Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 119

Making and Wearing Hats

I went to a tea party yesterday. It was a mother daughter event which included no actual tea, but the lemonade was served in tea cups and there were scones. "Come dressed in your finest." The invitation said. I did not actually pick my finest, formal wear is not quite right for afternoon tea. I did put on dressy clothes. Gleek did too. Then she got quite upset when she had no pretty shoes to wear. I'm not quite certain how we ended up with no nice shoes in her size. I guess she outgrew them during the past 9 months when she refused to wear anything but tennis shoes to church.

"I'll be the only girl there with ugly shoes!" Gleek lamented as we got into the car.

By the time we arrived at the church building two minutes later, shoes were completely forgotten. Gleek found us seats at one of the tables. The first activity was hat decorating. The organizers had purchased and array of straw hats and hat trimmings. A long table was covered in faux flowers, ribbons, feather boas, feathers, tulle, glittery stickers, and pom pons. Gleek approached the project with high enthusiasm. My first reaction was more reluctant than hers, but as I arranged ribbon and flowers on my hat, I found myself enjoying the process of making something beautiful. We wore the hats for the tea.

Gleek's hat was either a complete wreck or an absolutely brilliant expression of individuality and creativity. I loved it. I loved even more that she wore the hat to school today. As she disappeared into the school building I had a momentary fear that someone would make fun of her for her hat. Then I realized that Gleek's absolute fearlessness meant that her peers were much more likely to decide she was cool than that she was weird. She was still wearing the hat at the end of the school day, so all went well. Now I just have to figure out when and where I am brave enough to wear mine.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Gleek Present and Future

I am more vigilant of Gleek than the other kids. When she gets in an argument with other kids, I intervene. When she's wandered off my radar then I go find her. It occurred to me today that this is not fair to her. True she is more quick to anger than my other kids, but she keeps it in bounds. True I often have to figure out where she has disappeared to, but I always find her in a place that she is allowed to be. I keep reacting as if she is unpredictable and this is manifestly untrue. Gleek is awesome. Even in the midst of fury she chooses her words and actions. She sometimes says mean things, but she thinks even meaner things and chooses not to say them. That level of self control in a ten year old is amazing. When I look at who she is, I am always impressed. Unfortunately I often view her through a lens called "fears for the future." Wearing this lens gives me the false belief that today's behavior will be carried into the future. It is not true. Kids develop and change. I need to address the Gleek of today with kindness, love, and appreciation. If I can do that every day, then the Gleek of the future and I will have a good relationship. It will all be fine.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Giving Gifts

There is a formula for gift giving. It is not mathematical and requires quite a bit of attention or intuition, but it is very real. The formula is Effort times Interest divided by Expectedness. In other words the perfect gift is one which fits the interests of the recipient, demonstrates effort on the part of the giver, and is unexpected. Unfortunately the expectedness variable is the one that trips people up on holidays and birthdays. The more someone hopes for a gift the less likely they are to be pleased with what they receive.

I was thinking about this today as it was my oldest child's 16th birthday. Some birthdays weigh more heavily in the psyche than others and I felt some pressure to try to give my daughter a solidly good day. On the other hand, I have never felt like Bigger and Flashier is the same as Better. So I needed to facilitate her having a good day in ways that fit her and our family without making a big production out of it. I made a special before-school trip to the store to buy cheescake for her to take to school and share. She's been wanting to take cheescake for months, but kept asking last minute when running to get it was a huge inconvenience to me. I handed over the box to her and she knew that even though I won't always rearrange my days for her convenience, sometimes I will. She loved it and all was well.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Emergence

In the month of April I watched a long time friend, Dave, turn himself into a writer. He'd long been capable of writing things which were entertaining or insightful, but in April he took up a challenge to write 30 short stories in 30 days. He decided they were allowed to be awful stories because he would learn from the awfulness. I think it was somewhere in the second week when there was an almost audible click in his thinking. He changed from someone who occasionally wrote things into being a writer.

About two years ago I was tucking Patch into bed and he told me very solemnly that he'd had a vision for his life. He was going to be a cartoonist and draw Halo comics. He spent quite a long time detailing the ways that he planned for this to work. His plans included lots of practicing and would start the very next day. Morning dawned and Patch sprang out of bed to implement his plan. He discovered that drawing was harder than imagining drawing. Yet he still comes back to this dream and remembers it because it allowed him to picture a creative future.

Several months ago and online acquaintance Silvia Spruck Wrigley talked about becoming a writer. She gave me permission to quote what she said:

I wrote a diary from a young age without much belief in it or any thought that I would be a writer. I remember one day, I must have been about 12, I was upset at my grandfather and started creating my diary entry in my head. "Life isn't fair! Or at least Opa isn't!" I was pleased, this was a good opening. I was looking forward to writing it into my journal that evening. I repeated it to myself. It was a revelation that I had composed this with malicious aforethought. I was reading a lot of Judy Blume at the time, so I'm pretty sure that was a part of it, but it was a stunning realisation: that I could plan my words, that what I wrote could be improved, that there was good and bad presentation.

All three of these stories demonstrate an emergent moment. It is the time when a person's self image shifts and new paths for the future become possible. If you ask any writer, they can probably tell you one of their emergent moments. I remember beginning my first story at 6 years old and being proud of using quotation marks. At 13 I saw that Terry Pratchett had first been published when only 17 years old. I decided to do the same. The results for me were quite different, but belief in that dream carried me through my teen years. In 2005 I wrote a short piece of fiction which made me a writer again after a decade's hiatus. In 2009 I had an epiphany in which I realized that my blog counted as writing. Those are just my writing emergences. I've had them for parenting, gardening, being grown up, and dozens of other life roles. The moment of emergence will be different for everyone, but we all have them.

Emergent moments are inherently vulnerable. They shake the foundations of who we think we are and it does not take much to drive a person back away from the newly emergent possibilities. The first emergence is particularly fragile. My friend Dave had an emergent writing moment when he was 13 and unfortunately phrased criticisms made him shy away from writing. Writers at their early emergent moments need encouragement that this new future they can suddenly see is possible. They need to be told "Keep Going." Detailed instructions and criticisms can wait until the path is set.

One of the coolest things I get to do as a parent is to witness the emergent moments of my children. I watched Patch's comics with delighted amusement. More recently there was an evening when Kiki was feeling overwhelmed and doubtful about her ability to succeed at being a freelance artist. She talked to me. She talked to Howard. She did some thinking and reading. Then she came to me and her whole countenance had changed. "I can do this mom. I don't know every step, but it is what I am supposed to do. It will work." I looked into her eyes and knew that it was true. Like most paths it may wind some places that she doesn't expect to go, but the trip will be a good one.

Emergence, like triumph and being grown up, is not something that can be given. Each person must reach out and take it when the time is ripe. However there is much I can do to help provide fertile ground so that those I love can ripen their moments of emergence. I can build patterns of possibility and encouragement into our lives. Then I can meet those emergences with quiet love and encouragement.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Short Saturday Updates

I spent 8 hours of Saturday in my office prepping the PDF of Massively Parallel for Hugo Voters. It looks good. Then I sat and watched Spiderman with Kiki. She'd seen it before, but at 15 she has a much better grasp of social nuance than she did at 7. She loved it. I can't wait to show her Spiderman 2, which she has not seen before.

In all, a very good day.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Things I found on my kitchen counter upon waking up from an afternoon nap

A package of strawberries with only two berries left. (It was full when I lay down.)

A leaf.

A bowl full of orange liquid and two Popsicle sticks. Under it a note states: "Gleek's Popsicle!"

Two additional orange stained popsicle sticks (I haven't purchased popsicles for months.)

Two bags of open potato chips.

An eraser collection.

A note stating: "Dear Hakaber, Good. Now deliver the girls as fast as you can, the people in mervill are geting bored with the old princesses."

I almost don't want to know what the game was.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Park Day

"Can we go to the park today?" I'd been hearing the same question for over a week, but schedules and weather conspired against the plan until this afternoon. They ran and played. I sat and read. It was a lovely two hours. We came home tired, but happy.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

On Having Teenage Children

Many parents of young children dread the thought of having teenagers. I never did. Now that I'm here, I find that I continue to like it. I enjoy having adult conversations with my kids and they are just cool people to be around. That said, I've definitely noticed some developmental quirks. Sometimes these quirks catch me unawares and I realize that though they are adult sized and often speak like adults, they still have growing up to do.

Link is 13, so are most of his friends. This has given me the chance to observe groups of boys en masse. They all clomp. They clomp into my house, they flop on the sofa. Everywhere they go they are noisy without ever meaning to be. I suspect this is part of adapting to their rapidly changing body size. Some of it may simply be physiological loosening of joints to adjust for growth. They aren't clumsy, they just sound like they are.

The other big thing I've noticed about 13 year old boys is that they have no tact whatsoever. It is as if the tact circuit has been disconnected. They say the most appallingly mean things to each other without ever intending to be mean. Link grumps at his younger siblings and then is surprised when he is scolded. One time Link hurt his younger brother's feelings while trying not to. I explained three times why Link should have used different words, he still didn't get it. The thing is, I know that Link and his friends are good people. They used to be much more socially adept than this. It is a stage and they'll grow out of it. In the meantime I just pull Link aside for frequent whispered instructions.

Kiki is almost 16. In the past year she has quite frequently dissolved into overwhelmed tears. I remember 15 as an awful year for me, so it makes sense. Unfortunately weathering these storms of emotion is quite draining for me. I have to sort through her wild statements to figure out which ones are of actual concern and which are hyperbole. I have to figure out when to trust that good sense will rule the emotion and when I need to reign her in because she lost touch with rationality. I have to try to stand back because helping too much only ensures we get to have this same meltdown again a few weeks later after I've stopped helping.

So I weather the chaos and mutter to myself about teenage girls. Then I go to Howard…and half the things which come out of my mouth sound exactly like my daughter. I knew someday I would be concerned about sounding like my mother. I did not expect to be embarrassed to discover myself parroting a 15 year old girl. In the end I have to admit that the emotionalism may be a human thing rather than a teenage thing. We all have our turn to say "This is too much. I can't do it." I just hope my daughter can find the strength to stand up and try again the next day even when I'm not there to haul her to her feet. When I'm feeling calm, I know that she will. When I'm feeling stressed, I can't see how she'll ever learn it.

Even as I ponder the implications of developmental stages upon my teenage children, I have to acknowledge that I am also in a developmental stage. I'm not sure which one, they're hard to identify from the middle. At 38 I suppose I could be due for a mid-life crisis. That would make sense with the emotional arcs I've been identifying lately. Whatever the stages and how they affect who we are, my kids and I will continue onward helping each other and muddling through.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Carrying Other People

I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you.

-Samwise Gamgee

That quote comes from my very favorite moment in the Lord of the Rings Films. Frodo can't go on and Samwise carries him up the last slope. It is a moment in time when the quiet assistant character gets to be a hero. It is when the audience sees that without support failure is imminent. Every time I see the scene, I cry.

I thought of the scene this morning when my daughter was frantically typing away at a homework paper and remembered that she needed to bring treats to class. Cheesecake, she declared. She had promised cheesecake. I dropped what I was doing and began making a quick batch of cookies. I couldn't run to the store for cheescake and return in time, but I could bake cookies. My daughter was not pleased with the substitution. Then she was surprised and contrite when I got upset about her ingratitude. Only in the face of my tears did it occur to her that me dropping work to make cookies was a gift rather than something to be expected.

Carrying someone else is beautiful and heroic. Carrying the same person over and over is exhausting. How many times could Samwise have carried Frodo up the same slope if Frodo kept slipping back down? And what if there were three Frodos or five? At what point would Samwise collapse and need to be carried himself? There are times when carrying another person is the best and only solution. However it is not the only possible solution for most things. Sometimes Frodo just needs to realize that Samwise is tired too and offer to carry his pack for awhile.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Sinkholes and Structures

There are times when a friend asks me how I'm doing. I inhale to answer and I have no words. This is not a sign of nothing to tell, but a sign of "I don't know where to start." This past week is one of those times. When describing last week I previously used the metaphor of a flood, but today a sinkhole seems a more apt comparison, at least to start. I may very well jump metaphors before I finish typing. I do that sometimes. Sinkholes develop slowly and invisibly as water seeps far below the surface. The ground is eroded until it all collapses inward. I did that the second half of last week. Then I spent the weekend figuring out where all the water was coming from and how to go forward.

The core of the issue is this: I am the scheduler of our family. I was consistently scheduling everything to maximize Howard's creative output and to maximize the growth of the children. These are good things. I like them and think they are quite worthwhile. Unfortunately I was also structuring our lives so that the only way to maintain the system was for me to consistently give up things that I wanted. I tried very hard to stop wanting things without consciously realizing I was doing it. It didn't work and I collapsed.

As usual, Howard was there to pick up the pieces. He hugged me a lot. He listened to me ramble and fished out the important bits so that I could make sense of them later. He told me I should take a vacation. This last piece was the first step I took toward changing the structure. I've booked a flight to Baycon. I'll be going by myself and it will be terribly inconvenient for everyone. The inconvenience is the point. I am allowed to want inconvenient things and get them sometimes.

Today I saw the second structural change I need. Our house was a mess. It has been a mess for months because I have not had the time to clean it nor had the energy to make the kids clean. I realized that anytime a challenge arises in our family I assume that I am part of the solution. So instead of a cross connected web where everyone was helping each other, all the threads led to me. We had a family meeting tonight to point this out. Everyone nodded and agreed with me. Then we scattered through the house with assignments to make a room clean. Thirty minutes later the chaos level was greatly reduced. I don't expect them to turn over new leafs and be exemplary from now on, but at least we have tonight's lesson and cleaning to point to when we need to remind them.

Also included in tonight's meeting was a little lecture on "Thou shalt not ignore your mother when she speaks to you." I feel like I've been saying it for weeks, but it might have sunk in more tonight. I hope so. I'm tired of feeling disregarded and invisible.

Further adjustments may be necessary, but I figure they'll become apparent when we are ready for them. Honestly I am my own worst enemy in keeping these changes. It is going to take concerted effort for me to not let things slide back to the way they were. I've long known that the only person I can truly change is myself. Now I need to learn that it is okay to ask others to do some of the changing. It is harder for me. Doing most of the work myself is easier day to day than requiring my kids to step up. The hope is that they will someday step up without me having to goad them into it. If I can just get them helping each other I would not feel so over-burdened.

Right now I'm just glad that I can feel energetic and interested again. I wear out before the end of the day, but it is still better than all-worn-out all the time. Onward.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.