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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Be anxious for what?

The Boy is anxious again.

Today was a really great day in a lot of ways. The weather was nice for a change, so he spent a good amount of time banging on his fort in the backyard. I wanted to take pictures of popping water balloons (be afraid. be very afraid.), and he was my ingenious and efficient assistant, along with his sister. We had a really fun time. He got Burger King for dinner, what more could a boy who's nine-going-on-ten want? Maybe it was sugar, maybe it was having his friend over from after supper till bedtime, getting him all wound up, maybe it's a psychological disorder that will plague him for the rest of his life (you see how a mother's mind works at 12:30 am), I dunno, but for some reason tonight he was too anxious to sleep. Again.

I know he doesn't know this (and I kind of hope he doesn't find out because it couldn't possibly help the situation) but whenever he's anxious, I take his anxiety and multiply it by, well, a big number, say, if you could quantify love and trust, it would be the number for how much I love him divided by how much I really honestly truly trust God. And that amount of anxiety settles in the bottom of my stomach until I not only feel sure I've got a really spectacular ulcer, the kind that would bring all the doctors in the gastroenterological practice to stand around looking at the pictures and going 'hmm', but also, I wonder if I will ever sleep again. At the same time, my mama-bear tendencies kick in, and I want to cuddle him and hug him and protect him (even a little bit from his own father, who isn't a mother bear and who has to get up at 5:00 AM and so late-night anxiety just makes him a bit impatient really) and at least I want to stay awake until he is well and truly asleep because what if he needs me? And I worry about a lot of different things while I do this. Things like: what kind of mother am I that my precious son is too anxious to sleep? Am I raising somebody who's going to go on TV someday and explain that he'd have been just fine except for the way he was raised by those freaks that were his parents? There are only eight or so years until he might reasonably be expected to live on his own; will he ever be able to do that? Should we move so that his bedroom isn't so far from ours?

In other words, I kind of freak out a little.

And it's really a shame, too, because you know what I spend a considerable amount of time telling him when he feels this way? We talk about God. We talk about how big God is, and how powerful, and how he loves LT SO SO SO much and always knows what's best for him and takes care of him in exactly the way that is perfect forever and not just perfect for right now. We talk about Be Anxious For Nothing and Be Still And Know That I Am God. I pet his head and rub his back and talk in a low and soothing voice about Who's in charge and how marvelous He is.

And then I go back to my own bed, or I come out in the front room and eat Cookie Crush ice cream and read tomorrow's comics, and I try to will away that big ball of dread and all those feelings of inadequacy. Not because I'm a hypocrite, and not because I don't believe every word I just said to that boy, but because sometimes my belief just doesn't quite reach the pit of my stomach.

So, that's my prayer for tonight. God, please help what I know about you to turn into something I can feel about you too.

Monday, February 27, 2006

a day in the life

I was researching something completely unrelated to parenting (XM radio, which we just got; can't decide yet if I love it or not) when I happened upon a two-year-old article in the SF Chronicle containing the following sentences:

"Sandy Montag doesn't worry now when he takes his young children on a long drive in his SUV. He has a new toy that most parents will understand -- an in-car digital satellite television system.

With hundreds of channels of entertainment, from the Disney Channel to HBO, to keep them occupied, they're silent. "It's like you don't even have them. You can baby-sit and drive at the same time,'' Montag said." --"Satellite TV in the car, on the move", SF Chronicle, 11/10/2003

Is it just me, or is that just so wrong, on so many levels? I dunno, maybe I'm not "most parents". First you have the children's father talking about baby-sitting them, as if he's some clueless teenaged boy stuck in a vehicle with some young people and no idea at all what to do with them. This father revels in his children's silence, expressing relief that it's like he doesn't even have them when he can shut them up with the Disney channel (or... HBO? How old are these children exactly?) while he shuttles them from one place to another.

I really hope for their sakes that his children haven't read this article; don't you? Whoopee! it's so nice to know that Daddy's happiest when he can pretend he doesn't have us! Their poor little psyches.

I'll grant that having children in the car for extended periods can occasionally be a source of some high-magnitude stress. Are we some kind of freaks, though, in that generally some of our more pleasant times when we're on trips happen in the car on the way there and back? There's no computer, no DVD player (ahem); there aren't any bedrooms to disappear into. There are just these four people who enjoy each other and who frankly are the most important people in the world to each other. We're together, we're comfortable, we can talk at length about whatever crosses our minds, or listen to music and discuss it, we can watch the scenery go by while we listen to stories on tape that become as much a part of our memories as our destinations do. It's -- it's actually -- fun.

I started out this post feeling a kind of disgust for a father who had so distanced himself from his children that he felt the need to spend thousands of dollars on a system for his vehicle to serve as an opiate for those little aliens in the backseat who might otherwise, who knows, talk to him. Somehow, though, I wind up pitying him. How much he misses.

********************(when I use these asterisks it means I can't think of a clever segue but I'm about to talk about something unrelated to the above. Pretend I just wrote something scintillating and witty that will weave this post into a coherent whole, will you? thanks.)***************

We had the kind of day today that makes up for every bit of sibling rivalry and yelling and arguing I've dealt with (and dealt out, to be fair) in at least the past... three months? :) I feel a need to record it, so that when I'm having the kind of parenting day that drives me to the brink of, say, spending thousands of dollars for a digital satellite tv system for my car (so that I could toss the kids in, crack the windows, shut the doors, and flee for an hour or so, of course), I can pull up this entry and remind myself that really life is bliss. There was not an argument all day long (not even one spat! I am not kidding!). The kids did their chores without complaint. We had a fantastic and fun and productive school day, which included the following (ooh, a list!):

• C created a set of "acts" wherein she dressed up in costumes and did brief one-girl shows as: the Statue of Liberty (Jenn, your silver bolero has found a use. Hope you don't mind), Paul Revere (never were the colonists warned more cutely), a caveman (bearing a fearsome whiffle ball bat as a club), and Ben Franklin (carrying a kite and a key).
  
• T devised a series of "inventions". There was a time a few years ago when he did this with almost all his free time, but it had been a while, so it was really nice to see him at it again. Pacifists would, um, not like these inventions. However, he may have a brilliant future in the Department of Defense. Stay tuned.
  
• C read two entire American Girl books in one day and wrote a (painfully cute) summary for each.
  
• T wrote a report on a book about blue whales that surprised me with its excellence. All of a sudden the boy who would devise the shortest sentences possible so as to fit an entire paragraph on a single line of his journal, if possible, is writing coherent, lengthy (for him) treatises on the migratory patterns of ocean mammals.
  
• We made a really pleasant rainy-day trip to the library where we checked out stacks of books and only ONE movie. Nice change, that was.
  
• Both children set up "offices" in their rooms, using Sterilite tubs and an assortment of official-looking oddments including a flag consisting of a colored scrap of paper taped to a suction-cup arrow so as to stay upright. They were governors. It's funny, because when my brother and I were similar ages, we did the same thing, although I think we were just lowly office workers.
  
• my son vacuumed his bedroom and enjoyed it. It's a miracle. He likes folding laundry, too! No, you may not borrow him. He's, uh, needed at home.
  

*************************

Not to end on a low note or anything, but T could use your prayers. He's having a hard time right now; three of his very dear friends are moving away in the space of the next few months. I've always envied him a little, having a network of close Christian friends living nearby, but in the space of about two years, most of them have or will have moved elsewhere. Two of these coming up are hitting him particularly hard. Not that the friends who remain aren't wonderful -- but he's feeling the loss, a lot, right now, and I can't fix it for him. So... you know. Just in case you were short on things to pray about. thanks.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

continuing with the theme. also, my funeral.

Today we meant to go to a car show (hey, nothing is boring when the family and THE NIKON are around), but the NWS thought it looked like rain, so we went thing-shopping instead. You know, thing-shopping, where you don't have a list exactly but you have this sense that in spite of the fact that you are already incapable of putting away all your belongings in your house, there are things you need to buy. Things like a bigger toolbox for gunsmithing supplies, and a set of shelves to organize stuff in the laundry room, and picture frames, and casual-dressy shoes, and ... things. On the way to Thing-Mart, we passed a Toys R Us that was closing and stopped in for the clearance sale, emerging with a sort of appetizer sampler of Things -- including the Book Lovers' Edition of Trivial Pursuit, which I couldn't pass up at $7 even though I'm not sure who'll ever play it with me.

Then we came home and had an evening-long struggle to get C to put away the Things she already had. This process is even more depressing because of the absolute certitude with which I can state that within two weeks -- probably sooner -- there will be no sign that we ever did anything. That said, We're trying a new motivator. A dollar from Grandpa every time he came over and the room was clean stopped working after about the second visit. Now if her room's not passable when Daddy gets home from work, she loses an armload of toys for as long as Daddy sees fit. We can't just do the hip-parent thing and say "hey, it's your room, close the door and I don't care what it looks like in there," because we have to go through her room to get to the laundry room or to LT's room. Which last is actually against housing code, so actually we have to go through her room to get to the room where we store a bunk bed and where LT happens to occasionally sleep. Um, yeah. Not to mention that within a week she'd never be able to find clothes, or possibly to leave her bed, if she wasn't expected to clean it at all.

Also, just so you know I'm not an imposter, I will tell you that this afternoon I managed to break a 36"x45" sheet of anti-glare frame glass, when I decided to un-mount the Titanic poster that we had framed years ago in a haze of midlife-crisis-preview Titanic mania (we watched it after Natalie died and it resonated with us in some very interesting but short-lived ways). I figured that now that I know how to mat and mount pictures and have the necessary equipment, we'd use the frame for something else. Whoops. Guess we'll be buying a sheet of acrylic for that. It was satisfying, though, to set the quite-large remnants on top of a trash can and smash them to smithereens (carefully, so that said smithereens fell into the trash can and not around it) with a piece of pipe. I needed that.

After all that (just typing about it, let alone living through it) I'm exhausted and ready for bed, but I wanted to oblige Jenn and do a little thing she put up in one of her (dazzling array of) blogs. The idea is that I'm supposed to write about my funeral and my will. Morbid maybe, but anything for a friend. :)

1) My funeral: really I don't care much; I won't be there. The funeral's not for me, it's for the people I leave behind. So other than the fact that I want someone (my kids maybe? or the whole group?) to sing this one particular gospel hymn ("I'll Meet You In The Morning"), and that I want the gospel given loud and clear by someone who loves me and Jesus both (I know where I'll be; I want everyone else to hear at least once how to get there too), my survivors can set things up however they see fit.

2) My earthly remains: I'm torn re:cremation vs. burial. Cremation is tidier and more efficient (and cheaper); however, burial provides a grassy place where my family can go to remember me if they want to. So again -- whatever they want is fine with me. I won't be in that body anymore.

2) My will, specifically the 'to such a person I leave such a thing' part. Ech. I don't have a lot of special Things, and I'd probably want them (my books, my cameras, my flute maybe, my photos) to go to my kids and husband, with the understanding that they were free to give things away if they didn't want them and someone else did. Again, once I'm gone, I don't care, but I don't want people to fight or have their feelings hurt. So what I'd probably specify is the order in which people were to go through my belongings and take things they want. I dunno.

And on that cheery note, I'm taking my tired old bones to bed. Can you hear me creaking?

Thursday, January 26, 2006

motherhood again

LT and C arranged that in its entirety, from the picking (every narcissus in the backyard; ah well, there'll be more), to the arranging, to the marbles in the bottom (LT's doing. Pretty, no? Even my SON has a more decorative touch than I do), to the worn potholder underneath. Contributions to the Get Rachel New Potholders Fund are now being accepted. ;) It brightened my day yesterday, even though we had to move them to my room as soon as my dad arrived for dinner because the narcissus (narcissi?) give him a headache.

This week has been an enormous improvement over the terrible-mother despair that was last week. A few rough spots (LT got depressed last night again; we're thinking there's a connection to sugar consumption. With his genes, I'm not terribly surprised. We're going to experiment with his diet and see what happens) but overall very nice. We had a trip to the Valley to make on Tuesday -- that's the San Joaquin Valley, not Yosemite Valley -- and so we stopped off at the zoo since we have a family membership. The entire day turned out to be a golden kind of magic happy day -- good weather, everyone in a good mood, everyone getting along, everyone enthusiastic about the places we went and the things we did. Bliss. (That, and I took three hundred pictures in three hours. I only posted fourteen of them in the photo blog; you should be proud of my restraint. I know I am.)

Monday, January 23, 2006

"Motherhood is hard," she rambled.

Old-timers here (perhaps even back to the Blissful Contentment days) may recall that LT, who is now 9 1/2, has struggled with anxiety off and on. He wavers from simple caution, much like his father's, to anxiety (especially at bedtime) so severe that I contemplate finding a Christian counselor for him (except that it would scare him to death to go see one).

For the last few nights he has again been coming out of his bed to tell us he can't sleep, he feels anxious. I go in and talk to him and pray with him, cuddle his head, talk about things like "Be still and know that I am God" and "Be anxious for nothing", and try to get to the bottom of what's bothering him. Which has an additional wrinkle this time around, it would appear.

I'll backtrack for a sentence and say that I've always felt very blessed, having two children who completely adored each other from day one, and who never had serious sibling rivalry at any stage. Until now, when apparently LT is so bothered by his sister's dramatic tendencies that, according to him, he thinks about hitting her, a lot (I was a bit shocked to hear this, but quickly praised him for not hitting her, since I as a little sister and T as an older brother are both familiar with this particular aspect of growing up -- him far more than me). He feels that she gets far too much attention and wants us to give him more attention. He'll openly say that he likes to pester his sister, he likes to boss her around. Hey, at least he's honest. But I feel like I'm at my wits' end. I thought parenting newborns and toddlers was the hard part, with their constant neediness, and I would look forward to adolescence as this hazy foggy far-distant time when, yeah, we could expect some troubles, but surely for us things wouldn't be like for all those other people -- people who don't homeschool, who send their kids out to a rebellion-festering world from a very early, tender age, whose kids are influenced more by their peers than their parents, etc. And yet here I am, with adolescence supposedly still three or four years away, at a loss. This is where the rubber meets the road and I feel like a flat failure as a parent. If I can't make my son feel loved enough, then what can I do?

Well, there are a few things we've thought of in the week or so since this came up. We're going to make sure, as much as we can, even more than we've been doing, not to cater to C's dramatic whims. If she has a genuine problem, obviously we'll deal with it, and of course we'll love her and give her plenty of positive attention just like we do her brother, but her DQ antics have stopped being so funny and become downright annoying. We've been talking to her about this for a while, trying to help her to understand that she doesn't need to act more hurt or more scared than she really is. We're going to continue.

Also, we're going to set aside some special father/son time. We've always been advocates of both quantity and quality time with our kids, and we're all together as a family probably quite a bit more than most families we know, but LT is getting to an age where there are going to be things that his Dad needs to discuss with him anyway, and how better to make sure that can happen than to have a weekly date set up for them to do guy stuff together? With the added bonus that it will help LT to have something concretely memorable that's about him, without his little sister coming along and stealing his thunder.

And I'm trying to think of something service-oriented but still fun, where he could simultaneously use his skills, focus on someone besides himself, and get a little positive recognition (without being in front of people, which he hates). Maybe he and his dad and friends could refurbish donated bicycles for kids who can't afford new ones, or something. Still very much up in the air, that thought is.

I remember being the little sister. I remember distinctly when my brother was probably fifteen, and he was in the Sea Cadets, and he was really good at it. I was twelve or thirteen and I told Mom and Dad that I wanted to be in the Sea Cadets too, and my brother said (quite reasonably, as I recall) that no, he didn't want me to join, because this was one thing he could do where I couldn't come along and do it too. At the time I went along with it, and was (because C comes by her drama-queen tendencies honestly) a little flattered. Looking back now, I wish I could apologize to that teenaged boy, and the boy he'd been before that, for being such an inconvenience to his life. Just like with my own kids, he was more quiet and reserved; I was talkative and melodramatic. He was a quite decent student and knowledgeable about computers and a ton of other things, a really smart guy, but I was the prim, well-behaved little attention-hog nerd girl, and I think I overshadowed him in some ways, or at least I could see how maybe he felt like I did. I never thought to wonder if that was part of the reason he got in with The Wrong Crowd and had a bit of a hard time of it when he was in high school. (He's fine now, one of my heroes and one of my best friends.)

Maybe it's just human nature -- there's all kinds of documentation about birth order and its impact on personality. Maybe I'd be fighting an impossible battle, to try to get both my kids to realize they're on the same team and don't have to compete for our attention or love. The boy's fine at this moment; he and his sister are having a rousing light-saber battle, after having just sat down and drawn pictures to show what the Allegretto Scherzando from Beethoven's Eighth Symphony made them think of; his drawing did not involve any decapitated little sisters, or even any blood at all. Maybe I'm overanalyzing this, and worrying too much; you experienced moms are welcome (PLEASE) to give me advice. But I can't not try, you know? I just want the poor boy to be able to sleep. And, OK, I'd like for him to grow up as a normal, well-adjusted person, and not get into self-destructive hobbies, and it'd be great if as an adult he'd call his mom every week, and give me grandkids, and live near enough for me to see them, and maybe win the Nobel Prize for Literature or something.

Joking, joking. The prize for Physics would be fine.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

If this were my first time here...

You know how sometimes you go into a restaurant that you normally really like, and they're just having an off day? The service might be sullen, or the food a little less perfect? When T and I have that experience we usually say (almost in unison) as we're heading to the car -- "Well, if this were our first time there, I wouldn't go back."

Which implies, correctly, that we do go back. We know that things aren't usually that way, and we have a fair level of confidence that next time everything will be back to normal and we'll have a fantastic time.

Sometimes motherhood is like that. Today motherhood is like that, for me. I have a six-year-old who has basically spent the past five hours forgetting to clean her room. (I wonder if a propensity for being easily sidetracked is genetically inherited?). I have had to take away her three very favorite toys for a week, because I told her I would take them away -- one at a time -- if she didn't get down to business and do the jobs I'd told her to do. I am now sitting here quietly relaxing, letting the kids play. This is the second day we're supposed to be back from vacation into school, and it's the second day we've not done a thing that's scholarly. (well. Yesterday evening they did their chapter summaries, and now that C is finally done with that bedroom, she's playing an educational computer game. Um... LT swept the floor and shifted the laundry? Life training? I really hope my inlaws don't read this journal.) I'm calling today a mental health day for myself. I even called off our nearly-weekly pre-Bible-study dinner with my parents.

Anyway. I digress. What I started out to say was that if this was my first experience with motherhood, I would most likely be seeking other employment. It's a good thing that I know about the ordinary good days -- the snuggles in bed in the mornings -- the spontaneous kisses on the cheek from the antikiss that is my 9-year-old son -- the notes like this one that I found on C's bedroom door (spelling original, made by C when she and LT both had friends over):

RULeS To Come IN
1 KNocK
2 STATe YouR BuisNess
3 SAY THe PAsswoRD
4 If we TELL You T CoMe iN THeN COM iN
5 i we TELL You To Go AWAY fRm THe RooM THeN Do AS YouR TOLD
6 SAY WHO YOU WANT

THe PAsswoRD iS CAT

Yeah, it's worth sticking around. Especially now that the kids made me lunch (pb&j, two chocolate caramels, and a diet cherry Coke).

Monday, November 14, 2005

Help, please

Today C and I were learning (she: learning; I: attempting to re-learn) how to do that whole hand-clapping rhyming thing. We're doing OK with the clapping patterns, but we're short on rhymes. I remember in elementary school we knew a zillion rhymes, but couldn't remember any of them today (big shock, right?). I Googled 'clapping rhymes' and came up with a few good sites, but most of them repeat the same three or so (except for one, which I'd completely forgotten about until I read it on someone's circa-1996-era website, which is full of typical elementary-school potty humor and which we thought was baaaaad, hence we did it ALL THE TIME, but it's not something I necessarily want to teach C). So. Any of you who were once little girls, did you do clapping rhymes at recess/on the bus/whatever? Do you remember any? Please share. :) Thanks!

Friday, October 28, 2005

still life with sanity

(OK, so technically with the moving water it's not a still life. So sue me.)

For a more complete mental image of the scene, you should add the following ingredients:

• half a day in the city
  
• a daughter who is the poster child for overactive bladder syndrome (just in case you wondered, bathrooms at the dollar store are not the kind of place you want to visit twice in one trip unless you really have to)
  
• half an hour outside walking along the highway and through the tarweed in the dark, moonless night, looking for a cat who always comes running when you call but can't be found now, but who shows up, after you've envisioned yourself breaking the bad news to the kids, with a purposeful nonchalance that tells you how much she loved waiting until just the right moment to come out and show herself
  
• a three-layered (three-tiered?) cake to be baked and inexpertly decorated, by you
  
• a husband who's been sick enough to stay home from work the whole week, poor guy
  
• a quarter of a bottle of inexpensive shampoo for bubbles
  
• a specially-made 'bath music' cd playing on the stereo speakers wired into the bathroom by your ever-so-thoughtful husband -- said CD to contain plenty of Enya, Yanni, Austen-movie-adaptation soundtrack bits, Loreena McKennitt, and one heartbreakingly beautiful Puccini aria (hey, I'm not in school anymore; I don't have to restrict my musical tastes to whatever it is the cool kids are liking that year)
  
• and don't forget the FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF BLISSFUL SOLITUDE.
  

Stir ingredients well and simmer until Mom is limp and relaxed as a sleeping baby.

Monday, October 17, 2005

ah, motherhood

LT is The Teacher at school today. He takes this job very seriously, critiquing his sister's work carefully ("This is a good paragraph about spending the night at your friend's house, but why don't you include a couple of sentences about what you did while you were there?") and delegating jobs ("Mommy, it's your turn to pray before school. C, would you like to lead the flag salute?"). Meanwhile, I think C didn't get enough sleep at the aforementioned friends' house last night, because she has gone beyond "drama queen" and into the realm of "emotional basket case". She (like her brother) gave up naps at around the age of 18 months, but today after school, she's taking one. For the sake of her sanity -- and mine.

Since the kids were gone overnight, I got up this morning and went for a walk. A brisk walk, in broad daylight, alone (well, alone with The Nikon). It was strange -- I kept feeling like people were going to give me the kind of accusing glances I occasionally get when the kids and I are out and about during school hours -- like I was doing something that others would find vaguely illicit. It was nice, though, to be able to walk fast enough to feel like I should have lost at least five pounds by the time I got home. Bummer that it doesn't actually work that way, eh?

Thursday, August 11, 2005

cardboard sign says "yard sale"

We spent the afternoon preparing for tomorrow, when I hope that many obliging people will come to my house and pay staggeringly small amounts of money to haul away things I no longer have space to store. Oh please. Today was such a better day than yesterday, which ended up being one of the few days when I really really WANT a break from my kids. Or, in this case, my kid, but I won't tell you which five-year-old I'm talking about. I had an "I am the worst mother ever" headache (that is to say, a headache brought on by high levels of stress compounded by an excess of yelling), and it took "Ocean's 11" on the DVD player, some sugar-free ice cream, and a drawn-out relaxing discussion in the dark with my husband to make it go away. Then this morning I had him bring C in for a snuggle before he left for work, and by the time we got up I felt much better in every way.

And then of course today was full of that feeling of satisfaction you get when you finish a task. Drat it, why can't I get that same feeling without all the work? How manifestly unfair.

I'll leave you with a short list of seminars which my child or children are fully qualified to teach:

• Bathtime as Recreation
  
• How To Get Completely Sidetracked Without Even Trying
  
• Mud: Its Manufacture and Use
  
• Heart-Melting 101
  
• The Healing Magic of Malapropisms (with labs: Backward Letters and Cute Misspellings)
  
• Construction Workshop: Tall Piles of Stuff You Don't Want To Put Away
  
• Nutrition 17A: How to Convince Grandpa that Pop-Tarts and Sugared Cereal are Good for You
  

Hurry and book now; the conference season is just around the corner.

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