Category: Parenthood

The Conditions of Creativity

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“Fill the paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth

The other night we had some friends over. In the raucous atmosphere of an audience after so many months without one, my kids were showing off. My toddler was falling off a bouncy horse over and over and when I went to video him on the fifth time through, I asked, “Did you do that on purpose?” and he turned to me and winked.

It has taken me five days to write about that one funny and wondrous moment of connection with a not-yet verbal human. For me, I need to write in the morning, when I am still fresh from sleep. I can’t write when taking care of my kids, I can’t write in the middle of the day when I’m in work mode, I can’t write at the end of the day when I’m completely worn out. I once heard an interview with the author Ursula Le Guin and she said something about writing whenever she could. Except when her kids were young because she said, “of course you can’t write when your kids are young.” My reaction at the time was, “Why not?”

But now I’m starting to understand three things about being in the thick of life. First, that the moments that I see into the depths of life are precious. Just because we love them doesn’t mean our loved ones can’t muddy our waters. Second, that I can’t be a participant and an observer at the same time. Like the danger of being behind a camera on vacation, seeing everything through a viewfinder with one eye closed instead of seeing the full experience, I can’t digest the meaning of whatever is happening at the moment without creating a barrier to whole-hearted participation. I have to process it later. And third, that the conditions of creativity must be right to write. Even though my kids are so much of the inspiration of living without reservation, the attention they require engages my head in a way that blocks the quiet presence of the heart behind my words.

So I’ve waited until I was clear before writing this to you. That I can do so feels like a miracle, having a free moment, finding some words and depth about how they come, and even to have a medium that allows me to connect with others. It feels a lot like that wink from my son, a small sign that we might truly be communicating. Hopefully the sacred flow of creativity stays open long enough for me to ring true for you.

The Root of Courage

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“Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.” – Dan Rather

My mom was joking with me the other day that I’m paying for preschool for my toddler twice. “First you pay a monthly fee for him to attend three days a week,” she laughed “and then you pay again by having to hold him for three days straight after that.” And as it goes with humor, there is a lot of truth in that. As my toddler goes through this third week of being at daycare, I’m exhausted from making breakfast, lunch and dinner with only one arm but hopeful that he is getting a little more comfortable with this new routine. And as soon as we get into this rhythm, it’s going to change again when my 5-year-old gets to go to in-person Kindergarten for the first time.

This pandemic has been hard for me as I try to be everything to everyone – breadwinner, childcare, friend, teacher, janitor, all without much personal space to recharge. But this re-entry is definitely hardest on my kids. Even though there have been times when they were bored at home, all this time has mostly just been basking in their happy space without having to grow their boundaries. It has been all the sweetness of togetherness and not the growth that comes with otherness.

I come from a long line of encouragers but as we face these situations I think most often of my dad. At my dad’s funeral service, he was eulogized so perfectly as a “battery on feet, just looking for someone to jump start.” When working a project or a problem with my dad, I always felt that everything was possible. The word encourage has it’s origins from French – in courage. And to break that down further, courage as in rooted in the heart. So we encourage others by instilling courage, helping them to live from the boldness of their heart. I love this breakdown of the words because it reminds me that courage isn’t going forward without feeling but just the opposite, it is completely rooted in feeling. And to encourage, we help others lean in to all those feelings and do it anyway.

So I’m happy to hold my son for three days after his days at preschool. I give him some of my heart so that he can go forward living fully from his.

Affirming Ourselves

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“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha

I bundle my son into the car and off to preschool and when I return and sit down to work, I find that he’s removed the mouse from my laptop – the small pencil-eraser style mouse that sits between my G and H keys that is my favorite way to navigate. I look all over the floor for it, I search my office for my replacements but I’ve hidden them too well so that my kids won’t get them and now I can’t find them. Young kids are such a hindrance to getting things done. I was going to say “can be” but pretty much at this age, it’s not that they can but they are.

There is the big picture view that I am working in order to support my precious children so perhaps I should just take a deep breath, picture them and all aggravation goes away. And that is true, but it is also true that I really like to get things done. For my own sense of self and esteem.

I read a story in Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening about Dr. Elkhanan Elkes about how she survived the Holocaust. She always kept two things with her: a small crust of bread and a broken piece of comb. The bread was for when she met someone who needed it more than she did and the comb was to comb her hair twice daily as it affirmed her person.

Applying her wisdom to parenting — the crust of bread is easy. I don’t know of any parent of small children that doesn’t keep a little snack just in case with them. In pre-Covid times, we even shared these with other people’s kids that needed it. But the daily affirmation of myself and my humanity is a harder. Dr. Elkes story tells me it is something we all need for survival and it’s a daily practice. I am a person and not just a role that I perform at home and work. For me that affirmation comes from a meaningful communication with another adult at least once a day — writing a card to a friend, writing or commenting on a post, or checking-in with someone who’s going through something big.

So I borrow the pencil-eraser mouse from another computer, write this post and find that my son really helped with my affirmation after all – he gave me something to write about. That’s one thing done for the day!!   

Moving To Our Shared Rhythm

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“Most problems, given enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.” – Buddha

Two nights ago my son, 19 months old, woke in the middle of the night crying. It was so unusual that I had to go in to check to see if he was sick or cold, lost his lovey or something else disastrous. And in going in, I found that nothing really was wrong. He’d just woken up so I held him until he got sleepy again and put him back in the crib. So then the next night he awoke around the same time and started crying. Over the course of his learning to sleep, this pattern has happened before. He wakes one night and I check and then for the two nights after, he awakens at the same time. I had no idea he knew how to tell time. But I have learned through trial and error that to stop the pattern, what I need to do on those subsequent nights is let him cry and soothe himself back to sleep.

The discernment of when to leave others alone is tricky. Thinking of the times that it’s been hard – whether it was bugging my mom incessantly for something I wanted to buy when I was a kid or needing resolution from friend or lover in the middle of a kerfuffle, I can feel the tension of those moments. My impulse is to insert myself and push things the way that I want because I can’t stand the internal conflict. Or, I take the opposite approach and walk away entirely, hardening myself against needing at all.

The longer I live the more I am able to sense the Cosmic timing that helps guide us. Like some grand orchestra, I play my instrument but it sounds better when I wait for the cues from the conductor. I can ask for what I need but the response may be in the next movement. Expressing my hurt to a friend is best done when I’m feeling the clarity of my own notes and they might need to tune up before they can reply. Listening to my kids work themselves or their relationship out is like letting them practice their parts, something they’ll never get a chance to do if I step in too quickly.

I don’t like listening to my baby cry for the time it takes him to soothe himself back to sleep. But it makes it easier when I have the music of the Universe ringing in my ears.

Sliding Glass Door Moments

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“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty –
that is all you know on earth,
and all you need to know.” – John Keats

I was reading yesterday about how the English poet John Keats wrote “Ode to a Grecian Urn” while he was dying from tuberculosis at age 24. As tragic as that is for him, my mind immediately thought of his mother and how she must have felt. Clearly my becoming a mother has altered the angle from which I think about life. I’ve heard of decisions like mine to become a mother described as sliding glass moments – moments where you can see life on the other side and choose whether to open the door and cross the threshold.

I’m fascinated by our sliding glass moments because they define the major plot lines of our lives. They are the story we tell others when we first meet. I was stuck in traffic at 29-years-old and just had broken up with my boyfriend when I saw Mt. Rainier majestically sitting in front of me and decided to climb mountains. I was 39-years-old and my business partner invited me out to lunch to tell me of my husband’s infidelities and my life as I then knew it changed forever. I was 45-years-old and decided that I wanted to have kids and was willing to do it alone rather than rush a relationship that might not be right for all of us.

But as showy as those moments are, I think it’s equally telling how we live each day between them. Before my business partner told me about my husband’s infidelities I was drinking at least a bottle of wine each day trying to numb the fact that I was in a relationship I wasn’t supposed to be in. After he told me, I found meditation and the inner peace that comes with leaning towards life instead of away from it. Before I had babies I would cry hearing any story about the miracle of birth. After I had my kids, I practice my gratitude by writing at least one thing down every day for my gratitude box. If sliding glass moments are the plot lines, I think our daily habits must be the language and tone of how our stories are written.

I looked up the story of John Keats and found his dad died when he was 8-years-old and his mom died when he was 14-years-old. I imagine that his genius was in part defined by those moments and the words he wrote the way he lived each day processing them. Altogether they formed the life that brought the words to us – “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” – and in reading those we find the echo of both in our own lives: the truth of the big moments and the beauty of our days.

The Lightening Rod for Big Feelings

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“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

It’s my sister-in-law’s last day of nannying for me. The kids are aware of it but since they live so much in the now, it’s not as much that they focus on that information but the air is crackling with change and they sense it. It reminds me of the song my daughter sings about lightning: “Electricity gathers in a cloud, When frozen rain and bits of ice are bumping all around, Electricity leaping towards the ground, Lightning is the flash of light, Thunder is its sound.”

Just like with thunder storms, that energy has to go somewhere and in most cases, I find that I’m the lightening rod for my kids. They’ve bravely keep their little selves together until they see me and then it all comes bursting out. Lightning rods work because they draw the strike and then are wired to ground so that the energy is discharged safely into the earth. If a lightning rod is not wired to the ground, it provides no added protection to the structure.

I’m the conduit for my family’s emotion because my kids aren’t old enough to process many of the big feelings that come along with trying, getting hurt and having little control over the circumstances of life. And it’s not just kids that bleed off their pain and uncertainty. But to be the safe place for someone else’s emotions without endangering ourselves, we have to be connected to the ground. The danger of not being is that the electricity stays within us, causing damage to our organs, flashing out somewhere else unexpectedly or perhaps worst of all, building up until it’s a layer of charge that buffers our enjoyment of life. Completing the analogy, if we aren’t grounded we will not provide any added protection to the structure.

As with so much in parenting, I do much better with big feelings and changes if I take care of myself so I find myself continually working on my grounding. All week I have been getting up extra early, meditating to find that awareness that is bigger than my fear of the unknown, writing to process it all, and lying on the ground, ostensibly to stretch but even more to remind myself that there are many things that hold me up as life shifts. Leaning in towards the raw power of transformation and change, I find my center that is there through it all.

The Crux Move

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“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art in conducting oneself in lower regions by memory of what one has seen higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Daumal

I can picture the hardest move from one of my favorite routes in the rock climbing gym. It’s after you have climbed halfway up the 50 foot wall and then the wall juts out over your head so that to get past it, you have to lean backwards, reach your hand up where you can’t see and throw your leg out awkwardly to the side to counter-balance. It’s the crux move. The one that takes such balance, confidence and hope to overcome but leads to a gently inclined section that is a breeze to climb to the top.

Even though it’s been five years since I have regularly climbed on that route at the gym, whenever I get to a tough place in life I think of that crux move. It’s how I relate to the hard spots in life like the one I’m facing one now. My brother’s wife, Lindsey, who has nannied for me for five years is quitting to take her dream job. She has been here for me and my kids 2-3 days/week and in the coronavirus era, 4 days week to take care of everything. She has been the closest thing I have to a co-parent.

I am genuinely happy for Lindsey as my friend and sister-in-law and the time feels right for a change. But I’m also facing uncertainty as I wait for the school district to finalize their plan for in-person school. I’m hanging in this space in between what has been and what will be all the while trying to hold the ship steady and work.

The hallmark of these crux moves is the feeling of being off-balance and in fear. Life is pushing a shift, a shift that makes us live more out in the open because we aren’t treading our well-worn path. That exposure creates a tenderness against which fear is so much more palpable. For me, I fear that Lindsey will be relieved to be away from us and if so, does it mean she doesn’t love us and this work of raising kids isn’t worthwhile? And if I imagine Lindsey’s end, she is probably afraid that we don’t need her and aren’t grateful for all the time she gave us.

This fear leaves me feeling so vulnerable. I want to stack up all the irritations and hurts I can find, even though they are relatively few in order to block feeling this way.  But that’s when I come back to the muscle memory of the crux move. Learning to climb them taught me they go better if I’m not tense. The more I cling to whatever hand holds I have, the faster my arms burn out. But if I breathe deeply and relax into it, I preserve my strength for where I’m going. Even when I can’t see the next hand hold yet, I can feel my way into the timing so that I have momentum to help move me up and over. There is great joy in moving through a crux move because it requires the body, mind and spirit to all come together. Applying it this way, I get a glimpse of how no experience in life is wasted because our “play” helps create pathways through “life.”

I read recently that good-bye came about as a short way of saying “God be with you.” Saying it that way reminds me that we are all on a journey and the best way to help others along is to wish them well. So I wish Lindsey, God be with you, and I trust that the next move I make will carry me and my family through our crux move to the next part of our journey.

True Grit

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“Please remember that it is what you are that heals, not what you know.” – Carl Jung

The other day a friend of mine sent me a video. For a moment I wondered why she sent a video of the console as she exercised on a stationary bike and then she panned left and down, it showed that as she rode, her 3-year-old was calmly standing next to her holding her hand. Wow, I was so impressed — that she actually got on the bike and stayed on the bike in those conditions. It takes true grit for any parent to take care of their own needs with children around!

Taking care of myself to be the thing that I’m destined to get habitually wrong in parenting. First with one kid and now with two and I suspect with every change in routine and schedule, I keep relearning that I have to take care of me in order to be any use to them. My obstetrician used to joke that babies were parasites. They take exactly what they need from their host. She said it humorously but wasn’t joking. I’ve thought of it many times since having kids because sometimes I wonder what is left of me to be present. And it’s such a paradox because often when my kids need me most, I’m at my most depleted. As this quote from renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung says ”it is what you are that heals” that describes exactly what my kids are coming to me for, that surety, safety and knowledge of warmth that helps them soak away their hurts and fears.

If only I could be patient, funny and creative during the day then I can be thoughtful, deep and well-cared for at night. But when I try, the only thing that happens is that I end up exhausted for both. The answer is that I have to show up not only with my love but also with my needs, dreams and fears. It’s a threshold of entry that I must cross to be real with family, friends and colleagues.

My frequent excuse for not bringing all of me is that as a full-sized human, I don’t need as much so I lurk around living my life before they get up and after they go to bed. But every time I plan for us to do something that I want to do like go hiking, I’m rewarded that we all end up happier. Knowing that I want family to be a place where we are exercising and nurturing our most authentic, hopeful selves, I have to accept that includes me. It takes grit and courage but I know my kids will hold my hand, just as I hold theirs.

Life in the Waiting Room

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“Things are always in transition. Nothing ever sums itself up the way we dream about.” – Pema Chodron

I received an email last night from Seattle Public Schools. They aren’t going to be able to make the promised return date for in-person school for Kindergartners and 1st graders of March 1st. I have many reactions to that like “What, it’s been a year? How could that not be enough time?” but I also understand the huge number of details they need to work out. Whether or not I rationalize it, I still feel disappointed and in suspense. We’ve been packed in this house together for a year, doing the best to learn something including how to socialize with others and be happy about the circumstance and I’m ready for a change.

When I first decided to try invitro-fertilization to have a baby on my own, I went through all the steps and then sat down at my desk on the day that I’d gotten it all done and was prepared to start. I thought “Wow, life is about to change!” The next day my amazing father was killed in a bike accident and I was heartbroken. I thought “Not like that! That wasn’t the change I meant!” Even with this ever-present example of the most final way that don’t always change in the way that I anticipate or want, I still am very impatient for change and I’m an optimist that it’ll change for the better. I’m always looking forward to the next milestone or hanging my hat on “what I’ll do when…” It’s like living life in a waiting room, where you are isolated with the old magazines, never quite able to start something because you’re name might be called at any second, not enjoying where you are because it’s on the outside of the room you are waiting to be in.

There’s nothing to do but to return to now. Gratitude does that for me. I breathe into all the many things I’m grateful for including that, even amidst the grief of losing my father, IVF worked and I was blessed with my little family. Even when it feels like I can’t live in these circumstances for a moment longer, I practice returning to the sweetness of what is. It saves me from splitting myself between now and a time that has not yet happened. It saves me the energy of preparing for a future that will likely happen only in my mind. I stray from the moment, I return, it’s a cycle I repeat sometimes with every breath in the day. Life will change, I just try to meet it with my full and present heart.

Counting What Counts

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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and nothing everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein

Yesterday I went to the store with my kids and my five-year-old daughter wanted to bring her own money to buy a new toy. She packed an entire backpack full of supplies for our 10 minute drive to the store so it wasn’t until after she picked out something that we realized that she hadn’t brought her wallet. I agreed to loan her the money to buy it and she would pay me back but the Barbie accessories she picked were more than she had saved up. Not wanting to make this a lesson in indebtedness I didn’t make much of a point that I was happy to spot the difference. But later when she was showing my mom what she’d gotten, Olivia said, “But I lost all my money.” Stifling a smile I urged her to explain further and she then amended her statement to be “I gave all my money to my mom.” (Like it was some charity thing). I chuckled about that for the rest of the afternoon because this follows on a conversation where I tried to get her to change five-1’s for a five dollar bill but she didn’t like that trade. She wanted to keep her ones and also have the five so she found five coins in her piggy bank and wanted to trade that.

Knowing that this is a common hurdle for kids, I’m not too worried that she’ll get it. But it strikes me that we all face similar lapses in thinking when it comes to counting and what we value. We use “likes” as measures of acceptance when it’s really one insightful comment that makes us feel heard. We count how many times the nanny has left us without extra diapers instead of celebrating how well-cared for the kids are. We count how many kids socks we have to pick up at night when we’re tired instead of the smiles and looks for reassurance we answered in the day. We count how many extra pounds are on our bodies because COVID has made it hard to go to the gym instead of feeling the one amazing beat of life our hearts give us to keep going. We count how many days until life changes instead of leaning in to enjoy the closeness of life now. We count how many friends we do or don’t have instead of realizing that it’s the wholeness of the Universe that can make us feel loved.

I’m an engineer so I love numbers. The only way I’ve found to come back to what matters is to sit in meditation. It’s the time when I do nothing while seated on my meditation cushion that makes the most difference about the quality of everything else I do.