Archive for September, 2008
September 28th, 2008
I am a meme-killer. I tag people who are offended or don’t respond, even though I was flattered and honored to be tagged. I still carry shame that I was nominated on the always entertaining blog, From Stage Dives to Station Wagons, in August as a blogger that kicks ass and because it happened while I was on vacation followed by weeks and months of my husband (and tech support) being immersed in career transitions, I never managed to get the badge posted to my own blog.
But it’s funnny, the dimension added to a friendship when you both have blogs. When I moved to Oregon my friendship with Jenny had to be done mostly by phone, and then she started blogging and leaving comments on my blog , which, while it doesn’t replace the phone, allows us to slow down and be more thoughtful, sustaining conversations over weeks. So I am, I guess, more protective of her blog than of my own. And this morning when I woke to check Jenny’s blog and saw that she is playing this “Paying it Forward” game, I was inspired and excited for her, and a little anxious that she get the comment love that all bloggers depend upon. She loved (as do I) the description of how and why to do the game posted by Tuscon Cowgirl:
The point of this is not to encourage a form of blog chain letter, but to create momentum on doing an act of kindness without expecting anything in return other than that the recipient will, in their turn, pass the kindness along and pay it forward.
I have agreed to send something nice to the first 3 bloggers who post a comment on this entry. I’m assuming that “something nice” can be a token of some sort that will make someone smile and hold some form of positive meaning. In turn, those “first three commenters” who respond to my post will honor the pay it forward concept to the first 3 people who post on their blog… and so on. Please note my little pay it forward needs to be mailed (it is a token, honest), I can only pay it forward within the United States. So if you’re interested in participating in this, be one of the first three to leave a comment. Please remember that if you agree to pay it forward, you need to post this acknowledgment on your blog, link to me, and pay it forward to three more people.
In this past week of economic disarray, political mean-spiritness and shifting priorities, I believe a reaching out to extend a friendly gesture is worthwhile. The world seems to be rocking on its foundation in so many ways, I hope little things like this can help.
I checked in on Jenny’s blog all day hoping three people would already have gotten themselves whatever cool thing she would have to send on, (seriously? I’ve seen her make the most amazing charms!) but thinking how I could not possibly take on the responsibility for sending out three tokens to three commenters of my own. I am overwhelmed, tired, have three family birthdays in the next two weeks, my husband has been working extreme hours and I cry thinking about undone laundry. Not only that, but I am a meme-killer, and this is a lovely blog-game-meme that deserves loving attention.
But the thing is, Jenny is committing to doing this while dealing with her fourth daughter, a newborn who doesn’t like sharing her mother with her three older sisters during those crucial evening hours when family life is most hectic, while dealing with a child who is having a rough transition into kindergarten, while her husband is sucked by school and work into spending fewer hours at home than he has since before they had two children. And if she can find a way to reach out, maybe it’s because that’s one of the secrets of the universe, when you feel most helpless and unable to, that’s when reaching out makes the biggest difference.
So I am in. Be one of the first three bloggers to leave a comment, and I’ll send you a token.
September 23rd, 2008
So Rainer and I went to the zoo today with friends. Søren asked why Rainer was getting to have all the good times and I answered that four weekdays out of five, the highlight of Rainer’s day was getting to walk to school to pick his brothers up from school, so let’s not go trying to tally up who’s having the better childhood.
Not the point. The point, actually, is that the more time I spend at the zoo, the less I like people. I hope T., the friend we went with, wasn’t too put off by how completely misanthropic I was by the time we left the place — in fact, I think one of the secrets of our friendship’s success is that she was pretty similarly frustrated by the same things I was. What I saw that I had never seen before was mothers pushing strollers, strollers laden with preschool-aged children, too, not just preverbal infants, through the zoo while chatting on their cell phones. And I wavered between compassion for how exhausting and isolating just BEING with your kids can be, knowing I am in no position to judge, and being sort of angry on these kids behalf, that somehow the kids are getting a sort of obligatory pretense at a good time, with a person who isn’t even willing to take the time to talk to them. It seemed like being on a nightmare date with somebody you really like who brings along a friend to talk to instead of paying attention to you.
I am married to an iPhone guru and love my iPhone. I love all the things the technology can do for us, love the feeling of being connected and being able to check my email throughout the day without having to touch my computer. Lately, though, I’ve just felt like I have to be very careful about leaving the phone turned off and put away when I am consciously being with the kids, leaving it in a different room altogether when I am practicing with them or having a meal with them so I don’t get sucked in to Twitter. I want the kids to feel like they have my attention.
The unreliable narrator and I had a conversation about the term “self-pity,” how the accusation of self-pity has a sort of emotional charge, like feeling self-pity is this huge character defect, which definitely resonates for me, to the extent that sometimes when a situation is worthy of some righteous indignation I cannot get to the point of formulating my own justifiable anger because I am so busy hating myself for being self-pitying. But I think stronger than that in my childhood was “wanting attention.”
I don’t think this was specific to family culture, just more about how I understood the world. There was something wrong with people who wanted attention, and something wrong with my own desire for attention. Good girls cleaned and mopped and waited for their fairy godmothers to recognize their virtue while their lazy and vain stepsisters spent endless energy getting ready for the ball, basking in their mother’s attention. Of course the reward for not asking for attention was unasked for attention from Prince Charming. Part of my general wigging about performing on the viola a month ago had to do with ambivalence about attention, which on the one hand can feel so good, and on the other hand can feel terribly treacherous because if you mess up everyone is going to know. But when you catch yourself as a mother thinking that your child is playing up some symptom of being sick just to get attention, you realize how messy your feelings about attention are.
I don’t have room for messy feelings about attention for my kids. One of my biggest fears about the larger family was whether each child would get the attention he needed. I am not sure I always do a perfect job at that. It’s a constant balancing act, and plays against my own need to pay attention to things I am interested in that have little to do with them. Still, I want to make sure that the message that they’re entitled to attention, that attention is not the reward for being good, it is a right in itself, that if one has to clobber me over the head and tell me that’s what he needs, that’s okay, I will find a way and find the time and give him my undivided attention. I will even try to overcome my aversion to the zoo and spend more time paying attention to how my child is experiencing these animals, which are almost storybook entities to him, and less time paying attention to that mother over there who is distractedly shushing her child so she can talk on the phone.
September 19th, 2008
Sometimes when I am trying to understand what my kids need I have these insights into my own needs, and it can be so startling.
Take my five year old. Lately it’s felt like it’s impossible to discipline him because when he’s done something wrong he get so upset at the idea that I might be angry that all of the energy I want to spend on the message about what is and is not acceptable behavior is diverted, instead, into reassuring him that it’s ok, I still love him. If I respond with any tinge of emotion to anything he’s done wrong, be it pushing a brother, getting in trouble at school, or not responding to three or four requests that he pick up/get dressed for school/come out to practice/get ready for bed his face just crumples heartbreakingly. And part of my brain gets more frustrated feeling like this is a little manipulative, that he is trying to divert me from consequences. But then, I also believe he can be so distraught at the tone of my voice that he cannot hear what I am saying to him.
I know in a perfect world, I would manage always to be perfectly matter-of-fact and gentle in my interactions with him, but parenting is stressful, sometimes, and the stress shows, and none of his brothers is so sensitive to my mood, so I wonder if I cannot help him to develop a little bit of a barrier. I want him to understand he’s responsible for his behavior, of course, but that if people around him get upset, he’s still safe. He should make right what he can, but most of the things that are troublesome are impulse control, not any sort of “badness,” which I realize with a sort of “duh” reaction, especially when I think about him being a kid, it being his job not to know everything already. Even how to control all of his impulses.
The funny thing as I meditate on this child, this problem, of course, is that it seems to parallel a realization that I need to cultivate my own inner “so what?” (Ask this not in a defensive or angry voice but with a genuinely curious tone.) Raven learned early in our marriage that I would hear the gentlest, constructive suggestion as harsh criticism, and even over time, I learned to smile tightly and nod “Thank you for trying to help me with that…” but he would find me brooding over it hours later. I can turn the look in the teacher’s eye “Can I talk to you?” into extensive investigations into my adequacy as a parent, a disagreement with my husband into a sign our marriage is doomed, silence in the comments section as a sign my writing is unreadable.
But I think if I had just a little chance to ask myself “So what?” I would be forced into an inner dialogue that goes something like,
“I made a mistake!”
“So what?”
“My imperfect edges are showing!”
“So what?”
“I expect all love to be promptly withdrawn now that it’s apparent I am really not lovable.”
(and if my inner rational voice didn’t point out that that imperfect is not the same as unlovable, and besides, this is a little unlikely given all prior evidence but instead kept to the script…)
“So what?”
“So we’re one step closer to dying alone, unemployable, overweight, with only the cat to discover my body.”
“So what?”
And as I take “So what?” out to the furthest edges of these chains, I realize that there is some unconditional part of who I am that would still be okay under even in the worst situation I can imagine for myself, that my value is not how other people are seeing me.
My five year old is not going to be able to respond to “Mommy’s mad at me!” with “So what?” of course, but I think I am going to try to start giving him the, yes, external validation, that I do in a form that maybe emphasizes his value as a person not lying in pleasing me.
.
September 17th, 2008
Some mornings I sit down to my morning pages hoping that I will end up with a beautifully coherent set of words which can be neatly transcribed into a blog entry and bam, one stone, two birds, and more time to spend arranging dinosaur stickers with Rainer. This was such a hopeful morning, but alas I have only this loosely connected set of thoughts.
1) In a phone call wherein she tried to school me in the basics of music theory, my sister patiently explained that music has a vertical component, harmony, and a horizontal component, melody, which delighted me. I had never heard it put that way before. Of course days later, background characters having some conversation that was completely incidental to the plot and main characters of some movie or television show I was watching mentioned the EXACT same thing. And it occurred to me yesterday that when you read, the movement, the denotation, the story told is quite horizontal, while the intangible evocations, the cannotations are vertical. And that hyperlinks and footnotes and Couplandian sidebars stand in for more exact cannotation, for the secret language of best friends. And this thought also makes me happy.
2) I had just had this idea and written it down as I finished morning pages yesterday, just in time to go pick up the boys from the school. Which means it was one of those kinds of days where nothing seems to happen in the time or order you think it ought to, only I experienced the grace of not being all that worked up about what I had or hadn’t gotten done. And I walked with Rainer to pick up brothers from the school and we passed a house where someone just moved in and heard happy little kid noises from inside and there was a beautiful old Underwood on a table on the porch and that just seemed like a sign. By the time I got to the schoolyard gates I was musing on how vivid colors were and how full of possibility the universe is, and barely restraining myself from shaking the shoulders of people I met and saying “Doesn’t it just amaze you all that is contained in just a few cubic feet of human being? Don’t you just marvel at what it is that 20 square feet of skin can hold?” Which I will admit would have come across as quite manic, even though I still think these are amazing things to contemplate, but I contained myself and held to just smiling and people smiled back, and I got a hug from my first grader. And I asked him if he had his homework notebook, and he didn’t so the two of us ran in to his classroom to retrieve it, and then, there it was, the look in the teacher’s eyes as she asked if I could stick around for a minute so she could talk to me. And hearing about the rough day, the licking and kissing and kicking he’d been engaged in and the way he shuts down when she tells him he cannot do these things, it was this deflation, this realization that I am defensively clutching his homework notebook against my chest and I forced myself to mumble but of course such behavior isn’t acceptable and what could I do to help support her and end this behavior… And of all the sacrifices of motherhood, the sacrifice of a buoyant mood is a small one, and maybe if I had already been in a dark place this would have been much harder, but still…
3) I am caught, however, on this sense of containment, of the permeable membrane between inside of us and outside of us, that words and gestures can traverse, however imperfectly. I am still turning over Laura Miller’s words about “rigorous, imaginative compassion” to conjure inner life and “subdue loneliness” in her Salon piece on David Foster Wallace. How having been saved by words when trapped in pits of reflexive self-loathing becomes commission to reach out when I have moments replete with hope and a sense of the universe’s abundance. I was advised not long ago to close the computer and spend time off-line, that the internet can be evil, and I suppose it is a lonely place when it seems all promise of connection and still you strangle, cut off. And yet in these days of carefully balanced time by myself and time with my four year old and crayons and paper and dress-up and playdough and puzzles, the balance of writing for myself and the almost collaborative joy of getting comments and leaving comments on blogs, the balance of reading old favorite books and reading the raw experiences of real people separated only by a few circuits and wires, subduing loneliness seems like a genuine possibility.
4) I still struggle to come up with an adequate answer to a comment left by Isiah on a February blog entry on external validation suggesting that external validation really is not a need and one should try to get over it, that to experience such a need is to experience oneself as lacking. To my surprise, a search on that term led first of all to a site where people are supporting each other, apparently unironically, in trying to get over their need for external validation. Which has me wondering if I use the terms “need” or “external validation” in at all the same way. Because I know that theoretically I would be okay taking a vow of silence and living monastically without common reassurances (and actually, I am not convinced that I wouldn’t perceive external validations in that situation, I was fascinated at the idea that a friend’s experience of a silent retreat included a sense of interacting even without words) but I fail to understand the desirability of it. And I can easily imagine an unhealthy relationship to any sort of e.v., relying constantly on other people to tell us we are okay, but on the other hand, with our interwoven lives, having a voice break through from outside of our heads when we trip into solipsistic hopelessness doesn’t seem like a matter of “should” or “shouldn’t” but more a matter of the small ways we go about saving each other. I don’t have a lot of room right now for should, working on can and do, will and won’t. I think what I was calling external validation is the resonance of experience, the dismantling of solipsism, the joy of recognition.
September 15th, 2008
Jenny points out that it is past time for a new blog post, and she is, of course, right. But the inside of my head is not yielding pretty blog posts. And I muse on how the thread of comments gets away from me, here, until I have to strain to remember what the women coming and going, speaking of Michaelangelo could possibly have to do with Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her. Since I live to entertain, however, I offer up here, as an experiment, my best first line. The way an exquisite corpse works is everybody then adds on to the story looking only at the line above their own. Unmoderated comments means you’re on your honor because they get published as they get written.
Trying to flirt, Miranda Hobbes texted “I like my men like life itself, nasty brutish and short.” Unfortunately her iPhone corrected her text to “nasty British and short.”
September 10th, 2008
The awareness starts with the clenching of my jaw, and I realize I’ve been sucked into reacting, that my mood is driving me and not the other way round, anger that gathers as a cloud looking for a target for the lightning strike, but I cannot pretend that the object of my anger inspired the anger. The tightness in my jaw throbs to the rhythmic squeak of the neighbor kids’ trampoline, the undisciplined wisps of hair that refuse to stay tucked into my ponytail, the repeated honking of a Honda Odyssey that makes me think a small child has found my keys and is playing with the remote beeper. I race into the house, ready to pounce and realize the honking comes from a strange van, one across the street at the neighbor’s, and I seethe, slam the door. Return to the back porch, what should be an idyllic setting, peaceful, for finishing morning pages that I couldn’t do in the morning with all of my children’s needs, my husband out of town (again!) and I was up too late even though (angrily!) I know better. The breeze comes up in puffs, lifting at the half-covered page, the weight of my thoughts not enough to hold it down, and recedes, waves of wind, like waves of labor or grief. How do I forgive myself this aching throbbing stabbing ugly imperfection — then there’s the catch in my throat; no catharsis-inducing drama, just a slammed door, but I’ll let myself cry now.
Awful the feeling that I am helpless caught in experiencing events, responding to them, creating new events with the response, and it all colored by mood as if it were reality. I feel like I have spent my career as a parent experiencing an evolution of anger, from helplessness in its grip, to understanding it as a sign that something is out of balance, from taking discomfort of various sorts, channeling it into picking a fight with Raven, getting hypercritical of the kids, acting out in tantrums as if I could somehow restore some homeostasis of powerlessness by being more powerful than the slammed door, to more diffuse, quieter experiences of it — and still, I worry that I am poisoning the atmosphere my kids are breathing in, worse than second-hand smoke, realize I am helpless and need something that is not-anger, not-resentment. That I may be experiencing anger as a messenger that I need to pay attention to something, change something, but that some things are easier to change, like hunger, than others, like hormones and having four kids who can all have all of their demands on a collision course with my peace of mind, arriving at the same time, all urgent, all intense, all too much for me to process.
I struggle with the notion of forgiveness, here. I am thinking it is half of what I need, but I need it as an active thing, and in my head I can only define it in negative space, the place where resentment and frustration are not. True forgiveness, the restoration of full love, seems so rare, so impossible, whether I am trying to forgive someone else or myself. At a point when I felt like what I needed in my life was detachment, I finally settled that I couldn’t really do detachment, the best I could hope for was attachment to something greater or more diffuse, to pass from my need for things to be the way I wanted them to be to trusting that they would be the way they needed to be. Could forgiveness be attaching myself to the things I loved in a person and letting the things that hurt pass away?
I forgive my children fairly effortlessly. Maybe it’s about the intentions, that they so seldom deliberately set about doing something to be — I can’t even say be bad… what I perceive is the obstacles they have to obedience, distractibility, focus on some object that drowns out my voice, or my failure to communicate clearly, or the item broken because they didn’t foresee a consequence of their actions, and these things don’t make me angry. Even their disagreements, when I am calm, I hear as the jostling for respect and attention. I am better, now, I think at seeing these as opportunities for learning and teaching and improving my parenting skills, at least on the days when I am not finding myself clenched up in response to the neighbor’s dog barking.
All week this idea of forgiveness pops up unbidden, and how to make things ok when they aren’t ok, how to tolerate discomfort. Now Søren gently puts his violin in the case, then punches the couch, flops on the floor, head in his hands in frustration that he has FAILED when he doesn’t play a note as he intended. And I can rock him in my arms, truly grateful that I can give him this script, “You are doing such a good job being frustrated, I am so proud of you, this is the hard stuff, and learning how to be frustrated is even more important than learning Minuet! So when you’re ok we’re going to figure out what’s hard and break it into littler pieces that aren’t as hard.” Why can’t I do this for myself?
And what about if you’re struggling with assertiveness? I believe that forgiveness is not the same as being a doormat, that if you are frustrated with unvoiced complaints, what you cannot give voice to is impossible to forgive. And still we live in a culture of umbrage, where the position of rightness falls to the first person to get offended, and I try to imagine what a culture of forgiveness would look like. There are few pains like realizing that you have said something offensive despite your best intentions, and sometimes wish I could be judged for my intentions rather than their poor execution.
These are the questions I wrestle with as forgiveness keeps dominating my morning pages, unresolved. Is forgiving yourself merely analogous to forgiving someone else, in fact a different process altogether, since I am circling around the notion of acceptance, and with someone you love, you accept them, you cannot change them… but you can change yourself, right? a little? Is self-forgiveness a part of “self-soothing” to break out of a mood, out of a cycle of frustration and self-recrimination? Should forgiveness take into account all those differences that our judicial system is predicated on, whether an injury is intentional or not, whether it takes place in the heat of passion or is coldly premeditated? But surely forgiveness taking place in the offended person, often without the knowledge of the offender, at least at the moment of forgiveness, benefits the person not burdened with carrying the injury, the resentment, much more than it benefits the person forgiven? So the greater the offense, the more the forgiver needs that forgiveness, right?
September 9th, 2008
Rough draft of another heavy, introspective blog entry sits on my computer, and it’s one of those days when I just cannot take my own voice, so can I say instead? Last night I needed a movie I could sit and knit in front of and picked out Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her. I tend always to be a sucker for the intertwined stories type of movie, (loved Short Cuts), and I loved how this one worked, I think because the conjunction of these particular stories is as meaningful as any one of the stories told. And I liked that the characters talked not as people talk in real life but in dramatic monologues, in rhythms and repetitions. I liked that it wasn’t “forget you’re out there and we’re up on the screen as you get absorbed in this more real than real life life” story telling, instead it was storytelling where a gesture can reflect a hundred things and you have to pay attention (even if you’re knitting) to catch the internal references. And I resonated with the varieties of loneliness and grief and then taking that step forward, even though none of the lives particularly resembled my own. Then, too, finding thoughtful discussions of things I was only starting to pick up on on the IMDB discussion boards was another small gift, one of those moments of profound gratitude for the internet, like finding a cool person to go to the movies with who helps me appreciate them better. (Plus, I love that the one thread where someone tries to discuss whether an actress is hot just sort of falls flat with no real responses).
September 4th, 2008
So here is one of those little synchronicities that happen: I am busy ruminating on the discussion of selfishness over at urbanMamas, when I listened to this week’s This American Life on “Something for Nothing.” In the third act, Dirk Jamison starts describing what happened to his family when he was a kid and his father had this epiphany that working a job he didn’t like to pay for things with small pieces of the time allotted to him on this planet was a game he was unwilling to play, and took up dumpster diving. This deviated too far from the script his mother had for how one lives, of being productive, working hard, being proud of that, and the gulf between the two of them, charges of ’selfishness’ and ‘uptightness’ that were both justified, and both failed to capture the whole truth, and I started wondering how that tension plays into our ideas of the bad, selfish mother.
Here are the things I had concluded about discussing selfishness:
1) I still hate the zero-sum aspect of talking about my kids’ best interests vs. my interests.
2) What is in a child’s best interests is a value-laden, culturally relative best guess, anyway. Various sports, musical activities, and so on may be individually great for a kid, and the overall pressure of an overstructured childhood be devastating.
3) Even though it is only a best guess, that doesn’t excuse us from pursuing what is in our children’s best interests vigorously and in good faith.
4) What is in a child’s best interests, what a particular child needs, is going to vary with age, temperament, birth order, and a host of other factors. My fourth son doesn’t expect me to entertain him as his oldest brother did, and I have twinges of different feelings about that, until I remind myself that he is sweet, affectionate, clever, and very good at entertaining himself, so somebody must have done something right at some point.
5) There’s the chestnut of what a privileged position one is in when one is feeling guilt over minutes stolen to use the internet while at home with a child. (Yes. And?)
6) Finally, I think the charge of selfishness is so especially devastating for mothers because of connotations of being somehow ‘unnatural.’ Isn’t some biological imperative supposed to wipe all traces of selfishness from us? And I don’t know a mother who doesn’t feel guilt over something some of the time, because we tend to have very high expectations of ourselves.
But I’m not sure how useful guilt or accusations of selfishness are. I do know that they can eat up a lot of the time that one might spend on genuine self-care in order to come back at the parenting thing with energy and enthusiasm, whereas the time I spend flogging myself tends to lead to my most wretched moments of parenting, shrill and unpleasant moments (and thus feeding the cycle for my self-flogging, and so on). I have pretty clear boundaries about making time in my day to exercise and to keep a journal because when I haven’t had those things, the crashing and burning affects everyone in the house.
But the thing I realized listening to the This American Life is that “selfishness” is a pretty easy thing to project onto anyone who is doing what we wish we could do and feel too constrained to try. It is difficult to challenge the unspoken rules that govern our lives. The economist Steven Levitt gave a compelling TED Talk on how statistically, there is no evidence of car seats making children over the age of two significantly safer in a car accident and while I believe him, I’m not going to spend a lot of energy challenging laws on this, or facing the judgements of a community that KNOWS carseats are how a loving parent keeps a child safe. But what if that made me feel horribly constrained, unfairly restricted? Would there be anyone I could focus my resentment on so much as the ’selfish’ mother who refused to spend the money on carseats? So maybe I need to listen when I find myself seething at someone else’s ’selfishness’ to figure out what choices I have made that are making me feel constricted and resentful.
