Odds & ends

• (Possible TMI alert.)  This weekend will mark exactly a year & a half since my last visit from Aunt Flo, i.e., six months out from crossing the rubicon into official menopause. 
• So of course I'm spotting. :(  Nothing dramatic. No real blood. No cramps. Just some bits of dark brown matter when I wipe myself, not every time, but several times in the past few days. And a vaguely unsettled feeling in my abdomen, although that could be my overactive imagination/anxiety.  
• Dr. Google advises that it is most likely related to a thinning of the uterine/vaginal lining -- but also that any post-menopausal bleeding should not be ignored. 
• I need to call our family doctor's office anyway to see about flu shots, and whether they are scheduling annual checkups yet. (We originally had checkups scheduled for May. Because of COVID-19, those appointments turned into phone consultations to renew our prescriptions. The checkups were rescheduled for August -- at which point we were told to check back in October to see if they were taking appointments for physicals yet.)  So I will add this item to the list of things to ask about. 
• Has this happened to any of you who are in the Menopause Club? 
• COVID-19 case rates are skyrocketing hereabouts (in the province of Ontario, and the Toronto area in particular). :( They went from under 50 new daily cases in mid-August to just under 500 new cases on Sunday to more than 700 on Monday and back down to 550 today. (Woohoo?)  More than 300 cases have been reported in public schools since classes restarted. 
• The Ontario Hospital Association wants the province to revert back to Stage 2 (from the current Stage 3), which would mean shutting down indoor dining & drinking at bars & restaurants, again -- i.e., patio dining and takeout/delivery only. It will soon be too chilly here for patios, and many restaurants say they couldn't survive another shutdown.
• So far, all the province has done is lower the size of private gatherings (back down to 10 people), imposed earlier closing hours for bars and restaurants. Oh yeah, and closed strip clubs (!).  Meanwhile, they allowed casinos to reopen on Monday (!).   
• And so here we are...
• We made a trip to the bookstore this afternoon, and I picked up a card, some books (Sandra Boynton -- I adore her stuff!) and a soft stuffed toy for a Halloween goodie bag for Little Great-Nephew (he's still too young for candy -- although I may get dh to pick up a box of arrowroot cookies next time he's at the grocery store, lol). Also a card for his first birthday -- which is not until mid-November, but I figured I'd better stock up now while I can, just in case... If all else fails, some cash or a cheque in a card for his piggy bank will do just fine as a birthday gift, I'm sure. ;)  
• The fabulous folks at The Full Stop podcast -- Michael, Sarah and Berenice -- have invited the childless-not-by-choice community to drop by for a Zoom based coffee (or any beverage!) and chat, every Saturday in October, starting this Saturday, Oct. 3rd, at 10 a.m. BST/GMT.  They're looking at October as a trial run and will then continue if the chats are well supported. These are free to attend and unrecorded. Register once, on the events page of the Full Stop podcast website,  and then drop in on any of the sessions after that.  

#MicroblogMondays: "National Daughters Day"??

Who gets to decide what (or who) gets celebrated on what day? Who decides what things/people should be celebrated, and when? 

I'm not talking about long-established/"official"/"Hallmark" or religious holidays that most people know about & celebrate (and sometimes get a day off work for), like Halloween and Christmas and Valentine's Day and Easter and Mother's Day, but these lesser-known ones that you primarily find out about because everyone is posting about them on social media.  

Case in point: Friday was apparently "National Daughters Day," and EVERYONE was posting/showing off photos of their daughters on Facebook & Instagram. Even my high school girlfriend, who lost her 29-year-old daughter in a car accident last fall, posted a couple of goofy old photos of the two of them together. Her grief over her daughter is accepted. Mine (for a baby nobody else ever saw, stillborn 22 years ago) is not. :(  I was soooooo tempted to post a photo of Katie's marker at the cemetery. Or, if I REALLY wanted to make people squirm, one of my precious hospital Polaroids of me holding Katie (you can't see her face, just the blanket). 

(I didn't. I didn't want it to look like I was fishing for sympathy.)(I'm saving it up for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month/Day in October, lol.)  

(Someone commented on one post, "Gee, I have a lot of friends with daughters!"  TELL ME ABOUT IT.  :p)  

Someone on a childless forum commented something along the lines of "Why did Facebook have to create Daughters Day??"  (There was another comment to the effect of "pronatalism on parade.") I said I didn't think it (or any of these other made-up holidays) was CREATED by Facebook -- although people sure run with it there, and on Instagram. 

That got me curious -- so I Googled "National Daughters Day origins." As often happens with social media, the original purpose/meaning of the day/posting trend seems to have been lost/twisted.  One site I found suggested it may have started in India, where historically, there has been a stigma attached to having daughters & being a girl. There are still many countries where girls are denied an education, employment or even healthcare, where sons are preferred and given priority. Daughters Day is an opportunity to celebrate and encourage all daughters everywhere. 

It was also, apparently (depending on what calendar you checked): 

National Quesadilla Day

National One-Hit Wonder Day

National Comic Book Day

National Lobster Day

National Tune-Up Day

National Research Administrator Day

National Brave Day 

National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day 

National YogaFit Day 

National Research Administrator Day 

National Food Service Employee Day 

National Math Storytelling Day 

Who knew, right??  

Things get even more intriguing, though:  my question at the top of this post was "Who gets to decide what gets celebrated, and when?"  The answer is -- anyone can, really, although the reality is a little more complicated. There are several different "national day" websites. There's one that appears to be UK-based, National Day Archives, where you can apply to register your special day -- for a fee. (I wasn't able to find how much that fee would be, at least not without submitting an application, it seems.)  There's another that appears to be US-based, National Day Calendar. You can apply to have your special day registered and recognized by them too. Nothing is said about a fee, at least up front -- but due to a substantial backlog, they are only accepting requests from companies and organizations at this time. 

Personally, I'm marking National Daughters Day on my calendar for 2021... so that I'll remember to avoid social media on that day...! 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

#MicroblogMondays: It wasn't that long ago...

I was having trouble thinking of something to write for today's #MM post, until I saw Mel's, about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and just how new and tenous some of the rights are that American women now enjoy. 

I didn’t realize until just a few years ago what a critical role RBG played in some of these cases (which also affected women in Canada and around the world). I grew up in the 1960s & 1970s, graduated high school in 1979, went to university 1979-84, got married and entered the workforce in the mid/late 1980s -- so I'm old enough to remember those days -- and I do think a lot of younger women don't know some of the history and/or sometimes take these things for granted. 

Here are just a few of the advances women have made during my lifetime. I've written about some of these things before, but they're stories worth retelling, I think. (I did a bit of Googling to prod my memory, and found a lot of things I had forgotten, too!): 

• I remember the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. in the 1970s, and the historic nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as vice-president on the Democratic Party ticket in 1984.  I remember Sandra Day O'Connor becoming the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, followed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993. 
• There was a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada in the late 1960s. Its 1970 report identified a host of laws and policies that discriminated against women. By 1977, the federal government had implemented over 80 percent of the report’s recommendations. 
• When a new Canadian constitution and charter of rights was being written in the early 1980s (when I was in university), women's equality rights were initially not included. There was a huge uproar, and equality rights were enshrined in the new charter that came into effect in 1982. 
• The first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada, Bertha Wilson, was appointed in 1982. Eight other women have been appointed to the court since then, including Beverly McLachlin, who served as the court's first female chief justice (2000-2017). Four of the nine justices are currently women, making Canada's Supreme Court among the world's most gender balanced. 
• Murdoch vs Murdoch (1973) is a famous case that I remember from my growing-up years. Upon the breakdown of her 25-year marriage in 1968, an Alberta woman named Irene Murdoch sought a half share in the ranch property held in her husband’s name, to which she had contributed years of labour. The case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which denied Mrs. Murdoch's application, saying her labour was not beyond what was normally expected of a ranch wife. The subsequent uproar over the decision led to substantial reforms to matrimonial property laws across the country over the next several years, giving husbands and wives equal rights to property acquired during the course of the marriage.
• Prior to 1983, it was legal in Canada for a man to sexually assault his wife. 
• Although some limited provisions for pregnancy & maternity leave existed previously, current maternity/parental leave laws & structures didn't really come into being until 1983. They've been expanded several times since then. 
• Legislation providing redress for victims of sexual harassment was introduced into Canada's Labour Code in 1984.
• In 1980, a year after I graduated high school, the Royal Canadian Air Force began accepting women as pilots. One of my high school classmates joined the air force around that same time and became a pilot herself. She wasn't the first, but she was still among the first half-dozen or so women to achieve that position. She flew Hercules transport jets for several years before leaving the military.  
• A woman has never been elected prime minister of Canada -- but we did have one. Kim Campbell became the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party and thus prime minister when Brian Mulroney stepped down in 1993. She called an election a few months later and lost, but she's still in the history books as our first female prime minister. 
• Similarly, the first female provincial premier in Canadian history was Rita Johnston, who served as Premier of British Columbia for seven months in 1991 after she won the leadership of the governing Social Credit Party. The party was defeated in the subsequent general election.
• The first woman to become premier by winning a general election was Catherine Callbeck in Prince Edward Island in 1993.
• To date, just 12 women have served as the premier of a province or territory in Canada. 
• The only one currently serving in that role is Caroline Cochrane, Premier of the Northwest Territories, who assumed office in 2019.
• The Employment Equity Act, which applies to federally regulated employees and requires employers to identify and eliminate unnecessary barriers that limit employment opportunities of women, aboriginal/indigenous peoples, visible minorities and people with disabilities, was passed in 1986. 
• The large Canadian bank I went to work for in 1986 had only allowed women to join the pension plan 10 years earlier in 1976. 
• During my first week of work, one of the older women took me aside and told me, “We don’t wear pants here, dear. What if the chairman saw you?” (!) This was 1986, not 1956!
• I can remember being at a banquet in one of those early years and one of the executives (male, of course -- they were almost all men back then) practically patted me on the head and said to one of the other men there, "this little girl here..."  I was in my late 20s at the time. I decided that I wouldn't say anything because he WAS an executive and older than my father, but if anyone younger than my father ever said anything similar...!
• The first female branch managers, both at my bank and at any bank in Canada, were appointed in 1961, the year I was born (two on the same day). 
• I knew the first female senior vice-president and first woman executive vice-president (there has never yet been a woman president), and I vividly remember the day I saw one of the women vice-presidents, visibly pregnant, and realized she was very likely the first woman executive at the company to give birth and take maternity leave while holding an executive position. This would have been in the early 2000s. 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

"So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know" by Retta

Confession: I've never watched an episode of "Parks & Rec" on TV (although I've certainly heard of it). So I didn't have a clue who Retta was when "So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know" was chosen for the next read in our Gateway Women online book club (criteria:  no children or pregnancies as major plot points, and definitely no miracle pregnancies).  

Sometimes your book club chooses a book you would never have picked up otherwise -- and you're pleasantly surprised or even wowed by the introduction to a great new author. Of course, sometimes, you and the chosen book just don't click. ("The Three Weissmans of Westport," I'm looking at you....) 

Despite my lack of previous knowledge of Retta &/or "Parks & Rec," this was, happily, a book I enjoyed. Retta (real name: Marietta Sirleaf) grew up in New Jersey, the child of immigrant parents from Liberia, and attended Duke University, with the goal of attending medical school. She never did write that MCAT exam (although she says it's still an option...!): she started doing standup comedy while still a student, won a Comedy Central competition and wound up moving to Hollywood with dreams of starring in her own self-titled sitcom. 

That hasn't happened (...yet!), but she did land a co-starring gig on "Parks & Rec," which lasted seven seasons, as well as other TV & movie work. Besides dishing on her Parks & Rec co-stars, she has some hilarious tales to tell that involve Robert Redford, Robert Pattinson, Jon Hamm and Michael Fassbender, among others. Not to mention confessing her addictions to coffee, designer handbags, social media, "Hamilton," and LA Kings hockey (!).

This was a fun, light, easy read (and not a baby in sight. The closest it came to mentioning children were Retta's bewilderment over being called "Mom" on social media -- supposedly a compliment, but she says it made her feel old. And, when talking about her efforts to eat better: "I gotta be honest, at this point I want Krispy Kreme more than I want children."). Retta's voice and personality were evident in every page, and now I want to go watch some "Parks & Rec" and see what I missed out on the first time around.  :)    

3.5 stars on Goodreads, rounded up to 4. (Lisa, who runs the GW book club, recommends the audiobook version, and it would probably be great in that format!) 

This was Book #35 read to date in 2020 (Book #2 finished in September), bringing me to 117%!! of my 2020 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 30 books. I have completed & now exceeded my challenge goal for the year by 5 books, and am (for the moment, anyway...!) 14 (!) books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2020 tagged as "2020 books." 

Odds & ends

• It's World Childless Week, and there is SO. MUCH!!! great stuff to read, watch and absorb. Frankly, I'm having trouble keeping up with it all... but it's a good problem to have, isn't it? Check out the WCW website.... new content is being posted there every day this week. A couple of highlights so far: 
• I recently learned (via Gateway Women & World Childless Week) about a new support site/blog -- Peace & Joy (Again) -- specifically created for the Canadian childless audience (although of course the content is relevant to childless women everywhere!). Last year, GW's Jody introduced me via email to Susan, the site creator/author, who lives about an hour away from me. She & I had a lovely coffee & chat together in the spring of 2019, and we were planning to meet up again this past spring, at a point midway between our homes, before COVID-19 intervened. I've added her site to my list of resources in the sidebar here... check it out! 
• Tuesday was WCW Diversity Day, and I sat in on a Zoom webinar about childlessness as a workplace diversity issue. (As Jody Day has said, "We're the biggest diversity group that HR has never heard of.")  Two employees from Bristol University in the U.K. (a woman AND a man!) talked about how they created a workplace policy on childlessness as well as an employee resource group for childless/free employees that's now serving as a model for other organizations. I've always thought the Brits were miles ahead of us in North America on these issues... hope other employers will follow their example! (All WCW webinars are being recorded and are available on the WCW site, as well as on YouTube.)
• Yesterday was Aging Without Children Day, and Jody Day hosted a Zoom gathering of "elders" -- older childless women, aged mid-50s through mid-60s. It was a simply fabulous hour of conversation that I only wish could have lasted longer. As I commented, they deserve their own talk show.  :)  Check out the recording on the WCW site!  
• I'd never heard of Mypoint.tv before this week, but several people have used it to put together short videos for World Childless Week.  British broadcaster Bibi Lynch talked about her own experiences as a childless woman, along with some commentary from Gateway Women's Jody Day. There are other videos about WCW themes posted below Bibi's. Have a look! 
• New COVID-19 daily case rates here in Ontario,which had at one point dropped below 100 per day, have spiked back up to more than 300. :(  Parties have been identified as major source of infection (!), and in response, the premier has reduced the size of private gatherings allowed in the hot spot areas of Toronto, Ottawa & Peel Region, and set stiff new fines for violations. Kids are still going back to school this week, but over 50 schools have already reported staff and/or student infections. Sigh...
• Dh has started stockpiling staples on his weekly grocery runs (canned goods, pasta, cleaning supplies, etc. -- and, yes, toilet paper, lol) just in case there's another lockdown imposed, and we're going for haircuts again soon... while we still can...! 
• The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I'm not going to be able to go "home" to be with my family for Christmas this year... and the more angry I get about it. The virus can't be controlled, of course -- but people's behaviour can -- and it's making me FURIOUS that people are out there partying and not making good choices and not wearing masks (or not wearing them properly -- hello, cover your nose, please...!) -- while I've been holed up at home, trying to be extra careful and do the right thing for more than SIX FRICKIN' MONTHS... so far!!   
• Today is the first day in at least a week that I can (finally!) see some blue sky among the clouds. It's been horribly grey and overcast -- not only because of cloud cover, but also because of drifting smoke & ash from the wildfires on the west coast -- more than 4,000 km/2,400 miles away! 
• My L.M. Montgomery Readathon Facebook group will begin discussing "The Blue Castle" next week (which I reviewed here).  Part of the fun of the readathon is following along as volunteer readers read each chapter on videos posted to YouTube. After watching/listening to others reading from the past two books we've discussed, I decided to take the plunge and volunteer to do a video recording of myself (gulp) reading a chapter (Chapter 10, to be precise). I don't especially like the way I look or sound on video, but I love this book & decided I wanted to take part.  (I figure I can always do multiple takes until I'm either satisfied or my voice gives out, lol.) I'm waiting for instructions & haven't recorded my chapter yet... wish me luck!  

#MicroblogMondays: Small pleasures & annoying things

Small pleasures: 

• Cooler temperatures & less humidity (finally!) = able to have the balcony door open more often. 
• (Annoying thing: ...but also more grey skies/less sunshine.) 
• The first fall colours beginning to peek out on the trees. 
• Lots of great hair days since we resumed getting haircuts in July. :) 
• (Annoying thing: Hardly anybody witnessing it, since we're mostly at home...!) 
• New videos of adorable Little Great-Nephew (10 months old this week!) on social media over the past few days: at the apple orchard with his parents, pushing around a walking toy, standing proudly unassisted for a few seconds (before plopping to the ground, lol)... 
• Starting new book discussions with all of my online reading groups. :) 
• Lots of great viewing & reading to look forward to over the next few days with World Childless Week. 

(More) Annoying things: 

• Having to lecture my soon-to-be-80-year-old mother (AGAIN!) about WEARING A MASK when she goes grocery shopping. 
• Knowing that, after 6+ months (and now heading into the colder/darker months of fall/winter), we're still nowhere near done with COVID-19 yet. 
• Not being able to think up anything more original for #MM this week. ;) 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

It's World Childless Week!

Just a quick reminder that World Childless Week starts tomorrow!  Stephanie Phillips and a stellar roster of champions have put together a fabulous week chock full of things to read, watch and participate in. Have a look at the Events page to see what's available to you! 

Karen Malone Wright and Laura LaVoie of The NotMom actually kicked things off today with a Facebook Live chat with Gateway Women's Jody Day. The video of the chat is available on the NotMom Facebook page as well as their YouTube channel.  

Enjoy! :)