The Internet in 1850

TheDailyNewsForLadiesofQuality.com
Since such worrisome business is likely to disturb gentlewomen and cause hysteria of the womb, this site is proud to bring you instead the finest in embroidery patterns and euphemistically-phrased gossip about your neighbours. Updated weekly!

angelinthehouse.blogspot.com
I know he's only supposed to be a teenager and all that, but I think David Copperfield is SO hot. I nailed a daguerreotype of him to the front of the icebox, which caused my dh to make fun of me for most of the evening.

"Ha, Permilia!" he said, laughing and smoking his pipe. "I don't think David Copperfield is much interested in a 28 year old with six children and chronic fistula!" I don't think he'd laugh quite so much if he knew the quantities of rat poison I have stored in the pantry. JK!

PassablyAttractiveWomenOfLooseMoralsInPantaloons.com

YeOldeFark.com SCARY A new reform corset from Madame Caplin adjusts to the body, not the dress.

TheScarletLoafer:

I'd hit it.

LibbyMiller'sBloomers:

She has sharp knees.

Dear Madame Blogger,
We at Dr. Cyril Crumb's Sanative Liver Tonic know that you and your readers are modern, on-the-go women interested in knowing the most up-to-date medical advances. No more for you your mother's leeches!

Food As Solace; Food As Hope - A Guest Post

The astonishingly talented and formidable Mad wrote today's post.

I was born on a family farm. We were agrarian poor but we made do. I still remember drinking whole milk taken by the jug-full from the pasteurizing machine. It was warm, delicious. We had a small garden plot that we supplemented with produce from some of the cash crop farms in the neighbourhood. There were beef and pig farms nearby too. Food bartering was part of life in my rural community, because the products of hard work were readily abundant but cash was always scarce.

I sometimes tell my very attached child that my parents never played with me when I was a girl because they always had too much work to do. She’s dumbfounded at the notion until I tell her that I had lots of brothers and sisters to keep me company. I tell her that we had free reign at the farm until we got old enough to do chores. She focuses on what it was like to play hide and seek in a hay loft. I muse on the lingering effects of a feral upbringing. Life back then was not easy but it was good.

When I was 4 years old, my father was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We sold the farm, built a house on the corner lot and waited out his treatment and eventual death. I was seven when he died. My mother, whose only skill (and a considerable one it was) had been Farm Wife, was no longer marketable. That’s when our family made the shift from being agrarian poor to just plain poor.


Imagine, would you?

Imagine having six children and a terminally ill husband. Now imagine having six children, no husband and a grief almost too big to bear. Now imagine having all of that and no income whatsoever, outside of a Federal mothers’ allowance cheque. Now try very hard to imagine this as a life-long sentence and not just a five second hypothetical request.


How would you make do? Really, how would you make do?

Now imagine you have to do all the housework, all the chores without a helpmeet. Imagine that you have, as my mother did, a wringer washing machine and no dryer (or just imagine having to take all the laundry for a large family to the Laundromat instead). Imagine getting that many kids out of bed and fed and off to catch an 8 am school bus. Imagine you and your kids shovelling your long driveway all winter long without a man about the house. Imagine car or appliance fixes taking up your entire grocery bill for two weeks. Imagine no vacations ever for you or your kids. Imagine not being able to buy new clothes for your children. Imagine a life of hand-me-downs and kindly hand-outs from neighbours who used to be your peers. Imagine burning your garbage because you can’t afford the dump fees. Imagine working all day long, cooking and cleaning and just trying to cope with the hand that you’ve been dealt. Imagine never getting any thanks and collapsing into bed at night, every. single. night without someone to tell you, “It’s ok. You’re doing a great job. It’s going to be fine.”

Now imagine being one of the kids in this family.

Here’s what it’s like, nutritionally to grow up poor. My version is an isolated, rural version but poverty no matter where it happens is analogous in a lot of ways.


In the fall we would buy 200lbs of potatoes, 50 lbs of onions, turnips and cabbage, and countless bushels of apples to keep in the root cellar all winter long. These were the main ingredients in everything we ate. By December the food was so limp that boiling it into submission was the only way to make it palatable. Boiled potatoes one night would be followed by fried leftover boiled potatoes with onion the next night. My mother stored away extra pennies all year long so that we could afford these fall purchases; otherwise we would have precious little winter produce whatsoever.

The closest grocery store was a teeny one in the nearby town, five miles away. Their produce options were limited and packaged food in general was small in size and very expensive. If Mom drove 20-25 minutes to the bigger town, she had more options but she rarely had an extra hour in the week to justify the drive. Besides, to leave home for that long, she had to take the younger kids with her because a thirteen year old really cannot manage too many younger siblings on her own. Taking kids to the grocery store on a limited budget, however, is nothing more than an exercise in despair. Too many times I remember Mom caving-in to our demands for squeeze cheese, potato chips or Mr. Christie’s cookies. I’m sure she only did it because she wanted us to have a treat--she loved us, and she was too brow-beaten to see beyond the immediate moment. Besides, there really wasn’t a “beyond” to see.

For meat, we ate discounted stewing beef and hamburger, boiled bones in soups, fried bologna steaks, cheap Salisbury steak tv dinners, boiled corned beef, beef pot pies, and canned ham. My school lunches were always bologna or mac’n’cheese loaf sandwiches on the white bread that we kids demanded. I developed a life-long addiction to sodium. Hamburger Helper was cheap and made the same-old, same-old more interesting, and, so, we kids demanded it too. It turns out that the crappier we ate the hungrier we felt and the more demanding we got. My mother was already broken. It wasn’t long before she chose giving in as a means of coping.

When I was about nine, someone—an Uncle perhaps—gave Mom money for a deep fryer. From that day forward those limp, eye-ridden potatoes were served up as French fries. Usually, a hot plate of fries was waiting for us when we got off the school bus. Every day. Potatoes were cheap but cooking oil was expensive. This meant that the fry grease got changed about once a month.

By the time I was eleven, I was an expert at making French fries myself. Somewhere along the line, though, the handle of the deep fryer broke and I would have to wedge a fork into the boiling grease to lift the basket of fries out. One day it slipped and boiling grease splashed in my face. To this day, I have no freckles where the grease scarred my face.

And where was my mother when this happened you might ask? Well, she got a job as a Nurse’s Aide at a chronic care nursing home where she worked shift work: 1 week, 8-4, the next week 4-midnight and the final week midnight ‘til 8am. Repeat, repeat, repeat. She had a job like this in her late 40s with no child care at home. If she wasn’t working, she was usually trying to sleep. I spent many hours as a child rubbing her varicose veins, trying to ease the constant pain she lived with. My older sister who was now a teenager made most of our meals. From the time she was 13 until she left home after high school, she did a goodly part of the child rearing too. Both she and I eventually became quite good cooks out of necessity.

Ah, but when left on our own, we made brown sugar sandwiches for lunch if we were feeling sweet, mustard sandwiches if we were feeling savoury. We ate whatever we could find so much so that my grandmother’s favourite refrain was “You kids are going to eat your mother out of house and home!”

A few times during the course of my childhood, Mom, who had become considerably overweight, tried to diet. It never worked, though because she could only afford healthy food for herself, not for us, and we would always get into it. You might wonder why she tried to diet for herself when she knew she couldn’t feed us well in the first place. The answer to that is simple: she wanted to lose weight so that maybe someone would marry her and ease our collective family burden. What other hope did she have, saddled as she was with all these kids, a grade 11 education and a house in the middle of nowhere?

In summer we gardened and, oh, the sweet taste of fresh tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. We gorged on produce as long as we were able to. In August, a kind neighbour always left a 50lb sack of sweet corn anonymously on our back porch. We ate 8-10 cobs at a time and had the trots for the better part of a month, but it was oh-so worth it. And then winter would come again...

________________

You may think that it’s easy to eat well and cheaply. If you haven’t worn the psychological chains of poverty, of course you would think that way. My childhood was an exceptional one but, really, what keeps any of us from the experience I just recounted? What if you lose your job, your spouse, your home, your physical or mental health? What happens if the social safety net doesn’t catch you?

Wowza.

Okay! So a LOT of you would love to write, which is awesome. And I haven't replied back to anyone, which is not awesome, but give me a little time to sort everything out, okay? You WILL hear back from me.

WE HAVE A NAME! I'm gonna save it for a surprise, but it's something someone suggested yesterday, and I think it's pretty cool. We're REGISTERING THE DOMAIN today, which makes me feel pretty important.

Here is, broken down a bit more, what we're going to focusing on:

1) The practical how-tos of surviving poverty.
I'd like a wide variety of voices here, and yes, lots of food posts. I'd like to eventually have a really good, searchable recipe section. Other posts on surviving poverty - budgeting, gardening, second-hand shopping - will be here, too.

2) Poverty experiences.
If you have grown up poor, experienced poverty in other countries, or if you are poor NOW, and would like to write about that. This can also be a place to write about misconceptions you have had about the poor, or experiences working with charities.

3) More academic stuff.
Perceptions of poverty in the media, how poverty effects health and weight, explorations of social policies... all things that I'm not qualified to write, so if you are EMAIL ME!

What we are not interested in is poverty tourism, or poverty as some ennobling force. Being poor sucks and I don't want to hear about how interesting it is to be poor or how you voluntarily opted for poverty because you just luv shabby chic furniture.

I have SUCH a cool guest post coming up tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.

And in the meantime, here is my 5 Minutes for Parenting post for today, which is still talking about weight issues but this time the ones that affect my kids. See you there, I hope!

It's a GO!

Okay, it's actually happening! A friend of my husband's is building the website and my husband is doing all of the graphics and visual stuff.


Here's where I need your help:

1) If you're interested in writing and haven't commented or emailed me yet, do so. It would be helpful if you could state what your particular area of expertise is (cooking for people with allergies, vegetarian cooking, budgeting, gardening, handling mental illness and eating healthily or anything else that you feel might be applicable.). Also say (if you can) how often you could commit to posting - one time only? Once a month? More often?

We don't want this to just be another how-to website. We'd also like to explore some of the perceptions behind ideas of poverty and food, and so if you'd like to contribute that way, we'd be delighted.

2) What technical features should the website have? What would you like to see on it? How should it look?

3) NAMES, PEOPLE! THIS THING NEEDS A NAME!

4) Any other ideas you might have.

Here's An Idea

My husband was really inspired by this week's Fat Post discussion, and would like to set up a big professional-type website on eating (and living!) on a tight budget.

So. Do you have experience living and eating nutritiously on a tiny budget? Are you interested in posting regularly? Contact me - either comment here or email me - and we're going to get something going. And the more the merrier - he would like a big, vivid community of writers, so don't be shy.

Fat Rant

Did you know that many of the really effective medications for severe mental illnesses have the side effect of making the user gain lots of weight? Like, LOTS. Several people I know puff up and down depending on what medications they're on at the moment. They don't have any choices, unless you consider opting for terrifying hallucinations 24 hours a day a "choice".

So when people talk about weight like it's a simple matter of people just being too freaking lazy to get their heads out of the Big Mac trough, I get irritated. Yes, personal irresponsibility can play a big role in weight, but there are enough OTHER factors - poverty, depression, mental illness, the medications used to TREAT mental illness, the genetic tendency towards gaining weight easily, medical conditions - that I feel rather intensely that sweeping statements about how fat people are that way because they are big lazy weak slobs are, you know, WRONG and founded on a sturdy platform of unshakable entitlement.

Yes, most people would probably be healthier AND slimmer if they gave up eating like a bunch of deranged Roman emperors, but eating healthily right now requires a whole bunch of things - the time required to prepare nutritious foods (and I don't care what anyone says, it takes a LOT of time to eat healthily. A LOT. We make a lot of things right from scratch and it takes up MUCH of my day.), enough money to buy a varied amount of vegetables and fruits and whole grains and Omega-3 eggs and skim milk and free-range meats and do not TELL me that these things are inexpensive. They are not. We do not buy junk or prepared foods, we do the VAST amount of our eating having home-made, from-scratch meals, and do you KNOW what we spend on groceries every week for the five of us? READY?

$250.

All right, we have to buy a LOT of gluten-free stuff, and that's made - apparently - of solid gold and prepared in factories by teams of elite elves, to judge the cost of stuff. But still. That is the cost, pretty much, of a week of healthy, varied eating, and it is a HIGH cost. If you think that $1000 a month is within the reach of anyone... geez, I wish I was you. You must be RICH. And meanwhile, I know families who have one meal a day and it's generally canned stew with a bunch of bread to eek it out and that is not enough and they have fat kids, despite the fact that the children are literally half-starved. So go on, lecture them about how their kids should be eating organic vegetables and less saturated fats. Go ahead and be smug about how easy it is to feed a family healthily on "a budget."

edited to say: Okay, a few people are saying that it is possible to feed children healthily on a tight budget, and of course it is IF you have access to grocery stores that have low-priced, varied produce AND if you have the ability to do some creative meal-planning. One of my friends lives on my monthly grocery budget and she and her kids have a great diet. HOWEVER - go a few towns over and there's a town full of people on social assistance, no cars and NO grocery store in town, just a convenience store that sells high-priced canned foods, white bread, fried chicken and few fruits or vegetables. Go up north a few hours and everything is flown in, milk costs $15 a bag and there isn't any produce all winter. Being poor and eating healthily in either of those places becomes impossible. Do not presume that your easy access to things is universal.

Then there is also the fact that food does not take place in some magical vacuum. I know a lot of women who would eat much healthier if it was just them, but they're married and the man they're married to expects big chunks of meat and big mounds of potatoes at every meal and would cause them a lot of actual grief if they made some healthy vegetarian meal for dinner. Maybe, like me, you're married to a sensitive modern guy and you can't imagine what "a lot of grief" might look like. We are privileged.

So the discussion around weight, let me state calmly, is tainted all the way around by class issues and a lack of compassion towards other people's suffering. If you cannot imagine what it's like to be cripplingly mentally ill, if you cannot imagine what it's like to have crying hungry children and only enough money to feed them high calorie, high fat foods, if you cannot imagine illnesses that make your body betray you and gain weight despite your best efforts, then perhaps you should avoid publicly writing about weight and food issues, since what you think you know is tainted by privilege and by being utterly sheltered and what you say and write causes already vulnerable people more pain.

That Darn Leprechaun

It triggered the leprechaun trap - a figure four trap that the Girl whittled with her grandfather yesterday - threw the bananas around the kitchen, and scattered some gold coins and left a wee snarky note (signed, I am amused to note, "Ralphie O' Hedge."). The leprechaun MIGHT have done more havoc, but a certain pair of BFFs were having a sleepover and kept the leprechaun up QUITE late.


Yes, we have our fun.


But the downside to being a Fun Mom is, of course, that I am not always a terribly great mother. I mean, I'm kind and always ready to lend a listening ear but I also expect my kids to listen just because I'm fun and nice. I mean, that stands to reason, right? Right.

Anyhow. It is March Break right now and I am being a Fun Mom for pretty much 24 solid hours a day, with the result that I barely ever come within blogging distance of the computer, BUT HERE I AM RIGHT NOW. And now I am gone again. Spooky!

The Domestic Grind

I wrote about it today, and also bragged about cleaning my fridge. A sensible person wouldn't have let it get so disgusting in the first place, and then the task of cleaning it wouldn't have eaten up MOST OF MY DAY, but I never said I was sensible, so there you have it. And here you have my post, so there you go.

Sunday

We drove several hours last night over deserted rural roads, the occasional house flickering by, golden lamps in the darkness. The Girl sat behind us - her younger brother and sister left for the day with my parents where they, amongst other things, went to a church bean supper - and so The Girl was returned, however briefly, to her original state as our baby, as our first and only child.

Earlier that day, she had handed over homemade cards and cheerfully given out hugs (and you would have to know her to know how startling that was, because she is not a hugger), hugging her great-grandfather frail and toothless and laughing and hooked up to a heart monitor and an oxygen monitor and she hugged his daughter, looking shattered beside her 90 year old father who had just had a heart attack the morning before. His room filled up with people - far more than the ordered two the sign on the wall commanded - and so I took The Girl for a walk, first around the tiny rural hospital (the nurses waved at her, calling "Hello pretty girl! Are you Theo's great-granddaughter?") and then when we'd whiled away two minutes checking the hospital out, we went outside and walked around the hospital that way, her hand guilelessly in mine, my first child.

It was a gorgeous day, the snow melting away and the sun shining whole-heartedly on us, small birds flying around the hospital's trees and singing and singing. And inside was great-grandpa cheerfully heading towards death, himself still - although not today, not tomorrow, maybe not for weeks and months, if we're lucky - and I felt the sun shining on me like it loved me and heard the birds singing and realized that I can bear this, can bear the losses that are hurtling towards me. There were winter-ruined plants around the hospital, their branches snapped and their spines crushed, but most things had made it through the winter just fine.

Inside, my husband's aunt told him that great-grandpa had laid awake all night knowing that he was having a heart attack and only when it became too much pain for him to bear did he drive himself over to his daughter's house and asked to be taken to the hospital.

"If he ever does that again, I'm going to kick his butt," she said.
"Better shine up your boots, kid!" Great-Grandpa chortled.

And his room was full of people who had heard he'd had a heart attack and rushed to see him, which is something to be hoped for at 90, I guess. We didn't stay for long so we drove down the road to see my grandmother and stayed for dinner, and my grandmother told us that when she was a young mother, she would go to visit her grandmother and after dinner she would ask how she could help and her grandmother would dismiss her, telling her that the best thing she could do would be to take all those kids home.

"Although not you, dear," she said to The Girl. "You're no trouble at all." And she certainly isn't now, being much like a very small and amiable adult who we can take anywhere in the world without hassle. For a moment, I could picture her, my own grandmother's grandmother, this laughing woman who was frightened of snakes and was irritated and bemused by her grandchild's large family and then she vanished again, this woman gone for 50 years now.

It is nice, The Girl told me on the drive home, to have so many old people she loves, and I winced on the inside when she said it, driving by house after house of these gentle old people with more of the lights off every year. She does not know, yet, what she will have to live through.
And I did not know when I had her what life was, thinking that it was love and sex and the urge to have small soft babies when it seems to be more of just bearing one awful thing after another, of remaining strong through God knows how many winters. Some of the houses shone in the darkness and some of the houses were dark and I thought of how very very sorry I was, that I am sorry, my baby, my little girl.

Imaginary Friends

There are, I've recently noticed, any number of sites for people who want to laugh at the stupid Facebook updates of other people's friends. The gist of it is, I guess, that many people have self-centered, clueless morons for friends and no compunctions about holding them up for public embarrassment.

My friends - my actual real-life friends - are on my Facebook page, although we don't use it to communicate, since we're real-life friends and we SEE each other. Facebook is mainly where I keep in touch with online acquaintances or far-away relatives or friends from high school and the like, although "keep in touch" is a wee bit optimistic for my sporadic and unreliable appearances. I am slightly too old - and more than a bit too reclusive - for the Hey It's Everyone I've Ever Met Facebook pages of some younger people I know, people with hundreds and HUNDREDS of "friends" on their Facebook pages. Hundreds. And these people are certainly not all friends or anything even approaching that and so what happens is the mean-spirited aforementioned pages where one can hold other people's witless Facebook prattlings up for perhaps not-undeserved mockery.


Of course, a lot of people are dopey. And a lot of people live in bubbles of deluded entitlement or have never grasped even the basic principals of what constitutes appropriate revelations or are just so freaking upset by every little thing in their disappointing lives that they behave accordingly in their Facebook statuses, too. And some people LIKE gross, whining dramatics but most of us don't.

If you have 500 people on your Facebook friends list, I guess you can be fairly cavalier with a few of them, but it still seems fairly nasty to call yourself someone's friend - even in the off-hand, I Don't Really Mean It sort of way of Facebook - and then hold them up for public mockery. And a lot of these sites revolve around the idea that people get more annoying after major life events, like getting married or having kids and yes, there's nothing quite as self-centered as the person who has just married or who is pregnant with their first child. So what? I was self-centered and obnoxious when I was newly married, when I had my first child and I now cut the newlywed, the first-time parents a lot of slack. Big changes are HARD.

But it also goes to show how totally flimsy modern friendship is, that we are now mainly only friends with people we have a bunch of superficial stuff in common with, and that our primary obligation is to maintain an interest in as many of our pre-marriage, pre-child superficial interests as possible. This is what now constitutes being "interesting." And also "interesting" is the idea of a society where we each must be on our guard against our hundreds of friends, a world where relationships are now made out of something less than paper and which can end without our knowing, where any of our hundreds of "friends" can be held up for the amusement of strangers.

It's suddenly SUNNY out there!

After five months of nothing but grey gloominess, it's suddenly SHOCKING to wake up to sunny days and almost warmth. SHOCKING. So shocking that I wrote about it at 5 Minutes For Parenting. Now THAT is shocking!

Life Amongst The Savages

(According, In Part, To My Fragmented Reports On Twitter)

1. I send my oldest child off to school. This is always FRAUGHT with tension. FRAUGHT.
2. My mom comes over for a visit AND to fold clothing from my dryer. Hi mom! A pleasant coffee-drinking interval.
3. Time fer schoolin'. I can't find The Boy. Where did he GO? Resigned, I work on numbers with The Baby. 54, 55, 56, 57!
4. Oh, THERE he is, cleaning his sisters' room. It feels a bit churlish to be crabby with him.
5. Time for division.
6. Done with the part of the day that involves numbers and Hard Thinking! Onwards. WE are now painting gigantic fish.
7. This art project involves acrylic paint AND black pastels. Am I a total MORON? Everyone is FILTHY.
8. Everyone changes their clothes.
9. The Boy reads The Baby The Cat In The Hat. I reflect again that I do not enjoy Dr. Seuss.
10. The Baby insists that we read about Mrs. MacCave and her 23 sons named Dave. Oliver Boliver Butt!
11. Hilarity reigns.
12. The Boy starts working on his Periodic Table scrapbook. I realize we are out of glue. I make paste, which he cheerfully uses. Am I a total MORON? Everyone is FILTHY.
13. I give up on cleanliness.
14. Lunchtime! We watch Daily Planet and eat sandwiches.
15. Time for SCIENCE: We make meringues today which has something to do with nitrogen, I forget what.
16. While they're baking, we go for a walk and play in the yard and everyone gets SOAKED. I no longer care.
17. We return to delicious meringues which have tragically stuck to the wax paper. DO NOT BAKE MERINGUES ON WAX PAPER. The Boy looks up whether or not wax paper is toxic to eat.
18. It's not! Hooray!
19. Just now: "Mama, I love you, but you are a sap." - The Baby, speaking the truth.
20. I make gluten-free playdough to The Baby's extravagant delight.
21. We go through our homemade French flashcards, and once again I am forced to admit that "pupitre" is a funny word. This is how you can tell I am only a pretend teacher.
22. The Boy writes a list of funny words. Prominently featured: banana, Tootsie Roll, buttocks.
23. I attempt to read the kids a book about ponds. No.
24. On history: "We are reading about Aged China now," The Baby told me. "It is like now except everyone is all dead and lived very far away."
25. The educational portion of the day is now over, unless you count the part where my brother comes over and I show him pictures of a turtle made out of bacon.

It's Always Monday

The dread illness that swept through my house is still sweeping - now its victim is my poor long-suffering husband, who phoned me from work not too long ago with The Croak Of The Damned. Curse you, Olympic Fever!

I'm glad the Olympics are over. I enjoyed them while they were on and I practically had an aneurysm screaming at the tv during the men's hockey game, although I apparently didn't scream as loud as my dad, who credits himself with winning Canada the gold metal. That's some good yelling there, Lou. But now I get my tv back, hooray! And I can stop getting Mini Crushes on male athletes, since that's just never going to work out fellas, I'm sorry. For one thing, I don't speak Norwegian and for another, I can't curl. And for another, I'm sworn to be faithful to My One True Love, ol' sickly up there in the first paragraph. (Although I did have the brilliant idea, during the Canada/Norwegian curling game and immediately expressed upon Twitter that I should rewrite Twilight, but instead of dead teenage boys who don't have sex? Norwegian curlers. It was the pants, I suspect.)

Hey, want a pretty dress? I'm giving away a gift certificate to a store that sells all sorts of pretty dresses on my review blog.

So how is homeschooling going? Fine. We're reading about ancient China right now, and the Boy is working on division and The Baby is working on her yelling. Good times. We made some bread for St. David's day and I can say with some assurance that if St. David wants as much mainstream popularity as ST. Patrick, he's going to have to get a better bread. Also, we roasted marshmallows to observe carbon in action. SCIENCE. And then we went for a walk and I was so out of shape that I DIED.

Now I have to make soup for My Poor Sick Husband.