Family

Observations on a College Campus

By / October 12, 2012

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

Contemplating College for Kiki

By / October 6, 2012

Kiki filled out her first college application while I was away at the writer’s retreat. The first I knew about it was when the college emailed me saying that she’d applied and that all they needed were her ACT scores and a transcript. She took the ACT a month ago and her scores arrived last week. The transcript only required a five minute phone call to the school. Without any fanfare at all, we’ve shifted into the applying for colleges phase of Kiki’s high school year.

I can’t help thinking that it ought to be more stressful than this. There certainly is paperwork involved. There are dozens of little tasks to track and complete. But then tracking and completing dozens of small tasks is something we do around here daily. The fact that the tasks are related to college applications is only a tiny shift. Applying for scholarships is a similar deluge of paperwork tasks. Half the challenge is figuring out what is available so that the paperwork can be submitted. When I mentioned to a friend that I ought to be more stressed about paying for college, she pointed out that the dollar amount for a year of college is approximately equivalent to the dollar amount of paying for a book printing. Most people encounter sticker shock when looking at those numbers. I don’t because I’ve dealt with them every year for quite awhile. Covering the cost is a challenge, not something to fear.

Absent the deadline panics and financial terror which beset most families when contemplating college, we’re still left with the emotional ride of launching a child into adulthood. Kiki is taking all this in stride, as evidenced by her just filling out an online application when the link was mailed to her. We’ve scheduled some campus tours and she is very much focused on the possibilities rather than the possible roadblocks and troubles. My state is more complicated. I want to manage this all calmly, this is where we’ve always been aimed, but my emotions are unruly. When we arrived at the first day of school this fall, I cried for two days–grieving for the end of the era when all my kids live at home. It seemed silly to grieve then, we still had a year ahead, but that was when the grief arrived and I had to deal with it. Then it passed and we moved onward into the school year. Over the summer I watched my brother and sister as they planned big trips and fun events, trying to cram into a single summer all those things they meant to do earlier but somehow didn’t. My reactions spring from the same knowledge–that things are going to change–but my impulse is different. I want to hoard normality. I want to eschew all big events and disruptions so that we can have as many calm days as possible with all of us here.

Despite my desire for normal, change is in the air. Kiki is beginning to face outward from home, to plan and picture her future. We are beginning to set things up so that she can fly free. Each step is small, an application, a checking account, a college tour, but they accumulate. By next spring all these tiny steps will have changed us. Perhaps I was right to grieve a bit on that first day of school, my subconscious knew that the moments of change had already begun to arrive. Perhaps I grieved then so that I would be able to feel the joy inherent in this process. I watch Kiki, strong and so very obviously ready for all of this. She calmly fills out forms and writes paragraphs about the things she has done in her life. She is surprised to discover so many accumulated accomplishments. Some time in winter or spring she is going to look around and notice how far she has come in the past six months. She will be either happy or frighted by it. When she is, I will hug her tight and refrain from telling her how I saw it coming. Or perhaps I will tell her if hearing it is what she needs to regain some balance.

I know it will not be a launch and gone forever. We’ll always be part of each other’s lives even if we don’t live in the same house, but the change has begun. It is beautiful, joyous, and fascinating to watch.

Parent Teacher Conferences

By / October 4, 2012

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.

Unconscious Doing

By / October 2, 2012 / 1 Comment

“Can you hand me the sour cream?”
“My backpack is in the front room will you go get it for me?”
“I need a spoon.”

Until I went away I didn’t notice the barrage of small requests my kids make of me just because I am in the room. I notice them now because last week I was not here and they got their sour cream, backpacks, and spoons for themselves. I also notice the requests which are not made because I anticipate them and get them done before the child thinks to ask. I pour milk for the child who is chattering, spoon in hand, but hasn’t yet looked at the bowl in front of her. I put sharpened pencils next to the homework binder to minimize interruptions to the study process. Anticipating the next necessary task is something I do constantly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is one of the good gifts of anxiety, which carries over into relaxed tasks as well as worrisome ones. Perhaps I just learned to do this in the years when I was managing babies, toddlers, and preschoolers all of whom really did need someone to pour milk, hand out spoons, and find lost items. Maybe I learned it then and just never stopped.

My children don’t think about it either. They make these requests even when they are physically closer to the requested item than I am. If I’m paying attention and point this out, we all laugh together and they get it themselves. Yet the next time I’ll likely be distracted and just fulfill the request even if it makes far more sense for the child to do so. The thing is, I like anticipating needs and answering them. I like smoothing the obstacles so that important work can get done. Efficiency is pleasing to me and so I put forth the effort to create it whenever possible. This is why my attempts to re-train us all to let the kids do more are like emptying a bathtub with a spoon. Probably a spoon I fetched for a child because they asked for it.

“I think you had to leave because you’re so big. You fill the house.” Howard said as we were discussing my absence and trying to sort out why we all had to do this hard thing. This statement led to much teasing as I pointed out that perhaps different phrasing might be appropriate from a husband who is trying to welcome his wife home and make her feel loved. But after the jokes about wording were complete, I had to acknowledge that Howard is right. This is my house, arranged in the ways that I’ve selected, the schedule is primarily my design. Everyone else flows along with these things because I do a good job organizing. I do such a good job that until I’m not there to do it, no one stops to think if there could be another way. I’m pervasive and we could only see it by removing me from the picture for a week. A really hard week during which the folks at home sometimes despaired that they could keep it all together. In contrast I wrestled, not with guilt exactly, but with a deep part of myself which was convinced that leaving was a major dereliction and would cause harm. Logically I knew it was not true, but that deep place inside me believes that one of my primary jobs in life is to reduce stress for everyone else, particularly for Howard and the kids. I couldn’t even see this driving need until I put myself into a place where I couldn’t perform that function. Now I see it. Now I see how it has me fetching spoons and back packs every single day.

I think seeing it is half the battle. I can’t unknow this and I don’t want to. Seeing it will cause a hundred little shifts in my responses to these unthinking requests. All those tiny changes are likely to result in large pattern shifts over time. It will be interesting to see how much things are different in six months.

Being Back at Home

By / October 1, 2012 / 1 Comment

One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let me remember when I first started doing my own laundry and felt very grown up about it. This evening I enjoyed the process of planning and preparing dinner, even taking time for extra touches like putting a pitcher of water on the table so that everyone could remain seated instead of constantly bobbing out of their chairs to go get drinks or salt. I need to try to remember that these things are nice instead of always feeling burdened by them.

Kiki cried last night. At first it just seemed part of her head cold or perhaps just a cranky day. However it quickly became apparent that the real reason was that I had come home. She’d been strong and responsible all week long, with me home she could relax and confess how hard it had all been. Except, she told me, it wasn’t all hard. Lots of it was interesting and fun. She liked being grown up, but it was really nice to stop for awhile. I hugged her tight and reassured her that I want nothing more than several months of all of us staying home. It was what she needed to hear, not just that I would be here, but that I wanted to be here. She’d been picturing me off having a gloriously fun time only to return to the work of mothering. I did have fun, but I also spent a lot of time wishing that I were at home doing my regular things.

The other kids did not cry, but they were all quick to drop what they were doing and come hug me. Then they ran back to their things. None of them had tales of woe or worry. They were just glad to have me back.

So today I’ve been picking up where I left off. I’ve shipped out the orders which accumulated in my absence. I cycled many loads of laundry. I tackled the accounting. I slept in my own bed. All is well. Yet there are still reminders of my trip. I just picked a leaf out of my keyboard, remnant of sitting outside to type. I’ve also decided to aim for writing 500-1000 words per day. Those words can be blog posts or fiction. I’m not going to post word counts publicly, I’m just going to try to stretch a little and see where it takes me. If I don’t do something, then it would be all too easy for me to just dive into routine. I watched today how all those little tasks, which I was newly happy to do, each took a bite out of my day until it was consumed. If I want to write, I have to prioritize writing. So I shall.

For now, it is time to step away from the computer and complete the remaining small tasks of the day.

Letting Go of Home Thoughts is Hard

By / September 28, 2012

One of the reasons this retreat is being difficult is that the schedule tracking portion of my brain will not stay switched off. Occasionally I can be fully present in Tennessee, out in the forest, part of a conversation. But then I’ll happen to glance at a clock and without me bidding it to, my brain does the calculation to Utah time and supplies the fact that at home Howard is helping the kids get out the door to school. This wakes up the portion of my brain that is convinced that I’ve committed gross dereliction of duty by not being present at home to manage the schedule. I’ve left my kids before. I’ve left them for a week before. But I usually arrange for them to be on vacation or visiting with relatives. They are outside the usual schedule as much as I am. This time they are at home, following routine. I am not. But my brain keeps tracking their routine and telling me that I should really check up on homework or bedtime or a dozen other things.

I can’t escape from home thoughts yet home feels so far away. I’m really not sure what conclusion to draw from all of this. I’m not sure how this knowledge should affect future decisions. Does this fall into the “Don’t do that again” camp or is it that I need more practice letting go?

In the category of less conflicted lessons learned: don’t wear ballet flats into the woods, or if you do, spray with mosquito repellent first. The tops of my feet look like I have chicken pox. These bites don’t itch as much as the bites from Utah mosquitoes, but twenty-five bites on my feet is enough to draw notice. Particularly late at night when I’m trying to sleep and thinking about home things instead. I probably should be spending those wakeful hours thinking about plot things. But it feels like an additional dereliction, as if fretting over the home schedule is penance I must pay for not being there. And simultaneously I can also feel guilty because I have this opportunity and I am wasting it by thinking about home instead of thinking about writing fiction.

Over all, this is being good. I hope it is being good. It will take me months to see the results of what coming has begun. Hopefully I’ll be able to step back into my regular schedule and none of us will be sufficiently dinged by this experience that repairs are necessary.

Preparing for Departure

By / September 23, 2012

Who will bring in the mail while I am gone? I don’t know. I know I mentioned to Howard that he could stack it in the bin at the end of the counter, but that was just one of a dozen small conversations where I gave Howard details of little household tasks that I track and he does not. Some of these small things will be forgotten. Some already have been, since I forgot to even think of them–tasks so invisible that I do them without conscious thought. Awareness of all these little tasks makes me feel that everything will fall apart if I go away. It won’t of course. All of the important tasks will get done. Howard and the kids will see what needs to be done and they will do it.

Yet I worry, not for the tasks themselves, but for the additional stress that my loved ones will feel as they perform last-minute scrambles to accomplish necessary tasks. They’ll scramble themselves over obstacles that I am usually here to make smooth. I’m doing as much smoothing as I can before I leave. Meal plans are in place. Everyone has a week’s worth of clean laundry. The van has a full tank of gas. These small preparations appease my guilt, help me feel like it is okay for me to go and that disaster will not result. It is not as if I’m the first mother to head out for a week-long business trip. I’m not even the first one to feel guilty about it.

Last week I felt very tense about all these little tasks, with the same sort of tension which spurred me to put together a binder full of instructions and supplies for my mother when she came to watch my baby and toddler for a week. These days I can trust my kids to know their own schedules and requirements. No binders required. Yet I still feel the pull of writing notes and plastering the walls with them. Trash on Tuesday! Monday is a minimal day! Youth meeting on Wednesday! Instead of writing a dozen notes, I’ll just write one or two really important reminders. The rest I have to let go. The closer I get to departure, the easier it is for me to let go. I begin to accept that things will be run differently in my absence and that this is fine. My ways are not the only good ways. They may even find better options than the ones I’ve been using for so long.

I went away for four days in April and again in May. I returned from both trips to discover that all my people had grown. They were smarter and more capable because they had figured things out for themselves. They were also glad to have me back. I was glad to be back. I know this will be the same despite the extended length of time. Believing that it will be good for them is the only way I can get myself to let go of the responsibility. I am excited, afraid, curious, looking forward, feeling guilty, hoping for rewards, and counting costs. Tomorrow I fly.

How Can the Schools Contact Me, Let Me Count the Ways

By / September 19, 2012

I appreciate that my kids’ schools try to keep me informed. I really do. When Kiki was starting school a decade ago events and deadlines got missed because notes didn’t make it home or were never handed over to me. I remember being frustrated about the lack of communication. Now things have swung the other way and I feel like the schools are like a child on the playground shouting “look at me!” every five seconds.

Any time the elementary school has an announcement, they send a note home with the kids. Both of the kids, so I end up with two copies of every note. Then I also get a phone call telling me all of the information that is contained in the note. At the same moment that the automated system is calling me, it also sends me an email to tell me the exact same information. One announcement and I’m notified four times.

The junior high school both calls and emails for every announcement. Except that in addition to the automated announcement system, sometimes one of the junior high secretaries will also write an email to tell me the same information.

The High School also uses an automated phone and email system. It has the added fun aspect that most of the time the emails are not actually emails, but links to an audio file of the phone call. Also the principal’s messages are always attachments, never in the body of the email.

If all the schools have announcements on the same day, I’ll get three phone calls and four emails.

This is not all. The attendance system is separate. If any of my kids have an unexcused absence (If I didn’t call early enough to prevent them being marked unexcused, or if the teacher just fails to mark them there) then I get a phone call about that. There is a super extra special phone call and email combo that automatically contacts me if a child ever is absent from the high school flex class that they’re supposed to attend. That phone call will be a recording of the principal’s voice speaking very sternly about my student’s bad choices. Except the only time I’ve ever heard it was when my student was off doing school business and the teacher who was supposed to excuse her forgot to do so.

I did not sign up for any of the school PTAs this year because last year they averaged 1-3 emails per week per PTA.

So I feel a little bombarded, particularly this week when all three schools are very focused on their upcoming Parent Teacher Conferences and school fundraisers. I am over-contacted. Yet I am sure that every day the school secretaries get phone calls asking questions about exactly the information that they’ve handed out multiple times in multiple ways. They bombard me because it saves time answering parent questions over the phone and like spam, sending multiple messages is as easy as sending one.

Today I got a phone call from the school that I was very happy to receive. It was one of the teachers calling me directly to talk over concerns about one of my kids. We talked and problem solved for about 20 minutes and agreed that a conference with additional staff members might be beneficial. This is the heart of why I put up with the noise, the candy sales, the demands, the emails, the phone calls, because, in the end, all of those things begin with adults who care passionately about helping kids have the opportunities that they need. Some of the programs which are noise to me are vital for some other child. Because of this, I will exercise my patience. And submit a suggestion that maybe it would be possible to allow parents to opt out of the automated announcement phone calls.

In Quest of an Edible Lunch

By / September 17, 2012

The volume of kvetching over school lunch offerings increased this fall. Though that sentence does not paint an accurate picture. My kids would state their complaints if asked, but mostly they engaged in silent protest. Two of them independently decided that they would rather go hungry than eat anything served at school, and a third began hauling salt and spices to school in order to doctor the meals. Adding up all the information makes clear that something has changed in our current kid and school lunch configuration. Paying for school lunch bought me a measure of stress relief, but this year the kids are not demanding as much from me in the way of homework support, so I have extra cycles to explore home lunch options.

I began by ordering some bynto boxes from Goodbyn. These are three-compartment containers with lids. I figure we have a better shot at getting the kids to actually eat lunches from home if I can make the presentation enjoyable. The boxes are due to arrive at the end of the week. Until then my kids will be bagging it. I fully expect there to be challenges in the form of lost boxes, boxes left at school, and boxes not rinsed out after school. My junior high and high school kid have both been subjected to the indignity of having to actually seek out their lockers and learn how to open them so that they will have a place to put their lunches. I guess they’ve just been carrying all their books all day long.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be coming up with variety while keeping the prep process as brainless as possible. Kiki does not like sandwiches, while Link does not like wraps. Patch does not like cheese very much and everyone else does. We’re going to have to do some experimentation to discover which foods best survive transportation to school and sitting at room temperature. In theory this should be familiar ground. I grew up bringing lunch to school and considered buying school lunch to be a treat. I know how to do this, but knowing theory is different from practiced knowledge. It is going to take us time to add this into the rhythm of our days. That process is going to be disrupted by my departure next Monday, or maybe it won’t. There is every chance that Howard and the kids will own this process in my absence and I’ll come home to discover that there is a working system.

Let the quest for edible lunches commence.

The Long Hard Hike

By / September 6, 2012

There was a moment of decision at the beginning of the day which shaped everything that came after. It was a simple wooden sign pointing down two different possible paths through the Devil’s Garden in Arches National park. We hadn’t done much research on the trail, so confronted with this sign we made a decision almost whimfully. “This way.” Link said with a swing of his arm. The rest of us shrugged and followed.

It was a long low trail with a sandy path. If not for the sand shifting under our feet, the walk would have been easy. It was still pleasant though tiring for legs and feet. I noticed how the earlier rain had not soaked in past the top layer of sand. Each footprint broke through this wet layer into the dry sand underneath.

We kept walking, exclaiming at discovered pools of water in hollows of rock, or admiring the huge fins of rock that drew closer and then surrounded us. The landscape was desert, but beautiful.

Then we met a couple coming the other way. They told us that up ahead was a steep scrabble across a slickrock boulder. Even the name slickrock sounded a bit ominous. The woman hadn’t felt confident about it, so they’d turned back. Something in their words implied that this one steep spot was the hard part of the trip and if only they’d gotten past it, they could have had the rest of a pleasant hike. We rounded a curve of rock to see this steep place. A group was ahead of us and we watched an older woman with two walking sticks make the traverse with the help of her family members. If she can do it, so can we. It was the unspoken thought in all our heads. If we could only get past this one hard part, we could complete our lovely hike. Besides, we’d already been walking for an hour. It seemed better, easier even, to climb over the hard place and continue.

The spot was more than just steep. It was narrow and there was a slope down to a crevasse. It was simultaneously a simple place to cross and a dangerous one. Confident steps carried one across and up in less than thirty seconds. Howard helped three of the kids to the top and told them to wait. Link does not walk confidently, not over slickrock. Howard and I climbed with Link, one in front, one behind. It was a frightening walk with Link who does not like heights, who out weighs me, who sometimes freezes up when faced with a challenge. It was scary coaxing him up, but we succeeded.

We continued on our way, feeling glad that the hardest part was behind us. It wasn’t. We were one hour into a hike that would take another hour and a half to complete. That remaining ninety minutes was made out of scrambling up slopes, down slopes, looking for stacks of rocks to tell us we were still on the trail, and several ridge crossings where we had to walk along the top of the ridge with drops on both sides. Both Link and Howard suffer from vertigo. Our Gleek loved it all, so did Kiki, I would have loved it too, except I knew that Link was frequently scared and/or miserable. The fatigue grew until all the kids were asking to just go back to the car. Faced with each new challenge, we kept urging them forward because no matter what unknown lay ahead, it was still surely the fastest way to be done with the hike. Every challenge complete became one more argument for continuing onward. We didn’t want to face those things again. Particularly not that narrow passage of slickrock.

Oh, and periodically a squall would pass over us making everything cold and wet. Sometimes the wind would blow just as we had to cross a high ridge.

We kept going, even though we sometimes wanted to cry, even though our legs began to feel like jello, even though we doubted we could make it. There really wasn’t any other option. The only way out was through.

As the day wore on, Link learned to keep going despite the rough terrain. He stopped freezing up and began to find his own paths, the safest ones he could identify. We were a very tired set of hikers when we scrambled down that last ridge to the flat trail with the wooden sign post. I looked at the post and realized that had we gone the other way, we would have been just ten minutes into the hike when confronted with the first ridge walk. With only ten minutes to lose, we would have turned and gone back. The day would have been very different.

That hike through Devil’s Garden was hard. I would never have chosen to subject my kids to that level of difficulty. I spent most of the drive back to our condo picturing the many ways that various traverses could have ended in disaster. But they didn’t. Instead we have a shared memory of struggling and overcoming. We got to see places, like Private Arch, which simply can not be seen any other way. I still remember rounding the corner to Private Arch and having it appear right in front of us. We were the only ones there and peace filled us.

It felt like a sanctified place to us, the farthest point on the long hike. It was a place we could never see without struggling first. We sat there for a long time. When we finally left, Gleek said “I need to come back here again sometime.” I agreed.

I think about the Devil’s Garden hike when I meet someone at the beginning of a journey that I know will be hard. It may be a person embarking on graduate school, or a residency, or a dream to become a published writer. Even if they are aware that there is struggle ahead, it is impossible for them to know how difficult. If it is a path I have walked, I want to warn them, tell them that maybe they want a different path. Part of my heart wants to save others from pain and struggle. I have to remember that if I do, I also take away the potential for triumph. The only way to get to Private Arch is by climbing through some scary places.

We met others on the path as we walked, they were headed where we’d already been. Sometimes they asked us about the trail. We were honest about the difficulty, gave ideas about how to handle it if they chose to proceed, and told them how beautiful it all was. We told them to follow the trail markers and keep going. We added to those trail markers as we hiked.

Some day I’ll hike that Devil’s Garden trail again. It will be hard again, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean I should avoid it.