Family

Drop Off and First Day

By / August 22, 2016

Pulling out of the driveway didn’t feel like an event, not really, not even with my daughter Kiki’s life packed into the back of the car so she could re-establish herself in her college apartment. We’ve done this before, enough times that I have to pause and think to count them. There was a subtle difference this time, I can feel that we’re nearing the end. She only has 3 semesters left to finish her degree. We’re nearing the time when her life will shift into its next phase, but not quite yet. For now, she gets to have another year with roommates and college classes.

We went out to dinner the night before departure, Kiki, Patch, and I. Patch is firmly of the opinion that there should be a trip out for sushi anytime that Kiki is at home. I sat at the table with my oldest and my youngest (the other two are less fond of sushi and Howard was out of town.) Somehow the conversation turned to school things, and Kiki began telling tales of her junior high experiences. Kiki freely confessed some of the ways in which she made life more difficult for me and for her teachers during those years. I watched Patch as he listened and absorbed the information that this adult sister of his was not-too-long-ago much less adult. I could see him recognizing that if she could be that bad and end up where she’s at now, maybe he could have good paths ahead too. Patch shared some of his stories as well. Kiki listened and laughed along with the various predicaments and adventures. I was so glad we made time for the dinner. I think it gave Patch a chance to re-frame his experiences and contextualize him. It gave him a better shot at having a good year.

The morning of the departure, Link was sad. He would have liked to ride with Kiki and I to drop her off. Link likes long car rides. Unfortunately Kiki’s belongings fill the entire back of my car. In an effort to help him feel better, we went out to breakfast. I’m not sure it worked, but the food was good. Link will be home with us this year because there are ways in which he needs to grow and learn before taking on higher education.

The drive to college was filled with conversation. You’d think that after a summer of living in the same house, we’d have used up all the ready made topics. Somehow the act of packing up the car and driving opened up new sections of thoughts in our brains. We talked about things that we haven’t really paid attention to for most of the summer. Life feels like it has a forward momentum again now that we’ve moved out of the eddy of summer. I didn’t stay long at her apartment. Other years I’ve lingered for hours because we didn’t quite want to let go. Neither she nor I needed that this time. Some of it is influenced by the fact that we’ll see each other again in only three weeks when we’re taking a big family trip together. More of it is because she’s in a good place, ready to face forward and learn new things.

That drop off was two days ago. This morning I dropped Gleek at the high school and waved to Link as he left for his bus stop. The house is quiet. I’ve been awake since 6:30 and working since 8am. I love the structure that school schedule provides to our days. Over time it begins to wear on me, but for today it is a breath of relief. I have more space in my day to really focus on the work I have to do. I don’t know why it feels that way, since my kids are old enough that they don’t really interfere with work anymore. But somehow having them in the house puts part of my brain on parenting duty, and that part can rest when they’re at school. By afternoon I’ll be checking in on the school kids and evaluating what else needs to be done today. I’ll find out how the first days went and whether we have any issues to manage. I don’t really expect any. The hard stuff doesn’t pop up until later.

Walking Into High School

By / August 19, 2016 / 1 Comment

I just watched my 15 year old Gleek walk into the high school building for her orientation day. There was this moment when she walked past the pep squad sent to greet all the incoming sophomores, where the bottom dropped out of my stomach because I could see all the way my daughter was visibly different from what is standard dress and behavior in our community. We live in a place with a predominant religion. In our town 80% of the students she meets will be LDS (Mormon). Since we are too, this is a little bit comforting. We have at least a baseline expectation for what priorities and values the people around us hold, even though there is a lot of individual variation in how committed people are and how they interpret doctrine. My daughter is a walking, visual variation.

The norm in our community is short hair for boys, long hair for girls, conservative dress, natural hair colors. Even the teens who aren’t Mormon tend to follow this norm. Utah is very clean cut, Orem especially so. This morning my daughter walked into the school building with bright blue hair cut into an anime style pixie cut, short in the back, long near her face. She wore flowered cargo shorts and a black hat. Her arms were adorned with sharpie marker flowers and swirls reminiscent of tattoos. Her surface defies the norms of our community. Her heart embraces our religion. She loves church, and she consciously examines its doctrines. She studies scriptures on her own. She has developed her own relationship with God which is part of how she navigates her personal challenges.

Mostly she’s gotten positive reactions from people at church. I get lots of women telling me that they love her blue hair, that she’s adorable. Thus far I haven’t heard from people who think her blue hair is a sign that she is drifting, lost, or not committed. I assume those people are out there, and I’m grateful that thus far they are keeping their judgements to themselves. What I don’t know is how her surface appearance will affect her relations with peers at school. High school always sorts itself into groups. I worry that she’ll be pushed into groups where her appearance matches rather than being able to find places where her heart matches, no matter what she looks like. She enters the school with a group of established friends who have long accepted her for who she is. I hope that continues. I hope she finds people who celebrate both her internal strength and her enthusiastic creativity. I hope she finds friends who will be there and support her on the hard days, because high school always has hard days.

There are so many things I hope and fear. Mostly I try to not let those hopes and fears leak to where she can see them. My emotions are mine, she shouldn’t have to feel the weight of them. In a few hours I’ll go pick her up and I’ll get to hear how everything went. I would love for this year to be more aligned with hopes than with fears.

Ten days to Start of School

By / August 11, 2016 / 1 Comment

Before GenCon we’re in the midst of summer. After GenCon, everything is propelling us toward the onset of school. This is true most years, but feels particularly true this one. I’m still wading through GenCon laundry and accounting, yet my schedule begins to fill up with school things. I filled out school forms, paid school fees, and set up appointments to meet with school counselors. I know that last one isn’t on the list for most parents. There is a part of my brain that wonders if doing it makes me helicopter-y. Except the universal response from the counselors is “Oh yes. We definitely need to meet.” School counselors are very busy people who are not shy about dodging meetings if they think the meetings aren’t necessary.

Tomorrow is the meeting for Patch. We will examine every class to determine how the teachers will affect him. Last year he had one teacher in particular who loved him very much and wanted to help, but the ways that she approached trying to help made him more anxious and shut down. We went several rounds of trying to help her help him. Ultimately we just muddled through. Sometimes it happens that way. There is a limit to the amount of change I can ask of another person in order to accommodate my kid. I can absolutely say things like “write down his assignments for him.” I can’t really say “Make sure that you aren’t projecting anxious concern when you speak to him.” It is easy to define “don’t corner him” when you’re talking about physical space in a room. But unless someone has an instinctive understanding of his internal landscape, they can emotionally corner him without even being aware they have done so. The school year will be much easier if we start by placing him in classrooms where student/teacher affinity already exists, then we can use the affinity to help education flourish instead of spending all our energy trying to create affinity.

Gleek’s school counselor is going to be more difficult to track down, which is not surprising for high school. She’s answered my emails enthusiastically and would have been happy to meet with Gleek today, except that today began with getting Gleek’s wisdom teeth removed. She’s not coherent enough to be out in public quite yet. The teeth removal was a last minute, lets-get-this-done-before-school-starts effort which was triggered by her complaining that her jaw hurt. She’s a teeny person with big beautiful teeth, so I was pretty sure that the removal of the teeth was inevitably going to be necessary. The other school preparation which was important to Gleek was refreshing her blue hair dye. I’ve been assured by two different school personnel that blue hair will not cause her disciplinary problems on campus, but until she’s been on campus for a week without problems, a little worry will linger in my head. Fortunately we already know exactly what classes Gleek has and which teachers. We tuned it carefully, but the rubber meets the road when she actually attends class.

Next week will be Kiki’s packing week. She has to decide which of her things need to be transported to her college apartment and which things can continue to live here until she returns for Christmas. She and I are both getting weary of this nomadic two-location existence. She has 3 semesters of work left, so we probably only have four relocations left to do. I’m feeling how much I’m going to miss having her around. That feeling has varied from departure to departure. This time is a bit stronger than most. Tangled up in the packing week is some frantic scrambling to help her pound a story into shape before she goes. It is getting there, but unfortunately she ends up waiting on me for feedback. Often. Because my brain is full of all the things.

Link is not headed back to school this fall. We’re entering a gap year for him. None of us feel like spending the money or stress pushing him into a college education that he isn’t emotionally ready to handle. Asynchronous development is very common for people with autism. Link is more advanced than his peers in some ways and less advanced in others. He’ll be hanging with Howard and I at the house, taking an evening class, working for me, and pursuing some personal projects. We’ll also have him doing some of the family cooking, life skills for him, dinner for us.

I would like to be super optimistic about the coming school year. I remember that beginning-of-school rush when I looked forward to all the cool things my kids were going to get to do and learn. The past four years have leached all of that out of me. Yes there have been some wonderful teachers, some beautiful moments, but they feel like flickers of light. I’m entering this year with plans already in place for adjusting schedules, pulling back from stress, and partial home schooling as needed. I’ve laid groundwork with allies, and I know who I need to talk to in order to make adjustments happen. I’m braced for emotion. I don’t know what emotions I’ll have. I don’t know when they will hit me. I just know that I’m afraid that the coming months will reveal even more hard things. I refuse to stand helpless if the school system that is designed for typical children begins to wear away at my kids. They are not typical. This is both a wonderful and difficult thing. Of course I’m also afraid that I’ll be too quick to declare “this isn’t working.” So I’m sure I’ll spin in tight stress circles trying to decide what to do.

For today, I’m working to not borrow trouble. I’m consciously recognizing that Patch is going to get to have a couple of computer classes, which have the potential to be amazing for him. Gleek is getting to take a health sciences class which will let her explore possible careers in psychology, therapy, and other medical sciences. I don’t know if she’ll ultimately move that direction, but I think she’ll find the class interesting. There are going to be good things. I need to consciously remind myself of this instead of just stewing in all my fears.

Grandma’s House

By / June 9, 2016 / 1 Comment

It is a house made out of spare parts. I can see this in everything from the doors which are painted black plywood with garden gate handles and hinges to the roof which was made from reclaimed airplane metal. Shale rocks are found in the construction and the walkways, topped by logs probably cut from trees on the property itself. It is a hodge podge place with odd nooks and strange arrangements. Yet the hands which made this house loved it and they had a sense of beauty. It shows everywhere. No wonder that my Grandma, a collector of beautiful things, fell in love with the house. The fact that it constantly needed repair and alteration made it a perfect place for my Grandpa as well, he tinkered with everything.

Quincy house
I’ve written about the house before. It has been two years since I wrote that post. Grandma passed away last October and the time has come to clean out her house and get it ready to sell. I am here this weekend to work and to say goodbye. I walked the house today remembering things as they were and seeing things as they are.

I love the quirks of this house, like the skylight which is constructed of sturdy plastic that is ruffled in the same way that those potato chips with ridges are.
Sky light
I remember the sound of rain hitting this plastic. I also remembered when it started to leak around the edges so layers of plastic sheeting were installed inside and on the roof in an attempt to preserve the light while keeping out the wet.

The rain is slowly winning. It turns out that airplane metal becomes brittle as it ages over sixty years or more. Then it cracks. Most rooms in the house have evidence of water damage. A mildew smell here, stained wallpaper there. Right next to the things I love, I see reminders why we have to let the house go. The house is beginning to fall apart, and it can only be rescued by someone who is willing to pour money into fixing it up. That person has to be willing to live in it and notice the leaks the moment they happen instead of months later when the damage has spread out from the initial spot. No one in our extended family can do this.

I ran my hands over the walls of the rock room. I wish the photograph could catch the shimmer of these rocks. I’ll try again tomorrow with different lighting. Each rock is beautiful, obviously selected carefully and placed by hand.
Rock WallsI remember how warm the wall became when there was a fire in the fireplace on the other side. I stood there as a child, after playing in the snow, holding my hands and face near the wall to get warm again. Grandma would hang our gloves from the wire to dry them out.

In the rock room I noticed this cabinet, which is almost certainly my Grandpa’s work.
Victrola doors
It was exactly like him to pull doors off an old Victrola and put them into use. The Victrola itself is nowhere to be found.

Every room has a mix of eras. Kitchen fixtures from the sixties hold dishes from the eighties and a wall clock that is pure digital modern. Sometimes I can tell which things my Grandparents added and what things are original. I think the front door is original.
Front Door
It looks hand crafted from multiple pieces of wood. It is solid, with a heft when it opens and closes. Next to it you can see a sample of the gorgeous cedar wood paneling that lines several rooms in the house. It is all cut and laid diagonally in the front room so the eye is drawn to the second floor balcony with it’s sky light.

The whole house is beautiful, strange, old, new, damaged, beloved.
And we have to sell it.
Probably to someone who wants the land, not the house. Even if we do find a buyer who will love the house and fix it up, the house will no longer be ours. The process of fixing it up would change it, remove evidence of my Grandparents. We’d have no right to say anything or see the place again. This weekend is my last chance to be with the house. I want to sit with it in silence, touch the walls, remember the things Grandma scolded me for, remember when Grandpa taught me how to use a lathe and how Grandma scolded him for that. I want to sit with the memory of rolling toys down the slanted space under the stairs and of the games I used to play. My parents are hoping that it doesn’t rain thus leaking on the folks who are sleeping at the house, I don’t want anyone to get wet, but I would love to hear the rain on the roof one more time.

Graduation

By / May 27, 2016 / 4 Comments

I can tell from the photos on Facebook that high school graduation happened last night. My son’s peers, the kids he grew up with, smile at me from under square shaped hats while wearing shiny gowns. I’ve wondered how I would feel when this happened. I wondered if it would hurt. Dropping out was a success for my son. Passing the GED was a success. It was the way we needed to take control of his path, and reduce the pressure that was crushing all of us. The decision was right, but it was also a permanent marker of the differences of my son. When we kept him with his grouped peers, those differences were less visible. Or maybe I was more able to fool myself.

Looking at the graduation photos doesn’t hurt in the ways I thought it might. There is some hurt, but it is mixed in with a half dozen other emotions. I’m happy for my friends and their children, for my son’s friends. They are rejoicing and they should be. I wonder if they recognize that the diploma really is an achievement. I know that when I graduated from high school it felt like a participation certificate. Somehow I hadn’t internalized the fact that there are more ways to not get a diploma than there are to get one. I see this far more clearly after I helped my child choose not to get a high school diploma. I still feel guilt about that, a creeping fear that if I’d been better at parenting then my son could have stayed grouped with his friends. So that hurts when I look at the graduation photos.

All the emotions are stronger because earlier this week I was quite forcibly reminded that my son’s path to self-sufficient adulthood is going to be non-standard. While my friends are launching their children, or letting go while the kids fly free, I’m staring down at least three more years of long slow learning. Much of that learning will be in the shape of “Okay try it your way.” When everything in me screams that the way won’t work. Of course, having a high school diploma wouldn’t have changed how the next three years are going to go. All it would have done would be to add massive pressure and delay some of the necessary learning. It was the right choice. I just wish I could stop arguing with myself about it in my head.

Over time I win the arguments, achieve an internal peace on the matter. Until I see the graduation photos. I’m glad people post the photos. It is right that they celebrate their milestones. I’m glad that all the photos have flocks of comments “Wow, she’s so grown up!” “Congratulations!” “I can’t believe he’ll be headed for college.” The comments are evidence of the networks of people who collaborated over the years in helping this child become an adult. Facebook allows that network to participate. I am part of that network. I click Like and perhaps add a comment of my own. Then I move my mouse and click “hide this post.” No need for me to face my emotions over and over as new comments keep floating the image back to the top of my news feed.

In a few days or a week I’ll have found quiet in my head again. I’ll be able to feel (as well as know) that everyone has their own path and that all journeys are valid. We’ve had triumph already and more triumphs are coming, even if they don’t look much like triumph from the outside.

Mother’s Day Wishes

By / May 8, 2016 / 2 Comments

These are my Mother’s Day wishes for everyone out there in the world who needs them.

May you have less guilt today than usual. Less guilt about the job you feel you ought to be doing. Less guilt about feeling like you should have done more for the mother in your life (or the one who is no longer in your life). Less guilt about the planning you intended to do, but didn’t because other priorities took your attention. Less guilt about how you should do a better job teaching your children to honor their mother. Less of the accompanying guilt that you are selfish because you are the beneficiary of the reminders you give to your kids that they ought to be nice to their mother. That’s a recursive guilt, I hope you don’t have it in your life today or any other day.

May you have less stress. Particularly less stress that is associated with taking care of others. Even more particularly, may you not feel under pressure to have a wonderful day because if you don’t then everyone around you will feel like they failed and then you’ll all spiral into the recursive guilt which is unpleasant for everyone. I hope you can dismiss this stress, and any other pressure to present yourself as other than you are.

May you have fewer strings that tangle your choices. Most particularly strings that are attached to gifts. May all your gifts be stringless. May you be able to move through your obligations today without encountering any tangles. May you have a day where the needs of one person do not conflict with the needs of another, and where you are not called upon to be the arbiter of who is unhappy.

May you have a quiet moment of beauty. It can be a moment you created deliberately, or one you wander into. It may be as long as a soak in a hot tub, or as short as noticing a flower outside your window. I just hope you have a lovely thing in your day.

I hope all of these things for anyone who needs them, mothers, non-mothers, children, parents, grandparents, care-takers, and care receivers. And one last wish: May you extricate today from the weight of expectation and make it into the day you need it to be.

The Pattern and Flow of Habits

By / March 17, 2016

Things slip into being normal without us quite realizing it. This is neutral, because both good and bad things can slip into place.

The other day I was discussing homework with Patch because he needs to hustle to bring some grades up before the end of the term on Friday. We talked about how he likes to take a break and relax right after school, but that this often leads to us getting distracted. Then we get to bedtime without the homework done. “We used to connect homework to dinner time, but we don’t really do dinner anymore.” He was so matter of fact as he said it. And I felt an echo of guilt for the family dinners we haven’t had in years. Instead we tend to congregate in the kitchen, each fixing our own single serving of food from the available groceries. We don’t often have all of us together, but it is frequent for two or three of us to be there chatting while we fix and then eat our food. If the point of family dinner is connection, well we’ve found some different formats for that. Yet I’m all too aware that there are social graces and cooking skills that would be better practiced with scheduled family dinners. And we could have homework time after dinner the way we used to do.

This morning Howard and I watched a movie as soon as the two youngest were out the door to school. It was a movie with more swearing in it than I’m comfortable showing to my kids. It also wasn’t likely to interest them since so much of the film had to do with banking rather than explosions. It used to be that we’d watch this sort of movie after the kids were in bed for the night. These days the kids go to bed at pretty much the same times that we do, though I’m currently working to change the habit for the youngest two into an earlier bedtime. In theory, now that the kids are older, I don’t need the off-duty down time as much as I used to do. After all, I’m not doing hands on care for them anymore. They manage their own things, their own dinners. Sort of. Except when they don’t and they flop next to me and want me to do things for them because the things are haaaard. Yes. Adulting is hard and I get why my teenagers want to flop and let me do it for them. Particularly the ones who aren’t actually adults yet. So I still end my days longing for some off duty time, and usually not getting it. Which is why Howard and I have moved some of our dates into the middle of work hours. I feel a little guilty about that, but Howard and I need some child-free time somewhere.

Howard sat with our cat in his lap, gently stroking her fur. “We need to make her a vet appointment for a check up.” I agreed. She seems perfectly healthy, but she is getting up there in years and we want to make sure that we’re doing what we can to keep her in good health. Somewhere in the years we slid from no pets, to having an outdoor cat, to having an indoor cat. We moved from not being willing to spend much on upkeep to being willing to pay significant sums to keep her in good health.

The patterns of our lives drift, carried by the currents of our choices. They changed when Link went to partially homeschooled. They changed again when he dropped out completely and studied for the GED instead. They changed when Gleek developed a passionate interest in rollerblading multiple times per week. They changed when Patch picked up cello and again when he put it down. They change every time Kiki comes home from college and every time she goes back. Sometimes I want to make a deliberate pattern change and it is like walking upstream against a strong current. I end up bedraggled and exhausted, not very far from where I started. Other times a change just falls into the flow of other things effortlessly. I’m working to recognize when changes aren’t worth fighting the current, when they are, and how to design a change so that it goes with the flow instead of against it.

For now, I need to put aside these thoughts and dive into the creative flow necessary for Planet Mercenary writing and editing.

Today is a Good Place

By / January 5, 2016

I’m on the second school morning of the new year…and it is going really smoothly. Usually we hit the second day and it is hard because we’re tired and feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the things we’d forgotten we ought to be doing over the holidays. Except that yesterday Link was like a different person than the one I’ve been dealing with. He was up and focused, ready to work. He put in several hours as my assistant and also reviewed the school work he needs to be doing. It seems that finding a dream makes a huge difference in what he is capable of doing in a day. I’ve seen this forward-momentum version of Link before, but not for at least two years. Two long, depressed, emotionally difficult years. I’m not yet certain that the forward momentum will last past the first goal, but maybe it will. For now, I’ll be grateful for every day we get to have it.

Last night I had a conversation with Patch about his (giant) pile of missing and overdue assignments. The term ends on Friday and he has to hustle this week in order to pass a couple of his classes. For the first time in a long time, Patch was able to talk with me calmly about what needs to be done. For the past year or more, any discussion of incomplete work triggered anxiety and sometimes a full panic attack. He was able to acknowledge that while he doesn’t want to have to do the assignments, he really does want them to be complete. We made a plan for working on things. The plan included a reward and consequence structure that Patch thought through himself. He’s learning how to motivate himself in good ways. We also discussed the possible failure points of our plan, one or both of us may forget to follow through. We’ll see how it goes this afternoon. He was pretty tired this morning.

Gleek has continued her habits of getting herself ready for school and out the door. She’s always prepared for class and gets grades that make all the adults around her pleased. Over the last week or two it became clear that the same thing that makes it so I don’t have to manage her academic life, also causes difficulties in other areas. So Gleek will be getting more attention in the coming weeks. I’m fine with that. I like spending time with Gleek, she makes me laugh.

Kiki is off at college, doing college things. Her classes start on Wednesday. Howard has thus far experienced the regular ups and downs of daily creative work. Though having the quiet hours when the kids are out of the house makes it easier for us to settle in to working. All in all, it has been a really good start to the new year. I’m feeling happy and hopeful, which is a nice change. I’m not going to try to project trends or make predictions about what is coming for us this year. Instead I’m just going to recognize that yesterday was a really good day for me, and I’m going to try to make today be good as well.

Applying for Passports

By / December 30, 2015 / 1 Comment

It turns out that if you arrive at the passport office and the nice lady discovers that the name on your driver’s license is misspelled (which no one noticed at any point in the past four years), that the wisest course of action is to put applying for a passport on hold and instead apply to have the driver’s license corrected. The nice passport lady explained that the conflict of spellings might upset the passport people so much that they would begin to question the validity of all provided documents and we would then be digging around for “proofs of identity” such as yearbook photos. (Apparently this is the reason that I’ve been shelling out money for kids yearbooks all these years. Who knew? Also, I may end up regretting throwing mine out. Though since my passport is already acquired I’m probably okay.)

Since Kiki’s identification was the one misspelled, we dropped all the other family members back at the house. Then Kiki and I went on a ninety minute adventure at the DMV which was exactly like sitting in a chair and being bored for ninety minutes. We did have the entertainment of a young woman behind us who kept declaring that she felt bad about some relationship thing that was going on in her life. I couldn’t hear her mother’s replies. I wasn’t trying to hear the young woman either, but she so clearly enunciated and projected every word that I couldn’t help it. Eventually they left before their number was called. Presumably to go apologize to the boy in question. After that the only entertainment available was reading the looped slideshow about the value of organ donation, or playing games on our phones. Eventually Kiki’s number was called. Two minutes of paperwork was done. And now we get to wait four weeks for Kiki’s new license to show up. So that we can apply for her passport and then wait six weeks for that to arrive.

In the meantime the passports for the other kids should show up in about six weeks. Unless they’re rejected for some minor error, like the fact that Gleek wore her glasses in the photo. The passport lady said it was probably fine and she’s pretty expert at her job, so: fingers crossed.

All of this documentation effort is so that we can take the kids with us on a cruise next fall. Also, I like the idea of my kids having passports so that if we were to decide to take some other trip out of the country, we could just go.

Now it is 3pm and I really should be settling in and getting some work done, but my brain is tired from everything above. I might nap a bit instead.

Triforce Heroes

By / December 28, 2015

One of the games which made an appearance on Christmas was three copies of Triforce Heroes. This is a Zelda game for 3DS which is best enjoyed with three players who are sitting in the same room with their three devices. At first it was Kiki, Link, and Patch, but over time Patch lost interest and went off to play other games. This left Kiki and Link in need of a third player. They drafted me.

I’m not a particularly experienced player of video games. I played Nintendo 64 quite a bit when the kids were young because they liked to watch. Recently I picked up the new version of Majora’s Mask and have been playing through that. But I don’t have the practice or twitch speed that my two kids have. This is fine. My job is to follow along, not get hit by the bad guys and to assist in the solving of puzzles. I like not being in charge. I like moving through a world where the kids are the experts and they look out for me. “Mom you just stay up there until I kill all the skeletons.” “If you run close to the middle when it shoots, you won’t get hit by the laser.” Occasionally I show unexpected expertise and then I get a “Way to go Mom!”

Of course the game sometimes gets frustrating. There are times where I lose track of which little person I’m piloting on the screen and I accidentally run off the edge. Or none of us know how to beat a monster and it kills us over and over again. I may have said things like “Agh! I’m no good at this!” and it is possible that I stomped my feet on the floor in frustration. Then I looked up to see my kids looking at me with wide eyes. “Mom, do we need to take a break?” No. I was fine. The frustration was momentary. It comes and goes in the intensity of the moment. They just aren’t used to seeing me distressed in that particular way. So we all took a deep breath and agreed we’d give the frustrating monster one more try. We made a plan for who would take which role in the attack. And then we beat the thing. Together.

Triforce Heroes is a brilliant game for getting three people to practice team work. We try things and they don’t work, so we try different things. We talk about what we’re seeing, because it is impossible to complete the game unless we cooperate. I’m having a great time playing with my kids. I needed the challenge, the cathartic frustration, and the uproarious laughter. I kind of hope that Patch stays uninterested so I can finish the story with the others.