Better Make It A Double

natural (or maybe not)...

In the comments to the post below, Ella said that maybe I wasn’t exactly being fair to the role of my instincts. We people-types have a tendency to make things either/or, and I think maybe she’s right. I  do actually have that little voice or gut feeling, even often, that leads me in a certain direction. Often that feeling or voice is valid and helpful. The difference for me is that it almost never ends there, and I would never hold "following your gut" without some further reflection up as a goal. I feel like I need my “gut” to partner with rational reasons for doing things a certain way in order to feel like I’m making a sensible choice. I don’t, however, mean to imply that doing that is such an overwrought or onerous process. I don’t particularly struggle with the common complaint that all the parenting books contradict each other, at least not anymore. I don’t assume that any book is going to solve all my parenting issues or provide me with a perfect system (again, at least not anymore). I read fast and I’m good at gleaning, taking a tip or two and leaving the rest. Someone could certainly argue that in doing that, I ultimately end up trusting my instincts, and perhaps they’d be right. I kind of have my process down pat: a problem presents itself, I have a preliminary perspective on the matter, I do a little research, ask around a little, examine my biases and experiences a bit in the process, and draw a conclusion. Then I do it and feel pretty confident about it all, at least most of the time. But I rarely just say “Eh. I think I’ll do this, just because it feels right the first time I’ve thought about it, and my “gut” says that what I should do.”  My conclusions are often very different from my first take on a dilemma.

There have been times though, where my attachment to my “research” has come at the expense of the twin teachers that are instinct and experience, especially if I’ve done that research before I’ve actually gotten to that stage. I’ve also come to realize, especially over the past year, that the questions a particular book or method might answer, or the need they might speak to, are very different from person to person. Attachment parenting is a great example. A lot of us were taught that babies should be put down a lot so they don’t get spoiled, that one must never sleep with a baby, that breastfeeding should ideally only be done alone and for a few months, maybe a year. If that’s the message you’re getting, or if you grew up with a certain amount of stinginess when it came to affection, the AP books will probably especially kindly speak to you. If you set out to put your baby in a crib down the hall and found that your baby only sleeps on top of you or in your bed, or maybe that you don’t actually want to put baby down as much as you’d planned, or that breastfeeding on demand just seems to be what works, then getting your hands on a copy of a Sears book was probably like water in the desert. I’m actually a big fan of some of the AP hallmarks. I’m all for breastfeeding as long as you’d like, if it’s working out well for you and your child. We wore our boys all the time as babies, co-slept for the first few months (and are SO glad we did, because I cannot imagine having traipsed up and down the hall umpteen time a night), and we had a family commitment to breastfeeding.

However, by the time the boys were born, I’d already been reading Mothering for some time. I’d read all the Sears books while I was pregnant. It made so much sense! The world was all fu*cked up because we modern Westerners were doing it all wrong, so unlike how it was done by everyone since ever! It was, rather ironically, my rational, cerebral approach that started to chafe at me when it came to strictly doing things so “naturally”. I was never nearly as sleep deprived as I might have been because I often pumped milk and got a longer stretch of sleep by having J give them a night feeding once per night. J and I always did what we needed to do to protect one another’s sleep. When one boy woke up to eat, we brought the other sleepy baby to the breast as well, ensuring that we didn’t have night after night of ping-pong feedings. We never left the house without a bottle of expressed milk, because I didn’t want to tandem feed them in public (helloooo, topless mama). I told myself that it was OK because I had twins, that it would be pretty hard on any twin mom to do things in a purely natural manner. Silently, in the back of my mind, echoed college cultural anthropology lectures about how in some indigenous cultures, twin infanticide is not uncommon because twins are just that hard on how things are done in that culture. Also echoing in my mind were lectures on how a lot of different cultures have done things a lot of different ways throughout time, some of which would seem horrible to our Western ways, and about the idea of the Noble Savage, and how that idea had been used to racist and simplistic ends.

I am a stubborn soul, though, and I still felt that I was somehow shortchanging my twins by doing things in a less-than-AP way. I felt conflicted about the fact that my boys clearly slept better in their cribs than with us after they turned about 4 months old. I was sheepish about the fact that I had quite the routine going with my boys, doing naps and bedtime by the clock and finding that my boys seemed to take quite well to that. I also couldn’t deny that this approach was working for our family, that it felt, well, natural. I was clearly lucky enough to have decent sleepers, but I don’t think my kids would have been great co-sleepers or babies who spent all their time in arms and didn’t get put down for regular naps. They both have very regular habits and love routine. AP looked great on paper, but Dr. Sears doesn’t live at our house.

Now here’s the part where I feel like a bit of an idiot – because I’ve met people who consider themselves Sears/AP fans who’ve done things roughly like we’ve done. They didn’t get the guilt or the prescriptive parts out of it, they focused more on the parts about it being OK to be as responsive to your babies as you’d like to. I suppose that makes sense to me now, but it didn’t feel that way then. I’d read the parts about “throughout human history” and about the horrors of babies crying alone, and I’d feel like a sub-par mother because I had twins and couldn’t seem to pull it off.

Then, a few things happened at once. The AP e-mail list I was on, full of women who I used to think had this Mothering thing all figured out, broke into a scuffle over the most ridiculous things, with people lobbing insults over “baby cages” and “baby buckets”, and moms who work or dare take some time for themselves to run a marathon for a day, much less work. I read an article in Mothering that deeply offended me, because it implied that for the first year of life, the only “natural” role of the father was to support the mother in her mothering. From birth on J has been right there with me in the holding, rocking, changing, and feeding, and the idea that he was only good enough to change diapers, fetch me snacks, and rub my feet seemed insane. I had a friend who seemed so tired from getting up all night and breastfeeding every 20 minutes and then never, ever leaving her baby that her relationship with her husband was seriously strained and she looked like an absolute shell of her former self, yet she refused to consider her own sanity in the equation by getting even an hour’s break because if she was doing everything right, then she wasn’t supposed to want it*. I  read this, and had to admit that there might actually be multiple definitions of what is “natural” and that what’s natural in one culture might not work all that well in another.

And then, the kicker: O hit that lovely stage where he no longer took all that kindly to being nursed and rocked to sleep, but he also hadn’t mastered the art of falling asleep on his own without crying. For a while, we had a mother’s helper in the evenings, and I could manage the hour+ long song-and-dance it took to get both boys down without much in-crib crying, but then the money for that ran out, and since J works every evening, I was on my own. I had a feeling that what my kids needed at bedtime was not the same for each of them, and I was eventually proven right. By this time I’d spent a couple of months nursing O to sleep, putting him down, picking him up when he cried, nursing all over again, him getting more frantic as the clock ticked and he grew more and more exhausted until he finally passed out cold from hysteria-induced exhaustion. I was following the AP script, but getting nowhere. I even tried sleeping with him again, but got nowhere. I tried patting and soothing instead of rocking, but he wanted none of it. Eventually, one big psychic realignment of my perceived parenting values later, I finally figured out and accepted that O would go to sleep just fine if he could just cry for a few minutes first. He needed a little space, and a little crying released some built up tension within him (and he’s still that way, and will even say so now). N was a different story, and I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere doing that, but my ideas of what was “natural” was actually getting in the way of meeting O’s needs. By finally doing what seemed like the most sensible thing to do, I got my sanity and my evenings back, and vowed never again to follow any “method” that didn’t appear to be working. I also refuse to apologize for having needs of my own, for being an equally important part of our family even though I usually have to put my kids’ needs first. So I guess I do follow my “gut”, but I see instinct and experience and research as more or less equal partners. I also think that while there are few to no suggestions in the Sears books (which I no longer have in front of me to reference) that I have a problem with anyone doing, I don’t for one minute believe that his ideas are the only way to go, the only way to be a good mother or parent.

But then, other than a few anonymous women on an e-mail list, pretty much the only person who ever told me that was myself. Even Sears himself would likely have been less hard on me than I was on myself, but I think that after years of infertility and too much time dreaming of how, when I finally got the chance to be a mother, I’d do it the right way, I had some blinders on about that. In retrospect, I think I found my own ways to be responsive to my babies, choosing, for instance, to put everything I needed for the next few hours on the floor or in the bed: food for me, diapers, everything, and just get down on the floor or stay in bed with them, giving them all the touch they needed and wouldn’t have gotten if I’d been set on making trips all over the house all the time the way one might with an easily portable singleton. That tactic alone was more effective than any of Sears’ strategies as far as feeling like they really got something like the physical contact and responsiveness a singleton would have.

Three years later, I’m not only a lot more forgiving of myself for what I can’t accomplish perfectly, I’m also a lot more confident of my abilities to make good choices in mothering them without losing my mind in the process. The way we did things wasn’t just making the best of things, it was actually just fine, and chances are, AP or not, your choices were fine for you and your baby too.

*To be fair – this idea did not come from Dr. Sears, but other, more radical AP-ish books. I do think that Sears is a fine physician, and I’ve come to see that his books are a great comfort and resource to a lot of people, even as I’ve also met my share of women who regret having followed his advice to the letter. It’s really only the more dogmatic, prescriptive aspects of it all I have a problem with; the idea that there’s one “natural” way of doing things. His vaccine book is, IMHO, the best around, and I liked the discipline book too, for the most part.

 

follow your instincts (or maybe not...)

This post really spoke to me this week. Nothing like parenting little kids to bring your “issues” to the forefront, is there? Linda illustrated so clearly why it is that the phrase “just follow your instincts” upsets and frustrates me so much. When you've been exposed to a lot of anger, manipulation, and inconsistency in your own upbringing, your ability to trust your "instincts" in relationships is often kind of broken. I just haven’t had that modeling, that foundation of trust and support that would be needed to trust my gut when the going gets hard. I get flustered and angry, and can’t think straight when my kids act up. I feel ashamed of their age-appropriate behavior. If people like me want to be effective parents and not lose our cool or expect too much, we need something more than “instincts”. To that end, I like the very same parenting books that Linda does – books that give me the real, practical tools to use and the words to say, not just the philosophy. Read Linda’s post to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. I think I’m going to make J read it so he might better be able to understand what the heck my problem is sometimes.

OK, are you done? Now I’m going to cover some of the good stuff about being aware of your own painful upbringing. They do exist, hard won as they may be.

• I have one hell of a BS detector. A less-than-ideal upbringing leads to a lot of painful self-reflection for a lot of us, and this has its benefits. If I do say so myself, one of those benefits is being able to see through other people’s self-delusion, and I’m a good judge of character.

• I am that much more aware that “instincts” are biased for everyone. Sure, I’d rather they were biased by good modeling and consistency, but what we call “instincts” are, for all of us, based at least some on a combination of our experiences and our perceptions of our experiences. If you had empathetic, consistent discipline modeled to you as a child, your “instincts” might (depending at least a little on your temperament) lead you to favor treating your own children that way, which is, of course, a good thing. Where that gets tricky is thinking that the familiar feeling of just doing “what just feels right” will always serve you. It won’t, or t least, it won’t always serve those around you fairly. We live in a racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, different-phobic, materialistic society, and those biases are fed to us every day in various doses and forms. If you rightfully trust your “instincts” in some areas of your life, you may well come to the conclusion that trusting your    “instincts” is always a good thing, and it isn’t. Yet I see “instincts” held up as the gold standard for decision-making everywhere I go, especially among mothers, especially when it comes to reasons to be afraid. I’d personally say that “instincts” aren’t worth a lot in the absence of examining one’s biases unless, perhaps, we are in immediate potential danger and don’t have that option. (I’ve written about this before.)

• I am proactive. Not entirely trusting my ability to be consistent and fair in the heat of the moment means that I have to do a bit of experimentation and research to do OK about my choices, and while that takes time (and books are no substitute for experience), that research is still worth a lot. I do know what’s reasonable to expect of a three-year-old, because I rely on people smarter and more experienced than myself to write clearly about that. I proactively seek support from other parents in Early Childhood classes and other forums. I am painfully aware that unless I have a well-researched, well-stocked toolbox for dealing with the tough times, I’m up the creek. I have an intense desire to have things be different for my kids, and while that can have its own blinders, I think that my decision to be intentional about the way I raise them does them a lot of good. That feels especially true in our (U.S.) culture, a culture that is often mired in disconnection and materialism. Sometimes I overthink, but at least I always think.

• The idea that I have to be like my parents whether I really want to or not went out the window, oh, decades ago. I still struggle with their expectations, but I don’t think I struggle with them as much as do peers who idealize their parents or upbringing yet still feel called to make very different choices. In retrospect, I have enjoyed a certain freedom in making my own life choices and forging my own philosophy of life without feeling like I needed to justify why they are different from how I was raised. I was raised mostly in upper-middle-class suburbs, and by temperament alone, I think I would have been miserable aspiring to live in such a setting, not to mention working the kind of job I’d probably need to have to pay for it.

No-one can ever tease out upbringing from temperament perfectly. All backgrounds have their disadvantages, though, and most, including mine, also have their advantages in helping us become well-rounded, resilient people and parents.

That said, I still struggle a lot with anger and fear. There are days when I feel like I can either be a good wife or a good mother, but not really both. I get crabby and unreasonable, and then I feel awful. Money is very tight at our house right now, and this feeds into a fear that feels almost primal in its intensity at times, but since money is so hard for people to talk about, it feels lonely even in this economy. On some fundamental level, I don’t trust easily or deeply enough to get through tough times without losing some perspective.  When someone says, “things will work out”, I think, “yeah but for millions of people every day, they don’t”. When someone says they’ll be there or help with something, a small part of me says, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. When someone tells me I have good instincts, I think “Yeah, right, if you only knew!” When someone tells me to trust my instincts, I am amazed at the confidence of the person making such a suggestion to me, and not just a little irritated. I wish I had that privilege, but I do not. 

But I’m working on it, and we're all a work in progress.

(Now that I’ve covered my issues with the word “instincts”, I’ll have to get around to describing my issues with the word “natural”. Hint: context is everything, or at least, it's rarely irrelevant. For a primer on that, see this.)

 

 

spring

As this never-ending winter breathes its last gasps of frigid air and heaves a few last inches of unwelcome snow every few days, Spring waits, coiled, inevitable, yet invisible. I know this to be true, even though the very idea of Spring is starting to seem like a fable we amuse the boys with as we read library books about the seasons. Is it my imagination, or do my children look authentically skeptical when I talk to them about the daffodil bulbs that will bloom in a month or so? Surely, we thought there’d be evidence to impress them with by now.

Everyone I know seems just a little depressed these days, a little struck by weary disbelief at the recent weather, which was actually quite beautiful, just untimely. Last weekend brought a fairytale wonderland to Minnesota, full of powdered sugar-coated trees, thick blinding flurries, heavy clouds of deep steely grays mixed with spots of blue sky, making for beautiful strange light felt in the back of my neck. This is exactly the type of weather that would have been so welcome in mid-December, but only the kids seemed to appreciate the several inches that came just after the snow that had laid for months had finally started to fade to spots of ever-so-slightly greening grass. Snowmen abound in our neighborhood this year, evidence that kids have had the more optimistic view that we might as well do something with all this snow. One family a mile North of our house has even created an entire installation of snow creatures in the front yard, some of which were spray painted various colors. A brown cat, a pink Easter bunny. If the little springtime animals won’t come and assure us of the annual fecund end to our frigid Minnesota hibernation, a can of spray paint doesn’t quite do it for me as a substitution, but I suppose I needn’t judge another’s attempt to make the best of things. My own attempts seem to involve a lot of tea, sleep, and complaining.

I have a package of spinach seeds sitting in my kitchen cupboard, and my hand reaches for it, fingers the substantial seeds two or three times a day, willing the white away and the ground to thaw just enough in one of my raised beds that I can suspend an old storm window over the seeds and semi-frozen dirt to make for a workable cold-frame.

So close. Water drips from the roof so fast it runs like rivers into basements and down the street into full-to-capacity storm drains. Birds chirp the way they only do in springtime, looking rather desperately for food and finding only melted puddles of water, their little mating clocks ticking the same way they always do regardless of our relentless winter, hard, under feathers. Buds swell despite the cold and snow, coiled, like a shotgun of life, of rescue, of a promise fulfilled like a fable. It is here, we just haven’t been invited quite yet.

introversion

I’ve heard it said that introversion and extroversion as personality traits aren’t defined by how you spend your time, but how you get your energy. In other words, you could be a decent public speaker and spend a lot of time networking, and still be an introvert who needs solitude to feel happy and sane. By that definition, I am an extreme introvert, though some who don’t know me all that well might never guess it. I need time alone to feel sane. Even time away from my children, even my spouse.

I went to a boarding school in high school, and it was so overwhelming it nearly killed me. I just couldn’t cope with the constant over stimulation from all those voices, all those people’s lives happening in such visible and audible proximity to my own. I stayed up until all hours of the night just to experience not only the quiet in the school halls, but also to know that everyone was asleep. I started smoking partly just for an excuse to go for a walk in the woods on a regular basis*. I mostly avoided room-mates until I got married, and while I love being married, I’d always been grateful that our only partly overlapping schedules allowed for some time alone in the house almost every day.

And then we had kids.

For me, this is the single hardest thing about having children. Not sleep deprivation. Not doubting myself. Not controlling frustration and anger, and not impatience. Those things are all hard, but never being truly alone (and being on call to coughing and bad dreams and whatever other noise on the monitor just doesn’t do it for me), and then needing to prioritize connecting with my spouse over holing myself up somewhere, well, I think most of my really bad days can be traced to not meeting my particular introverted needs. I am such a freak about this, and I wish I could change, because it would make life a lot easier, for me and by extension, my family. Unfortunately, though I have great faith in people’s ability to change, I’m fairly certain that introversion is pretty hard-wired within me. I’ve been this way my entire life – all my earliest good memories are of spending time alone, in peace.

I do really need people, value people. I’m actual fairly social in practice (though I avoid crowds and parties if I can at all help it unless I know almost everyone there at least somewhat well), and I’m not immune to feeling lonely if I don’t have good regular connections with friends. It’s just that regular alone time is a very primary, fundamental need. It’s where I get my energy, how I re-fuel. I’ve been an insomniac my entire life, but only when in circumstances that don’t meet that need. Call me dense, but I only recently made that connection. I can probably learn to deal a little better, and I have a thousand little things I do to cope, but the need is still there. And in my current life, this need is rarely met.

This is why going away for a couple of days in the woods every now and then is so important for me. I’m trying to recognize that even if no-one, not even J, actually affirms this need or claims to really understand it, their tacit, practical support is worth even more. It is a sign of love that people help meet needs they don't entirely understand, and I'm grateful for that, but it’s not easy to take the time, to ask family members to help me get it, to not feel guilty about the money, or the need to be away from people I love.  “What did you do?” is anyone’s question if my silent retreat comes up. “Not the point”, I think, though I am actually amazed at what I did, how much good thinking happened, how much prayer was heaved Godward, how much writing poured out of me.

On Friday evening I walked down to my cabin after a group meal and a goodbye to the friend who came with me, unlocked the door, walked in and locked the door behind me, then stood at the door with both my palms against it and my forehead leaning on it for minutes. It wasn’t that I thought anyone would ever come in through that door, like the lock had anything other than a symbolic purpose. I am not scared to be there alone at all. I just needed to breathe, to let it sink in that for the next 36 hours I’d be truly, completely alone, that no-one would disrespect that sacred space.

The exception, of course, is God. My belief in God is rooted at least partly in the fact that somewhere within me there has always been a strong sense that while I need some real space from other people on a regular basis, there is no such thing as true aloneness, because of my connection to the spiritual realm. I spent a lot of fruitless energy trying to deny that connection until I found a framework in my early twenties that made some sense to me. That framework is a particular Christianity, and my reasons for all that are best left for another complicated post, but suffice it to say that I’m grateful and enriched by having made and continuing to nurture that connection.

Some people most feel a connection to God by talking about it or through collective ritual, and while I do often feel a strong connection to God in church, I feel it most when truly otherwise alone. It doesn’t mean I value people any less than anyone else does —it just means that I need regular solitude in order to have the most meaningful, authentic relationships I can, to be present with people when we’re together,  to love the best I know how.

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*and quit many years ago.

gravity

This afternoon we had Caro and her girls over, and I held Iris a bit here and there. Iris is a big baby, all appley roundness and babbly busyness, sitting up and getting mobile. When I held her, she immediately turned around back toward her mama, as healthily attached babies are wont to do after a few months. She was happy enough to hang out with me, but her turning toward mama was like a horizontal kind of gravity.

Caro mentioned in her post today that she remembered several previous birthdays of great wishes – a baby, a healthy baby, another healthy baby, and that this year, as she put it, she was “feeling so sleepily, stuffily grateful that no giant want looms so large anymore.”

I can relate. Every medium-sized thing I wish for—the current one being two slots in the preschool I thought the boys were already admitted to—reminds me that there used to be much greater wants, wants that threatened, at times, to suck the marrow out of me. Wanting a child was like dragging around a lead blanket that obscured everything beautiful and dragged any kind of airborne lightness down with it. The absence of that want leaves a space the size of an ocean, all wind and waves of blue. I am a little sad when I hold sweet babies like Iris and realize that I may never again be gravity to a baby, but it’s a sadness borne of good things that have happened in my life, of knowing those good things intimately. It’s a happy kind of sad.

solstice dreams

For me, the underlying principle behind recovering from a far-from-ideal childhood is that of being intentional*. If we want things to be different than it was when we grew up, if we want to enjoy a family life that reflects our priorities and our values, then we need to be intentional about what that looks like, even if it feels like a lot of work sometimes. Our family rituals, the things we prioritize, how we spend our time – we need to decide as a family what that looks like.

This past year, as my boys are getting older and their babyhood is becoming a memory, I’ve started to realize that I can also be more intentional in my own experience of things, and that intentionality and ritual don’t have to be limited to the spheres of church and family.

The last few months have been hard. As the winter solstice approached along with the end of the year, the old ritual of writing resolutions didn’t quite feel right to me. Really, it felt a bit lonely to think of my goals and wishes in that way. I wanted to let go of some of the things that have been holding me do wn, and articulate what I want to more fully embrace or hold onto. I didn’t want a “To Do List”; I wanted a ritual, a time of connection, and I wanted to share it with other women. A week before the solstice, I spontaneously and impulsively sent out the following e-mail to a few friends who I knew has also struggled over the past year for one reason or another, all women with young children:

Dear friends:

As some of you may know, it's been a difficult season for me over the past couple of months, even as I am well aware of the many blessings in my life. It's been a season full of personal and family illness, calamity, stress, anxiety, and low spirits. In the midst of all this, I find myself finding a need for some connectedness and ritual, some way of marking collectively that this will pass, that we're not alone, that the days will soon get longer and the sun will eventually return.

It’s been on my mind lately that several of the women in my life, all also mothers of young children, have also been struggling for one reason or another over the past few months, and if you count yourself among them, I invite you to share a little bit of time together with me at home next week, just before the winter solstice, to help let go of some of the frustrations, guilt, anxiety, anger, impatience, or whatever else is wearing you down as we move through these sometimes long winter days. In doing so, I'd like to honor the very hard work that is motherhood and caretaking of small children, the value of supporting one another in it, and also in supporting each other's intellectual and creative lives.

If you'd like to come, please write down a list of some things you'd like to release of let go of as the winter solstice approaches, and a separate list of some things you'd like to hold onto, embrace more fully, or cherish as the sun begins to return with the upcoming solstice. I will ask each woman to read her letting go list, and release it into the fire (fireplace, or maybe even outside, depending on the weather). After we have all finished, we will read our "embracing" lists, hold onto them for ourselves, and each light a votive candle for on the table as we finish, lighting a final candle in the middle of those when we have all shared our lists followed by a short period of silence. While I do have a specific religious faith and tradition, I want to make this a time that is also meaningful of and inclusive of those who do not, and while I welcome anyone to share her own lists in whatever ways are meaningful to her, I will not frame the ritual itself in the context of any prayer or religious affiliation. Please feel free to make your lists as long or as short, as specific or brief, as you wish. We don't all have to approach this the same way, and there is no "right way".

I haven't done anything quite like this before, and I realize this kind of thing isn't for everyone (I take no offense to that), but if you think it might be helpful for you or even if you're not sure, please consider coming.

I'll provide some refreshments and something to drink. You may certainly bring something, but please don't feel obligated to bring anything other than yourself and your lists.

--Emmie

Two women were able to make it, both friends from my writing group. Both have had major challenges over the last year, the ongoing, day-to-day kind as well as wholly unexpected events and revelations.

The three of us read our “letting go” lists and released them into the fireplace one by one. We then read our “embracing” lists and held onto those after each lighting a candle. Then we sat in front of the fire on my living room floor and talked for about three hours.

It was wonderful, and just what I needed, a way to say, “I am not living this life in a void. My voice does not echo into nothingness. My difficult feelings about it all are valid and understandable. I have hope for the future and people to share that hope with. I am able to lend an understanding ear to someone else who may need to share her burdens and hopes.” Here are my lists:

I want to let go of:

Anxiety and fear

Denial and avoidance

Anger

Excessive impatience

Excessive pain

Old hurts, especially with family members

Attachments to things I don’t need or use

Exhaustion

The myth that research can solve anything, including difficulties with children, relationships, and health

I want to more fully embrace:

Sunlight

Creative and cooperative approaches to respite

Making time for my creative self

Calling myself a writer and living up to that title

A more reliable presence as a church volunteer

My prayer life

A practical support system other than family in times of great stress or emergency

Solitude

My life partner and a better understanding of what he would like to more fully embrace

Valuing acceptance over information, especially of health conditions and of my children’s developmental stages

A connection to the larger community through volunteering

Friendships, both formed and forming.

So I guess all that is to say, I have no resolutions this year, though a few of things on my list of things to embrace may read a bit like resolutions.

I have some more CEU's in the School of Hard Knocks, many grand hopes, a heap of fervent prayers, and tremendous gratitude.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

____________________________________________________________

*The book The Intentional Family is a great resource on this topic, as is Living Simply With Children.

 

she who cannot control her children

Yesterday, I was running a couple of evening errands and as I was stopped momentarily in traffic, I looked to the right, directly at the duplex where J and I lived for the first year of our marriage. Through the back bedroom window I could see two faces framed in golden silhouette, one person’s head thrown back as if laughing.

That first year of marriage was both terrible and wonderful – wonderful because we were happy to be together in this new way, optimistic, the newness of everything carrying us through the more difficult aspects of our new relationship as husband and wife. There were also challenges that year, partly in the form of my working for a horribly difficult and unethical boss, but worse, at least for me, was probably the stuff going on in my own head. I recall a certain stubbornness, even a hardness within me as our daily interactions dripped with symbolic meaning and potential precedent. We were earnest in our efforts to work things out, but every dropped towel and perceived assumption about marital roles felt loaded with weight and the effort of making the right choice, the right resolution to set us on the right path. We both worked full-time, so it was easy, probably too easy, to measure our individual efforts side-by-side, and then we had to also  consider complicating factors such as just how important various domestic details were exactly, anyway. But J is a fair and honest person, some of our hard work did actually have a positive effect, and my concern over precedent eventually gave way to more trust and flexibility, where it remains today. We have our issues, but sharing the workload fairly is nowhere near the top of the list.

As I watched the laughing forms in the window of our old duplex, I remembered that old stubborn feeling, and recognized its recent familiarity. As my boys move into an age where they and their parents are seen as truly and completely accountable for their public behavior, I am again finding myself to be preoccupied with precedent. Every loud refusal to cooperate, every large and small tantrum, every rudeness and aggressive act sends tiny alarm bells off in my head. They say, “Your kid is acting like a brat. You don’t have control over your children. If you don’t nip this in the bud, you’ll have rude children for as long as they live in your home”. 

Now before you think that I either actually do have complete brats living with me, or perhaps alternately that I am way too concerned with what other people think, let me give you a bit of context. I grew up Dutch, moving to the U.S  at the age of seven, and I spent my whole life after that seeing a dramatic difference in both the behavior of and expectations upon Dutch and American children. Dutch kids, at least the ones I ever had any exposure to, are pretty polite to adults. They can, and are expected to carry on actual conversations with them, even as teenagers. They can look adults in the eye, and are expected acknowledge their presence when they arrive and leave. All my Dutch relatives and our family friends saw it as their job to gently guide us into behaving agreeably, but always through gently worded suggestions and expectations, always kindly. “Here, Emmie. Why don’t you pass the nuts around to the guests. Remember to say excuse me, please when you pass in front of people.” I don’t remember feeling chided and restricted so much as honored, cared for, to be taught in this way by the people who loved me. This kind of teaching was a two-way street: the adults with the expectations also had a genuine interest in how I was doing, what my interests were, and the like. Every single time we went back to the Netherlands to visit, I was surprised that their questions were genuine, that they took a real interest in what mattered to me. Looking back on that part of my upbringing, I can’t help but notice that it’s a lot easier for adults to care about and take an interest in children that also happen to be likable. My mother tells it this way: when my brother and I were seven and three, new to the U.S. the in our New Jersey suburb, people were amazed at how polite we were. I think it faded fast, as I distinctly remember encountering, for the first time, adults who barely said hello to me, didn’t look me in the eye, and expected nothing from me when they met my parents.

My boys are not brats. They are two, they are probably rather on the active side even for boys, and they could definitely use a bit more respect for other people’s property, but they do pretty much say hello and goodbye when asked to, as well as please and thank you. They ask to be excused before they leave the table, mostly unprompted. They have an awfully hard time sitting still, and they whine a fair bit despite our consistent efforts to make them repeat every single thing they whine about in a normal voice, but they are starting to self-correct, and will always correct themselves if asked. Our efforts are paying off somewhat, even without a culture that really backs us up. But there is another voice arguing with me when I ask my boys to behave themselves in one way or another. I am starting to realize that kids, at least some and probably most kids, will whine and throw fits a fair bit in inconvenient places no matter how hard you try to prevent it and no matter how consistent you are. I’m starting to realize something that’s even more of a fundamental revelation: that fact that you can’t actually control your children. You can guide them, you can lead them, you can mold them, you can control a whole lot about their environment, you can be consistent, and empathetic, and firm, and all these things affect the outcome, but you cannot, no matter how much you try, no matter how you are expected to, control them. I cannot control how they feel, what their exact motivations will be, what their preferences, opinions and beliefs will be, or even many of their actions. I’m sure there are many things I could be doing better, more effectively, but they still have their own minds, their own wills, their own desires and temperaments.

Perhaps this is more obvious to you than it has been to me, but the desire to control my children runs deeper than I am comfortable admitting. I confess that learning this is a slow, somewhat painful process, especially with my Dutch upbringing as context, especially raising my children in a culture that both seems to want me to be able to control my kids’ behavior, yet leaves me pretty much on my own to even try. And now what I struggle with is this: How does one let go of this idea? How can I, with no prior experience in childrearing, have faith that my best efforts are good enough, and that my kids will be basically likeable to and respectful of people of all ages?

I think that a lot of social conventions, at least the ones based on courtesy and respect, actually make sense. Every culture has its norms, its traditions, for better or for worse. Some traditions are definitely worth nixing, some assumptions badly in need of revising, but resistance to popular culture isn’t the same thing as not valuing culture at all. Manners, common courtesies, basic expectations of our children, these bind one generation to another, they allow some connection between people that don’t know each other, and they make one feel at home in one’s own culture in a way that isn’t dependent on television or other media. In the U.S., we live in a culture of hating OPK’s*, t-shirts that proudly declare our kids to be the hellions we expect them to be, outward signs splashed across t-shirts bought at any mainstream big-box store or tacked onto the backs of cars that basically say a big f*ck you to anyone you might happen to encounter. We live in a culture where it’s considered entirely normal that many teenagers descend by middle school into a state so antisocial that they often cannot so much a hold a basic conversation of a couple of sentences with an adult. We also live in a culture that thinks not, “I wonder what I could do to help” or “That must be tough” when kids throw a tantrum in the grocery store aisle, but “wow, that mother has lost control of that child!” What an interesting mix, this combination of judgment and low standards. It’s all about the individual. All about that mother who cannot control her kids, because it’s all her job to try, and the only way the rest of society is going to help out there is to let her know it with glares and open-mouthed stares. Not that I’d know anything about that….

I’m trying very hard to remain true to my own standards while remembering that J and I can’t do it all by ourselves, and that even if it doesn’t feel like it, our best efforts will have to do. I’m trying to be more forgiving of both myself and my children, to enjoy them and empathize with them more on difficult days. I’m trying to sort all this out a bit more consciously so that I don’t load them down with all the baggage of my own cultural background and upbringing.

We are starting, on occasion, to see glimpses of a new maturity from them, a desire to please us that wasn’t there a couple of months ago. Some of what I most hope for is there too – boys remembering once in a great while to talk respectfully to an adult, and receiving genuine affection and interest from an adult in return for their efforts. There are many parenting problems that cannot be solved so swiftly as nipping anything in the bud; behavior based on values will almost always be taught and measured over the long haul, just as anyone's parenting ought to be measured over a longer span than a moment, a tantrum, or even days. In realizing that setting expectations and limits with my kids is not the same as actually being able to control them, in trying to let go of the desire to control them, I am slowly  learning, in these first years of motherhood, to have faith in myself, my children and my family.

You could call me a slow learner, because some days that is wholly easier than others.

*"Other People's Children"

gray matters

By coincidence, Snickollet posted today about something I’ve been thinking about ever since I read this article in a copy of Time that was lying around at work.

Snick found a fistful of gray hair recently, more than she could pluck, and after she posted about it, she got many helpful comments about choosing and applying hair dye.  I'm gonna not-quite-join-the-chorus over there and say that while I don’t think there’s anything wrong, per se, with choosing to cover your gray, gray air is also normal and natural, and it's perfectly OK to learn to love it if you'd rather not dye your hair.

The Time article is an interesting article, though perhaps a bit over the top in describing gray hair to the mommy wars, and I did question her premise that gray hair was such an issue for only boomers. A quote: Catherine Clinton, 55, a dyed-red college professor in Greenwich, Conn., [ ] says, "I have seen friends who have stopped dyeing their hair, and although one or two look really good, others mainly look less like themselves, more drab and less vibrant." I don't have a problem with hair dye itself (What the hell – go purple! Or green! Or both!), but obligatory beauty requirements  do bother me. I think that what she says is only true because most women dye their hair after age 40. Lets face it – if most women dye their hair, then the rest of us are going to look older if we don’t. If we all had the money and desire to get face lifts the same could be said for them, and already can be in Hollywood and among TV news anchors.

About a year ago, I decided to stop highlighting, and I'm still trying to find a hairdresser who doesn't spend the whole time trying to convince me to dye my gray and "lighten things up a bit". I’m going to be honest here and say that before I had the boys, I resented my early gray hairs mightily. First kids, then gray, I said, but the kids didn’t come when they were first beckoned. I faithfully had my roots done and my highlights touched up. I did look a little younger, a little “brighter”. It did feel good, until my roots started showing, and I started dreading the 2 or 3 hours and $60-80 it took to get the look back. And now, now that I am a mom, now that I’m pretty content with my lot in life and I know my spouse could care less about my hair color, well, I just can’t really justify it anymore.

Last winter, if finally occurred to me that nothing terrible was going to happen if I didn't cover the increasingly frequent gray hairs, and so I stopped going for highlights altogether. I think I’m ready for a little gray. I’m 33, and I don’t think anybody ought to give me crap about it, especially not for “my own good”. I resent the idea that having clean, brushed hair in a style that suits your face isn’t good enough, isn’t even enough in some cases to prove your basic self-respect. I know my own mother feels that way, and at 61, she keeps saying she’s going to stop dying her own hair but then can’t do it. I’ve been trying to escape my mother’s notion of beauty for at least two decades, (her recent response to my saying I’d lost 15 pounds: “You are going to be so beautiful!” As a size 5 at 5’9) and I don’t think she’s going to be please to have a gray haired daughter. In many situations, I’m not sure that women who have “careers” even have much of a choice but to dye, especially if they go gray early.

Yet, despite all the pressure, I have something besides stubbornness keeping me out of the hair dye aisle and the colorist’s chair. I had a few women in my life growing up who were gray in their 30's and 40's, and I always associated gray with wise, artistic, intelligent, freethinking, or kind. When I think of a 40-year-old gray haired woman, I think, teacher, professor, intellectual, pastor, activist, all potentially good things to be. Besides, does a birch tree look drab? Does a snow-capped mountain range, or a flock of white birds? Isn’t it more likely that we are just training each other to think so?

I belong to a Mennonite Church, and while you couldn’t pick any of us out of a crowd and we’re a pretty progressive bunch, it is true that very few of the women dye their hair or wear makeup. The longer I sit in the pews or at the potluck table on Sunday mornings and look at these women looking pretty much like God made them, the more I see, really see their beauty. It is as radiant as anything else, the beautiful gray and white steaks in their hair and the lines on their faces show strength and experience, and these women, in their collective inattention to the color of their hair, their rejection of the camouflage of agelessness, give me permission to do the same. I am grateful for that.

So, Snickollet, go out and grab that box of dye or make that appointment if that’s what you want to do, or maybe even if that’s what you have to do. But if not, if you don’t have to and you resent it, you can come on over here and join me in embracing the look that says: 

I am alive. I have lived. At least on the outside, I am just what I appear to be.

Edited to add: Snickollet's follow-up is here. Here's the comment I left there:.

I think your feelings make complete and total sense. I find it interesting that when I was dealing with the uncertainty and pain of infertility, it was important to me to look young, healthy, and, I dunno -vibrant? on the outside. I needed that desperately, because on the inside I was a total mess, and felt like my chance to have my body do something other than let me down was slipping away. It is only now, now that I have those children, and now that I come from a relative place of strength, with the support of a loving spouse, that I can accept how my body changes and see it as something other than a betrayal. There's a lot that's not settled for you right now I'm sure, a lot of unknowns and a lot of new territory. I think if you'd feel better getting your old hair back, than you should go for it without hesitation, and with an open mind about how you might approach it at any point in the future. Thanks for the reminder that we all come at these types of dilemmas from different places and for different reasons.

 

Thanksgivings

I am thankful for my beautiful, sweet, healthy children.

I am thankful for my and my family's relative health, and for access to medical care.

I am thankful for employment, and for the fact that our family doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket during these uncertain times.

I am thankful for relationships, chosen and unchosen.

I am thankful for people who sacrifice for the greater good, who ask difficult questions, who dare ask and fight for justice and for peace.

I am thankful for people who do the quiet, often invisible work of extending grace and mercy in this world.

I am thankful for the roof over my head, for our warm, cozy house, and for access to healthy food and clean water.

I am thankful for my husband, who has picked up a whole lot of slack around here lately without complaining, who supports me in countless ways, and who so often shows me a new way to look at things.

I am thankful that while I am at work, N and O are in his competent care, learning things from him they won’t learn from me.

I am thankful for the good and important things I have learned from difficult experiences.

I am thankful for my church, for the body of God’s people that we choose to be together, for the people who are helping us pass the peace of Christ on to our children.

I am thankful that though my family of origin is far flung, we have the resources to visit one another and keep in touch.

I am thankful for discovering a love of writing, and for being part of a generation of mothers that talks and writes about the realities of motherhood, both terrible and wonderful, profound and mundane.

I am thankful for God’s love, a gift of the most extravagant sort, which knows no bounds.

wait

I asked N today whether he'd rather walk over to me to have his shoe put on or have me carry him. He said "not both!", which is, I suppose, the toddler version of "neither". Varying versions of that scenario played themselves out all day. The strategies I have at hand are ever changing, and I guess he's on to me with that one.

The boys have been quite challenging lately. Quite. They've also been so very smart, so articulate, so independent, but I barely have a moment to behold their new skills before I have to rescue some object, pet, or one brother from another. Sometimes I think that the really bad weeks we have here and there are partly just the bridges between one thing working well and then no longer and then figuring out what will work instead. More experience would serve me well here, and I'm left with that sinking feeling like I'm making every mistake twice only never to get the chance to try again.

O's switch to a bed has been, well, interesting. The first few days were quite challenging. No naps, lots of banging around, yelling, and giggling. He didn't even try to come downstairs, but he did try to climb the safety bars on the window like a ladder, move his bed to the other side of the room, and jump off the bookcase onto it. At one point, I was so desperate for him to nap, I threw the mattress back in his crib, zipped him in, and told him to go to sleep. He did, but not before he wrecked the crib tent, meaning there was no going back after that. the crib-tent wrecking is the only reason we're even trying this transition right now -- we're simply out of options. We're making real progress, though. J and I have been listening to him carefully on the monitor and wordlessly putting him right back in bed every time he gets out, as well as talking about our expectations during other times of the day and right before bed. I toddler-proofed the crap out of his room, so it hadn't even occurred to me to make him stay in his bed, but making that expectation clear changed everything. After many, many trips up the stairs, we are making progress. He's going to sleep about an hour after the lights go out, and he's napping again. Praise God, because he's a mess when he doesn't nap. We all are.

On Monday, I was driving with N in the car, and he said from the back, "I want a big boy bed too just like O's!". I told him that we'd get him one, but that he had to sleep a whole night with his crib tent open first. That night, J put him to bed, and N asked him to leave the crib tent open, something he'd refused in a panicky  voice ever since we first brought up the idea. I found him a  toddler bed on Craig's  List that very evening (got two well-made wooden toddler beds for $45 and $35 apiece, both used from different sources!), and we put it in his room the next night. After adjusting a few things to his exact specifications, we tucked him in, said goodnight, and he slept all night. And has every nap time and nighttime since then.   

In general, it's the day-to-day transitions, not the big ones, that are really tough right now. This week J and I have both independently come to the conclusion that some logical consequences are in order. If they're that uncooperative about getting out the door to their favorite place to play, then maybe we won't go. We won't rub their noses in it, we'll even empathize with their frustration and sadness, but we won't go. If we have to go somewhere, and N's refused to have his shoes put on, well the shoes go in my bag, and out we go with no shoes on until we get into the car. With a smile on my face if I can manage it. it does seem to help, but only if I can stay calm, and hey, we do get out the door that way, shoes or no shoes. Sometimes discipline is actually just a means to an end in a particular moment: so much of the challenging stuff they're doing right now is developmental anyway and will pass no matter what exact (reasonable) thing I do. I forget that sometimes in my fear of raising bratty, rude kids.

My little almost thirty-two-month-olds also seem to need more verbal encouragement than they used to, and I, with my sincere aversion to empty praise, find that a bit exhausting. I'm trying to be both specific in my praise as well as spare enough that I'm not saying "good job" every darn time we go through a doorway or take a bite of food. "Thank you boys for being so patient and waiting for me to pay for our things in the store! it made shopping a lot more fun!" The more specific the better - they eat it up. Who knew? Today N told O "keep trying and you can make it work!" when O was struggling with his mitten. And then when O got his mitten on, N pulled on his hood, hard, and sent him barreling into the coat hook and shoes...

We've discovered "racing" this week as well, as in "Ready! Set! Go!". They love this, and N, who is more than a mite faster than O, will get there first every time and say, "N won!" Then O will catch up and they will both say "O won!" They simply don't yet understand what it means to win or to lose, that there's even such a thing as winners and losers. There are many ways in which the grownups in their lives are wiser than they are, but it's a beautiful thing to live in a world where we can all be cheered at the finish line, whenever or however we get there.

I think, that for these times, these bridges between times of more equilibrium, the times that leave me grasping for answers, strategies, patience, and my own equilibrium, I just need to wait. The tools will come, the aggravation will pass, and the ways in which they're changing will bring blessings both long awaited and wholly unexpected. Meanwhile, I will put them to bed right on time, write, sleep as much as my restless mind and body will let me, talk to other moms both online and in person, and eat as much chocolate as possible.