Waiting for the afterlife

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

Hello readers! This post will go into the weeds of Catholic theology about salvation and sin. I tried to keep it broad enough for all audiences but given the nature of the topic, it could not be avoided. 

In response to my last post about hope for things unseen, reader MJ left a comment full of good questions. I decided to cut them out and use them as a prompt for this post. Saddle up because this is going to be a wild ride into the heart of what I believe and where it got me.

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MJ wrote: 

Beside hope for a better tomorrow, that things would become the case, did you ever have hope for eternal life, for salvation, for unity with the God that Catholics worship? Did you ever think that heaven would become the case for you? The cornerstone of Christianity is that life is eternal and death does not mean the end. That definition of hope, that faith that better things will eventually become the case, must be applied to life as it is understood by Christians: that it won’t end when you die. Christianity does not hold together if you do not hold this view. One’s life may very well be “shit” from day one til the day one dies. Absolutely hellish vision if you think that is all there is.

These questions are difficult to answer without going into what Roman Catholics believe and how these beliefs shape religious practice. I will also need to give you some context about my family’s faith, how it formed me, and what I took with me in adulthood.

I was born to two Catholic parents, received all the Sacraments on schedule, and celebrated all the Christian major feasts by going to Mass and having a party. That said, while I remember going through phases of weekly church attendance with my mother, I would not describe  my family as “practicing” Catholics. The word “practicing” to me evokes a form of strict religious observance that my parents never espoused. My parents were believers in Christian virtue, in a religion that welcomed everyone, in the qualities of belief that made you a bigger, better person. My family’s religious practice was not coercive. It was not based on fear. It was a practice of 1: Corinthians (love is patient, love is kind…) and of the Beatitudes (blessed are the poor in spirit). My parents took the parts of religion that felt good, like music and community, and left the parts that didn’t. In conservative Catholicism, people like my parents are derisively called “cherry pickers” or “cafeteria Catholics.” 

My parents held that every good thing should be enjoyed in balance, including church attendance. Church was something we did on Sunday, some of the time. The rest of the week, we just tried to live upright, ethical lives. We never went to confession, we never talked about sin. We never had to behave a certain way, do certain things, or wear certain clothes just because it was what our faith instructed. There were right and wrong ways to behave and the difference was pretty clear. Don’t be a jerk, work to relieve suffering around you, be kind to others.

I don’t remember turning into an atheist as a teenager. I’m naturally disposed to delight in things the eye cannot see: love, beauty, kinship, intuition, connection. I like my universe inscrutable. I like my questions unanswerable. I am comforted by the presence of something bigger than me. I prefer not having all the answers. 

Yesterday, I was driving with my daughter Ève (12) when she told me: “I don’t really believe in God, but I think that if ‘God’ wanted us to explore space and the deep sea, we would be able to breathe there.” Ève doesn’t believe in God, but she believes that some things are beyond our comprehension. She calls this mystery God. She believes that the deepest seas and farthest galaxies have a purpose that is beyond our grasp. Ève is ok being a spec of dust in a larger universe. I’m like Ève: I fell out of practice as a teenager but I never fell out of belief. 

I returned to religious practice when I was pregnant with my third child. I was looking for community and belonging. I was looking for certainty. I wrote about my turn to practicing Catholicism in this 2021 newsletter post: 

Like my mother before me, I came to the faith looking for somewhere to fit in. Paul’s family was associated with a close-knit conservative organization inside the Catholic Church and while conservatism didn’t come to me naturally, the ready-made community did. As a young woman with a law degree and a growing family, I longed for a sense of certainty. I wanted to be sure that I was making the right decision. Communities of faith celebrated my choice to prioritize family over career. The further I went down the conservative spectrum, the more certainty I encountered. Scripture’s promise of a “peace that defies all understanding” was extremely compelling. For someone with an anxious inner buzz, inner peace is a powerful pitch. 

To me, there was always a difference between Catholicism and conservative Catholicism. I had grown up in a family where practice was strictly a matter of how you conducted yourself in the world. If parts of your religion made you mean (for instance, taking small kids to Mass), you could just cut them out. In my family, religion was supposed to help you show-up in the world as a better person. If it didn’t, it was pointless.

In conservative Catholicism, I encountered a much different approach to religious practice. It was almost entirely focused on salvation, first your own then that of others.  Suddenly, what a Christian friend affectionately calls “the Catholic noise” became nooks and crannies of rites that were like pebbles on a scale. Every single thought and action was contributing to a load of sanctity that would take us into blissful eternity. There were big rocks of sanctity for sure: service to others, self-denial, and so on. But salvation was also in a myriad of anxiogenic little decisions, such as “How hard do I have to try to find a Sunday Mass when I’m on the road?”, “How sick do I really have to be to be exempt from Sunday obligation? What about my kids?”, “Is New Year’s Day a real day of obligation?” (answer: yes in the US but not in Canada so better not chance it…) “Can I attend a wedding in a non-Catholic Church or would this be validating mistaken beliefs?” “Is yoga a satanic practice?” “Is Harry Potter a gateway to wiccanism?” “Can there really be Communion if there are drums in the band?”

In my family, eternal life was something that happened organically as a result of showing up in the world as a virtuous person. We didn’t live our lives wondering how to get to heaven. Heaven was our inheritance, a given. As virtuous Christians, we lived our lives trying to make the world a better place for everyone. Here. Now. 

In the faith I joined, eternal life was something we earned by behaving a certain way. Scripture and Tradition gave us an instruction manual, and if these instructions made us miserable or unhealthy, we were to work at acceptance, self-denial, and abnegation. As fallen human beings, hell was what we deserved and salvation would be granted for a lifetime of sanctity. 

To root an entire belief system in fear, you have to start young. As an adult “convert” – converting from one faith expression to another – some teachings of the Catholic Church always felt alien to me. Scripture tells us that we should cultivate a childlike faith, which is understood as humble and trusting. I think that it is also a faith that appeals to the imagination. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist requires an effort of the imagination, the Immaculate Conception requires an effort of the imagination, heaven, hell, purgatory and eternal life require an effort of the imagination. Children have an openness to stories, to things that are not entirely rational. They know about the limitations of their knowledge, they understand their smallness. None of these stories about heaven and hell were taught to me as literally true when I was growing up. 

I brought into my adult conversion the mind of a child that had not been imprinted by religious guilt or fear. In hindsight, I can say that I missed the bad and the good of religion’s grandiosity. I missed the fear of hell and eternal banishment. But I also missed the awe of believing in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And the comfort of believing in the promise of eternal life. My religious practice was firmly rooted in my senses: it was in making music, writing words, creating community, offering support, being a mother to my children. I found awe in nature but mostly in art, often crying in art galleries and at the end of a well-written book. In her question, MJ wrote: “The cornerstone of Christianity is that life is eternal and death does not mean the end. (…) Christianity does not hold together if you do not hold this view. One’s life may very well be “shit” from day one til the day one dies. Absolutely hellish vision if you think that is all there is.”

Does it not hold together? It does for me. Catholicism is embodied. Body, blood, soul, and divinity. Eternal life is your reward, but your life on earth is your one shot at living it well. In Catholic doctrine, human beings in flesh and blood come together as one to become the Body of Christ. Jesus himself, having died and gone to Heaven, is no longer doing good deeds in Palestine. He relies on us to be his hands, eyes, and ears. To heal, to help, to soothe, to comfort. 

About 10 years ago, I read an article in The Guardian about an atheist whose beliefs had been shaken by working with homeless addicts in the South Bronx. Expecting to find hardened cynicism about the unfairness of life, he had instead found some of the strongest believers he had met, “steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore:”

Who am I to tell them that what they believe is irrational? Who am I to tell them the one thing that gives them hope and allows them to find some beauty in an awful world is inconsistent? I cannot tell them that there is nothing beyond this physical life. It would be cruel and pointless.

(…)

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.

The idea of atheism as a luxury accessible to those who have done well rang true to me. But I found that it also gave Christians an easy way out of fixing inequality in a meaningful way, because this life is not our final destination, and suffering is redemptive. 

In a comment to my last post, my friend Faustina wrote “hope is not a strategy.” Shouldn’t we have more to offer those who have nothing than the promise of a better afterlife, hopefully?

When it comes to me, my hope of eternal life is now a question mark more than it ever was. One thing conservative catholicism has been good at imparting is black and white thinking about who is saved and who is not. 

When my marriage ended, my ex-husband and I initially decided to stay in the same house to minimize the strain on the children. This turned out to be an ill-advised decision in more ways than one: it decimated my mental health, plunged me in the depths of burnout and depression and eventually led to my loss of employment at the City. Living with my ex-husband when he was no longer trying to sugar-coat his contempt was deeply degrading and traumatic. Zero stars, do not recommend.

I moved out of the family home in November 2020, 6 months after the official end of the marriage but I could not afford to rent in my community. Five months later, my (then) friend Glen moved in to help me pay the rent. As you probably know now – although I’m never sure how many of my subscribers read my posts all the way through – Glen and I are now “together” together. He still pays the rent but we sleep in the same bed. It’s been a good deal to be honest.

When my friend Glen moved in with me, 3 people took me aside and told me about the inappropriateness of moving-in with a man. I was emotionally vulnerable and I was putting myself in a situation of mortal sin. 

In Catholic theology, mortal sin  is a deliberate turning away from God that destroys love in the heart of the sinner. It’s a grave action committed in full knowledge of its gravity and with the full consent of the sinner. Repentant sinners can be forgiven by a priest in confession but repentance for Catholics is not the simple act of saying sorry. It also implies a desire to stop the sinful behaviour by any means, in thoughts and actions.

The Church does not provide a list of mortal sins but they are generally known as breaking one of the Ten Commandments: murder (including suicide and abortion), apostasy, and the range of sexual deviances which includes anything but PIV intercourse with someone you are married to (self-pleasure, homosexual sex, and – yes – adultery.)

When I left the family home, I had barely enough money to support myself and a fraction of what I needed to support my children. I made $3600 a month and $2500 would go to rent and utilities on the first day. I had signed-away my right to child and spousal support because we were sharing the family home and left with nothing: no money, no furniture, no household supplies. My commitment to Catholic marriage had left me in an incredibly vulnerable situation and I was being warned about living in sin. 

Glen stepped in and paid half my rent and utilities in exchange for a single bed in my basement. He held me together as I went through the most heart-wrenching time of my life, stayed by my side as I flew into white-hot rages so loud my voice went hoarse and never faltered. Not only that, but when I lost my job 10 months later, he was able to pick up the full rent and keep my children and I from losing our home. I still have the rescue list he wrote for me when I lost my job at the City:

In the Catholic Church, my relationship with my ex-husband is the right true one, and my relationship with the person who wrote that note, paid my bills, and fed my children puts me in a state of mortal sin. Of permanent estrangement from God. I have to renounce salvation for choosing a man who loves and respects me over one who really doesn’t. My current living situation puts me in a state of mortal sin with full knowledge of its consequences, absolutely no repentance, and no intention to stop. In other words, my goose is cooked.

If the Catholic Church doesn’t want me loved, respected, supported, and whole, then there is no room for me at its table. I’ll find another party. 

I don’t want to waste away waiting for something better to happen when I die. I prefer living my life as if it mattered. 

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Hope for things unseen (and a note about Substack)

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

Before we start:

Substack has been taken to task for its unwillingness to implement content moderation on the platform. You can read Casey Newton’s post about it. For paying subscribers, a portion of your payment to this newsletter goes to Substack and supports unmoderated content, including hate speech.

In 2019, I left Twitter because it was a cesspool. In 2022, during the municipal election campaign, a Twitter troll decided to use my relationship with my partner Glen as the basis for a smear campaign meant to disqualify him from public office. This troll shared personal information about me and where I live, encouraging his followers to dig out dirt about my employment and family history. Glen and I used to work together and we always accepted that questioning whether we were in a relationship while working together was of public interest. The problem is that when we answered “no, our relationship started two years after I left his office” , it was not enough. I was unemployed at the time and this smear campaign compromised two employment opportunities. I had to consult a defamation lawyer who went over the tweets and emails and agreed that there was defamation but that the cost of pursuing it would be higher than the potential award, especially given Twitter’s reluctance to make its platform safe for women. Our requests to Twitter to remove the content were ignored or turned down by the platform.

At the time, Glen was still using Twitter and I was trying to convince him to leave it. He felt like it was a useful tool to communicate with his constituents. I said: “Your white male constituents.” To me, his continued use of Twitter to broadcast information — about parking bans, development applications, weather events — forced people who were not safe on Twitter (like me) to use the platform. It was like taking office in a part of town known for its sexual assaults and expecting women to go there to access city services.

As a cis white man, Twitter was safe for him. Case in point: he was subjected to the same smear campaign I suffered and was re-elected easily. To me, it was not enough to encourage women and other vulnerable people to leave Twitter. Staying on the platform was an endorsement of Twitter’s policies concerning unfettered freedom of speech and harassment. Bringing traffic to Twitter in the form of constituents looking for information about bus delays and snow removal was unconscionable.

Which brings me to Substack. Substack’s decision not to moderate hate speech is not a threat to me. With my 200 subscribers, 50 of which pay a nominal fee for my content, I operate unbothered by hate speech. My revenues, paused at the moment, are so small that if I squint I can’t see them anymore. The portion of my earnings that could be argued to support hate speech is calculated in hundredth of a decimal point.

But it is not ok for me to benefit from a platform that threatens others just because it is safe for me.

If you have good solutions or insight, please share them with me. I won’t resume subscriptions until I find a solution. One option would be to add a Stripe “checkout” button and let people pay as they go. Maybe I will revive the blog for those who prefer avoiding Substack altogether and add micro-payments to the blog. I think that we all have a hand in making the Internet a safer place for woman and other vulnerable groups.

Ok, on to the post itself.

January is almost over and I have not written anything since last Fall. The problem with writing is that it creates its own momentum. When you stop writing, you don’t only lose the habit, you lose the inspiration. Like all skills, it’s a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. So here I am, coming back to it. 

How am I doing lately? I’m ok.

On the good news front, I am working again. After applying for 200 jobs, writing exams and taking tests, I got a message on Facebook from a friend whose husband was trying to staff an admin assistant position at a large public sector union. Two weeks later I was back to a full time job. My job is a 3-month term position that was just extended for another 3 months. I enjoy the work, I really believe in the cause, and while my job is strictly administrative, I sometimes come across papers and over-hear interesting presentations about health & safety, alternative conflict resolution, anti-racism in the workplace and indigenous advocacy. My boss is attending a conference on “Trauma informed approaches to justice” this Spring and while I can’t make a case for going (she could need someone to hold her shoes…) I love the fact that I am working for an organization that supports this type of formation for its employees and managers. I’m hoping to claw my way to a position in grievance & adjudication or labour relations. I think there’s a future for me in sticking it to bad managers after the last two years.

There are a lot of good parts of my life, things I am thankful for. I live in a cozy house near a park. My children can walk to school and bus or bike everywhere else. I’m in love with a man who loves me back in equal irrational amounts. I often tell him “I’m but a shadow of the person you met in 2018” and his answer is always the same: “But it’s still you.” His optimism verges on annoying at times but it has a way of knocking me off a downward spiral. A few months ago I was having a tantrum about how bad everything was and I told him: “Why can’t you see that everything is SHIT???” His face fell and he said: “Every morning I wake up next to you, and we sit together on the couch and I have coffee with my best friend. I think that’s pretty awesome.”

Right.

On days when the kids are not with me, we live a quiet domestic life with my daughter Marie and our dog Mirabelle. The other half of the time, we live a loud and chaotic family life trying to keep it all together. But seeing those good and lovely parts takes an act of will. I have to force myself to look at the good parts because the not-so-good parts are still overwhelming. I read a piece of fashion advice forever ago: once you are done putting your outfit together and accessorizing, close your eyes and turn yourself around in front of the mirror. When you open your eyes, the first accessory that jumps at you should be removed. A little like perfume: if you can still smell your own perfume after 15 minutes, you’ve overdone it. The tough parts of my life are like the first accessory you see, like the perfume you can still smell after 15 minutes. I take a swirl in front of a mirror and when I open my eyes I see the hardest parts: the precarious employment, my age, financial instability, school issues, health issues, legal issues. I have to force myself to remember the good parts. But the hardest part is having no hope that things will get better.

I have been reflecting a lot on hopelessness, what is it, where it comes from, how I got to that place and why I can’t leave it. In 2021 I went through a severe burnout and depression. One of the most enduring symptoms of mental illness (for me) has been the loss of “interest or participation in activities normally enjoyed.” I lost my interest in music, in writing, in hosting, in creating community around me, and nothing is coming back. I clawed my way almost all the way out of the depression bucket but for that little ledge of enjoying anything. If you have been in labour, it’s like transition: a really uncomfortable in-between space. It’s “the lip” of cervix that won’t completely make way for pushing the baby out. That lip of cervix that feels like a brick wall when you push against it and yet, is so negligible the midwife can touch your baby’s head.

So I’m here waiting for my new birth and wondering if after 3 years, this is just the way I am. Maybe this is a permanent fold in my life, a consequence of the loss of innocence, of trust in providence. The loss of the illusion that if you make the right choices and do the right things, things will work out.

When I was a practicing Catholic, I found a lot of comfort in Romans 8:28 “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose…” When you put this belief in the driver’s seat, you start seeing adversity as part of an ensemble, like a painting that is only partially finished. Another part of Romans 8 is a call to hope for things unseen: For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

Romans 8 is a real shield against hopelessness, you could even call it a bit of self-gaslighting: if you believe in God and are called according to His purpose, adversity is not adversity. It’s only part of a bigger story, one that ultimately ends well. And if your senses tell you that your life is shit, you need to work on your faith. Because your senses deceive you. 

When I reflect about the loss of hope that has accompanied the end of my marriage, I am struck by a compelling irony: hope for a better tomorrow, for greener grasses, for an “after”challenging times, is what sustained my relationship with my husband for 25 years. Not that things were bad, but my ability to get along and be happy with Paul for so many years was largely based on my ability to follow along. And my ability to follow along was rooted in an ability to hope, to trust. I looked up the online dictionary’s definition of hope as a verb and it gave me to “want something to happen or be the case.” To want something to be the case. That is an accurate summary of my marriage: to want something to be the case. 

We moved 10 times in 20 years in the same city. This April, the little rental house where I currently live will be my longest held address since 1995. Every move was motivated by a promise: a bigger dream, a better situation, greener grasses, stronger footings. Paul was always looking at the next best thing. As soon as things settled, we were on the move again. Paul went through these cycles of creation and destruction like clockwork every 3 years and my ability to hope, to believe it was true, to want something to be the case, buoyed this frenetic search.

I had chats with my older children about how these moves affected their emotional and social lives and I remember telling one of them that I never felt forced to move, I always went along because I believed it would be the last time. Every. Single. Time. I was busy having and raising my children and while the cycles of creation and destruction were difficult for me, Paul was a generous provider. I remember telling a friend – who was worried about how vulnerable I was in this situation – that I was also gaining from that arrangement: I had the large family I had always wanted and we didn’t want for anything. I also remember telling my mom when she shared similar concerns that Paul would always stop short of self-destruction: as long as my fates were tied to his, I’d be ok. Boy, did that come back to bite me in 2020!

I got pregnant at 21 between my first and second year of law school. I knew early on that my professional and personal lives would follow a jagged path. But I always believed my turn would come. I never resented the demands of my family or the impact of my children on my career. To me, that was just life unfolding. I believed in “later”. I believed in having it all, just not all at once. I followed along, raised my children, and every now and then Paul would throw me a line: I got my master’s degree and started a career in politics between pregnancies and moves, creations and destruction. But everything stopped short of coming together: the jobs in bioethics paid too little (if at all), the jobs in politics had crazy schedules, daycare was too expensive, we needed to pay off our debts, get ready for the apocalypse, build a custom house, homeschool, move back to the city, get a job, sell a house, rent a house, build our equity, spend it all on a camping trailer. It was never quite “my turn.” I didn’t know what “my turn” meant but I always knew it would come.  “My turn” had something to do with taking a step back from the cycles of creation and destruction, with the ability to shelter myself – and the children who wanted to – from the constant restarts. And throughout, a deeply held belief that things would work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

What drew me to the Catholic faith was hope. The idea of things unseen, the idea that our human limitations prevent us from seeing the whole picture. Christian hope is a powerful motivator. For me, it was the glue that held it all together. I started a blog because I hoped to become an author. I practiced my music because I hoped to join a band. I got a master’s degree because I hoped to find work. I built up a foundation between cycles of creation and destruction, between pregnancies and nursing, hoping that when my turn came I would be ready for it. Once the kids were older, once things were more stable, once money wasn’t so tight. After the next move, the next contract, the next opportunity.

For 25 years, I rode the coattails of Paul’s sense of self-preservation but when my marriage ended, I became an obstacle, something to protect against. Today, when I turn to my Christian hope, all I see is that my belief in Catholic marriage, in mutual support, in a joint venture, has left me completely exposed and financially dependent on someone who sees that dependence as an existential threat.

Things are no longer working together for good for those who love God, or maybe I am no longer in God’s favour, or maybe I am no longer called to His purpose as an ex-wife. There was hope of things unseen, enveloping my 25-year marriage like a fog. When the fog lifted, there was nothing left but a broken promise of mutual support, precarious employment, unstable housing, and the need to hire a lawyer to prevent my children from falling into poverty. I’m angry at Paul, for sure I am. But to be honest, I am angrier at the Church for making women like me hope that God is bigger than patriarchy and capitalism. 

I don’t know how to get back to a hopeful place. “It’s the hope that kills ya” or maybe it’s the shock of realizing that hope led you to your own demise. But this life without hope is not a life.

Your Christmas Party was brought to you by…

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

I started writing this rant before the new round of pandemic restrictions hit Ontario. Some of the details might no longer be accurate but the feeling remains the same: we’re asking more from our children than we are willing to give ourselves. We are funding our freedom to eat and drink using our kids’ credit. There will come a time to pay. Follow this link and subscribe to my newsletter to read it:

https://vroniquebergeron.substack.com/p/drinking-on-credit?r=ugay2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

You don’t like newsletters and giving your email address? Please read why I am doing this and reconsider: https://fearlessfamilylife.com/2021/12/21/the-newsletter-format-why/

The Newsletter format: Why?

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

This is a copy of the Welcome email you will receive if you subscribe to my newsletter. It explains why I switched to this format. You can subscribe by following this link: https://vroniquebergeron.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Greetings readers and welcome to this new iteration of Fearless Family Life, Vie de Cirque and whatever else you might have read from me over the years. After thoughtful reflection, I decided to move my writing to this new format (the email newsletter).

Since my separation in April 2020, I have been struggling to write about the experience of growing through the pain and parenting under new circumstances. I struggle to navigate the fine line between sharing authentically about the peaks and valleys of family life and sharing information that my children may not want me to share about. My story is also theirs and graduating from potty training and co-sleeping to learning difficulties and mental breakdown has been fraught with caution and self-censure.

That said, I know from years of reader feedback that sharing my reflections helps you make sense of yours. And putting my journey into words helps me find meaning through the pain. There is a pruning and maturing process that occurs in my handwritten journal day after day. But when I am able to write a coherent narrative about my experience, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, I start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Sharing my experience with my readers is also how I make sense out of it. You are much a part of my healing as I am a part of yours.

I subscribed to substack with the goal of making this a paid newsletter. The experience I will share on these pages is personal and impactful and I want to inject an element of intentionality into my readership. Charging $5 a month for my content will not break the bank but it will put a value on my writing and ensure that the people who receive it really want to read it. This matters to me at this point in my life.

Object writing: Thanksgiving

~ Veronique ~ 1 Comment

The late afternoon sun sits just above the awning, pouring a diffuse light into the coffee shop. A large reclaimed wood table marks the centre of the establishment, drawing eclectic elements of design and decoration to itself. A school holiday on the eve of Thanksgiving has forced families into a 4-day weekend, a blessing grown tenfold by Mother Nature’s friendly disposition.

Coaxed out of their homes by summer’s last hurrah, customers slowly fill every seat in the small, welcoming space. Some come and go, continuing their stroll coffee in hand. Others settle on the patio, soon to be met by friends or greeted by acquaintances.

Distracted, I watch the moment unfold through the large windows in front of me. The street and its activity unroll, bordered by the black and white awning, each window like one of 24 frames. A second in time.

 

Staffer’s Notebook: We’re not gonna take it. Or we will.

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

Last month news broke with allegations of improper behavior by Councillor Chiarelli. This week, Councillor Chiarelli requested a leave of absence for stress-related illness as victims shared more first-hand testimonies of sexual harassment. For women working on Councillor’s Row, questionable workplace behaviour from elected officials was old news. The real news was that someone was talking about it. 

In the weeks since the news broke, my boss and I have had several conversations about working conditions for Councillors’ staff and he encouraged me to share my thoughts in my Staffer’s Notebook.  

The power dynamics leading men to exert dominance over women’s minds and bodies is well expressed by Oscar Wilde’s famous quote: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” We expect elected officials to be leaders in their community and we hold them to the highest standard of behaviour, yet it is democracy’s inconvenient truth that they represent the best and the worst of us.

The story of the powerful man and the intern is as old as democracy itself. I scoff at the surprise that it should happen here, in Ottawa. If the MeToo movement has taught us anything, it’s that years of sensitivity and inclusion training has done nothing to discourage those who use sex to control. We seem to take comfort in the suggestion that this behaviour is the purview of jerks. Drawing a clear delineation between the good guys and the bad guys prevents us from looking at the ways our work environment enables abusive behaviour. Nowhere is this as true as in political offices. At all levels of government, the harassment and questionable hiring practices of elected officials take root in a garden carefully maintained by others.

I have worked as a political aide in federal and municipal politics. Everywhere, our employment conditions are precarious. Yet we work amidst organizations with mature and elaborate HR practices, alongside a well-represented unionized workforce. Be it in the federal or municipal government, elected officials are free to belittle, sexually objectify and threaten their staff while everyone looks the other way. And so the seeds of abuse sprout and grow unchecked, untamed and unmanaged. Our only recourse is to take it or leave it.

The image of one elected official representing one constituency has not kept pace with the complexity of representative democracy. Elected officials still hold office as a one-man show, but their operating budgets have grown to include a full-time staff providing the level of service that residents expect. Yet, everything in the staffing of political offices seeks to minimize the visibility of staffers and discount their existence. We are an extension of our employer, a line item in an operating budget, hired and fired at will. Our jobs have no requirements, our salaries are drawn from the same budget as office furniture and left to the discretion of each councillor. There is no salary scale, no promotion track, no equal pay, no performance reports, but most importantly, no complaint mechanism protecting us from the consequences of speaking out. Like office stationery we are expendable, and our value lies in augmenting a Councillor’s capacity without being noticed.

The low pay and precarious conditions of employment invite a workforce that is young, inexperienced and transient, unwilling to compromise its ability to find better paying work elsewhere in the organization. It also works to create a revolving door of young and inexperienced staff that carries with it a reputation for incompetence and ineffectiveness. Some departments will not let municipal staff interact directly with political aides in the absence of a manager. It works at cross-purpose with the City’s stated goal to be an employer of choice and with councillors’ need to receive sensible and knowledgeable advice in the conduct of their duties. Most importantly, it prevents the coalescence of stories, concerns and experiences into corporate memory and practices.

The precarity and sensitive nature of elected officials’ positions has explained their need for flexibility in staffing. For the most part, this flexibility has worked to the advantage of people like me: people with incomplete or patchy resumes, people with interrupted work experience, people whose personal lives have stunted their professional development, in other words, people who have difficulty finding work elsewhere. A CBC news item referred to our positions as “desirable” and I agree that my position as a Councillor’s Assistant has given me a unique perch into the complex levers of public administration. But being “lucky to have this job” combined with the unchecked staffing practices afforded to elected officials compromises our ability to challenge abuse,  especially in the absence of clearly defined protections against retaliation.

We assume that the desirability of our position makes up for its precarity. This might be true for the stock staffer imagined from political tv series but for those who eschew the glamour of fiction, the desirability is subservient to the precarity. We have bills to pay, families to support. We make decisions to manage the precarity of our positions rather than its desirability: we keep our heads low, we don’t make waves. We can justify the low pay and long hours by the desirability of the position. But we cannot in good conscience justify vulnerability to abuse and harassment as the price to pay for a desirable position. Yet this is the message that the City sends staffers by letting elected officials make their own rules in matters of staffing.  

Last week, Mayor Watson and Councillor Kavanagh issued a public statement stating that “All City employees, including employees of elected officials, have the right to a workplace that is free of harassment.” This is as true as it is meaningless. We may have access to counselling services and a shoulder to cry on, but we are institutionally kept at arm’s length from the City’s Human Resources. Once we avail ourselves of our 6 counselling sessions, our options to deal with harassment remain as binary as they ever were: take it or leave it. There is no HR pipeline to find us safe employment elsewhere in the City, no procedure to provide adult supervision to our employers, no protection against the gossip and rumours that may spread as a result.

The Clerk’s Office sent out an email reiterating the City’s commitment to be a workplace free of harassment and announcing a review of the recruitment and hiring process for Councillor’s Assistants. I hope that this review will be done in consultation with Councillors’ Assistants. However, I am concerned that the need for sweeping systemic changes, once identified, will meet fierce opposition from Councillors and inertia from City Staff. 

Power is a tricky thing to pass on. It’s slippery and it doesn’t have handles. 

Sight Lines

~ Veronique ~ 2 Comments

It’s Tuesday morning and we are walking to school down a neighbourhood street, the kind that invites speeding.

The street is straight and as wide as a French highway. Every street corner boasts ample sight lines, right into another beautiful, wide, straight, neighbourhood street. These neighbourhood streets are so close to two elementary schools that the children who live here do not qualify for bussing. They are expected to walk or bike. Yet the car — or if you live in an affluent suburb like Stittsville, the luxury SUV and the contractor pick-up — is King. The roads are designed for maximum visibility, which we have learned, invites maximum speed.

On our walk to school, I am holding my 5 year-old’s hand on one side of the street. My daughter is walking on the opposite side  because she’s mad at me.

Before we left, her brother threw her school bag on the ground instead of giving it to her and she said: “I’m not picking it up” and started leaving. I said “So he throws your school bag on the ground and you leave it here with your lunch and your homework. Who are you punishing exactly?” Her brother was long gone. She lashed out at me “SHUT UP. I don’t care about you, I don’t care what you think. Just stop talking.” And my heart just broke because it was the third time before 8 am I had been told by someone to shut up and the second time I had been told that no one cared. And that was after being yelled at by another angry child who had been asked not to swing a toy at the walls, accusing me of not caring about anyone. Never in my life have I met someone who worked so hard for people she doesn’t care about.

And so we walked towards the school and toward an incoming white SUV who had to swerve to avoid my daughter on one side, then swerve to avoid my son and I on the other side. In my impatience, I made a hand gesture signalling her to slow down and she did slow down just enough to roll her window down and yell at me.

“I’m doing 35!” she said as she sped off again through a stop sign. The stop signs are beautifully designed for maximum safety, with sight triangles the size of Texas. The visibility is so impeccable that you don’t even need to stop, you can see cars coming a mile away. A 5 year-old on his bike, maybe not. But he’s not the King of the road.

Who knows, maybe she was doing 35? Speed is hard to appreciate when the pick-up coming at you is so jacked that the front wheels are taller than your 5 year-old. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in traffic on the 417 with anything less than 10 inch of ground clearance. Everything looks too fast when it weights 2 tons and is coming at you, know what I mean? I don’t have a radar gun in my head, I only have a hunch that whatever the speed limit is, if you need to serve to avoid my child, it might be too high. Just a hunch. Just a mother’s heart that may be bruised but still skips a beat when you hurl a heavy-duty motor vehicle at the featherweight child she’s just been accused of not caring about.

My daughter crossed the street and came to see me. She said “Why was this lady yelling at you?” and I said it was because I had made a sign to slow down. “That lady looks like she might have a problem” my daughter answered.  And I said “Maybe. But how is that different from what you did this morning?”

“I said something you didn’t like so you yelled at me. I said something this lady didn’t like so she yelled at me.”

“I’m everyone’s anger doormat. People are angry and they don’t like it, so they look for someone to wipe their anger off on. You just used me to clean the anger you felt towards your brother. This lady used me to clean up the anger she felt at God-knows-what. We wipe our anger on people and we leave satisfied, for a moment. But the anger doesn’t disappear. Now I have to deal with it. Now I have to deal with the pain of having been yelled at, of having been told no one cares about what I say, of having been accused of not caring.”

Now I have to deal with the fear that the next time this lady drives by my family she’ll speed up instead of slowing down, just to show me who this street really belongs to. Anger doesn’t dissipate. It doesn’t evaporate. It communicates like a disease. It sullies everything it touches until all of us are trying to wipe it off something else.

Seeing is not caring. We thought that better visibility would make our roads safer,  as if seeing the other was all that carefulness needed to take root. We expanded the sight lines, widened the triangles, until we realized that carelessness expands to fit the space it is given.

We have worked diligently to eliminate friction points. To eliminate the need to proceed with caution. To eliminate the need to look the stranger in the eye, to see the other’s fear. We are trying to eliminate the need to mature, to become self-aware. To admit our mistakes. We make it possible for a grown woman driving an expensive vehicle to react with the maturity of a 10 year-old girl and drive away satisfied, having learned nothing but maybe taught two children that problems are solvable by denial and deflection.

And so carelessness expands to fit the space it is given, anger communicates like a disease, and sight lines become blind spots.

 

Blogging like it’s 2009

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

Last Fall, after looking unsuccessfully for work for a few months, I deemed it God’s will that writing should be my new job and committed to write a blog post every day to get back in the writing habit.

Of course, 3 days later I found work that I enjoy so much it became my hobby. In other words, I haven’t been blogging much since December. I still write plenty but that will be lost on you unless you have questions about utility easements and bus rapid transit.

All that being said, I miss writing about inconsequential things like raising well-adjusted children in an off-kilter world, loving your babies when you don’t like them, and trying to find balance when everything piles up on one side. I still have ideas and opinions and I share them freely on text and email. But I miss the interaction with friends and family near and far through my blog.

As more and more people take breaks from social media and become more circumspect about what they share publicly, and as social media grows increasingly useless as a free sharing platform, writers have switched to subscription models and email newsletters. I tried the subscription model but I’m not popular enough to make it worthwhile: I received enough money to create an obligation to write but not enough to free-up time to do so. I never tried the email newsletter but if your Inbox is anything like mine, you know that we are way past peak newsletter. I’m not sure what the solution is but I think that we will soon see a return to RSS readers and eventually ink on paper. In the mean time, if you enjoy reading what I write, I would like to know what is the best way to reach you.

I have a few “Staffer’s Notebook” posts on matters of urban planning and city-building currently stuck in the pipe but I plan too return to my completely haphazard mix of “whatever floats my boat” as soon as I clear them. I’m also working on a “Now” page, which is something more specific than the “About” page but more permanent than a social media status. Think of it as what you would tell relatives you see once a year at a family reunion.

In the meantime, here is a picture of Ève and Lucas — my twins — who were the reason I started this blog 8 years ago, while on bed rest expecting them. Don’t blink!

 

Trees and road safety

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

I am currently in France visiting family for a little over two weeks. Since my job is also my hobby I took the opportunity to turn this holiday into an urban planning field trip. Europe is far ahead of North America when it comes to managing population density, resource conservation and the perils of pollution. It’s not a criticism as much as an observation: these concerns appeared on Europe’s radar earlier than on North America’s.

Yesterday, we travelled from Rouen (in Normandy) to the Ardèche region, a forested mountainous area near the Rhône and within a crow’s flight of the French Alps’ foothills. It’s in the south-eastern quadrant of the Hexagon.

Instagram: @hey.vero_

We travelled most of the way on France’s privatized toll highway system and finished the trip with a short stint on the “Nationale 7” , the historic tree-lined trunk road stretching from Paris to the Italian border. Used by thousands on their way to the Mediterranean, it is known in popular culture as “la route des vacances” (Holiday route) and — more tragically — “Route de la mort” (Death Route). It is comparable in history and popular culture to America’s Route 66. If Route 66 had been built by the Romans.

We drove down the old Nationale 7 along the Rhône River towards the mountains of Ardèche.

Later that evening, we were discussing road safety and how a series of French policies in the 80’s and 90’s had seen a steady decrease in road casualties from 18,000 a year down to 4,000 with an increasing population. My uncle said in passing that it was hard to parse out which policy had had what impact “between alcohol, speed, seatbelts and trees…”

Trees?

My mother said “Oh, these trees killed a lot of people!”

As it turns out, the iconic borders of trees have a storied past. Seen by some as a road safety hazard, they are also part of France’s cultural heritage to be saved and protected:

Avec la vitesse, la conduite en état d’ivresse, les incivilités, les arbres d’alignement en bord de routes sont aujourd’hui considérés comme un danger à éliminer. Et pourtant… Depuis des siècles, nos paysages sont structurés par les alignements qui bordent routes, fossés, canaux et rivières. Les arbres de bord de route, et en particulier les alignements, constituent un patrimoine reconnu, protégé par la loi dans certains pays.

http://www.patrimoine-environnement.fr/les-alignements-darbres-en-danger-partout-en-france/

Believed to be an answer to medieval deforestation and a solution to shipbuilding needs , the trees, called “arbres d’alignement” for the way they delineate the roadway, were mandated by Henri III in 1552.

Roadway tree planting intensified at the beginning of the 19th Century as a mean of reducing the dust caused by vehicular traffic. By 1895, 3 million trees lined 35,000 km of national roads and even more could be found alongside secondary roads and channels.

In the 1940’s the border trees — until then considered a source of shade and cultural identity — became the scapegoat for the death toll brought on by the rise of the automobile. Calls for their systematic removal met cries for their preservation. Accused of causing 10% of roadway deaths, border trees were not even given the grace of mentioning the state or behavior of the drivers before being killed.

Caught in the crosshair of a campaign to reduce road fatalities, border trees received the support of President George Pompidou in 1970 when he wrote an exasperated letter to his Minister of the Interior upon learning of a policy to remove border trees in spite of his express wishes that they be preserved (my translation):

Trees have no other defenders than myself it seems, and even this doesn’t seem to matter. France does not only exist to allow the French to drive around it at will. Regardless of their importance, road safety problems shouldn’t result in the disfiguration of France’s landscape.

Decreasing traffic accidents will only result from educating drivers and establishing simple rules adapted to the configuration of the road instead of the current complexity sought in signalisation as if it was a hobby. It will also result from more stringent rules in matters of drunk driving (…)

In other words, blaming the trees is a little rich when you were soaked as a Christmas cake behind the wheel. (My uncle told me that blood alcohol levels used to be an extenuating circumstance in vehicular manslaughter trials. We laughed but it wasn’t funny).

Ordinances calling for the systematic removal of roadside trees multiplied in the 80’s and 90’s until 2006 when studies of road safety revealed that border trees — or as one urban designer once told me “anything vertical close to the curb” — had a traffic calming effect. Studies of road safety statistics in communes where trees has been completely removed also emerged showing the questionable impact of designing roads to be wide, straight, and devoid of obstacles (spoiler: it makes people drive faster, has an hypnotic effect and contributes to an increase in accidents.)

In 2010, a village near Norfolk, England experimented with the traffic calming effect of the ironically called “French style avenue”. Borders of trees were shown to reduce the average speed upon entering the village by 3-5km/h for a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining traffic cameras.

England is generally considered to be 30 years ahead of France in matters of traffic safety and yet, despite these positive results, the remaining French border trees have been singled out as part of a wide-ranging safety audit of French departmental roads.

If you are as interested in the confluence of road safety, traffic calming, environmental preservation, urban design and urban heritage as I am, go and read this 66-page document (with pictures) on road infrastructure and natural landscape from the European Landscape Convention : http://patrimoine-environnement.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/CEP-CDPATEP-2009-15-TreeAvenues_fr.pdf

In the meantime, here is Charles Trenet singing the praises of Nationale 7:

Q: How do you know someone does CrossFit?

~ Veronique ~ 11 Comments

A: … they tell you.

At the risk of being one of “these people”…

About 4 years ago, a friend joined a Crossfit gym and started gushing about it *incessantly* on social media. My 9th child was about 7 months old and my health was declining rapidly due to undiagnosed autoimmune thyroiditis or Hashimoto’s disease. I was gaining weight rapidly, going from 140 to 200 lbs over a 4-month period. I suffered from creeping depression, constant fatigue, debilitating migraines and insomnia, and the best answer doctors had for me was that these things tend to happen when you turn 40… I did a Whole 30, cut gluten and dairy. I lost some weight but nothing got the results my friend was seeing on her CrossFit journey. I envied my friend’s measurable progress but I thought — as most people do — that I wasn’t in good enough shape to start CrossFit: I had a back injury, bad knees and a lazy streak. I wasn’t as focused as my friend, it looked too hard, the people looked weird, it just wasn’t for me.

The picture below shows me in December 2014 and May 2015, before and after adopting a paleo diet. 

In the Spring of 2015, after adopting a Paleo diet and cutting out gluten, my cycles regulated and I was able to get pregnant. After an early miscarriage I was pregnant again and looking forward to welcoming Baby Number 10 around the end of March 2016. In September 2015, I miscarried again, this time after 13 weeks of pregnancy. The miscarriage was sudden, unexpected and turned into a major medical emergency when I started bleeding out. It was like my body had opened a faucet at full volume. The last thing I told my oldest daughter as I left for the hospital was “try to make my bathroom not look like a crime scene.” There was blood up the shower walls from the large clots that felt splashing on the floor. I passed out from the blood loss, was hospitalized and received a blood transfusion. A friend told me to expect the recovery to last as long as the pregnancy would have. Of my 10 pregnancies, that one was by far the one that took the most out of me.

September 2015, before and after the blood transfusion.

After my miscarriage, I started sufferig from unrelenting back pain. I assumed it was due to poor core conditioning and took a gym membership. I went to the gym regularly for weightlifting, yoga, Zumba, and TRX group classes. I have ADHD and the trauma of the miscarriage had sent my symptoms into overdrive. Back then, before I gave up trying to brute-force it without meds, I had a decent day if I could get two exercise classes a day. I would drop off the kids at school, go to the gym for 3h, see the physio for my back, see the therapist for my brain, and it was time for school pick up. I used to joke semi-seriously that being me was a full time occupation.

Being active was better than not being active but the results rapidly plateaued. I had lost some weight thanks to dietary changes but I kept gaining unless I followed a strict autoimmune protocol diet. This caused me to hyper-focus on food and tailspin into anxiety. I felt in a constant loop of lose-lose situations, damned if I did, damned if I don’t. I was cycling through different types of physical therapy and alternative medicines  to address my back pain, looking for anything, anyone, that could at least stop it from getting worst. My thyroid condition was tricky to manage, going through 3-month cycles of flare-ups, medication adjustment, stabilization, and back to flare up. My migraines were getting more intense and more frequent, often keeping me bed-ridden for days. Medication narrowly kept my ADHD from running away with my sanity but if I forgot to take my meds, the whole day was a write off. I was moody, unpredictable and sad. I was looking for work unsuccessfully and half-thankful I wasn’t getting any luck: I didn’t know how I could hold down a job in these conditions.

I was hopeless and depressed, believing what I was told: I was over 40, my body had been through a lot, that’s just what happens when you have 9 kids. You’re amazing for showing up, why do you expect more?

My oldest daughter signed up at CrossFit Closer on my recommendation. A year later, we moved just around the corner from Landmark CrossFit in Stittsville and registered two of our kids for the teen classes. A few months later, my husband signed up. One of our close friends signed-up at my daughter’s gym. At this point, I considered myself Patient Zero for 5 CrossFit memberships and I didn’t even know what a box looked like on the inside. I saw how amazing it was for other people but I wanted no part in it.

On my 45th birthday, I sent my resume on a lark to my new municipal councillor and on December 1st 2019 I started working at Ottawa City Hall. From my first interview, I knew that this job would change my life. Right out of the gates, it gave me enough confidence to see that I still had a fight left in me. I agreed to try a CrossFit class with my husband on New Year’s Eve just so he’d shut up about it.

I went. It sucked. I came back two days later. I’m stubborn like that, and I just can’t quit at the bottom. And that’s how I knew the old me was still hiding somewhere in there.

It’s been 6 months and I go to a 6:00 am class every weekday. I started training 3 times a week in January and increased it to 4 then 5 times over March-April. I try to squeeze-in a yoga or mobility class once or twice a week and I bike 30km to work once or twice a week.

Inside the gym, the transformation has been slow and steady.

You won’t see my Amazing Mom Bod on Instagram because I ain’t got one. I still weigh more today than I did 9 months pregnant with twins. In 6 months of training I gained 8 lbs and dropped half a pant size, so i’m not even getting new clothes out of this deal. If I was in it for the body, I’d be blowing my nose in my bikini right now. My technique is improving, my stamina is improving, my range of motion is increasing. When I started CrossFit I couldn’t run, I couldn’t lift, I couldn’t jump. And now I can run a little, I can jump on and over things, and I can lift some weight. My back pain is slowly decreasing but is still a limiting factor. I take two steps forward and one step back, consistently slower than everyone else, but I’m moving in the right direction.

Outside the gym, the transformation has been more remarkable.

I can bike to work. I can drive my car in reverse without needing pain meds to get over the twisting motion. I can get out of my car without having to remember which foot goes down first. This spring, I helped with the flood mitigation efforts in Ottawa and I was able to fill sandbags, move sandbags, hoist myself on the back of a flat bed truck, jump off the back of a flat bed truck, run with a wheel barrow from one site to another, in pouring rain, all this a few hours after my 6 am workout and I felt better coming out than I did going in.

My migraines are almost completely gone and their severity has decreased to the point where they can be managed with minimal medication. My autoimmune condition is a non-issue and my thyroid meds have not increased since last year. I was even able to completely eliminate one thyroid medication. I went from taking 4 prescription drugs daily to two. I eat well but I’m not tracking calories, macros or eliminating entire food groups. I limit my sugar intake by eating whole foods but I don’t worry about treats. The reality of high intensity workouts is that you can’t eat like shit before and you don’t want to eat like shit after. I can follow my body’s cues on how much carbs, protein, fat and hydration it needs. Not having anxiety over food and diet has been a huge improvement to my quality of life.

Inside my head, the transformation has been life-changing.

The biggest difference CrossFit has made has been in the management of my ADHD symptoms and I want to dwell on this for a minute. We know that exercise is key in managing symptoms of cognitive and mental disorders but few therapists know that all exercise forms are not created equal.

ADHD medication — while life-changing — is not a panacea. It makes it possible to manage your condition by giving you the ability to form habits and follow through with healthy lifestyle choices but it doesn’t magically give you a “normal” brain. Using enough medication to manage all your symptoms without effort puts you in dicey territory when it comes to the delicate balance of benefits and side-effects. To get the most benefits from medication with the fewest side-effects, you should travel the last mile on your own steam. That’s what CrossFit has done for me.

High Intensity Interval Training combined with strength training have had the same impact on my ADHD symptoms than medication. Medication gave me the ability to function normally in the world. CrossFit is allowing me to finally realize my full potential (and if you or someone you love has ADHD, you know that “not performing to potential” is one of our Greatest Hits).

Living with ADHD is like trying to drink from a fire hose. All the time. Your brain is processing every input cranked up to 11. Physically, CrossFit workouts are like a soothing bath of endorphins for your brain. Every morning at 6 am I take a day’s worth of nervous tics and fidgetting energy and I burn it for fuel in a workout.

My CrossFit coaches were the first people who didn’t buy the “you’re over 40 and had too many kids” set of excuses. They took me where I was at and told me to push it an inch farther. With 9 children, nobody dares call me lazy or tell me to try harder… except my CrossFit coaches. They believe that wherever you’re at is where you push from. And maybe the range of how far you can push is tiny, but they’ll make you cover than range.

As a mother of 9 in her mid-forties, I can’t tell you how life-affirming it has been to spend the first hour of every day with a group of people who believe that you can always improve something, that there is no right age to give up and stop trying.

The group class setting and the planned workouts have helped me stay consistent for 6 months, a record for anyone who has a brain wiring averse to forming habits. The feeling of peace and contentment I feel after the buzzer rings and the workout ends is like nothing I ever felt before. It acts like its own drug and it keeps me coming back the next day.

Don’t take my work for it. Try it. Find a CrossFit gym that matches your needs and abilities — some are more competitive than others. If you have injuries or challenges, ask clearly how the coaches are planning to address them. Ask about modifying workouts to fit your circumstances. If you don’t like the answers, visit another gym — or just come with me to Landmark CrossFit in Stittsville. The coaches have built their brand on achieving progressive results through great form and technique and my gym mates cover the gamut of age and ability.

Come on, do it. I wouldn’t be “one of these people” if I didn’t think it could change your life.

 May 2019 at my second born son’s graduation from RMC, holding my youngest son.