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.

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

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.)

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 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.

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 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

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 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.