The Kids Are All Right, II

The first present under our tree? Made by Little A in July, all by himself. He's all right.

So, if you've read Part I, you know what has worked for us in terms of teaching our kids independence, confidence, and resilience. It’s getting a little trickier for me these days with a new teenager dipping her toe in the world of dating and setting her own class schedule, but I see signs that the kids are all right.

When August came, the kids could not wait to get their class and teacher assignments from school. They’d been anticipating this moment for at least a month—yes, they love school. They just do! In any case, we stopped by the mailboxes on the way home. The kids tore open their envelopes in the backseat and S found out that, once again, she will not have any of her close friends in any of her classes this year. Even as she said, “It’s okay. I’m used to it,” I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

We all separated to unpack from our weekend away; I figured she needed time to process alone anyway. Next time I saw S, she had cleaning supplies and was headed upstairs to clean the bathroom, her weekly chore. Then, when I went over to the sofa to fold the four loads of laundry sitting there, it took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing. All the laundry had been folded. I’m super picky about my laundry, so I usually hog that chore, yet here it was, done. I knew it hadn’t been either of the boys, so it must have been S.

I thanked her for doing it and she shrugged me off, so I called in her dad for reinforcement. At bedtime, he casually said, “Thank you for folding my laundry.” And our daughter’s reply blew us both away. “I felt sad. When I feel sad, helping makes me feel better.”

When my brain caught up to her amazingly insightful comment, I let her know that she’d spoken a deep truth and that a lot of people have to grow up a lot more before they find that way of coping. Internally, my mom-brain kept asking, “HOW did she learn that? What did it?” I still don’t have an answer. Somehow, somewhere, enough adversity crept into her life—without my planning or arranging it—to teach her that altruism is one of the most effective ways to improve our quality of life. Damn. That’s amazing.

On a lighter note, both our kids are enjoying the freedom of our new neighborhood. With great sidewalks, walking paths, and a few dirt roads and without the traffic of our old neighborhood, they’ve ridden their bikes constantly. Toward the end of summer, Little A’s bike bought it—the back end of the chain assembly warped so that it was sticking through the spokes. (We found out later it had been assembled with the wrong tension.) Anyway, the bike couldn’t be ridden or walked. So S told her brother to walk her bike, while she picked up his bike and carried it a quarter mile home.

That beautiful, precious, and—let’s face it—unnecessarily difficult solution touched the heart of this ‘80s child. That moment could have happened to any of us who grew up with long summer days of being “neglected”—at least by today’s standards. And maybe our kids didn’t take the easiest option, so maybe we did mention that S could have left her brother with his bike, ridden home, and gotten an adult with a car to come get both brother and bike, but what we said over and over—what I hope stuck—was, “You made it work. You did it. You took care of each other and got it done.”

And I still don’t know what experience gave S that internal gear. Was it all her attempts, failures, and ultimate successes in circus? Spending time at an outdoor, overnight summer camp in the woods? Seeing the fruits of her faithful piano practice? Doing “adult” chores alongside her parents? Living with parents who stumble and screw up all the time but never give up? Some peer drama I don’t even know about?

If I’m honest, I think it comes down to attitude. Whatever we parents seek in our children, we will find. Maybe it’s because her dad and I look, ever and always, for strength, empathy, responsibility, and perseverance in our children. Maybe it’s not so much the quality or quantity of the challenges that fall into their lives, but how we ask them to respond. Maybe it’s the confidence we have in them, the confidence they borrow until they have enough of their own.

S voluntarily spent hours at Halloween using her circus skills to spot other kids on the rings. She's all right.

The Kids Are All Right, I

All my life, I have dreamed of being a mother. My life experiences as a big sister, babysitter, camp counselor, nanny, and mentor all gave me a taste of what I longed for—being a parent, a teacher, a confidante, being the first one to open a young human’s eyes and ears to our beautiful world, being the one whose “you can do it” rings so powerfully that the child can, in fact, do it.

To me, one of the greatest miracles we can perform as humans is to lend another our belief in them until they find belief in themselves. From the first moment a baby fusses, stirring restlessly, seeking a solution to whatever bothers them—whether they’re wet, cold, lonely, gassy, or hungry—we have a chance to share our confidence in them. As we soothe them with our voices while changing, swaddling, cuddling, rubbing, and feeding them, we say, “You’ve got this. You can hang on. You can speak up and be heard. You can get what you need.” Eventually, they believe us.

The miracle, though never more fundamental, grows and grows with each child. I’ve often said that I love beautiful new infant skin, so free of scars and marks, but I also love toddler shins with all those first bumps, bug bites, and booboos. The toddler skin belongs to someone who is out trying things, running and falling, reaching and slipping, stepping in things that they’ve never stepped in before. That skin belongs to a scientist, an inventor, an explorer.

I love my children. I’d cheerfully sacrifice any body part to save them from harm. I love my children. I want them to embrace the world and their abilities. I want to say, “You can do it!” until they learn to say, “I can do it!” Those two priorities take balancing. So, as our children and their miraculous explorations have grown, I’ve had to redefine the concept of “harm.”

You see, I’m a resilient person. No brag; it’s just my go-to answer for that eternal interview question, “What’s your greatest strength and weakness?” I can handle anything. That’s great in natural disasters; not so great when you put up with unnecessarily difficult human BS because you’re too busy getting stuff done to notice that your life is getting worse and worse. But that’s a blog for another time.

It’s not a stretch to say that my experiences as a child and young adult honed whatever innate resilience I had; tough times made me tough. So here lay a huge stumbling block for me as a mother: how would my beloved children grow to be resilient without encountering some really shitty things in life? How shitty do things have to be to create resilience? Do I have to seek those things out or will they just come along in the course of life?

And that’s why I thought long and hard before intentionally picking a definition of “harm.” I decided that I would protect my children from permanent harm as much as possible. If they took a risk that might lead to reparable harm, I’d offer suggestions but not veto their choice. So, in playground terms, that meant if they could break their necks, crush their skulls, or die, I would not let them climb there, try that, or hang on it. If they might break their arms, I’d offer advice for being safe, I’d keep a (subtle, distant) eye on them, but I’d leave it up to them.

This seems to have worked for us. S got to climb almost as much as she wanted and Little A got to “try” almost as many crazy things as he wanted. We worked it out. But, like any other parent in the new millennium, my biggest parenting challenges have come from the outside.

I’ve been fortunate not to have any major confrontations or, thank goodness, actual legal issues, but I’ve had my fair share of parents calling from across the park, “Is this your little girl over here on the jungle gym?” Though harmless enough in print, that question always carries heavy criticism. If so, why are you over there? I’m here minding my child. Yours is unattended. Yours is climbing without an adult standing in arm’s reach.

When the kids were younger—and by that I mean that S did not look like an adult or even a teen—I would not leave them alone in the car at our local grocery store. Now, we’ve shopped there forever, the staff all know the kids and recognize our car, it’s an incredibly safe area, we usually see someone we know in the parking lot, and I can usually park within three spaces of the door. So, one day, when they whined about wanting to stay, I was honest with them.

“Listen, I know you can stay here and be safe. You’re plenty old enough. But. I also don’t want to have to deal with a stranger calling the police because that stranger thinks you’ve been abandoned in a car. I just want to get some cereal and go home, so you’re coming in with me.”

That little speech became a point of pride with them. They’d laugh about it and show off by repeating it for family friends. Clearly, my spur-of-the-moment, honest answer to their whining gave them confidence. I had no idea how happy I would be that I’d made that speech, but, from then on, I referred to it every time I asked them to come in the store. It’s fallen out of use lately; S has gotten taller than me and Little A has about two inches to go. Now I’m *almost* certain no one would call child services on me for leaving them. Almost.

I recently read this article, full of stories where someone did call the police. It makes me sad, not just because the stories illustrate the reasons behind my decisions not to leave my children

alone in a safe parking lot, but also because they define the cause of the extremely fragile mental state of many rising and young adults today.

I’ll never forget seeing a work-study student in the costume shop of a prestigious private college burst into inconsolable tears after sewing a seam wrong. Anyone who sews has done it—many, many times. Seams go wrong. The bobbin runs out or the tension’s wrong, another piece of fabric gets pulled in or you just don’t end up where you need to be. It’s just thread. You rip the seam and sew it again. Yes, it’s frustrating and it can be the icing on a crappy-day cake, but if you’re a twenty-year-old who has been sewing several days a week for a whole school year, sobbing seems like a reaction out of proportion to the problem.

That happened twenty years ago. I won’t even try to link to all the articles about lack of resilience in college or the workplace since then. They are ubiquitous and depressing. Young adults don’t know how to get to work or class on time, speak to a professor or boss, talk to a roommate, handle constructive criticism—it’s almost like they’ve never developed the skills to handle life alone.

Notice that phrase I used above. I wrote “don’t know how to” rather than “can’t” because they can. They’ve just never done it. They’ve never done anything alone. No one ever said, “You can do it.” No one believed in them, over and over, until they did do it, until they could say, “I can do it!”

Believe me, I have more to say on letting kids do stuff alone--look for Part II soon--but I still can't really explain how this works. I just hope folks out there will consider believing in others, especially children. It's hard to imagine in this world, but sometimes believing makes it real.

Sure the tree would fall, I said nothing. And she did it!

Measuring a Month

Like any good theatre geek, I pretty much always have a soundtrack running in my mind. The epic "Seasons of Love" from Rent has been on my mind lately. I'm not trying to measure a year right now, but being out of our home has given us a distinct month to measure. And adding up the landmarks on our family's journey through the last thirty days has brought me joy.

Like the artists in the musical, we truly can measure our time in love. I cannot express the strength and patience my husband has shown throughout this process. I've watched with awe as our children have handled the increased driving, the decreased privacy and rest, and the general chaos of our days with good spirits and resilience. And our village has been there for us, as always--especially when it comes to understanding my distraction and unreliability!

So, we measure our days in love. And also these odd tidbits. Enjoy!

One experiment in viscosity at dinner time!

One birthday party with friends 

Two missed days volunteering at the school store

One student journalism conference 
One diorama built 

Three writing contests entered 

One birthday party with family

One Halloween party; one Halloween night

Sixty dog walks

One jar of peanut butter 

Two makeup days volunteering at the school store

One annual physical 

Fourteen circus practices 

One high school career fair

Two cold fronts

One road paving project begun and ended

Ten piano lessons

I now have a favorite laundromat!

Two overnight business trips 

One “Fall back” time change

Two trips to the laundromat 

Seven loaves of bread

One Election Day

Forty-two school lunches packed

Forty-two school drop-offs

Twenty-nine school pick-ups

One press night for the school paper

Fifteen collective pounds gained 

More than a few trips to circus!

One dental checkup 

Two haircuts

Three blogs written

Twenty-seven times housekeeping came

Five times housekeeping couldn’t come (the dog was in charge)

One formal dance 

One third of a black belt test

Nine doses of dog antibiotics

Annnnd... 

Thirty-one Belgian waffles 

And on we journey...

Expect Deyays

How tired am I? So tired that I started a conversation with my son in the car–ten minutes AFTER I dropped him off at school. I was kind of mad he didn’t answer me…

I really can’t complain; all of our challenges are definitely of the first-world variety. We’ve been in a hotel for two weeks while our house is de-molded (one more week to go!) and I know that’s a privilege. Yet…I want to go home. As more mold have been found and more facets of repair have been layered on, I kept thinking of my favorite local digital road work sign: EXPECT DEYAYS

The sign cheerfully sits beside a roundabout under construction near our house. I had many reasons to look forward to moving into our new house—many! I REALLY looked forward to the shorter drive to school that would soon begin at that roundabout. I knew we wouldn’t get it right away, since the shorter road was under construction, but I'm excited for it to happen.

S. started the high school schedule this year, so I make at least four roundtrips to school each day. Saving ten minutes per leg saves me almost an hour and a half per day—that’s no small amount!

So when the road, due to open in August, didn’t finish on time, I was bummed but not overly so. I expected delays. It’s now due to open in November.

Blue=current options. Red/yellow=future option!

I haven’t been quite so calm about all the delays in our mold remediation process. My home is my sanctuary, so it’s hard to have mold, dust, dirt, and lots of strangers in it, especially since they’ve had to destroy and rebuild parts of it with all our belongings inside. I didn’t quite expect all the delays; I definitely didn’t expect the DEYAYS.

Yet they have come. One night we went down to the hotel pool to de-stress and met a delightful young man named Jensen who favored us with renditions of his favorite Jimmy Buffett songs—“Knees of My Heart,” “Volcano,” and “Come to the Moon.” Pretty good taste for a three-year-old! YAY! Thank you, Jensen.

Speaking of taste, our son, newly turned eleven, seems to be having a growth spurt—at least if the three-course breakfasts he’s downing at the hotel buffet are any indication. This morning, Big A and I decided that it might be a good thing that the HVAC contractor who goofed is buying those breakfasts! Yay!

I’ve been disappointed in my goals for the month—painting the kids’ Harry Potter bathroom, for one. Instead, I took out my frustration on creating a kick-butt Fire Swamp in the back of our van for Trunk or Treat. YAY!

Flame Spurts! (Candy) Lightning Sand! R.O. U.S.!!!

The dog has gone nearly everywhere with me and made lots of friends—far more than I have, thanks to his puppy magic. And the folks at the hotel simply could not be any nicer. Yay! We’ve had lots of random, silly fun as a family. Yay! And ice cream, lots of ice cream. Yay!

Our new home almost seems surreal; spending three weeks away after five months there has set it at a distance, in a way. Yet, as we all count down the days to our return home, I can’t help thinking what a wonderful partner and children I’ve been blessed with in this life. Yay!

EXPECT DEYAYS, everybody!

Bruno hoping for DEYAYS!

We've Got Mold Again

Or in this case, DO NOT auto-correct!

Yes, we've got mold again. Apparently mold brings out the blogger in me. Hopefully, lack of mold brings out the reader in you. Misused song lyrics aside, I actually started this blog during a mold remediation in our previous house; it's tradition at this point!

I’ve spent considerable time trying to decide how many circles of heck we have in our home right now. And it’s heck, not hell, because, really, they’re just petty annoyances. Wait, though—would lots of CONSTANT petty annoyances be worse than say, eternally burning in a lake of fire? Nah, we’ve definitely got heck.

So a slight construction error, a teeny oversight, a small piece of wallboard missing between our Florida-hot attic and the air handler closet convinced our chill air handler to sweat things a bit, then the sweat went and invited mold to the party. Luckily, we saw all the cars parked on the front lawn and called the cops before the party got out of hand. Or into the ducts.

The mess did manage to roll downhill, though, soaking the studs and wallboard between the front hall and master closet. Party on, dudes!

So, at this precise moment, our air handler has been kicked out of the house; it’s sleeping it off in the garage. Amazing new antimicrobial sprays have been sprayed. Damaged wallboard has been ripped out in the air handler closet upstairs and the hall downstairs. And we have four dehumidifiers running and two portable A/C units trying to cool the great room and master suite.

After a lot of thought on the above situation, I decided we don’t have circles of heck in the house, exactly—more like a Venn diagram of heck.

The first circle, the upstairs, has been abandoned. It’s excessively hot and proportionally miserable. The second circle, the back of the house, is almost cool but sounds roughly like the inside of a jet engine. The white noise rises to the level of—honestly, I can’t choose from the metaphors the leap to mind. Feel free to insert your own image here. The third circle, the front of the house, is moderately hot but somewhat quieter.

In the center, where these three circles overlap (and, ironically, where Harry Potter lived) is the Heckmouth beneath the stairs. Basically, the attic is still open to the air handler closet, but now the wall below the air handler closet has been opened to the house. With a dehumidifier in front.

In practice, it’s like having a giant fireplace in the center of the house. Hot attic air pours down through the wall and into the hallway. You can warm your hands on it as you go by.

Welcome to the Heckmouth.

Night and...

...day! (Not pictured: 7 more machines)

And, you know, it’s unscheduled work for the trades—they fit emergencies like this around their regular work. They come as they can. The dog loses his mind. My husband loses it at the dog. The kids aren’t sleeping well. All the first-world problems. Heck, I tell you. Sheer heck.

So standing here, in the middle of my third mold remediation, I’ve finally figured out that having my home, my sanctuary, my introvert’s snail shell completely invaded by random people from multiple trades doing unexpected and messy things—well, all that brings me to a place where I have nothing to lose.

And that, it turns out, happens to be where I need to be to create.

I’ve been trying to write more lately and basically, in a nutshell, more or less have written…less. I’ve read a lot of helpful advice about the discipline of writing every day, I’ve guilted myself with thoughts of how much housework or editing I could be doing with the time I’m setting aside to write. I’ve tried to back myself into writing like a nervous mare with a shirt over her eyes. Nope.

So the problem’s not lack of time or motivation or ideas, it’s just regulation anxiety-induced paralysis. Writer’s block with a healthy side of self-editing because, after all, I edit for a living.

For now, that’s all in the past. I’m at honey-badger-level of don’t care. Sidebar—do honey badgers regularly get their homes torn apart? In the end, I am producing mold-inspired blogs, poetry contest entries, and chunks of longer works in progress. And, wow, that sounds like some really messed up Pinterest recipe board--Mold-Inspired Writing for Fall!

To paraphrase Buffy the Vampire Slayer again, and Willow for the first time, "I think we've kind of played the scene." Look for more scenes from the Heckmouth coming soon to a blog near you! 

Be the Flood

I often write blogs when life seems to be saying something to me repeatedly. I’d like to think that I would notice those messages, whispered over and over, on my own…but maybe Oprah made me do it.

I vividly remember hearing Oprah say that if you don’t listen when God whispers in your ear, He’ll shout. The implication, of course, is that we really don’t want God shouting in our ears. God, life, light, the universe, the force—whatever it is, she’s right. I’ve learned that things always go better for me when I listen to the whispers.

Like many of us, I’m feeling drained and desperate these days. I’ve been pouring myself into my family, my little world, and my work, but I’m empty. I know I can’t fix the world right now, today, so I do my best for the global scene and do my best locally and then try to believe that’s enough. It’s not feeling like much lately. And I’m not special or alone—I see it in the people around me, in my friends’ thoughtful posts online, in the shops I go into, even in the way people drive. We are burning out.

So when life sent me two bright exceptions, I noticed. I enjoyed them thoroughly. And all the while, the analytical part of my brain wondered, What is the big picture here? Then a fellow blogger whispered in my ear.

The latest blog by the Hands Free Mama, Rachel Macy Stafford, is a beautiful tribute to her daughter and to Rachel’s loving appreciation of her daughter’s gifts. And it gave me the clue I needed to finish my thoughts.

I felt a bit jealous when I read Rachel’s loving descriptions of her noticing, wandering child. Partly, I think, because who wouldn’t want to their own inherent gifts appreciated and nurtured like that? That is love! We all yearn for that. I also think a bit of it was my own nature—if I can see something good that people do, I want to do it, too! Now, in my forties, I’ve learned to smile at that feeling and remind myself that the gifts this amazing young lady has are really not in my wheelhouse. I have other gifts.

Once the jealousy passed through, an epiphany jumped into its place. Life whispered. I got to glimpse the bigger picture. Rachel’s right; we absolutely do need folks like her daughter to heal this broken world. I want to take her wisdom one step further, though—we need folks exactly like each and every one of us to heal this broken world. 

That’s the thought makes my puzzle pieces fit, the amazingly huge and yet mundane bit of wisdom that we can carry with us everywhere. I’d like to share my two bright moments and see if you think I’m onto something.

We went to see Incredibles II for Father’s Day, as many people probably did. In our case, no one had turned on the lights in the theater or the projector. Strips of lights lined the stairs, but nearly everyone had to use their phone lights to find their seats. After we’d sat munching popcorn in the dark for a few minutes, I got silly.

Now, I know this impulse came from ME. From the truest, most inherent part of who I am, which is also a part of me that has been buried, straightened, controlled, managed, and otherwise manipulated to Behave itself. But that day--maybe because I was so tired, maybe because the weight seemed so heavy, maybe because God nudged me—I did what I almost never do. I actually got silly.

I took out my phone, turned the flashlight on, aimed it at the enormous screen, and started making shadow puppets in front of a theater full of people. My family and I giggled, then little snort-laughs started exploding from other people all around us. I couldn’t keep it going very long (I don’t know a ton of one-handed shadows), but when I turned my light off, someone else turned theirs on. We did this for about twenty minutes!

Twenty minutes of spontaneous group fun…in the dark…with total strangers! That bright spot (literal bright spot!) started me thinking.

I have a few other inherent parts of me that get a lot of flack. For instance, I always tackle “too much.” That’s in quotes because, really, how do you define “too much”? And who is in charge of defining it anyway? (I’m laughing at myself here.) If I ever end up faced with that eternal, boring pair of matching interview questions about my greatest strength and weakness, that’s my answer: I can handle A LOT, but sometimes I try to handle “too much.”

My wonderful husband even gave me a plaque to celebrate that.

Our life is insanely full right now. It’s far surpassed the normal madness of modern life. I’m not just talking work and parenting, both of which are jobs and a half these days. I mean that we’ve got huge life changes happening, deep growing we’re doing, and friends and family we want to be there for. I bet 4 out of 5 dentists would agree that anything I add to my list right now is “too much.”

Yet I’m also, inherently, in my bones, a baker. I love to bake! Cookies, cakes, muffins, even pastry. (Somehow no one complains about that quality of mine…hmmm.) I’ve had some buttermilk in the house, waiting to be a part of the best muffin recipe ever. And, as a family, we all want to be part of our new neighborhood. And the baker in me knows that food never fails to make a great conversation, so…

So today, with a book edit due Monday and a host of other things on my mind, I baked mini-muffins, then took them to three of our neighbors. My daughter and I spent a few minutes with each one, chatting and enjoying every minute of it. And now I sit, with happiness filling my heart, in the den we’re not fully moved into (we will be building the wall unit next week), not finishing my editing project because…

I’m also a writer. A writer who drops everything when insight happens, who tries to transform the whispers in her ear into understandings to share. Who feels most real, alive, and heart-full when crafting words to put out into the world.

I’ve spent a lifetime taming all these parts of me, my random childishness, my inflated sense of the possible, my absolute need to breathe in ideas and breathe out newly created thoughts. They do not fit the busy-ness of modern life.

Yet they do fill my cup. Just like wandering does for Rachel’s daughter. Just like some precious, irreplaceable gift does for you.

My hope for the world lies in that thought. I’m nothing fancy—my gifts won’t cure cancer or bring about world peace. At least, they won’t do that on their own. But they can fill my cup, they can bring me health and peace and joy, they can give me overflowing love to spill out into the world.

Be fiercely, joyfully, wholly yourself. Be who you are, in everyday moments and in life-changing ones. Lean into your true self, let your own gifts fill your cup. Let it spill from you into the world around you. No gift, no overflow can be too little—every drop counts.

Drop by drop, we can make a flood. Drop by drop, we can heal the brokenness. Drop by drop, we can fill this world with love.