Detoxing Ungracefully

This weekend, for the first time in a long time, we didn't have any Saturday-gobbling plans. Ballet in the morning for Polly, church activity in the evening for which we would leave around 5:15 pm. Which meant a good long stretch of hours in the middle of the day for getting back on top of the flotsam and jetsam of Sloan Family life. This was good, because between parent-teacher conferences and American Education Week visits to the classroom and playing the harp in the evenings and having relatives and missionaries over, we'd been doing a lot of getting through things and not much getting on top of things for the past 2-3 weeks. So I was ambitious to do the following things:

• rake leaves
• pay bills
• finish/make progress on the crocheted rug for the girls' room
• scrub the bathtub
• do the Christmas letter
• file papers
• clean off my desk
• clean off the art desk
• move out the broken dryer and hook up the (hopefully) functional dryer
• go to the gym
• record and analyze our family expenditures
• finalize our December calendar
• catch up on my Book of Mormon reading
• make cookies for my neighbors
• do family history
• floss
• find a wheat grinder and grind the 50 tons of wheat we inherited from a sister in the ward.

(Okay, I may have employed some hyperbole in that list. Flossing, for example, might be expecting too much.)

Anyway, I actually got a reasonable amount done. After ballet, the kids and I made a Walmart run, and when we got home, I did a whirlwind cleaning of the house and then cranked out the bills. In the meantime, Dave went out to find some games from Goodwill for game night that night and do a couple of errands. The kids played played played (and by that I mean made a huge mess in the basement while intermittently gorging themselves on PBS Kids on the computer). After the bills, I tried to get up the energy to go rake leaves in the upper 30's gloom of a November afternoon, but I ended up curling up in bed to try to shake a headache and a bad mood. As I lay in bed drifting into a nap, I found myself wondering why I was so grumpy. Wasn't I glad that we weren't crazy busy? Wasn't I glad that we had a relaxing day with not much planned? Why couldn't I just be like Dave and take it easy in the morning and just enjoy a day off? As I pondered this, I found myself wondering if I was going through a detox process. It's not that I want to be busy all the time, or that I find myself depressed and without a purpose when I'm not busy and scheduled. I don't want my bow tightened all the time, and I look forward to the end of a busy season because I know that I need to regroup and get ready for the next round that will be coming soon enough. But I just don't really know how to detox gracefully. Detoxing for me means releasing all of the tensions and worries and nagging to do's that I've been thrusting aside while the Sloan Family Machine is functioning at full capacity. I've heard that when you start drinking a lot more water, it flushes toxins and impurities out of your system, and as they're flushed out, they make you break out and feel a little ill. But that's all just part of the process of getting them actually out. I don't know if the physiology of that is accurate, but it felt true to the emotional and spiritual process of coming off of a busy season. 

Anyway, this insight didn't necessarily change anything for me, but it gave me a framework for being patient with myself and for explaining to Dave why I'd been grouchy-ish all day. And it gave me the challenge of finding out how to detox more gracefully. Perhaps make sure that I'm listening to good music all day. Perhaps make sure that the gym happens before Walmart, since Walmart on a Saturday saps the life force out of anyone. Now the big question: will any of this help me to make the Christmas season more worshipful and meaningful?

Homework Time

I had parent-teacher conferences last week for the girls, and one of my take-aways was the need to give Polly more experience at home with focusing on tasks, practicing sight-words, basically becoming a more disciplined student. She's got a ways to go in developing those executive functioning skills, and evidently letting her draw elaborate storyboards for princess adventures and roller-skate around the house isn't facilitating them. I have to admit that I haven't taken her homework too seriously before now. SOmetimes Dave would do it with her, sometimes I would, sometimes we'd do it in the afternoon right after school, sometimes we'd do it in the morning before school. So Dave and I decided that it's time for some structure. The plan is that I will feed the kids dinner around 5 pm, when they're hungry and whiny and clingy anyway, and then when Dave gets home around 6, I'll sit down and do homework with her, and Dave will play with Joshey and Cici and get them ready for bed. We tried it out on Monday, and I learned a few things.

• Dinner isn't any easier when I'm the only one waiting tables. It's not tremendously easy anyway, with Cici and Joshey as the World's Messiest Eaters, not to mention the World's Pickiest Eaters (Cici, anyway). I feel the need to be training my kids in proper table manners (we have a little song for it: "Sit on bottom, use your forks! Chew your food and don't be rude!"), so by the end of dinner, I'm feeling grumpy and stressed. Then I need to clean up the table in order to do homework on it--reference the world's greatest mess above. Dave usually walks in around this time, and the only thing I have for him is stress and grumpiness. 
• Now that I'm thinking about Polly's homework in terms of a practicing ground for improving her performance at school, I'm more heavy-handed about how she does it. I want her to be sitting still, focusing, doing her best work, not being silly. Every lapse of attention, every resistance to my feedback or help translates in my mind to the reason she's not getting into a good groove at school. Which means that she's feeling a lot of emotional pressure from me, because I'm feeling a lot of emotional pressure about trying to help her succeed in the classroom. 
• Which all adds up to: argh. My instinct is that I'm not approaching this the right way. It's okay for family life to have intense times, times that kids need to learn to do things simply because they need to be done. But there also needs to be time to just enjoy each other's company, time to not have the emphasis be on constant training and correcting. At least, I think there should be. And I wonder if I'm crowding out the enjoyment by the stress I'm feeling and conveying to my children about their behavior. Shouldn't dinner be about reconnecting with everyone, processing our days together? Not about "Cici, sit down! Joshey, do NOT throw your water! Yes, Polly, you're the neatest one." 

Well, I have more thoughts, but it's now the end of the evening, and I'm tired. More on this later, I'm sure.

"Hey, I have an idea!"

It's 8:06 pm, and I'm here in the girls' dark bedroom, Old Testament stories on (we're in the middle of Elijah right now). But it's anything but quiet. Polly decided that she wanted to rearrange her bedroom so she could be closer to the portable DVD player, so for the past 10 minutes, she's been wrestling her mattress off the box springs and hauling it across the room. I'm actually very impressed with this feat. She asked me for help, and I said, entirely remorselessly, "Nope! I'm doing my computer work!" She didn't need my help after all, as it turned out. And as she tugged and pushed and shouldered it around, she'd punctuate her efforts with "Hey, I have an idea!" and then she'd run over and throw a blanket or a pillow on the mattress. Funny girl. I like that she's getting to know that wonderful feeling of having an idea and having the power to carry it out--and having that confidence boost of having done it.

This is apropos of very little, but I've been recently thinking about the fact that Polly's physical build is like mine--tall for her age, and strong and solid. Cici is built like Dave, tall and skinny, with a lot of natural grace. I've wondered if Polly will ever wish that her body were different--more like Cici's, perhaps, or more like one of her friends or cousins. I certainly went through that, wishing that I were shorter, more slender, had a different shaped face, had different colored hair. Polly has already wished that she had "golden hair" so that she could be in the "blond hair club" on the bus (that's a subject for another night). As Polly grows up, I want her to come to value her strong, capable body. I have been grateful for the ability to pitch right in and move pianos with the best of the men. Being strong and able to bear a lot of physical stress has become an important part of my identity, and I wish I'd arrived at that place much earlier, in my insecure teens. We'll have to see. In the meantime, I'm glad that Polly now knows she can move her mattress wherever she wants in her room. Now to convince her to move in back in the morning...

Today was a normal day. Rainy, which I always like. Although I've started using cloth diapers again, and yesterday I hung a load out on the clothesline, then neglected to bring them in before the rain started. Ah well. They'll just smell extra fresh, I suppose.

Our line-up today was doing morning work, going to the gym (yes, we've become a gym membership family. It feels like the height of luxury to drop Joshey off at the kids' club and then go use a bunch of expensive fitness equipment for as long as I want), playing with little Sebastian after his grandma dropped him off, lunch for two little boys, naps for two little boys, a very little bit of bill-paying and mail-opening for me, then getting Cici off the bus and, for once, giving myself over to playing with her. Cici is such good company, I love her dramatic intonations ("Do you want to be CROCODILES with me?" she'll sing, her voice going up and down the treble clef), and she is so very easily pleased. She also put herself down for a nap in the afternoon, which meant that she was good company all the way till bedtime :). Which was a good thing, because we spent most of the afternoon in the car, dropping off Sebastian and then taking dinner to a new mom in the ward. If I were my neighbor, I would take a seat by my front window and just laugh every afternoon around 4 pm, when I'm loading up the car to take Sebastian back. First, Joshey gets strapped in, a look of resignation on his face. He always is the first in and the last out. Then back in the house for Cici, inevitably followed by a sprint back to the house to bring out handfuls of apples for the kids. I badger Polly in, and finally, I bring out Sebastian and his bags. Efficient I am not.

Tomorrow...I'm going to New York City! Dave gave this trip to me for my birthday in July. I'll be visiting Benjamin and Shayla, arriving on Friday evening and leaving Sunday afternoon. I'll have over 6 hours on the Megabus to read any book of my choosing, and I can even sleep in! This is going to be wonderful. The country mouse going to the city, with the best of city mice to show her around.

Trying Something New

So here's the problem: around 10:30 am, when I'm feeling energetic and things are getting done around the house, I find myself thinking, "Today is definitely the day. I'm going to post an update on the blog. How could I not write about this wonderful, golden stage of life when Joshey runs around like a little Rumplestiltskin and Cici requests the same three books at bedtime every day and Polly documents her entire brain through stick-figure drawings?" But by the end of the day, I'm thoroughly sick of myself and my wonderful, golden stage of life, and all I want to do is scrunch myself up in bed and read the scriptures until I fall asleep. 

But here's the other problem: there are probably only two people who will read these updates with any regularity or interest, but I love them both very much. And I have the sense of depriving them of some happiness by not writing these updates. So I want to figure out how to make this happen.

Here's my current plan, which I'm debuting tonight. I do the bedtime routine with the girls, but instead of falling asleep in Polly's bed and then dragging myself downstairs at 10 pm, I bring my laptop upstairs, and while the girls are listening to the Old Testament Stories DVD, I'll check my e-mail (which also often doesn't happen) and post something. It might not happen every night, but it would be hard to do much worse than going silent for 9 months. 

So enough explanations. On to the updates. Yesterday, voting day, the kids had a school holiday. We bustled around in the morning, getting the dishwasher loaded, making beds, starting a load of laundry, doing our morning work. Then around 10 am on a gorgeous, sunny, mid-60's morning, we jumped in the car and headed to the zoo. We got a membership for Christmas, and I love the frequent trips we've taken. I warned the kids that today was not a carousel or train day--just a see the animals day. And they seemed okay with that. 

We have our zoo visits down to a science: set up the sit-and-stand stroller, tie the plastic bag full of food to one of the handles, hang my purse on the other handle, strap Joshey in the front, sit Cici in the middle, and have Polly stand in the back. Then mommy flexes her muscles and pushes everyone to the shuttle stop. We saw the new penguin exhibit, got great seats to a puppet show, and then did the rounds of rhinos, zebras, flamingoes, elephants, and chimps, ending with a visit to the goat petting farm, which is Cici's absolutely favorite spot ("I'm Mary, I'm Mary! These are my little lambs!"). As we walked between exhibits, I gave the kids slices of cheese, graham crackers, cucumber slices, muffins, and Halloween candy. 

"I'm pretty good at this," I thought, as I was passing another mom whose umbrella stroller had just fallen over from being loaded down with too many bags. "It really isn't fair that I'm the stay-at-home parent that gets to do these kinds of things in the middle of the day. How much would Dave love to see Joshey imitating that elephant? But he has to sit in front of a computer working on spreadsheets all day." 

This is an internal conversation that I often have. 

"Of course, Dave gets to go to the bathroom by himself whenever he wants, and he gets to sit down and have lunch without waiting tables for toddlers. And I had to work hard this morning to get the housework all done and ready for us to be gone. But still. It doesn't seem fair that I get to have all the fun." 

An hour later, after we'd washed hands from petting the goats and taken a few turns on the barn slide, I was turning the stroller toward the shuttle stop to start for home. As we passed a little gift kiosk, Polly asked if she could run in and look at things. "Sure," I said, not thinking things through very well. "But remember, today is not a buying things day. And make sure to catch up with us!"

I continued pushing the stroller up the ramp, and as I reached the top of it, Polly came sprinting after me, tears streaming down her face. 

"Mom! You have to come see this thing! I really really really really want it!"

Oh boy, I thought, Strategy 1: change the subject. 

"Wow, you're a super fast runner, Polly! Were you worried we were leaving you? We were just going up the ramp because the stroller can't go up the stairs. Why don't you point at the thing you wanted to show me from up here?"

Polly, still crying, pointed at a pink-and-black striped stuffed tiger attached to a stick that acted like a leash. For the record, Polly has about 100 stuffed animals at home, and she'd brought a giraffe to the zoo precisely to prevent this kind of situation. 

Strategy 2: say no in a non-inflammatory way. "That looks like a really cool stuffed animal. You love pretending to take your stuffed animals for walks! Today isn't a buying things day, but shall we add that to your Christmas list?"

But Polly wasn't having any of it, and as I inexorably took her away from the kiosk, Cici decided to join in the fun by wailing about not being able to see the penguins again. And then, as I wheeled up to the shuttle, the back wheel on the stroller fell off and the plastic lunch bag split down the middle and spilled its contents on the ground. Doing some deep breathing, I got the stroller, the food, two screaming girls, and one angelic little boy into the shuttle. 

Okay, I thought to myself, Polly needs time to get herself under control, but I can give Cici something to eat, and that'll distract her. I pulled out a cup of yogurt, took off the top, and stuck in a spoon. Again, I wasn't really thinking this through. 

"Your little girl is getting really messy," one of the other parents commented to me. Sure enough. Peach yogurt all the way down her dress. That's what happens when a 3 year old eats yogurt on a jolting shuttle bus. 

We made it to the entrance, and I got the stroller down, then wrestled the wheel back on the spoke while a zoo volunteer hovered close by, trying to figure out how to tell the lady with two screaming girls and a broken stroller to move along because she was holding up the shuttle schedule. 

On the way back out, there was another kiosk with another pink-and-black tiger, and Polly burst into tears anew, declaring that she was never going to school or ballet again, she was only going to the zoo. 

By this time, we were half way to the car, passing by a broad expanse of grass covered with fall foliage.

"Okay, let's just stop here, shall we? Let's just take a moment to calm down." I wheeled us onto the grass, and then I proceeded to completely ignore my tearful Cici and my worked-up Polly while I put the lunch things in my purse and gathered up the trash and the torn plastic bag. Then I took out my baby wipes and tried cleaning up Cici's dress, only to conclude that it couldn't be done. As it was a temperate day, I took her dress off and wrapped her up, Baby Tarzan style, in the pashmina I keep in my purse. By then, I noticed the poopy odor coming from Joshey's backside, so I changed his diaper as well. This whole time, Polly is sulking, and Cici is finding cause after cause for fresh tears (she couldn't climb the tree! She didn't WANT the giraffe! She was all done with yogurt!). Oh yes, and we were right next to the walkway where all of the other parents were walking by with their well-behaved children. I could almost hear them muttering to themselves, "What is that lady doing there, surrounded by trash and dirty diapers and crying children? And why is that poor little girl in nothing but her underwear and a scarf?!"

My strategy to calm the girls down by stopping on the grass clearly wasn't working, so we trucked on through the last quarter mile to the car. By the time I got the stroller collapsed and back in the car, Joshey was asleep in the car. By the time we'd gotten on the freeway, Cici was asleep. And by the time we'd made it back to Parkville and Polly had gone in with me to vote, she had forgotten that life without a pink-and-black tiger wasn't worth living. 

That night at dinner, I told Dave that I took back everything I'd been thinking about feeling guilty for getting to be the stay-at-home parent. By golly, I earn every good moment I get through all the impossible moments that surround them! I also told him that every public place needs someone, some parent, to be "that parent." That day, I was "that mom." The one with the naked child, the one with the bratty kindergartner, the one with everything that was falling apart. Maybe it's like jury duty, and I won't have to be that mom for another year. Wouldn't that be nice?

Let Sunday Go

Well, it's 11:19 on a Sunday night, and about 45 minutes ago, I sent an e-mail to Mama telling her that I was going to bed. Such is the self-deception of the night before Monday (though wouldn't it be wonderful if I could somehow hear her voice echoing down the basement stairs, saying, "Sweetie! Time to turn the light off!"). Sunday is almost always the night on which I stay up the latest. I'm waiting for the weekly harvest of family letters, which is a high point in my week and definitely worth waiting up for. So far, Mama, Benjamin, and Rachel have submitted their offerings, along with Dave's parents, as they so faithfully do every week. Daddy's will be coming along soon enough, I'm sure. Rosalynde wrote last week, and she's much more considerate than I am about the degree to which she'll make her siblings and parents read minute accounts of everything that happened in her kids' lives, so I don't expect to hear from her this week. If I'm lucky, Abraham will send a brief epistle which will capture the matter-of-factness, modesty, and goodness of this brother of mine (though he, too, sent a letter just three weeks ago, and he averages once a semester these days). Gabrielle updated her blog last week, and probably will this week, so she's not necessarily tied to the Sunday night filing deadline. I get my Christian-fix from Facebook and on the phone (time for another conversation, Christian!), though I'm not above placing a little guilt trip in his path to get an honest-to-goodness letter every now and then. Christine will often write for her and Brigham, so maybe something from her will appear in my inbox, and send me back to my perennial schemings about how to fit in a trip to Utah over the summer. And, of course, we'll hear from Eva tomorrow, on her P-day in Russia. So within 24 hours, I will again feel connected to this family of origin of mine, and I'll have some wind beneath my wings for the week to come. I'll resolve to work a little harder, like Mama and Daddy and Benjamin. I'll resolve to have more intelligent conversations, like Rachel. I'll resolve to take pictures and post them to my blog, so Gabrielle can see how desperately I need her to take pictures of my family again, since I'm bungling the job famously. (Boston! Less than a month! Pictures of me and Joshey!) And then I'll take a deep breath, and I'll plunge into the week. I think that I let Sundays go with the same reluctance that I leave my parents and my siblings at the end of every family reunion. I know I'll see you again. I know life wouldn't work if it were a non-stop family reunion (or a non-stop Sabbath). But still.

It's 11:41 now. Time to let Sunday go. It will come again next week.

My Book of Life

I've been turning over a pet project in my mind for the past year or so. I would love to chronicle some of the people who have entered into my book of life because of the way their lives have touched mine. My life is abundant with riches and treasures, both tangible and intangible, and all of these treasures, every single one, is a gift from someone. A project of this sort would require some diligence and staying power, and I'm still mastering that skill (though, for the record, I'd like it known that I am unfailingly diligent in the brushing of my teeth and the application of mascara every morning. If only I could be so diligent about saying my morning prayers and reading scriptures!). But Valentine's Week seems a good time to start, even if that start will prove to be inconsistent and fitful. And the first entry in my book of life, of course, belongs to my mother.

I've been telling the story of my mother for my whole life. How she was raised on an Indian reservation (she used to do presentations in my elementary school classrooms wearing her Navajo dress and bringing her papoose carrier and fry bread. No, she's not actually Native American, though you might think that, given her black hair and high cheekbones. My grandpa was a range conservationist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so they moved around from reservation to reservation). How she met my dad in the Honors Reading Room at BYU, and she was everything that he had hoped for in a wife--smart, pretty, musical, hard-working, and a committed disciple to Jesus Christ. How every employer or professor she ever had wanted her to stay on with them and take over their work when they were done. How she bore and raised eleven children instead of running large companies or teaching at universities (though she actually does teach at universities now, as a religious teacher). How she bore and raised these eleven children in expensive Southern California in a one-income family. My mother managed to pay for private piano lessons and instrument lessons for all of us--that's about 100 cumulative years of paying for music lessons, if I'm factoring in all of the variables correctly. We ate a lot of scrambled eggs and pasta and red sauce, and I am so grateful that I have a robust musical education instead of memories of steak and pork chops. There are so many other parts to the story of my mother. She cared for my little brother Jacob during the year and a half that he fought cancer, and when he died at age 5, she spent the next year writing a book about him to try to overcome her grief. Six years later, she lost her last baby, Isaac, when he was born too early. Loss, grief, faith, pressing on, compassion, consecration--in the emotional lexicon of my brain, these words belong to my mother. But then, there's the many memories of seeing her at the kitchen table with the road atlas and a sheet of paper in front of her, carefully plotting out our annual family camping trips--an exhaustive itinerary complete with mile counts and equipment lists. There's the old book of "Having Fun in Southern California for Kids" (I made that title up--can't remember the real one), from which she planned summer and spring break and weekend outings to the California missions, Solvang, Olivera Street, the Central Library, the beach. My mother would claim that she's not good at having fun--and I have to say, you would be hard pressed to find a woman less likely to enjoy a manicure and lunch at a nice restaurant with a group of friends. But she created the conditions for fun and discovery and imagination and wonderment for her kids, and also for herself, I'm sure. Despite the fact that she was always holding a baby and handling a toddler, I know that she loved absorbing the rich history of Southern California, a place that I don't know if she'd even been to before she and my dad moved there after law school.

I could tell stories about my mother forever, and I probably will be. Telling stories about her is my way of navigating myself through the waterways of motherhood, as I continue to enter into the phase of life that she was in when I first came to know the world. My little Cici comes and wants to bounce on my crossed ankle as I'm nursing Joshey on the couch, and I remember doing that same thing to my mom as she was nursing Brigham. I find myself irrationally aggravated at Polly when she smears her fingers all over our front plate glass window, and I remember my mother's own battle against smudged windows. I find myself putting on mascara in the morning and putting on jewelry on Sunday, and I wonder if my children will remember me as being as beautiful as I thought Mama was. She defined beauty to me--her dark hair, her slender frame, her collection of Sunday dresses and Sunday shoes in the closet. Snow White couldn't have been more beautiful than my mom, I knew.

I don't mean to idealize my mother (though there would certainly be plenty of grist for that mill). One of the things that I value the most about her is that I've seen her grow and change as she's moved through different periods of life. She wants to keep growing and changing and progressing--she doesn't think she's perfect, and she's not going to stop battling the weaknesses that she feels she has. That is comforting to me, as I am so acutely aware of my own imperfections, even those that I think I should have overcome by now. My mother's greatest gift to me, I think, aside from giving me life, is her ability to see simultaneously my weaknesses and my potential. I know that I can't hide anything from her, no matter how much I might wish that some part of me didn't exist. But I also know that she sees in me infinite potential, infinite capacities for goodness and growth. And because she sees this, I believe it, too. Isn't that an amazing gift for a mother to give her daughter? The sure knowledge that the person who brought you into this life thinks that you will make good of it.

Happy Valentine's Day to the person who taught me first and most about love.

Hibernation

I've been hibernating from the world for the past couple of weeks--hoping, I suppose, that when I poke my head out, both the world and I will be full of springtime warmth and goodness. Well, no luck on the first count, though the weak winter sun is enough to warm our kitchen a bit, even if it can't melt the snow outside. As for the second count, I have learned plenty of times before now that the advent of some anticipated date or event doesn't flip some internal switch that activates the good habits and noble character that are slow to accrue in me. I did not become perfect when I started college. I did not live the flawless life on my mission. I certainly didn't become the ideal student when I started graduate school. And somehow I don't even approximate the discipline and hard work of my mother, now that I am a mother myself. But, in the words of Theodore Roethke, "I learn by going where I need to go." So I can't hibernate forever and hope that I'll wake up as the exemplary person. I'll blunder into a serviceable life if I keep at it. It won't come any other way, at least. All of which reminds me of something that my sister Rachel told me. She learned it from her mission president. "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." The inverse is also true, of course--if something is worth doing, it's certainly worth doing well. But if it's worth doing at all, it's also worth doing badly, partially, start-and-stoppedly until you can do it better. You can't simply not do it until you can do it well, otherwise we wouldn't be able to do anything that doesn't come to us naturally. So I'll do the things that are worth doing in any manner I can, and I'll try to do them frequently enough to get the practice that I need to do them better.

Well, I didn't intend for this to become a cliche-ridden pep talk. What I really wanted was to give some snippets of Sloan life from the past couple of weeks:

Polly has discovered our treasury of "Harold and the Purple Crayon," and she's enjoyed re-enacting some of the stories on our picture wall.

A trip to Olive Garden--it's always important to document the fun things we do, lest our children doubt that we actually did them, don't you agree?

We've had some little babies in our house recently, and Joshey has been very drawn to them. If I could handle it, would 12 months be the perfect sibling interval? (TOTALLY facetious question, since the first condition in that question would never be met)

A couple of weeks ago, we spent a VERY long afternoon traipsing from car dealership to car dealership trying to resolve some minor issues with our minivan. The kids were truly phenomenal over the course of the 6-hour adventure. As were the other customers who didn't mind the occasional preschooler sprawled out over the floor.