“Don’t look back.” This is a handy rule for keeping a journal. Write forward, write now. Or, in the priceless words of Natalie Goldberg, “Keep your hand moving.”
Not looking back is also a handy rule to break. Inside those nights that flood your throat with brine and scour the art from your hands, you might have no choice but to turn around and fix your eyes on the shoreline. Open the old books from the previous years. Peek at where you were. This is a good way to remember that you have arrived at exactly the place you need to be.
Tonight is such a night. My year-ago self hollers directions across the distance separating us, calling me back from the undertow. It is awfully cold and not a single star orients the sky. A person could take an unplanned detour into the Bermuda triangle. Thank goodness that girl packed the map and a bullhorn.
The entry below, from April 30, 2011, is translated more or less directly from the cursive.
So, you let go of your joyful thing because you are not as good as the good ones (you tell yourself), you lack the drive or talent or passion (you believe), they are wise and better and more together and older (or something) and you feel so young and directionless and wide-open and full of unlimited possibility.
And so. You let go. You move on to a different hobby, find a love or a project or a child or a simplified identity to consume you. And your life is full, you smile a lot, you have friends, you climb things and make things and learn things and master things, and life is good.
It is all just rocking along until one day you stumble across a person doing the thing you used to know as your joyful thing. And that person? That person is so very young. That person has cobbled together a way to do the joyful thing from scraps of potential, a handful of opportunities, a pinch of time. That person is just as muddled as you were (and, in fact, still are). But, that person is doing the joyful thing anyway. Doing it with dedication, doing it well, making something beautiful with it. And you see now that no one was wiser than she is now. No one was wiser than you were then. You had an answer in your hands, in your life, in your daily practice.
Do your joyful thing. Do it badly. Do it in the spaces between. Do it sloppily and selfishly and with too much self-absorption. Do it no matter how much better someone else seems to be at it. Stumble doing it. Be awkward doing it. Make an ass of yourself doing it. Improve and adapt your way of doing it. Seek new approaches to doing it. Talk to others who do it (but not too much – you need to be doing it, not talking about it). Do it for an audience of 1000 even if no one shows up. Do it for god, for the neighbor kid who beat you up, for the other kid who rescued you. Do it for your ancestors and your grandchildren. Do it because you know you have to.
Do it because you suck at it but the world doesn’t care that you suck and the world doesn’t care if you’re a genius. It is not up to the world.
You are not great for doing it. You are not a martyr for not doing it. You are only less you if you don’t. You are only getting one thing right if you do.
Practice. Every sing day, practice your joyful thing.
It’s true you may never be any good at it. So, you should spend the rest of your days doing it because it is yours. You cannot escape it. It will haunt your years if you don’t do it. Don’t fool yourself. If you are not engaged in the daily practice of doing your joyful thing right now, something is askew in your life. You may be drinking too much, or having dreams of infidelity, or living a little too stretched to fit the role you’ve taken on, or you hate your job, or you don’t quite have the energy to make a decent meal, or you spend your evenings watching TV and zoning out on Twitter, and something feels wrong but you can’t put your finger on it. Maybe you still do your joyful thing a couple times a year, and you think of it as a hobby, and call your life “balanced.” But when you do it, it feels hard and a little forced, and doesn’t feel like the joyful thing it once was. And so you wonder, Was it just a passing fancy? Maybe it wasn’t really my joyful thing. . .
Don’t let yourself off the hook. You know better. The reason your occasional attempts fall flat is because your joyful thing is rusted out, thirsty, and in need of a good cleaning. You can’t just hop on and roll it around the block once or twice a year and expect it to function optimally. You’ve got to get back in there, take it down to bolts, oil it, prime it, feed it, get it moving. You need to work the kinks out a little every day. Every damned day.
Your joyful thing is not a toy. It’s not a hobby. It is you. It is your limb. An organ, maybe. You have to treat it as an undeniable, irreplaceable, necessary part of you. A part that will turn septic and poison the rest if the nourishment is cut off. A part that will feed and energize and balance the rest, if properly attended to.
It doesn’t take much. Just daily practice. Start today. Do your joyful thing.
Now, this very second. This is when you return to yourself.
Category: Uncategorized
Care Benefit
You fantasize about leaving. You will yourself into staying. When indecision presses itself against your eyes and forces them to face the cavernous night, you see no path through the knot of thorns. As you wander deeper into the thicket and feel too imprisoned to make any decision at all, you are choosing. Every moment, a choice. Every choice, riddled with unknown consequences.
Here is one more to consider: You choose to act with civility. Through the difficult conversations and the planning for life as a split family, you hold the best interests of your children close to your heart. You and your spouse put aside your own wild fantasies of fleeing, and you remain living close to one another. You share custody through a complex arrangement that attempts to shield your children from the upheaval of a divided life.
You split most expenses right down the middle. Without a fight, you take on the extra burdens of time, meals, finances. You forego activities that could further your own prospects due to the intricate inter-dependency of the fragile threads weaving together each month’s calendar. You breathe through your disappointment with the unchanged patterns of your former spouse (and, to be fair, yourself). You surrender short-term control for the sake of long-term peace. You drive further, and let the other parent be closer to the school or the day care, and pay extra for the gymnastics lessons your ex claims he cannot afford. You keep spreadsheets of health care premiums and soccer fees and co-pays and preschool expenses.
You trust, even in the presence of overwhelming doubt.
In your parenting agreement, you hash out how each holiday and year will unfold. You make plans for paying for college and for putting money into savings accounts and life insurance to make sure your children are cared for even if one parent decides to give it all up and hitchhike to Vancouver. You agree to review the plan every year. The judge stamps the whole thick tome. With that act, the state holds you far more firmly to a family arrangement than a marriage certificate ever did.
You are never rid of anyone. Do not be fooled.
Tax time comes, and you believe you have prepared yourself for this. Only one parent can claim the children as dependents in any single year. You were so very thorough. You made sure to write into the agreement that you will claim the children in the odd years and your spouse will take the even years. Every other year, you will receive the tax break.
The first year is no problem, because you were still married for most of it, and you are still on speaking terms with the ex. It is easier simply to stay married for filing and split the burden. Then, you begin to organize materials for the year to come. As you sort and sift through tax law, you pull the lid off a foul-smelling bit of news.
Only the parent who claims the dependent child can claim the childcare tax deduction. So, even though you will be spending thousands of dollars to ensure your kids have safe care while you are at work, you can claim none of this as a deduction. The government simply assumes all your income is yours, and you are single and carefree. Does that injury need an insult? Well, here you go: because your strained income has no chance of covering a mortgage payment, you also do not receive a tax deduction for home ownership.
It’s okay, though. You can start a flexible spending account to pay for dependent care. This is what your HR office tells you. By using a pre-tax FSA , you can reduce your taxable income by the several thousand dollars you will be paying to the day care. The income the feds see as your own will be a few thousand less, and they will come at your wallet with a moderately smaller shovel in April. Knowing the exact amount you will be paying for childcare for the upcoming year and tracking every single expense by way of receipts are tasks you can handle. You have learned through the divorce that your mastery of administrative minutia rivals that of the Queen’s personal secretary.
Alas, fate and the IRS have not exhausted their arsenal of gags. Just when you have completed your page of calculations and are about to fill out the paperwork the nice lady at HR sent you, you dig down a little deeper into the tax law. It turns out that you cannot use an FSA for dependent care expenses if you do not claim the dependent children. Even if you are responsible for those children, and even if the state has given its stamp of approval to a legal document indicating you must pay 50% of all childcare expenses, you are still not able to use a flexible spending account.
Every other year, from now until your little ones outgrow after-school care, the feds will haul back and punch you right in the gut. It does you no good to see it coming. Your armor is strong, but the smack will still rattle your bones.
You spit a few curses into the ether, toss the paperwork into the recycling bin, and take another deep breath. This is an even-numbered year. You will simply need to prepare yourself to get slammed with the tax rate of a single, unencumbered person. In order to do so, you will need to live as if you are anything but.
You must remember this: a family is not the arcane configuration prescribed by the church, the court, or the congress. The laws were written by people who believed in the binary relationship between victory and defeat, between innocence and guilt. They also are charged with protecting those who cannot protect themselves. This is not you, your ex, or your children. You know your immeasurable power rests within the bond you continue to cultivate in this new arrangement of your life.
You do not need to win in order to win. No one needs to lose more than has already been lost. Remember you and your children’s other parent were able to craft a bespoke agreement that will hold all of you in its intricate folds. Because of your willingness to draw your own pattern upon the fabric of your family’s life, your children will never need to know it cost you every bit of currency you had in your pocket to create it. They will only know the reward from this complete commitment of resource. They will only need to enjoy the true, simple riches of what this unfolding version of family provides them.
Yes, your children will believe they have been wronged. From time to time, your former spouse will try to convince you of that same half-truth. Maybe in April every other year, you will yourself indulge for a day or three in fear and doubt and self-immolation.
It is okay. Trust will win out. Soon enough, you will open your eyes all over again to the bright, beautiful gift of this new life. Your children will have two civil, loving parents living near each other and adapting to changing times together. This gift will be theirs to cherish and squander as they see fit, as is the privilege of all children who grow up rooted in abundant love.
Learn your Stripes
When the foal is born, his mama positions herself between the other zebras and him so she can imprint him with her stripes. Pressing her unique fingerprint into his awareness is a necessary precaution fir those moments when a lion leaps from the grass. During the ensuing melee, the baby can zero in on the correct adult.
I wonder, though, if she is also memorizing him. It is hard to tell from pure observation if mares also imprint during those first moments. Mama zebras do not say “What beautiful stripes!” You do not see them clapping their hooves together and crowing, “You look so nice with that design. Awesome!” They are more dignified in the scrutiny of their young. The pattern is itself. Her foal, himself. Zebras do not waste their time taking the measure of the being. Seeing is the only act that matters.
Maybe it is time to bring a little Serengeti to our house.
Bug pads into my room on weekends just after sunrise, singing, “Good moaning, Mommy!” In his rumpled, happy daze, he climbs between the sheets with me. We read through his schoolwork from the week. I unfold a page covered in dots. “Tell me about this,” I say.
“It’s a marauders map. See? There is the Gryffindor common room, here are my footsteps, and Zee’s are there. . . “
“Oh. You drew footsteps.”
“Yep. And rain. Here, this is lightning,” he points.
Next is a picture of bunnies with an arithmetic problem in thick scrawl. I read it. “Two plus eight equals. . . ?”
“Ten. See? And there are two bunnies there. And that’s the Easter Bunny’s house.”
“I see dots inside.”
“Those are all his Easter eggs.”
We go through like this, a dozen papers in all. I am learning to quiet the impulse to declare the things “great” or “cool” or “well done.” I simply ask, “What is this?” I describe what I see, or ask Bug to explain to me what he sees.
Part of the game change around here is to begin mirroring my kid without judgment. This involves stilling the urge to assess his actions in any way, either positively or negatively. No more tepid, knee-jerk praise. “Good job” has overstayed its welcome. I send it packing, along with “awesome” and “nice work.” My preferences and my assessments need not be factors in my son’s pursuits. What matters first is what is happening, and second, the thing that follows. My job now is to put names to these occurrences and help the kiddo link chains of events. He and I can work through correlation and causation. As I help him see and reflect, I aim to let go of judgment’s illusion of control.
This approach to parenting may be so cock-eyed that it will backfire on me. Without giving my son a pat on the back for appropriate behavior, how will he be able to navigate the complicated choices before him? I do not have a clear answer to this. All I have is a sense that it is time for me to right the balance. My capacity to be critical and demanding is so well-honed, I tend to cut off parts of people who venture too close. Bug is never going to suffer as a result of my lazy discipline. The standards I lug around are exacting enough, thank you very much. It is time for Bug to tend to the cultivation of his own.
Let’s be honest. Bestowing and withholding praise are both well-meaning (if ill-conceived) attempts to shape my son to believe what I believe and like what I like. As most kids do, he is apt to learn both to crave my approval and recoil from it. Both are dangerous motivators. Do I really want Bug to be at the mercy of my capricious tastes and mercurial moods? Surely, I do not want to set my son up to swing between chasing down his parents’ admiration and rebelling against it. I want to protect him from, not make him susceptible to, peer pressure, charm, the controlling impulses of the more self-assured, and abuse. I am all too familiar with the tendency of approval -seeking children to grow into acceptance-hungry adults, clutching at wisps of praise as insubstantial as sugar floss in a sweaty grip.
Self-reliance and self-awareness are muscles requiring a steady buildup over time. My kid has to decide for himself how he will read the landscape. As he grows more independent and spends more time away from the brood, he needs the wherewithal to calibrate his own moral compass. Have I taught him to see clearly? Does he know how to assess his own developing stripes, to read his own moods and feelings, to sense in his own gut what is right and wrong?
Here comes the zebra, wandering back into the frame. She pauses to graze. One eye is on the distant field, keeping that tiny foal in her sites.
Her approach is worth a shot. I step back. I gaze at my offspring gazing back at me. He is both of me and separate from me. I release him to the grasses, surrender my grip, and just pay attention.
-“You put your shirt on by yourself.”
-“You threw a fork and it hurt mommy. I shouted. Now your body is curled up. Your face looks like this.”
-“You shared your grapes with that little girl, and she is playing with you.”
I only need to confirm what is already occurring, and try to help Bug’s developing brain consider his state of being. I can help him orient towards his own body and mind, the impact his actions are having, and the (possible) cause and effect of each choice. I can do all of this without pinning on the gold medal. By simply mirroring my son, rewards intrinsic to his behaviors resolve into view.
I believe in my child. I am actually learning to trust him. This is our journey together. As I resist the urge to judge, I allow Bug to watch and learn from my actions, speak his own perceptions, and draw his own conclusions. I also allow him to really see me, and to notice me noticing him.
When someone bears witness to our story, it lives more fully than it ever could when it is swimming inside of us. Because of this, the gift of attention confers both energy and serenity. I want Bug to be seen and known, exactly as he is in this moment. I want my son to hear his experience called back to him across the wide open spaces. I want him to see my pattern and know I am here, always, to help him orient himself. We hold each other, yes. Also, we are free to follow the unique angle of the wind to the source that calls us.
Special Effects
He races through the small patch of green at the edge of the cul de sac. Under his feet, the grass grows wild. The knot of stalks reaches his shins. Suddenly, a blur of motion bursts out around him like an electron cloud. His feet meet earth, setting off one explosion after another. A whisper of wings and rain catches the air, following him through the brush. He neither sees nor hears, swimming just below the surface of this quiet cacophony of sound and motion.
“What is that?” I ask, pointing. He stops, and as he does, the grass falls silent. He looks sideways at me through the stillness. Then he is off running again, bursts of confetti meeting his footfalls.
“Look!” I call. He stops again. All is still, all is silent.
“What?” These interruptions are seriously inhibiting his pleasure. And anyway, there is nothing to see. Controlling a phenomenon enough to observe it renders it unobservable, as Heisenberg tried to explain.
“Watch,” I say. I stride up next to Bug and stomp my foot. The weeds send up an inverted shower of tiny, living things. Bug’s eyes pop open. Then a grin spreads lights him up from within. He lifts his foot and stomps. Another shower, followed by the tinkling of tinsel rain on a forest canopy. For an instant, I wonder if these airborne, pinging things are midget grasshoppers or buff-winged moths.
I crouch for a better look. The weeds are slender, dark green stems with tresses of gold radiating out in all directions. Because of the yellow dusting atop the bending plants, the clearing appears as an infant wheat field. The tendrils are thin, cleaved nests. Each is a floral ovary clutching an egg in a loose grip, readying itself to take a shot at starting next season’s crop.
Next to me, Bug is stomping, giggling hard at each detonation. I bite my tongue and keep my observations to myself. Does knowing what things are really teach us what they are?
Then he is off and running, his face pink and his arms wide. His gaze is back, down, up, everywhere. His voice cries out the high notes. He is the bandleader now of this moving parade, and all around him, one explosion after another announces to the world the arrival of this force of nature, this human animal. His weight is enough to set loose a surge of animate fireworks right here on earth. The simple presence of him sends life skyward to seek a brand new start in an unturned corner of the world.
Cessation
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
-Marianne Williamson
When he was eighteen, Giovanni’s father offered him $1000 to quit smoking. The kid refused. “I didn’t want to quit,” he says with a shrug.
My own parents never ponied up cash to entice me to kick the habit. Maybe if I had grown some cojones and smoked in the open, they might have given bribery a whirl. I have no doubt I would have rejected their offer. It was not until I was in my twenties and weary from the merry-go-round of quitting and starting that I finally found whatever storehouse of desire I needed to be ready to stop.
A pregnancy scare accelerated my readiness. The moment I had even a crumb of suspicion I might be carrying a child, I quit. This was before any confirmation the crumb was an it or even if I would keep said it should it come to fruition. The details were irrelevant. My sense of responsibility for giving that little being its best chance trumped all my self-deluded chatter about dependence and ill-gotten pleasure. I stubbed out the smokes, flat and hard, and tossed the pack.
A week or so later, my body sent a clear signal that the phantom child was never more than a slip of the clockworks. I could have launched an America’s Cup contender with the force of my exhalation. As I made haste to the corner store and stood outside lighting up that next cigarette, I considered the object in my yellowed grip. Sure, I was no longer – in fact, never had been – carrying a child. Did that change anything? If not that life, what of this one? What was I to do with the pesky problem of the beloved being in my care, still me?
The sudden arrival of a sense of duty for the small, mighty force living in my skin was most inconvenient. Also, I had been able to forego the smokes without a moment’s hesitation. That pesky fact was a hungry dog that kept following me home.
I puffed away feebly and with an increasing sense of dissonance for a few weeks until I realized I could not stomach the dithering. Was I a smoker or not? A choice had to be made. I could either return to the fiction that nicotine is both more valuable and more powerful than I am, or I could give it up.
The terrible truth was that I loved life more than that cigarette. The mind games came to an end. For too long, I had been singing that stale refrain, “Oh, I would love to reach a point where I could just enjoy a cigarette at a party from time to time.” Forget it. One becomes ten, and I am back at a pack a day. Even if I could just light up here or there, the gratification would not be worth the price. I knew as plain as day that I did not want anything to hold that kind of sway over my mind and body. Lasting pleasure is never so easy. Vices are gingerbread houses. They get you every time.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
– Alice Walker
So, that was it. When I crushed out that last American Sprit fourteen years ago, I said, “I will never smoke another cigarette again as long as I live.” It was a commitment between me and my very own juicy, living self. I have never once faltered. Why would I? It has been so much simpler than I ever imagined it would be. This, I have come to understand, is how such things work. When the path ahead becomes clear, confusion falls away. The only hard part is in willing oneself to lurch up out of paralysis and begin walking.
What do we grasp? Since dispensing with cigarettes and television, what I notice is that the conceptions I lug around are a greater drain than any single behavior. I see myself as only just so brave, only just so capable, only just so energetic. Or worse, that I deserve special treatment and that the normal rules do not apply to me. I fool myself into thinking these ways have laid claim to me, even imprisoned me, when I am the one with my arms threaded through the bars. The reward is $1000. The reward is $100,000. The reward is a treasure chest inlaid with golden beetles and inhabited by a family of genies. I refuse to open my grip. The reward is my own full and electrified power, and still I hesitate. What can possibly be the compulsion? What hold does this thing I keep pressed between my stained fingers have over me, even after the satisfaction has burnt away, even when the Everything is right there for the taking?
I picture Aron Ralston again, sawing away when it became clear his attachment to his own arm was killing him. He cut off a part of his own body. He did this unimaginable thing, just for piddly ol’ life. No one offered him a dime.
Of course, kicking a habit only gets you so far. Sustained practice writes the epic story. Letting go is just a clearing of the clutter and an opening of the blank page. The joyous discipline that follows makes it possible to ink into being the scholar, painter, athlete, nurse.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
– Audre Lorde
We all know it, though. Deep down, I know it, and you do, too. Nothing is more precious than the next glorious incarnation waiting on the other side of the abyss.
No one among us is innocent. No one has more than a brief, long-forgotten visit to the garden before crashing into the first of many nauseating, bottom-dropping-out transitions. Every time through, you learn your power. You become fuller, and your vision sharpens. Like a stone cut and cut again into impossible brilliance, the in-between chisels you into an ever more distinctively patterned version of yourself.
It beckons. That other self over there, it calls. Drop that banged up old satchel. There is nothing in there you need. Set it down, and leap!
Giovanni was onto something at eighteen. Rewards mean nothing if you do not want what comes next. Once you arrive at the lip of the cliff, rewards still mean nothing. Only the wanting matters. Only the courage to want will lift your foot and send you over that edge.
Floral Tradition
I told him I do not like cut flowers.
Colombian workers, pennies per hour, chemicals baths,
pick your poison.
Porn is no fun
when all you can think is
Those poor girls.
In autumn, he brought a cutting of lavender
dried and dropping a cascade of violet nibs
all over the bedroom floor.
It came from a local farm
where it had been put up in the rafters last spring.
At our first dusting of snow,
he wound silk ribbon in purple and blue
around a taped stem
until it became two roses
fastened in place with pins.
In February, when other women in the office
received their fragrant splashes
carried in on cargo planes from sunnier places,
he set upon my desk a Dracaena
in a pot of soft soil,
its minute trunk grown from infancy
in the shape of a heart.
When April became summer,
he plodded, sleep-deprived and stomach growling,
on a winding trail along a creek
because I asked.
I saw a spray of white blossoms
but walked on because he needed to eat.
He stopped for me. Planted his feet.
“Come look at your flowers,” he said.
I did. Sugared petals threaded with candy floss.
He motioned to the purple ones and bent to help with those.
Spring Beauties.
Wild Sweet William.
Blue Creeping Phlox.
My collection grows.
Alongside his,
the names bloom
from my tongue.
Postcard from the Backcountry
You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
Mark 1:11
This bungled, bumping journey with you is quite an adventure. Your unique sense of direction steers us into wondrous and uncharted territory. When I pause to look around, I see the strangeness for what it is. The high canopy shelters, the bright blooms startle, the roots hold the shifting soil steady enough beneath our feet. You carry me to a way of knowing I could not have visited without your companionship.
Because of you, I am learning new habits for walking well. As we go, I will pack these ways close and keep them within reach.
- Ignore the clock. No one wins any prizes for being on time. Misery cancels out the gold star for punctuality. When we are trying to dress to get out the door for school, moving between your two houses, or just gearing up for the next activity, we can make our way with care. A too-abrupt transition into the chaotic press of the outside world is like stepping straight from the bubble bath into rush-hour traffic. The mind needs to gain its footing. You will have your moment to stretch, to fuss a little, to hear about what waits on the other side of the moment. I can sit with you, touching you gently. Hot cocoa is waiting in the car, I remind you. The kitty cat was asleep on your bed in the middle of the night. Your Grandpa Bill is coming next week. A light touch can welcome you back from the unscheduled bliss of your play, your dreams, your lazy wanderings. We will get where we need to go eventually. In the meantime, let’s greet one another and enjoy the hello all over again.
- Seek positive intent. When you knocked over the child at the party, I know you wanted something but did not know how to communicate your eagerness. I will try to say, “You were excited about the flag the little girl was holding. You wanted a turn with it. You grabbed and pushed her, but that hurt her. You could say, ‘Please, can I have a turn with the flag.’ If that does not work, come get me and I will help you figure it out.” Even when you are hitting me, I know you are trying to achieve something. I empathize with this. You are trying to tell me you are disappointed about the pleasure you believe you have been denied. Your hitting hurts, though, so I will help you learn to say “Mommy, I am so angry and frustrated.” I will let you cry. I will show you ways to be gentle with your big, hot feelings. In training my eyes to look for your positive purpose, I learn to see the intent in other people’s actions, too. When folks around me behave in ways that strike me as wrong, I remember that they are trying to manage their own complex lives. So many of us walk through our days feeling we have failed ourselves and others, that we have fallen short. Yet, we are all doing our best with the resources we have. I am, too. When I pay attention to the good at work inside confused behavior, my heart softens.
- Forgive, forget. Forced apologies are hereby banned. You have had enough with feeling bad about yourself for the time being. Saying “sorry” is only useful if you feel contrite, and we both know you cannot achieve anything as subtle and generous as repentance when you are tied up inside. For now, it is my job to forgive you when you make a mistake, even if you are not ready to admit you made one. I will decide you are trying your hardest, and I will remind you that you are good, no matter how tangled up you feel. We have time to untie the knots. I will sit with you until we both simmer down, and then we will make our way out of the jungle together.
- Apologize freely. True apologies are not an admission of failure. When I catch myself acting with fury or aggression, I will stop and tell you I am sorry. “I really got mad and started yelling when you were kicking the shower door. I’m sorry, Bug. I should not have yelled. It did not help at all. I was actually scared before I was mad. Next time, I will try saying, ‘I am worried about you breaking the glass doors. I do not want you to get hurt.’” My job is to keep you intact and well. When you act out, you have something roaring inside you that needs to be heard or received. At the same time, I am trying to help you get somewhere safe. I know we can work together to solve the problem. I can say I am sorry for boiling over. Then I can turn down the heat and train my attention back on you, on us, on the opportunity before us. As I speak my apology and act to guide you to a calm place, I forgive myself. I release my grip on the mistake, and re-commit myself to loving you well. My mind is clear of the fog of self-loathing and hopelessness, and I begin to see options again. I can help you find your words. The path forward begins to lay itself bare.
- Come out of hiding. When I slip into my room to piddle around on the computer, start tapping on my phone, or open the paper, I am not really with you. Long days of parenting and working can drain energy stores and leave me grumpy. My exhaustion manifests as a vanishing act. My sleight of hand does not fool you when we are together, because I am attempting to disappear in plain sight. When I withdraw, I believe I can shield you from the ill effects of my mood. I know better, however, and so do you. It’s no wonder you lock yourself into a suit of armor when you feel dark things. You see very few people giving name and face to their distress. My ducking and avoidance have far more of a negative impact on you than the blahs and blues of my presence. I want you to have more choices than “got it together” and “invisible.” I will try to stay with you, in my ups as well as my downs, and even the flat places in between. If I need to work on a project or take a few minutes to myself, we will discuss it. I can explain what is happening before I shift gears, and assist you in setting yourself up with an activity. You are learning to be perceptive about people and their needs. I can help you by naming my own place in time, talking you through what I expect, and being transparent about my behavior.
You have led me towards these small, immense lessons. I hope to continue to hold them close as we make our way through this tangled landscape. Walking this path is not easy, but it is the only one for us. In your company, I learn to be a better parent. This also means I am learning to be a better friend, neighbor, and inhabitant of this teeming planet.
During this leg of the journey (as with so many others), you are teaching me how to expand my capacity for love. You help me see more clearly, and I see what a beautiful boy you are.
Nowhere Near Kansas
Defiance is always a relationship problem. If your child does not accept your direction (‘I don’t care what you say, you can’t make me!’), it’s always an indication that the relationship is not strong enough to support the teaching. This happens to all of us from time to time. At that point, stop and think about how to strengthen the relationship, not how to make the child ‘mind.’ – Laura Markham, Aha Parenting
When the brain is no longer in survival mode, it has the opportunity to come up out of the storm cellar and assess the damage. A weekend of nourishing activities and a few days of rest have calmed the skies. Climbing up into daylight, I can see the havoc this two-year typhoon has wrought on Bug’s and my relationship. It is hard to believe the thing is still structurally sound. It is even harder to face my own role in wrecking the place during my mad dash to get us to safety. Survival-mode parenting may keep the roof from blowing off, but it does not do much to help a kid learn to learn how to build anything solid.
This is not just guilt talking. A raw empathy for Bug also surges through me when I survey the scene. I want to be able to go back to the beginning and throw myself around him. He is too little to face so many of the events unfolding around him, and I wish I could protect him not only from the storm but from my own botched reaction to it. Alas, no one has yet perfected a time machine. Bug and I will have to pull what we can from the wreckage and start rebuilding right here.
As an earlier post described, my kid is struggling hard to manage life in two homes. Transition times yield the most resistance, but explosions occur at bedtime, in the morning, and during any activity involving additional people. Strong feelings seem to flood Bug all in a rush, and he acts before he has a chance to find his footing. It is normal to look for a causal relationship between a child’s behavior problems and a single, identifiable event. The conventional approach is to wonder if his new teacher, the long commutes, a split home or a food allergy might be to blame. In my gut, I know better. I know that displacing my child’s distress onto circumstances beyond us has been a way for me to manage my own sense of being overwhelmed.
I also know better because I was a child once. The difficult situations around me were never the real challenge. The challenge was in not knowing how to make sense of my feelings about difficult situations. We all have painful childhood memories; for me, the ones with deepest imprint have nothing to do with the precipitating event and everything to do with fearing the fallout from my responses. Somehow, I was supposed to get my act together, yet I had no idea how to go about doing this. A sense of indistinct danger hung over my tangled feelings. The memory of distress is so vivid that even as I write about it from the safe distance of three decades, my heart begins to gallop.
A kid’s emotional vocabulary is rudimentary at best. I am guessing my childhood home was not the only one unacquainted with the “I statement.” I remember how very difficult it was to know how to behave when I was feeling sad, scared, angry, or disappointed. This is not an indictment on my parents or any family culture. The language of loving guidance is a foreign tongue to most of us. Feelings are strange and slippery things, and they can seem even more perilous when we attempt to face them. Even as an adult, it is tough to gain composure, think clearly, speak rationally, and act well when the pressure is on. Who wouldn’t duck back down into the cellar and pull the hatch closed?
When I am feeling anxious or upset, I want someone to remind me that I am safe. That I am loved. That the world does not hinge on this one decision, that it is okay to take my time to sort it out, and that I have help if I need it. When I do not have these things, I become more prone to burst. Why would things be any different for Bug? In Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline, Becky Bailey suggests,
When your children are having a hard time obeying you, they need to believe that you have faith in them. They need to sense that you have confidence in them before they can develop confidence in themselves.
Yet, when my son is acting with aggression, what do I do? Increase the pressure by threatening “consequences.” If he does not put his toys away and put on his jammies now,he will lose books at bedtime. If he does not stop saying “shut up,” he will go straight into time out. I take away his ability to gain confidence in his own decision-making, and he loses trust both in himself and in me.
I understand the argument that children need some form of punishment in order to learn to behave appropriately. I understand it, and I do not agree with it. I have been attempting that approach for months because my own stressed brain has not been able to come up with anything better. However, the more I attempt to will Bug into compliance, the wider the rift between us grows. Sure, he may hop to it if I threaten to pour the hot cocoa down the drain, but he only grows more tightly coiled as the day rolls on. Against this survival parenting, my heart and mind have been gently, insistently reminding me that my own intense and stressful responses to my son are exacerbating his defiant behavior. My child has been begging for help in learning how to face a tough situation. Because I have been so very tired, I have largely left him to twist in the wind.
What is the alternative? As I squint into the new daylight, this is about as much as I can discern: I need to mend what is torn between Bug and me. Laura Markham suggests that “the most effective discipline strategy is having a close bond with your child.” This is what my heart tells me to do. It is also what practice has been reinforcing. No matter how aggressive Bug’s behavior, I remind him that I love him and that I am on his team. “It seems like you are having some big feelings, buddy. Let’s see if we can figure out what to do.” I try not to snap. I know what it’s like to have someone get angry at me when I do something I know is wrong. It only makes me feel more hopeless. Suggesting my kid has to “get it together” before he is allowed to be in my company or in the company of others sends the message that only his proper, polished-up self is invited to the party. I want to reverse course, and provide affection and support to the messy, work-in-progress my son truly is, as all of us truly are.
I am practicing staying with him. I am learning to let him cry or blow up a little or say what he needs to say. Afterwards, we can talk it out. Maybe we will have a do-over or experiment with something altogether new. I try to remember to use just one scale to measure an approach before I take it: does this choice strengthen or weaken my relationship with Bug? I do not always get it right, but as I breathe through my own confusion, I remember that the thing my son needs more than anything right now is me, loving him.
Now that I have clocked a few good nights’ sleep and opened up the cellar door, I can see the debris strewn around. The gift of this perspective is that the sun shines under the broken places and reveals treasures I never knew existed. Where structures once stood, rich soil, long fallow, offers itself up to us. Here and now, my son and me. We begin.
Bailey, Becky. Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.
Exorcise Plan
I love to cook. Aside from slapping turkey pepperoni and low-fat cheese on wheat bread and telling Bug it is “pizza,” I do not cook anymore. I love to garden, but I planted nothing more than one patch of shriveled beans last year. I love to read, knit, camp in the mountains, write meandering letters to friends, wander through museums, and learn the names of the trees. Nevertheless, for two years, I have barely brushed the edges of any of these pleasures.
With bittersweet relief, I have watched dozens of activities recede into the horizon. By bidding them farewell, I am able to welcome the simple joys of the few pursuits proven to sustain me. Long walks, dancing, writing, and a smattering of friends fill the scarce pockets of time around the duties of work and home. The things I do for fun are easy. They require little planning and even less effort.
My objective is to wean myself from stress.
This may not sound revolutionary. The same repeating loop of advice comes at all of us from multiple fronts every day: sleep more, eat less, take the stairs, reduce stress. The last one is the toughest for me. I have lived on a steady diet of drive and self-improvement for my entire adult life. It is hard to imagine what a more serene existence might look like. The first thought is “dull.” I have equated minimal stress with laziness and low motivation for so long that I do not know how to disentangle these concepts from one another.
The knot is beginning to fall loose. The ghost hunters have helped.
Over the years, lovers of the paranormal have explored the high incidence of hauntings in Victorian homes during the turn of the century. Entire families would descend into a kind of eerie madness, hearing noises and seeing poltergeists. For the skeptics among us, it is easy to assume the family members shared a tendency towards suggestibility or psychosis. Strangely enough, though, visitors to the homes would begin to report frightening, other-worldy sensations after a few nights. This tended to happen during the dark winter months, and it was common enough to catch our attention more than a century later.
Was it a mass insanity? The power of suggestion? Opium?
Tightly sealed homes, fireplaces, gas light, and an overactive imagination can brew into a deadly cocktail. Curious historians and scientists are now beginning to zero in on carbon monoxide. We all absorb a dusting of CO along with the oft-maligned mercury, arsenic and lead as we plod along the surface of the earth. In miniscule doses, these naturally occurring chemicals are harmless. It takes a barely measurable increase in any of these to initiate bizarre neurological effects. A flood is not necessary to tip the balance into madness. A steady, overabundant trickle will do the trick.
It is called poisoning.
I consider stress equally malicious. Stress, or more accurately, cortisol, seeps into the body when the panicking brain activates a fight-or-flight response. Cortisol is useful when you turn the corner and see a saber-toothed tiger. That burst of energy taps instincts and helps prepare you to respond. After that initial surge, however, the ongoing flow becomes problematic. Besides the delightful health effects of overdosing on cortisol (high blood pressure, weight gain, brittle bones, weak immunity), cognitive function deteriorates. The mind suffers.
Cortisol’s effect on sleep is only marginally understood, but I can tell you from personal experience that stress-saturated dreams can look like a joint project between Salvador Dali and Edward Gorey. In waking hours, paranoia becomes a constant companion. Hypersensitivity crashes the party, dragging along self-destructive thoughts, flashes of rage and sorrow, and distorted social perception. A person can get lost in the funhouse, walking at angles, conversing with ghosts.
This joy ride is the result of a primal mechanism whose purpose is to protect us from becoming tiger kibble. I suppose it makes sense. The ones who outran the big cats are the ones who passed on this genetic legacy. As with so many other instincts, this does not serve us well in an industrial society full of self-imposed “threats.” The brain cannot differentiate between a predator and rush hour traffic. It responds to both as if survival is at stake. A few too many hours or years of low-level panic, and some of us begin to fray at the edges.
While my bone-rattling descent into single motherhood is a significant factor in my cortisol dependence, neither parents nor divorcees have a corner on the stress market. Most anyone works, pays bills, or lands in the checkout line behind the dude with the bad credit card knows the upending power of stress. However, too many of us walk around bathed in cortisol from sunup to sundown. Some continue to marinate in it all through the night.
I, for one, have reached my quota. I quit. If that Victorian mama found out that her family had been breathing deadly doses of an invisible toxin for two years, you can bet she would have called a time out, opened the windows, and gotten her charges to a soft place to recover.
It may be impossible to control pressures at work and with the kiddo, but I can make a determined effort to regulate my responses to them. Another thing I can do is turn the pencil over and start erasing. Remove that extra class from the calendar. Say “no” to the next invitation, no matter how much I like the friend making the offer. Forget about the bin of yarn under the bed, the library of cookbooks on my kitchen shelf, and the next round of birthdays. My only job now is to handle the few things required of me with grace, and release my grip on the rest.
As for those few precious hours I call my own? I may head to Glen Echo then leave before the second dance. I may decide to sleep in until noon then rise at dawn to for a quiet run. I may draw a bath then drain it so I can eat strawberries on the back porch. Anything I do in the next few months will be because it feels good. I have never tried this radical approach before. I figure it beats spiraling further into an epic battle with phantoms.
To heal from any overdose, the only option is to purify the system. Stretch out beneath the cleansing breeze and let it chase the demons from the blood. The air has been there all along. The only thing left is the choice to breathe it.
Natural Tendencies
The “Growing Up” section at Barnes and Noble has something for the bullied kid, the child of divorce, the grieving kid, the kid with two mommies and the one whose mommy is pregnant.
How to Stop Being a Bully is nowhere to be found.
Bug’s defiant behavior has been ratcheting steadily upward over the past. . . six months? Year? It’s hard to say. I have not been paying as close attention as I should have been. It has also been tough to admit that something abnormal is going on. Bug’s intensity is not entirely out of character for a boy who punched his way into the world and latched onto me with a grip that made me writhe in pain for six straight months. All sorts of words are used to describe a kid like Bug. High-need, demanding, defiant, strong-willed, stubborn. “Charismatic” is on the nice end of the spectrum. The words on the other end are the ones you bite back when you see a child like mine lording over your kid at the playground.
As for the specifics? Let’s put it this way: Bug’s favorite clip on YouTube these days is Steve Martin’s evil dentist number from Little Shop of Horrors. He giggles with glee all the way through.
Most days, sunny strains of Bug’s goodness rise above the darker chords. He is playful and athletic, curious and agile, imaginative and silly. He dances like a fiend to rock star music and makes epic pirate ships out of old sheets and dining room furniture. However, his foul temper is a rising crescendo, drowning out his better self. It is chilling to watch my beautiful baby unfold into a mean-spirited, unlikable child. It is also tough to come to terms with the possibility that these characteristics are not just “a phase,” and that this may be his hard-wired disposition. I worry so much for the young man he will become, and I want him to learn how to manage his big feelings so he does not land in a vortex of reactivity feeding negative self-image feeding delinquency.
We have a tough road ahead. In helping my boy manage himself, I also have to face the role my constitution plays in his. He has inherited the wide arc of his emotional pendulum from me, and he learns how to calibrate (or not) the intensity from me. My reactions contribute as much to Bug’s behavior as my nature does. I cringe when I recall any number of the shameful ways I have responded to his button-pushing over the years. The explosive words I hear coming out of Bug’s mouth of late are perfect recordings of my voice.
Children’s books on the topic may be in short supply, but grownup books proliferate. Reading about tools like positive discipline and loving guidance has given me insight into the needs behind Bug’s behaviors, and the way my choices help or hinder him as he tries to get those needs met. There are no shortcuts. Accepting that something has to change requires me to discipline myself, all the time and in every setting. My knee-jerk snapping or weary permissiveness serve as a perfect model for the behavior I am trying to eliminate. Is it any wonder my kid’s grouchiness grows worse when I am at my worst? Responding with enhanced mindfulness is the only choice.
For nearly five weeks, I have been attempting careful consideration when responding to my son. No matter how hot under the collar we are, how loudly he is shouting hateful things at me in the supermarket, how exhausted I am at 11:15pm after two hours of bedtime struggle, and how much I feel like crying or punching the wall when he is up again at 4:30am complaining of a nightmare, I try to silence my Nurse Ratched instincts. Whatever my first reaction is, my job is to pause and subvert it. Taking a breath deep enough to turn down the heat allows me a moment to consider Bug’s perspective and our options. I do not always succeed (like after gymnastics this weekend. Yeah, that was me forcing my child into time out right in the middle of the parking lot), but my track record is, I hope, improving.
The blowouts are diminishing in frequency and intensity. Bug may still be experiencing the lightning storm of big emotions, but his behavior does not ignite me as quickly. I keep telling him I am going to help him figure out how to manage his feelings. That he is not alone. After a few minutes, his temper settles, and we are back to some kind of equilibrium – even pleasure – in each other’s company.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wrap up this essay in a neat little bow? It would go something like this:
In time, practicing mindfulness becomes habit. Children are as resilient as the platitude suggests, and they can learn new ways of handling themselves. Parents can, too. Eventually, measured responses supersede knee-jerk aggression or defeat. Whether the human brain is capable of developing new instincts is a topic of debate. I hold out hope that with intention and patience, mindful responses become an abundant source of inspiration, as easily tapped as whatever came before.
If you want the happy ending, then stop here. The messier truth is that subverting one’s instincts is incredibly exhausting. The self-control muscle grows fatigued from overuse. If making the transition to new behaviors is this tiring for me, imagine how tough it is on a five-year-old! I keep seeking settings in which good behavior comes naturally to Bug so we can both let down our guard and he can succeed without Herculean effort. This seems a critical counter-point to the hard-earned victories of the long game.
As of today, we are still seeking. Sadly, few low-pressure venues exist in our world. Even on playgrounds, even in the back yard, my boy appears almost to look for things to hurt or reasons to lash out. It is like watching an evil villain in training, rubbing his hands together as he decides where to sow seeds of discord. I have to tell myself that my son is just a strong being with a hair trigger, a bottomless pit of energy, and a few too many bad habits for handling disappointment in a world that does not turn on an axis of Bug.
This is an important realization for a mommy who is still learning to accept the same humbling truths. Habits can change. Doing so is a matter of re-orienting ourselves in the right direction then allowing our momentum to carry us forward. When we veer, as we inevitably will, we check the compass and make the necessary course corrections, as often as it takes, as long as the journey lasts.
Maybe Bug and I should add our own title to the “Growing Up” shelf at the bookstore. We can call it White Water: How to Change Course Mid-Stream without Capsizing.
My backup plan is to start saving for a top-of-the-line drill and dentist’s chair. As it goes with all children, whether doom or destiny, Bug is going to follow his own path wherever it takes him.
My mama said,
“My boy I think someday
You’ll find a way
To make your natural tendencies pay.”
Shannon E. Williams 