Category Archives: parenting

Is it okay to be mean?

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In my post “OK, Now I’m Mad”, I was mean to my Toronto Star courier, implying that she could be brighter and that got me asking whether it was okay to be mean while blogging.

I know bloggers don’t take an oath as doctors do to do the harm, but isn’t it a general rule of civility? If so, what’s going to happen to humor?

How for example can Clotida Jamcracker be so funny if she gives up dissing her high school acquaintances and her mother-in-law Dottie? http://clotildajamcracker.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/making-coffees/

On a more serious side, how can we understand why Slapppshot kidnapped his daughter to Sweden if we don’t know her Australian mother had become a drug addict?  Right now he’s in the middle of a series titled, “Confessions of an Alcoholic”. http://slapppshotblog.com/2012/07/24/confessions-of-an-alcoholic-2/  These, I am glad to note, are other people’s stories and he has permission to recount them. So no harm.

Clotilda has built a firewall around her true identity and used  pseudonyms, so the chances of her targets finding out how she really feels -or feels when she’s being funny – are slim. Slapppshot on the other hand would be easier to uncover. Indeed much to his dismay someone actually did and emailed him ominously that they knew where he lived.

Is it okay to be mean if we do it anonymously then?

Oh, this question is way too politically correct, isn’t it?

Black Humour: Despair young and Never Look Back

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We were laughing. I remember that. It was Mother’s Day, wedding day. The hotel room was suddenly full of people. We oldsters were waking up from our nap and the youngsters had descended on us, bearing greetings. The last to arrive was Leo, 17, my grandson. And we were laughing.

It had been a bad year really. Someone was very ill, awaiting  surgery. Some, still getting  hit hard by this recession. Someone was grieving the lost love of his life. Someone else, heartbroken. But here we were from both sides of the continent, together at last. We were laughing. Blackly!

And then I said to Leo, “Despair young and never look back.”

How could I? He was a fresh-faced seventeen year old. How could I lay Samuel Beckett’s bleak advice on him?

Leo laughed.

It’s hard to be fresh-faced and seventeen under the circumstances, but, more to the point, Leo shares that black sense of humour. He figured out as a much younger person what life can be and he, like the rest of us, in that room had decided to laugh.

I first came across Beckett’s advice in MIchael Ondatje’s The Cat’s Table, the story of a 10-year-old’s voyage from India to England on his own. He befriended two other children also on their own and ate with them at the lowest table, the one farthest from the captain’s table, the cat’s table.

I knew Samuel Beckett, having taught Waiting for Godot to puzzled teenagers for many years. (Why were the tramps waiting? Was Godot God? Why didn’t he come? etc.) It was impossible to say. Beckett had pared the language down to the point where the audience had to decide. But it was clear that, apparently abandoned and betrayed, they suffered in their waiting. Whether that suffering was comic or tragic was harder to say.

Beckett’s advice in response to a young fan’s letter was equally hard to decipher, but it came down to that: figure out early how bad life can be and accept it, then you’ll get along fine. Okay, I added that last bit, but Beckett must have agreed I figure: he kept on.

Why is it so comforting to find people who share this black sense of humour? Why does my sister find my post “Why I Will Never Sleep Again”, a useful indicator of whom she can relate to? (Those who think it’s funny – yes. Those who just look puzzled – not so much.)

Beckett’s advice will be interpreted as terribly bleak and totally inappropriate by some of us, and so absolutely true as to be mundane by others.

When I sit down to dinner, I enjoy the company of the second group. How comforting to know that they have been there too, that they know how absolutely awful life can be and they can find that funny. That doesn’t, by the way, necessarily mean that they are drunkards. Beckett was indeed Irish and they are famous for their black humour. They are also famous for drunkenness, although Beckett was not. It is possible to be drunk without alcohol. It is possible to be drunk on life, to rise up from whatever disaster is trying to put you down and laugh.

No, not in its face, not defiantly, cynically certainly, but not bitterly. “I see you for what you are, Life and I am not impressed.”

And so in that hotel room, on Mother’s Day, before the wedding, I added words from Beckett’s play, absurd in their resilience, in case Leo didn’t get it : “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

And there is barely a pause between the two thoughts.

Easter/Passover and Journal 108

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Every Easter, my mother outfitted me in new clothes, a coat she had made, a new hat, new shoes. Not to do so, in spite of our poverty, would have been shameful. Eventually, this led to a good deal of work as the family expanded. The clothes were to be worn to church of course. Today she would have shuffled us off to Walmart no doubt, but the closest she could get to that bazaar of economic necessity was the catalogue. That’s where the hat and shoes came from.

For Easter breakfast, she would fry up a dozen eggs and my father would tackle the lot.  The hens had started laying again by then, whether Easter was early or late.

Quaint customs that indicate advanced age.

We moved away from that rural community and found ourselves more or less lost in a city. The rest of the family gave church up, but I kept on, partly because they didn’t. I sang in the children’s choir in a long black skirt and a brilliant white surplus that had to be washed and ironed far too often. On Good Friday, I went to the somber morning service and on Easter Sunday, I rejoiced at all three services, Matins at 8 a.m., Eucharist at 11 and Evensong at 7. I found the experience beautiful, calming and comforting. Little by little, I found myself thoroughly assimilating the traditions of the “high” Anglican church I attended.

At a certain point, I stopped attending church. It was shortly after my children were born and baptized. My husband had started tutoring on Sunday morning and could no longer do childcare.

Yet the habits of that background persisted: Good Friday inevitably lead me to self-examination and grief over my shortcomings, while Easter Sunday was filled with light and grace.

Time moved on. The family grew, broke in pieces, reformed, grew again.

Some years, I found myself at a table where we were asked,”How is this night different from all other nights? I listened to the Passover story, which was not entirely new to a Bible reader after all, but now I was seeing it from inside, so to speak. And eating different food.

One year, when I was on my own, I read Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ in which he documents the parallels between Christ and the pagan sun gods to urge us to regard the story in a more metaphorical way. Toward the end of the book, he mused that we will never be more dead than we are now. By that, he meant here in what we call life, we are so thoroughly emersed in the material world that we are deeply alienated from our spiritual selves.

This is a time when we instinctively ponder questions of death and resurrection if only because nature is modeling the latter. (Well, not the poor magnolias here in TO. They got carried away by early March warmth, burst into bud and then got frozen by a cold night. The fruit trees ,however, are setting a blooming example.)

I don’t consider myself an Anglican nor even a Christian at this point, much as I respect the tradition. Buddhism and Taoism also seem to have much to teach, as does Rumi, the great 13th century Sufi poet. But the Easter child lurks within and wants the holiday honored.

This year, oh my goodness, the odd bits of family we can still gather has chosen to gather on Friday. A party on Good Friday! What would Aunt Mae say? Actually, she’d probably say she wouldn’t mind a bit of that brandy and settle down to enjoy herself.

So this leaves me rattling around by myself on the big day. What to do? Last year, journal 108 tells me I went for a walk down through the park to the river and then cooked up a rack of lamb and asparagus. This year, I will take myself out in my best duds to my favorite restaurant for an early dinner.

And eat chocolate.