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Summers

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Children, Culture & Language, Family, Mother's Self, Mothering, Parenting

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Summer’s started.

In sharp contrast to the eternal, mind-numbing boredom of my summer days growing up, my summers since becoming one half of an international couple have involved travel. We are always an ocean apart from one set of parents or the other, and this distance only became harder when Fred entered the picture. Both sets of grandparents are getting older, their health is an ongoing issue, and the responsibility to make the time to see them while we still can has become ours.

We leave early tomorrow for Japan, where Fred was born and had spent the first four years of his life. Though he’s stopped speaking Japanese, he maintains an inexplicable attachment to his first home. He still remembers the park near our home, the “school bus” he used to take to preschool, his favorite store, his grandparents.

I always go back with a bit of weight in my heart. Japan is where I became a mother, and memories of those early baby and toddler years are packed up – so neatly, so separately and so inaccessibly – on one side of the world. I have no physical reminders of my early motherhood where we are now in the States, at all…but when I go back – two planes, one three-hour bus ride and a taxi later – it all hits me again. I walk again down the path to our favorite park and the familiar streets to my three grocery stores. We didn’t have a car back then, so I used to walk those roads pushing Fred in a stroller, with groceries in a backpack and more hanging on the handles of the stroller. As Fred got older he would come with me on his tricycle. On bad days when he was too hot or too tired, he would refuse to pedal and ask to be carried. I would then carry him and the groceries, and push the tricycle the half mile it took to get home. But mainly I remember how he would stop to look at the flowers or pebbles along the way home, or we would stand at the train crossings to wait for and watch the trains go by. With Max away at work 16-18 hours a day, I often felt lonely and alone that first year, isolated in a town with no friends and knowing no one who spoke English. The days seemed endless with so many hours, and so I didn’t mind how long it took to get home from the store. During this time, Fred and I had our own special world: we had each other.

We moved to the States right around the time Fred was ready to enter school. By the time he started kindergarten he was becoming part of a social fabric that would stretch wider and wider. In the years since, he’s moved from my arms and my lap to arranging play dates on his own; from watching flowers and pebbles to explaining to us how our phones and camera work.

But we’ve both grown, haven’t we? I get together with girlfriends now, without Fred. I’m working again with clients. I’m reading again, and writing. We’ve both developed our own worlds here in the States, together, and apart.

So I’m looking forward to flying out tomorrow, and spending three weeks together with Fred and Max, starting with the 16-hour flight. I’m looking forward to asking Fred, “Do you remember this?” and sharing with him the pieces of our world that have meant so much to me but which he was probably too young to remember.

Do you revisit the different places of your children’s life?

The American piano

30 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Children, Family, Mother's Self, Parenting

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piano inside

Photo credit: Fred

Over thirty years ago, when I was about Fred’s age, my mother took me around to a couple of piano retailers. I had somehow gotten chosen to take piano lessons through our school’s music program, and after a year or so of lessons, my mother thought that to make any improvement I was going to need a chance to practice at home.

Eventually, and to no surprise, my mother told me that we weren’t going to be able to afford a piano after all, or even a keyboard for that matter. And it wasn’t just the piano, but a house large enough to accommodate a piano and the private lessons that I would need once the music program ended when I entered middle school. I knew it was a pipe dream anyway, but it moved me that my parents - recent immigrants who wouldn’t even treat themselves to an occasional coffee – would even consider the possibility of piano lessons for me.

I don’t remember feeling overly disappointed about stopping piano, as my interests in playing music barely had a chance to germinate. Whether it was a way to rationalize our inability to afford music or actual belief, the refrain “We’re not a musical family [and thereby have no talent or potential]” came to play over and over, so much so that I never picked up another musical instrument again, nor did I ever expect or plan for my own child to play music.

Then one day we were at a friend’s house for a playdate. Fred was three years old at the time. While the other children were playing, Fred caught sight of my friend’s piano, and walked over and planted himself on the bench. He grabbed a pizza take-out menu, placed it on the music rack, and began “playing” with both hands. He kept his eyes intent on the menu, following the “notes” dictated by the different pizza and side order options and periodically flipping to the next page of the fold-out menu to continue with the piece. Emotion took hold of his small body as his entire posture took on the shape of his impromptu pizza masterpiece.

We adults all gathered around this toddler “virtuoso” and laughed and applauded. In the years following this episode, Fred would gravitate toward pianos and keyboards at friends’ homes and at electronics stores and experiment with the keys.

When he was eight, I finally decided to find him a piano teacher. He will never be really good – I’d convinced myself of that at the time, and told all my musical friends that we are not a musical family – but since he seemed interested, I thought it would be nice for him to learn to play, and to make music a part of his life. We got him a $250 keyboard using credit card reward points and found a graduate student in music who was teaching twice a month. This more relaxed schedule suited us and the expectations that I had for Fred.

Fred’s been playing for a year now, or technically a half year, since he only meets every couple of weeks for lessons, and has performed wonderfully in two recitals. Sometimes (often) he complains about having to practice, but there are times when we can’t get him to stop. He enjoys taking familiar pieces and playing them in a half dozen different ways, making his own “Chinese” versions and “Halloween” versions, or creating his own pieces inspired by commercial jingles. Once, a couple of musically sophisticated friends – the type of near-prodigies that I always imagined the children of real musical families to be – laughed at Fred’s rustic pencil-scrawl compositions. Sadly, my normally assertive boy did nothing to defend himself and I knew it was because deep down he believed himself to be inferior. But I no longer believed this of my son, and while I typically stay out of friendship squabbles, I stepped in this time to stop the ridiculing. No, we had come too far to be shamed back to square one.

This weekend, we bought a piano.

When I was younger I’d always known I would one day own a car, a house. No matter how modestly one starts out, a car and a home are always an accessible, equal opportunity part of the American Dream. When I put my signature on our piano purchase this weekend, it dawned on me that the dream I never dared have was suddenly realized: more than just ownership of a magnificent instrument, it was the lifting of barriers through the generations in my family that said “We can’t.”

On miscommunications, mean comments, and first impressions

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Mother's Self

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I’ve been interviewing for new staff these last couple of weeks, and one particular meeting left me thinking…

I’ll call the candidate “Tom.” Tom was perfect. Present tense perfect until he asked a few questions that got me wondering.

The questions that he asked left me wondering if he was planning on eventually branching out to form a rival business, if he cared too much about what we were paying, and if pay was going to prevent him from putting in some of the necessary work that is needed in the beginning as part of the learning curve.

For a couple of days after we spoke I tried hard to separate his words from my interpretation. I imagined myself going to a couple of trusted friends with this issue. How would I recount the story? I told myself that I would need to recount his words, and not my interpretation of his words.

Tom’s questions were, after all, legitimate. I just need to ask myself how legitimate my reactions were. Was it intuition? Was it misinterpretation? I am equally adept at both.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen only in interviews (though I can imagine how many promising candidates have bombed their chances at a job because of it). It happens daily in our interactions with significant others, with our children, with our friends. Does any of this sound familiar?

Partner 1: Don’t forget you need to get [Junior] from soccer practice at 4.

Partner 2: You don’t believe I can get anything right, do you?

…..

Child: I can’t do this…it’s too hard…

Parent: You’re always complaining about things being too hard. What’s going to happen when you get to high school? Or start working? What’s going to happen then, when things really get hard and I’m not around to solve everything for you?

….

Friend 1: I was so exhausted yesterday, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give [Baby] a bottle.

Friend 2: What is wrong with using a bottle once in a while? Maybe you need to stop reading all those mommy blogs and La Leche propaganda. I don’t know of any adult who  thinks back and wishes his mommy never used a bottle on him.

….

Alright, so those examples are a bit extreme (or maybe not?) but you get the picture. I mean, how often are we bringing in our own emotions, insecurities, and experiences to conversations?

A year ago one of my posts was syndicated on Blogher. The post was about a discussion that I had with my son over blog writing privacy. In fact, the syndicated post was about which post I should syndicate. In it, I said to Fred, “Maybe I should use the story about how you didn’t want to wipe yourself.” And it goes on to show his reactions to my seemingly insensitive choice of topic.

550+ uneventful views of the Blogher post later, I received two negative comments, with one being nastier than the other. Both women felt hurt by my betrayal of my son’s trust, stating that in writing about not writing about his most private moment, I had violated his privacy. Piercing words that went straight to the bullseye of my being a s*itty mom. And here I reacted to their words: to me, there is nothing worse than intentionally hurting a child emotionally for my own gain. According to these commenters, that is what I had done or, at least, that is how I interpreted their judgment of me.

That night, I searched out the contact information of the meaner commenter and emailed her. I told her that her words stung, but because of her comment, I looked again at the post I had written, this time more critically. By early morning I had received a response. She was exceedingly gracious, and embarrassed, and apologetic. She was nothing at all like the comments that she had left the previous day. I was heartened.

We, in fact, exchanged emails for a good part of the morning. The more we “talked,” the  more I came to see that she had completely misread my post. She had somehow read into my post that Fred had come home with his underpants soiled – unable to clean himself – and that I had blogged about it. I was absolutely stunned, because nowhere in my post had I even alluded to anything like it. I had written one sentence – “Maybe I should use the story about how you didn’t want to wipe yourself.” – that was all. The original post was about a battle of wills I was having with my then-5 year old, about how he once offered to pay me to wipe him. The post centered around the negotiations that Fred was engaging me in, and it was a story of how these little 3 foot creatures can wear us down with their mental tenacity.

The commenter told me that my post reminded her of a childhood experience she had gone through. (It wasn’t her, but a friend or cousin who had soiled himself…I just add that lest you misinterpret ;-) )

I won’t label myself thin-skinned or thick-skinned, because I believe that it is simply human to feel hurt by mean comments. Since this experience, though, you could say I’ve become more thick-skinned, less likely to take something personally. Just as blog posts that remind us positively of our experiences can resonate with us, so can posts that bring back bad memories. We bring so much of our pasts and our fears into the words that we hear and read and we can easily react not to the messenger’s experiences but to the emotions that his/her experiences evoke in ourselves. Our friend’s decision not to give in to formula can bring up our deepest insecurities that we have given in, and our child’s momentary whining about hardship can go to the heart of our fears as mothers that we are not doing everything right.

In a week, I am going to have to make a decision about Tom. How well I can harmonize his words, my emotions, and my intuition will impact, on some level, his career trajectory and the quality of our business. I hope I will have the clarity to do right by both him and us.

Keep walking

10 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Mother's Self

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I’d struggled to write for the last few weeks.

We reached a domestic code orange when we came back from our spring break trip in early April. For the first week we were all tired and uninspired. The house was in disarray and it was a struggle to get Fred to stick to his daily routines and homework assignments. Then the Boston Marathon bombings happened and the clouds and rain took up residence over our town. Max stepped up to the plate while I wrestled with guilt, self-criticism, and an internal debate over whether or not I should seek therapy. Because behind the lethargy was an undercurrent of anxiety and loss of purpose that I have only recently begun to acknowledge.

During all of this, a former client paid a visit from the UK. His visit forced us to make the house presentable. This has been an area of struggle for me for as long as I can remember, and as an adult I have wondered if all this time I have been suffering with an undiagnosed case of attention deficit disorder. Deep down, I knew that our lack of organization in the home was also a prison of chaos for our son, making his completion of daily tasks distracting and difficult.

We cleaned up. Got rid of all the paper that made my waking hours a living hell. Cleared our tabletops. Set up a gigantic white board checklist for Fred. As soon as we organized our house, everything clicked into place. Fred checked off his tasks one-by-one and by the end of two weeks we were high-fiving and hugging one another over his achievements. Of course, he improved in his time management because we removed the noise that had been drowning him.

Clearing my physical surroundings made it possible for me to begin making sense of the static that was inside my mind. And I finally admitted that maybe I was not okay. I have certain anxiety issues that I have conveniently ignored, that Max and girlfriends have so kindly worked around. Driving makes me anxious, for example, and I am dependent on rides if going beyond the confines of our small town. While I never loved driving, at least when I was younger this fear never really stopped me; it took more work but I would make it my goal to get to where I needed to be. I’ve since stopped pushing myself in this way. The risks outweigh the benefits, I would tell myself. But this is not okay. It is not okay because I am letting my anxiety over driving and other areas box me in at an age when I should be heading toward self-actualization. But I have harbored these secrets because I am competent and professional, and I am at an age and stage in my career where I am supposed to be confident, not afraid.

Being present – acknowledging, admitting and doing – has helped me swing out of these up-and-down three weeks. I was so traumatized by the cleaning job we did that now I deal with every piece of clutter as soon as it presents itself instead of waiting for it to accumulate. I’ve re-started my walk/jog program post-ankle surgery, having so far moved from a snail’s pace of jogging 20 seconds to jogging 30 seconds for every two minutes of walking. Someday, I think, I might go for a 5K. Or drive to the next city to meet a friend for lunch. Someday I might do more to help expand our business. Somehow, I’d let my dreams for myself and my goals for self-improvement fall away the moment I began nurturing someone else’s life as a mother.

Especially since I broke my leg last summer I’ve learned to accept that improvement can often only inch along. As it is often said, any journey is made up of many small steps. I don’t need to run. I just need to admit that I have to take that first step, and to keep walking.

Are there areas in your life that you’d like to improve? Do you also have issues with anxiety?

How to grieve a public tragedy

18 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Children, Family, Mother's Self, Mothering, Parenting

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I wasn’t happy with my post on Tuesday, the one in which I’d written about Boston.*

All of it was true – the way Fred asked me how I’d felt, the way he gave me permission to feel bad, the deep, deep indebtedness and pain that I feel toward the city that gave me life. But I wrote it all from a place of self-consciousness. I held back. I put up a front. I thought, the only way people will come to read this piece is if I tell them it’s not a depressing piece. I fenced in my emotions and plagiarized the optimism and fortitude that I’d read about and already seen in so many people.

The thing is, I don’t know how to grieve. I don’t know how to grieve for a public tragedy and for one in which I don’t have any direct connection to the actual victims or survivors. But it hurts, and it hurts me in a way that is different from the Oklahoma bombing and even the 911 attacks. It hurts so badly because it happened to a place that I see as my second mother.

And I didn’t know what to do with my feelings. Of course, I called my parents and talked to my brother briefly. Max got it all in stereo. Fred got the abbreviated PG version. Close girlfriends and I exchanged very short messages. But really, what can you say? A good friend of mine offered to talk. But she’s busy, and I couldn’t imagine dialing her up while she is trying to juggle school pick-up and grocery shopping just to make her listen to dead silence occasionally punctuated by a sob in the background. No, at this time I probably needed to be alone…to be alone and yet not all by myself. So I went to Facebook. It is there that I learned of the explosions in the first place as well as found an instant gathering of friends, including childhood friends in Boston.

Grieving on Facebook made me feel better until it did not. And I’d go in this cycle over and over and be too stupid to just sign off. It’s an easy place to grieve. You can identify those who feel the same as you do and, through mutual sadness and anger and bewilderment, you find company. But not everyone meets you there; in fact, the majority doesn’t, or some do, but sporadically. You try to control yourself and only update your emotional state twice a day, and you think you are helping the public by sharing articles that offer newsworthy updates or some eloquent meditation on what has happened, swearing, to God, that this “must-read” will be the last (for the day, anyway). You do this because for you it’s cathartic, and because, you hope, it might bait some friends to come over and make you feel less alone. But slowly, you fear, your Facebook friends are tuning you out. Or perhaps they’re so consumed by their own grief that they cannot deal with Facebook. Or perhaps they don’t know what to say. Regardless, you are left back where you started: What do you do with your feelings?

It all happens in such vastness. It isn’t our grandmother dying, where there’s a place we can all go to and feel connected. When large, distant tragedies hit we shed tears with our hands clasped over our mouths across state lines, across oceans and we want to hold someone’s hand and yet so many times we are doing this in front of a screen. During Sandy Hook and Boston I wanted to reach out and hold more than just my husband and my son. I wanted more but I didn’t know where I could find these other hands. Maybe the reason I’ve turned to Facebook is because when so many invisible people are hurt, I need to go to the biggest place I can find.

And with vastness comes diversity. I have learned, through Sandy Hook and now through Boston, that we all deal with and process our feelings so differently, and yet how we do it impacts how others around us can cope. There’s the person who can’t stop talking about it and the person who wants to shut it all out. Put them together in a common space, like Facebook or a house, and no one’s needs get met.

When no one talks then it can be easy, at least for me, to assume that everyone else is moving on. Everyone is coping, and everyone is doing what she needs to do to not let a couple of bombs get in the way of Being There for her children. Many girlfriends say to me that they just turn off the news; it is too upsetting and they just turn it off. I allow myself to believe that they can do this because they are made of better maternal fiber than I – that in times of crisis and down-to-your-knees emotion they still have the mental clarity and wherewithal to carry out their priorities.

On the day after the bombing I blogged about Boston and then I failed to make dinner. Max had to take Fred to his after school activity, and I told him that I couldn’t cook. I just couldn’t. Because cooking would mean going to the supermarket and going to the supermarket would mean getting showered and getting dressed. I’ll change to go out for dinner, but before that I couldn’t.

And things continued like this. My body started to feel heavy, like I was on the verge of catching the flu. My head, neck and shoulders ached. Fred asked to do something with me and I said no. At night I scolded him, longer and more harshly than was necessary, because he was slow to get into bed. Rather than talking back, he just clamped his hands over his ears. Yet still, before he drifted off to sleep, he reached for my hand as he always does, and whispered with his lips brushing my cheek as he never fails to do, “I love you too, too much.” He is a third-grader, just like the little boy who died. I got to hear my son tell me that he loves me; Martin’s parents never will.

Yes, I hated myself at that point.

After Fred drifted peacefully to sleep – a privilege I realize I can no longer take for granted – I opened my computer, and I read my friend Alexandra’s blog post When Your Heart Tells You to Stop. She talked about her day after the bombing. It was uncannily similar to mine. She could barely cook. She’d walked out of the auto shop forgetting to pay for the work done on her car. She was unsettled and unfocused and hurting.

It wasn’t just me.

It isn’t just me.

It is because of Alexandra’s post that I can feel, let alone write all of this. Before it I was bombarded in every direction by Fred Rogers’ quote, the one about how in bad and scary times we should always look to the ones who help. There were messages galore about looking on the bright side and being resilient and bouncing back and having hope, and that became the message I believed I needed to feel and to own, right away. We Americans are very strong and very forward thinking and very optimistic. I take so much pride in that, but on the first day and even on the second, I just wasn’t there yet. I couldn’t race my emotions through. Call me slow but for the life of me I couldn’t muster up the strength to move on, no matter how many people, it seemed, were already on that other side. How those people got there so fast, I don’t know. Maybe they are wired differently. Maybe they found all the right support. Maybe they turned off all the news. For me on those first few days, I just needed to hurt, to say, This Sucks, and to have people tell me, I know.

*I’ve since edited my post Boston from Tuesday, because I owe it at least that. I’m happy with it now.

Boston

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Mother's Self

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Fred woke up yesterday complaining of a headache and tried gently to twist my arm into letting him stay home from school. And yet, he was sitting up, smiling and, later, even laughing during sillier moments in our conversation. I said to him, “You know, when I broke my leg, all the doctors would ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Getting you out of me was a 10, so I would tell them 7.”

He liked the scale, admitted he was a 2, and trotted off to school.

***

At around 3:00, I flew down the stairs to look for Max to tell him there had been an explosion at the Boston Marathon finish line. My high school friend had posted on Facebook that she was praying her sister, who had run in the marathon, would be okay. I was not getting any of this – why was everyone worried if the runners were okay? – so I googled the Marathon, and then turned on the t.v.

I watched in horror and indescribable sadness as the city that raised me went up in smoke. The historic library on the left of the scene that is replayed again and again on t.v. – that is where I fell in love with books for the first time. I went to the prom, met up with friends, had my first date, attended family and friends’ weddings, and transferred trains to get home from school daily all within a 2-block radius. A year ago to the month, Max, Fred and I went on an Easter egg hunt at the church down a little ways.

Watching my expressionless sadness and tears, Fred asked, “Mommy, how do you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

I was not really up for talking, but I grabbed the opportunity to be consoled.

“Umm…I guess I would say an 8…I want to say 9 or 10 but that’s for the people who were actually there, who saw it happening, or for those who got hurt or had a friend or family member get hurt, or…”

“Die,” said Fred.

“Yes, the 10 is for those people who lost someone.”

“So you’re saying 8 because you grew up there?”

“Yes.”

“I think you can take a 9.”

***

I am grieving because, indeed, so much of who I am is tied up in this beautiful city and birthplace of America. Over San Francisco where the rest of our family was, my parents chose Boston – after fleeing China and Peru – to start all over again and to feel real hope for the first time.

Though we immigrated during a time of heated racial tension (I started school right at the explosion of the notorious court ordered desegregation in the 1970s), not once did Boston ever turn its back on us, not when my parents were struggling to learn English, not even when they had no legal right to even be here. Boston gave my parents work and community resources and a chance to rise out of their initial jobs as restaurant dishwasher and garment factory worker. By the time I was in junior high my father opened a new restaurant with a group of partners, and was now fluent enough in English to work the bar and to chat up all the customers. He became a loyal fan of both Boston sports and the Kennedys and is proud of the following four highlights in his life:  1) waiting on former Celtics great Dave Cowens in his restaurant; 2) shaking hands with former Patriots coach Bill Parcells in the Cleveland Circle theater restroom (my father is not shy); 3) shaking hands with Congressman Joseph Kennedy along the Charles River; and 4) being granted US citizenship after 20 years of waiting. His approval was held up in the red tape of the INS for years, until we wrote to Congressman Kennedy, who pushed his application through. Well into their 70s now and armed with a shed full of shovels and snowblowers, they refuse to accept my invitation to join us in a warmer, slower, gentler part of the country. But then again, my parents cannot move even if they wanted to; my mother is still working for the city, and she refuses to retire.

And the Boston Public Schools’ mission to elevate its working class children through opportunities and dedicated teachers allowed my brother and I to eventually attend colleges and universities that my parents never even dared fantasize about. My own greatest memories of childhood include piano lessons, advanced classes, trips to see the Nutcracker and the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe, a 4 year scholarship to study studio art at the Museum of Fine Arts, a chance to design floats and costumes and march in the city’s Walt Disney Parade, an invitation to become a cast member of a PBS talk show with Dr. Tom Cottle…all of this came not from my parents but from the schools. The Boston Public Schools gave us what our parents wanted to but didn’t have the means to.

Boston is my adoptive parent, my angel, and today I miss it with an ache I can’t describe.

Yesterday so many either lost or are now clinging to the hope that my family has had in abundance. I grieve for those children, those runners, those spectators, and those families whose dreams were unexpectedly cut short in this magical city. That the city that gave us so much reason to move forward could be juxtaposed with scenes of danger and fear is mind-boggling.

But Boston is nothing if not fearless. And resilient. And loyal. We know her winters. We know her schools. We know her sports teams and her fans. We know her history in the formation of this country. Most of all, we know her people. They are people like my parents, who have soared on hope during their own periods of danger and fear and who in turn will stand by Boston’s side to the very end.

On a scale of 1 to 10, today I feel a 10: for sadness, for anger, for hope, for gratitude, and for pride.

boston                                      photo credit: Barewalls.com

Family vacations – the good, the bad, and the ugly

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Children, Family

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We just got back from our first family vacation in 2 years, and I overestimated my ability to keep up with my blog, so I apologize for the long silence (assuming you had missed me ;-) )!

dolphin

We tackled our first theme park vacation in Orlando, having booked the trip at a prematurely optimistic point in my broken ankle recovery when everything felt great. (My ankle would start to ache again a few weeks before our trip.) We also decided to go during Fred’s (and half the world’s) spring break, which started over Easter weekend (smart move #2). Finally, we chose to drive for 2 days rather than fly. Smart!!

So, with the ugliest pair of Easy Spirit sandals I could tolerate, a car trunk packed almost to the roof, and a 9-year old fully outfitted with electronics, headset and snacks, we were off to undergo the parental rite of passage/sacrifice of Making One’s Child Happy.

The following is what I have learned about vacationing with family:

  • Don’t believe family members when they say they’re “okay.”

Max drove all 10 hours to FL. I have anxiety issues surrounding driving on highways and in unfamiliar places so I couldn’t relieve him. We got in late afternoon and took it easy, then decided to hit the Kennedy Space Center the next day. But something was off. As if a typical 9 year-old child doesn’t challenge your nerves enough on a regular day, imagine what it feels like when you’re (both) exhausted and cooped up together 24/7 in a small hotel room or in 45-minute line after 45-minute line in 80+ degree heat. By the third day (because it is always the third day of a trip when your world explodes), I had sent a text to my girlfriend back home telling her this family vacationing thing was all a mistake.

Another friend of mine once told me that she and her husband have a 3-day (see?) grace period with each other when traveling; for those first 3 days, snapping and short tempers are understood and forgiven. It’s the exhaustion talking. For many people including myself, there is this pressure to not waste a minute of a trip because you’re there for a limited time and especially if you have already spent $$$ on park passes. Next time, though, I’d be willing to take a full day or two “off” to let the tired parties rest – book a massage ahead of time for the driver, sleep in, take turns relieving one another of childcare duty (assuming you are traveling with another adult).

  • Don’t believe your child if s/he says s/he’s not hungry.

Fred waited 2 years – not an insignificant amount of time when you’re 9 – to visit Legoland. So as soon as we got there, he was salivating at every ride and at every store and at every play opportunity. He had no idea that he was hungry. By the time we were finally able to tear him away to eat, it was already 1:00 p.m., and the funny thing about eateries is that, when you’re starving, there doesn’t seem to be any around. So we walked and walked until we came upon a panini place. Max searched and waited for a table to open up while I waited in line. The line, which didn’t look that long, took 40 minutes to move. By now it was 2:00, if not later. Max helped bring the tray of food back to the table which was, incidentally, very wobbly, and because the lid had not been placed tightly on my large Dr. Pepper, the whole cup splashed all over my chest, legs and feet when Max set the tray down. It seemed like a fitting end to the torturous wait for lunch and, picking up on my mood, Fred refused to eat, which only made me even more exasperated. Our bickering finally culminated in him sobbing, “I didn’t wait 2 years for this!” And with that he reminded me of what was important. I stroked his hair and face and apologized and he finally picked up his sandwich to eat.

My tip: start scouting and getting in line for food a good hour before you know your children will be hungry. (I’d brought snacks but on this particular day, they didn’t work – Fred was too excited to acknowledge that he was hungry.) Or, get in line well before the lunch crowd hits.

  • Let it go

I had a lot of rules and expectations crossing over the FL border: wake up early each day and leave for theme park by 8:30; order only water as the beverage at dinner; order soda a maximum of 3x over the course of the vacation; delay bed time by 30 minutes maximum; refrain from purchasing unnecessary souvenirs; update blog mid-week.

We followed none of it. We’d get back to our hotel at 9 p.m. at the earliest and sometimes couldn’t make it out the door the next morning until 11. Fred came home with stuffed animals, Lego sets, Lego shoes, postcards, and a small $8 Kennedy Space Center keychain for keys he doesn’t have. My soda rule for him also went flying out the window, even though we’d “agreed” on it before leaving home. It’s just hard when on most kids’ menus the only available drink option is soda, and every child, it seems, is walking around Legoland with a gargantuan Lego shopping bag. I could either auto pilot “If everyone jumps off the bridge, does that mean you will too?” and brace myself for battle or simply give in (within reason, that is). Given how much bickering had already taken place, I decided to let these battles go. “It’s vacation,” became my new mantra. And with that, I gave myself permission to stuff myself to the gills as well (and returned home with an extra 5 pounds).

Oh – and the most important thing to let go of? The illusion of the perfect vacation. Just because we’re sitting on the Riviera doesn’t mean we don’t still get hungry or sick, don’t still make mistakes, don’t still feel any emotion other than joy. We’re human regardless of where we are geographically or how much we have invested in this get-away.

  • Savor

What snapped us back into place time and again was the big picture we kept inside of us: We’re on vacation…and not just any vacation, but a 9 year-old’s equivalent to my personal dream of visiting Fiji Islands or the Taj Mahal. The joy for us was seeing the delight in Fred’s eyes over and over and over again: when our car entered the parking lot of Legoland, when he got splashed wet at the killer whale show at Sea World, when he took a lick of his first dolphin-shaped ice cream. Though there were times when I had rated this a “so so” vacation because I lacked the power to make it absolutely perfect, Fred recalls only that it was one of the best trips he has ever taken. Children have an amazing way of not dwelling on the small moments of unpleasantness – the long lines, the growling stomachs, the traffic, the small fights. I realized, then, that Fred had created his own power to make the perfect vacation.

Jet kite FL

What did you do for spring break? What have been your best (or worst) vacation memories? Any tips?

When it’s not depression, and yet…

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Mother's Self

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sunset

Each Monday through Friday, between 7:30 and 7:35 a.m., I stand poised at the doorway that connects our garage to our family room, my right hand on the door frame, my left hand waving good bye to a shadow of Fred as Max backs out. As soon as the car straightens at the end of our driveway, I do one last wave to the two pairs of eyes that have already turned straight to face the road. As they drive away I attempt to close our temperamental garage door, cursing each time it rolls back up.

This is my daily ritual, and it is accompanied by a small wave of dread.

At this point in the day I march back to the kitchen to clean up after breakfast and lunch preparations. Since I work from my home my mind then moves toward, then rejects, the idea of some light morning exercise and a shower. So it’s onward to my computer to begin the daily run of checking work e-mail, work-related news, and client documents. I also remember that I need to call AT&T and a medical biller to resolve mistakes that they have made. It’s a waste of my time, poor customer service, and I make a mental excuse to put this off yet again. I think about what Max and I will do for lunch, and I am relieved if there are leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. Then I wonder what we’ll do for dinner, and realize I have to find time to squeeze in a trip to the market. And before I know it the school day will be done, Fred will be home, and while I can’t wait to see him, I brace myself for the inevitable nagging and negotiating over homework, snacks, and jackets and socks strewn on the floor.

My days are uneventful, but somehow I end up disliking myself at the end of each one. Yet another day will always go by where I do not call AT&T, do not exercise, do not make better progress on the ____ work project, do not clean the ____, and do not better restrain myself from nagging and scolding. The non-depression depression that I experience is well nourished by this parade of self-criticism.

Perhaps you have been there too. It’s that land north of depression but south of joy. It’s that place in everyday life where you climb out of bed on time but in slow motion. You pick at the work in your house. You talk to your children with just more irritation in your voice than is necessary. But you don’t need meds and you don’t have the time or the money to see a therapist (but oh how you’d love to talk to someone!). You get through each day doing what needs to be done, if even at a B- level in your book. It’s just the tedium of a script that never changes and yet you are treading too deeply in inertia to initiate any changes.

By coincidence I had an “eventful” and light bulb sort of weekend. Our Saturday started off with an early morning used book sale at our area high school, where Fred and I filled up a carton full of terrific finds. In the evening we enjoyed dinner and a music and dance talent show/fundraiser with good friends at the same high school. On Sunday, we went to see Life of Pi and treated ourselves to coffee and doughnuts afterward.

While my weekend can’t exactly be categorized as exciting, it was filled with my favorite things: books, bargains, the arts, food, friends and, of course, family. I did more than just accompany Fred to his weekend activities or run errands or watch Fred and Max play basketball. We did something that I enjoyed and, for me, I realized, anything related to the arts provides me with the spiritual and aesthetic lift that I don’t get enough of in my life.

Little did I predict that a box full of book bargains and a schedule to look forward to this weekend would vitalize me enough to clean out my closet and drawers, organize the bookcase, vacuum, cook (we usually eat out on weekends), clean our bathroom, do the laundry, change our sheets and bath mats and even pack for a family trip that isn’t happening for another two weeks. I even insisted to Max to hand over a new work project to me. I ended the weekend not just satisfied with our activities but feeling good about myself: I accomplished what I’d put off for weeks and I liked myself as a mother.

In Simple Abundance, Sarah Ban Breathnach tells about a woman named Joanna Field (a.k.a. Marion Milner) who in 1934 published a book called A Life of One’s Own. Field had kept a journal in which she noted daily the triggers of happiness in her life. Ban Breathnach writes, “It was written . . . in the spirit of a detective who searches through the minutiae of the mundane in hopes of finding the clues for what was missing in her life.”

And so, like Field, I have started my own journal and journey to find the simple daily pleasures that, in a mosaic, will hopefully become a life of contentment, energy and purpose.

Do you also find yourself languishing in this…”non-depression” depression? What are the simple daily pleasures that make a difference for you?

On anger, forgiveness, and love

14 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Family, Mother's Self

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I’ve had this post sitting in my draft box for a couple of months now, but I finally felt brave enough to hit the “publish” button after reading Rudri’s heartfelt and emotional post On Lessons from Experiencing Loss. Thank you, Rudri, for sharing with us what you’ve learned from grieving.

…………..

I’d written quite a bit about my difficult summer last year – about my broken ankle, the sudden death of our young colleague. But there was another event that I hadn’t shared, which was that for two very long and life changing days, I had believed I was going to lose my mother.

My mother was diagnosed with a condition carrying such words as “rare” and “aggressive.” When she called to update me on her post-surgery follow-up, she had, due to language barriers, misunderstood her doctor’s prognosis, and passed along to me her interpretation that, due to the sensitive location of the tissue in question, the doctor was unable to treat her completely. To be unable to remove everything, according to my research, meant basically a gradual but inevitable death. At my request, she arranged to have the doctor speak to me in two days.

I have written about how my leg injury led me to pledge to live life differently and certainly that is true, but in truth, it was those two days in between losing and regaining my mother that had changed me. By the time I got off the phone, my ankle had ceased to be something worth whining about. What a waste of emotional energy it had been to feel sorry for myself, to wonder if I could ever walk again. Of course I would walk again. How trivial every other “tragedy” becomes when a loved one’s life may be at stake.

My connection with my mother at this stage in our lives, with so many miles between us, is symbolized by our weekly phone call. Usually Sunday, usually around 9 a.m. But sometimes she would catch our answering machine and sometimes she would call outside of our unspoken time slot and I would get annoyed. More often than I am proud to admit, I had been unable – or unwilling – to talk to her, cutting her off because I was in the middle of something or on my way to something. “Yes, I know, you’re busy. You are always busy. There never seems to be a good time to call you,” my mother had said to me tearfully and more than once.

I had rationalized to myself, for many years, that I had gotten that way because of our complicated and sometimes painful relationship, that if she had criticized me less, or been less controlling of me, maybe I would have had different feelings of our relationship. I would tell her that it was her fault I didn’t want to talk to her, that I would get on the phone and feel paranoid she’d find more fault in me. I would tell myself that I was trying to achieve peace and self-acceptance, and I needed to push away all sources of potential toxicity. I’d forgiven so many people in my life, but not my mother. I had had nowhere to go with the raw and painful emotions I felt growing up, and somehow I had turned my mother into my scape goat.

I had been angry for over thirty years, and for the first time I softened. When I realized I might have only a few more years left with my mom, I softened.

I began picking up the phone patiently whenever she called me at work. I let slide any minor annoyances. I simply nodded “okay” when she nagged me. I listened to her vent about annoying colleagues. And, really, that was all. There were no criticisms. No attempts to control me. We talked and we laughed. She began looking back on her years as a mother, half laughing and half sighing, “Ay…I was so clueless…it’s a wonder you and your brother turned out okay.” And I began learning things about her I had never known – that her single mother in rural China had encouraged her – a girl in the 1940s – to be anything that she wanted to be and that she (my mother) used to love what few books she could find, and would stay up until 3 reading Russian novels by lantern light. In very quick time, I began to look forward to our weekly conversations.

Like that I let go of all the anger I had harbored against her over the last three decades. I let it go only to realize, with intense surprise and then regret, that the overly critical mother I had immortalized in my head all this time did not even exist. Or maybe she did, 10 or 20 years ago, but she had changed. Or, perhaps, I had changed…maybe I had stopped fighting her love and her attempts to get close to me, and I finally gave her the space and permission to be the mother she had always been trying so hard to be. I’ve had a lifelong fear of getting too close to people, of being loved too much, of being possessed and smothered. And I fought my mother the hardest…of course, because she had been the one person with the most love to give.

Our past is complicated and I am a flawed person from a family wounded by immigration, poverty, mental illness and cultural and generational differences…why I would want to push my mother away is a whole other, much longer story. But had I been willing to let go of my anger sooner, we could have had more quality years together. We could have been laughing longer. I could have seen my mother more clearly, instead of holding on to the image I may have created in my head as a way to avoid responsibility for my own healing. While the cancer did not reduce my mother’s years with me, my anger did.

I spoke to my mother’s doctor two days later. She’s fine. Everything was treated. They need to keep an eye on her condition but no, it is in no way a death sentence. So like my leg injury, the misunderstanding of the doctor’s prognosis turned out to be a gift. It was a 5-alarm fire call to let go of the past and a chance to reunite. I saw and chose love at the brink of loss, and, so luckily, I was given the gift of more time. I am late, but I made it.

 

Our sky: on having goals mid-parenthood

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Children, Family, Mother's Self, Mothering

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I received my college newsletter the other day. It opens with a pep talk by our class president, in the equivalent of a drill sergeant’s 0500 whistle: “We all need to have GOALS, people!” (I paraphrase; this is how her words sounded to me when I read them in my pajamas at 1200.) “We’re in our mid-40s! It’s time to GO!”

Continued, on page 2, is the feature article, written by one of our classmates whose recent novels have been nominated for awards and praised by Oprah. The books are being translated into multiple languages and there is discussion about a possible television series, or a movie. But she is not here to talk about success, she says; she’s here to talk about failure – the many failures that she had overcome before she won her first book deal, and the fear of failure that we can’t allow to stand in the way of our developing our goals.

Good ideas all around, except she was apologetic… apologetic for bringing up the taboo topic of failure to our class of female glass ceiling shatterers. My alma mater carries a long history of women who have changed the world, women whose names are too big for this humble blog.

The newsletter jarred me. My first instinct was to cry and crawl back into my own womb of girlfriends, writers/bloggers and fellow mothers with whom I have shared my real life these last three years, into this world where I never have to apologize for being anything less than human.

The truth is, I don’t feel like GOing. I’ve gone, I went, and I don’t want to go back. In fact, I want the opposite. I’m trying to slow down. There was a long time in my life when it was exhilarating to keep getting better than I was and to keep learning more than I knew. I threw caution to the wind and moved to Tokyo when I was 30, working 6 days a week and trying to absorb every ounce of intercultural newness. I had a seemingly permanent zip code in Outside My Comfort Zone. Then one day I turned inward. I wanted steady, and predictable. Maybe I needed that because this new project called parenting that dive-bombed into our lives was so new and explosive that I needed everything else around me to be constant and easy.

While I sat there momentarily judging my class president, I stopped to think about her pep talk. Ear-splitting whistle and whip cracking aside, maybe there is validity in her words. The idea that I have to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or break the frontiers of science or write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel are expectations that I read into her words, because I viewed her not as a friend or fellow mother but as a spokesperson for the alma mater that had long ago made the sky both our limit and our goal. We all need purpose, but perhaps we need to make it up to us in what direction we want to reach.

I’ll be honest. For the last 6 weeks or so since my work season has quieted down I have dragged my feet from one day to the next. I worked hard these 8 years to finally achieve this balanced life style that I now have, and instead I find myself feeling listless and without purpose. What do I want to do now? What will be meaningful for me? My relentless years of nursing and diapering and chasing a little child around are over. My years of trying to build up a fledgling business are over.

I need a goal and another form of purpose. But before I can figure that out I need to re-define my sky and know that it will be a different one from the alumna next to me, and from the one that shone on me a decade ago before I became a mother.

Do you have goals outside of parenting? Do you feel you’ve also changed in how “ambitious” you are since you became a parent?

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