Surprise! I'm a single parent

Years ago I was in Farmers with my, then, young daughter. As we walked through the linen and towels section in comes a guy on some kind of shopping mission and he has three kids in tow.  Looking back now the family looked a bit like a Wellington version of the West family. The kids were everywhere picking things up and being loud – but not noticeably being bad as far as I can tell. The guy wasn’t happy. He said: If you kids don’t behave, when you get home you are getting a good hiding.

That night I read my daughter her story and as I leant over to kiss her goodnight she said: Now Mummy – I’m going to give you a good hiding!

Oh no! I thought back to that fathers words earlier that day. And I was confused – what had I done to inspire her to give me a hiding?

Oblivious to what’s going on in my head my daughter smiled and dove under the covers, she giggled a bit and then popped out again. Ohhhhhh I get it – a good hiding! Ooohhhh wasn’t it nice that she wasn’t about to commit a violent act.

If you live in New Zealand and you are a parent you would have to be a seriously unconnected person not to have known about The Smacking Bill as it was unfortunately known.

You will see my bias right away when I summarise the Bill for non-kiwis like this: Its a bill that firms up the law regarding physical disciplining of children. The reason the Bill was needed was because parents and caregivers who have harmed their children (mostly parents) have often used a defence about the right of a parent to administer a smack or two to reprimand their child. There was a grey area in the law and courts were less able to deal with parents say, hitting their children multiple times with a leather belt or jug cord, than two drunks clobbering each other in the pub car park.

There was a lot of public debate about The Bill when it went through. But it went through. Done and dusted right? Nope – now we are having a referendum.

Next month if you choose you can answer the following referendum question:

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

What????? The question is confusing – John Key said it seemed it had been written by Dr Seuss but that gives it too much credit. It was written by people who think it is so important to retain their right to smack that they are happy for other people’s children to suffer. It is a manipulative question. It does not address the extremes of society the bill set out to deal with. It insinuates good parents have become criminals. 

A lot of people have expressed more emotion about the wording of the question than the question itself. There is a risk, I think, that the extreme right (who believe government should be less interfering) and more fundamentalist Christians (who want to use the rod in order not to spoil the child) will be out in larger numbers than those who have found more effective ways to communicate the rules of safety and socially acceptable behaviours and have just moved on in the culture of parenting.

I guess I’m one of the latter – I’ve been reading the plunket book, had the fortune to have witnessed trained early childhood caregivers resolving small disputes between kids and larger problems like hittng and biking without violent tools. I had parents who mostly responded with reason and ran our household in a way that more democratic than autocratic or despotic. I can count on one hand the times smacking has been an option for me. But it’s not about me – I’m part of the cultural shift away from smacking. When I vote yes, I will be saying yes smacking children should be a criminal offence in New Zealand because if it isn’t it sends the message that degrees of violence towards and between children is ok. And what I expect to happen in society because of that clear ruling is that nobody thinks twice about making a complaint about a violent or abusive parent, that interventions happen sooner because there are no grey areas, that children grow up exposed to more effective ways of negotiating their expected behaviour. That ultimately children who might have grown up to be unable to communicate about conflict and used their fists, use their heads.

I am now the proud owner of a $1001 document that outlines who owns what between my ex and I. That’s cheap! But don’t think it didn’t hurt to transfer the money into the striped suited ones account.

We had waited six months for his lawyer to write a draft. Six months! If I was writing these for a living I’d have a basic template and a basic interview and I’d knock ’em out like buns in a bakery.

To get things moving along I surfed the net to find out what was required and wrote up a draft. Then I got the ex to read it and made some changes. Then I consulted the list of lawyers my colleagues had recommended and contacted the one with the best parking. I told the lawyer I didn’t want to waste money. We set a price. We added a few extras like some arrangements about what we do about Christmas.

Then off it went to his lawyer. A month passed. My ex came up with a change – the sentence he’d contributed to the document wasn’t what he meant. We made the change. Finally word came that the agreement was signed and ready for my X. I drive to my lawyer. Reading through it I saw that my ex and his lawyer have signed the earlier copy. If I’d signed it it would mean an extra ten thousand dollars for me.

I pointed it out. Yeah, I know.

We printed out the right copy I signed that and we sent it off to the sink hole of time management his lawyer seemed to be.

Thursday I heard that the document was completed. Anticlimax. Now we follow the agreement and maybe by the end of the month my house will be mine (and the banks). ‘

If you want a copy of my agreement to use to draft your own just let me know.

Driving to work I picked up a woman who’d just missed the bus. The bus stop is close to my house. She asked me if I lived close to the solo mother. I thought about it and said no I didnt think so. We chatted on and then back came this question did I live close to the solo mother… finally….. I’m so slow….. I get it…… that’s ME!

or Christmas creeps up on Easter

or I thought I’d blogged this but apparently I never got around to it (blush)

here goes:

Just before Easter an American church group was making a plea for contributions to poor children’s easter baskets. The camera panned to such a basket and there in non-recyclable plastic were a collection of toys and, presumably, chocolate goodies.

What the? Stop the insanity! Why would you encourage the children of poor people to think that three or four months after crippling consumerist Christmas there’s another credit card celebration. Come on! It’s bad for kids to keep getting something for nothing. It’s bad for parents to have to respond to another financial demand. And why would a church group of all things be promoting the blurring of Christmas and Easter???

Capitalism is built on exponential growth. Exponential growth is highly
unstable…. so, therefore, is capitalism.

There is a lot of evidence that Christmas does us more bad than good. Family violence rises, and people report higher levels of debt, loneliness and depression. Interestingly domestic violence has shown a regular decrease in April for a number of years:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/2321790/Experts-baffled-by-April-dip-in-family-violence

So I think there is a case to not mess with Easter until we know more about why there is some correlation with a positive indicator. In fact rather than buying into yet more consumerism maybe we should be winding the clock back a bit. I’m writing this the day after Good Friday in which I successfully did not eat chocolate. You read it right! Largely this is because I’m feeling blobby enough: having succumbed to impulse purchases of chocolate on and off since Christmas as that’s when the eggs come out. Just as October sees the first bloom of tinsel at my supermarket, New Years day seems to spark a laying out of the Cadbury cream eggs (actually I like caramel).

I’m a person who drives more than she should. I barely manage to keep up with burning the calories I consume at breakfast, lunch and dinner. These eggs and other treats that come my way at work morning teas and get-togethers seem to settle round my midriff like a sort of anti-life preserver.

The effects of Easter haven’t just registered with me. A nutritionist is complaining about the size of some of the Easter eggs on sale:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2328606/Easters-chocolate-excesses-anger-nutritionist

Easter, as I understand it, has it’s origins as a spring ritual. It’s about looking out the window after the hardship of winter and celebrating survival and new birth. The egg is symbolic for its promise of new beginnings, new life and fertility. And then the chocolate industry got involved. Easter slotted in rather well with the Christian celebration of Jesus death and (new life) resurrection. A few thousand years of paganism, a few of christianity and somewhere in there the happy advent of the hot cross bun as a result. But lets leave it there. I’m all for fun rituals that remind us of something but those which only encourage empty expenditure need to be questioned. We have had enough credit trouble lately. 

Being a Mum on a limited budget who doesn’t get out much I have to admit to kind of liking the supermarket. It’s full of grown ups for one thing. There’s a sort of pleasant camaraderie among strangers. They seem to play music from my era. They have stuff I need.

The supermarket is a place with its own rules – it’s not socially challanging but it is psychologically interesting. It’s human lift behaviour plus plus. If I do the whole task and don’t talk to anyone its no problem. If I have a polite exchange of some sort then it kind of reinforces a sense of community. Totally fake community but somehow it’s good all the same.

I love it when someone asks me a question – breaks out of the ranks of carefully spaced trolleys and the unspoken protocols of browsing bubbles – and says something like: do you know where the mouse traps are? (I did) or do you know if they have changed my porridge packaging? (I didn’t). One that gives me a kind of thrill is when I’m at the check out and the operator holds up a swede or rhubarb or some other produce they have to know the name of to price and they ask: do you know what this is? And I especially like it if they ask me what I do with it.  Then I feel like a TV chef. Or at least someone who has a cooking repertoire beyond instant noodles, bread and coke.

I was completely astounded, disgusted and appalled when I read that one of the top 5 items sold in supermarkets was coca cola. Huh? Its not even a food.

I think another reason I like the supermarket is because its a place I get to spend money. I have a lot of rules to myself ordinarily NOT to spend money. Not to go places where money could be spent. But the supermarket is a place I get to do it with a clear conscience. And because I can go beyond instant  noodles I get to make a lot of choices. The supermarket lets me create menus in my head as I go round kind of like a restaurant but so much cheaper. Within the boundaries of my budget its a place where I get to be creative.

But it’s not all fun in the supermarket. In fact it’s the frontier of green living. You can do it a lot or you can do it a little. Several years ago I was looking for a jar of green curry and asked a worker if there was any out back. While he went to look I moved over several aisles. I was a little surprised then when a different supermarket employee suddenly rocked up to me with a jar of what I was after. I thanked him and then asked how he had found me. Oh, he said, it was easy. I just looked for the bag lady.

Now I’m often guilty of dressing down to shop, but after a momentary think and enough time to see his confident grin turn to the panic of one who realises he has insulted someone unintentionally, I realised he meant my distinguishing characteristic was the fact I had brought my own bags. So that really was upsetting really – there were few of us about that this could be used to identify me.

As I said, that was a few years ago now, I went from sometimes seeing a fellow person a few check outs over from me with their own bags, to seeing maybe one in ten people with bags. Maybe one in ten. I’m being generous actually. It’s a very very small thing bringing your own bags. And there is a lot of pay off:

Your bin isn’t filled up with plastic bags and you save money on council rubbish bags.

The bags can be used for lots of other things.

They don’t break – I’m pretty sure mine never have.

They don’t dig into the palms of your hands, they are in fact pretty comfy.

You can keep your plastic fruit and veg bags inside them and reuse these again.

The special lined ones keep your milk and meat and frozens all nice and cold.

The flat bottoms mean they stand up better and it’s easier to both settle them in the car and unpack at home.

And, apparently, it’s also good for the environment.

Ooops I realised I told a whopper a little higher up by saying I can shop with a clear conscience. Because bringing my own bags has made me a weeny bit more aware of all the extraneous plastic that things come wrapped in. Often it’s refined rubbish that we seldom buy but sometimes it’s a hard choice when strawberries, for instance, have suddenly become perfectly cheap enough to put in school lunches but you have to bring them home in a box of hardy non recyclable plastic with additional disfunctional holes. It gets you thinking.

Is credit crunch real? Well it’s a word. Officially! It’s been added to the Oxford Dictionary. It sounds like some kind of bad tasting cereal . As far as I understand it the credit crunch began when overseas banks became too nervous to lend to humans and to each other. At the heart of the problem were borrowers with mortgages built on metaphorical sand.  Just a little over two years ago I first heard the words ‘sub prime’. For a while I thought sub-prime mortgages was a sort of company  but no its a sort of risky investment.

Prime mortgages are ones which banks give to people with excellent credit ratings. Sub-prime mortgages is lending to people who do not.  This is a harsh life lesson we all learn at some stage when we lend money to a friend and then we don’t get it back.  We get a little savvier about assessing credit risk. Well apparently there is a lesson to learn at the corporate level here too and the global economy is just cottoning on.

The idea was that the value of houses would increase and so would peoples equity in the houses.  If they ran into trouble they could borrow more against their house. But the bubble burst. Hmmmm It was a pyramid scheme of sorts. Layers of banks we’d never heard of emerged in the public domain and there was a crisis of trust in the banking economy.

How did we go from credit crunch to global economic downturn?

During the hey day of investment in dodgy borrowers debt was onsold to investors. Mortgage-backed securities went into hedge funds who thought they were a sure thing. But the bubble broke, mortgage holders started to default on their loans and the peculiar 20^th century culture of ‘BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH IT’ became BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTHLESS’’.  

The rapid freefall of the American economy is impacting on American consumers, businesses and markets.  Jobless rate are at their highest highest point in a quarter century and consumer confidence is low. The value of stock investments  shrivelled. The burgeoning retiree market is in tatters as retired people must cut back on sending. For others retirement is now much further off unless it is enforced by unwanted unemployment.

Economists see the stabilising of the credit market as what is needed to stop the slide. New Zealand economists are still debating what the effects will be here in Godzone. On the national radio recently Jim Morah and friends were saying is it really happening here? Jim and co clearly hadn’t had to sell a house last year for 100 thousand dollars less than it was worth the year before and they hadn’t looking at rising unemployment figures. However on the whole I found this quite refreshing because most of the other media commentaries are gloomier than Paris Hilton in flat heels and you find yourself wondering  if this doom mongering might not be contributing to the economic downturn.

Just about every major metropolitan newspaper has published their top ten or 12 or twenty tips to survive a depression. Most of it doesn’t seem worth the surfing energy. Ive read The observer, The Times, The Telegraph, The Listener, and to save you the bother here are my favourites:

1.       Don’t take on more debt. Well I never. So obvious but every good list mentions it.

2.       Cancel the gym membership and the cleaner and gardener. OK its clear that people who read The Times are still living in Mary Poppins land and if things get worse they will possibly fire the nanny.

3.       Don’t buy a 2000 pound exclusive Louis Vutton bag as sported by Madonna as it can be hired for as little as sixty pounds a month!!!! Yeah right. I really read this in a serious list. Perhaps the serious translation of this is now isn’t the time to buy even if you can get credit – maybe rent for a while and see what happens.

4.       Freecycle – this is actually a good tip – get out of the false economy and into the community economy. You join an online group based on your geographical area. Regular newsletters tell you what people want to get rid of, what they want and what’s been taken.  So far Ive gotten of an old aquarium, broken barbeque, a chest full of old video tapes, music stand, .. and Ive gained the dvd player Miss 7 got for Christmas, some garden furniture and organic tomatoes. The other thing I’ve gained is some interesting new community contacts.

5.       Switch broadband – overseas there is a lot of competition for new clients with attractive rates for new customers. OK I don’t know about this one here but the basic idea is query what you are paying when there is a choice and probably with competition hotting up there could be some bargains to be had.

6.       My tip: Beware the sites that say they will find you best and cheapest service! The other day I was looking for a miniskip and entered my details in a site which said it would compare all bin hireage in my area. The skip they selected and said I could book online was  $165 but when I called a company direct I got what I wanted for $135.

7.       Get a flatmate. Other sites recommended a boarder to help share your costs – in my experience this can be hard to achieve but if you aren’t eating out any more its nice to ahve someone else who cooks the odd meal and breaks out the vacuum cleaner and can split on a dvd new release instead of a movie.

8.       Get walking! The global economic crisis has outshadowed the bloat of the You Deserve It culture that was creeping into the country and had snuck at least 3kgs on my frame. Any day now me and the kids are planning to walk to work. Any day. Some day soon. One of these days. ….

9.       Get to know your neighbours. Your family and your neighbours are your backstop in a crisis. The me me culture distances us from the real treasure of our human relationships. The TV program Dallas might have brought the Berlin Wall down but greed has also seen people evicted and lost

10.   Joanne Black at The Listener last year wrote a piece on the new frugality. I think she is on to something there – there is no shame in buying second hand, making do, and waiting before you buy. Now more than ever nobody is going to think you are a loser. In fact it’s cool.

I have been thinking for a while about how people don’t know their neighbours so much anymore – it’s not like when I grew up and we all knew each other (or so it seemed to me as a kid). I wanted to do something to get our neighbourhood together.

I’m really fortunate to have a woman who has become a good friend who lives three doors down the road. She has two kids who sit in age just ahead and just behind my youngest. They go to different schools but every afternoon they are at one another’s houses. Last year we were all excited when some people bought the place next to my friends and they had two kids in the same age group again. The kid web grew but that didn’t mean the parents were really getting together.

So we organised a barbeque between some of the families nearby so people could get to know each other. I think one of the most surprising things about this was how excited the kids were about it. One of the highlights of the event was the sight of seven children making their way through the broken fence between the section with the trampoline and the section where the adults were cooking and sitting around in the sun.

The lovely obliging neighbours who hosted ran out of gas on their barbeque as soon as he had started to cook and my friend turned to me and asked if we could go grab the gas of my exs barbeque. My ex had been invited but he wasn’t so keen. And I have to say I was OK with that. Now they wanted his gas bottle and they wanted me to get it. So I said it would be better if someone else asked him and off went my friend with my eldest daughter.

They got back with the bottle having re-extended the invitation and apparently my ex was going to turn up for half an hour or so. A couple of hours later I read my cell phone and my ex – never one for details – hadn’t realised where the barbeque was and there was a nasty text implying I had somehow omitted to tell him. So that was a bit of a damper, but as always these days the things which would have made me feel guilty and stupid now have the effect of demonstrating that my ex always did and still sometimes does seem to find blame with me when there are only the flimsiest connections. And that he no longer has the ability to hurt me like he did. These are my I DID THE RIGHT THING moments.

Meanwhile I think it was on step forward for our community in terms of being more than just people sharing geography.

Yup only in America does a woman give birth to Octuplets and she’s already a single parent to 6 children.  Shock horror!  I don’t know why she didn’t just go work in early childhood.

The debate here is around intentional single parenting and intentional access to state support and, just how many is enough children – both at one time and altogether. The Octuplets Mum appears to be  greedy with fertility treatments, grasping for state support  and blatantly doing without a Dad.

She’s an extreme example that lets us see our prejudices, values and morality more clearly.

While it wasn’t my gig, I do have a couple of girlfriends who have become a parent with various forms of donor ingenuity.  I also have a few more friends who have made incredibly unwise choices to have children with very unsuitable men. I fear far more for the offspring of the second group because like almost nothing short of incarceration is going to stop their no-good Dads having some negative impact on their lives. If I were choosing between Mr Almost right, Mr Suspect and Mr Test-tube I know who would cause the least grief in the long run.

In an earlier blog I brainstormed how I might select a lawyer. I thought I should mention I still haven’t got one. This is largely because of the feedback I’ve had regarding their general usefulness.  Their main skill seems to be taking money off people without progressing settlement particularly well. What I have taken from this is that if you are able to talk to each other you might as well negotiate your own settlement, if you cannot talk to each other you still might as well negotiate your own settlement because all you gain from a lawyer or two in the mix is a greater barney with a price tag.

One of my friends has spent several thousand on a lawyer and gotten nowhere – she’s got another lawyer now.

My ex has a lawyer. A last minute, slow, and somewhat illiterate lawyer. Strangely he doesn’t want me to know her name. This would seem to be an impediment to negotiating with her. So I have gone from selecting a lawyer for me – to detecting the lawyer of the ex.

I feel a bit sorry for the ex-lawyer because I am now in stage 5 of the separation stages. These stages are:

1. I’ll settle for nothing just to get out

2. He can take anything he likes as long as I can feed the kids

3. Actually there are a few things I came to the marriage with and I should keep

4. Hang on a minute I worked the whole time and earned more and still did all the housework – I deserve half

And now stage 5: screw it I’m gonna take everything I can this guy has kept me waiting too long and now the blinkers are off I realise I’ve been totally walked over for 15 years and I’m not taking it anymore.