{"id":346,"date":"2010-09-11T21:41:40","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T05:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/?p=346"},"modified":"2013-10-02T14:26:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T21:26:05","slug":"i-know-how-to-cut-grass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/i-know-how-to-cut-grass\/","title":{"rendered":"I Can Cut Grass!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I know how to cut grass.<\/p>\n

While that may not seem monumental to some people, to me it\u2019s on par with navigating my way to the moon. There was only one time during my childhood that I was permitted to enter the sanctum of what my traditionalist parents considered the male domain of grass cutting.\u00a0\u00a0Of course, the more I wasn\u2019t allowed to touch the lawn mower, the more I wanted to sweat behind the all-powerful mulching machine. Dish-washing, bathroom cleaning, and shirt ironing didn\u2019t cut it for me.<\/p>\n

In my parents\u2019 defense, a cousin of mine had succeeded in chopping off a few toes in a lawn-cutting incident around the same time I began to beg for mowing privileges. Perhaps that factored into their decision. However, it was a male cousin who\u2019d been injured, and no female cousins\u2019 toes met a similar fate.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I was destined for zero mower-cutting skills. How can a person remember how to start, push, empty cuttings from, and clean a lawnmower with only a single demonstration, complete with an overbearing father watching in trepidation as his only daughter pushed the lawnmower back and forth one time over the lawn?<\/p>\n

In my childhood I quickly learned there were many gender distinctions in addition to who got to cut grass. My fundamentalist Christian parents also role-modeled a mother\u2019s need to stop working and become a housewife, the husband\u2019s position as the head of the household, the wife\u2019s need to obey her husband.\u00a0 It was clear that as a girl-child my role was to function as a sewing, cleaning, obedient, and academically focused human with the goal of finding a husband so the cycle could continue.\u00a0 My mother left her lucrative position as accountant in the local pharmacy to remain home with her children, dutifully asked her husband about any cent about to be spent except for the allotted amount of grocery budget, and accepted being hit every so often as part of the marital contract. She worked hard to turn me into a successful seamstress (I was deemed a failure because I had to use a sewing pattern), a cleaning whiz (I honed my skills in two summer jobs as chambermaid and also as part of a Mini-Maid team), obedient Christian (I attended a severely strict boarding school in Alberta and then went on to a private fundamentalist Bible College<\/a>) and academic achiever (a perfect grade point average in university at one point).<\/p>\n

The husband aspect I excelled at for many years. I was engaged by the age of 15 to a Christian boy who occasionally hit me, and by 20 years old was married to a traditionalist Christian I met in Bible School who believed as I did: the man is the head of the home. Further, to be separate from the world as stated in the Bible, John 17:15-18, meant no dancing socially, swearing, or viewing inappropriate movies.\u00a0 And, just like my parents, he believed a man\u2019s chores exist outside the home and a woman\u2019s chores inside.<\/p>\n

At first that worked for me: I didn\u2019t have a clue how to work a lawnmower any way. In fact, it wasn\u2019t long before I had no clue how to put gas in the car or how to fix a showerhead either. Talented at cleaning toilets and changing diapers, I didn\u2019t know how to go about finding a light for the stove or how to change the oil in the car. Those tasks became bigger and bigger walls hemming me into the traditional wife role I\u2019d signed on for. My husband ensured they remained that way when I began to realize I was as closed in as Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca and Princess Leia in the garbage compactor<\/a> in Episode IV of Star Wars.\u00a0 He said I couldn\u2019t manage mowing lawns or taking care of the outside of a home. The walls grew tighter once I began to see our own children following in our footsteps: our older daughter obeyed her younger brother and she learned to stop asking why and to accept. I was teaching helplessness to my own daughter and I knew that had to change: how could my children reach their potential as human beings when they had to focus so much energy on being what fundamentalist Christianity stated?<\/p>\n

I tried to alter the pattern but it was impossible to work within the tight confines of the marriage. The harder I worked to gain my freedom, to be able to know myself along with my family, the harder my husband worked to hang onto the familiar rules and structure, and the tighter the walls became.\u00a0 The abyss between what was familiar and the other side seemed insurmountable. However, the alternative of being squished into nothing was not an option. Finally, I took step by tiny step: I went to counseling, joined a group for abused women, acknowledged the reality I was living in and that it needed to stop, separated, and finally moved with my children into our own home.<\/p>\n

The learning curve was akin to that of an infant learning to walk. In those first few weeks on my own I had a lady kindly point out as I was driving up to the gas pump that my gas cap was on the other side of my vehicle. I didn\u2019t know what buttons to push or how long to wait for things to process, and I wasn\u2019t sure if I\u2019d put the gas cap on tight enough.\u00a0 I\u2019d never owned a car before and had to purchase a van. Fortunately, my knight in shining armour appeared in the form of a van owner who\u2019d been raised by a single mom and helped me through the nerve-rattling car buying experience, giving me an exceptional deal in the process. I discovered weeks later that he even tucked a little guardian angel figurine under the visor to keep the kids and me safe.<\/p>\n

Finding a home to live in was mind-numbing. I figured the only way to work through it was to sit the kids and me down, and write our ideal list: what we each wanted in a home. My son decided he needed enough yard for our non-existent trampoline, and my daughter wanted a fair-sized bedroom and all bedrooms on the same floor. I wanted some privacy.\u00a0 We wanted an upstairs and downstairs, and, figuring the sky was the limit, voted for a fireplace as well. After months of searching, we found it: a front and back yard with lots of grass to mow and substantial room for a trampoline, fair-sized bedroom and bedrooms on the same floor, an upstairs and downstairs, a big hedge in the front, and not one but two fireplaces.\u00a0 On Thanksgiving weekend, friends descended like worker bees to help with the move. Our first night in the house the kids slept soundly in their new rooms.\u00a0 With help from people who believed in us, we did it!<\/p>\n

Now I had to learn how to mow. My ex found me a second-hand electric mower as he wanted to keep our heavy-duty gas mower, and a friend kindly shared his mowing expertise <\/a>with me, patiently showing me how to start, push, dump grass out, and clean. I learned a lesson fairly quickly about short cuts. I figured I didn\u2019t need to add the step of dumping the grass from the grass catcher: unlike every other lawn mowing individual I\u2019d witnessed, I could leave the grass where it fell. I mean, it was environmentally friendly to do that, right? The lawn would be happy that I was so kind to it.\u00a0 That plan worked for a few months until the weather turned warmer. I woke up one morning to two lawns covered in yellowed tufts of hay, blowing like tumbleweed across the prairies. I ended up using a rake over both lawns. I then piled the hay into stacks and, with my bin full on the curb, became another of the lawn-cutting contributors.<\/p>\n

A few months later I talked grass, the lawn kind, with a colleague at work. \u201cI need to aerate my lawn and get some moss killer on it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I nodded in what I hoped was a knowing fashion. \u201cYeah, I should do that, too. This is the time to take care of stuff like that, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYep.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI am noticing that there\u2019s more moss than I expected. Whole patches of the grass are actually moss,\u201d I said. \u201cIs that normal?\u201d<\/p>\n

He nodded. \u201cThat happens. It\u2019s important to stay on top of it.\u201d We said our goodbyes.<\/p>\n

I think I walked a little like John Wayne as I continued down the hall, saunterin\u2019, swaggerin\u2019. I\u2019d had a successful lawn-mowing conversation. Granted, for the next few minutes I began to think of the world of lawn care: moss-killing, aerating, fertilizing? It was a potential nightmare.<\/p>\n

But once I took a few breaths I was better: I wasn\u2019t at the aerating stage with my lawn. And the reality was, that was okay. There was a scary-looking weed trimmer I needed to learn how to use before I started poking holes in the moss of my lawn, anyway.<\/p>\n

And you know what?<\/p>\n

With the help of another friend, I did figure it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know how to cut grass. While that may not seem monumental to some people, to me it\u2019s on par with navigating my way to the moon. There was only one time during my childhood that I was permitted to enter the sanctum of what my traditionalist parents considered the male domain of grass cutting.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,18,7],"tags":[9,120,121],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-divorce","category-enlightenment","category-relationships","tag-divorce-2","tag-relationships","tag-self-realization"],"aioseo_notices":[],"views":48621,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thriveinlife.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}