"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom"-William Blake

This morning we were reading a spring issue of Click, a really nice theme-oriented kids' magazine for 3-6 year-olds.  There was a craft suggestion for making leaf rubbings.  Always on the look-out for a craft that won't necessitate expensive trips to several different art and craft stores to gather supplies that will then end up furry with dust on our supply shelf, I said, hey, that'd be fun, except there aren't any leaves on the trees yet.

Bridger said, "I'll go look for some leaves!", went outside, and came back in with a beautiful flower from our Norway maple.  Intrigued, we found photos online that someone had taken over a two-week period in April and May of a Norway maple tree's flower opening up into new leaves.  It helped us identify the baby leaves on our own sample and understand the tree's leafing cycle much better than I'd ever understood it before.  Here's the URL for that if you're interested:

http://www.lookoutnow.com/animal/n_maple.htm

At this point, the kids and I were still just exploring and appreciating.  I wasn't thinking "educational activity" yet or "scientific method."  We were simply seeing something small and beautiful that we'd never noticed before, and that was enough.

I got excited and said, hey, let's go look at the early flowers and leaves on other trees and see what we find.  I plucked off the long, dangly flower from the neighbor's birch tree and more flowers from the maple, feeling a little apologetic toward the leaves that wouldn't get a chance to grow and soak up sunlight for the tree.

I labeled my specimens with a date and put them in plastic bags, thinking we could collect a few samples over the next few days and watch how they changed.  By this time, Bridger and Cass had moved on to swinging off the various ropes and swings we have hanging off the maple tree.

We decided to head to the park.  Bridger hopped on his bike and I pushed Cass in her stroller.    

As I walked, I noticed all the different variations on flowers, leaves, and seeds that were emerging.  It was wonderfully eye-opening and exciting.  I chattered on, pointing out how one tree we passed had flowers that were very similar to a birch, and yet the bark was different.  

"Maybe they're related in some way," I speculated.  

"I'm riding away from you now!" Bridger declared.

"Am I talking too much?" I called after him teasingly.

"Yes!" he called back.  But nicely, very nicely.

I really think it wasn't so much that it was too much information, or that he wasn't interested on some level.  I just think he had noticed that I was no longer pointing things out solely out of interest or delight but with an ulterior motive:  to satisfy my desire to at least occasionally do something that qualifies as an academic subject.  Underneath my apparent joy and curiosity, there was a whiff of anxiety and striving and goal-orientation that felt, well, icky.  Bridger had the good instincts to put as many sidewalk squares between him and that icky feeling as he possibly could.  Bully for him, I say.

There's a homeschooler named Tammy Takahashi out in California who has a blog titled "Just Enough and Nothing More."  I still have trouble sometimes stopping at the "Just Enough." But I guess, as the poet William Blake put it, you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. 

Hosan

I'm pretty annoyingly goal-oriented when it comes to weekends, to the point where Brian and I actually have a family meeting on Friday nights to decide what tasks we want to get to during the next two days.  There's just so much to be done if I'm going to feel like a worthwhile human being:  I want to spend quality time together as a family, exercise, maybe squeeze in a few hours of writing, because after all Brian is home to watch the kids.  On top of that, I think we ought to get much more done than we usually do when it comes to household and yard chores.  Oh, and if the kids don't get outside and play, I start to feel guilty about Nature Deficit Disorder, so of course they must be marched outdoors at some point.  To make things even more fun on weekends, I often find myself giving Brian the hairy eyeball if I don't think he's acting like a good dad should act (i.e., he's hanging out on the couch with his laptop instead of romping on the floor with the kids).

Yesterday, on Saturday, we did a lot of things I feel we are supposed to do to make for a good weekend:  all four of us walked to the library (outdoor time!  family fun time!) and then to a park to play for a while.  I did yard work and even got in some writing.  And yet I often felt rather joyless and pressured, in part because Cassidy was extremely emotional and needy, which made it hard to stick to my goals in the ways I had hoped to.

As it turned out, I think she was getting sick.  Today she had a low-grade fever and was very low-energy.  After lunch she climbed into my lap and Brian said quietly, "I think she's going to fall asleep."  He suggested I take her up to the comfy chair in my writing room and hold her while she snoozed, since that was the best chance she probably had of getting in a much-needed nap.  He told me he'd bring up the book I'm reading and a cup of tea.  

I held my warm, sweet daughter in my lap and for the first time in I don't know how long, I didn't leap to use a child's nap as an opportunity to go get something done.  I read and drank tea in the middle of the afternoon and listened to the rain and looked down at my girl's beautiful, flushed face.  

After she woke up, she and I went down and found her brother working happily on a Lego scene and her dad on the couch with his computer.  I could have thought about all the things that weren't happening:  the chores not done, the exercise and time outdoors getting neglected, the one-on-one fatherly interaction Brian should have been having with Bridger.  But instead I just felt peace and contentment.  My boys were clearly having the day they wanted to have at that moment, even if it wasn't the day I would have chosen for them.

Later, while Brian read to the kids, I made a Tunisian pepper and potato couscous dish that I hadn't made in years--too many steps, too complicated.  I relished the beauty of the red, yellow, and green pepper simmering in a tomato sauce, relished the smells of garlic and onion.  I wanted to call my sister and a very dear friend of mine whom I often call when I'm having a hard time because I wanted to call for once when I was feeling happy and calm.  I wanted to simply listen to them, to soak up their voices and catch up on their lives without my listening being clouded by my own troubles.

In Zen monasteries, days off from the normal monastic routine are called "hosan."  They're a sort of Zen sabbath, a day of rest.  Today it struck me that I (and maybe my whole family) would benefit from fewer goals on the weekend, fewer agendas, and a whole lot more hosan.

Clearing the Table

In my ongoing quest to peacefully involve the kids in helping, one thing I decided to do was to ask that they stick around and help clear the table after meals rather than peeling off as soon as the meal is done (or sometimes before Brian and I are even done).  

This has gone surprisingly well in the week or so since we got started.  Cassidy loves opening and closing the fridge and finding the right places for the milk and the salad dressing.  Bridger has been very helpful about putting dishes in the dishwasher--not just his, but any that need putting away.  It really wasn't hard at all to start doing it, either--I just talked to the kids about how stressed out I was a week or so ago, and I said that clearing the table together was one small change that I thought would help me feel calmer.  And they understood that.  They seem so grown-up and capable to me as we all bustle around the kitchen together.  I hope that they feel their own competence growing, too.

Why did I think this was important?  I think it's a good idea for us all to get used to the idea of working together to finish a job, and to think not just in terms of "how little can I do before I take off?" but to stick with a task until it's completed.  It's just good life practice, and a practice I'm still working on at 40.  

I also think I have emphasized the kids' needs and preferences so much that I haven't always made enough room for my own.  By saying, hey, I really would like your help so I'm not left with a mound of dishes to clear and wash, I'm sending a larger message about how I want our family to work.

I've also been trying to clear my table, metaphorically speaking, in other ways.  Last week I sat down and looked at the 100s of pages I have generated on my mess of a book draft and took notes on what I actually have.  I made a month-by-month plan for how to work my way through revising this shaggy monster, so now I just have to do it.

To stay on top of that effort, one way I need to clear my table is to spend less time sending emails, posting on this blog, and trolling the Internet.  I still plan on posting here, but it will probably only be a couple of times a week.  But if you've been reading, please do keep coming! It has been nice for me to know that there are a few folks out there, reading what I have to say. 

Deep Listening and Council Practice

At Clouds in Water Zen Center's Sunday service today, the head priest Sosan Flynn did something different and interesting.  She had us divide up into small groups of about four or five people, with some groups including middle-school students from the center's youth program.  We used a modified version of Council Practice, something the Clouds community has been working with for a few years now.  

Sitting in a circle, we passed around a talking piece--in this case, a smooth rock--and first checked in with our names and one word about how we were feeling.  Then we responded one at a time, as briefly but honestly as we could, to a few questions from the middle-school group:  how do you tell people you are a Buddhist?  Can you tell about a time when your outward actions didn't quite synchronize with your inner intentions, or a time when your outward actions did mesh with your inner intentions, and what was that like?  

The ground rules were simple:

When you have the talking piece, you get to talk.

Everyone else's job at that moment is to listen from the heart, without thinking about how they want to respond.  The listeners trust that when the talking piece gets to them, they'll know the right thing to say, without rehearsing it in their heads beforehand.

It was fascinating to me to notice the times when I did start to jump ahead as I listened and think about what I wanted to say.  I had to make a conscious choice to in a sense empty myself to make space for the other person's words.  I had to stop thinking so much about how their words might connect with my experience and instead focus my energy on trying to see what the other person's words meant to them, and what their experiences were about for them, apart from any connection to me.

At the beginning of the Council Circle, the word I used to describe myself was "Restless."  By the end of it, when we checked out with a another word to sum up our state of mind, my word was "Relaxed."  

I noticed ripple effects throughout the day.  When I took a walk with a good friend, I caught myself leaping ahead to make some point about me instead of taking the time to delve deeper into what she was saying, ask her questions, or just stay with her ideas for a while longer.  I didn't always catch myself until I was in the middle of doing it.  But even noticing that gave me a new sense of all that I'm missing out on by approaching conversations this way.  I found myself approaching my friend with a new curiosity as I realized all the ways I could learn more about her and hear her more deeply if I would just. . . slow. . . down.  

After I got home, Brian was tired and grumpy after a challenging afternoon with the kids while I was away.  He was getting pretty nitpicky and exasperated with me about the way I was doing things in the kitchen while we made supper together.  For instance, he asked, "Why didn't you just put it ALL in?" after I left a trace of quinoa in the storage jar instead of going ahead and cooking it all.  I have a habit of leaving just the tiniest trace of food in containers and then not using it up, leading to annoying clutter in the refrigerator and cupboard.  This is so ME--I hate endings and goodbyes, I guess.  I've never been much good at finishing what I start, although I'm getting better at it in my middle age.

Often when Brian gets nitpicky with me about one of my annoying habits, I get defensive and irritable and hurt, and I lash out.  But tonight, I just laughed.  I put my arms around him and said honestly, "It must get so annoying for you, these little food foibles of mine."  And I meant it.  I wasn't trying to humor him.  I understood that my habits were annoying him, and for once, I didn't feel judgmental toward him for being annoyed.  At the same time, and this was key, I didn't feel judgmental toward myself for being so annoying, either.  I saw us both for who we were, irritating the hell out of one another, and at that moment it was OK.

"Thank you," my husband mumbled to me after we stopped hugging.  

I would really love to find a way to keep cultivating the practice of deep listening that I got a small taste of today at the Zen center.  It feels like an essential practice for so many aspects of life--parenting, working with City Hall (notice I didn't say fighting), being a wife, a friend, a daughter, a writer.  

I feel so excited and grateful for the communities I am a part of and all that they're inviting me to learn.   

 

Just This! Just This!

Yesterday afternoon I was outside in the front yard with my daughter.  She was flying a little paper kite on a string, her curly hair bouncing around her, her bare, muscular legs pumping as she ran.  I thought about raking the garden out from under its bed of leaves.  But then a line from my dear spiritual uncle Walt Whitman came to mind:  "I loafe and invite my soule, I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."  I stayed put on the warm grass and watched my daughter, and doing that, I realized how rare that kind of ease and focus is for me these days.  So often, I'm trying to do several things at once, glancing at my children out of the corner of my eye while I attend to some other task.  

Of course it's important for me to do some of the other work I want to do:  to write, to work for our neighborhood, to care for our house and yard.  But I want to remember to just be with the kids more often.  I want to strive more consciously to take both a big view and a little view, all at once:  to keep in mind the big view of supporting my relationship with my child and modeling gentleness and kindness--even when we're running late to get to an appointment and my daughter suddenly decides to get verrrry particular about what shoes she wants to wear and how I should put them on.  And I want to take a small view when that's more appropriate--to focus in on one girl running across the grass in the sunshine, instead of letting her be crowded out by a flock of noisy abstract concerns.

On that note, here's more poetry from another spiritual uncle, Ryokan, an 18th-century Japanese monk and hermit:

First days of spring--blue sky, bright sun.

Everything is gradually becoming fresh and green.

Carrying my bowl, I walk slowly to the village.

The children, surprised to see me,

Joyfully crowd about, bringing 

My begging trip to an end at the temple gate.

I place my bowl on top of a white rock and

Hang my sack from the branch of a tree.

Here we play with the wild grasses and throw a ball.

For a time, I play catch while the children sing;

Then it is my turn.

Playing like this, here and there, I have forgotten the time.

Passers-by point and laugh at me, asking,

"What is the reason for such foolishness?"

No answer I give, only a deep bow;

Even if I replied, they would not understand.

Look around!  Just this!  Just this!

With a Little Help from My Friend. . .

I was feeling pretty low the last few days, for many reasons, chief among them the latest developments in the library fight.  

A small group of us wrote an op-ed for the paper about the library issue.  The library director and the library media relations rep emailed the day it appeared and said they appreciated our passion but that one sentence in the piece contained inaccuracies that they felt must be corrected.  They followed up with a conference call with the director and the media rep, which I conducted to the best of my ability while my children periodically bellowed in the background.

I felt many emotions:  embarrassment about the inaccuracy (which, though minor in the grand scheme of the issue, was preventable and foreseeable); anger at the library for only responding to us when they wanted to publicly correct us and not responding to our larger concerns; fear that we might have done more harm than good and shot our group's credibility by making a mistake.

There's a reason they say you can't fight city hall.  It's not easy for citizen activists to pull an effective effort together on short notice and on our own time.  This doesn't mean I'm giving up.  It just means I'm feeling pretty bruised.

It remains to be seen what's going to happen.  It's been four days and the library still hasn't published any kind of correction or counterpoint op-ed.  They did email back and say that our city councilmember, the deputy mayor, and the library director have a meeting set to start hammering out a community process for determining the library's future.  So that's progress, though the effort to get that going was happening before our op-ed appeared.

I'd like to write more about how I felt about making a public mistake when the stakes feel so high.  Not tonight, but later--either here, or in an essay, or both.  

Since the whole thing broke, I've been spending way too much time up late stewing about it all, reading about other library closure issues in other cities (Philadelphia's facing 11 library closures in their system of 57, for instance, and the strategies and justifications the mayor there is using are remarkably like the ones our mayor is using).  I am beginning to see a pattern in my own city and cities across the country--the current lousy economy is being used as an excuse to steal our public commons from us, the places like rec centers and libraries where we connect as neighbors and citizens.  These are places that have been with us through generations of troubles--why can't our leaders find the will to keep them open now?  The library I'm fighting for opened during the Great Depression, for God's sake.

Today I was feeling so hopeless and down, so out of energy for the kids.  I called another mama friend of mine and just asked straight-out for support and encouragement.  I know that like me, she struggles with being the kind of mother she wants to be.  

She reminded me of the obvious stuff that's so easy to overlook--that getting enough sleep and exercise and maybe an hour a week to go sit in a coffee shop and write in my journal would probably make a remarkable difference.  We laughed.  We commiserated.  I walked away feeling ready to try again with my kids.  And for that I am so grateful.

More Equitable Chore Sharing--A First Dispatch from the Front

A few days ago I started setting the table for dinner before we headed out to martial arts.  I was feeling a little stressed about getting us out the door on time, and Bridger noticed.  He offered, "Can I help you set the table?"  Cassidy got very upset and said, "No, no, only I do it, I do it!" and started yanking off the silverware he'd set down so she could re-do the job.  

One challenge, I'm realizing, in getting the kids to share chores more equitably will be to reassure Cass that her place as a good helper is not being usurped if Bridger helps, too.  When Cass helps me, I've often thanked her for helping and told her how much I enjoy working with her, and at times, she's commented, "Bridger doesn't help."  I've tried to point out ways he does help, while acknowledging that she often does help more readily and volunteer more.  I'm realizing that Cass may have started defining herself as The Helpful One and drawing a sense of worth and security from that, so I can see why it might have been threatening for her when Bridger pitched in spontaneously.

I think it is very easy for kids (and parents) to fall into defining children by how they are different from their siblings, making it hard for kids to break out of set roles (i.e, one's the pretty one, one's the smart one; one kid's the good kid, the other the troublemaker).  I think it's also easy for kids to start defining their lovability by how well they fill gaps they think their siblings can't or don't fill--as in the child who takes on the role of being a parent's support person and confidante, or the child who tries to be extra-good, stifling their own spirit, to make up for a "naughty" sibling.  

I want my kids to know that they can both be whatever they want, no matter what their sibling does or doesn't do.  They can BOTH be athletic, BOTH be thoughtful and smart, BOTH be attractive, BOTH be sensitive, BOTH be strong, BOTH get angry or sad, BOTH be imperfect, and BOTH be lovable, each in their own ways--beyond comparison.

The Power of Play

Today my husband emailed me an article from the Wall Street Journal with the comment, "Sounds a lot like what has gone on at home since Bridger could talk."  The article, titled "Playing Nice:  Teachers Learn to Help Kids Behave in School," focuses on a preschool teacher in Portland, OR who has improved kids' behavior by adapting a play-oriented curriculum.  At the beginning of each day, the kids choose a pretend-play scenario, like "Barber Shop," from pictures of play ideas posted on the wall, then each chooses a role.  "Then," the reporter writes, "they have to act out the roles for 45 minutes, with children helping each other stick to their roles."  The idea is to strengthen "executive function" thinking--the ability to control impulses and integrate new information.  

Well.  I don't have any doubt that the kids are gaining wonderful things from this kind of play. But the level of control of the play seems a bit much--for instance, the reporter noted that if a kid has chosen to play "the baby" in a scenario, but then shifts into a different role midway through, the other kids will "help" the "baby" play the role he/she originally set out to play.  

I can see and value the intention behind this--helping kids learn to follow through on a plan, for instance, and helping them play by agreed-upon rules.  But for me, part of the joy of play is how it morphs as you go--and how playmates have to make subtle or not-so-subtle adjustments as individual people make new discoveries or decide they want the story to charge off someplace new.  I think kids can develop self-control, initiative, and "executive function" without being forced to stick to a prescribed play role for 45 minutes.  I also suspect less-controlled imaginative play is a truer reflection of children's actual concerns and dreams.  But I guess that kind of play wouldn't be as guaranteed to serve a set, predetermined learning outcome.  I know it's also got to be harder to manage that sort of play in a larger group setting. 

Around our house, we call pretend play "doing stories," and my husband is right--that has been going on since my son could talk.  It started with a set of three toy construction workers, dubbed "Struction Guy," "Struction Gal," and "Struction Beard" by my son.  The basic storyline was that one of the 'struction workers got hurt on the job.  "Oops!  I fall down!" was a refrain I heard hundreds of times.  Sometimes they played hooky from the jobsite and did something Bridger and I had recently done, like going raspberry-picking.  

We moved on to doing car stories with Matchbox cars and train stories with wooden Thomas trains.  We created art car parades with Legos and acted out countless stories of knights and pirates with dress-up clothes.  

For most of my son's toddler and preschool years, that was ALL he wanted to do:  hours and hours a day of "doing stories."  With me--never by himself.  It's funny, because aside from a little drawing and writing stories, that was pretty much all I wanted to do as a kid, too.  But with Bridger, I often got numbingly bored by the repetitive storylines and found myself wishing, jeez, couldn't we go paint, or do a nice craft, or play a board game every once in a while, just to break things up a little bit?  But no.  We could not.  

As much as I sometimes resisted being pulled into Bridger's make-believe world, I often found out fascinating, wonderful things by playing with him.  My son doesn't talk much about his feelings.  But when I'd been getting upset with him a lot a few years back, he created a storyline about Lego brothers and sisters who built a beautiful Lego castle out in a forest so they could live away from their parents--because "Their mom and dad yell at them too much."  Bridger loved having me act out having the parents drive past the castle and speculate about the master builders who must have created the castle--he loved the parents being too dense to recognize their children's talent and skill.  OK, I thought.  Points duly noted.

Other times, I was able to find out what questions he was working on, without him having to articulate those questions in words.  For a while, he loved to play "The Car Who Doesn't Know Anything."  I was a very foolish, innocent car who came into a big city full of more knowledgeable cars, and I had to be shown around and have everything explained to me.  This helped me put myself in his shoes and realize how much he wanted to be able to be the authority sometimes.  Another time, he went through a spell of wanting me to be a less-fancy Matchbox car who was jealous of the faster, prettier hot-rod Matchboxes.  Playing this, I guessed he was working on questions about competition and his own value in relationship to others.  Very interesting stuff, and, when I let myself forget about wanting to, say, check my email or sweep the floor, we sometimes really got into a beautiful zone together.

After so many years of wishing Bridger would "do stories" more by himself and not always want me to do them with him, my son seems to have weaned himself to mostly "doing stories" on his own or with other kids.  He likes to play castle sometimes with his sister and me, but for the most part I'm becoming more of an onlooker to his imaginary world.  He invites me to see the Lego space battle tableaus he's set up on the living room floor, but doesn't ask me to act out the battles with him.  And that's fine with me.  My challenge now is to remember to come over and look with a smile and genuine interest, even when he yells out, "Come look!" when I'm in the middle of making dinner.

Now it's my daughter who wants me to "do stories" with her, and again, I'm fascinated by what my children work on as they play.  Today in the back yard, Cassidy started out wanting to pretend we were characters from "The Boxcar Children" books.  But then she decided she wanted to be a ballerina, and I would be a bad knight who wanted to capture her and put her in a dungeon.  I'm fascinated by how she is processing the messages from fairy tales, toy catalogs, and even comics (she was utterly enthralled with a Prince Valiant comic strip that showed pretty maidens being carried off by hairy half man-half beasts).  

I loved what we did together with the victimized ballerina-in-the-dungeon scenario.  Together, we wove a story in which the ballerina escaped and stowed away on a pirate ship (our backyard wooden play structure).  The pirates loved her dancing and made her their Pirate Princess and leader.  They sailed all over the world, to Italy, Australia, and Antarctica.  Everywhere, the Bad Knight turned up and had to be defeated with the help of various allies and stratagems.  So Cassidy got to both work out her fascination with and her fear of being victimized, and at the same time, she got to be strong, powerful, and free.  I could never in a million years have come up with such a rich learning experience for her on my own.  It had to come from her.

What if Cass had been in that Portland classroom, and her classmates had told her, no, you can't switch to being a ballerina, you said you were going to be Violet from "The Boxcar Children"?  What if the scenario she wanted to play wasn't one of the choices listed on the wall?  What if the teacher had steered Cass away from pretending to be a victim in a dungeon because of the teacher's discomfort with Cassidy choosing such an un-PC role?  

I wonder.  I wonder.

For more on the power and value of free play, I love the articles "Looking Back Over Twenty Years" by Alison McKee and "And They Played All Day" by Naomi Aldort, which you can find at http://www.alisonmckee.com/articles.html#general and http://www.naomialdort.com/articles.html.  You have to scroll down a bit to get to these particular articles.  Sorry these aren't direct links--I haven't figured out how to post links yet.  I'll work on it.  

Keep on playing, and please share your own stories, too!

Chores

OK, I'm back on house cleaning.

My daughter loves to help me out around the house.  She and I make her bed and my bed every morning.  She helps me cook.  She sorts silverware into the right compartments in the drawer.  She loves to swish the toilet brush around in the toilet.  She sprays off windows.  I've never really tried to enforce chores with her--I've taken more of a "Let's do this together!" approach, and she seems to respond to it really well.  I think she just also has a really strong desire for order in her surroundings.

My son really resists when we ask him to help.  He can be incredibly hard-working and helpful when it's his choice to help and the work seems interesting to him--like at our harvest days out at the community supported farm, he works as hard as any grown-up picking and cleaning veggies and loading bags.

A part of me would love to just trust that given time, encouragement, and lots of modeling from us, he will learn to be more helpful, in the same way that I trust that he will learn everything else he needs to learn without being forced or manipulated in to it. 

But a part of me just doesn't quite buy the wait-and-see approach, I think because of my own experiences as a kid and young adult.

When I was a child, my house seemed to get clean by magic while I was away at school.  Clean clothes appeared neatly folded in my drawers and hung in my closet.  My bed was made when I got home.  The house was always pristine and picked up.  That was my mom, of course--no magic there.  

My dad died when I was twelve, and suddenly, shockingly, my mom was a widow, a single mom, and sole breadwinner for our family at 33.  She needed more help from us, but we hadn't built up the habits of helping.  We just didn't notice when dirty dishes were strewn all over the house, our rooms were carpeted with dirty clothes, and our bathroom was a disaster.  Or if we noticed, I guess we were still expecting a little cleaning magic to come in and take care of it all for us.  We were young teenagers, interested in watching MTV for hours to wait for a Duran Duran video to come on--not cleaning our rooms.  I don't want to make excuses for our lack of helpfulness.  I just want to note that by the time I was twelve, it was very difficult for me to switch into a helpful mode.  

My mom often got horribly angry with us, and I can understand why.  I can't even imagine the stress she was under those years.  Her anger usually made me do better for a little while, but I always eventually slacked off again, once my fear and shame had worn off.

After I left home, I continued to be a slob, and it sometimes made life more challenging for my roommates and embarrassing for me.  At college, my roommate put up a Post-It note to remind me to wash my towel when it got smelly.  A housemate had a dream about strangling me in the bathtub because I never cleaned it and she always ended up doing it.

When Bridger was about three, I went through a phase of trying to use rewards and punishments to encourage him to pick up his toys--this was before I really started to finally kick my own addiction to our society's reward/punishment parenting paradigm.  If he helped clean up, he could watch a half-hour of a video.  If he didn't, I, uh, bitched at him and threatened him with no video until he did help.  No wonder he resists it when I ask him to help out, all these years later.

Eventually I came to my senses.  I realized that I was creating a situation that wasn't good for our relationship and probably would lay the foundation for him to resent and resist housework.  I ran across Sandra Dodd's ideas about an unschooling approach to chores, and they radically shifted my perceptions:  http://www.sandradodd.com/chores/

Since Cassidy's birth, the little bit of Waldorf theory I've read has really reinforced what my heart tells me is true:  it's a wonderful thing if families can start early with involving children in being helpful, and if it can be a pleasurable, easy-to-remember routine--just part of the day.

These days, I'm working on finding ways to involve Bridger more in the chores while being true to my non-violent, non-coercive parenting values--because I think it would be good for him, good for our family, good for me.  I also don't think it's a good idea to let the girl-child do all the work.  It just doesn't quite ring true to how I want us to live our lives and be in the world.

I'll keep you posted on how it all goes. . .

Abraham Lincoln, Unschooler and Attachment Parent?

For me, one of the great joys of homeschooling so far has been being infected by the interests of the children learning around me.  Unschooling author Mary Griffith calls this "viral learning," a phrase I love.  I know viral learning happens in families that don't homeschool, too--the difference, perhaps, is that I spend more weekday hours hearing all about children's interests, for better and for worse.

One of the learning bugs that infected me came from our friend Madeline, who's nine years old.  Last summer she was obsessed with presidents.  Her conversation was peppered with presidential facts, and whenever possible, she tried to steer the kids in our play group into pretending to be various First Families.  She learned how to subtract four-digit numbers so she could figure out how old presidents were when they died by looking at their birth and death dates.  With the presidential campaign going on at the same time, it was hard not to be sucked into her enthusiasm.  

After a family trip through Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I plunged into reading everything I could find about Theodore Roosevelt.  Next came FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt.  I found myself moved both by how ahead of their times these leaders were and humbled and instructed by the ways they were limited and blinded by the times in which they lived.  As my friend Katrina put it, seeing their blind spots was a good way to reflect on my own.  

Now I'm reading two books about Lincoln:  Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and a chapter book for kids called Lincoln and His Boys by Rosemary Wells.

What has been striking me is how very self-educated he was--I'd forgotten that he only had about nine months of formal schooling.  While his lawyer and politician peers were studying at prestigious prep schools and colleges, he was stealing peeks at Aesop's Fables between plowing rows in a field.  While other would-be lawyers studied under the mentorship of established lawyers, he studied to become a lawyer on his own.  Even after he'd become a lawyer and was well into his forties, he was still an avid learner of all sorts of subjects.  After trying cases all day, he'd stay up late trying to work out ancient geometry problems.  After watching East Coast lawyers in action for the first time, he went home determined to study harder:  "For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one, too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-trained men are coming West. . . Soon they will be in Illinois. . . and when they appear, I will be ready."

Often, I notice, writers about Lincoln marvel that he was able to accomplish so much when he didn't have the advantages of schooling.  I have to wonder if it was his self-schooling that helped him see possibilities that other leaders of his time didn't see.  I wonder if it was self-schooling that gave him the confidence to master new subjects as he needed to--to become, for instance, a more masterful military strategizer than most of his generals.  

The other thing that strikes me--and moves me--about Lincoln is what a devoted father he was.  In his gentleness and acceptance of his children, he was definitely way ahead of his time.  When his sons broke into Cabinet meetings and hauled him off to play, he often laughingly went along with them, to the consternation of his Cabinet members, who thought children should be seen and not heard.  His wife recalled him saying, "It is my pleasure that my children are free--happy and unrestrained by paternal tyranny.  Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent."

As slightly disturbing as the "love as chain" metaphor is, I can't help but see that Lincoln was basically expressing what attachment parenting advocates say now:  that connection to our children is more important than enforcing blind obedience.

Way to go, Lincoln.  You rocked in even more ways than I knew.  And thanks to Madeline for infecting me with presidential history fever. 

Noticing Joy

My friend D. P. of the blog Unschooling is Dreamy (see sidebar) referred me to a post entitled "Snapshots" from the SouleMama blog (see sidebar again).  In it, Amanda Soule writes

"This blog. . . is one of the ways in which I remind myself of the joys, the beauty, and the blessings around me each and every day.  Writing here helps me remember.  And it helps me to see and look for those things, people, and moments which do bring me joy."

In another post, Soule writes about how her young sons have begun reading her blog, and how they enjoy searching the archives for stories about their younger selves.  I can imagine the blog being a pleasurable read for them, given their mom's joyful, appreciative approach.

That got me to thinking about what I write about on my blog and in my essays.  One of my big interests, I think, is to document the times when a moment of challenge opens up into a moment of beauty, or of greater closeness with someone I love, or of clarity, even if that clarity is very fleeting.  I want to be honest about my own struggles as a mother without revealing too much of my children's private lives.  I think it's often very hard to figure out where the "too much" line is, and of course it will probably keep shifting as they get older.  Ideally, though, I'd like them to be able to read my writing about them without wincing. 

After reading Amanda Soule's post, I've found myself trying to be more conscious of the beauty in my life.  Not to be too Pollyanna-ish, but I've been noticing how it only takes a slight shift in perspective to turn something frustrating into something that's actually kind of lovely.  Like, I can choose to find it annoying that my daughter insists on accompanying me from room to room and up and down the stairs (often holding my hand)--or I can feel incredibly grateful to have her company and find it sweet and endearing that she wants to be with me.  I can feel discouraged and overwhelmed by the pile of laundry on my bed waiting to be sorted, or I can savor the way my life is enmeshed with the lives of three other wonderful people as I fold each pair of size 3 pink pants, each size 6 T-shirt emblazoned with a truck or car, each Lands End button-down shirt and pair of black Levis.  

This week I was at a meeting with some other library advocates who have been fighting to save our little old library.  We were drafting an op-ed that we hope to publish in the St. Paul newspaper as a pre-emptive measure before the upcoming city budget hearing, and we were shaking our heads over how enamored the current city government seems to be with fancy, sleek new libraries over decades-old, dearly beloved ones like ours.  One of my comadres in the fight laughed, "We like our library BECAUSE it's dorky and funky!"

Tonight, I'm feeling such a deep, deep love for my own dorky, funky life.

In Which A Bad Parenting Moment Leads My Daughter to a Moment of Startling Clarity and Wisdom

Yesterday I was getting a little grumpy about the number of times my daughter Cassidy went off in a corner to hide that she was pooping in her pants, then resisted my attempts to clean her up afterwards.  She reiterated her oft-stated position:  she thinks four is about the right age to learn to poop in the potty.  I groused, "Well, you know, a lot of kids your age actually do learn to poop in the potty.  So don't feel like you have to wait until you're four.  You could get started learning any time now, as far as I'm concerned."

"But Mama," she said calmly, "Cassidy is Cassidy.  So I have to do it this way."

Well, I'll be damned, I thought.  

I hunkered down to look her right in those gorgeous hazel eyes of hers, put my hands on her shoulders, and said, "Cassidy, you are so right.  I hope you always remember that what works for somebody else might not work for you."

I don't blame her for hiding when she poops in her pants.  She knows she's likely to get a lecture when I find out what she's done.  I just have to--breathe, now, Carrie--let go of rushing this whole potty learning business and trust that some day, she will indeed learn.  Not the Carrie way, but the Cassidy Way.