@ Home in the World

2011 Peace on Earth Photo Challenge

Note: I'm bringing this back again because I really liked the idea and the blog is suddenly getting more attention again. Please join us!

And so this is Christmas, and what have we done, Another year over, and a new one just begun...

-John Lennon

"Happy Christmas" became one of my favorite Christmas songs the year John Lennon died, 31 years ago yesterday.

I had lost my own father earlier that year and there was something so bittersweet in Lennon's voice and his lyrics that resonated with me. In that moment when John and Yoko whisper "Happy Christmas" to each other, for a split second, you understand why they were together in the first place.

"Happy Christmas," and "Starting Over" were on the radio constantly in tribute and I never got sick of them. When I think of those days, it is the candlelight vigils from John's millions of fans that stand out in my memory; light against the darkness of his murder. No doubt, the next 24 hours will be filled with radio remembrances before we go back to talking about Christmas sales and the stress of the holidays.

I've always been a bit of a romantic about Christmas. My husband and I started dating and got engaged during the Christmas season. There's something about those old time carols and Christmas concerts that I treasure. Unlike Valentine's Day, Christmas is a holiday I can truly appreciate. On New Year's Day, there is nothing better than opening a new calendar, or starting a new journal. I love that fresh start, the promise of the possible.

But the thing about the holidays that does not get enough attention are those times of quiet after all the festivity is done. Even the traditional Nativity scene is a moment of peace after the struggle of birth and the hardship of travel. You can almost believe that war is over and there is peace on Earth.

In modern times, it might be having the tree all to yourself after the kids have gone to bed, Christmas cookies awaiting Santa's arrival, a walk in the snowy woods, children playing with their toys without fighting, or animal tracks in the backyard snow. It could be your church, empty, but still decorated in celebration of the season. It's those moments when you can breathe deeply and realize that there's no more to be done; the party's over or you've wrapped your last gift.

This holiday, I'm inviting you to pay attention to those moments, appreciate them, document them and share them with others. It will be nice to see how each of us defines peace.

Here's how it works:

1. During the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, take at least one photo of a peaceful moment or scene. Post on your own blog. Include a link back to this post.

 

2. Leave me a comment on this post or email a link to latelierdelisse@yahoo.com . Please be sure to include a description of your photo to give us some background.

 

3. On New Year's Day I will include all of the links I get in a roundup post with my own Peace on Earth photo. Hopefully, a tour of them will be a wonderful, calming experience for many.

 

Peace

 

I fear

Rubber bands. On more than one occasion, my little brother stretched one out beside my head and let it go, snapping my ear, hard. Rubber bands pulled my hair out if I had to use them in place of a wrapped elastic. Used as a tourniquet above my elbow, pinching, binding, and stealing the feeling from my fingers, they are the worst part of drawing blood.

The slamming door. When I am stressed and worried about the outcome of things, this is the sound that I hear, over and over in my head. It is the sound of being left behind, shut out, asked to leave, disinvited. It is being told, once again, that I am not good enough, a failure, that I don't deserve...

The missing driver. My recurring dream, as a child, was of riding in a car with no driver, or a disconnected steering wheel, that was really a toy. I can never recall the car of my dreams spinning out of control, only the fear, even after I awoke, that it was going over the bridge.

Changing my oil. The funniest of my fears, this is really about another out-of-control vehicle; a malevolent force, starting up and running over me, even as I tried to care for it.

Losing everything. The people really. I fear that they will one day say "Enough! We are through with you, and the things you can't do. We are off!" And I will someday die, alone.

The Ends of Things

 

School is almost over. The countdown is two weeks now. Pumpkin's end of year performance and open house were both last week. I watched my youngest child get up on stage and with 30+ peers and sing at least part of the songs. He knew his lines and his cue to step up to the microphone. His fidgeting and enchroaching into his neighbors' space was unchanged from last year, when the fact that he was the only child exhibiting constant movement prompted me to finally agree to ADD meds. That was most unexpected, but I'm still glad I did it because the medicine has helped him ward off the sillies and exhibit much greater self-control.  Another mom with an austistic son pointed out Pumpkin's shirt-twisting behavior and said that she recognized it. It's always a relief to hear from people who understand what's going on with him.

This year has been a surprisingly sucessful year for Pumpkin. And it's really been this past week that i've noticed things like how much he is talking about other kids in his class and how he speaks of playing with them and exchanging ideas. I can remember celebrating in earlier years being able to have the simplest of conversations with him, and having him ask questions of me. Now he's able to tell me more about how he's feeling and what makes him upset. He's starting to take an interest in sports, which always surprises me and reminds me not to pigeonhole him.

I was a little worried about his teacher assignment for this year and I think he did take her some getting used to, but overall, I would say this was a far more successful year than the last one. They were able to push/coax him farther than I ever would have imagined.

This past weekend we marked another ending of sorts. The social worker who guided us through the adoption process (twice) is retiring at the end of June, and with that, the agency will close its doors. A few years ago another employee was arrested for embezzling from the agency. Though she was ordered to make restitution, adoptions were getting tougher, the recession would soon follow and the agency never really recovered. 

This weekend a small group of local families brought together by our agency came together to celebrate the social worker who made it all happen. The cake you see up there represents several of the countries our agency worked in and of course there's the U. S. flag that all our children came home to. I knew only one of the families at this particular gathering, but it was interesting that the experience of having traveled to a foreign country to start a family, and then come home and handle the challenges our children presented produced a near instant bond with many of the others.

It felt so good to be able to tell another parent that her child, with behavioral quirks I also recognized, was able to come up to my older son, introduce himself and ask Tigger to play. I recognized her happiness at this news, that her son was reaching out, that all the time spent in therapies had manifested itself in a friendly, if young for his age, little boy. Hurray for them! There is hope. Our work and our belief in our kids is paying off. We have been able to give them something worthwhile - a home, a family, a chance!

It's interesting that this was the first year that I did not feel that pull to be headed to Russia. I don't know if the weather and the calendar didn't match, or we had a different trip (to Washington DC) to plan but usually, every April and May, Piper and I start talking about how it really feels like we should be packing and putting together paperwork. It wasn't like that this year.

Tigger has been with us 8 years and Pumpkin 6. We are rapidly closing in on the number of years we were married without children. It is getting harder and harder to remember what it was like before. I am certainly no longer longing for those childless days as I once did. We still have significant challenges, but with each passing year, we are more and more a team.

Our newly constructed house isn't so new anymore, and could frankly use a paint job in some places. I'm coming to realize that many of the office clothes I had before children are almost 10 years old and need to be weeded out. And, even though I did not birth these two children, at nearly 45, my body type is different than it once was.

I'm not exactly sure how to put this, and I'm sure that I'll be exploring this in the weeks to come, but I have come to a point in my life where I fell like I need to get a better handle on things. Of course, sitting here trying to work this out at nearly midnight when I have to be at work the next morning is a perfect example of the sort of thing I shouldn't be doing anymore. I'm getting a little too old to be just keeping my head above water, rushing to prepare for the next meeting, always slightly behind and trying to hide my panic about it.

A friend of mine once taught me to eliminate distractions. I was getting better at it before I had kids. Then I sought distractions, desperately needed them, was gratful for them keeping me sane. Now I simply have too much on my plate.  I either need to give stuff up or manage it all better. I don't really want to give up on the blog. I still have the stories, but it is really about making the time.

How many times have I written a sentence like this?

Too many.

I haven't mentioned this yet because I am still quite surprised about it. It doesn't feel real to me. I'm going to BlogHer in August. I applied as a volunteer and was accepted. I am travelling, by myself, to San Diego for several days, and I will meet, or at least cross paths with, many of the bloggers I have admired who have long since established themselves and done something with the opportunity that I have allowed to pass me by. I am wondering what I will get out of it at this juncture, because I have been so disconnected from the blogging community lately, because I have been disconnected from my writing.

We joke about bucket lists and 40 x 40 lists. I am too old for the latter and hopefully not old enough for the former.

But one thing that has been on my life list since I was ten years old  (Tigger's age!) is that I wanted to be a writer. It is the one thing that has been consistent in my life, and one of the few things I have managed not to do.

I don't have to look too deeply to understand it. I have not honored the need to keep writing, because I did not want to fail. All the writing I have been doing lately has been for someone other than myself. I don't even mean my audience here, I mean my job, my volunteer work, my ghostwriting for others. None of it is helping me be a writer, or at least not a successful one.

I will be 45 in the fall. Back when I was 35 I felt that everything I did from there must count. I haven't always honored that. Certainly, I have done a lot with the last 10 years, including some things, like parenting, that I way undervalue. But time's awasting  and I must find a way to end the self-sabotage on this one, last thing.

 

Parenting

Or perhaps, The Battle Hymn of the Tigger Mother.

Amy Chua is already backing slowly away from her smackdown of Western parenting that was published by the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. She claims surprise that it engendered such a negative reaction and that if people only read the whole book they would see that she has given in somewhat by allowing playdates and such after her younger daughter rebelled. 

And though David Brooks did address the issues of denying one's children a social life, most of the rest of the world picked up on the verbal abuse.

That's certainly what got me.

Like a lot of other grown women all over the Internet, I was on the receiving end of those insults, restrictions, and humiliations as a child. I wish I could say that they had pushed me to become a high achiever, hugely successful with a Type A personality that never let anyone stop her. But no.

For most of my life I pretty much had a big F for Failure stamped on my forehead, and it wasn't until I was in my mid-30s that my husband managed to convince me otherwise.

My upbringing is a big part of the reason I was just fine with not having any daughters. I just couldn't see being able to handle those aspects of myself that I have always had the most difficulty with. I was afraid to look at a daughter and see myself, and I was afraid not to.

Instead, I have Tigger. Tigger could so easily be related to me by blood, he fits in with my family tree of control freaks so well that it is scary sometimes. Some of the things that drive me craziest about him are the things that remind me of myself.

My mother was on me constantly for all the noises I made. I had a hard time sitting still unless I was reading a book, and even then I was probably fidgeting, making popping and clicking noises, and worrying the pages of the books I was reading (the creases and wrinkles can still be seen in my copy of Charlotte's Web that I just gave Pumpkin to read). While waiting for my turn in Scrabble I would make bubble sounds by running my tongue back and forth against my upper lip, or tap my fingers, or bite my nails. My sweet grandmother never said a word (except about the nail biting) but the rest of it drove my mother up a wall backwards.

Like me, Tigger prefers never to be alone.* He has not ever been able to entertain himself without the TV. I had to learn because I spent hours alone in my room, because it was the only way my mother could have some peace. Fortunately, I loved to read and could be hidden away for hours with my nose in a book. Tigger hates to read, but he loves his radio as much as I did back then.  Sometimes the only way to stop his constant attention-demanding behavior is to isolate him, but knowing how it felt, I really hate to do that. It doesn't really solve the problem long term. Just this morning he got sent upstairs for his attitude. Of course he doesn't settle in with a book, but picks up the mini-basketball in his room and shoots hoops. Now there's no backtalk, but the bouncing and banging can be heard throughout the house.

Tigger is one of those kids you have to constantly keep an eye on. He will take advantage of any opportunity to get away with something that he's not typically allowed to do. He has, from the very beginning, gone to great lengths not to do what is asked of him, especially if he has any inkling that it's something that is good for him. I had much more fear in me than that, but I went to great lengths to avoid doing homework from the fourth grade on. He would too, but there's now the happy advantage of having his teacher post the homework assignments on her website. Gotcha!

Raising him has been an endless game of deciding which battles to pick, because it could easily all be a battle. If it's healthy, he doesn't like it; if it's warm, he doesn't want to wear it; if it will help him with his self-control, he's not interested; if it will make him smarter, he doesn't want to deal with it. I have largely stopped buying desserts lest I find that he has gone through an entire box of cookies before I'm even awake.

Like me, and my mother before me, his control freakishness is born of insecurity. Of my two kids, it is Tigger who most feels that loss that adoptees experience. He can't really put a name to it, and I'm not sure that he ever will, but I know that my unwillingness to be alone became nearly tangible after my father died.

And so I can empathize with Tigger, who lost me in a big way when we brought a second child home and Pumpkin's behaviors took up all my time, energy, and most of my sanity for a while there. Tigger's nowhere near back to getting equal time with me, but we can talk about it now, and I can let him know that I recognize his frustration. Making time for him is something I need to get better about. I think it surprised him that I made it to nearly all his soccer games this fall. I hadn't made it to any last year, because I was busy keeping Pumpkin out of trouble.

This morning some woman in church stopped to compliment me on Tigger's behavior. That she used the word "turnaround" alarmed me a bit, but I knew what she meant. Of course while she chalked it up to good parenting, I said a silent prayer of thanks to Concerta. I wish I could take more credit for the things he does well, but the fact is, without the medicine offering us some relief from his impulsivity, we would not have been able to get as far as we have. There is no greater evidence of that than the attitude problem we have with him nearly every morning and when the meds have worn off. The teenage years should be a blast.

If anything, the medication has enabled us to raise our expectations for him, because it has forced us to examine those expectations (ADHD kids, says our pediatrician, are usually very smart), and the impact they had on his expectations for himself. He was behind in reading, but this year he is back up to grade level (doesn't like it any more than before, sadly). He hates to do anything "hard" but he selected an instrument to study (the violin) that I consider rather challenging.

Our greatest struggle, as working parents, is to support him in his activities and reinforce his sometimes shaky commitment. We can do that without insulting or humiliating him.

I don't care if he becomes a doctor, or a lawyer, or the next Yo Yo Ma (yes, I know he plays the cello). What I really want for Tigger is to find something he loves and find a way to make it a successful part of his life. I don't want him to be forced to follow a path he hates, or find himself stuck in an office cube in his 40s, desperate for a way out.

I want him to remain curious, learn how to be happy, and to continue to grow his generous spirit. I want him to understand that he needs to be in control of himself before he can be in charge of others, and I want him to realize that, though acheivement is often arrived at through struggle and pain; love really shouldn't be.

 

 

 

*As an adult, I know cherish my alone time, even if it is just the commute in the car, but it took me a long time to get to that point.

Pastiche

pas·tiche

[pa-steesh]  noun 1. a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.

2. an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.

I've taken advantage of having the week off to do some much needed housekeeping on the blog.

Although I haven't had much time for writing, I have really been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with @ Home in the World.  I started writing as a way to capture some of the stories from our adventures adopting two Russian boys. Overly optimistic that we'd be able to do more than just armchair traveling even after we became parents, I gave it the subtitle "International Adoption and Other Travels."

For various reasons, we haven't been able to do much travelling and the boys are getting to be the age when many blogging parents start to talk about their stories becoming their own. They have been with us nearly 8 and 6 years and most of the Russia stories have been told. Certainly there's more to tell about our experiences as a special needs family, something we're really just starting to get a handle on, but in a lot of ways this blog has been more about my (long) adjustment to parenthood.

Personally, and professionally, I'm in a pretty good place. As a parent, I'm in that respite place before adolescence. There's still quite a bit of road ahead, but this might be the section that is better paved, and less hilly.

Writing is the only thing that is really suffering right now. I've wanted to be a writer since I was in the fifth grade, but it has always been last on the list. With so much going on right now, it's really a matter of finding a topic that I'm excited enough to spend the time and energy on.

Looking back, I really feel like I did some of my better writing when taking on social perceptions of motherhood and parenting, politics, and in other venues, education. I'm going to try to get back to that, as time allows. I have certainly written about adoption, but it as been mostly about our experiences and only occasionally on the politics surrounding the topic, as I find myself too often at odds with people's notions of what should be offensive to me.

During the vacation week, I spent some time going through my blog rolls, updating sites that have changed names or addresses, and (sadly) dropping those who have stopped publishing altogether. There were a lot of changes to make.

For a time, I saw blogging as a way to move from well-received posts on a local message board, to some venue with a broader audience. That didn't happen, largely because I never really struck while the blogging iron was hot. From the looks of things, it has not only cooled considerably, but formed into a gate that's rather hard to get open -- just like traditional publishing.

The fact that the Photo Challenge went nowhere really told me something. It was something I pretty much already knew given that sites with much greater popularity have ceased publishing recently.

Still, I wouldn't have put so much work into this page over the break if I didn't want to continue to do something with it. The trick now is to make the time to write.

Sandwiched

I finally snapped at my mother on the way out the door. I had managed to keep it all submerged for two days, but the pressure finally got to me. When she tried to give me advice about packing the car, suggesting that I could simply sit with a large suitcase at my feet in the front seat for the three-hour ride home, I lost it. She might have thought it was okay back then to try to squeeze us in the back seat with all her furniture and other things at our feet, and in our laps, and poking into our sides, on the long rides between New Jersey and Connecticut every weekend.  Those trips were so indicative of the priority of her things over her children. It really wasn’t okay then, and I will certainly not put up with it now.  My outburst hinted at, but did not truly approach, the twenty years of crap that will never truly be resolved between us.

She moved away from me then, choosing to wave good-bye from the safety of her glassed-in porch, perhaps to spare me another five minutes of her nit-picking, her lack of faith in my judgment, her inability to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, it’s just as likely that heading back toward the house was an unconscious decision on her part and that I was the only one in the exchange to feel any guilt, any kind of burden of the past. She absolves herself of any responsibility for my brother’s poor choices by blaming genetics; “he’s just like Dad’s brothers,” she says in the same tone she used to remind me how much I looked like her mother-in-law, whom she clearly resented.

It is enough that I must bring my two rambunctious boys to stay for two days in a house full of antiques. It is enough that my sister has bailed at the last minute and that she and her family are not there to act as a buffer between me and our mother, as I have so often been called upon to do for her. Having more of us there blurs the focus, spreads the critique; reassures each of us that we did not imagine the dysfunction with which we were raised.  Now it is only my husband and I, listening to her constantly berate our boys for their odd posture and involuntary leg swinging at the table. We are compelled to join in the nagging, lest my mother’s furniture be ruined by them just being boys.

In one of her stories, my mother recalled standing at the foot of the stairs yelling for my brother day after day so that he would get up and get out the door to catch the school bus. I wondered, but did not ask, if it ever occurred to her to go up the stairs and into his room to speak to him – one human being to another, instead of some overbearing master yelling at a dog.  I was a freshman in college before I realized that most families do not communicate by screaming at one another. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that many siblings did, in fact, enjoy each other’s company.

It is hard being the eldest daughter in my mother’s house, and even harder to simultaneously be the mother of two imperfect boys. In my mother’s presence, I see them through her eyes; note every misstep, cringe at every jump and slide and lean and push. It is so hard not to bring her wrath down upon them in my own voice. It’s hard enough in my own house, never mind hers.

On this visit, Pumpkin was freaked out by the radiator, something that had never bothered him before. This time though, he insisted that it sounded like a man, standing in the corner of their bedroom, sniffing. Last night, I watched him walk around my mother’s house before bedtime, counting all the radiators (perhaps his way of controlling his fear of them). While I sought to calm his nerves against this formless hissing, I felt the usual dread that consumes me on these visits, reveal itself as menace. The cavernous Victorian house felt claustrophobic, and the world outside its windows threatening. I could not wait to get back to safety.

On the car ride back to Massachusetts, pressure valve released, I could not stop crying. I struggled not to completely lose it on the boys squabbling in the back seat. I was exhausted from protecting everyone, including myself and my mother, from the ugliness of the past. It also occurred to me that it was finally time to acknowledge that I was never going to move back to Connecticut, that I would never be comfortable there, and that even though I still had lots of friends in the area, the simple fact was that I was strangely reminiscent for a time that had really not been all that great to begin with. Never mind that Piper would never consider such a move; it had been in the back of my head since I left 25 years ago, always the possibility of getting back to my roots.

No more. Perhaps it’s not so much that you can’t go home again, it’s more that sometimes, you just really shouldn’t.

Progress Made

It has been almost two months since we put our boys on the bus for the first day of school. 

It has become a tradition to take their photos each year before they leave. I started when each of them headed off to preschool for the first time, before they were even taking a bus. Boy, were they little!

Between sharing this year's photos with family and friends who mostly reacted with the obligatory "They're getting so big," and sitting at a meeting at the school when a flock of actual preschoolers paraded past the window, it is starting to sink in that my 8 and 9 year olds are not little boys anymore.

Granted, much of their recent behavioral maturity has to do with the prescription of ADD meds for both of them. They have had an enormous impact on the dynamics in the house, the flow of our weekends, and our ability to simply go on vacation.

They are also playing together a bit more. Sure, there's still plenty of sibling antagonism, but just yesterday I went looking for them, thinking the house was entirely too quiet, only to find them in their room playing a game. That it was a game of catch, in the house, I managed to overlook in favor of celebrating their mutual cooperation.

Their advancing grade levels are bringing more changes. As a fourth grader, Tigger can choose an instrument to play in the elementary school "orchestra." I had all sorts of ideas of the kind of instrument he was going to be attracted to, but the one he picked - the violin - surprised the heck out of me. He's super excited about it, too.

He's also playing soccer this Fall; really playing, not just rolling around in the net like a giant pillbug. He seems to far prefer defense, knows where he's supposed to be, and is usually there.  He played goalie last week, and for the entire half that he held that position, no one scored against him. I was amazed, and impressed.

I spent years worrying that this child would never express an interest in and aptitude for anything beyond a screen. He spent years fighting against doing anything remotely productive or educational. Reading? Bah! Karate? Hell no! TV? Absolutely, at every waking moment and whenever you are not looking.

Pumpkin is a second grader. I am trying to keep as closely in contact with the goings on in his classroom as it is possible for a working mother to do. When I made the decision to have Pumpkin repeat a year of Kindergarten, my biggest fear was that he would overcome some of the things that were holding him back, get to 2nd or 3rd grade, and be bored out of his mind. This may be the year. 

The first clue was the worksheet of coin values that he quickly filled in and had enough time left over to draw in explicit detail the head and tail faces of each coin, carefully copying out the words E Pluribus Unum, and other characteristics. The second was his mention of getting a bigger packet of math worksheets than everyone else. It is interesting that he has noticed this and I wonder exactly how long this is going to be the strategy for keeping him entertained.

I put it that way because this teacher has a reputation for being V E R Y  R I G I D! This was borne out on open house night, when Tigger's teacher demonstrated an exercise with parents using a technology she had just adopted and made her presentation interesting and interactive. Pumpkin's teacher passed out a list of rules.

Still, the start of school was so much calmer this year than last. I wonder if we are in that "eye of the storm" before they become teenagers.

 

Fear(less)

I can't swim.

Well, I know howto swim, I know all the strokes, but my endurance is non-existent. It horrifies me. I grew up around boats, I'm a pretty good sailor, I've spent much of my life at the beach, I took swimming lessons for almost 10 years. I love being around the water, I'm just not so crazy about being in the water.

I have never, to my knowledge, come close to drowning. I have never needed to be rescued. But I do know that feeling of desperation that I might not make it to safety, that gasping for air, that feeling of the oxygen leaving my limbs, my arms turning to rubber, powerless. All the strength I have on land gets washed away.

My mother, in one of the few instances when she's stood back and looked objectively at what was happening with me, suggested that, as a child, I was so panicked about not being able to breathe that I could never focus enough on the strokes to develop a breathing rhythm. As an adult, I can feel the cold water pushing the air out of my lungs, in much the same way that I cannot catch my breath in the cold winds of winter. I wonder if this is what asthmatics feel? Are they afraid when they can't breathe? Does fear make the problem worse?

Fear is a big theme in my family. It wasn't until I was well into my 30s that I realized how much my childhood and adolescence was ruled by my mother's fears. I missed out on a lot because of this. I had no social life through most of high school, because my mother feared I was too impressionable and would get sucked into drugs. She never understood, and would never believe, that even without after-school activities, I had plenty of opportunity for that sort of thing, and zero interest.

Fear was largely behind her determination that I should not be a parent. I think her objections were more about the weaknesses she perceived in me, rather than any feeling against adoption. She told me that Piper and I would be happier without children and that she had no desire to be a grandmother, but when I walked in on her eagerly discussing baby names with my not-yet-pregnant sister, how do you think I felt?

When we finally made it to Russia and back the first time, and I described the trip to her, she asked me if at any point I had asked myself what I was thought I was doing there? I acknowledged some self-doubt, but frustrated with her lack of belief in me, I looked her in the eye and said "If I lived governed by my fears, I would never do anything in life." She acknowledged the point.

Having children brings out all your shit. There's really no getting around it. I have experienced more fear, anger, and anxiety in the past few years than I have in half a lifetime. I see, much to my horror, how much my feelings and reactions mirror my mother's, and how careful I have to be that my boys' childhoods not turn out as stunted as mine. This is harder than I ever imagined.

Glossing over entirely the metaphoric implications of a fear of drowning, let me take you to the swimming hole we visited this weekend. The one with the natural water(fall) slide and the ten foot cliff jump; the one that's 20 feet deep and has a strong current. The one that much, much, older boys leapt into with wild abandon. The one my boys saw and naturally wanted a piece of.

For a moment, it looked like I was going to get away with refusing them. Pumpkin cannot swim and he has no sense of danger. His fearlessness has long been remarked upon by other parents, but it is not exactly healthy. Of course, he loves water. I tried steering him toward the more shallow pools, and that worked for a bit, but then he saw that Tigger could go if his father went first and waited. The more he saw others jumping in, the more upset he got.

It's a complicated balancing act that most parents do between safety and over-protection. I know first hand how too much sheltering can lead to a poorly-managed independence. Pumpkin is already kept from certain activities because of his behavior challenges, I don't want to restrict him more than necessary, but there he was, longing to leap into the depths of my worst nightmare.

The families around us got drawn into this drama. One father suggested a swimming hole half a mile up the road that was smaller and safer. Another mother told me that, she too, cried the first time her boys jumped off the cliff. My distress eventually caught Tigger's attention causing him to hesitate at the edge. Now he was afraid. Pumpkin was in no way deterred, Piper felt that he could go because there were now a lot of people looking out for him and it became evident that I was eventually going to lose this battle.

Thankfully, a solution was found. The neighbors we traveled with pulled a bright orange life preserver out of their car and offered it to us. Pumpkin donned it immediately and stopped crying. I can't say the same, but I was able to stand off to the side with my camera, and not miss the shot.

Too tired to blog, and related rants

So, I'm reeling from the news that my beloved Women's Colony has decided to shut down. I was under the impression that they were testing the waters of expansion, but apparently Mrs. G. and her colleagues decided that it was all a bit too much.

Today came the announcement that the Silicon Valley Moms Blog is also ceasing operation. I haven't heard why, or figured out if that also means that local affiliates across the country are also ending, but that's at least two in as many days.

I wasn't a big reader of SVMoms, or any of its sister sites, but The Women's Colony was a daily check-in for me. I will miss it terribly. I appreciated the company of women who were older (can I say that?) and had seen more than a thing or two with children, husbands, and extended family. I loved the Confessional, though I rarely had the need to use it. Their decision has put my quandary in a lot sharper focus.

I don't want to shut this space down, and I don't yet plan to. However, my job, something I can't really blog much about, is consuming not only my time, but my brain space.

But you know, the lack of blogging is really only a symptom.

Piper and I had a long talk last week about the vast number of things that we were not attending to while we were working. We must make a list of things to tackle, and we haven't even done that yet. Much of it deals with getting Pumpkin some additional help, but then there is a lot of paperwork stuff we have needed to chase down, but have let go for far longer than we should. Pumpkin needs to be in a theraputic camp, but when I finally got around to looking into it, the application deadline had long passed.

We need to get a shed for the backyard, but we have needed to do that for ten years. We have a very bad habit of just living with stuff, and it's causing us to miss out on a lot these days.

We need to go on vacation. We desperately need to take our children on a trip this summer, but chances are, we won't do that either. It's too hard, and we can't seem to make a decision about where to go. We will spend our weekends trying to catch up with housework, yard work, and work work, before we know it, it will be the end of August and school will be starting.

There's a half a dozen things I want to blog about, even more when you count the other blog I was trying to launch that focuses on Education and Learning. There's so many good topics on that front; The Texas Textbook Massacre, the push for charter schools, the national standards proposal and whether they measure up to what we already have in Massachusetts, and the whole social media in learning thing, going on in the adult learning world.

I can't seem to do it. I get upstairs into the office that I created for exactly that purpose, I get two or three lines on the screen and I can't get any farther. My writing has always been slow, I agonize over every word, but it's more than that.

I'm freekin' tired.

It's 5:30 PM. I'm writing this at my desk at work before I leave, because even if I get it all written in my head on the drive home, it will never get on the screen. I will stare a mostly blank screen for hours and second guess myself. Before I know it, it will be midnight, leaving six hours before I have to get up and go to work. And that's before I've put that last load of laundry in, gotten my clothes out for the next day and gotten ready for bed.

Vicious cycle.

Here's the thing. I'm finally at a place where I have the full life I always wanted. But I feel like I am seeing that life rather than really experiencing it, because we don't have our shit together. I've always been easily distracted (except when I was reading), but the full schedule and the lack of sleep are really making things worse. I used to be able to keep details in my head, but I can't do that either. I've gotten some extra little tasks to manage at work, but since they aren't really related to projects, I'm afraid I'll forget all about them. No "system" has ever worked for me. I have never, in my whole life, been able to stick to a routine. Whether that's self-discipline or ADD, or some combination of the two, I'll probably never know.

But somehow I need to get a handle on this so I don't lose it all.  Because I have finally gotten to the point where I can say I'm a good writer. I have a good life, and a good job, and a great family, but I have no idea how long I can hang on to all of it.

My Madeline is a Roast Beef on Rye

I miss my dad. He died 30 years ago last February, when I was 13 years old. I tried to write about him on February 11, the anniversary of his death. I tried again on the 28^th of February, which was his birthday. I found, much to my dismay, that I was not writing about him, but about how much his loss defined me and in some ways still does. I could not honor him in a way that I wanted.

 

This afternoon, reading Mom-101's post on a favorite restaurant she shared with her father and grandfather, opened a door for me.

 

I actually went to Google Earth to find the restaurant my father used to take me to. It is still there after all these years. Several blocks away, I found the address where my father's business had been located, and where I had spent so much time as a child. A new, much more modern, building stood in its place.

 

I think most of the truly happy memories from my childhood involve my father. He would take me off into his place of work where I would distract his secretaries and raid the supply cabinet. I used to pretend I worked there, typing letters to imaginary clients and wasting yards of adding machine tape on meaningless columns of numbers. Of course, I imagined I would grow up to actually work there, I thought I would be a secretary like the young ladies I admired.

 

He would take me around with him from project to project, from place to place, to both job site and store. While he talked with people be they employees or clients, I admired the construction machinery, and in the case of an auto parts store Lodi, New Jersey, the floor-to-ceiling Playboy centerfolds plastered on the walls. My Dad pretended not to notice.

 

Often he would take me from work to the Lyndhurst Diner where they knew our names. I would play with the tabletop Juke box and order the same thing every time.  I haven't been back to New Jersey in over a decade, but a roast beef on rye is my Madeline.

 

People told me that I looked like him; that I took after him, that I was mechanically-inclined like him. These were all compliments to me, they filled me with pride. He is the source of my inner gadget geek; he had a mobile phone back when they worked like ship to shore radios. He understood technology; he had a computer in his office that took up the whole room, but he knew that digital watches would get smaller and thinner the longer they were on the market. He understood how barcodes would be used long before the scanners showed up at the supermarket. He gave me my first radio, tape recorder, stereo, he would have loved my iPhone.

 

I knew he loved me. Even when he was upset, I never had any reason to question that. I knew he was proud of me. He never really had to say it, but the day I discovered he kept one of my perfect spelling tests in his car with him was a revelation. I was closer to him than anyone else in my family.

 

When I was a child, I spent entirely too much time at Children’s Hospital in Boston. My memories of that place are almost entirely about how well I was taken care of, and my father coming to visit me. There’s a story I’ve been told about the day I said my first word. It had not been a good day at the hospital. My mother and the medical staff were very worried about me making it through. I don’t know where my father had gone, but we all heard his footsteps coming  down the hall. I started to get very bouncy, and when he entered the room I recognized him even in hospital garb and mask. Of course, I said “Dada!” and it was the light moment in a very dark day.

 

I made it. I’m still here, but he is long gone. I don’t think about it in the way that I once did, but every so often, it hits me what I’ve missed; what he’s missed.

 

I like to think he has been watching over me these past thirty years; giving me the strength and the sanity to marry a good man. Our first son is named after my father, and I struggle to convey how important he was to me, without getting into how sad I was without him.

 

It was incredibly hard to enter my teenage years without his protection, though I don’t know that I would have seen it as such at the time. He took me to work with him less frequently the closer I got to puberty. He didn’t want me around all the young men that worked for him. It was difficult for him to watch my sister and me develop crushes on boys. He was no social butterfly, so it must have pushed some kind of button with in him when my sister declared that she wanted to marry a “cute, smart, boy,” for my father uncharacteristically quipped “I was the last of them.”

 

Thankfully, that may have been the one thing he was wrong about, because my sister and I both managed to find them. Of course, we had the best example to go by.

 

_______________________

 

That photo was taken at Children's. I was under a year old. Looking at it now, I'm realizing that the crib in the background is nearly identical to the ones my boys slept in at the Baby Home in Russia.