@ Home in the World

May your days be merry and bright; very, very bright.

Pumpkin's over-the-moon excitement about Christmas has been tempered only by the fact that it hasn't snowed. Oh, we had about 20 flakes swirling about the yard a few days ago, but they didn't stick and as far as Pumpkin is concerned we might as well be living in Texas. He wants to move to Syracuse where it snows a lot because "no snow is boring."

Since we came home from Washington DC after Thanksgiving, Pumpkin has been obsessed with putting as many lights as possible on our house and in the front yard. Now I grew up in Connecticut where most people's idea of Christmas lights was a single candle in each window of the house. As I recal even the Middle School in town put electric candles in each street-facing window. That sort of staid, classic look is exactly my style.

When we had a simple six-room Cape, that look was a lot easier to pull off, but I couldn't keep it going when the kids came. They kept knocking the candles over, and eventually, I stopped trying and stuck to pine bough garland and little white lights around the railings of our new front porch.

That's not enough for Pumpkin who would prefer our house look like a participant in a competive decorating contest. He tends to be drawn to those displays where every edge of a house is outlined with lights. No one in this house is getting on a ladder to put lights on the roof, so or no snow, so Pumpkin is trying to content himself with creating a fake fence out of my tomato supports and some shovels and stringing lights along that. It looks decent at night, but a bit junkyardish during the day. I wonder what he's going to be like when it's time to take the lights down.

He's been caring for the displays meticulously. He's the only one in the house with the patience to track down the blown bulb in a string and replace it. I've told him I'm not buying any more lights this year so he's been frantically trying to resurrect the strings we have. I caught him trying to add the one string of candy corn shaped lights I bought for Halloween years ago.Orange, now there's a Christmasy color. I've also caught him out there at 10:00 at night in pajamas with no shoes or coat fixing some little detail that's not to his satisfaction. OBSESSIVE? Yes, yes he is.

We have new neighbors this year who have erected one of those godawful inflatable lawn displays. The rest of their lights are very blinky and blingy. Pumpkin is envious. I am reaching for the asprin and the shade pull. 

Of course nothing around here compares with this kind of stuff. There are several versions of this video, all different houses synchronized to the same song. I have no idea how they do it.

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Just don't show this to my son. He'd probably be able to figure it out.

 

 

*The photo is from the Botanical Garden in Washington DC. My sister took us the day after Thanksgiving - a trip worth a separate post. We thought it would be a nice calming thing to to with the kids, but it was as crowded as any mall, though certainly less frenetic.

**Speaking of calm, don't forget the Peace on Earth Photo Challenge. You'll appreciate being able to find a quiet moment or two.

Mid-Summer

 

Summer rolls on.

In spite of the fact that I am working full-time, I do feel like I'm actually appreciating summer this year. Sure, I've only been to the beach once this year (it's a ten minute drive away), but my kids and my husband have been quite a few times. You'd think I would spend that time by myself blogging, but mostly I have been reading and gardening.

I really hate getting to the start of the school year and thinking that the Fourth of July was just yesterday and where did the whole summer go? I don't think it's going to be that way this year. It is just about the halfway point and I feel like July 4 was quite some time ago. I vaguely recall the parade ending in an ferocious downpour.

Tigger is back at the camp that he loves and I am less than thrilled with. After missing the first week because I insisted he go to baseball, he was greeted at his regular camp like some kind of returning hero. It's no wonder he loves the place. My beef with it is that they let him get away with stuff I think they shouldn't. I'm sure he sees this as freedom, but for my part it is the reason Pumpkin will never be able to attend. So far Tigger has had the nastiest case of poison ivy I've ever seen and had to be put on steroids for a few days and now he may or may not have a (third!) broken arm.

This is Olympic week at the camp. T landed on his elbow the wrong way doing the long jump. X-rays proved inconclusive so the put him in a splint and we are going to have it checked out again later this morning.

We did find a compromise for Pumpkin this year. Every summer the town recreation department runs a "playground program" for elementary aged kids at the school. Though we haven't sent him before, I felt that P had made such progress this year that he could easily handle it. It's only a half day four days a week and it is in a place with which he is very familiar and very comfortable. So even P is having a better summer than in the past.

Today I have taken the day off to go to a Red Sox game with the family. The kids are old enough now to appreciate the fact of being at the game and Piper and I are both working now so we can afford to go. This year we have tickets for two games. The next one is on Piper's birthday in September. It's one of those games that could mean a lot in terms of the team's standing, or it could mean nothing at all because the standings have pretty much been decided. I haven't been following the season as much as I have in previous years. I know they started out badly and have gotten much better since April.

This weekend we are headed up to Maine for what is becoming a near annual trip to Rangeley. We'll make a stop in NH on the way to drop off the dog at my MIL's and possibly meet my BIL's brand new baby. I'm ridiculously excited to be an aunt again. I've been so busy being a parent, most of my neices and nephews have all grown up in the meantime.

I go back to the office Wednesday for a day before leaving for the airport for BlogHer. Yes, I'm going. I'm both excited and apprehensive. That's a whole separate post.

Beyond next week though, who is to say? The rest of the summer might just fly by, and the kids will be back in school before we know it.

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.

 

About that dog

Meet Dudley.

 

Doesn't he look sweet and innocent?

Don't be fooled!

At age 2, he is a TODDLER.

And here I thought I was comfortably past that period of my parenting life.

We got Dudley from a Lucky Lab Rescue after a local shelter decided we wouldn't be good doggie parents because I work during the day. Never mind that we've already had two dogs who did just fine at home by themselves, and with the babysitter coming in before the school bus, the dog's alone time would actually be less than Henry and Cassie had.

Even though the Petfinder had his location listed as Salem, MA,  which is nearby, Dudley was living in a foster home in Indiana. God bless people who can foster. I just can't imagine taking care of a dog and then having to let him leave. I'm having a hard enough thinking about him going to my Mother-in-law's for a week while we go on vacation. Anyway, nearly a month after we agreed to be his new family, Dudley came to us via a truck ride to Connecticut.  

I didn't want a puppy. We are not in a good position to be training a puppy, and so getting a dog who had some experience living in a house and understood some basic commands was probably going to be best. From the moment they handed me his leash however, I knew we were going to be in for a ride. This dog is strong. And, as an added bonus, not used to walking on a leash. However, after his, uh, pit stop, he hopped into the crate in the back of our car as if he belonged there.

Lucky Lab asked us to buy the crate for the ride. We have not really used a crate with our previous dogs. Henry came with one, but it was too small for a grown Lab. I dutifully went out and spent nearly $200 on a collapsable one that was mostly backpack fabric around a foldable aluminum frame. Once home, the dog ate through the crate within 72 hours. Thankfully, PETCO took it back in return for a large gift card with which to pay for dog food for months to come.

Now the dog hasn't really chewed anything else. He does like to move shoes around, so there is yet another creature in the house determined to keep me from finding a pair of matching shoes for myself and each child every morning. At least when we do find them, the shoes are intact. Dudley seems to know they are not food.

Side note - my sister once had a cat with a sponge fetish. He would steal sponges off the counter and hide them in odd places around the house. If you needed to wash out a dish, you might have to look under the sofa first.

When it comes to real food however, not much stops him. You can't leave anything on the counter unattended for a second. While I was looking the other way, usually to break up an argument between the boys, that dog has absconded with:

• A newly made sandwich
• A box of uncooked pasta
• The top crust of a yet to-be-baked blueberry pie
• And much more

I want to be mad at the dog, but most of the time I'm just kicking myself for having left the room and left the food there so invitingly. That dog is quick!

Apparently his foster family allowed him to think that dogs belong on the furnture. He has his own bed, but much prefers ours. Or, if there's are are people actually in the bed we will sometimes wake up to find the dog sleeping atop the trunk that sits at the foot of our bed. That can't be comfortable. In the last few days he has figured out that if he gets up on the bench in the mudroom, he is better positioned to watch for the school bus. Awww!

The challenging thing about a rescue dog, is that you often have no idea of his background before he got to his foster home. And, sometimes, I'm finding, you'd prefer not to know. Piper and I have figured out that much of Dudley's behavior is based in fear. It's why he wants to be close to the adults in the house at all times and why he barks like a hound from hell.

Um, yeah. We can't have people over anymore. Not that we had a lot of visitors in the first place, but oh, boy Dudley doesn't want anyone new in his house. Putting him upstairs while the guests come in and letting him out while they are here seems to work just fine, but if we forget that step, Dudley goes into full guard dog mode and the guests go into panic. Not. Good.

So we need to find a doggie shrink trainer who can help us with that. Because as the kids get older, they are going to want to have more friends over. The boys were quite the handful as toddlers, but they were never biters. I don't really want to have one now.

Thankfully, the vet says that at age two, he's still young enough to be trained.

After having kids, it's easy to forget that having a dog is still work. But Dudley is getting us all out walking more than we had been and it's been great having him play out in the yard with us.

He's made himself right at home.

 

Unwanted Conversations

I've had to talk to my ten year old about suicide twice in the last six months.

In the Fall, it was a high-school student whose mother teaches at Tigger's school and whose brother is in Tigger's grade. I won't go into the abundant speculation about the hows and whys, except to say that he wasn't obviously unhappy, and he wasn't bullied. Small town news spreading (as opposed to gossip which has a meaner edge) ensured that Tigger heard far more of the details about this tragedy than I would have liked, but he was able to ask me honest questions about what he had heard and we were able to discuss it and be sad and shocked and not know quite how to feel about it together.  He seemed appropriately bewildered by the whole thing.

But then it happened again. A few weeks ago, it was the director of Tigger's summer camp. Tigger, who has a great ability to get in good with authority figures in spite of his challenges, talked about this young man almost daily in the summer. This was someone he had been nice to and who had been nice to him. This was someone who will clearly and directly be missed in Tigger's life.

Unfortunately, that same weekend, there were also two young men who died of heroin overdoses. Because they were around the same age as the director, there was much said and mixed up about who died in what way. So in the same conversation I had about the director's suicide, I also had to talk about drugs. 

Tigger will be in Middle School in a year and a half. I have known that conversations like this were coming soon. I'm not going to be one of those parents who doesn't talk about things and who shields her children from everything. My own personal squeamishness about topics will not translate into kids who become victims of their own ignorance. I'm not the kind of person who believes that not talking about something will keep it from happening.

But whenever I have to have these conversations, I wonder if every word that comes out of my mouth is saying the right thing. Am I going to be able to convince him that these things are not worth doing, or am I making them more attractive to his dangerously curious mind?

Ever since he was small, Tigger has been getting into all sorts of things that he shouldn't. No hiding place was clever enough, he would find it. No prohibition was ever meaningful, he'd be into whatever it was as soon as you turned your back.  And for Tigger it is often more important to see if he can get away with something than have a care about potential consquences. Consequences have never overcome impulsivity. Only the ADD meds have really helped with that. So as he approches adolescence, I worry about how those tendencies will translate in the mind of a willful teenager.

When we first went to the pediatrician to talk about ADD, the doctor warned me that not medicating him would lead him to self-medicate when he was older. I was already aware of this possibility and have seen signs of it in the smallest of things.

I have absolutely no personal experience with these sorts of topics. I got through my entire adolesence without any kind of drug experimentation. I never had any interest in losing that kind of control. Similarly, no matter how bleak the world of my teens and 20s got, I never gave any thought to ending my pain in any kind of permanent way. I could never imagine just not being.

Now I think the same holds true for Tigger. He is a fighter. He is not willing to die or even to be shortchanged in life, and it is interesting that our first serious talk about drugs involved the death of two people. That, I believe had an impact; it made the danger seem less abstract.

We live in the kind of community where bad things aren't supposed to happen. It is safer than most, but it also produces a curious denial of destructive behavior. If we adults talk about these topics amongst ourselves, it's always about someone else's family. Because gossip can be cruel, It's much harder to admit that it might someday be our family member in the woods, or behind closed doors, or in court. On the surface, it all looks happy, but dig deeper and someone might be crying for help.

Now when, in response to an open ended question regarding the biggest challenges to our Commonwealth, the Massachusetts Senate President comes out with "opiate addiction," you know there's a threat to your family. Even in your small, safe, little town.

I'm a big fan of local schools hosting parent or family nights on these topics with professional speakers and therapists; parents need help, and they need to know they are not alone with these fears and challenges. As with anything out of the "norm" sometimes we need to face down the finger pointers and extend a hand from experience.

As parents, Piper and I will continue to do the right things. We will make sure that Tigger is kept occupied in sports and other activities. We will continue to have these terrible conversations. We will try to use the sometimes infuriatingly small-town network (if you don't know what you are doing, someone else does) to our advantage, and develop relationships with other authority figures in Tigger's life. We will do our best to protect him and help him find pursuits that he loves.

And we will hope, as every parent does, that it is enough.

My 8 year-old can find Egypt on a map

Have you seen this nonsense from FOX News?

 
Credit

Turns out the image is over a year old, but it seems to be authentic. Really? Can they not find Iraq on a map after all those years of drum beating for the war?  As one clever commenter said about the original image; "that's one way to liberate a country."

 I can kind of understand confusion in the Middle East. Very few Americans will actually ever go there. We don't want to think about where oil comes from. We don't get the whole tribal thing, and what is an Emirate, anyway?

But Egypt is on a whole other continent. We learned about Egypt in our childhood story books and Middle School Social Studies. Doesn't anyone remember World Civ? Oh wait, it's that whole 40 years in the desert thing, isn't it?

It's been incredible to watch so much of this whole thing transpire on Twitter. I have a Twitter account that I use mostly for work. The people I follow are mostly learning specialists, but there are some personal bloggers, a few journalists, a couple of comedians, and the State Department (still a Hillary Clinton fan, you know). Almost immediately after it was announced that the Egyptian goverment  was shutting down the Internet, Twitter came alive with people retweeting anything that could get out of or about Egypt. My favorite so far is from Anil Dash: "Mr. Mubarak, tear down this firewall!"  Only the Haiti earthquake has attracted this much attention from people not directly involved.

(A brief pause while we consider what it would have been like to have had Twitter in 1989)

Clearly as a Democracy we don't like dictators and shouldn't be supporting them, but I'll admit to being a bit concerned about what might come after Mubarak. Is this going to turn into the experience we had with Iran? Who exactly is the Muslim Brotherhood, besides the most organized entity in all of this chaos? Are they friend or foe? Okay, they are not fans of al Qaida, not at war with the West so far, so good. Mohamed ElBaradei; Nobel Laureate with strong Western ties, another possible positive outcome. Omar Suleiman; friend of Israel, okay; friend of the Bush Administration's Extraordinary Rendition program, not so good.

The point I'm trying to make here is that although we shouldn't assume that Egypt will become the next Iran, there's really not a whole lot we have to say about it if it does. We've been touting the benefits of democracy, while supporting some decidedly undemocratic regimes; usually for the sake of "furthering our interests." Over the years, and particularly in the last decade, this kind of hypocrisy has diminished respect for the United States around the world and threatened the security we enjoyed, both as a nation, and as individual American travellers. Interesting, isn't it that those who most fear a conservative theocracy in Egypt are those who want to come as close as possible to such a thing here at home.

In the meantime, while street protests move from Tunisia to Egypt to Iran to Libya, Americans are getting a much needed lesson in spreading democracy without invading a country.

We're learning a bit about geography, too.

 
(Drawing by Pumpkin)

 

 

 

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.

Marathon over, let the crashing commence!

Or, as my friend Chip would say; "Let the mild rumpus start!"

I have been waiting for this week since Thanksgiving. I have the entire week off. Actually, I've been off since Wednesday evening, but I've been in scramble mode for the last several days.

I spent most of Thursday wrapping things. I got a bit of a chuckle over how much my attitude toward Christmas has changed since before the kids came along. I used to be quite a fussbudget about gifts and getting every little detail right, down to the perfect wrapping. Now, I let Piper get gift certificates for most people on our list, I drove out to my favorite jewelry store and got earrings or bracelets for each of my nieces and a few other women on my list. I even let Pumpkin help with the wrapping. It's not pretty and I don't have the time to care. How liberating!

Side note 1: Pumpkin is so enamored of the miracle properties of Scotch tape, that I put a few rolls in his stocking. I'd credit the blogger I got the idea from, but I've forgotten who it was. If it was you, brilliant! I figure when he's in his 20s he'll graduate to duct tape, like most men.

Christmas for us started around 6 or 7 AM Christmas Eve morning. It started as many mornings do, with an argument between the boys. I don't remember what it was about, and it really doesn't matter. More than likely Tigger was teasing his brother, and his brother was hollering SHUUUTTUPPP! It's like a call and response thing between them, like clockwork, most mornings. I used to set an alarm, now I have children.

Since I knew I had a million things to do, I didn't even try to go back to sleep, but took my shower right away and got started on "the list." Having the day before off was the way to go, because the stuffing was already made and half the Christmas dishes were already washed. I just had to prep the potatoes, and talk Pumpkin into cleaning up the mudroom so we could go get bagels for the next morning.

Side Note 2: Yes, I have Christmas dishes. They were my mother's. She gave them to me a few years ago and they have sat in boxes in the basement along with the my wedding china which was also hers. Piper and I have been married 18 years and have never used the china. My mother has made noises about wanting it back, but I can't imagine what she's going to do with it either.

Side Note 3: Bagels and lox for breakfast every Christmas morning. I take some perverse pleasure in having Jewish food for Christmas. I don't know why, but Christmas wouldn't be the same without it.

Our trip to get bagels also involved a trip to a big box hardware store for my last gift. Piper had been looking at table saws and I was thinking to get him one, but got overwhelmed at all the choices. I got him a gift card so he can make the decision. While we were there, Pumpkin insisted on looking through a book about designing bathrooms. I'm not sure where this interest came from or whether anything will come from it as his geography obsession clearly has, but on the way home, Pumpkin asked why we didn't have a bathroom with a "standing bath." Unfortunately, he got rather frustrated with me as I had no idea what he meant. Finally, I handed him a notebook and asked him to draw one for me. What he drew turned out to be a clawfoot tub! Found in translation!

Back at home I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven. I have learned to pour a little water in the bottom of the roasting pan, not touching the rack, so the raost doesn't dry out, the drippings don't burn at the bottom of the pan, and you have the start of a fabulous gravy.

Tigger needed to be at the church at 2:30 for reading rehearsal. In past years I have gone with him and staked out a pew. The family Christmas service is the most well-attended event at the church and rows of extra chairs have to be pulled into our small sanctuary. My in-laws arrived around 3 and the service began at 4.

In addition to reading, Tigger was one of four kids who sung all the music. T is in the 4th grade, there is another girl in the group who is in grade 5 and the other two are 8th graders. One of the reasons that I chose this church was its willingness to let kids be kids. There is no time when that sentiment is more evident than this Christmas Eve service. Our attendence there began on Tigger's first Christmas Eve with us. He spent the entire service asking if we could leave now. The priest ended the service with "the Mass is ended, yes Tigger, you can leave now, go in peace."

I spent this service marvelling at how old everyone had gotten. Not in a bad way. My neighbor's boys were up at the altar with Tigger. I've known them since they were babies. They are teenagers now, all dressed up in ties - real ties, not the clip on kind. The daughters of other friends are back home from college. Time marches on.

After the service, there was turkey. Then there was dessert and gifts across the street. I gave the older teenager a chef's knife. He is constantly asking me how to make the things I cook. Later this week I will put together some recipes for him. That's part of the gift. The younger boy got a book on making cheap special effects for video. There are some gifts I can still get just right.

It's late when we get back, but most of the wrapping is done, so all we have to do is pull things from their hiding places after the kids go to bed. Tigger is pretty sure that we are Santa, but not certain. Pumpkin still wonders if Santa can see him in the bathroom.

Christmas Day begins at 5:30. Piper finds the boys sitting in the dark, waiting for 6:00 when they can wake everyone up. He has figured out how to use the timer on the coffee machine. It worked. Piper's big present was a video camera. Mine was a chest freezer that I have wanted since we got the vegetable garden going again. Tigger got a skateboard, and Pumpkin got his own camera, which I hope he'll use instead of my iPhone.

There were a few hours of resting and playing with gifts. I got in a quick nap. We packed a change of clothes and headed for Easton to spend a few hours with Piper's family before heading down to CT.

After Thanksgiving, I wanted to spend as little time as possible in Connecticut. The storm gave me a good reason to leave early. We spent less than 24 hours at my mother's. Obligation fulfilled. The storm started just before we left at noon. It took us 6 hours to get home, including the bookstore break we took just to get out of the car. Getting stuck behind plows is no fun at all, but it is probably safer than being in front of them.

We woke this morning to find the power out. It remained out until 6:30 PM. We had a blissfully quiet day full of Lego kits, Calvin & Hobbes, games and naps. My iPhone was the only connection to the outside world.  

I have the rest of the week off. I look forward to not doing a whole lot.

Don't forget the Peace on Earth Photo Challenge! Comment or email by December 31.

 

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.