Which is harder: being a wife or a mother? Before you toss out that question at your next book club meeting, be sure to pour the wine, because the conversation is about to get heated. And the answer is … well, in my experience, it depends. Both marriage and motherhood are partnerships. I tried out the idea that my husband call me life partner instead of wife, providing weeks of amusement for my two sons, who now insist that I am their life parent. (Life mother, they tell me, is too gend...

What is my mother like? Think Joanne McLeod, but with style. Growing up, I would stumble into the kitchen for a snack, and there she would be, standing beside her Hal Johnson (my stepfather), giving me the eerie impression they had just wrapped filming an episode for a knock-off of Body Break, those 90-second television spots featuring Johnson and McLeod telling viewers to “keep fit and have fun.” A health fanatic, my mother has ...

Nine years ago, the Canadian television industry went through a major restructuring. By the end of it, the number of potential employers in the industry was substantially reduced, and my husband was out of a job. It was a lousy year for us, just like this year is a lousy year for a lot of people. So that year we decided to cut and run. We started our own business and we relocated to the country. The decision to cut our dependence on someone else for my husband’s paycheque was based on t...

My mother died at the beginning of February. That’s a strange way to start a column about the economy, but bear with me. The first week of my March was spent sorting through her physical effects, through the broken chairs she had saved to repair, through the apple sauce she had made and frozen from a small apple tree in her Victoria, British Columbia backyard, through the gallons of frozen berries, spinach, and herbs she had stockpiled in the chest freezer. My mother, and my father, who ...

I am not exactly sure when the environmental lobby began to expunge the term “Global Warming” and replace it with “Climate Change,” but the move says a great deal about the debate. I spent the first 27 years of my life in southern Britain, where a white winter storm was as rare as a genuinely funny comedy on the CBC. This past winter, however, the entire country came to a halt due to Canadian-type levels of snow. It was cold and rainy, too....

Alex Fratarcangeli, the anti-hero in Nino Ricci’s Governor General’s Award-winning The Origin of Species, defines CanLit as the place where people “turn when they [need] every shred of good feeling stripped from them by the description of … one more child frozen to death in the snow.” In the novel, Ricci turns this description on its head. For it is not the wilderness of the Canadian topography that Ricc...

At this time of year, every year, I end up in the same argument with my wife. I’m still stuck in my cozy red wine rut and my wife, always a step or a hundred ahead, has moved on to thoughts of warmer weather and whiter wines. As I write, we are planning to have seafood lasagna for dinner. Obvious argument: red for a rich pasta dish, white for seafood. It’s always a matter of what we’re in the mood for and tonight we’re in the mood for … er … discussion. Although my true love is a...

I was reading over some statistics the other day. Not that I’m one to follow statistics, but sometimes I feel this need to see how I fit into the world. I discovered that women own 34 percent of small and mid-sized businesses and they are likely to have fewer than 20 employees. Women also tend to have businesses in the service sector. What stood out most, however, was that women-owned businesses are not producing the revenue of their male counterparts. The truth is that businesswomen have a ha...

Everyone I know does it: wake up in the morning, shuffle to the bathroom, flush the toilet, turn on the tap. Some jump in the shower for a warm, refreshing rinse. I can be found in the kitchen, chin on palms, leaning on the counter waiting for my water to boil. I never questioned this ritual, let alone my general use of water, until I was in my little cousin’s bathroom. This particular bathroom was littered with Betty and Veronica comics. Casually flipping through one, my attenti...

The Baby Boomers are planning on taking their vitamins and living into their 100s. For many, health issues aren’t a given upon retirement; as a result, a huge gap exists between selling the family home and 24-hour care. The Dunfield fits the gap. Marketed as "refined seniors living," for the most part to the active, independent senior, The Dunfield will open in August as rental suites at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto — a far cry from out to pasture...