parenting

I Don’t Think this is the Tuesday I Ordered

By / July 29, 2014

I’m certain that I did not request to be awakened at 5am by a cracking sound in my neck followed by pain. An hour of stretching, laying on rolled towels, and using a ball for pressure point therapy, all failed to fix whatever it was. So I had a morning of pain, smelly lotions to loosen muscles, and slow movements. Fortunately Howard was able to help me reset some of the alignment, which means I remain stiff and sore, but the pain will subside when my muscles decide to unlock.

Also on the not-entirely-expected list, Link picked an Eagle Scout Project. He’s working with Habitat for Humanity to build a tool shed for a community garden. It is an excellent project, well suited to Link, and obviously needed. Yet suddenly the next few weeks have an array of project related tasks to complete. Many of them have more to do with paperwork than with the actual project. BSA runs on paperwork. I think one of the hardest parts of the project for me will be keeping my hands off. I can picture all of it in my head. I can make it happen. But this is Link’s project, not mine. He is the one who has to make it happen. Not me. That is the point. My role should be limited to asking “Have you thought about this? How do you think you should handle that?”

Related to pain and loss of sleep, extra napping was necessary and stole some work hours.

I knew that today was the day I sent Gleek off to Church Girl’s Camp for five days. I put it on the calendar months ago. I’ve seen it on the calendar many times since. Yet somehow I arrived on Sunday and thought “Oh. That’s this week?” She packed up all her things yesterday and I helped her review them this morning. We went to the church and I lingered for a bit because I need to make sure that a leader was aware of Gleek’s daily medications. I watched Gleek as she joined with the other girls. Last year I spent two months with lots of attention focused on Gleek and camp. I wasn’t certain she could handle it or I wasn’t certain it was fair to the leaders to impose her particular bag of troubles on them. I didn’t know what the stresses of camp would do to Gleek’s anxieties. I had to skip out on half of the writer’s retreat I wanted to attend because I needed to be the one who sent Gleek off to camp. Last year camp was hard and full of anxiety, which is why it surprised me that it sneaked up on me this year. It arrived and I hadn’t been thinking about it. That in itself is a huge measure of progress from last year to this year. Gleek went off to camp happy and I feel confident that whatever difficulties the leaders have with her will be within the range of challenges that are normal with any thirteen year old girl.

After the pain, sending Gleek to camp, the nap, and the eagle project paperwork, I really thought it would be time to sit down and get some focused work done. Unfortunately my brain decided it needed to do 1500 words of writing first. Not writing on my fiction project, nor writing in a blog post. Nope. It was pages of dumping out the contents of my brain just to see what is in there. I have to do that sometimes. It helps me figure out where the anxiety is coming from. Today’s fun anxiety symptom is heart palpitations. Haven’t had those in a while and they seem directly related to the pain, so I know they’ll go away. Yes I’ve had them checked by a doctor. I wore a heart monitor and everything. There is no physiological reason for them. They’re caused by anxiety, and in this case, pain.

I’ve now reached 4:30pm. This day was similar to what I thought it would be, though I’d hoped to get a lot more work done by this hour. Life can not always be executed as planned and I just have to roll with what comes instead.

Playing with Identity

By / July 19, 2014 / 3 Comments

This afternoon I helped Gleek add highlights to her hair. They went on top of the red that we colored her hair several weeks ago. Neither of us was completely happy with the red by itself, but I think the highlights really make the red work in a way it didn’t before. I’d always said that once my kids were twelve, I’d help them color their hair if they wanted. Gleek has been the first child to take me up on it.

Gleek has also been experimenting with clothing. She has decided that ties are awesome and sometimes wears one. One day she donned a white shirt and tie, slicked her hair back and looked very much like a boy, except for the curves. Gleek liked this look. I worried about how the world at large would react to it, but didn’t argue with her. Her identity is hers to define, not mine. I don’t know that she got any overtly negative reactions, but she’s since reverted to clothing that is socially more standard for girls.

Sometime last fall I became aware that Gleek’s friends and teachers were all calling her Leeka. Not literally, but they were calling her a variant of her real name that bears as much resemblance to it as Leeka does to Gleek. I always find it interesting when teens choose their own nicknames. Kiki ended up with hers because she decided it was easier to let people call her by it than to try to explain how to pronounce her full name. Gleek, who already goes by a shortened version of her full name, went out of her way to ask people to call her something different. They did. It’s a cute name and it suits her.

Thirteen is a prime age for playing with identity. Gleek has left behind the child that she was and is trying to figure out who she is now. It is fun to be an observer and assistant while she figures it out.

Past and Present: Conversations with Other Mothers

By / July 15, 2014 / 3 Comments

Changing diapers was part of my daily existence for ten years. I remember being puzzled at the reactions of people for whom it wasn’t. They spoke of diapers as this huge and distasteful chore. As far as I was concerned, diapers were easy. Keeping hold of my highly-active toddler in a public space while eight months pregnant, that was hard.

Today I am babysitting my sister’s kids and I changed a stinky diaper. I noted within myself exactly the sorts of reactions that used to puzzle me when I observed them in others. The influx of small children means that our toy cupboard vomited its contents across the family room in a way that hasn’t happened since the last time this set of children came to visit. I had to watch and respond to a toddler with my mommy radar turned all the way up to ten, in order make sure that he was safe and that he didn’t endanger any of the things which are important to our family. I used to just flow with these things and bend my life around them. Now it all feels like a big intrusion. I willingly agreed to the intrusion. I like my sister’s kids. I’m glad to watch them for the day. Yet at the end of it I will be quite glad to return to a quieter house.

I’m on the other side of the fence these days. I used to be the mother of young children who mostly stayed home because I didn’t want to impose my personal invading force on society at large. Now I’m the one who gets intruded upon, at home, in public spaces. Mostly I don’t mind or am even amused or enlivened by the presence of other people’s children. I watch with tolerance and sympathy when a toddler tantrums in a grocery store. And, yes, sometimes I observe with annoyance. I like my friends’ kids quite a lot. They are charming little people and I marvel at seeing the world through their eyes and watching them change from visit to visit. Yet in the world at large, it sometimes feels like I’ve become the enemy. I am the mother of older children who is perceived as judging the mother of young children. I am a font of boring stories about when my kids were little. Being around young children brings all those memories to the forefront of my mind, and in that moment I think I remember how hard it all was. I want to help, or make it easier, so I spill the stories in an effort to form some sort of camaraderie. I’m trying to say that we’re all in this together. That is not the result.

My self awareness of this is thanks to a good friend of mine, a mother of a young child, who cared enough about our friendship to address the issue with me. It is hard to be critiqued on this sort of thing. I’ve done a lot of thinking as a result. I’ve also done quite a bit of observation of myself and of others. I’ve come to the conclusion that my years of experience as a parent don’t make me any sort of expert, because my children are different from those of my friends. I raised them in a different decade, in a different social context, with a different house, and a different husband. There are so many differences as to make my solutions and stories irrelevant. Instead of trying to provide help or advice, it is my job to listen. When my friend’s current concern triggers a memory, I should stay with their experience, not intrude mine. At some point in the conversation my friend may outright ask for advice, that is the appropriate time to share something from my own parenting experiences.

Shortly after my friend’s critique I altered my conversational strategies with a different pair of friends who have young children. It was hard at first. All my instincts told me that the way to be friends with other mothers was to talk over our similar experiences. But their current lives match my past, not my present. A story fell out of my mouth out of habit and I watched the conversation dive into a lull as a result. I did better after that. I had a wonderful and emotionally connecting afternoon. It was the first time in a long time I did not spend large portions of the conversation feeling out of step and old. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I had to match their present experiences with my present experiences. The contrast in those experiences was what made the conversation fun for all of us. They were far more interested in hearing about my current dealings with teenagers than in my past struggles with potty training.

I’m very grateful to be making these realizations now, years before I have grandchildren. I shudder to think what unfortunate miscommunication loops I might have set up while trying to “help” my children parent their own kids. I was well on my way to becoming a person I never want to be, and I would have been driven toward it by an ever-more-intense desire to connect.

I still have thinking and learning to do. I have to fine tune when my accumulated experiences add to conversations and when they do not. After all, I started this blog post by delving into a memory. At one point I paused and considered whether I wanted to re-write it, because it seemed to demonstrate exactly the story-dropping behavior that I’m trying to extinguish. I eventually decided that this is my space and an appropriate venue for me to examine my experiences out loud. My experiences may be irrelevant to the world at large, but they are important to me. It is crucial that I see the difference and converse appropriately. It is also crucial that I don’t squelch all my stories in all contexts.

Balance is hard. I’m sure that I’m getting something else wrong as I try to correct this. All I can do is strive onward.

On the Dreams of Children

By / December 3, 2017 / 1 Comment

When a child expresses an impossible dream, listen to it and help her identify small steps she can take toward it. We often squelch the dreams of children because we don’t want them to be disappointed, so we disappoint them now, trying to save them from an imagined larger disappointment later. Odds are that long before you reach the impossible part of the dream, the child will have moved on to a different dream, but she’ll still carry what she learned trying to reach for the first one. And sometimes, if the right groundwork is laid, the impossible becomes possible.

Kiki’s Birthday

By / May 16, 2014

I failed at birthdays last year, which is sad because all of my kids hit significant milestones. Gleek turned 12, Patch 10, Link 16, and Kiki 18. All the birthdays hit in the midst of other things and though I wanted to give them full attention, I just didn’t have that. The one I failed worst was Kiki. When I look at all the things going on at that time, the failure is understandable. I had all the end-of-the-school-year stuff. I had meeting after meeting about Gleek to make sure that we had her anxiety under control and things set up properly for the next year. I’d just sent The Body Politic off to print. We were expecting the coins the next week. I had relatives incoming for Kiki’s graduation. There was also the trecherous emotional terrain we were marching through having our first child graduate and be college bound. I wasn’t entirely stable. I careened through that month just trying not to crash. Then two days before the birthday, my hard drive failed and I had data loss. Computer failure is always massively anxiety inducing and I was already maxed out. So, yes, completely understandable that the birthday did not go as we would have hoped, but still painful.

I remember talking with Kiki about having a low key birthday and thinking it would be okay. We were getting her a laptop for her combined birthday/graduation present. It was the largest and most hoped-for present she’d ever gotten in her life. We went on her birthday to pick it out, but it had to be configured, so she did not get to take it home and play with it on her birthday. If I’d thought that through I would have realized that computers are rarely things to walk in and take home. I’m pretty sure that Howard took her out for sushi that birthday afternoon. So it is not that we deliberately ignored her, nor that we forgot. I thought it was all good. But she was sad, because most of the day had been just a normal day. Then at bedtime Patch had a meltdown because he hadn’t given her a present and it was really important to give her a present because she was leaving and her leaving was sad. Patch’s meltdown reminded Link and Gleek that they felt the same way. So I piled the three younger kids into the car and took them to Walmart to buy presents. I guess Kiki was in the shower or something. Somehow we left the house without her knowledge.

Though I would have liked to have done the shopping trip earlier (ahead of time, instead of late) as I walked with my kids through Walmart, I realized this was exactly what they needed. I watched them as they looked at towels, mugs, etc. Looking at these things, they were actually picturing Kiki at college and thinking about her there. They each selected a thing that they thought she would use and appreciate. Then each one knew that their sister would be taking something that they had selected for her. Much love went into the selection of those gifts. Every bit as much as if they’d shopped earlier, though for obvious reasons advance shopping would have resulted in a different birthday experience for everyone. When we arrived home we had a 10:30pm “patch up the feelings” birthday party. There were smiles and hugs. Kiki was touched that we’d disrupted bedtime in order to try to make the birthday more what it should have been. It was definitely not the 18th birthday that Kiki emotionally needed.

There were about two weeks between Kiki’s birthday and her graduation. I gave her a small gift on each of those days. I called it eighteen days of celebrating Kiki. We both knew it didn’t erase the birthday that wasn’t what it ought to have been, but it let me show that the hard day was not for lack of caring. I don’t know if it really helped or if she was humoring me.

This year is different. Kiki really doesn’t need more than a low-key birthday. She went to a movie with Howard. I fixed her lunch and took her shopping. She got plants; a philodendron from me and a little bonsai tree from Gleek. Link gave her the stuffed portal cube that he had. Patch gave her books. Howard gave her an easel. It was still more cobbled together than advance-planned, but the key is that she never felt ignored nor neglected. Not once. Not only that, but I was able to tell her about my (failed) quest for a lucky bamboo plant. It was a story that demonstrated that I’ve been thinking of her and her birthday for over a month in various bits and pieces. (This is usually true. I think a lot, but actually pull things together just in time.) The love is no different between this year and last, but the emotional needs and capabilities vary greatly. Last year Kiki was looking ahead to leaving home and needed evidence that she was loved and would be missed. This year she’s just arrived home and had seen in a dozen ways how glad we all are to have her here. Different year, different emotional needs.

Kiki and I talked about last birthday and this birthday. I don’t believe any hard feelings linger. But I did have a moment of being appalled when I remembered the scrambled 10pm shopping trip. I’d actually forgotten that part until Kiki mentioned it. It is one more evidence of how insane last year was. I’m so glad to be in this year now. I’m also glad that I don’t have to figure out any more birthdays for a while. They’re hard to get right.

Learning is not Always Fun

By / April 26, 2014 / 4 Comments

I read a blog called Mayaland. I love reading Maya’s blog. Her approach to life and raising kids warms my heart. They have adventures, a pond which sometimes has a turtle, a dog, there used to be goats, and they build houses out of found parts. I truly respect Maya for the life she has built and how she is raising her kids.

Maya unschools her kids. This is a form of homeschooling that doesn’t require structure or formal lessons. Instead it lets the kids follow their own interests. Maya wrote about how it works for them. I’m so glad that it does work for her family, but that post made me cry. In particular, this sentence hit me hard:
“learning is easy when you’re having fun”
Because I do not think that all learning can be fun for all people. I do not believe that a dyslexic child, left to herself, will automatically learn how to read when she is “ready.” There are a host of other challenges and disabilities which act as road blocks to learning because the associated activities can’t be fun. At least not until a certain level of skill is acquired first. Yes it is possible to use future fun as an incentive to get over the hard bits, but for some people learning itself is hard. Worthwhile, rewarding, but hard.

I remember fourteen years ago when my two and a half year old son was tested for developmental delays. That test revealed much, as did the classes and education that came afterward. The classes taught me how to teach him. My son did not know how to communicate beyond a couple dozen words. He did not even know how to point to indicate something he wanted. Toddlers point and insist on the things they want. They demand and reach to communicate. My son didn’t. The teachers gave me a simple activity to teach my son how to point. An M&M candy in a cup with a black dot on it. I put my son’s finger to the dot and gave him the candy. We played the game four times and the lights went on. Suddenly he pointed at all the things he wanted and his world was larger. A simple adult-structured activity gave him a tool that enabled him. Yet that first time, I had to grab his hand and put his finger on the dot. I had to push him to do something that did not come naturally to him.

When the time came to teach my son to read, I used exactly the book that Maya dismisses as a waste of time. I didn’t need a structured reading program for my older child. She took to reading easily, but my son needed someone to break things down for him. He needed smaller steps, different steps. Truthfully, he probably would have been content to grow up without ever learning to read. He’s sixteen now and still does not seek out reading, but the fact that he can read enables his life in hundreds of ways. I suppose it is possible that left to himself, he would have tackled reading in his own time. But back in first, second, third grade I had to choose whether to push or to let him continue not knowing. I chose to push, to create structured activities, to insist that he learn skills that I knew would make his world a larger place. It was learning to read that finally taught him how to speak comprehensibly to the world at large.

My son has an auditory processing disorder. All language was scrambled on the way into his brain. This was a large part of his developmental delays. It was why, even at ten years old, he spoke in sentences that sounded like he’d thrown the words into a cup and pulled them out in random order. Given context and familiarity with him, we could figure out what he meant. But when he started reading sentences, he finally learned that spoken sentences should have a natural rhythm and order. Requiring him to learn to read made it possible for me to talk to my son, and that is truly worthwhile. He is amazing inside his head. He sees things that I don’t. He thinks in ways that are unique to him and now he can share that with me when he couldn’t before. It is possible that his innate brilliance would have eventually led him to read without my structured lessons, but I would have missed out on years of being able to talk to him. I don’t regret those years, nor the educational pushing that gave them to me.

My choices are different than Maya’s, which does not mean that either of us is wrong. It just means that we have diverse challenges, children, resources, and capabilities. We definitely agree that people learn best when the process is enjoyable. I structured my son’s lessons in games as often as I could, because games spoke to him. I just think there is also value in learning that comes in ways that require a person to do something hard that they dislike.

Enjoying Spring

By / April 24, 2014

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

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

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

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

Tending and Blooming

By / April 23, 2014

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

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

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

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

The Mother at the Pool

By / April 10, 2014 / 1 Comment

The other mother at the pool reclines in her bathing suit. She reads a magazine, often looking up to engage with her children in the pool. Other times there have been more people, today it is just me and her with four children in the water. I sit in the shade, fully clothed. My laptop is open and I type. I don’t don’t know if she is judging me for the choices I display. It hardly matters. My imagination supplies judgement for her, giving her a critical voice. I am obviously a workaholic who can not leave her computer at home. Or I am the disengaged mother, more interested in updating facebook than spending time with my kids. She has no way to see that I am a writer. I’m stealing this time to craft stories, because all writing time is stolen from something else. Each moment I am aware of what I neglect.

Along with the guilt for not treasuring each splashing moment with my children is the litany of how I should write differently. If I write fiction, I’m aware of the blog post that did not happen. If I blog then some part of me mourns the fiction time. Then there is the incessant knowledge that I ought to write more letters to my Grandmother, my daughter at college, my parents, siblings, friends. My head is so noisy with self-judgements, it is a wonder that I can find words at all.

That tanned mother on her lounge chair with her magazine likely has no thoughts about me, other than to tell herself what I think of her. So young mother across the pool, enjoy your quiet hour, because motherhood does not often supply hours when the kids are happy and need nothing. They can entertain each other for a time, my kids and yours, while you read words and I create them.

The Changing Parenting Equations.

By / March 27, 2014

This week the Writing Excuses team has been together to record episodes and to plan ahead for some mutual events. I spent considerable amounts of time looking ahead in the calendar for when things could be scheduled and then doing the parental math necessary to see if I can also absent myself to be at some of the events. The answer for this Fall is no. Writing Excuses is having a retreat (sold out) in September, but the logistics necessary to hand off all of the child care so that both Howard and I can attend are too complex. I will be staying home. I’m a little sad, because I love the house in Chattanooga, but I’m glad that someone else gets an opportunity to go and take the hostessing slot that I would have occupied.

In all my scanning of calendars I noticed something. In the Fall of 2015, the parenting equations change. Suddenly I won’t have a kid in grade school anymore. I won’t have a kid in an intensive gifted program. My oldest at home kid will be eighteen and technically an adult. I can’t say yet what becomes possible because of those changes, but they will definitely have an effect. The equations will change again in 2016 when it is likely that I’ll only have two kids at home. I’m not going to rush ahead and plan anything. For now I’m glad to have a good year where things will remain about the same. We had so much transition last year that status quo is good for awhile. But change will come to us again. I can see it on the horizon.