Archive for the ‘My exciting life’ Category
September 19th, 2007
Today it was my son’s portable video game case with a bunch of cartridges in it that left home in Portland and didn’t make it to Albuquerque; Saturday it was a stuffed dragon of his younger brother’s that I had endowed with enough anthropomorphized sentiment because it — named Turnip, by my three year old, Turnip, he’s got a gift for names! had accompanied Rainer to preschool on that first insecure day, had been kissed goodnight — had endowed it with enough something that the idea of just buying a replacement felt guiltily wrong. Turnip set out for errands with us, and was unfindable at bed time, and several phone calls did not reveal it to have been turned in anywhere.
Other stupid losses — the couch last week decided it had been jumped upon one time too many and gave up the ghost, the frame collapsed, defeated, so we have no place to sit in the living room and I spent yesterday — instead of packing for our trip today, obsessing over how our living room doesn’t work, and is too cluttered to be comfortable, a tiny room designed only for sitting, no piano, not the library I have taken as some concrete manifestation of my identity and moved faithfully from one home to another over the last twelve years, certainly not for a television. And with terrible reluctance I toted books and bookcases down to the basement where I can still easily access a book I want, but maybe there will be a little more room to sit in the living room. But it feels wrong, like I am doing it so we can have room to watch television, which just seems shallow and lame. And we are still in negotiations about how to replace that couch. Small house, big family, what I really want is a place where we can all be together, not the kids off in their own rooms, all of us withdrawing, because I fear the day when they really don’t want us all to be together, it seems like this dreadful looming inevitability.
But I know it’s not about the couch. I get all fixated on arranging and cleaning the house when other things are out of control, because — well I just do. The universe isn’t that big and bad and scary if my cd’s are in alphabetical order with genres that only I can really define.
And I must admit I go out to check under the seats in the rental van and find myself, ack, reciting:
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
I’ve been dreading coming to New Mexico, because even though my grandmother died in June, so long as I wasn’t here I could continue without it being truly real, she wasn’t a part of my daily life, I didn’t get the daily reminders of grief, the rending of the fabric of the everyday. But, now that I am here, and seeing her empty house, seeing cousins who belonged to my childhood, allowing for the overlapping of griefs — that the person she was to me was just slightly different than the person she was to my sister, to this cousin or to that one, and the collection of all of us coming together with our memories and our stories of who she was makes her absence this more concrete thing — I’ve been worried about it being overwhelming. Worried about responding appropriately. Worried about what I will feel, and about what I might not feel.
She would have been one hundred tomorrow. We had a birthday dinner for her tonight, but it was hard to imagine how it would have been — she would not have liked being the center of such attention, of so much fuss. She had a way of not quite pursing her lips, blinking behind her glasses, nodding her head, patting your hand, that seemed to acknowledge your need to connect but still gently deflect the attention. I look at the collection of people here to celebrate her life, and wonder if we form a crude outline of the things she believed in, faith in various forms, the commitment to musical education, the books always at hand, the working hard and not feeling sorry for yourself…
The funny thing is that my response to all of the conventional expressions of condolences have been “Well, it’s sad missing her, but she had such a long, such a wonderful life, and even her death seemed to be happening at a time of her choosing, waiting until my parents were done with their school year, and it was gentle and peaceful. And this period of decline wasn’t frightening like I thought it might be, it was this grace of someone whose spent her whole life taking care of others allowing herself to be taken care of…”
The moment of loss isn’t what makes me crazy, the tug and the tooth not there in just a moment, it’s the adjustment, the tongue unable to stop tracing the new contours of the mouth, the new dawning of each implication of the loss. If everybody here tomorrow to memorialize my grandmother is bringing with them a tiny piece of who she was to them and we’re all together and then we disperse and then this person my grandmother was really becomes past tense, and it’s awful.
But maybe with some bawling and hugging and going ahead and really feeling it, I’ll be able to go on and deal with the things my kids keep inadvertently leaving behind and forgetting, the things I cannot control, stop looking at furniture catalogues like porn, and be ok with loss since there is no way to prevent it.
September 11th, 2007
“…because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker, it is not enough these days to simply ‘question authority,’ you’ve got to speak with it, too.”
– Taylor Mali, my new YouTube fascination, and the best distraction from the heat, the exhausted and whiny kids and their incomprehensible homework, the kitchen I’ve got to clean so I can make dinner so I can clean it again, and my frustration with a day that started out with such promise!
September 2nd, 2007
SO someone used the search term “hypographia” to get to my blog. And I used the term to mean the opposite of “hypergraphia” which means the compulsion to write. There is a difference. Greek – ‘hyper’ as a prefix means ‘over’ ‘above,’ ‘beyond’, ‘hypo,’ ‘below’ ‘under’ ‘beneath’. Right – hypergraphia, compulsion to write, hypographia, struggle to write? Aren’t I clever? Sure way to make people look for everything you say that is wrong and stupid. Or just hate you. See, high school experience as the walking dictionary taught me something. But I hate that somebody might be searching for hypergraphia and find my hypographia and think that that is evidence for spelling it the other way. Stupid Greek to make two almost antonyms sound so similar. You cannot even find hypographia in the dictionary. Or not any dictionary I’ve ever used. (Careful with the qualifiers missy). Oh, though, I am in a horrible mood, and something about railing about word usage is so satisfying. I don’t even know why I am in a horrible mood. Yeah, I do. It’s the stupid television on. Too much of the time. Or the computer. Or the video games. This wasn’t how I was going to parent but everything I do or suggest looks kind of dull and stupid next to shooting aliens together on the game that was never going to be played in front of the kids. SO, they’re watching the idiot box, I’m bored and frustrated, and they’re going to grow up not knowing their Greek prefixes. And I should enjoy this time to myself, but instead am doing that lovely thing where I clean to show how annoyed I am (my mother and sister do this too). Not a clear way to send a message.
August 31st, 2007
On June 12th, my grandmother, Mary Bogart, passed away. She would have been 100 on September 20th of this year, and we’re planning to be in New Mexico on that day for a family gathering and memorial service. When our first child was born, he had six great grandparents, all but my father’s parents who passed away my senior year in high school, and now our boys have only their great grandmother, my father-in-law’s mother. I am so grateful they will have memories of all these people. It also means that we’ve had more funerals in the last five years than in any other period in my life. It doesn’t seem to get any easier. My mother asked me several weeks ago to write something for the collection of memories of my grandmother that she’s putting together. This is what I came up with:
This is hard to write. Maybe because if I were trying to describe Grandma to somebody who had never met her, I would start with the story of bringing home a report card in middle school that had five A+s and one A, and showing it to her and being asked “So why isn’t there a plus next to this one?” And maybe that would make it sound like she was tougher than she was. Because I never doubted that she loved me, and in the question about why there wasn’t the plus was the faith she had in me, that I could do anything. And that was a gift. When I tell people about my grandmother I describe coming to visit her in her 90’s and there being an algebra book lying on the table, about her practicing the piano into her 70’s, not because she was going to be hitting Carnegie Hall but because it meant something to her. I tell people that what I learned from her about living a long and happy life was staying active, keeping your mind stimulated, holding to faith, being of service to others. That what I learned from her was that love can be expressed in quiet actions, the baking of birthday cakes and taking of walks, as clearly as it is in lots of words. And yes, she was a tough woman, which has helped me to understand that I can be tough when I need to be, that it’s better sometimes to meet adversity with pragmatism and action than with self-pity, but that that toughness is not exclusive of lovingness. And maybe the thing I would then describe to someone who had never met my grandmother, if I could keep it together, is the gift that came with her slow decline in the last few years of that toughness falling away a little, and how when I last visited New Mexico, we didn’t exchange a lot of words, even though there are a lot of questions I would have loved to have asked her but never did, but I sat and held her hand before leaving and when I got up to go there were tears in both of our eyes, and that there was something there that neither she nor I had the words to express, but it was expressed anyway.
August 17th, 2007
It’s funny, how, except for the occasional babysitter and the year of teaching the youth class at Sunday school, my life has had very few teenagers in it since I was one. It’s sort of a shock to be around them and have them move around you, not acknowledging your existence or at least your personhood, segregating themselves — and I find myself tempted to get in their faces “I remember being just like you.” Which would be about the worst thing, I think, I could say. Because the essence of youth is thinking you’ve invented the whole experience.
Still, a recent dose of being around some Bahá’í youth, and having a facebook account, which seems a little like eavesdropping in a playground for teenagers, and the fact that my son going into sixth grade has put him, in our Bahá’í community, officially in the ranks of the ‘pre-youth’ which seems completely impossible because I am just too young to be te parent of… Anyway.
I surprise myself missing the intense yearning to change the world, the burning passions, the deep loyalty to friends, the sense of endless possibilities. I miss staying up all night talking because no responsibility was more pressing than the need for connection. I miss the slight ambiguity of male friends with whom there would never be a romantic spark, and yet these aren’t the friendships I have as a married woman, associating primarily with other married women and avoiding even the suggestion of confusion.
A sentence in the unreliable narrator’s blog “the flavor of that era in my life—young, uneducated, thrashing around, putting up with a lot more than I should” resonates, though. I miss the possibility, but not the uncertainty. And though I know people who have prolonged their youth well into their thirties, there does seem an allotted number of days in our lives to each of thesee stages. I can as easily miss the sensuality of my children’s infancies, or the imaginative reach of my own childhood, totally ignoring the painful aspects of sleep deprivation or having almost no voice, the horrible uncertainty of making mistakes I didn’t even know existed as possibilities, picking my way between social/parental land mines. Some days I look forward to the possibility of wisdom and maybe stature, the wry and gentle humor, feistiness and patience, I see in the faces of the women ten and twenty years older than me whose lives are no longer bound up in the lives of their children. But then, I already ache anticipating missing the boys.
So it is possible that for me, right here, right now, knowing exactly what I know now, is a fabulous place to be: Raven makes me feel beautiful, my children all still want to be with me, but allow me to sleep through the night peacefully, I am as strong as I have ever been and more confident, we are getting better at having friends as a couple, and the friendships I have maintained from my twenties have been tested and are strong. I wonder if my youthful self would despise the settledness,the settled for, the settled down, the compromosided complacence and concessions to a practical life, mortgage and minivan, but, no, this is what I have always wanted, and I am proud of the commitment, the work it represents. And of course, if you mention to me the fact that in approximately twenty five and a half months I will officially be the parent of a teen-ager, I clap my hands over my ears, squinch up my eyes and start singing loudly.
August 6th, 2007
Listened to this lovely story on NPR about how having four children — and being able to send them to expensive private schools, hire consultants for potty training and teaching them to ride bicycles and buy fancy vehicles in which to transport them — is a symbol of status in some communities. I tried to keep it in mind as I sent my husband off to San Francisco for a conference on Linux, and spent the day trying to pack and ready the house so I could take my little status symbols camping for five days and not come home to a house where my feet stick to the floor from those same status symbols pouring their own orange juice. I tried to keep it in mind when I found myself having a full scale temper tantrum because the older status symbols wouldn’t put down their electronic babysitters when asked politely and put away their own laundry or interact with the younger s.s.’s so I could turn my back and not find that the younger s.s.’s had dumped the laundry I had just folded in preparation for packing all over the floor so that they could run around with the laundry baskets on their backs like turtles or slide down the stairs in the laundry baskets or do whatever other wonderful creative things you never see kids in Pottery Barn Kids catalogues doing with playdoh up their noses and so on. Remember when you could carry around a ridiculous little dog in a handbag as a status symbol? I am having fantasies with rhinestone collars.
I’ll see you sometime early next week when I’ve recovered from camping.
August 4th, 2007
My older two boys almost wore out my patience with the board games designed for three and four year olds many many years ago — the ones with no reading involved, no counting higher than six, much less strategizing, bluffing or showing off vocabulary (too much online scrabble this week. lying next to my husband at bed at night with both our laptops open. makes me feel really old and married.) I’m talking about games that really require one skill and one skill only, taking turns. Not a small skill to develop, but once you’ve got it — hard to find the challenge. Still, today, we had a a child over to play with the older boys and my four year old was disconsolate at being left out so when he begged for me to play a boardgame with him we dragged out the Chutes and Ladders. Candyland is easier to cheat at, to sneak the kid cards so he can win quickly and you can do something else, but whatever.
I remember preferring Chutes and Ladders as a kid, and sat studying the pictures which are really nothing but little cartoon depictions of actions and their consequences. As a cute as the girl sweeping and getting to go the circus is, the boy riding his bicycle with no hands and getting a broken arm, it occurs to me these could use updating, things with a bit more moral sophistication. The thing is most squares would have both a ladder up and a chute down, that most behaviors have a risk that could go either way; the skateboarder could get a major contract with a gear company and he could end up with lots of broken bones, the cat rescuer may have a grateful cat and may also get scratched up and bitten trying to approach a panicked animal, you refuse to let somebody copy your homework in class and you don’t get in trouble in class (hopefully, though I can remember getting in trouble, unfairly, when someone else was talking to me) but you get beaten up at recess.
And no, that’s probably not the appropriate message you want to send your four year old. For now, I’ll let him believe that there are things that are clearly the right thing to do, things that are clearly the wrong thing to do. But I am moving away from layering my consequences on top of the inherent ones in his behavior.
For example, at the library last week, there was a child manning the treasure chest of small plastic trinkets to reward kids who had participated in the summer reading program, and my four year old went and picked one out, wanted it so badly, but had to put it back because we haven’t participated in the program. Part of it is that I am too lazy and too time-hungry to keep track of time my kids spend reading and being read too, but the other part of it is, as my ten year old came up and said in my voice, that “Reading should be its own reward.”
I really was impressed by the argument in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards. I am even learning to trust that doing the wrong thing is its own punishment. This was part of the argument in Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, that the coercive carrots and sticks are not respectful and distract kids from the inherent consequences. It may be a fine line to walk, I am not abdicating my responsibility to be the one with an eye on long-term consequences, but I am working on getting the kids to understand consequences and to make decisions for themselves, especially on the relatively low-stakes stuff.
August 1st, 2007
I broke up with my kids’ violin teacher today. Not that I was seeing her socially, exactly. But then it felt really personal. No chance we’re still friends. I tried so hard to be diplomatic and express gratitude and respect while explaining we need something else right now. I had had a fantasy of going in for a final lesson with her (already paid for!) on Saturday with cards the kids had made and flowers, giving them a chance to say goodbye. But she’s very much convinced her way is the only way, and lay quite a trip on how I was betraying her and how much she has invested in me and my children (hey, I was the one writing checks!), and every point I had about what wasn’t working for me she argued prolifically, until I was left with a weak “yeah, I guess that’s how you see it.” But she was upset I hadn’t brought any of this up earlier, that it seemed so sudden… I hate that feeling of having something sprung on you, and yet, over the course of this last year, seldom has she seemed to actually hear me. I felt completely run over.
Still, over the last year, she’s let me know who she was. I do think her method works, but it was getting harder to cope with her style of dealing with children, with me. So today, I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths, convinced that this was the right thing for my kids, that they haven’t been consigned to never getting a good technique, that this phone call today actually proved that I made the right decision. After I came not-so-suddenly to the conclusion last Saturday that I couldn’t continue another semester with her, I have been losing sleep about having to tell her (and it seemed inappropriate to write even this publicly about it when I hadn’t talked to her. And I am trying not to go into a litany of what didn’t work and what was making me crazy). So I am looking forward to resting better tonight, knowing that I did the right thing, was honest and honorable and forthright and, for me, darn assertive.
Astonishing how much of my identity had gotten caught up in being a parent in her studio, knowing my place in the hierarchy there (we were going to have some seniority this year, dammit!) and how once that broke and all of the ripples of implication settled down, I felt lighter and a little freer.
Mi hermana, the wise ‘cello teacher, reminds me that this is a business transaction. She was shocked when I described the length of the conversation. Why didn’t I just say, “I’m sorry, this is the decision we’ve made. Thanks for your time.”? I’ll never be that person, I’m afraid.
Plus side: we had another lesson this evening with a different teacher, who teaches one of my son’s classmates, and he impressed me. He listened thoughtfully, had a style very much “This is great. One thing you could do to make it better is try it this way.” In fact, he seemed to be using a lot of the scripts I’ve heard from my sister in her teaching, which is my highest standard. And the eight year old responded terrifically. With the four-year-old, he managed a pretty good balance between listening respectfully, and keeping him on track. Which, considering the astonishing free association the child is capable of, was quite impressive. He laid out clear goals for the next lesson: the most important thing to work on is this, when I come next I am going to ask to hear this. My biggest fear was that I was going to be sacrificing some of the exacting learning-the-right-way-not-developing-bad-habits-muscle-memory that was the old teacher’s hallmark, and yet he was exacting about the hand-shaping and posture and holds he wanted from my son, and had new and different ways of explaining it, and I don’t feel like we’ve compromised.
I don’t think he’s the rebound teacher, and I don’t think the last year was wasted. And I think I won’t be tied up in knots trying to interpret things said off the cuff that have nothing to do with the violin. It’s a tricky thing about Suzuki, because it does have to do with the whole child and how the child is being raised. It works best in the place where their work is play and their play is their work and discipline and coaching and the relationships between parent and child, teacher and child, and parent and teacher are all in a good balance. But I know how to raise my children, have agonized over the decisions of when to push them, when to refrain from pushing, when to try and ask a little more of them — whether it’s in helping around the house or sitting quietly through a performance or tasting a vegetable that they are convinced they hate — and when to save my energy for the bigger battles, and these things are my privilege and my responsibilty as the parent, and what I really want from a violin teacher is really lessons in violin playing right now.
July 23rd, 2007
And my husband is off to New York again, a red-eye, leaving in about half an hour. I have been trying not to fall into the pattern where the day before he leaves I am tense, grouchy, and not even conscious of why until I realize I am wondering whether I will be able to hold it together while he’s gone, that I will be completely netless.
Among the hardest things to leave in Dallas was the network of people whom I could comfortably easily ask for help, people whose kids I had watched at night when there was a trip to the emergency room for back pain, the child whose father was undergoing treatment for lymphoma and I could happily offer to take over her mother’s mornings working in the co-op preschool when she needed it, the economy of favors that wasn’t about expecting anything back but more, realizing that if I were in need, I had people ready and willing, lined up to help, the friend who watched the older boys when Rainer was born, the neighbor across the street who would bring her three year old over to feed the fish when we were out of town… When you register your kids for school, you have to fill out an emergency contact number, someone who will be responsible for your kids if they cannot get hold of you, and, while we’ve met some great people in Portland, had some lovely evenings out, the odd playdate here and there (which is harder to manage when you get to four kids spread out between 2 and 10) I feel funny asking, um, would you be our emergency contact?
Anyway, when I have the bed to myself, it’s hard to fall asleep, and I don’t want to be grumpy and tired in the morning. I have to get son #2 off to drama camp early tomorrow. With the self-discipline of the sister who wants her ice cream cone to last the longest, we are reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aloud, as a family, clapping hands over ears so as to avoid any and all spoilers, and will suspend the reading until Raven is back, so I am going to shut the laptop, and try and race through a bit of re-reading of the Half-Blood Prince. I’ve forgotten a scandalous number of details, I think in the initial read there was such a rush to find out what happens that I could disregard numerous references to Ollivander the wandmaker going missing, and other such stuff that wasn’t tying in to the main plot. But spending an hour reading HP7 out loud to the boys and then retreating to read HP6 silently for myself is a bit confusing. Have to find something short and fun to read out loud for the next three nights to the boys while their dad is gone.
July 21st, 2007
I love and hate the structurelessness of these summer days, because I like seeing the patterns that emerge when they’re not imposed from outside. There are things that I am not exactly rigid about, but that are pretty much essential components of a complete day: writing in the morning, practicing with each of the three music students, time on the elliptical listening to my favorite podcasts, reading out loud to them before they go to bed…
In my determination to make blogging a habit I find it works to set aside time after I get the kids in bed, though it is easy to spend way too much time playing onFacebook, reading other blogs, looking for a perfect sleeper sofa to go in my studio (in gleeful anticipation of October’s visit from my goddaughter and her amazing mother). But maybe it’s the longer northern summer days, endless daylight, my children go to bed at a shameful hour, even when we’re not at Harry Potter pre-release parties, I stay up later to get non-childed time for reading and writing, and, undersleeping, I function less efficiently morning, dragging out the morning pages for hours around the interruptions of another cup of coffee and wiping up spilled cereal, negotiating peace or at least dulling the roar, and the other thousand urgent things that punctuate thought around here. I suspect I could achieve more efficiency by really being with the kids when I am with them, really applying myself single-mindedly to other things when I am not, but that is not likely to happen, and I am so much happier when I relax about all of the shoulds creeping back into my thinking.
Rather than relying on previous schemes of setting strict limits on the kids’ screen time of whatever sort I informed them at the beginning of the summer I wasn’t interested in being the screen police, and that they could watch tv or use the computer or play video games so long as I didn’t start perceiving it as a problem. That is, I expected not to have to hear fighting about any of those things, not to worry that they are becoming unbalanced and forgetting to play in other ways, to read, to help out around the house. And, surprisingly, it’s worked, though I suspect the older boys sort of nudge the younger ones, we’d better go do something else for a while so mom doesn’t take this away.
I am overjoyed to trust a babysitter, to have her coming over tomorrow night for the third time in two weeks — this time, so we can go to a fundraiser hosted by my husband’s tea-shop owning friend for a non-profit promoting the teaching of ecology and environmental science in elementary schools. It feels so healthy to practice being an out-without-kids grown-up, as much as I have always believed in having lives that included and involved them.
Anyway, not a lot of deep reflection today… stayed up writing past 1:30 last night, and got up at 7:30 so I could write two pages before taking a child to a 9:30 violin lesson, but, as a result was rather gentle in my expectations of myself today. Though we went to a Harry Potter party, the older boys and I, it was mostly to let them relish the experience of dressing up and going out late at night and being among other diehard fans, we have not yet bought a copy, though I expect they should be plentiful tomorrow with no line-standing… we will read it aloud, a chapter or two, or maybe three, a night, until it is done, doing our best not to read anything about it elsewhere. Funny, knowing how many families will buy more than one copy so that it can be read by several people simultaneously… I like the pacing of reading out loud, the hearing my kids get excited and speculate, their anticipation and enjoyment improving the experience tremendously, and in a sign of unprecedented maturity, suspect that wanting to know what happens is outweighed by the not wanting it to be over.
