Tag: parenting

Uncertainty

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“Life was not meant to be easy…but take courage: it can be delightful.” – George Bernard Shaw

Often when I drop my daughter and our neighbor to school in the mornings, I see a man standing at the fence watching his child. He’s dropped his child off, they’ve run into the playground to stand in line before the teachers bring the kids in and the man stands there, sometimes watching, sometimes waving.

It’s an image that affects me deeply. Is he worried about the child being bullied? Or just sending him his love? Is he struggling with the separation? Whatever it is, it feels like the man is sending out his personal bubble of protection to encompass the child from afar.

And I understand it because sending my daughter to first grade in these pandemic conditions meant I had to send her off to a building that I’d never been inside of and to a teacher that I’ve met in-person once. It’s a little like sending her off to a black hole every day and then just being so thankful that she comes back out.

But that all changed last week when they finally processed my volunteer application and called me last minute because they needed help with lunch. The school has set up lunch tables outside and rotations so they can eat sufficiently spread out all facing one direction. They have hand sanitizer protocols and wipe down procedures and the kids seem to handle all these rules with such aplomb.

It felt like such a luxury to be with my child as she was playing in the playground, eating lunch and also to be able to chat with her friends. I met Will, the boy I wrote about in the COVID crush post. [He also lines up on heart number 15 next to my daughter and told her a few weeks ago that he has a crush on her.] He came up to me during the lunch service and also told me he had a crush on her. He was adorable!

In the middle of the seating our 3rd rotation out of 4, the loud speaker went off with a huge clang and announced that everyone needed to “shelter in place.” Kids had to pack up their lunches and evacuate the playground. Without any clear understanding of why, we helped these 2nd and 3rd graders return to their classrooms in a hurry.

[Eventually it was explained there was a tornado warning which is beyond rare in Seattle. Then the news came in that was intended for an area about 30 miles west of us. It was too late to get the kids back out to the lunch area so we just supported them eating in their classrooms.]

The man at the fence has come to symbolize uncertainty for me. The uncertainty that has been so acute in this pandemic era when we haven’t had access to check on our loved ones – whether they be elderly, sick, kids or even our pets as we sit outside the vet clinic. All that worry about how we can keep them safe when we can’t be involved in their care.

Finally getting to see the inside of the school helped resolve some of my uncertainty. Strangely it was the emergency that made me feel better most of all. I worked arm in arm with much of the school staff and got to see the people that make school happen every day. It was an honor and wonder to see their dedication, resourcefulness and care. I hope one day I can tell that to the man at the fence.

(featured image photo from Pexels)

The Detailed Answer

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“Love is the beauty of the soul.” – St. Augustine

I was driving in the car with my kids when my 6-year-old asked me, “Mama, do you like being a parent?” I replied that I did and that I especially did because I was proud to be a parent of the two of them. Which is true but also a really broad answer that encapsulates all the specific things that go into parenting.

Yesterday was a great example of all the reasons why I love being a parent.

Since it was a holiday morning, I snuggled in my bed with my two kids and we watched a video that my daughter made. She was explaining grown-up teeth and it came out like this, “You know what grown-ups are, right? And well, they have teeth. And when you are little, you lose all of your teeth. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.” [insert expression where she gets really close to the camera and tries to show every one of her teeth] We watched that video over and over and laughed!

I can’t think of a day as a parent where I haven’t belly-laughed.

Then my daughter was asking me why we have Veterans Day. I explained it as if it originated as a celebration of the end of World War II. Later in the day I found out it was marking the end of World War I. Oops.

Every day I have to explain something that isn’t in my wheelhouse. I make mistakes and I learn.

Yesterday morning my daughter’s best friend, who is brown, came over and they were making art on the dining room table. My daughter said she didn’t like brown as a color. It offended her friend because she is brown. They had a conversation trying to solve both individual expression and systemic hurt.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get some insight into all that comes with being human.

I had to take my 2-year-old son to the doctor for his flu shot. He flinched when he got it but didn’t cry. But 10 minutes later he pinched his finger when we sat down on a bench and started sobbing.

I’m reminded every day that being a safe place for others to express their hurts is a sacred job.

The three of us went over to visit my mom. We played the piano, explored all her toys, read books, fiddled with the water in her sink, found tiny places that only little people could hide in and laughed. We had the snacks in a routine that my kids associate with my mom and it’s easy to see how traditions are born.

There is some reminder every day that my kids and I are part of a loving, bigger family that holds us, helps us and hears us.

Tired after all the excitement and hurts of the day, my son didn’t want to eat the dinner I’d made for him and tipped it onto the floor. I too was tired and frustrated and said so. My son said for the very first time, “I lorry.” (I’m sorry) We picked it up together.

Each day comes with the need to forgive and be forgiven.

As I got ready for bed, I went into my kids room to check on them. The sound of their breathing and the precious shapes they make while they sleep renews every fiber of love of safety in my body.

Every day I am overwhelmed with my love for these beautiful miracles.

When my daughter asked me if I liked being a parent, I asked her if it seems like I do. She said “Yes. I mean you get tired and frustrated sometimes but, yes.” That about sums it up.

Dispelling Shame

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“What you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can.” – Thomas More

We bumped up against shame a couple times this past weekend. As always, it left a mark.

The first time was when a group of young kids, including my 6-year-old daughter and her friend were looking into a stream that’s on the way to the salmon spawning grounds. They weren’t doing anything wrong and I believe the grown-up that was with them was making sure they weren’t going to but an activist yelled at them in case they were thinking of stepping into the water.

The second was when my daughter dropped an old iPhone that I’d given her to play with. It’s so outdated that it doesn’t have any value to a grown-up and can’t connect to the Internet but it does turn on and take pictures. She’s old enough now to understand the cachet of a phone and was so excited that she even put on jeans so that she’d have a pocket to carry it in.

But when she discovered that after dropping it a few times the screen had cracked, she followed suit and cracked. Her melt down was in part because she accurately assessed that I wouldn’t replace it. But more than that, she was ashamed that people would know she was a person who couldn’t take care of a phone.

Shame reminds me of an incident when I was 18-years-old. I was with a group of guys in a bar in Idaho. We were too young to buy drinks so we were just standing around when someone who we’d helped tow his boat earlier in the day offered to buy us a pitcher of beer. I was the closest and because I didn’t drink, I said, “no thank you” even though I meant “not for me.” The guys I was with could have killed me. But no one said anything.

This incident still marks me more than 30-years-later because I’ve never talked about it. I felt like a goodie-two-shoes even though I didn’t care – I just misspoke. Even typing it makes me feel that burn all over again. It’s because it’s so trivial and yet I still remember that I know how powerful shame can be.

After the incident at the stream this weekend, my daughter and her friend bumped into each other and they got into a kerfuffle about space. As an observer, it was clear it had nothing to do with who bumped whom and everything to do with discharging the shame of being yelled at by a stranger when they very much like to follow the rules.

The night the phone cracked I sat with my daughter at bedtime and we talked about shame. About how silence and secrecy are the things that shame feeds on and if we want to stop the shame spiral, we have to talk about it lest we give it the power to make us feel unworthy.

As we talked, I realized that I was confused as a parent about which message to emphasize because I think taking care of the things we own is important. But making the distinction between it was bad to drop the phone and being a bad person because she couldn’t take care of the phone was more important to me. Because shame leaves a mark. But how deeply etched the mark is depends on how quickly we can pull out of the shame spiral.  

As a postscript, when my mom came over last night, my daughter pulled out the phone she had hidden when she was ashamed and talked about what was on the phone, how it got cracked and what we need to do to take care of our stuff. It was like getting immediate feedback on a test and we passed. Phew!

Wounds or Scars

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“Suffering makes an instrument of each of us, so that standing naked, holes and all, the unseen vitalities can be heard through our simplified lives.” – Mark Nepo

The other day I shook out the blanket that I keep outside for lying on the grass in summer and my son immediately starting looking for the little farmhouse that we usually play with on it. I am fascinated by how quickly my kids make associations. Blanket = Little People farm. A particular cup = hot cocoa. Boots = puddles. Baths = lotion.

But that observation makes me realize how much I do it as well. Fall comes and I think of hot cider. I turn on Grey’s Anatomy and want a glass of wine. When I write I sit in one chair and when I work I sit in another.

It seems to be a way to winnow down our choices so that we don’t have to make as many decisions. But every once in a while a pattern crops up that reminds me of where I stuck. The other day my daughter was carpooling with friends and they asked if there was a particular car she didn’t like. She said BMW’s. And they asked why and she said it was because her mom didn’t like them.

I had to laugh when my carpooling friend told me this story. My daughter and I had been talking about cars and I’d offhandedly said that I didn’t like them because it seemed like the drivers bought them for image. Which is a very unfair broad generalization that I never thought would be repeated. The fact is, my ex-husband bought one to bolster his image and so I created the association. I’ve been over that relationship for some time so I shouldn’t punish BMW drivers forever.

Meditating on this, so many associations came up for me. Many of them are ones that make me smile – places that I walk that remind me of my beloved dog and phrases when I hear them that bring back my dad.

And one that I wasn’t expecting. I miscarried a baby four years ago. When I heard the news, I went to hike a beautiful trail that overlooks Puget Sound. This trail had been my go-to for any time I needed to think. The wind seems to whip whatever is inside me out into the open and the view puts it into perspective.

As I was thinking about associations, I realized that I’ve never been back to that trail since the day I heard the news about my miscarriage. Obviously I went on to have a beautiful son and so I filed the miscarriage away as old news. It isn’t something that I mourn or think of as painful. It just was. But every time I think of hiking that trail, I think “nah” without ever digging deep for the reason.

Life keeps teaching me I can carry around wounds or scars. If I choose wounds, they drain a lot more energy as they try to heal without ever been unpacked. But if I do the work to clean them out and then heal into scars, they just become part of the patchwork quilt that is me.

All of this introspection is a great reminder to me that I can pass things on based on my loves or my losses. And given how easily they clearly stick for my kids, I think it’s time to heal those wounds before any other misguided association gets repeated!

The Courage Not to Quit

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“It always seems impossible until its done.” – Nelson Mandela

When my daughter, her friend and I were biking back from school the other day she absolutely refused to walk her bike up a steep hill even though her friend and I were walking our bikes. She would run out of steam, stop and then start trying to ride again in the middle of the hill. I repeatedly coached her “walk your bike.”

Finally she explained she wanted to be a story. “What does that mean?” She replied, “I want to be a story we talk about at the dinner table.”

I assume this hearkens back to the time she bought an ice cream for her brother from the ice cream truck, all by herself, with her own money and without me telling, choose to get one for him too. I blogged about it in The Great Turnaround post. I was proud of her, she was proud of herself and I told many people the story when they came over for tea or dinner.

So I had to explain that for every epic journey, there is always a time that you want to quit. I’ve never climbed a mountain where there wasn’t a place where I totally wanted to quit. Just mentioning this brings back the time on the Mexican volcano, Mt. Ixtacchuatl right after we left high camp at about 14,000 feet.

It was dark, the middle of the night and we were walking on scree – that loose gravel that shifts every time you set your weight on it so that every step was a scramble and rebalancing effort too. We were on the way to the 17,600 foot summit so we had a long way to go and the only thing I could think was that I’d have to contend with this on the way back too. I totally wanted to quit.

And so I told her that’s where the stories come from – because you want to quit and yet you don’t. Whatever you do to get past that section where it’s hard and bleak doesn’t have to be pretty. The epic stories all have a middle section. Otherwise they aren’t very entertaining..

My daughter looked at me as if she wasn’t convinced. And since she’s 6-years-old and has had very little personal struggle in her life, I suspect that she doesn’t yet have a hook to hang that on.

So the next time she had to ride home from school, her friend’s dad ran behind them and pushed them up the hill as they stayed on their bikes and rode. She returned home to me triumphantly and said, “I have my story now!”

Picture of the Week

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My 6-year-old daughter and her friends wanted to ride bikes to school. It felt hard to do – it was cold, difficult to get everyone ready early and took a lot of coordination with the other parents. As this was our second time doing this, my daughter felt confident enough to lead for some of the ride with me and her little brother on my bike behind her and her two friends following us. We turned a corner and all the difficulty stripped away when I took this picture. The promise of the day meeting the potential of youth.

I was so proud of them. But more importantly, they were proud of themselves.

Riding to school on a crisp October morning

Cut the BS

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“Life is the sum of all your choices.” – Camus

The first time I did preschool with my daughter she had just turned 2 years old and it was a co-op preschool. Parents worked in the classroom one day per week and dropped off our child the other day of the week. The teacher said to us, “Never leave without saying good-bye to your child. It doesn’t work to sneak out.”

I think that might have been the best parenting advice that I may have ever received. I took it to mean to not undermine my child’s trust in me by being sneaky. Just because you can fool a small child doesn’t mean you should. I didn’t know any better at the time but witnessing parents do the “sneak-away” approach at other moments, I’ve seen the resulting effect when it’s happened. The child seems both dismayed that they can’t find the parent as well as beyond consolable because they want the parent for comfort.

I want to claim that I knew sneakiness doesn’t work in life before I was a parent but that would also be BS. I was not attuned to the feeling of tension that signals a choice of not facing or facing the emotions of someone who will be unhappy by what I chose to do. I have ducked out of many parties with a white lie about why I couldn’t come instead of telling the host the truth that I didn’t feel like coming. I shudder to think about the time I canceled going to see U2 with a friend and his son because I had a colossally bad day at work.

But what I’ve learned from parenting isn’t about lying per se – because I don’t tell my kids the truth about many things like Santa and the Easter Bunny and whether or not I’ve ever had sex. It’s more specific to not telling the truth in order to avoid emotions. Like saying we are out of cookies instead of being the bad guy who says “no” because they’ve had too much sugar.

Instead of amplifying feelings by adding the horror of being tricked, this advice has taught me to lean into the discomfort of the initial disappointment. It also honors the emotional intelligence of anyone that I might mislead who can often sense they are being tricked, even at a very young age, even if they don’t know exactly how.

I’m leaving. I will miss you and can’t wait to scoop you up when I return. There is nothing like the sweetness of reunion and it is not possible until we recognize the truth of being apart.

(photo by Pexels)

Effective Redirection

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“It never hurts to see the good in someone. They often act better because of it.” – Nelson Mandela

The other day I quietly came into my still dark room and to put my toothbrush away before waking my daughter for school. She had migrated into my bed in the middle of the night as she often does so I brushed my teeth in a different bathroom so as not to wake her prematurely.

After setting my toothbrush down, I went to kiss her on the cheek. As soon as I did, she barked out “You are ignoring me and you’re late!” And I was taken aback that the quiet had turned to this and started to retort, “Now wait a minute, you are in my room and I’m just trying to get to my bathroom…”

It made me think of a dog-training article I read the other day. One of the tips was that when telling a dog not to do something, it’s too vague for the dog because in essence we are saying “don’t chew my shoe” but then then dog has to both process that and also think of what it should be doing. The article, and I can’t think of where I read it or why I read since I don’t presently have a dog, suggested instead to tell the dog what to do. That in essence solves both problems – getting the dog to stop chewing the shoe and redirecting it to a new behavior – in one command.

This seems to be the work of relationships as well. I don’t think it’s just me that often responds that I don’t like what someone has said or done without ever saying what I’d prefer to happen. In fact, I often just hope the other person can intuit that! Because thinking and naming what I want comes from a different place than a retort, an intentional place that takes some work to access. It’s a subtle shift from defense to bridge-making.

When my sister-in-law nannied for me she was great at saying to my kids, “A better way to say that is…” and it worked great at helping them know how to express their feelings but in a way that is more likely to be heard. My sister-in-law both was telling my kids what not to do and redirecting the behavior but in one efficient suggestion.

My 6-year-old daughter is so verbally adept so it’s really easy to forget that communication is still incredibly new to her. It may not be obvious how to express irritation and ask for what she needs. And more than that, it requires her to practice accessing her intentional space as well.

Even though I’m an old dog (or middle-aged one), I’m trainable too. So I stopped my retort and started again. “Hey darling girl, a better way to say it might be, ‘Morning, Mom. I’m frustrated you are taking so long because I’m dying to have your attention.’ ”

(photo by Pexels)

Comparative Suffering

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“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

I’m old for a parent of a 2-year-old and a 6-year old. I had my son when I was 50 years old. Most of my long-time friends have kids in college which is great when I need babysitters. So part of my parenting journey has been to make new friends with people that have young children and have met many delightful ones.

But the other parents don’t complain to me. That isn’t to say that they don’t like me or include me, it’s just that generally they refrain from sharing their parenting woes. Every once in a while I’ll get a hint of why they don’t when a mom friend will say to me, “My husband was out of town for this week and wow, it’s so hard to get two kids to bed!” And they will often then add, “But I shouldn’t complain about that because you have to do it all the time.”

While I reassure them that it is totally fine to say that to me, I completely understand. More than that, I don’t feel bad that I do it by myself because I chose to. In fact, I often think about what would have happened if I’d had children when I was married and shake my head in relief that it’s only two kids that I have to get ready in the morning and not three if I was still married to my ex. 😊

But I finally have a term for why parents don’t complain to me because of a great Brené Brown Unlocking Us podcast episode with Esther Perel that I heard this week. Comparative suffering. When we start to complain about something and then cut ourselves off because others have it so much worse. I was recently talking with my friend Mindy about my dad’s death when I was 45-years-old and then stopped because her mom died when Mindy was only 23-years-old. I felt insensitive because I’d been able to have him in my life so much longer.

But I heard a heart-changing quote from Brené Brown on that podcast: “I had very little empathy for other people because I wasn’t open to my own pain.” When we stop to acknowledge that something hurts, sucks, is difficult — without comparing it to anyone else’s journey — we land ourselves back in reality. And from there, we can reach other people.

I frequently use “Comparison is the thief of joy” with my 6-year-old when she resorts to comparison with her friends. But now that I heard that wisdom I’m thinking of expanding it to “comparison is the thief of relationship.” We don’t have to compare any of our experience – good or bad. And when we do, we just have to acknowledge our own experience and theirs, and then continue to be real because that’s the glue of friendships, old and new.

(photo from Pexels)