at someone.

The other thing I like to reflect on when the Mass-going gets tough is somewhat related to the theology of the body. As Catholics, we believe that our bodies and our souls exist in union. We believe that what we do with our bodies is relevant to the state of our souls, hence the Church’s teachings on contraception and human sexuality. That’s why we hold that pilgrimages and some forms of physical mortification such as fasting are keys to the purification of the soul. That’s why people haul their butts up the Camino and skin their knees on the Santa Scala. There is spiritual growth in physically getting your sorry self to Mass with your screaming toddler in a football hold. There are graces in physically keeping your child in the presence of God during Mass. The struggle is blessed a hundredth fold compared to the contained Mass attendance with your dress unruffled and your hair in place. Mass attendance is your Camino, make it count.

I don’t mean to cast shadows on my fellow sisters who manage to attend Mass without a fight. Our paths to spiritual growth are as different as we are. But whatever your cross is, don’t leave it at home when you go to Mass.

2016: Here’s looking at you kid.

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I used to write a retrospective of each passing year until I had twins and just about everything disappeared in a fiery crash. This year I decided to pick it up again. I’m sharing it with you because it’s fun and fluffy and not too scary.

  1. What did you do in 2016 that you’d never done before?

I started working out with a personal trainer.

I took a kid to the hospital with a broken bone.

The police brought one of my kids home (not the same one).

  1. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Last year on New Year’s Day I was on a liquid diet recovering from dental surgery and had to visit the ER with some weird fever and irregular heartbeats. I’m sure I didn’t make any other New Year Resolution than “survive 2016.” And I did!! Go me!

This year, my only resolution is to heed my own advice and live fearlessly. I have the “Fearless Family Life” thing down but I’m a fearful insecure person on just about everything else, especially my own creative endeavors. This year, I want to launch into crowd funding and try to get published. Both will require uncomfortable amounts of vulnerability and fearlessness, things I don’t have in spades.

  1. Did anyone close to you give birth?

My cousin gave birth to her first child and a lifelong family friend gave birth to twin girls. Many many friends and acquaintances gave birth. Congratulations mamas!!

  1. Did anyone close to you die?

My sister’s mother-in-law died of cancer in 2016. I had not known her very long but she was such a kind and caring person that one could not help but feel close to her. At her funeral Mass, the large church was full to the rafters. Her death made me reflect on how I wanted to touch those around me, how I wanted to be remembered.

  1. What countries did you visit?

None. Not even my own. I visited South Korea through the tv series Descendants of the Sun and the northern coast of Spain through Gran Hotel. That counts right?

  1. What would you like to have in 2017 that you lacked in 2016?

Health, fitness, a positive self-image and confidence? And the right meds to achieve it.

  1. What dates from 2016 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

I don’t remember dates. The winter of 2016 is one big blur, I don’t even recall it happening at all. I’m assuming nothing noteworthy happened although I’m sure my family will let me know by email if I’m off the mark. The Spring of 2016 was when homeschooling wrapped me up and we rolled into the Summer holidays a little early.

  1. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Giving up gluten for good. Finding Ritter’s Rum Soaked Raisins chocolate again after a too long absence.

  1. What was your biggest failure?

I got pregnant with my 10th child in 2015 and was due to deliver on March 30th 2016. That didn’t happen. Homeschooling was a big fat fail. Not because I think that sending the children back to school is a failure: our other children have done very well in school and I’m one of a handful of homeschoolers who believes that kids do learn something in school. The failure was to live up to my own standards, of still not being the person I want to be. Homeschooling has taken a lot out of me, and I’m proud of myself for having tried. But doing so prevented me from developing skills in the things I am good at such as writing and music. When I look back at our homeschooling adventure, I don’t (yet) see much to show for it. I’m sure perspective will grow on me like moss, with time and a peaceful spot in the shade.

  1. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing new this year. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is still kicking my ass daily.

  1. What was the best thing you bought?

Chocolate, Pu Er tea and the entire Nashville discography.

  1. Where did most of your money go?

Depends how you look at it. Most of our family’s income goes to taxes. If you consider after-tax money, the mortgage is probably the largest number on the family’s spreadsheet.

  1. What did you get really excited about?

Starting music again. I had my Taylor guitar repaired and started playing for the first time in 10 years. I also learned to play the piano enough to play at church. Playing at church just about kills me every week but it gives me the motivation to practice. I occasionally sing with my daughters – at home, not at church —  when they indulge me. Singing with my daughters is the single best part of my days when it happens.

  1. What song will always remind you of 2016?

Probably Alexander Hamilton

  1. Compared to this time last year, are you:
    – happier or sadder? Roughly the same but more frazzled so I’ll say “happier” just because I WANT TO BELIEVE!
    – thinner or fatter? Thinner by a whopping 5 lbs on a good month. Same on a bad one. Thanks for nothing thyroid jerk.
    – richer or poorer? Richer
  2. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing. Finishing stuff.

  1. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Anxiate. Is that a verb? Compare myself to better-looking and more talented people. Believe that there’s no point writing because the world doesn’t need another book/song/blog post, especially not one written by someone less talented than (fill blank with current literary obsession).

  1. How did you spend Christmas?

Éloïse summed it up nicely on Twitter:

 

  1. What was your favorite TV program?

Nashville and Gran Hotel

  1. What were your favorite books of the year?

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King), Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Harding), Writing Better Lyrics (Pat Pattison) and Au Bonheur des Dames (Émile Zola)

  1. What was your favorite music from this year?

The Nashville Soundtrack, Half Moon Run, Miranda Lambert, The Lumineers, Hamilton.

  1. What were your favorite films of the year?

I saw three movies released in 2016: Fantastic Beasts, some kid movie I can’t recall and LaLaLand. Of the three, LaLaLand was my favorite.

  1. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 43 and I was in Toronto with Éloïse, Marie and a friend for the Pentatonix / Us the Duo concert at the ACC.

  1. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Losing the 20 lbs I should have lost a long time ago given the way I eat and exercise. Oh well, I didn’t gain 50 more pounds and that’s satisfying, I guess.

  1. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2016?

Flowy tops from Winners, jeans from Mark’s.

  1. What kept you sane?

Music and exercise, thyroid meds and a generous side of chocolate.

  1. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2016.

“Think small to go big”. That’s from Seth Godin. I had been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to make my blog “go big”. I wanted to write the type of posts that make blogs popular – read: “earn income” — but I was in a conundrum because I don’t read any blogs that are popular. I was stuck trying to put out a message that I wouldn’t read if someone else posted it. That’s when I heard Seth Godin on the Tim Ferriss podcast say “Think small to go big.” Meaning that if you can’t touch one person’s life, what makes you think that you can touch a million? I realized that being able to interact with my readers one-on-one, knowing them by name, being friends on social media, was what made my content special to my readers. I’ll never have the mean or fluffy streak that makes blogs go viral because I’m always striving for a genuine contact. When I accepted that this was the smaller and slower approach I wanted to maintain, it freed me to look for alternative methods of generating income online such as crowd funding. I don’t know if I will ever earn anything that way — it’s hard to convince people to pay for something they have been getting for free for years — but at least it will be on my own terms. And as a creative type, that’s the best I can hope for.

What I wrote in my notebook when I heard “Think small to go big.”

 

 

Self-care in the midst of chaos: is it even possible?

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** This week’s podcast on self-care and was inspired by this blog post, originally published on Vie de Cirque in 2015. **

As a mother of many, I am often asked about self-care and finding time for oneself in the midst of chaos. Where can a mother find peace when the things that bring her joy — like hobbies and travels — are incompatible with parenting a tribe?

The question of “me-time” is one that is close to my heart because everyone wants to know. In an article for the Ottawa Citizen published in January 2014, I answered that I had to find “me-time” in the midst of chaos. It’s true but simplistic. The ability to find inner peace when your life is a pinball machine is a work in progress. I often feel like I am hanging to sanity by the tip of my fingers. So how do I go about finding my place in a household where my work is forever answering everybody’s pressing demands but mine?

To explain my understanding of self-care, I must go back a few years. I got pregnant with my oldest child when I was 21, unmarried and in Law School. My boyfriend (now husband) was a junior officer in the Armed Forces. He was deployed overseas and we didn’t move-in together until shortly before our first child was born. Our second child was born 14 months later. People around us quietly believed that our hasty marriage was doomed from the start. My husband deployed overseas again and our third child was conceived upon his return. I finished my law degree while expecting her. My husband’s traveling schedule and the demands of providing for a growing family were such that we decided that he would work while I stayed home with the children. I decided not to write the Bar exams at that time: the cost of putting 3 children in daycare while I pursued my studies for an intense year of studies, work placements and exams.

After our third child was born, we decided that our family was complete. I always dreamed of having 5 children, as had my husband, but I was hanging to sanity by the tip of my fingers. That’s when our fourth child was conceived and born. When I think back on that period of my life, I hear the song from Emmylou Harris Red Dirt Girl:

Nobody knows when she started her skid, she was only 27 and she had 5 kids

I was severely struggling with my imposed vocation as a stay-at-home mother of four young children. I had studied to become a lawyer, a challenging course of studies where I had excelled. Now I was a full-time mother in full downfall from my pedestal. My peers were starting to advance in their careers, moving into cute houses in trendy neighbourhoods. I was moving out of a world of visibility and rewards and into a world of invisibility feeling like a failure. People my age had no children, my friends with children had 10 years on me and had chosen to stay home. I was dreaming of living in a trendy neighbourhood with matching furniture as opposed to my perfectly adequate little semi-detached house with a mismatch of hand-me-down pieces.

I was neither very good or very happy in my vocation. I was trapped in a spiral of self-loathing, grasping at anything that made me feel better, regardless of whether it was good, healthy or moral.  I believed that my unhappiness was the result of forgetting myself for too long. Of neglecting my goals and ambitions in the pursuit of an ideal that wasn’t mine. But the more “me time” I took the deeper I sank.

It took a ride to rock bottom before I understood that my family and I were in this together. That focusing on me at the exclusion of my family was robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Mothers: there is no amount of stuff, credit, spa treatments and girls nights out that can buy you happiness in your marriage and family. So often I read desperate pleas from mothers who cannot find peace and happiness in their own family and there is always someone to suggest more “me time”. A night away, a day at the spa, a week in a resort, working outside the home. Don’t get me wrong: I love a pedicure as much as the next girl. But your happiness and your physical and mental health cannot hinge on an expensive getaway. Or even a cheap one. What I learned from my stay in the trenches of unhappiness is that you can’t outrun yourself. Indulging in temporary make-beliefs only makes the return to reality colder and darker.

Addressing underlying causes of unhappiness can be difficult. Children are too young to understand that they need to give mommy some space. Your life partner should be the one caring for you. If you don’t have a supportive partner, maintaining your sense of balance in family life will fall on your shoulders and you will have to build fences around the non-negotiables of your life. Fences and families don’t mix. If your life partner — husband, boyfriend, mother — is not looking after your needs, you need to fix your relationship. A happy marriage is the most important self-care you can give yourself, not to mention the very thing your children need the most to be happy and secure as they grow.

After I had my 4th child and disappeared in the fog of depression, my husband and I came to the conclusion that I was simply not cut out to be a homemaker. I still believed that having a stay-at-home parent was best for children but I simply couldn’t be that parent. I headed back to school to pursue graduate studies in law. But even though I excelled in my academic studies, the belief that I wasn’t cut out to care for my children was haunting me.

I found work as a political attaché and juggled family life and paid employment for the following 4 years. I learned that nothing was going to be easy. I could work to make our family-work balance manageable or I could work to become the mother I always wanted to be. I chose the later. Nowadays, I am a homeschooling stay-at-home mother. I have the large family I never dared to dream I would have.

Self-care starts with physical and mental health. I try to eat well, not too much, and exercise. I get regular medical check-ups to make sure that any physical or mental struggles are properly identified and treated. I make room for spiritual practices like prayer and a sacramental life. I see a friendly spiritual director and I receive the Sacrament of reconciliation once or twice a month. But where I draw the line for myself is the type of self-care that takes away from my family, whether it is by causing financial strain or emotional absenteeism. If you need to spend money you don’t have, or if you need to completely check-out of your role as mother to feel alive and whole, you need to address the underlying causes of your feelings. Going out with friends, sharing a meal, being pampered or getting relief from your daily occupations are some of life’s greatest pleasures. You should seek these opportunities for the joy they bring you, not as a matter of survival.

My husband and I have turned the self-care equation around. Instead of seeing me as the result of the equation, we’ve made our common vision of family life the result of the equation. Self-care happens in the context of the vision of family life we want to achieve: a happy, united, and well adjusted Catholic, large, homeschooling, family, living in the country. The pursuit of my dreams and ambitions are part of the equation yielding that result. Being physically and mentally fit, growing in faith and fortitude, laughing, looking pretty, feeling like I can leave for a weekend without societal collapse and starvation, are all part of the equation. My husband and children benefit from the result and therefore are part of ensuring that I get enough and adequate self-care. Knowing that they have my well-being in mind frees me from having to worry and pursue my well-being selfishly, like a desert wanderer searches for water. I am no longer afraid of disappearing behind my children because we are a team, not a competition.

Caring for a family of 11 is still hard on a good day and there is precious little time for self-care in the traditional sense. I have to rely on a “broken windows approach” to keeping my essential space in a large family: I don’t share my morning coffee and I am almost obsessive about using the bathroom by myself. I find great joy in having coffee with an old friend, seeing my siblings and my parents, and enjoying a few seconds of quiet in a tidy house  (not between 1 and 2 am). There is always someone in my personal space and I have worked hard, emotionally and spiritually, to learn to love it.

Finally feeling good at what I do: that’s better than all the pedicures in the world.

 

 

Life as a river

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I was going to start this blog post with some poetic musing about life being a winding road and how we don’t always end up where we thought we would. But even winding roads lead somewhere: a ditch, a dead-end, another road, a pretty little cabin in the woods. Life is a series of decisions which have ramifications, consequences, and more decision points. Days grow into weeks, weeks into months, months into years and suddenly you are 43 wondering where the heck it is you’re going. Sorry, am I talking to myself again?

My husband and I have changing our minds and correcting course down to an art form. Blessed are the flexible for they shall not break. In our 20 years of marriage, we’ve owned more cars than we can remember, we moved 10 times within the Ottawa area, bought big houses, sold big houses, bought little houses, sold little houses, rented houses, gutted main floors, finished basements and built from scratch. I have been a student-mom, a stay-at-home mom, a homeschooler, a failed homeschooler, a graduate-student mom, a full-time working mom, a part-time working mom. My husband has worked full-time, part-time, homeschooled when I could not, supported my pipe dreams and ambitions. He has started companies, joined companies, left companies, owned companies, sold companies. In the middle of all this, we had 9 children and lost two to miscarriage. We have lifestyle ADHD I think.

While I envy people who relentlessly pursue one thing, I am pleased by our ability to roll with the punches. We relentlessly pursue the stability of our family, no matter the personal cost. We may not have taken our respective careers in measurably successful paths — unless paying bills counts, which it should — but we know why. When my daughter asked me why I had not pursued a musical, legal or political career, despite my affinities for all three, I told her that I chose my family at every fork in the road. These are not career paths with stable incomes, regular hours and holidays. Each involves a good amount of damning the torpedoes. Maybe life’s road is not so winding after all, it’s more like a river, digging its bed by force of repeated decisions. We follow a road to where it leads us but the river digs its own bed, just like we make our lives to our image.

Last week, my husband and I met with the principal of the nearest French elementary school. See, we’re sending the children back to school after Christmas. With our two teenage daughters starting high school last September, this marks the end of our homeschooling journey. You can learn more about our discernment process by listening to my first podcast on discerning homeschooling.

Un-mixing the mixed feeling is a new journey of discovery and reinvention. In my life, I have accomplished things that required effort, things that required self-discipline, things that required commitment, physically demanding things, emotionally demanding things, everything demanding things. I’ve poured myself out and filled myself up all over again. I’ve stumbled, fell, dusted myself up and picked myself up. I never thought I was cut out for homeschooling but I thought I could channel all my brainpower and energy into this one thing and give it some forward momentum. The kind of energy and brain power I used to power a Master’s degree in Law with a breastfeeding infant, my fifth child, in Montreal, while we lived in Ottawa.

In 2016, I taught myself to knit, play the guitar and the piano, use Adobe InDesign and a few other things. But like my Master’s degree, those are things I can control, only limited by the capacity of my brain and the speed of my fingers. I felt called to homeschool and I thought that I could develop that skill just like music or design. As it turns out, I couldn’t. As it turns out, loving your children is not always enough. As it turns out, things are not as simple as they seem. Homeschooling involves other humans and you can’t switch them on and off.

I have wracked my brain wondering why God would call me to something I was so woefully unable to provide. Why give me talents that are of no use to a mother of many, that stay bottled-up inside, stuck in my throat? Why give me a writing talent I don’t have time to use? Why give me a musical talent I can’t develop? Why give me 9 children and talents that involve quiet introspection? Why wasn’t I equipped with what I needed to answer this call? I don’t know. Either God made a mistake (unlikely) or I’m not humble enough to see the wisdom in the plan (very likely). Or maybe the call was to greater humility, masquerading as a call to homeschool. Maybe homeschooling was the light post I was supposed to walk into.

So my life flows on like a river, part water, part banks, unsure if I am the constraints or the current. At times spectator and actor, it lives me as much as I live it.

2016: The Soundtrack

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One of my favourite non-family-related holiday traditions is the browsing of “Best albums of the year” articles, blog posts and podcasts. Back in the days, my holiday music-buying lived and died according to what former broadcaster and pariah Gian Gomeshi offered as his top 20 albums of any given year. Since Gomeshi’s fall from grace, I have not found a compilation that was as consistently up my aisle as his. Oh well.

Now a normal music compilation would give you a list of “Best Albums Released in Given Year” but this is not how my world goes round. I’m a binge-everything. Binge-writer, binge-eater, binge-Netflixer, binge-music-listener. When I love an album, I love it until I break the machine. As a teenager, I warped cassette tapes. I don’t listen to music when it’s released, I listen to music when I want to. As a result, this is a compilation of the best bands and albums I discovered in 2016. I came late to the party on some of them but that should be no reason to neglect them. Happy listening!

1. Half Moon Run. Originally from Montreal, now mostly touring, the band kicked-off their latest tour in Ottawa this December. I went to their show with my oldest daughter, who was a fan back in the days when they drew a crowd of 15 at Ottawa’s Bluesfest. Now critically acclaimed and playing to sold-out mid-sized venues, the time to catch them up-close and personal is surely running out. Music style: alt-pop, Indie rock, rich melodies, vocal harmonies and acoustic arrangements.

On the playlist:
Consider Yourself
Full Circle

2. Scroobius Pip. I discovered this rapper/Hip hop/spoken word artist through my favourite podcast Sodajerker on Songwriting. As a writer, his work was a revelation to me. It inspired me to start writing my own poetry. My gateway song was The beat that my heart skipped but if you can take a bit of sound distortion, do listen to Magician’s Assistant: It’s brilliantly written, raw and hits you like a gut punch. Music style: Slam poetry, hip hop, spoken word, rap, electronic.

On the playlist:
The beat that my heart skipped
The Struggle
Magician’s Assistant

3. The Lumineers. Another discovery through Sodajerker’s interviews. I already knew Ho Hey (because who doesn’t?) but I recently discovered their second album, Cleopatra. The Lumineers are taking the old quip about 3 chords and the truth to it’s most beautiful expression. Their arrangements are creatively minimalist, in the way that only genius musical minds can muster. They don’t rely on instrumentation and over-production to round-out their songs, relying instead on rock-solid melodies, hooks, and riffs on the piano and guitar. Their songs tell stories that are made even more poignant by Wesley Schultz’s haunting voice. You can get a better look at the stories told in Cleopatra by watching the videos. In each video, the characters of the different stories cross paths and impact each other’s lives in direct and indirect ways. Music style: Acoustic, Americana, folk.

On the playlist:
Cleopatra
In the light
Ho Hey

4. Hamilton. Not having lived completely under a rock, I had heard about the musical Hamilton. I knew it was a phenomenon. I knew that tickets on Broadway were sold out until the cows came home, yadda, yadda, and my friends who loved Hamilton wouldn’t shut up about it already. Still, I was not inspired to listen to it until my 14 year-old daughter bought it on iTunes and it found its way on my phone through a sync accident. Hamilton is the Pulitzer-prize winning, viral, hip hop musical about one of the Founding Fathers. It doesn’t matter how you feel about viral phenomenons, musicals, hip hop or Founding Fathers, Hamilton is the kind of opus that will entertain, educate and punch you in the gut regardless of taste. The songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda are lyrical genius, the main characters of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton capture the human struggle between right and wrong, rationality and emotionality, with accuracy and style. The two Hamilton albums are the musical by the original broadway cast (including composer Lin-Manuel Miranda in the title role) and The Hamilton Mixtape in which various artists offer their takes on the songs and themes of the musical. Music style: hip-hop, rap, musical.

On the playlist:
Aaron Burr, Sir (From the Broadway Cast)
Wait for it (From the Broadway Cast)
The Battle of Yorktown (From the Broadway Cast)
Immigrants (From the Mixtape)
I wrote my way out (From the Mixtape)
Valley Forge (Demo) (From the Mixtape)

5. Sweet Crude. This Indie pop-rock band seeks to revive the traditional sounds of French Louisiana. This is my most recent discovery and I haven’t listened to their work quite enough (yet) to distil it but it’s coming. Their music is dazzling and engaging, it’s like an old-fashioned kitchen party except that everyone can play and sing. Strongly recommended. Music style: acoustic, Indie pop-rock, folk, Americana.

On the playlist:
Parlez-nous à boire
Mon esprit

6. The Nashville soundtracks. Nashville is a TV series about the lives of a cast of music-industry types set in the city of Nashville, Tennessee. The characters include country music stars at the top of the heap (Rayna, Juliette), nobodys on their way to stardom (Scarlett, Will), nobodys looking for a break (Gunnar, Layla), the supporting cast of band members, songwriters, managers and producers (Avery, Deacon) and other hangers-on. It ran for 4 seasons on ABC before being canceled and picked-up by CMT when the fans raised enough of a ruckus to bring the show back. The fifth season kicks-off this week with a one-hour sneak-peak at the two-hour premiere scheduled for January 5th. But enough about the TV, the real main character of the show is THE MUSIC. With each season, a full-length EP is released plus single tracks for a total of (at least) 20 songs per season. And what songs! The show creator, Callie Khouri, is married to mega-producer T-Bone Burnett. The music is written for the show by an all-star buffet of Nashville’s best and brightest songwriters and was produced by Burnett first and then by Buddy Miller. The actors are doing their own singing and the music is curated to advance storylines, develop character arches and narrative exposition. Music style: Country, blues-rock, folk, Americana, acoustic, alt-country, country-pop.
It was too hard to pick the best tracks of the 150-or-so songs for the playlist so I went with my favourite combos of characters to songwriters:

On the playlist:
If I didn’t know better (co-written by John Paul White, performed by “Scarlett and Gunnar”)
No one will ever love you (co-written by John Paul White, performed by “Rayna and Deacon”)
Undermine (co-written by Kacey Musgraves, performed by “Juliette and Deacon”)
Changing Grounds (written by Gillian Welch, performed by “Rayna”)
When the right one comes along (co-written by Justin Davis, Sarah Zimmerman and Gloria Middleman, performed by “Scarlett and Gunnar”)
A life that’s good (co-written by Ashley Monroe and Sarah Siskind, performed by “Deacon”)
Lately (co-written by Ashley Monroe and Sarah Siskind, performed by “Scarlett and Gunnar”)
Heart on Fire (co-written by Kate York and Sarah Siskind, performed by “Maddie and Daphne”)
Boomtown (co-written by Maren Morris, performed by “Juliette and Luke”)
I will never let you know (co-written by Kate York, performed by “Scarlett and Gunnar”)

7. John Hiatt. I discovered John Hiatt through the Nashville soundtrack when his hit Have a little faith in me was covered by Maisy Stella and Will Chase. The album Bring the family was his first release following his sobriety. He started recording Have a little faith in me in studio with a heavy arrangement but the session was plagued by setbacks and delays. The next day, he learned of the suicide of his ex-wife and recorded the pared down acoustic version he his most widely known for. The rest is history. This album is no one-hit wonder however: every track is a hit. Music style: Folk, country, blues-rock, Americana.
On the playlist:
Have a little faith in me
Memphis in the meantime

8. Miranda Lambert. Yes. Miranda Lambert. I don’t care how you feel about over-produced blond country singers, this girl is the real deal. For sure, some of her songs are cut for commercial radio success but her early albums were critically acclaimed as well. Pick any of her albums and you will find that most of her songs swing country-country rather than pop-country. I’m partial to Platinum as her best album although Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is not far behind. Music style: Country, alt-country, country pop, bluegrass.

Once again, it was hard to pick my favourite songs so I went with my favourite songwriters instead:

On the playlist:
Little Red Wagon (written by Audra Mae)
Dry Town (written by Gillian Welch)
All that’s left (written by Tom and Dixie Hall)
Gravity’s a b**ch (written by Miranda Lambert and Scott Wray)

In 2017, I’m looking forward to dig into the work of Gillian Welch. Her songwriting hits all my buttons. Otherwise, I will just float where the music leads.

What were your favorite finds of 2016? Feel free to link your Spotify Playlists in the comments and let’s chat tunes!