Tuesday, January 29, 2008

 
The name is Bub. James Bub. Master of Disguise.

BLESSINGS


Gman went back to school yesterday, after nearly a week at home due to chicken pox. Since he’s been immunized (unlike British kids), he had an extremely mild case with only a dozen spots and absolutely no other symptoms. Nonetheless, civic protocol required me to keep him home for a week, so it was 5 long days of double-mama duty, my first experience of this delight. But while I initially dreaded my plunge into the parental cold-pool, honestly, I enjoyed our week together. Like all new things, it was scary at first: “How will I keep him from jumping on Miss V and covering her with pox-infested kisses?”, “How will I keep from killing him if he spends all day throwing attitude at me like he’s been doing lately.” But despite my worries, I figured it out and managed (mostly) to keep my temper. There were massive play sessions involving all the pillows and balls in the house. Chaos was created and cleaned up hourly. There were lots of snacks and lots of tv. We did leave the house a couple of times to go to the park – outdoors being the only safe place for a kid with the pox – but even on the days we stayed inside, we somehow found a way to pass the time.


And I discovered, as I often do when I am most at odds with Gman, that the more time I spend with him, the more quickly I find solutions to mend what ails us. Enforced togetherness forces me to really listen to him and be more creative in my parenting. And having some fun together doesn’t hurt either. It’s odd, but I often find that my worst parenting days are followed by my best parenting days – like I’m attached to some kind of cosmic bungee-cord, ricocheting between the depths and the heights of the parental plane. Smack your kid on Saturday and by Tuesday you may have discovered a new and fun way to get him to eat his vegetables, while simultaneously developing his pre-literacy skills and building his self-confidence. Bizarre. So I guess the pox, like so many unexpected events, was a blessing in disguise.


And now, one blessing has yielded another. Having lost my solitude for a week, I am doubly grateful to have it again. Lord Limescale is still working part-time for the next few days and generously taking Gman to school and picking him up, which means that I have nearly SEVEN UNINTERRUPTED HOURS OF SOLITUDE each day. Those of you with children will appreciate how remarkable this gift is. It is great great great to have so much QUIET – kind of like Body Butter for the soul – it lubes up all my creative parts and creates a deep and gentle sense of satisfaction. Just being in my house, getting to putter and do all my homegirl activities, getting to stare out the window at the shadows shifting on the house opposite ours, getting to stare at my baby, getting to nap – all these simple pleasures are so much sweeter because they were denied me last week.


One of Gman’s favorite games lately is to make my voice “disappear.” He’ll say “Abracadabra!” and I’ll move my mouth without sound, pretending that I have no voice. Then he’ll repeat the magic words and my voice will return. He usually likes to play when he’s in need of a power boost, and I don’t mind, because he giggles a lot in a really cute way while he does it. But it reminds me that sometimes I wish I could make his voice disappear! He talks more and more each day – clearly he is carrying on the legacy of verbosity that derives from my mother and myself – each day questions, stories, ideas, narrations, and all manner of mumbling, whining and other patter erupts from him in ever growing torrents. He is, in fact, almost never silent – just like he is almost never still. I remember one of the phrases that stood out when I read The Mommy Myth a few years back was that in addition to all the good stuff, raising children also entails a lot of mundane, boring, and just plain annoying parts, one of which is the “enervating noise.” That certainly rings true for me. The best part about the solitude my special post-partum period affords me is a chance to escape that noise for a little while, so I can hear the sound of my own thoughts again, and the quiet rhythmic hum of my own trusty soul.


Be well.

Labels: ,


Tuesday, January 22, 2008

 
UNTIL NOW...


I was sitting on the couch this morning, holding the warm, cuddly bundle that is Miss V, and thinking about time. Well, actually, I was spacing out, but occasionally a thought would drift through my head like the tail smoke of a jet blazing across a cloudless sky. It sounded something like this…”Breathe in. Breathe out. Warm. Steam on windows. Heater blowing. What was I doing last year at this time? Breathe in. Breathe out. Rustle. Gurgle. Burp. My foot hurts. I wonder why? Breathe in. Breathe out. A year ago, Miss V didn’t exist.

So, I pulled out my 2006 journal and settled back on the couch for my annual ritual of re-reading last year’s inner thoughts. As is often the case, a lot has changed in a year. And also, things are exactly the same. Apparently on November 22nd of 2006 – the page to which the journal cracked open and also the last pre-London entry – I was thinking about how to lighten up and appreciate the good stuff. Work I am actively pursuing this week as well. The backstory on this entry (which I have excerpted below), is that my good friend Aphrodite - who is not only the most passionate woman I know, but also a genuine goddess in her quest for truth and wisdom, who I have known for (gasp!) nearly 20 years, and who has also given me the great gift of being my personal coach for the past few years – once shared with me a core concept from her coaching model: the phrase until now…I see this phrase as a literal get-out-jail-free card, as in “Until now…I have allowed other people’s expectations to shape my choices, but I will now trust my own desires.” Or, “Until now…I have devoured potato chips mindlessly, but I will now fill my body with better fuel.” You should try it – it’s better than dark chocolate and twice as addictive. C’mon, think of something you catch yourself doing over and over again that pains you in some way and let this magic phrase peal from your lips…

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

I’ve been thinking about A’s phrase until now…and the freedom it offers of just being able to walk away from old behaviors that you don’t want to engage in anymore. I’d like to walk away from the self I’ve been for the last 4 months, maybe even for the last 2 years. The fearful, cramped, anxious-about-her-career, exhausted, beleaguered, whining, complaining Minkgirl. I’d like to give her a vacation – maybe Tahiti or the South of France. I’d like to see her come back with long hair and a tan, wearing a sari and barefoot. I’d like to see her cock her head to the side while chewing on a blade of grass and say “Man…I like that.”

While she’s gone, a new Minkgirl could move into her house and spruce up the place – roll up the window shades and open all the doors – air the place out. Put fresh bunches of wildflowers all around and silly figurines in unexpected places. Erect permanent (or rather impermanent) monuments to pleasure throughout the house – a pile of laundry to jump in like new fallen leaves, a treasure hunt of books leading from one room to the next, beautiful pictures and words cut from magazines pasted all over the walls. There will always be music playing and something sweet baking in the oven. When you ring the bell, this Minkgirl will answer the door laughing about something Gman has said, and she will invite you to come and sit on the kitchen floor with her and watch the light fade from the sky while you sing songs about love.

A nice vision – this alternative self who knows how to appreciate simple pleasures. I picked up Mommy Mantras again this weekend, a sweet and sensible little book that I was also reading around this time last year, when the nights were oh-so-long and Gman was punishing us in every conceivable way for rocking his world by moving to London. Here’s the phrase that caught my attention both then and now:

It's not about what we do wrong, but rather about what we do next.

Another way of saying until now…It’s not about falling off the horse – there is absolutely no way to avoid that, no matter how long or how skillfully we ride – it’s about how quickly you can recover and get back in the saddle. That idea does a lot to chase away negative self-esteem when I make mistakes.

The human brain is so complicated – we have to build such elaborate mental castles to trick ourselves into seeing what’s already there – how good and beautiful life is. I seem to live perpetually in need of an attitude adjustment. Maybe everyone does. A positive attitude, like any other good thing in one’s life – an intimate relationship, a vocation – requires daily recommitment. What I’m looking for is a few more tools to help me and the others in my family remember to make that commitment. We have our Friday night Shabbat ritual, and that really helps, and sometimes (if I can remember) I do yoga or a little meditation, but we need even more tools to help us remember to look on the bright side. Like a warm and totally trusting body lying in one’s arms reminding us to stop, breathe, and just be.

Be well.

Labels: , , ,


Monday, January 21, 2008

 
SLAP

One of the most common questions people have been asking us about life on Planet New Baby is “How is Gman handling having a new sister?” For the first 10 days, I had the pleasure of replying “Oh, he’s doing great! He’s so excited about Miss V, and he’s being so loving and helpful.” But sometime last week Angel Honeychild Gman was replaced by his evil twin Push Mommy’s Buttons Until She Screams Gman. I’ve been screaming a lot lately, as my son has begun refusing to do all rudimentary tasks (ie. get dressed, eat food, brush teeth) and generally responds to any request I make of him with an adolescent-style sneer and a loud and obnoxious “Mama, NO WAY!” Add to this the fact that he is systematically testing every limit we’ve ever set¸ and the fact that he’s been physically and verbally aggressive with both his father and me (thank god none of it has been directed toward Miss V…yet), and you have a sense of the seething context in which my all-time worst parenting moment occurred this past Saturday.

Do I feel you leaning in?…Ready for a good glimpse of some stinky dirty laundry?...A story that will be you feel better about any sub-standard parenting you’ve done this week? On Saturday, I slapped my son across the face. In a really public place. He shrieked and cried like I’d lit him on fire and wouldn’t stop, and so, we had to carry him kicking and screaming (sans shoes, sans coat) from the building out into the cold, and find a public bench on which to collapse, recover, and lick our wounds.

Now as much as I know this will shock my readers, I cannot claim that I’ve never raised a hand to my little bundle of joy before. In fact, there was a dark time during the first few months after we moved to London when it was a good day if I only spanked him once. Although personally, I think anything that we do to our children between the ages of 2 and 3 should be automatically expunged from our permanent parenting record, because let’s face it…they probably deserved it. But I draw the line right above the bum. Hitting a kid in the face…well, that’s pretty fucking low. Talk about conditional love. Displease mom and she’ll give you a good taste of her right hook. Never mind that he hit me first, also in the face, as hard as he could. Never mind that we were completely at our wits’ end after trying for 15 minutes to get him to exit an indoor play area – the kind with a 4-story cage in which a small child could disappear and join a band of Lost Boys, because the apertures of the various slides and inner sanctums are too small for ordinary grown-ups to squeeze through and catch the little buggers. Never mind that we know Gman is experiencing deep emotions about the sea change his family has undergone and that he has no ability to express this except through tantrums and other histrionic displays. It all happened so fast – he hit me, I hit him – and then we were standing in a bog of our own making while literally hundreds of other parents and children looked on. Talk about humiliation.

It took me the rest of the night to recover. We managed to straggle home and feed ourselves. And then I called my friend Dee, who has been riding on the Double-Decker Mama bus for nearly a year now. Besides being a kick-ass parent, Dee has a Ph.D. in Education, and a great sense of humor. She assured me that my slap hadn’t left any permanent scars and that even though it will probably take us months to sort out how to negotiate Gman’s insecurities and anxieties with any grace and how to operate effectively as a family of 4, we are not going to break our children before we get there. David and I were gloating the other night how much easier it is to deal with an infant the second time – you already know how to care for them, I can breast-feed without using 6 pillows, both hands and a special footstool, we’re not so terrified every 10 minutes that we’ve inadvertently killed our baby. But I can now see that compared to people who’ve had multiples for more than 3 weeks, I am a total fucking neophyte. It’s like I’ve been cruising along for ages on level 7 of my favorite video-game, feeling all stud-like ‘cause of how well I can avoid the space invaders and beasties, and suddenly I got bumped up to level 42, where I’m getting blown up or having my spine sucked out my nostrils every few seconds.

I woke up on Sunday and thought “OK, Game on dude!” I think this parenting thing is going to get a lot harder for awhile. And so I need to work out, eat my Wheaties, take my vitamins and be prepared each day for a whole new level of mental, physical and spiritual engagement. I remember during the first year of Gman’s life, I often thought that parenting was a kind of visceral form of Buddhism, because the daily lessons of living with an infant usually encompassed that religion’s core concepts: Live in the moment, Don’t make assumptions, Practice detachment from your own ego and agenda, Everything and Everyone is interconnected. And like so much of life, I find myself back on a familiar street again – Parenting as Buddhist Practice Part 2. I think I’ve still got the course books hidden somewhere in the back of a closet. And I’m pretty sure my Humility Robe still fits. Ah universe, you are wily and cunning in your unwillingness to let us forget what we have learned. I hope I’ll remember a little longer this time.

Be well.


Photo by J Belluch.

Labels: ,


Tuesday, January 15, 2008

 

When life gives you a wave, ride it to calmer waters.
Originally uploaded by SaundraG.
WATERS

When I was younger, whenever I felt a little crazy, I would hop in my car and drive to the beach. I favored hard-to-get-to spots such as one of the Marin Headlands beaches that can only be reached via a crumbly hillside trail that is clearly marked "Closed" (a warning that never seems to deter local residents - there were always loads of people on this particular beach). Upon arrival, I would lie directly on the sand - no mitigating towel or blanket - digging myself ever so slightly down into the earth - and let the heat of the sand and the sound of the waves slowly pulse the craziness out of me. I did this a lot in my 20's. The sound of all that water rushing up to meet the land and dashing away again is the most comforting sound I know - it mirrors the pitch and pace of our own breaths and heartbeats - it is the sound of life itself. It is a sound I could trust, even when I didn't trust myself.

And now in my 30's, it seems that I have become the ocean, and my children are the ones lying half-buried in the sand, calmed and caressed by the tidal sounds emanating from my body. When my son is feverish or wakened by nightmares, I lie on the floor next to his bed with a hand on his body making slow, rhythmic, tones with my voice - not music, just sound, in waves - and it calms him until he can finally let himself relax into sleep again. When Miss V cries, my husband and I pick her up and make load whoosing sounds into her ear (recommended by the Baby Whisperer I think!), and she immediately quiets, lulled by the same sort of consistent noise she experienced in the womb as my blood rushed to and fro.

In pregnancy, one's body becomes an entire tidal ecosystem, as is evidenced by the rising fluid levels in all parts of the body. One of the many strange features of the post-partum period is how much you have to pee, as all this extra fluid, no longer needed to buoy and sustain the baby, is released. I wonder if the fact that we all begin life as aquatic creatures explains our deep fascination with the sea, as though we understand that this breathing of air is a new and temporary thing, not our original source of sustenance.

...to be continued...

Labels: ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?