Omnivalence

I’ve just started reading Mary Pipher’s new autobiographical book, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, and after reading the prelude, I’ve decided that she’s my mental twin.

For example:

Few people have sought serenity with more ardor or have worked harder at relaxing than I have.

My experience exactly! A week in an all-enclusive? I’d prefer to be shot.

I can see all sides of every issue. From my point of view, the answer to every question is: “It depends.”

Uhuh. That’s why conversations with me can be so painful. Except when they’re with my oldest son, who like me, can spend hours debating the exact meaning of each word in every sentence.

I like this one:

I coined a term for myself – “omnivalent,” an adjective that describes a person who has complex and changing ideas about everything all the time…..I can have mixed feelings about a paper clip.

Yes! I’m not ambivalent, I’m omnivalent! It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that my opinions change.

I am easily bored.

Yup.

Moody.

Yup.

Exuberant.

Often.

Obsessed with sleep, and greedy for sensory pleasure, knowledge and love.

That’s me! In bed by ten o’clock with a cup of tea and a stack of self-help books!

My favorite:

I could form a support group for people who try to hard.

Or in my case, care too much.

I haven’t even read the introduction yet. I predict many Mary Pipher quotes on this blog in the next few days.

In My Daughter’s Eyes

We don’t watch TV around here, thanks to T, who at age 2 became a little OCD about the screen. Neither of the older two had shown much interest in it, other than Bill Nye the Science Guy and Magic School Bus, but for some reason, maybe I had gotten a little lax, maybe they were watching more than they used to, I don’t know, but right before we moved to where we live now, I had a diapered toddler who was going up to the TV all day, slapping at it and screaming and trying to convince me to turn it on and he was a persistent little character, so the yes TV/no TV wrangling got pretty intense. When we moved into our new place, I decided not to unpack the TV, thinking that with the distractions of a new house, he wouldn’t even ask for it. I was right, and our TV-free family was born.

For the last 8 years, we haven’t watched TV at all. We have a TV, but it just gets used for movies and for when all the teenaged boys descend here on the weekends with their Guitar Hero and Rock Band paraphenalia, which I haven’t allowed any of the kids to own, but haven’t been strict enough to ban from the premises.

This is all to preface the fact that our newest family togetherness activity involves a TV show (that we watch on my computer).

The Gilmore Girls.

It’s a show about a single mom and her teenage daughter and it’s altogether unrealistic in it’s witty feel-good cleverness. Major problems don’t exist, the characters only have endearing flaws and every issue is sorted out within three episodes.

Still, for some reason, we love it. All of us, including the now 10-year old T, who one would not think was of the right age or gender to enjoy a show that deals mainly with relationship issues. And interestingly, it’s become something of a vehicle for discussions about relationships. It’s easier and safer to talk about stuff like that when it’s in the form of fictional characters, and we have the show as a common language.

Here’s a video that someone put together with scenes from the show. It makes me cry. I guess I’m feeling a little sentimental about being a mother, and the kids growing up, and what it all means.

Be warned, it’s on the sappy side. Best watched when you have been away from your kids for five days.

(try to ignore the bits about the daughter being the mother’s salvation, which, if you know anything at all about enmeshed relationships and projection and narcissism is patently disturbing.)

Actually, now that I’ve re-watched this in the cold, hard, light of day, I’m realizing that it’s cringe-worthy in it’s sappiness. It moved me to tears when I watched it yesterday. Yikes. God’s Gift to me? A bit much for my athiest sensibilities. What was it that had me weeping? I think it was the bit about being a hero to my daughter, and the hope and possibility for my childrens’ lives.

lly

Note To Self

You know how it is when life is humming along just fine on one level, and really, everything is fine, except that underneath, it’s really not?

That’s how it is for me right now.

The kids and I have things worked out so that everything hums along pretty smoothly when they’re here. Everyone gets where they need to go, birthday parties are attended, winter clothes are bought, good food is cooked and eaten, we have our own special routines, our own special rituals, we celebrate good times and we make time for getting together with friends and family. They have their own rooms, their own stuff, their own lives, they have relationships with each other, and we have a sense of the five of us as a family.

And yet, there is an underlying issue that isn’t being dealt with, that we all know is an issue, but that we never speak of. It affects them, it affects me, and it affects my relationship with them. I hadn’t realized until last week how very profoundly this issue has constrained my relationship with my children, because the not-speaking about this one issue has not only forced an unnatural constriction on what is eligible conversational material, it has also restricted the flow of feelings around here. I hear about the kids’ feelings on all sorts of topics, but not this one. We all know that there’s sadness and anger and confusion, and we all know the source of it, but I haven’t felt that it was something we could talk about because it wasn’t going to be changing any time soon. I also, rather densely, thought that it was something that could be partitioned off, and that it could be forgotten about when it wasn’t an active concern. I have nothing to do with it, I can’t change it, and they don’t need to hear my two cents. Or so I thought.

By not talking about it with them, by not actively helping them to come up with a possible solution for the source of their anxiety, I have colluded with it. In my efforts to protect them, I have stranded them. The reality of their situation is still there, and they are dealing with it, even if I give them shelter when they are here.

This became startlingly clear to me by something that happened last week, and I have been mulling it over ever since.

Not sure what the outcome will be, not sure yet how things are going to change, but I do know that they have to.

I thought that I was doing the right thing, and maybe for a time, it was the right thing, but it isn’t any more.

Secrets in a family just aren’t healthy, no matter what the source and no matter who they are meant to protect. The cost of keeping them outweigh any benefits of not knowing. Because on some level, everyone knows anyway.

(Secrets on a blog, on the other hand, are necessary. At least in this situation. Which limits the amount of advice and help I could have received. Which is a bummer.)

Child’s Eye View

Halloween Humbug

15 Halloweens.

I am so done with this holiday. I can’t decide which is worse. Handing out candy or accompanying the trick-or-treaters. Doling candy means getting to stay inside my nice warm house, but I’m a boring old curmudgeon and I could not care less who is wearing what costume. Every 30 or so seconds another batch of them ring the doorbell, so there’s no point in even sitting down. Too cold out to leave the door open, so it’s open, close, open, close for hours. The other option involves wearing every layer of outwear that I own, because I know from experience that hours of standing in subzero temperatures watching my overheated little monsters run breathlessly from house to house makes me cold even if I flap my arms up and down by my sides to keep the blood flowing to my fingertips.

I bought a heap of candy but not even one pumpkin.

No decorations.

I think I’m in the process of throwing in the towel.

Good thing for the younger two that they have older sibs. I think there’s a horror movie marathon in the works and the list of potential Halloween sleep-over guests is growing. The little ones will likely come home from their trick-or-treating to a houseful of costumed teens, a wasteland of candy wrappers, and a mother safely locked in her room.

HALLOWEEN . . . by Jay

Halloween is coming L was going to be cat in the hat but no
she is… a card from Alice in wonder land!
I can’t decide what to be so I am going as several things:
a cow boy, a vampire, a pirate, and a bunny.

Block city. . . by Jay

L  and me made a block city, it was big and wide , the floor was was made of blocks but we didn’t make a whole wall.

We organized the blocks before making the city.

There was a tower in the center that me and L called the tower of  trust.

The city was malty colored and the city was sematricule.

What Matters?

What matters is the center inside yourself – and how you live, and how you treat people, and what you can contribute as you pass through life on this earth, and how honestly you love, and how carefully you make choices. Those are the things that really matter.

~excerpt from Refusing to be a Man by John Stollenberg

Breaking News

Some exciting things happened this week:
- L was invited to compete at an international diving meet. First time ever, so she’s over the moon excited. And proud as can be. It’s for the top twelve age-group divers in each country, which obviously means that L is in that category, which is a huge thing for this girl who tries so damn hard and who broke her foot before nationals last year and who lives and breathes this sport. She keeps saying, “…..and there’s going to be divers there from Australia and from Europe….” like she can hardly believe it.

-T got glasses. He’s over the moon excited too. He’s been hopping up and down every day since the optometrist’s visit, saying, “….I can’t wait, I can’t wait…” I asked (gently) probing questions to try to figure out why he wants glasses so badly, but all I really understood was that he wants to be like his big brother, who wears them. I’m really glad that he’s happy about them. I remember my younger brother getting glasses around this age and him despising them. He was always  “sitting on them by accident”, “losing them”, “forgetting to put them on”, and breaking them.

Which reminds me of when R got glasses. He was five, and apparently, had 20/200 vision in one eye. Both eyes like that and he would have been considered legally blind. I had no idea until the routine kindergarten vision screen, after which I wanted to get t-shirts printed saying Have Your Child’s Vision Tested! He could read and see things close up, but everything in the distance was just a vague blur. Which I didn’t know. Urgh. That might have explained his reluctance to play soccer. He could barely make out his mother walking towards him, never mind see a whizzing soccer ball going by. I spent the weeks before his glasses came in an agony of self-reproach, which I got over, but the actual moment that he put the glasses on……absolutely magical. I still get all teary remembering. He put them on, his eyes widened, and he said I can the snowflakes! Followed by I can see the leaves! and on and on all the way home.

I’m Excellent

I was going through my old emails searching for something and I came across this little gem, titled I’m Excellent:

what kind of mother whips up a last minute tiramisu while fielding three extra kids for lunch (thanks juje) before dashing off to work on her master’s? this kind. the same kind that also loaded the dishwasher, comisserated with a sick and whiny son, scarfed down a bowl of home made lentil soup and patiently listened to 8 renditions of eye of the tiger on the guitar over the shrieking of four small girls all in the time it took to whip the cream and layer the ladyfingers.

i would like to add that i’m the kind of mother that happens to have mascarpone cheese in the fridge but I’m not. cream cheese will have to do.

What was that all about? I clearly did think that I was superwoman that day. And I needed someone else to know it.

And I didn’t even have diapers to change or vomit to scrape off the floor.

Loaded the dishwasher? Now that’s tough.

Bye bye summer….

Trust Yourself

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and……try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in  a very foreign language…….Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,  live your way into the answer.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

My translation: Carry on even if you don’t know what exactly the future looks like. Just try to follow your deepest truths, and live in a way that allows you to feel that you are living according to your own set of values. Every choice, big or small, changes our direction on the journey that our life takes, and hopefully, the path that we end up choosing to follow brings us to a place where we feel at home.

Think About It, Girls

Today at lunch, J and her little friend M, both 8 years old, were gleefully telling me how they had seen T “dancing and twirling” down the street to school the other day. They showed me how he had pirouetted “like a ballet dancer” and then giggling, remembered how some “big, strong boys” on skateboards who were going by on the other side of the street must have thought that T “looked like a girl”.

Wouldn’t that have been a good thing? I asked them. They stopped laughing and looked at me, confused.

Girls are great, right? I said. They tentatively nodded.

You two are girls. You’re pretty great. Aren’t you? Emphatic agreement.

Isn’t being a girl a good thing? Yes, yes, nodding heads.

So why is it a tease to be called a girl?
Silence.

Then a flurry of discussion.

More Midlife Musings

…only as we focus more on contributing than consuming can we create the context that makes peace in all aspects of life possible. It is in leaving a legacy that we find meaning….

~ exerpt from David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (2001)

It’s the journey, not the destination….yada yada yada

For a long time it has seemed to me that life was about to begin – Real Life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid – then life would begin.

At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

~Alfred D’Souza

Seems to me that I’ve read variations on this Aha! moment fairly often, and I guess that’s because, damn it, it’s true. There isn’t going to be at time when I’ll feel that I’ve finally made it, things won’t ever be done, finished, stable, ready, feeling all nice and tidy. I’ll never get to a nice flat place on top of everything. I won’t ever have it all sorted out to my complete satisfaction. One thing gets managed, two more pop up, and several other unrelated concerns arise. New information just begets a whole pile of new questions. The more I learn, the more I want to know. Get to where I think I want to go and find out that it’s just one step on an even longer path. Slog up a hill, and crest the top, only to see yet more hills in the distance. As soon as the kids are out of diapers, THEN I’ll have time for X, Y, Z. Except that by the time they’re out of diapers I’m a single parent and having to juggle 5 different schedules with one ancient minivan. There will never be a time when I finally get to that place, that place where it all feels perfect. I’ll keep struggling and questioning and wondering and managing and laughing and weeping and then I’ll be dead.

Now that I’ve finally accepted this as truth,  I realize that I have maybe forty good years left ( and that’s if I’m lucky) , and that fills me with a sense of urgency. I want to really use this time, my precious time of being a conscious human being alive on this planet, not just let the time pass.

I Can’t Watch Anymore

I dropped in to see this one at diving practice today, and was unlucky enough to see her on the 10M tower.

I’ve been watching her dive since she was six. First off the side of the pool, then the big step up to the 1M springboard, which seemed like a Very Big Deal at the time, then working up to the 3M springboard, learning ever trickier backwards and inwards and twisty sorts of things, and eventually up to the tower. 5M seemed sort of okay, but I had some nervous tension watching her flip and somersault off 7M, because, honestly,  that is really, really high up. She’s been competing off the seven for two years now, and I’m still not very comfortable with it. I went up the tower once, just to see what it was like, and when I up there it was all I could do to grip the handrail and peer over the edge. Sickeningly high.

After Canada Games this year she told me that she’d be starting to dive off ten in the fall, so it’s not like I didn’t know this was coming. I thought I was kind of okay with it, and really, it’s not like I have a choice, but having to sit in the stands and crank my neck way back to see my teeny tiny daughter, all skinny in her bathing suit, teetering on her tiptoes on the edge of that platform, FACING BACKWARDS, getting ready to JUMP IN TOWARDS THE CONCRETE PLATFORM, and then plummet 3 1/2 stories to the water after doing god knows how many somersaults, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open.

I felt sick.

Watching her up there getting ready to go, looking at her all  those interminable minutes that she spent thinking or concentrating or mentally preparing or whatever it was that she was doing, all I could do was hope hope hope that it all went well, that she would end up in the water unhurt. I kept thinking of how much it would hurt to do a major belly flop form that height, or a face smack, or really anything at all other than a perfect entry. When she finally made her sickening leap and ended up doing a lovely something-or-other, which I didn’t even see because I was so nervous, and when she did end up perfectly fine, and I saw her smiling face break the surface of the water, all I could think was Thank God that’s over I hope she doesn’t do another.

But of course she did.

She loves diving, and she’s thrilled to be old enough and strong enough to finally dive from the ten. She’s not thinking about shoulder dislocations or broken collarbones, or bruising from head to toe.

After practice I told her coach that I’d changed my mind, that I was pulling my daughter out of diving, that it was really just too much, but he just laughed and shook his head. I think he thought I was joking.

Fatherhood = Motherhood = Personhood

The daily work you put into raising your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.

~Excerpted from Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon, 2009

Thanksgiving

Can’t say that I am in full agreement with a holiday that commemorates the way that my white ancestors took over a land that was being lived on by others, but I do cotton to the idea of taking time to give thanks. Thanks for the harvest, thanks to the earth, thanks for friends, family and life itself.

I deliberately chose photos of the kids each doing things on their own. Things that they like to do, things that show who they are. I am fantastically grateful to be on a journey with these four individuals, and I’m happy that we’re managing to find ways to be a family and yet be ourselves.

Still Me (Being Still)

I’m in a quiet place in my life.

When the kids aren’t with me, I’m mostly alone. I spend time with friends, I go to the university for classes, and I do yoga, but I have large blocks of time that are mine alone. I could fill the space up with any number of things, but I don’t. I don’t want to.

I feel like this is necessary time. This aloneness. It suits me right now. I don’t want to rush it, or change it.

I feel like I’m settling into myself, taking the time to notice my breathing for the first time…..ever.

Yoiks

I was snuggled all safe in my house, but then there was a freakish little snow squall.

It was disturbing.

It’s far too early in the season for snow to fall.

I haven’t felt like taking photos for ages, but there was something compelling about the light, the weird angle of the sun, and the way the snow was swirling and twirling in eddies in front of the window, just like it does in the middle of winter, but against a backdrop of still-summer.

By the time I got my boots on and rummaged through the bins of winter stuff for a hat, the little storm was over, but I went for a walk anyway.

Last year it didn’t snow until after Halloween. That’s three weeks away. I haven’t cleaned out the garage yet! I haven’t raked the leaves!

To be fair to me, the leaves have to fall before they can be raked.