Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 58

Raising My Strong Willed Child

We don’t parent on our own. Or at least, we shouldn’t. If we try to muddle through on the basis of our own (lack of) expertise, we’re more likely to screw it all up.

So I was very grateful to sit down for a long, focused conversation with a woman I respect deeply. She is raising a child like Nicholas, only she’s much farther along in the process. I’m not sure how to process that conversation except to share what has changed in me since then.

If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you’re probably aware that I’ve focused more emotional energy on figuring out how to deal with Nicholas than all my other children put together–including the one with Down syndrome. A strong-willed child wants to test the limits, and that includes the limits on the limits. For example: if you draw the line in the sand, he’s obviously going to cross it. But he has no intention of abiding by the consequences, either. If the consequence is “go to your room,” you’re going to have to make him go. It’s exhausting. It never lets up.

And if you’re not careful, all of life becomes a battle. And battles don’t leave room for love–the warm fuzzy kind of love, I mean. The battles themselves are an expression of love, but not one that brings you closer together and facilitates enjoying each other’s presence.

I’ve always known I needed to keep calm when dealing with Nicholas. But he’s so good at identifying my buttons, and he goes right for them. (Name this tune: He never hit the brakes, and he was shifting gears.)

Insert note of irony: while I am drafting this blog post, everything I am writing about is playing out around me. Just keep that in mind.

What always made it even harder was the sense that Nicholas had no empathy, no willingness to think about anyone’s feelings or desires but his own. I have often feared that Nicholas is wandering through the world without much of a conscience to guide him. Consciences can be molded but not created, and I’ve spent a lot of energy fretting on that subject.

“Oh no, strong-willed kids usually have a huge desire to please,” my mentor-mother said. I wasn’t sure I bought that, but I went back to my memory with an open mind and I soon decided she was right.

I’m jumping into speculation here, so bear with me. I think part of the reason things often spiral out of control is because parental disapproval weighs so heavily on him. Once he’s on Mommy’s bad side, he feels he’s beyond redemption. So then he acts the part.

That reaction makes no sense to me, but it is what it is. Everyone’s soul smarts when they get in trouble, but different people react differently. What makes Nicholas decide in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound is the appropriate response to getting in trouble? I don’t think I’ll ever understand that, because I was…uh, I still am…a person who reacts to criticism with a desire to instantly remake myself in the image of whoever is scolding. That, or stay up for three nights tossing and turning and having ghost arguments with them to vindicate myself.

But it doesn’t matter, really. I don’t have to “get” why my son reacts that way, as long as I can see through to the hurt and sadness that lies beneath it. When I address the problem through that lens, everything works out much better.

In the meantime, his public persona gets comments like “easy-going,” “goes with the flow,” “so kind and thoughtful,” and “an absolute joy.” Nicholas, like Julianna, has an uncanny knack for creating a fan club for himself wherever he goes. At least among the adults. So I know he’s got the empathy, the ability to think of others. The conscience is there. It’s just that the way I’m trying to access it isn’t working.

So I’m trying to learn new patterns of behavior for myself. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but flexibility is a good thing–not just for the body, but for the mind and the soul, too. God grant me the grace to raise my son up into a holy man, despite my many failings.

What’s YOUR Problem?

Photo by Duncan C, via Flickr

Life is unpredictable, but over the past several years I’ve learned there’s one thing I can count on with absolute certainty: somewhere between one week and two days before university graduation, I will lose my voice. It happens virtually every semester, just before I join the platform party at honors convocation as the official singer of the alma mater.

This year was no exception. For three days I took cough syrup, slathered myself with Vicks, and drank tea in an attempt to get the slow-moving virus to clear my body before graduation. It happened just in time. Praise the Lord, I had a voice on Saturday morning.

But the thing that stands out to me about this weekend is that the commencement speeches were the best I’ve ever heard. Jim McKelvey, who co-founded Square, had everyone laughing at intervals, but the message was serious. He wanted to point out to the graduates that no longer can they count on praise or immediate feedback like grades to keep them motivated. From here on out, they have to motivate themselves.

It could have been a real downer of a message, except for the humor and the takeaway: Find a problem. Find a problem that bugs you down so deep, you’re on fire about it. A problem so troublesome, it gets you out of bed in the morning. Find that problem, he said, and then go fix it. And if you succeed, find another one to solve.

After McKelvey came Jim Held, the owner of Stone Hill Winery in Herman, Missouri, who was being awarded an honorary doctorate. He came to the microphone and said, “I could talk about the wine industry in Missouri, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the last 2 1/2 years of my life.” It was a simple but powerful story of a stroke he was told he wouldn’t recover from–and did. He changed his bad habits, and he changed his future. The takeaway: the choices you make have consequences. So make good ones.

I come out of this weekend feeling pretty blessed, for many reasons I can’t go into in public. But this blessing I can share: I feel tremendously blessed to be staring down age 40 with a clear sense of what my life-motivating problems are–the ones that motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. There are two. One of them I outlined on Friday. The other is the need for a healthier view of sexuality, one that recognizes and embraces the message Jim Held underscored: personal responsibility and self control, the fact that choices and consequences go together and you must take the responsibility to exercise self-control to achieve the outcome you value.

I feel even more blessed that these two passions of mine dovetail so seamlessly: that living out a sexuality that respects the way we are put together (as opposed to slapping a pharmaceutical on something that isn’t broken in a misguided attempt to “free” sexual expression from its natural consequences) also respects the earth.

My question for you today is this: what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning? What global problem do you want to solve? You don’t have to answer that publicly, but think about it. And if you’re willing to share, so much the better.

Itching For A Fight (a 7QT post)

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It began Tuesday morning, when I pulled into a spot at the public library twenty minutes before it opened. I let Michael get in the driver’s seat and play with all those fun controls while we waited. We were not the only people killing time between school dropoff and library opening time. There were half a dozen other cars in the lot. In the white sedan beside us, a blond college-age girl sat navigating her a smart phone…with the car running. For over fifteen minutes.

Now, it was not a hot day. Nor was it a cold day. My blood pressure rose every minute she sat there spewing pollutants into the air unnecessarily. I wanted to get out and knock on her window and suggest that she shut her car off. When we all got out to walk into the library  at the same time, I sent a little prayer winging skyward: Do I speak, or do I keep my big mouth shut?

The compulsion to speak was nearly beyond control. But I could not for the life of me come up with any way to address it that sounded anything other than  nose-in-your-business.

And so I didn’t say a word.

___2___

This is not an easy dilemma to solve. On the one hand, it seems clear that life in this world will be much better if we stay the heck out of each other’s business. I may not agree with your choices, but it’s wrong to stick my nose in and give you the third degree about it. Our personal choices are our own.

A friend articulated it this way later that afternoon: “I kind of think whether people run their car for half an hour is their prerogative.”

___3___

Not so fast.

Photo by Rachel Knickmeyer, via Flickr

Because it’s not your prerogative to do things that screw up the world for everyone else. We all have to live on the same planet, and that means we all have to think about how our actions impact others. That’s the reason we have rules at all. Nicholas has been asking questions lately like, “Why does green always mean go?”

“Because that’s the rule they made, honey.”

“But why?”

There is no why, it’s just a rule someone came up with so we could all coexist peacefully.

This issue–unnecessary consumption–is a global issue. It impacts all of us.

___4___

Christian has tried for years to convince me that arguing with people is useless, that no one changes their mind because you engage them in flame wars or even spirited debate. All that happens is everybody leaves with bad feelings. This philosophy wars with my nature–I come from an extensive, widespread net of extremely opinionated people  dating back at least two generations, and probably further, only I was too young to know them. But in the past decade and a half I’ve come to recognize the truth of what my husband says. More often than not, I take deep breaths and abstain from pointless argument.

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But then again, evangelization can’t be limited to people who already agree with us. And if I feel convicted on an  issue because of my faith–in this case, that we have a responsibility to take care of the earth we’ve been given, and that there are dire consequences if we thumb our nose at that responsibility–then I’m not really living out my call to discipleship at all, am I?

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Dawn on Cloud Nine, by Krasnickaja Katya, via Wiki Commons

So…I’m opening a can of worms I’ve been avoiding all week. I’m just going to say it.

I believe in global warming.

I know that a good number of my readers probably don’t, but there it is. I don’t see how you can look at the explosion of devastating storms and years-long drought in recent history and not think, “Gee, isn’t it just possible that something we’re doing is having an impact on this?” These weather events are not judgment from God, and they are not just oh-well-it’s-a-fallen-world-after-all. If they’re getting more severe and more common, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and think about this quote from Fitzgerald:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

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[image error]I don’t see how we can close our eyes and pretend this isn’t happening, and say “it’s nobody’s business but my own if I burn fuel for fifteen minutes, or half an hour, in a parking lot.” I don’t see how we can say “it’s nobody’s business but my own if I don’t recycle.” Actions have consequences. How can we call ourselves Christians if we put “it’s-my-own-business” ahead of “the good of the whole world and everyone in it”?

End rant.

Fairy Wings

Making a new friend

Look to the sky, s’mores fairy

Fly away, Tink

Looking Back, Living Forward On Mother’s Day

I think I was in the sixth grade when it happened.

At some point along the line, the bathtub faucet in our one-bathroom house became unusable. Don’t ask me why. Kids don’t pay attention to details like that. We also have no idea why the decision was made not to fix it right away. I mean, it was fixed–we had a working bathtub–but the faucet had two spigots, a hot and a cold, not one that blends the two. In my childhood home, hair washing was always done by leaning back under the faucet.

So for whatever that period of time was between the faucet failure and the official refinishing of the one bathroom, we washed our hair in the kitchen sink. Tip the head forward, the blood running to the brain, long hair shedding into the strainer in the bottom of the sink.

I hated it.

But I’ll tell you what I hated more: the day my mother came over and saw something that sent her over the edge. I don’t remember all the words, but it was something along the lines of what a shoddy job of washing your hair and if you can’t do it properly I’m doing it for you! I’m pretty sure I made that hair washing as miserable for her as she made it for me.

(Note: I’ve never, ever said the words “if you can’t do it properly I’m doing it for you” to my children. Never. I mean, maybe one or two thousand times.)

About two days later I was scheduled for a haircut, and with the memory of that scrubbing still scouring my ego, I told the stylist to CUT.IT.ALL.OFF.

And in half an hour I went from being a socially-awkward, early-developing girl with pretty, thick, long brown hair to a socially-awkward, early-developing girl with horrible, ugly, out-of control short curly brown hair. (Curls? Where did those CURLS come from? I don’t have curly hair! What does one DO with curly hair??????)

BEFORE

AFTER. It still gives me the heebeejeebies.

I was thinking of this episode last night as my daughter screamed at me while I attempted to (gently) clear the mixture of melted marshmallow, dark  chocolate, and graham cracker crumbs from the long strands around her face. Every hair brushing, hair washing, or hair “styling” in our house is guaranteed to contain at least one bloodcurdling scream. I think she does it out of habit now.

(Note: the term “styling” must be used very loosely, because, well, look at those pictures above. Any girl who can go in public looking like that for two years is not likely to be a great stylist of her daughter’s hair. And when said daughter’s hair is every bit as thick as her mother’s, but fine and straight instead of coarse and curly? Yow. It won’t stay in anything–ties, clips, hair bands, braids, bows, headbands–useless, one and all. She gets it in her food at every meal.)

Reflecting back while living forward brought me to a couple of profound realizations:

1. There’s a reason the Almighty, in His great wisdom, gave a woman like me three boys who don’t need their hair brushed at all, and only one girl.

2. My mother put up with a whole lot more crap than I ever gave her credit for.

Childhood leaves scars. Stupid scars, usually, petty and eye-roll worthy, but scars nonetheless. Parents usually take the blame at the time, and the kids usually forget to reassess once they get a bit older and wiser.

Fortunately, there is a divine justice built into the world. We blame our parents for everything bad that happens to us in childhood, and then we become parents ourselves, on a mission to ensure that our kids never experience the same thing. And we’re so focused on our own pressure points that we miss a couple dozen others, thus ensuring that our children, in turn, will blame us and vow that their kids will never…

Well, you get the idea.

Doesn’t that just make you all warm and fuzzy on Mother’s Day afternoon? ;)

Happy Mothers Day to my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law’s mother-in-law, and my friends. It’s time we all admit what a rock-star-worthy thing we’re doing here.

What “me” time after the kids go to bed looks like on a stormy night…

Sunday Snippets

It’s been far too long since I joined you all. It’s just been one of those, er, calendar years. But anyway, here I am, ready to join back up for Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival.

Question of the week: share a memory of your First Communion. Hoo-boy. I’m about to show my scars. And my self-centeredness. It has to do with my first communion dress, and I already talked about it here, in Take #3.

On to this week’s posts:

After a very heavy Lent, in which I spent my time reflecting on the Stations of the Cross, I’ve been really into kid posts lately. My two major posts recently were: Parenting In Fear and What Do They Hear?  But this week was mostly about Nicholas: Heartbreaker and Adventures in Tee Ball With Mr. Jabberbox. And Big Boys, Crazy Hair, & Sex Ed.

Happy Mothers Day! I may just post tomorrow instead of Monday…we’ll see.

Big Boys, crazy hair, and sex ed (a 7QT post)

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We had a friend over for dinner last weekend, and as we were asking her about her studies and her plans for the future, Alex sat across from her shaking his head. “This is why I don’t want to grow up,” he said. “There’s too much work.”

___2___

This reminds me of what I always say about my two younger boys. Nicholas is desperate to be a big boy. Michael thinks he IS one.

___3___

Michael’s been in speech therapy since the beginning of March, and I don’t know that I’ve talked about it much. We’ve taken the last two weeks off because his therapist was out of town, and Michael took so long to warm up to her–he’s been going through a raging case of secondary separation anxiety–that I didn’t want to set him back by having a sub. She says he works very hard, but it’s really difficult for him to make the various vowel sounds. He does have one very consistent word now–”Ma-ma!”–and a few inconsistent ones–baw (ball), tsoo (juice), meh (milk) and “wa-wa” (water). He also calls every color purple: “poh-poh.” He can point to the right ones, he just calls them all purple. And although he can’t talk, he makes an engine noise, something between “zoom” and “shooo” and “brrrrrr,” to illustrate all his various engine-powered toys.

___4___

See, this is why I don’t talk about Michael’s speech therapy. Because lists of words are BOR.ING.

So let’s try something different.

What in the world is THIS?

Oh, it’s just my 9-year-old’s head after he visited the hairspray booth at Julianna’s school festival.

Why yes, in fact his head does still look like he’s on the set of a bad horror flick every time he takes a shower. Thanks for asking.

___5___

We have a nest full of baby birds in the bathroom vent for the basement bathroom. They are really noisy. About every three minutes they send up a chorus of chattering that lasts ten seconds, and then stops again. All I can think is that every time something moves outside their vent, they think it’s Mama Bird bringing them juicy worms or whatever they eat. Man, and I thought my bunch never shut up.

___6___

Yesterday Michael decided he needed a snack an hour before dinner. He got in the refrigerator, perused the offerings, and brought me….wait for it…

A chocolate syrup bottle and a caramel syrup bottle.

___7___

One of the unanticipated benefits of teaching natural family planning classes in our home is the way the information permeates the kids’ environment. I did a series of interviews a couple of years ago with families who were second-generation NFP users. I wanted to know what made the message “take.” I asked them how they went about The Talk, and do you know what they said? “We never did The Talk. It was just in the air.”

The more I think about it the more convinced I am of the wisdom of this. The Talk is a big, threatening thing, and it compartmentalizes a topic that should not be compartmentalized. If we are going to live our lives through the lens of our sexuality, then we can’t treat it like it’s a one-and-done lesson. It has to be part of everything we do.

I spy NFP charts on the TV screen on a Sunday afternoon…

Clearly we’re on that path. Crossing my fingers that it works as well for us as it did for the people I interviewed.

Fastest-written 7 quick takes ever! Go me!

Adventures In Tee Ball With Mr. Jabberbox

Things Nicholas said and asked in the twenty-minute drive from Daddy’s office, where we dropped off his siblings, to the baseball field:

Why is campus so small?

What do you mean, we’re at the edge of campus?

Where’s Daddy’s building?

This is the way to my school!

How do they make glass?

How do they make dirt?

Oooh yay, Lucky’s! (Lucky’s is a grocery store.)

How do they make apples?

Look, they’re building two houses!

Why did that woman honk at you?

(With occasional breaking into the Imperial March, when he runs out of other things to say.)

Things I heard in the half-hour wait at the ballfield for his game to start:

Why did you park there?

I think that is my coach.

I think that is my coach.

I think that is my coach.

Do you know how many kids my coach brings? ONE. Can you imagine that?

Did you know there are no girls on my team?

I think that is my coach.

Is that boy on my team?

Are we having juice?

I think that is my coach.

Do we have sunscreen?

Look at all those dandelions. They have a lot of dandelions. You hate dandelions.

Hey, I think I heard my coach.

I think that’s my coach, because he’s on a motorcycle.

Things heard on the ballfield, as the coaches tried to direct this crowd of five-year-olds:

Right field is over there!

You missed home plate, buddy.

Things observed during a peewee tee ball game:

Nicholas’ first swing at the ball perched on the tee was nothing but air and a bat going fwing-fwing-fwing toward the dugout. Of the ten kids on his team, he’s the only one who “got” that you’re supposed to drop the bat after you hit (one of them hit the ball and just stood there watching it arc across the field), but ahem, he’s missing a few other key pieces.

On the bench in the dugout, Nicholas and his teammates were wrestling, stealing each other’s hats, giggling, tickling–all horseplay, all the time. Once again I had to smile and shake my head at the difference between Nicholas and his older brother. Alex always sat with studious decorum in the dugout. Nicholas: cutup central.

It’s hard to imagine that within this bunch of kids spinning in circles, rolling in the grass, and chasing the ball in circles resides the future star players of our local high school teams.

Things I heard on the way home, before Nicholas’ eyes glazed over and he almost fell asleep:

Why do they call kids “child”?

I wonder how the kids are doing. (Meaning his siblings, at home with Daddy.)

Heartbreaker

On a beautiful Sunday evening, the whole neighborhood goes outside, something deep in our hearts feeling a need to connect with creation in some small way, even if it only means spraying the neighbor’s car with a hose. As soon as dinner–also eaten outside, on the deck–is finished, Nicholas shouts, “Can I go play with G?”

When we finish washing dishes, the rest of us go outside. Our neighbor smiles and chuckle as she watches Nicholas. “Your kids are going to be such heartbreakers,” she says. “The other day he came over and knocked on the door wearing his suit. I said, ‘Wow, look at you! Don’t you look good!’ And he said, ‘Yup. I just came from church. Perhaps I should wear my vest.’”

Yes, you read that correctly. He puffed out his chest and said Perhaps I should wear my vest.

All I can think is Christian’s reaction when he saw this picture:

Age 2

“We’re gonna have trouble with this one,” he said.

Your Weekly Dose of Kid Moments

1. Julianna funny A: Julianna’s been cracking me up lately. She’s missing a lot of cognitive understanding but the nuances of drama she has down cold. She’ll put the back of her hand to her forehead and tell me in a thread of a voice one step removed from the grave, “Mommy–I-hef –fehvoh.” (Fever.)

I’m going to print this picture and have her write a letter to Julie Andrews.

2. Julianna funny B: She had pinkeye Easter weekend, and I had to sit on her to get the eyedrops in her eye. So the last few days, what does she do? She comes up to me and says, in a slightly less pathetic voice than the above, “Mommy, I–hef–peck-eye. I need–eye-dops.” “What?” I say. “You are being goofy! You don’t even like eyedrops!” (Or cold medicine, for that matter. Although if you could take it in a spoon like Mary Poppins, she’d consider herself in Heaven.)

Trying to get her to adjust from trike to bike. She can do it, but she’s really intimidated by the height.

3. Julianna funny C: Pretty much every day she comes to us with her head bowed and her eyes covered, whimpering as if the world is ending. We used to get all concerned to find out why she was upset. Now we sigh tolerantly and say, “Yes, Julianna, what’s the matter?” Weeping–crocodile-tear-weeping: “I need give Tinkoh Bell hug!”

4. Nicholas drew this picture of Noah’s ark for me: Note the shark in the water, the ark hovercraft, the lightning bolt, and Noah hanging off the stern. At least I think it’s the stern. Not entirely clear. Still, this makes me happy, because until quite recently he was a scribbler. It’s good to see him progressing to deliberate, meaningful representations of the world. Even if they are a bit, y’know. Sci-fi.

5. Alex lately has adopted a car game made up by one of his classmates. It’s called SWAT. Or something. I’m not sure, exactly. They pretend to shoot SWAT vans. And what is a SWAT van, you ask? Well, you know, I’d kind of like to know that myself. I thought it meant any van with no windows in the back, i.e. delivery vans. But he seems to cast his net a bit wider than that. “Suspected SWAT area!” he’ll say to his carpool buddy. I smile, but it does make me quite happy to see them paying attention to what’s going on outside the vehicle. He’s been wanting entertainment, i.e. iPad or book, any time he gets in the car, so having him interact with what’s outside the car is a good thing.

6. I wrote a post about fear and parenting this week that has generated a good amount of discussion, if you’re interested.

7. Today marks the end of a crazy writing week–three deadlines, two of them involving multiple parts. I’ve barely slept this week. I promised that starting tonight I’d take this weekend off and not even think about writing for a couple of days. I’m already tempted to backslide on that, but I know I need the mental, emotional, and physical (i.e. sleep) rest. I’ve been making do with 5-6 1/2 hours of sleep this week instead of my usual 6 1/2 to 7. I’m at the point where if I sleep 8 I drag all day without energy. Who would have thought I’d adjust so thoroughly to insufficient sleep? Have a great weekend!