Better Make It A Double

temperament

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the personality traits that my kids have. One very nice thing about having your kids get a little older is that you can start to more clearly see the difference between temperament and development. N, for instance, likes order and control. This has persisted beyond the fussy ones and the terrible twos – it’s just part of who he is. He has specific ideas about where things should go, what order they should be done in, and how long it should take. This can make transitions with a preschooler very difficult. When those traits are combined with the typical developmental needs of the age, such as craving independence and playing with power, it can be maddening to, for instance, get out the door on time and with everyone’s sanity intact. Even O gets impatient with N. Upon leaving somewhere, N will want the shoes in the entryway to be lined up just right, or his bunny to be tucked in just so, or want the blocks put away the “correct” basket. He has the negotiating skills of a pint-sized litigator, and sometimes we just have to pick him up and shut the door behind him in order to get anywhere. Easygoing he’s not, and never has been. Often, though, I find that if I’m just a bit more patient, and give him an extra minute or two to think things through on his own, he will cooperate willingly. It’s easy to mistake his need for order for defiance. Giving him lots of choices about things that don’t matter as much is a very helpful tool with N, as is giving him lots of warning that we’re leaving. As much as they drive me crazy sometimes now, I do think that some of these traits will serve him well in life. I think that N is extremely interested in how the world works, in how things are organized. He’s very imaginative, and dramatic, and he’s starting to tell us more and more complex stories. The ability to create a story and the desire to control one’s environment are probably part of the same thing – fiction could be seen as a form of complete control, after all. N has the capacity to get totally lost in an activity, lost in the world of learning, and imagination. He sings and rhymes all the time. I think it’s quite likely that he will also be an organized kid. He already likes his room neat, and often, after I’ve closed the door and tucked him in, he’ll get out of bed before naptime, clean up his room a bit more, and then go to sleep. So transitions are hard now – that’s just the price we pay for having such an intense, creative, persistent little thinker on our hands.

O similarly has traits that tax our patience now but might serve him well later in life. He is extremely persistent and stubborn, and has an unrelenting desire to take things apart and see how they work. This can be frustrating and even dangerous, and he’s gotten himself in some scary situations. Sometimes I feel like it’s all I can do to keep him safe, though this is slowly getting better. He knows some things are off limits and consistently leaves them alone. Still, I can’t leave him alone with anything new that’s electrical or with knobs, or he’ll attempt to take it apart to see how it works. His capacity for risk-taking in general scares me, as he climbs up walls and hangs off anything he can. (and actually, this is true for both boys). It’s as if the question in his brain is always some version of “I just want to see what happens when _____”. But, as he gets older, and develops a bit more impulse control and common sense, and is able to share more of what he’s thinking, I am gaining more respect for and shedding some of my annoyance with these tendencies.  He asks the most amazing questions: “Who made our house? What’s underneath our basement? Why do airplanes fly when their wings don’t flap? Where is the very top of the river?” He has an incredible memory, and so often shows evidence that he’s picked up information I had no idea he was paying attention to. He’s starting to be able to verbalize or research some of the questions he has without pulling everything apart. A few miles west of us, there’s a workshop for kids called Le*onardo’s Basement. You can register your child for a few sessions at a time based on age, and they can, with proper supervision, do everything from building electrical equipment, to dismantling machines, to welding. I can so see O being at home in such an environment –too bad they have to be at least 5 years old. O is extremely persistent when he’s trying to learn something, and isn’t easily discouraged. He is already learning that if he keeps trying, he’ll get it eventually. I remind myself continually that the desire to take everything apart will likely be followed by a desire to put things together. Only God knows what form that might take, but it could be interesting. Meanwhile, the best way to get through a rainy afternoon with O right now is to take of the back of the toilet tank and spend 30 solid minutes talking with him about how everything in there works. So I have to keep a careful eye on O, and spend a lot of time teaching him on what he can and can’t get himself into. It’s the price we pay for having such a curious, creative kid who stubbornly sticks to things until he figures them out.

Obviously, discipline is an important part of what we do with young children, but at the end of a tough day with them it is so easy for me to resent their inborn tendencies, tendencies that are part and parcel of the gifts God has given them, because those tendencies are inconvenient to deal with in young children who need so much attention. It’s probably much more helpful to try not to see these traits as the enemy, even when they test my patience. May God grant me the wisdom to take the long view, to trust that we can help guide them to use their gifts to the fullest capacity someday..

Ultimately, I think that the not knowing what shape that will take is one of the gifts of parenthood. That part isn’t up to us – we are only guides and teachers, doing the best we can, and letting go just a little continually, from the time the umbilical cord is cut to the time they leave the house a couple of decades later. We tell our boys that their job is to be safe, respectful, and kind. All the rules and limits we have for them basically stem from those three things, and I don’t think that basic idea will change as long as they live under our roof. I do suspect that N and O will be interesting, thoughtful, good people someday, and that they’ll be better off if we don’t try to make them into something they weren’t meant to be. I suspect that someday it will seem like that was a very small price to pay for the privilege of being part of it all.

velcro boys

N is still such an intense kid. When he’s feeling at home, he’s the kind of kid that fills up a room –full of funny faces, songs, climbing, dancing, and jumping. That’s not to say that he’s just bouncing around – he actually has quite a good attention span and can hold the thread of a game or narrative for long stretches. He’ll sit for a long time with a book. He’s just active, and animated, with a dimpled grin as wide as his face. Yet, despite his apparent social confidence when he’s with us, he still has a lot of trouble with separation, especially from me. When we were in Holland,J and I spent a day in  Amsterdam with my brother, leaving the boys with my parents. By all accounts the day went well for them, and N didn’t seem put out by it when we got back. In the past, he’s refused to look at me, sometimes staying mad for hours. But then, last night, I was rocking him, as we still do together most every evening after I put O to bed, and we were talking things over. We talked about the tears that morning when he went to the church nursery, and then, out of the blue, he said, “You left me in Holland with Omie for a long, long time.”  Oh, it broke my heart to hear that it was so hard for him, even with someone who he adores, that he remembers it and feels less than OK about it a week later, back at home. It’s almost as if the experience of my being gone isn’t so bad, but the idea of it worries him. The tears at church were hard to see too, as was the first day I went back to work after our trip, him looking me right in the eye with his giant dark-blue eyes and saying, with a note of true desperation, “Don’t go. Don’t go.”  The boy is such a fretter, such a thinker. When he’s at home with us, he actually likes a fair bit of alone time to putter around in his room. He’s so happy in there that I sometimes feel like I’m interrupting when I come in after his nap and he’s sitting up in bed “reading” a book to himself and singing. Usually, I tell him he can come out whenever he’s ready, and sometimes he doesn’t emerge for 20 minutes. Then when he comes out, he seizes the day like it’s his last, as long as one of the people who love him the very most is right there with him. Ultimately, I think he’s an introvert who gets his energy from being alone or with the people he’s most comfortable with. Lately, he’s been telling me at bedtime what kind of dreams he plans on having, and telling me what kind of dreams to have too, so we can see each other in them.

We seem to go in waves with this separation stuff, and right now is particularly intense. Actually, both boys are really clingy right now in their own ways, O more with the constant need for hugs and kisses, and even their games all seem to be about separation and togetherness. Compared to 6 months ago, the boys are kind of a mess. When did they get so big, so long and so lean? They’re super clumsy right now, full of scraped knees and bonked heads and running into each other and the furniture, and full of high drama over nothing. Their need for sympathetic attention is intense. Where did my confident “I wanna do it myself” 2-year-olds go?  I know all this stuff is pretty normal for the age, but wow. They are, on a positive note, playing more and more directly with the other kids we spend time with, and that is nice to see. Mostly, they are very sweet with other kids, though N is terrified of rough kids and bursts into the most mournful tears if another kid is unkind to him.

Preschool is only a couple of months away, and while I think O is a bit shy and might be a bit overwhelmed at first, ultimately I think he’ll love it. He loves new things, and loves the kinds of things they do at preschool. I’m a bit concerned about N, though, and part of me wonders if he’s quite ready.* I predict that it will be a rocky transition, even if it quickly gets better, and I’m trying to think through what J and I can do to help him with it. N has eventually transitioned to the church nursery, to having me right next door at our early childhood classes, to grandma and grandpa, aunts, and a babysitter or two. The babysitter thing has always been kind of tough for me – I have a hard time trusting that their needs will be met and that a teen sitter will be watchful enough to keep them safe. Maybe I should have pushed harder with this, but my gut always said that my need to go on a date or whatever isn’t worth the worry if family isn’t available, both for their safety and N’s distress about separating from us. We do have a good sitter now that both boys like, but since we’re trying to save some money, I’m looking at doing more swapping with people from church. At least that’s a stable group of adults that N sees every week, that the boys will hopefully grow up knowing. I ma encouraged by the close relationships I witness between the teens in church and the adults that have been a part of their upbringing.

Did your 3-year-old go through an especially clingy phase? How did the transition to daycare or preschool go for your (similar-aged) kids, and what did you do to help them? Am I worrying over nothing?

Right now the prospect of leaving them both at preschool leaves me with a giant lump in my throat.

*I am fully aware that many people have no choice in this matter much earlier in their children’s lives, and that most of those kids do just fine if they have good caregivers. All the same, we don’t have to send our kids to preschool; we are sending them entirely for their own presumed benefit, so it makes sense to ask the question.

 

in the backyard

It wasn't raining that day, but O was prepared anyway.

As you can see our back yard is still the source of lots of fun. Right now, the boys can pick peas, strawberries, lettuce and herbs back there, and they are eying the green raspberries, which look like they'll be plentiful this year after a good layer of chicken compost this spring.

Every year, we go to an awesome local nursery and buy a bag of a couple of thousand lady bugs. They are beneficial in that they eat aphids and some other bugs that would otherwise eat our vegetables since we don't spray. We let a few hundred out at a time for about a week, and keep them in the fridge in between releases. For the third year now, the boys have thoroughly enjoyed this ritual. I'm thinking that next year, I'll have to have the cousins over to see it too.

And it all washes off at the end of the day...

home

We’ve been back from the Netherlands for a few days now, and updating here has started to feel like bit of a daunting task. It was a complicated trip, emotionally speaking, and there are just way too many unformed threads floating around in my head to write coherently about, at least yet. There were wonderful times –seeing the boys connect with people and enjoy close to every waking minute of the trip immensely (and they were so good, overall, even on the plane), me catching up with cousins and old friends, an all-too-short family reunion on a gorgeous summer solstice evening. I feel compelled to add that I am aware how very lucky we were to be able to take such a trip.

But going back to one’s homeland, to a culture and landscape that is always a part of you but that, upon returning to, you cannot help but feel removed from, is overwhelming. When in the states, I almost always feel invisibly Dutch. I speak perfect Midwestern English, and other than my name, (which, incidentally, is not really Emmie, which is a nickname) no-one that doesn’t know me well ever suspects I wasn’t born here. But I was almost 7 when we moved; I could read, I can remember much of the several years before we left. Leaving was devastating, and the beginning of a lot of very isolated nuclear-family pain that reached its peak just before I left home at 17. Yet, when I go back home I feel ever American, like a bumbling foreigner who just happens to know the language. And what is that word, home, anyway? It has too many meanings to me to really mean anything at all anymore. In either direction across the ocean, I am supposedly going home. In either direction, I feel alienated from where I’ve come and where I’m going. Add to that many layers of complicated and often painful family history, differing interpretations of that history, and lots and lots of seeing people I see once every 5-10 years for all-too-short periods while chasing 2 active preschoolers through antiques-filled houses, and well, I’m shot. I am SO tired, and I don’t think it’s just the jetlag. I feel, well, almost kind of sedated, in a fog of unrealized emotion. I find myself weeping, in the shower, onto my pillow, but feeling close to nothing. I think I am perhaps the only ¼ of my nuclear family who can feel this numb without the benefit of large and consistent amounts of alcohol, a fact that hit me again and again, like a silent box to the ear, as last week I watched my brother knock back beer after beer after beer and grow only increasingly quiet. I confess that I truly didn’t want to know this fact that I can do nothing about. My little brother, the one who I left behind, the brilliant one, the artist, drinking himself into a still-respectable haze every night. We are so good at this, my family, no falling down drunks, we, no, just a whole lot of dollars spent on alcohol every week, shopping carts and recycling boxes overfilling with clinking bottles and rattling cans, a tendency to spend evenings sitting perfectly still and staring off into space while listening to music or watching television, maybe sometimes an unfortunately loose tongue or a hint of a liquor-fueled mean streak.

I, rarely drinking at all and religious to boot, am a foreigner within my own nuclear family. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe it ends here, in Minnea*polis, in our little house full of people who wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Maybe it will end with two little boys growing into men who want to feel the lives they are leading. It would kill me to entertain any other possibility.

This, my grandmother’s home, feels as much like home as any place ever has. It’s been almost completely unchanged for my 34 years, bantam chickens running around the grounds, dark antiques filling the interior, the same dishes, glasses, bedspreads, everything my WW2-occupation survivor grandmother set up right the first time, well worn, but of quality. The same scents of wood oil, cut grass, and roses, the same tiny cookies served in a tiny chipped bowl with strong tea, her same hearty laugh, looking past us, like a private joke was almost shared but then not. She’s lived there 50 years this month, and may not live there another. She’s 88, and our embrace by her kitchen door last weekend may well have been our last. I suspect that while the logistics of the next trip will be easier, the rest of it will be much harder. Not coming home to my grandmother, or even just not to her home, is impossible to imagine.

 

we're off

Well, we're off to the Netherlands after "one more sleep". Pray for us (or wish us luck, anyway).  We're taking the boys, but leaving the  ladies. By the time we get back, they should be able to stay in the run without being able to escape through the chain link like they did yesterday.

home

In a few days, our family is hopping the pond to the for a family reunion. I was born there – we moved to the U.S. in 1981, when I was seven. We’ll be gone for 9 days, staying in a cottage resort not far from my grandmother’s house, about 40 minutes outside of Amsterdam. I am already a bit emotional about this trip. It is a bit of a pilgrimage, as my grandmother is in her late 80’s, and has declared that she’s to spend the rest of her life on her side of the pond. It’s extremely expensive for us to go there, and I’m not at all sure I’ll ever see her again after this. We’ve been planning this trip since the boys were born.

On the night of the summer solstice, we’ll all be celebrating together in her house—all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and spouses. The boys and one cousin’s baby girl will represent the fourth generation. In the fall, my grandmother will probably move into a retirement home in town. She will undoubtedly mourn the loss more than I, having spent 50 years there, but I also cannot imagine not having that house and garden to come back to. With the exception of one family friend, it is the only home that’s been there my whole life. My earliest memories are of going carefully down the winding staircase, of feeding her hens, and of looking out the screen-less windows from the little upstairs room I often stayed in over the gravel drive. My grandmother’s house is a classic Dutch house, with timber framing, red and white checkerboard shutters, and a thatched roof. I can easily understand why my grandmother is so attached to it, with its friendly, open kitchen, large windows, and sprawling garden. She insisted on staying after my grandfather’s death in the mid-eighties, but no-one thought she’s still be there today.

Things are kept simpler there than they used to be, but once, there was a sprawling vegetable garden neatly encased in a rabbit-proof fence. There were egg-laying hens (her flock is now reduced to a few aging pet bantams that don’t lay anymore), elaborate gardens containing many hiding places, and in the small woods, even a little wooden playhouse. There is a pond that I skated on, with double-ridge skates, leaning on a child’s chair at age two. Every time I’ve been back as an adult, I realize how seeing a place again helps to preserve our early memories of it. I barely remember our other houses, but I have so many early memories of this one. I loved it then, and now I can see better how she did too. She doesn’t have a yard, she has grounds. My own gardens are tiny compared to hers, but somehow I spend my summer evening time very similarly to the way she always has. I make rounds around the house, examining all the beds, weeding a patch here and there, making mental notes, harvesting vegetables, checking on hens or calling them home to roost be scattering a bit of scratch. When I was little, I tagged along to those very activities whenever I visited my grandmother, which was often.

I know that my grandmother is burdened by her house now, that she doesn’t feel safe there anymore, rattling around all by herself. She had a fall recently, and she’s increasingly forgetful and confused about things like the day of the week. I am grateful that she’s leaving at her own initiation, and that we all have a chance to mark those 50 years with her, that even my boy will have a chance to run around under the trees and through all the little paths. I’m grateful that my decidedly non-religious family—my grandma and I being the sole exceptions —we seem to have found some way to ritualize this very rare reunion, as well as the passing of an era. My grandmother is the family matriarch, and I, her eldest grandchild, live furthest of away from her. Nonetheless, I feel that our connection is both timeless and eternal, beyond a place to come back to.

weather

The morning started with me leaning over the toilet, still in my nightgown, my arm reaching down into the bowl, up to my elbow in the thankfully clean toilet water. I was desperately trying to retrieve some fingernail clippers that had fallen in, trying to grab a tip of them before they slipped in further and forever clogged the plumbing. In desperation, I finally threaded an Ethernet cable down the toilet until the hooked tip caught the clippers and pulled them up. It was quite possible the weirdest on-the-fly solution I’ve come up with in a long while, but it worked.

Then, at our Early Childhood class, while the parents were in the other room, O earned himself a time-out from the teacher for being uncooperative – a bit of a trend he’s had with authority figures lately, always testing limits with a smile. Nice way to end the year. A good part of the parents’ conversation was all about new (and highly unlikely) ways we hadn’t thought our kids could die, which, sorry, but I find that unhelpful at best.

I got to work, covered the front desk for a bit so everyone else could eat lunch, and was treated to a distantly heard earful from three of my co-workers about those awful people who spend all that money on infertility treatments when there are starving children in the world. I learned a lot. Did you know:

• That it is so unnatural, and those kids can be really deformed and shit
• That there are waiting children just waiting to be dropped off at my home (and that they wouldn’t be starving if not for people like me)
• That the health care crisis is because of all those test-tube babies (and shit)
• That you need to accept your destiny, and that not everyone is meant to be parents
• That lots of the time you end up with septuplets (also and shit)

And somehow, I’m home now and sitting here perfectly OK with how my day went. Maybe it’s the fact that I did eventually get the damned fingernail clipper out of the toilet, and the relief was good for something. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s probably OK that O learns to cooperate from other people, because I don’t really want to do that alone. Maybe it’s the fact that the thought of me and my family being responsible for the health care crisis, coming from a bunch of smokers and/or morbidly obese women who obviously don’t know their ass from their elbow on this issue, is at least as funny as it is offensive.

I think, oddly, that it might be the weather that’s sparking a bit of extra resilience within me this week. We’ve had a lot of heavy wind, thunderstorms, and even some exciting hail and rainbows. This morning was that “cabin weather” I love so much – dark clouds with lots of blue sky between them, bright sun followed by dimming clouds, gusty wind high in the trees, raindrops through sunshine on only one side of the street. I cannot help but love this particular Minn*esota weather  even as I feel for those who were affected by the worst of it today. It feels exhilarating and freeing, making me feel alive deep in my bones. The boys seem to like the weather too, running around in their boots and singing “It’s raining, it’s pouring”, watching the lighting and counting for the thunder.

After the rain, I walk the garden, pick up small fallen branches, munch on parsley, see the growth that came from a deep drink of rain, and the dumb annoyances of the day roll off of me. I go back in and hug my kids, make dinner, get a shoulder rub from J, and can’t stop smiling, even on a day that starts out elbow deep in toilet water.

sheltering/letting go

My boys, at 3 years and 2 months, are on the very edge of having real playmates besides each other. They have great fun with their little buddy J, who they’ve known since they were babies, and it is so much fun to see them all shrieking and talking to each other about this and that imaginary plot. With most kids, they still hang back and play with each other or alone, but I can see that this is changing fast. They’ll start preschool in the fall, but I predict that even by the end of the summer, they’ll be in a whole new social universe.

 As fun as that is to watch, I confess to also being a tiny bit sad about it. Until now, the boys have been fairly sheltered. I don’t plan to shelter them from everything their whole childhood, but for ages zero-three, that has felt right to me. They haven’t had much (really any) media exposure, save for a bit of YouTube Sesame Street  when they've been sick. They don’t even know how to spar like pirates, or pretend to shoot a gun. They wouldn’t even recognize a gun.

So far, their little buddies are also pretty gentle little kids who aren’t yet caught up in aggressive TV characters and competition and violent play. But it will change, and I will need to be tolerant of their finding their places in a complicated, media-driven culture. More and more, I also feel that my role as a parent extends beyond my family into a covenant with other kids and their parents, even if those families act differently, play differently or have different rules and standards. Nurturing those connections, within preschools and classrooms, on the playground, and with neighbors, requires putting aside your own perfect ideals for what kids are exposed to. The reward is less alienation and more connection, mutual understanding, and a healthier community in general. These things are very important to me, but so far, nurturing those connections hasn’t had a cost because my kids are so young. That’s changing, though. It doesn’t take more than one kid to teach your own kids all about fighting, and winning, and scripted media worlds. It seems like all the moms of older kids I know are at least a little bothered by the subject of their kids’ play.

Really, part of what’s hard for me to let go of at the moment is simply the fact that I so very much enjoy the subjects of their current play. They pore over books about reptiles, and bugs, and every kind of transportation. They make cities out of blocks, catch and identify bugs under a magnifying glass, water the garden, pretend to be baby birds. They kiss their “babies” (mostly stuffed animals) and put them to bed. They turn a pair of mittens into a game about snowmen, a colander into a trip to the moon. They run back and forth in inscrutable games, dragging their toys behind them with strings begged off their daddy.

They do fight some, but their conflict centers on having two ideas about how the same game should go, or both wanting the same toy or object, not competition: not comparison or wanting to best each other. They become jealous of each other’s piece of my attention, but they don’t engage in one-upmanship to garner it. I know this will come, but we haven't seen it yet. It bothers me that so much of the 3-and-up media and even literature I see seems bent on promoting competition over cooperation. Some of the 3-and-up books we bring back from the library are all about one kind of race or competition. It’s like once they turn three, the jig is up-time for the “real world”. Won’t they figure all that out without our tutelage? Are any kids really in danger of not competing enough? Kids are certainly in danger of not learning how to resolve conflict. The whole world is suffering from our not knowing how to resolve conflict, share available resources, and show love for people we don’t know first-hand. Do the writers of that kind of book or movie think that’s all 3-and-up kids are interested in, because if so, I beg to differ.

Last night, after we met our church playgroup for a park outing, the boys and I stopped by the ball field, both boys sitting in our red side-by-side double stroller. They watched intently, asking questions, trying to figure out how the game is supposed to work. I tried to explain, that there are two teams, the object of the game, and so on. It was useless, because they don’t yet understand that for one team to win, the other must lose. They don’t know what winning and losing are.

I know that I can’t shelter them forever, and really, I don’t want to.  We don’t have a TV, and that will probably be an issue for them at some point, so we don’t plan to worry much about what they watch at friend’s houses as long as it’s age-appropriate. I believe that play is an important way of working through what kids are exposed to in their environment, so even “war play” probably won’t be censored in our house (though I don’t have to have it in my face either). There are probably some things I won’t shelter them from that a lot of parents would. We often go to the Wednesday peace vigils on the bridge here to protest the war, and I talk with them in frank terms about what all that means. We talk about how killing people is very sad, that it isn’t what God intends for his people to be doing, that we all have a purpose in life—we are all gifted with a way to contribute— and that someone who kills or is killed is not getting the chance to live out that purpose. We talk about how people sometimes have to use their loud voices to stick up for those whose voices have been made quiet. The boys take me literally, run up and down the bridge with their tiny hands stuck in a bona fide peace sign, screaming “Peace! No war!” at the top of their lungs, and I am kind of a mess when I see it, because they are sons, they are boys, and war is always a possibility for my children’s future. But so far, they are little peacemakers, good at conflict resolution, not yet caught up in a world of competition, materialism, and violence. So far, their games don’t make me cringe, their playmates are sweet and fun to have around, their orbit is still our little house and family. Forgive me for being utterly grateful for how long that’s lasted.

When we had their dedication in church, when they were almost four months, we promised to let them go where God calls them, to the ends of the earth if need be. That wasn’t an easy promise to make even then, and making it on that day was largely symbolic, an abstraction, almost like our pastor was sealing the deal before we read the contract that is raising children. It isn’t until they get a bit bigger that we can even begin to comprehend what that kind of promise means. It is a promise that I have to make in tiny ways every day, in more and more complicated ways. It is a promise that I really might have to keep someday in its entirety, as some of the parents in my church have recently, letting their teens do relief work in a Third World country for an entire summer, swallowing hard as they put them on the plane with their Ipods and giant duffel bags.  Risking life and limb for a greater good.  The ends of the earth.  

God help me to be self-less enough to let them do what they are called to do in the world, today and beyond, to look at parenting as an engagement with a community and not waste my energy on creating some sort of personal laboratory of ideal circumstances. God help me to remember that my children are citizens of the world, and trust enough to let them find our way in it, to be their base, and their foundation, but let them go, today just a little, someday, to the ends of whatever parts of the earth their gifts are most needed.

Last night, we had another milestone around here: I discovered that my boys are really ready to enjoy the Shel Silverstein books. There aren’t too many pictures, so it requires that they’re sophisticated enough to really listen to the words. Oh, how we laughed at Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, and Captain Hook, and the man who lost his head and thought it was a rock. I have many memories of reading these poems to my brother when he was just four and I was eight, not long after we moved to the United States.

New to a foreign country, he and I played all kinds of games alone together, many of them competitive and full of shoves and angry words, but we also played a game called “Hug-O-War”, where’d we hug and roll over each other until we both ran out of breath. It was rough, and physical, and probably loud – the kind of game that my mom probably told us to take somewhere else, saying, as she often did in her native Dutch, that “this will end in tears”. I don’t think it did end in tears often, though. What I remember anyway, is that the two of us clung and rolled down our grassy hill, chanting the poem as loud as we could, squeezing each other as hard as we could, feeling the sensation of being squeezed hard by gravity and arms, grass rolling right over our faces, laughing and holding on for dear life.

Hug O' War

by Shel Silverstein

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

spilled milk

J and I have been trying some different strategies to deal with the complete 0-50mph meltdowns we’re seeing a lot of lately with our three-year-olds. It is SO aggravating to deal with meltdown after meltdown over nothing. Often it seems like it’s just out of habit, because if we ask them to “try again”, to for instance, say, “Oops, my milk spilled! May I have a rag?” instead of screaming, “Waaaah!! My miiiiiilk!”, they often do it without a problem, changing their entire demeanors back to reasonable from seemingly inconsolable.

Whiny kids are a trigger for me – I’ve always hated whining. I even considered looking for a different job once because I hated being around a whiny co-worker that much. My kids’ whiny, drawn out tone when they request something makes me cringe every time I hear it. It feels like hearing nails on a chalkboard.

I wish I knew how to prevent this whiny stage with children, but with the possible exception of kids with an especially sunny and optimistic temperament, I’m no longer sure it’s entirely possible. We sure tried, though. They’re not exposed to whiny TV characters or whiny older siblings. We don’t respond to whiny requests or demands. We give them better words to help them try again to get what they want. They’re well-rested, and get plenty of positive attention. We catch them being good and highlight it when they are. Still, the meltdowns over nothing.  All the time. It’s just this age, isn’t it? Seriously, if you have kids the same age or older, I want to hear one of two things from you: “it’s the age”, or what to do differently.

I actually may have some answers for myself, though. This weekend, I kit upon something that was kind of interesting to me. I realized that my kids have no idea yet how to distinguish between something that’s a big deal and something that isn’t. They act much the same whether their milk spills or they’ve been painfully hurt because in the moment it happens, it all seems like the end of the world. It’s about resilience, or more specifically, self-talk. It’s about the ability to recognize and say to say to oneself, “This is not a very big deal, I can deal with this.” Or, if it is a big deal, it’s being able to say, “I can find the resources I need and have enough faith in myself and my people to handle this” (even if that means wailing in mama’s arms, which is perfectly legitimate sometimes).

And really, don’t we all struggle at least a little with this every day? I sure do. Watch me as  I do my nightly chores in a funk only because I’m grumpy at being out of chocolate, or harbor a grudge because J crabbed at me an hour before, or lament over the hour-and-a-half lost in a fruitless Tech Support maze. (I’m still not over that last one). My ability to get through the day effectively and happily don’t have as much to do with chocolate or crabby spouses, or aggravating details, or even identifying feelings as they do with my ability to put things into proper perspective and move on. It’s about resilience.

To that end, I’ve been thinking that what my boys might need to move past this stage is some coaching in how to put things into perspective. It’s rather tricky, because I’ve been quite on the side of “honoring kids’ feelings” up until now. I grew up with (and still deal with) my parents telling me to basically get over it when anything goes wrong, that my feelings didn’t matter and weren’t legitimate. I really, really didn’t want to do that to my kids, and have spent a lot of time and energy on learning strategies that are respectful of feelings and teach kids that ALL feelings but only some actions are OK. It sounds so good in principle, and my boys are indeed very good at labeling feelings by now (especially for boys). However, that strategy – saying, “I hear that you’re very upset”, may have some limitations I wasn’t aware of. I think I may have been unwittingly encouraging them to throw a whiny fit in order to get me to say that they’ve been heard, and to be too dependant upon me saying I hear and understand them in order to feel like I do. These days, they have a lovely habit of insisting upon being heard (and right away), and scream if I haven’t acknowledged whatever they just said. I always make them repeat it more politely, but I wonder if maybe I haven’t had a hand in creating this problem. I wonder also if it wouldn’t have been better not to essentially mirror their over-reactions in the service of honoring their feelings. This also applies to separating – I’ve never wanted to tell them how to feel about my leaving or them having to leave me, but I recently realized that sometimes they need me to model more confidence than they can muster, even if it feels awfully close to the “you’ll be just fine” I’ve tried so hard to avoid. Sigh. It’s so disheartening to realize that you’ve been overcompensating for your childhood. For you parents of babies – I know you’re exhausted, but do you have any idea how much simpler babies are than older kids?

I’m still not going to tell my kids to “suck it up and get over it” when they cry (though I’m perfectly willing to tell them to take it elsewhere if they throw a fit by whining or screaming), but my strategies are changing and evolving. I don’t spend as much time labeling feelings as I used to. I’m working harder to use optimistic language, to say “I have faith that you can handle that” or “I know you’ll find a great way to solve that problem” instead of “you seem very upset” a lot of the time. Sometimes I do both.

This weekend, we spent a lot of time talking about what is a “Big Deal” and what is a “Little Deal”. I tried to do it in a fun way, and not just when we’re in the middle of an issue. I know that it can feel like a Big Deal, ad that it’s not always for me to say what is and what isn’t, and we talked about that too. We talked about it more as kind of a game, a game that was very interesting to them. I’m also trying to be more conscious of what I model, to illuminate my own putting things into perspective and problem-solving.

There is one related area that I think we’ve really gotten it right so far. Since the boys have been really small, we’ve pointed out how their efforts in learning something new paid off until they succeeded. We say, “You kept trying, and you made it work!”, and this has turned into a bit of a mantra for our family. The boys even say it to us, themselves, and to each other. They try hard at new things, and are proud of themselves when they succeed. I’m trying to use our success in that area as a model for the kinds of interactions we have around whining and throwing fits. I need to use that same type of language when it comes to being other kinds of resilient, when it comes to dealing with powerful and overwhelming feelings. Identifying and respecting feelings matter, but so do resilience and the ability to put things in perspective.

 

phoning it in

OK - I know I've written about similar issues before, but in this interesting stage, where my boys scrutinize and comment on my every move, I cannot help but feel like my living room is a microcosm of our society. O asks if I’m going to the bathroom again, and then stands next to me wanting updates on my progress. N tells me to put on the other necklace, the pretty one. Some days, they have more of an opinion on how I dress and behave than on how they dress and behave. But my boys are three, and mostly adorable, and they are my own children.

Mothers’ choices are so often under a microscope outside of their living rooms, and she is quite rarely considered both smart and wise enough to make the right choices for her family without input or downright judgment from other people. For some reason I’ve encountered a lot of this lately. My MIL commenting yet again that she’s so glad none of her grandkids have had to use (shudder) daycare.  An article in a mainstream magazine describing today’s mothers as self-absorbed and narcissistic for daring to blog, write, and commiserate. Two sessions of an Early Childhood class that focused on “working and the family" where the otherwise very nice teacher seemed rather bent on encouraging us to focus on our families, as if the idea that our families need our time was not part of our decision making regarding whether to work. She passed out articles encouraging us to remember that “nobody ever died saying they wished they’d worked more”. Right, but some people might die wishing they’d held onto the house, been able to help their kids pay for college, or not having had to worry about money so much. Many women are happier, more patient mothers if they work at least part-time, and that didn’t come up either. The fact that women’s careers might have as much legitimate “value” in the world as men’s certainly didn’t come up. No, the myth of the sacrificial mother is alive and well.

Motherhood is capable of feeling exhilarating, utterly enjoyable, and full of wonder, and rewarding like nothing else known to you. It can also feel mind-numbingly boring, brutally relentless, and even terrifying. All in the same afternoon week .

The job description is miles long: who could you ever hire to fill the role of your average mother? You couldn’t. The hours would be too long, the details too many, the roles too varied. Cook, nanny, laundress, housekeeper, teacher, nurse, bookkeeper, grounds keeper, household manager, you get the picture. Then add chief worrier, philosopher, spiritual director, and giver of devoted, unconditional love. Could you even imagine the want ad? Or the salary? And then on top of all that, we’re supposed to play the saintly, beatific mama who clucks proudly at her brood and doesn’t complain, doesn’t need a break, and certainly doesn’t ever say, “To hell with this! I need to get the f&ck out of the house for while, by myself”.  But many of us do have those awful moments, even days and weeks, where nothing seems like it’s going right, where we’re agitated, overwhelmed, or sad – I know this from reading blogs, and memoirs, and from having real, honest conversations with other mothers that reveal that same desperation that I sometimes feel at having to fill an almost impossible role in the way that it can seem like I’m supposed to. And the pressures on today’s mothers are unbelievable –the economic pressures are far higher for our generation than they were for our parents’ generation, and we have a ton more pressure around the types of minute-to-minute interactions we have with our kids – but at least we’re a little more honest with each other some of the time. We have a lot more than Erma Bombeck (God bless her) going for us in that regard.

Still, mothers’ choices and the things they do with their children are often unjustly scrutinized, and far too often by each other.  I read a blog entry recently (by a mother) that mocked women who talk on their cell phones while pushing strollers or sitting at the playground. Quote: “Duh! You’re at the playground. With your kids.”  Then, interestingly, I heard a mom at the playground say almost the same thing to her friend, while they were both watching a mom on the other side of the playground having a chat on her phone. Um, if I’ve been caring for kids all morning, dealing with screaming and whining, wiping butts, counters and floors, putting together puzzles and fetching milk—no, not that cup! —and not having one damned moment to even sit down, God forbid I take my kids to a place where they’ll be perfectly happy without my constant direct intervention and call a friend for a few minutes. Or the bank, or the insurance lady, or whoever the hell else is on my mile-long to-do list. Where does this scrutiny, this monitoring, and this need to correct mothers, even fellow mothers, come from? I've heard the cell phone comment before over the years, this symbol of the zoned out, inattentive mom with no sense of priorities.

And while we're on the subject, what the hell is so wrong about blowing your kids off for a little while every now and then, anyway?  What is wrong protecting your own sanity a little bit, and teaching their kids that they’re not the only ones in the family? What is this insane pressure to “engage” with them All. Day. Long.? Perhaps it is a side-effect of the guilt and pressure already heaped upon us. IMO there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying “go play” to your kids every once in a while, and maybe a lot right. I’ve often thought that’s at least one thing the Erma Bombeck generation was a lot better at than this one is. Kids do need to learn to amuse themselves, even to be a little bored or frustrated sometimes in order to creatively figure out something to do. I'm not sure they are even particularly well served by our constant direct entertainment once they are past babyhood. Parents do often need a quiet moment, or just to be able to unload the dishwasher in peace for a few minutes. Granted, this is probably easier for me with twins than it is with moms that have one kid or one kid and a baby (though I’d be willing to bet your kids collaborate in performing less mischief too), but judging moms who do anything else at the playground but stare lovingly at their children or act as their besotted cheerleaders, waiting snack bags in hand? That seems crazy, and a little mean. We are, according to some lines of thinking, not capable of making good choices, managing our time, or prioritizing our kids well enough to know when it’s appropriate to make a damned phone call. Am I alone in finding that insulting?

I think that for whatever reason, people who are going through difficult times tend to choose either solidarity or alienation-and-judgment as coping mechanisms. We tend to either seek out support and band together to get through things or to find ways to say that everyone else is doing it wrong. We cling to the things we’ve learned (or think we’ve learned, till kid #2 comes along), and turn them into arrows borne of alienation because we don’t have enough support to see that those details don’t have to matter all that much, that if we just hang out and tolerate each other, we’ll probably feel less threatened and more supported by fellow moms. It’s hard sometimes, and I’ve gotten it wrong myself more than once. I've also completely misjudged who I might have something in common with (or whose company I might just really enjoy) based on first impressions. This isn't high school, but it  is a chance  not to recreate it.

I do love being a mother, thankfully much more than I hate it most days. But I love it a lot more for the frank kvetching I can do with a good friend every now and then, for the support and excellent co-parenting skills of my spouse (you’re absolutely right about your conclusions there, Lisa), for the occasional retreat, for rewarding work, for outlets like writing and blogging and gardening, and for a supportive and engaging faith community. I need every little bit of that scaffolding in order to stand upright and do this job right.  

Ultimately, when we get all judgy, give each other the once over, and come to rigid conclusions about the right way to do things, I think we’re asking the wrong questions, questions that obscure bigger, more valid and relevant issues.

We’re asking:

Should moms work, and how much?

Should moms stay at home, and for how long?

Are moms doing enough for their children?

Are moms making the correct choices as far as disciplining their children?

Can moms be trusted to pay enough attention to their children and keeping them safe?

Can she be trusted to do a good enough job?

 

We need to be asking:

 

Are moms too stressed? Why?

What kind of support do moms need in order to be patient and effective as parents?

How do we create a society that is richer in that type of support?

How could I help?

How could or do policies and programs help?

What makes for a healthy family, anyway?

What can we teach our children or expose them to that will help make the transition to parenthood easier for them than it was for us?

What’s a fair division of labor within families?

What do children actually need to thrive, and what is the community’s role in that?

Should parents and teachers be the only ones that take an interest in children’s lives?

 

restless

Goodness, N is trying my patience all of a sudden. Whiny, defiant, unreasonable and uncooperative, if not engaged in an all-out screaming fit. It had been a while since I’d seen this side of him, and now that he’s a little older and more sophisticated, it’s like living with Terrible Two Version 2.0 –louder, more persistent, and smarter than Version 1.0. Normal age-three stuff, I’m told, but man. How quickly we forget those patches of true difficulty with one developmental stage or another. I really struggled to be even civil with him at times this weekend, and didn’t always succeed. My own general mood made for some bad timing this weekend, though it had its high points. My endometriosis symptoms are thankfully quite minor compared to my pre-pregnancy days, but every now and then, like this month, my period refuses to come on time. The cramps, lower backache and crabby depression come right on time, though, and it can drag on for days. Other months, my first sign of a period is in the bathroom, which, after a decade and a half of monthly extreme pain, still comes as a grateful shock. The best parts of this weekend involved getting much work done in the garden. J and I were a good team, and he took the boys away for some Daddy-and son fun a couple of times when I was at my most frustrated. I was so very grateful. Every time I step into the garden, the smell of crabapple, red-twig dogwood, and lilacs bowl me over with their lush, clean scents. That, combined with a little dirt under my fingernails is an elixir for a restless soul. Now if it would just be over 70 degrees for a couple of days in a row, please,  so that my tomato plants quit looking even more grumpy than I am.

vegetable gardening: the anti-primer

Ok, so I am not any kind of gardening expert. I knew squat-to-little when we bought our house in 01’, but I do really, really love it. I have some OK perennial beds and a good number of raised beds for veggies, but I’ve also been somewhat limited by my back pain. This spring, I both have some good relief from that pain and no longer have boys that require lifting all the time (though, O really seems to disagree lately). I’m making better headway than I have in years. I’m currently recovering from walking pneumonia, so I’ve been a bit tired at the end of the day, when I usually put the baby monitors outside with me and get a little work done. I’ve been staring at the long grass and the weeds with a  bit of frustration, but J has promised to take the boys to their Early Childhood class on Friday morning so I can get some planting done, and I can’t wait to get all the rest of my babies (most of which were grown under lights) in the ground. A couple of weeks from now, I’ll get the cucurbits in, as well as the beans, and all the initial planting will be done. I’ll continue to do successive plantings of carrots, radishes, and lettuce. Memorial Day is considered our “frost safe” date around here in our Zone 4 clime, though certain foolhardy brave folks flaunt that advice with a becoming sauciness that my more cautious side can never seem to muster.

So anyway – not an expert, just really enthusiastic and always learning. I am never really more at complete peace than when I am in the garden, except maybe when I am writing or hiking in the woods. That’s not to say I don’t tremendously enjoy other (and more social) parts of my life, but I get the most energy from those things.

Snickollet asked for a “primer”, though, and was echoed by Clover, and I just had another friend ask me for some tips, so I’ll throw a few things out there with some links to people that know far more than I.

First off, in case you only read this far --

Some things I wish I’d done differently:

• Bought more than one of each perennial and less variety overall.
• Paid more attention to what’s in bloom when.
• Spaced  things out more and waited for them to fill in, rather than creating an “instant garden”. Trust me; I’m still paying for that mistake.
  
• Built all my raised beds in cedar or with landscaping pavers so they don’t fall apart in a few years.
  
• 'Made sure all my raised beds were accessible from all sides.

Vegetable gardening: starting small

If you want to grow a few veggies and start simple, you can do a few just in pots on your deck or patio. I recommend an organic approach. You’ll need:

•  Some good-sized pots (8-12 gallons or so).
• A big bag of potting soil ( not the kind with chemical fertilizer in it).
• Some organic liquid or pelleted fertilizer labeled for veggies (kelp or fish, usually).
• A garden trowel.
• Some light-duty gardening gloves (or a really good nail brush).
• Tomato trellises or cages (one per plant)

Go to a decent nursery (not Home Despot) and buy starts of tomatoes (just one plant per pot), Swiss Chard, lettuce, and herbs. Tomatoes should be determinate (the kind that stop growing after a while instead of vining on indefinitely – not practical in a pot).

If you have some chards of terracotta (like from a broken terracotta pot) it is helpful to put one over the hole in the bottom of your pots, round side up, so that the hole never gets packed with dirt or roots. That way, water can always drain properly, and your plants won’t drown after a good rain. Some gravel at the bottom works too (chicken grit is quite cheap, if you can get your hands on some).

In any case, pack your soil loosely around the plants. IMO, you can put about 4 lettuces or chard in a pot that is about 12 inches across the top. Chard is so beautiful (especially rainbow chard), and just keeps coming when you cut it. 2 chard and 2 lettuce per pot would look especially lovely.

Make sure you cut down your lettuce before it bolts (goes to seed), or it will be bitter and inedible. Chard really doesn’t bolt. You could put in a few lettuce seeds just as you plant your starts for a successive planting. A few radish seeds tucked here and there is another option.

For herbs, I’d say about 3 per pot will work for most. Chives and thyme are perennial, so you may want to plant those in the ground or they’ll likely freeze over the winter if you’re in a cold climate. Dill is probably too big for most containers, but basil, parsley, oregano, rosemary, sage, marjoram, and cilantro are all good options. If you do them in several smaller pots, you can try extending the season on some of them (not cilantro) by moving to a sunny windowsill when it gets cold.

For this late in the Spring, and if you’ve never done it before, I’d say that might be a good way to start. See how you like it – if you don’t mind the attention if requires, if you like poking around the nurseries, getting your hands dirty, seeing your kids enjoy a leaf of basil. See how it feels to put your very own tomato and basil on that mozzarella, to pop outside and grab a sprig of rosemary for those summer potatoes. If you start looking at your backyard and your vision gets all foggy and you suddenly envision a thriving vegetable bed in that corner instead of what’s already there, you’ll know you’re done for.

Expanding your options with raised-bed gardening

In that case, I’d recommend building a raised bed if you live in the city. Lead and other pollution in the soil is a real issue, and raised beds are the best protection against that. As mentioned earlier, it’s best to use a durable material. Green-treated wood is still somewhat controversial for veggies (it no longer contains arsenic), but do not use railroad ties. I am kind if liking the concrete pavers I’m slowly replacing the pine sides of two of my raised beds with, and of all the options I’m familiar with, that’s probably the most environmentally friendly. Cedar is ideal as far as it’s attractiveness and durability, but quite expensive, and I’m not sure if cedar is such a readily-renewable resource. Leave a comment if you know more about this.

My beds are about a foot high all around. As for dimensions, ideally, you should be able to reach any part of them with your hands when you are kneeling. Here are some primers on ways to build them. May I just say that there was so much less information on the web about stuff like this back when I was starting? I personally recommend square foot gardening – an intensive approach that’s ideal for raised beds and cuts down on weeding. I’ll let you research that on your own –the book is widely available.

Now what?

Let’s say that you spent a summer doing pots, liked it, and built a couple of 4x4 raised beds. You could square them off (use bamboo sticks or string to make the squares, then follow the book’s directions as to how much to plant per square) and do lettuce, radishes, carrots, cukes, and zucchini from seed. You could buy starts of tomatoes, some herbs, maybe some more chard and lettuce to get an earlier start on things.

 See how that goes. If you think you’ve really got the gardening bug, you could add another couple of beds and invest in some lights. You could start poring over seed catalogs in December and get your own starts going in the basement as early as February. You could add a couple of apple trees the next Fall. You could notice that chickens would provide excellent slug control as well as a free source of good fertilizer. You could consider turning your gravel driveway over to several more raised beds, adding another bay to your compost pile, and planting a “Food Shelf” bed of lettuce and broccoli in the boulevard. God help you then.

 You could then find yourself with something resembling the following To Do List:

• Seed more flower seeds indoors
• Get pots ready for zinnias
• Plant tomatoes, etc.
• Weed back beds and raised beds
• Re-seed carrots
• Seed more lettuce, radishes
• Pull dandelions and crab-grass
• Mow lawn
• Water trees while gardening
• Seed lawn
• Check on front perennials
• Put up peony rings or string
• Clean out peony bed
• Plant hostas in back area
• Figure out way to mark off bed for squash
• Move rosebush to back area
• Update gardening journal (lilacs bloomed 3^rd week of April)

 
Some of my favorite gardening/local eating sites and blogs:

Mary Jane's Farmgirl Connection

Garden Rant

Garden Blogs by Region (from Sustainable Gardening)

You Grow Girl

 Locavore Nation (NPR)

Garden Works (local to MN)

Metro Blooms (local to MN)

Some interesting articles:

Dharma In the Dirt (NYT)

Urban Farmers' Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market (NYT)

The Gospel of Consumption (Orion)

(OK this last one really doesn't have much to do with gardening, but it's very much about related concepts about sustainable living. A must-read, IMHO.)

Some more How-to’s:

Seed Starting (about.com)

Essentials of Organic Gardening (about.com)

WikiHow on Gardening

Some of my favorite books:

World Community Cookbooks

This series of cookbooks (by Mennonites) are a great resource for helping you figure out how to stretch your food dollar, make more sustainable and ethical food choices, and figure out what to do with all that CSA/Farmer's Market or kitchen garden produce.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

Micheal Pollan's books (I'm currently reading In Defense of Food.)

The All-New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew (you can also get an overview here).

The Frugal Gardener, by Catronia Tudor Erler

Coming Home To Eat: The Pleasure and Politics of Local Foods, by Gardy Paul Nabhan


--Happy gardening!