The Beauty of The Difficult Child

I have a difficult child.

I used to say I had a child with ADHD. Then it was a child with Anxiety. Or maybe it was food allergies. Or trauma. Or perhaps Oppositional behaviours.

The child has been diagnosed with all of these and more.

But the fact is, from the moment this child was born, the child was difficult. This is a child that cried from 5pm to midnight every night. This is a child that woke at 3pm after just two hours sleep, screaming, when the only thing that worked to settle the child (I’m avoiding saying he or she he, because you don’t need to know which of my children it is) was dancing to Thunderstruck by ACDC.

This is a child that for three years woke from every nap screaming and crying. Who required about an hour of comfort for the pure torture of having woken up.

This is a child that is so sensitive, that my own frustration and anger regularly becomes the child’s. I am not able to feel anything without the child feeling it too.

This is a child that takes the blame for everything, but feels that we place the blame there and resents it.

This is a child that never lets an argument pass, never walks away from a fight, and never accepts responsibility for any actions.

This is a child that is so smart that any situation can be taken advantage of and is.

This is a difficult child.

Yes, some medications help. Yes, some therapy helps. Yes, some parenting tactics help. But nothing will stop this child from being difficult.

The child is simply a difficult person. A difficult person is unlike a difficult child. When people are young we think they are all meant to be obedient and quiet and tidy and get along with others. Those are good children. And that is what we, as a society of parents, have been raised to expect from our children. Anything outside of those behaviours is outside the norm.

But what we forget is that there are many difficult adults. There are many adults who challenge everything they hear, who pick fights at the slightest provocation, who don’t follow the status quo. In fact, many of those adults are our heroes.

My child is my hero.

This child may not be easy to raise. This child may not ever give me one single break or help me in any way. But this child challenges me to be the best person I can be and to help the child channel those “weaknesses” into strengths

There is nothing that will ever fix this child. I will always be called into school meetings. It will always take two days to convince the child to spend a half hour tidying a messy bedroom. And I will always be challenged by the child’s behaviour.

Children like my difficult child require more. They require better parenting. They require more attention, vast amounts of structure, more time to complete tasks, high levels of tolerance and low levels of frustration. They require the adults around them to be the very best they can be.

It is easy to make excuses, to say that the child has a disorder or an illness and to throw your parental hands up in the air and tell yourself and the world that there is nothing you can do. But how does that serve the child? Or the parent?  Or society at large?

The only thing to do, when you have a child like mine, is to strive every single day to do better, to be better, and to eventually raise the child into a strong adult who may keep those “difficulties “ but use them in positive ways.

We are a society of quick fixes, instant solutions and expert opinions – but none of those apply to difficult children.  If they did we would be a society of “normal” automatons with no one challenging the status quo and no one seeking to change injustices.

I thank God every day – alongside cursing Him – for my difficult child. I give in every day to despair and frustration, but I also find at least one moment every day of soaring, incredible hope that this is a child who will grow into an adult who will make a difference.  This is a child who can literally change the world. It won’t be easy, just as raising the child isn’t easy, but this is not a child made for ease. This is a child made for change and growth and resilience.

I wouldn’t medicate or diet that away even if I could. I love my difficult child with a fierce love that accounts for all his difficulties and his promise and I pray that I do right by him. Some children are harder. Some children are almost impossible. But no child is without promise. And the more they cause us to struggle, the stronger their promise is.

And so I struggle. And I try. And sometimes I cry. Often I fail. But I will never give up on my difficult child, because I will never give up on the idea that challenge is what creates change. And I think we can all agree that the world needs lots of change.

Why Mothers Kill

Last week a mother in Winnipeg allegedly killed her two young children and then disappeared. On Monday, her body was pulled from a river nearby. The river water hadn’t had time to wick dry on her lifeless body before bloggers and authors left, right and centre were writing about how they sympathised with and identified with the mother.

I’m not going to name the mother, because frankly I think her children deserve memorial more than she does and her family deserves privacy more than we need the salacious details. I’m not going to name the articles I read either, because it’s obvious that these writers picked this subject to write about because they wanted to ride the wave of public attention and get some more “hits” for their columns.

I am going to name the supposed cause of this whole tragic incident, however. According to the media and those writers who disgusted me, this woman killed her children and then herself because she had Post-Partum Depression (PPD). Several writers wrote an “it could have been me” type response because they too had PPD. Some who didn’t wrote that they had had fleeting moments of murderous rage towards their children as well and there but for the grace of God go they.

I’ve got one response. Malarkey.

Actually, I could respond stronger than that. These articles filled me with a murderous rage of my own. A man is grieving the loss of his two young, innocent children and an obviously tortured wife and some people think they can jump on the national focus of attention and get themselves some book sales or Facebook fans. 

It disgusts me.

But what disgusts me more is how each of these articles feeds the idea that women are somehow not responsible adults, able to make rational choices, because we are at the whim of our hormones. Post-pregnancy hormones make us think horrible things, apparently. I remember some of those. And yet, I didn’t kill anyone. As a rational adult, I was able to control myself so my thoughts and feelings were just that, and did not turn into actions. That, in my opinion, is the difference between children and adults. We are able to control our physical responses to emotional and mental stimuli much better than children. But if women can’t, then I guess we’re all just children?

What really disgusts me, though, is the way the media and these writers reported that this woman had Post-Partum Depression and drew lines from that diagnosis to her behaviour. A lot of women have PPD. It has been suggested and shown in studies that men get PPD as well. PPD does not make a person a killer, any more than autism, mental delay, bipolar disorder, or a slew of other stigmatised disorders do.

What is a mother diagnosed with PPD going to think if we spread the idea that it causes women to kill their children? What mother, experiencing extreme sadness, agitation or obsessive thoughts will seek help if she knows she will be labelled with a disorder that could cause her to kill? What father will be comfortable leaving his children with his wife if he believes that her PPD could make her kill? Reporting this way is a grave disservice to public health and will only traumatise women and their families further.

But don’t take it from me. Jennifer Hartmann, a mother of one beautiful little girl and a woman who was diagnosed with PPD after her birth, says it better than anyone:

PPD is very real, and actually, pointing the finger at PPD for this woman's actions is kind of dangerous for people who have the illness. When I was suffering from PPD/OCD, I obsessed over my child: I was afraid I was a terrible mother, all the while doing more than my share to ensure I was a bloody excellent mother. I had intrusive thoughts that vividly made me think horrible things were happening to my daughter, but they never did. In fact, the reason they were so horrible is that I would never do anything to hurt her and couldn't even stand the thought of it!

If women with PPD see that their illness can cause a woman to leave her children in a bathtub to die and drown herself in a river, it might take them longer to heal. The thoughts of being inadequate would only increase if a PPD sufferer thought she were capable of something like that. Even though I consider myself healed and have been off medication for quite a while now, those old thoughts came back to me when I read the stories that implied this horrible event happened due to PPD. I thought, "that could have been me and my daughter," or even worse, "that could be me, my daughter, and my future child if the PPD is worse next time."

However, if it were a perinatal mood disorder that caused this horrible tragedy, it wouldn't be PPD at all. It would be PPP (Post-Partum Psychosis), a completely different illness. The media's failure to distinguish between the two is actually causing women who do not have psychosis to doubt their ability to keep themselves and their children alive, and that's neither healthy nor fair to these women.

According to a 2010 study by the American Anthropological association, every year 200 women in the United States kill their children. This results in the deaths of about 3 children per day at their mother’s hands.

Numerous studies peg the incidence of Post-Partum Depression in mothers at about 20% (rates vary from 9%-30% depending on the scale used). 

Obviously not every woman with PPD kills their children.

In fact, the much more severe Post-Partum Psychosis occurs in 1-2 out of every 1000 births. There are about 4 million births each year in the United States; meaning approximately 8000 women are diagnosed with PPP each year. This disorder, which causes psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, disordered behaviour and persistent intrusive thoughts, is much more common than women killing their children.

Neither PPD nor PPP will cause a woman to kill her children. And reporting that either of these disorders is the causative effect is irresponsible and dangerous. I take special umbrage with authors who have suffered from these disorders and state “that could have been me” without stipulating why it wasn’t them.

It is said that women without family and social support, or who suffer from other disorders in addition to PPD or PPP, or who are going through stress in their lives are more likely to kill. And yet, these occurrences also do not cause women to kill. Many women every year go through all of these in confluence and their children are unharmed. And many women who kill – like the woman last week – have close knit family looking out for them and their children.

So how do we know if a woman will kill her children? What I believe is, a woman or person who kills – despite everything else going on in their lives at the time – requires the actual ability to kill. Most of us don’t have that, especially the ability to kill someone we love. It has little to do with motherhood, social situation, or mental illness and everything to do with innate character.

One thing we can be sure of though: of the women currently in prison for killing their children, most report that they said at one time or another that they didn’t feel they should be left alone with their children. Most of them were ignored, or received some help but not enough so that they never spent a moment alone with their children. The woman in Winnipeg had family arriving to help her later that day, and yet she could not hold on that long. If a woman ever states that she does not feel her children are safe alone with her, than we, as a society, need to take that very seriously. A little bit of help from family will not cut it. They truly should not be left alone, even for a moment, with their children. 

Letter to an Expectant Parent

When the pregnancy test is positive, your attitude is meant to be too.  You think that all your emotions are meant to be joy, excitement and pride. But it is normal to feel nervousness, anxiety, uncertainty and even, perhaps, a looming sense of dread.

photo credit: cafemama

You look at the world around you, and all its imperfections and you wonder what you’ve done bringing a new soul into it to suffer amidst the mess you and the generations before you created.

Danger is a Definite

In 2004, Matthew Francis O’Quinn was 28 years old. His girlfriend was 15. She was probably not his first girlfriend, but she was the first to come forward with accusations against him of violence and confinement. Whether she is the first woman she treated that way, we’ll never know.

He took her into the woods and kept her in a tent. He beat her daily. When she tried to leave he threatened her family. “If you ever leave me I will kill your mother, and I will kill your brother,” he told her, according to a CBC news article on her attempts to alert the public to the danger he poses.

Her terror lasted a full month. And at the end, after she escaped, saving herself from his brutality, O’Quinn was arrested and went to jail.

But then he got out. In 2008, he did it all over again. Another young girlfriend, another remote location, more beatings, more threats. Back to jail.

And he got out again. In 2010,  another young woman, the same thing. In between dragging his girlfriends into the woods and beating them he got by by breaking into cabins and stealing the owner’s possessions.

And once again, O’Quinn was sentenced to a short two years – because apparently that’s all you get for terrorising, beating, threatening and confining a teenage girl or woman.

And now he’s been found guilty of the same thing again.

Except this time, he brought a gun along and held it to his victim’s face. His threats too, became more specific: he would cut up her young daughter if she tried to escape.

O’Quinn started out with a streak of violence that would rival most organised criminals’. And it’s been getting worse. Not only does he not show remorse, but the moment he gets out of jail he plans his next attack. Our courts have done nothing so far but throw him in jail for a couple of years and then let him out for a few months until he strikes again, dragging him back to court and jail again.

And in the meanwhile at least four women have had their lives irrevocably altered. They were terrorised in ways most of us can only imagine: taken away from human contact, confined in a remote location, beaten, threatened, in fear not only for themselves but their loved ones.

That each of these women managed to escape before he killed them speaks only to their strength and fortitude and reflects nothing of his abilities.

For its rather obvious that O’Quinn could easily kill a woman. Or a young girl. He’s made the threats, he’s used branches and fists then graduated to guns.

The most unnerving thing, though, is the way he takes his victims into remote areas. He removes them from any human contact, making escape harder, but also making covering-up easier for him. He is well-versed in woods survival and knows how to disappear.

Is this the kind of man who should be free to walk our streets? Or crawl about in our woods?

When he gets out of jail this time, where will he take his next victim and what will he do to her? Will the threats become reality? And is murder that much worse than what he’s already done, leaving four women to deal with the aftermath of his campaigns of terror?

O’Quinn has been found guilty of the latest charges for confining, beating and threatening a woman and his sentencing will take place in January. In a recent article on his hearing, CBC reported that “The Crown says it may apply to have O'Quinn declared a dangerous offender.”

It “may” apply? Our provincial courts and our prosecutors aren’t quite sure if he’s a dangerous offender or not? I’m sure. I’m pretty certain that my readers are sure too. I know his previous victims could make you sure.

It doesn’t take a law degree or training in social work or psychology to know that O’Quinn should never be allowed near another woman. And the only way to guarantee that is to make sure he is termed a dangerous offender and is imprisoned indefinitely. It saddens me to say that I consider another human being incapable of redemption, but it is an obvious fact given his actions and behaviours.

For the sake of our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, it is imperative that this man be dealt with properly by the courts. If you agree, please contact ourMinister of Justice, Hon. Darin King, to express your desire to see that “may” turn into a definite “will.”

Christmas in Retail

It is on us once again: the Christmas shopping season. And it doesn't matter how anti-commerce hippy-dippy you are, you're going to wind up in a store at some point during this month of madness, even if it's just to get groceries.

Parking, line ups, sales with no merchandise, empty shelves, crowded aisles. How freaking frustrating. And there you are spending your last $50 to pick up that present for Aunt Agnes who you don't even like but still you have to get her something because she bleeding sends you some useless piece of shit every year. And it's such a farce and a rip off and by the time you get to the cashier, who is replacing her* register tape and refusing to look you in the eye while you tap your fingers impatiently....well, of course you're going to say something snippy to her.

But maybe you could stop. And think. It's always been my belief that everyone should work in retail at some point in their life, just so they learn not to be an utter asshole to cashiers and customer service people. I'm going to expand on that and say everyone should work in retail during the Christmas rush.

It's a VULVA... but it's not!

The Red Trench
Photo Courtesy: The Telegram

The first time I saw it I was still in highschool, visiting the campus to see some friends. I remember the thrill of the glass elevator and riding up to see the whole thing.

The Red Trench… I took the name seriously. Trenches, to me, spoke of war trenches. I decided it was a blood soaked trench of war and the white v-shaped crest at the top was a dove – the symbol of peace – with its head buried in the trench. Was it backing out of the trench, distancing itself but with an eye on the atrocities of the past? Or was it venturing in, attempting to cleanse it?

Neither, it turns out. Apparently I have a bit of an imagination when it comes to interpreting art. But not as much of an imagination as some.

“Do you know what it is?” a boy (I’d say man, but 15 years later, by all reports, he’s still not mature enough to be called that) asked with a snigger, in my first year at MUN. I was embarrassed. I didn't know what it was, really. Just my own interpretation. So I shook my head no.
“A vagina” he answered.
“No it’s not.”
“It is. Everyone  knows it.”

False Feminists in Politics

I still remember when Kim Campbell became the first female Prime Minister of Canada. As a young teenager looking for female role models and tiring of Thatcher and Mother Theresa as my sole sources (okay, perhaps I exaggerate), I was excited to see a feminist representative leading our country. Sure she got the job by default, but hey, we'll take it however we can get it. It was easy to get swept up in the fanfare of her victory.

Yet, despite Campbell's assertions otherwise, she was not really a feminist. Sure, she said she was, claimed she was raised to be one. However she made the distinction that "all feminists do not necessarily walk in ideological lockstep." (The Politics of Kim Campbell).

Really? Because feminism is a concept, an ideal, a philosophy and a way of life. Merely believing that women should have equal opportunity or equal rights does not make you a feminist. I know it's confusing because every woman out there who has a bit of brain in her will declare herself a feminist and put her own spin on it, but feminism is not about individual freedoms, nor is it about equality - not solely. How can it be? All people are not equal, so creating equality for women, well what does that look like? Will we be equal to the white, upper class, post-doc educated men? Or to the black, immigrant, non-English speaking men?