Last week I was a mother of two for thirty-six hours, and all I can say is, it was so easy. Unbelievably easy. For the first time I questioned our choice to clump so many children so close together. I began to doubt myself, to wonder if the desire for more children contains a fair dollop of self-righteous ego. Would I be a better parent, more patient, if I had only two?

I cling to the objective truth I discerned in days when I was sleeping more: that the short-term chaos reaps benefits I would regret missing out on later; that twenty years from now, I’ll never say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that;” no, in fact, I’ll be profoundly grateful for the richness of my life, and glad I looked long-term instead of being overwhelmed by the size of the task.

Even now, objectively speaking, I am grateful. Each of my has their own unique beauty, qualities the world can’t do without that offset the moments when they drive me crazy. But it is a humbling realization, knowing that I can never do for and with each of my children everything I would like.

While I was nursing yesterday I read the new issue of Liguorian cover to cover. William Rabior shared that the word “noise” comes from the Latin word “nausea.” Yes! I thought. The chatter of constant stimulation overstimulates more than my baby; it overwhelms me, too. My nerves coil tight; nervous energy zings from point to point inside my brain until I’m incapable of living in the moment, but spend my days bouncing from one obligation to the next, planning, always planning how to squeeze more, more, more into every day.

Michelle Francl-Donnay’s take on an examination of conscience brought me face to face with all this, and tied it all together. I don’t know that my life really looks all that different from many of yours. I may have more visible irons in the fire, but many of you work full time and come home to squeeze in a few precious hours with your family; many of you struggle to keep the house clean and get all the kids to their various appointments, just like I do.

Since we bought our new camera, I’m loving the ability to capture a sliver of the moments I’ve seen with my eyes, moments like I’m sharing today. But when I go back to look through them, I realize I’m living my life only half paying attention. And when I see these pictures, I realize how much I want to remember these moments. How much I want to experience them fully, with every sense, not just enough to be able to blog them, but to capture the feel of them in my skin, the taste of them on my tongue and the imperceptible smells in my nostrils. I don’t want to half-live.

When my little ones crawl up on my lap by twos, I want to revel in it, not feel worn out and put-upon  by overstimulation. I don’t want to be constantly saying, “Later, later,” because I just have to get this savory, half-gourmet meal cooked. I want to be present in my children’s lives–and perhaps even more important, fully present in mine.

I don’t know what the answer is yet, only that I’m hearing a call that tells me to stop considering myself indispensible, and my time more valuable  than my presence to those I love. To stop worshiping at the altar of productivity, and save more of my emotional energy for the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood.

It’s time to learn to live in the moment.

photo by Martin LaBar (on hiatus), via Flickr

Today, I am thankful for sleeping till 7:15, and being awakened by the slanting rays of sunlight instead of a baby’s cries or an obnoxious alarm clock.

I am thankful for a husband who knew he could offer me a welcome rest by taking two kids with him when he went to visit family. And who took the child I most needed a break from–the one who does not know how to shut off his voice box unless he’s asleep, and sometimes not even then.

I am thankful for sleeping in the middle of the bed, and children who were in bed by 8p.m., giving me some much-needed down time.

I am thankful for sleeping with the windows open.

I am thankful for two days in which I actually was able to concentrate on my novel–for the first time in months, feeling that I actually accomplished something on it, because of the quiet around the house.

But I am thankful, too, for a much-needed reminder that the child who is hardest for me to deal with right now is probably the one who needs me most .

And I am thankful that the quiet, the bed to myself, the sleeping late, was only for this one night. I am thankful that by dinnertime, we’ll have all the chaos back. It’s not the chaos I miss–I could do without that forever–but the love it represents. Because the truth is that, just as motherhood is a variegated flower containing both light and dark, so is family. You can’t have one without the other.

And that insight is perhaps the most important “gratitude” of all.

*

I am at war with dandelions.

Dandelions (mlecz) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know, go ahead and laugh. Project your shaken heads over the e-waves, passing me subliminal messages about futility. I know it’s futile. At noon, I pick off every yellow head within a three-house radius of my yard, and by nine the next morning, each plant has sprouted three more. I clear the neighborhood at three and by seven, yellow spots are popping up all over the grass again.My theory is exhaustion of resources, till the weed & feed arrives on the premises—at a bare minimum, no white fluffy seed heads multiplying the madness by exponents. But never have I seen such a determined plant. As I chase my kids up and down the sidewalk, the wreckage of my battle confronts me on every side: shriveled, dried-up buds and flowerets littering the concrete while right beside them, bright, perky baby florets smile up at me. And I think, if I had half the stamina and perseverance of these nasty little weeds, what couldn’t I accomplish?

And in some ways, I empathize with the poor unwanted dandelions. The remains of my assault on the mighty curtain wall around the literary world lie banished to a folder in my email account. Shriveled little florets that read “Thank you for considering us for your submission. Unfortunately…” The first I handled with a philosophical shrug; at the appearance of the second, I went all Don Music and shrieked, “I’ll never get it! Never!”

Unfortunately, this bad habit does not limit itself to the submission of music and novels. Nope, I’m pretty much like that in everything I do. If I can’t figure out how to fix something in the first five minutes, I call for backup. That goes for computers, broken objects, and any toy that needs assembly. Not to mention exercise. And spiritual pursuits. Like finding mental quiet when kids are around. There’s got to be a way to do it, but I’ve never figured it out—mostly because at the first hurdle, I give up.

I need to learn a lesson from the dandelions. A lesson in determination and stamina. Because I’m well aware that the dandelions are going to outlast me. After all, they have nothing else to do, and everything to lose.

]]> http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/03/27/the-determination-of-dandelions-2/feed/ 4 ckbasi Dandelions (mlecz) http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/02/14/massaging-the-fine-line/ http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/02/14/massaging-the-fine-line/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:06:24 +0000 Kathleen http://kathleenbasi.com/?p=8839 ]]> I feel bad. All personal writing is cyclical: it reflects the overall temperature of your life. There are good days, there are bad days, but a bad day amid a string of good ones projects a different feel than a good day amid a string of difficult ones.

Life with a newborn is indeed life with a tyrant–a sweet and cuddly tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless, with whims and no schedule, virtually no predictability and thus, no way to do anything but react. And it is this that makes the six month mark such a relief. For some reason, the six month mark is when everyone hits their stride again–or, in Baby’s case, for the first time. During those first six months, there are lots of lovey moments, lots of joy and laughs and moments of amazement–but none of that changes the fact that those first six months are freaking hard, no matter how many times you do it.

We’re not quite halfway through those first six months. And I know that is the nature of my recent doldrums in attitude. I am trying to blog positively, or at least as positively as I can, but I also want to be real about things. The problem is, I can feel the drag from below in every post lately, until I feel like I’m massaging the fine line between being real and just plain old whining.

And although I know it will turn around in its own time, I hate the frustration and desperation I’ve been feeling lately. Because every time I post about unending sickness or lack of spirit-fill time, every time I feel the drag from below in my public reflections, I think of those who aren’t parents yet, who’ll get scared off parenthood by my posts. And I think of those whose hearts bleed with every complaint from those of us blessed with children–those who, like me not so long ago, long for the very chaos that’s kicking my butt.

Today being Valentine’s Day, I think I should at least acknowledge that the reason I do all this self-emptying is because I love them so much. I love Alex’s creativity and fierce love for his siblings, Julianna’s dusky giggle and ability to elevate the ordinary, Nicholas’s impossible cuteness and the way Michael looks at me like he can’t get enough. I love the fact that even though yesterday’s snow day was a really rough, unproductive and sedentary day, it began with all four of them snuggled in bed with me (“mommy, I want to nuggle,” Nicholas said), and it ended with sledding in the dark. And I know that someday it’s those things I will remember, not the difficult. It doesn’t make the current difficult any less so, but it helps keep things in perspective.

Julianna, age 5

 Michael, 10 weeks

Alex, 6 3/4

Nicholas, 2 11/12 and obsessed with his birthday cake already

*

Shared at “Just Write”

Then I came up with one. And another. And another. And the more I thought, the more I realized I do have them, they’re just more practical in nature, and less easily summed up in a pithy title. But they’re all aimed toward one ultimate goal: independence. I guess I’d have to call myself a middle of the road kind of free range parent.

I think I will probably address some of these in individual posts, so today I’m just going to share what I came up with. And then…then, I’d like to know what your philosophies are.

• Telling kids no.
• Letting them fight their own battles and ask their own questions.
• Being willing to admit I’m wrong.
• Moderation: in food, in toys, in TV, and related to that…
• Giving the gift of family instead of Stuff.
• Loving touch.
• Tolerance: Not stopping them from doing things that aren’t wrong, even when it’s annoying.
• Allowing them to suffer. (I have a lot to say on that subject, so as horrible as it sounds, bear with me. I’m not talking about making them suffer, just allowing it when it happens.)

What all these have in common is this: letting go. As parents, we are often urged  not to “rush” children to grow up. But at the same time, we feel anxious if we don’t have our kids in one sport every season, music lessons and speaking three languages. Most of my music students have more than one extracurricular activity every day. If that’s not pushing kids to carry an adult’s load, I don’t know what is. And I think we feel that instinctively, which is why we end up doing things for them that they should be doing for themselves–to try to offset it. And that’s how we get helicopter parenting.

I want to be the anti-helicopter parent…but still nurture and love them. My goal is for my children to leave–even Julianna, my little girl with the magic chromosome–to fly the nest, to leave me free to do all the things I’ve put off in the service of my children–but to love them so thoroughly and completely that they’re happy to return.

Most days, I think I fall far short. But every once in a while, when I’m loving them so hard my body almost can’t stand the force of it–every once in a while, I’m sure I’ll succeed.

Image via Wikipedia

When sick moves in, you don’t always know it’s happened at first. It’s just a cold, right? Okay, a long and extended cold, a toddler who needs a “tih-oo” every five minutes, but no big deal. An infant who has to have his nose suctioned periodically for a week, then two, then three.

When sick moves in, you load up the kids and go to the doctor on a Thursday to make sure the baby really is just getting virus after virus, and it’s not something that needs treatment…and then, that night, the toddler spends the entire night wailing and screaming, until your nerves are raw and you wonder what you were thinking by having children in the first place, and in the morning there’s crustiness outside his ear and you feel horrible for not recognizing that your child has an ear infection, the first ever in six years of parenthood. And then you think how lucky you are to have avoided it so long, and berate yourself for your shot nerves and hair-trigger temper. And you load up the kids and go to the doctor again…at nap time…with kids and a mommy who haven’t slept well. Nearly hysterical, you call your husband and tell him to COME HOME FROM WORK RIGHT NOW. Which he doesn’t, of course, and by the time he does–early, just not as early as you wanted–everyone’s calmed down and you feel like a total loser for calling at all.

When sick moves in, it’s the cruelest kind of face slap: just as you think you’re finally going to get a good night’s sleep, the toddler’s roommate comes down with a cough bad enough to make you waffle about sending him to school. But he wants to go, you want him to go, and he’s borderline, so you send him. Half an hour after you put the kids down for nap, the school calls and says, “Sorry, come get your kid.” So you lose yet another day’s nap for the sick children, and top it off with two days with four kids in the house and nowhere to go.

When sick moves in, you come face to face with the reality that it’s not the big stuff that gets you, but the minor ones. You tell yourself that this too shall pass, that kids need to get sick, that this will make them healthier when they get older. But the truth is, you want to murder everyone, or at least exile them, or at least find a really deep hole to dive headfirst into. Preferably one where it’s quiet and will allow you to sleep uninterrupted by coughs, screams, and wails, not to mention that cute baby you have to nurse twice a night. And you berate yourself for your poor attitude, because you know other people who really have it bad, and others still who would give up several years of their life to have medical problems so trivial as viruses to deal with, instead of the ones they’ve been given. You snip at your spouse, burn with resentment because s/he sleeps through it/doesn’t do enough/isn’t being sensitive.

And then child number two hops a plane to Ear Infection Hell. Another sleepless night, and the spouse snips at you because he didn’t sleep, and you want to scream, “THIS IS MY LIFE ALL THE TIME, AND YOU’RE ACTING THIS WAY BECAUSE OF ONE NIGHT???” A date night canceled. Doctor visit #3. (Thankfully, Daddy handles that one.) Another round of amoxicillin, and you breathe a deep sigh of relief…until Daddy starts hacking, adding yet another layer to the Reasons Why You Will Never Get A Full Night’s Sleep Again, and you feel guilty and selfish for thinking about that when those you love are suffering.

When sick moves in, the sickos breathe all over the healthy ones: the immuno-compromised child, the newborn, and the caretaker of the whole household. And you start thinking, Oh, no, when is it my turn? So you spend Saturday morning running around with a spray bottle full of vinegar and a rag, wiping down every surface you can think of that might be harboring microorganisms. You develop the worst plugged milk duct you’ve had yet this time around, and all tricks are powerless against it when you have a baby who doesn’t appear sick, but just wants to sleep and nurse back to sleep without really eating.

And then Toddler starts coughing. And wakes up the next morning with a high fever and spots all over his body. And now you know which child it was that had a sensitivity to penicillin. Only it’s Sunday, and your only medical option is a trip to the ER, which seems an overreaction considering how long it took to show up. And Baby decides he doesn’t want to nurse.

When sick moves in, you start perusing the mental calendar and realize  it’s only January. We have two full months of sick season left, and we’ve already been sick for six weeks straight.

Entering week seven, and hoping that I’m telling the end of the story. This has been a very self-indulgent run, so if you’ve made it this far, you should also know that although I’m incredibly sleepy this morning, I’m in a better emotional place simply for having vented it all out. Sometimes that’s what you need most.

Image via Wikipedia

We were gone all day yesterday, and pretty much all day Saturday. And all day Thursday. And last night, Michael developed a stubborn stuffed up nose that meant I went to bed at 11, got up at 12:20, 2:15, 4:20, 5:35, 6:20 and 7:30.

My gift to myself today is scrapbooking, and a repost on attitude. Which is something I need to be thinking about today.

***

Working drive-thru is not a particularly fulfilling experience. In college, “Beavis & Butthead” was all the rage. In my limited and accidental exposure to their crassness, the only thing that I ever thought was funny was their skit about working drive thru, which had me ROTFLMAO, frankly, because they nailed it. When you work drive, you wear an uncomfortable earphone in one ear whose ding literally rattles your eardrum. People pay no attention whatsoever to what you say, and most engines make so much racket that it amounts to an assault on your ear. At least, that was my experience at Taco Bell in the early ’90s.

I couldn’t stand people who mumbled as if they were discussing amongst themselves and then got snippy because I didn’t acknowledge them. I couldn’t stand people who shouted as if I was half a mile away instead of at the other end of a highly sensitive wireless mic. I hated the car noise. I hated opening the window in the cold, and how numb my fingers got. I hated pretty much everything about it. In other words, I had a very bad attitude about Drive.

One day when I was in for the long haul—5-close—I spent the first quarter of an hour clenching my teeth as I rattled off my “Hi-welcome-to-Taco-Bell-may-I-take-your-order” in a sour monotone. And then, a gentle Spirit whispered in my brain, telling me something had to change…and since the customers weren’t going to change, it was up to me. Find one thing to compliment in every person who comes by, it seemed to say. And make it specific, and sincere!

I took a deep breath and opened the window to find…a woman blowing copious amounts of cigarette smoke in my face. God, I said to myself, you have GOT to be kidding. I cast my eyes around and said, “Your hair looks nice.”

The woman’s eyes widened a bit. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

It felt ridiculously contrived for a few minutes, until something hot and hard inside my chest began to loosen, like a muscle being massaged. But a couple of hours later, when the supper-hour crush suddenly eased off, and I had a moment for self-analysis, I discovered that I felt buoyant, bubbly—charitable, even. I found that there was something I could sincerely compliment about every customer. And I found myself enjoying work for the first time in weeks.

What I learned that night was that attitude and mood are choices. It’s easier to pin the blame for my lousy outlook on someone else. But the responsibility for making each day a good one is mine and mine alone. Like all the most important lessons in life, this one has to be learned over and over. The details that I choose to focus on or ignore are the ones that determine my mindset.

A lesson to keep in mind this morning.

Image via Wikipedia

There are certain times of the year when the whole blogsophere latches on to the same subject. Every September there’s a rash of sentiment about kids growing up and the back-to-school transition. Every November 1st, we’re treated to photos of Halloween costumes. And for a week in January, the topic is New Year’s resolutions.

New Year’s resolutions get a really bad rap sometimes. A surprising number of bloggers this year are talking about how bad they are. Some refuse to set goals because they’re going fail, and they think it’s pointless. One person even suggested that resolutions are a bad idea because they place our focus on our weaknesses instead of our strengths.

But I think we as a culture look at a new year’s resolution in the wrong way. Sometimes they’re not made to be fulfilled. Some goals will never, ever be fully attained…but if you refuse to aspire, you’ll stagnate instead.

I’ve made resolutions for a couple of decades, and generally I’ve kept them…but not always. Sometimes I go into it knowing I won’t live up to them.

The first goal I set, knowing it was unreachable, was this: If I’m going to bother getting my flute out of the case on any given day, I’m going to practice a full four hours. “That one’s made to be broken,” I wrote, “but the pursuit of it will make me a better musician.”

Actually, I didn’t do half bad on that goal–I hit 4 hours of practicing 80-85% of the time that year. (Before you get stuck on that number, bear in mind I was a flute performance major preparing for grad school auditions. For a music major, practice = study.)

The thing is, self-improvement is a process, not an end point. You can lose the weight, after all, but you still have to maintain it. It’s not like you can check it off the list and go back to the way you did things before.

And that’s also why I disagree with the blogger who thinks we shouldn’t focus on or weaknesses. It’s a laudable thing to try to make oneself a better person, even if we stumble and fall along the way. Something resolved left unresolved, after all, still makes me a better person.

**

I need to apologize to the Write On Edge people…when I set out to write the prompt today, it went a different direction than the prompt was meant to…I debated whether I had any business linking up at all. Hope you’ll excuse me. Usually I try to be very careful to follow exactly.

Christian & the kids were at a concert on Saturday night when I walked into my kitchen and stopped dead, staring at the piles of papers waiting to be filed, gifts and school projects no one had had time to sort and put away, and toys—the toys that are supposed to stay in the basement—on every level of the house.
“Oh…my…gosh,” I said.

My mother went upstairs to start folding more laundry. My dad pulled Michael out of his car seat and started goo-goo-eyeing him. I hung up my coat and tore into the mess. It didn’t really look any better when I had to cease and desist for the night, in part because of the extra clutter my homecoming had brought into the house, but I did as much as I could.

What a difference six days can make. Every previous baby homecoming has involved a two-hour drive on a very sore abdomen, every bump causing me to wince and hold my incision. It’s involved the panicky not-feeling-good of engorgement. This time? This time I lit into the household tasks with an energy that amazed even me. All I could think was I had to do as much as I could before the kids came home and I needed to minister to the people in my household instead of the household itself.

I am way more interested in nesting now than I was in the last two weeks of my pregnancy.

Transition is tough every time. Thirty-six hours in, I’m already almost wild; Nicholas looks hurt when I shush him—because he never, ever, EVER shuts up. He just keeps repeating the same things over and over, right in my face while I’m trying to concentrate on making sure Michael is actually nursing and not simply tearing my breasts to shreds without getting anything out of them. Why is it that every baby is a stellar nurser in the hospital and then decides to be a fit-and-start-er upon arrival home? Julianna wants to breathe her runny nose and phlegmy cough on him, and everybody wants to hold him all the time. And ten days of hospital stress and nursing in a cramped corner beneath a vitals monitor that was beeping every minute and a half finally took their toll; I woke yesterday with the crick in my neck to end all cricks. Splitting headache, agonizing pain in my back.

Let’s just say it’s not conducive to house cleaning.

Transition, I whisper to myself. Just keep your cool. This, too, shall pass.

Besides, there’s this to counterbalance it. I just have to discipline my attitude.

I keep wrestling with why the whole “enjoy it” thing evokes such a strong reaction in me…strong enough to spark multiple blog posts!—and it seems every time I puzzle over it, I come back to my mother.

Throughout my childhood, my mother showed an astonishing capacity for letting her children be independent. We lived in the country, ¼ mile from a family of boys close to our age, who had go-cart trails intersecting three wooded properties. We’d play for hours in the woods, swinging on vines across waterfalls, building and climbing treehouses that met no kind of building code—even climbing nails to somebody’s deer hunting stand, which was nothing but a convenient perch in an oak tree, sixty or seventy feet up. When Mom needed us home, she’d stand outside and cup her hands and shout toward the west woods, then the east, since she didn’t know for sure which way we’d gone.

We jumped off big round hay bales. Two was the norm, three terrifying but doable. Once, my feet slipped off the edge of the stack when it was rafter-tall in a barn that can house a combine with room to spare. I hung from the rafters, knowing I couldn’t get back, and the only option was letting go. Which I did.

All that by the age of ten.

As a preteen, I got my first job picking strawberries at the apple orchard. It was about three miles from our house, and my sister and I rode our bicycles there on gravel and county highways without shoulders. Once we had money to spend, we’d ride our bikes into town, making a big loop from Grandma’s house to the library and downtown shops, and then to Wal Mart. We’d be gone for hours.

And then, for some reason, I got scared of growing up. My parents had to plant a boot on my butt and kick me out of the house, because I was scared to leave home. My mother had to force me to learn to drive. She battled me through it because she needed me to drive my younger sisters to school. Then I didn’t want to work. After an outing with my friends, she greeted me with, “Did you have fun? That’s nice. You’re not doing it again until you get a job.”

I need to be clear: this was not a neglectful home. Every night we ate dinner as a family. My parents kept contact with what we were doing and who our friends were, all our interests. One night when a close shift at Taco Bell ran late due to multiple buses and the resulting mess, a fellow worker and I de-stressed in the parking lot by turning our car radios up and dancing the electric slide before coming home. When I drove in the driveway an hour and a half later than usual, the house was ablaze with light, my dad headed out the door to look for me, my mother standing at the top of the stairs in tears. It hadn’t occurred to me that they’d even know what time I got home, because they were always in bed.

But we were expected to do our own homework, without supervision—though we could ask questions if we needed to. We were expected to practice our music without being babysat through it. For several years, I was paid to make dinner for the whole family so Mom could go help Dad in the field.

I know the argument against everything I’m holding up as an ideal: it’s a different time now, and country living is less frightening than city. But I don’t buy it. Wide open spaces with no people around to witness if something happens? The jagged edges of two generations’ junk hiding in tall grasses? Bluffs to fall off, into jagged rocks?

The world wasn’t any less terrifying for my parents. They just handled it differently. They were always there when I needed them—when I got food poisoning, when I had to go to court for causing a car accident—but they were the anti-helicopter parent. They have approached every new stage of their life with incredible grace: adolescent children, empty nest, grandkids, caring for parents. They aren’t afraid to age. And I think this is because they have chosen to embrace letting go.

This is what I aspire to as a parent. It’s about balance, about enjoying the good parts without glossing over the bad, without over-sentimentalizing any stage. It is possible to enjoy the present without regretting when it’s time to move on. My parents have proven it. I pray every day that I achieve what they have.