Month: December 2010

New Goals (But not necessarily New Year’s Resolutions)

By / December 31, 2010

In the past 10 days I have had a series of introspective realizations. These thoughts very naturally to the formation of new goals. The little non-conformist voice in my brain says “We can’t make new goals now. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone is making new goals.” But I have the goals, and they are exactly what I need at this point in my life. It would be foolish to squelch or delay them out of an impulse to be different. These goals are not things that I will be putting on my To Do list or pushing myself to complete. I can’t complete them, not in the sense that they’ll be done forever. This makes them a very different sort of goal than I am used to making. There will be no progress to track, no self-applied pressure. These goals are merely a little mental sanity check of five things that I will perform each day in an effort to be conscious of the good and enjoyable things in my life.

My five daily things:
1. Read Scriptures/say prayers. I am specifying no particular amount nor am I requiring myself to always ponder deeply. But for at least a few minutes each day I will be present to and address my sources of spiritual direction.

2. Small happy conversations/thoughts. Included in this goal is my plan to have at least one non-business related, happy conversation with Howard each day. It can be very short. Also included is the effort I blogged about recently where I consciously find things currently present in my life which are opposite to my worries.

3. Do something each day to improve my health and physical fitness. I have a format for this which seems to be working. My slide into stress was accompanied by a weight gain. It isn’t much of one, but the reversal of this will do much to help me feel in control of my life.

4. Spend some time each day being a writer. This might be only five minutes where I consciously ponder a plot point. The purpose is to create a space during which I at least glance into my cupboard of writing thoughts.

5. Spend a couple of hours each week working on a project which makes me happy and can not possibly earn us money. Hobbies exist to make life joyful. I haven’t made space for mine in over a year.

If I miss something on the list on an individual day, that’s fine. I have no intention of keeping score. I probably only need the daily mental review of the list long enough to make space for happiness part of my daily life.

Pondering next year’s calendar

By / December 30, 2010

The calendar lay across half of my kitchen table. Around it were multi-colored pens, my planner, a schedule from the school, and last year’s calendar laid partially across the top. The time for my annual switching of the wall calendar had arrived. All the various notes and plans made for 2011 were dutifully recorded in the color of the family member to which they applied. I stood back and surveyed next year laid out before me. It didn’t look too bad, but there were big events not on the calendar because the dates for them are not yet fixed. Howard and I had a long conversation about this just after Christmas. We mentally juggled book production and release schedules against the fixed commitments on the calendar. Some side projects were approved while many were tossed in the “not this year” file. The resulting plan for next year is busy, but hopefully only crazy in a few spots.

My fingers traced across the calendar as I mentally marked our tentative press and shipping dates for the two books we plan to produce next year. My hand hovered over June and July which look empty on the calendar, but which I know will be full of preparations for GenCon and WorldCon as well as book production. I thought back to a piece from I book I’ve read recently. It talked of an old Jewish man who never made any kind of appointment or plan without speaking the words “God Willing.” For the man this was not a fatalistic prediction that the plan would fail, but rather an acknowledgment that no mortal being is in full control of his life. Many things may happen between now and next week to make a dinner date impossible, he speaks the words so that he will not be angry or frustrated if some other event intervenes.

I press my hand flat against the calendar. I have planned next year. It is a good plan. I have built in more flexibility in the months. I have place space for happiness to dwell in each day. I intend to hold this schedule loosely and not panic when it inevitably has to shift or change. God willing, this is how 2011 will be. If it turns out differently, and it almost certainly will, then I will try to trust that there is a bigger plan with pieces that I can not see.

The calendar now hangs on my wall. I’m ready to proceed.

Gleek in Flight

By / December 29, 2010

“No, it’s okay. I can do it myself!” Gleek says firmly. The attendant releases his hold on the bungee cord and Gleek proceeds to shift her body to increase her bounce height. She is safely tethered between two poles above a trampoline, but I can see the slight uneasiness in her face. This “sky flight” looked so much easier from the mall floor when she decided to spend five of her precious Christmas dollars. I see her shift in the harness, uncomfortable, but not willing to let that discomfort prevent her from doing the tricks she wants. Bounce by bounce she goes higher until she dares a flip. Her hair flies back to reveal her triumphant grin.

My body moves in sympathy with her bounces, as if I could somehow help from my seat on the bench 20 feet away. I don’t mean to do it, but some part of my brain knows that if she would only shift just so, her bounces would be higher. My muscles flex in a vain attempt to telegraph motion to her. Gleek soars into the air again, flipping, bouncing, only occasionally glancing at me to see if I am watching. This is what she needs from me, a witness to her efforts.

Sometimes Gleek’s motions go wrong, killing the bounce. She jiggles on the ends of her tethers, trying to regain lost momentum. The attendant reaches to help and Gleek waves him away, just as she waves away help both at home and at school. I’d watched this guy with the other kids. He pulled on the bungee and they flew much further than they can get by their own weight. He keeps his hands by his sides and watches as Gleek builds her own bounces. I still my body yet again.

When time is up, she comes back to the ground both glad to be done and wanting more. We gather her purchases and collect her shoes, mall trip complete. Then we head out into the bright world to find a new challenge for me to witness.

Reorganizing my office, my computer, and my brain

By / December 28, 2010

After a 5 day holiday hiatus, I have resumed my office reorganization project. This time I’m tackling digital files. I need to make space on my primary drive so that I can be working on two Schlock books in parallel. (An amusing coincidence: one of the books will be titled Massively Parallel.) My computer is out of date and needs replacing. This is item number one on the list of Things to Do Once We’ve Opened Pre-orders and Have a Buffer of Money Again. Until then, I shuffle files, burn data to disk, and make dual back-ups on external drives.

On it surface this data shuffling does not seem to do anything to forward my office reorganization, but this reorganization is not only about optimizing my physical space. Even more important than making the things I need easy to find is the mental process of looking at exactly how I work. My work processes have grown in response to necessity, usually in the urgency of the moment. After that I was a bit afraid to mess with a system that was working in the middle of a crisis. (Something always felt like a crisis) Now I am questioning if some of the way I work is helping to create a feeling of crisis where none needs to exist. This is similar to the mental adjustment I’m attempting to make in how I worry about/ trust in my children.

It is time to reorganize, re prioritize, and re-evaluate. I know what my goals are, they haven’t changed any, but my mode of travel needs to improve a lot. The physical organization let me see that mental organization was necessary. The mental organization is helping me see how the physical organization can work even better. In the end I don’t know that I will reach any of my goals more quickly. That’s not the point. The point is to be less tired and more happy as I travel.

Relaxed day in limbo land

By / December 27, 2010 / 2 Comments

The week between Christmas and New Years is always a sort of limbo. All the big events of the holiday season are complete, but we can’t yet return to normal because the kids are still out of school. Add to that the fact that the holiday provided me with space to unpack and reorganize all my thoughts. I now have plans I want to implement, but they need to be built into “normal” and so must wait for normal to arrive before I can fully see if they will work.

Despite being in limbo, today was a good day. It was not as focused as I’d hoped it would be, but I still got all of the necessary tasks done. The kids played more video games than I probably should have allowed. Perhaps tomorrow I will require more cleaning.

Seeking bright things instead of dark

By / December 26, 2010 / 1 Comment

For months now I have been swimming in fear. Or perhaps a better description would be wallowing in worry, because swimming implies movement and possibly gracefulness. I don’t feel like I’ve moved at all. I’m still stuck in the same emotional morass. Some of the worries have revolved around business or financial fears, but mostly I have worried over the children. These worries have worn tracks in my brain so deep that it is hard for me to believe that my kids could travel by any other path than the one I fear most. Then I spend emotional energy trying to figure out how I can heave them out of this dangerous path. I’ve also spent time feeling guilty because I’ve been more worried about one child than another, as if the lack of worry somehow demonstrated a lack of love.

I’m tired of wallowing. I want to wash off and do something else with my mental energies. I’ve devised a means by which I can consciously re-train my mind into new habits. I intend to spend some focused time each day thinking of qualities that my children already possess which are opposite of my fears for them. (The “already posses” is critical here. This is not about me creating, but about me recognizing.) I will try to find specific actions made by the child within the prior 24 hours which demonstrate those qualities. For example: If I worry that a child will cave to negative peer pressure and bullying, I will counter the fear by remembering the rainbow socks she wore even though some other kids thought they were odd. I will follow that up by remembering how my daughter did not care about other opinions because the socks made her happy.

This process will teach me to look for and witness the bright, wonderful, and strong things about each of my children. It will teach me why I don’t need to be so worried. A natural effect of me noticing the good qualities will be that I react more to the good things. This isn’t part of my conscious and careful plan, I always react to what I see, I just intend to notice different things. I believe that my increased response to positive things will in turn have an effect on my kids. Children thrive on attention and response. They instinctively increase behaviors which earn them attention and responses. My reactions to the strong, bright, good qualities that they have will encourage them to grow in those ways–just as a seedling turns toward the light.

Their growth will be a happy side-effect, but it is not the point. My focus is on changing me, not them. I’ve been exactly backward in my thoughts lately. I was racing around a maze, trying to brick up all the dark alleys. Instead I should have been working on making the bright and beautiful paths easy to find and follow. I do that by traveling them myself. In the end my children must make their own choices. They will not always make the choices I wish they would. But I need to feed my trust in who they are so that I can watch and love without so much fear.

The Nativity, Beginnings, Middles, and Faith

By / December 24, 2010

Shepherds, wise men, angels, Mary, and Joseph, they all rejoiced at the birth of Jesus. They all came from cultures which prophesied and awaited the coming of the Messiah who would save them all. I wonder how dismayed they were to wake up the next morning and discover that there were diapers to be changed, sheep to be fed, and normal life to be lived. The birth of Christ was a long-awaited moment, but it was only the beginning. Years of work and preparation were necessary before the true work of the Messiah could be done.

I am in the middle of raising my children. This Fall has been a tumultuous one, not in events, but in emotions. In no measurable way am I at the culmination of anything, nor at the beginning of something else. It would be nice to have a clear marker on the road, what I have instead is Christmas. I stare at the porcelain nativity scene and look at the baby. I look at the Mary in blue, so serene. They are frozen in the moment of joy, which turned out to be a brilliant moment at the very beginning of a long hard path. But once the path was done, not a one of them would regret it.

I’ll take Christmas as my marker. The fact that I’m here means that 2010 has passed and somehow we all survived. More than just survived, we have grown. I will photograph many things tomorrow and years from now I will look back and be able to see the whats and whys of where we are. I think I will look back and see that this Fall and this Christmas were a beginning. More importantly I’ll be able to see what was begun and why it matters.

I don’t think the real Mary was quite so serene as my porcelain one. She had just been through labor, not the medically-assisted, epidural-ific version of labor that I have experienced. She did natural childbirth. In a stable. With no doctor or nurse, or anyone but Joseph nearby. She must have been frazzled, sore, and high on endorphins. She knew she was at the beginning of something, all new mothers do, but what measure of terror she must have felt when contemplating the path before her. Perhaps she did not experience the Nativity as a moment of pure clarity and beauty, but rather as a muddle which only made sense later.

I think I can have faith in that. I can trust that it will make more sense later when I am not in the middle of so many things.

My holiday from urgent tasks

By / December 23, 2010

Yesterday morning my life was awful and impossible. This evening life is good and happy. Since nothing much has changed in the last 36 hours I am reluctantly forced to acknowledge once again that my emotional state is prone to fluctuation and therefore not a good short-term measure for my quality of life. What is valuable is taking an after-the-fact look at the specific complaints I listed as to why my life was impossible. The analysis is not surprising. I am not spending enough time on activities which replenish my emotional well-being. I’m not just talking about “taking time out for me” because some of the things I find most fulfilling are when I spend time deliberately helping someone outside my immediate family. Other soul-filling activities are actually a lot of work, (gardening, writing, family photo books) but the work I spend on them makes me feel like my life has value in a way that I can see and measure. I can see the weeds pulled, the words written, the pages finished. It is kind of hard to quantify “parenting” particularly when it is like the air I breathe, omnipresent and invisible.

The holiday has created a little space where many of my other responsibilities are held at bay. It is rather like one of those lulls in the crashing waves where the ocean pulls back leaving me standing ankle deep in wet sand. There are no packages to ship, emails to answer, tasks to complete, because most everyone else is also on vacation. The schools have backed off as well. There will be homework to manage next week, but this week is clear. The waves that have pushed against me and occasionally swamped me have retreated for a moment. In this space I organized and sorted and discarded. Mostly this is a physical sorting as I discarded years of old papers and garbage. As I sorted through piles, my brain also sorted. I dredged up old memories and then filed them away in new places. As I organized, I began to picture how my physical spaces need to be arranged so that I can accomplish the tasks that are in front of me. But I tried not to think too much about the tasks themselves. Tasks have dictated the order of my days for more than half a year. The biggest value in this holiday space is the freedom from urgency. I have time to consider what is important to me rather than what must be done right away to prevent an imminent crisis.

My space will only last until Monday. I can see the urgency swelling like a large wave gathering momentum to crash across the shore. A part of me wants to start preparing now, hurry and complete a dozen small chores so that they’ll be out of the way. Instead I am doing the mental equivalent of wiggling my toes in the sand, looking at the sky, and taking a deep breath. It is good to take time off from battling the waves to remember that I like the beach.

Before Monday arrives I intend to have a plan. It needs to be simple and low maintenance, but I need some structure which demands that part of each day is given over to things which are important even though they may not be urgent.

The Whats and Whys of our Christmas Traditions

By / December 22, 2010

Traditions exist for reasons. Sometimes they exist by nothing more than inertia and become burdens for those who must carry them onward. But good traditions help define the community or family which upholds them. My favorite traditions are the ones which spring into existence simply because they bring fulfillment to everyone involved. I remember during the early years of our family, we cast around trying to find Christmas traditions which fit. These days we have a solid set of Christmas traditions which work very well for us. I expect they will evolve as our family continues to shift and change, but for now they are good. I thought it might be interesting to list our Christmas traditions and the purposes that I feel they serve for our family.

Christmas tree: We have an artificial tree. We haul it out of the basement, assemble it, and put ornaments on it.
Why: The assembling of the tree heralds the beginning of the Christmas season. Looking at the ornaments connects us with Christmases past and often sparks the re-telling of family stories.

Pile of Christmas books: Lately I’ve taken to arranging all our Christmas books across the front of the piano so that they’re easy to select from. We don’t have many Santa-themed books. I tend to go for more unusual, less saccharine Christmas stories like A Wish for Wings that Work by Berke Breathed or Miracle by Connie Willis
Why: I like having new/familiar books available at Christmas time.

Countdown Candle: On a candle I paint numbers from 1 to 25. Each evening in December we light the candle at bedtime snack. It burns while the kids eat and I read from one of the Christmas books. The kids take turns blowing out the candle.
Why: This one grew out of my love for some way to count down until Christmas. One year someone gave us a countdown candle and it fit so nicely with our regular pattern of reading aloud at bedtime that we have done it ever since. I expect that this one will fade away when the kids stop wanting me to read aloud at snack time.

Gift Wrapping: The kids select gifts for each other, wrap them and put them under the tree. Lately all our gift paper has been white and drawn on by hand.
Why: Watching the accumulating pile of presents under the tree makes the kids happy. The white paper is a concession to the fact that the kids always liked drawing all over the gift wrap even when it already was covered in pictures. I’m not sure how long hand-drawn gift wrap will last as a tradition, but it works this year.

German “poor man’s christmas tree” on Christmas eve: This carved wooden pyramid features little wooden nativity figures which spin around as the fan blades on top are pushed by the heat of the candles which ring the base. Ours was given to me by my sister who served her mission in Germany. We light the candles, turn out the other lights and have a little Christmas Eve program which involves reading and cookies.
Why: We wanted a way to help the kids focus on the spiritual side of Christmas prior to the excitement of Christmas morning. We found that turning out the lights and lighting candles helped focus the attention of the kids. They quiet and watch the spinning shadows and figures while they listen. It is a little ceremony that creates a space of peace and calm right before bed.

Gifts for Jesus: We have a green velvet box which holds pieces of paper. Each year we write down what we want to give Jesus as a birthday gift. No one else gets to see it. This is done as part of our Christmas eve around the German candle tree. Afterward we have cookies.
Why: This was a deliberate addition to our traditions as a mechanism to help the kids understand why gift giving is so prominent in the holiday. It is also good for each of us to think through how we can be better people and give service to others, which is really the only way we can give gifts to Christ. The cookies were introduced as a reward to help the young ones focus. They aren’t necessary anymore, but we still like cookies.

Christmas Morning Surprises: We have never been proponents of Santa in our house. Instead we have a small array of gifts which are for the whole family to share. The kids know that Mom and Dad buy the gifts even when they are very small. (One child hypothesized that we wait until kids are in bed then run out and buy them that very night.) These gifts are displayed in the family room. When the kids get up on Christmas morning, they line up and enter the room together to see what the surprises are.
Why: The joy of shiny new things on display for Christmas morning is reason enough.

Stockings hung by the fireplace: We have huge stockings because Howard did when he was growing up. Most of the month they hang rather limply, not particularly decorative. But on Christmas eve we stuff them full of treat food such as cereal. The kids can dig into these as soon as they are done admiring the morning surprises.
Why: It is nice for the kids to each have a little stock of Christmas morning goodies that is clearly theirs rather than shared by everyone. Also having some of the morning surprises hidden away extends the new-things joy.

Christmas Breakfast: We require the kids to all have a solid breakfast before we proceed any further into the day. The breakfast must include protein.
Why: The whole rest of the day goes better if the kids are not sugar crashing and cranky.

Present Preparation: The morning surprises are played with and admired on both sides of breakfast. Eventually one of the kids wants to open the presents under the tree. We require all children to get fully dressed and the family room to be cleaned up before we proceed.
Why: This is both a stalling tactic and a chaos reduction tactic. If all the surprises of the morning are expended in one quick burst, the rest of the day feels anticlimactic. So we deliberately try to slow things down so that the kids will savor and appreciate instead of rushing on to the next thing. The fact that they know work lays between them and presents means the kids are a little more content to play with the new things that they already have. The clean up also means that new things do not get lost in the chaos of wrapping paper.

Gift giving: The kids carry all the presents from under the tree into the family room where we all have room to sit down. They then sort the presents according to who is giving the present. So each of us has a pile of the gifts we are giving and those gifts from other people are stacked in a seventh pile. Then we start with the youngest and someone gives a gift to him. He opens it. Then on upward in age.
Why: Again some of this is a stalling tactic. By drawing out the opening, everyone has time to focus on the gift in their hands rather than tossing it aside for the next package. Requiring people to hand-deliver the gifts they are giving helps us all focus on the act of giving rather than on getting. It also encourages mental/emotional connections between the receiver, giver, and gift. The process does not always work perfectly, but the structure encourages good habits in us all.

Christmas Dinner: We all sit down at the table together for a delicious meal. This usually happens around 2 pm. Between breakfast and dinner, people snack.
Why: It is another point of family connection. We like an excuse to eat yummy food. Also having a solid meal helps prevent sugar crashes and crankiness.

Christmas Day Movie: We always make sure that one of the Christmas gifts is a movie that we can sit down and watch together as a family.
Why: This way when the mid-afternoon crankies/boredoms hit we have something new and soothing to do as a family.

German Candle tree reprise: We light the candles again and turn out the lights. On this night we read something like How the Grinch Stole Christmas rather than Luke 2.
Why:It brings a spirit of calmness to the end of our Christmas day and reconnects us with the spiritual heart of the holiday.

Other traditions which we used to have, or which I like the idea of, but which are extremely hit and miss for our family:
Caroling
Sending out Christmas cards
Giving treats to neighbors
Giving gifts to teachers
Driving around to look at Christmas lights
Outdoor Christmas lights on our house

Parenting Challenges of the Christmas Season

By / December 21, 2010

Christmas is a season full of parenting challenges. Somehow I must sift through all the loud proclamations of desire and protestations of need to determine what is actually the best gift for each of the children. In deciding upon gifts I need to find a balance between long-term usefulness and Christmas morning joy. I also have to balance size and cost so that none of the four children feels slighted. All of this must be done within a budgeted amount of money. There are always last minute shifts in interest or need. And sometimes wants and needs are significantly divergent.

Additionally I must try to teach my children something larger about giving and how to go about it. They each must participate in the selection of gifts for siblings and parents. I have to teach them how to discern what a sibling would want that we can actually afford to give. Despite the fact that it is so much simpler for me to just select gifts for them to give to each other, I have to figure out how to let them do the picking. Then there are the little educational speeches about how to behave when we give and receive gifts, which are aimed at making the present opening a conflict-free experience.

Along with the responsibility to teach about giving, I also have religious responsibilities to teach the spiritual meanings of the holiday. Somehow this needs to be framed in a way that is meaningful to each child. One size does not fit all. Lessons about service and giving outside our immediate family are also important to feature. These things must be scheduled and framed in such a way that they are positive for our family and don’t kill the budget.

Cultural events abound during the holidays. Surely I should add some of these into our lives so that we may be enriched.

Then comes Christmas day itself. Allowing the children to tear through their presents in under an hour leaves the whole rest of the day feeling somewhat anticlimactic. It also means that the kids are so focused on the next present that they do not focus on the one in their hands. Thus evolves a series of seemingly-torturous-to-young-children rituals whose sole purpose is to slow down the events of Christmas. Much of the joy of Christmas is in the anticipation and so it must be extended and released as slowly as possible.

Last year I orchestrated a beautiful Christmas for my family. By dinner time I was a wreck, too tired to appreciate what I had created. So this year I somehow need to do all of the above, while also making sure that I do not overload myself.

Ha.

I think the core of sanity in my holiday season is to realize that Christmas is a community created event. I need to stop trying to create Christmas for my family and allow us all to create it for each other. This was the philosophy behind my laissez faire approach to decorating. It is also why I had a brief conference with each child about what they’d like to get for siblings. Then I acquired those things, but waited for the kids to be interested in present wrapping. They each did their own wrapping this year, which allowed them to focus on the gift and the person to whom they were giving it. Hopefully that will create an emotional connection that has them excited about giving on Christmas morning. The kids will be prepping the food for Christmas day. Much of this will be done in advance so that no one slaves for hours in the kitchen solo.

Even in writing this blog entry, I am still plotting and planning. I need to let go and trust that we have enough good structures built over many years. These solid traditions do not need me to steer quite so fervently as I did in the years when we were establishing traditions. I need to relax my grip a little.