1 Mother 2 Another

This article’s been going around the
internet, and I’m sure most of you have read it, so I almost
didn’t post it here thinking it’s overkill.


But it’s also incredibly important, so I’m posting it
anyway.


The article is href="http://www.rolereboot.org/life/details/2013-06-when-your-mother-says-shes-fat#.Uc3E_ln-tHk.facebook"
target="_blank">When Your Mother Says She’s Fat
and you can imagine the content. The truth is that the disparaging
remarks we make about ourselves every day absolutely shape how our
daughters see us – and themselves.


I haven’t always had the best self-image (shocking for a
ballet dancer, I know), and this is one of the things I can
honestly say I’m doing right with my daughters –at
least most of the time. I want them to live better than me –
to be happier in their own skins than I was. And that’s why
when my daughters hear the word “diet” they think it
means simply “whatever foods you eat”. As in “She
eats a healthy diet,” or “Her diet includes lots of
vegetables and lean protein”.


My daughters have never heard me speak disparagingly about the way
I look – I don’t slam my freckles, or my (lack of)
height, or the roll around my stomach that shows up when my shorts
just come out of the dryer. If they see me working out and wonder
why, I tell them, “To keep my body healthy and strong so it
can keep up with you! Mommies don’t get gym class like you
do, you know!” Whatever angst I might have about my physical
appearance I save for my girlfriends, and let them help me through
that. It’s not my daughters’ job to reassure me, and
it’s not their right to learn how to dislike their looks from
me.


Just read the article – and then see if it changes how you
talk about yourself around your daughter.


And maybe even think about yourself.

Maddie’s spending the week at her
riding stables in a five-day horseback riding camp. It’s
all-day, every day, and it’s exhausting. 8 to 5 would wear
out any third grader; add to that the fact that she’s in
Texas heat, un-airconditioned, working and sweating outdoors the
whole time, and you’ve got one worn out child by the end of
the day.


She’s never been happier.


She gets a couple full lessons each day, of course, but she
doesn’t spend every minute horseback: she grooms the animals,
feeds and waters them, cleans their stalls, and so forth.


And then there’s the rest of the time, which is where I think
the real lessons are.

A friend of mine has a chronic illness.
What, exactly, isn’t important. But think Lyme disease,
except the lows are much lower. So sometimes she’s on top of
the world, and sometimes she’s literally crippled and out of
commission for several days. Her life is incredibly inconstant and
hard to predict, and has been so for a couple of years. And
I’ve learned a lot about grace and a sense of humor and
humility from watching her battle this thing.


The past couple of years have been incredibly hard on her child, of
course, and living in constant uncertainty – Is Mommy having
a Good Day, or a Bad Day? – has taken its toll on the girl.
But it’s also shaping the child into what I think will be a
very strong, unshakeable adult who knows that Something Bad
happening is not the end of the world.


One of the things I’ve grown to admire most about my friend
is how she approaches each and every Good Day determined to drink
every drop from it, and it’s definitely influenced my
parenting. When it’s a Good Day, nothing is off the table,
and my friend is the epitome of Yes Parenting. Long bike rides with
her daughter, exploring through the neighborhood
“jungle”, making sand castles in their flower beds
– everything’s fair game and nothing’s off
limits. There’s never a time when she rolls her eyes and
thinks, “Hey, Kid, I just want ten minutes by myself to check
email. Go entertain yourself.” My friend is Present.


Every minute she can be.


There has to be boundaries, of course, and the child doesn’t
rule the roost. But thanks to my friend, I find myself giving a
reflexive “no” less and less often. For my girlfriend,
she literally has no idea when her Good Day will end and when her
child will be forced to entertain herself anyway. So she barrels
ahead, luxuriating furiously in every moment right up to the last
second.


Don’t you wonder – what would your family life be like
if you lived that way?


Messier, sure. Less down time, sure. Less television at night when
little voices call you back upstairs for “one more
snuggle” and you swallow your crabby sense of “But
I’m off-duty now!” and head up there to love on your
kid. Less of your to-do list crossed off, most likely.


But so much more of the good stuff, don’t you think?


Our kids need to learn that they’re just one part of a big
picture – that they aren’t the center of the universe.
I’m not denying that. But perhaps we need to learn that there
are more important things than updating our Facebook status one
more time.


Like making sand castles in the flower beds, for example.

Yes, there’s no surprise endings
with a title like that, eh?


Friday morning Maddie was apprehensive about heading to Invention
Camp – still nervous about her group’s duck launcher
not working – but was trying hard to be strong in her
decision not to forfeit. When I dropped her off, I pulled the
counselor aside and said, “Listen, if the duck-launching
thing doesn’t go well and Maddie asks to go to the bathroom,
can you please let her go? Quickly?” and filled her in on the
rest. The girl was sympathetic and promised to not give Maddie any
grief should tears overtake her.


Throughout the day I sent up a quick prayer for my daughter –
not that she’d win, or even score a point, with her invention
– just that she’d have the courage to try it, and the
strength to face the results. By the time I went to pick her up for
the parental showcase and dismissal, I was a nervous wreck.


As I walked towards Maddie’s table the counselor spotted me
and beamed. “Guess who didn’t need a bathroom
break?” she fairly shouted.


I looked at Maddie, who tried unsuccessfully to mask a smile and
finally gave up the attempt altogether. “Baby? How’d it
go?” I prodded.


Maddie jumped up and down. “We won! We won!”


Yep, her group won her level’s challenge.

Last night I lay snuggling with Maddie as
we do every night, talking through the day behind us and looking
forward to the one to come. Maddie’s been in Invention Camp
all week, and today is the culmination of all their hard work,
getting to test inventions they’ve been working on all week,
and showing off their projects to enthusiastic parents.


“So are you happy camp is almost over, or sad?” I
asked.


“Well, mostly sad, but also a lot stressed about
tomorrow,” Maddie said, surprising me.


“Why are you stressed about it?” I asked, and Maddie
gave a huge sigh, and spilled it all.


The camp asks every student to bring in some sort of machine they
can take apart – an old computer tower, an electric drill, a
popcorn maker, whatever. They were then broken into small groups
and given the task of taking each item apart, and then using those
parts to build a duck launcher – something that would launch
a rubber duck so many feet to land it in the bathtub. There are
rules, of course, and what you brought is what you get to use.


Maddie’s group has her computer tower, a coffeemaker, a dvd
player, and a couple other items, and for the first part of the
week Maddie’s enjoyed this part of the day. But apparently
Thursday brought on more than a small amount of panic as my
daughter’s group tested their contraption over and over again
and nine times out of ten, failed to make it work.

Maddie’s eight now, and we’ve
long seen some Serious Talks coming down our pike at this house.
It’s commonly touted that girls mature faster than they did
when I was growing up, for a variety of reasons.


I’m not trying to discuss the theories behind
“why” – growth hormones in dairy products,
over-explicit and age-inappropriate media exposure, there’s
quite a list of common theories out there. But I am hearing so much
of the “fourteen is the new eighteen”, and “nine
is the new twelve”, and I can’t deny that I’m now
within shouting distance of age nine.


So I do what I always do in situations like this – I start
reading.

So we’ve been out of school for one
full week and change, and it’s like we never left summer at
all. We’re staying up late, we’re sleeping in,
we’re eating when we feel like it and making a lunch out of
smoothies (with spinach and avocado, don’t freak out) and
tortilla chips (organic, but still, you got me on that one).


Then, after one glorious week out of school, we turn the corner
into a couple weeks of back-to-back camps. Yesterday Maddie started
her Invention Camp, one week of 9-4 daily geeking out with other
friends who like to make rubber duck-launchers out of taken-apart
coffee-makers. My kid LOVES her some Invention Camp, so she was
signed up and ready to go.


Which meant that Sunday night I had to drag out her lunch bag from
where I’d gleefully stuffed it mere days before, and pack her
a $@#% lunch.


I disdainfully picked up the lunch bag (which, I am sure, is
perfectly nice and with which, I am sure, I’d have been
friends in different circumstances. Circumstances like, say, a
world where I was not a slave to that freakin’ thing five
days a week. And a world where people can be friends with lunch
boxes.


But I digress.)


So I disdainfully picked up the lunch bag and set it on the counter
with barely-concealed contempt. Or, perhaps, not concealed at all,
since I swear it sneered at me and said, “Listen,
you’re not my favorite person either.”


Sigh.


I’m fighting a very strong urge to buy a week’s worth
of pre-packaged yogurt and those Uncrustable things and just be
done with it.


It’s not easy being green.

The other day Maddie and I were listening
to music in the car, jamming out and singing along.
“Mommy?” Maddie said. “I like singing pop
music.”


“I do too, honey!” I replied, smiling. “What are
some of your favorite pop songs to sing, and why?”


“Well,” she said pensively, “There’s that
Justin Beaver, of course. He has a lot of popular songs.
Unfortunately,” she continued, “they’re not very
good.”


“Well,” she amended, “a couple of them are
well-written and would be nice to listen to if someone else sang
them.”


And this? Is why I love my daughter.

3:30 a.m. last night, there was a knock on
our bedroom door. “Come in,” Brian groggily said.


Cora came tiptoeing through the door. “Mommy, I . . .”
but I was already out of bed and stumbling towards the door before
she even finished her sentence, knowing from the past four nights
what was going on.


We’ve got a new baby in the house, and no one’s
sleeping.


Cora adopted a four-month-old kitten the day after school got out;
it was her promised sixth birthday gift, and we’d made her
wait until school was over so she’d be home to bond with it.
And as fun as that kitten is, around 3:30 a.m. we all wish (just a
teensy bit) that Kitten was back at the animal shelter.

I just read href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-grossloh/the-milestones-that-matter-most_b_3195567.html"
target="_blank">an interesting piece on the Huffington
Post from the end of May – yes, I’m behind –
on parents in America versus other cultures, and how we mark
different sorts of milestones than parents in, say, Sweden.


The article points out that while we as a culture raise
spectacularly verbal kids – children here can bargain and
negotiate like trial-room lawyers while still in kindergarten
– we sometimes lose sight of other values that would be
worthwhile to foster.


The author lists such values as thinking about others, and being
more independent at an earlier age. On taking care of younger
siblings, she writes:


In our country, we worry that asking siblings to care for each
other puts an undue burden on their individual potential. The
opposite is true: when we ask our kids to care for one another, it
unleashes their potential as nurturing, socially responsible human
beings.


I know I find myself sometimes putting on my eight-year-old’s
shoes still, partly out of habit and partly out of a desire to
hurry the whole process along; this is probably an anathema to a
culture that has five-year-olds out herding the family livestock
for hours at a time.


What do you guys think? And if we’re losing sight of some
important social values here, what’s the best way to go about
teaching them?

Dear Maddie:


This weekend we celebrated your eighth birthday for what seemed
like days: we spent a fun morning with friends horseback riding and
eating ice cream at the stables; we went for a huge long family
swim with more friends; we at ice cream and cake and pizza and your
favorite meal: smoked ham, baked beans, and steamed broccoli. And
of course we took lots of breaks for opening gifts.


The weekend was a revolving door of friends and family stopping by
to drop off a birthday present, and I can’t help but rejoice
at what a close community you’ve got in your own right here.
Friends came by with a book of poetry about animals (how well does
she know you???), or with gift cards to a favorite store, or even
an original poem written by a sick friend when she had to miss your
birthday party. You, my friend, are well loved.

Yes, today is the last day of school, and
everyone in the world is rejoicing.


Except Cora.


Every time we talk about the “summer” or the last day
of school, she growls at us. Sometimes she cries. She can’t
believe her teacher won’t be her teacher any more, and
there’s no WAY she can imagine first grade will be anywhere
near as good as kindergarten.


My poor kiddo.


Yesterday all her workbooks were sent home from school, and at
bedtime she gleefully got out her mathbook and did math problems
before lights out.


Yeah, there’s no hope for her.

Yesterday was Cora’s kindergarten
revue, followed by her end-of-year party, then Maddie’s
end-of-year party – for which I am a party mom.


What does that mean?


It means that we spent an hour being assaulted by ridiculously
sweet kindergarteners singing “What A Wonderful World”
(I DARE you not to cry at that!), followed by 80 kindergarteners
eating pizza and playing games in the Texas sun, followed by me
being partially responsible for 80 second-graders playing games and
eating ice cream in the Texas sun.


Followed by me going to teach for several hours.


I? Am tired.


Just keep swimming . . . just keep swimming . . .