Archive for January, 2008
January 26th, 2008
So I just finished Ann Hood’s The Knitting Circle, which is one of a handful of books published in the last couple of years with knitting as this theme for recovery and connection between women, and it was a fast read, I got to cry reading it which was a little unusual for me, I think I needed the cathartic cry. As a sidenote, however, I have to mention the importance of proofreading, because when a character is in the hospital waiting anxiously for news of a sick loved one and the nurse offers to send in a ‘chaplin’ the image in my head of consolation with a cane and funny mustache is REALLY distracting.
Still, it was strange reading this right on top of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Am I in a morbid place, needing to consider grieving from multiple angles (I am thinking of pulling C.S. Lewis back off the shelf and then possibly DVD’s that make me cry, Shadowlands and In America) and to be honest, there isn’t a lot of mourning going on in my life right now — I still think of my grandmother frequently, but more with surprise that I cannot write her a letter and rationally expect a response. But it may be thinking about the NPR interview with Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, where he mentions this advice he got in Bhutan, that to be happy, one must set aside a few minutes each day to think about death. My own death does not freak me out, much, I think, at least compared with the unthinkable thoughts of the possibility of the death of people I love. Unthinkable, and yet it’s impossible to read a book like the Knitting Circle without thinking of it.
I remember in prenatal yoga someone saying that the work of motherhood is worrying, and certainly part of the job is to be aware of all of the potential dangers you must protect your children from. But that’s not exactly what I am thinking about. I am thinking about the weird taboo of grief, how we pretend it will never happen to us despite its inevitability, about our own loss of words when someone we care about experiences grief. I don’t know whether I worry more about being unable to withstand grief when it comes or about coming through it. But experiencing it in the tiny degree that I do when reading books that detail the experience does seem to deepen my appreciation of the happiness around me right now without extending the illusion that any of this is permanent.
January 19th, 2008
I have a list of things I have in my head that I intend to blog about:
1) questions about the trade-offs of community and friendship because the way my family’s life is structured now it feels like we have a richer sense of community than we’ve ever had but less time we’re investing in individual friendships.
Which leads to the related question I’ve been pondering,
1a) whether the price of participation is conformity, and if that’s true for a community (suggested by Jennifer Niesslein) if it’s more true for a friendship…
Related to blog topic
1b) the changing nature of friendship in my life and how people I have never or seldom interacted with face-to-face can be as dear to me as they are,
The completely unrelated,
2) wondering if I can draw a line of when I became an adult as the day I was finally able to separate my parents as people from my parents as the institution of parenthood, (though admittedly, it still blurs a little.)
And in what I’ve held off writing because I worry about it becoming a rant,
3) how hard it is for me to be out in public spaces where parents are interacting with their kids in voices pitched to be overheard by everyone around, using the exact scripts of encouragement and psychologically correct lingo current in the most progressive parenting magazines, because I find myself wondering when parenting became performance art and what is wrong with me that instead of being really happy that these people care and try I suspect “trying too hard” and “hypocritical.” And maybe this goes back to the first blog topics, and how I keep stumbling across random blogs detailing the playdate from hell and how parenting is so hard enough as it is without spending a lot of effort in erecting this potemkin village facade of being some sort of perfect parent. I want a parenting community that is honest about the struggles involved as well as committed to striving for being better parents.
Anyway, that’s what I would be blogging about if my brain weren’t fried from being the solo parent four days this week, wrestling against three-year-old will until I have no strength left, wondering if the nine year old throwing up last night is a sign of something about to hit the rest of the family and what I ought to be doing to prepare if it is, and trying to reconnect with my husband after living in entirely different realities for a week. I am so grateful for a three day weekend, and imagine the next time I sit down to blog there will be something I NEED to write about that isn’t any of the above.
January 11th, 2008
So before bed last night I noticed we hadn’t used our home phone all day and thus had not noticed a voicemail. It was from the school counselor at our kindergartner’s school, asking us to call back. I am embarrassed to describe the anxiety I felt and how I tried to analyze the message, “She called us Mara and Raven, not Ms. Collins and Mr. Zachary. Surely if it were really bad we’d be getting Mr. and Mrs. treatment?”
In our last six years as public school parents, and even the year before when our oldest was in pre-k, we’ve sort of gotten used to — or maybe you never get used to, but gotten less surprised by — getting the phone call from the school telling us some way some son of ours has failed to conform to standards of conduct. All three of the boys who are now in school have gotten in trouble at least a couple of times, often for good reasons, like #2 joining some friends in kindergarten throwing dirt clods from the playground at passing cars (ouch! I do not condone this, am I making that clear?) I don’t want to sound defensive or delusional when I say, though, that my boys are generally on the well-behaved end of the spectrum — I can expect them to sit quietly at Sunday morning devotions when many of their peers do not, we have interesting conversations about ethics, they mostly get along pretty sweetly, and when they don’t I try to make that an opportunity to practice problem-solving skills. I insist on respect for adults generally and teachers especially, and have agonized to find the right balance between firm and empathetic as a parent, and am mostly really proud of them, feel pretty good about being connected with them. So why do I anticipate a phone call from someone administrative at a school as being trouble?
I think about how I NEVER got in trouble in school growing up. Ok, once. In 4th grade we bobbed for apples and Mrs. Card’s big curly hair-do was plastered to her head and I was trying to be funny and said something about her head not being as big as I thought and I didn’t realize it would hurt her feelings, honest, and I still feel pangs of shame about that. My dearest, sweet husband on the other hand — well I think he got in trouble enough for stupid things that it somehow acted as an inoculation. Like, you get in trouble for stupid things, and you realize it isn’t the end of the world, and it doesn’t touch your sense of yourself, your faith in yourself. I also think that it resulted in Raven being really, really difficult to intimidate. Whereas me? I feel like I am breaking the rules not buying glasses at the optometrist’s office, especially when they go on about the dire consequences of how difficult it is to get a scrip for my astigmatism correct, and what a hassle it will be to return glasses bought on-line, and this does not make for me being a Happy Person. Truth be told, I would rather have my boys grow up making mistakes and not being easy to intimidate than have them grow up afraid of making mistakes even if their perfect behavior feeds my ego about what a Great Mom I am.
In case you’re wondering about what the counselor wanted? Raven called her back this morning, and the school had had an incentive program to reward kids with over 90% attendance with Portland Trailblazers tickets, but had only received a number of tickets equal to the number of students (which was 37) and so they were hoping to find out which kids really cared about going to Blazers game (not ours!) and sending them home with two tickets so an adult could accompany them (sort of important for the population of this school) and rewarding the rest of the kids with something like a party. Not a big deal, in fact, at all, this time.
January 7th, 2008
Somehow today we stumbled into the routines that carried us through before the holidays. Right now, I am waiting for my little studio to warm up so I can practice with violinist and my violist before we go grab dinner and take our cellist to his lesson. I am steeling myself for waking up tomorrow morning when Raven has already left for the airport and even though this is a one-night trip, I know it will be followed with another trip next week and one two weeks after that and I won’t flip the page on the calendar and look any further ahead than that.
I have accomplished nothing on my list of things I should get to today, and am capable of just enough self-examination to ask myself if the way that makes me feel is proportional to the situation. I may joke about setting the bar low: everyone has something to wear, everybody has had an opportunity to eat something, the house has not burned down, nobody is bleeding, nobody has ingested anything too awful. But maybe finding the routine is a chance to check over the elements of my day and make sure that they do line up with what I want from life. I was getting excited that maybe I would get Rainer signed up for a co-op preschool next fall because these things all have January/February deadlines, and a friend started telling me which fundraising committee involved the least amount of work and I realized I couldn’t stand fundraising. I hate fundraising. I have all these vague ideas about the sort of mother I should be, ideas that involve active involvement with PTA’s and committees, and at the same time these things always meet in the evening when I am practicing with the kids, doing homework with the kids, taking the kids to lessons, on a good night, cooking with the kids, or, more rarely, spending time with friends or my husband so that I can come back to parenting happy and enthusiastic.
I do want to change the world. I am inspired by the people in my life doing it in all the different ways that they are. But I am, realistically, going to make micro-changes and not volunteer long hours when it takes away from my time to raise my kids and to read and write and think. And I am in love with not just my notebooks, but also with my blog, with the blogs I read, with the comments exchanged, and the sudden eye-opening insights and understanding that we none of us have to struggle this struggle alone. So I practice gentleness, and nod, yep, not a lot of externally measurable things visibly accomplished today, some days are like that.
January 6th, 2008
Or what Raven did during his days off: check out our newly sealed basement floor! When we moved in, we had plans to finish the unfinished basement, but the contractor our realtor had recommended didn’t return calls and we have had enough bad experience with contractors in Dallas to realize we didn’t have the time or energy or disposable income to really devote to a major house project like that right now. I still would love to have a second bathroom for our family of six, but we have settled into this house pretty comfortably. Except for the basement. It has not been an inviting place. Mostly it was towering stacks of moving boxes, boxes waiting for recycling, boxes of things that didn’t into the house from the previous house and Raven’s old office. Then a few weeks ago, our five year old was invited to a playdate at the home of a friend who had filled her unfinished basement with gym tumbling mats and suspended stretchy climbing hammocks and drapings and swings from the beams of the unfinished basement ceiling, and it was a magical and inspiring space. So I came home and and started moving boxes, collapsing boxes, and sorting and cleared out the space leaving it, well — like this: 
The floor was nasty, though, endless sweeping didn’t reduce the amount of dust and dirt coming up from unfinished cement floor, so we found an epoxy cement sealer, and Raven then got busy turning it into this: 
And when all of the epoxy had dried, I went and found many of the toys that had been stowed since we moved from Dallas to Portland and set them out and the boys descended with great joy. 
Rokenbok remote control vehicles that I had bought in a going out of business sale five years ago, fisher price toys that my older children chewed on before anyone thought about lead paint (actually, I was worried about wooden toys sold in Prague and thought American plastic toys were the safe option. Sigh.) And the puppet theater I built myself!
It’s nothing fancy, I still am looking for tumbling mats and I hope to get a swing hung from an exposed beam, but there is lots of room for them to run around or ride scooters around on a day when it’s too wet, cold, windy and dark for me to drag us all outside. And then there’s the surprise of waking up in the morning and finding the boys not watching television together or playing video games, but down in the basement playing together.
So I took a break from working down there and found in the current issue of Brain, Child a debate over whether there is such a thing as too many toys, and on UrbanMamas a discussion of what to do with unwanted excess toys. The thing I don’t want to lose track of is what toys are: they are the tools with which my kids have been learning about the world.
I remember the way I played as a child, taking the medical kit out of the case it came in so it could be a suitcase to pack on a trip when we turned the bunkbed into a space vehicle by draping blankets from the top bunk to the bottom and creating a control panel out of an old piece of cardboard and using plastic dishes. I think about how imaginative play allowed the development of empathy and the exploration of who we were, who we could be. I think of how many very interesting, strong, smart women I know who can tell you stories of formative experiences of cutting Barbie’s hair. I think about how amazing it is to eavesdrop on four boys playing legos together — often they will make video game styled play into a three dimensional game with levels and backgrounds made from lego plates or my oldest will take pictures to make a stop motion movie, things totally different from my own childhood. Toys have this elasticity to fill the need a specific child has at a specific time — I’ve heard dramatic dialogue between hot wheels and seen them lined up and categorized according to different schema, wondered at roads built for them from blocks.
And so I have moments of that sort of über-mom envy of the very principled parents who provide their children with only handcrafted German Waldorf-endorsed wooden toys, or pottery barn kids catalog envy of the image of perfectly organized and neat playspace with neat and presentable children playing, no doubt very quietly. But I like the childhood my kids are having, I like the balance, I like the practice they are getting in making choices for themselves, I like the way they use different toys to explore different ideas and different ways playing together, the practice they get in listening to each other and taking turns, the fact that they have gotten to experience sometimes getting a toy that they had seen advertised and really wanted and then found a little limited or flimsy when they finally got it. I love the memories I associate with many toys, of people who love my children, of time I have spent playing with them. I try not to let that translate into a clutter of so many toys that the kids cannot find something to play with, and I have donated boxes of things outgrown.
I had a hard time with the first video games to come into our house, but realized that compromise here was a strength, not a weakness. I can explain it in terms of a childhood where I was deprived of sugary cereals and bad television, and how when I was old enough to shop for myself and own my own television I found some things that weren’t very good for me completely irresistible for a couple of years. I understood my kids would be playing these games at somebody else’s house if they weren’t playing them at our house, and also realized I wanted them to be able to play them in moderation, I wanted them to develop the ability to self-regulate a little, and that I could find ‘teaching moments’ by having them in my house — and I feel like we’re pretty good about using them in moderation. Hopefully, I am doing the job I had hoped to of providing my kids with the tools they need to grow into interesting and good people.
