Since my pal Valle doesn't have a blog (she should!) and thus I can't link to her song and add it to the Google thingamajig on the right...I am going to share it with you here.
Close your eyes...
A note to any and all of my small (but exceedingly great) coterie of readers, please consider yourself tagged. If you post about a song you sing or sang to your children, send me the link and I'll add it to the thingamajig.
As I was lamenting a few days ago, bedtime has really changed around here. Though I have been pretty good at enforcing my new "power-down-a-half-hour-before-bedtime" edict, I have (I told you I would!) given them back their music.
Back in the day, I sang songs to them every night. I had a couple that I sang over and over again. One of their all time favorites was Across the Great Divide by Kate Bush. Here it is sung, much better than I ever did, by Nanci Griffith.
I sure would like to know what songs you sing or sang to your children, so I am gonna tag Mizmell, Slouching Mom and (un)relaxeddad.
How about sharing a link or a video version of a song you sing or sang to your children? If you leave 'em in the comments, I'll keep track of them all right here. If you write a post about it in (or is it on?) your own blog, I'll add your post to my handy little "Songs We Sing" thingamajig over there in the upper right hand corner of this page. That way, you can come back for inspiration when you just. can't. sing. that. same.&*$#)#)ing.song. one. more. time...
In the early days of motherhood, I was so busy, so enmeshed, so enthralled and overcome, that I never paid much attention to the fact that time was passing. Those days are gone.
On October 17, I got an email invitation to join something called NaBloPoMo. Since the invitation was from my pal Mizmell, and I count on my pals to steer me in the right direction, I accepted. Only later did I realize exactly what I had done.
NaBloPoMo is the home of the National Blog Posting Month challenge (who knew there was such a thing?). By joining, I was committing to posting every day for the month of November. Every. Single. Day. All those eons ago, it sounded so simple - like dinner plans you make really far in advance and then, when the evening arrives, you find yourself scanning your internal horizons for any excuse not to go that you haven’t already used with those people, those people who you actually really like, but the reason why you like them is now inexplicably lost, hidden in such an irretrievable space in your mind that you doubt it ever existed at all. But it must have existed, right, because otherwise why would you have said “yes” to begin with?
I have a history, you might say, of “commitment issues”. For example, I was struck with an exceedingly serious case of buyer’s remorse the day after I got married. It only lasted, oh, about six months.
I have now been married for 22 years, but the idea of committing to blogging for 30 days in a row strikes fear in my heart.
Given my own “issues” with commitment, you’d think I might have been a tad more understanding when Oldest, who was all of six years old at the time, wanted to quit his first and only AYSO soccer team. Despite the fact that it was clear by the third practice that the glow of having his very own uniform had faded to a chill, grim light, we pushed him on. Despite the fact that he was always as far away from the action as he could possibly be and still be on the field, we insisted that he play. Despite the fact that he clearly, like Ferdinand, would rather be smelling the flowers in the field than elbowing his way to to the ball, we dragged him to the games. And despite the fact that, when the kind and generous coach actually gave into his entreaties to play goalie (no running required!), and he let a ball that was going so slowly that every horrified parent saw it pass him by into the goal in aaaaaaaagonnniiizzzinnnly slowwwwww mooooooootioooooon, we wouldn’t let the poor kid off the hook. I think we actually use the words “you made a commitment to your team and you have to honor it”. To a six year old. He was in kindergarten, for God’s sake. Why didn't some wise soul point out to us that he probably didn’t even know what the word commitment meant?
Mate had played soccer in college and had a fantasy that his first-born son would share his love of the game. I had a fantasy that my first-born son would get all the opportunities for after-school sports that I, as number six of nine siblings, had been denied. We were far to busy paying attention to what we wanted to remember that the job was to help our shy and sensitive, light-years-away-from-being-ready-for-contact-sports six-year-old have a positive first experience with sports.
Most of the big mistakes I’ve made as a mother have happened when I have taken a moment in the present of a child and projected it into the future. So when my sweet, reluctant six-year old, who was suffering under the judgmental glares of the older, tougher boys, told us he really didn’t want to play soccer anymore, he immediately morphed in my eyes into a slacker 29 year-old who is incapable of holding down a job and is thus forced to live on the street. Forever.
Because he had to, Oldest gamely finished the season, but he did not play another organized sport until ninth grade. In retrospect, it is so completely obvious to me that we were crazy to force him to play. If I had it over again, I would have let him quit the team and just do what he really wanted from the beginning - wear that beautiful, shiny uniform to every single day of Kindergarten.
As for me and NaBloPoMo, I'm going to benefit from the mistake I made with child. If I really hate it, I'm gonna let myself quit.
You might have been too busy trying to roust your sleeping children out of bed to read this article in New York Magazine but … it's worth checking out. New research shows that chronically over-stimulated and under-snoozed children are suffering real, significant and possibly long-lasting negative effects on their cognitive abilities due to the simple fact that they are not clocking enough hours in dreamland. In fact, our kids today are averaging about an hour less of sleep a night than kids thirty years ago. Here’s a fact that pulled me up short: in a study of more than 7000 Minnesota high schoolers, “teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen minutes more sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged eleven more minutes than the C’s, and the C’s had ten more minutes than the D’s.” Ouch.
As a result of reading this article, I took a look at our familial sleep habits. Back in the early days of mothering, I was always a big believer in having a bedtime routine which could be neatly summed up as follows: Bath, Books, Bed. For years, the hour before bedtime was a soothing blend of warm baths, endless re-reading of whatever the current favorite book happened to be, followed by me singing a couple of songs while scratching their backs once they were tucked in bed. After that, I’d tiptoe out of the quiet and darkened room.
What does bedtime look like now? Well, Youngest simultaneously texts, IMs, talks on the phone and video chats with his innumerable friends right up to the stroke of ten. Most nights I catch Middle, in bed, the only light the glow of his computer screen, as he simultaneously talks to his girlfriend on his cell, switches up the song playing on iTunes, IMs his friends and makes minute adjustments to his Facebook profile. Mate is no better. He works his Blackberry, plays online poker and checks up on the state of the some or all of the following: the PGA, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and/or NBA. What I don’t understand is why he still takes the Sports Section to the bathroom with him in the morning. What could possibly transpired in the sporting universe in the few short hours he has been asleep? But, I digress...
In response to my being so rudely awakened to the actual state of our nighttime affairs, I have decided to take one of my many mothering stands. To be precise, this will be my two thousandth eight hundred and forty-sixth mothering stand. But who's counting? Can you see my children rolling their eyes and groaning in the background?
Here’s the new rule: from now on, everyone in the house has to “power down” for at least the half-hour before bedtime. No TV. No computers. No phones. Of course they are gonna fight me on this; to make sure they don’t feel too powerless I plan to include music in my first list of banned electronics and then, after a suitable tussle, give it back. Though I may find it hard to pull myself away from my Google Reader (is it too much to ask that, just once, I could get that thing down to ZERO?) it will be easier for me to obey my own new rule since, well, it’s mine.
How about your house? Are your kids getting enough sleep? Are you?
My mother has always said she doesn’t mind when babies cry.
She can pick up the smallest of squalling creatures, raw with hysteria, and remain calm. Her heart rate doesn't speed up, nor does her respiration. She isn’t frantic as she tries to determine what is causing the upset. She methodically runs through the possibilities: Hunger? Cold? Wet? Tired? Gas? She is unhurried as she works. And if there is no answer to the crying, no way to stop the tiny tornado of tears, she is fine with that. The baby can cry. She will hold it. Rock it. Let it be, unsoothed.
I used to be horrified by her calm. I mean, what kind of person is not affected by the sound of a baby’s cry? Aren’t parents hard-wired for reactivity, for God’s sake? Isn’t there an evolutionary imperative that makes a baby’s cry a natural epinephrine detonator that sends panic shooting through parental veins so they can snatch their baby from the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger? Aren’t we supposed to be affected when babies cry?
When my babies cried, I took pride in the fact that I responded. It bothered me when they were caught up in a miniature tempest. I felt my agitation was natural, expected. Their cries were a call to action. After all, wasn’t the measure of my maternal mettle my capacity to soothe?
If my baby cried and I couldn’t soothe him, I felt I had failed.
I saw my mother’s calm in the face of a baby’s cry as proof of an unnatural immunity to pain, of a callousness I couldn’t even imagine, of a bone-deep coldness bred from narcissism.
Was I ever wrong.
She doesn’t get upset when babies cry because she does not take it personally. It’s not that she does nothing when a baby cries. She will try a new position, check the diaper, offer a pinky finger, determine if hunger is the culprit.
What she will not do is make it about her.
She knows that babies cry. Sometimes they cry for a reason. Sometimes they just cry. She does not feel required to make them stop.
Unruffled, she will hold them while they cry, pat their backs, rock back and forth on her heels, breathe in the milk-fed smell of them. She does not get sucked into the fury of their wailing. She does not run for cover.
She waits, a shelter for the storm.
***Unwittingly sparked by Bub and Pie
Today, over at Relaxed Parents, a father had his first talk about death with his three-year-old son.
The son asked the question, “Will I die?” The father answered, “We all die eventually.” The son chose to disbelieve him. “I am not going to die,” he said.
Little boys do not like the taste of death. They spit it out if they can.
Adults do not like the taste of death either. For a year, Joan Didion spat death into her napkin, hid it under the table so no one would see.
I remember when Youngest did not like the taste of death. He swallowed it whole when he was four-and-a-half years old and he couldn't spit it out.
***
He is drawing pictures at his little table. He draws a picture of my father, who died years before he was born. “This is Mac,” he announces. Then he scribbles, hard, all over the picture, blocking it out. “Mac is dead.” He draws another picture, this time of my mother, who is very much alive. “This is Rosie.” He scribbles over this picture, too. “She is going to die.”
I can see he is getting upset. I don’t know how to stop it.
He draws another picture and immediately scrawls hard across it. “You are going to die.” He scribbles furiously. “I am going to die.” He is crying now.
“We are all going to die.”
He cries with huge, heaving sobs. He cries so hard he starts to choke. He gags. I pick him up and run to the bathroom. He misses the sink and the vomit spills all over the floor. There are little bits of food I can recognize: pasta and corn. But no death. He couldn’t dislodge it. Death refused to come up.
He keeps on crying.
I can’t thing of anything say, so I carry him outside. Somehow I think if we are outside, under the sun, it will be better. If there are trees and earth, it will be better.
I hold him in my arms and rock him as he cries, the way you do with all babies once you have had one of your own.
He keeps crying. He can’t stand it, I know that. He can’t stand having this certain poison inside of him.
I am so worried I consider hauling out the idea of heaven, which I don’t believe in. But then I think, “Don’t lie.” I know only one thing. At this moment I must not lie.
The sun is shining, my baby is crying, and I can’t think of anything to say that is not a lie.
And then I do. I know what I am going to say. I don’t know it if it will work. Please God make this work.
“Youngest,” I say. His crying lightens. He looks at me. I can tell he is hopeful. He believes in me.
“It is true that we are all going to die,” I say, “but there is one thing that does not die.”
He sighs. He waits. He tips his face to me as if I were the sun.
“Love doesn’t die,” I say. “And when we die, our love doesn’t die. It goes on and on.”
His little body relaxes in my arms. He gives a hiccup as the tears fall away. He stops crying.
Love is an antidote and it is enough.
Back in the day we had, for reasons too many and virtuous to describe, an iron-clad no-TV-during-the week rule. Then came Christmas 2005, when Youngest asked - make that, begged - for the DVD collection of the first season of Lost. Santa, unthinking fellow that he is, obliged. Cut to Youngest and I, lying on the couch for literally days on end. He was entranced, transfixed, enthralled. All I kept thinking was, “TV show? Acid flashback? TV show? Acid flashback?” Anyway, if we averaged four episodes a day and there were 22 episodes in the first season, well, you can do the math. I can’t, I’m still coming down.
So that's how the no-TV-during-the-week-rule was demoted to a one-TV-show-during-the week rule. Oldest was still home at the time, and he chose to watch 24 which I watched with him until one too many White House aides talked on his non-secure cell phone with his evil terrorist master while still in the Oval office with the President. Middle watches an eclectic mix of shows which includes Mythbusters, Futureweapons and…is there something called Stunt-Junkies-Gone-Wild? Needless to say, none of them are prime time fare so he wasn’t really affected by the change of my stony heart. So it was just Youngest and me, curling up together on the couch every Wednesday at nine - except, of course, when Lost, like the infamous Oceanic Air Flight 815, mysteriously plummeted off the Tivo radar and just, well, disappeared.
Here we are in February 07 and Lost is back from whatever rehab it goes to, with the sole purpose, it seems to me, of destroying any vestigal remnants of my self-image as a good enough mother. Why do I say this? Why do I shake my fist at the whimsy and evil caprice of the TV Gods? Because Lost is now on at 10PM! I mean, come on. Can somebody up there, just once, cut me a freaking break?
When Youngest informed me of the new time slot, my first reaction was panic. It must be because he is my last, or because he is so sweet, but my heart clutched at the thought of the colossal tsunami of disappointment headed my way. But then I remembered one of the great tricks of the mothering trade. I shook my head, sorrowfully. This particular head shake was perfectly calibrated to accomplish the following: first, to adequately express the I’ll-climb-Mt. Everest-without-oxygen-before-I’ll-let-you-stay-up-until-11-on-a-school-night impossibility of his watching the show on Wednesday nights AND, and this is where it's really diabolical, to make it look as if I am really sad about that fact. With one magic head shake, I am transformed from authority figure sadistically asserting her mercurial whims, to the comrade in arms sharing his pain.
It all was going, most beautifully, according to plan. He didn’t put up a big fight or, worse, let his eyes well with unshed tears. He was the very definition of the word stoic. Until. Until. Until I was blind-sided by my supposed friend A, the mother of one of Youngest’s favorite pals, S. “Only for the first night,” she promised from behind the wheel before screeching out of the parking lot. “OK,” I said to Youngest as I waved the dust from my face, “If S is watching it for the first night, so can you, but after that, it’s all Tivo, all the time.”
We watched - or should I say attempted to cram the increasingly outrageous plot developments into something resembling a narrative - the first episode. As I ushered Youngest to bed, by which I mean I nodded in the direction of his bedroom as I staggered to my own, I lifted my eyes to the heavens and, yes, thanked the TV Gods for their schedule change. That show is really only just barely watchable on Tivo. All was well in the land of compromised parenting positions.
NOT. As he climbed into the car after school yesterday, Youngest informed me that my soon-to-be- ex-friend A had caved, yes, caved and S was now allowed to watch Lost in perpetuity. At. 10. PM. I immediately got on the horn to confirm her treachery.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m a terrible mother,” she said upon hearing my ominous tone. “It’s just that I’ve been so hard on him lately, and its something we get to do together, and I told him if he ever complained even a tiny bit about getting up on Thursday morning it would all be over. Do you hate me?”
The truth is, I don’t. So much of the time, I'm the one who doles out chores, yells “For Chrissakes, GET OUT OF BED”, and is known for setting what some (okay, my husband and all three children) might consider unreasonable demands pretty much ‘round the clock. It gets old, being the taskmaster. Sometimes you want to be the fun one. Sometimes, you gotta make sure to create memories that will make them smile many years hence. Sometimes you have to give them some ammunition to use in the great social battle that is middle school. Sometimes you just have to give them what they really, really want. So I caved too. And last night, on the dot of his usual bedtime, Youngest and I settled in on the couch. He watched with the level of intensity only seen in those who are heading to seventh grade the next morning with a gleeful sense of superiority over their classmates with better mothers. I, on the other hand, fought a losing battle against sleep. At some point, I toppled over, and only roused myself as he clicked off the TV.
Fearful of losing his awesome privilege, Youngest literally shot out of bed this morning and went sunnily off to school to lord over his friends his knowledge of what happened to - what’s the guy’s name who ran into Jack on the stadium stairs back in the first season? - him.
So that is two down, twenty to go. Truthfully, the thought of twenty more episodes makes me wish my head would explode. In fact, there are only two things on the face of this earth that could entice me to watch another season of Lost: the look on Youngest's face when I caved and Daniel's play-by-play.
OK, here’s your chance to make me feel less a flagrant failure of a mother. What TV shows do you watch with your child, and why?
The other day, Oldest called me up to report that his friend Will D was wondering what was up in our house. Since last I heard Will D was busy being a newly minted college student, I asked what had prompted his concern for our family 3000 miles away.
Turns out Will D. had seen Middle's latest status on his Facebook page. For those of you who have been lucky enough to not spend any time haunting Facebook, the status is where you describe your state of mind.
Will D reported that Middle's status was currently, and I quote, “hating his mother.”
It’s like deja vu all over again. When he was about four (don’t let anyone ever waste your time with the notion of the Terrible Twos. Two has nothing, but nothing, on four) Middle and I went through what might be laughingly called a rough patch in which, with stunning regularity, he hated, loathed, detested, despised and abhhored me. However, since he was only four, his vocabulary restricted him to the following:
"I hate you."
Or, "I Hate You."
Or just for fun, "I HATE YOU."
Or to change it up, "I HATE YOU!"
Or, for the sheer drama of it all, "I HATE YOU!!!!!"
Every disagreement, no matter how small, concluded with I HATE YOU. Over and over with the I HATE YOUs. Endlessly with the I HATE YOUs. Always with the I HATE YOUs.
I tried a number of tactics. I told him it was OK to be angry. I tried to express the depth of my understanding at his fury at being forced to leave the park or go to the park, go to bed or get out of bed. Whatever we did, it ended with him yelling I HATE YOU!
Finally, after one too many I HATE YOUs wafted from his car seat to me behind the wheel, I said, “Middle, it is not OK for you to keep saying I HATE YOU to me. I know you are angry and I want you to use your words and tell me how you feel.”
After a short silence, he replied, “OK… I FEEL I hate you.”
That was it. The last straw. The dead end. The moment in mothering when you either a)bail completely and send the child to live with your sister or b)take everything you know about the situation, throw it into the air and see where the pieces fall.
When they landed, I HATE YOU had become YOU HATE ME.
This, I could deal with. I waited for a moment of calm and sat down with him. “Middle,” I said, “lately you have been saying ‘I hate you’ a lot. But I wonder if, just maybe, when we are mad at each other, you might think that I don’t love you.”
Oh, that face, I wish I could describe to you the little face - just on the verge of crumpling into tears - that looked up at me, and, without saying a word, nodded yes. I pulled him into my lap and told him that no matter how mad I got at him - and no matter how mad he got at me - I would always love him.
And, swear to God, he never said I HATE YOU again.
Until the other day. On Facebook.
I guess he didn't think much of my observation that, bright as he is, he is not actually bright enough to excel at Honors Chemistry without, on occasion, you know, working at it.
Oh well.
He knows I love him.
I just remembered the time I took Youngest to get his first pair of shoes. He was about 18 months old (yes, I kept 'em in those amazing Swedish moccasins as long as I could) and he was very excited to go get his shoes. Really, he was. I swear. Only he got there and we sat down in the plastic chairs and the sweet guy who has worked there for thirty years came over and...
Everything was going fine. Really. Youngest picked out the shoes he wanted. Sneakers, with velcro instead of laces which was very new and cool back in the day. Anyway...
He stood on the measuring tool. He didn't like it, but he did. Then the salesman went off to fetch the shoes and Youngest's lip started to quiver. And then he started to cry. And it was not your silent tears-streaming-down-the-face crying, it was clear-the-store-out crying.
Mothers were looking at me. The salespeople were looking at me. Hey, people on the sidewalk outside were looking at me. What kind of mother was I? No, what kind of monster was I? How could I possible let my child cry so hard - over a pair of shoes?
Here is the thing. I did consider just walking out. It's not as if it didn't cross my mind. But there are these moments with your children when you KNOW that they want to get through whatever nasty spot they are in and find themselves on the other side. I decided not to pick him up in my arms and take him out of there.
So he puked on the floor. He cried so hard that he threw up all over the rug. And that really did clear out the store.
And then it was just me and Youngest and the thirty-year kids shoe store veteran who, I am quite sure, was ruing the day he decided not to attend college.
He did succeed in shoving the shoes on Youngest's feet. We all stared at his tiny little appendages, encased in solid leather for the very first time.
Youngest stood up. He looked down some more. And then he declared, "I LUUVVV new shoes!"
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