thirty threadbare mercies

The outward expression of an inward grace.

Write-A-Thon Th-Thon Thon Thon August 27, 2012

Filed under: Blogging,San Francisco,Writing — rheabette @ 8:08 am
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I often bemoan my lack of large swaths of time to write, having instead to fit in tiny sprints of wordcrafting, between shaking it at toddler dance parties, running to work meetings, and carving out time to connect with my husband.  Still, I hesitated at signing up for 826 Valencia‘s 3rd Annual Write-A-Thon, which was also a celebration for the 10 year birthday of the non-profit.  I was a bit intimidated, thinking of all those established writers sitting together clacking out their ideas, with little ol’ me among them – would I stick out as the imposter I fear I am in the writing world?  In the end I decided to get over myself, heed my own advice to take risks and seize the time to create, and went ahead and registered.  Then I sent out daily calls on Facebook and Twitter, ending up raising $410 in six days, all going to the free tutoring, writing classes, and scholarship support that 826 Valencia offers San Francisco youth!

826 Turns Ten!

I arrived straight from work, all jittered up on coffee and sugar, sweaty from running Olive up and down my stairs in order to get there in time for the workshop that The Writer’s Grotto was running at noon.  My nerves were assuaged somewhat as I sat down next to an old friend, a young man I’ve known since he was a bright seven year old, who is now as tall as I am!  Here he is, hard at work, taking the posture I saw repeatedly all over that room – one hand on the head, holding up the weight of all the ideas we were having and shaping:

The amazing and incredible Writer Boy: Luis!

Fresh infusions of coffee and sugar beside me, I sat down to put one word in front of the other… and kept going, for five hours straight.  It was bliss.  I was able to write a piece, then re-write it from a different perspective, then write another piece, playing with it by taking out all the adverbs, making it work in new ways.  All the while, 826 was celebrating their birthday in different ways, making announcements, bringing out special treats, and, every once in awhile, Dave Eggers would hand out charming cartoon drawings he was doing of the participating writers.  His daughter, a Poltergeistian cutie, practiced her letters beside him.

I can’t share all the pieces I worked on over the day, but I’ll give you a little taste — here’s the response I wrote in 5 minutes during the workshop, to one of the prompts in The Grotto’s awesome new book, 642 Things To Write About, which I read aloud to the group and got some lovely feedback on:

The prompt was to imagine you are filling a time capsule to be opened in 500 years, and write the letter to the folks who will open it, describing life as you know it today.

Dear Sir And/Or Madam,

I want to remind you that we once bled.  We, the human race, weren’t always so robotic, so sterile, so cut-throat.  We used to bury our dead.  We once conversed face to face, with nothing more than oxygen between us, our eyes boring into each other’s skulls.  I know that you can read about love, but I’ll have you know that it once injured us.  We’d sit up for days, not just to make more things or create more ideas or digitize experience, but simply to revel in the beauty of the skin of our lover – its chocolatey sheen as it moved across our own flesh.

Sincerely,

A Human from 2012

After five full hours of writing indulgence, I heard my daughter’s voice in the adjoining pirate store (yep, this organization is so rad, they even run a pirate supply store in the front of their building), “Is my Mama in there?  IS MY MAMA IN THERE?!”  It was a cute yet jarring call back to reality.  I checked out, and picked up my literal pirate booty, earned through my fundraising prowess.

Swag!

Olive was actually quite tantrummy and weird that evening, like she’d all of a sudden realized I was gone, doing something fabulous without her, for five hours straight, and she wasn’t having it.  But we had a good time checking out the Pirate Pack 826 outfitted us with!

Olive steals my eye patch, like a true pirate. Arrrrrr!

If you haven’t participated in a fundraiser in a little while, I encourage you take the leap and get involved, soon.  It really feels gratifying, to use your skills to support a worthy organization.  When I put out the call to my community, and 13 people responded in six days, it was a great reminder of the kindness and generosity of the people in my life.  Next year, I’ll have the gumption to start fundraising even earlier, and perhaps I can raise a boatload for the kids of SF’s endeavors in wordsmithing!  Maybe some of you will join me on 8/26/13?

 

You’re Only as Crazy as Your 2 Year Old August 24, 2012

Filed under: Parenting,Psychology,Toddlers — rheabette @ 1:34 pm
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Recently I was asked to define psychological health, and I said that a healthy mind is a flexible one.  The ability to withstand change, transition, and allow your neural pathways to flow, is the basis of mental health, in my opinion.  One needs safe boundaries to be able to be free, but those perimeters cannot be so rigid that you can’t change your mind, play, or handle loss.

I felt rather proud of this definition, but suddenly I realized that according to what I just wrote, toddlers are the epitome of mental illness.   If you have ever tried to get a small child to give up on a promised outing, or let go of a beloved toy, you know what I mean.  A huge part of this developmental stage is learning to wrap their little brains around when things don’t go as planned, and dealing with the vicissitudes of life.  Children crave rules, and once they’ve learned one, it’s hard to comprehend that sometimes rules can be broken, or just don’t apply in certain circumstances.

For instance, my daughter has been working on “waiting her turn” on the playground — for a ride in the swing, or on the seesaw, etc.  She’s turned this into a mantra that she uses to inform others: “You have to wait your turn!” she exhorts the woman waiting in line for her latte at Ritual Coffee Roasters.  ”You have to wait your turn!” she shouted in the wind to every person who came down the stairs to the beach the other day.  My friend Amanda tried to explain to Olive that no one has to wait their turn at the beach.  ”There’s so much water, and so much sand, that no matter how many people come, there will always be room for them!  That’s what’s so great about the beach!” she told my little almost-2 year old rule-keeper.  ”You have to wait your turn!” was Olive’s strident response.

I’m beginning to believe that repeated exposure to such rigidity gives parents “compassion fatigue”, the kind which one becomes besieged with when working on the front lines in any mental health profession.  On Monday, I was taken to a place of sheer insanity while in the throws of my daughter’s obsessive behavior over an article of clothing.  A few weeks ago, Olive received a hand-me-down long sleeved T-shirt, with a picture of Dora The Explorer on it.  Dora looks particularly innocuous, as she is depicted in a flowing dress and has a bluebird resting gently on her hand.  Since then, every day, during getting-dressed time, Olive will ask, fervently, for “Dora shirt?”  We let her wear it once a week, as that’s as often as we do the laundry.

On the fateful morning in question, I unfortunately decided that Olive was ready for some motivation.  Baths are hard for her, since we have to comb out the dreads that form in the back of her afro, and as she was about to climb in to the bubbly water, I showed her the Dora shirt, and told her that if she did well in her bath, she could wear it that day!  Silly Mama, 2 year olds don’t understand contingency plans!  Olive straight up lost her mind, kicking water all over her papa (who seriously hated me for a few minutes there) and screaming bloody murder, trying to get her hands on that prized shirt.

Once we abandoned the bath, and she had the shirt on at last, I thought the worst of it was over.  However, the smug look on Dora’s face belied the fact that there were more Dora-related tragedies on store for me that day.  Summer in San Francisco is very cold, at least in the mornings, and as Olive and I headed out, I was careful to choose a coat that wouldn’t totally cover the beloved T-shirt.  However, Olive flung herself on her back in misery once the coat was on, because it besmirched the totality of the Dora shirt, even just on the arms and back.  She continued to cry and scream for our entire walk, until at last I let her take the coat off once we got to the park and she could warm up by running around.

I was never so grateful for a rest from both my child and that stupid effing T-shirt, which I got during nap time.  However, after that brief interlude, we sat down to lunch, and craziness resumed.  Olive began shoveling applesauce (which she still adorably calls “applebop”) onto her chest, then wailing in misery, “Oh no!  My Dora shirt!”  I cleaned it off a few times before I realized she was creating this bizarre drama on purpose!  Well, as we’ve all heard, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  So, I pulled the friggen shirt over her head, threw it in the laundry (oh, how I longed for a working fireplace, to match the drama of the day!) and texted my husband, “The Dora shirt is off.  Let’s never speak of it again.”

Don’t get me wrong – I have little-to-no beef with Dora.  She’s adventurous, bilingual, and resourceful.  However, I have no idea why she is always asking kids questions and then asking them to say it again, “Louder!”  I mean, AREN’T OUR CHILDREN LOUD ENOUGH?  Olive frequently breaks the sound barrier, or reaches pitches that set all the dogs in the neighborhood howling.  So, though I dig Dora, the shirt with her likeness on it had to go.

Even with the object of her obsession out of the picture, Olive continued to try my patience with rigid demands.  The whole day enfolded in this fashion, until at last we were both inexplicably covered from head-to-toe with my lipstick, glaring at each other in frustration and confusion, and my friend Giselle said, “It’s time to go home.”  You gotta know when to fold ‘em.  My husband arrived like a knight with roses and outstretched arms to place my daughter into.  It was the kind of day that makes you wish you were Jack Donoghy, with the ability to sit in a darkened room drinking scotch and staring off at the skyline in a $4,000 suit.

The next day I prepared by deciding to wipe the slate clean.  With my cartoon nemesis nowhere in sight, I said to myself, “I completely forgive my daughter, and myself, for yesterday.  We did our best, and I managed not to lose my patience entirely and call her (or Dora) any names.  To their faces.  Today is a new day.”  And you know what?  Inexplicably, Olive was a complete ANGEL that day.  She was literally the best behaved she’s ever been since entering toddlerhood.  So, I guess the upside to being a crazy-making small child is you don’t hold grudges!  She was able to just let go and start anew, and I took a page from her book, enjoying our time together to the hilt.

Simpler times: no cartoon characters to be found, enjoying a solo swing.

So, Mamas, Papas, & Caregivers, if you’re in the throws of a particularly insane day with your little one, hang in there.  Call for back-up. Incinerate your version of The Dora Shirt, and start over the following day.  We’ll all make it out of here alive, if with a few more personality quirks than when we embarked on this Toddlerhood journey.

 

Call Me Never August 19, 2012

Filed under: Friendship,Mothers,Parenting,Personal,Toddlers,Uncategorized — rheabette @ 7:40 am

Children have a preternatural sense for when their parent is not paying perfect attention to them. A friend of mine says that even when they are asleep, if she dares to pick up the telephone, her boys wake up. I picture them as Shakespearean figures, popping their tiny bodies out of bed, announcing, “Lo! I quicken! The one who hath borne me hath spake to another!”

A new friend asked me what was the best way to get in touch with me. “Oh, I’m easy to communicate with. Text, email, Facebook message, G-chat, carrier pigeon, telegram, Instant Message, snail mail, Blog comment, Skype, Cyrano de Bergerac me at my window… JUST DON’T EVER CALL ME.” Since she has two children, she totally understood where I was coming from. Parents of young kids need the ability to write you back at lightning speed, between the diaper changes, top speed chases after toddlers out into traffic, and near-constant doling out of snacks that make up our day-to-day lives, at the end of which we usually collapse.


My friends who don’t have children, or who had them so long ago they have forgotten this phenomenon, are always calling me and becoming chagrined at how I can’t listen to their engrossing story about their boyfriend’s new job or how much sand they got in their hair at the beach yesterday.  BELIEVE me, I want to know about that new sexual position you’re trying out, but can you please either tell me in scintillating email form so I can read it in absolute silence while my child naps, or over cocktails once her father is home so I can zip out to meet you and pretend I am a normal person?

When I was a young teenager, I used to write out notes of what I would talk about when I called boys I really liked.  The topics were actually quite dull and embarrassing, about who won the basketball game and lame jokes about how Mrs. Hamilton’s hair looked like Rockadoodle.  I would cross out each item as I managed to work it into the conversation — when I was out of topics, I’d say goodbye.  Now, even though I feel a little sorry for those boys who didn’t know I was working off a script, I cannot imagine bringing that much foresight into a telephone conversation.  I’m lucky enough if I can blurt out “Let’s meet at the park in 15 minutes!” before Olive imperiously asks, “My turn?  MY TURN!!”

“No phone for Mama. It’s always Olive’s turn!”

Of course her Grandmother and Aunt don’t mind these interruptions to talk to their beloved little family member, and they also don’t judge me for turning on Sesame Street when I really need to talk to them with my full attention for once.  So, they are basically the only people I call.  My friendships that rely on telephone conversations consist of a perennial game of tag, of which I tire immensely.  If you are reading this and I have EVER called you, especially in the past 2 years, please know that that is the highest form of regard I can mete out.  It means I am taking the few seconds when I could possibly be peeing alone, or having a complex thought, or picking up my disaster of a house attempting to call you instead.

I don’t think this difficulty with telephone conversations has been created by the digital age.  I distinctly remember ignoring my mom for hours on end while she was gardening, cooking, or reading a book, but the SECOND she picked up the phone to call one her friends, I’d decide that I needed her help with my homework, or to ask if my best friend could sleep over, or just generally annoy her so she’d lose her cool on the phone.  ”But when are you getting OFF?”, I’d whine, becoming boneless at her feet while entangling myself in the phone cord like a feisty kitten that you want to throw against the wall.  I also had an unrelenting campaign to get “my own phone” — not just a phone in my room, because I could stretch the cord from my sister’s room to my own, but, as I unconvincingly told my parents, “I need my own LINE.  All the girls at my school have their own phone number!”  My parents were not the kind of people to be swayed by what everyone else in town was doing.  So, before we got “call-waiting”, I’d interrupt my mother’s phone calls all the time so that I wouldn’t miss a very important call inviting me to a pizza party or asking me to the 5th grade dance.  I don’t think my mother had an uninterrupted phone conversation for 2 decades, and she managed to have many thriving friendships!

Parents of the world, I know you can relate.  If we need to get together, you know we’ll work it out, even if it means showing up at each other’s doorstep.  In the meantime, don’t call me, I won’t call you.

 

Blog Bling August 15, 2012

Filed under: Blogging,Personal,Writing — rheabette @ 6:51 pm
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Sometimes, your week just needs a little sweetness.  My mornings have been really frustrating lately, as somehow even though I’m waking up earlier, I’m still needing to shoot myself out of a freaking cannon to get out of the house.  This morning, I got sunscreen in my eyes while trying to get to an 8:30am dance class (Yes, I wear sunscreen to dance class.  White ladies in their 30′s would wear sunscreen TO SLEEP IN A COFFIN) and spent the next 20 minutes crying it out of my irises while trying to get my bangs to not stick STRAIGHT OUT from my forehead.  It was sort of a shitshow.

Anyway, I made it to the dance class, and had a total blast shaking my cares away with my friends.  No one cared about my scarecrow bangs or eyes red from expelling UVA/UVB blockers.  Then I sat down to my computer to work and found that my blog had been singled out for a Reader Appreciation Award!  Natalie, an amazingly kind and funny blogger that I met recently through the wild world of the interwebs, has a hilarious and interesting blog called The Cat Lady Sings, and she was nice enough to nominate my blog for the award.  I’m grateful for her part in turning my morning from an exercise in futility to an “I’m Walking On Sunshine” kind of day.

Here’s the thing.  These awards are kind of like the blog version of chain letters, but since they don’t have all the creepy guilt usually attached (YOU WILL DIE FROM CHOKING ON RAMEN NOODLES IF YOU DON’T KEEP IT GOING) to such things, and they are given from a really authentic place of wanting to spread some blog lovin’, I am going to fully participate, and wear my Reader Appreciation Award like a friggen Olympic gold medal.

I think they need to work on this logo, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

Recipients of the award are asked to:

  1. Identify the award and who gave it to you.
  2. Post the Logo on your blog.
  3. Share 7 items about yourself.
  4. Nominate 5-10 other bloggers to receive this award, and notify them on their blogs.

At first I kind of cringed about writing 7 things about myself and then I had to slap myself upside the head and say, “Rhea!  THIS WHOLE DAMN BLOG IS ABOUT YOU.  If you were concerned about being thought of as self-centered, I think that ship has sailed, sweetheart.”  So, here you go:

1. I am a pitbull of a friend.  I’ve been told that I’m intimidating at first, and it’s definitely difficult to get admittance to my inner circle of relationships, but once you’re in, you’re in for life.  I’m insanely loyal.  This has actually not always been the greatest thing for me — I’ve been loyal even when it is really foolhardy to do so.  So, once you’re friends with me, strap in — you’re basically gonna be hearing from me for the rest of your living days, and there’s very little you’ll be able to do to shake me off your trail.

2. I’m chronically early.  This week I showed up an entire 7 days early to a date I had with a friend!  Really, that one was just a mistake, but I use it to show that I’m basically incapable of being late.  I’m about 5 minutes early to everything, which sometimes makes people really anxious, but there’s nothing I can do about it.  Years of sitting by the curb waiting for my rather tardy parents to pick me up, and arriving late to dance class and missing the warm-up made me insane.  I soon figured out that my town was small enough for me to ride my bike or walk everywhere, but that got hard in the freezing New England winters.  In any event, if you make a date with me, prepare for me to be there right when you ask me to be, but don’t worry, I’ll bring a book in case you are a typical West Coaster and you run 10-15 minutes late.  If you’re 30 minutes late, however, I’m probably not going to make many dates with you.  That shit is just rude.

3. I’m almost equally attracted to women as I am men.  It’s about a 40-60 split, with the dudes winning out a little bit because of their “other”-ness.  It’s not really a big deal to me, because I met the person I was meant to spend my life with when I was 19, so the whole question of what gender I’d end up with was trumped by finding the person that was right for me.  In 12 years of our relationship, I’ve never met anyone, male or female, who attracted me more than my husband, so I’m lucky for our compatibility.  I mention it because I think if everyone could see how prevalent having a fluid sexuality is, maybe folks will be less homophobic.  It causes me zero angst, and you shouldn’t fret over it, either.  It’s normal, and not scary, and sort of lovely.

4. I prefer honesty to pleasantness in my friendships.  At this time in my life, when I have so many responsibilities with parenthood, marriage, career, and self-work, I just don’t have time for dishonest, shallow friendships.  I watch old episodes of Sex and the City and the thing I find least realistic is not Carrie’s shoe budget, but the fact that she managed to find four friends all willing to be balls-out honest with one another.  I’m always the friend answering “what do you really think of my boyfriend?” with my real concerns about said man, and sometimes that means I scare people off, but it also helps me weed out those people who are not interested in going deeper.  I used to do this in a very blunt, unattractive way, but through my friendship with Amanda and my relationship with my husband, they have taught me how to safely express myself with sensitivity, rather than blurt out my feelings like a 4 year old.  So, I wait for you to ask for my advice, but once you ask, you can be sure you will get the honest truth from me!  And I expect nothing less from you, my friend.

5. I have an unnatural obsession with dance flicks.  You Got Served, You Got Served AGAIN, Center Stage, all the Step-Ups — you name it, I’ve seen it, and rented the straight-to-DVD sequels.  They have such terrible over-acting, ridiculous plots, and I simply can’t get enough of them.  The dancing is so fun that it’s my favorite addiction.

6. In mid-2009, I went through a stage of wanting really long brightly painted acrylic nails.  Never one for manicures before, I’d go to those fume-filled establishments and get chemicals put on my hands.  I love that I awarded myself this frivolity, and that I knew when to pack it in.  My husband has a bizarre phobia of nail polish, so he didn’t really look at my hands very much for those months, but he did love having me scratch his back with my talons!

These ones are actually quite tame, but it is the only photo I have of my acrylic nail period. Who takes pictures of their hands?

7. I absolutely hate cooking.  I am fortunate enough to have married a man who spent a lot of time watching his fabulous chef of a mother cook, so he can whip up amazing meals at the drop of a hat.  However, I force myself to cook once a week, because otherwise I have to do dishes 7 nights a week, and that gets real old.  Also, I’m pretty good at it, I just despise it because it does not at all come naturally to me.  I don’t “speak food”, but I LOVE it, so I’m like an awkward teenager in the presence of Victoria’s Secret Models — “I WANT YOU AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU”, bumbling around in the kitchen in frustrated desire.  I usually end up with a delicious meal, but it’s always some elaborate thing that took me ages to make.  I’m totally the stereotypical “father” in the relationship — when it’s my turn to cook, I want to make a fancy thai-inspired three-course meal, not just whip up a pasta dish like every other mom would do.  I get in way over my head and start using an insane amount of pots and spoons, leaving a pile of dishes and a disaster of a kitchen in my wake.  I mean, I know I have several part-time jobs I do mostly from home, but I’m basically a stay-at-home mom.  I really should be better at this housewife stuff.  I’m no domestic goddess, but, we eat.

Oh my gosh — thinking of 7 things is really hard.  It’s like writing 7 mini blog posts!  At last, we are on to my nominees for the Reader Appreciation Award!  These are the blogs that I read EVERY single time they post, and really enjoy following.  I hope you will too.

1. Tanya at The Sky And Back.  This is one of those blogs you want to start from the beginning.  She chronicles her struggles with infertility, then her pregnancy, then the joys and hard times of parenting, all the while with hope and humor aplenty.

2. Christine at Restless Everything Syndrome.  Two words: Feminist Christian.  Ingeniously merged into one word by the one and only Christine: Femipiscapalian.  Or maybe it’s Feminiscapalian.  She is constantly using words I need to look up in the dictionary, but I love a heady read with a good dose of cursing and deconstructing of paradigms.  Dig in!

3. Blake at Project Enough.  I was SO excited to find Blake’s blog, in my Year of Enough, no less!  It is a constant source of inspiration for me.  Perfect for anyone trying to practice Operation Rad Bod!

4. Rebecca at Unsolicited Advice.  I love Rebecca’s perspective.  I think some of that is because I just like Rebecca — in real life I have the honor of hanging out with her about twice a week.  But being friends with someone does not always equate to enjoying their writing, but gratefully, Rebecca is a killer writer.  Check out her no-holds-barred take on such varied topics as folks who are jilted to meeting LaVar Burton.

5. Rosy at unEARTHed.  Rosy is a landscape architect. and much of her writing is about her relationship to the land, which is something I don’t have much experience with.  However, the way she writes about it is so beautiful that I am drawn in, finding myself thinking about soil and urban farming in all new ways.

6. Jessie at Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring.  Jessie writes so poignantly about her experiences as a chaplain in the health care system.  I love how she weaves her own life experiences and the lessons she learns through taking care of the souls of others.  She’s a very inspiring person.

There you go — 6 excellent blogs to lose yourself in tonight, or in the days to come.  Happy reading, and thanks again to Natalie for giving me the honor of her appreciation!

 

A weighty question August 14, 2012

Filed under: Body Image,Inspiration,Parenting — rheabette @ 1:33 pm
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Operation Rad Bod has been kicking my butt this week.  For some reason, I’ve been really struggling with thoughts that I am not the right size, that I am taking up too much space in the world.  I find the Olympics incredibly inspiring — the stories of victory as well as watching how champions handle inevitable defeat and disappointment.  However, I think two weeks of watching perfectly chiseled bodies has chipped away at my newly found sense that my body is awesome, just the way it is.

I keep noticing scales in people’s bathrooms, and feeling the temptation to step on them and see what number will arise.  But really, I have been basically the same weight range for 4 or so years, barring the 9 months of pregnancy.  What would a couple of ticks up or down on the scale really tell me about myself?  Would it tell me how I’m doing in my life, if I’m succeeding or failing?  Would it inform me that I was a “good enough” woman, mother, member of society?  Nope.

I am realizing that whether we intend to or not, we use the scale as a measure of self worth, because there is no real way to tell if you are a worthy person.  You can’t get that feedback from others — their perspectives are way too jangled up with projections and needs.  You can’t let the culture at large tell you, because everyone knows the messages you’ll get there are a freaking disaster of cookie-cutter forms you’re supposed to mold yourself into, no matter how much of you gets pushed out the sides.

So, how do you measure your self worth?  You can step up on the scale and let that number be your focus, or strive to wear a particular size or look a certain way in photographs.  Or, you could use all that energy and gusto towards working on your soul.  I truly believe that self worth will never be measured up on a scale — it has to come from within.  But your self can be a scary place to be, if you are not practiced in hanging out there, alone and with a good flashlight.

I have been trying this summer, as gently as possible, to redirect my attention from my weight to my soul, as often as I need to.  What this looks like is: a) I have a negative thought about my body  b) I feel bad about having that negative thought about my body (come on! this is supposed to be Operation Rad Bod!)  c) I try to accept the thought rather than fight it  d) I replace it with a question: How are you doing, Rhea?  What is causing you to get down on your corporeal being?  What’s really bothering you?

Usually I am able to find the source of the insecurity that led me to gnash at my image of myself.  I take a deep breath.  If I have the time, I look to my inspirational sources to give me a jolt of the “You are ENOUGH” message we all need so dearly.  As a mama reminded a mama-to-be at the baby shower I attended this weekend, “You can do anything for 2 minutes”, and two minutes is usually all it takes to get me out of the pattern of self-hatred, and redirected into one of acceptance.  It may only last for another two minutes before I have to do it again, but constant practice in self-acceptance is so much better than giving in to the spiral of self-destructive “I should be different” thinking.

Can these people just follow me around all the time? That would save me a lot of effort!

Everyone agrees that children should be encouraged, but it is harder to get folks interested in giving positive messages to adults.  It seems silly, like we shouldn’t need to be told we are awesome, that it’s self-centered to work towards a positive self-image, or something we should have figured out long ago. It seems like every other book I read to my almost-two-year-old is about how she should feel so very awesome about being herself.  Be you!  You’re amazing!  You’re great just as you are, big nose, stinky feet and all!  You just go on being yourself and the world will fall at your feet, doors will open automatically for you, and you will know the secrets of the universe!  And literature goes on like this, throughout childhood, with titles such as It’s OK To Be Different, I Like Myself, and What I Like About Me.  Modern children are told, over and over, that if they celebrate their own damn selves, they’ll be doing okay.

I love these kinds of books, and I read them aloud to smiling mamas and nannies at the story/song/dance times I run at Dolores Park and at Rare Device, and sometimes I think to myself, “Will it really be okay with you?  When your kid turns out to be transgendered, wants to be a dancer instead of a doctor, or unpopular in school?  Will it be okay with me, if my child becomes a Bible-thumping Republican, joins the army, or eschews all artistic expression as ‘lame sauce’?”  If I want to be accepting of my child, I need to be accepting of myself.  Children are notorious for sniffing out inauthenticity, and a parent who says, “You are beautiful just as you are, honey”, but is desperately trying to change their own visage or is really down on themselves in other ways will make their child unsure of their credibility.

The reason I am doubting our collective exhortation to “be as you as you can be!” is that once you’re an adult, if you’re out there being you all over the place, the world is going to serve you up a nice steaming plate of “sit-down-shut-up-there-are-no-unicorns”.  In fact, there’s a cynical part of me that thinks the titles of these books should be: “Be different!  Be you!  Until You Reach Adulthood, and then Be Like Everybody Else for Frick’s Sake, You Stupid Show-off.”  

But of course that wouldn’t help.  What we need instead are more messages to adults that it’s okay to be who they are, so if they really believe it and live it out, their children will, as well.  This summer, the area I’ve focused on has been accepting my body, but there are many other areas of my life that could benefit from this loving attention.

A friend who has been away all summer came home yesterday, and was so glad that she could actually see my body in the outfit I was wearing!  So, that was a sweet reminder that even if I don’t feel like I am doing it “perfectly”, I am still making strides in Operation Rad Bod.  I think what would be helpful, in making this process less laborious and constant, was to hear more from other people who are trying to love their bodies as they are as well.  So, tell me, how are you loving your body lately?  What do you love about it?  What are you working to accept about yourself?  And, most importantly, where do you find your self worth?

 

Fear Is Your Friend: On Not Overparenting August 6, 2012

Filed under: Parenting,Personal,Toddlers — rheabette @ 1:54 pm
Tags: , , ,

Despite all the texts about child development you read, proclamations you tell your friends about what you’ll never do, and test runs with other people’s children, you won’t know what kind of parent you’re going to be until you’re really in the thick of it.  Until you are sitting with your child in a dance performance, and she’s talking through the whole thing, and people are twisting their heads at you like you’ve brought a baby dragon into the studio.  Until your little darling, having just asked you for 15 things in a row, takes all of them and throws them on the ground, and they splash up and ruin the clothes they fought you to get dressed in.  Until you really mess up, lose your patience, and regret it, tearfully, at the end of the day.

I am growing into parenthood, just as my daughter is growing into toddlerhood.  Parents don’t just arrive, fully formed, just like children don’t come out of the womb asking calmly for a snack and a story.  Since I am my own person, rather than some “style” of person, I rarely find articles about parenting particularly resonant with how I am raising Olive, especially since most of them advocate, loudly and with certainty, either the “French style” of parenting that seems to equate detachment with good behavior, or the hyper-involved “American style” (if there could ever be such a thing in such a diverse society) in which parents lose their minds cutting up grapes and negotiating playground politics for their children.

If there’s anything I’m realizing, it’s that “Olive’s childhood” is also my young adulthood.  The idea that a child has a “childhood” that is all their own is a fallacy — what is happening in the child’s life in those years is directly related to what is happening in the lives of their family members.  Sometimes I talk about my “own” childhood as if it were a fixed thing that happened to me, not a deeply interconnected web of memories and facts from several different people.  I am recognizing that now, and it is redefining the way I’m thinking about development.

I have written before about the need for parents to live their own lives as fully as the one they are trying to shape for their children, and my belief in that was only solidified by reading this reasoned article by Madeline Levine in the New York Times: Raising Successful Children.  She advocates letting children take their own risks, and find their way out of their struggles how they see fit, with as little intervention from the parents as possible.  She challenges parents to own their anxiety and let kids work out their problems while staying warm, engaged, and non-shaming.  Well, how does one do this?  Levine concludes the article with this gem:

“Parents also have to make sure their own lives are fulfilling. There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.”

I want Olive to look at her parent’s lives and not see empty shells filled with T-ball practice schedules and perfunctory “Date Nights”, but two adults who are living their lives with passion, taking risks even if it means falling on our asses sometimes, and caring more about having connections with other humans than getting ahead.  In order to do this, you have to sacrifice something, and I am choosing to let go of making sure my child does everything perfectly.  The title of Levine’s article is a bit of a non sequitur, because the point that she is making is by trusting our children to be capable to meet challenges, rather than urging them to “be the best!”, they will become successful independently.

When I was a child, my father mercilessly taught me to attack my challenges head on.  “Face your fear!  Fear is your friend!”, he would growl, whenever I showed intimidation.  I tried to hide my fears, but my father was impervious to bullshit, and over time, he discovered that I was afraid of the dark, dogs, and cemeteries.  So you know what he had me do?  I had to walk a dog (a wild mutt from the pound that we had just obtained for the very purpose of making me face my fear), at night, through a cemetery.  I was seven years old, which my dad called “The Age of Reason”, so I should have been up to the task.  I cried, I cajoled, I sat my bony butt down on the hard earth at the start of the cemetery, but with fear as my friend beside me, I sure as shit walked that dog through the graveyard, and, eventually, got over all three of those fears.

I am not advocating that parents today make their children jump off a diving board if they are scared of heights, or sing a solo in church if they despise being in the spotlight.  Personally, I want to find a balance between the “sink or swim” attitude my dad had and the overparenting Levine condemns.  Lest you imagine that I have this all figured out and am sitting here from a perfectly balanced parenting perch, judging any mom still wiping their 4-year-old’s bottom, don’t get it twisted.  I am a continual work in progress, as is my child, and we’re figuring out the way forward together.  I think a good way to do that is by keeping my own life interesting, working on my own internal demons, and letting Olive find creative solutions to her problems, being there to celebrate with her when she does.

Olive painting her own face – no, it did not come out looking like a butterfly or a cat, and I had to dig blue goo out of her nose, but she did it herself, and loved every second of it.

So, why am I writing about this, when I profess to be less-than-inspired by parenting advice columns?  Because I want us to do better.  I want the parenting community of people who read articles like this to be less decisive, more comfortable with doubt, with the fact that we are all working it out as we go along, but trying to do it consciously, so we write, we read, we discuss with friends what it’s like to have another person’s life in our hands — how to help that life bloom rather than wither or be chopped off before it’s done putting down roots. And I want said parents, especially mothers, to feel okay about having their own lives, to live boldly with the knowledge that it is actually helping, not hurting their child to do so, as long as they don’t turn off their emotions towards their children in the process.  We must be brave with our lives so our children can be brave with theirs, and that means taking risks, and allowing our kids to struggle in order to watch them fly.

 

Hopeless at 13, Hopeful at 31: My Leg of The Hope 2012 Relay August 5, 2012

Filed under: Inspiration,Personal — rheabette @ 1:51 pm
Tags: ,

When I am searching for a gleam of hope in an otherwise dismal situation, I turn not to religious texts or inspiring political speeches, but rather, to music, and not R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”, but usually slightly more subtle expressions of struggle and strength.  The first moment that I can remember truly feeling empathy for an enemy, and therefore hope to get through a conflict, was through music.  No one enjoys middle school, but in 7th and 8th grade, I was so horrifically depressed that I seriously considered, many times, whether everyone might be better off if I were not in this world.  Looking back now, in the modern age of anti-bullying campaigns and you tube videos to help kids through such times, I realize that I was the victim of bullying, and that it was slowly killing me.  However, thinking of myself as a “victim” was something I had been trained never to do, so I would not have dreamed of describing it that way.  I just figured people were assholes and I was just going to keep on being me, and possibly die trying.

Conformity was all the rage in my suburban town back then, and I was simply not fitting in to the Early 90′s big gelled bangs super-feminine mold that was set forth for me by the other girls in my grade.  Instead, I had discovered punk and “alternative” rock, and was dying my hair with Manic Panic, wearing huge men’s corduroys from Army-Navy Supply, and trying my darnedest to get as many scars from hurtling down hills on my boyfriend’s skateboard as was humanely possible.  My more conventional classmates devised a name for me and my friends — “Scrubs” — and a clean-cut ex of mine led the pack, filling my locker with disgusting things, starting rumors that I didn’t wash, and taunting my “wicked queer” band T-shirts. All of this was sort of fine, as it didn’t get physical, since I had gotten in enough fights as a child that people knew not to fuck with me.

However, a new girl came to town, who wasn’t around for my playground displays of street cred, and was looking for someone to burn.  Unfortunately, I raised her ire by getting noticed by the boy she had a crush on, a very attractive but totally scary older guy who I was not really interested in, as he was dangerous not in the shaggy-haircut-tagger kind of way that I was into, but the arrested-for-selling-dope kind of way.  However, he started calling me, and new girl found out, and decided I needed to be taught a lesson.  She got a brick, wrapped it in a towel, and hit me in the back of the head with it in the hallway.  I passed out.  When I came to, I was totally hysterical.  I was not only in some pain, I was mortified, knowing what little shred of dignity I had left was gone, and terrified, because I truly believed this girl was going to kill me now.  I did everything possible to ignore her, including changing my route home and switching lockers.  I hated her for what she had done to me, breaking what little self esteem I had left and leaving me both seething with anger and scared out of my wits.  She and her friends continued to taunt and threaten me, and the dark cloud around me worsened.  I knew where my dad kept his gun.  My idol, Kurt Cobain, killed himself that year, and I considered joining him.

But then, I started to listen to R.E.M., and specifically, the ballad Everybody Hurts.  At first I would put it on repeat and sit in self-pity, writing long “woe is me” diatribes in which I imagined my funeral — who would feel guilty, who would be sad, who would remember me, and who would simply not give a shit.  Suddenly, I started to really listen to the words.  Stipe was singing that EVERYBODY hurts, including my aggressors.  I started to imagine that those mean girls had things they felt shameful about, had times in which they cried or wished they could cry, their faces trapped in that pain grimace where you want to let go but can’t.  And in feeling empathy for them, their power over me diminished.  We did not become best friends, but I gave up hating them for terrorizing me, and somehow found the strength to stand a little straighter in the hallways.  I did not stop being my wild self, and in time those girls got bored with picking on me and moved on.  A very long time after, one of them apologized, but I didn’t even need the words “I’m sorry”.  I had already forgiven them, the moment I realized I didn’t need to hold on to the hate.  They probably hated themselves enough for the two of us.

Time and again, when I’ve needed a perspective change, a song has called out to me, and the melody and words have floated me through the period of difficulty.  Often it is simply the knowledge that others have experienced what I’m currently going through, and made something beautiful from it.  This is what I love so much about blogging — it gives me the experience of building a community of people who say, “Me too.  I’ve been there.  I may not know how to get out of the place you’re in, but, at the very least, you’re not there alone.”  That is the best expression of hope that I know.  Not canceling out the darkness, but being a body beside me in it, groping for the light together.

This post is a part of Melanie Crutchfield’s incredible effort to commemorate the 2012 Olympics by doing a blogging relay about hope.  With this piece, I pass the baton to you, dear readers — add your post about hope to the 50+ voices that have participated so far, and give it the hashtag #HopeRelay2012 on Twitter so we can read all the posts, and be inspired by one another!  Melanie plans on compiling all the posts at the end of the Olympics and hosting a kind of Closing Ceremony for all the participants and readers.  Where do you find hope?

 

 
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