Welcome to my blog: Ramblings of the wandering mother.
This blog will document my experiences as a woman on the road. I am preparing to leave my home on the 17th of May (an arbitrary date subject to change) and head from the Pacific Coast to the land of poutine and family. I am embarking on this Odyssey with my beautiful daughter and a great longing to, as the cliché so strongly states, find myself.
I am uncomfortable using clichés but sometimes they are necessary. They affect the reader in a way that may either cause annoyance, as my pretentious academia influenced self feels, or they invoke strong feelings of recognition that I am hoping the readers of this blog will feel as they peruse my elementary writings. I say elementary because writing is not my strong point though I hope that will change over the course of this summer.
This Odyssey will include my attempts at writing, photography and general explorations, both externally and internally. I will document everywhere we go, with the intentions of showing you the different lifestyles of the peoples of colonial KKKanada. I will attempt to maintain a high standard of critical thinking, but I cannot promise you this. In the end it doesn’t matter as the process of reading this will make any experiences I relay to you an experience in itself, which you will then subjectively store unto yourself. I trust that you will make your own judgments about the things I describe, especially as I travel through six provinces relaying what I see and learn to you. I am excited to take pictures of the different towns, cities, landscapes, forests, and people that we encounter on this journey and I hope that my amateur (as in zilch) photography skills will do justice to their beauty.
I will be taking my time as I cross the country (or half of it), camping/couch surfing along the way, in hopes that I can show my daughter the true beauty of this land and the inhabitants of it. She has spent far too much time living in a city and I feel, as one who grew up in rural Kanada, that I have a responsibility to her to show her the places without Starbucks on every corner. I am also excited that at the end of our travels eastward we will be spending a large portion of the summer with our relatives in Montreal, and hopefully this will improve our ability to speak French. I feel guilty that I am completely Anglophone despite half of my family being Québécois. I have attempted to learn French in the classroom but these attempts had poor outcomes to say the least. When we come back to the west coast we are both going to be attempting to learn French in the institutional setting so I hope that our time in Montreal will help kick start the process of learning (for her most especially- she’s sort of a genius child).
I am equipped with a wicked camera, a semi broken laptop, a pile of books, a guitar and a strong longing to learn outside of the classroom. I also am leaving with an intense need to take a break from the life I have here in the city. The city I live in has a constant call to action, as it possesses some of the greatest atrocities known in Canada’s present day situation. We have the starkest contrast of class conflict in Kanada, with multi-million dollar condos blocks away from destitute poverty. We are home to hundreds of missing sisters, mostly of aboriginal descent, who have been stolen from us by patriarchal and racist forces. In prisons half an hour away from our city hundreds of people are being detained for the simple crime of desperation and longing for safety. They sit, with their families split apart, in cages while they wait for a racist government to decide their fate of whether to allow them some semblance of freedom (an impossibility under the state) or to send them back to a genocidal country where they will surely face harm due to their Tamil ethnicity. Indeed, racism, homelessness, and sexism are pervasive everywhere but in my city it is exaggerated by the extreme apathy of the rest of the city’s inhabitants.
As a student at the most “prestigious” institution in the west, I am surrounded by apathetic young people who think they understand the world because they get an A when they tell their (neoliberal and obviously biased) professors what they want to hear, and I am tired. I am tired of fighting for menial reformation. I am tired of trying to convince the students here that they should be fighting for lower tuition, better transit and better housing for themselves. I am tired of trying to make menial changes which may improve the lives of some students ten years down the road from now if I am successful, which is difficult to do when you’re a minority loudmouth, when there are so many greater injustices that surround us every day. It is hard to fight for people who won’t fight for themselves and, though I am a starving student myself, I need help in this fight for representation and the fulfillment of my needs. Despite my seemingly tired and faithless attitude, I still reserve hope. In fact, the students have given me many reasons to hope here and those events I hold dear to my heart and I commit myself to coming back. I am taking a break from all of my activism, but because they have given me reason to believe, I will come back when I am strong again. I too was once a stubborn Liberal who fought tooth and nail with any ideas that contradicted mine, because I felt validated by the institution. In fact, I was once (shudder) a Conservative Christian, and so I am quite familiar with many types of stubbornness. I am also familiar with the feeling of rage that comes up when cognitive dissonance threatens mental comfort. It is not pretty, but it is human. Every time I, or someone I meet, has a story of overcoming mental toxicities I am given hope. When the students voted en mass (87%) for lower tuition I was given hope. When they stood up for Palestinian Human Rights, whether publicly or in letters, I was given hope. When they write on the bathroom stalls, words they are afraid to say publicly but which need so desperately to be said, I am given hope. I know that the students here are intelligent, passionate, and overworked. I don’t blame them. But I do need a break from the constant call to action.
I also am taking this time to heal. I will read lots, rest lots, laugh lots, examine lots, and generally have the free space and time to understand the path I have traveled thus far and be better able to cope with the destructive forces I have overcome. I look forward to the end of this term, which I am barely hanging onto, so that I can take the time I need to heal properly. I have faith that by the end of this summer of exploration and healing I will be stronger and able to competently handle doing all the things I want to do in the next year and for the rest of my time at university. I also look forward to the epiphanies I will have, some of which I may share here, many I probably will not.
I welcome your emails, comments, questions, and general communication with me. Indeed, if you see that I am about to come through your town and would like to meet up I also welcome this and would love to meet up with you and your crew. I will be selling books along the way and would love to participate in any book fairs that are happening in your town, or even meet up and have an information knowledge sharing party.
(I’m not your conventional anarchist and I’m not your conventional mama)
p.s. Canada is a colonial state. This is why I reference it as Kanada or KKKanada, but sometimes I just refer to it as Canada. There is no rhyme or reason to when I call it by the different names, though I may start using it with more purpose attached to it at some point or another. In fact, sometimes I may be doing it purposefully and other times not, and you can subjectively choose for yourself whether there is meaning behind it or not. In fact, there is always meaning but you can choose for yourself whether you think I am attaching a certain meaning or not. I know you might think that as an anarchist I should be consistent in my references but I don’t really like rules and this is my way of defying a rule. If I were to truly live consistently in line with my values I would not live at all. Life is a compromise. Even if I left society, I still am unable to change the ways I have been raised in an individualistic sick society so I would still be impure and would probably be detrimental to the plants and animals or to my loved ones I left behind. There is no escape. I give up on the idea of purity. Purity is another rule imposed on us by others.
p.p.s. I am a student activist because I am a student. I believe that we should fight for our communities and stand in solidarity or fight alongside our neighboring communities in their resistance, but we should never try to fight their battles for them. As a student I am uber privileged, despite my poverty, and I feel I have a responsibility to shut up and listen and learn from those around me. I also feel that I have a responsibility to advocate for better access to education and a better standard of education. I do this because university has had a positive affect on my life and I am extremely grateful to the professors, TA’s, peers, books, resources, clubs, experiences, advisors, special speakers, and even courses that I have learned so much from. I understand the critiques of the university as a patriarchal, white, racist, classist, elitist institution that does nothing more than uphold the status quo of the capitalist system; however, my experiences at the university, though dire at moments, have greatly been positive and I am confident that the overriding philosophy of learning is enough to justify continued participation in the academy, most especially, the continuation of the fight for . Learning is essential. Thinking is essential. This is why I fight for student rights: I believe that the fundamental values of education are essential in our fight for a non hierarchical, consensual, classless, healthy, sustainable, loving society. I also understand the critiques of student leftists who think they will bring on the revolution because they need to somehow advocate for everyone. I try my hardest not to be like that and welcome being called out if I am being like that. I understand that, although I’m not white or male, I still possess a lot of privileges and I do not want this to cloud my vision. Being called out is hard but essential because if I am not open to change than I am allowing myself to be like that which I am against. Also, it’s hard to realize you’re doing something wrong when you never get told it’s harmful.
