parenting

Scattered Day

By / November 12, 2012

I usually love it when my children ask a question which demonstrates a new level of adult comprehension. I enjoy the conversations which tend to follow. However the question “What do internet predators want kids for?” is never going to be fun to answer. Especially when the child asks astute follow up questions if my answers tend to the general. I believe if a child has enough emotional and social development to ask the question, that child ought to be given a truthful answer even if the answer is disturbing. Unfortunately some questions require definitions of terms and discussions of biological realities. So I am now trying to think happy thoughts.

In addition to the question above, today included a child with an ingrown toenail. Some significant crankiness which was well managed by those who felt it, but still spread out a bit. Extra trips out to run errands for two kids. A declaration that Mythbusters qualifies as a family activity. Cold and snow that is beginning to melt. Work on the family photo book. And… something else. Surely there must be something else to help me account for all the hours between now (9:40 pm) and 6:30 this morning.

Ah well. Hopefully tomorrow can feel more focused, less interrupted, and calmer.

Sunday Afternoon Parenting

By / November 4, 2012

It is, naturally, the day after a teacher compliments Gleek on her much improved behavior at church that Gleek has a melt down. However it is a measure of great progress that the “melt down” would barely measure on a scale which we used in days of yore. On the way home from church Gleek’s tale of woe spilled forth. It had far more to do with not wanting to grow up than anything else, which makes me wonder what arguments were aimed at her in the effort to get her to comply. Or maybe today was just the day for Gleek to stare oncoming teenagerhood in the face and be afraid of it.

Because one emotional upheaval is insufficient for Sunday afternoon, Link had to face down his communications merit badge. He’s recently decided that he does want to become an Eagle Scout and that he wants to do it before he is sixteen. I find this a worthy goal, mostly because I’m so glad to see him picking any goal and heading for it. Link needs some focus right now. Except there is this one requirement where Link has to lead a meeting, and that felt impossible to him, which meant that he felt like he had to give up the whole goal. I could see his despair and I knew that it would not go away. He really wants this. So we talked and I made some calls. And I arranged for the meeting to take place this Wednesday in our back yard, on home turf. Beyond that I can’t, and shouldn’t, make this any easier. I can’t give Link this triumph. All I can do for him is insist that he attempt it rather than giving up without trying. He may fail miserably come Wednesday and I have to let him. I much prefer that my children learn lessons about succeeding over hard things, but lessons from failure can be hugely important.

I’m very impressed with my kids just now. It seems like they are all soaring. Yes they’re periodically crashing into emotional messes because they feel like it is all impossible, but then they get up and fly again. Link can not see how his communication skills are improving by leaps and bounds on an almost daily basis. Gleek is afraid of growing up because she’s already mid-process. Every day she’s taking responsibility for her own work and actions. According to Howard Kiki has totally rocked her first full convention experience. She sold some artwork and may have some commissions lined up. Patch had been taking schedule changes in stride instead of getting upset when things do not work out how he expects. I’m sure we will again find ourselves lost in the woods, wondering which way to go in order to help a child. For now the paths are clear and we’ve got some good gliding straightaways ahead.

A Promise to My Son

By / October 18, 2012 / 2 Comments

Last night I looked Link in the eyes and, with every ounce of intensity I could muster, I promised him “I know it is hard now, but it will get better.” He believed me. Even in the middle of feeling like his life was impossible and his challenges were insurmountable, even though he is fifteen and has begun to make value choices independent from mine, even though I’ve sometimes failed him–in that moment he believed me. It helped that I spoke truth.

I’d been listening to him for thirty minutes as he described the difficulties and emotions he faced. I tried not to speak too much, because it is a failing of mine to try to give him words to describe his experiences. I love words. I love wrapping them around concepts and experiences. For most of his life my son has not loved words and he was happy to let me provide them when he did not have them. But now he needs his own words, not mine. He needs to wrestle and struggle to give his own shapes to his thoughts. He needs to cry out in frustration until he manages to discover the words which fit his feelings. I must bite my tongue and not try to fix that struggle, because the struggle is what he needs. In so many ways my son is like the hatchling who must push and work his way out of the shell, because the effort to escape will give that chick the strength to survive everything else that comes later. I can already see the end of this struggle. I can see how far Link has come and how close he is to being free from the shell. He spent thirty minutes talking to me about his feelings, this would have been an impossible feat for him just six months ago. So when I told him it would get better, I knew that it was true. And he believed me.

Within an hour, better had already arrived. I didn’t know it would arrive so quickly, but I’m glad it did. I also know that more struggle is ahead, because he is not done with this process. Watching a chick struggle to hatch–without helping–is hard. So I do the equivalent of making sure that the egg and chick are in a safe place, a warm place. I speak encouragement. I prepare the food and other necessities that the chick will need which the egg did not. I do everything I can to make this easier, except pull off the shell. Then I wait, and occasionally I look into Link’s eyes and promise him that his struggles are temporary. It gets better.

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.

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.

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.

Strategies for Dealing with a Bully

By / September 19, 2012 / 3 Comments

Here at Chez Tayler we are currently managing a couple of situations where one of my kids feels picked on or bullied. This is nothing new. We deal with iterations of this almost every year. We’ve also dealt with situations where I needed to teach my kids not be mean to others. In helping my kids analyze their experiences and formulate strategies, I’ve realized that many of these strategies are fairly universally applicable. So I am going to offer them to the internet as tools for dealing with bullying.

Before I begin talking strategies, I feel it is important to clarify that not every negative social interaction is bullying. Bullying is persistent and there is usually a power differential. If the kids have roughly equal social status you can get all sorts of nasty conflict, but it is not quite the same as bullying. What gets fascinating is that sometimes two kids both feel like they’re being bullied because they perceive the other person as more powerful and popular than they are. Some of the strategies below address true bullying, others are more appropriate to other sorts of social conflicts. I’m going to put them all down, because I can’t be certain which strategy will be most helpful in a given situation. Please be careful and cautious, bully situations sometimes get worse for a time as the bully lashes out at the social shift. If there is any risk of physical danger, get allies–adults, teachers, other parents, friends, people who will help keep you or your child safe.

1. Lay Low. This sounds like the common, and often useless, advice “just ignore it and the bully will stop,” but it is not quite the same thing. Laying low is not hiding and waiting. It is lowering your visibility for awhile to give you space to pay attention to some of the other strategies on this list. Avoid the places you’re likely to see the bully, try not to draw attention. If you are a target of opportunity, or the bullying is taking place in a particular social context, laying low may be all that is necessary to defuse it. This is why the “ignore it” advice still gets handed around. Sometimes it works. Laying low can also resolve social conflicts that are not actually bullying. However if a bully is deliberately seeking victims, this may shift the target, but will not eliminate the behavior; other strategies have to be used.

2. Identify allies. True allies are people you trust to listen and act fairly, not just people who will always take your side. If people only choose sides, you find yourself in the middle of a West Side Story conflict; two groups ready for battle. In theory the staff at the school are impartial people, who will judge fairly. It is not always the case. Look around at how other people are reacting to the bullying. You’ll likely notice some people who do not like it but are not saying anything. These could be allies. Parents should be allies for their kids. Listen in detail, don’t get instantly outraged and defensive. There are two sides to every story and until you know both sides, you are not ready to aim your outrage at the most appropriate target.

3. Identify Causes. Another common bit of advice is that bullies are actually scared inside. This has truth in it. Most bullying is not deliberately malicious for maliciousness sake. It is immature personalities flailing around trying to defend themselves from social harm or to scrabble themselves into a better social position. Some harmful behavior is just inconsiderate and clueless. Feelings of insecurity are a huge driving force for meanness. Figuring out where the hurtful behavior comes from does not necessarily make it hurt less, but it definitely strengthens the person being hurt. It gives you a chance to come up with ideas of how to change the social context. Often clues to the shape of the pain are embedded in the bullying itself. For example: the insecure girl seeks to tear down another girl who she perceives as a competitor. She is trying to push her insecurity off onto someone else.

4. Risk Assessment. Sit down in a safe place to figure out why the things the bully did hurt. Is it physical injury? Is it that you’re afraid that other people will believe the bully’s words? Figure out what the bully has power to damage that matters to you. This lets you focus on undermining the power of the bully carefully and consistently. It gives you specific aspects of the bully situation that you can focus on and untangle. Also spend some time thinking through what power you have. What allies can you bring into play? What new allies can you acquire? What consequences will there be if you take action? What can you do to remove the power of the bully over the things that matter to you? Identifying what you’re most afraid of and what you most want to salvage from the situation helps you better assess what you are willing to risk in order to make the bullying stop. When the bully has no power over anything that matters to you, the bully becomes irrelevant.

5. Extinguishing Behavior. Most bullies are not very self-aware. This means that they can be experimental subjects like Pavlov’s dogs responding to stimulus and rewards. Once you’ve identified some causes and the risks, you can begin to remove rewards for behavior you don’t want and add them for things you do. A boy pulls the girl’s hair because he likes to hear her shriek and he wants her attention. She can begin by stifling her shriek and turning away instead of turning toward. If she also rewards him with attention for a positive behavior, like holding the door open, then the boy will shift his behavior to match the rewards he wants. This tactic works best when applied slowly and subtly. It is particularly effective if allies are part of the plan. Five people working in concert to eliminate an unwanted behavior can make it vanish quickly. Be aware that extinguishing one behavior may make a new unpleasant behavior emerge.

6. Keep Records. I add this one with caution, because for the most part we should let go of the small social harms we receive rather than holding on to them. But if you are dealing with a true bully, someone who persistently tries to undermine you or harm you, then this one is critical. Employ it when the victim is at serious risk of physical or emotional harm. Write down information about bullying incidents, what was said, where it happened, who witnessed it, any proof you have that the incident occurred. These records are first for you, to help you identify patterns. Second they function as evidence if you have to convince someone in authority that they must act against the bully. I do not recommend that children be the ones to keep records. Parents should encourage the kids to tell the stories, but parents keep the records. Do not let the bully know about the records. If the situation resolves, stow the records and let it go.

I know there are other strategies out there, but thus far circling through these has been enough to empower my kids to handle their social conflicts. If you have additional thoughts and strategies, I’d love to see them in the comments.

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.

Inward and Outward

By / September 11, 2012 / 1 Comment

I have been turning inward, staying home, focusing on family. I have been trying to teach myself that not everything is my responsibility to fix and that when things go wrong it is not necessarily my fault. These are important lessons for me, and harder to learn than perhaps they ought to be. I keep circling around like Rabbit, Pooh, and Piglet in the woods, always ending up back at the very same sand pit. It seems like I should focus, work harder, not get distracted. Yet lately I’m running across articles and sermons speaking about reaching out. They are resonating for me and I’m discovering a desire to be a better friend, neighbor, acquaintance, writer. At the exact same time I feel like I should be drawing in, conserving my energy for the things which really matter instead of spreading myself out thin across too many people, too many communities.

I think about these things as I lay curled up on my couch with a blanket over my head. The blanket creates a warm darkness that feels safe. I carefully unclench my jaw. Again. I know that the clenched jaw is a signifier of stress or anxiety, but I don’t know exactly what the stress is or why it is there. It seems that these things ought to have a source, and that I should be able to follow the flow back to that source and figure it out. Find a way to reconfigure my internal landscape so that I can have interior pools of calmness instead of pressured pockets seeking to geyser. I want caverns and pools forming lovely stalactites and stalagmites, not underground hot springs that bubble with the stench of sulfur. Instead I squeeze my eyes tight, unclench my jaw and try to arrange words in my head so that I can write them down later.

Nothing went wrong with the morning. We got up on time, the kids ate breakfast and did their homework with only the mildest of nudges. I did have the remnants of the migraine which struck me the night before. Perhaps I was a little bit sick. Yet I followed my to do list through the tasks of the morning, even to the point of grabbing a quiet moment alone with Gleek to discuss some of the physical manifestations of her anxiety and how we could perhaps redirect those into more socially acceptable avenues during school hours. It was an important discussion. Gleek was quiet, cooperative, and communicative as we discussed reasons and options. I wore my very best therapist hat, dusted off and spruced up because it has seen a lot of use lately. Putting that hat on takes an effort of will these days. It feels so heavy sometimes. Which could possibly be a source for some of the tension, and one of the major reasons I must chant to myself that not every problem is mine to fix, nor my fault. Yet sometimes wearing the therapist hat feeds energy into me instead of pulling it out. Sometimes extending myself means I end up with more, not less.

My feet are cold even curled up under my blanket on the couch. This too is a sign of ambient anxiety. My body pulls warmth toward my core, conserving it for…something. When I am relaxed and centered I am warm to my fingertips and toes. Having the space and time to curl up and contemplate my cold toes is a luxury. Many days I must carry on and get things done without time to contemplate. I can go for quite a long time before I hit a wall, my ability to focus vanishes, and I have to face all the things I’ve not been thinking about. If I can even figure out what they are.

The day before, I watched Gleek in her classroom as the teacher handed out assignments. Unbidden, my brain took note of each one and added it to my task list. I tried to shake them off; they are not my tasks, they’re Gleek’s. Yet it was like getting rid of styrofoam peanuts, they kept drifting and clinging no matter how much I tried to discard them. At homework time, Gleek pulled out her work, and most of it was already complete. She has inherited from me the tendency to work ahead, get things done early, and to fret over assignments before fretting is strictly necessary. This is reassuring to me. I do not have to track her assignments. She will do it. I wonder at what point she will find herself curled under a blanket trying to untangle her thoughts because the same tendencies which make her effective at getting work done also create needless anxieties. All I can do is wear my battered therapist hat and hope to pass on lessons as I learn them.

Eventually enough words line up in my brain that I must record them. I lift the blanket off my head and wrap it around my shoulders. Then I go to my computer and type. Amorphous thoughts are pinned into little black symbols written in pixels, stored as ones and zeros through a mechanism I barely understand. All I really know is that I click and the words are there. My words, trying to wrap themselves around my experiences as a method of conveying those experiences to others. With my words I turn inwards, seeking my thoughts and reasons, trying to figure out why I am the way that I am. My words also reach outward, seeking to connect with others. The seemingly contradictory happens simultaneously through the same action. Perhaps the answer then is to write.

Space is Becoming Cool Again

By / August 31, 2012

A year ago I wrote an article talking about the lack of child-aimed science fiction. It was based on a blog post I wrote in 2009 about an experience with Patch where we deliberately sought out information on the space program. At the time, both times, I expressed concern that my children would not experience the sense of wonder about space that I felt as a child. If people don’t feel that wonder, then funding for space programs will disappear, and that would be sad for all of us.

This month NASA landed another rover on Mars, an event my teenage daughter was excited to watch. Today I picked up a copy of a National Geographic entitled “Exploring Space” As soon as it was spied on the counter, a child snatched it and ran off to read it. Also today, I saw a commercial for Nook Color in which a little girl and her mother read Curious George and then the little girl played space exploration by pretending to be an astronaut. Many congrats to Nook for portraying a little girl aspiring to be something other than a princess or a fairy. It pleases me greatly that the advertising folks at Nook think that space exploration is cool enough to entice people to buy a Nook Color to share with their kids.

I think we might just inspire that next generation of scientists, engineers, and astronauts after all.