I usually don’t read articles about tattoos because tattoos, like those taboo topics religion and politics, seem to have no neutral ground: people either love them or hate them, and are passionate in their stance. Even if an article itself takes no sides, the comments that follow enevitably contain at least one person who thinks that tattoos are disgusting, and that women who have tattoos are less than lady-like (to put it nicely). So, to save me from being irked, I just avoid reading about the subject entirely. Thankfully, most people do not engage you in random conversations on the street if they happen to spot a tattoo, so it’s fairly easy to avoid being annoyed there.

Motherhood, as I’ve discovered, is a bit of a larger no-man’s land unless you are a sucker for punishment. No matter how you feed, diaper, or clothe your child, where/when/how you let them sleep, or what methods you use to discipline (or not) your little one, someone will silently – or not so silently – judge your choices. Again, you can avoid the subject online but you can’t just avoid showing your child in public, and that mere presence of a child seems to provide the opening for people to share their opinions, whether solicited or (more likely) not.

So what exactly possessed me to read an article entitled “Moms with Tattoos” a few days ago I will never know (I think it was something in the link to it about “Will your tattoos affect how other moms look at you on the playgound?”), but read it I did. Clearly I am a sucker for punishment after all. As it turns out, I guess they weren’t feeling as edgy as they tried to make themselves out to be since the article was about as flighty as a butterfly – and never came close to answering whether or not my tattoos will prevent other moms from letting their kids play with Abby. I guess I should be thankful that most of the moms I know also have tattoos, so I never have to worry about them dropping me the second an ink line peeks out from under my clothing.

The only remotely interesting point in the article was when one mom wondered whether the fact that she had tattoos would make her daughter want tattoos. Charles and I have joked more than once that Abby will likely hate tattoos just because we have them, which makes us wonder what form her teenage rebellion will come in (not even two and the teenage angst is being imagined already!).

Maybe she’ll join a convent.

This being my first “official” Mother’s Day as a mother, I really wasn’t sure what I expected from it.

Ever since Abby was born, I certainly think alot about being a mother and what the experience means to me. There’s a part of me that really wants to capture the emotions that I feel, perhaps so that I can define them, or perhaps just so that I can reflect on them at a later date when Abby is a older or whenever our next child adds his or her stamp to it. But, so far I haven’t been able to find the right words. Try as I might, they seem to lurk just below the surface, teasing me with their presence and then darting back into the fog before I can gather them up. I feel as if the words that I do have may do motherhood an injustice, that they will merely brush the surface of things without getting down to what really matters the most. Because how do you put into words things like the overwhelming joy you get from watching your child figure something out for the first time, why a look from her can send you into a fit of laugher, or how she can break your heart every single day because it just becomes overloaded with Love for her?

Perhaps words just aren’t the right medium. But, since words are all I know, I keep chasing them.

And since words are what I know, and Mother’s Day is what is now, it was pretty easy to find essays and articles leading up to today on what I might expect from Mother’s Day, a.k.a. How to Celebrate Being a Mom. Or, I guess more precisely, how I should be celebrated as a mom. Some were very heartfelt, others a little more lighthearted. None quite summed up my thoughts on motherhood, but they did make for interesting reading I suppose. Many suggested that I could/should have asked for a day off today – a day to do whatever it was that my heart desired. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized that I was doing what I wanted: if it wasn’t for Abigail, I wouldn’t be celebrated today (I would still, of course, be celebrating my mother), so it kind of made sense to me that I would spend the day with her.

While I might not yet be able to adaquately sum up my experience as a mother, this is certainly the first year that I really noticed all of the Mother’s Day advertising and all of the gifts that they try to get you to buy to commemorate motherhood. And I did get gifts this morning, although, as with Abby’s birth, I didn’t “expect” anything.

I already got the greatest gift.

Cheesy, I know. But also true.

When traveling, I often enjoy the journey almost as much as the destination. If the journey involves a car, I just need the right soundtrack and snack food and I’m more than happy to go along for the ride. If it involves a ship, once we get past the safety orientation I’m all aboard and even a day or two at sea can be enjoyed by attending the talks, stepping into the casino, or sitting in a lounge chair by a window with a beverage, watching the waves go by. And if it involves a plane? Oh, if it involves a plane my enjoyment reaches a new level! I love flying. I don’t mind the lineups to check in or for security, or the waiting to pick up my bag at the end. My enjoyment is sometimes tempered by cramped leg room or someone who spends the entire flight with their chair fully back, but these succeed only in bringing my enjoyment down a notch or two and are not enough to completely overshadow my glee. My favourite part is the take-off: there’s just something awe-inspiring about getting a plane into the air. Hopefully, one day we will try traveling by train as I feel that too will have its own perks.

But, lately when knitting, I’m all about the destination. Sure, the planning part is very fun – caressing all the beautiful yarns, deciding on the right yarn and colour, finding just the right pattern for the yarn (or designing a pattern, if it’s one I’m doing myself) – but once I get past that I’m beginning to find that I run out of drive. Sometimes, even with all the groundwork done, I delay a project because I just don’t want to cast on. And the actual knitting? Sometimes … well, sometimes it feels a bit like a chore. Sure, there are things like lace, cables, and pattern work to keep me on my toes, but sometimes I can’t seem to enjoy those as much as I probably should. Instead, I’m wishing that I was done, rather than enjoying what I am doing. Payoff over process. Sometimes I get so close to the end, only to be bogged down by the finishing steps like seaming and weaving in yarn ends, that my progress slows to a crawl, further dampening my interest.

It never used to be like that though – I used to enjoy the process of knitting more than I seem to now. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy knitting an awful lot, I guess I’m just finding that the particular aspects of what I enjoy are changing. I’m not sure if it is just the sheer amount of knitting I do, or perhaps the amount of knitting I do for people other than me that has changed my perspective on it. Whatever the case, I want to enjoy the journey again, as well as the destination.

We only go on a few trips a year, and even when I was traveling for work it was only every few months, so traveling never really gets old for me, but I usually knit three to four dog sweaters a month from November through to March, and then I have had large projects on the go over each of the summers for the last few years.

So, since this is our year of Zen, I’m going to work on enjoying the process of knitting again. ‘Cuz, really, one should be Zen when wielding a pair of large, pointy sticks.

After Abby was born, I had a bit of an identity crisis. I was now a “mom” and that label seemed to come with much more baggage than I had ever thought it would. It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite quotes as a teenager:

“This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go, and what to do”.¹

I had no idea where to go, or what to do. Everything about being a parent makes you feel like a failure. After muddling my way (with much help from Charles) through the first few weeks, I figured out (although not quite quickly enough) not to read any more parenting books, or at least to take the ones I did read with a grain of salt, because every book tells you that you are doing it wrong. It doesn’t matter what “it” is (sleeping, feeding, dressing) you are definitely doing it wrong. And other people, well-meaning as they might be, generally do not make it easier by offering unsolicted advice. In the light of the day, I could stand by my/our decisions, but in the middle of the night, it was much, much easier to second-guess what I was doing. After all, I was just guessing for the most part. Guessing what she wanted. Guessing what she needed. ‘Cuz babies don’t have instructions.

On top of the stress of ruining our baby’s life by doing something as monsterous as feeding her when she was hungry (i.e. on demand), there was the fact that none of my clothes fit. Maternity clothes were too big. My regular clothes were too small. I could count on one finger the number of pants that fit. Another two fingers covered the number of skirts I could wear. I wanted to be a good homemaker (dinner on the table, laundry clean, house generally tidy) and a good wife (not looking as if I rotated through the same outfit every three days) but I wasn’t feeling good about myself as a person.

“Judge me all you want, just keep the verdict to yourself”.²

The problem arises when you are the one judging yourself. Internalizing all of those judgements just magnifies them. And in the two things that mattered most to me, my baby and my marriage, I judged myself as failing.

The good news is, I finally gave myself a reprieve. Crisis averted. The bad news is that, while all my pants and skirts fit now, my shirts still don’t fit. Darn breastfeeding boobs.

¹ Courtesy of the epitome of teen angst, miss Angela Chase.

² Courtesty of a cigarette ad, although I try to ignore that fact.

How do you put a value on a person?

My value as a blogger? Probably not high given my frequency (which as we know is infrequent).

My value as a maid is definitely zilch. I’m pretty good at making messes, not so good at cleaning them up, particularly when baking – I’m a catastrophe then. Cooking is only marginally better. Luckily we have a housekeeper who comes in every two weeks to set our house in order.

Facebook tells me that I have 96 friends, so I guess 96 people value me as a friend, or at least want to use me to pad their friends list.

This site sets my Twitter value at $24. That’ll buy you about four Venti Chai Lattes and two lemon loafs, with a bit of change to spare. Or one very nice skein of yarn.

Some people might set my value by how much money I make, but right now I make no money. Actually now all I do is spend money (groceries, bills, baby), so does that assign me a negative value? On Judgement Day, will I be handed a bill showing my balance owing?

How about my value as a mother? As a wife? As a daughter, sister, sister-in-law? As a friend? There are so many ways you can compartmentalize your value and come up seemingly lacking by looking at only one segment.

There is a quote by Michel de Montaigne: “The value of life is not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet very little.”

I like that way best.