1 Mother 2 Another

Dear Cora:


I’m so sorry getting to school was hard a couple mornings
ago. Realizing you were going to be the only one riding, and
anticipating a fun, quiet journey with plenty of alone time as you
rode at the head of the group, only to have Maddie begin running to
get ahead of you, must have been very hard and disappointing.


But you handled it so well, baby, and I’m very proud of you
for that. You didn’t throw your scooter down and refuse to
move for ten minutes. You didn’t hit your sister and yell at
her. You spoke to her calmly and explained you wanted alone time,
and continued on your way to school. You didn’t hold anger
against your sister, but cheerfully forgave her at school. You will
not always have things go your way in this world – you simply
cannot control other people, even as you can’t always control
yourself! But you can choose how you respond to these situations,
and choose to not let them affect you.


I wish I’d had a chance to chat with you on the way to school
– I do love our few minutes together in the morning, to check
in with each other before beginning our busy days! But I’m so
glad I got to witness your choices and how you handled a hard
situation. I think you really lived this scripture out:
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving
each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you.”
(Ephesians 4:32)


I love you, li’l bit!


Love,


Mommy

Maddie:


Yesterday morning was a very hard morning for getting to school,
wasn’t it? You decided to walk, and when Cora opted to ride
her scooter and you realized Cora would be (gasp!) ahead of you,
well, you didn’t like that. You took off running, trying
– and succeeding, for a block – to be even with/ahead
of Cora, even as she tried her hardest to get out in front for
once. When I saw you running so hard ahead of your sister, after
you’d just said your legs were too tired to ride a bike, my
heart broke a little bit. It broke for Cora, certainly, who looks
up to you so much, and feels the weight of being the youngest in
the family – which means she’s never as fast as you,
never knows as much math, never reads books as big as yours –
and who just wanted to be first down the path to school. For once.
Every other time she’s ridden her scooter, she’s had to
ride behind you on your bike – and be reminded once again
that she can’t ride a bike, can’t keep up with you.
Even if she starts out first on the sidewalk, you come up behind
her, ringing your bell and saying, “Excuse me, Cora,
you’re going too slow.” Today was Cora’s chance
to be the leader, to know what it feels like to have some quiet
time and get to the stop sign first, and when I saw you press
insistently ahead of her in the alley I felt so bad for Cora.


But my heart also broke a bit for you, to see you make that choice
–or, perhaps, to not even make a choice at all, and simply
think “I can go fast so I will.” In which
case you didn’t consider your sister at all. When I saw you
do that, I became angry – angry that my two girls were going
to have a rough start to the day, angry that this choice
you’d made would define the rest of the trip to school, angry
that there was no consideration for your sister in your choices.


And I let those feelings out when I spoke to you about it,
didn’t I? I pointed out every single thing you did wrong, and
why it was wrong, and how it hurt Cora. And while I may have spoken
the truth, I don’t think I did a good job speaking to you
with love, and for that I apologize. In the Bible, Paul tells us
we’re supposed to encourage each other, and build each other
up, and I tore you down.

The girls have gotten into a bit of a rut
fights-wise: Cora gets frustrated and storms to her room, and
Maddie doesn’t want to let (fill in the blank) go and tries
to push open Cora’s door, forcing the door open or running
over Cora in the process.


In retaliation, Cora’s begun locking her door – mostly
as a defense mechanism against Maddie. It’s her last card to
play against the sheer superior strength that Maddie has. So
it’s a smart move, except that locking doors is illegal in
our house.


Yes, even in the bathroom.


Yesterday things came to a head once again, and the fighting
escalated so quickly that by the time I made it upstairs tempers
were quite high and I had to pick Maddie up and carry her to her
room. Both girls had right on their sides in one form or another;
both girls had wronged the other. Both girls were sobbing.


It was time to make a change.

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.

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?

We're hitting a particularly ugly stage
in our household, where selfishness and jealousy abound.


Maddie won't share her new wings; Cora won't share her favorite
Barbie's favorite swimsuit; Maddie illicitly reads Cora's new
library book before Cora does, and then admits she did it even
though she knew it was wrong; Cora purposefully takes waaaaay
longer than her turn on the mini-trampoline.


We're working through this one baby-step at a time. Lots of
talking, lots of praying, lots of scripture, lots of Parenting
Tools use.


But I'm not so sure we'll all still be standing when this is all
over. I just don't see how it's possible.

A couple months ago Cora experienced some
“dire crisis” that sent her into a meltdown one fine
afternoon. She’d asked for a couple holiday cookies and
I’d said yes without checking our stash; a quick look into
the cookie jar revealed only one cookie left. One.


“But Maddie had two of these cookies yesterday! I want two
cookies!” Cora wailed, and burst into tears.


I stared at my daughter, a puddled mass of sobs on the floor, not
trying to manipulate me into magically finding a second cookie
– just unable to move past the fact that there was only one
cookie to be had.


Now, in the past, I would have handled the situation like this:

Over the holidays I loosened my
nutritional hold on my household quite a bit, and allowed more than
a modicum of sugar to course through my children’s veins. I
do love to bake, and don’t see how I can fill the house with
goodies and then not allow the girls reasonably free rein with the
cookie jar; I worry it’ll set them up to see the sweets as
something forbidden and oh-so-desirable.


Likewise, as candy comes into the house from Christmas parties and
gifts from friends, I can’t simply take the twenty cabillion
candy canes and dump them in the trash. Ok, if I’m being
truthful, more than a small amount of store candy DID end up in the
trash, but my girls were pretty free to consume whatever they
brought in the house – after checking with a grown-up, of
course. And Maddie’s big request from Santa? A gumball
machine filled with jelly beans.


I know.

A few months ago Maddie had a play date at
a friend’s house, someone whose mother I only casually knew
from school. When she returned home a few hours later, her eyes
were shining with happiness. “I had the best play date
EVER!” she cried. “When can I go over again?”


I smiled. “I’ll talk to your friend’s mom and see
what we can set up! What was so fun about this play date?”


Maddie sparkled. “We watched television the whole time, and
her mom let us eat a LOT of candy!”


Oh.

A friend of mine told me that her daughter
recently walked out of a bathroom and remarked casually,
“Every time I look in the mirror I’m surprised that
I’m pretty.”


Nonplussed, my friend pressed the issue and learned that her
daughter considers herself unattractive – not because of
anything that anyone has said, it’s simply how she sees
herself.


Now, my friend and her husband are excellent parents and raise all
their children thoughtfully and deliberately, and made the choice a
long time ago that they would not dwell on appearances when
speaking with their children, especially their daughters. So a
compliment from them might sound something like this: “Hey,
your outfit looks very pulled together today! I can see that you
spent a long time working on it.”

Thursday morning Maddie and Cora were both
fighting over some toy or some such before school; Maddie had
something and Cora was trying desperately to do the right thing and
thus kept saying, “Please, Maddie, PLEASE may I have
it?” And Maddie pulled one of her specialties –
prevaricating – and kept up a constant stream of “Well,
let me think . .” and “Well, it’s just that . .
.” until I was about to pop a vein.


Finally, I abruptly said, “Right. Ok, I officially declare
today a ‘yes’ day. That means that any time someone
asks you for something or asks you to do something you have to say
‘yes’. OK?”


The girls looked at me warily, turning the edict over in their
minds for loopholes or potential land mines. “You, mean,
ANYTHING we ask of you, you have to agree to?” Maddie asked
hopefully.

Our family uses the discipline method set
forth by Turansky and Miller; their seminal book, target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Heart-Work-Scott-Turansky/dp/0781441528/?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1328846432&camp=1789&sr=1-1&creative=9325">
Parenting Is Heart Work, is the book that set us off on
our original path as Brian and I tried to figure out how to raise
these girls. My two hands-on favorites, though, are target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Angry-Exchanging-Frustration-Character/dp/0877880301/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">
Good and Angry and href="http://www.amazon.com/Home-Improvement-Eight-Effective-Parenting/dp/078144151X/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">
Home Improvement, two nuts-and-bolts, Biblically-based
books that have given us concrete ideas for helping to shape Maddie
and Cora’s hearts for the long run.


Recently a friend of mine gave me one of their newest books,
href="http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Shifts-Heart-Based-Strategies-ebook/dp/B004Y76VNA/?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&tag=1mother2anoth-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1328845558&camp=1789&sr=1-6&creative=9325">
Parenting Shifts: 50 Heart- Based Strategies to Keep You Growing In
Your Parenting and I have to tell you, it’s a
handy little book to have around. It’s a slim volume with
fifty (FIFTY!) different chapters. Each chapter is self-contained,
only a few pages long, and targets one specific area of parenting.
So you get chapters about complaining, or resisting discipline, or
ignoring you, and so on. I love that I can pick this book up when
we hit a new (and painful) growth spurt in one of the girls and I
can study up really quickly in my Cliffs Notes version of how to be
a good parent in whatever area we’re currently experiencing
difficulty.

Maddie’s going through a tough time
right now – a sort of emotional growing pain, if you will.
And it’s been hard for me to stand back and let it happen,
when my instinct is to rush in and fix things. I know, though, that
this is something she has to work through on her own – some
lessons, I know well, can only be learned the hard way.

Maddie’s worrying has gotten worse,
and it has us, well, worried. Right now, several weeks spent on
Fire Safety combined with nearly daily fire drills has gotten
Maddie rather freaked out about the possibility of fire, both at
school and at home, to the point that she worries when she hears
the house heater come on, and frets the entire day if we’ve
got a fire in the fireplace.


I was talking about this recently with someone I know who is a
children’s therapist, and she asked me what we do in these
situations. “Well, Maddie will usually ask question after
question about the situation – how do you start a fire in the
fireplace? How do you know it will stay in the fireplace? What
happens if it doesn’t stay in the fireplace? How can you be
sure? – and we try to answer each one, calmly dissipate her
fears, and de-mystify the worry by breaking it down
logically,” I said a bit smugly.


Apparently, that was the wrong answer.

Maddie has always been a worrier, and when
she gets stuck on something it’s almost impossible to get her
out of it before she’s good and ready. About two weeks ago,
Maddie had a scary dream in which I left her and didn’t come
back, ignoring her begging to “Come back, Mama!” as I
drove away on my motorcycle (!). Ever since then, Maddie’s
been stuck to me like glue. She cries when I leave at night –
big sobbing tears, running-in-the-rain-after-me (literally) tears,
the kind that break your heart tears. When I visit her class in
school to help out, I have to pry her off me when I leave.


This has moved into other areas of her life, to the point that
Maddie is now spectacularly unable to handle emotional
disappointments. Can’t go to a friend’s house after
school? Meltdown. Can’t choose which video to watch with
Cora? Meltdown. Lose a book for bedtime? Meltdown of epic
proportions.


Saturday, I’d had enough.

One of my parenting discipline choices
I’ve made is to say “no” as little as possible. I
try to give in to any reasonable request, so that when I do finally
say “no” the kids will respect that and accept it. At
the same time, sometimes I see the need to say “no”
just so they can practice their obedience and acceptance, so the
whole thing gets muddied. Add to that the fact that I desperately
try to never reverse myself, and so hold off saying
“no” until I’m sure I mean it and will stick to
it, and the whole “no” thing becomes a road fraught
with peril.


My kids, of course, have quickly learned that the word
“no” has many shades of meaning. For example, if one of
the girls asks me if we can go out for lunch as we head home from a
morning spent with friends, my mind will race through all the
ramifications even as my mouth opens. When was the last time we
went out to lunch? Do we seem to go out to lunch every time we have
a play date, and thus need to go home so it doesn’t become
taken for granted? What commitments do we have after lunch? How
much money do we have left this month?


What’s in the fridge that I can make lunch with, anyway?

The discipline system we use at our house
is based on choices and consequences – bad choices lead to
unpopular consequences. And rather than do time outs, with a set
amount of time to be endured, we do breaks – the child goes
on a break that ends when they’ve had a change of heart and
are able to calm down. So a break can last sixty seconds, or sixty
minutes.


Like it did yesterday with Cora.

“Mom, I think I want to begin silky
training now,” Maddie said to me a few days ago.


“What’s silky training?” I asked Maddie.


“You know, where I practice using it less.”


“Do you want to give up your silky, honey?” I asked,
pictures of kids teasing Maddie during quiet time at school dancing
unhappily in my head. I know that when she started school
she’d told me a couple kids had teased her about sucking her
thumb while she snuggles with her silky, and though she’d
told me then she didn’t care I thought perhaps things had
changed and she’d become aware of “fitting
in”.

Maddie is having a big issue with greed
right now, preschooler-style. If I give her a treat – say, a
cookie – she’ll ask for another one ten minutes later.
If I let her have a donut hole after church, she’ll ask to
stop for lunch at IHOP on the way home. And woe be unto me if Cora
gets something –perhaps a new pair of jeans to fill out a
hole in her wardrobe – and Maddie does not. Then we get the
tears and the “PLEASE!!” and the “It’s not
fair!”


We’ve spent a lot of time these past few months talking about
being content with what you have, and a few times we’ve had
to do some harsh consequences. A couple spectacular days of begging
for sweets, and Maddie lost having any kind of food treat for two
weeks. That was rough, and I thought had taught her a lesson
– treats are privileges, not rights, and should be few and
far between – but she quickly fell back into her old
ways.

There’s a popular book out called
href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-That-Lasts/dp/0802473156/ref=dp_ob_title_bk"
target="_blank">The Five Love Languages, which sets
forth the belief that there are five different ways we say “I
love you” to someone, and if we can learn which ways are
preferred for a person we can make them feel more loved more
easily. The five different languages are (and realize I’m
distilling an entire book into a paragraph here) Words and
Affirmation; Physical Touch; Acts of Service; Gifts; and Quality
Time. My husband, for example, is Physical Touch and Quality Time,
so he feels far more loved if we spend some time cuddling on the
couch watching a movie together than if I vacuum out his car as a
surprise. I, on the other hand, am Gifts and Acts of Service, so
the best way my husband can say “I Love You” is by
giving me money to go shopping for myself (gifts) and watching the
kids while I do it (acts of service).


This has a connection to parenting, I promise.