Tag Archives: parenting

On meeting chaos with joy

I started writing this post seven minutes ago, only to be interrupted by a phone call from a job prospect, wondering if we can talk via skype rather than conventional phone. So now I’m downloading skype for my new computer and trying to remember if I have a login and whatnot (it’s been a while since I used skype, since facetime works better around here and most of my peeps have macs or iPhones). And it will complicate life later, because now I have to consider how I look and how my background looks…sigh. This strikes me as a typical moment in a typical “me” day.

Okay, and as I am downloading skype and creating a new account (because it’s faster than trying to track down my old one), I get an email from a student who will be taking my summer class at the University of Southern Maine. I reply, carefully, and with the consideration her thoughtful questions demand. Twenty-three minutes after I started writing, I continue.

See? See? I want to shout to Life. THIS is what I’m up against. I can’t do a darned thing for myself without the whole WORLD rushing in. But here’s the thing (even after the hyperbole): I love all this multiplicity. Sure, it makes me crazy sometimes, but I love knowing that tomorrow I get to play with my boys again, and it’ll be warmer, so maybe we’ll head back to the playground near our house and I’ll watch Chi learn to climb higher and farther (which stops my heart but is wicked good for my reflexes). Maybe we’ll pick more flowers, or just look at the deepening maroon of the emerging hyacinths. (Ezra told me yesterday: “Sometimes I just like to say the word hyacinths. Hyacinths.” He’s so my boy.) Maybe there will be swinging; maybe there will be falling down; almost certainly there will be some shouting and also lots of hugs. And I won’t get a damn thing done except support two very small people in the process of becoming bigger people. And here’s the best part: the day after THAT I get to spend prepping my summer course, which is a senior thesis seminar on sustainability. How lucky am I? And how nuts, that these are only the two largest and most urgent of my many different tasks and responsibilities? This goes for all of us, I know.

It occurs to me that the absence of pattern, or maybe the prevalence of interruption, is a hard thing for all human creatures, small and big, and also that our efforts to construct regular patterns can keep us focused on the wrong things, or looking through the wrong lenses. It’s one of the prime lessons of parenting, right? That attention to the random, spontaneous declaration is rewarding; that saying yes instead of no can take us all further, together; that getting messy is okay when we have nowhere to go and we live in the company of a great blessing called the washing machine. The hardest days of all are the days we have to get stuff done, when, as my mother-in-law once famously put it, “We don’t have TIME for joy!”

We always have time for joy. It is the root of our humor and lord knows we need that ALL the time. It is the base of our compassion, without which we aren’t even human. It is, at best, the quiet breath that’s always waiting inside us, the one we are physiologically incapable of actually fully exhaling. The trick is remembering it, befriending it, and, quite frankly, expecting it to be around as much as it is. It’s a beautiful surprise, constantly available, and ultimately life-altering.

On dancing and seeds and grace

grape hyacinth budHere’s my afternoon: starting seeds with Ezra in the basement; coming upstairs to find Len and Chi home from the grocery store and provisioned with a tasty new beer (well, Len, anyway); dancing with both babies to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.  Her song “Bonus 2,” which is essentially First Corinthians brought to extraordinary life, always reaches out to me — but today, as I held my small fevered Ezra in my arms and danced, it was transcendent.  To sing those ancient words of love to my son, through Lauryn’s music, to feel the rhythm move through the bones of this old white Colonial, well, I was shaken.  I was lifted up.

I don’t often write about spirituality, or at least not as such.  It’s partly because I feel those are kind of private issues, and also because I’m uncomfortable with the ways articulations of our own faith can end up looking or feeling like advocacy or pushiness to others.  I confess, I’m also tired of the self-congratulatory tone of lots of the writing out there on religion.  And also, let’s face it: I’m a seeker who was raised Quaker (more in the secular humanist end of that spectrum) in a kind of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sort of way.  So I have no sense of authority, only a heart full of questions and gratitude.  I tend, then to use the language of mindfulness or grace, since the former is more of a practice and the latter more of an acceptance of what seems an obvious and widely accepted truth.  For me, there are lots of interchangeable words that describe what I have faith in: love, beauty, the sacred, harmony, nature, the universe, grace, providence, serendipity, the Way, the Light, truth, hope, and of course the many permutations of god.  It is clear to me that music is sacred, as are the gifts of all artists and growers and makers and seekers — all creatures, and especially those who offer up something of beauty, who uncover or create or otherwise act with generosity in this sad and broken world.

I’ve been trying to read Margaret Wheatley’s So Far From Home, though it’s hard, because its premise is that we cannot change the world; we can only accept our powerlessness and do our best to live whole and beautiful lives by doing the right work because it is work that needs to be done.  That living, that standing in contrast to the crazy and the broken, is itself transformative.  I buy this, mostly, because it seems smart and truer than anything else I know, but I’m not wise enough or whole enough to live within it.  I’m trying.   Most days, I’m still seeking, perhaps too anxiously, for that “right work,” unable to accept that where I am is enough.  But on a day like today, that truth rings out: of course it’s enough.  Perhaps not forever, but I don’t live in forever.  I live right here, right now, right in the middle of all this beauty, surrounded on all sides by grace.

On patience, or, er, its absence

As we walk into Ezra’s school building this morning, he gleefully announces to the receptionist, the nearby teachers, and one or two families in the adjacent waiting room: “My mama just got really angry!”  Given that he delivered it with a smile, I suppose it might have been worse, but judging by the comments and snickers from the assorted onlookers, I’m guessing folks were feeling my pain.  Mercifully, I HAD BEEN angry but was no longer, or that little episode would have slid right past humorous and down into enraging.

You understand, I’m sure, how mornings can produce anger: the running around, the running late, things running down small faces that had been, just moments ago, ready to go.  Ezra decided to practice spitting by himself, which involved dribbling water all over his carefully-chosen (by him, at great length and with much turmoil) shirt.  Malachi decided to practice tooth-brushing on his own, which I’m all too happy to encourage, until I caught him scrubbing the fireplace bricks with his toothbrush.  The sidewalk is icy; the sippy cup is empty; the baby is halfway up the stairs.  Not a soul is listening to what I have to say.  It’s all a little much.  So of course I got angry.  And I yelled.  A door may or may not have been slammed.

In the car on the way to school, Ezra seemed unusually quiet, and then unusually chipper and cheerful.  As a child who often put on a happy face to bring my own family back to equilibrium (or at least civility), I was suddenly visited by the specter of all those burdens I never want him to carry.  Immediately, the anger was gone, and in its place was the sensible, loving, compassionate mama I like to think I usually am.  “Gosh,” I said to Ezra.  “Mama was really angry there for a little bit, huh.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I was so angry.  I’m sorry I yelled.  I know you and Malachi were doing things that weren’t ideal, but you’re kids.”

“Yeah.”

I know you’re working on how to be a better listener, and I’m going to work on not yelling and slamming things.  Next time Mama gets that angry, she’s going to take a deep breath and say: ‘Wow!  I’m really really angry.  I’m going to give myself a time out to calm down.’  Does that sound like a good idea?”

“Yeah.”  Then, a moment later, “Hey, Mama, I want to see the purple finch at my feeder.”  Okay, buddy, we’ll keep an eye out after school.

Anne Lamott says we have a chance to start a new 24 hours any time we choose.  Pema Chodron says: “This is our choice in every moment.  Do we relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness?”  Yes and yes.  And yes.  That small window, that tiny glimpse of reality in the middle of all the chaos — that can help us be open to what is rather than what we wish were.  And what IS might be infuriating in small ways, but it’s also pretty darn amazing in all the biggest ways: my kids so focused on their activities that they tune out the world; my kids learning the skills that will support them long after they’re out of my grasp.  (Plus, hey — my fireplace bricks got a little scrubbing for the first time in their lives.  Just so long as they don’t expect it to happen again.)  We breathe in.  We breathe out.

On the sweetness of children

We’ve developed something of a Goodwill habit at our house: I hunt down old sweaters and velvet to upcycle (and, of course, the occasional fabulous garment to wear), and the boys find books and toys.  We’ve had amazingly good luck lately, and the visits are fun for all of us.

On our trip yesterday, several people commented on how sweet my boys are.  One lady in particular did it at length and with the kind of pointed remarks and sidelong glances that made me look around for the other, less-than-sweet boys who were being implicitly criticized.  But it seemed she was entirely genuine.  I was pleased and gratified, of course, and I agreed with her: I DO have sweet boys.  Much of the time.  And, I explained, when they aren’t being sweet, well then, we aren’t out.  For long.

I realized as I said it that I may have finally cracked the code of all the “Love and Logic” and “Aha! Parenting” approaches.  If you can let go of your own agenda and your own attitude for long enough (which I find really really hard), you can really BE with your kids and hear how THEY are doing.  Which gives you either a vast array of emotional responses (anger, resentment, frustration, grief…) or, much more simply, a clear choice: to keep grumpy kids at home or to take them out in the world, knowing full well what that may entail.  On days when I’m close to my best self, like yesterday, I can make that choice and then not be particularly put out if the trip causes more turmoil instead of less.  In fact, yesterday we even had some moments of near-meltdown in the toy section, which led to me calmly crouching down by Ezra and explaining that we could stay and browse if he could be quieter and a good listener, or we could go home.  I suspect it was my (I confess) unusual calmness and rationality in meeting his little outburst that caused it to settle so fast.  But it was not ten minutes later when the kind lady started saying such nice things about him.

I’m kind of thrilled that these lessons are slowly settling in, slowly coming to life in how I actually work rather than how I’d LIKE to work.  Just showing up without an agenda makes it weirdly possible to pursue my agenda.  Being present to all the humor and chaos of my boys helps them tune into ME, too, so that when I’m fed to the eyeteeth with toys underfoot, we can have a cleanup game, together.  With dancing.  I feel like we’re all trained to find peace by escaping upheaval — but sometimes our lives ARE the upheaval, and the only peace (of hope of accomplishment) is relaxing into it.  If you can’t get out of it, get into it.  Like swimming, I guess: it’s when we stop thrashing with fear and exhaustion that our bodies can finally teach us to float, eyes closed, belly-up to the sun.

Heard this afternoon

Me, to the boys: “You know what’s amazing? You will never in your whole lives not be loved by your mama.”
Ezra (three, in case you couldn’t tell): “I’m going to skip your love.”
Me: “That’s not super nice, dude.” Then, as he starts to eat the curtains, I add: “Do not eat the curtains. Do NOT eat the curtains.”

Hard to believe this is the same kid who did this last night:
I was nursing Chi while Ezra finished his tub and I heard Len talking with Ezra, helping him get out, dry off, brush teeth. Then I hear whispers outside Chi’s door. And the crack widens. A small toweled head appears around the door, and much higher up another, larger head follows. “Can Ezra say night night to Chi?” Len asks. “Sure,” I say. Ezra tiptoes into the room, then turns to look up at Len again. His face is illumined, either with love or with the hallway light, I’m not clear. “Papa, can I give Malachi and Mama night night kisses?”. My heart reaches all the way to the door. He tiptoes over, his hooded towel in its superhero cape position, and climbs carefully up on the nursing stool. A gentle kiss on his brother’s “sweet soft head” –their two small faces turned briefly toward the glow — and another on my lips, and like that, he’s gone. Precious beautiful wondrous heroic love.

 

On the challenges of showing up

When I was in graduate school, I worked at a really good restaurant that some friends of mine were opening.  It was a small place, and serious about their food, drink, and service.  To support that, they made every staffer go through an intensive and prolonged training where you tasted every single thing on the menu (oh, hardship) and learned about how it’s made and how to describe it.  The wine part turned out to be especially interesting to me, because we were given the proper schooling on how to “taste” wine, and I found that I resisted mightily.  I could taste all the same things everyone else was talking about, and the descriptions all made sense and I enjoyed having a new vocabulary, especially one with such cultural cache (how the eff do you write a French accent in here?).  But I could not, and cannot, let wine roll all the way off the edges of my tongue.  It is way too intense for me.  It’s almost physically painful.  Our teacher, the wife of the team (who has since completed sommelier school at Windows on the World and opened her own wine shop) was amused — apparently there are people who are considered “super-tasters” who have these issues.  That seems too fancy a title for me, but the fact remains that I cannot abide the intensity of wine that way.  Some folks can’t drink hard liquor for the same reason; others hate spicy food.  Sometimes experience is just too much and we want to calm the stimulus or avoid it altogether.

I tend to think about mindful living in the same way, especially parenting.  I’ve realized lately that I spent much of the fall in kind of a daze, dealing with one familial health issue after another, and so rarely actually attending to the people rather than the problems.  I’m becoming aware of this as I see how much my kids have grown, how the shapes of their faces are changing, the growth of downy hair on their arms and cheeks.  We walked at the pond today and Ezra stomped puddles the whole way there, rather than riding in the stroller; Malachi wanted to get out and walk, holding onto my hands, up and back, up and back one particular stretch.  I’m trying not to avoid the anguish of their growing up anymore.  I’m trying to think of the truth I heard of a child’s first day of school: how terrified you are for them, and for you, and how thrilled you are as well.  That the two not defeat each other, or cancel each other out, seems like a major goal, or perhaps a small miracle.  So that’s how I’m trying to live these days: to see and relish the absurdity of softness and roundness that is still, for a while, Chi’s little body, and not to worry about what comes next.  Many days, that seems too tall an order, because how else do we prepare ourselves for the angst and chaos ahead?  But maybe all this mindful stuff is right after all, and the only reality is now, and the only truly great thing we can do is show up.

On letting go of the story line

Pema Chodron, in various of her works, talks about “letting go of the story line” as one of the crucial skills that enables us to stick with the practice of living, of being present to our lives.  I had never even heard the concept until I went to a retreat she was running at Omega when I was 35 weeks pregnant.  The retreat was called “Smiling at Fear,” which seemed like a good idea, as I had just left not only a job but a whole career I’d spent 15 years building AND I was about to have my first child.  I was working and working at the concept of befriending my negative emotions and I just couldn’t see how you make friends with a runaway train and I was feeling the old desperation rise up in my throat.  But then she said that about the story line, and how we spend so much of our lives acting out particular stories that we feel define us, and all of a sudden I could see it.  Even THIS, the process of wanting to shift something and not being able to, was a story line I was committed to.  So what happens if we let go?  Well, it turned out that letting go of that one meant that I could just BE there — in a beautiful warm room with two extraordinary friends and several hundred other fascinating people.  With a wise and holy teacher before me and another one inside me: that joyful acrobat in my belly has never since stopped teaching me.  I was able to breathe, to stretch, to sit in quiet and gratitude.

I think often of the challenge of setting down the story line, and less often I actually remember to do it.  But sometimes life surprises me.  Yesterday, for example, was full of surprises.  My 14-year-old car had been making some terrible noises, and I realized that I really didn’t want it on the road, much less carrying me and my two precious babes.  I had convinced myself that it was a clutch problem, or worse, and that now, here, finally was the repair job that would be the death of Hubert (yes, after the excellent bloodhound in Best in Show.  We generally name our cars after dogs).  So I prepared for the worst by doing what I do: managing for time and money.  We spent some time looking up used cars online, and I concluded that Tuesday’s lineup of meetings would give me only four hours for car repair, so we’d better the diagnostics done Monday.  I called the shop (Center Street Auto in Auburn, Maine — if ever you need anything, they ROCK), and they graciously agreed to take a quick look for diagnostics if I came in at 11.  So both boys and I “took Hubert to the car doctor.”  Twenty minutes later, they handed back the keys, having identified and fixed a loosening wheel (!!!).  No cost, no trouble, no major life shift.  Oh!  Look at that.  I had the story all wrong.  Which is reason number 2 for setting down the story line: first, it makes you crazy if you let it define your life, and second, you might not even have the right story.

When we get home, I gratefully remove all the winter accoutrements from our three persons and head to the kitchen to figure out lunch.  But there’s water in the disposal (which is the only drain in our kitchen sink and which, we know from past experience, has no main drain cleanout beneath it, so any serious problem in the pipe becomes a serious plumbing issue in the house).  AH, I think.  There it is.  Not the car but the plumbing.  THAT will be our major problem.  But before I despair completely, I figure I’ll do the recon I’d feel stupid to skip: and of course, the under-sink unit had merely become unplugged somehow.  Crisis averted.  Story line aborted.  Or perhaps there’s a different story line starting to form: maybe I am a resourceful protagonist who can sometimes solve her own problems and so doesn’t need to freak out about them.  Everything in its own time, eh?

It was a sunny day, and warm (upper 20’s), and we still had a nice foot of snow on the ground, so I hauled both boys outside after naptime.  The storyline there is about hassle pre- and post- and about crying over snow in the wrists while we’re out there.  But I announced we’d have outside time, and by golly we did.  Ezra helped me pull Malachi in the little red sled and went down the hill twice himself; he even made the lower half of a snow angel. Twenty minutes of enjoyment outside and we went in for warm snacks.  The sun slanted glowingly into the kitchen; the neighbors’ trees were all bronzed and rosy at their tips; the startlingly clear sky showed not one but three jet trails, brighter than light, converging slowly toward Portland. Of course there’s going to be whining, I thought.  Of course the snow gets in at our wrists, right where our skin is most fragile and thin.  But this does not mean we stay inside.  We try to remember that we will warm up again; we zip up and tuck in and open our eyes to the sky.

On sleeplessness and dishevelment

A few thoughts, if I can remember them, on the jittery, anxious, grumpy, at-loose-ends way of being that results from too many nights up with the baby.  (Wait, that sounds like some nights we’re NOT up with the baby.  Not so.  Lately it’s just a lot more.)

1. There is a direct, linear relationship between sleeplessness and depression.  And aggression.  And memory loss.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, because if they do they’re an asshole.

2. Sometimes things are inappropriately funny when you are severely sleep-deprived.  Nowhere near often enough, though.

3. Eating is a basic and necessary ritual that becomes less attractive and harder to remember.  Eat something.

4. The full beauty of chronic sleep deprivation is that at some point sleep is no longer desirable, nor attainable.  Under these circumstances, it’s best to warn those around you.  Because, really, they shouldn’t be.

5. Don’t talk to anyone you have to go through a phone tree to reach.  Do not, under any circumstances, try to figure out why you’ve paid out $8000 so far this year for health costs when your family has a $5000 deductible.  It’s not good for anyone.

6. It is unlikely that your child will suffocate in his sleep — or not — simply because you are awake to hear him.  For real, my friends.

7. Potty training.  There, I said it.  Not a conversation to have under these circumstances.  Big brother will have to cope with diapers for a little longer until someone — anyone — has the fortitude to remember where the potty is, let alone get his pantsless bottom on it.

Crap.  There were others but I don’t remember them.

On birthdays

I have a friend named April who is my birthday idol.  She, like me, grew up in circumstances where it being your birthday only meant that you EXPECTED to have fun and be showered with love, not that you WOULD.  She, unlike me, became someone who designed her own birthdays to meet her expectations.  I, on the other hand, tend to struggle with Great Birthday Ambivalence, not wanting to have to plan it all myself but also wanting something I want.  You see the challenge? Chi's feet

This little struggle is one of many I hope to avoid passing on to my sons, and so I’m concentrating on thinking about their births, about their presence in my life, about their marvelous, miraculous specificity.  Above all, I’m realizing that their birthdays (especially the first one) are as much about me as about them.  All day, it’s: “at this time last year, we had just met you for the first time!”  “At this time last year, you were having your first mama-milk!”  Standing up from the table after lunch, I stretched tall and felt the usual tug of deep c-section scar tissue…and, of course, thought of how much my body has put up with for the sake of these beloved creatures.  Their birthdays are, really, a celebration of capacity, of generosity, of animal instinct and tenderness.  A rejoicing in who they are and what they love; an exploration of how the everyday makes room for the exceptional.  Best of all is seeing the older boy tend to the younger, leading not one but TWO rousing choruses of “Happy Birthday,” and actually honoring his new status as Owner-in-Chief of some pretty interesting new toys.

These are times we want to snapshot, to cordon off, as if it would help us get our hands on this slippery, uncontainable life.  But like the children themselves, they move too fast for clarity, and we’re left with a joyous blur of someone crawling at high speed toward the door.