Ceeya Cinco

Today, my beloved Ceeya turns five! Here she is, enjoying a birthday chocolate muffin before school this morning. 

I can't even describe how much Ceeya has changed our lives, and (warning, cliche) how much richer our family is for having her in it. We were not lonely before as three, but now I wonder what we did with only one child. I can see how some people keep trying for just one more kid. I don't see how they afford it, but I get it. Each kid seems to magnify the love in the house. It doesn't seem possible, but love just magically expands.

Sweet Dub and I joke about Ceeya being our Unexpected Journey, and it has been one wild and crazy journey that has taught us so much about each other and about ourselves. She is so amazing and lovely and needed in our family. How I worried that she might be overshadowed by Viva! It seems silly now, since she is such a big personality, but Viva is a tough act to follow.

I need not have worried. My little busy bee is no shrinking violet.

 

Can't wait to see what comes next. Happy Birthday, my babygirl!

Long as God Can Grow it

You haven’t heard from me in a while, I know. I should write some kind of treatise about work-life balance, about making time for creative pursuits, about this completely messed-up capitalist system that we have all been suckered into, or I might even write about six bad work habits and how to correct them so you can streamline your day, maximize your time, reach optimum productivity and all kinds of hooptedoodle.

Okay, well, not doing that today. I have serious problems.

I used to have a giant mane of curly unruly hair:

  

It took years for me to learn how to deal with it, to embrace it as uniquely mine. But every now and then (every five years or so) I get tired of dealing with it. There is SO MUCH of it. I could knit a sweater for a cat with all the hair I shed every day, which would be a completely pointless exercise, but honestly, sometimes I get tired of dealing with the sheer bulk of it. And then I find myself thinking about cutting it into a bob, or even (lured by pics of Halle Berry or Eva Pigford - oops now Eva Marcille), a cute little curly pixie, like so:

 

 
 
So last fall I cut it all off, right before Thanksgiving. And I liked it. And here’s the thing:  I have a lot of hair, and it grows really fast. If I wanted to have short hair, I had to commit to a regular schedule of haircuts. That quickly grew tiresome, and I missed being able to put my hair up, or back, or whatever.

Now I am growing it out. And I have middle-aged mom hair. And I hate it.

The standard advice here when you’re growing out your hair and are in the unhappy middle stage is to do something fun like coloring it. Oh, but that would be too easy. At the same time I cut my hair, I committed to no longer coloring it. I turned 45 a couple of weeks ago, and you know what? I think it is perfectly reasonable for someone my age to go gray.

The combination of the silver coming in and the hair growing out means I am doubly unhappy with this middle stage. My hair does not lie down until it gets long and the weight of it stretches the curl out a bit, so right now it is just growing up, stretching toward the sky, and it won’t be tamed. It is long enough to look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

or maybe this:  

 

And yet it doesn’t look like that, not anywhere close.  I am not a high-maintenance person. I am a big fan of the “five minute face,” and my hair styling routine pretty much takes about five to ten minutes in the morning. I am struggling with hair bands and headbands and little clips and such. All this to say: not feeling quite the kickass glamour goddess these days.

Poor little me, I know. But we’ve all been there. I am trying my best. A wise person once said it’s not what’s on your head but what’s underneath. I’m working on that, too.

 

 

 

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Thanks to the kindness of some old and very dear friends of Sweet Dub's, we spent most of last week at a beautiful resort near Palm Springs. For free! We got a block of rooms and our kids played happily for days in the pool. I feel very blessed.

To the obvious question, "Wasn't it obscenely hot in the desert in July?" I say to you, yes. Yes, it was.

However, the resort had several pools and its own little water park on the premises. Our friends rented a cabana at the pool so we had plenty of water and shade. And one day they took all the kids to an off-site water park and gave us a day to ourselves! I can't even tell you how nice it was to have some carefree grown-up time. Look upon our glee!






I am super leery of water mixing with my phone so I have no pics of the kids in the pool. But here they are, getting ready for fun in the sun:







And some shots of the hotel grounds:







It was 107 degrees out in Rancho Mirage, and just 100 miles away and a few days later, it's 71 degrees at the beach today. Pretty amazing.




Back to work on Monday. Feeling pretty rested...although we came back to a notice of a rent increase. Ahh, reality. There you are!

Nonetheless, can't beat the lazy days of summer. Hope you are enjoying yours!

On Not Being Nice

I have been sitting with the verdict of the George Zimmerman trial all week. I have been sitting with it, creepy mournful ghastly thing, hunkering on my shoulder and poking its poky tendrils through my brain, and it is a nasty tear-making creature. Ignoring it is not making it go away.

 

Many people have written about the murder of Trayvon Martin and the context of this case, far more eloquently than I could ever do. The vilification of Trayvon, whose side of the story we will never really know, has been sickening. People attribute and project all sorts of things on this dead boy that it is impossible to know. I have been reading all different viewpoints, and it has been eroding my stomach lining, and I just have to stop.

 

However, among the many, many pieces I read this week, two really struck me as useful:

 (1) At Native-Born, Faiqa Khan writes (and btw, hat-tip to Kristen at Rage Against the Minivan for her amazing roundup of links, via which I found this):  We acquit each other when we look the other way when a remark is made about “those people” and why they are “that way.” We acquit each other when we accept the idea that “race is not an issue.”

I want to tell you all, for your own good, stop saying that. If you think race isn’t an issue, then race is most definitely an issue for you. When you pretend something does not exist, you give it power. …You cannot destroy that which you think does not exist. You cannot heal a sickness if you refuse to believe that you are sick. You deny a sickness, though, and it only grows. 

 

(2)  And over at Mocha Momma, two old posts which are not related to Trayvon, but which gave me a lot to chew on: one, where Kelly Wickham recounts going to BlogHer in New York and having to tell off aloud-mouthed woman on the bus; and two, where she describes overhearing a loud racist conversation and how she responded. (Warning:  this second post also later contains one of the most heartbreaking stories that you might ever read about her dad’s ugly encounter with racism as a child. It wrecked me.)

 

This week I have been thinking a lot about the moments when I have been confronted with prejudiced behavior and I have not wanted to confront the behavior because I am at work or at a party where I don’t know many people, and I don’t want people to feel uncomfortable. But *I* am uncomfortable. It is this socialization to be quiet, not to make a fuss, which allows behavior like this to continue. Unabated, because I don’t do my part to abate it. I can’t wring my hands about racism continuing to exist if I am not actively doing my part to help erase it.

 

I am a white black woman. Both of my parents are light-skinned black folks. Many people in my family can pass for white, and many have (they don’t talk to the rest of us). In the day-to-day, black people for the most part recognize me as one of them – because most African American families run the gamut of skin color, and inevitably I am told “You look like my niece,” or “You remind me of my cousin.” Most white people do not realize I am black unless I explicitly say so. I have the privilege of being able to fly under the radar, so to speak. I recognize this is a privilege, but I have never enjoyed it. Sometimes people act like I am playing a nasty joke on them when they discover I am black.

 

At any rate, I know where this silence comes from, and it is hard to get past. Many members of my immediate family are “ethnically ambiguous,” and they have learned it is better to be silent in the face of prejudice, to go along to get along. And that worked for them, I guess, but at the price of their own self-worth. Because to ignore what you are, to deny what you are, means that there is something implicitly wrong with what you are. And that is just bullshit.

 

There are times when I do speak up. There are times when I am already so weary of the person in question (for other reasons) that I don’t feel like making it a “teachable moment.” There are times when I am so shocked by what someone has said that I can’t speak. But the times when I don’t speak up? They eat away at me. It’s poisonous.

 

Coming back around to my point: this week I’ve decided to stop being nice. I’m not going to be nasty, but I’m not going to keep my mouth shut. This way, over here? It’s the way forward. And it won’t reverse the verdict, and it won’t bring Trayvon back to his family. But it will help me move toward a world I feel more comfortable in.

 

Fighting the Funk

I am in a bad place, for a variety of reasons, and I have cut back again on blogging even though I want to do it. I seem unable to come up with a coherent interesting post. Added to that, today I got some bad news which is very personal and not something I can share - not just here, but with hardly anyone but Sweet Dub. He is already stressed out - we have some scary health things going on in our extended family - and I don't want to add to that, so for the moment I am keeping it to myself.

I am awash in anxiety and can't talk to anyone about it. It's very lonely. So I am feeling very anti-social and while Sweet Dub had arranged a full day of activities with friends for the 4th, I decided to sit this one out. He took the kids out and I have spent the day alone for the most part.

Some people when they are anxious turn to drugs or alcohol. Me? I turn to Windex and the vacuum cleaner. I clean house, perhaps because when things are more orderly I feel more calm.

My apartment is nice and tidy. I am exhausted. Periodically today I have burst into tears several times. Crying and cleaning is quite tiring.

I am frustrated and weary with the onslaught of obstacles thrown in my way. I know I am blessed and rich in many things: my little family is intact, healthy and fairly happy most of the time; I have a steady job; we have food and clean water and a roof over our heads. I know this and I am grateful for these things every day.

But. BUT. We are struggling financially and it is testing our marriage. We remain committed to each other for better or worse, as the vow goes. But it has changed the way we interact with each other. June was horrible. We snapped at each other a lot, and we fought without really making up fully afterward, which is very unusual. We don't fight. We disagree sometimes, of course, but we rarely fight.

This shift in our dynamic is only making me more anxious. So around we go.

Why am I writing this? To make sense of it myself, I suppose. I believe we will pull this car out of the ditch even if we have to do it with our teeth. But I am suffering right now, down here in this blasted hole. It's down and dirty and not in a fun way.

I hope to post again soon from a better place. On this Independence Day, praying for freedom and the return of good humor, and potato salad. The best to you and yours.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

It is what it is.

Blurry photo courtesy of my iPhone. Local mural in Culver City, CA.

And then there are the times when it feels like this modern life has swept me away, and I swirl around, grabbing at this piece of flotsam to anchor myself and get my work done, floating on this piece of jetsam to pay attention to my family, who is also bobbing about precariously. It has been a busy time.

We have had various large car-related bills in the last few weeks, some anticipated (both of our car registrations due in the same month) and some completely unexpected (two flat tires, so two new tires; both car batteries died within a week of each other, so two new batteries; and my car still needs two new tires as the treads are very worn but now I’m broke). I’m trying to work out what this means, if anything. Is this some sort of cosmic message that we need to slow down?

 

Over the same time period, we’ve seen the end of the school year, and with it, the end of preschool. Ceeya will enter kindergarten and will turn five this year. My oldest, who was only born five minutes ago, is ten years old. I will turn 45 this summer. Time is rocketing by. Each day I try to be fully present for my children, and sometimes I fail. As the primary breadwinner in our household I feel I must be extra responsible to my job, and that takes a lot of energy – and sometimes, a lot of tongue-biting, which is extra tiring. (Lord, don’t let me get started on that.) I want to do a good job but I don’t want to invest all of myself in it. I need the best part of myself for my family.

Viva asked me last night if I could go on a field trip with summer camp today, and I had to say no. Her dad would usually go, but his computer was down all week and is finally working as of last night, so he is behind on his photo and film editing. I hate to tell her no.

What I am getting at here is that I am feeling a bit melancholy these days, and wishing things would slow down a bit. But I am realizing that in whatever way possible, I have to do what I can to dial things back. I am trying to figure out how to simplify a bit so we are all happier.

I know, I am not responsible for anyone’s happiness. So maybe what I should aim for is that our home life is a little less hectic, a little calmer, and that I approach it with more joy than I currently do. I say to my kids sometimes, “Life is not a carnival! We can’t be doing something spectacular every minute!” This is usually when they have had a wonderful day and then still find something to whine about, as kids do when they are tired from having a wonderful day. And so, for myself, too:  I know I cannot expect life to be a carnival every minute. But it sure ain’t all cotton candy and gleeful shrieking right now.

I could use a little more carnival and a lot less of the swirling muddy water. Putting on my party hat and trying to remain open to whatever comes next, to know that there is a reason for this season of clouds instead of sun.

The Couch

I am lying on the couch in my mother's house. Everyone else is still asleep. I have been up since about 4 AM.

Sweet Dub is out of town for work. My mom invited me and the girls to sleep over but once we arrived she kept telling me she really hadn't thought it through. In a 3400 square foot, 5 bed, 4.5 bath house, there was nowhere for us to sleep or bathe.

My mom has a mental illness, and one of the ways it manifests is hoarding. Her house is not like the TV show Hoarders: Buried Alive, but there are rooms which are unusable. I thought we could sleep in my grandma's old room but that has become impassable. Instead we have bunked down on couches and on the floor.

The half bath on the ground floor is always clean and in working order but there is no shower there. My mom didn't want us to use her bathroom because we would have to pass through her bedroom to get to it. My sister and her family also live there, and their bathrooms are clean, but they were out of town and there is some weirdness about using their space when they are not home. (My sister actually keeps a separate refrigerator from my mom - her family's food is in the garage. They like to very clearly delineate their space.)

So: my mom said we could use my grandmother's bathroom but she would have to clean it out.

I went into the bathroom, where I never go, and realized I would actually have to pull boxes and baskets of stuff out of the shower before we could even clean. Okay, I did that. And the bathroom itself wasn't horribly dirty - it just hasn't been used literally in two years since my grandma passed. Lots of dust.

My mom started cooking dinner and enjoying her granddaughters. I could hear them talking and laughing.

Down the hall, I scrubbed down every surface and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. And as I was doing so all my anger and hurt over years suddenly was gone and in their place came an acceptance. My mother is ill and she needs me to be there. In my mind I kept hearing my grandma, who throughout her illness told me and my sister, "I hope you are as devoted to your mother as she has been to me."

And suddenly my relationship with her has changed, and I am at peace with it for the first time in a very long time. I realize I need to be of service to her, out of love, and that is what she needs most right now - to be loved, just as she is. She is ill. She is ill. As much as I wish it were different, I can't beat my head against the wall of that wishful thinking in my every interaction with her. I realized she is ill, and her behavior and flustered apologies indicate she is embarrassed and ashamed. And I can't contribute to that.

I don't speak much about my spiritual beliefs here because I feel they are intensely private for me, but I feel God lifted the fog from my eyes yesterday and today I am looking at the world differently, more compassionately than the day before. And it happened while I was scrubbing the floor around the toilet.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone (from the couch, where I slept next to my nephews' bearded lizard last night.)

Perfect Vision

Photo:  Eye Test, by John LeMasney, Creative Commons

My darling husband is in a bit of a funk. This is hard for me, because he is generally a positive person and he is always working toward something. He is having some moments of self-doubt, not sure of what direction he wants to pursue, frustrated because the hooks he is putting into the water are luring no big fish.

 
“I’m thinking we need to do a vision board,” I said to him this weekend. “You need to be able to really envision what you want. It can be very simple, but I think you need something to look at every day in your workspace so you can see clearly what you’re working toward. Even if it’s something as simple as what you want your home office to look like, where you’d store your cameras and video equipment – just something positive to move toward and look forward to.” 

Many years ago I was introduced to the concept of a vision board (sort of the Pinterest of its time) through The Artist’s Way. Vision boards are boards you create to graphically illustrate your hopes and dreams – what you want to see in your life. The process is designed to help you create a clear, very detailed picture in your mind of what you want for all aspects of your life.

When I made mine, I was close to 30 years old, single, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Oh, and my 18-year-old cat had died. I was doing a lot of soul searching and I realized I was lonely and kind of directionless. I found some lovely recycled deep purple paper, took a stack of magazines and a glue stick, and went to town. My vision board included a handsome black man, an adorable brown-skinned baby, a cat, a dog, a writing table, lots of pictures of nature, a cup of tea, and a beautiful woman with a gorgeous smile who to me just screamed “happiness” and “fulfillment.” I hung the board on the closet door in my bedroom.

Within a year I met the handsome black man who would become my husband, and 18 months after that had my firstborn adorable brown-skinned baby. I have no idea where that vision board is today (we have moved approximately 700 times in the intervening years), but Sweet Dub still teases me about it to this day. As a toddler, Viva looked eerily similar to the vision of the baby I had. He jokes that I dreamed her into existence.

I believe our success in life is in direct proportion to our clarity of purpose. After thinking about it, Sweet Dub agreed that perhaps visioning would help him focus. He has been trying all different kinds of things in an effort to create some income streams, which is admirable, but it translates into his energy going in a million different directions – some of which occasionally result in him getting paid, which let’s face it, no complaints about that.

We have decided we will each create a board and hang them in our bedroom where we will see them every day. It may sound kind of nuts, but I’ve already seen it work once. I’m interested to see what his will look like, where there are areas of overlap or surprises, if he wants a pet unicorn, etc. Have you ever done anything like this? What would yours look like?

Mud Mud MUD

I wish this picture were me. But it is! But it isn’t. I am not four years old and squishing in the mud at preschool, glopping clunky Tonka trucks on their way to heaven knows what business. I am 44 years old, and I am receiving texted photos of my baby at preschool while tippity tapping away at my office keyboard, sipping Sweet Leaf mint & honey green tea, and trying to ignore email messages. I am wearing black pumps, not mud socks, but at the same time, this is me. On some level I am four years old and I just want to get in the mud pit and get my hands dirty.

Letting It Loose

Photo:  Creation of an Abstract Mural, Glass, by LaurMG, Creative Commons

I just wrote four paragraphs about creating art, and about how I put my creativity on hold when I was in college and never let it back out of its cage after that and how it has fought me ever since, and I read back over those four paragraphs and I hated them even more than I hate run-on sentences. So I used my conveniently placed “delete” key and now you don’t have to suffer through them.

What I want to say is this:  I feel an art project coming on this weekend. And I’m also feeling a very strong push to go back to school for some kind of artsy endeavor. I miss making things. And I want to explore how to coax that part of myself out to stretch and sniff the air.

How is that going to happen? I have no idea but I feel I am being called to do it, so I better figure it out. 

I’m thinking I may start with Bliss Habits, which is rolling out “Summer Camp for your Inner Child.” What the heck, what do I have to lose?

Nuggets

Photo:  3 pigs craft and flannel board story - Creative Commons, by Mommachels-Flickr

I have only touched briefly on the school changes that have happened with us over the past few months, but I want to give a bit more background because this has impacted us a great deal. Around December of last year, it was becoming painfully clear that (1) due to staffing changes, Ceeya’s preschool was not providing the type of care we had become accustomed to; and (2) it was becoming cost-prohibitive to send her there. The preschool was struggling financially so it was understaffed and couldn’t afford to bring in different teachers, and we became aware of an exodus of kids from the school.

Ceeya’s preschool teacher had taught 3^rd and 4^th grade previously but she had no classroom experience with this age group. I didn’t feel she was engaging the kids at the appropriate level – she seemed to default to arts and crafts and coloring, which I felt was a missed opportunity for this age group. They are little sponges for information at that age, and school can be so much fun for them. I also noticed that Ceeya’s toileting hygiene started to slip because the teacher wasn’t as on top of it as the previous teacher. The children in the class were a mix of three-and-four-year-olds, so they were all potty trained but still at the age where I would say they needed regular reinforcement on how to wipe and wash their hands.  At home in the bathroom with her I realized she had stopped wiping at all and no longer even flushed the toilet. It was infuriating and I had to have repeated conversations with her about how important it was to keep herself clean. I also had conversations with the teacher that seemed to go nowhere, since there was no change.

As things deteriorated, we started working with Ceeya at home in the evenings and on weekends with materials we got from Lakeshore and various online sites because we felt her fine motor skills were stagnating (a relevant concern due to her sensory processing issues) and quite frankly because she was bored with school.

At the same time, I started looking into other preschools in our area, most of which were (1) just as, if not more, expensive and (2) not accepting new students. The situation was looking desperate. And then the skies parted and the fates conspired to have me run into a former coworker/ friend/ neighbor at an event that I would not usually have been at, but was asked to attend because another coworker had a dentist appointment. And there, my problems were solved, because she told me about a FREE LA Universal Preschool (LAUP) program in our old neighborhood, which was collaborating with a FREE pilot pre-K program at Viva’s school (which, hello? How did I not hear about it?). They were in need of additional kids for the program because it was still new. 

So in February, Ceeya began attending two FREE educational programs and our only cost now is before and after care, which saves us $500 a month. Instead of coming home with coloring pages, Ceeya now comes home with sheets to help her trace her name. She is learning to read sight words (the, and, this, etc.) and can read some books by herself. In LAUP, they have done a unit on the life cycle – so they have hatched real live chicks from eggs, they have a tank full of tadpoles, and they recently acquired caterpillars and are learning about chrysalises. She has a new best friend named Miles, who is crazy about her.

All of this is great, except for one thing:  the naps.

Due to the structure of the LAUP/Pre-K programs, there is no nap time scheduled for these kids. The person running the LAUP program also runs the after-school program, which includes older kids. There is no separate quiet space for the younger kids to nap.

Ceeya is awesome when she’s well-rested. When she’s not, it is – how do you say? – challenging. Basically, she falls apart at the slightest perceived provocation. Witness, last week at around 5:30:

I have just gotten home and I have gone into the other room to change my clothes. Ceeya and Viva have unpacked their lunches and are sitting on their bed talking.

Ceeya:  Guess what we had for snack today?

Viva:  What?

Ceeya:  Tacos and chips.

Viva:  Chicken nuggets.

Ceeya:  [falls out screaming and crying]

Mama [runs into their room]:  What happened?

Viva [wearily]: I have no idea, all I said was chicken nuggets.

Ceeya [after 3 minutes of unintelligible cry-talking]:  I said I had tacos and she said I had chicken nuggets!  [screaming and crying again]

Mama: I don’t think that’s what she meant.

Ceeya:  But I didn’t HAVE chicken nuggets! I had tacos!

Mama:  I understand. So if YOU know you had tacos, then you had tacos. What difference does it make what she says?

Ceeya:  Because she is MEAN.

Viva: WHAT? Oh my God. I didn’t even –

Mama:  Viva.

Viva:  What?

Mama:  She is deliriously tired. Let’s not make things worse. Let me talk to her. Why don’t you go relax yourself in the other room, okay?

Viva goes off in a huff. I am left to put Ceeya back together from a little puddle on the floor.

And repeat this scenario in various incarnations to infinity, and that is what our life is like right now on the weekdays. Sometimes Ceeya passes out at about 6:30 and we have to bathe and pajama her in a half-conscious state. Sometimes depending on his schedule Sweet Dub is able to pick them up from school at 2:30 and can manage to get Ceeya to take a nap by 3:30 or 4:00, but by that point since she wants to sleep for two hours she is impossible to wake up. Either way, it is not a good time.

 

For future discussion:  Ceeya just misses the cutoff point (must be 5 by October 1) for kindergarten for the fall. Her pre-K teacher says there is no point to her doing another year of pre-K. In the meantime, Viva’s teacher is saying that Viva is at the top of her 4^th/5^th grade class and she won’t have anything left to learn in 5^th grade next year. I really wish I could just take one year off and take the kids out of school and travel. There is that whole pesky “how would we eat” dealio though.  Hmmm…

 

April is the Cruelest Month

Photo: Creative Commons, by allison.hare– Flickr

April…April is a helluva month.

 

We kick off April on the very first day with Viva’s birthday, which is fantastic, and it should be all fireworks and bonanzas from there. But just a few days later, we reach the anniversary of my grandpa’s death. And about a week after that, the anniversary of Sweet Dub getting laid off. (This year it is three years since he lost his well-paying office job, and three years of financial struggle as he has worked various freelance photography and videography jobs and done his damnedest to get some TV projects off the ground. We are trying to morph this into the anniversary of the day his own business was founded, turning lemons into lemon bars if you will. Some days we are more successful at this than others. Yesterday Sweet Dub got a flat tire and it turns out he needs two new tires for his truck. As we no longer have an emergency fund or any financial wiggle room, it was hard to put a positive spin on this.) A week after that is the anniversary of my grandma’s death.

 

So to recap:  for our family, April comes in like a drumline and goes out like a fugue. Added to that, last week was just ungodly in the number and magnitude of horrific events occurring across the country and the world.

 

Again, trying to look at things from a different perspective:  there is certainly room for something spectacularly amazing to happen later in April, to balance things out in the future. (Hint, hint, Universe.) I would not be opposed to that.

As Sweet Dub says, “It’s not much of a success story if there is no struggle.”

It's Personal

In my Internet travels today, I came across this article, in which the author describes how she read her 5-year-old daughter’s diary.

Her daughter had asked repeatedly for a diary so she could be like her older brother. She was clearly thrilled to have it, and happy to be a big kid and have her own secret book with its own key. She told her mom not to look, and she laboriously wrote down her secrets in it. The mom, Kim, started to worry that something was wrong.

She unlocked the diary and was pleasantly surprised at what she found. Her daughter, who at nearly 6 years old is still mastering how to print, was merely cataloguing all the things which made her happy.

Her relief was so great that she took a picture of the pages with all their adorable misspellings and posted them on the Internet – I’m not sure why, except to reassure the Internet, who probably was not all that worried about it, that her daughter was perfectly fine.

To me, it’s one thing if her daughter left the unlocked diary lying around; particularly if she left it lying open. It would be difficult to resist a peek. But she didn’t. Kim rationalized unlocking it by creating a problem that didn’t exist:  her daughter was being secretive, thus she must have something to hide.  

Again, this is a 5-year-old girl.

Every child is different. But if she suspected something were seriously wrong, Kim could ask her to draw a picture. She could ask her if something’s bothering her. She could just talk to her. She doesn’t describe anything that I can see would trigger this sort of reaction – for example, was her daughter having trouble sleeping, did her eating habits change, was there some sort of radical change in her personality?  It sounds to me like her daughter was having a pretty developmentally normal moment, establishing boundaries, indicating that she is an individual with opinions and ideas that she is working out.

I understand some parents believe that they have the right to poke around their child’s rooms and through their belongings. To a certain extent, I agree that a child cannot expect unconditional privacy – sometimes poking around through their things is the way you find out there’s a fundraiser at school, or that they need $4 for a field trip. But if unlocking the diary did not already cross the line, publishing the thoughts that an evidently sweet and happy kid believed were private certainly did.

With the omnipresence of technology in everyday life, sometimes we forget that blogging and the Internet have not actually been around that long. We forget that we are kind of making these rules up as we go along.

I have shared before that Viva and I keep a mother-daughter journal. While I may occasionally share the things I write to her (as long as they are not too personal), I would not share anything she wrote in the journal with anyone without asking her. And honestly, I would think twice about asking her because I AM her parent and thus the power differential already exists. I wouldn’t want her to feel she had to comply.

I guess what I am trying to say is:  ease up a little bit out there, Internet parents.  Tread carefully. And this is as much a reminder to myself as it is to anyone else.

Don't Mess With Boston

"...I've found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay... small acts of kindness, and love." -Gandalf the Grey, The Hobbit (the 2012 film version, apologies to the purists)

Copley Square, Boston. Image courtesy 123rf.com, royalty-free stock photos.

I was born in Boston, and grew up there. One of my earliest memories is of being in Copley Square, leaving the Boston Public Library with my mom and sister, and running into my great-grandmother (my father's grandmother) Mabel on the way to the subway. I remember it because she was very old, well into her 90s then, but she was still out and about, on her way to the library from the bus. I remember it, too, because she stopped to talk to us even though it was chilly out, and I remember she looked at the three of us with such great love. I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old. It was a small moment, in the scheme of things, but I rarely went through Copley Square after that without thinking of her.

As a teenager, I hung out in Copley Square frequently after school. I went to movies there, I ate ice cream there, I had pizza there. Hell, I went to the prom in Copley Square. 

After college, when I moved back to Boston, I worked on Boylston Street, a few blocks away from Copley Square proper, and I spent endless hours there after work and on my lunch hour. So yesterday, when I saw a tweet that there had been an explosion at the Boston Marathon, and then went to CNN.com to see the mayhem and devastation of a bombing in Copley Square -- I can't put into words how sick I felt. It was akin to seeing my backyard blown up. My backyard, where a friendly neighborhood block party went terribly, horribly, sickeningly wrong.

I'm sick, and I'm enraged. And it is not making me feel any less so that some are using the funerals of people killed in this tragedy as a jumping-off point to make some bizarre religious-political statement. I don't think Jesus would approve!

I can only hope that this horrible tragedy brings people together to build something positive. Boston deserves better than this. We all deserve better than this.

Life Lessons: Dealing with Conflict

What I would prefer to do.

Has someone ever said this to you?  “I don’t like confrontation, so…”

Does anyone really LIKE confrontation? I guess some people do get a charge out of arguing and trying to prove their point. To some people it’s a game. For me – having grown up in an unpredictable household – my survival instinct is always not to make waves, to fly under the radar, or whatever non-confrontational metaphor you’d like to insert here.

However, I have been trying in my grown up years to alter this tendency – not to become confrontational, but, when there is a conflict, not to back away from it. Today, I have been dealing with a work situation in which I have been treading very carefully and diplomatically around a top executive who felt they were being taken to task for something that was outside their control. I do not feel this person is completely absolved in this situation, but I can’t outright say that. Hence, I’ve been trying to tactfully suggest ways we can fix the situation without making things worse.

It appears to have blown over – the most recent emails I’ve received thanked me for clearing things up and my boss even went out and bought me a mini chocolate cake in appreciation (which for some reason, no matter what I do, will only appear here upside down. Ain't nobody got time for that.):

 Are you confrontational? Or are you an avoider? Or somewhere in between? 

 

Every problem has a gift for you in its hands. – Richard Bach

And Now For Something Completely Different

Is this thing on?

I have so many things to talk about. Let’s start with just one, because it’s so ridiculously entertaining:  have you heard about the quote-unquote song “Accidental Racist, ” a collaboration between country singer Brad Paisley and hip hop icon LL Cool J?

OH EM GEE!

Evidently the intention of this song was to let Brad Paisley explain that being a white man in the South, he feels like he is walking on eggshells all the time around black folks, and to let LL Cool James soothe his rattled nerves.  “Hey, no problem, go ahead and wear your Confederate flag, it’s all good, brah!”

Let me tell you, Ladies Love Cool James, but this is a hot mess. It is like an SNL skit when it goes painfully wrong, like right off the rails. Here are some sample lyrics, just so you understand:

“RIP Robert E. Lee but I gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me, know what I mean"

“If you don’t judge my gold chains… I’ll forget the iron chains” (No, for REALS.)

Needless to say, the blogosphere is having a field day with this, as it is just too good to pass up. Perhaps the most entertaining critical interpretation I’ve seen so far is at Grantland.

Here’s a taste of it (but please go read the whole thing, because it is quite funny):

 

"I wasn't there when Sherman's march turned the South into firewood
I want you to get paid but be a slave I never could"

Just so you're clear, LL is saying that he wants white people to make money, but would appreciate it if it didn't come at the expense of his freedom from slavery. It seemed necessary to spell that out, in case it went over your head.

Whew. 

I think it's laudable to try and have a dialogue about racial issues in this country - God knows we need it. This just ain't it.

One of the Greats

Today is the ninth anniversary of my grandfather’s death.

Reggie was my mother’s father, but he was more than a grandfather to me. I am not sure quite how to describe our relationship: if I say he was my second father, it sounds disrespectful to my stepfather, but in all honesty he was the most consistent father relationship I had in my life. My mother separated from my biological father, George, when I was only 11 months old, and he had very little to do with me or my sister from then on.

But Reggie is a big part of my memory bank. My mother was quite young when she married and had children; she was only 22, with two kids, when she left my dad. We moved in with my grandparents for a while, a pattern which continued throughout my life. I honestly can’t remember how many times we moved in and out of their house, but the precedent was so firmly established that after one particularly nasty fight with my stepfather when I was away at college, my sister moved in with my grandparents permanently. At any rate, even when we weren’t living there, we were at my grandparents’ house every weekend. It was clean, and quiet, and the fridge was full, and hugs were plentiful.

I remember helping Reggie rake leaves, shovel snow, wash the car. He made snowmen with us in the backyard. He took us around the neighborhood and hovered at the ends of driveways while we trick or treated. He taught me how to ride a bike. He taught me how to drive a car. He insisted we go to summer camp. He paid for braces, and bikes, and ice skates, and God knows how many other things. When he peeled an orange, he would peel it in one glorious long peel and then cut teeth into it with a paring knife. He would then put the orange teeth into his mouth, bare his teeth in a horrible grin and chase us shrieking through the house. 

He was very reserved but then would turn unexpectedly goofy; he liked to joke a lot. While he was nowhere near as demonstrative as my grandmother, who was very loud in her loving of us, we never held back with him. My sister and I would fling ourselves at him and squeeze him with our skinny little arms and screech how much we loved him until he finally said, “Ditto,” laughing almost bashfully at letting us pull it out of him.

Reggie was the grandson of slaves, and impressed upon me early the importance of education and of getting good grades, of working hard and doing the right thing. He graduated from college during the Depression, and recounted how there were no jobs back then, especially if you were a black man. He went back to school and got a Master’s in Education because he wanted to be a teacher. He served in the Navy in World War II, and as a light-skinned black man was accidentally assigned to a white unit. In retelling the story, he said he believed they thought he was Italian, but as the military was still segregated, as soon as it was discovered he was summarily reassigned to the “Negro” unit. As he described it, it was a humiliating experience.

He met my grandmother on shore leave in Virginia in 1944. She said he was “soooooooooooo handsome” she couldn’t even understand why he was talking to her (which is ridiculous, because she was gorgeous). “In that uniform, oh! He was soooooooo handsome,” and of course he was. (Throughout my childhood, he was always beautifully groomed and dapper, even in his pajamas.) They were married in 1945 and settled in his hometown, Boston; and welcomed their first and only child, Cynthia, in 1947. He worked for the government for 40 years, retiring at 70.

He had very high expectations of me and would examine each report card with care. He was always trying to teach me something, and those lessons stuck, but I would say the greatest lesson was his example. He was hard working and thrifty, and he took care of everything he loved. He was fiercely proud of his lawn – having not been able to afford a house until he was in his 50s, he was extremely house proud. He was financially savvy but cautious. He did not live beyond his means, he chose his words and his friends carefully, and he always put family first. 

When he was alive, life made sense. And after he passed, the family was flung into chaos. All along, I believed my grandmother was the rock, the hub around which we all revolved – but after Reggie died, I realized that the hub was the two of them working in tandem, as a team. She was devastated when he died – we had to take her to the funeral in a wheelchair, she was that overcome – and honestly never recovered.

I really miss him today. I’ve had a lump in my throat all day. I hope he and my grandma are together, cracking jokes and sitting comfortably side by side, reading the paper or watching baseball. I hope he occasionally peeks down here and smiles at what he sees.

Some of us have great runways already built for us. If you have one, take off! But if you don’t have one, realize it is your responsibility to grab a shovel and build one for yourself and for those who will follow after you.
- Amelia Earhart