“I miss [Little Bird] already!” I sighed, in the car on the way to church.
“Who?” my husband said.
“Har har,” I responded, knowing full well he knew I was referring to our seven-year-old son.
Continue readingFeeling the Absence in Our Family
Challenges
What does equity and equality have to do with being spoiled?
“But he’s spoiled!” my older son proclaimed loudly, expressing his opinion that his brother always gets what he wants.
Now, his claim is blatantly untrue. In fact, my older son is probably the one who gets what he wants more often just because he has stronger opinions. My younger son is more likely to say, “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”
But I wasn’t going to get into that conversation. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere and just turn into the nonsense of trying to list every time that my older son got what he wanted.
Instead, I took a different angle. “Well, you know that we do try very hard to be fair. But fair doesn’t always mean equal.”
Continue readingFinding Rest as a Parent Even When You Don’t Want To
“You should be so available to play that your children never need to ask,” read the meme. Or least that’s how I read it. (Although it really was close to it.) But what if they always want more than I have to offer? I thought in desperation.
Other memes or oversimplified advice extolled the virtues of connection, especially when it came to getting your kids to do what you want or need them to do, like brush their teeth or come to the table for dinner. Some even made the connection explicit, saying that your kids will be cooperative if only you’re connected enough with them. Of course that message implies the opposite – that if they aren’t cooperative, it’s because you aren’t connected enough.
Continue readingMoving from watching to participating as a parent
“You aren’t supposed to lead play, just watch,” the parenting expert voice in the back of my head said. So I sat there on the living room floor and watched, keeping my mouth closed, lest I pass judgment on how my kid was playing.
Even though something felt ‘off’ about this statement, I couldn’t help but see it as the culmination of so much parenting advice – and more strikingly, parent shaming.
Continue readingWhat now keeps me up at night as a mom
My eyes closed, nearly drifting off to sleep, I startle, awakened by a creaking noise. Is it one of the kids’ doors? Is one of them up, perhaps to go to the bathroom? Listening closer, room still dark, I strain to hear. The noise occurs again, but I can locate it just outside our window. “It’s the blueberry bushes, scratching the house,” I reassure myself. But some part of me doesn’t accept that answer and keeps listening anyway – just in case.
Continue readingWhy the Ramona books still resonate with kids today
1958? Wow, I didn’t think this book was that old, I thought as I looked at the title page of the classic children’s book Beezus and Ramona. Ramona’s four year old behavior – eating one bite out of each apple in a bag, writing her name on every page of a library book – seems just as relevant 65 years later as it did then.
Continue readingOn holding expectations loosely
Sometimes, plans don’t work the way they should the first time. But that doesn’t mean they will never work, just that you need to adjust. As someone who gets stuck on expectations, this can be really hard. But it’s almost always worth it to figure out how to make it work.
Every year, we do an activity Advent calendar. For the past several years, COVID has prevented us from doing many of the activities we’ve done in the past, including the train display at the U.S. Botanical Garden. I found out that they finally relaunched it this year, outdoors. But the one day we could do it overlapped with a really important meeting of one of my older son’s extracurricular activities. So that was a no-go. But we were able to go after Christmas – not ideal, but better than nothing. And so we went the week of Christmas break, which worked out beautifully.
This lesson *may* just apply to far more than planning activities. When we hold on our expectations too tightly – whether to who our children are or what we do with them – we miss out on what is possible. As hard as it is to come to terms with what is not, it’s so much better to embrace what is.
Respecting the Seasons of Growing Up
Breaking off twigs heavy with red cherry tomatoes, my mouth twisted in dissatisfaction with the brown leaves around it. I should have watered it better, I should have cleared the yellowed leaves out more, I should have, I should have, I should have.
But no, I thought, pushing that criticism aside. I was deriding myself for not fighting the plant’s natural cycle. Trying to keep cherry tomatoes neat and pruned is a fool’s errand. It works against rather than with the plant. We’re still getting loads of tomatoes – so what if it’s messy?
So often we try to buck the natural cycle of things even when they fulfill their purpose, don’t we? So often we try to make things neat and fast when they are messy and take time – like childhood.
Continue readingRelying on the Village in Parenting
I opened and closed my mouth trying not to say anything to my younger son. Finally, I just had to. “No, not like that!” I cried, as our kayak started moving backwards. I sighed and thought, “I thought he knew how to do this?!”
My younger son was sitting in front of me in a red double kayak. I was attempting to leave shore. He dipped one side of his paddle in the water, then dipped it on the same side again, and then dragged it backwards on the surface.
“Take your paddle out!” I yelled. I struggled to figure out how to explain the sixteen different things he needed to fix, all at the same time. I tried to start with something concrete.
“Ah, ah, your hands, your hands need to be spaced the same amount apart. Can you spread them out?” I stammered as I paddled, trying to keep us from running into another boat or going backwards. As he fixed his hands, I replied, “Yes, like that.” Then thought, “Or not,” as his hands shifted exactly back to where they were before. And then his paddle was going backwards again. “Ack, no, stop paddling!”
My husband, Chris, spotted our flailing. My older son was in his kayak and while his form wasn’t perfect, he had done it before and was remembering the rhythm. My husband was in a good place to provide a metaphorical hand.
Letting Go of Control So Our Kids Can Have It
“I can’t get the bike lock open!” My older son came up to me with the keys to my bike lock in his hand. He was supposed to be unlocking his bike from the rack at school.
“Uh, just make sure you put it in carefully. It’s kind of fussy. Why don’t you try again?” I said.
“Hahaha, I was just tricking you!” he said. I sighed. He went back to the bike.
A couple minutes later, he was back again. “I really can’t open it. It’s really stuck.”
“Uh, okay, I can help then.”
As I started walking towards the bike, he laughed and said, “I got you again!”
Cue me looking at the non-existent camera in my life, like I’m a sitcom character.
“Ha ha. Yep, you definitely got me. Go unlock your bike, please.”