So Way Short of Where I Want to Be

Yesterday goes down in the annals of my parenting history as a truly horrible day. Most days I figure I score pretty well as a parent. I am not a yeller by nature. I am strict but most times tend to reasoned logical consequences. But yesterday just sucked.

It started reasonably well. Actually very well. I can not allow myself to forget the positives and be overwhelmed by negativity. Took the boys to church and the most positive thing about this was watching KC voluntarily go with a trusted adult to another classroom to pack toiletries for a shelter. So very huge for this little man who was my velcro child for so long. That he would now be comfortable taking steps away from me. I am so proud. I remember how very long he was willing to be in my arms, in my lap, in a rebozo, anywhere but separated. He was interested in the world around him but wanted to observe it from the safety of my arms as opposed to sampling it on his own or with peers. People made subtle comments over the years as he grew older and I was still toting him around. "Was there a problem" was the usual hidden agenda to the probing questions. As though a child wanting and needing the nurturing safety of their parent was a problem. I smiled and sloughed off the comments, listened to the jokes about how he would forget he had legs and just did what felt right. And it paid off. He is so much more confident and day by day is doing more and more new things.

Came home from church and took Chet shopping for Christmas gifts. He stresses if he hasn't got all his things purchased way before a holiday and i figured anything I could do to keep him calm and happy was important. Off we went and the trip went pretty well also. I tried to get across to him that I like spending time with him and I wish he would come out of his room more and spend time with me. I know it won't change anything but I think it is important to keep reminding him that he is loved. He is my first born. I remember the days spent waiting for him to come home like it was yesterday.

And then things just crashed and burned. KC wanted to read upstairs on my bed. This should not have been a big deal. At 4, that feels like so much independence to him and should be a safe place for him. My bed is absurdly low to the ground, even if he falls off he can't hurt himself. I know he was a little tired and was sick of the football big brother Rob was watching and was looking for a place to hang out. So I said yes. Apparently somewhere along the way he decided to go in Chet's room and pester biggest brother. I hear the sounds of fractiousness and investigate. Chet says KC is going in his room. I tell Chet to shut his door because KC can't open it on his own and actually physically shut the door myself. I go downstairs. I think all will be well. Except it wasn't. Because Chet didn't feel he should have to keep his door shut and opened it. KC went back and tried to go into his room and Chet checked him with his body hard enough to hurt his arm. Not seriously thankfully, but it could have been, because Chet has no sense of his own strength and never has. There is KC holding his elbow and crying and Chet complaining as though it was KC's fault. He doesn't get that shutting the door was what he was supposed to do. To him it had been shut for ages--it was literally 10 minutes. And when I go to walk into his room to talk about this with him, that is when he decided to shut the door, by putting his foot against it to try and prevent my entry.

I don't think that is what incensed me. I think what it really was was looking at KC holding his arm. And knowing that in his little 4 year old mind he had just been trying to connect with his big brother. He tries so hard to build a connection with Chet. Chet is as weird and foreign to him as --I don't know, a now extinct dinosaur? KC is all about emotion and Chet hates emotion. It isn't a match made in heaven for sure. Chet would be happy I think if KC left him alone and never acknowledged him beyond a hello. But KC wants to understand Chet. He loves him at some deep level even though he has told me that Chet annoys him, frustrates him and makes him mad. But yesterday he hurt him and that crossed a huge line with me.

Unfortunately my response didn't help anything. I went into Chet's room, pushed the door to, and proceeded to lambast him. I didn't yell, I'm not a yeller, remember? But I was intense, I was in his face. I swore, something I almost never do. His lack of concern over his use of force didn't do anything to dampen my parental fury. In his mind, KC was wrong because he was trying to go into his room and he was just keeping him out. At that point, I pushed him onto his bed and he toppled over onto it like a felled tree. Between the fact that I startled him and my previous martial arts history it wasn't hard, though Chet is much bigger than I and outweighs me. My point to Chet was just that, it was startling. It was could even be considered fear producing and that this was similar to what he did to KC, except that I did it in a way that would make sure he wasn't hurt. He didn't get that. I know he didn't get it. Looking back in the calmer time of 12 hours later, I can't think why I would think it would demonstrate anything positive to him. And then Kirsty came into the room and said that perhaps I should go downstairs now, so i did. That was when she explained that KC had seen me push Chet --the door being ajar and not totally closed--and was visibly alarmed. Great. So I terrify my own child inadvertantly while trying to make sure my eldest doesn't physically harm him. Yup, I am up for a parenting award. Sigh.

On Gratitude

It has started all ready. The annual Yuletide flood of catalogs, ads, and lists of wants and needs compiled by children who either still believe in Santa or think Mom and Ooma have a bank account roughly the size of Fort Knox. They will all get some of what they want. no one will get all they want. Hopefully they will all be happy. I always worry about this. Particularly this year with finances squeaky tight. My belief is that Yule is about so much more than the gifts. But I am not 4, or 12 or even a disabled 23 year old. We work hard to have other facets of the holiday have great meaning, the lights, the decorations, the baking. The giving of baked and handmade items to friends and neighbors. The music of the season. These all have their place and make the holiday more than a giant gimme party.

But I had somewhat despaired of our kids getting this. Well not all our kids. KC and Lissa are young enough where they get caught up in whatever we are doing. It is all fun and magical and they will buy in. But my Rob is my middle guy. And Rob definately defines his happiness by things. Having things. Buying things. Planning on buying things. And not just any thing. Expensive things. Like a big screen TV. Video games that cost enough to buy our food for nearly a week. And so on. However this morning I have hope. Heifer Project sent me two catalogs this year. I have left them on the island in our kitchen and Rob has been perusing them at breakfast. He was stunned to learn from reviewing the catalog that one of the things one could do was to help buy school supplies for children in the USA. "Here?" he asked in a puzzled voice. "In our country?" Yes, there are hungry people here. Yes there are children who don' t live in areas where the schools provide the tools they need for learning. He shook his head in wonder.

"Look Ooma, a flock of chickens doesn't cost much does it? Do they eat them?" Being vegetarians the thought of them consuming meat doesn't thrill him, but I remind him that they will also use the eggs and be able to sell the eggs to get money for other things they need to buy. He is excited now, looking at the options. Sure there is an ark of animals for $5000 but there are bees and goats and a host of other options that are more affordable.

In our kitchen we have a money jar. One of those gizmos that count your change as you put it in. The deal is that anyone who has spare change or finds change puts it in there. Right now it is virtually empty because we used the money to donate to UNICEF in October. But now Rob has a new plan. We will all save our change during the year and we will decide what to buy from the Heifer catalog next winter with our savings. No matter what is under the tree this year, I just got the biggest gift ever. The gift of a child learning the meaning of generosity.

More Musings on Mental Health

I have been reading another blog whose writer is presently writing about healing from emotional traumas and this has been an interesting topic to reflect on. I find myself trying to understand my sister's mental health issues. I am very much the kind of person who wants to know the why, when and how of things. I like to make sense and order out of my world,and for me, this doesn't make sense. Or perhaps I should say, didn't make sense.

After all, she and i were raised in the same family. By and large our parents treated us equally. If there were any differences, they were that she was viewed as the "pretty one" and I was the "smart" one. Accordingly she was often given greater latitude in her behaviors and choices because she was pretty and presumabley didn't know better. I felt the unfairness of this growing up. I struggled with accepting the fact that I was attractive, if not perhaps pretty by the standards of my family. But I was able to grow beyond this. Writing of this now does not evoke painful memories. It is more like looking back through an old scrapbook of family vignettes. I know who I am and I know what I am. I don't look to others to form my opinion of myself. I deeply believe that we choose how we will walk our life's path. We don't always get to choose the path, but we do get to choose how we walk it.

But I think my sister does. And therein may possibly lie the root of her mental illness and why her life has been by and large one dramatically marked by ill advised choices and emotional chaos. She is validated by the opinions others have of her, by what her friends say and thing. By being sexy and desirable and able to ensnare a married man. She has many good qualities too but her life choices seem to create situations where those good qualities become diminished or trampled by the morass of suffering she ultimately burdens herself with.

Do I think it is my parent's fault that she has this illness? No, not really. We are all imperfect and doing the best we can. Is their imperfection perhaps at the root of some of her issues? Maybe. I hope that therapy brings her an ability to walk her path with confidence and with the joy that I believe we are all entitled to find in our lives.

November musings

It amazes me that some seasons blend almost seamlessly into one another, at least at the beginning. I don't for instance, see a big difference between the end of June and the early days of July. Or the end of July and the beginning of August. But some are sharply different here in New England. May is usually a lot different from April. April is usually wet and raw and yucky. May heralds in more sunshine and better days. Likewise the difference between October and November is another sharp demarcation to me. There is a difference in the sky in November, even in the first few days. Suddenly there are less blue skies and lots of clouds, sometimes filled with wind, some with rain. But big billowy clouds none the less.

Even when there is still foliage on the trees the colors are different. October is full of bright color. November is those somber hues that I associate with the garments worn by maiden aunts 30 or 40 years ago. Colors like "ashes of roses" and deep russets. Rich browns and oranges that have been browned down. Nothing showy but yet pretty in an understated sort of way. But not an October look--no , that is strictly November.

I don't really love late fall and I have a hard time embracing winter as well. I hate the physical feeling of being cold, something that I am most of the time from now till mid April or so. I wear layers and layers of clothing but the reality is, I am usually still cold. I have Reynauds syndrome and it is to be expected. Especially as i live in a drafty old victorian house in New England.

I have learned to mask my deep dislike for the colder months and find moments of joy to share in the winter with the kids. I don't want my feelings to color their perceptions, so we play in the snow, we hike, we build snowmen. We laugh. . . and i dream about crocus and snow drops lying in wait for the first warmth of spring.

On thinking about mental illness

OK here is a situation where I am waaaaaay out of my comfort zone. My sister has been diagnosed with a mental health issue and is in treatment. I love her. I want her to be well. I want her to be happy. I want to be able to have a relationship with her. And I am not sure if any of that is really possible in the sense that I know and interpret those things. Mental illness isn't like other illness. I can't put a Diego band-aid on her and have her owie get healed. Healing her owies is going to involve her confronting her own demons. It is going to involve really plumbing her depths. Sadly in the past she has a history of doing this just enough to become functional again but with no real change in her behavior patterns long term or in her ability to have healthy relationships.

I have always figured that the best thing to do was to become educated about situations. So when sis revealed her dx to me I went on the internet, did some reading there and then found a book at the local library which was written for the families of people who suffer from this particular illness. Naively I thought I would get answers. In many senses I did. However in almost all cases, they just made the situation more depressing to me. It would appear that the grim reality is that I need to be able to give up my dream of just having a sisterly relationship. She is truly not capable of that. What she hears from what I or anyone else say is so distorted by her illness and emotional needs that ultimately the relationship becomes threatened by her dysfunction.

Yes, I can train myself to try and speak differently. And I will, because I love her. But this feels to me that I will be reduced to speaking as a therapist almost. It is clear that there can't really be a level of reciprocity in our relationship. She is not capable of hearing my worries or challenges, they will be too much for her. They will cause her to feel that the world she so desparately wishes to order is even more out of control than she had thought.

I feel a great sense of loss surrounding this. I only have one biological sister and I expect that this is a great part of it. I don't have a large network of cousins either, having come from a very small family. However I do have a great network of friends and I also have the family that I married into and I am very very blessed to have a sister through marriage. I have a wife who I love beyond words to describe it and four beautiful children who brighten every day. So I have much, very very much to be grateful for. And I am. My needs can and are being met through the other good people in my life.

I am also though worried for my nieces. All of my reading leads me to seriously worry about the amount of loving care that she is capable of consistantly providing to them. A conversation with her adult daughter raised additional concerns for them in this regard. I worry that my sister's involvement with her own disease is leaving my niece's without loving consistant guidance. Without the parental touch stone that children need to feel safe, loved and brave enough to make the right choices in a challenging world. And I am hampered by distance as to what I can do (if anything) to help in this regard. It is a situation with no easy answers and for now, all I can do is watch, be open and ready and loving and hope for the best.

Of Politics and Voting

I have struggled to order my feelings around the election and I find myself repeatedly babbling, even inside my own head! :-) It was historic. It was mind blowing. It was for the first time in more years than I care to count, the candidate I believed in, who won. And won decisively. Won in a way that there can be no talk of recounts and faulty machinery, etc. A candidate who won on a mandate from America. And that candidate is a black man.

One of my ministers growing up marched in Selma. The civil rights demonstrations, the changes in our laws, really it was not so long ago. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. But I wonder if he ever dreamed that a black man would become president of this country. Would he, could he, have dreamed that large in those years?

At the beginning of the campaign, although I was a pro-Obama person, I had a hard time dreaming that large. Truth to tell, I would not have been surprised if Hillary Clinton had won the democratic nomination. I watched in awe as the Obama campaign kept rolling on, gathering momentum. I listened to him speak and I felt hope. OK I know that being a stirring orator does not make one a great president. It doesn't mean you will make the right decisions day to day. that comes from surrounding yourself with intelligent people and I hope that this happens. But there is nothing wrong in my mind with feeling hope either. With feeling that the person speaking, is carrying me along in their dream, that their vision will help our troubled, hurting country. If we don't hope, if we don't dare to dream, elections such as Tuesdays can not come to be.

And as I fed my children breakfast the day after the election, I was able to smile (OK grin foolishly) and remind them that really, truly if you work hard, and dream large, that anything is possible. It felt good to be able to say that to my children. As black children I have the unpleasant duty of explaining things that are not right and fair. That they have to achieve more than a white counterpart to be viewed as just as qualified. That though all pre-teens are prone to mumbling, that young black men who mumble get looked at differently. They are sometimes viewed as uneducated, as thugs, etc. I have had to explain to my asian indian eldest son that he looks like he could have Iraqi heritage and that after 9/11 there was a real need for him to try and control some of his eccentricities while in public in order to remain safe. I have had to explain the realities of DWB, of gangs.

But on Wednesday morning, I could put those harsher issues aside for a time. We could bask in possibilities and opportunities, and talk about dreams fulfilled and promises kept.

Is it a New Day?

I remember as a teen all the discussion among adults about the glorious years of Camelot. The short time in our country's history when a handsome youthful president and his attractive family occupied the White House. It was historic in so many ways. He was young. He was Catholic. He was from Massachusetts. I remember my mother crying the day that JFK died. But I couldn't grasp much of what was going on. I was truly a wee, wee child. All I knew was that the whole house seemed gloomy and none of the regular things that happened in our home and even on television seemed to be taking place.

I understand now more of the hope that my parents must have felt back then. I feel that hope today with an election taking place which could put the first black man in the White House. Is Obama the best candidate? I don't know. For me, he is a better candidate than John McCain. I admire McCain. He is a POW. He is a blunt and plain spoken person. He is in every sense a true patriot. There was a time when I would have voted for McCain. Unfortunately for him, that is not this year. I hope that by voting for Obama that a number of things happen.

* I hope that his presence as a leader in our country's highest office will allow other children of color to dream, to strive and to achieve this and other great goals. Our future can not and should not be predicated on having anglo european ancestry. Great minds, great visionaries are not bound by gender or color.

* I hope that his presidency will lead to a higher approval rating for our country in the world at large. I am upset by the fact that our country presently seems to feel it has the right to tell other countries what to do and how to do it. We are not one, though we all inhabit the same planet. Our needs and our solutions for those needs are often fundamentally different. Though I am grateful to live in a democratic society I honestly don't believe democracy is the answer for everyone. Democracy is hard. It requires a level of participation and of education that isn't possible in every situation. There are situations where other forms of government provide well for their constituants.

* I hope that President Obama will work more actively than I think a President McCain would, to end our military involvement in Iraq. I see no way for us to win this in the long term sense. I feel that we entered the situation under false pretenses (those infamous WMDs) and without fully understanding a culture so different from our own. As a mom of 3 boys, I don't want to see a draft where my babies are required to serve in a war I don't believe in. McCain has indicated a tentative openness to restoring the draft if needed. I know recruitment levels are down. It was enough to make me refuse to vote for him even if I wasn't supporting Obama.

Two weeks ago when I was at our local library an older African American gentleman saw me there with 3 of our 4 kids. I noticed him eyeing us in the library but was a bit too busy with the children to do more than smile at him. Part of me wondered what he was thinking. Black children raised by white people are a hot button topic for some people of color. The majority of people I meet respond positively but there are always a few who don't. Anyway, at the end of our library visit I was pushing our double stroller out to the car while attempting to carry one of the two bags filled with books which are a standard for our library visits. We are a family of active readers. Rob was with me, carrying the other equally heavy bag. As we approached the car the same gentleman was there, and it turned out that he was parked next to us. I smiled and said good morning as I loaded books and children into the van. He smiled back and said "are these future Obamas?" I smiled more widely and said I certainly hoped so. He said something about how good that was and how beautiful the children were and drove away.

I want that for my children. I want them to know they can reach high, dream big, and live largely and well.