Month: February 2013

My Begruding Attendance at a Meeting and What I Learned from It

By / February 6, 2013 / 4 Comments

I had a dozen reasons why I should not go to the Relief Society meeting. It was a craft night. I didn’t particularly want to make either of the offered crafts. The even was right across homework time and bedtime. Kiki and Link weren’t feeling well. Gleek was on edge. If I went I’d have to talk to people. I wasn’t sure what to say. The house was a mess and the mess would no get better in my absence. Howard would be out until late. The list of reasons why I should go was shorter. I was part of the committee and should support the event. I’d agreed to help with one of the crafts. There would be some short lessons along with the crafts. The most compelling reason was a sense that I’ve become disconnected from my neighborhood friends and I ought to fix it. Also I’ve been feeling like I should be giving more to my church assignments rather than just the bare minimum I’d been allotting for months. All day long I mulled over these lists. I thought through the excuses I could give. I knew that my attendance was not essential, everything would be fine without me. The most responsible thing would be to stay home and maintain order for my family.

It was thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the Relief Society meeting and I still hadn’t called the committee chair to say I would not be coming. I don’t know why. I’d rehearsed the call in my head multiple times. I knew she’d be friendly and understanding. I had good reasons. Yet I had not called. Some part of me knew that it would be the wrong choice. I stood in my kitchen listening to the sounds of the kids playing games. I had no dinner plan and interrupting games for homework was sure to spark some rebellion. I really should have begun my preparations to leave an hour before so that all would be orderly while I was gone. Staying home made sense, but there was a ream of paper on my kitchen counter–a necessary supply for one of the crafts. Buying it had been my assignment and it had to be delivered to the event. I threw macaroni & cheese into a pot on the stove, called the kids from their games, told them I’d be gone for a bit, instructed them to do homework as soon as they ate dinner, and within the thirty minutes I was out the door.

“Thank you!” called the committee chair as she saw me enter with the ream of paper.
I smiled in return “I’m going to need to duck out early.” I said, splitting the middle between my two lists. I’d come, but I’d hurry home to take care of things there. I sat and listened to three quick lessons on building good relationships with God, with family and with friends. No words or phrasing jumped out at me, yet I had a creeping sense that I need to be better about the second two. God and I are on pretty good terms just now, but I haven’t been doing so great at reaching out to family and friends. I listened. I tried to absorb and think how I’ll need to change.

I also thought through my exit strategy. I’d introduce the craft and then duck out. No one would miss me. The evening was already an obvious success. I could see that the committee chair was right,the women in our neighborhood needed nights like this. They needed an excuse to get together and visit. Around me I could hear people laughing, commiserating, and offering advice. These were the sort of conversations which don’t seem important enough to make a phone call, but which can change everything through sharing experiences and perspectives. I stood up introduced the craft and then hands were busy while hearts and minds spoke. I stepped to a corner of the table and began cutting the paper I’d brought into quarters. It needed to be cut for the project. I was doing a useful job. Three women shared the table with me, but we didn’t talk. Each of us was occupied with the projects in our hands.

The paper was cut. I’d been at the meeting for an hour. It was time to make my quiet exit. I paused by the committee chair to let her know that I was leaving. She smiled and thanked me for all my help. As I walked down the hall of the building I thought about that silent twenty minutes at the table with the other women. I’d kept hoping they would talk to each other. Then I could listen. Then I could know that everyone else was having a good experience, learning, growing, sharing. I like listening to conversations and occasionally participating. It is my preferred social mode. I thought how very different from me most of the women in my neighborhood are. Many of the things I am passionate about don’t matter to them. Other things we have in common, we could have talked about those, but didn’t. I guess I’m just not good at small talk. I pushed the door open and exited the building.

You know that is not true. It wasn’t words, more of a knowledge that planted itself in the front of my mind. And it wasn’t true. I do perfectly fine chatting with strangers. It is a skill I’ve carefully cultivated and I practice it all the time at conventions and professional events. When I exert myself I can make conversation in grocery store lines or on elevators. My feet slowed and I stopped in the cold winter air. Ahead of me was the parking lot and my car,behind me was the warm building filled with women who were connecting to each other, or wanting to connect. Some of them did not know how to start conversations. But I did. I was good at starting and maintaining conversations, and I’d stood silently for twenty minutes while a younger woman, new to the neighborhood, in need of friends, stood next to me.

I’d come to the event, but I’d held myself back from it. I was there in body, but not in spirit. I could ghost away and my absence would make no difference at all, or I could go back in and exercise all my capabilities to make the meeting be all that it could be for everyone. I stood for a quiet moment. My breath steamed in the air. Then I did what I knew I ought to have done in the first place. I turned and went back inside to really be present for the meeting.

An hour later I’d introduced myself to the new neighbor, talked and laughed with familiar faces, shared thoughts on parenting, education, and crafts. I’d meant to deliberately circulate, talk to lots of people. Instead I landed in a comfortable conversation and stayed. I could perhaps have extended myself even more than I did, but I went home knowing that I’d begun to work on those friendships and connections which I need to build.

There will be another Relief Society meeting again next month. I’d love to be able to say that I’ve learned my lesson and will attend it whole heartedly, reserving nothing. The truth is that I’ll probably have the same paired lists next month. I’ll fight the same battle again. I know that getting out and talking with people is good for me. It makes me happier, more connected. Yet I tend to stay at home by myself. I have hundreds of logical reasons for it, and truthfully I do need quiet empty spaces to recharge. I seek them out. What I forget is that my respites need to be balanced with times when I truly give my full attention to connecting with other people, as I did for the Relief Society craft meeting. Or mostly did, I can do better than I did this time. And I will.

Choosing Between Professional Events and Family Needs

By / February 5, 2013

It was not a good day for reasons that I’d been unable to discern. I tried to manage it with willpower and then an application of caffeine, yet I couldn’t seem to get started on important tasks. Time slipped away from me in reading things that weren’t particularly important. When I focused on something important, concentration eluded me. I sat down to write all the thoughts in my head to see if I could sort some order out of them, that did not lead me to clarity either. I muddled through, accomplishing only the most critical tasks, until I washed up in Howard’s office at the end of the day, like driftwood.

I talked, Howard listened. My words were just repeating the things I’d written out for myself, but I framed them for my audience of one: the listener I could count on to not think less of me even when some of my thoughts were selfish or judgmental. I don’t like to be judgmental, because I recognize it and then I try to fix it, which is good, but exhausting if I am in a situation where an unending stream of judgmental thoughts keep appearing in my head. But Howard listens and lets me sort the thoughts, even the unfair ones, the ones I never want to write down because written words give permanence to something I want to get rid of.

One thought followed another and most of them ended up being about scheduling June. That is the month of the Writing Excuses Retreat, it is Gleek’s first girl’s camp, it is when extended family reunions are scheduled. The trouble is that Gleek’s camp and the retreat are right on top of each other, in direct conflict. Additionally, the people who usually watch my kids for me when Howard and I travel together have had life shifts. They are not available this year. Thus my attendance at the retreat is complicated. I talked through all the possible fixes and complications of fixes. I expressed what Howard and I both feel: that Gleek’s girl’s camp is far more important than me being at the retreat. I pulled out all the “if, thens” I could muster. I was still talking when Howard held up a hand to pause my flow of words.

“Sandra, you keep talking about possibilities, but the tone of this conversation is you grieving the retreat.”

Oh.

In that light the grayness of the day made sense. I was grieving, not because I would never get to be part of a retreat, not because I was shut out of professional opportunity, not because I’m forced to stay home, I may yet get to go for a portion of the retreat, but a reduced length of stay means I am a visitor at the event rather than an integral part of it, and that is a different experience. I am mourning the trip where I get to go early, help set up, assist in making things run smoothly, be part of the structure of the retreat. I would have enjoyed that. I would have been good at it and useful. But they will be fine without me and the cost of getting that trip is too high. It is more important to me that I be present to help Gleek prepare for camp and that I wave to her as she drives away on the bus.

This has been a year of choosing between professional events and family needs. Last week I was part of a panel discussion on blogging at the Orem library. It took place at the exact day and time as the church young women’s “New Beginnings” program which provided orientation about the year of activities to come. Parents were invited. It was Gleek’s first young women’s event. She was excited, bouncing. Kiki took her because I was busy. In another week will be LTUE. Gleek’s class is having a fantastic medieval feast for which parents are providing help and activities. I would volunteer, but I’ll be at the Provo Marriott helping run a booth and giving presentations. In May I’m scheduled to speak at the LDS Storymaker’s conference. I don’t know what family event will conflict with that, but at this point I’m certain there will be something. I have to choose, all the time. Only in retrospect can I have any inkling whether I chose wisely.

I want to make clear that these are my choices. I am not trapped. I am in the fortunate position of having to choose between dreams, and most of the time there isn’t really a bad choice. Howard has to choose too. For eleven years he chose to work for a corporation to pay our bills. Now he chooses work over relaxation and is hard on himself when he doesn’t do enough. He sacrifices his ideal work schedules around the family schedule. Sometimes he abandons his projects to do things for me and the kids. This is not a situation where one person makes all the sacrifices. We are all having to balance work and family every day. Even the kids. I like it that way, even when it is hard. I do not want my adult children to say of me that I gave up everything for them. Instead I want them to know that I had a life full of things which mattered to me, but that I would drop those things for them if they really needed me. I try to live that way every day, even when it lands me in a day when I must cry a little for the road not taken.

Final decisions have not been made about scheduling for June. The plans will solidify as we get closer. Howard must go to the retreat. He is one of the hosts and a significant draw for the attendees. Gleek will definitely go to girl’s camp. It feels like I’ll be home to send her off, but whether I stay home after her departure is yet to be decided. It doesn’t need to be decided at this time. For now it is nice to see my choices clearly. It lets today be a better day than the one that came before it.

Today’s Scorecard

By / February 4, 2013 / 2 Comments

Funny how I only feel like life has a scorecard when I feel like I’m failing at it.

Credits:
Went to tax appointment. All seems good. I’m apparently still competent at bookkeeping. I just need to turn in one additional piece of information then wait for them to be done.

I drove kids home from school, to two different social activities, and retrieved them from the activities without forgetting any of them.

I hugged my girl when she was sad, even though I couldn’t make the sadness measurably better in any other way.

The cat sat next to me and purred, so I must have done something right.

Demerits:
There were long stretches of quiet time when I could have gotten piles of work done, but didn’t. This sums it up really. Everything else is a enumerated list of specific things I ought to have done.

I’m not sure how exactly the day slipped away from me. I probably should have given up and taken a nap this morning. Then perhaps I could have been awake and motivated for the rest of the day. Or maybe not. Sometimes low energy days just happen.

Diagnosing Children

By / February 4, 2013 / 7 Comments

I did not quite realize when I decided to have children that I was signing up for a crash course in first aid and preliminary diagnosis. Yet from day one I had to monitor my child and decide whether or not the symptoms merited medical attention and how urgently that attention was needed. At first all of the ailments were new. I learned the signs of ear infections and childhood diseases. I became an expert in the interpretation of rashes. I tended kids through croup, chicken pox, asthma, a kidney infection, RSV, adenoid removal, nearly broken bones, scrapes, cuts, stitches, objects up noses, objects swallowed, and several dozen varieties of flu, stomach flu, and colds. Somewhere in the middle of all of that I changed from a mom who called others to have them look at baby’s rash into the person whom others called with rash questions. You’d think by now I’d have seen it all, yet I’m still scratching my head, consulting google, and trying to decide whether to see a doctor about all sorts of things. This past year we’ve had heartburn trouble, ingrown toenails, strained abdominal muscles, a scratched cornea, and –just tonight– a case of systemic hives triggered by we know not what. I never wanted to be a doctor and yet I’m regularly called on as a first responder and triage nurse.

And this is the point when I should be able to bring all of these thoughts around to say something useful or profound about it all. Mostly though I’m thinking about how unpleasant hives are and how much I don’t want to have to play “figure out what caused the systemic reaction.” Time for bed.

Avoiding Sickness and Furbies

By / February 2, 2013 / 1 Comment

It feels like getting sick this winter is inevitable. I don’t particularly want it, but it has been years since I was mowed flat by a flu variant and some part of my brain thinks I am due. My kids have been sick, some of them more than once. We’ve had coughs and fevers, sore throats and headaches, all in various combinations. The worst I have felt was the edges of a sore throat or a headache. I am glad, of course. I don’t really want to be sick. Yet since it feels inevitable I find myself staring at the calendar and marking the days when I really can’t be sick because there are things I would cry if I missed and which could not be rescheduled. The Orem Writes event last Wednesday was one of them as was last night’s Ballroom With a Twist concert. I’ve now entered one of the “okay to be sick” zones during which events can be rescheduled if I need to. If I’m going to be sick, I should do it now so that I can be done before LTUE in a week and a half. Of course sickness does not cooperate with attempts to schedule. And perhaps I’ll escape without getting sick at all. I would not complain.

In other news, my sister’s family came to spend the night. A furby came with them. It is a blue fuzzy furby with no off switch. The only way to get it to be quiet is to leave it alone in the dark for ten minutes. My five year old niece loves the thing. She talks to it in Furbish, which is the completely invented furby language. She also pretends to be a furby and was chattering away in Furbish, using it to ask for drinks of water. We waited until she asked in English before supplying them. As I listened to this child be obviously bilingual English/Furbish I thought what a sad missed opportunity furbies represent. Why on earth do the furbies not speak Spanish, or French, or any language that is actually spoken by human beings? I know that playing with a computerized fuzzy toy will not teach a child a full language, but it could be a very useful beginners tool. As it is, I will be very happy to bid farewell to the thing tomorrow.

And now I’m off to bed so that I can stay not-sick.

Providing Support and Working Together

By / February 2, 2013 / 4 Comments

On one of the writer’s forums where I participate there is a discussion about relationships between writers and their spouses or significant others. People have been sharing stories of support, or commiserating about lack of support. A few even shared how conflicts over writing time have contributed to the demise of a relationship. Reading that thread makes me very grateful for what I have with Howard. I can’t imagine us deliberately failing to support each other in something that we wanted. Sure there are times where we accidentally cause each other grief, but when Howard began a record production business I learned accounting to help out. When I decided to make a picture book, Howard used his photoshop skills to clean up the images for print. When Howard wanted to cartoon, we gave him a box on the counter, then a drawing table in the front room, then a bigger drawing table in the office. There are times when I sacrifice for Howard and times when he sacrifices for me. Sometimes we make these small sacrifices even when we’re not immediately thrilled by the project the other one wants to do.

As an example, I love the show Dancing with the Stars. I watch it whenever it airs. It makes me happy, but Howard has no interest in it at all. In fact there have been times when he has begrudged, just a little bit, the time I spent watching episodes of the show. Though we soon figured out that the begrudgement was indicative of something else, not really the show. Yet he also recognizes that watching the show gives me a small measure of happiness. This evening I’ll be going to a live performance of some of the dancers from the show. This means I’ll be out of the house for hours and we paid for the tickets. If it was going to cause huge stress for our family, I would not go. But instead Howard helps me create space in our lives for this small happy thing. In return I don’t demand that he come with me or try to make him enjoy the show as much as I do. It is okay for us to enjoy different things.

We do similar adjustments and planning for the more important creative projects in our lives. It is not always easy. There are times when I’ve really struggled to stand up and say that a project matters to me and I need support with it. There are times where I’ve looked at my own thoughts and realized that I need to adjust to be a better support to Howard. There are times when the best form of support is to get out of the way and let the other person struggle with it.

My heart really goes out to those who have heads brimming with creative projects but whose spouses are jealous of those projects, or of the time those projects take. That is a hard place to be. I am greatly encouraged by the fact that several people in the forum have been inspired to go and speak with their loved ones, airing out the dreams and associated difficulties. Some of those people have come back and reported that talking it through brought to light the true source of the conflict and it was not about writing at all. Instead it was about allocation of time and resources when those things are in short supply. If this is the case, then adjustments elsewhere make space for writing or creativity. Or it was about how the difficulty of writing and publishing affected the emotional well being of the writer. Watching a loved one pursue something painful can be very difficult. Finding solutions and having discussions can be hard because it requires both people to be self aware enough to identify the sources of their emotions and to carefully take steps to change their actions. Yet I have hope that my friends who are struggling will be able to find ways to become a team instead combatants. The answers are not easy, but they can be found.

The Politics of Birthday Parties

By / February 2, 2013 / 6 Comments

Gleek turned twelve this week. So did one of her classmates. The classmate is throwing a massive party and inviting the entire class. This sort of large scale party is common at Gleek’s current school. It is in an affluent neighborhood where people have houses large enough that they can invite thirty (or fifty) kids for an evening and just let the kids go play downstairs in the basement basketball court/play room. I don’t live in that neighborhood. We drive from across town and our house sometimes feels crowded with just our four children. I’m glad that these families open their homes and provide opportunities for the kids. It is kind of them. Or at least I choose to interpret it as kindness instead of as displays of conspicuous consumption, but we can not reciprocate. I can’t afford to host a party for thirty kids. I wouldn’t even want to. Crowd control on an event like that is not my idea of a fun afternoon.

The trouble comes because birthday parties are one of the only forms of social capital available to elementary school kids. The kid with the amazing party is perceived as cool. My kids are coming up on the second year in a row where I’ve declined to provide that sort of coolness for them. Two years ago all my kids had parties. It exhausted me and burned me out. Last year I declared no friend parties. I loved that year. It let us focus on private family celebrations rather than adding more events to our already packed family schedule. I want to do the same this year, but I remember how Gleek spoke wistfully of a birthday party all last year. She kept doing it even when I told her point blank that an expensive birthday party was not going to happen. So I have to decide whether I want to let her have a party even though we’ve already had a special birthday outing. However opening the door to one party hands a lever to my other three kids who, in my judgement, don’t have the same emotional need for one, but who will fly the flag of fairness. Not only that, but I will then face the dilemma of how many guests. We can’t do a thirty kid party, which means Gleek can’t simply invite everyone she knows. We have to winnow down the guest list. This requires Gleek to prioritize her friendships, and is where all the social capital around parties comes from. After listening to a child agonize about who to invite and who has to be left out, I understand why some parents host a party for the whole class, it eliminates the need to select.

Perhaps instead of a single birthday party, I will encourage Gleek to invite smaller groups of friends over for movie night parties. By removing “birthday” it becomes a less significant event. Not being invited becomes less of a snub, particularly if the “snubbed” person is invited over for a similar event a different week. Of course this has me hosting multiple evenings with pre-teen girls taking over my family room. I think I still prefer that to the pressure and complications of a birthday party. Gleek really does need to be connecting with friends outside of school and we’ve had trouble making it happen lately. Smaller parties have another benefit: my kids get stressed by large parties. They don’t realize they are. They say that they want them, but more often than not the guest of honor ends up hiding in a quiet place away from the noise, or melting down because something did not go right. Smaller parties make sense, but they just don’t hold the same social cachet for kids as a massive spectacle.

Sigh. In some ways all of this gets easier when the kids are teenagers and begin arranging their own social calendars. For now, I just need to put the giant class party on the schedule and make sure that Gleek does not miss it.