last month
March 11, 2017 § 4 Comments
February lingered unwritten in my memories; a month misplaced.
There was an unhappy argument whose sadness I dragged through unremarkable days, counting the hours until sleep. Not quite prepared to name my emotions, I would draft the day to dog-ear my thoughts; folding a corner of my attention over complicated emotions.
It was an unexceptional argument, but one that weighed on my thoughts and kept my spirit hemmed in. I couldn’t shake the tenderness and so I distracted myself with routine responsibilities, new book titles, and fresh air.
It was almost a week before I unfurled myself from caution and even then I was reserved in my joy. I had only just begun to relax into the luxury of a rare school day off from work, savoring the sweetness of unhurried errands, when our daughter returned home heavy-hearted over the unexpected resignation of a favorite teacher.
My own unhappiness had waned enough to absorb the balance of our daughter’s disappointment and I was reminded of a favorite quote by Ray Bradbury: We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
It was a month of filling our cups and then spilling beautifully.
A day after our daughter’s teacher resigned brought another abrupt goodbye. Again my husband and I sat with our daughter, listening while she wrestled the emotions that accompany people leaving us unexpectedly without reason or closure. Days later we would revisit the language of change as we scheduled classes for the coming school year.
This time it was our daughter drafting unexpected changes, setting expectations and expressing greater independence as she outlined class requests and the logic behind her decisions. Some of the choices begged patience enough to empower our daughter with something Brené Brown calls an “inspired yes,” giving our daughter ownership of her schedule and accountability for her goals.
Then, with all the ceremony of adolescent milestones, our son began wearing braces while our daughter prepared for her first long distance trip away from home. It is a season of change, unexpected endings and new beginnings. The days are longer, but the hours fuller.
Maybe this is why I miss writing most, time stands still long enough to capture a memory as we spill the beautiful moments of ordinary lives into words.
changing expectations
February 3, 2017 § 2 Comments
When we moved, our family began creating new expectations for one another and ourselves. The speed of change left us all a little bewildered and we settled into the discomfort of not knowing the otherwise predictable parts of our days with curiosity.
My children were used to me knowing what comes next. My routine circled my children’s in a way that kept me distractedly tethered to their needs with an invisible thread of communication between home and school. It was a once necessary open-ended energy that had been left running like a forgotten switch to a burned out bulb.
In our new space we had to trust one another to move through the murky unknowns, alone; to lean on strangers and navigate new challenges outside the familiar relationships of old experiences.
There were times it was tempting to exercise old habits, for myself especially. To draft messages that lent insight and history to our new community of teachers, but it was the occasions my children spoke for themselves or muscled through the difficult frustrations independent of my support that we fell into true appreciation and greater pride, humor and humility.
Some were substantial, like the morning the school called and my phone volume was muted because we no longer carry our phones like life lines. There were simpler occasions, too, of classroom confusion or forgotten materials. Then, there came the novelty of my decision to return to work and the subsequent patience and independence that guided my children to look further within when they might have previously reached out.
Yesterday as the hour of our daughter’s band solo neared, I marked the minutes with borrowed nerves; internalizing my daughter’s worries and dancing around a temptation to interrupt her attention with words of encouragement. Only, it occurred to me I was hijacking her experience with my eagerness to help.
Instead I waited for the impossibly long end of day to collect my daughter’s story in the lines of her posture and the angle of her smile. I listened as she talked about running late and loosing her place, the judge’s critique and the unexpected kindness in a stranger’s encouragements. Each moment was a gift I watched my daughter unwrap in her telling, something of her own to share.
It is perhaps an overdue epiphany, one I procrastinated passively out of a sense of purposeful self-importance. What felt like a kindness, protecting our children from emotional struggles, was quite possibly an error of affection. I’ve begun listening more than I speak, leaning quietly into a posture of faith that informs an expectation of strength.
Changing my expectations of self.
one at a time
January 23, 2017 § 2 Comments
Before we were a family of four, I drafted lists of good intentions for who I would be when we were no longer three. At the very top of my list was a pledge to set aside time to devote to each child – separately. One at a time.
I understood that I was better when my attention wasn’t divided, but I could not yet know how I would grow into another version of myself; that I would find beauty in the chaos of both children unraveling my frayed sense of order. More importantly, I did not anticipate the ways they would complete one another.
Last Thursday, our children sharing cookies after an evening band performance, the conversation overlapped in a family shorthand of movie quotes and comedy skits. These moments of frenetic stillness, times when the dishes stay put and we linger unhurried in the noise of our thoughts, these are the reasons I’ve returned to a commitment of fewer distractions, less multitasking, and uncluttered weekends. Singular conversations and collective contentment.
Small moments, together.
One at a time.
body of thought
January 15, 2017 § 2 Comments
It started with an excruciating pain during an unfamiliar exercise. Despite my admonishment of physical resolutions this year, I was swept up in a sudden need to move and threw myself enthusiastically into a new routine.
My efforts at stillness had quietly underscored the way I use movement both for avoidance and empowerment. Restless distractions that allow me to cloak worry in productivity are intimately related to the way I use exercise to purge those feelings I struggle to name.
Yesterday, inventorying for injury in a posture of submission to a very immediate sense of vulnerability, I tested the smallest movements with patience and settled among my thoughts.
Our bodies are great teachers in crises.
My body demanded I identify the harm and tend to the moment at hand. There’s a certain power in naming what hurts, allowing ourselves to speak directly without apology for weakness.
There is also humility in acknowledging what worked once may not serve us now. Freedom in accepting that our needs and abilities change over time.
Images can be deceptive; a body may appear healthy, but hide a deficit of strength. Similarly one can appear weak while exercising great strength.
Lastly, we teach our children as much in good health as we do in injury and sickness. It is natural to tend to another in need, but there are great lessons in self-care.
In those moments of stillness as I tested my body for stability and considered how I had changed, what I might need, and the actions that would best nurture healing, the thoughts I had been circling in movement all week settled into place and I marveled at the way life invites us to presence.
This past week my son wrapped up another academic term with finals. The end of anything brings the beginning of something else and we’ve been chasing significant change with unconventional choices in anticipation of his new term.
There has been great joy in the anticipation of these adjustments, but also remorse and grief for the years I held my son accountable to a pattern of commitments that contradicted his needs for another’s impersonal trajectory of success.
For all my efforts to parent outside the mainstream language of success, I’ve bought into patterns of parenting that conflicted my earliest days of motherhood; days before labels invited comparisons that bred fear and worry. For years I gauged good enough and belonging by unfortunate standards akin to fitting in.
While verbally celebrating my son’s individuality, I was shaping his future with a mass-produced machinery of normal. If A, then B. Never accounting for a factor of C.
There is so much more to this moment. I’ve been gathering my thoughts, privately, trying to decide how to mark this milestone in writing as we embark on a new adventure. It was strange that a physical injury is my introduction to sounding out these changes, but so it is:
Name the harm.
Understand what worked once, may no longer apply.
Recognize that images are deceptive, one can appear weak while exercising great strength.
Our actions speak more loudly than words, our children are listening to our choices.
gratitude remembered
January 1, 2017 § 3 Comments
It is one of the few intentions I have muscled into tradition, the jar of notes we read aloud on New Year’s to remember the year past. A hodgepodge of paper scraps in mismatched handwriting; moments of gratitude we collect over the course of each year.
There’s magic in the happy exclamations of remembering, a current of joy that leaps from page to person as we take turns sounding out one another’s celebrations. The notes are read out of order and without ownership so that each memory becomes a curious discovery.
This year the greater joy came from those misplaced moments. The events and good fortune forgotten on paper that we collectively called into account. The act of reading expanding to accommodate left out Remember When’s.
Small moments and sentimental milestones that map the past in a constellation of family.
peace
December 26, 2016 § 1 Comment
Friday morning I was the first to wake. Warm coffee in my favorite mug and only the light of the Christmas tree, I watched the first snowflakes tumble lazily against the darkness. Curled beneath the blanket my mother crocheted, with a book fallen forgotten across my lap, I lingered in content distraction while my family slept.
The past few days have been a happy treasure of simple riches; the company of loved ones and the easy busyness of cooking, card games and old movies. Our children curled into my parents’ company and I stole kisses from Mr. Claus beneath the mistletoe.
Some traditions were lost, Christmas picture books collected dust. The elf watched from his shelf, but without the magic of forgotten caution. A game of clues was played with the distracted mastery of someone sleepwalking a familiar path.
I might have grieved these small changes, reminders that my children were outgrowing beloved holiday hallmarks, but in the quiet moments I marveled at the new traditions in this unfolding season of joy. My children drafting their own Christmas cards to friends, an activity I once performed in solitude, or their company in the kitchen as we worked through the mechanics of family meals and holiday baking.
It’s been years since I baked with so much joy, exploring unfamiliar recipes and experimenting with new ingredients. Stumbling through the mess of failed dough for the perfect cookie. The meditative quality of soapy water and endless dishes. Meals that unfolded into the rhythm of wakefulness and rest, punctuated with conversation and laughter.
There was a gentleness to this Christmas, a quiet togetherness that ruffled old memories with fresh air. It was impossible not to remember the complicated experiences of past holidays; destructive houseguests that rattled peace with unkindness. There was a time I might have been caught in the contradiction of these experiences with disappointment or remorse, but the wealth of my gratitude outweighs regret.
This week, as I tuck away ornaments to welcome the New Year, there is a tranquility of peace and joy; mindfulness and presence for this season.
comfort & joy
December 21, 2016 § 4 Comments
There is a stillness to this season, small changes that have created a simpler experience of Christmastime. Gone is the chaos of elementary school parties; teacher gifts and classroom games, goodie bags and delegated snack assignments. Our children are of an age that we can recall the quiet frenzy of these holiday productions with equal measure sentiment and relief.
This year we’ve kept our social commitments minimal, intentionally gathering among old friends and new while preserving time enough to rest between festivities. A lunch celebration with co-workers and a coffee date between errands, a formal performance and an elegant evening among neighbors are sandwiched between lazy mornings and reruns of beloved movies. School nights have been squandered with spontaneous baking and vacation days given to family.
Even the gifts are no longer choreographed into tidy measurements of equality among our children, but aligned by need in anticipation of joy. Small gestures of thoughtfulness and indulgent offerings of appreciation. Our children have outgrown wish lists and are content to pen their names to family Christmas cards, adding their own greetings to old school friends and favorite teachers.
We’ve outgrown some traditions and added others, traded responsibilities and packed away reminders of unhappier Christmas spirits. As we near Christmas Eve, I find myself lingering in the quiet hours by the tree. Counting my blessings, unfolding gratitude like little cardboard doors on advent calendars; each day the sweetest gift of all.
no wrong answer
December 17, 2016 § 4 Comments
Yesterday a last-minute invitation for previously postponed plans lead to a contradiction of desires. The offering was indulgently unruffled, old friends on the eve of a winter storm. The richness of comfort food and conversation with the promise of an evening stay to avoid slippery roads home.
Opportunity came on the heels of today’s cancellations. No longer did we need to rise early for extra curricular activities; there was a treasure of time to forfeit a lazy evening at home. Except, it has been a long week. One that entailed travel for work and cold, afternoon dog walks; holiday errands and a stubborn runny nose. Despite careful planning and restful evenings, I could feel my family exhaling into home.
Instead of leaping towards an instinctive yes, we leaned into an intuitive no. Rather than an improvised celebration, we gathered into shared stillness. My husband cooked a seemingly endless offering of snacks while the kids and I nestled into a movie; laughter bubbling over the space between kitchen and couch.
This morning, in the beautiful mess of early snowfall, I considered the richness of our family’s good fortune. There was no wrong answer in the generosity of our choices, only an abundance of opportunity. Exquisitely ordinary gifts in a season of happy distractions.
parenting & politics
November 9, 2016 § 2 Comments
The morning after the election, breakfast was a conversation in tolerance and respect. Educated, kind individuals are already speaking hate, fear and panic in the wake of yesterday’s election.
Some threaten to abandon America, passively pledging to list their homes and apply for Canadian citizenship. Others who once echoed the elegance of “when they go low, we go high” are speaking a different language.
I am reminded of the post-election rhetoric just eight short years ago and I wonder when we will learn the lessons our children are being taught in the midst of our distraction.
Today I am tasking my children with a responsibility to listen gently and speak kindly by modeling a discussion around opinions and emotions.
World leaders may be looking curiously at our choices, but our children are listening to our language.
grace & growth
October 25, 2016 § 3 Comments
It’s been a week of ups and downs, watching my children grind through the mechanics of personal struggles. Some common to their age, others unique to their personalities. The only universal space between their discomfort was my reaction, the language I used to acknowledge their emotions.
I’m working to listen through the urge to guide, offering empathy over direction. In trading the wisdom of my experiences for serving as a witness to my children’s challenges, they’ve gained greater authority and accountability for their mistakes as well as their success. They are growing up and this task of mothering is no less difficult for their independence.
There’s grace in the growing.
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