Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 15

The trials and tribulations of Kate, mother

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Don’t let those innocent faces fool you. I’m on to them.

In the past week, a couple things have happened in my world.

First, we learned that our 5 1/2-year-old needs a nap after school. Luckily, it only took us two days to realize what was going on. Unluckily, we haven’t figured out how to make it really work yet, so sometimes it happens, and sometimes…it doesn’t.

Second, I’d had it up to HERE (envision the hand at the hairline) with being ignored. For example: that blasted black sock was STILL sitting on the living room floor THREE DAYS and FIVE REMINDERS after first being pointed out/instructed to put it away.

I was not happy. Not happy at all.

Saturday morning, I cornered the kids in the van, where they were all seatbelted in and couldn’t get away, and I announced (calmly) (mostly) a change in procedures in our house. From now on, I will give an instruction one time. If I have to give it again, the consequence will be an extra chore. Two reminders = two extra chores. Three strikes and you’ve lost your screen time for the day.

That was 9:30 a.m. By lunchtime, Michael had lost his screen time.

On Sunday, Nicholas made it to two strikes. Even though we had a conversation about it while he was doing the job I’d given him.

(What kind of conversation, you say? I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a strong-willed child insight: “So,” he says, as he’s sllllooooowwwwwwllly doing what I told him and getting his a) loose change, b) wallet, c) ear buds, d) book off the table so I can set for dinner. “So…do we get three strikes every day? Or do they just add up till we hit three?” Would you like to know where I found all that stuff? On the stairs. Still not put away. Envision me pounding my head against the nearest hard surface.)

But wait! There’s more! Sign up today and for absolutely free (oh wait, this isn’t an infomercial? my bad) you’ll get Miss Julianna on Sunday afternoon, trying to sneak extra iPad time by closing the door to the boys’ room so I wouldn’t hear it talking to her.

And that night, in what is becoming almost a nightly pattern, we came upstairs to go to bed and found Nicholas and Michael having a sleepover on their floor.

As my husband is known to say, when told of his children’s latest and greatest exploits:

“Awesome.”

How my 12 year old watches a concert

St. Cecilia and all my pastoral music friends…pray for us.

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(And if anyone caught the misspelling of Cecilia before I fixed it…it’s not because I’m a know-nothing! It’s because my sister spells her name the way I originally wrote it!)

Staying Home vs. Working Mom

Last week, we watched the movie Suffragette. I hope many of you have watched it, so I don’t have to explain that it was…sad. Sad beyond expression. But one thing that really struck me in that movie was the fact that Maud worked full time—more than full time—outside the home. She sent her kid off to somebody else to take care of.

For a lot of people, the stay-at-home/working mom debate probably feels tiresomely passé, but I still see the barbs popping up on both sides. I’ve heard the pain expressed by working and stay-at-home moms alike, who feel beleaguered. Judged. Too often by each other.

I always planned to be a stay-at-home mom. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life cocooned in a community that sees it not just as a valid choice but as THE RIGHT choice.

The thing is, I was less than a year into stay-at-home motherhood when I started working. I remember the moment I received my first acceptance, for the octavo Go In Peace from WLP. I was in the basement of our old house, nursing Alex while working on the computer with a repairman in the next room, and I scared both of them by screaming in excitement.

For twelve years I’ve been wrestling with the balance between work and motherhood/wifehood. There’s no question that my presence at home is a huge value to the family. It would cost $7-9K a year per kid for day care in my area, and these days, the cost would be transitioning into money to pay a nanny/chauffeur. The fact that I can do the grocery shopping and cooking while Christian’s at work means we have more time to spend as a family. That’s a value you can’t quantify. And of course, I’ve been able to shape my kids’ world view without worrying about what they’re exposed to or taught in the brief intervals they were away from me as small children.

And yet. I am more than a mother and wife. The gifts that were given to me as a human being who happens to be female were given for a reason. If I suppress them until my kids get old enough, I’m burying my coins. I was given the passion and gift for writing for a reason. I’m supposed to do something with it.

I consider myself unfathomably blessed, because the work I feel called to do can be done from home. It’s stressful and requires a lot of self-discipline, but I actually do get to “have it all.”

But what about women for whom their calling, the talent that they can offer the world, can’t be done from home? Do their gifts not matter?

Even I, working from home, have been tormented by messaging like “You’ll have decades left to have a career; your kids are only little once.” How much worse must it be for women who work outside the home? Those words may be true, but the reality is that if you drop out of the work force for three or five or ten years to raise a family and then try to come back, you’ll spend the rest of your life fighting a losing battle for equity.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize this SAHM mom ideal is really a pretty new construct. Even this book on Our Lady of Fatima that my mother gave me to read to the kids talks about how Lucia was the go-to child care provider for the entire village. Even in a peasant village in the 19-teens, a lot of “at home” moms were sending their kids out to be tended by someone else.

Which brings us back to Maude, from Suffragette. Yes, she is a fictional character, but I get the sense that she was an amalgam of many of the experiences of women involved in the suffragette movement in England. You could argue that it was different for poor women; that families of more means did, indeed, have mothers who stayed home with their kids. Except those kids had nannies and governesses.

Then, too, wrestling with all this has made me realize that without women in the work force, and a lot of them, issues of just compensation and so on would be shunted aside even more than they already are. That might not impact those who choose to stay home, but it sure as heck would impact single moms, who have no choice.

And now that I have a son on the cusp of adolescence—a son who watched Suffragette with us and who stopped the movie more than once to ask questions about what it means to be a woman in this day and age—the importance of this question is becoming ever clearer. I am a Catholic mother. My #1 job is to form my children in the faith. Not some warped version of it that picks the simplest parts to explain and ignores the real challenges the Gospel poses to people living in a real world, where there are no straightforward, cut-and-dry answers, because when you yank on one thread several dozen others move, too.

Mothers who work outside the home aren’t less-worthy mothers. One woman who’s close to me says, “I am always a mom first, even when I’m at work.”

I’m not belittling staying home. Quite the opposite. For all the hair-pulling moments I’ve experienced the last twelve years of being entirely or almost entirely at home with my kids, I can’t imagine going back and choosing any other path. It has been exactly what I was called to do.

But nor will I stand for a world view that belittles those who do choose to work outside the home. We all have to discern our lives and our vocations based on our individual circumstances, the personalities, strengths and weaknesses of all the family members. And above all, we have to stop minding everyone else’s business.

Learning To Say No…to Me.

[image error]“I need to learn to say ‘no’ more.”

Those words, spoken by a friend of mine this past January, were like a tiny pebble in a small creek. They resonated, but I already knew, or thought I knew, what I wanted to focus on in 2017, and the word “no” wasn’t it.

But as the year has gone on, the ripples from that tiny pebble have been spreading and ricocheting off each other, gaining momentum, and I’ve realized this is what I am supposed to be doing this year: learning to say no.

The thing about being type A is you tend not to set limits for yourself. In fact, often you choose not to accept that you have them. You see a need, you see an opportunity, you see that you have the appropriate skill set, and you say, See? I can manage this too. Then you find your nights chasing your mornings and your schedule crammed with activities for 4 kids all at the same time in opposite corners of town while DH is otherwise occupied, and you can barely breathe, but by golly you get everybody where they’re going and you still manage to make some minor progress on editing That Novel. And you think, See? I can do this.

But at some point you start thinking, Okay, I CAN do this…but what am I doing to myself in the process? And WHY?

I’ve been thinking about m y friend’s words a lot, the past few months. And I’ve been practicing saying no. It feels terrible. Terrible. I’ve said no to a couple different volunteer opportunities for causes I’m passionate about. No to a couple of teacher appreciation lunches at the Catholic school and the request for volunteers in the classroom. I feel dirty and somewhat guilty about this. Who am I to say my time is more important than that of any other parent in the school? Still, I did it.

But here’s the thing I’m discovering: as important as it is to learn to say no to outside commitments, sometimes it’s myself I have to say “no” to.

I don’t always have to fix dinner from scratch. It’s not the end of the world to grab fried chicken from Kroger on a baseball night, or to heat up chicken strips at home some night when I’m wiped out. It’s not even the end of the world to grab fast food once in a while.

I don’t have to make every single loaf of bread from scratch. It’s okay to buy one from the store once in a while. (Even if it’s not nearly as good.)

I don’t have to increase the number of Jazzercise classes I take every single year. The important thing is to exercise; if I get to three classes a week and fill the rest of the time with gardening, biking, running, lawn mowing, and swimming, that’s fine. I don’t need to pressure myself to make that 20-minute drive to and from the center four or five times a week when I can do different exercise based around home.

This is what I’m working on now. How I’m trying to love myself. And it is a particularly important lesson to keep in mind today, because this morning I am turning a page: All my kids wanted to go to summer school.

First, I feel a need to explain this. I am beginning to realize that summer school in my town is a very different experience than it is in most places. It’s all day, every day. And it’s fun. The kids are doing a couple hours of core learning and then they’re doing units on bridge building, gameology, puzzles, and technology. So they all wanted to go, and that means instead of waiting until August to have an empty house with all four kids in school, I get a one-month sneak preview.

Last summer, a friend of mine whose kids are a little older than mine gave me some advice. I was sharing how hard it was to write with Michael getting older and being ready for kindergarten but too young to go—how bored he was at home, and how much I was looking forward to the 2017-18 year. “Kate,” she said, and I braced myself for the usual annoying don’t wish it away/enjoy it/you’ll miss this when it’s gone advice. Instead, she said:

“When the time comes…pace yourself.”

Words to live by.

The Everyday Environmentalist

[image error]With Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris agreement yesterday, those of us who are passionate about care of the earth are, if not surprised, still frustrated. What we are not is powerless. If the data in this chart, or this one is accurate (and as I’ve been hearing variations on this theme a lot the last two days, I have no reason to think otherwise), then we, as individuals in the U.S., have a lot of room to reduce our carbon footprint. There’s no rule that says we have to wait for our leaders to mandate it. Why don’t we, as individuals, take the lead?

Today I re-present:

THE EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTALIST:
35+ ways to green up your real life (and often save money in the process)

 

[image error]In the Kitchen

Take your own bags to the grocery store. Cloth is even better than paper or plastic.

2. Buy fresh, not prepackaged. Making mac & cheese or pancakes from scratch really doesn’t require more time, and veggies you cook yourself lose less nutritional value.

3. Buy organic.

4. Buy local.

5. Grow your own vegetables.

6. Compost.

7. Recycle.Yes, even so far as bringing home the plastic ware from the fast food restaurants which don’t offer recycling. This is a biggie!

8. Wash and reuse Ziploc bags.

9. Wait to run the dishwasher till it’s full.

Vehicles and driving

Turn off the car. (Another biggie.) Why run your engine while you check your phone, wait for kids at their lessons/practices, or for your spouse at the grocery store? Every bit of that is unnecessary pollution. Turn it off.

11. Slow down! The faster you drive, the more gas you burn, and it really doesn’t make a significant difference in time, anyway.

12. Make one trip to the grocery store for the week—IOW, plan and shop with a list.

13. Combine trips & walk from errand to errand when possible. Not when convenient–when possible.

14. Take advantage of public transportation.

15. Carpool.

16. Make sure the tires are at the proper pressure (you get better gas mileage).

[image error]Around the house

Buy refills on cleaners instead of a new squeeze bottle every time

18. Buy used, and don’t buy things you don’t need. (Another big one!)

19. Use compact fluorescent bulbs.

20. Turn the lights off.

21. Turn the computer off, or at least put it to sleep. Why have it running while you’re sleeping? And in the summer it’s adding to the heat that the air conditioner has to fight.

22. Unplug electronics. They draw power even when not in use.

23. Use Recycled Paper.

24. Print on the back sides of used paper for rough drafts.

25. Turn the thermostat up a degree in the summer and down a degree in the winter.

26. Seal doors & windows with caulking or weather strips.

27. Get double pane windows.

28. Replace old appliances.

29. Set the water heater no higher than 120.

30. Take shorter showers.

31. Dry clothes on a line instead of in the dryer.

32. Plant a tree

33. Replace parts of your lawn with native plants–wildflowers, low-maintenance ground cover, and so on–so the mowing takes less time and gasoline.

[image error]For the Family

Use cloth diapers. There are diaper services that can do the cleaning for you.

35. Toilet train early. In my experience, the success or failure toilet training has much more to do with parental commitment than a child’s “readiness.” (Since I’ve toilet trained four kids, and the only one who was over 2 was the one with a disability, I stand by that statement.)

Bonus: Practice Natural Family Planning. No plastic, no chemicals going into the water supply, no waste. And despite what you may have heard…it works.

(This post was originally published on May 29, 2007, but I fine-tune it every time I re-post it.)

 

Fragility and Indestructibility

This is a post about this boy…

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…who yesterday, while I was running siblings to various lessons, punched (yes, I did say punched) the light switch in the kitchen, with this result:

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But at three this morning, the cries started up in his room. I hauled myself out of bed and across the hallway to find out what was the matter, expecting a bad dream, but the choking cough alerted me that it was something more serious. My five-year-old has croup. The seal-bark cough, the stridor breathing, the absolute panic of not being able to draw breath.

As I gathered him up into my arms, it struck me how still, his little boy body fits so perfectly against me, like puzzle pieces. He’s all arms and legs now, shooting outward, just waiting for the weight gain to fill them out. But he still likes to snuggle with me—on top of me, although now when his head rests on my chest, his toes dangle past my knees. It’s about the only time of day you can get him to be still, that snuggle time.

He was wailing, panicking, and I thought of the many times we went through this with Julianna, and I felt a deep gratitude, there in the wee hours of the night, that I had those experiences, because I know not to panic. “Michael, I need you to calm down,” I said, holding him close against me. “Crying makes your body need more oxygen. You need to calm down. I’ve got you. As soon as you calm down, I’ll explain what’s happening to you.”

And he did. It took a minute, but he settled down against me, and I was able to convince him he wasn’t dying and he didn’t need to panic. It was a bit surreal, having a child with croup who was old enough to have a rational conversation about it. Even more surreal when you consider that this is the child who rips off drawer faces and considers tackles an acceptable form of greeting.

It seemed rather useless to put on the vaporizer, considering the windows are open and the humidity is already high, but I got some Vicks (well, Target generic) and smeared it all over his chest and back, and set up all his big stuffed animals with his pillow in front of them, and propped him up against it, then tucked him back in.

“What’s ‘oxygen’?” he asked sleepily.

You’ve got to love science lessons at three a.m.

After I explained oxygen and carbon dioxide, I kissed him goodnight and promised him we’d go see the doctor in the morning.

And although his breathing was still raspy, he shot upward and wrapped those long, lean, yet still so very baby-skin arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. “I love you,” he said.

These are the moments motherhood is made of.

An Unexpected Aldi Hack (i.e.: Friday Funnies)

I stumbled across a wondrous thing yesterday: how to get through the grocery store in record time. I’m sure it’s going to be universally useful to every person who reads from the fount of world-changing information known as Kate’s Blog.

How To Get Through Aldi In Eighteen Minutes

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That’s me in the center, on a mission. And three of my minions. The fourth one took the picture. (Real Photo credit: kennymatic, via Flickr.)

Step 1: Invite over two extra elementary school-aged boys.

Step 2: Promise them the XBox…AFTER you get done at Aldi.

Step 3: Prepare for anarchy. When they grab the list from your hand, just roll with it. When they shout, “What can I get next?” yell something. Anything. When the youngest cries because everyone else is faster than he is…ignore it.

Step 4: Let them run all over the store, collecting items. Don’t try to keep track of them. They’re like boomerangs. They always come back. The kids, that is. By all means, keep track of the list! That is, after all, the point of the visit.

Step 5: Let them find you a grocery lane. Because they can’t be any worse than you at picking the shortest line, right?

Step 6: When they go hide under the far checkout lane to do surveillance…just pretend they belong to someone else.

“Who ARE those poorly-behaved little boys?” Photo credit: ALDI security valiant aja, via Flickr.

Step 7: Let them all pack a grocery bag, and forget worrying about what goes in it. Except for the lettuce bags. Those are sacrosanct.

Step 8: Leave Aldi 18 minutes after arriving.

There, you see? I told you it was universally useful. You’re welcome.

Happy Memorial Day!

 

In Which A Recovering Social Loser Processes Her Kids’ Social Status (or lack thereof)

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Photo by  Laura Barberis, via Flickr

Elementary school and junior high were no picnic.

I had my first breakup in the fifth grade, and it wasn’t even a romantic relationship. My best friend…okay, let’s be honest, my only friend…came over while I was sharpening my pencil by the coat rack and said, “I think we should be friends with other people.”

She used those exact words. I was too young and dumb to realize that actually meant I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.

For a year, I didn’t have any friends at all.

I was always picked last.

I never got the jokes. (Full disclosure? Sometimes I still don’t.)

I was only invited to birthday sleepovers because it was a Catholic school rule that everyone had to be invited. And people made fun of me when I was out of the room. I heard them.

High school was a fresh start for me, and three of the four years were basically good. Sophomore year was terrible, start to finish. But even during the good years, when people said, “These are the best years of your life,” I shook my head inside and chose to believe they were just being idiotic adults.

Most of the time, adults knew what they were talking about, but in this case, I’m happy to say, the teenager knew more than they did. Thank God. In college I finally found my people—the classical music crowd—but it took full-on adulthood to reach a point where I feel like I am happy with who I am and I exist in a community of people who understand me.

Frankly, I think it has a lot to do with being happily married. A child’s emotional stability, that sense of belonging, gets rocked by the onset of adolescence, and you spend the next ten to twenty years trying to find a new place where “home” means the safety you knew as a young child. Just sitting here thinking about it, I grieve for the children who never know that sense at all, and for the adults who never found it again. And, frankly, for the list of people for whom high school was the best time in their lives. Shudder. Imagine if life never got any better than that.

Why this traipse through the ghosts of angsts long past? Because now I get to experience it in a whole new way. More than one of my children is currently experiencing some variation of the not-good-enough that defined my later childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Probably it defines those parts of everybody’s lives, but in adolescence, those of us who inhabit the bottom of the social totem pole—not good at sports, not cool, viewing primping as a waste of good superhero-drawing/reading/writing/music practice time—feel that our faces are rubbed in our inadequacies quite frequently. Who knows? Maybe it’s harder to navigate those insecurities at the stratospheric end of the totem pole, because you are trying to keep up appearances when you feel like a fraud. Maybe I should be grateful for the spiritual/emotional/intellectual honesty of having had nothing to prove—both for myself and my children.

But it’s hard to see your kids suffer. As much as I value being outside the mainstream on, well, let’s face it, just about everything, I know how it hurts to be looked at like you’re somehow less valuable for it.

What I am grateful for is the fact that so far my kids want to talk to me about it. Because I’ve thought long and hard on these questions over the years, and for that reason I don’t fall back on the useless and maddening platitudes that adults used when I was a kid. Because we can use the experience as an ongoing opportunity for lessons in mercy, in recognizing how every situation is more complex than it feels, and in keeping the focus on Jesus.

And mostly, because it lets me love my kids really hard.

Michael Mayhem Graduates Preschool

Michael, with his toy guitar: “This next song is called “Starlight Can Never Destroy A Death Star So I will Use My Laser.”

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I went to his end-of-year celebration at his preschool yesterday, which consisted mostly of him attacking me at frequent intervals with flying leaps and fierce hugs interspersed with little girls coming around to take pictures with him.

It floors me to see how advanced academically he is. He is actually writing messages to us–all caps, no lower case, and asking us how to spell words–but writing nonetheless. Julianna does this app on the iPad for homework. It’s called ST Math. It’s graphic math, with no instructions of any kind, which has on more than one occasion made my head want to explode, but apparently the kids do pretty well with it. She’s doing the first grade curriculum and as we were trying to show her grandparents how this worked on Mother’s Day, Michael watched upside down and then started doing it for her. I had to get pretty firm with him to back off.

In part, it floors me because he’s in a special ed preschool, one where the primary focus of the instruction is the kids with developmental disabilities. We enrolled him as a “peer model” through the school district when he was three to try to develop sensitivity and awareness toward kids with disabilities–because of all our children, only Alex, who witnessed and participated in her early childhood therapies, really has an inherent awareness of and appropriate interaction with her. To her younger brothers, she’s just their sister. They don’t tolerate her desire for hugs, and their power struggles over the iPad and books and so on look like every other sibling struggle. They don’t give her one inch.

There’s great value in having that relationship–Julianna is always trying to get away with things based on her disability, whether she’s doing it consciously or instinctively–but I still wanted Michael to at least be capable of making a distinction.

When it came time to move him to a traditional preschool for his preK year, to make sure he got the needed academic preparation, we found ourselves waffling. He seemed comfortable, and the school was right here in the neighborhood. Often, we bike to and from. The kindergarten teachers at the Catholic school said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. He’ll be fine.” And so we left him in place for a second year.

His teachers at Early Childhood Special Ed have told me repeatedly how seriously he takes his job as peer model, but I always thought that was just teachers being nurturers; I didn’t take it that seriously until one day, Michael and I went out with my friend and her son, who is a couple years younger than Michael, after Jazzercise. The boys jumped around, climbing on and under things and generally being normal little boys while we talked and tried to keep their exuberance (and potential for damage) contained to one corner of the cafe. When it was time to go, Michael’s little friend did not want to go. It was like a switch flipped in Michael. His tone of voice gentled, he helped his friend put his coat on, he held his hand and led him out the door. My jaw hit the floor.

It will be interesting to see how the experience of being a peer model shapes his future character. In the meantime I highly recommend it for anyone looking for an inexpensive and extremely enriching option for preschool. Because clearly, it didn’t harm his academic potential at all.

In any case, such is the world of my littlest guy as the school year closes. I’m having so much fun with him.

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Magic Everywhere

On Holy Saturday, we were running an errand for my mom at the local photo/camera store, and Christian decided to surprise me with the camera lens I’ve been wanting for a long time–one that has a super-low F stop. I hadn’t had time to play around with it too much (see: busy) until this past weekend. Saturday night, as we were having a backyard fire pit cookout, Alex said, “Mom! Look at the way the light comes through the smoke.”

I looked–and then I ran for the camera.

That night, I really got to experience the “golden hour.” There was magic everywhere. I hope you enjoy.

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