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In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Relationships, Uncategorized

Back to School

Julianne HarveySeptember 6, 2017

Can you hear that sound? It’s silence, the kind that falls after parents have ushered their beloved offspring to a new year of school (well, you might hear cheering from some and weeping from others – both moms and kids – but here the biggest joy of all is the QUIET).

Other years, when my kids were smaller, I used to feel a bit melancholy on their first day. I would get so used to them being home over the long days of summer that I would miss them for the first week.

Now that Ava is grade nine and William is grade six it’s a different experience. They need to return to structure and see their friends. Both of them require challenges, apart from staring at inane Youtube videos all day long. My kids may have mixed feelings about going back to school, but I can see how necessary it is for them.

As our children get older, things change. For Ava, who has four years left of high school before embarking on her own life away from us, these precious last years under our roof take on a fresh significance. She is supposed to grow in independence and begin constructing an identity outside of our family and it’s important for us to support her in this quest.

We have good friends who just said goodbye to both of their university-age daughters. They are now officially empty-nesters. I’ve been texting with my friend about this process and I know it will be here all-too-soon for us as well. The key is to be present and to notice the stage that is happening right now, but also to transition into a more hands-off parenting style so we are all able to celebrate the coming separation instead of fighting it or mourning it.

William is in that in-between age of eleven. He’s not quite ready for the angst of the teen years but also not really a child. It’s a delicate stage, where one foot is on each side of a divide. He longs to be older but also wants to remain young and safe. We are working on encouraging him to step out of his comfort zone and to take more risks. School helps with this.

Every parent-child relationship is different and will require planning and strategy in order to find success. The beginning of September can be a particularly raw time. It’s exciting in one sense and scary in another.

As parents, we get to practice letting go of our children once again. This is their time: to make new friends, to cry and have their feelings hurt, to take risks and soar, to be embarrassed, to learn that if the first five experiments fail you can keep trying until you get where you want to go.

Happy back to school season to all parents and kids. May it be a marvellous year of discovery, compassion, fun and important life lessons learned.

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life, Uncategorized

Pick a Side

Julianne HarveyAugust 15, 2017

We can no longer afford to theorize about what we might have done if we’d been alive during the second World War. With the events of this past weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, the time to pick a side and stand up for what you believe is RIGHT DAMN NOW.

Recently I read an article on Twitter about the defining factor between those who helped Jewish families and those who did not. The biggest difference between the people who risked their lives to save others and those who refused was their upbringing.

The people who were raised in an authoritarian setting, with punishment looming if you didn’t obey, stood by and did nothing while others were jailed, humiliated and murdered. Those who hid people persecuted by the Nazis at great risk to their own safety did so because as children they were taught to think for themselves and to question authority.

I can’t stop thinking about that article because the evil of “us versus them” is not just in the history books. It is happening now, in 2017, and it forces each one of us to pick a side. Not with our words, because we all know talk is cheap. Now is the time to prove with our actions whether we will stand up for the rights of all people and live with a sense of inclusion and compassion.

No middle ground exists here. This isn’t about left and right, conservative and liberal, fake news and real news. No shades of grey can be found in this argument. It’s time that every one of us looks deep into our own prejudices and sense of privilege. Unless we get really honest and brave about these topics, no true healing can take place.

The right response to the images and the rhetoric from Charlottesville is rage and disgust. This is the correct moral and ethical response to symbols of hate and bigotry. But as time moves on and these feelings fade, the next step is honest, reasoned conversation about the dark depths of our own hearts. When we get honest, we can start to heal and then to rebuild. It’s time now to create a healthy, inclusive, female-led world. We can’t possibly do a worse job of it than then men who have been leading for centuries.

No more grand theories. Now is the time for action. To stand up and say “NO” to hate, racism and supremacy. Now we need to work together, with love and generosity in our hearts and our words, to bring healing to such a divided, angry and lost world. It’s always darkest before the dawn, but we must build this new dawn. To make it better and more inclusive and compassionate than anything the world has seen before.

Pick a side. Neutrality does not work here. Silence is complicit agreement with the current power structure. Resistance speaks up, no matter what the personal cost, for what is right and decent and moral. It’s our time to rise. To heal. To extend our hands to those who need our help, whose very lives are threatened by this rising tide of hatred and fear.

Our weapons are love, truth, inclusion and courage. Who is ready to stand up and be counted? To speak up for what is right and to refuse to be silent and terrified. I have chosen my side and I will use my voice. This fight is too important for anything else.

In Culture, Identity, Movies/TV, Nurture, Parenting, Uncategorized

Cultural Beauty Standard Madness

Julianne HarveyMarch 28, 2017March 27, 2017

It’s time to change the way we think about women and weight in this culture. The entire fashion industry is built on the idea that being extremely thin is the gold standard. Our society literally encourages girls and women to starve in order to be considered attractive. Anything else is disappointing at best but more often disgusting and offensive.

I say NO MORE OF THIS MADNESS. All change starts with individuals, so I am no longer interested in allowing someone else to tell me what beauty looks like. I know for sure it’s not starving yourself so you can wear size 0 jeans.

What’s wrong with a nice, round tummy and thighs that jiggle a bit when you walk? This obsessive pursuit of a demanding beauty takes way too much of our collective mental energy and time, not to mention inciting a raging case of “not-good-enough-ism” in many women who are healthy and gorgeous at a size 12, 14 or 16 but feel gigantic and hideous because of the messaging in our unbalanced society.

I’ve been checking old movies out of the library on DVD to watch as a family, believing that classic cinema with its focus on character development and stellar writing can act as a balm for our cell-phone addicted, dumbed-down current media environment. Last week we watched Citizen Kane (okay, the first half of it before my attention wandered…not completely sure why this is AFI’s top movie of all time) and I was struck by the healthy appearance of the women dancing in one scene.

In 1941, apparently it was desirable and reasonable to have thighs bigger than delicate tree branches, gently flabby upper arms and soft bellies. It’s the polar opposite of what we see now on screen so it jumped out at me.

I’m determined to stop wishing for a flat stomach and perfectly toned arms and legs. It’s simply not worth it to me to put in that kind of time. But it’s not enough to make this decision – I also have to actively reassure myself that how my body looks is okay, DAMMIT. It’s more than okay. I’m strong and healthy and beautiful and thirty pounds over my doctor’s weight and I’m completely over feeling like shit about it.

A lot of this relates to the undercurrent of sexism still very present in our modern world. Most fashion magazines are not aimed at men. The expectation that women have to be beautiful, thin, expertly made-up at all times with their hair bouncy and freshly coloured at a salon is real and pervasive. And you better have a strong sense of self-esteem to go out of the house in anything other than a carefully-designed outfit because in sweat pants you run the risk of feeling marked, lazy and judged.

I really think it’s time for us to stand up against this tyranny. Nobody gets to make us feel inferior without our consent. I thought our cultural beauty standards didn’t bother me but it turns out that they really, really, really do. I’m going to work on actively loving myself through this by reassuring my own rounded body that I’m okay, exactly as I am.

My daughter just turned 14 and is pursuing a career in acting. The pressure to be so tiny that you almost fade out of existence is immense, but I want her to be confident in the body she has and the unique beauty that she possesses. The best way for me to help her love herself and refuse to compare herself to others is to walk this out in front of her.

Who’s with me?

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Uncategorized

Clarifying Priorities

Julianne HarveyAugust 16, 2016August 16, 2016Leave a comment

It takes hard times for many of us to clarify our priorities. When life is smooth and easy, we become complacent, bored, discontented. We get restless and little things crop up to irritate and annoy us.

But then we face a crisis or a tragedy and everything around us looks different. We are changed, from the inside out, and what mattered to us days or weeks before can suddenly shift and settle into a new form.

This has happened to me with my recent hospital stay and my slow recovery. I see now that I had a desperate need to slow down within myself; to learn how to rest and simply be instead of fretting about achieving. I had to practice allowing myself to be loved and cared for, not because I was proving that I deserved that affection, but just because it sprang from the depths of another’s soul. I had to remove myself from my own performance in order to see that I was loved even laying in a hospital bed with a tube in my throat, unable to talk or impress anyone.

Getting home and recovering, inch by painful inch, day after day, I understand now what it means to be patient. How healing it is to turn my life setting to low instead of high. How much I notice when I am resting instead of running. The details of life become sharp and crisp, instead of blurry and distant.

I am changed. I can finally see what’s important and what isn’t important. Proving, striving, yearning…all a waste of precious time and energy. Being present, grateful, authentic…these things have staying power. They sustain, enrich, nourish. I have gifts to give to myself and to others. I will not minimize these any longer. They matter. I matter. Those I love and cherish matter.

Pain is truly a marvellous teacher. None of us would throw up our hand to volunteer to struggle, to weep, to be shoehorned into surrender. But yet it gives us a chance to re-evaluate what we are doing with our time, energy and money. It offers us a unique window into our motives, our deepest fears, our unsatisfied yearnings. Our unexamined beliefs about who we are and what we are doing in this world.

Like spring cleaning, our souls need refreshing from time to time. Usually circumstances will create this opportunity for us, whether we like it or not. It could be surgery, or the loss of someone close to us, financial troubles, behavioural concerns or a host of other unforeseen situations. They offer us a mirror, into our truest selves, which we can choose to examine or ignore.

My priorities look radically different now. I’m grateful for this, even though I never would’ve chosen the path that brought me to this place. But we all must play the hand we are dealt. This internal work is for a lifetime, with endless journeys to undertake and truths to understand. I know who I am now, on a deeper level, and there are no shortcuts to arrive at this type of meaningful significance that has the power to shift an entire life to a new level.