Month: April 2007

The following is from Mental Tesserae “Why I Cry” I wish I’d written it. It is beautiful and so very true:

I’m standing alone in a stairwell looking down at all the steps I’ve taken.I’ve married a great man, given birth to four wonderful children,accomplished a few impressive things along the way like collecting college degrees, running half-marathons, finishing some quilts. But some of those other steps below me represent regrets – the petty things I’ve said and done, the projects I’ve started but not finished, the many ways I’ve screwed up my kids (because God knows they’d still be perfect if it weren’t for the bad habits I’ve let them develop). And above me the stairs continue to ascend with mocking regularity. I rest my arm on the railing and prepare for the rest of the climb – the next step, next day, the next batch of laundry. But for now I pause in the light of the landing that is the present moment and I take a deep breath. And sometimes I cry just a bit.

The key word here is the very first one,”Sometimes.” There are other times when life is invigorating and interesting and joyful. But on the days when life is like a long flight of stairs, this is how I feel about it.

The ice maker in our fridge leaked again. It warped the hardwood underneath it and ran down a wall in the basement. I am ready to tear off the water line and tie it in a knot. Having ice dispensed from the fridge is nice, but it is a very expensive luxury if it costs us $1000 every couple of years to sand and refinish warped hardwood floors. And we will have to live with the warped floor for 6 months to a year just waiting for it to dry out enough for the work to be done. I hate this. I hate that this is the fourth or fifth time that my plumbing has cost me over $1000 in damages. I hate that it happened on a day that was already bad. I hate that Howard hundreds of miles away and too convention exhausted to talk on the phone for long.

Yesterday Kiki was in a Mood. She was ready to pick a fight with me over the fact that I made two sandwiches for myself so I could save one for later. She didn’t want a sandwich. She didn’t even like the kind of sandwich I made. My extra sandwich caused her no inconvenience whatsoever, but still tried to pick a fight over it. She sat at the kitchen counter, a little lump of pure fury with no target. Her hairbrush bore the brunt of it and now lies in two pieces.

Today Kiki is better. Instead it was Gleek’s turn. She cried on the way to church because her legs were tired. She cried when she didn’t get to pick the bench we sat on. She cried that I didn’t have any food for her to eat. You get the idea. When it came time for her to go to her primary class, she sniffled the whole way there, but was happy after that.

Then it was Patches turn. He’d been happy all during Gleek’s upsets, but when time came for him to go to class, he bawled because he just wanted to be with me. I know that most of the problem was hunger and fatigue. This helps me plan better for future Sundays. For today I just had to tolerate being climbed all over for the next two hours by a bored and tired four year old boy. He craved the comfort of contact, but couldn’t sit still. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone and not touched by anyone.

At least Link has been in a very happy mood for two days. He is glowingly happy because I finally fixed his blankies. He’s been waiting for me to get it done for months.

Hopefully the rest of today can be a little less moody.

Today began with kitchen cleaning and french toast. It felt good to be paying attention to the needs of my house and my kids since yesterday all my attention went to my poor little story. The story is still in pieces, but I’ve begun the process of picking up the pieces and sewing them back together again. Speaking of sewing, I spent a big piece of the morning sewing a costume for Kiki to wear next week. Her class is putting on severely abridged versions of Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing and she has to have a costume. Fortunately I had a green dress that worked with only minor alterations. I also had the pieces of a Kiki-sized cloak that only needed sewn together. Add some shiny ribbon and voila! While I had the sewing machines out, I did some other repair work that the kids have been waiting for me to do.

Now it is 2 pm and I need to be planning a lunch of some sort. Meals work better if I have them prepared before the kids realize that they’re hungry. I get really grumpy if I’m fixing lunch and the kids come foraging. Then they fill up on snacks and leave lunch on the table. This always leaves me wondering why I bother to cook at all.

This past week I have been hard at work on a story to submit to Julie Czerneda for her anthology. I hammered out characters and events and conflicts. I had reached the point where I felt like it was pretty much done. I gave it to several people to read. Nancy and Janci gave me good “tweak it here” type feedback. The third person, Chalain, dissected my 6 page story with 16 pages of commentary. When I was done reading it, I was ready to cry. I felt like crying because he was right. He’d picked everything apart and I could see very clearly that I could not leave my story the way it was. So there I was with all the pieces of my story and no idea how to put it back together again. Scattered around me all the pieces seemed to have equal value, yet they could not all fit into 5000 words.

I talked to Chalain about his review and by the end of the talk I could see where I needed to go. I get to keep the characters, events, and conflicts, but the viewpoint must change. This means jettisoning some major character development that I spent a lot of time fleshing out. So right now I’m re-writing the whole thing. I saved a draft of the other version, so I can revert to it if I want to. I probably won’t want to. By the time I’m done with this version I’ll love it as much as the other one, if not more. Unfortunately this means I am back to drafting. I was so happy to be tweaking and refining. I really hope all this effort is rewarded by acceptance into the anthology.

I’ve often listened to Janci as she talks about how her writer’s group rips apart her stories. It always sounded so hostile to me, but she always expressed gratitude that the did it. I didn’t understand, now I think I do. If the story is well made, it can’t be ripped apart. If it can be ripped apart then it needs to be made stronger. These kinds of critiques stress test the stories. No one wants to send a poorly made story out into the world. Chalain has just gotten himself permanently added to my pool of draft readers. He did me a painful, but necessary, service today.

This morning I checked comments on yesterday’s rambling entry and was informed that I am boring. I deleted the actual comment because it contained profanity. Naturally it was anonymous. I am left to wonder, if I am so boring, why was it worth this person’s time to inform me how boring I am? What did the person hope to accomplish? The answer I’m afraid is that the person is grouchy about something entirely different and is spewing the bile everywhere. The troll’s boredom is not my fault.

The first time my journal was trolled was on my fifth entry. It was emotionally devastating. This time I am able to shrug and delete the comment while wondering idly at the motivations of someone who wanders through and randomly throws stones. The troll was right, that particular entry was fairly boring. I wrote it not to entertain others, but to record for myself and to tell Howard (who is away at a convention) how my day went. Many of my entries are similarly boring to others. But then that is part of livejournal and blogging in general. Not every entry can be brilliant or entertaining.

Today Kiki, Gleek, Janci, and I had a “spa day” where we painted fingernails, put glitter on Gleek’s face, and tried out some hair treatments. The hair treatments were a highlight for Kiki. We tried out a recipe that involved glopping eggs into the hair and letting it sit for 30 minutes. Kiki happily sat to have her hair done and then insisted that I have my hair done too. As soon as the egg started to go into my hair, Kiki danced with glee. In fact all the kids found mommy with egg in herhair to be delightfully funny. I don’t know that the treatment did much for the health of my hair, but it was worth doing to provide amusement for the children.

We also fixed a yummy lunch including shrimp, chicken, and rice pilaf. Then Janci provided us with a yummy no-bake cheescake. Naturally the kids didn’t eat much of the shrimp, chicken, or rice. They filled up on cheescake and cheerios and pringles. In case anyone was wondering, Bacon Ranch Pringles are nasty. I couldn’t even finish one of them. Patches seemed to like them though. He gobbled his way through half the can. Of course he doesn’t call them pringles. He calls them Spuddies ala Over The Hedge. Spuddies are his new favorite food group and he begs for them constantly.

Patches didn’t participate in any of the spa activities, but he still had a good day. He acquired a Star Wars puzzle and I helped him assemble it twice. The second time both Janci and I sat with him in the front room and we took turns removing some pieces from the puzzle so that Patches could put them back in. It was an enjoyable diversion in Janci and my conversation.

Link didn’t participate in any of the girly stuff either. Instead he set up a marble circle on the floor of his room using yarn and tape. Then he hauled Kiki upstairs for a game of marbles. They had lots of fun. Patches wanted to play too, but they wouldn’t let him, which is why he came to me in tears saying “No one will play with me” and I agreed to do the puzzle for the second time.

Gleek had a great day. Not only did she get to paint multiple layers of fingernail polish, but she got glitter on her face. Then as soon as she mentioned wanting to play with a friend, that friend called.

It was a good day for everyone.

A couple of weeks ago I sat and watched Patches play with a friend’s transformer toys. As I watched I remembered him being mesmerized by the display of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys at a McDonalds. At that moment I realized that my little boy is moving away from the world of Blues Clues and into a world of Ninja Turtles and Transformers. This change does not surprise me, I’ve seen three kids before him make similar shifts in interest. The change itself is not the surprise, but somehow I wasn’t expecting it right now. Patches is my youngest child and he is not a toddler anymore. I rejoice for this. I love watching him get stronger, smarter, more capable. But I also feel wistful.

On the same day that I noted Patches and the transformers, Gleek announced that she has wiggly teeth. This is also to be expected. She is 6 years old, prime age for growing adult teeth. But it saddens me that her beautiful little row of baby teeth is about to be replaced by a mish-mash of gaps and oversized grown up teeth. I know it is part of growing up. I know that I’ll love the gap-toothed smile as much as I love the one I see now. I still feel the urge to grab a camera and take a million pictures. I want to capture who she is right now, because in a year this Gleek will be gone. She’ll be replaced with an older version.

Life rolls on. I can’t bid any moment to stay forever. But sometimes I want to. . . just a little.

When we hear about events, like the shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday, our instinct is to grab our loved ones and to huddle somewhere to keep them safe. We begin to look askance at that strange person down the street or down the hall. We wonder if he or she might be the next one to pull out a rifle and shoot people. We want to withdraw from these people in an attempt to keep ourselves safe.

This is exactly wrong.

If you want to prevent an event like Columbine or Virginia Tech, you should befriend those with no friends. People with friends and social contacts do not spiral in loneliness and despair. People with something to live for do not share their pain by firing a gun. Every case of a mass shooting features a shooter who was called a “loner.” Think about it. You know a loner. Have you said hello lately? Smiled? Validated that person’s existence? You don’t have to be best friends or hang out all the time. You don’t have to put yourself in frightening situations. All you have to do is meet the loner’s eyes and treat him like a person instead of an obstacle.

Most loners will never be violent. Violence is a choice. Most people with the same amount of pain as yesterday’s shooter choose other ways to deal with it. This is admirable. But life would be better for everyone if there are a dozen friendly people nearby to ease the pain.

We are not powerless to prevent violence. All day, every day, good people do a million things to help each other, to prevent people from being driven to violent extremes. Look around you and see who needs your friendship today. That is what you can do.

Today I intend to be done blogging about our trip to Seattle. I just need it all to be done so that I can move on to other projects.

Hotel:
During our trip we spent two nights at a hotel. The kids really relished living in the lap of luxury. They grasped very quickly that nothing in the hotel was free. During the first evening Gleek inquired which of the things in the hotel would cost extra money to use. She asked about everything from the TV to the towels to the toilet paper. I was pleased that the kids were paying attention and trying to save money. The hotel room was a fairly spacious one. It had two double beds and then a little sitting area with a fold-a-bed couch. Howard and I took one bed and the kids doubled up in the others.

The kids loved the hotel. They loved snuggling into bed and watching cartoon network. They loved riding the elevators down to breakfast. They loved getting to make waffles and eating bacon every day. They loved leaping from bed to bed. They loved eating hot pockets heated in the room microwave. But more than anything else, they loved the swimming pool.

Each of the days that was stayed in the hotel featured a visit to this swimming pool. On the first day I got into my swimsuit and played with them. It was fun for all of us. Then we trooped back to the room and took turns washing off. The swimming had the added benefit of wearing the kids out so that they went to sleep easily. On the second day poor Patches was already worn out. Several days in a row of exciting activities will do that to a little guy. He fell asleep in the car on the way back to the hotel and remained asleep when I carried him upstairs. The other kids all begged to go swimming, so I carried sleeping Patches down to the pool and let him nap on one of the deck chairs. He missed the whole thing. I sat near him and wrote some of my thoughts while watching the other three kids splash and play.

The kids were sad to leave the hotel behind. I’ve had several requests to go back there again. Link in particular missed the hotel breakfasts. We’ve appeased him somewhat by introducing waffles into some of our weekend breakfasts.

Getting lost:
I do not think of myself as a person who gets lost. I’ve got a good sense of direction and before we took the trip I printed out lots of maps. Perhaps I should have expected to get lost in a strange city, but I found it extremely annoying that 3 out of 5 times that I got behind the wheel of the van, I had to call someone to help me find my way to where I wanted to go. I attribute the first two times of being lost to not having maps to and from the hotel. This is because I’d assumed that the hotel and the convention were the same location. I got lost driving from the hotel to the convention. Then I got lost driving from the Aquarium to the hotel. Both times it took me an extra 40 minutes to get where I wanted to go and I had to call our local friend Dan to help me sort myself out. The third time I got lost was due to having to make a split second decision about exiting and choosing wrongly. In that case it was Pi who gave me additional directions. Each time I did my best to remain calm about finding my way, but I found myself very angry about it. It took me awhile to figure out why.

I don’t mind at all letting people help me. I often decided that the best way to get something done is to ask someone else to help. But in these cases I decided that I was capable of driving myself and to be proven incompetent was infuriating. I like to be able to do things for myself. I knew that driving in a strange city would be a new experience for me, a challenge. I did not conquer the challenge the way I wanted to.

Movies in the car:
The drive from Orem Utah to Seattle Washington is about 15 hours long. That is a very long time for kids to sit still in the car. We managed it by making sure they got regular breaks and by throwing movie after movie into the DVD player. I even rented some new movies from Netflix so that they would have new material to watch. It worked really well. The kids were amazingly good. This was particularly true on the return trip when we didn’t stop over for a night at my sister’s house.

Watching all the movies was necessary to sanity, but I found myself wondering if by putting a stream of movies in front of them I was robbing my kids of a piece of the road trip experience. They were so intent on the electronic entertainment, that they hardly looked out the windows at all. I love watching out the windows and watching the scenery change. During this trip I found myself thinking about the pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail in covered wagons. I watched the scenery and thought about how hard that trip would be. Occasionally I tried to draw my kids attention to things outside the windows, but mostly I did not want to disturb the quiet. I wonder if my enjoyment of scenery and thinking are a product of my childhood road trips which did not have movies. Will my children grow into contemplation of scenery or will it forever be foreign to them as they turn away from the windows toward screens?

The Shoe/Nap Incident:
On the Sunday afternoon that we were in Seattle Howard had to work the convention, the kids and I crashed at the Strohl house for a much needed quiet day. I even managed to sneak away downstairs and catch a nap for awhile. I was so exhausted that I didn’t even come fully awake when Patches crashed into the bed next to me demanding that I get up and help him put his shoes on. He wanted to go outside and play with the other kids. I was still exhausted and wanted to just lie still for awhile longer. I told Patches that I would be happy to help him put on his shoes if he would just go get them and bring them to me. Patches insisted that I had to get up right then and go help him put on his shoes. I offered him two choices, either he could wait for me to finish sleeping or he could get the shoes so I could help him without getting up. We were at an impasse.

Patches is frequently in the habit of making demands and throwing a screaming tantrum if the world does not align itself exactly as he pictures it should be. I get very tired of this. Despite my fatigue and mellow mood I decided I needed to take a stand on the issue. I’d given him two choices and over the next 30 minutes I did not waver on the shoe issue. I did attempt to snuggle him and tell him a story or to do any number of things, which I hoped would stop the screaming without me having to get out of bed. Patches would have none of it. He steadfastly refused to stop screaming unless I got out of bed to help him put his shoes on. He rebuffed all my efforts to be kind and loving.

Eventually Patches became so upset that he started crying for his blanket. After that shift I declared that I was now done napping and I got up to help him find his blanket. It wasn’t really a victory for either of us, but I figured that it was about the best that I could expect considering. A blanket and a snuggle and a snack turned the world around for Patches. And the remaining afternoon was pleasant.

I’ve thought about the incident since it happened. I’ve thought about how Patches steadfastly refused any offer of love/help that was not shaped exactly how he wanted it to be. How often do we do this? How often are we so disappointed in a gift, which isn’t what we would like, that we can’t see how much love went into the selecting of the gift?

During our 30 minute battle I tried to reach out in love to Patches many times, but because my love was not shown by me getting out of bed to put his shoes on, Patches could not see my love for what it was. He could not comprehend that I would show my love for him by teaching him that he can not always shout orders and expect people to obey his whims. It is perhaps too sophisticated a concept for a four year old, but I as an adult have no excuse. I need to be careful to make sure that I am open to expressions of love which are proffered in ways that I do not expect.