Tag: parenting

Always in My Boat

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“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.” – anonymous

This morning I was trying to put shoes on my toddler. I got one on before he starting running around the kitchen island. It started a game where we were chasing each other and hugging when we collided. My five-year-old daughter got in the mix and I stopped running just to watch them run, collide and hug. A moment of pure fun and joy.  

In my twenties I dated a man who had rowed crew for the University of Washington. His stories of teamwork and precision were beautiful. If I close my eyes, I can still see the images painted in my head. On a calm, still morning at the break of dawn, 8 rowers carrying a shell down to the water with the coxswain giving directions, they flip the boat and lower it in to Lake Washington. Once they are all in with the coxswain nestled in the front, they take up their oars and in perfect rhythm set off across the smooth surface as the morning mist swirls around them. The cox calls directions and timing. Stroke, feather, stroke.

I’ve been picturing my family as a rowing team. Each of my kids is a rower and I am the cox, at least for this phase in life. We get up every morning and do our best to row across the expanse of the day. Each of us has a part and some days we are in sync and glide smoothly.

And then on some days, one or both of my little rowers or I have a fit which I liken to catching a crab. That’s rower lingo for when the blade goes into the water at the wrong time for the momentum of the boat and results in the oar driving hard into the rower, perhaps even knocking them out. It’s a hard moment for everyone in the boat and we have to take stock as to whether we keep rowing until they can get back into the rhythm or stop to help them center themselves again. Because we are a team and no team gets good without practicing together.

We also have to take into consideration the conditions outside. Right now as we transition back to in-person activities, it feels like the lake is choppy and it’s hard to hold the boat steady. It’s also when we have to set our expectations that we won’t be going as far or as fast until conditions improve.

I like this analogy because it helps me see the long view of life and my family. For now they are in my boat but someday they’ll have their own boats and I’ll be a rower for them. And then of course, I’ll be gone and then they’ll have to close their eyes to see me pulling for them as I do with my dad and the feeling that he’s always in my boat.

Because what is the boat? I think of it as anything that keeps us above water. For me it is Faith and it makes it so much easier to stay afloat in the reassurance there is a Higher Power so much bigger than me. I step into the boat trusting that a master craftsman has constructed it to be sound and for the best rowing experience in both still and choppy water.

This morning as we ran around the island, my daughter caught my son and hugged him long enough for me to get that second shoe on. We took that instant to stop, hug each other and laugh. I felt the prayer in my heart, “Thank you for this beautiful and easy moment that gives us momentum to glide through all the others.”

A Comedy of Errors

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“We are here to live out loud.” – Balzac

Yesterday as I was loading the car for a special Palm Sunday drive-in show for kids at our church, I accidentally knocked my toddler down the two steps leading to the crawl space. We were going to the event with my mom and her friend, both over 80-years-old so I had gone in the crawl space to get camp chairs for them. I didn’t realize that my toddler had followed me up the little step stool and was just outside the door so that when I opened it to come out, it knocked him down. My five-year-old daughter went screaming into the house because she was sure he was dead, somehow the bike next to him also fell over (but I don’t think that was any significant source of pain) and fortunately when I went and gathered him in my arms, there was no obvious injury and he only cried for about 30 seconds.

But I still needed to get some pillows out of the crawl space so to make sure we didn’t repeat the same thing, I let the kids play in the car so that he wouldn’t follow me. After I got the pillows I got in the car with them, my daughter in the driver’s seat, son in passenger seat, me in the back. My son locked the doors and then pulled the door handle which set off the security alarm. I didn’t have my keys on me so I couldn’t turn it off and every time we tried to unlock the doors, it would automatically relock them. The horn was honking, the lights were blinking, the kids were crying – it was a fiasco! But I managed to get a door open, get them out of there and the horn stopped blaring.

It’s no wonder that I’m exhausted at the end of the day. I’m so busy taking care of everyone else’s moods that I don’t care of my own. Until after they go to bed and then I watch TV I don’t even care about, drink a glass of wine or spend too much time surfing the Internet. Those feelings – the horror that I knocked my child over, the frustration that I can’t do something as simple as getting things out of my crawl space without unleashing a whole chain reaction of undesired events, the relief that no one was hurt – they just sit in my gut and bubble all day long. Instead of being able to exercise, go for a walk or meditate, I just put them aside where they sap energy. And I know that I’m not alone. Everyone sitting at work with their boss and co-workers watching can’t exercise their emotions when they are frustrated. Any care giver or health care worker can’t show their emotions as they carry out their jobs. No one with any celebrity can make a parenting mistake without someone catching it on camera for everyone else to comment on.

But as someone who no one is watching, I wonder: Am I doing this right if I can’t take a moment to feel things through once I’ve taken care of making sure the kids are okay? Should I be parenting differently so that they see me take care of my mental and physical health? Because actually the most important audience of two is watching me after all.

I have a long history of being a caretaker, working very hard to be prepared so that things go smoothly and finding my inner sunshine and optimism. Which is to say that change will not come easily but I’m hoping awareness goes a long way to help get me started. Because I’m not sure that I knew how much I wasn’t expressing on the day before yesterday that wasn’t nearly as dramatic. That is the miracle of living out loud for me – that naming things has real power to shine light on doubt, wounds and habits and to start them healing. No doubt I will make plenty of other mistakes and the process will have to repeat but I hope to at least share the story along the way.

Postscript: We finally made it to the Palm Sunday event yesterday – it was cold and rainy. My daughter and my mom got out and danced while the rest of us huddled in the back of the car, enjoying both the warmth of being close and opportunity to be in a crowd, albeit a small, socially distanced, drive-in crowd. The chairs were not necessary because it was too cold and rainy to be sitting out in the open. But I had them just in case.

Finding My Stride

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“Song is not a luxury, but a necessary way of being in the world.” – Mark Nepo

This first mountain guide that I ever climbed with recited poetry. Not while we climbed but during breaks and when we were all gathered in the evening around the camp stove drinking hot drinks. I was not quite 30-years-old and eager to learn everything I could about climbing so the poetry stuck. And the rhythm of it while I climbed was so helpful when roped to others. Go too fast and the rope bunches up and makes it harder to avoid stepping on it. Go too slow and you tug on the person in front of you, throwing them off balance. High up on the mountain where the oxygen is thinner, the breath harder to catch, having a rhythm stuck in your head to move to works. The guide favored Robert Service poetry and I can still recite it, maybe even use it to find my internal rhythm in moments:

There’s a race of men who don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stand still.

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

A roam the world at will.

I’ve been thinking about stride a lot lately because I’m having trouble finding mine. Three weeks into getting my toddler into the rhythm of preschool, there was a teacher in-service day and school was cancelled. Now my 5-year-old is going to go to in-person Kindergarten for the first time starting in April but they are cancelling all remote classes for 3 days to prepare. And changing the start time for everyone, even the kids that are staying remote. And once they’ve been back to school for one week, then we are taking a week off for Spring Break. I totally get that starting back up a big school district is a huge task and acknowledge that they need to take the time. I’m just trying to figure out how to get my work done amidst the turbulence. This moment of re-entry, obstacles and challenges feels like the upper reaches of a mountain. My little family is like a roped-up team. It’s hard work and I feel like I can’t find my stride and it’s hard to breathe.

I’ve had plenty of moments in the mountains when I couldn’t find my stride either. And like with what I’m feeling right now, one of the biggest reasons is low-level worry and complaints like I’m tired, it’s windy, what are the tough conditions we’ll face ahead? But my time on mountains has taught me that I can take one step at a time until I find my stride. If I can replace the worry and complaints with a song, a mantra or a poem, I start loosening up and flowing again.

So I’m channeling my inner mountain guide as I meditate in the morning of these weeks knowing that if I can find my rhythm, I make it easier for all those on my rope team. Because we are all tied together and we’ll get to where we are going and face our obstacles as a team. I’d rather do that singing than worrying, dancing through one step at a time.

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.

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.