education

We sat in the therapist’s office with nothing to discuss. Three weeks and there had been no meltdowns we could talk through, no major stress episodes, no panic. It was as if the troubles ceased the moment we attempted to observe them. Whatever the reasons for the vanished anxiety, there did not seem to be much point in paying out of pocket week after week so we could sit on a leather couch with nothing to discuss. All parties agreed that perhaps therapy might be more useful again in the fall with the stresses of beginning junior high. So we walked out and cancelled the remaining appointments.

Ten minutes after arriving home Gleek shrieked and panicked because a wasp got into the house. Twenty minutes after that she saw another one outside and plunged again into fear, but channeled it better. During homework time she pulled out a familiar array of stress tactics such as whining, flopping, singing out loud, making random noises to annoy her brother, dropping pencils, and resisting the help she asked for one second previous. My job was to stay calm, expect her to get a grip on herself, and wait for her to settle down and do the work, which she eventually did.

I am left with questions about coincidence and causation. Ultimately I think that Gleek would have been alarmed by a wasp in the house whether or not we’d decided to discontinue therapy. It also makes sense that her first big panicky event would dredge up all the old tactics out of storage. Or it could be that some part of her considered the therapy sessions as a sort of safety net and discontinuing them raises her ambient level of anxiety. In which case, discontinuing is exactly what we need to do so that Gleek can practice managing her stresses and fears.

Even with the resurgence of old coping strategies, Gleek still had a better handle on herself that she would have a month ago. She faced the second wasp without shrieking. She completed her math assignment before curling into a ball under a blanket. Then when I requested that she emerge so we could plan for the remainder of her homework, she used a visualization technique to bring herself back into a planning state of mind. We’ve come quite a long way since March. Now we just need to hang tight for the next four weeks of school.

Kiki is just a few weeks away from her high school graduation, but her brain is ready to run off to college. As she described it to me, she’ll walk into the front room and sit on the couch. Then her head fills up with thoughts like: I wonder what the couches will be like at college. Will I be the girl who is always sitting on the lobby couches and doing art? I wonder if there will be friends to sit on the couches with me. I hope those friends are nice. Then to escape the couch thoughts Kiki will step into the kitchen and be confronted with a new barrage: There are kitchens on each floor of the dorm. I wonder if we’ll have floor parties where everyone pitches together and there is yummy food. How will that work? Will other college kids no how to cook. Maybe I should learn to cook more. I don’t have any dishes, maybe I should bring some dishes. Pretty much everywhere she goes, her brain tries to jump ahead to college. This frustrates Kiki, who would like to be able to focus on finishing high school and let college get closer without constantly thinking about it. At least Kiki is self aware enough to see what is going rather than just getting quarrelsome about high school things.

Patch would also like to jump ahead to the end of school, only he is less self aware. His teacher is expressing concern that he is tuning out in class and thus missing important information he needs, like assignment details. Both the teacher and I have talked with Patch, mostly we need to corner him and require the work instead of letting him get away with sliding by. Unfortunately this means that homework times are unpleasant because Patch pulls out all the stops trying to avoid the work even though logically he knows he can’t and shouldn’t. This evening we had an extended negotiate about which work is actually due to see if some could be pushed off to a different day. Then there were tears because it was all too hard, after which he plowed through half of it with no trouble at all. Finally he manifested with a headache and general malaise which required flopping. When I did not excuse him from the work, he sat down and got rolling, cheerfully plowing through the rest of it. I find it fascinating to watch Patch’s avoidance techniques, because I see so many of them in myself when I have work I don’t want to do.

Thus far Gleek has responded toward the oncoming end of the year with a more relaxed attitude. This is good news in comparison with the stress she was carrying before. Link has exhibited renewed vigor in pursuing good grades as a result of an agreed upon incentive program.

I’m trying to take each day as it comes and make sure to notice the flowers so that they don’t bloom and vanish while I’m busy.

“Children!” my voice was pitched loud so that it could be heard over their chatter and pierce their internal imaginations. “I have two children with two projects and we have about two hours before bedtime. There is only one of me and I’m going to need you to follow instructions.” My declaration came at the end of fifteen minutes where I kept trying to get the kids to focus, but they kept pinging off in random directions the moment my back was turned. Patch’s project was an animal report where he made a lift the flap book about leopards and a shadow puppet play about monkeys. Gleek needed to construct a Mesopotamian house out of paper that compared and contrasted it to a modern house. These are the sorts of projects which lead to late hours and many tears, except this is at least the third such set of projects for the school year and thus far we’ve avoided major project meltdown. The kids nodded in response to my words and began adjusting their ratios of work to distraction in a more productive balance.

I was not good at projects when I was in school. I was a fairly classic procrastinator except in the cases when I loved the project and thus expanded it to be much more difficult than it needed to be. I was really good at working in a huge burst of creative energy, but not at all good at continuing to work when the energy ran out. Even in my early mothering years I would work in bursts, organizing the entire house, making a cleaning schedule, and then letting it all fall apart less than a week later. Somewhere in the last seven or eight years I learned how to work a little every day. Perhaps it was learning about the power of practice in creating excellence, but more likely it was just that I’d finally lived long enough to see the the accumulation from small efforts. The most physical manifestation of this was the day when I received an inch-thick book in the mail which was full of one year’s worth of blog entries. I’d written a novel’s worth of words a day or two at a time. I could see that later blog entries were smoother than early ones. I could see that my skills at layout and design progressed from year to year. Expertise requires practice over time.

My children appear to be learning this lesson at a much younger age than I did, probably because I’ve been so focused on it myself. I don’t let the big projects slide, they have to work on parts of them days and weeks ahead of time. In our business I’m always deciding what needs to be done today in order to prevent next week or next month from being crazy. Keeping track of kid projects is part of that. Last year I did all of the tracking and enforcing. It was exhausting. This year Gleek is doing it all for herself and Patch is beginning to. Patch sat down to draw a cover for his Leopard book while Gleek scrounged for scissors and tape. I went to dig out our shadow puppet theater and discover which pieces could be re-used for Patch’s play. I came back upstairs to discover Gleek playing with her stress ball and Patch eating pistachios. I redirected them back to work. I cut out a cardboard alligator (You can’t have a monkey play without an alligator) and then took the pistachios away from Patch until he glued down the informational flaps into his book. Later Patch declared that he would die from having to write down a bibliography, but he did it in his deliberately over dramatic voice, so I just waited and then he wrote it all down. Gleek was in the front room throwing her stress ball onto the floor to watch it flatten, but when asked, she informed me that her house was done.

In the morning Patch will need to practice his shadow play. Gleek will need to figure out how to transport her house safely. There will also be computer homework (10 minutes typing practice) and some spelling sentences to be written. The homework does not end until school does, but the work and projects just seem to fit right in with everything else around here.

I am old. Not old lady old, but mom old. Everywhere we went there were young people and they were all open and ready to engage, meet new friends, maybe find someone particularly special. …and I don’t fit with that anymore. I remember fitting. I remember belonging to the crazy energy of an apartment of girls baking cookies late at night because we had too much studying to do. Part of me misses it, and part of me is tired contemplating it. But I watched Kiki, and she is ready for it. She bounced as we looked at the library, the dorms, the art department. She is ready to launch into college and I am the mom who gets to send her off and go home. Just writing that sentence makes me feel boring.

(No need to make me feel better. I’m fine. I really like my current life stage and level of wisdom. It is just one of those How did I end up here? moments.)

When one tours a college campus in the rain, it is best to wear a coat with a hood. I wish I’d known that rain was in the plans when I walked out of my house without grabbing my jacket yesterday.

Up next: admissions forms, then an unending stream of scholarship forms and financial aid applications. But walking the campus let Kiki picture herself as a college student. It helped her to refine what she wants.

Onward

I never know on walking in to a parent teacher conference how I will feel walking out. I’ve walked in feeling like all is fine and left with a pile of new worries. I’ve arrived with pressing concerns and departed feeling relieved. I’ve had conferences where the teacher and I had nothing much to do but smile and agree all is going well. Then there are the times where the teacher and I talk for a very long time discussing options and trying to define the shape of the challenges. Sometimes those long conversations result in a moment of inspiration when one of us suddenly sees an answer that makes everything else fall into a workable plan. Other times we run out of words and sit across the table wishing we had an answer to go along with our commiseration. I’ve had teachers who work with me as a coordinated team and others where every conversation felt like a missed catch, lots of words but no connection. Parent teacher conferences are fraught. I had three of them today. They each gave me insights into the child and the teachers. The new insights have given me new things to do for my kids and some new things not to do anymore. The impact to my workload is minimal, but shifting habit patterns is always a challenge. Contemplating the need to change habit patterns while tired and brain fried is exhausting. Time to sleep and think about it all again tomorrow.