Moving

 Hmmm...this is interesting.

Hey mama. I LOVE you...

Hmm..if I push up, I can move....

I feel like Superwoman...but backwards...yeah I want to go towards mama...

Damn it you people! Pick me up! 

Baby Beastie may never crawl or walk. She has four servants and one beast of burden. Why move when others will do it for you? I suspect Baby Beastie may be a diabolical genius.

Ahhh...Shit

I was doing so good at keeping up and then I blew it by chatting with a group of AWESOME women. Dis tractors. But as one of them just pointed out, "It's on 9 in Washington State." We'll just pretend that it's nine here too.

So these women are part of the reason why I have this new fantasy. I want to travel all over meeting my online friends. I want this for purely selfish reasons because I love my online friends but I also think it would just be such a cool writing experience.  Now I need some funding. I daydream that I could convince a publisher to take on this project. My mom says reality t.v. which would kind of rock too...

What a great idea though: Homeschooling family of six, on the road, meeting people they only know online. The implications are endless. Theory, adventure, chaos. I want to do it. Some one out there wanna fund us? We'd come visit you...

Some of the Nicest People I Know

Today was a full day and not always the best of days. The girls woke up in some kind of foulness that resulted in too many tears and too much frustrated mama. I felt tired and defeated before we even really did anything. Hanging with another home school family was good but Beastie C was rude.

But the day ended extra good because I finally got meet one of my blogger friends, John BR and his wonderful wife Kathy. They were lovely and smart. It was an evening spent catching up on each other's lives, and talking about the world. This is about my fifth meeting of someone I have meet over line, and it so far I have a good track record.

Whenever people tell me about how the Internet is destroying our ability to connect to other people, I think that it is not that simple. I have meet some good friends through the Internet. From a couple of wonderful "due date" clubs to the people I have meet through blogging, I have made some life long connections. These people have become my community. I often long for a world in which they would be close enough for us to actually hang out. I think sometimes that maybe it wouldn't be that great to know them in real life but then I meet them...and it's still pretty great.

Tonight hanging out with John BR, getting a hug from Kathy and him made him even more real to me. His poetry reads a little differently now.

Postscript: Do you think someone would fund me in an attempt to meet all my online friends:P? Seriously how cool would it be to travel around and meet all of you and write about these encounters! Awesome I say!

Mother, Oh The Trap

This morning, with coffee and steel cut oatmeal (to keep my milk supply up for baby R) I stumble across this gem. My initial impulse is to not just read it as I am hardly an Erica Jong fan. I find her writing simplistic and a bit too melodramatic. Her essays and speeches just seem whiny and filled with unacknowledged privilege but since it was causing such a stir where I had found it, I decided to read it. What resulted was lots of sputtered coffee, and rants aimed at the computer screen (I am fully convinced that somehow my computer conveys these rants to the intended recipients). There is so much that just annoys the hell out of me in this article, and since she's all over the place with a poorly executed argument, there is much to cover. I cant' and wont' do it all. I suspect there will be many well reasoned arguments out there that take her to task for her silly stereotypes of AP parents to her confusing logical twists.

What I want to focus on are two major problems I have with her attack on attachment parenting. The first is that her attack ends up being leveled against other women whether she wants that to be the case or not. It's impossible to not read this article and not feel that if you attachment parent that you have somehow given up on being a feminist or having any care for women's rights. Now of course you're just a tool of some kind of nebulous thing called Attachment Parenting but it's still you. What her rant tells us is that only certain kinds of choices that are okay to make. Her choices are good, well thought out ones and the attachment parenting mom's choices are bad. It's that simple to her.

Herein lies the problem with choice. If you make choice the end all of any kind of discussion on rights then you end up in a world where all choices are valid. You can argue, as she does, that some choices are more limiting and cause more pain to others. And yes I do agree with this but I am not sure if attachment parenting is one such choice. I could  as just easily argue that her choice to work, hire a nanny, buy formula, etc makes me repressed and that her choice results in a country that does NOTHING to support me in my role as a mother. Who's oppressing who? one may ask. Choice is a problematic little idea. I see choice as a smokescreen that keeps up from focusing on other ways to view the world. There is the argument, for example, that "This is my body and I can choose what to do with it." But on the other hand this is also the idea of the body behind "It's your body so YOU take care of it."  I'm not necessarily saying get rid of choice but let's at least look at the assumptions behind such notions.

Because really so few people in the world have ANY choose about their lives. And I'm not just talking about people in "developing" countries. Choice is not a reality for most of the people I know. It's not always a reality for me. We are ALL forced to live in certain ways because of the system in which we live. Which brings me to my next big issue.

I can't figure out what Jong wants. She insists that we parents are too tired to be out in the streets protesting. Apparently what we need to do is to what she did which was hire a nanny so we could tour the world promoting our books which are filled with lovely feminist ideals. Okay then. Let's see. Find a job that will allow me time to write. Why a job? Because writing is NOT going to pay my rent, food, electricity, daycare. Next find a publisher who is going to give me huge advances and promote my book by sending me all the world. Well that's EASY. Okay so maybe she doesn't want to me to aim so big. Instead I need to find a job where I can work against the man. But those jobs don't usually pay well, and I need a fairly well paying job so I can afford daycare. Boy am I screwed. I'll never get to grow up to a good protester.

See that's the big problem here. Jong refuses to acknowledge her own privilege and in doing so does nothing to question the status quo. She bemoans that we don't have villages to help us raise our children but does not suggest that we tear down the corporations that turn us into money making machines. She does not proposal a radical shift in society where we value women and the work they do. She does not offer a visionary world (as our founding feminist MOTHERS did) where men are equal partners in child rearing and housework. She does not outline a plan where we help women and children with health care, food, childcare, etc.



Jong does not take the time to question why it's okay for formula companies to pimp their wares to poor women. She does not question why she hates fast food but is okay with formula (which is processed). I am not slamming mothers who need formula but I am slamming companies who actively try to sell their wares to vulnerable new mothers who are scared that their babies are not gaining weight. The bottom line is that the lifestyle she promotes sells as much as attachment parenting doest. They are both lifestyle niches that capitalism gets its hands on and promotes through exploitation and fear. But there are other paths, and she missed the opportunity to explore these trails.

Tired

Well I've made it to day 8 with some somewhat decent posts. But today I just don't have the energy to think. I asked H to give me something to write about and he said "Write about writing." And just thinking about that for ten seconds made my head hurt. I'm thinking tonight is not the night to work on my SOP for Toronto which really needs to be done so that I can send it out.

Today R woke me up early as usual. She's totally a morning baby and I can't wait until she's more into H. He's a morning person too so they could hang together and I could sleep. If she ever decides that she can be more than five inches from MAMA. Sometimes I fear that I have created a monster with the attachment parenting stuff. It's still hard to hear people using Cry it Out with great success (as in way more sleep than me). Or that they can leave the baby with just about anybody and the baby is fine and they've been doing it since the baby was six days old, etc, etc. And there is this part of me that wishes that I was getting sleep and that I was able to leave R for a bit once in a while. I look back though and realize that so much is just each kids' personality. Camille was in daycare from like four months on and she was still super attached to me. Piper who never saw daycare in her life is, and was, super independent. Thus I know that I'm doing okay by R and that right now she just needs to be attached for whatever reason.

So after getting up way too early, I got the dining room cleaned, dishes down, another load of laundry going, and breakfast for the beasties. I also did school work with all three of them. This was all in between R just fussing all freaking day. I have no idea what was wrong with her but I felt slightly crazed by noon. She wouldn't nap, she wouldn't be worn. She just wanted me to hold her while she fussed at me. Very annoying. She did chill out for about a half hour with some food so I was able to cook supper.

Then it was off to work with beasties in tow. H had to take the GRE today so I had to bring them. I settled them in with Chick Fil A while my students took a test. Then we went to Trader Joe's to get food for the week. I ended up spending way too much because I was starved and they had all their Christmas crap out...like dark chocolate shortbread star cookies. OMG goodness. The beasties were less beast like than normal so it was a more pleasant shopping experience than normal (can we say "Tenderloin wrapped in bacon for the samples. They munched themselves in a meat daze). However the way back was living hell as R SCREAMED and panted all the way back. Sigh. Now she's finally asleep in my lap, delicious and cute.

But me? I'm tired. I'm too old for this baby business. Tomorrow is a calmer day so I'm hoping to get said SOP ready to go and application out tomorrow. Then I have have to get all my stuff together for transcript sending and all that fun busy work. Wednesday is another overbooked day. I need a day book as I keep doing this to myself. But it will be fun. Best part is that we are meeting John BR!!!!!! Can't wait.

The Problem With Beastie Boy

This morning U stumbled out of his bedroom, and sort of fell into the recliner. H and I were both all over him: "Are you okay? What's wrong? Was your handshaking? Do you have a headache? Do you feel weird?" He was ignored us half the other time and only managed to grunt the rest. By the time I had worked myself up into a panic, he had stormed into his room in tears. "There's nothing wrong!!!" He yelled before hiding under his blankets. H went in a little later and figured out that U was mad because he had "Nothing to do" and we wouldn't rent him Halo Reach (again for like the fifth time in the last two weeks). In addition, he hadn't see his complex buddy all weekend, and despite the fact that was nine am he wanted to invite him over. He didn't ask for any of these things because he knew the answers would not be to his liking.

He was also upset because our concern comes because of his epilepsy. U went from being pretty interested in learning about his condition to just pretending it doesn't exist. His medication is a sore point as it is and any mention of epilepsy is taboo. I've stopped trying to talk about it with him because I'm just not sure where to go with it. I don't want to push it on him but, on the other hand, I am a big believer that one should be aware of their own bodies and their own health. And I know that my fussy mom concern drives him crazy in that it's just a reminder that the epilepsy does exist. As we're approaching, the one year anniversary of his first seizure, I can't help but be paranoid.

And of course there is the factor of oncoming puberty (shudder) and the side effects of the meds. The meds make him moody and irritable. Puberty makes him moody and irritable. It's a volatile combination. I write this totally calm and with understanding. I taught teenagers (as has H) and we know this attitude is par for the course. But it's a bit different when it's coming from your own child.

I told H today that I think it's hard on us for a couple of reasons. We feel like we're really close to our children. We home school. We have very family centered life. We rarely go out without them. We include them in our own lives as much as we can. And then of course we practiced attachment parenting with all of them. I nursed. We co-slept. We wore them. So this pushing us off is a bit hard. We're letting him do it as it is obvious that is what he needs to right now but boy does it hurt more than I thought it would. Plus I am a big believer in compassion for all, and it's hard to deal with someone who can just be really mean.

For awhile parenting him seemed easy. There was this kind of awful period when he was a baby where I just felt like everything I was doing was wrong. He was my first baby and I was such a moron about it all. He was the baby with colic too so that didn't help matters. When he finally hit about 3.5, it seemed to just be great. He turned into this funny, sweet little guy that was so easy. I pretty much felt like it was smooth sailing up until now. And here we are entering a new phrase for us all, and suddenly it's that panicky feeling like "Shit I'm going to screw this up for sure."

Everyday is like walking among landmines. Sometimes he needs me to be right there and other times he pushes me away. If I step wrong, he explodes. His words are rude and angry. Filled with shrapnel and flame. He hasn't learned how to direct those weapons (thankfully) but it's still a wounding moment for me. I sometimes lay awake at night and wonder if I somehow screwed up with him and that is why he's turned into this rude, sometimes mean little person. I hear/read other people's descriptions of their wonderful sweet boys and wonder "Where did I go wrong? What did I not do well enough?"

It's a new path for us, and funnily I feel myself having to go back to that same kind of listening I used when he was a baby. Waiting carefully for his cues before acting. Shaping my responses in ways that work for him and me. Balancing his needs with those of the collective. And all the while hoping to hell that I am modeling to him so that when his body calms down he has something valuable to carry into the world.

And...

I am totally posting on the fly AGAIN. My problem is that the day doesn't really end for me until one or two a.m. I keep forgetting that I have to post before midnight to get this post in for the day. Craziness!

Today I discovered that, according to the GRE, I am not any smarter now then I was when I began my graduate program. I say this in jest as I got the exact same score I got five years ago. But it did make me ponder on the way home if I had learned anything. It seems that I have. I know I've read much more and that my understandings of what I read as an undergrad has deepened and changed. Perhaps my test taking ability has undergone no change. I did take this test on three hours of sleep and feeling not very well. Perhaps I can chalk the no change towards betterment to this?

I'll post more on what I have learned tomorrow. Tonight I am thinking about where  I was five years ago. Piper had just turned six months, and we had just moved to this same complex. We lived across the green for where we are now. My apartment was filled with boxes and I was seriously freaked out over three papers due right on top of each other. I suspected at that time that I was not capable of doing the whole Master degree thingie. I felt stupid and inept. I wrestled with this insecurity as I tried to write papers with a nursing Piper, and in between attempted to slowly unpack.

There were other concerns. Umberto was not doing so hot in school. He was staring to tell us he hated books. We had no idea what was going on and even less of an idea of what we were going to do. Camille was not talking to anyone,  and I was scared she had autism but everyone told me I was crazy for thinking this. Piper was my most  chilled baby and thankfully left me lots of time to freak out about what a horrible graduate student I was. It was also the semester I meet wonderful advisor who encouraged me to keep working. A long with H I had two people who had faith in my ability. It helped.

And now here I am five years later with the degree in hand. Sending off more applications for more degrees. It's a frightening process but as I drove home today, I realized that sometimes you are more than you think. I had a passion for the academic stuff and I persuaded H that we had to take this leap into the unknown. Look we are now...about to leap again.

Some images from that not so long past...echoing back in the tiny body of Rowena and the frantic writing and form filling...

New Tradition Born out of Necessity

Wordless Fridays: From now on a series of pictures of that captures our week.

Running Like a Girl

The other day we were at the park with some friends. One of the boys ran by and his father said, with disgust, "He runs like a girl." I was pretty floored. Floored enough that I didn't say anything. Someone said, "Oh leave him alone he's only five." Later in the car, I sat for a moment thinking of what I should have said. I should have said "Who cares? What's wrong with running like a girl?" I run and I bet five bucks I can run faster than the guy who made the comment. And what does it mean to run like a girl? 


My friend Julie posted this on Facebook: "I have often thought that homophobia is an extension of misogyny. That there is a strong, unspoken, often unrecognized belief that women and anything feminine is inherently less than everything masculine - and anybody who adopts any female qualities is somehow less than." H pointed out when I told him this that men can't deal with men acting feminine because they can't understand why somebody would want to embody that lack. And I think they are both right. Homophobia is about many things and one of those things is the feminine and what that means. To want to be a woman is seen as a flaw, a weakness. It is meet with disgust and violence. To have womanly qualities is seen as bad, and ultimately wrong. Why do so many men not want their sons to "act like a woman?" Why do they say them "Why are you crying like a little girl?" Why do they stop cuddling their boys after a certain age? What is wrong with acting like a woman (whatever that may mean?).


Shortly after this comment is made, my own son comes running from the creek. He runs awkwardly all skinny limbs. Not graceful and certainly not "manly." His elbows are tucked near his hips and his hands flop from his upward held wrists. He looks like the stereotype of a  gay man running. He is flushed and happy because he has been taking photos. I do not look at the man who made the earlier comment. My son is not five. He is ten. If I see disgust, I feel like I might smack this man in the face.


There was a time when my son's hand gestures, the way he crosses his legs at the knee would not have been seen as womanly. Judith Butler argues "If one 'is' a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered 'person' transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities"(Gender Trouble, 6). Gender is something that is never stable as it transforms not just through history but through different social places we inhabit. Gender is free floating in some ways but also incredibly limiting because it imposes itself onto our bodies, and we learn through culture how to shape the way we carry our bodies in gendered ways.  Look at this painting of George Washington: 

I can't imagine a modern US general posing like this for a portrait. The very way our bodies move are mired in historical conceptions of masculine and feminine. 


My son at ten would be bullied if he were in school. Of this I have no doubt. H and I both taught long enough to witness what happens to kids who hold themselves the way that my son holds himself.  It is not the parents who will do this although they carry the attitudes themselves. Sometimes I even worry in our homeschooling groups that some kid is going to notice and say  something. I don't think that saying "Hey dude George Washington held himself this way." is going to make much of an impression among preteens. At ten, my son is not holding himself this way because he is gay. He is not interested in boys or girls sexually. Well if he is not sharing the information with us. He knows that he's free to be interested in whatever gender he wants. We don't care. But he's just not telling us and we don't push. 


But I have to confess that I do wonder if I should warn him that people might comment on the way he holds his body. I haven't because I also feel like this will wound him fairly deeply. I do not want him to be self conscious about his lovely body. He is already headed into that awkward stage where he becomes intensely self-conscious. This has come at a time when he is also feeling a little of out of control of his body due to his epilepsy. But then I am scared that someone else is going to say something. And they won't be kind about it. 


I do not care how my beautiful son runs or how he holds himself. He has lovely qualities that some might call feminine. I don't label them. I just nourish them because they are good qualities for humans to have: compassion, nurturing, gentleness. I want my son to grow to be a good human. Not a good man. Or a good woman. Just human in a way that recognizes the human in others around him.


(Yes this is partially by the influence "My Son is Gay" post that has been all over Facebook today but it's also mostly been percolating in my head since the rash of suicides by young gay men over the last month. I have been struggling to find the words for what I wanted to say about bullying, my son, and the fear I have for him. My disclaimer is basically no I didn't just jump on her post.)

"Never Try, Never Fail"

A few years ago, the kids were really into the cartoon movie "Robots." At one point one of the robots says "My motto has always been 'Never Try, Never Fail." We, adults, laughed uproariously. Now as I gather my materials for submission to Ph.D. programs those words don't seem so funny. What started out as a energetic, excitement has trickled into a nerve wracked crawl. I often wonder if I'm slowing down in hopes that "Oops! Didn't get it done in time." will just sort of happen, and I can do the never try, never fail method of life.

When I look at everything all laid out, I just feel like I'm not such a great candidate for a program. The insecurity slowly eats away at me as I struggle through the day. When a reading seems to hard, I immediate peg this moment as meaning: You're not good enough to do a Ph.D. program as opposed to the fact that reading with Rowena screaming two inches from my ear might be a tad distracting. OMG! A typo on Facebook. Yeah I suck and can't write. And these thoughts are followed by "Why bother?" Why sink all this money into something you're just going to suck at. I actually lay awake a night and worry that I'm going to mispronounce a word as a teaching assistant.  This is life when you just don't feel good enough.

These are the times when I read stuff like this and feel this intense envy. I want that house, and that life. I want to put away these applications and move to a farm in Maine where I will do crafty things and my kids will always clean and lovely. I day dream about a life where I am not constantly feeling this lack. A life where I feel good enough. Of course I know that if I had the lives I read about, I'd feel just as insecure. Hell I'm about as crafty as nothing so that alone would be a big fail. And let's face it, my housecleaning and decorating skills are zilch. I'm not really cut out for the farm life either. I am lucky that I am able to feed the kids and myself. And god forbid I don't live real damn close to a Starbucks.

Really, I'm just longing for a place where I feel good enough. The two-sidedness I spoke of last evening has nothing to do with thinking that any other kind of life is easy. It has to do with me feeling like I'm doing everything like shit. I feel like my academic reading and writing are not so great, and then I struggle with feeling like a horrible mother and home schooling mother at that...I just feel like I don't do anything good enough. This is a hard feeling to live with, and I can't help but wish I could focus on just one thing. But then I wonder if that desire comes from just being afraid to fail.

As I send in these applications I struggle with realizing how much I really want this. I tried to distance myself because to admit that I wanted this with a deep, deep desire made me even more scared of failing. I can't imagine what it will feel like if all these schools reject my application. It's a dark place that I am afraid to explore too deeply.

Living Between Normal

My nights have been spent frantically finishing up graduate applications. I don't have time during the day to do this between homeschooling, dealing with R, and preparing for the two classes I teach. I wait until R is asleep for the night (and this usually occurs on my lap), the beasties are in bed along with H, and I type. I type up more verisons of my Statement of Purpose, my CV as well as dozens of form questions about where I live, how I score on tests, and my general state of fiances (no, sorry Duke,  I am utterly unable to pay my own way through your Ph.D. program). As I do this, I wonder if other mothers have such disparate lives.

If I choose to put my kids in school, got a full time lecturer position or whatever, I would fit in with many of the women I work and study with. It would be normal for me to do this with them. When I decided to have R, one colleague said "But why when you are just about to have all them in school?" I didn't remind her that I home school. I keep that to myself unless asked outright. And sometimes this normal does look very attractive. What would it have been like to have six kid free hours a day? What would I do? I imagine all the work I would accomplish. The articles! The SOPs! The applications completed! Oh my!

I go to the park, on a day when I have to work. We are going to hike. It's wonderful. I enjoy being outside. I enjoy talking about my children. I enjoy not thinking about work. Until I realize it's now a half hour until I have to be on campus so no more sitting on the bench, soaking up the sun. I have to rush off to work. Not so the moms I am with. They are able to stay at the park for another hour. As I hurry suddenly sluggish children down the wooded path, I wonder what it would be like to just focus on the children and homeschooling. Oh to have each day just be about the beasties and their schooling! To not have to worry about correcting or applications or papers! 

Today as I rushed to my mom's house for an impromptu visit, I pondered how I always feel like I'm running into two different directions. Frequently at the same time. Three days of the week, I can't really plan much as I have to go to work. If I do go out, it's this packing nightmare where I have to load the van with not just the beasties' stuff but all of my work stuff as well. Plus lunch for them and dinner for me. I'm usually tired on the days I don't work because I stay up until 2 am working on graduate applications. This is the only time when R is asleep enough for me to concentrate. I wonder sometimes if I'm just giving crap to both lifestyles. Maybe if I just choose one I'd be able to do that lifestyle justice as opposed to always feeling like I'm leaving shit undone. 

And I also wonder if it would make me feel part of one world or the other. Would I have closer relationships with either group if I were to just plant some alliances? If I do go to graduate school, how will I interact with other women in either group? 

Part of me knows that the allure of either world is based largely on fantasy. Many of the women I know in graduate school do not have children. And those who do struggle with the same things I do even with their kids in school. My homeschooling friends confide that things would be easier financially if they worked and as one mom told me a long time ago "I just want to be able to dress like a grown up once in awhile." 

Committing Once Again

Reading another friend's blog, I discovered that November was write a post a day or something like that month. I got the badge to prove it...

So once again, I will attempt to write a post a day for a month. I'm not sure I'm up for it. I'm tired. I have a six month old beastie. I am applying to six graduate schools. I have to take the GRE on Saturday. Yeah. Busy as usual. I figure even if it's drivel maybe it will inspire me to get this going a bit more and keep me off Facebook less. We'll see how things work out.

So in the meantime...Halloween Beasties...

Camille, My Love

I've had this entry kind of rolling around for a couple of weeks now. Life happened as it tends to do, and I found it getting pushed back behind Statement of Purposes, GREs, and general "OMG, I need to get graduate applications in by December!" But then I read this, a friend's post that promptly brought my own post back to the front of my clutter brain.

I thought when pregnant that we needed to prepare Piper. Piper was the one whose place in the family was going to be usurped. Thus I spent lots of time reassuring Piper that she would always be my baby. That I loved her so much, and that the new baby could never replace her. She always looked me with this sassy "Well duh." expression. Piper is not lacking in confidence.

Within a very short period of time, it became apparent that Camille was the one who felt displaced. Her mood swings become more drastic. She acted mouthy and rude. Her feelings about R were ambivalent at best. And we jumped in right away to reassure her but I sometimes think it would have been better if we could have just caught it earlier.

And I wish it was H that she wanted. See I have always felt a little bit of distance with Camille. Despite being the child that is by far the most like, she is also the one I don't feel as close too. For one thing, Camille is often hard to get close too. Like her mama, she is a bit prickly and it takes some work to push past those prickles to the warm person she can be. Plus, I had to leave Camille at daycare when she was about three months old. This is not a bad or a good thing but it is not something I had to do with the other three. And it hurt. I cried all the way to work because the last thing I wanted to do was leave my precious baby there. But we had to eat. H had her a lot more than I did for the first two years of her life. It was apparent that she ADORED him (and who can blame her? I do too!). H is a superb father, one of the best, and if you ever doubt it look at the way Camille looks at him. I figured that there was this distance between the both of us. That she prefered H in all things, and that I wasn't nearly as important. So when this stuff started happening, I pushed her to H. I figured if H spent more time with her than with R she would be okay.

Whoa boy did it ever backfire! R now loves her papa but prefers me so much that she's not exactly happy when left with H while I work.  It's not fun for anyone in this apartment when I have to leave her. But Camille wants me. She wants to do things alone with her mama. It moves me profoundly to have this happen. My heart hurts when I even write this out. Camille wants to go out with me. She wants to read her stories to me. She wants to go out shopping with me. She wants to do things with her mama. And now I have over attched baby who hates being in a micro inch away from me.

But there is still this tension between us. I suspect because we are so much alike. There is that tug towards and away that happened between my mother and I. I suspected it might happen later but not so soon. And I am not sure if I can head this tension off or if it's something that comes with the mother/daughter territory. I do not ever want to feel distance and alienated from my love, my Camille. I want us to draw from each other's strengths instead of pushing against. I feel this as we butt heads again over Math work. As she yells at me because I won't do watt she wants RIGHT NOW. As we argue over picking up her papers or clothes. Sometimes the day feels like a huge explosion of one crisis after another until I am so exhausted I shut down. I don't want this for my relationship with this lovely headstrong, powerful girl. I want our relationship to be mutually nurturing. It's just that sometimes I am not sure how to go about do that.

Hiking

A homeschool friend has instituted weekly hikes. We missed this week's hike but we got to go last week. I'm really excited about this as I've been wanting to get the kids moving more. I'm envisioning a day when we can do some real serious hiking. And this time of year is just made for hiking. It's cool with the leaves blazing in their change.

 Fall days!

 Before our walk.

 In the Nature Center. We got there a bit before our friend so the kids played in here. It was hard to drag them out!

 Dinner! The girls were very excited to see the snake's dead rat lunch. They were hoping he'd feed while we there but no luck.

 Love Beastie P's big eye here.

Practicing with the binoculars.

Ahhh...so deceiving. They're cuddling and they appear to get along. Do not be fooled.

Beastie Boy checking out some things.

On the Dragonfly Pond trail. We started with an easy trail to start.

 Checking out a rotted log looking for bugs.

 Using the observation stuff the center gave us.

 At the pond!

 My big boy.

And my little sprite.

Camille did surprisingly well on the hike. She really doesn't like walking and she's always the first to start complaining that she's tired. I think it helped that we walked to the pond with friends. On the way back, however, we walked back a lone as I needed to get to work. She wasn't too thrilled with the walking at that point.

Baby Beastie loved the hike and stayed up for the whole trip. She normally goes to sleep when we walk.

The end, right before mama realized she was going to be late for her class!

Breaking Children and the Problem with Spying

In the last couple of weeks a blog post has been circulating around concerning one man, a blogger, who watched another father not be very nice to a child. He condemned the man, saying the man "Broke his child." His post was moving, and in many ways right on but I didn't react the way that others did. Why? Because about ten minutes before I read the article, I had yelled at Beastie C after a really long, hard day for her. Unlike most of the people I knew, when I got done the article, I thought "Congratulations asshole on making another parent feel like a big fat fail."

You see I could relate to the father who was not being overly nice. After shopping with four kids, who are alternately screaming for everything they see, sobbing to be breastfeed right.now, and beating on each other because "She looked at me weird!" I get a little snappy by the time time we hit the check out. I'm sure there have been many a parent who looked at me snarling at beautiful innocent Beastie P and thought "Oh my god that woman should have gotten a license to have a child." I'm sure that people thought "Oh my god she's breaking those poor babies. Someone take them away."

And here's the thing, if you're spying on me in a micro second of my life, you miss all the other things. You miss the parks where I am laying on the gross covered in beasties laughing and playing. You're missing me at 4 am holding my baby boy as he seizes. You're missing me sitting with Beastie C and reading with her at 2 am because she can't sleep. You'll miss the lovely nursing sessions with Baby Beastie.  You don't see me walking down the road holding hands with Beastie P. You don't see the cooking, cleaning, and lesson preparation that goes into making their lives happier and smoother. No, what you see in your tiny spying moment is GreenTeaGinger being a utter and total bitch to her children. Because she's tired. She hasn't spoken to another adult in over eight hours. People have given her dirty looks when her child has shoved against them.  No one has said in a while "Good job mama." Instead there's you. At the counter. With your one FUCKING child. You and your judgment which is already being formulated into a blog post. A blog post that thousands of mamas will love and share. And there will be an equal number who hate it. There will also be a number, who like me secretly feel for the other dad.

I'm not advocating that we yell at our children. But I am advocating that maybe as parents we need to be more honest. Perhaps there are many of you who don't ever do anything wrong in your parenting. I applaud you and perhaps we should leave the breeding to you. But I suspect that there are many more who, like me, sometimes fail. Sometimes we yell or say mean things. Sometimes we really don't like our kids because they're being awful (I always love them but I don't always like them). You know what I think? I don't think we're breaking them. Breaking is something that happens over time. When I yell at my kids a few times a week they are not broken. Trust me. Kids are more resilient than we give them credit for. I am one who believes firmly in apologizing to my children. When I yell, I wait until I'm calm and then I hold them and apologize. I explain to them why I yelled. We have a talk and then they're off into the next thing.

Those who know me know that my kids do not fear me. They love me as fiercely as I love them. But those who know me know this because they weren't spying on me at the local grocery store.

Blocked

This weekend was spent "doing too much" and "not nearly enough." I had to re-constitute my to-do list on the computer again because every time I remember something to do, it was followed by three other things that needed doing. My perfectionist side was rearing up and getting real snappy about things not moving along like clock work. It was one of those weekends where I just picked fights with everyone over everything.

But mostly it was the problem of me getting one thing into my head and just bulling for that thing. I am, like most parents, a master multi-tasker but sometimes my feet find a path and nothing is going to get me off it. All I want to do is work until the task is completed. This is was how I was feeling about my grad applications. I had many other things to do. I had children to feed and care for but damn it all I cared about were those stupid applications.

Life kept happening though and I felt frustrated with each minor set back. R decided she MUST NURSE.every.second.of.the.day. Piper was just super needy and wanted lots of extra attention. We had a pumpkin farm visit we had promised the kids. There were meals, dirty dishes, and dirty clothes all needing care. In my head, I gnashed my teeth and thought terrible thoughts.

And then I got knocked right off the damn path. I discovered that my GRE scores were not valid. I missed the cut of date for time by about five months. I am going to have to retake them and soon. I had not budgeted out the money for this or the time. In addition, the thesis title on my transcripts is wrong. It's the title of another person's thesis. I ranted and raged. I sobbed until I was hysterical. H calmed me down but I was so devastated.

I know it doesn't seem like a big deal but it was just this one more thing that made everything feel so over-whelming. It's all part of me being tired. Tired of fighting for every damn thing I have in terms of the academy. I spent four years fighting to prove I could do the work. And now I'm fighting to convince a PhD program that I'm awesome and they should take me. And just when I'm feeling like I might be able to pull this off, I am knocked down. Again.

But today some friends kicked my ass, and promised to kick some ass for me. And just now I took some time from doing all the stuff for my classes (cause yeah I'm teaching two classes with all this going on and by tomorrow at midnight will have 60 papers waiting to be graded), to read to Umberto. Because if I'm going to keep knocked down, I might as well take the time to lay down sometimes. Take the time to be with my beasties.

If I hadn't gone to the pumpkin farm, hadn't paused for that moment, I would have missed this:

 Cause how cute is Piper in a riding hat?

 And a top her first pony!

Oh Camille, the look on your face when they put you on that horse. She's hooked, and I remember that feeling so well. The feel of beings so high up, and oh the smell of horse. Like heaven.

She's got it! She felt confident enough to give the horse a pat. Now I'm hoping we can scrape up the money for her to ride. You could see her visibly calm down as she sat there being lead around. The horse is a good thing for Camille. She told me: "Up on the horse...I felt wild like the horse." Total connection.

And how could this not make anyone stop for a second and just breath. Oh baby!

I have to remember that what kept me sane through my MA was H and these beasties. It was having to be human to feed them. Having to stop to read a beautiful picture book. Time to watch them grow into themselves.

The Bully Next Door

When I was nine, we moved to a new town. This wasn't an unusual occurrence. We moved a lot. This move was rougher because I would no longer be attending the tiny Christian school connected to our church. My family made up a large portion of the church and thus ensured that I had a place of prominence among my peers. Before that I wasn't popular but I wasn't picked on either. Mostly I was so strange the other kids just ignored me. They no doubt would be the same kids who picked on me in Jr. High but for some reason at the lower levels of elementary, I was just shunned. This didn't bother me much. I was in my own world anyway.

But our move brought me into direct contact with a whole new world of children's cruelty. It was so bad that even now when people talk about the "innocence and purity" of children I snicker. The children in this town were some of the nastiest people I've ever known. It began on the first day when I wore my favorite outfit. It was Kmart purchase. Beige dress pants with gold buttons, a cream dress shirt with a peter pan collar, and a crochet beige vest with gold buttons. I LOVED this outfit and, yes, looking back I realize it was hideous. But I.loved.it. 

When I was introduced to the class, everyone laughed. And this was the only start. At the first recess, I was mocked. I was trying desperately hard to not cry because I sensed if I cried, it would be over. The lunch recess was where all hell broke loose. I couldn't hold back the tears, and then they knocked up the bullying a notch or two. Several students surrounded me, boys and girls, and began to yell insults at me. Then they started to push me around until I finally was shoved hard enough to fall into a mud puddle. My outfit was ruined, and to cap it off when we returned to the classroom, the teacher yelled at me for being dirty and wet. This happened every day. For months. Looking back, I wonder where in the adults were. I mean, wouldn't a teacher on recess duty noticed that a gang of fucking kids had surrounded another kid? I don't think I told my mom because there was a lot of crap going on in our lives, and I didn't want to worry her. I was the good kid who didn't cause problems.

One day I was at my grandparents visiting (they lived in the same town). I loved going to their house. It was my safe, warm space. My comfort space. I was helping my grandfather put leaves into the garbage bags when all of a sudden I heard the familiar taunts. I looked up, wiping my hair from my ears, to see the ringleader of the bullies with a friend. How ironic that he lived right across the road from my grandparents. He kept at it and I tried to ignore him. My grandfather encouraged me to ignore him. And I tired. But finally I couldn't take it. I was in my safe place and this little asshole was making fun of me. I ran at him, and put him in a headlock. I held on while he bucked and tried to shake my off. I didn't care. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to feel every bit of pain he had inflicted on me. I remember his friend screaming for me to let him go, and I kicked at the friend when he tired to touch me. My grandfather ended up pulling me off. The kid was chocking, his lips blue. I was sobbing and screaming obscenities at the kid. My grandfather carried me back to the house and gave me chocolate milk. I was shacking and terrified. I was scared about what would happen at school the next day. 

The next day everyone ignored me. I was now someone to be feared. I was crazy.

Looking back, I wonder how I survived this bullying. It stopped at that school but it continued at other schools. And remember we moved a lot. There was always something. I was fat. I had zits. I was dorky. I read too much. My clothes were crappy Kmart purchases. My hair was frizzy. There was always something. I learned to not let it show how much it hurt. I starved myself thin. I stole Clearasil to try to get rid of the zits. I hid in my books. 

Everyone told me to ignore it but years and years of being called ugly takes its toll on a person. My body became shaped by those words. Now, 30 years later, I still have moments when in the mirror I still see that girl who is fat, ugly and covered in acne. 

Writing a Life

Where does one begin a life story?
Life does not really move a long a straight line. There are no themes. No over arching lessons.

Memories are tricky material to weave into a story. When I look back over my life, there are many stories but they do not flow. Some of these stories are likely not even true, or at least did not happen the way I tell them. When I close my eyes, and think backwards through the years, the memories are fuzzy. They come in random bits, not in any kind of coherent order. I think of moments that stand out but that do not always connect neatly.

When I look back, there are not always stories or even words. There are times when what  I remember is a smell, a flash of touch, jumbled images packed together in poem. There are memories that I have created over pictures. These picture tales are so old that I no longer know if the memory came before the picture.

And my memories of my religious past come now with a whole set of theoretical considerations. They come with the concerns of a mother wondering about her own children and religion. They come both sanctified with nostalgia and demonized with old wounds.

Reluctance

Striking a balance between the beasties' plans and our plans is a constant struggle in our homeschooling journey. I struggle with my teacher side which wants to plan every little detail and my more hippie side which wants to let things just flow. There appears to me to be a middle road that meanders through these two extremes. My goal is to follow that road as best as possible.

This morning typified what I have learned about how the beasties work. Now given their own choice, they'd watch Netflix instant streaming or play X-Box all day (depending on which beastie you ask). When I call a quit on electronics, boy beastie will play with Legos and maybe even read. Girl beastie 1 and 2 event elaborate story lines with their stuffies. None of these things qualify as non-learning but I do think that a little structure is important. It's that middle road, and it's a middle road I try hard to get them to see rather than impose it on them. I know that they may go to college someday and that we have to start prepping them for a learning world that is not home. So after breakfast and some electronics time, I pushed, gently, towards the dreaded Math books. Boy beastie is quite good at math concepts but he detests the drudgery work associated with Math. Girl beastie 1 just plain hates Math.

As usual, there was whining, eye rolling and sulking. I counted to ten because lately my patience has been in short supply (no sleep and little baby). Instead of yelling, I just pointed out that they only had to do one sheet each and then they were done. I sat with them and nursed R so that they could have me there if needed. They both sat down, and did the work. And that's when the amazing thing happened. After helping them, I went to nurse R in our bedroom. Beastie C came in and asked me if she could do another page. Hell yeah! Please! Then Boy Beastie came in and wanted to show me his drawing of a Native American village and his "village." He explained to me what things were and then said he didn't see much alike in the two villages. He went on to list the differences. At the library, Beastie C sat and read three books on wolves including one with Native American myths. She speculated with me about why Native peoples might use the wolf so much in their stories ("The wolf can be very mysterious."). Boy beastie was engrossed in a book on the Hoover Dam.  When we got home, Beastie C did a bunch of science experiments, sharing her results with everyone which in turn got them excited to try them out. After dinner, all the beasties did wet watercolor paintings representing autumn. They were lovely and Beastie P did this wonderful abstract painting in which she captured water, leaves changing and pumpkins.

I told H how that it's neat that if I push them just a little, it seems to set off this chain reaction in which they engage in a variety of other learning activities that I don't have to push on them. The freedom comes with a little reminder of the restriction.

Old Age Learning

My high school French teacher was crazy. At some point, he gave up trying to teach us how to conjugate verbs and focused his energies on training us to sing in French and Latin. He claimed to have been a trained opera singer but considering the number of things he claimed to be, we were skeptical (he was crazy remember?). Needless to say my grasp of French was weak at best. I tried. I loved translating poems but it involved a lot of dictionary use. I felt unable to memorize vocabulary. And speaking French was out of the question. My inability to speak English well eroded my confidence. Plus we were too busy singing.

Flash forward to college. I'm dating someone who is obsessed with China. I mean, obsessed. He talks me into studying Chinese as my language. This may be the stupidest thing I've ever done. A, it's really hard. B, it's not the language that will get me into graduate school for English or for American Religion. C, the boyfriend dumps me and marries our teacher (not joking), and D, I end up marrying the hot exchange student from Mexico and reproduced many little beasties with him.

Now here I am still not knowing Spanish even though we've been married for almost 11 years, and I kind of lived in Mexico for awhile. Why? Well I suspect my in-laws ask that often. I'm sure my friends do as well. And oh yes, my professors who often ask me for Spanish pronunciation. It is a huge embarrassment to me. But my fear outweighs that embarrassment. I am so scared of failing. So scared that I just kept saying I was going to learn Spanish and then never did anything about it.

This came crashing in on me while I was filling out applications to Ph.D programs. One programs basically said they are not going to take you if you don't have the prerequisite two languages. I felt pretty down about it. I even cried a bit. But mostly I sat on the couch and whined about why I can't learn languages. H, that hot Mexican exchange student, essentially shot down all my reasons. At the time, it was super annoying and I kind of said mean things to him so he would leave me a lone to sulk.

And later, after everyone was sleeping, I thought about this whole language thing. I was angry over some comments that had been made when I foolishly whined on Facebook. I suspect the poster thought I was being "that American", you know the one who says dumb things like "You better speak American here." It was insulting to be lumped into that category when that wasn't the issue at all. What bugged me was that this poster had no idea how hard foreign languages can be for someone like me. I didn't even take  a language until high school as the American public school system doesn't feel the need to teach us foreign languages until then. Yeah private schools do it earlier but hell there was no way we could have afforded that kind of education. When I decided to major in the academy, no one sat with me and said "Chinese. No. Not unless you plan on studying something that has to do with China." I had no clue what it meant to major in the academy and certainly no idea of what I had to do to prepare myself for that life.

But really there's nothing I can do about those things. And I realize as I sat on the couch that I don't know if  I suck at languages because really I've never tried. I never had the opportunity to apply myself. More importantly, my beasties had sat there while I cried about what I perceived as my inability, my stupidity. I keep telling them that they can learn anything they apply themselves too. We home school because we believe that learning should be self-motivated and self-driven. We believe that with effort we can learn what we desire to know. In the course of about ten minutes I had shown my beasties that I didn't truly believe those things when they pertained to me.

Tonight I sat down with H's Spanish book, and began at chapter 1. It wasn't so bad. The beasties helped me. We serenaded their daddy to sleep with our Spanish.

Attachment

Thursday was spent in a constant haze of too much to do. I strapped Rowena to me, and just plowed through all the crap on my to-do list. We packed snacks, made lunches, prepared for my class, did math with the older beasties. She was attached to me physically but there was a gap. I didn't feel fully connected. At one level, I know that I can really be that attached 24/7. But these days are rough because I just never felt we had our little moments together. Nursing was rushed and spent with me busily typing and reading.

We dropped boy beastie off with his pal, and then zoomed over to my school. Rowena surprised us all by not screaming through the whole car trip. She started fussing a bit once we hit the last light before the parking lot. We rushed to get coffee for mama and chocolate milk for the girl beasties. We hurried from the cafe to my office, where I rushed nurse Rowena. I brought her to class, handed her off to her dad, taught a hell of a class (one of those rarefied beautiful moments where the class just gets it, and you did nothing but gently lead them there). After class, I got to nurse Rowena during my office hours but it was still a fast and furious pace.

One the way home, H offered to ride with her in the van because at this point she was super cranky. I drove the girl beasties home in H's car while he charioted Rowena. I should have enjoyed the relative peace (five years do not stop talking. Ever.). But instead I felt this pain, this tugging inside me. I yearned towards my baby. I had not renewed that sweet connection we have, and being apart from her, not close enough to hear her crying, to see in the rear view mirror her shock of black hair, hurt. I knew this tiny cut could not be healed until we laid together to nurture not just to eat.

And so we finally arrived home to lay down in our quiet room, just the two of us. I held her small round body against me as she nursed. We gazed at each other with nothing to buffer the moment. And I felt with each second, that invisible thread shine.