by Karyn Wills | Feb 10, 2014 | 2014, Awareness, Being Thankful, Brothers, Childhood, Education, Family, Food, Health, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Milestones, Motherhood, Nature, New Zealand, Nutrition, Older Children, Parenting, Relationships, Traditions, Travel, Vacationing, World Motherhood
One of my enduring memories of childhood is of trapsing over paddocks, up and down hills, in gumboots too big for my feet picking mushrooms or blackberries. Eventually getting sore heels and aching legs. Eventually filling buckets and ice-cream containers with food.
Probably scrapping with my sisters. Probably moaning about having to do so. Definitely covered in blackberry juice and scratches on blackberry days. Definitely not impressed by having to pick mushrooms, which I didn’t like to eat.
This summer holiday, my boys got to harvest their own food. Not blackberries and mushrooms, though. They got to harvest seafood.
Tuatua (too-ah-too-ah) are a shellfish. The children love to collect them. We go out at almost low-tide or just after low-tide in thigh-high water. We do the Twist. Our feet sink into the wet sand and feel around for something hard. When we find one, we reach down and pick it up with our hands.
Sometimes, we are side-swiped by a wave. Sometimes, we pick up a round hard sea-biscuit instead. At times, instead of the Tuatua-Twist there is a Crab-Bite-Leap with occasional bad-language. There is almost always laughter and a competition to see who can find the most. This year, the boys and their cousins also took responsibility for collecting fresh seawater twice a day, to keep the Tuatuas in, while they spat out all the sand inside their shells. They kept them cool in the fridge and, when they were finally cooked, the children ate them: some with gusto, others not so much. To me, they taste a bit like chewy seawater…
Our eldest son, 12 year-old Joe, with his 13 year-old girl cousin, Billie, trapped their own crayfish.
Crayfish are related to rock-lobster and, in our extended family, are usually trapped off-shore and by boat, or dived for with scuba-gear and tanks. Joe and Billie had kayaked out around a small peninsula and discovered an old craypot on the rocks. They dragged it out of the sea and managed to convince their fathers to repair it. They then kayaked it out again and dropped it on a good rocky spot.
Each day they went out to check their pot, just as the adults do the other craypots. The first day they caught – seawater. The second day they caught – seawater. The third day they were a bit fed up and otherwise occupied, so didn’t go out. The fourth day or maybe it was the fifth, Billie was out fishing and Joe went out alone to see what was there and to bring the pot in for good. He was very excited to discover they had caught a legal-sized cray! Yes, duly cooked and eaten.
In these days where many children don’t know that carrots grow in the ground or that their meat comes from a real animal, I love that our boys are sometimes involved in the process of food-collection and the processes of preparing it for a meal. I know that these are the Good Old Days and these moments will create some of their childhood memories.
Do your children do similar things you did as a child? Are they involved in collecting or harvesting their own food?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in New Zealand and mum of three boys, Karyn Van Der Zwet.
The image used in this post is credited to the author.
Karyn is a teacher, writer and solo mother to three sons. She lives in the sunny wine region of Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand in the city of Napier.
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by Purnima Ramakrishnan | Jan 23, 2014 | India, Older Children, Purnima, Sports, The Alchemist, World Motherhood, Younger Children
The boys after a game of chess
It all started with one eleven year old boy’s boredom. He wondered how to keep himself occupied in the holidays which were to come the next week. He talked about it to his friend, and they decided to coach the younger kids in their community. And the idea evolved. Today, Ashram Avenue Sports Club, the one in my community which has over 20 kids, some coaches, some students, some both, in various types of sports have joined in the plan.
So, in my community there is a club, started by tweens. They coach the younger kids (aged from 5 to 10) in football, cricket, badminton, chess, art and crafts. They created a website, a Facebook page. They even collected money from all parents, and appointed a treasurer and are keeping balance ledgers. This money is utilized to buy supplies like balls, sport kits, first aid, etc.
There are two adults who are administrators, keeping an eye on everything they do. Once in a while they check the account books, talk to parents and just about do whatever needs immediate attention. My house is the venue for the chess coaching. An empty plot nearby is the ground for the outdoor games. Yes, they sought permission from the plot owner, and he was kind enough to rent it out to these budding idea machines for no cost at all.
So, during the weekend and holidays, they have a schedule which involves all these games with breaks in between.
I am so happy! That is the point of this post.
The parents are happy with this arrangement. There are a lot of problems, too, but everyone likes this idea. And hence, we are constantly evolving and as and when we face any issues, we try to sort it out among ourselves.
No, these kids are not great coaches. They are not training the younger kids to become Olympic Players either. For that, a few other children are enrolled in professional sports schools. But this is for keeping the children happily engaged and in a good and structured manner.
I do not know how long this will last. It has lasted now for about a month. And it has constantly been evolving into something more meaningful and more effective. This is a good community where I am living. Everybody almost knows everybody else. It has its own positives and negatives. But so far the positives have outweighed the negatives.
As a mother, what does this mean to me? Personally, my son was not an outdoorsy type of person. He was more into intellectual things and not into exploring sports and activities. Well, there is nothing wrong in that, because everyone has their own interests and abilities. But this initiative has made him explore sports. He is familiar with all sports but now he is interested in playing, too.
I do not expect him to excel in sports. I only want him to know and understand the joys of physical activity, sports and games. For that I am grateful to these “coach-children” who made this happen.
Has anything special happened in your community which left you mildly surprised and at the same time immensely thankful?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by Purnima, our Indian mother writing from Chennai, India. Her contributions to the World Moms Blog can be found here. She also rambles at The Alchemist’s Blog.
Photo credit to the author.
by Mannahattamamma (UAE) | Dec 18, 2013 | 2013, Cultural Differences, Culture, Expat Life, Holiday, Older Children, Religion, UAE, World Motherhood
Starting midway through November, the green and red and white streamers appear; houses are bedecked with sparkling lights and buildings attempt to out-bling each other in outrageous green, red and white displays. Festive lights and decorations sprout along streetlights and across shop windows and children get restless in school waiting for the holiday.
Except the red-white-and-green don’t signify Christmas but the UAE National Day, which is celebrated on December 2nd and commemorates the day forty-two years ago when the rulers of seven different fiefdoms signed a constitution and became the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Zayed, the leader of Abu Dhabi and the first President of the UAE, died in 2004 and his likeness is everywhere on National Day. For those of you in the United States, imagine if George Washington or Thomas Jefferson had died only ten years ago and you’ll have some sense of Zayed’s very long shadow.
For three years now, I’ve experienced a kind of cultural dissonance around National Day, as its colors and lights intersect in my mind with images of New York gussying itself up for the winter holidays. True, the UAE flag has a black stripe in it too, but when the buildings are lit up, they’re mostly lit up in what I think of as “Christmas colors.” In my Facebook stream (which as an expat sometimes almost seems like a real space rather than a virtual one), pictures of people celebrating Thanksgiving or decorating their tree bump up against pictures of cars wrapped in UAE flags and buildings displaying Zayed’s face in lights.
Abu Dhabi prides itself on being a relatively open culture; there are expats living here from almost every country in the world. The international population means that that the city is a smorgasbord of holiday traditions, from Ramadan to Diwali to Christmas; I have friends here who (quietly) celebrate the Jewish High Holy Days, as well.
The malls and shops reflect this cosmopolitan community but in sometimes disconcerting ways: holiday Christmas displays feature Santa on a camel, or Christmas trees draped with UAE flags. It does seem, as Thomas Friedman wrote several years ago, as if the world really is flat. Friedman is talking about economics rather than cultural traditions but I’m starting to think that we can’t really separate the one from the other. Eventually, it seems, we’re all going to be living in versions of the same place: a mall.
The other day, as we walked to the movie theater in the mall (in Abu Dhabi, everything is at some mall or other), past the prayer rooms and the Christmas trees and the UAE flags, my younger son said “How come people fight about religion?” I didn’t have an answer and he’s not yet old enough to be able to appreciate the irony inherent in his question: that in the “Middle East”, a phrase (and place) that still scares many people in the West, my son seems to be learning that different cultural practices can co-exist — not always comfortably but nevertheless without violence.
So happy National Christmas day to you all: may Santa (or whomever) ride his camel to your house and leave you white, red, green, and black striped gifts, and may you all have a happy new year, no matter which calendar you’re using.
This is an original post for the World Mom’s Blog by Deborah Quinn.
Photo credit to the author.
After twenty-plus years in Manhattan, Deborah Quinn and her family moved to Abu Dhabi (in the United Arab Emirates), where she spends a great deal of time driving her sons back and forth to soccer practice. She writes about travel, politics, feminism, education, and the absurdities of living in a place where temperatures regularly go above 110F.
Deborah can also be found on her blog, Mannahattamamma.
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by Fiona Biedermann (Australia) | Dec 16, 2013 | 2013, Being Thankful, Childhood, Domesticity, Grandparent, Kids, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Me-Time, Oceania, Older Children, Parenting, Pregnancy, Siblings, Sleep, Sleep and Children, Womanhood, Working Mother, World Motherhood
Twenty five years ago today I became a mother for the first time. In some ways it feels like a lifetime ago and in some ways it feels like only yesterday that I was gazing at the face of my oldest son, in both awestruck wonder and sheer terror.
I was seventeen years old and I thought I knew it all, as only a teenager can believe. How wrong I was.
Motherhood is the biggest learning curve any woman can embark on and there is no right or wrong. If you love your child, can keep him safe from any major harm and bring him up to be a halfway decent human being, than I think you’re doing alright.
Then again, sometimes all the right parental steps in the world can’t prevent what life throws at us or what our children become.
The thing is, in my case, if I were to do the motherhood thing over again, I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot I would do differently. Although given a chance, I probably wouldn’t be quite so hard on myself and I’d probably take a little bit more time out for me.
As a young mother I felt like I was constantly having to prove myself, I had to try just a little bit harder, put in a just a little bit more effort, complain a little bit less – basically just suck it up and get on with the job of being a mum to prove everyone wrong.
I was my own toughest critic and at times I could beat myself up better than anyone else about how I was failing as a mother.
The truth is, I wasn’t failing as a mother, and I never did. One of my son’s girlfriends once told me how terrified she was that she wouldn’t be a good mum. I told her the very fact that she was worried that she wouldn’t be meant that she would be fine.
As a mother, you do the best you can with what you have.
I believe that no-one can say what is right or wrong about motherhood. Breast fed baby or bottle fed baby, working mum versus stay-at-home-mum. How we raise our children is our choice and that is what contributes to a world full of people with different personalities, who have a multitude of experiences and knowledge to add to the great big melting pot of people.
Yes I’m feeling slightly nostalgic as we celebrate my oldest baby’s birthday today. I consider many of my friends who now have young children and I wonder whether it would have been wiser (like them) to wait until we were better off financially and more established in our careers and life experience.
When our friends were marching up the career ladder, partying hard and taking overseas holidays; hubby and I were having sleepless nights and staying at home making our own fun and eating home cooked meals.
Then I consider the fact that my children didn’t want for the important things, they had food in their bellies, a roof over their heads and a wealth of love and good times. Yes we struggled financially and stress kept me awake on many long nights. My kids might not have had expensive toys and name brand clothes, but they grew up loving the outdoors and learning to make their own fun.
The best things in life definitely were free – money can’t buy things like imagination, sunshine, nature and water.
Now at the age of 42, I’m ready to start living my life. In the last few years I’ve had to sprint up the career ladder to catch up with others my age and that’s had its own set of challenges as well. The good thing is, my youngest baby is now 16 and I’m still youthful enough to enjoy my life and all the challenges which lie ahead.
Besides when I get nostalgic for babies, I now have my grandchildren to love and adore and the energy to still enjoy them – not to mention the added benefit of being able to hand them back.
The reality is, if I had my time to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.
What about you, are there things even now, which you know you would do differently?
This is an original World Moms Blog post by Inspiration to Dream of Adelaide, South Australia. Fiona is the writer of Inspiration to Dream and can be found writing or reading in every spare moment that isn’t filled up with work and her three boys, and of course with a bit of spare time thrown in for hubby as well.
Image credit to Cliparto This image has been used within the terms of use from Cliparto
Fiona at Inspiration to Dream is a married mother of three amazing and talented MM’s (mere males, as she lovingly calls them) aged 13, 16 and 22, and she became a nana in 2011!
She believes she’s more daunted by becoming a nana than she was about becoming a mother! This Aussie mother figures she will also be a relatively young nana and she’s not sure that she’s really ready for it yet, but then she asks, are we ever really ready for it? Motherhood or Nanahood. (Not really sure that’s a word, but she says it works for her.)
Fiona likes to think of herself as honest and forthright and is generally not afraid to speak her mind, which she says sometimes gets her into trouble, but hey, it makes life interesting. She’s hoping to share with you her trials of being a working mother to three adventurous boys, the wife of a Mr Fix-it who is definitely a man’s man and not one of the ‘sensitive new age guy’ generation, as well as, providing her thoughts and views on making her way in the world.
Since discovering that she’s the first blogger joining the team from Australia, she also plans to provide a little insight into the ‘Aussie’ life, as well. Additionally, Fiona can be found on her personal blog at Inspiration to Dream.
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by Sophie Walker (UK) | Dec 11, 2013 | 2013, Autism, Being Thankful, Childhood, Divorce, Education, Friendship, Girls, Inspirational, Kids, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Me-Time, Older Children, Parenting, Relationships, Running, School, Sophie Walker, Special Needs, Stress, UK, Womanhood, Working Mother, World Motherhood, Writing
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer.
My bookshelves were bursting with myths and legends, tales of epic journeys and magical enchantments and warriors and warlocks and princesses; talking animals and terrifying villains. I read many of them over and over and would always think, when I closed the covers, how wonderful the author must have felt to have created such a thing.
I started writing my own stories, on sheets of rough paper, taped or stapled together. I would write the title first, then the author – me – beneath, then carefully index the chapters, number the pages and sometimes, if feeling really enthusiastic about the content, provide rave reviews for the back. I showed my parents, my friends, my teachers. People nodded and smiled.
I grew up, and kept writing. I studied English and French literature, and kept writing. I studied journalism, and kept writing. I got a proper job, and kept writing. Then I had a daughter, and stopped for a while. When I came back to it, I wrote furiously for several months, then realised the embarrassingly semi-autobiographical nature of the novel I had crafted, and put it aside. I got married, and got divorced, and had another child, and got married again.
There wasn’t very much time for writing, let alone for cudgeling my exhausted brain into thinking of something interesting to say.
Then my elder daughter Grace was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. It had taken us years to find out what it was that was ‘off’ – what the teachers saw, and wondered about, and what her peers saw, and walked away from, and what I saw, and thought was just my eccentrically lovable child. Finding out that my daughter had autism was like discovering she had been living behind glass for 8 years and that I had been oblivious to the sound of her banging her fists on it.
We were sent off with a label, and little support. Grace started to be bullied at school as she grew older and her differences became more apparent and other children were drawn to her weirdness and capacity for combustion when they pressed her buttons. They found all her buttons.
Grace spent a lot of time crying. I spent a lot of time crying. We both felt very alone.
Then one day on the way to work, I pulled out my notebook and emptied the thoughts in my head onto the pale blue lines. I scribbled and scribbled, oblivious to the other commuters, thinking that if I wrote everything down then I might be able to make sense of it. I came home and said to Grace: “Shall we write about what’s happening to us?” And Grace said: “Yes. Please tell them what it’s like.”
So I wrote. I wrote a blog and called it Grace Under Pressure. I wrote about how it feels to be the parent of a child with autism. I wrote about the things I was learning and about how much I realised I still had to learn. I wrote about Grace’s marathon attempts to fit in and understand her own limitations and learn to cope with the limitations of classmates who had no sympathy or understanding. I wrote about running a marathon myself in order to raise awareness among those who had no sympathy or understanding of autism.
People started reading the blog. Then more people read it, and more. Eventually, someone said: “You know, you should really think about making this into a book.” A publisher called Little, Brown agreed.
My book is not the book I ever thought I would write. But it is the kind of book that I used to read. It is the tale of an epic journey, and a magical enchantment, and a courageous princess. I am very proud of the princess, and I am grateful to her every day for letting me tell her story and for taking me with her on the adventure that changed our lives.
Grace Under Pressure: A Girl with Asperger’s and her Marathon Mom, by Sophie Walker, is published in the United States by New World Library, and in the UK by Little, Brown (Piatkus).
**Enter to win a free copy of Grace Under Pressure! Comment on this post for a chance to win — we will be choosing a winner on Friday, December 13th! **
This is an original post by our writer in the UK, Sophie Walker.
The image in this post is credited to the author.
Writer, mother, runner: Sophie works for an international news agency and has written about economics, politics, trade, war, diplomacy and finance from datelines as diverse as Paris, Washington, Hong Kong, Kabul, Baghdad and Islamabad. She now lives in London with her husband, two daughters and two step-sons.
Sophie's elder daughter Grace was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome several years ago. Grace is a bright, artistic girl who nonetheless struggles to fit into a world she often finds hard to understand. Sophie and Grace have come across great kindness but more often been shocked by how little people know and understand about autism and by how difficult it is to get Grace the help she needs.
Sophie writes about Grace’s daily challenges, and those of the grueling training regimes she sets herself to run long-distance events in order to raise awareness and funds for Britain’s National Autistic Society so that Grace and children like her can blossom. Her book "Grace Under Pressure: Going The Distance as an Asperger's Mum" was published by Little, Brown (Piatkus) in 2012. Her blog is called Grace Under Pressure.
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by Mamma Simona (South Africa) | Nov 27, 2013 | 2013, Africa, Family, Home, Kids, Life Balance, Motherhood, Older Children, Parenting, South Africa, Stress, Womanhood, World Motherhood
Several years ago I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. It’s a common disorder affecting about 5% of all women and is characterized by widespread pain and many other symptoms.
Fibromyalgia is not a psychiatric disorder, even though a particular kind of anti-depressant or anti-seizure medication is sometimes helpful in controlling the nerve pain.
In my case, on a “good” day I feel the same body “achiness” and fatigue normally associated with the flu. On a “bad” day any movement brings tears to my eyes.
The reason I mentioned my Fibromyalgia is just to illustrate a point – as moms we tend to put everybody else’s well-being ahead of our own. My daily pain and fatigue is my new “normal” so for the most part I don’t even mention it. Despite my daily pain, I hold down a full-time job, do chores, do charity work and study online. Do I think I’m “special” for doing all that? Absolutely not!
Yet I still feel guilty because my husband cooks most night. I also rely on my teenage daughter to do a lot around the house and on my son to clean up the yard. I constantly feel that I’m not doing a good enough job of taking care of my house and my family. I want to be a better wife, mother and employee but I’m physically unable to do more than what I already do.
My husband and children are very loving and supportive. They don’t have a problem with helping out. I’m the one who feels like a failure when I can’t do everything I think I should be doing.
Even knowing that I’m doing the best I can, my inner critic doesn’t seem to cut me any slack. My best is simply not good enough. There, I’ve said it. I don’t think I’m a good enough wife and mother and that’s all I care about. What’s funny is that I know (in my head) that I can’t be all bad. I know I must be doing something right because I have a great relationship with my husband and I’ve helped to raise two really amazing young people.
Recently I started feeling worse than usual but I just chalked it up to my Fibromyalgia and kept on going. I finally went to see my doctor when the bad days weren’t letting up.
It turned out that I was feeling so awful not because of my Fibromyalgia (although that surely didn’t help) but because I had a bacterial infection that had spread from my sinuses to my chest. I was diagnosed with sinusitis, laryngitis and a chest infection – all of which required antibiotics and bed rest. I didn’t even know it was possible to have all three at the same time.
Obviously my doctor booked me off work. I stayed home but of course I felt guilty about not going to the office. I know I’m far from unique in this regard. No matter how “good” we moms try to be, we always feel that we’re somehow dropping the ball.
Why is that? Why is it that we are able to be so supportive of each other and so compassionate towards others, but we’re so harsh with ourselves?
I know that I need to learn a new way of living. I need to find a way to stop feeling guilty about things that are outside my control.
If you were hoping for some answers from this post, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I don’t have any answers, just a lot of questions.
How do you change more than 40 years of conditioning so that your children learn a different way of being through your example? How do you learn to accept your limitations with grace and gratitude? How do you start being as kind to yourself as you are to others?
This is an original post for World Moms Blog by Mamma Simona from Cape Town, South Africa. She shares her home with a husband, 2 kids, 2 cats and 2 dogs.
Photo Credit To: Hans Van Den Berg : Flickr Creative Commons
This photo has a creative commons attribution license.
Mamma Simona was born in Rome (Italy) but has lived in Cape Town (South Africa) since she was 8 years old. She studied French at school but says she’s forgotten most of it! She speaks Italian, English and Afrikaans. Even though Italian is the first language she learned, she considers English her "home" language as it's the language she's most comfortable in. She is happily married and the proud mother of 2 terrific teenagers! She also shares her home with 2 cats and 2 dogs ... all rescues.
Mamma Simona has worked in such diverse fields as Childcare, Tourism, Library Services, Optometry, Sales and Admin! (With stints of SAHM in-between). She’s really looking forward to the day she can give up her current Admin job and devote herself entirely to blogging and (eventually) being a full-time grandmother!
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