Friday, October 25, 2013

What "Work" Really Means

So after a record five weeks of the new job, I finally got the "I'm here all the time and you're only here half the time," reproach that I'd been expecting. She held out longer than I thought she would before telling me that, to be honest. It still wasn't pleasant. Then she got upset because I was clenching my fist (it was either that or get really upset myself and say things I'd regret).

It appears that only she is allowed to find the present circumstances difficult. After all, I'm going on a 4-5 day vacation every time I commute 2.5 hours one-way to a different city in order to pay for the privilege of staying in an 8x11 foot room in a house that's not my own and work 12-hour shifts in order to keep a roof over all of our heads before commuting back.

She's doing the real work of going to class 2 hours a day and bringing Bean to daycare and bringing him home. She told me she feels like she's trying to fit 24 hours of work into a 12-hour day, which, okay. I get that a house is a lot of work, and Bean is a full-time job by himself. I would never dispute that.

The thing is, on my off days I work a second job doing translation contracts so that there won't be too much month left at the end of the money, since she has no income. So while I realise she thinks that I'm not doing anything, I'm working 90 hour weeks trying to keep things afloat financially. Just because she doesn't see me working, I guess she assumes that it must be all fun and games for me. Work is a lovely, relaxing thing that I do away from home, and when I am home of course I "slack off" by not immediately setting to and mopping floors or doing laundry (because I'm usually working on my translation stuff).

Short of burning out, I'm not sure what I can do about this situation. So far any attempt at discussion has failed, probably because emotions are running high on both sides. I'm exhausted and so is she, but she seems convinced that I can't possibly be tired because I sometimes get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep (on average once every 7-10 days, which is admittedly more than she gets because she has trouble sleeping even on a good day).

So, I don't know. Anyway, this has been a rant. Carry on.





Thursday, October 24, 2013

Oh, the irony...

I'm becoming one of those parents. You know the ones, the ones who are obsessed with books on parenting and trying to work out just how badly they are screwing up their kids.

So far I've only read the one book, but suddenly I find myself with a "to-read" list as long as my arm. Whoops. On the plus side, my newest obsession is unlikely to affect anyone but myself, as my input on parenting strategies is still, as far as I can tell, unwelcome. I can't imagine my girlfriend will be any more receptive to "I read this in a book," than she has been to anything else I've said.

I've been back at home since yesterday evening, and we've had a pretty good time with Bean overall since I came in. We were fine right up until just before bedtime, at which point the very notion of being asked to go pee was treated as ANATHEMA. So I held him by one hand in the bathroom as he jumped and thrashed and flailed and flopped—right up until he accidentally knocked his leg against the bathroom counter and promptly wailed in anguish. So I sat him on the toilet, gave him a kiss (to make it better, you understand), and we had the following exchange:

Me: "Was that a good idea or a bad idea?"

Bean: *hiccupping* "A b-bad idea!"

Me: "Mm-hmm. And do you think you would have hit your leg if you'd listened and gone pee like we told you instead of flailing around?"

Bean: "Da!"

(As an amusing side note, Bean has not said "yes" or "yeah" or "yup" in about two years. For reasons unknown to anyone, he started saying "Da!" like a little Russian boy, and nothing we do or say has made him change his mind)

After that there were hysterics at bedtime because he remembered a half-eaten apple that he decided he had to have right now instead of going to sleep. He ended up not falling asleep until about ten to nine... an hour and twenty minutes after bedtime.

This morning went much better. My girlfriend was going on a field trip with her class (she's taking conversational French in order to hone her skills for the job market here in Quebec), so she told me last night she and Bean needed to be out the door by 8:00 at the very latest.

Morning and evening routines are what Bean finds the hardest to adhere to. Inevitably there seems to be screaming and tantrums and tears, or else he simply ignores all requests to go to the bathroom/eat his cereal/put on the clothes he's picked for the day. In the past 2-4 weeks this has gotten so bad that he and my girlfriend have not made it out of the house before 8:15 at the earliest, and sometimes as late as 8:45. My girlfriend's class starts at 9:00, which gives her not enough time to drop Bean at daycare and get to class on time.

Generally in the mornings I try to stay out of the way as much as possible. It's been made clear to me that I don't know what I'm doing and that my interference is unwelcome. This morning, though, I offered to help out, and much to my surprise she accepted. So while she was sorting out her lunch I got Bean going for the day.

Perhaps it was the novelty of my going through the morning routine with him, but he did really well right up until the last minute. He went to the bathroom and took off his nighttime diaper with very little prompting. He picked out clothes for the day (a button-down shirt and his "cosy" pants, since all his skirts are in the wash) and got dressed all by himself—I helped with exactly one button. While he ate his cereal I pulled out my phone to show him the new foal in my "pony game" (an iPhone game called Derby Days with which he's developed a slight fascination). By then it was five minutes to 8:00 and the car was packed and it was looking really good for getting out the door on time. Alas, at the last minute he decided he wanted to play in his room rather than go pee and put on his shoes, and so there was more flailing and whining and it took both of us to get his shoes on him. In the end, they made it out the door at 8:05, which is still the earliest they've been in at least a month.

In short, I'm counting today a win so far. If we can carry this momentum through to the evening right through bedtime, that would be awesome.

In the meantime, I have a stack of reading to do...



Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Real Challenges

Ostensibly, this is a blog about the challenges of our newly formed, nontraditional little family.

I'm going to guess that most people who first come to read this are going to expect posts about my anxiety about the fact that Bean is gender nonconforming, about all the uphill battles we're facing. Snide remark from other adults, teasing and bullying from other children, the works. It's possible, even likely, that there will be posts about that, eventually.

The thing is, that's not the main problem we're having these days. I'm really not worried about Bean's clothing choices, nor have I ever been, and nor has his mother. Are we concerned that there might be repercussions later? Of course. For the moment, though, we are blessed by incredibly supportive friends and family (except my own parents, but that's a post for a different day) who so far have no so much as batted an eyelash at Bean's love of pink and sparkly frilly things. His preschool have also been wonderful and supportive, and the two "incidents" with other kids were short-lived and barely registered as a blip on the radar.

The real problem we're having with Bean is a behavioural one. I've mentioned before that he's a high-energy kid, that he never stops going except when he's asleep. He's also been acting out. A lot. This is no doubt due in great part to the fact that he and his mother moved in with me the week he turned three. After three years of being one-on-one with his mother who was a SAHM and was able to devote her attention to him 100% of the time, now he lives in a house with another adult who takes his mother's attention away AND goes to preschool full time, five days a week. He has to cope with a new parental/authority figure, a new home, new pets (my dog and two cats, who are much more present in the household than the two cats who live(d) with him and his mother and resided primarily in the kitchen).

It's a huge adjustment, and just as that happened I got a job in a new city which means I have to commute back and forth every 4-5 days. So my schedule is a mystery to him (heck, it's a bit of a mystery to me), and that adds to the overall stress.

In short, there is a lot of acting out. He doesn't listen, no matter what we do. Lord knows, we have tried everything from time outs to taking away toys to turning off the TV to resorting to "redirecting" at the suggestion of his teachers (i.e. physically moving him away from whatever it is he's doing that we don't like and setting him up doing something better), to no avail. He's lost whatever ability he had to tolerate frustration. The moment he hears "no,"  he melts down. Screaming tantrums, kicking and shrieking and turning red in the face, and just ignoring it until it stops doesn't work, because he just works himself up more until he's rigid and practically convulsing with rage.

When he's not having eardrum-bursting tantrums, he's running in circles and screaming (happy screams instead of tantrum screams are still screams), or getting into everything he shouldn't be getting into. Whatever idea pops into his mind, he acts on it instantly. I realise that this is part of being a three-year-old, but because he's so high-energy, what would be a minor thing with most kids turns very quickly into disaster with him. If we tell him not to mess with the drawers, he does. A regular kid might open one drawer and poke at it. Bean, on the other hand, opens all the available drawers and pulls out everything in them, dumping it all on the floor in the time it takes for us to turn around and say "No, don't do that!"

Any attempt to discipline him, when not met with the aforementioned tantrums, are met with giggling and outright defiance, as though it's all one giant game. I remember that, as a child, I was incredibly sensitive to my parents' moods, and would be crushed at the thought that they weren't happy with me. I was, even then, a people-pleaser. Bean has no such compunctions. If we're angry and frustrated, so what? That just makes it funnier. It becomes an increasingly funny game until we find the right "punishment" for that moment, at which point he starts screaming and wailing again.

It's exhausting and frustrating for all of us.

It doesn't help that my own role as parent/disciplinarian is fuzzy at best. My girlfriend and I are still working out the kinks of this whole relationship thing, and in many ways she still has the get-the-fuck-away-from-my-kid reflex whenever I try to intervene. This in turn makes me tend to either back off or not come on as strongly as I would if it were, say, a child I'd raised from birth/infancy. Bean gets away with a lot more than I ever would have liked to see in one of my kids, especially when it comes to how he behave with/around other people. He also senses that my authority is in doubt, and that makes it much easier for him to ignore me whenever I try to get him to do anything that doesn't fall within his "This is what I want to do right now" parameters.

These days, even a suggestion of "Go to the bathroom, please," when we notice he's grabbing at himself is met with "NO!" If we insist, he has a tantrum. No matter what unfolds afterward, it inevitably winds up with wet underwear. Bean actually started potty training early by most standards, well over a year ago. So it's not like going to the bathroom is a huge ordeal for him, except how apparently it is. The mere suggestion that he interrupt whatever he's doing is insupportable, it seems.

What doesn't help is that Bean is slightly delayed with his speech. Nothing too worrisome, and he's been improving by leaps and bounds since going to his new school, but he's definitely behind most of his peers. Only his mother understands the majority of what he says. I can grasp about 60% of what he says, and other adult are flummoxed. He hasn't figured out pronouns or articles except in the most basic way, and while he's now managing complex sentences (something he wasn't doing even at three years old, when he was still only putting together two words at a time), they're pretty fragmented. I suspect that the frustration of not making himself understood is a part of what's been going on.

In short, I'm at a loss, and I'm not in a position to do anything about it. Every time I even mildly make a suggestion about modifying something, I get shut down. Either it's something that's already been tried (and heaven forfend that I point out that trying something once and never again doesn't, in fact, constitute a proper try), or else I get "that would never work, because X, Y & Z." My girlfriend has years of childcare to her name (her mother took care of kids, and she ran her own daycare business for years), whereas I have none, so my input has no weight to it. Whatever idea I have, it's automatically theoretical because I have no real world experience to lend it weight. The only experience I have is my own childhood (and I was that rare unicorn of children, a quiet, self-directed people-pleaser, the kind of child who was so low-maintenance that people think my parents are lying about how easy I was to raise), and the stories I hear from other parents.

So, fair enough. I am pretty sure that my girlfriend is never truly going to accept me as Bean's other parent. Bean is hers, and I just live here. We are planning to have other kids, and I suspect it'll be hard to have the kind of double standard that will always have him getting exemptions from every attempt at discipline, but it's still workable. It's not ideal, but it's not a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned. Raising Bean is a big challenge, and there will be different challenges in the years to come with other kids.

In conclusion? The gender nonconforming thing? It's not a real problem. It's just who Bean is, and that's one of the best things about him. I just wish it were the worst of our problems, because if it were? It would mean life was 100% awesome all the time.


Friday, October 11, 2013

The Demise of Barbie...

All the non-adult members of our household are in revolt since I started my new job. My commute and multi-day absences are taking their toll.

Bean's first tactic of screaming through his bedroom window for me not to go didn't have the desired effect of making me stay home, so last week he changed tactics.

"You go to work now, Dahdee," he said (it's how he pronounces my name, and it still amuses me to no end that people think he calls me "Daddy."). "You go to work and me stay home alone with Mama!"

Yes, reverse psychology. He's a smart cookie. Of course, it didn't produce the results he wanted. All it did was hurt my feelings. I expect that this is something I should try to get used to, being the co-parent of a kid who wasn't ~mine~ for the first three years of his life.

Alas, the pets are also staging a revolt. The cats have been... well, they've been cats. It could be worse. The dog, on the other hand, has been acting out more and more. He's chewed a few of Bean's toys, though my girlfriend was able to save most of them (the squeaky hedgehog, alas, no longer squeaks). Last week, however, the dog ate Barbie. To be specific, he bit off Barbie's butt.

Barbie is relatively new in our household. My girlfriend LOVED Barbies when she was younger (and still loves Barbie), so she rightly thought Bean would like her too. She dug two Barbies out of storage last week, and Bean does indeed adore them. It was one of the few things that made him play quietly in his room (you have no idea how rare this is), along with his train tracks. We have a house for Barbie, and one of his Christmas presents will be a Barbie Volkswagen that was found on sale. We're pretty sure Barbie is here to stay.

So on Tuesday right as I was packing the car to go there was the sound of crying and screaming from Bean's bedroom. From the sound of it I assumed he got himself in trouble for not listening/pulling on the dog/some other act of mayhem. I have a whole long other post that I need to write about the actual challenges we're facing with Bean, rather than the gender-creative thing. Oddly enough, that's not the "problem" with Bean. But like I said, that's a post for a different day.

When I went back inside, I found my girlfriend comforting Bean, who was in tears. There were bits of plastic all over the floor, and Barbie no longer had a bum. Her dress was in tatters. I put the dog in a time out, complete with presenting him with Barbie's remains. I have no idea if he understood why he was in trouble. I had bought him a different toy last week in the hopes that it would distract him from chewing the stuff that didn't belong to him, but apparently that didn't work at all.

So this week I found a couple of inexpensive Barbies at the store today. It's hard to find a good Barbie these days. Many of them now come with their clothing tops moulded on them in plastic, which is silly. After all, the whole point of Barbie is to dress and undress her any way you like, so that Barbie can be anyone you want her to be. I did finally find some that passed muster, and hopefully this will make up for last week's heartbreak.


Monday, October 7, 2013

The Colour Spectrum

This is the written-on-Sunday-posted-on-Monday edition.

Right now Bean is wearing a powder blue t-shirt with a picture of ballet slippers on it, pink leggings, powder blue socks, and a black cotton skirt. He's on the floor of the dining room assembling train tracks and yelling at the top of his lungs.

"Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

He's not actually hurt, though he has loudly claimed that he is. It's like sharing the room with a barking coyote. He's since moved on to staging what sounds like an elaborate railway accident.

If it weren't for the outfit, no one would think twice if they observed him right now. His behaviour is all "boy." And yet because he's wearing a skirt, I'm pretty sure that the average person might well look askance until someone explained it to them.

I am off work until Tuesday evening, and incredibly happy to be home. It's been a rough three weeks since I started this new job. A car accident for my girlfriend, a fried computer (hers, not mine), and the new commute for me have all contributed to a household filled with stress. So being home for four days is giving all of us a bit of a break.

Tomorrow is the birthday of Bean's grandfather, known as Pake ("Pah-kuh"), which is Frisian (or West Frisian) for "grandfather." So while my girlfriend went out to get birthday presents for him, Bean and I went for a long walk with Sergent, my seven year old husky-collie mix. Sergent is a sweetheart who loves Bean and lets him do pretty much whatever he wants.

We stopped to play in a nearby park. I use the term "park" loosely, because up until recently it was actually a fruit store. It burned down and they eventually tore down the building and laid down sod. So now there's a bit of grass growing, and there are about a dozen flower bins laid out, but that's about it. It was a good space for Bean to run around in, though, even though I wished it was better fenced-in than it was. Bean is... to put it politely... not a very good listener. He tends to run off and make us chase him because he thinks it's funny. Luckily, yesterday was a really good listening day, so we had a lot of fun running around the little park.

Bean was on his hands and knees in the dirt playing with acorns when one of our neighbours stopped by. She and I have chatted a few times, but she'd never met Bean before then. He was wearing his bright pink t-shirt that says "I love to dance!" on it, as well as his fuchsia skirt over his skinny jeans. The neighbour and I chatted for a few minutes until she tilted her head at me, clearly confused as to why I was using masculine pronouns to refer to Bean.

"Elle?" she prompted me, maybe thinking that French wasn't my first language (for the record: it is).

"Non, il," I confirmed. "C'est un garçon. Il aime les jupes." (He's a boy. He likes skirts.)

The thing is, Bean isn't all boy or all girl in terms of stereotypical likes and dislikes. Many of his behaviours are stereotypically "boy" (although I have known little girls to also behave this way). He's an incredibly high-energy kid. No one ever quite understands to the extent to which I mean "high energy" until they meet Bean. His mother and I often get reactions of "Oh, yes, my child is go-go-go too!" By which they mean that sometimes their kid gets hyper and runs around. Bean never stops moving, ever. Not when he's watching TV, not when he's making a puzzle. He's rarely quiet. The rest of the time he's loud. The volume ranges from we-have-to-talk-louder-to-make-ourselves-heard-during-normal-conversation all the way to ear-splitting shrieking that makes all our pets run for cover.

He also likes trains and cars and digging in the dirt. He just also likes pink and purple and sparkly things, princesses and fairies and makeup. It's very, very rare that he will sit and "play quietly" with any of his toys, whether it's his trains or his Barbies. In "Raising My Rainbow" Lori Duron said that they like to think of C.J. as a rainbow rather than a muddle of colours. If we think of the gender thing as a colour spectrum, Bean isn't a rainbow so much as he's kind of like a tie-dye t-shirt. Colourful and chaotic. We don't know if he'll continue to be gender nonconforming when he gets older. The trend seems to be 'yes' for now, but it's hard to tell. He's three and a half. He may decide that he's bored with skirts when he's five, or he might not. Either way, we're going to let him express himself the way he wants, and hopefully he won't want to censor himself for fear of being teased or bullied.

So the neighbour and I had a good chat about how kids should be allowed to like whatever they like. She was a little more hesitant when I brought the conversation around to grown men being allowed to like supposedly feminine things only, but she kept on gamely when I went into my "Feminism is also for men!" speech.

At the end she waved, Bean politely said goodbye, and she went on her way. No fuss, no muss.

For the most part, we haven't received the sort of censure that I've read about with other people whose kids don't fit the norm. It helps that, for better or for worse, my girlfriend and I are part of the LGBT community here. We may not be very active, but we know a lot of queer-identified people. All of our friends are feminists and believe in the equality of the genders. They've been teaching their daughters that it's they can want whatever they want out of life, and they understand the importance of teaching the same thing to our sons. Bean is also still young, and we are blessed that his daycare providers are supportive of his clothing choices and don't believe that ballet is only for girls.

In short, love the colours you love. The spectrum is literally just a social construct.


Saturday, October 5, 2013

About Anonymity

I'm not exactly anonymous. I've always had a public persona on the internet, and I doubt this will change.

That being said, for the purposes of this blog, I'm going to keep quiet on the subject of names of people and places and anything that might make my family readily identifiable. After all, my life is no longer only my own, which used to be the case. I owe it to Bean and my girlfriend to protect their privacy. As such, I will be using nicknames and posting photographs with the faces blurred out or positioned in such a way that they can't be seen/recognised.

Anyone who knows me who comes across this blog will recognise the players instantly. I am not trying to hide who we are—our friends and family know us, after all, and there is no shame here. What I am trying to do is to protect us as much as I can from whatever the internet might throw in our direction.

I hope that all my readers (if readers there end up being!) will understand and respect this.

Thank you.

Here be brightly coloured dragons...

Post #1.

I'm not sure what kind of blog this will turn out to be. I've blogged before, mostly on LiveJournal, but mostly as a kind of personal journal with a small audience. This will, I think, be rather different. I'm starting late, but I see it a little as a way to chronicle the biggest change(s) in my life and how that goes.

To sum up what's happened since last April: my girlfriend of a year (we've known each other for ten years but only been dating for one) moved in with her three-year-old son, hereafter known as Bean. (I have yet to figure out a nickname for my girlfriend. Stay tuned. :P) I work for the RCMP as a telecoms operator, which means shift work, and recently I got transferred to a different city nearby. So for now I'm commuting back and forth for 4-5 days at a time between shifts.

So I've dived headfirst into being the "co-parent" (as my girlfriend puts it), of an extremely high-energy three-and-a-half-year-old boy, who also happens to be gender nonconforming. Or maybe more gender creative—that term seems to fit him better. Bean has two speed settings: fast and asleep; he also has two volume settings: loud and asleep. He loves trains and Iron Man and playing with rocks. He also loves princesses and fairies and pink and purple clothes and all things sparkly. He wears skirts and tights and hair clips as well as his regular "boy" clothes and plays with Barbies and throws rocks in the water and digs in the dirt. Basically, he's a kid.

I don't know if anyone will read this. I don't know if I'll be able to keep up with posting. I don't know what I'm going to put in here, except for the fact that it's going to be about my own experience with all of this. I'm not an expert, and goodness knows I am riddled with my own fair share of neuroses. Up until now, I've been terrible at relationships and not all that good with small children. I've had plenty of other things happen in my life that I will likely end up discussing here as well, because they are important to who I am.

In short, this is uncharted territory for me. Here be brightly coloured, gender nonconforming dragons. ;)

Also, eventually I hope to clean up the look of this blog. I am terrible with all things html and other coding, so bear with me while I muddle my way through the beginnings of this.