Family

Taming the Garden

By / May 3, 2014 / 1 Comment

Somewhere in the years, Mother’s Day became and emotionally complicated holiday. It didn’t used to be. I try not to make it so now, but sometimes it is because my children and husband want to do something nice for me and I want to let them, but I don’t want them to feel obligated. Sometimes it slides by without a ripple and all is happy. Other years it is a fraught day with emotions other than happiness and contentment, even though all of the scripts state that Mother’s Day is supposed to be a day when Mom is happy. This year I saw the holiday coming. I also know that money is tight and so the last thing that would feel happy is extra expense. I sat everyone down yesterday and declared that what I really want for Mother’s Day is for our yard to not be an absolute wreck. I was surprised at how willing the kids were to go along with this plan. I think they liked having a clear goal.

This morning the work began with clipping and clearing. We broke out the mower for the first time and trimmed back various bushes and vines. The pom pom spruce got sheared back. We stared at the apricot tree and the pear tree, but both have gotten so tall that we’re going to need some sort of a pole saw to give them the trimming that they need. Four hours of work across five people and we’ve cleared away a significant mess. This evening some of the dry branches will have a second use as fuel for our fire pit. There will be smores. Next week will all be hands and knees work. We’ll need to get down into the flower beds and pull out all the extra grass. I want to clear the dirt enough that I can sprinkle seeds. I’d love to plant flowers that will bloom this year, but I don’t have the funds for that. I can do seeds though. I have a big stock of them that have accumulated over the years.

At one moment during the morning I stood and watched my kids at work. They were all focused on their tasks at hand, which is not at all how family work days used to go. They functioned as a crew and got lots of work done. Then afterward they did more things together. I have to remember that we play together more happily when we’ve worked together first.

It would be so lovely to spend this summer glad every time I step outside my door instead of sad and guilty. That would be a lovely gift indeed.

Learning to Divide the Load

By / April 29, 2014 / 1 Comment

At 2am this morning I had a brilliant opening sentence for this blog post. My brain worked, crafted, and whittled to make sure I had a sentence that was balanced and clever. Of course at that hour I was attempting to be asleep and so I did not get up and write it down. Naturally I can’t recall it this morning, partially because my brain is fogged from lack of sleep. Stupid brain.

I haven’t been writing much in these past few weeks. I’m juggling too many things and holding them all in my head. The logical thing to do would be to reach out to one of my many willing friends and say “Hey, can you help me with this?” That would make a lot of sense. Tasks like shipping 300 Strength of Wild Horses packages would be far more enjoyable with company. The trouble is that the things to do arrive in such small pieces. I always have trouble deciding that this one additional email means that I should stop and figure out how to reconfigure the load so someone else can help me carry it. It always seems like stopping to shift things around will delay progress. Surely I should just carry on. Besides, other people are busy too. I don’t want to bother them.

I want to say that this “do it myself” tendency is some sort of virtue or at least not a symptom of pride, but I suspect the opposite is true. It is a flaw which frequently leads to me being overwhelmed. I don’t have to be. Many people have told me on many occasions that they’re happy to help out. Yet somehow I always fail to stop and decide to divide the load.

I’m hoping to change this when Kiki gets home from college. She’s going to spend the summer with us dividing her time between art commissions and being a Tayler Corporation employee. I will have someone in my house to whom I can assign work because she is getting paid. I’m certain it will not all be sunshine and roses. I’m still going to have to fight my tendency to not want to bother other people. Yet hopefully by the time she heads back to college, I’ll have learned some things about where hired help is helpful in my business processes. Also hopefully, I will have figured out how to budget and pay for that help. It will be a learning experience for us both.

Of course between now and Thursday when I drive to fetch her from school, I have much work to do. Not the least of this work is turning our dungeon basement room into a space that Kiki can live in for three months without feeling opressed by the bare concrete walls. We don’t have the money to fund framing and finishing. Instead I’ve put up sheetrock on the one framed wall and I’ll be hanging unbleached muslin over the remaining concrete. ($40 can cover most of the room.) The walls will still be hard to the touch, but hopefully we can trade Dungeon-bedroom for blanket-tent bedroom, which seems lots cozier, if still odd. Planning how to make it work is one of the things my brain was considering late last night while also crafting the perfect blog opening.

Perhaps I’ll do some before and after pictures later today. For now, I need to head over to the warehouse. I have 90 more packages to mail and then I can call the SWH shipping complete.

Enjoying Spring

By / April 24, 2014

Spring is hope. I breathe it in the mild air. I see it on all the trees which have begun to leaf out after looking dead all winter. Spring is when the world turns green again after the darkness. For the first half of my life I did not have a favorite season. Ever since I went through a dark winter which included radiation therapy, Spring has been my favorite. Summer is good. Autumn is fine. Winter can be beautiful, though it wears at my spirits. Spring is hope. I like hope.

My kids feel the hope too. Yesterday Patch’s teacher requested a quick meeting with me, and my heart sank, because the last two quick meetings about Patch were filled with concern about the levels of anxiety he carries. This one was markedly different. “He’s doing so well.” She said. “It’s almost like he’s a different child.” We talked for awhile, trying to figure out what caused the change. Maybe it was his long-time best friend moving back into town. Maybe it was when we passed the anniversary of when everything fell apart last year. Maybe it is the cello lessons which are giving him confidence. Maybe he’s finally made peace with the fact that life changes. Maybe it’s because Kiki comes home next week. Or maybe he just blooms in the springtime like the flowers do. I’ve seen it year after year. He struggles in the winter and is happier come Spring. But each year he struggles less and blooms more, so it is progress of sorts.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told “It’s like he’s a different child” by teachers, though sometimes the pronoun is “she” instead. It is one of the reasons that I was able to survive last year. I knew that the struggles were not our destiny forever. I don’t know if all kids go through cycles where they flounder, turn inward, lash out, and worry the adults who love them. I’d like to think so, rather than believing that my kids have more intense experiences than average. In the hardest moments I look at my child and know that the capability to soar is in there, that they have to find it themselves, and once the child taps into it, everyone around will say “It’s like she’s a different child.” No. She is what she has always been. He is what he has always been. It is just that the potential has burst forth, and where there were only bare branches, now there are blooms.

We have five weeks until summer. Technically summer doesn’t begin until June 21st, but for all practical purposes, once school lets out–it is summer. It feels like we’re heading into a season of summer for our emotional lives as well. We had our year of transition. Now it would be nice to have a year of stability and plenty. A year where the kids all stay in the same schools and we enjoy a quiet routine. We’re almost there, but I’m not going to rush forward. Because it is spring now, and spring is a season to be relished.

Tending and Blooming

By / April 23, 2014

I used to be a gardener. It is still a thing that I love and someday I will again make time to tend the ground and grow flowers. Right now it is simply not as important to me as a dozen other projects that I have. I find time to get outside and beat back the weeds, but that is not the same as being a focused gardener. A tended garden is a thing of beauty. My garden is a wilderness where plants have a survival-of-the-fittest battle with only occasional intervention from me. I’m pleased that sometimes the flowers win.

Every year Thanksgiving Point Gardens hosts a tulip festival. I always intend to go. One year I even scheduled an outing to go, but then one of my kids picked that day to pretend to be sick. All of the other years, at least five or six of them, I simply missed the window. Somehow the two weeks in April when the tulips are in full bloom always were busy. I would look up at the end of the month and realize that I’d missed my chance yet again.

This morning, for the first time ever, I didn’t miss it. My friend said “Do you want to go?” and I said “Yes.” So we both ditched our piles of work and we wandered the gardens.

Beauty can be found wild, in untended corners, or even wide open spaces. Yet there is an art to a tended garden, I walk there and I know that it is loved because someone had to get down on hands and knees and dig. They had to get dirty, tired, and sweaty to make sure that all goes well. A tended garden takes a sacrifice of time. I’ve spent my last few years tending other things. This year I’m watching my children bloom when last year was life torn up, mud, and despair. Sometimes tending something is like that, you have to make a big mess before beauty can happen. I’ve also tended many books and last week I got to see them arrayed in a booth where others could see the results of all those invisible hours. My garden is full of weeds, but my life is full of things that are beautiful because of the effort I’ve put into them. So perhaps I am still a gardener, just not of flowers right now.

Revisiting: How to Raise a Strong Girl

By / April 13, 2014

This is day two of the massive comic convention in Salt Lake City. If you’re at FanX, please stop by booth 2017 and say hello. This is another essay that I’ve read aloud during events and feel has things to say that are worth re-reading. I originally wrote it in 2012 and then revised for my book Cobble Stones 2012. You can find the book in our store for only $5. I don’t have an e-book edition at this time.

How to Raise a Strong Girl

Last week I saw several social media campaigns urging people to go see the Pixar movie Brave on opening weekend. “Let’s show Hollywood that girl-led movies can make money!” they said, as if increasing the number of girl-led films would make the world a more fair place for women. I did see Brave during opening weekend, but only because Howard writes reviews and needs to see films early. I wanted to love it, but I didn’t. It managed to gut punch me in my emotional baggage about motherhood roles. I came home feeling like the movie told me that being a mother meant being the person who ruins all the fun and enforces all the rules. I was sad because my heart is Merida climbing the rocks and riding through the forest, but my life is Elinor imposing order onto the lives of others.

Today I decided to spend my afternoon seeing Brave again. My kids had not yet seen it, and I wanted to re-view the film leaving my emotional baggage at home. I bought tickets and then hurried to finish my work; before we could leave I had to make progress on my shelving project. I donned my work gloves and plugged in my borrowed electric sander.

There is a sort of magic in watching a power tool turn a sharp wooden corner into a smooth, round one. I glided the sander over the edges of the boards, and dust blew away. I was careful to keep the sanding surface away from all my limbs and thought gratefully of my grandpa, who used to take me into his big garage and let me work on projects with him. With Grandpa, I soldered, repaired bikes, used a lathe, sawed wood, and hauled rocks. Grandpa let any grandchild who was interested participate in the work; there was no distinction based on gender. Because of Grandpa, I am not afraid to pick up a power tool and make things, even if I have never done so before. This shelving project is my first time using an electric sander.

Afternoon came, and we all trekked to go see Brave. The kids loved it. They laughed out loud at exactly the slapstick moments which didn’t work well for Howard and me. I loved it too. I loved it as much as I wanted to love it the first time I saw it. The mother character, Elinor, has to be rigid in order to provoke Merida into taking action. A more balanced representation of motherhood would have ruined the film. The scene where Elinor quells the room full of brawling men is critical to a hero moment later in the film when Merida turns and faces down the woman who turned all those strong men into jelly. Yes, the brawling scene plays to a stereotype, but it gives power to the moment that I think is the epitome of Brave: mother and daughter staring angrily into each other’s eyes because they have mutually exclusive plans for the future.

I’m glad I took my kids to see it; they now have a new princess story in their minds which is in many ways the antithesis of a classic Disney-type film. But, if I were to weigh what I did today for gender equality, the most important thing I did was sand boards. My grandpa is not around to haul my kids (both boys and girls) into his garage to use power tools, but they can see that Mom fixes stuff. For every movie where the girl character exists to scream, there is a time when I am fetched to slay spiders. For every movie with true love in it, they see a hundred days where Mom and Dad snap at each other grouchily in the morning and then laugh together later in the evening. For every movie where the dad is helpless to manage the household, there are the days when Howard cleans the kitchen and makes dinner.

Seeing a movie present a different perspective can be truly powerful, as when a young Whoopi Goldberg saw Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek and realized that black women could be on television without being maids. These powerful, pivotal moments in entertainment matter. Perhaps Brave is one of those moments and can change the world for some girls. But if I want to raise strong girls of my own, I just need to live as if the equality I hope for them already exists. I need to gift them with pocketknives, bows, arrows, hair ribbons, power tools, and nail polish as their interests warrant. My actions should say, of course they can be what they choose to be, so long as they are willing to work hard to get there.

Life is not fair. It never will be. No movie can make it so. But strong girls can see the unfairness and do what they want to do anyway.

Continuing Vacation Report

By / April 9, 2014 / 1 Comment

I try to clear the decks and tie up all the business things so that nothing will need attention while we’re gone for our family vacation. So far I’ve succeeded one year out of five. This year several time critical tasks relating to FanX next week, GenCon in August, and the LOTA release in May all sought me out and demanded attention. This meant I had to engage my work brain, which was then hard to disengage.

Today we traveled beyond the reach of cell phone and data service. Canyonlands National park is a place without reception. We hiked until we reached the point of diminishing returns on hiking. Fortunately we hit that point when we arrived back at the car rather than halfway through a hiking loop. We all agree that the best spot was the Cave Spring hike. It was challenging enough to be interesting without ever feeling dangerous.

Last night I wondered if we should just shorten the trip and go home early. It seemed easier somehow. Today I’m very glad that we stayed. Though some part of me is listing the places we need to take Kiki when next we have a chance. She would have loved the Cave Spring and Newspaper rock. Newspaper rock is a section of cliff face with doodles on it from the past thousand years, proving that graffiti is not a modern invention.

Or perhaps it is an older, slower, more permanent version of twitter. People throwing notes out into the universe hoping that someone else will see them and respond. I find it comforting that while humans long ago had different resources, they were still driven by the same human impulses that we have today and that we will have a hundred or thousand years from now.

Tomorrow we pack up and head home. Then vacation will be just a memory until this time next year.

Also Part of the Vacation Experience

By / April 8, 2014 / 2 Comments

Not every moment of vacation is lovely. I’ve written two posts that are mostly about the lovely bits. They are true and accurate portrayals of portions of this vacation. There are also the times when Howard and I sit at a table and count the costs. Sometimes I wish to be at home having a normal work week, because I like my work (mostly) and even for the parts I don’t like, I don’t want to fall behind schedule. Sometimes close proximity means we get on each other’s nerves. Sometimes I look at the kids all playing games on their electronic devices, which is exactly what they could do at home. There are moments when I’m tired or bored, because watching kids swim and catch fish has limited entertainment value. Sometimes I want to eat something that we don’t have in the fridge at the condo. The kids squabble or stress each other. Beloved items get lost in the stream and can’t be found again.

Vacation is never just about wisteria and beautiful moments. It is a blend of all the things, which hopefully ends up being more positive than not. I’m writing this post in one of the tired moments. It’ll pass.

A Pocket Paradise

By / April 8, 2014

Bees are good company. This counts as surprising news to all of my children who tend to run screaming at the first sound of buzzing or glimpse of black and yellow in flight. But I have been sitting for most of the afternoon in the shade of a blooming wisteria and the bees have never once bothered me. They’re too busy digging into the flowers to find the sweetness hidden within. I particularly like the giant black bumblebees the size of my thumb because it seems like they shouldn’t be able to fly at all, but they do. I once followed one in it’s search along half the fence line. She sought nectar. I sought to capture a picture of her in flight. I think she was more successful than I.

Frogs are good company too, sort of. They’re the kind of company that I don’t know I have because they sit quiet right until the moment that I’ve come too close, then the cry out and leap into the water. At first that was all I saw as I walked along the edge of the pond; A motion, a noise, a plunk, and then ripples on the water. It made me laugh. I laughed because I was startled to not be alone with the trees and water. I decided to walk along the circumference of the pond, to see if I could spot a frog before he jumped. I never did. Twenty times I was startled by sound and motion. Half the time I laughed. The frogs were more wily than I. Though I did learn how to turn quickly and watch the frog stroke through the water to hide in the leaves on the bottom. I wish I could tell them not to be alarmed, that they need not fear me. But I’m not the only visitor here and not everyone just wants to look.

This place that we stay is only a pocket in the red rock desert. It is tucked between rock ridge and highway. At night headlights on the highway light the windows of our condo. While the kids swim I can hear trucks as they drive by. There are also other people here, which is sometimes nice and sometimes I wish they would go away. We have to share the space. Share the pool. Share the pond, the frogs, the fish, and the lizards.

We have to share the national parks too. This morning we drove into Arches behind a long line of cars full of people who’d chosen the same hour that we did to enter the park. Many of them turned off at the first big attractions. We drove toward the far end where our planned hike began. This time we carefully selected an easy hike. In fact that was a major feature of our selection process. Each kid wanted to know how this hike compared to that one long hard hike we did two years ago, the one we’re all glad we took, but none of us is quite ready to repeat. We passed people on the trail and listened to the music of their languages. Arches is filled with people who have traveled half a world to be there. It is three hours from my house, tucked into a desert that is mostly boring. A pocket paradise.

I overheard one older gentleman saying he hadn’t seen any arches yet and he’d been there all morning. He was pondering a walk to Sand Dune Arch and wondered if the walk was worth it despite his arthritic hips. I spoke with him for a moment, suggesting the double arch and windows arches as the most spectacular sites with the least amount of necessary walking. We saw him again at Sand Dune Arch. I congratulated him on making the walk. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up, then looked up at the arch. It is tucked in between massive fins of rock, a hidden arch, not often photographed. The man said “I thought it would be redder. I haven’t seen any that look like the pictures.”

Pictures, stories, and social media posts are all curated for point of view. We only see what someone else chose to put into the frame. That gentleman had traveled a long way, and he might never get a chance to see what he expected when he started that trip. I hope that he found ways to be happy with the experience he was having instead of always wanting it to be different. If someone came to our preferred vacation spot based on my descriptions, they might be disappointed at the smallness of the pond, pool, park. These things are not large. There is just a small green place created first by a natural spring and then later by people who wanted to turn this into a place to stay. It is only a pocket paradise, but it is sufficient for us. I notice that there is plenty of wisteria for everyone and no one asks me to share the company of the bees.

Feeling at Home While On Vacation

By / April 7, 2014 / 1 Comment

“This may sound strange, but it feels like we’re almost home.” Howard said at the end of more than four hours of driving. We’d traveled south from our house, made a stop in Goblin Valley State Park and were only minutes away from arriving at the rented condo in Moab.
“It doesn’t sound strange at all.” I said. “I’ve been feeling the same thing.”

This is our fourth year spending spring break at a condo in Moab. We don’t always get exactly the same condo, but it is the same complex with the same swimming pool, pond, stream, and park. I remember our first arrival. I was so tense because we’d never rented a condo before and I was terrified that it would be a huge mistake. The kids pinged all over the place and we were constantly telling them “don’t touch that, don’t jump there, be careful, we’re only renting this place.” It got dark and stormy that first night and Kiki was in tears because she just wanted to go home and be in her own bed with her kitty. We ended up calling the neighbor who had the cat meow into the phone for us. I hardly slept that first night, my head full of stress trying to make sure our vacation would work and stress because work email had followed me and I knew we had looming deadlines.

The next day we visited Arches and started to have all the things we hoped for when we booked the trip. Two days later we were happy to go home, but all of us wanted to come back. So we did.

We’d only driven a mile or so further when Gleek piped up from the very back of the car. “It feels like we’re almost home!” Howard and I laughed.

We pulled into the familiar gravel drive with the rocks popping under our tires. I directed Howard to unit 2, which will be our home for the next three days. We waved at the park and pool, knowing we’d go there soon. The kids all jumped out and quickly unloaded their packs. There were no arguments about who would sleep where, the kids just claimed their preferred beds. Then Howard and I sent them outside to catch fish in the stream while we did our survey to figure out what cooking implements this kitchen had and lacked. There was no need to follow the kids to make sure they were safe. We all knew the safety rules and boundaries.

Link wandered through on is way out to the back patio. “I like this place.” He said. I smiled. Link is not a person who is relaxed or happy if he is uncertain about how things will go. Coming to the condo removes so much of the stress from vacation because we have familiar patterns to fall into. There is real value in going new places and seeing new things, but there is joy in the familiar too. I watched Link, Gleek, and Patch swimming in the pool. The three of them were playing a cooperative game in a way that they rarely do at home, but they always seem to do when we’re here. It is as if the game waits for them along with the pool and the stream. I watched them as bees buzzed in the wisteria behind me and I breathed the scent of the blossoms. It is so lovely to go on vacation and feel at home.

Bumps in the Road

By / March 12, 2014

Life is rolling along and everything is feeling good, then whump. I hit a speed bump, or a pot hole, or maybe it was both a speed bump and a pothole. Anyway my tire is flat, which seriously impedes my ability to keep rolling along happily. It’ll all be fine. I just need to find the jack and change out the tire. Then I can roll along again. Right now I’m in that moment when I’ve rolled to a complete stop at the side of the road and I’m trying to remember where on earth I keep the jack. I’m hoping it is here in the car with me.

The things which flattened my tire today:

I looked at the list of things I really should have gotten done already, the list of things I ought to do today, and I compared these lists against the actual hours I have available between now and midnight. The numbers of things are far more than the hours.

I thought about the parenting things which I have left to do this week and how they are going to interfere with the work things. Or maybe it is the other way around. Either way something important is going to have to slide.

We had a boom year financially last year. That means that this year we have a boom year for paying out taxes. I planned for it. I saved for it, but the number still feels a bit like a gut punch. I end up revising my plans for what I think we can afford this year. It is time for me to go over the budget again. I’ll just add that to the list.

Related to the finances, all the old anxiety demons have come howling out of the dark places where they’ve been hiding. “why can’t you plan better?” They howl at me. They blame me for spending too much, for not saving enough, for not being as frugal as we once were. And then once they get up a head of steam, they’ll start in on the many and varied ways that I’m a failure as a human being. So I’m spending psychic energy not listening to them and trying to shoo them back into their dark holes. Out of my head forever would be better, but I’ll tackle that when they are not surrounding me in a swirling mob. One at a time I can get rid of them. En masse, I’ll settle for having them shut up.

Howard has been suffering medication-related insomnia which has not helped him feel calm and happy. So we’re tinkering with that this week. The big bill punches his anxiety buttons too. That’s extra fun. His internal howling voices get restless when he’s having a depressed day. So later today Howard and I will, no doubt, be conferencing about these negative thoughts, both his and mine.

That’s it. I really thought there would be more things, but I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes and everything else that has floated through my head lands firmly on the good side of the ledger or is covered by the list above. Howard and I have both been writing prose fiction. He’s under contract. I’m not, but I know I’m writing the book that I need to write. Maybe I’ll find a contract for it later this year. Kiki is home with us for the week, and that is really fun. Link has been taking control of his homework and is going to bring all his grades up to passing before the end of the term even though he was out of school for a month. Gleek is excelling at horseback riding and I see the things she learns there spilling into other areas of her life. Patch hasn’t been showing signs of anxiety. He just earned his arrow of light and will go to scouts for the first time tonight.

So very many things are going well. I just wish there were two of me to keep them all going.