Get Ready to Ramble

I feel a rambling, unfocused post coming along…

I received an honest to goodness piece of mail on Friday, a card from a good friend.  Tears, people.  I shed tears.  She wrote such lovely things about our friendship, such good reminders to me of what really matters, and what really doesn't, and she wrote in an actual card, not in a Facebook post.  Such novelty!

So the front made me laugh and the inside made me cry and all at once, she made me want to be better.  A better mom, a better friend, a better calm (let's make that a noun, shall we?), a better presence, a better Lover of Life.

But then I woke up on Saturday morning and I. Was. Daunted.  I was the very picture and definition of Daunt.  I desperately wanted a lovely day, a love-filled day.  I wanted to be grateful and peaceful.  Oh, and I wanted to shop at Costco, do all the laundry, clean the bathroom, fix Little T's scooter, buy myself some new clothes, read my New Yorker, and take a looooooong nap.

None of that got done.  Exactly NONE.

One small thing did happen: I took my kid and my dog for a hike, and tried not to let Little T's rastafarian hair (fine on an actual rastafarian) chastise me.  We had a delightful time.

We ate apples.

She contemplated life with her dog.

I stared at her a lot.

And I got a little taste of that woman I want to be.

Later in the day, I drove all over creation, to futsal games, and play rehearsal, and birthday gift shopping, and birthday party drop offs, and Awards Night dinner…and there were clashes at home over bedrooms not cleaned and plans not communicated and feelings being hurt.  There were defensiveness and pride and laziness.  There were large hair tangles and larger laundry piles and no moments to read my New Yorker.

In other words: family.

* * *

Her rastafarian hair does, in fact, chastise me, and makes me cringe when she takes that head of hers out in public.  But apparently, it does not chastise me so much that I actually do much about it, at least not as often as I should.  This is an interesting lesson in chastisement.  Because I think I chastise my children rather a lot, about those bedrooms not being cleaned, for example, and I freak the f*** out when the behaviors in question do not change.

What makes behavior change?  What makes a mother better?  What makes a kid do what his mother says?

I'm not sure about the kid.  But for me, words written on a card and sent through the US Postal Service seem to work quite well.

I found a little slice of peace and gratitude this weekend, under the many layers of life that usually clamor for my attention.  I hope this is the beginning of a habit of being peaceful and grateful.  I hope I get many more reminders and that I pay attention to them.  I hope to lose myself in reminders of what really matters.

* * *

Wherein a Cynic Rethinks Some Things

All those awesome happy beautiful good life photos we see on social media: they're all a total crock, right?

When my kids see their friends' super cool Instagram photos and respond by decrying their own boring lives, I whip out my tried and true lecture entitled The Problem with Social Media and wax on and on about the insidious nature of the filtered, photoshopped, edited, culled and selectively presented Beautiful Life we think everyone but us is having. 

It can make me crazy, this 24-7 invasion into our homes and minds and psyches, and I feel a certain sense of urgency about making sure my kids know that all those sick shots are not necessarily an accurate portrayal of life. 

As you might imagine, my kids roll their eyes at me a lot. 

I'm a bit of a fun sponge like that. 

Today I had occasion to re-consider my opinion.  Because ya' know what? This weekend has been super average -- dare I say boring. My house is a mess, I've been kinda grumpy and my kids have been unpleasant and annoying.  I'm half-heartedly cleaning a ridiculously cluttered garage and serving uninspired meals; my kids are half-heartedly doing homework and serving up complaints.  Rick is, as usual, working hard and not taking any time to relax.  Just normal, tilting towards Bummerville, ho-hum life. 

Who wants to document and remember that?

In the midst of all that mediocrity, this happened too. 

And I immediately grabbed my phone and posted these photos on Facebook because they're fun and cute. 

I chastised myself. Gently, of course--nothing too serious. But I did roll my eyes at myself for a moment. 

And then I realized that I would rather remember these moments, thank you very much, instead of the bickering in the car on the way home from Mass, or the mountain of laundry defying physics in my garage, or the truly inane battle of wills I got drawn into with my kid, or a hundred other challenging moments in this long, mundane weekend. 

Maybe it's narcissistic at worst or fake at least to only post what makes ours look like a charmed life. 

Or maybe it's what keeps me grateful, keeps me going, keeps my head in the game. 

Whaddya know, a cynic can still learn a thing or two from this crazy world.  Photographs of a happy family never tell the whole story. But the part they do tell is pretty damn important too.

#grateful

Thank you, Philip Levine

On Valentine's Day, Philip Levine, our 2011 Poet Laureate, died.  To mark his life and the small but significant impact he had on me, I am re-posting a reflection I originally posted back in 2011, shortly after his appointment as our nation's "First Poet."  I still think about this post, and its impetus, frequently.

* * *

from The Poetry Foundation's website
biography of Philip Levine

Written August 11, 2011. Yesterday, the Library of Congress announced the appointment of Philip Levine as the new Poet Laureate of the United States. The job of the Poet Laureate is "to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry." (Taken from the website of the Library of Congress.)

Prior to that announcement, I knew little to nothing about Philip Levine, although his name was familiar. But the news came to me yesterday while I was lamenting the quality of my children's exposure to arts and culture, at least any arts and culture that doesn't make my ears bleed. So when, in the car on the way to camp this morning, our local public radio station KQED aired an interview with Levine, I turned it up. I wanted my kids to hear this guy talking about poetry. I'm sure my intended audience was more attentive to his/her electronic devices, but I turned it up anyway. I paused to explain to my captive audience what a Poet Laureate is, and was greeted by blank stares.

But I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the interview. I liked what he had to say about teaching at Fresno State, where he has been for 30 years: 

"I've got these students, who are capable of learning, gave themselves the freedom to learn because they gave themselves the freedom to fail."

He goes on to say that at other, more prestigious schools where he has taught, like Yale and Vanderbilt, "students had a lot of trouble being told that their poems were no damn good." It seems that education, for these high achieving students, is more about being brilliant already than about expanding one's mind and possibilities. (You can access the whole interview here.)

What an important concept to keep in mind. Amidst all our striving towards excellence and achievement, it's easy to lose sight of real learning. We can forget the importance of failure in shaping our minds, our hearts, who we are, and how much we grow, in intellectual and in more personal or creative endeavors.

While we may want our children to work hard enough to go to a good college or university, what we want for them even more is the freedom to fail, the freedom to find more and better paths for their creativity and innovation to flourish. Maybe in art or poetry, maybe in engineering, maybe on a soccer field or in a medical lab, maybe in their personal pursuits or in common cause for others. 

Maybe in family life and raising children, too. Maybe parents need the freedom to fail, in order to grow and get better at crafting children, the way a poet crafts his poems. Perhaps it's not about being perfect already, but about keeping ourselves open to the possibilities before us, to directions we aren't expecting to go.

Leave it to a poet to remind us how our hearts and minds expand.

* * *

Read more about Philip Levine in his biography on The Poetry Foundation's website.

Sights and Sounds

It has been such a busy and challenging year so far.  Many highs and lows, many, many activities, and not much down time.

Today: the perfect antidote.  A much needed day off.  Some California winter weather (read: sunshine).  A trusty dog.

Not much in my world cannot be made better by hearing and seeing the following:

What sights and sounds soothe your rough edges?

On Laundry and New Beginnings

I don't make New Years Resolutions.  Per se.

Instead, I spend the whole last week of each year in a perpetual state of "Oh My Gosh I Need To Read More, Eat Less, Breathe More, Yell Less, Calm the F Down, and Take Charge."

Then I resolve to be a better person.  All vague and stuff.  Because really, resolutions don't work.

Do they?  December 31 is just a day on a calendar.  It doesn't matter.  It's not significant.

Is it?

Anyway, who the hell knows?  I only know one thing for certain: I spent an inordinate amount of time on my two week vacation sorting laundry, doing laundry, folding laundry, finding laundry, and re-organizing the laundry area of our garage.

The one thing I didn't get done was putting it all away.  And I am oh so very terrified, now that I've been back to work for two days, that all my hours of thankless labor will be a big fat waste of time because while I am at work, I fear the small and grimy hands that could be rifling through my neatly folded piles looking for just the right pair of leggings, toppling piles and wreaking havoc.  The face belonging to those hands might as well just spit in my face and reject me outright.

Because as is the case with every organizational project I ever take on, peeling back the covers and discovering the extent of the problem becomes a daunting and downright sysiphisean endeavor.  Case in point: I told my daughters to clean out their dresser drawers so we could put away all the folded clothes as neatly as possible.  My youngest is adamantly insisting that one of her drawers is her "crayon holder."  And so, I find myself in a power struggle with an 8 year old over whether or not a depressing collection of mostly broken crayons really belongs in a dresser drawer.  The power struggle is too much for me, when I'm pretty much doing 3+ full time jobs at the same time, between main job, raising kids, keeping house, and doing freelance gigs.  (Husband also doing multiple jobs, also helpful, also fighting the same battles I am, just so's ya know.)  So I put off winning the battle, or so I tell myself.  I tell myself that I will finesse her, that I will bring her around to my point of view without having to argue, that I will charm her into submission…tomorrow.  When I have more energy.

And then tomorrow comes and it's the strangest thing, but I don't got no more energies.

So I don't charm her.  She is un-finessed.  Crayons are still in the dresser drawer.  Folded clothes, slumping and sliding in their piles, are still on the laundry table.

Take that power struggle and multiple it by 5.  These days, I feel like I'm locking horns with each and every one of my little darlings…and this is just normal, not a crisis, not dangerous and not anything to really worry about.  I can spend 10, 15 glorious minutes with my crazy-bright and funny 10 year old, impressed by the sheer speed of her wit and dazzled by her laughter…and then BAM, I do or say something that prompts her to tell me what I mean and terrible mom I am.  Horns lock.  Battle lines emerge.  She won't let me hug her or tease her into playfulness again.

It happens on the daily.  Times 5.  How am I supposed to get the laundry put away in such an environment?  How keep resolutions to be better?

But one other thing I know for sure.  Want I want to do more than anything else in the world tonight, after I finally get home from a full day of work, followed by an evening school board meeting, when I am utterly exhausted, and just as all the children finally have my ear to pull and my arm to tug, is this:  I want to put all of the folded laundry away.

I resolve to do so.  I resolve to be a better person.  Eat more, sleep less.  Or the other way around.  Whatever.  I just. want. order.

Instead, I have children.  And many piles of folded laundry.  And a brand new year to...conquer.

* * *

  

Cupcake Dreams

I want to be a kid again.  I want to tell stories the way my youngest daughter does.  I want to dream about cupcakes.  And I really, really want a Dream Teller of my very own.

During dinner last night, Little T was devouring my homemade spaghetti sauce and making me feel like Martha Stewart, Julia Child, and Ree Drummond, all rolled into one, and she mentioned that she knew she was going to have a good dinner tonight because her Dream Teller told her so.

Come again, daughter?

Your what?

That's right.  She has a Dream Teller.  Every morning, after a night of dreaming about cupcakes and unicorns and whatever other lovelies visit her while she is sleeping, her Dream Teller tells her what her dreams mean.  Here's last night's:

Actually, I don't want to be a kid again: I want to be THIS KID.

* * *

Averting Awkward Alliteration

Little T learned about alliteration today in school, and she had a great time creating little one line "poems" with her classmates. My personal favorite, koan-like in its profound simplicity, is this:

The careful cat cooked colorful cupcakes in the courtyard.

Let that soak into your brain for a moment. It's pure beauty, right?

She remembered many of the others she composed at school:

The lion licked lots of lemon lollipops.

Savana slid down several slippery slides.

The seal told his sister several silly stories.

Then we started making up our own, Little T, Lady E, and I.  I'm guessing the ones we did here at home used the words "butt" and "poop" more than the ones Mrs. Onu collected from her 2nd graders. I'll save you most of those but here are a few of the gems we came up with:

Happy hippies hold hands and hop through hothouses.

Isabelle has a big icky contagious illness.

The canine’s colorful crap cooled down after being freshly cooped up. (Thank you, 5th grader.)

Big bears bang their butts on the backs of banana trees.

For that last one, she had the word "paws" instead of "butts."  I got a kick out of suggesting she might be able to think of a body part that started with a 'B' and then watching her crack her little self up with the revision. 

I refrained, however, from making the same suggestion for this one:

The princess printed pretty pictures of her prince’s...BUTT.

She was so pleased with herself!  So amused!  So delighted with her hutzpah! 

Mommy was pretty happy, too, to have avoided an awkward -- although admittedly hilarious -- alliterative apex!

Language is such a thrill, isn't it?

Mr. Angry Truck Driver Guy, this is for you.

Driving home in the twilight tonight, my two youngest daughters in tow, we encountered one of those teachable moments.

I had just managed to avert a potent Clash of the Sisters, and was basking in the success of having steered us successfully away from the threat of punches to an invitation to "come up on my bed when we get home" from the top-bunk dwelling sister.  It was glorious.  And rare.

We were sitting at a red light, when my youngest asked for pain medication and a drink of water.  She is currently in a wrist brace from a slight sprain, and her wrist was hurting.  Also, she can't do some things, such as open a water bottle.  I glanced up at the light, marking that it was still red, grabbed an ibuprofen from my purse, gave it to her, and then reached for the water bottle, opened it and handed it over.  She took the pill, drank the water, and handed back the bottle.

In the time it took for those things to happen, which seemed quite brief to me, the light turned green.  The driver of the truck behind me BLASTED his horn at me.  I spilled the water.  And then I stepped on the gas and began to proceed through the intersection.  Mr. Angry Truck Driver Guy swerved hard to my right and passed me at just the right pace to allow him to give me a nice long glare as he drove by.

Daughter commentary: "MOMmy, HE'S giving you the STINK eye!"

Once he passed me, he swerved hard back to the left and in front of my car.  Just to make a point I guess.

* * *

Earlier today, a co-worker of mine dissolved into tears from two recent and unexpected deaths in her family.

Earlier today, my son called me with a plea for advice for handling an upsetting issue in his life.

Earlier today, I listened to a news story about an Iraqi student who lives in an ISIS-controlled area, who is now breaking the law by attending his state university; he leaves his house before dark each day to minimize the possibility that he will be arrested for pursuing an education.

And right at that moment, in my little minivan cocoon, I had, in a short five minutes, successfully prevented a nasty, soul-crushing fight between my daughters, and tended to an 8-year old's pain.

I kind of think that Mr. Angry Truck Drive Guy needs to take a chill pill and realize what's really important in life.

But my own reaction was interesting too.  I wanted to speed up and RIDE HIS ASS.  I wanted to ask him WTF was so important that he had to shatter my nice little moment with my daughters.  I really wanted to pull right up to him, roll down my window and say in a drippingly sarcastic voice: "Hey, I'm soooooo sorry I made you wait an extra 10 seconds.  I was giving my daughter pain medication for her sprained wrist.  I hope we haven't made you late for something truly important.  Have a nice evening, asshole!"

But my girls, they saw it differently.

They thought the guy was a whack job.  They had a nice little laugh at how stressed out he got.  Nothing was going to touch their groove, or derail them from their top-bunk plans.  So that teachable moment thing?  That was them, teaching me not to sweat the small stuff and to keep right on enjoying moments with the ones I love.

Here's my advice to humanity: whenever possible, whenever it occurs to you, several times a day if necessary, take a giant chill pill and control your stink eye.  It's just not that hard to tend to the more important things in life, if you give it at try.

* * *

We drove on, into the twilight, and soon right along the gorgeous San Francisco bay, and I was so happy to be with my non-fighting daughters on one of the first Fall-feeling evenings of the season.

Chill pills are the best.

* * *

Hey, I'm a Literary Mama!

This is me: just imagine that's a bottle of Simple Green in my hand, and not a skull.

I am pleased to share with you that today I joined the ranks of some women writers I very much admire: Literary Mama has published a piece of my writing!  There are two reasons this is fun for me:

First, because someone other than me posted something I wrote.  That's just awesome.

Second, because I can share Literary Mama with you!  Please visit, browse, share, comment, and repeat.  It's a wonderful space for the "maternally inclined.

Enjoy!


Post Script. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do wear poofy Elizabethan sleeves and tights while cleaning.  Doesn't everyone?

Thank you, all

Thank you to everyone who has shared kind words with me after my latest post about my mom.  Each one made me tear up a little bit…good tears, as opposed to the sloppy, nose-running, blotchy-faced, sleeve-mucking business that sometimes happens to some people but not me.  Ever.  Mostly.

I haven't been able to keep up with this blog very much in the last several months due to having a job I love and a family I pretty much like well enough.  But I'm very grateful that I have this space, for those moments when I need to write something down.  Writing, as many people have said, is a solitary activity.  But reading -- and commenting and sharing -- those things create community, or show you one was there all along.  So thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading and responding.

I'm grateful for you all.

Much love,

Monica

Dancing Hands

Dementia and decline. Decline and dementia. Disease and depression and doctors.

It can feel all consuming, as if all those "D-words" are the only things that exist, as if the person suffering is hardly there, crowded out by D's big and small.  My father's time these days is spent managing all those D's, trying to make sense of them, trying to respond to them, and trying to make BIG D DECISIONS about care for his wife of 49 years, 8 months, and 18 days.

My too brief visits with my mother these days are overwhelming for so many reasons: guilt that I cannot visit more often; anguish over what she is experiencing and our inability to help; compassion for her, and for my father; gratitude that I can be there at least in some small ways.  And great sadness over how much she has changed.

It is a painful time, but it is not without its bright moments.  As is usually the case, one such bright moment came to me, and to my mother, courtesy of one of my kids.

I brought Little T to visit Grandma Rose a few weeks ago.  Our stay was a mixed up, jumbled bag of good and bad.  When we walked in, Grandma immediately said: "Boy am I glad to see you!" and we proceeded, over the course of about 45 minutes, to talk about things Little T was doing in school, what her siblings were up to, the book Grandma Rose wrote, and myriad other things.  These brief interactions were punctuated by my mom's anxiety bursting forth in expressions of fear and struggle.  One minute she was talking about her book, the next she was wailing about how the staff was punishing her, the next worrying about spitting too much, or her hands trembling, or the pictures on the wall moving.

(A side note: One of the most challenging things for me, about my mom's dementia, is that I'm certain that many of these things are truly happening for her; she is not imagining double vision, for example, or the walls moving, and those things alone would make a person "crazy." It's easy -- but not accurate -- to lump all of a person's odd behaviors into the category of dementia. They do not all belong there. If my hands trembled all the time, it would drive me nuts and would be such a distraction that I'm sure I'd talk of little else. That's not dementia: that's just life. In many ways, it does not even matter where normal ends and dementia starts. She still deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. As do we all.)

Little T did an amazing job of responding to Grandma's now and then questions and of trying to respond to what she thought Grandma might need. She offered tissues, looked for a book to read her, and gave me little suggestions of things that might help.

After about the 6th or 7th time Grandma raised her hands from the bed to show us, with some force and agitation, how much they were shaking, my giant of a tiny seven year old whispered something to me that made me smile. I told her to tell Grandma. Here's what she said:

When your hands are shaking like that, 

you should pretend you have jazz hands!

Something amazing happened. Grandma laughed.

I had not seen that happen in months.  I wanted to grab that girl, swing her around, hug her tight, and tell her how brilliant and wonderful she is.  Instead, I laughed too, choked back a few tears, and joined in as Little T and I did our best jazz hands, in solidarity with my mama, whose hands now danced above her bed cover.

I thought this a rather remarkable interchange.  What I learned later is that not only did it make my mother laugh, but it stayed with her.  She told my dad the next day about Tallulah's suggestion to pretend to have "dancing hands" and since then, she will refer to her dancing hands frequently, with less agitation now.  She also mentioned those dancing hands to me, almost a month later, recalling that Tallulah had suggested them to her.

She's not happy that her hands shake.  But I think -- I hope -- that she now has an occasion to recall a small bright moment with her granddaughter when the shaking thing takes over.  It makes a difference.  It's a chance to smile, when she has too few of those chances these days.

I think, in the midst of my daily striving, while I'm trying to raise children right and do my (paying) job well, as I'm steering teenagers to good choices, and working with Rick to get the bills paid and the carpools accomplished and the house maintained, that the Jazz Hands moment is the single most significant event of the last several months for me.  That moment is proof positive that simply being present is, truly, the most important thing we can do in this life and for each other.

It was absolutely not an earth-shattering moment.  It was a quiet, simple laugh, almost no more than a smile.  But nothing has meant more to me than to see my mother laugh that day, or to hear that the dancing hands have stuck around.  Everything else swirling around me pales by comparison.

Jazz hands, dancing hands: take a small moment and transform it by saying something, anything, to make someone else feel better.

When it works, it will stay with you forever.