On taking on another child

So once again, I have failed to live up to my revised blogging goal of once a month (down from the initial once a week goal in August, when I dipped my toe into the world of the blog). It has been over two months since I wrote a proper post. A lot has changed.

For one thing, the semester ended at the beginning of December, and exams were over by mid month. Along with all school-related stress, for a few weeks, at least. However, nature abhors a vacuum, and the car required a new radiator, which came with a $700 price tag. Gulp. Thank goodness for VISA.

As well, I acquired a new housemate in December, which brings with it a host of adjustments. So far, so good, but I struggle daily with control issues. And I still feel like a single parent.

We had his son with us for much of the holidays, which was both delightful AND exhausting. Our boys are 3 months apart in age, yet a year apart in the school system, so it's almost like twins... and I felt like a single parent to two demanding boys, one of whom I hardly know.

Just recently, his son declared to his mother (they live in Kelowna, 4 to 5 hours away through high mountain passes) that he wants to live with us. Although this is delightfully exciting to my fella, I am only looking forward to the end of the Family Maintenance hassle of regularly reduced pay-cheques. I don't know that I can gracefully cope with taking on the lion's share of caring for another 6 year old. Who will be the one to get them both off to school/daycare in the mornings? Who will be the one to struggle to make the grocery budget stretch to feed another mouth? (This kid eats like a teenage boy already!) Not to mention sussing out his food likes and dislikes. Who will chauffeur them around to school and extra curricular activities and playdates (Fiance doesn't have a driver's license)? Who will be the one to put them to bed every night, read stories, do homework with them, etc.? I have a sneaking suspicion the answer to all of the above is li'l ol' me. Sigh. I am exhausted just thinking about it.

I have a confession. I do not love the boy. And this makes perfect sense - I hardly know the boy. Unlike my own child, I have not carried him in my own body, I have not suckled him at my breast, I have not helped him through all the many 'firsts' of the baby and toddler years. In the past year, I have seen him a total of 5 times. Two of them were extended visits, but the other three were short, a single overnight visit when his folks were in town visiting and wanted free childcare to go out partying. But despite this understanding, I feel guilty for not loving him. I am fond of him, and I kiss and cuddle him, but when we have power struggles, that affection goes out the window. So I feel guilty, like I am a faulty mother. Send me back to the factory, there's an error with my feminine mystique!

I want assurances from my fiance that he will take on an equal share of the child-rearing tasks if his son is to come and live with us. He says he is willing, but, as with the housework and food preparation tasks, willingness may not be translated into action. I am silently resentful about the amount of unpaid household labour I preform, and I am unwilling to feel this way about his kid - it wouldn't be fair to the boy to be raised by someone who resented doing so.

So I wait, and worry. None of this will come to pass for months. The legal child custody agreement will have to be changed, which involves lawyers and legalese and the filing of documents. Will we need to go to court? I have no idea, as I have de facto custody of my own child, and all arrangements for child support are made privately. We can't take him on before this is complete, as we can't afford daycare out of pocket. We will need to apply for childcare subsidy from the provincial government, which we cannot do if his mother has legal custody.

However, I'm the only one with reservations. His dad is (of course) thrilled, my son is also thrilled (a built in playmate - there's no sibling rivalry at this point). My sister/roommate's response was, "I don't care, he's funny." Sometimes I wish I had a 'dangly' (as CannedAm said in her recent comment to my last post, the one that's over 2 months old - and my first ever comment, exciting and amazing as that is). If I wasn't a woman, all these concerns would vanish. Perhaps I need a wife of my own? ;)

Families and Poverty in Canada, some brief thoughts

One of my classes this semester is Sociology of Families. It's an upper level course, and has an extra credit (4 instead of the average 3). Thus, there is a LOT of reading. Our participation mark is worth 25% of our final grade, and includes weekly homework assignments. This week, we are reading about families and poverty.

This is an issue near and dear to my own heart - I am poor. I'm not poor in an absolute sense, I have a home and food in my fridge. But I do not make ends meet on a monthly basis, and without my credit card, I might not be able to put gas in my car or feed my son cheese and meat.

Luckily for me, I live in Canada, and not the United States. Thus, I have basic medical. My son also has his basic dental and ophthalmologic care covered by the government (but not mine, I'm expected to pay out of pocket). As well, I'm eligible for numerous redistributive social payments, from lower income taxes for low income families (I get it all back, not that it's much, but I'm sure Americans don't have the same benefits, so I'm lucky in comparison) to social benefits like the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the National Child Benefit Supplement, which, combined, gives me a cheque for about $250 a month. This definetly helps pay the rent. I've also recently recieved a one time tax free payment of $250 to help me "deal with higher energy costs" I was eligible for this because of the above mentioned benefit programs.

Despite these efforts by the Canadian and provincial governments to help out people such as me, the working poor (okay, I'm not working right now, but I was, up until mid-July, when I quit after giving 13 months notice, to focus on my education. Now I'm living on student loans, another government financed program), not much is shifting, demographically. Women and immigrants (especially "visible minorities") are still struggling, even after a sustained period of economic growth and job creation (1994 - 2004). The evidence suggests that it was upper income Canadians who benefitted from that economic growth, and the gap between the highest and lowest quintile is growing.

Single mothers are hit especially hard. Lone parent families comprise about one in five families with children. Yet among families classified by Stats Canada as income poor, over half are single parent families. So, it is children who are increasingly living in poverty, with all the associated negative outcomes. This is despite a 1989 unanimous resolution by the House of Commons to end child poverty by the year 2000. Hey, folks, that was 8 years ago! Child poverty hasn't changed in 25 years!

So, it seems to me that we, as Canadians, are willing to pay lip service to the plight of women and children in our patriarchal world, but when push comes to shove, and it's time to reduce deficits, we're gonna cut social benefits to women and children (UI becomeing EI, and reducing eligibility from 70% of applicants to only 30%). What is my government saying to me? Sounds like, "go get married woman, find a man to take care of you and your kid."

Yikes. The second wave of feminism began in the 70's.

First grader behavioural issues

Oh, what to do. My first grader is having behavioural problems at school. He disrupts the class. Here is an excerpt from a note she wrote me today in his planner:

"He also wants to lie down regularly on the floor and has a great difficulty when required to attend to lessons.... Please speak with him, as I am concerned about this behaviour if he will be accompanying us on Tuesday's field trip. Your support from home is appreciated."

The teacher is quite experienced, has a great attitude (we had a half hour conference about 3 weeks ago, I got a great vibe from her), and stresses positive interactions with him. But this is the first time my child's "strong will" has been an issue for a teacher or caregiver. He has been with his childcare provider for two years, now, and she was as surprised as I was to hear he has attention issues in class.

But now it sounds like he won't be able to go on the class field trip! As my only notification has been from the above planner note, I may be jumping to conclusions, but off the school grounds, safety is an issue for teachers, and if he can't listen in class, how about at the pumpkin patch?

Of course, the field trip falls on a day that I am unable to participate, or I'd just go with them, and make certain the little you-know-what minds his p's and q's. How can I possibly assure this teacher that he will behave?

Laziness has Nothing to do with Poverty

My inspiration for my last post was MomGrind's Blog Action Day post, which generated lots of interesting discussion in the comments. I added my two cents worth, was responded to (cool, or what?!), replied to the responses, and then got the following reply from MomGrind (the quote is from my reply):

“What I’d really like to argue is that poverty is not at all related to laziness.” I agree. I assume that a very small portion of poverty cases can be explained by laziness or by lack of drive, and those are the people who would indeed exploit a welfare system. But my assumption is that the vast majority of cases have nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with bad luck, lack of opportunity and other factors that have been mentioned here.

I don't want to leave a further comment, but I have a response to that, so I'm posting it here, on my private blog that no one's ever looked at, because no one knows about it!

I would argue that zero cases of poverty are related to laziness. I believe that the instances of welfare abuse, which has been chalked up to laziness, is actually the result of learned helplessness.

I was, again, reading away in my ethics textbook (Rachels, 2007, p. 97-98, see last post for full reference), this time about Utilitarianism (the founding ethical principle of democracy), when I came across the description of a psychological experiment from the 50's, apparently before animal rights and ethics committees @universities.

This was @Harvard. The experiment had 40 dogs in a "shuttlebox," a device consisting of two compartments separated by a barrier, initially set at the height of the dog's backs. The floor delivered electric shocks. At first, the dogs could escape the shocks by jumping over the barrier. Then they shocked the dogs on the other side as they landed. The dogs learned to anticipate the shocks, yet jumped over anyways. Then they blocked the passage between compartments with glass so the dogs couldn't escape the shocks at all. After 10 or 12 days the dogs ceased to resist the shocks. This was in an experiment to study "learned helplessness," a topic the psychologists thought important for the mentally ill (ibid).

If we extend the concept of learned helplessness to people experiencing poverty, who have had "bad luck, lack of opportunity and other factors that have been mentioned," it can be seen how people can stop resisting their circumstances, and essentially give up, thus being perceived as "lazy."

some brief thoughts on poverty, morality, and responsibility...

Yesterday was Blog Action Day, where bloggers wrote about poverty. I'm a little slow on the draw, but here's my two cents worth...

I just read the following in my textbook for my Philosophy class Morality and Politics: "A 60 year old man shot his letter carrier seven times because he was $90,000 in debt and thought that being in federal prison would be better than being homeless" (Rachels, 2007, p. 82). This is in an argument disproving the theory of Ethical Egoism.

The example is one in a series of harmful, unethical things people have done for their own benefit. Other examples include a nurse raping unconscious patients, a paramedic injecting emergency patients with sterile water, so as to sell the morphine, and parents feeding a baby acid so they could fake a lawsuit against a formula company.

I can see how these other examples fail to be moral, and of course I can see how it is immoral to shoot someone to save yourself from possible homelessness, but I cannot place all the responsibility for the immoral act upon the 60 year old man's shoulders. Should not society itself bear some of the responsibility for producing such anxieties? That is, are we not all collectively responsible for such a tragedy? Where was the social safety net for this individual?

It's high time we remember the lessons of the Depression and start looking out for every member of our society as a moral responsibility. By looking out for one another, I mean providing people with agency, not giving people charity. I mean giving them the tools to make a better life for themselves.

I'd like to live in a Canada that had already met the millennium goal of eradicating child poverty.


References
Rachels, J. (2007). The Elements of Moral Philosophy. 5th ed. by Stuart Rachels. New York: McGraw Hill.

Tomatoes! Tomatoes!

Yes! I have oodles of tomatoes!

About a week ago, my housemates /sisters and I cleaned up the garden for winter. Just in time, too, because the rainy weather is here.

We tore out all the beans and peas and sunflowers and squashes and tomatoes. We got rid of the lettuce that bolted in August. We planted new seed, plus broccoli and pac choi.
We had a laundry basket full of green tomatoes. We thought only a very few would ripen, so we spread them out on newspaper in the basement in the dark. The rest have been sitting in my kitchen, waiting for me to turn them into green tomato salsa for Christmas prezzies for those who have been VERY good ; )

But they've been ripening like mad! Now I only have a pot full of green ones, so maybe only two batches of salsa? Maybe if I keep waiting, they'll ALL ripen!

But what to do with all the ripe ones? They're ripening too fast!

The whole haul: