On the Limits of Dreams and Gumption

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I remember sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch of my mother’s mountain home with my infant baby, my second child, in my arms.  I had just received a job offer  in Tennessee less than three hours drive from her.  We were delighted when we got the news but this day we were there because my partner and I had travelled from Indiana with our infant son and 6 year-old daughter to find a place for our family to live and a job for my partner.  Ours was a colicky baby and stress levels were high all around.  I was crying and rocking, myself and the baby, and my mother told me hesitantly that she wished I could get OK about where I was at this juncture because “it gets harder,” she said.  It’s a statement that probably reads harsh; it feels a little that way as I type it, but don’t remember being put off by it then.  And I certainly now understand the motivation to say it.

I was talking with my daughter recently, who is now not six but twenty, about her own junctures, and found myself invoking my mother’s acknowledgement that life is actually very complicated and, in many ways, becomes increasingly so as we move through it.  Now, as it turns out, life also provides innumerable opportunities to grow and get stronger and become more deeply rooted so that one isn’t buffeted about so by its forces. But those are just opportunities, not guarantees.   And the movement of and through life does offer different vantage points that provide wider-scope and longer-range vision.  The terrain gets more complex but one can see it with greater clarity.  And in some ways, this helps one to navigate it more adeptly.  But adult life is tough.  And taxing.  And many parts of it are totally unrewarding. And “unfair.”  These facts are troubling for any of us to cope with, but particularly so for those who moved through their youth with a sense that things would go a whole other way.

An article in Huffington Post ten days ago, and an article at NPR.org ten days before that highlight the difficulty that adolescents and young adults are having in coping with the fact that their lives will be hard, competitive, and “unfair;” and they seem rather incapacited by this difficulty.  The NPR piece is about “helicopter parents” who “hover in the workplace,” sending out resumes for them, arguing with employers for better pay or benefits for their children, and, if you can believe it, coming with the kid to the interview (!).  These young adults learn that there is much more justice in who gets employed where than there actually is, and that if they (or their parents) follow particular formulas then the outcomes they seek will materialize. They learn that mediocrity is just the same as excellence.  Although such reasoning is absurd to those of us in the know, it comprises firmly held beliefs among our children who, I’d like to point out, didn’t make them up.  They learned them us.  It’s too hard for us to face the terrifying facts that we do not have enough power to set our children up in happiness for life, that all the gumption in the world will be insufficient, that it actually isn’t true that they can be whatever they want to be, and that the children’s gifts and raw material, plus a whole lot of luck of the draw, are the major determinants of their future, not their “dreams.”   As Mickey Goodman argued in the Huff Post piece, we have focused so much on making our kids happy, that “now it’s difficult for them to generate happiness.”  We’ve made the building up of “self-esteem” primary and the hard work of building up of social and intellectual skill sets and the ability to handle defeat quite secondary, at best.  You know, if you believe it you can achieve it, even if you don’t have the skills or drive.

But the fact of the matter is that adult life is hard.  That your “dreams” (and while you’re dreaming, dream big, we’ve told them) are not the thing to ground your whole future in.  That Facebook relationships are fine and fun and affirming, but you also have to learn how to negotiate face-to-face relationships with people who are not your “friends,” who do not “like” everything you say and believe, and who do not see your birthday as something remotely significant.  And that as parents we finally are not powerful enough, no matter how much we say we’ll “give ‘em hell” and “set ‘em straight” to get the universe to conform to our familial fantasy world that our babies will get what we think they “deserve.”  Mediocrity is not just the same as excellence, the future is uncertain even for people with spunk, and yes, in fact, “it gets harder.”

 

Getting Rid of “The Talk”

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I find it strange to still be hearing adults refer to “the talk” when they mention discussing sex with their kids, as if there were only one.  As if you could possibly cover anything significant about the human body and desire and maturity and emotion and the entanglements of these in sexuality.  Not to mention STDs, pregnancy, parenthood, sexual identity.  And forget about constricting gender binaries. Or the problems of the notion of “virgin.”  Or broken hearts.  These are all critical elements in communicating about sex and they certainly can’t be covered in something as momentary and isolated and awkward as “the talk.”  Family communication research indicates that young people prefer their parents as primary sources of information.  It also shows that parents fancy themselves rather thorough in talking about sexual matters with their children.  It also shows that the children don’t fancy their parents as being all that thorough.  So something breaks down, it seems and, while I am seriously one of the last ones to point to parents when we seek explanations for social phenomena that we don’t like, I am going to go ahead and say that, as parents, we’ve got some real issues about this sex talk thing. And because we refuse to confront them, we pass them on to our children.

It’s a troubling message indeed if children come to see sex as something that can get covered in a rather official, sit-down, fidgety but stalwart conversation.  “The talk” is so dang somber, and it’s so NOT like the rest of the family’s conversations, so set apart from the rest of how the family does things, that it doesn’t invite engagement in the moment or continuing dialogue later at all.  Given that studies continue to show that people rate fear of public speaking as a top fear in their life, and in fact have rated it in some studies higher than fear of death, and given that we set “the talk” up as some sort of prepared speech, albeit to a small audience, it’s no wonder parents don’t do it, or don’t do it well, or that their kids are exceedingly uncomfortable through the whole thing.  Part of the solution is to quit thinking of sex talk in terms of THE talk and to incorporate talk about sex into everyday conversation.  Most parents probably do not use the model of “the talk” to make sure the kids carry their cell phones and have them ON and ANSWER the dang things.  They probably don’t have “the talk” about speaking in respectful tones to parents or about how to treat siblings, or about driving safely, or about homecare responsibilities, or about politics or religion/spirituality, or about how to treat other people.  These things are too important to reduce to a single conversation. They tend to get incorporated into everyday life and become just part of a family’s regular discourse.  So families tend to already have a pattern in place for dealing with important things—they talk about them a lot.

For the most part, we actually don’t make something more important by having the big ol’ sit down about it; we just make it awkward and intimidating. We make something important by giving it a place in everyday conversation.

Even conversations about death function in this way.  My friend Catherine asked of some of her friends recently how to respond to her 4 year old’s queries about whether or not he was going to die, or his mom was going to die.  I think the way we deal with the important stuff is to incorporate it into everyday life.  Now death is tricky of course, not necessarily a topic that parents should initiate, but if the child is asking, you don’t have to resort to walking over to the couch, sitting the child down, holding her/his hands and looking into his eyes to answer the question.  I think that these conversations work better if they happen while you’re stirring pots, or pulling up weeds:  All living things die.  Animals, plants, people. People usually live for a long time. Hand me those carrots over there.  When you grow up, you will probably have me with you, like I have my mom… They’re important enough to answer directly but not so awful that we have to do them in ways markedly different from the everyday way we connect.

Getting rid of “the talk” and replacing it with everyday conversations will require that we give up any illusions of control, of containing the conversation, of being its director.  Maybe we’d rather pretend that our children have not been learning about sex and bodily intimacy since they were born, that years of messages about privacy, nudity, hugs, personal space, and kisses have not been about sexuality at some level, and that billboards, magazines, the internet, peers, television, song lyrics, commercials, radio, and film have not been overwhelming the children with sexuality information, or images of death for that matter, for years.  But that would be delusional thinking I’m afraid, and would put us grossly out of touch with the worlds our children in inhabit.  These issues are part of their everyday life already, and you can be part of that in an everyday way.  Or you can keep pretending.

 

It’s Simply Complicated

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Mothering is both harder and easier than we make it out to be.  It’s tricky trying to figure out, in a given moment, whether this moment is the kind where you should lean toward: this is really not that complicated…breathe…just move forward with purpose and trust what you already know. Or whether this moment is the kind where you should lean toward: not all answers are evident, get some input from people you trust…it feels hard because it IS hard…you are going to make mistakes and this is OK but search beneath the surface to find what isn’t volunteering itself to you.  Most moments are probably the kind where we should do a little of both, and this bothness is the great intellectual puzzle of parenting, through and through.

Our children are not going to turn out the way we thought they would.  It’s exactly that simple.  Even if you are a solid planner and executer of the plan, even if you’re one of the incredibly hip and open-minded parents who thought your plans or hopes for them were loose and totally open to their interpretation, even if you’re otherwise really good at “letting go” and “releasing it.”  And, admit it, this fact is pretty disappointing.  And then that other fact—that you have the gall to be disappointed (it’s so some other generation)—is disappointing.  You worked so hard to avoid “disappointment” in your mothering practice.  It sounds so trite when you hear someone say your children will go their own way that it’s nearly impossible to grasp that you haven’t already accepted it.  (I mean look how YOU turned out, relative to what your parents had imagined for you, for heaven’s sake).  You know this.  You do know this. And yet, here you are, wishing for different outcomes, outcomes more like the ones you conceived than the ones they did.  The struggle with that wishing, with accepting the fact that you are that kind of mother, like so many others before you and around you—including the ones you fancy yourself different from—is absolutely core to parenthood, especially once the children aren’t little anymore.  You spend our children’s younger years putting in place the mechanisms that will offer direction but grant them freedom, and teach yourself to embrace their individual humanity, and then you spend their later years rather shocked that it sort of didn’t work.  And confronting the fact that all your effort landed you squarely in a position that looks suspiciously like the one you saw your own parents in, or parents down the metaphysical street, or parents on film or TV at whose troubling disposition you shook your head or rolled your eyes back in the day.  I would that we were all better at “releasing it” and “letting go” because this puzzle is absolutely the way of things.  The error isn’t in the disappointment; the error is in thinking you won’t have it.  And there’s not much to do with it once it settles on you, accept to not assign it more weight than it already has—whether coming from how you judge your children or in how you judge yourself.

I think we struggle similarly with wanting to be seen as more than someone’s mother, with wanting our children to see us as a whole person and not just “their” whatever, with wanting cultural messages to represent us as having more than maternal concerns on our mind, as having other commitments to honor too.  And I think that, as with wrestling through “letting our children be,” even those of us who fancy ourselves enlightened thrash around in this a bit, and then find the presence of this thrashing in our lives quite quizzical.  We already know we’re not just mothers.  We firmly hold to our right to full personhood.  Yet being absorbed in self too frequently feels like a crime, like we’re robbing our children, even older ones, of what is first their right.  We can’t ever shake the feeling of being a convict released on a technicality, a member of the seedy underworld of maternal criminality, where mothers are people first and keep getting away with it, even if under ever-increasing surveillance and policing harassment.  And again, I think the error isn’t in struggling with these “convictions,” but in thinking we won’t have such struggles and being surprised all over again  when we do.

We are, very simply, going to have plans for our children that they do not unfold, and we are going to struck by that in some way, and then further struck by the way we are so struck.  And we are, very simply, imbued with full personhood, and we are going to struggle to embody that, and then be struck that we are so struggling.  It’s exactly that complicated.

 

Fine. I’m Flawed. (Whatever.)

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OK so fine.  I’m a flawed human being.  I don’t always act in my own best interests.  I don’t always act in my children’s best interests.  Sometimes this mother in me comes out who is more like what I think my own mother was like.  Resolute. Directed. Consistent. Grownup.  And other times, well.  Let’s just say less so.

I’ll grant, for example, that shooting whipped cream into my mouth directly from the can is one of those things you do when you’re, say, nine.  And I’ll grant that teaching my children this uncouth habit by poor example, to my partner’s complete and total dismay and probably disgust, is something that…well something my mother wouldn’t do for one thing.  And OK yes, me walking through the grocery store with my two children when they were younger, all of us trying to not be seen spraying whipped cream into our mouths is, it could be argued, less than stellar mothering practice. But I’d like to say in my own defense that . . . well I don’t actually have a defense for that one.

But I do have a defense for the time that I walked with my children when they were younger through a pitch dark campground, quite scared myself, but trying to convince all of us that we were on an adventure.  We had set up camp and needed some things in town, so while we were there and because it was dark by now and they were hungry, we got some dinner so we could just get to the s’mores already once we got back to camp.  Except whoops the gate closes at whatever time that was so we couldn’t get in.  We had to park outside the gate, climb over it, and walk into the campground, down what seemed to be an interminably long road in some very serious darkness. My son was a very little boy who was in charge of holding up the light, mostly because it served to distract him from fear, only that made things even more eery.  I was pretty rattled by the whole thing but had to fake my way through it, believing not much of the this-is-a-perfectly-safe-campground narrative I was feeding them.  They didn’t buy it either, I don’t think, but they were trying.  Now that I’m writing it, I realize I actually don’t have any kind of vindicating defense for this mishap either.

And then of course there’s the time, which I’ve written about before, when I forgot to tell my children that their Grammy and Papaw’s dog had died.  Now this wouldn’t have been so terrible I guess except that we were about two blocks from their house when one of them said something about “can’t wait to see Sally” and that was the point at which I was prompted to tell them about Sally’s demise.  And none too delicately, I’m afraid.  And unfortunately for all of us this memory is emblazoned in their skulls so that, every trip since, they recount it right around that same point in the bend of Piney Grove Road where I originally relayed the devastating news, something to the tune of  “Oh. Um.  Sally died.”  I don’t have a defense for that one either.

And when they forget something that I wanted them to remember but is of little true consequence, I say things like “You were supposed to check to see if the dishes in the washer were clean before you put dirty ones in there,” which alone isn’t so problematic but when followed with some tender pedagogical prompt like “you big loser,”  might be construed as such.  I suppose. And when they are coming unglued over nothing, or are acting obsessively about this or that, I’ve been known to say something helpful and motivating like “Hey.  Re-LAX!  You big freak.” And sometimes when they’re telling a story I cut them off mid-narrative to say “Wait, before I forget…” and then continue with whatever it is that I’m terrified I’m not going to remember—which is a well-grounded and well-evidenced terror, let me just say—something urgent along the lines of “Did I show you that YouTube video of the dog rolling himself down the stairs?”  And while I hardly ever flick them on the forehead as a mild disciplinary measure, I do frequently have my hand poised in the ready-to-flick position when they are heading toward an infraction.  I don’t have a defense for that one either.   There are more examples, but luckily I am at the end of my post.  ( I do want to say to my mom at this point that I do actually act with dignity sometimes.  I mean I’m not really as good at it as you but I’m working at it.  Love, Amber).

 

With Relish (please)

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I’ve written before about the importance of not being too invested in the “highs” of mothering, about how mothers clinging steadfast (or frantically) to the feelings of “success” is unwise, not fruitful, not empowering.  It’s an unkind thing to do to yourself, really, to let your sense of self worth hang on standards that are dictated by absurd mothering standards at one end, or your children’s ridiculous and naïve standards at the other, or false but no less sensationalized images of motherhood that surround us at the other (and yes, this continuum has three ends.  Just go with it).  I do think that this is so very important, and so very very difficult.  So I want to write today without losing sight of this.

I’d like to invoke the memory and/or recognition of how sometimes, it just works. Sometimes, it’s easy.  Sometimes, it just flows.  I want to sit down to that, chew on that, taste that.  With a little relish, and for just a few moments.  I mean look, I’ve been dragged through it as a mother.  Slammed doors, cops, crushed morale, total disregard, collusion, lies, eye rolls, hospitals, perceived judgment from my peers, actual judgment from my peers, insensitive demands from the people I work for, taxing demands from the people I live with, dinners dinners dinners, the relentlessness of it all.  But then every once in a while.  Every once in a while, it isn’t hard.  These may be minutes, swiftly fleeting, or they may be waves, larger and slower but ebbing and flowing.  Or they may be the lingering kind.  Right now, I am in the greatest space with both of my kids that I can remembering being in.  My relationship with both of them is just so genuine and so lovely.  So easy.  I feel loved and valued, they seem to feel loved and valued.  They seem to really like each other.  And I’d just like to say a big hell yes to all that because jeez louise I could really use me some love and value.  It’s hard to let those things come from within all the time; it’s hard to find them down deep in there.  It’s pretty crowded down there, for one thing, all that trash and used up stuff that really needs to be let go.  Dusty, moldy, and broken like it is. You know what I mean.

So I am feeling grateful for these moments when I can see evidence that I’ve done right by my children and when I am nourished simply by the fact that they are good and beautiful human beings. And I know this because they are being good and beautiful people right here before my eyes.  And they are loving me and laughing with me and thanking me.  And I am appreciative of the fact that we are having these blissful moments despite the complexity of the world that surrounds us, and despite our own inner conflicts, and despite the tensions that arise between us because of them.  I’m especially thankful of these moments because I think they come hard to some families, like, for example, “blended” families (the image invoked by the word ‘blend’ being clearly misleading), where things are more cobbled than blended.  Hobbled, maybe even.  Or maybe decoupage is a better metaphor—bits and pieces pasted on top of each other and then shellacked so that the whole seems smooth. And whole. And like you meant it to look that way.  Families where there is a longing, a yearning for something that isn’t quite this, at best, and totally unthis, at worst. And surely this isn’t only, or necessarily, the case with “blended” families.  When moments of simple and easy love are able to surface in “blended” and other complicated families, it sure is a warm and tasty thing. So I’d like to close my eyes…and just savor it….

 

You’re Not the Boss of Us

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If we had a nickel, collectively, every time someone told a mother what to do, we’d have enough money to really change things.  Because there simply is no shortage of such people, no absence of such advice or admonishment, no end in sight to the ways that others get all up in our business.

Take for example something as seemingly simple as that totally unhelpful charge to “enjoy every minute” because it “goes by so fast” that Glennon Melton wrote about in her blog at the Huffington Post this week*.  Of course “every minute” is far from simple in motherhood, and enjoying each and every one of those is even farther.  So now I can feel inadequate not only about how I mother but also about how my day is full of moments I am not enjoying, Melton suggests.  Nice.  That’s helpful.  Thanks.  You know what, I’m going to invoke a retort I’ve heard my kids and lots of other ones deploy in one form or another over the years:  Quit bossing me around!

And then there’s the family dinner example.  This is something I’ve been pushing against for a while now; I’ve written about it before, here and here, and alluded to it in other posts.  I’m also beginning a research project looking at mothers’ experience with the “family meal”  since so many researchers are so acutely focused on the children—their nutrition, their weight, their perceptions, their drug and alcohol use, their asthma, their cancer, their early sexual activity, their weak vocabulary—and how the “family meal” at the end of the day (and no, breakfast doesn’t count) magically saves them and us from all that (I am not even kidding; that’s what the researchers suggest and what the news media have TOTALLY gone with, no one of course mentioning that one of the two most extensive research projects that lead us to these conclusions was funded by a grocery store chain, and partnered with Stouffer’s, and no one of course focusing on mothers, who are likely orchestrating that delicious and magical panacea).   It’s curious that no one mentions mothers in this research (and I do mean no one), nor do responses to the research ask questions about what mothers and their families might need if they are to save the world, or their families, by having a dinner around the table all  time.  Neither researchers nor policy makers seem to groove to the next step:  If the family meal will save the world, how can we help families pull one off the recommended five to seven days a week?  No, that’s where the news media come in with helpful hints like include the children in food preparation.  Clearly these are news professionals who make dinners in their own homes most nights of the week and have experienced firsthand the joys of young people in your kitchen at the end of a long and haggard day.  Nice.  That’s helpful.  Thanks.  They probably enjoy every minute of it too.

And finally there’s the example of the post I came across yesterday in my “family meal” research: “Is Drinking on the Mommy Job a No-No?” a post from last October at TodayMoms on MSNBC.  Aside from the infantilizing that exudes from the headline even as it ostensibly is addressed to moms (but more likely is addressed to those who would police mothers’ behavior), there’s the absence of course of any discussion of fathers, and there’s the convenient invocation of motherhood as a “job” but—oh, I see—only when it suits the status quo.  Nice.  That’s helpful.  Thanks.  So we won’t think of mothering as a “job” when moms are not accruing leave time, or retirement, or health benefits or sick days.  We won’t think of it that way when we’re considering moms whose “work” takes place in unsafe environments.  We won’t think of it connected with the issue of accruing social security or worker’s compensation for injury “on the job,” oh no.  Only when we can drip “the most important job in the world” sentimentality on people (and it’s hard to get that stuff off by the way, once it drips on you) and only when it gives us firm grounding for further policing mothers. We can think of mothers’ work as a job when we can compare her glass of wine at the end of the day or at an evening playgroup to airline pilots  who “have that rule of no alcohol for 12 hours,” as one of the experts did…you know, pilots who have lots and lots of days off, for god’s sake, and lots and lots of income for god’s sake and lots and lots of “work”-related benefits.  For god’s sake.

Mothers are suspiciously absent from discussion of the family meal although their role in it and their obligation to save the world with it is so clearly implied.  And they are suspiciously present in the discussion about drinking “on the job.”  And they’re annoyingly gushed at about never feeling anything but enjoyment over the hard work of motherhood. I wonder when people are going to start talking with us about what we need in order to do this important work and quit bossing us around!

*Special thanks to my cousin Susan Kreider for sharing Melton’s post with me!

 

Sticking to the Issues

Last January, inspired by the Jewish Near Year tradition, or more specifically that of Yom Kippur’s solemn day of atonement that follows the new year, I wrote several posts, beginning with a piece on food, and followed by pieces on work and time, in which I plotted out what I saw to be my “wrongs” of the year previous.  My goal, of course, was to then right them in 2011.  I had thought this post was going to be about how I was rather unsuccessful; I think these will always be core points of struggle for me.  But after writing out the post, I’ve had to come up here to its beginning to say that I’ve not done a bad job of working on some of my “issues” overall, though I do have some work to do on them in 2012.  I feel uplifted, and sort of caught by surprise, by the realization that I did, in fact, make progress last year.  I think I’ll turn my focus toward celebrating that and away from critiquing myself for the areas where I’ve seen less success.  So hooray for that (my friend Lori Ann tells me she appreciates my participation in bringing ‘hooray’ back.)

My efforts to make changes in my overinvestment in work have resulted over the past year largely in redirecting where I put my work-related energy, so that it gets funneled into the parts that feed me—like teaching and writing—rather than the parts that bore and drain me—like administrative components.  The job is heavily administrative in its own right though, so this is tough goal to meet.  Plus, I’ve not really addressed the issue of being overinvested in work given that I’ve only modified which parts of work get my focus.  I’ve not focused on it less.  I am no less “invested in work” this year than I was last year.  Now, I do think that making conscious choices about which parts I’m going to care a lot about on one hand and which parts I’m going to do only as well as is absolutely necessary on the other is an important development.  I find I am less anxious about the administrative parts and I am teaching/writing in ways that feed me.  I’m less buffeted about emotionally by it all.  So I guess I’m differently invested in work.  That’s probably something, yeah?

I think I’ve made a good bit of progress on food, specifically on being overinvested in meal preparations and family members’ responses to them.  One way I’ve made shifts is to cook fewer meals proper.  I have a very difficult time thinking of simplicity in terms of meals.  I don’t mean that my meals are elaborate; they are not.  I do mean that having a leftover and salad, or a sandwich, or a couple of vegetables, feels so on the fly to me.  And this is strange because the person from whom I learned most of what I know about cooking and family meals is my mother, who fed us this way at least every third night, when my father the firefighter was at the fire department for a 24 hour shift.  I don’t give myself much credit for just “making something to eat” if that something isn’t served up from some big pot or pan.  Weird.  Anyway, I do cook a little less and I am navigating my daughter’s shifting diets, as she figures out who she is and what culinary and body care directions she wants to head.  She is vegetarian now (last year mostly so, plus some chicken) and she is leaning toward being vegan I think.  I’ve made some changes in what I cook and tried to cook more vegetarian when she’s around and meaty stuff when she isn’t.  When we had meat, like Christmas ham, I tried to ensure veggie options and afterward made a vegetarian pea soup alongside the one with ham.  I am much more comfortable with her declining my cooking so I guess I’ve fairly effectively detached my maternal “worth” from how many spoonfuls she takes of my preparations.  I’ve also worked on redirecting my food energy, as I did my work energy, funneling it into what “feeds” me.  I did a great deal of cooking over the holidays primarily motivated by the fact that I damn well felt like it.  I’ve tapered off since, because I damn well felt like it, but I do have corned beef and cabbage in the crockpot right now so I’m pretty stoked knowing we’ll come home to that tonight. J

I seem to be making some progress on the third issue I atoned for last year:  Time.  It’s hard to differentiate this issue from the work issue, of course.  What I struggle with most as I noted last January, is breaking away. I still pine after images of lakes I want to sit by and woods I want to walk in; I have a terrific photo that functions as the background/wallpaper for my computer screen at home that is a red clay road through a lush wood, much like the one featured in this post.  “I need to be walking down that road,” I think to myself when I first sit down in my home office, “not seeing it in 2-D on my computer screen.”  But I don’t feel so much like crying for the longing of it.  So perhaps that’s a sign that I’m managing to unwind more. I did spend much of my spring and summer under the gazebo in my back yard—working often enough, mind you, but otherwise looking at cookbooks and magazines and managing my rental property.  And I did spend some time at the beach in the summer, and I did take myself on an 8-day writing retreat in early fall, which I blogged about beginning here.  So as I write I can see that I’ve made some improvements on which I can build this year.  I still haven’t figured out how to break away in a more routine way—regular walks, fun on the weekends, going out for a meal or coffee with friends.   That last one is something I aim to take up in serious way this year.  Anybody up for lunch?

 

My Girlfriend, Cooking

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Cooking and I, well, let’s just say we have a complicated relationship.  I mean I do love her, I do.  But when calling up descriptors of us as a couple, clichés like absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt seem to fit better than, say, you’re the light of my life or  you make everything make sense when you’re near me.  What I like, as I’ve noted in a previous post about good intentions, is  planning.  I like thinking about Cooking and planning what our time together will be like, but once the day finally arrives to actually DO something with her, well, I have a harder time with that.  We work better long distance, I think.  Do you know a couple like that?  They’re fine as long as they’re not together all that much?  Maybe you ARE part of a couple like that, so maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about. I mean there are occasions, when we’re together, and especially when we’re alone, that I can really get into her.  And it’s those occasions that I try to keep in mind on days when a meal I’ve prepared rather tanks, or days when everyone in the house is suffering from some spat of sorts she and I have had.  I feel like defending our relationship by saying, Hey, it’s not always like this!  Sometimes we’re really good together!  You don’t know her like I do!

We spent a very sexy evening together before the holidays, making gifts for some friends, mixing it up, rolling it out, you know, things were getting pretty hot.  Lots of attention to the details, if you know what I mean, not rushing anything.  My hands all up in that business, taking the temperature of things, taking a taste now and again.  A little sweet stuff, a little instrumental holiday music playing in the background—some Celtic and some jazz, and boy was I ever in the mood.  We just stretched it out like that for hours.  Not a single thing on my mind but  Cooking and whatever she needed to make things work, you know?  I don’t mind saying that I was pretty exhausted by the time the evening was over, but I was surely satiated. Some of the positions I had to stay in for long periods caused me some aches the next day (she likes this one thing I do…well, nevermind).  But wow, the memory of that night will sustain me for a long time.  I store that memory as evidence that I really do have the capacity to enjoy her, that we really can be quite good together.  It’s hard though because you can’t have a whole relationship based on separation from the rest of your life, you know?  I mean there are other responsibilities—work, children, friends—that keep you from your love and that have need of you.  You really have to find a way to integrate your love relationships into the rest of your life or you’re always going to feel torn.  But.  It’s complicated.

The thing with Cooking, see, is that she wants the kind of attention I was able to pay her that night like all the time!  And when I try to do something quick, like drive-through or takeout or something, boy do I feel guilty.  I convince myself that these options aren’t “good enough,” that Cooking is what’s “best for me” and my family.  I mean she could really care less about how exhausted or stressed out I am. She wants me attending to her like constantly!  As if she’s the only thing I’ve got going on in my life!  She’s too much work, finally, in the end, you know?  And it’s not like love means never having to say you’re sorry, because I’ve apologized to my family plenty of times for my ill-temper when she and I aren’t in a groove and nothing I do seems to work and we’re all sitting there looking at a plate full of fallout.  I mean they’re good about it, my family.  They don’t talk about it much.  They know I’m going to move in and out of that relationship in a troubled way and that, though selfish, she isn’t mean to me or unkind anything.  She’s just so high maintenance.  I wish we could have more time alone together, when I’m not exhausted from life so we can give each other the kind of love and tenderness we both deserve.  I always feel like we’re just throwing things together.

When I’m sitting by myself with a cup of tea, looking through our photo albums or journals or relationship manuals or whatever you want to call them (I affectionately call them “cookbooks”), our relationship feels so promising.  So adventurous.  So fun and rewarding.  And every once in a while and sometimes more often, it really is all of that.  Besides, it’s not like I could leave her, so let’s just get that off the table, as it were.  I suppose I could be near her if she hooked up with someone else in the house, you know, if you love something set it free….  But honestly, I don’t think I could bear it, being second like that.  We’ve been through too much together and nobody knows her like I do. So I guess we’ll just keep plodding along, doing the best we can despite how complicated we are.  Besides, I know lots of women who have very complicated relationships with their own version of her; maybe that’s just the way it is with Cooking.  I mean no one said it was going to be easy.

 

Little Is the New Big

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I’ve been struck, many times and especially lately, by the way that the feelings of childhood stick with you.  It could be argued, I suppose, that this isn’t all that striking, since we’ve long known that the early years of anyone’s life profoundly shape the later years.  We know from studies of the psychology and sociology of family life and from studies of human interaction in family contexts that what we process as children sticks with us in some way for many many years, maybe even all the ones we have.

It’s a scary thing for a parent, for me at least, to reckon with the fact that the slightest offhand remark, the truly playful tease, the short-tempered snip at the end of stressful day may be the very thing a child ends up hanging onto.  It’s mortifying to recognize that the seemingly most innocuous comment uttered in the front seat of the car might well, once it’s landed in the backseat with the little people back there, be the very thing they hang their future self esteem, or teenage years, or twenties, or career choice on. One begins to see just how golden silence is.  Of course it’s all more complicated than that; multiple other intervening variables, some that fuel and some that temper, modify the impact of all kinds of childhood experiences.  Our perspective changes, probably perpetually, and the narratives we tell about our lives from those changing perspectives shift what we see and remember and therefore what we hang our future on. But a single moment can sure stick with you.  I’d wager any one of us could identify a single sentence, or nickname, or label that stuck with us for a long, long time.  We can probably identify some phrase that we still can’t shake.  Sometimes those have had far-reaching effects in a negative way, and sometimes they’ve incited all manner of motivation and drive and self-respect.  Even so, it is a heavy burden to bear as a parent knowing that something you said but didn’t really mean, or didn’t mean like that, might be the hook on which your children hang their future.  Or impale themselves even.

Beyond words though, I’ve been struck recently by the ways that adults never really shake the feelings and insecurities of youth.  Several years ago, when I was ascending the stairs of my university’s administration building to get to the president’s office where I would argue on behalf of the Women’s Studies program, I thought to myself, “I’m too little to be going to the president’s office.”  I didn’t feel like I even knew what I was doing, much less how to argue on behalf of what I was doing.  I’ve never fully shaken that feeling that everyone else that surrounds me knows what is going on and knows their role except me, who is faking my way through all of it.  The great imposter about to be pegged as such at any moment.  I am still stunned when I get feedback from students who say they are intimidated by me.  Intimidated by what? I think.  I don’t even know what I’m doing!  Now, as head of an academic department at a university, when someone says—someone just said it to me two days ago—“Here’s what we’d like to do, with your approval….” It still strikes me as strange that anyone would need the approval of someone who is too little to be doing what she does, and doesn’t even know how to do it anyway. My colleague was paid to speak at a major event on her area of expertise and she was mortified; “I’m too little,” she was saying.  She took a picture of the hall where she would be speaking and texted it to me, horrified at being given such a significant role when she felt so small.   When I got the promotional postcards for my first book, the Mothering in the Third Wave anthology, the first thing I did was send one to my mother with the note “Mom, look what I can do!”

I don’t doubt for a second that most people struggle to keep the insecurities of youth at bay in adult life.  I suspect that the struggle for some is greater than for others, but I imagine it’s tricky terrain for most folks in any case.  I’ve been noticing the pics of my Facebook friends lately, especially those I’ve known for a number of years; I’m seeing lifeyears and experience in those pics.  Age even.  I see that they have kids and some graying temples and lines, that they own homes.  Didn’t we all just…sortof…get big, I thought.

 

The Road to My House is Paved with Good Intentions (Part 2)

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In last week’s post, I sang a song of respectful melancholy about intentions that never made it to the execution stage, having lingered in the idea stage so long that they just ended up taking up valuable psychological and physical space and were better served abandoned.  Most of those were about meals that never got cooked but for fear of misleading my readers into thinking that a single post could possibly represent this issue of unspoken but no less broken promises to my self and my family, I offer up another one.

My problem, in part, is that I am a planner.  I’ve always been weak in classroom math (though I was awesome in geometry, so much so that when I got my first exam back from my teacher in tenth grade I got up to hand it back to him thinking he’d given me someone else’s.  Oh sorry, you gave me the wrong…hey, how’d my name get…oh…wait…this is mine?  Anyway, I think of planning as my math.  It feels like math to me anyway, except that I like it and enjoy the mental workout—more geometryish than mathish for me I guess.  I work to figure out equations of time and money and preference (as with cooking), of the fit of similar and contrasting elements and of solving for the missing variable (as with holiday gatherings and meals), of complicated word problems about time and schedules (as with anything family, and also with planning a course I am teaching), of plotting out location and timing (as with gardening).  The problem-solving I do in all this is my math.  The good kind. Where I like it and get an A.  As long as planning will suffice.  It’s the completion stage I have so much trouble with. Things aren’t  nearly as neat organized and beautiful and fun and delicious in this stage as they are in the planning stage.

I’ve been planning to rearrange my dining room for at least two years now so I can see my china cabinet from where I sit in the family room…I never get to enjoy my dishes in that cabinet because I’m always scurrying past them in their current location.   It actually might be three years I’ve been planning this.  But moving the cabinet means moving what’s on the wall and that will mean confronting that only one ill-placed piece is on the wall and that I need to do something with those walls, like put up the plate display that has been on the floor for three years, next to the Scrabble game that has been there since at least three Thanksgivings ago, maybe four. I wish I were kidding.

Now I do have a pattern of follow-through on some things.  On occasion. I do have nice family gatherings at my house over the winter holidays and once each summer.   I do finish teaching each course I create, though perhaps with less fervor near the end than at the beginning; luckily by that point my students are too strung out to notice.  And I did send my son off to “eighties day” at his school looking like some cross between John Bender from The Breakfast Club and Axl Rose.  I did complete the task of moving around all three bedrooms upstairs—my office to my son’s room with glorious windows which he kept shut in his boycave, his room to my daughter’s since she has an apartment now, and her room to my former office.  It was chaotic but totally doable given that we had help on the moving and the painting parts. I did begin and end a monstrous load of laundry last night.  I did clean up and decorate my house for the holidays (and am planning a party largely for the purpose of getting more mileage from the effort.  My fantasy for this party is that the planning stages will be so completely amazing that this time I will NOT spend most of the party sitting by myself in the living room because I’m too exhausted from the labor to even mingle).  I did manage to bring to fruition my last couple of summer reunions, and last Christmas and this Thanksgiving family gatherings, so I’m hoping I’m on a roll.

But there are still the hubcaps of my car that are so completely filthy that mere words here won’t do the filth justice.  There are wall hangings that need to be adjusted—just simply moved a bit with my hand, mind you.  There are Facebook and Twitter posts that I don’t seem to have time to write (remember the latter can only be 140 characters long), plastic bags that need to be taken back to the grocery store for recycling, a facial I paid for and haven’t yet had, a full closet of shelves in my new home office that needs to be organized, a blog post that needs a conclusion…