I Don't Care If You Judge

I Don't Care If You Judge

Something really curious has happened to me over the last year, and like a lot of incremental changes, I'm not quite sure when it happened, only that it has.

On Sunday we went to an incredible street festival in the centre of town and, as befits the law of averages, one of the three children was on the verge of melting down on a rolling basis throughout the day.

First to go was Alfie who, on discovering that his sister had eaten all the dumplings while he had been off watching a batucada band, flipped both his lid, and the remaining dumplings clean out of my hands.

While soy sauce dripped off my nose and pooled in my bra, I took a deep breath and refocused on what needed to happen.

“Alfie” I said gently, getting down to his level “look around you. This is my favourite top, and those were your sister’s dumplings. I know you feel sad, but now we feel sad too.”

And then we hugged, and he said sorry to me and to his sisters.

And then I said sorry because now he had soy sauce all over him too.

Throughout this little scene, I’m pretty sure – no scratch that, I KNOW – that there were people around us looking on in disgust. I could hear them, I could see them, and I could feel the waves of disapproval at my parenting approach.

You know how much I cared?

About as much as I care who wins the current series of the latest must watch “reality show”, which is to say, not even the slightest bit: It is actually impossible to quantify the lack of fucks I was able to give at that point, numbers do not go down that low. Minus fucks only extend so far, and I was way off the end of that scale.

Later on, Miss Olive reached the end of her day which, because she is only 2, was about 4 hours before the rest of the family reached the end of their days. I don’t think it is an over exaggeration to say that there was a hella ton of woes, with a generous side helping of doom expressed attached to the situation.

We were in a makeshift bar garden, where extremely cheerful adults were in the process of enjoying some extremely alcoholic drinks and some extremely pleasant music. None of them had planned to add an extremely loud toddler tantrum into the mix.

I wanted to share how I reacted to that one too, because for some reason, one of the other adults who was there with us grabbed my camera and took a photo:

This is what it looks like to finally get my parenting priorities right.

I was shocked when I downloaded my photos and found this; shocked enough to want to mark this as something important, both in my life and the children’s.

Right here, is me giving all of myself to my children, and none of myself to the judging of others. Right here is me being 200% present for the people who need me. Right here is me being able to do that without the knot of nausea I used to feel when my children “kicked off” in public.

I have no idea when it happened, I just know that it has.

Wednesday 23 March 2016 Comments: 1

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Elections, and Raising a Media Savvy Child - Pt 2

Elections, and Raising a Media Savvy Child - Pt 2

So tonight I sit humbled at the endless ability of my children to surprise me by zigging when I expected them to zag. Metaphorically speaking, of course, I haven't started teaching the children combat manoeuvres, we have just been talking more about the US elections.

I had a little time with Alfie over the weekend, so in keeping with his preferred approach to learning, we had a chat about how two of the presidential hopefuls make us feel. I actually hadn't intended on showing Alfie much Trump footage, because despite being fine with watching the likes of Jurassic World, watching footage of that guy's rallies puts the fear of God in him, but BAD!

He actually caught me taking a break from cleaning toilets, on my phone, propping up a cold cuppa while I took in this video. Sidling up to me, he craned his neck to see my screen, shooting me one of his "watcha doing there?" looks before taking my wrist and slowly lowering it to his height.

OK, I thought, you want in on the action, let's go watch us some Trump.

The video is 13 minutes long, but it took us for-frickin-EVAR to get through it, because there were so many talking points to each segment.  

I have to admit that is the one positive thing I can say about Trump: He is a one man syllabus for social studies. 

We didn't just focus on the video; we chatted, just keeping things loose, and making the space to see where the conversation took us. We talked about minorities, social justice, and the idea of universal healthcare. 

It's probably important for me to tell you that Alfie has many talents, but the top two are climbing, and winding people up - not necessarily in that order - so when I say we talked about universal healthcare, what I really mean is he played me like a damn fiddle. 

According to Alfie, people should have to pay for healthcare.

No, I'm serious, he actually said that.

His logic - when I asked him in the sort of calm a voice I usually reserve for situations that would otherwise get me arrested - was that people have to work and pay for other things (like houses and clothes), why not healthcare?

I'm not sure whether I was more outraged at the fact that he had said those words, or that he had managed to push my buttons so damn easily. Alfie simply gave me the six year old version of mike drop and walk away.

  

Once I'd calmed down and stopped flaring my nostrils, it did get me to thinking; logically, he had a point. 

While I will defend to the death the moral imperative of universal healthcare, is the idea of paying for your health the more ... umm ... base logic? Alfie was quite right that other basic human needs are accepted as chargeable in our society, so why not apply the same logic to healthcare? Is the idea of a socialist society even something we can think of as "natural" or is it a human construct based on our attempts creating a more "advanced" society?

While Alfie sat at the Lego table exuding the air of smugness that comes with an argument decisively won, I took to the internet to do some learning of my own. I found an awesome video over on the Khan Academy looking at the concepts of Capitalism and Socialism and I did some thinking about the animal kingdom, and where they sit on the scale. 

Obviously I'm not saying that it is a perfect comparison - most animals don't have pockets in which to keep change for starters, which does somewhat limit their ability to embrace capitalism - but stripped of the intellectual choices of humankind, I wondered if I would find an example of an animal society choosing to support the less able members of their society.

The short answer? You bet your ass I did!

What I find interesting is that Orca sit waaaaaay up towards the top of the "animals who could totally beat you at chess" scale, so while it may not be a purely human desire to create an equitable society, maybe it is fair to say it is a more cerebral desire.

Either way, I just know that next time I come up with the bright idea of discussing life's big topics with the children, I will be more careful to do it without agenda. I will also be looking into debating groups for Alfie, y'know, so other people can enjoy his natural talents as much as we do.

Wednesday 16 March 2016 Comments: 0

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Three Reasons I Hate Working in STEM

Three Reasons I Hate Working in STEM

Today I am going to take a huge departure for my usual topics and write a post about my life outside of the family. I'm doing this as my own small contribution to this year's International Women's Day theme, entitled Pledge for Parity.

I actually really like that word - parity – covering, as it does, the goal of equality in status or pay. It feels to me that it covers a whole smorgasbord of issues that this world needs to address without necessarily carrying all the baggage of other more familiar and emotive words like equality, or feminism, or perhaps simply not-being-an-asshole-to-50%-of-the-population.

By way of qualification for what follows, I've worked in IT since 1999. We think nostalgically about it now, but I remember being on my first assignment as a new graduate with a major IT consultancy planning for the potential downfall of civilisation with the coming of the Y2K. Laugh if you like, but the struggle was real, and I'm sure there are risk planners who retired with the fees they made that year.

Back then, I was a fresh faced Systems Tester, saving the world one defect at a time. I loved what I did, but I couldn't hold out against genetics, and every move I made took me down an inevitable road that led to me becoming a Project Manager by my mid 20s.

And I've pretty much stayed there ever since, despite finding out the hard way that being a woman in STEM is often a deeply unpleasant experience. 

I want to share some of that experience with you, and because lists are big in online writing at the moment, I have decided to be brave and put together my top 3 reasons why being a women in STEM sucks. 

Wow, I just realised I called talking about the realities of my profession "being brave". I guess I was more overdue to write this article than I realised!

1. I work with Men Who Know

In fact, the entire industry is filled with them, stuffed into every team and role you are likely to interact with on a daily basis. Who are they? They are the Mansplainers.

These are the colleagues who can hardly contain themselves when it comes to sharing information with you, whether you asked for it or not. They have absolutely no knowledge of your skillset, or experience, but they're not going to let a little thing like your PhD stand in the way of taking you back to basics. Everybody knows, women aren't technical creatures, best to assume zero knowledge in all cases. She'll thank you for saving her blushes.  

Coupled with this is the regular delight of being interrupted in meetings, because when it comes to the joy of sharing your knowledge with the wider team, nothing says "good communicator" like steamrolling over the top of the woman speaking when she has the misfortune to have to pause to take in oxygen. 

Anyone who has been guilty of that in the past, please know that while I may have a sanguine smile nailed across my face, inside I am praying to the God of Cats that your beloved moggie has taken a crap in your favourite shoes.

On the plus side, it has made me a far more succinct communicator. These days I try and time everything I need to say to fit into a 30 second window; a bit like Twitter, but in meetings.

2. I am not your fantasy

A long time ago I had to force myself to stop thinking about how some of my colleagues looked at me. 

I also had to stop wearing boots that came up past my ankles (no, they're not kinky boots), tops that showed any hint of cleavage (eyes up here, Cowboy, they're not talking, I am!), skirts that sit anywhere but on the knee (yes Junior Coder, the question I came to ask you WAS whether I should wear a shorter skirt, thanks for sharing!) and basically anything that involved leather, even though I use a motorbike for my commute.

Women in IT are generally shoved kicking and screaming into one of two clichés: We are either the ballbuster/ dominatrix managers, or we are the cute geeky girls. Which makes it really hard when you are just trying to figure out how to do your job. 

The thing is, I didn't choose a career where physical objectification was on the job description: I didn't look at IT graduate programmes and miss the small print right under the heading of "key competencies" that said "must be able to laugh off years of yicky, unsolicited sexual innuendo" because if it had, I would probably have just cut out the middle man and applied to Hooters.   

3. I will consider myself lucky if I am able to do my job without abuse.

This is the scary one; I mean the really life changing, scary fact about being a woman in the IT industry. I can spend the rest of my career working my backside off to be the best PM I am able to be. I can be promoted, maybe one day reach the top of the industry, but I can't speak out about the way women are under-represented and poorly treated in my industry without an unconscionable level of risk.

Thanks in part to the anonymity and immediacy of social media and online communities, abuse has become the de facto response to women commenting on inequality in the IT industry. And I do mean tirade, of the sort you would normally expect from someone just discovering hormones, and which has left several women receiving death threats credible enough to have them leave their homes when they criticised the representation of women in gaming industry.

If that's not the most insane sentence you've ever fucking read, then I have no idea where else to go with this. 

So my Pledge for Parity is to keep speaking out about the state of my industry - not on here, I know you just come here for the bad parent stories - and to support my peers to bring parity to how we work.

One busted ball at a time.


This post is part of Lulastic's International Women's Day 2016 Blog Link Up. If you want to see a load more awesome thoughts on this year's theme, head over and check out the other contributors. 

Monday 7 March 2016 Comments: 0

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Elections, and Raising a Media Savvy Child - Pt 1

Elections, and Raising a Media Savvy Child - Pt 1

Congratulations America, you finally made me break my resolve not to talk about that unholy mess of a human who plagues my social media feed.

What is that made me want to talk to my children about this distant cluster f*ck, you ask? It was this video where a couple of Trump supporters were only too happy to support Trump's aspirational quotes ... until they found out they were actually said by Hitler.

Hitler for Christ's sake!!

  

You would think would make someone re-evaluate their core values: In this case, not s'much.

Which is not to say I am going to wade in with some half baked opinion on who should rule 'Murica: To be honest I'm woefully unqualified, comparatively ineloquent, and it has very little to do with me other than the fear shared by many non Americans about how Trump The President would approach the small matter of foreign policy.

No, what this three ring circus has really put front and centre in my mind are the unique responsibilities that I have in raising children in the current media age.

If you don't already subscribe to the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day, I would really suggest you do because it is nothing short of awesome. Destin recently had the chance to interview President Obama and what they discuss around feedback loops (or lack thereof) and how that is changing the nature of political debate (by generating lots of shouting) really clarified a couple of things for me:

1. My children need to be invested in how countries are run.

2. My children need to be able to see past pomp and circumstance in order to make sound choices.

That was the easy part, working out an age appropriate way to start having those discussions was what kept me awake half the night.

I wanted to find a way to look at the importance of government, not through the ritual of how they operate, but in a way that would speak to the children on an emotional level and on a level that was relevant to their own lives. I also realise this is a pretty heavy topic so I was going to have to keep things reactive and fluid in order to keep their attention.

All of which means rather than a lapbook, or a long list of worksheets, I decided to look at the subjects of government with the aid of a spider diagram.

Hey don't knock it, I wrote every essay of my degree using one of these! OK so they looked a lot more complex, and made a lot more reference to 17C women's writing, but in principle, same whole deal.   

These questions were designed to generate discussion with the children, with no obvious answers or logical conclusion. They were also meant to be vague and to give them the chance to take the conversation off in whatever direction they needed.

That's a long winded way of me saying that I don't need a précis of all the important questions I forgot to include; which are many and varied.  

In Part 2 I'll post about what we did with that information (spoiler, it involves a load more questions and a ton of YouTube videos) but that will have to wait for another day because it's hella late, and mama gotta work in the morning.

Friday 4 March 2016 Comments: 0

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