So let's talk about Facebook. Sometimes I think to myself, "Self? You post entirely too often on Facebook. It makes you look needy/overthinky/not busy enough to do other things." But for me, it's not about showcasing my kids (though I do plenty of that) or detailing my mundanity (though I do PLENTY of that) or spouting bumper sticker platitudes (I'm honestly not sure if I do that or not, but tell me if I do and I'll try to stop).
It started when I lost my job. That sounds so innocuous, "lost my job." I, along with people I cared about and people I started caring about the second we were thrown in the dinghy together, were ripped out of the fabric of an institution that has been idealized from what it was but which, for better or for worse, has become the yardstick by which I measure all other organizations. Not that I know a lot about those, really. I got a job almost immediately after being cast out of what has become Eden in my absurdly revisionist memory.
I had some great friends there. I have those great friends still. But I wonder sometimes if I would, had I not jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.
And then it became something more. A new job that didn't agree with me and at which I was slowly losing skills I'd spent almost a decade honing, coupled with my inherent ability to miss people from the tips of my toes kept me clinging, and clinging hard.
And then it became something more. I quit that job, came home to raise a baby and try my hand at trying my hand on my own. On the days I felt like a shut-in, or on the days I felt like I was doing it wrong, all of it, and had no illusions of anything but continuing to do it all wrong till the end of time, I used it like a life raft.
And now? Now it's more about keeping those ties that would've probably been severed long ago. That, and keeping myself from going stir-crazy in a house with only a busy and often-baffling one-and-a-half-year-old and two senior golden retrievers to keep me company.
It's a touchstone. And so I use it. Forgive me if I use it too often, and if you're sick of hearing about my plans for the day or the latest weird thing Katherine did or the latest unintentionally funny thing Alex did or why I love life one day and want to run away to Fiji the next ... well, feel free to defriend me, and I'll pretend I didn't notice.
A blog, on the other hand, feels like a safe place to blather on as I tend to do if given half a chance, and so here we are. I would tell you that Alex is driving me nuts with his perfectionistic tendencies which clash spectacularly with his newfound interest in origami tutorials on YouTube, or that Katherine has started speaking Swahili, best I can tell, or that the workflow is either white-water-rapids fast or stagnant like a swamp, or that my attempts to climb back on the diet-and-exercise train have all but failed because "idunwanna" has become a viable excuse ... but it's getting on up toward my bedtime and I never write more than I can conceivably complete to my satisfaction before I fall into bed.
So this is the Julie version of the short story: Tonight Katherine was the cutest thing I've ever seen, wearing nothing but tights over a diaper, belly hanging over the top of the tights, babbling incoherently at Charlie because she wasn't taking the pieces of dog food K was trying to shove between her teeth. Tonight Alex told me I'm the best mom ever and then, later, insisted (against my protests) that I'm "disappointed at" him because he's "only" on Level L books. (Which, fwiw, is equivalent to a third grade reading level.) Tonight I had soup for dinner and pizza for a pre-bedtime snack, which is probably one of the reasons I'm not exactly meeting my weight-loss goals at the rapid clip I had hoped for.
Tonight I had a fleeting idea for a story, maybe even a book, and then I lost it because the Dexter season finale broke my brain.
Tonight Katherine decorated our Christmas tree with tampons and I found my new lipstick floating in the glass of water I keep by my bed.
Tonight Alex slipped and called Steven "Daddy" instead of "Dad," and my heart broke just a little.
And who knows what tomorrow will bring? I'll likely put the highlights (or the lowlights) on Facebook, for my own reasons and against my better judgment. I might tell the world how much it sucks that you miss someone the most when you know you won't be seeing them for a while. Or how hard it is to not tell your kid to hang on for another week, he'll have real origami paper come Christmas and not have to make his origami ninja stars out of random pieces of looseleaf. Or how my heart leaks out of my body when Katherine appears out of nowhere, wraps her arms around my leg, and says, "Mwah!" Or how Alex and I are reading books by the same author. Or how much I love my friends and their ability to say the rightest possible thing at the rightest possible time. Or how weird I think it is that spell-check didn't put a squiggly red line under "rightest" just then.
For now, I'm going to read a chapter of my terrible teen horror novel, wish that I had the patience and the time to write one of my own, and then hope I can sleep and that Katherine's snot doesn't wake her up so that we're both equally cranky in the morning.
Because I have work to do. And she has messes to make.
Life is sweet, messy, maddening, and worth it.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
TV and other mommy crimes
I ran out of cheesy secondhand teen horror novels, was just slightly underwhelmed by tonight's installment of my current television obsession, and am nowhere near tired enough to turn in, so here I am, scrounging out a long overdue (but pretty fluffy) blog post.
In Alex news, he's becoming a chess champion but still ends up guessing the wrong person when you play Guess Who? with him, which leads me to believe someone, somehow, is doing something wrong. We've made sure he knows the difference between a beard and a mustache, and where a goatee falls in the mix, and whether or not someone with just a ring of hair around the sides counts as bald and that "orange" hair is actually called red hair, and still, you'll be down to the wire and he'll be all, "Is your person George?" And you feel a twinge of pity when you have to say, "No. My person is Nancy."
But ask him which ways pawns move or what's the best strategy to protect your king or bishop or whatnot, and he's all over it.
He is now Alexander at school, in part I think because the other Alex in his class is an Alejandro, and the teacher wanted to differentiate but was iffy on how to pronounce the latter (or maybe just hasn't heard the Gaga song). And Alex is fine with being Alexander, and I am fine with him being Alexander because that's what I wanted him to be in the first place but everyone takes liberties and it's easier to just let them.
He moved up another reading level, he's into origami, and I'm easing him into becoming a horror-genre fanatic like his mama. We started small, with Goosebumps and R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, but I have big future dreams of his accompanying me to the theater to see Blair Witch XII or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Returns years down the line. We were both a little freaked out by the Scary Mary episode of Haunting Hour, but in my defense I was subjected to a disturbing (if giggly) Bloody Mary experiment with my sister and her friend at the tender age of 5 and will never quite live down the trauma. But since then, and once you get past the extreme 1990s, extreme Canadianness (no offense intended), and extreme bad child acting of Goosebumps, it's not so horrible. And it's a sight better than Caillou.
Yes, Katherine has fallen under the spell of that infamous bald 4-year-old boil on the butt of cartoon-kind. If I were a better mother, perhaps I would stimulate her brain by reading to her all day, having her put together 100-piece puzzles singlehandedly, or taking her on a new, stimulating cultural adventure every day. Unfortunately (and not), I have to work. So she watches some TV. Her preferences are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (tolerable, now that we're far enough out from Alex's Mouse-ka-days that the hot-dog song doesn't make me want to drive rusty nails into my eardrums), Fresh Beat Band (even WITH the new Marina and her giant mouth and never-gonna-measure-up-to-her-predecessor desperation), and yes, leading the pack, Caillou. She likes Elmo but has no patience for the other residents, whether human or monster or unidentifiable muppet creature, of Sesame Street.
Most of the time, though, she has no patience for sitting and watching TV, which is great except when she brings me a toy, book, or random object and slaps it right smack down into the middle of my keyboard, either coincidentally or not (as I'm beginning to believe) shutting down the program I was working in or inserting a whole bunch of errors that my clients would likely frown upon.
When she's doing something wrong and I catch her at it, she immediately stands up, smiles so sweetly you'd swear she's the female Damien, waves, and says, "Hiiii!" And you're wrong if you think that's not persuasive. Sometimes I manage to hide my laughter in the couch cushion, but my girl she is no dummy. But I tell her every day, cute will only get you so far. We still don't rip pages out of books, lick the dogs, or poke our fingers into the Blu-Ray player slot. And now that Christmas stuff is up, we don't take the crudely constructed wooden baby Jesus out of his makeshift cardboard manger and try to eat him. Call me strict.
Christmas shopping is all but done, and every day that goes by that I trip over Katherine's play vacuum or slip on an errant marble or jump when T.J. Bearytales lets out a bone-chilling blat of discordant music as his batteries slowly die makes me more set on the idea that my kids just don't NEED a whole lot. Give Katherine an empty box and a Happy Meal race car. Give Alex a piece of paper and find him a YouTube video of the lady who does step-by-step origami. They're all set.
That's it for now. I'm skipping over the ugly details of our recently ousted stomach virus because I'm still two brain-bleachings away from completely forgetting the ordeal. In fact, I'm skipping over a lot of things. But here is my nod to what we're up to in this almost-December of 2011 world. I take some solace in the fact that there's no more significant news to report.
In Alex news, he's becoming a chess champion but still ends up guessing the wrong person when you play Guess Who? with him, which leads me to believe someone, somehow, is doing something wrong. We've made sure he knows the difference between a beard and a mustache, and where a goatee falls in the mix, and whether or not someone with just a ring of hair around the sides counts as bald and that "orange" hair is actually called red hair, and still, you'll be down to the wire and he'll be all, "Is your person George?" And you feel a twinge of pity when you have to say, "No. My person is Nancy."
But ask him which ways pawns move or what's the best strategy to protect your king or bishop or whatnot, and he's all over it.
He is now Alexander at school, in part I think because the other Alex in his class is an Alejandro, and the teacher wanted to differentiate but was iffy on how to pronounce the latter (or maybe just hasn't heard the Gaga song). And Alex is fine with being Alexander, and I am fine with him being Alexander because that's what I wanted him to be in the first place but everyone takes liberties and it's easier to just let them.
He moved up another reading level, he's into origami, and I'm easing him into becoming a horror-genre fanatic like his mama. We started small, with Goosebumps and R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, but I have big future dreams of his accompanying me to the theater to see Blair Witch XII or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Returns years down the line. We were both a little freaked out by the Scary Mary episode of Haunting Hour, but in my defense I was subjected to a disturbing (if giggly) Bloody Mary experiment with my sister and her friend at the tender age of 5 and will never quite live down the trauma. But since then, and once you get past the extreme 1990s, extreme Canadianness (no offense intended), and extreme bad child acting of Goosebumps, it's not so horrible. And it's a sight better than Caillou.
Yes, Katherine has fallen under the spell of that infamous bald 4-year-old boil on the butt of cartoon-kind. If I were a better mother, perhaps I would stimulate her brain by reading to her all day, having her put together 100-piece puzzles singlehandedly, or taking her on a new, stimulating cultural adventure every day. Unfortunately (and not), I have to work. So she watches some TV. Her preferences are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (tolerable, now that we're far enough out from Alex's Mouse-ka-days that the hot-dog song doesn't make me want to drive rusty nails into my eardrums), Fresh Beat Band (even WITH the new Marina and her giant mouth and never-gonna-measure-up-to-her-predecessor desperation), and yes, leading the pack, Caillou. She likes Elmo but has no patience for the other residents, whether human or monster or unidentifiable muppet creature, of Sesame Street.
Most of the time, though, she has no patience for sitting and watching TV, which is great except when she brings me a toy, book, or random object and slaps it right smack down into the middle of my keyboard, either coincidentally or not (as I'm beginning to believe) shutting down the program I was working in or inserting a whole bunch of errors that my clients would likely frown upon.
When she's doing something wrong and I catch her at it, she immediately stands up, smiles so sweetly you'd swear she's the female Damien, waves, and says, "Hiiii!" And you're wrong if you think that's not persuasive. Sometimes I manage to hide my laughter in the couch cushion, but my girl she is no dummy. But I tell her every day, cute will only get you so far. We still don't rip pages out of books, lick the dogs, or poke our fingers into the Blu-Ray player slot. And now that Christmas stuff is up, we don't take the crudely constructed wooden baby Jesus out of his makeshift cardboard manger and try to eat him. Call me strict.
Christmas shopping is all but done, and every day that goes by that I trip over Katherine's play vacuum or slip on an errant marble or jump when T.J. Bearytales lets out a bone-chilling blat of discordant music as his batteries slowly die makes me more set on the idea that my kids just don't NEED a whole lot. Give Katherine an empty box and a Happy Meal race car. Give Alex a piece of paper and find him a YouTube video of the lady who does step-by-step origami. They're all set.
That's it for now. I'm skipping over the ugly details of our recently ousted stomach virus because I'm still two brain-bleachings away from completely forgetting the ordeal. In fact, I'm skipping over a lot of things. But here is my nod to what we're up to in this almost-December of 2011 world. I take some solace in the fact that there's no more significant news to report.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Wherein I blog badly
Forgive me if this post is only semi-literate. I'm tired. Katherine was up all night for the first time in ... well, ever ... and that's including those newborn days when she would wake up, suck down a midnight snack, and go straight back to sleep. Yes, I know how lucky we were.
Last night was a different story. She was very obviously having trouble getting comfortable. It started with moaning, tossing and turning. At one point I went in and her head was pressed up against the foot of the bed, one arm flung over the back of her head and one leg sticking through the bars of her crib (and here I thought one of the bazillion crib recalls had addressed that particular hazard).
She was fine as long as I was holding her, but when this became clear it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't fancy standing next to her crib holding her for the next three hours. So I thought to myself, Self, no one is getting any sleep this way. Let's just put her in our bed. Myself and I did so. And we discovered, quickly, that our girl is a burrower. She would wiggle around until her face was smushed right up against my own, which was fine and dandy except that my nose and mouth were buried in her chubby cheeks and I couldn't breathe. So I moved, and she went over to her daddy, who was still out cold, and burrowed into his side until he woke up and made the grave mistake of rubbing her head, which she took as a sign that it was time to play. Cue flopping and rolling and general delirium culminating in her patting (slapping) me on the face a few times, until I opened my eyes and looked at her ... and she waved "hi" at me.
Suffice it to say, bringing her in bed with us is not an option.
Today, after a trip to the doctor, we know it's a virus and an ear infection and she's started antibiotics and is Motrined up. My plan is to attempt to sleep on the couch with her if it proves to be a night like last night. I figure one of us should get some peaceful sleep, and why not let it be Steven, since I can ostensibly neglect to shower and/or dress and still get some work done tomorrow.
Which brings me to the all-around ick that was this day.
Sometimes I think on-the-job training is insufficient when it comes to parenthood. There should be a boot camp of sorts, an immersion crash course covering every scenario you might possibly encounter over the next eighteen years and then some.
I mean, parenthood. It's arguably the most important job there is, right, and there's nothing that can prepare you for all it entails. It's the great equalizer, isn't it? We grow these creatures in our bodies, we plan and prepare and stockpile gear and necessities and read All Those Books like our lives depend on it and formulate opinions on things we never before considered (cloth or disposable? breast or bottle? co-sleeping or crib? paci or not?). We decorate nurseries as though matching a bed skirt to a window treatment or finding the perfect shade of paint for those wooden wall-hanging monograms of the future occupant's future name is going to make one bit of difference.
The rules change when it becomes reality, and that happens at different times for different people. Women, more often than not, have their epiphany earlier than men, who don't suffer the back pain or the massive body changes, the blood pressure ups and downs and the sleep deprivation from fifteen nightly trips to the bathroom, who don't feel the squirms and bumps of an ACTUAL BABY growing and subsisting in their ACTUAL BODY.
Fast-forward six years, to the child who someone less sensitive than I might call our guinea pig. When we had him, my husband and I barely knew anything about being grownups, much less parents. We got dogs and thought they were a good-enough trial run. Essentially, we were stupid. Or at least its kinder equivalent, naive. Ever since, there has been something new around every corner. First diaper change, first trip to Children's Hospital ER, first public tantrum, first day of kindergarten, first day he didn't want me to sing him a song before bed ... firsts every day, every single day.
It hasn't been easy lately. In some ways my boy is old beyond his years. The child has been speaking coherently since the ripe old age of nine months, and while he has retained certain little Alexisms from yesteryear (i.e. he still says "I had bleed," instead of "I bled," for instance, and his prepositions and verb tenses aren't so polished, and some of his mispronunciations I will never correct because they are just damn cute and I'll probably continue to think so when he's sixteen and other people deem it a bit odd). But he's six. He's six and growing up too fast because that's what kids do these days. I don't think we did. But maybe members of every generation believe that they were kids longer than they were, because childhood, when you're in it, seems eternal, vast and all-encompassing with no boundaries or time constraints.
So, as a mother, I struggle to merge the duality of my son's six-year-oldness and his desire and sporadic successes at being, or at least seeming, much older than that.
"You have recess after lunch?" my mother asked him one day.
"Yes, that's correct," he replied seriously.
Who talks like that? My sometimes-pretentious first-grade man-in-the-making.
Now, and by now I mean this week, he's obsessed with sportsmanship. He is a bad sport, he says, and having seen some of his disproportionate outbursts when he loses, I can't honestly disagree with him. But we've discussed how it's a choice, not how he feels when he loses, but what he does with how he feels. (Sometimes therapy starts at home.)
But he stubbornly refuses to admit that he knows that's the case. "I made the choice to be a good sport," he told me tonight through gritted teeth, from behind the pantry door where he'd chosen to hide so as to avoid looking me in the eye. "It didn't work."
Just now I went into his room for our reading time, and I found a note on his floor.
"That's for you," he said.
"Oh really, what's it for?"
"You told me how to be a good sport, and now the good sport is just popping right out of me."
I hope, hope, hope, that we're doing right by him. But again, without the handbook, who ever knows? I wish there were report cards for parenthood. Something to let you know if your kid is on the path to greatness, or to simple happiness, or to self-fulfillment ... or to prison. Not that those are the only options, mind, but I'd take any of the first three.
And I know it's not all nurture because nature plays a role. From that I take solace and find new worries, because I am me and it's my nature.
No one instilled it in me. It's just me.
Just like Alex is Alex, sweet and stubborn and earnest, goofy and serious and fiercely loyal, tenderhearted, maddening, and temperamental.
Just like Katherine is Katherine, affectionate and obstinate, funny and exasperating, a hyperactive, intoxicated monkey as a bunkmate and a squishy piece of heaven after bathtime.
All I can say is that we're doing it, day by day, helping these little people grow and trying our blind best to facilitate that growth, to guide without pushing, and to instill in them the simplest and the most important fact that anyone can hope to possess: that they are loved without question and beyond reason.
Last night was a different story. She was very obviously having trouble getting comfortable. It started with moaning, tossing and turning. At one point I went in and her head was pressed up against the foot of the bed, one arm flung over the back of her head and one leg sticking through the bars of her crib (and here I thought one of the bazillion crib recalls had addressed that particular hazard).
She was fine as long as I was holding her, but when this became clear it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't fancy standing next to her crib holding her for the next three hours. So I thought to myself, Self, no one is getting any sleep this way. Let's just put her in our bed. Myself and I did so. And we discovered, quickly, that our girl is a burrower. She would wiggle around until her face was smushed right up against my own, which was fine and dandy except that my nose and mouth were buried in her chubby cheeks and I couldn't breathe. So I moved, and she went over to her daddy, who was still out cold, and burrowed into his side until he woke up and made the grave mistake of rubbing her head, which she took as a sign that it was time to play. Cue flopping and rolling and general delirium culminating in her patting (slapping) me on the face a few times, until I opened my eyes and looked at her ... and she waved "hi" at me.
Suffice it to say, bringing her in bed with us is not an option.
Today, after a trip to the doctor, we know it's a virus and an ear infection and she's started antibiotics and is Motrined up. My plan is to attempt to sleep on the couch with her if it proves to be a night like last night. I figure one of us should get some peaceful sleep, and why not let it be Steven, since I can ostensibly neglect to shower and/or dress and still get some work done tomorrow.
Which brings me to the all-around ick that was this day.
Sometimes I think on-the-job training is insufficient when it comes to parenthood. There should be a boot camp of sorts, an immersion crash course covering every scenario you might possibly encounter over the next eighteen years and then some.
I mean, parenthood. It's arguably the most important job there is, right, and there's nothing that can prepare you for all it entails. It's the great equalizer, isn't it? We grow these creatures in our bodies, we plan and prepare and stockpile gear and necessities and read All Those Books like our lives depend on it and formulate opinions on things we never before considered (cloth or disposable? breast or bottle? co-sleeping or crib? paci or not?). We decorate nurseries as though matching a bed skirt to a window treatment or finding the perfect shade of paint for those wooden wall-hanging monograms of the future occupant's future name is going to make one bit of difference.
The rules change when it becomes reality, and that happens at different times for different people. Women, more often than not, have their epiphany earlier than men, who don't suffer the back pain or the massive body changes, the blood pressure ups and downs and the sleep deprivation from fifteen nightly trips to the bathroom, who don't feel the squirms and bumps of an ACTUAL BABY growing and subsisting in their ACTUAL BODY.
Fast-forward six years, to the child who someone less sensitive than I might call our guinea pig. When we had him, my husband and I barely knew anything about being grownups, much less parents. We got dogs and thought they were a good-enough trial run. Essentially, we were stupid. Or at least its kinder equivalent, naive. Ever since, there has been something new around every corner. First diaper change, first trip to Children's Hospital ER, first public tantrum, first day of kindergarten, first day he didn't want me to sing him a song before bed ... firsts every day, every single day.
It hasn't been easy lately. In some ways my boy is old beyond his years. The child has been speaking coherently since the ripe old age of nine months, and while he has retained certain little Alexisms from yesteryear (i.e. he still says "I had bleed," instead of "I bled," for instance, and his prepositions and verb tenses aren't so polished, and some of his mispronunciations I will never correct because they are just damn cute and I'll probably continue to think so when he's sixteen and other people deem it a bit odd). But he's six. He's six and growing up too fast because that's what kids do these days. I don't think we did. But maybe members of every generation believe that they were kids longer than they were, because childhood, when you're in it, seems eternal, vast and all-encompassing with no boundaries or time constraints.
So, as a mother, I struggle to merge the duality of my son's six-year-oldness and his desire and sporadic successes at being, or at least seeming, much older than that.
"You have recess after lunch?" my mother asked him one day.
"Yes, that's correct," he replied seriously.
Who talks like that? My sometimes-pretentious first-grade man-in-the-making.
Now, and by now I mean this week, he's obsessed with sportsmanship. He is a bad sport, he says, and having seen some of his disproportionate outbursts when he loses, I can't honestly disagree with him. But we've discussed how it's a choice, not how he feels when he loses, but what he does with how he feels. (Sometimes therapy starts at home.)
But he stubbornly refuses to admit that he knows that's the case. "I made the choice to be a good sport," he told me tonight through gritted teeth, from behind the pantry door where he'd chosen to hide so as to avoid looking me in the eye. "It didn't work."
Just now I went into his room for our reading time, and I found a note on his floor.
"That's for you," he said.
"Oh really, what's it for?"
"You told me how to be a good sport, and now the good sport is just popping right out of me."
I hope, hope, hope, that we're doing right by him. But again, without the handbook, who ever knows? I wish there were report cards for parenthood. Something to let you know if your kid is on the path to greatness, or to simple happiness, or to self-fulfillment ... or to prison. Not that those are the only options, mind, but I'd take any of the first three.
And I know it's not all nurture because nature plays a role. From that I take solace and find new worries, because I am me and it's my nature.
No one instilled it in me. It's just me.
Just like Alex is Alex, sweet and stubborn and earnest, goofy and serious and fiercely loyal, tenderhearted, maddening, and temperamental.
Just like Katherine is Katherine, affectionate and obstinate, funny and exasperating, a hyperactive, intoxicated monkey as a bunkmate and a squishy piece of heaven after bathtime.
All I can say is that we're doing it, day by day, helping these little people grow and trying our blind best to facilitate that growth, to guide without pushing, and to instill in them the simplest and the most important fact that anyone can hope to possess: that they are loved without question and beyond reason.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Home Work
I work from home.
We know this.
I hear comments all the time about how lucky I am to be able to do that, and I agree, and I'm endlessly grateful that it has (as of this blog post) worked out well for me. God, I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that!
When I worked in an office, especially in my most recent one, I spent five days a week longing wistfully for the weekend, spinning fantasies of working from home in pajamas and fuzzy socks, editing at my leisure without interruption and maybe even starting on that book I've been wanting to write since I set forth that goal at the age of 7, the comforts of home with (bonus!) enough work to keep my brain from atrophying, which it was doing at a rapid clip in my last incarnation as a not-so-glorified proofreader. (Side note: Never make the mistake of calling a copy editor a proofreader.)
The reality is that some of it is actually like that. I am partial to my fuzzy socks. I have, generally, a steady flow of work. Home is comfortable when the dogs aren't obsessively licking their paws and after I get in my daily dose of vacuuming. I cannot focus on anything if there is a strand of dog hair or a speck of dust on the floor, and I realize that doesn't make me sound precisely stable and I don't particularly care. Some people have their morning coffee. I have my morning Dyson.
Recently, though, I lost one of my main (minus the "one of") gigs and I feel obligated to say it was through no fault of my own but due to company cutbacks. (Aah, those. I'm familiar. Once upon a time a bunch of amazingly talented people worked together ... and then New York took over.)
Recently also, my baby became a toddler, which means that the days of two, two-hour-long naps are over and the days of abandoning the laptop to extract the child when she has managed to wedge herself between the coffee table and the couch with an oversized book, or of running to see what just fell in the kitchen, or of saying, "Don't touch" more times than is prudent before I actually get up and move her bodily. Or of cuddling the tears away when she leans over too far in the act of examining her belly button and tips over on the hardwood floor on her head.
Some days more time is spent comforting, cajoling, and containing the stress of knowing, at the back of my mind, that I'm going to be working into the wee hours to meet a deadline because my children come first. Unfailingly, unchangeably, unapologetically.
Not that they haven't always. Alex was in child care from the time he was 3 months old, and the time I got a call from the daycare to say he couldn't turn his head I fled my cubicle like my desk chair had spontaneously combusted and I was next. Meningitis, was my fear. A crick in the neck, it turned out to be.
But wiping snot with one hand and noting structural errors in prose with the other has become a regular day at the office, which happens to contain my couch, my fuzzy socks, my vacuum cleaner, and my beloved family.
Those recent developments (or, rather, setbacks) I mentioned before weighed on me for a while, but not a long while. Like, ten minutes, the time it took for me to hang up the phone and process the information before realizing that Katherine was being too quiet and finding her in the kitchen, happily patting an impressively tall pile of spilled kosher salt into the linoleum. And I knew I had no choice but to roll with it.
"We'll work it out," Steven tells me when I step over the line from stressed to anxious. And I believe him, even if he's just saying it because he needs to believe it, too. We do what we have to do, and we make things work. Sometimes they don't work quite the way we want them to, but then we just head down that path and see what's there. It can't hurt to look, and it may hurt more than you'll ever get the chance to know, not to.
It's a lesson I learned not so long ago, and one I'll keep learning every time something unpredictable happens and I'm forced to reevaluate. I'm tougher than I give myself credit for, more often than not. Or so I've been told by those who know me best.
But yeah, it's nice to work in fuzzy socks, and the spontaneous hugs and kisses from that walking maker of messes when I'm in the middle of a project that's due in ten minutes? That's priceless.
We know this.
I hear comments all the time about how lucky I am to be able to do that, and I agree, and I'm endlessly grateful that it has (as of this blog post) worked out well for me. God, I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that!
When I worked in an office, especially in my most recent one, I spent five days a week longing wistfully for the weekend, spinning fantasies of working from home in pajamas and fuzzy socks, editing at my leisure without interruption and maybe even starting on that book I've been wanting to write since I set forth that goal at the age of 7, the comforts of home with (bonus!) enough work to keep my brain from atrophying, which it was doing at a rapid clip in my last incarnation as a not-so-glorified proofreader. (Side note: Never make the mistake of calling a copy editor a proofreader.)
The reality is that some of it is actually like that. I am partial to my fuzzy socks. I have, generally, a steady flow of work. Home is comfortable when the dogs aren't obsessively licking their paws and after I get in my daily dose of vacuuming. I cannot focus on anything if there is a strand of dog hair or a speck of dust on the floor, and I realize that doesn't make me sound precisely stable and I don't particularly care. Some people have their morning coffee. I have my morning Dyson.
Recently, though, I lost one of my main (minus the "one of") gigs and I feel obligated to say it was through no fault of my own but due to company cutbacks. (Aah, those. I'm familiar. Once upon a time a bunch of amazingly talented people worked together ... and then New York took over.)
Recently also, my baby became a toddler, which means that the days of two, two-hour-long naps are over and the days of abandoning the laptop to extract the child when she has managed to wedge herself between the coffee table and the couch with an oversized book, or of running to see what just fell in the kitchen, or of saying, "Don't touch" more times than is prudent before I actually get up and move her bodily. Or of cuddling the tears away when she leans over too far in the act of examining her belly button and tips over on the hardwood floor on her head.
Some days more time is spent comforting, cajoling, and containing the stress of knowing, at the back of my mind, that I'm going to be working into the wee hours to meet a deadline because my children come first. Unfailingly, unchangeably, unapologetically.
Not that they haven't always. Alex was in child care from the time he was 3 months old, and the time I got a call from the daycare to say he couldn't turn his head I fled my cubicle like my desk chair had spontaneously combusted and I was next. Meningitis, was my fear. A crick in the neck, it turned out to be.
But wiping snot with one hand and noting structural errors in prose with the other has become a regular day at the office, which happens to contain my couch, my fuzzy socks, my vacuum cleaner, and my beloved family.
Those recent developments (or, rather, setbacks) I mentioned before weighed on me for a while, but not a long while. Like, ten minutes, the time it took for me to hang up the phone and process the information before realizing that Katherine was being too quiet and finding her in the kitchen, happily patting an impressively tall pile of spilled kosher salt into the linoleum. And I knew I had no choice but to roll with it.
"We'll work it out," Steven tells me when I step over the line from stressed to anxious. And I believe him, even if he's just saying it because he needs to believe it, too. We do what we have to do, and we make things work. Sometimes they don't work quite the way we want them to, but then we just head down that path and see what's there. It can't hurt to look, and it may hurt more than you'll ever get the chance to know, not to.
It's a lesson I learned not so long ago, and one I'll keep learning every time something unpredictable happens and I'm forced to reevaluate. I'm tougher than I give myself credit for, more often than not. Or so I've been told by those who know me best.
But yeah, it's nice to work in fuzzy socks, and the spontaneous hugs and kisses from that walking maker of messes when I'm in the middle of a project that's due in ten minutes? That's priceless.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Dead fish and toddler frustration
Since I posted last, Alex's fish died. Again. Only this time there was no smooth cover-up operation, partly because I felt guilty for lying to him the first time and partly because, well, how many times can you replace a pet with such a naturally high mortality rate before (a) the kid notices or (b) you start to feel like you're taking the easy way out because you can't stand to see the kid sad.
And really, seeing the kid sad is pretty awful. I'm sure all parents feel that way about their kids, and I'm sure Alex's tears are not unique in their ability to make anyone who sees them feel like they did when the hunter shot Bambi's mother.
I debated ways to phrase the bad news, ranging from "Finny is no longer with us" to "Have you ever heard of fish heaven?" to "So, about that fish of yours..."
But "Finny's dead" popped out, Band-Aid ripped off, and it was like that time that I actually DID rip Alex's Band-Aid off and realized that that bit of advice is not to be universally employed. Like, for example, when the Band-Aid-covered wound is on the child's FACE and you have ten minutes before you have to take him to meet his kindergarten teacher with an angry red splotch on his cheek that looks suspiciously like a slap mark. Nice.
His grief over Finny was brief but intense, both of which seem to be defining characteristics of childhood emotions both good and bad.
Luckily for all concerned, we left for a long weekend with the Texas family the next day, leaving behind an empty aquarium filled with weeks' worth of fond memories of Finny the Fish (the Second, but you didn't hear that from me). For a while there was a shrine in the spot where the tank used to be, a water glass filled with water and a seashell, a note that was heartbreaking in its earnestness, and a spotlight fashioned from the aquarium lid.
Now that Alex's heart seems to have healed (a couple of weeks seems sufficient mourning time for a pet you've only had for a minute), he's on to bigger and better things. New DS games, for instance, and counting backwards by tens from 200, and jumping up three reading levels since the beginning of first grade. Life is in constant flux when you're six.
Katherine has suddenly grown dimples because, apparently, her face didn't think it was irresistible enough without them. Were I one to be swayed by cuteness, we might have a problem in the coming years. Steven is one to be swayed by cuteness, so we'll see how that shakes out.
We're fully ensnared in Mother's Day Out two days a week now, and the drop-offs are as not-fun as I remember them from Alex's child-care days, and the pick-ups are generally filled with trepidation; the main teacher makes vague accusations like "She had her moments" and "When the mood of the room changes, she gets upset." And I try not to take it personally because these are not judgments on Katherine's 15-month-old character nor mine as her mother. I ask, after all, invariably, "How did she do today?" I guess I should inform her that the only answer I'm really interested in, whether true or false, is "Great!"
I've always been a proponent of the ignorance-is-bliss approach to life. I guess I could just quit asking.
I'm ready for her to start talking more now, and not because I'm paranoid. I know that she will start talking and that one day, if she's anything like her brother, we'll wonder that we ever wanted to rush it. But I do think it would cut back on some of her frustration. She knows what she wants unfailingly, at all times. And she wants you to know that she knows what she wants. And she wants you to give it to her. Yesterday. "More, more, more," she signs incessantly, increasingly frustrated as you play the destined-for-failure guessing game. "More what? More milk? More goldfish? More Fresh Beat Band? More ... patience?"
When you stumble upon the correct more, she rewards you with one of the newly dimpled grins, and you've earned a gold star for cracking the code.
The whole tiring scene, replayed fifty-some-odd times a day, makes me think fondly and perhaps a little revisionistically on Alex's baby days, when he said things like "Mother, a cookie would really hit the spot" and "I would like for you to pick me up now." OK, no, but certainly "Cookie, peez!" and "Up, peez, Mama!"
Katherine just likes to make us work for it a little harder. She is honing her feminine powers.
In the meantime, I just need to improve my guessing skills.
And really, seeing the kid sad is pretty awful. I'm sure all parents feel that way about their kids, and I'm sure Alex's tears are not unique in their ability to make anyone who sees them feel like they did when the hunter shot Bambi's mother.
I debated ways to phrase the bad news, ranging from "Finny is no longer with us" to "Have you ever heard of fish heaven?" to "So, about that fish of yours..."
But "Finny's dead" popped out, Band-Aid ripped off, and it was like that time that I actually DID rip Alex's Band-Aid off and realized that that bit of advice is not to be universally employed. Like, for example, when the Band-Aid-covered wound is on the child's FACE and you have ten minutes before you have to take him to meet his kindergarten teacher with an angry red splotch on his cheek that looks suspiciously like a slap mark. Nice.
His grief over Finny was brief but intense, both of which seem to be defining characteristics of childhood emotions both good and bad.
Luckily for all concerned, we left for a long weekend with the Texas family the next day, leaving behind an empty aquarium filled with weeks' worth of fond memories of Finny the Fish (the Second, but you didn't hear that from me). For a while there was a shrine in the spot where the tank used to be, a water glass filled with water and a seashell, a note that was heartbreaking in its earnestness, and a spotlight fashioned from the aquarium lid.
Now that Alex's heart seems to have healed (a couple of weeks seems sufficient mourning time for a pet you've only had for a minute), he's on to bigger and better things. New DS games, for instance, and counting backwards by tens from 200, and jumping up three reading levels since the beginning of first grade. Life is in constant flux when you're six.
Katherine has suddenly grown dimples because, apparently, her face didn't think it was irresistible enough without them. Were I one to be swayed by cuteness, we might have a problem in the coming years. Steven is one to be swayed by cuteness, so we'll see how that shakes out.
We're fully ensnared in Mother's Day Out two days a week now, and the drop-offs are as not-fun as I remember them from Alex's child-care days, and the pick-ups are generally filled with trepidation; the main teacher makes vague accusations like "She had her moments" and "When the mood of the room changes, she gets upset." And I try not to take it personally because these are not judgments on Katherine's 15-month-old character nor mine as her mother. I ask, after all, invariably, "How did she do today?" I guess I should inform her that the only answer I'm really interested in, whether true or false, is "Great!"
I've always been a proponent of the ignorance-is-bliss approach to life. I guess I could just quit asking.
I'm ready for her to start talking more now, and not because I'm paranoid. I know that she will start talking and that one day, if she's anything like her brother, we'll wonder that we ever wanted to rush it. But I do think it would cut back on some of her frustration. She knows what she wants unfailingly, at all times. And she wants you to know that she knows what she wants. And she wants you to give it to her. Yesterday. "More, more, more," she signs incessantly, increasingly frustrated as you play the destined-for-failure guessing game. "More what? More milk? More goldfish? More Fresh Beat Band? More ... patience?"
When you stumble upon the correct more, she rewards you with one of the newly dimpled grins, and you've earned a gold star for cracking the code.
The whole tiring scene, replayed fifty-some-odd times a day, makes me think fondly and perhaps a little revisionistically on Alex's baby days, when he said things like "Mother, a cookie would really hit the spot" and "I would like for you to pick me up now." OK, no, but certainly "Cookie, peez!" and "Up, peez, Mama!"
Katherine just likes to make us work for it a little harder. She is honing her feminine powers.
In the meantime, I just need to improve my guessing skills.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Not so deep thoughts
Tonight I am extra thankful for my husband.
I guess it's easy to take the really good ones for granted. The ones who bathe the baby without being asked, who know when you're upset and need to be left alone versus when you're upset and need someone to be just as righteously angry as you are versus when you just need a good hug and an assurance that it's going to be okay.
I try not to do that, take it for granted, because I know how lucky I am. I know that Steven is One of the Good Guys, and I'm pretty sure they're few and far between. At least from what I've seen. He makes me laugh, he keeps me sane. He loves me when I'm finding it hard to love myself. He is my balance, my anchor, my home. And, thank God, he's the father of my children.
My baby is now walking, and I think the crippled-crab crawl is gone forever. Bittersweet. She still walks sort of like Frankenstein, and the least distraction has her freezing and holding her arms out for balance, and she has the first little scrapes on her perfect baby skin, knees and elbows, from taking tumbles that she gets right back up from and keeps going on her merry way. She occasionally holds on to my finger but more often than not pushes my proffered hand away in a grand gesture of independence. Last week at a bookstore she insisted on doing it herself, and it took us a good 20 minutes to make it from the back of the store to the checkout counter, but she was proud as could be.
My other baby (who says I can still call him that, but only in private) is a big first grader, who likes to sit on the first grade bench and who has decided he's in love with our former neighbor girl. One day when his class was on the way to recess, Liddy was en route to the bathroom when she saw Alex, ran over, and hugged him. When she left, he says, a little girl from his class asked, "Who WAS that?" which led Alex to believe that she is in love with HIM, and has determined that he shouldn't tell her he's in love with Liddy because it might hurt her feelings.
Who knew the soap operatic antics begin in first grade?
Katherine will be starting Mother's Day Out two days a week in a few weeks. I know the first day is going to be hard for both of us. After all, we have not been separated, essentially, since conception, my girls' beach weekend notwithstanding. MDO will give me eight hours a week of uninterrupted work time, and the idea of THAT is so tempting that maybe I will be able to let go of her tiny hand and walk out without crying. You'd think it would be easier with the second one, but since Alex was in care from the time he was 3 months old, it was different with him, somehow. But I honestly think his experiences have led to his (to me and his father) incredible ability to roll with the punches, to make friends in any environment, to be the strong, confident, easygoing kid he has grown to be.
I've been very content lately. Life is good. And when it's not, it's at least funny, interesting, or enlightening.
Katherine, who has taken to raiding our pots-and-pans cabinet, came out one night with a clear-Plexiglas pot lid, put it on her head like a hat, and laughed like it was the best joke ever. But the funniest thing to US was when Alex, cracking up himself, said, "Katherine's a pot head!"
Oh, kids.
I've managed to scare up some extra work and have yet to be let go from my primary source of income even though their recent "restructuring" scared the daylights out of me. I originally said I'd give this work-at-home deal a try for a year and if it didn't work out, I'd go back to an office job. But the time I get with the kids that I wouldn't have any other way is precious, and I wouldn't trade it even on the days when I have a triple deadline and Katherine isn't in the mood to let go of a big handful of my hair.
It's stuff you don't get back. Like the crab crawl. Like fluffy-haired Alex. Like watching them grow up, little by little, and still being startled when the older one comes into the room with pajamas that fit him a second ago suddenly stopping well above his ankles. Like going from Mommy to Mom without realizing it's happening.
It's no different for moms who work outside the home; I've been one of those, too.
If I learned anything from my first go-round with parenting, it's that nothing is insignificant and that it's important to take mental snapshots along the way.
I guess it's easy to take the really good ones for granted. The ones who bathe the baby without being asked, who know when you're upset and need to be left alone versus when you're upset and need someone to be just as righteously angry as you are versus when you just need a good hug and an assurance that it's going to be okay.
I try not to do that, take it for granted, because I know how lucky I am. I know that Steven is One of the Good Guys, and I'm pretty sure they're few and far between. At least from what I've seen. He makes me laugh, he keeps me sane. He loves me when I'm finding it hard to love myself. He is my balance, my anchor, my home. And, thank God, he's the father of my children.
My baby is now walking, and I think the crippled-crab crawl is gone forever. Bittersweet. She still walks sort of like Frankenstein, and the least distraction has her freezing and holding her arms out for balance, and she has the first little scrapes on her perfect baby skin, knees and elbows, from taking tumbles that she gets right back up from and keeps going on her merry way. She occasionally holds on to my finger but more often than not pushes my proffered hand away in a grand gesture of independence. Last week at a bookstore she insisted on doing it herself, and it took us a good 20 minutes to make it from the back of the store to the checkout counter, but she was proud as could be.
My other baby (who says I can still call him that, but only in private) is a big first grader, who likes to sit on the first grade bench and who has decided he's in love with our former neighbor girl. One day when his class was on the way to recess, Liddy was en route to the bathroom when she saw Alex, ran over, and hugged him. When she left, he says, a little girl from his class asked, "Who WAS that?" which led Alex to believe that she is in love with HIM, and has determined that he shouldn't tell her he's in love with Liddy because it might hurt her feelings.
Who knew the soap operatic antics begin in first grade?
Katherine will be starting Mother's Day Out two days a week in a few weeks. I know the first day is going to be hard for both of us. After all, we have not been separated, essentially, since conception, my girls' beach weekend notwithstanding. MDO will give me eight hours a week of uninterrupted work time, and the idea of THAT is so tempting that maybe I will be able to let go of her tiny hand and walk out without crying. You'd think it would be easier with the second one, but since Alex was in care from the time he was 3 months old, it was different with him, somehow. But I honestly think his experiences have led to his (to me and his father) incredible ability to roll with the punches, to make friends in any environment, to be the strong, confident, easygoing kid he has grown to be.
I've been very content lately. Life is good. And when it's not, it's at least funny, interesting, or enlightening.
Katherine, who has taken to raiding our pots-and-pans cabinet, came out one night with a clear-Plexiglas pot lid, put it on her head like a hat, and laughed like it was the best joke ever. But the funniest thing to US was when Alex, cracking up himself, said, "Katherine's a pot head!"
Oh, kids.
I've managed to scare up some extra work and have yet to be let go from my primary source of income even though their recent "restructuring" scared the daylights out of me. I originally said I'd give this work-at-home deal a try for a year and if it didn't work out, I'd go back to an office job. But the time I get with the kids that I wouldn't have any other way is precious, and I wouldn't trade it even on the days when I have a triple deadline and Katherine isn't in the mood to let go of a big handful of my hair.
It's stuff you don't get back. Like the crab crawl. Like fluffy-haired Alex. Like watching them grow up, little by little, and still being startled when the older one comes into the room with pajamas that fit him a second ago suddenly stopping well above his ankles. Like going from Mommy to Mom without realizing it's happening.
It's no different for moms who work outside the home; I've been one of those, too.
If I learned anything from my first go-round with parenting, it's that nothing is insignificant and that it's important to take mental snapshots along the way.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Life is funny, even when it's boring
I have this fantasy of life running like a well-oiled machine. Laundry doesn't pile up. Dishes are promptly loaded into the dishwasher, washed, and put away. Dinner disasters don't happen. The children are sweet and happy and entertain themselves quietly while I get my work done. The floors don't keep needing to be mopped because of muddy pawprints, and the culprits of those pawprints don't keep making their beds in the mud under the deck. There is no dust. There are no stray goldfish crackers in the crevices of the couch, or greasy little handprints on the TV screen. I don't lose my cool, ever, and my hair is always presentable. And I don't wear clothes with dried arrowroot cookie smudges on them.
It doesn't last too long, the fantasy, because usually by the time I get to the laundry part I'm too busy running the vacuum cleaner (or lately, my Godsent little handheld Dirt Devil) to suck up breakfast crumbs under the table or scrubbing sticky finger leavings from the chairs.
And then I sit down to do my work, be it editing or writing or occasionally self-promoting so that I can do more editing and writing. Katherine plays happily for a good 15 minutes while her breakfast digests and The Fresh Beat Band is on, Alex takes about twice that long to get dressed (factoring in the inevitable re-do that comes when he dresses in clothes he got out of the dirty-clothes hamper, puts on a shirt that fit him two years ago but that now shows his belly button, or just forgets what he was doing altogether, on which occasions I find him sitting on his floor in his underwear, making signs for the aquarium he's going to open in his bedroom, admission required and a Betta fish the main and only attraction).
I realize that, if you'll excuse the analogy, the road of life has potholes. Big ones. The kind you can lose a tire in, if you're not extra-careful, or at least jostle something loose from the undercarriage and spend a few weeks worrying about the rattling sound until it goes away on its own.
But some weeks it's harder to remember that the road always smooths out. Some weeks you're just plain spent. Or just plain anxious. Or just plain overwhelmed. And I've come to understand that those kinds of weeks are okay too, as long as you don't get stuck there and let the mind-set best you.
So now I'm always looking toward the next thing that's going to push me out of the pothole. Alex starting back to school is one. Katherine starting to walk is another, and my back is thanking me for it.
Much less is it thanking me for my recent decision to undertake Jillian Michaels' 30-Day Shred, which got rave reviews all over the place and which, from my first session, I've decided is a form of preparation for an afterlife spent in Hell. (I need to go to church.)
Alex has a new backpack (it bothers him that it's flat, but I told him it will get less flat when there's stuff IN it) and a new lunchbox even though he usually buys his lunch because I am A Lazy Mother. He has tie shoes and he calls them that, "tieshoes," like it's just the one word, and they come untied about 75 times a day, so apologies in advance to his first-grade teacher.
I know he's ready to go back to school because he's complaining about being bored, which he knows means I'll put him to work, and he's doing weird things like tying his tieshoes together and trying to walk across the backyard, peeing into an empty water bottle and hiding it behind the toilet (???), and playing hide-and-seek with Katherine, who forgets she's playing after 60 seconds and leaves him crouched under my bed for half an hour before he realizes she's not looking for him.
Katherine, while we were waiting for her incisors to pop in so we could have our sweet girl back, cut two surprise teeth at the same time, further back and seemingly VERY painful. So now I understand her weeklong upset. She's back to laughing, walking like a very short, very drunk person, falling on her well-padded behind, and giving everything in sight big open-mouthed kisses. I was flattered until I saw her kissing Steven's shoelaces the other night.
So, all in all, right now things are. We're in a holding pattern while Big Things await. I'm doing some editing for a former co-worker who left the pack, moved to Orlando, and created a wonderful publication called Edible Orlando (edibleorlando.com). I'm doing some editing for Oxmoor House, the book division of Southern Progress ificanstillcallitthat. I'm writing daily health and wellness posts for a corporate wellness company and can maybe feel a bit less hypocritical about those if I manage to survive the next 29 days, JILLIAN. I'm writing for Alabama magazine, and have written for Birmingham Home & Garden. I'm working on a little project of my own, too, and am determined to stick with it this time and not let my muse die as it has so many times before.
I'm busy and I'm stumbling along and I'm no longer feeling guilty for being SO INCREDIBLY READY for my boy to go back to school. I think of Katherine's morning naps and of all the work I can get done in blessed silence.
Sometimes I miss an office, even if it was just two flimsy walls with a big beach umbrella overhead (what WERE those anyway?). I miss people who don't drool on me or try to steal my F2 key. (I'm not sure what it does, honestly, but thanks to Katherine now I'll never know.)
But mostly I feel lucky to be doing what I'm doing and that I still enjoy it and that people still seem to think I'm good enough to give me more and more work.
And aside from the work part, I've recently re-realized the fact that God knew exactly what He was doing when He put Steven and me together and gave us these amazing, frustrating, temperamental, earnest, confounding, fascinating, hilarious, heartrending kids. Thanks for that.
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