Month: December 2013

The Beginnings of Things

By / December 31, 2013

I’ve you’d asked me at Thanksgiving how I expected to spend the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I would not have answered “sitting in a freezing cold horse arena watching Gleek have her first riding lesson.” Horseback riding lessons were not even on my radar as a possibility back then. I watched Gleek attempting to post and succeeding for short periods of time before losing the rhythm. I listened to the teacher explain how she needs to control her body and also how the teacher spoke to the horse. I realized that teaching a fractious horse is probably not much different than teaching self control to an impulsive young girl. This teacher will be good for both. So each Tuesday afternoon we’ll be travel ling to the horse barn. I will sit, maybe write. Gleek will learn.

We don’t know yet whether riding horses will be something we do for a while and then move on to other things or whether we’ve just opened a door into an alternate future. The same is true of Patch and his cello. His first official lesson will take place next week, but yesterday his cousin sat down with Patch and gave a basic lesson in bowing, plucking and music theory. The fact that Patch paid rapt attention for more than ninety minutes suggests that he’ll like playing cello. Again, we have to wait and see. My focus is on providing opportunities for the next several months rather than on planning futures.

New Year’s Intentions

By / December 30, 2013

We talked for two hours, my sister-in-law and me. It was the first chance we’ve had to sit down and visit in almost a year. Both of our families have been in transition, stressed, hers more than mine. We both pulled inward and just managed the things in front of us. And we’re both poised on the edge of a new year which looks like it will contain more stability. I’m still not placing too much hope on that. I’m not looking too far ahead. I glance through the year so I can see the shape of the calendar, but then I focus only on the next few days.

Yet, unintended, I find I have concrete wishes for some of the ways that I want this next year to be different. I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions. I always have dozens of goals in progress and to attempt to renovate my life in a flurry of January goal setting sounds like a recipe for failure. Wishes is a good word, because goals are concrete and measurable. They are things which end up on my task list and which I then am assigned to complete. Some of these wishes have manifested small related goals, but mostly they are prayers for the general emotional content I’d like for this year. They’re the rough sketch which will change when it gets set into firm lines.

I would like to be more social this year, to unfurl where last year I pulled in.

I would like to leave the writer cupboard in my brain standing open because I’m digging into it often enough that closing it does not make sense.

I would like to continue to renovate the physical spaces in our house, knowing that this renewal is symbolic for the emotional renovations in our family.

I would like to spend more time happy and less time afraid.

If I want these things, I will need to make goals. Little goals, because big goals often fail, but a small well-designed goal can fit right into the life I already have. Small goals often feel like they are accomplishing nothing, but over time they transform. Rather like noticing today that Gleek’s teeth are almost straight in her braces, when they were extremely crooked last March. Small changes applied over time are what transformations are made of.

Boxing Day and Organization

By / December 27, 2013 / 2 Comments

I like boxing day. I don’t know what the actual cultural traditions are around the day. I know it falls on the day after Christmas and is British in origin. I have a vague notion that it was the day when wealthy gentlemen would box up gifts and goods to distribute to their less-well-off tenants. Thus Christmas was full of new things for the gentlemens’ families and boxing day was focused on charity. Or, if you were one of the poor, then boxing day was the day of new things.

For me, boxing day is when I clear away all the boxes and accumulated packaging. Many of those boxes get filled with things we don’t use or need anymore. I took a car load of things over to a thrift shop to donate. By noon tomorrow I’ll have accumulated another car load of things. It is amazing how much stuff just sits in the corners of our house, unnoticed and unneeded, but never cleaned up because it isn’t really in the way. Except it is. Because those corners and storage spaces need to be cleared so we have places to put the things we actually use. It is time to clear away all the accumulated stuff from this past year when I did not have the brain to sort. As an example: the shelf in my laundry room where I shoved outgrown clothes until I had time to give them away. The shelf was over flowing, so I filled a big garbage sack and gave the things away. There are lots of spaces like that. Flat surfaces covered in random things because I needed a place to put them down. This week I am clearing them off.

I am also helping the kids tackle their rooms. Link doesn’t need any help here. In the past year he has sorted through his own things and gotten rid of the things which are no longer relevant to him. Patch has a harder time with this. Sorting is overwhelming to him. So we started with a garbage bag and a donation box. Then we picked one spot in the room and began. Once we got rolling, Patch quite enjoyed the process. He liked being able to see how much space he has. even better, he can find the things that he really wants, instead of them being buried under trash and old stuff.

Gleek’s sorting is going to take a lot longer. She has always been an accumulator of small things. Sorting is not just a matter of things she wants and things she doesn’t. Instead we have to dig deep and find all of the stashed rock collections. There are half a dozen purses, each with a similar collection of useful items such as pens, Carmex, pretty rocks, shiny things. The purses must be emptied, the contents evaluated. Each purse considered. Sorting Gleek’s room gives both her and me decision fatigue. I really long to just tear through it when she’s not there. That is what I would do when she was younger and the result would be multiple garbage bags full of things that Gleek never even missed. At younger ages that was appropriate, but now Gleek needs to learn to organize her own things. This is particularly true because Gleek’s collections are one of the ways that she manages her anxieties. Learning how to keep the collections under control is a critically important life skill for her. More important, facing the collections also brings up the associated memories and she has time to process them again when she is not under so much strain. I can see these memories wearing on her. She gets slower to answer my “what shall we do with this?” then she says she doesn’t want to sort anymore. So I bring us to a stopping place and we stop. I have this space between Christmas and New Years when business things are slow. The internet is slow. I can focus most of my energy on putting my house in order. Gleek and I can afford to do a little bit each day.

Going through my room and my office was a lot more fun. In those spaces I can make rapid fire decisions. This stays, that goes. This newly cleared drawer can be re-purposed for something else. When I am done the clutter is cleared away and the surfaces are ready for dusting. And I have boxes and bags of things ready to be given away. I like donating things. I’ll never have to clean them up again. We have an unusually large amount of stuff to donate this year. I believe it is the result of our year of transition. We all changed this year and so the stuff we want and need is also different. We’re re-shaping our spaces to better reflect who we are now instead of who we were.

By the new year our house will be much more organized. It will finally have joined us, prepared for the next phase of our lives.

Christmas

By / December 25, 2013 / 1 Comment

Gift giving was tricky this year because our kids do not really need more stuff. They like having new stuff, but there wasn’t much that they longed for or actually needed. I think this speaks well to how our lives are going lately. Yet Christmas morning without gifts for them would have been a sad experience for us all. Howard and I were stumped until we realized that the best gift we could give our kids was an open door. We picked something for each child that made possible something that was previously out of reach. Kiki got a scanner/printer for her use at college. Link got an old used laptop which will allow him to learn programming at home. Gleek gets to try out horseback riding lessons. Patch got a cello and lessons to go with them. There was an array of other smaller things, many of them designed to make us all laugh. Laughter at the present opening is one of the best things about the holiday.

I hope that you found laughter and new possibilities in your holiday celebrations as well.

Friendships

By / December 23, 2013

I’ve been thinking about friendship today and loneliness. I have many people that I consider friends. The would, and have, dropped everything to come help me in a time of need. I would, and have, dropped everything to help them. I am richly blessed to know so many good people. Yet most weeks I don’t see or speak to any of my friends who don’t live in my house. I tweet, comment, and generally interact online with all sorts of lovely people on a daily basis, but that is not the same. I attend church every week, but often I sit by myself and only engage in a few sentences here and there with my neighbors. I used to have a group of friends who gathered every other week for a girl’s night, but then half of them moved further away and the rest of us had our lives shift. We don’t meet anymore. For several years I had regular handwritten correspondence with some of my friends, but that dried up this year too. I stopped having the energy to reply.

I didn’t notice as all of this was happening. I’ve been turned inward this year; very focused on family, business, and emotions here in my house. But somehow I’ve come to a place where my in-person interactions with friends have dwindled to scattered lunch appointments. I did it to myself. Some of it was necessary because I had to conserve my resources of energy. But I’d like next year to be different. I’d like to be around friends more often. I just need to remember how that works and how I make it happen.

Snow Falls Again

By / December 22, 2013

Snow is falling today. Each flake is tiny when landing on the ground, but they have been falling all day. They land on the piles of snow which still have not melted from the snow storm before this one, or the snowfall before that. Most winters the kids are hoping we’ll get some snow in time for Christmas. This year it has been on the ground for weeks. I stepped outside in it, to feel the hush which always comes with snowfall.

Then I thought back all through the year to another day when snow fell, way back on February 9th, when I wrote another post that talked about snow, but was really about many other things. I read that post today while I was gathering information for the 2013 Tayler Family Photo Book. When I wrote that post I was at the beginning of my year. I’d had a hard week and knew there was quite a bit of emotional sorting yet to do. The week was harder than the post makes clear. At the moment of that post I did not know how long that sorting would take or how complex the emotions would become. I look back with sympathy for my past self. It got so much harder in the next couple of weeks. Then it got harder again before it gradually became easier. It is now December and we’re not done sorting yet. Reading that post makes my heart hurt and I realize how very emotional the process will be when I begin pulling together my annual book of blog entries. It will dredge up all the memories of the hard things which happened this year. Part of me wants to just close the door and move on. We’ve made our shifts, transitioned into a new familial life stage. Next year might be a time when we can just settle in and be glad. I would love that, but I have to finish this first. I have to read through it all and remember it. In that process I will be able to let go some of the trapped emotions that are attached to the events.

Snow is falling, illuminated by the Christmas lights on our front yard tree. I don’t know what the weather will be for the rest of this winter. Perhaps it will all be as snowy as the past few weeks have been. I hope that the emotional weather for next year is not as tempestuous as the year just past. It seems logical that it would be, but I can’t control that any more than I can dictate to the sky whether it should snow. All I can do is clear away the snow that has already fallen so that I am better able to handle what ever comes next.

Declaring Indpendence, Patch’s Turn

By / December 19, 2013

Tomorrow Patch and his 5th grade classmates are meeting in the library to declare independence from their teacher. She’s been being very unfair to them lately. Deliberately so, since she is teaching them a unit on the American Revolution and wants to have a discussion about how it is sometimes important to declare “no more” and stand up for principles. So tomorrow they’re all signing a declaration of independence and refusing to go to class until the teacher accepts it. Then they’ll all have a Christmas party. I’m sure the teacher will be quite relieved, because she’s been sending emails to parents telling us what she’s doing and how she hopes it will play out. When Gleek went through this experience with the same teacher, they had their revolution on Thursday prior to Christmas break. This crew tolerated things a little bit longer, but then the teacher threatened the Christmas party. So tomorrow will be an exciting day. Then after that we’ll get to have a breather from school, which will be lovely for all of us.

Thinking About Cultural Heritage

By / December 19, 2013 / 3 Comments

I am an American citizen with fairly standard-issue Northern European mixed heritage. This means that sometimes I feel boring, or like I don’t really have a culture to call my own. That is an illusion created by the fact that my culture is everywhere. I am represented in every book I read, every show I watch. I spend the vast majority of my days swimming in my traditions and culture. They are as pervasive as the air and I pay them about as much attention. This means that I do not truly understand when someone else has a driving need to connect with their heritage and a vital need to protect it from absorption and dilution. I can intellectually comprehend, but I’ve never been alienated or separated from my culture of birth. I don’t have that emotional experience, which means I should listen carefully when those who do have it, choose to speak in a forum where I can listen.

I do have one aspect of my life that is non-standard. I’m a born and raised member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as Mormons. On my mother’s side I am steeped in pioneer heritage, stories of people who trekked across the wilderness in order to build a place where they could practice their beliefs freely. That heritage is praised and used to shape modern LDS culture. On my Dad’s side is a conversion story, which is also a strong part of LDS culture. We love stories of people changing their lives in response to personal spiritual experiences and exercises of faith. My childhood is steeped in this culture and my adulthood continues to be, because I choose it, even though there are aspects of modern LDS culture that trouble or annoy me. Note that there is a difference between the doctrines of the religion and the culture that forms around them.

Any time there is a news article or media event that throws general attention on the LDS faith, I feel anxious. Often the attention is neutral or positive, but I still feel cautious anyway, as when I heard about Book of Mormon the Musical. I did not know whether that play would accurately represent my faith or culture as I experience it. Logically, I knew that a misrepresentation would not do me any harm, but I paid attention anyway. I pay similar attention to any other news stories relating to Mormonism. I worry that people will make assumptions about who I am based on what they think they know about my faith and culture. I know that there are some people who will automatically be antagonistic toward me because of it. Yet I skip most of that negative attention, because my sub-culture does not show on first glance.

Then I think about what it would be like if my Mormonism were written on my face. What if, like the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, I had to display my cultural alignment for all to react to every time I went out in public. When I imagine that, I begin to understand what it is like to be a person of color in the United States. Then I begin to understand why the “It’s a culture not a costume” campaigns matter. Some people are not given the option to blend in. They have no choice but to stand out wherever they go and that makes them a walking target, not just for hateful things, but also for people like me, who mean well, but are still fumbling around trying to understand. I don’t understand. I haven’t lived it. This means that I should listen on these issues more than I should speak. I should give my attention to when people tweet about Being Black on University of Michigan campus (#BBUM) and the twitter hashtag #IAmNotYourAsianSidekick. And if I’m tempted to think the issues are being blown out of proportion, I should remember to do a comparison of the google image searches for Caucasian and Asian. Then I should think about how I would feel to have my heritage represented by such a search.

We are all products of our cultures, and one of the aspects of white American culture is to assume that our experience of life is what everyone gets. It is not true. Life is not fair. We all have different difficulty settings and if we’re aware of that, then we have a chance to see all the people around us as equals who are shaped and made interesting by their cultural heritages.

Tracking All The Things

By / December 18, 2013 / 1 Comment

My brain tracks things. It does it automatically, sometimes without my consent. I’m not sure when it started. It is possible that I’ve always done it. I know for certain I’ve been at it for at least the past decade. This capability is, mostly, very useful. It is the reason that I am able to run so many projects in parallel. It is the reason that Howard and I hit deadlines and one of the reasons we’re able to make a living at what we do. I love my ability to track, but there are times when it is problematic.

Just last week I was out to breakfast with my friend Mary. She told me about some upcoming tricky scheduling between a work event and a family event where she had to travel extensively in between. During the conversation, I felt my tracking brain click on and I knew that some part of my brain would be paying attention to whether Mary was able to make her tight connections. There is no point to me tracking that information. Mary is a grown up. These are her events, not mine. And there is nothing that I can do to affect the outcome. My life would be more contented and less stressed if I could spend that day happily oblivious to Mary’s travels. And I’ll probably spend most of that day not thinking about it. But at least a couple of times, my brain will ping “I wonder if Mary made her deadline.” and then I’ll go check.

This happens to me every day. My brain pings me about a dozen things that it has chosen to track. Was there a follow up to that internet kerfluffle? Did so-and-so manage to make that souffle? Don’t we need to start scheduling that meeting for that project which is three months down the road, but we need to start now? I haven’t seen a schedule from AnyCon yet, I should email and check. I’m constantly thinking of things before the people, whose jobs the things are, have had a chance to think of them. I do my best to reign it in and make sure that my tracking does not adversely impact others. The good news is that while I can’t stop my brain from pinging me, I am not compelled to follow through on the pings. I can answer a ping with “That’s not really my business” and move on with my day. That thing is likely to ping me again until the deadline is passed, but each time I can dismiss it or act on it as seems appropriate and logical.

Unfortunately in the parenting arena things get murkier. It is easy to see that my friend’s travel plans are not my job. But what about my child’s homework? Obviously the child needs to do the work. Obviously it is my job to teach kids how to face homework and get it done. Obviously young children need an adult to help them track and teach them how to track. Obviously children under stress need more help than usual. But there is an area where things are much less obvious. I have to figure out at what age I step back and let the kids track their own things. The ages differ according to child, previous experience, and ongoing stress level. I’m really good at stepping in and giving lots more help. I’m much less good at stepping back. If I know what the assignments are, I want my kids to snap to it and get it all done because then those assignments will stop pinging in my brain. What my sixteen year old needs right now is space to sort and track his own assignments. He needs to find his own ways of getting things done. His ways are not my ways and that makes my tracking brain crazy. It pings me all the time about his work, and my job right now is to tell it to shut up, because tracking is his job, not mine.

The good news is that eventually my tracking brain will recalibrate. My college kid is home now and my tracking brain is treating her like any other visiting adult and not trying to track all of her tasks and things. Though I don’t ask for details about the work she needs to complete while she is here. Details are hooks on which my tracking brain gets caught. On the whole I suspect that this aspect of how my brain works is outside of normal, but it is more of a benefit in my life than a detriment, so I’ve just learned to manage it.

Christmas Present Ponders Christmases Past

By / December 17, 2013

It is predictable, right around December 15th, I’ll write a post about how maybe things are slowing down a little, then I’ll not blog for several days because. Nope. Not slower. It is also common for me to write a December post where I’ll think out loud about how our Christmas traditions are different than they used to be, or how I’m trying to shift things and let go of the concept that Christmas is mine to create. Then come Christmas day, I’ll likely write a post about how it all turned out fine despite the fact that I thought I was ruining everything. The refrains are all familiar, rather like the Christmas carols which fill the air. I have these variations on the same emotional tunes played out year after year.

Perhaps that is why this year I haven’t played many carols, or really done much of anything to consciously create a Christmas mood in my house. I put up lights. I put up the tree. These things make me happy, but other than that I’ve been letting the holiday exist or not without much effort from me. Naturally this has resulted in a vague guilt that I ought to be doing more, or perhaps a vague regret that my days are spent just keeping all the necessary parts of our business, educational, and household things running. I feel like it would be nice to do Christmas things, but I’m already over extended. So I let go of the things I can’t do and tell myself that it is okay. It has been a very long year and I’m worn out.

I’m discovering that small kindnesses mean much to me this Holiday season. A Christmas card from a friend I’ve failed to write for six months, a bag of treats from a neighbor who I used to speak to far more often, and email offering to help because I sounded tired or stressed in a blog post. I treasure these things because I’m not able to give such small kindnesses lately. I can see how little effort it would cost me to do similar small kind things. I feel like I ought to stretch far enough to write thank you notes, to stop by and say hello to a friend, to make a treat. I keep choosing not to. I’ve already extended and extended far beyond what I would have thought I could sustain last year. To do more is beyond me. I appreciate greatly when someone else offers me a piece of their time or energy. Small kindnesses are not insignificant.

I’m not particularly stressed in each individual day. When people ask me how I’m doing or how my day is going, I answer “good” without pause for thought. Because things are generally good. The kids are aimed in good directions for growth. We’ve had a good business year. Our many projects are coming along. We’d always like them to be coming along more quickly, but nothing is stalled. All of the things are good. There are just a lot of things and there have been all year long. It leaves me wanting to clear out and simplify rather than add the complications of Christmas celebrations. Proper celebrations come from a place of joy, not obligation. I have moments of that, when for some minutes or hours I’m glad for the holiday season and for family. Then I’m back to making sure all of the day’s things happen.

I think it will begin to feel like Christmas when the kids are out of school. Then I’ll take them shopping or to the movies. The feel of our house shifts during the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. I’m glad for it because it is good for me to step out of the regular necessities of our schedule. I also miss our regular routine and the happy feeling of getting work done. So the holiday season will begin for me on Friday, four days before Christmas. Which is about when it came together last year. Only last year I spent most of December feeling like I’d failed for not making Christmas permeate our house earlier. Perhaps my niggling regrets represent a step toward acceptance that Christmas now is different than it used to be and it is okay.