Tag Archives: daughter

A Promise To Myself

Posted by on November 19, 2011 3 comments

For a long time I thought I had my shit together. But it turns out I’m still carrying all sorts of baggage around, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to sort my shit out, if you’ll pardon my French. Instead, I was avoiding. I was keeping myself busy. I was pretending. It’s time for change. That change starts today.

That’s not to say I’m unhappy. Far from it! But I’ve taken a step back from a lot of things in order for me to be able to concentrate on making myself whole again. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve narrowed down my goals into three tangible, attainable targets. I intend to improve:

  • My career prospects
  • My relationship with my daughter
  • My health
To that end, I’m working to eliminate distractions and stressful, unhappy situations from my life so that I can concentrate on the three targets above. And I’m making lists. Have I ever mentioned how much I love making lists?
So, here are my lists. By sharing them with you, I hold myself more accountable. I’ll touch base and update on progress, and you can ask how I’m doing, too!

Career Prospects/Work and Community Involvement
  • March with my brothers and sisters in the Evict Rob Ford rally tomorrow. 
  • Attend NDP Leader’s Levee Saturday night in a pretty black dress. Hand out business cards. Make contacts. Look for opportunities. Enjoy spending time with like-minded folk who have like-minded goals. 
  • Run for the position of Secretary on the executive of my union’s area council.
  • Find someone to nominate me as a delegate to our regional Labour Council.
  • Bug my manager to (finally!) implement the career development portion of my most recent performance evaluation.
  • Join some committees and working groups. It’ll look good on my resume.
  • Volunteer at a soup kitchen. It’ll feel good in my heart.
Relationship with Gwen Junior
  • Start a Saturday afternoon hot yoga routine at Moksha Yoga Uptown (only seven dollars!).
  • Hire a math tutor – sit with them and help.
  • Write a weekly letter to her, and encourage her to do the same.
  • Try to weasel my way back onto her Facebook hahaha
  • Teach her to cook.
My Health
  • Aforementioned weekly hot yoga.
  • Buy a pair of ice skates – skate for free Friday nights.
  • Check out the lane swimming up the street once a week.
  • Stop eating such bullshit! Like, seriously!
  • My friend Mitchell (you like what I did there, M?) just sent me this brown rice detox thing – maybe I’ll try that.
  • Get a solid eight hours sleep.
  • Drink more water!

My Daughter Is Smarter Than Me

Posted by on January 21, 2011 3 comments

There comes a time in every parent’s life when it becomes evident that they obviously did everything right, because their child is high-five calibre smart.

Well, I guess maybe this doesn’t happen to parents of stupid children, but I digress.

I need no reminder that my teenage daughter Gwen Junior is one smart-ass kid (both figuratively and literally), but a text message this morning was a pleasant reminder that she seriously rocks the casbah.

There’s a poster on the subway that I noticed a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t help but laugh because it’s just so tacky. It’s an ad for a no-frills funeral service here in Toronto. I remember laughing about reading such a depressing ad on the way to work every morning, and even took a picture of it:

This morning, I received a text message from my daughter, who was on her way to school. It read:

Funerals have finally become affordable.  ”improving on the traditional through convenience and affordable choices” whoever made this ttc poster needs to go back to school.

I knew right away what poster she was talking about, but spent a few minutes wondering why she thought the ad designer should “go back to school” based on that line (which, although you may not be able to see it in my photo, is in the gold bar). Then, it hit me: she thinks the grammar’s bad!

See, the way I initially read it, “convenience and affordable choices” sounded okay, because the convenience of the service and the affordable choices it offered were mutually exclusive. But evidently, my daughter felt that “convenient and affordable choices” was the correct way to go about it, illustrating that the choices were convenient as well as affordable. Which… makes total sense.

It could be argued that both ways are technically correct, but this illustrates that my daughter can, and does, explore alternate and improved ways of expressing one’s thoughts and intentions. Which I think is fucking awesome. So I replied with a ‘Omg ur right, it should be “convenient and affordable choices’. Good eye!” and spent the rest of the morning basking in my obvious superiority as a parent and all-round human being.

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Those Kids and Their Silly Jibber Jabber

Posted by on January 18, 2011 4 comments

Sometimes I feel silly writing parenting blog posts. Mostly because they’re about my teenage daughter, and I am fully aware of the fact that I am way too young to have a teenage daughter. But I have her, and like it or not*, she’s here to stay.

Despite my beauty and youth, however, I am often made to feel old and out of touch by many elements of my daughter’s day-to-day life. One such element in my apparent loss of fashion sense – the childish fantasies I had of sharing a wardrobe with my someday daughter never came to pass, mostly because I wouldn’t be caught dead in what she likes (and vice versa, I’m sure, but I’m pretty hot so I don’t worry about it that much).

What’s really made me feel a million years old recently though is the slang I hear coming out of her face. It’s just so stupid that I want to eat nails. Here are a few examples:

  • Legit. Legit is a word that teenagers nowadays are using in inappropriate contexts, to emphasize the… legitimacy of their statements. For instance: “Okay so when I got off the bus I legit stepped in a puddle,” or “that boy is such a nerd, he legit plays chess in the caf.”
  • Awks. Abbreviation for the word awkward. Often used in its place, or on it’s own as a one-word indicator of just how ridiculously fucking awkward they are, feel or consider the situation to be.
  • ROFL. Now we all know what this means on the internet – Rolling on the Floor Laughing. It’s been around since day one. But what you might not know is that kids are now verbally saying ROFL instead of actually rolling on the floor laughing. They pronounce it “raw-full“. They usually say it with a straight face to demonstrate how “scene” they are and then get very angry when you implement Operation ROFL’s Plan B (forced rolling/laughing by way of armpit tickle).
  • Loafting. I actually overheard my daughter use this term (via eavesdropping) a few weeks ago in a discussion with her girlfriend about how lazy said girlfriend’s boyfriend’s best friend’s little sister is. “Everytime I see her at school she’s just loafting around in the halls…” was as much as she was able to get out of her mouth before I burst through the door and demanded to know what the hell that stupid word meant. She looked at me like I was a third-grade dropout and replied, “it’s not even slang, Mom. Look it up. It means a slothful person who just bums around doing nothing.” I stared at her in disbelief before replying, “DO YOU MEAN LOAFING? IS THAT THE WORD YOU MEAN? YOUR ENTIRE SHIT-FOR-BRAINS GENERATION ADDED A SUPERFLUOUS LETTER T TO A PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL WORD AND YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME LIKE I’M THE CRAZY ONE? Blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
  • True. Another real word used inappropriately, most often to convey assent or agreement. Me: “Gwen Junior, your turquoise Manic Panic hair dye has stained the bathroom sink. Go scrub it right now or you can’t go on the internet.” Gwen Junior: “True.”

Someday, I’ll be cool again – when my daughter’s my age and she’s busy freaking out over how stupid her kids sound. Silly kids and their jibber jabber. Back in my day…

* Most of the time I like it… she’s generally pretty rad.

Here’s What I Think

Posted by on December 21, 2010 1 comment

So my teenage daughter and I had a wee skerfuffle today, and she dropped a couple of F-bombs. Not one to let anger get the better of me, I simply replied as follows:

This accomplished a few things: it broke the tension, it gave me the opportunity to teach her the meaning of a couple of new words (linguistic and inarticulate, the latter of which she guessed on her own with some prompting of course), and it allowed me to share a rare bit of wisdom with her: that there are far more intelligent ways of making one’s displeasure known.

Now if only I could practice what I preach :)