Mommy is not About the Blaming, Mommy is About the Solving

This being the motto I made my older children write temporarily on the chalkboard on their bedroom door. Because it seems like the assigning of blame has lately been an obstacle to actually solving problems. And I will write about this as delicately as I can and let the child I am writing about read it before I publish, but not only did I have one of those moments where I felt like I was on my parenting game, able to see things from the kids’ perspectives and communicate my own insights in a useful way, but it turned into one of those moments where seeing things reflected in my kids’ life made me understand that I have the opportunity to grow a little too. Mostly my kids are pretty peaceful, not unnaturally so, but we are lucky. They have a lot in...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 25, 2008 | 9 comments

Penguin Love

Practicing viola with Xander yesterday, he got frustrated with the same brush-y bow stroke he’s been working on for weeks now. I understand the frustration but need him to keep practicing anyway, and I try to speak lovingly of how when he practices he works through problems, but I catch this sort of trying to cheer himself up, asking “So am I learning faster than other kids my age?” which may be the cry of a child who has a brother two years older that he feels he will never catch up with, has a younger brother whose every accomplishment is fussed over and praised. I think of how he was visibly aching Sunday morning when he and Aodán both played with a group for some friends and there was voluble praise for Aodán’s playing and I had to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 23, 2008 | 5 comments

Static

PreScript: So I know I have a habit of way-over-prefacing things without getting to the point so you have no clue what you’re reading or why until the second or third paragraph. I wish I could say that was going to change, or that I was going to come back and edit this paragraph out of here. But it’s my blog. No, wait, I don’t really believe that, or I do, but I also believe that it’s your time, and I am grateful you’re spending some of it reading this. But still I’ll argue that I sometimes have to write in the way thought spools out rather than in a punch-y, following the rules for getting and holding attention way, because the way thoughts spool out and develop over time is sometimes more interesting than the thought...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 19, 2008 | 2 comments

Call Me Penelope

Not that we are keeping score, but Raven’s been out of Portland 13 days out of the last 25, and I mostly function ok except for missing him and not having figured out how to get a good night’s sleep when he’s not here. Hence lots of keeping my hands busy, watching movies after the kids go to bed and knitting: Please understand, I am not complaining. I appreciate that the interacting with people is the part of his job he’s good at, the part of his job he loves, despite the travel, and I appreciate being able to be at home with the kids because he’s good at it. Still, it’s different from how I grew up and it’s sometimes a little hard on all of us. Anyway, too tired for a smooth segue, but I swear there’s a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 10, 2008 | 3 comments

Conversations with Inanimate Things

Ugh. Know what I hate about having the sun come out after weeks of modestly keeping to itself behind the clouds? I see all the accumulations of dust and griminess that I could ignore when the light was a little dimmer, and after being compelled to wash the kitchen curtains, I’m dusting the top side of the window frames which nobody can see anyway, and I run the dust into the high corners where webby things proliferate and over the smoke alarm in the kitchen and that bugger starts beeping and saying, yes, in words “Replace batteries in the kitchen.” And that’s a cool technology, right? There are some things that are distinctly nag worthy, and batteries in smoke alarms count. However, we have built some redundancy into the system, with...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 8, 2008 | 1 comment