Trains and Meltdowns

Sometimes Carl and I forget just how much the littles do pick up from our conversations with each other. Car rides are our best time for discussion, which means that they get to hear everything we say. We do have some sense of propriety - some matters for discussion stay in the bedroom, yes? - but we never hesitate to talk about serious matters in the car or at the dinner table, from politics to philosophy to theology to our future.

It's that last one that was giving Joy some worry, and made me realize how aware I really do need to be of little ears.

We've told the girls for a while that we will probably be moving to Chicago in the next year. We've built it up for them, given them all sorts of things to look forward to when we move out there (especially, oh especially the train). Except now all of the sudden Chicago has become Boston (most likely - long story that can be summed up in "just as good of a grad school for Carl, better job opportunities"), and we kinda sorta forgot to talk it over with the littles.

We've talked about it plenty in front of them, though, which just might explain Joy's most recent meltdown precipitated by not being able to ride the train when we took Gunka (their great-uncle) to the station after a visit. I got no sense out of her sobs (with hands pressed firmly over her eyes while tears streamed down behind them), but Carl finally managed to get out of her that she didn't want to move to Boston; if we were going to move at all, she wanted to move to Chicago. With the trains.

A little more digging also found out that this upcoming trip we're taking to visit the school, she thought was going to be our move. She thought we were moving to Boston this weekend.

Ack, my heart broke.

Joy pays attention to everything, she thinks about everything, but she doesn't talk about much. Especially when she's worried or scared.

We explained to her that we don't even know for certain yet that we will be moving to Boston, but when we do know, we'll tell them. We'll have lots of time to prepare (granted, our move from PA to NY took place in two weeks, but to a kid, that's long enough). We won't just up and move them without talking about it.

Then we started talking about all the fun things there are to do in Boston - I even read to her a little from Make Way for Ducklings - and we promised that there are trains in Boston, too, and we will ride them.

She's been doing better ever since then, but it was a good reminder to us that, as they used to say, "little pitchers have big ears," and if we are going to talk about everything and anything in front of the littles, we'd better make sure we are including them in those talks, explaining things to them, and using language and ideas they can understand.

Otherwise, there is going to be a whole lot of confusion, and many more meltdowns.

And nobody wants that.

Winter morning

I love waking up to a baby full of smiles...


And to a sky making all sorts of beautiful things happen outside my window.


Spring and summer mornings have warmth and birdsong and light. But these winter mornings bring the snuggles like whoa.

The Ideal

Yesterday, Lindsey wrote a beautiful post on the importance of fairy tales for children. This morning, I posted on Twitter about Joy curling up with her favorite book of fairy tales. I've been thinking a lot lately about various quotes regarding fairy tales -

Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads. -GK Chesterton

But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening. And, as I am always telling you, the most wonderful things happen to all sorts of people, only you never hear about them because the people think that no one will believe their stories, and so they don’t tell them to any one except me. And they tell me, because they know I can believe anything. -E Nesbit

Fantasy is hardly a way of escaping from reality; it's a way of understanding it. -Lloyd Alexander

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. -CS Lewis

And Chesterton again -

Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed. -GK Chesterton

I love fairy tales, and always have. I bitterly resented the stupid English prof in college who tried to convince us that they were all a result of suppressed sexual desires (he said that about EVERYTHING we studied in that class - dude had issues), because there is so much richness to be found in their depths, richness that is missed when you focus solely on the secret message of Red Riding Hood's red cloak.

I also get frustrated with people who are only familiar with the Disney-fied version of fairy tales, and judge them all based on that. Dismiss them, really. Well, sure, when the only message you get out of fairy tales is that you need to have big eyes and a tiny waist and win your prince to be happy, I agree that they're a load of crap and our kids shouldn't be wasting their time on them.

But the originals have so much more. Did you know, in the original version of The Little Mermaid, the sea-witch wasn't evil, the mermaid didn't win the prince, and her sister sacrificed their greatest beauty - their hair - in order to have her turned into sea foam instead of just becoming nothing? It is, at its heart, a story about love and sacrifice, both love between a man and woman, and love between families - and the message is, the love between family is the strongest.

Awesome.

So I give my littles fairy tales to read. I don't encourage them to dream of being princesses in pink frothy gowns and sparkly shoes (though Joy at least does really love her sparkly shoes), but I encourage them to think of things like honor and courage, sacrifice and love, honesty and nobility. These are the themes I have always found wound throughout fairy tales, the idea of an Ideal, something that can and should be sought and aspired to.

I have one full shelf on my bookcases of fairy tale collections, not just the traditional European tales I grew up reading, but Russian fairy tales, Japanese fairy tales, and more. Every time I see any collection of tales at a garage or library sale, I snatch it up. I was my girls to be able to experience the tales from many cultures, to learn without having to be taught what ideals are universal, and which ones are specific to cultures, and to learn about other peoples simply by the stories that shape them.

Disney? Not so much.

Unless we're talking Mulan or Belle. One fights in her father's stead, and one loves books. Now those are heroines worth emulating.

Joy showing me something in her fairy tale book this morning.

By any other name

The whole science of naming is something that has fascinated me since I was a young child. I remember filling the margins of my notebooks with a list of the names that I thought were beautiful--Helen, Clover, Augusta, Beatrice, Felicity, Jessamine--and wonder which one of these I would pick for my future child, what she would be like, how her name would shape her. When they handed that blank birth certificate form to me in the hospital, all those neat little boxes waiting to hold the name we'd chosen for our daughter, I actually trembled with excitement. I couldn't believe they were going to let me name an actual person.

A lot of thought went into picking Lulu's name. Which, in the interest of full disclosure, isn't actually Lulu. I don't want to say exactly what it is because I feel hinky about giving her name on the internet. I mentioned it several times on my old book blog, but this is a blog about her life, and I don't want to share details of her life without her consent. One day, if she wants, I'll go back and do a search-and-replace on the whole thing with her real name, but until then, she's Lulu. It's her nom de guerre.

Lulu has three names, first, middle and last. Her last name is my husband's, because I am subjugated and antifeminist but mostly because my maiden name is German and hard to spell. Her middle name is for my paternal grandmother, who died when I was 11. I have 21 years' worth of memories of my mother's mom, my Mammaw, to share with Lu when she is older, but I wanted her to have something of my other grandmother, too. So we added a few letters to her name, Lois, and made a name that felt a little more fresh.

Lu's first name is short and sweet and to the point. It is the name of a character in my favorite book. It's a classic; it peaked in popularity in the U.S. in 1910 and has been sliding ever since. It's not a new oldie, one of the ubiquitous "pretty grandma" names like Violet or Alice or Eloise. It's common enough among the general population so that you won't bat an eyelash to hear it but it's not a name that you find much on women under 40, much less little babies. Think Jane. (It's not Jane. But Jane is on my list).

But on an everyday basis, we don't call Lulu by any of these carefully chosen names. Most of the time we call her stupid things like "Bicky" or "Dog-Dog" or "Pants." When we're not using these undignified monikers, we call her by a nickname. It's a foreign version of her real name, a legitimate name, not made up. It's in the top 50 or so names for girls in Holland and Belgium and France, but in the U.S., it's very rare. There is a Dutch pop star and French actress and a character in a popularish book and movie who share this name, but I have never met anybody in real life who goes by it. We like that Lulu has two names, J.D. and I, and that they are so different. We like that she could use either one of them her whole life, or that she can switch back and forth between them as her situation and identity dictate. Whether Lulu grows up to be a Supreme Court Justice or the singer in a punk rock band, she's covered.

I think something that I have always liked about names are the small--and not-so-small--ways in which they shape our lives. A child's name is so important to whom he or she will become. That's backed up by science--researchers have found that students with names starting with A or B do better in school than kids whose names start with C or D, that men named Dennis and Joe are far more likely to become dentists and plumbers than men named James or Andrew. When I meet a parent with a baby, I always ask what his or her name is, and then I try to think about how that name will shape that baby's future. Will little Atom grow up to be a physicist? Will Colton ride horses? Will Shiva backpack through India, feel an affinity for Hindu philosophies? I'm named for an aunt--my mother's sister--and we are very, very close, and so alike that it's scary. But what if my mom had named me for her other sister? Would I feel closer to her, share more of her traits?

But what I really love are the things a name says about the namer. The things I wouldn't otherwise know. When my very good friend gave her son a very Celtic name, one of the ones with a lot of consonants that don't sound how you expect them, I wanted to know what led her to choose it. It seemed like a kind of random choice. But then she told me the story of her Irish immigrant grandparents, why they left their home in Ireland, why they moved to America, their traditions. I was floored--I hadn't known my friend's ancestry was so important to her. I hadn't known she was Irish at all. And I'd known her for 10 years.

At story hour at the public library a few weeks ago, there was a mother with a four-week-old baby, and his name was Larry. "That is a marvelous name," I told her. "Most people think it sounds like a hick or an old man," she said, "But it was my dad's name." And then she told me about her dad, who had died. She gave part of his memory, and part of herself, to me, and I'd only known her for thirty seconds.

Even really common names can be more revealing than you'd think. A woman I went to elementary school with recently named her daughter Jennifer, which isn't strange, but seemed like a strange choice because of its unstrangeness. But there was a story there, too: my Filipino friend, with her Filipino name, had dreamed, when she came to this country at a young age, of being a bright and bubbly, quintessentially American Jennifer instead of the foreign-sounding Maricel. Jennifer represents countless Jennis, Jennys, Jens and Jenns to us; to her it represented a wish for her new life.

So it's surprising, given the deep, intimate, personal nature of the naming process, that people can be such TOTAL ASSHOLES about the things that other people call their children. Seriously, everybody on the planet? What is WRONG with you? People can find something negative to say about pretty much every name under the sun (as evinced by the fact that nobody liked the boy name J.D. and I picked out, which was JOHN, probably the most inoffensive name known to man). But we parents of kids with unusual names reap it harder than anybody else. Just the other day I was talking to my friend S., whose daughter is named Liesel, and she recounted to me the story of a woman who accosted her while she was in the grocery store, minding her own business, to tell her that she didn't like her daughter's name, which she had discerned from the monogrammed diaper bag hanging over my friend's shoulder.

"When people do that to me," I said. "I wish them hemorrhoids."

"When people do that to me," Liesel's mom said, "I wish that they would be somehow unfairly implicated in a heinous crime and forced to flee the long arm of the law and the grip of the one-armed man. Like in The Fugitive."

So we talked about it some more, at length, and came up with a list of dos and don'ts that everybody must follow when talking to parents about their childrens' names. Because we decree it so. And because the penalty of not doing it is hemorrhoids.

• DO call the child by the name the parents have chosen. Even if you don't really like it or you feel stupid saying it. Don't choose an alternate nickname, or make one up, or use the middle name instead.
• DON'T be afraid to ask questions. It's OK to ask how a name is spelled or pronounced. It's OK to ask more than once if you need to. Because pretty much everybody prefers that you ask multiple times rather than getting it wrong.
  
• DO let us know if you know someone else with the same name as our child. But please don't tell us if you had an evil teacher/horrible boss/person you never liked with that name.
  
• DON'T be afraid to say that you think a name is unusual. We know the name is unusual; that's usually why we chose it.
  
• DO try to chose your words carefully, though. Words like "strange" and "weird" and "odd" don't always sound the best. It's always better to say "interesting."
  
• DON'T say you dislike a name. Don't ever do that, please. Usually by the time a parent is sharing a name with you, the kid is born and here and that's his name and your opinion will only make everybody feel bad. Remember that if we all had the same taste in names as you, then your own child's name wouldn't be so special. And everyone wants their child's name to be at least a little bit special--that's why there are 50,000 nicknames for Elizabeth, and why people go so ferally batshit crazy when someone "steals" the name they've chosen.
• DO try to find something to like about the name that's being shared with you. Even names like Ethel and Edna can be charming if you think of them in the right way. For instance, Ethel Waters was a totally boss jazz singer and Edna Ferber wrote some of the most adorable books in the history of books. Accentuate the positive. And there's always a positive.
  
• Most importantly, DO ask about the story behind the name. You'll almost always learn something important or meaningful about the person who chose it.
  

If you hear me calling my kid Dog-Dog, though? I give you permission to look askance at me for that.

"One day I'll learn to talk, Pantoufle. And then I'll get my revenge."

How did you pick your child's name? What does it mean to you? Please share the story with us in the comments.

Autumn Leaves

On Friday, we drove through the Adirondacks on our way to visit my folks for the weekend. It was glorious, especially in the southern part where everything was either at or just barely past peak. I wanted to stop EVERYWHERE to take pictures.

But we waited until we got to Lake Placid (which is one of my favorite places in the whole world and almost as much of a home to me as where I grew up, because of all the time I spent there in my college years, working almost every single weekend of the fall and winter at various sporting events) and could get some lunch as well as pictures.

Except then my camera quit working on me. And it was raining, so I couldn't take the time to mess with it without it and us getting soaked. So we grabbed lunch and drove the rest of the way up to my parents'. No pictures at all.

(We fixed the camera once we got up here, by the way. The lens had some dust in it.)

I was a little disappointed at first, but then I got thinking about the nature of beauty. Isn't, maybe, half of what makes some things beautiful, their transient nature? If the trees were always this dizzying array of golden, orange, and red, would we notice them as much, or would we take them for granted after a while?

Maybe, by not being able to capture the whiteness of a mountain cascade spreading like a veil across the dark rocks, the reflection of red and yellow in a lake at the bottom of a mountain, the colors spreading across the horizon as far as the eye could see, maybe by only having to fix them in my memory instead of relying on the camera to record them for me ...

Maybe I appreciated them more.

And maybe, if I think of these days with small children as beautiful in their passing, if I look at potty training, and self-control teaching, and mealtime struggles, and never ever getting enough sleep, as memories getting locked away in my heart instead of tasks sucking up my life ...

Maybe I'll appreciate them more, too.

Not to say I won't still get frustrated and tired and occasionally longing for the days when they are older. But if I think of these days as fleeting as the autumn leaves, it might make it easier for me to delight in them.

Nostalgia

We took advantage of the gorgeous weather last weekend to visit one of our favorite state parks and did a bit of exploring/rambling/hiking/picnicking.

When we moved from our previous house to this one a few months ago, I kept waiting for my moment of nostalgia, the welling up of all the good memories we'd had in that place, momentarily overshadowing all the very very bad things that caused us to move in the first place.

It never came.

I had it here, at the park, though.

Carl's been doing phone interviews for a new job, new city, new state (more about that if it comes through - I'm not terribly superstitious, but I still don't like talking about things when they are nebulous possibilities instead of "Hey! We're moving in two weeks!"), which means that we are looking very seriously at everything we do here being the "last time."

The last time for apple picking at our favorite orchard. The last time seeing the gloriousness of an Upstate NY autumn. The last time visiting each of our favorite parks. Our last time at this park, this park we visited when Gracie was a week old and we had to get out of the house, the park that gave my children a place to run and play when we didn't have a yard, the park where we were able to look from the mountaintop and see the beauty of this strange new city when it was all new to us.

And then I had that nostalgic twinge. I forced myself to walk slowly, to breathe deeply, to soak in the moment instead of regretting how quickly it would pass. And as the littles ran and tumbled and laughed and played, as Carl chased them all over in crazy circles, I smiled and let the memories sink down into my heart.

We may never visit this park again, but we will always have each other, and new memories will build on top of the old ones.

Girl Power!

"Need help," Gracie said, tugging me over to the toy box and pointing inside. "Need tac-tor."

Since the tractor was already in her hand, I deduced she wanted a driver for it. I asked, she confirmed, and I scooped two little people out of the box without paying much attention. Only after the driver was settled in the seat, and the extra person sitting happily in the wagon, did I look more closely to see that I had given my daughter two females.

Boo-Yah, that's right, girls can drive tractors too!

Wait, did I really just say boo-yah?


Growing up in farming land, it was never really that unusual for me to see girls on tractors. So it surprised me, this instinctive and vehement reaction. It had to be, I surmised, in response to having daughters, rather than being female myself. After all, I worked eight years shoulder-to-shoulder with the guys in the local hardware store, hauling freight and unloading trucks with the best of them. Dad taught my sister and me both to fish, to shoot a gun, to throw and catch a baseball (I hate softballs - they are so much bigger; it's nearly impossible to throw them well) ... at my grandparents' summer camp, all the grandkids would chip in with Gram and Grampie to haul brush away, all seven girls and the one lone boy cousin. My family moved to a fixer-upper house when I was nine, and since Dad worked all day, it was Mom, Lis and I who would tear down walls and help put up new sheetrock.

In other words, when you grow up without people throwing stupid ideas at your head about what girls (and boys) can and can't do, it's not too likely to feel violent feminist emotions on your own account.

But when people start making assumptions about my daughters, and trying to impress on them from birth that there are some things off-limits or unacceptable just because they are girls ... well, Mamma gets pissed.

"Be gentle!" one mom of boys chirped to her sons as they were playing with Joy. "Girls are fragile flowers."

"Oh, she's all girl," someone else will say about Joy, for no reason but that she's tiny with delicate features.

"Oh, girls run and scream and act crazy too?" a friend asked as we tried to talk on the phone, as her boys ran wild on her end, and my girls did the same on mine. (Another time, it was, "Girls put their underwear on their head too?")

"They like to play with trucks?" people will ask blankly, staring at their toy collection.

And it drives. me. nuts.

Why shouldn't they play with trucks? Who was the idiot who decided vehicles had to be for boys alone? Joy's latest fascination is with trains, while Grace, as mentioned above, is showing a bit of interest in tractors. And do people really expect that they are going to sit quietly and play softly all day long, simply by virtue of being girls? Aren't all kids supposed to run and shout and act free and crazy, isn't that just part of being a kid?

(This works the opposite direction, too, as I realized with something of a sad shock when I heard one mother worrying about the fact that her son would rather spend time cooking in the kitchen than playing war outside with his brothers.)

And yes, Joy also likes baby dolls and the color pink, and Grace is a darling snuggler who showers affection on everyone and everything in her vicinity, but that's awesome, too, that they are already so diverse, that Joy can like trains and dolls all at once, that Grace can be my crazy wild child and my sweet darling in the span of ten seconds. I want them to pursue anything and everything that interests them, to not succumb to societal pressures, to not be ashamed of "non-girly" interests, or even, on the other end, not to feel like they have to be embarrassed if they really do like pink or purple or sparkles. I want them to be their own person, regardless of what others think.

So yes, boo-yah to girls who drive tractors! As for their driving abilities ...

Well, the less said about that, perhaps, the better.

FYI: Your parents are cool(ish)

Because I am a loving parent (and also probably extremely overprotective), I haven't really had many nights out since Lulu was born. I live in fear of wearing out the few babysitters that are willing to watch our child for us. And I think I have PTSD from being separated from my baby for the first days, and weeks, of her life. So J.D. and I are the annoying people who take our kid everywhere with us, and haven't really had a proper date night since Lulu was born. We even took her with us to our anniversary dinner back in May.

But when J.D. told me that X, my favorite band of all time, was playing in Maryland on Monday night, and that there were tickets left, and that it might be fun to go, I carefully weighed the pros and cons of leaving my baby called my MIL and asked if we could dump Lulu's ass with her for the evening. How could I not take this opportunity? I listened to Wild Gift pretty exclusively from about 2003-2006; it was the only CD in my car for a while. I think at one point, it got stuck in my CD player, and that was fine by me, since it saved me the hassle of having to find it in the detritus on the passenger-side seat. Plus, everybody in the band is in their 60s. Who knows how many shows they have left?

So Monday night, we went. I put on real clothes (as opposed to yoga pants). I did (run a brush through) my hair. I put on MAKEUP (lipgloss counts), and EARRINGS and even perfume! We left the baby and a heap of her stuff with my in-laws. And J.D. and I drove to Annapolis, and we heard X play.

And! We talked about so many things on the ride there! Things that were not child-related. We talked about politics and home values and music and gossiped about people we know and it was SO QUIET. And yes, there were a few times when I looked back and saw the empty carseat and freaked out for half a second, thinking we had left the baby in the parking lot or on the roof of the car or something, but I soon calmed myself because THERE WAS NO CRYING and it was just so peaceful I couldn't help but relax.

This show was the strangest punk show that I have ever been to. Instead of being crammed in a basement or a sweaty room in a bar, we were seated at a table surrounded by a bunch of other tables in a pretty upscale restaurant. A waiter came by to take our drink orders and left carrying a tray of empty martini glasses. There was a list of specialty beers and available tapa-type appetizers and a bunch of people in business casual work clothes and I was the youngest person there by about 15 years, which is what happens when you like bands that rose to popularity before you born. We watched a documentary and then the band played through their most famous album, and then they played for another 45 minutes or so. Altogether, we were there for about two hours, and in those two hours, I listened and sang and talked and drank (iced tea) and generally had an AWESOME time.

A picture of the band, and also the pole that blocked half of my view of the stage. But it was a very upscale pole.

I had so much fun. I had forgotten what it was like to be able to give my whole attention to something without wiping up drool with one hand and calculating how long before I needed to breastfeed again in the back of my mind. Between sets, I went outside and bummed a smoke off of a young crust-punk and got into a very heated discussion with him about the definition of anarchy (lack of state, not lack of laws) and why Haiti is so f-ed up (corrupt government and deforestation). I quoted Thomas Jefferson and brought up the whole lawyer thing to make a point. And then I realized that zipper on my $14 Forever 21 jeans had been down the whole time and that I was possibly not as cool as I thought.

I slunk back into the venue and drank more iced tea and listened to Exene wail and watched Billy Zoom play the guitar, cool as a cucumber, and was happy when the band played my favorite one of their songs.

After the show, J.D. and I sat in a deserted park in the center of town and talked for a while. And then he stood up, and said we should probably get back. My first thought was, why? And then I remembered: the baby. For a minute, I felt like a bad mom, because I kind of...forgot. I had a picture of Lulu in my head, her blue eyes welling, missing me...when I'd been chugging iced tea and singing at the top of my lungs. How could I have wanted to be away from her? What if she needed me?

But then I got over it, and decided that going out and enjoying myself was the best thing I could have done for my child. Lulu, if you are reading this thirteen years from now, do not take this the wrong way, but right now, being your parent, while fun and often funny, is not always very intellectually stimulating. And you, like all babies, can be rather selfish in that I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE IN THE BATH, MAMA, I NEED TO EAT NOW. Tonight I got to recharge my batteries, and remind myself of who I am outside of you, and I can't share all the things I love about the world with you if I do not experience them and thus cannot recall exactly what they are.

Plus, if I had not gone away from you, I wouldn't have gotten to come back and experience tons of delicious baby smiles when you saw me again. That was pretty great.


Other things I learned tonight: pregnancy has robbed me of my iced tea tolerance, which was once pretty impressive. I think I spent about 30% of my night out going back and forth from my table to the bathroom. Luckily, it, too, was far more upscale than the bathrooms I am used to at these events. There was no drug use going on in there (that I could see). And no hanky-panky between people reeking of B.O. And there was one of those hand dryers that's so strong it moves the skin on your hands all around. FANCY!

Making mistakes

Last week, in conversation with J.D. and in front of our kid, I used a word, unthinkingly, to express frustration with a person in the service industry who was inconveniencing me. Total asshole move on my part. The thing is, later I realized this word is more than just a curse word, that it can be really hurtful to a lot of people. It's not something obvious, one of the words that is right at the top of the DO NOT USE list. It's one where you kind of have to think about why it's wrong. And thinking, that's something I don't do a lot of, obviously.

And once I realized what I had said, I was horrified. And disgusted with myself. I tried to apologize, and to soothe my guilty conscience, by donating money to an activist group. It didn't work. I still felt bad, and I realized that the only thing I could do to make myself feel better was either 1) hop in my Delorean and ride back to the past and NOT SAY IT, or 2, and more realistically) resolve to never do it again in the future and really watch myself.

But here's the thing: I thought I had been watching myself. And now I wonder: how many of these kinds of mistakes am I, as a mother, going to make? Mistakes that I don't even realize I have made until later, or mistakes I NEVER realize that I've made, where I sail blithely on, unawares, after leaving a lasting impression on Lulu's mind that THIS is bad, or THIS is wrong, even when I don't believe that myself?

I think the song from South Pacific is wrong. You don't have to be carefully taught, necessarily. Sometimes you just have to be carelessly taught.

How many mistakes have I made already? How can I undo them when I'm not even aware of what they are, where they happened? How can I live with the fact that I am going to fill this marvelous, beautiful, wonderful blank slate of a kid with neuroses and biases and ideas about the world that might be hurtful or just plain wrong? I chatter on unthinkingly and don't remember half of what I said as soon as I've said it. But I can't control what Lulu will remember and what she will discard. I can't control which phrases and ideas that she hears from me will stick with her, and shape her. I can only control myself, the things I say, the things I put out there.


And I'm not used to doing that. To looking inward, to weighing my words, thinking before I act. It feels like A LOT, you know? Too much responsibility. And it's turning out to be far more difficult than the responsibility you think about when you bring the kid home from the hospital, the feeding her, the keeping her alive.

I thought at first that the hard part of motherhood was the sleep deprivation, the blowout diapers, the fear your child will be hurt or lonely or worse. But I also thought that parenthood could be separated into two categories of important and less important events. That in the valleys between the peaks of important things, you could relax a little and enjoy yourself and not have to worry about it or try so hard.

I am starting to realize, now, that it's all important. Everything. There are no valleys. It all counts.

Tragedies, And How We Deal With Them

There was a lot of talk, around the eleventh of this month, about how to talk to your kids about tragedy, and when to start. I didn't pay that much attention to it, partially because I rather prefer to go case-by-case and deal with each thing separately and personally, instead of having one over-arching "method" for dealing with tragedy. And it was partially because my littles are so little that there hasn't seemed much need for preparing myself for this particular stage of motherhood yet.

Or so I thought, until last Sunday morning, when we were out to breakfast with my parents before church, and the older gentleman at the table behind us had a stroke.

It was a quiet stroke - since I was sitting with my back to their table, at first I thought it was just a gentleman with Alzheimer's out with his family. The daughter kept saying "Dad, it's time to go home now." Then there would be a pause, then she'd say again, "Dad, are you ready to go home?" Then the staff brought out a wheelchair, then my own father went over to ask if he could help (he knew the gentleman personally), and it slowly dawned on me that this was more than just Alzheimer's stubbornness.

(On a side note, "just" Alzheimer's stubbornness sounds ridiculous, when you think about what that entails. Which I do, all the time, thanks to my grandmother's condition.)

Eventually, they had to call 911, and the paramedics came and loaded him up on a gurney and carried him out to the ambulance. By that point, he was responding physically, squeezing their hands when they asked and even attempting to smile, though he wasn't speaking.

And my girls sat there through it all. By God's grace, Joy, who would have paid exquisitely close attention to it all and been very disturbed by it, was sitting next to me, and could only see bits and pieces out of the corner of her eye (thanks to our persistent reminders that turning one's head to stare at anyone is not polite). Grace could see it all, but she was more interested in the pond out the window than anything else. She pays attention to everything, too much of everything, to be affected much by any one thing.

So all I really had to do was explain to Joy that the funny-looking bed was for when people weren't feeling well enough to walk on their own, and they were taking the nice gentleman to a place where they would help him feel better. And she accepted that, and Grace was persuaded to not run over to try to climb on the gurney, and then the paramedics and the family left, and that was that.

Not a huge deal, not like someone died behind us, but still enough of a poignant reminder to me of the fragility of life, and the ever-hovering presence of tragedy. What would I have told them if it had been more dramatic, if it had been so noticeable even Grace couldn't remain oblivious? What will I tell them, in a year or two years or however much longer she holds on, when we have to go to Great-Grandma's funeral? How do you explain death, and sickness, and tragedies, and the cruelty of some aspects of life, to children who, thank God, have only ever known the beautiful side of this world?

Even more, how to explain the deliberate cruelty of some people, whether it be a schoolyard bully or a terrorist?

I'm not sure, yet. But I think I need to start figuring it out, at least how to break things down into a basic explanation that can be adapted to specific circumstances, lest the next time we confront the harsher realities of life, my children turn to me for answers, and I am left with nothing to say.

Philosophies and Motivations

A couple days ago, I had to put Joy in time-out TWICE for hitting her sister (to be specific, the second time she pinched Grace's arm, which she seemed to think was perfectly reasonable and should not result in a time-out, yet was strangely reluctant when I offered to pinch her arm so she could see how it felt to her two-year-old sister). As we talked about why she was getting disciplined, I realized that my parenting philosophy, the principles and guidelines I want to instill in my girls, has finally crystallized into something solid.

No "hitting is wrong." Instead, we talked about the need to love other people, especially her sister, and that love means wanting to protect them from being hurt, not causing them hurt. We (or rather, I, since Joy's contribution to the conversation consisted of "Do you like your shirt?" and "No, I don't love sissy" when pressed for an outright answer. Which is okay, because she's not yet four, and has plenty of years to understand love) talked about how important it is to be the kind of person who shows their love by acting in a loving and kind manner, and how all our actions ought to be motivated by thinking of what is best for others, not for us.

And that, in a nutshell, sums up my thoughts on life, and how I want my girls to grow up thinking. If I set them a bunch of rules and regulations, they might look very good on the outside, but what of their motivations - will they be prideful and smug? No, I want them to look at their insides, to think about their motivations, and then act upon that. My mother, who is currently studying philosophy as part of her MA in Classics, tells me this is "Virtue Ethics," which sounds pretty good to me.

When they do something well, we praise their sweet spirits, their helpfulness, their thoughtfulness, anything but the deed itself. When they do something wrong, we talk about why the deed was wrong more than the deed itself.

This all has an added side benefit - girls especially are so driven by outward appearance; so much emphasis is put on beauty. I want my girls solidly ingrained in the idea that it is what is inside of you that makes you beautiful, not how pretty your features and figure are (and let me tell you, with those two beautiful elfin girls, it is HARD not to gush all the time about how pretty they look!). They will be getting enough pressure from outside sources, the older they grow, to focus on the image they are presenting to the world. I want to start them with a firm foundation that it is what motivates them, rather than their actions themselves, that is important.

It would be a whole lot easier to just set a list of rules - do this, don't do that, but hey, who ever got into parenting expecting it to be EASY?

And seeing this sort of behavior between the two of them makes it all worthwhile. Wouldn't you agree?