Month: December 2013

Contemplation in the Christmas Season

By / December 14, 2013

We have reached that point in December where life has slowed down enough for me to contemplate all the things I would like to do as celebrations of the season, but which I’m not likely to actually accomplish. I love the idea of a daily quiet contemplation where I light a candle and spend some time just sitting with the Christmas tree. I feel peace in those moments, that peace is the point of Christmas for me, connection to a natal event long past, connection to loved ones in the present, and expressing appreciation for all of it. I dearly want to carefully contemplate and select gifts for all the people in my life. I want to write handwritten notes. I want to give out tokens of appreciation. The reality of my holiday is that I might have a contemplative moment once or twice per week during the first part of December.

Only ten days remain between now and Christmas. In order to give gifts to everyone who matters to me, I’d need to sit down and make massive lists. I’d have to live by those lists and scramble to assemble and deliver everything. That effort would completely obliterate my attempts to find peace and contemplation during the holiday season. The two desires for Christmas celebration are mutually exclusive at this point. So I am going to do what I always end up doing, I’ll muddle my way down a compromise path. I’ll give some gifts, but not others. I’ll write some notes, I’ll give some tokens. Then I’ll hope that my neighbors will not feel slighted when I don’t make plates of treats to give away. I’ll look at the few Christmas cards on my wall, remember the years when the wall was covered, and know that this is the natural result of me being too busy to send cards out any time in the past five years. I still love both sending and receiving cards, but something has to go.

Our church Christmas party was tonight. It was a lovely event, good food, good company. The program was brief, but heart warming. It was a good balance of all the things a Christmas party needs to be. Howard, Link, and Kiki left early because they wanted to get back to the game they were playing together. Gleek and Patch played running games with all the other kids. I visited with a few friends, had one really important conversation, and then stood off to the side and observed. There have been times when I was fully invested in my community of neighbors, when I had important things to talk about with all of them. Lately I drift through, touching down in the community only lightly. I feel bad about that, because I know that it is my choices that keep me adrift. I would be more connected if I did things like making plates of treats for neighbors, or went out of my way to have conversations with people I have not spoken to lately. I have not given very much to my neighborhood community in this past year, all of my energy went into family, business, and keeping promises made to backers and customers. At some point in the future, maybe next year, I’ll connect with my neighborhood again. I do what I can and what I feel inspired is most important at the time. I did not spend this year wrongly.

We have one more week of school. During that week I need to help my two youngest kids select and acquire presents for their siblings. There are other holiday essentials to be planned and brought to fruition. And of course there are piles of homework that I get to guide my youngest into completing. It is plenty to track, but tonight I have a Christmas tree in the dark and a quiet hour to feel calm. It is well.

Logistics Brain and Writing

By / December 13, 2013 / 1 Comment

I haven’t been blogging as much lately, which often happens this time of year when my logistics brain takes over in order to manage the complexities of December scheduling and shipping. But I miss it. I miss unspooling long thoughts into words. Today I drove three hours to fetch Kiki from college and I spent most of that time sorting thoughts into probable blog entries. There are half a dozen of them and now I know what they are. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll be able to steal some time to write them. For tonight I’m going to have a Friday evening with my kids at home.

An Evolving View of the Twilight Series

By / December 9, 2013 / 3 Comments

I read Twilight about six years ago. It was after the third book in the series came out, but before there was a movie. I wanted to know what all the buzz was about, because I’d heard both raves and pans. I began reading and was pulled right in to the relationships portrayed. Then three hundred pages into the book, it suddenly had a plot instead of just a relationship. I enjoyed the book, but then I started to think about it. The more I thought, the more things I found that were of concern. It is one thing for a grown woman to read it as escapist fantasy, but I worried about young girls who were still forming their ideals for relationships. There is so much unhealthiness in the relationship between Edward and Bella. I was also concerned that Bella is so blank. She only makes one decision in the entire book and has to be rescued from the disastrous consequences. When my teenage daughter, Kiki, decided to spurn the books and join the anti-Twilight camp, I was glad and I never bothered to read the rest of the series.

Fast forward about six years.

A few days ago Gleek brought home Twilight from her junior high library. She told me that she had it, almost embarrassed, not sure that this was a thing that was allowed. She knew that lots of people hate the book. She knew her older sister dissed it. Yet she read the back cover and it sounded interesting to her, so she brought it home and she asked me if it was okay for her to read. Then I had a decision to make. At twelve, Gleek is at exactly the impressionable age that I was concerned about reading the book. If I told her not to read the book, she would probably obey. She’s a good kid. But I also know that the reason she’d obey is because she trusts me and I want to retain that trust. Someday she may ask to do something that I really feel is bad for her, something she wants desperately, but I have to deny. On that day I want her to know that I don’t just say no on a whim. I want her to trust me. Honestly, Twilight does not merit that level of concern. It is a romance book, probably no worse than half a dozen manga books that Gleek has read. So I told her my concerns about the series. We had a conversation about relationships and stalking. I told her why people love the book and why others hate it. Then I let her make her own choice. She decided to read it.

She loved it and will certainly be reading the rest of the series. And so will I, because I want to be able to talk about the things that happen in detail. I want to be able to reference specific scenes as examples as we have an ongoing conversation about how teen and adult relationships work. We’ll get to talk about how all people want to be desired and protected, but that those drives can lead them down dangerous paths if they are not wise. Those are really good conversations for us to have when she is twelve and most of this stuff is theoretical. So I suppose that a young girl reading and loving Twilight can be a good thing, which is not something I thought I’d hear myself say six years ago.

Skipping Elf on the Shelf Does Not Make You a Bad Parent

By / December 6, 2013 / 2 Comments

I see articles about Elf on the Shelf, Kindness Elves, or November dinosaur adventures, all of which are traditions that require daily creative effort from parents after they’ve put kids to bed, and I think that maybe parents don’t need to do that stuff to be good at parenting.
Actually, let me take out the qualifiers.
You don’t need to do that stuff to be good at parenting.
If you love it and it adds joy to your life. Great. Go for it. If it burdens you, do something else. Find a tradition or point of connection with your children that brings you joy: read stories, play video games, go on walks, parent child yoga, whatever. The point is that you share something, not that you attempt to contort yourself for the current popular fad.

I’m so glad these things are popular when my kids are too old to care. I’d have been terrible at them. Twenty-five-year-old me would have felt like a failure for being terrible at them. You can ask my kids, I was a horrible tooth fairy. And it is okay. My kids are happy. Their lives are full of their own creative efforts. They are not emotionally scarred because they had to dig the teeth out from under their pillows and hand them to me in order to get paid. In fact, that has become a point of connection, a family joke.

So I say to parents of young children, skip the dinosaurs and elves unless they genuinely make YOU happy as well as your children. You don’t need the stress.

An additional note of caution: time and energy intensive traditions may not be possible every year. This year’s joy can become next year’s overwhelming burden. If it was fun last year and you hate it this year, find a way to let it go.

Project Funded, and Other Things Going On

By / December 5, 2013

Strength of Wild Horses is funded and then some. I can now do a happy dance and heave a huge sigh of relief. I’ve felt some of that relief since last Saturday when the project crossed the funding threshold. But I feel even more relief today. This is the day when I can stop the promotional push and shift over to making sure I fulfill promises. That is a much more comfortable place for me to be.

Unfortunately I arrive here woefully behind. Yesterday I was flattened by a stomach flu virus and spent the day in bed quarantined from the rest of the household. I don’t remember much of the day and what I do remember was pretty unpleasant. So all of the shipping I was going to do yesterday, landed on today instead. Then today I was able to work at only about half my usual speed. So, pretty much everything is behind schedule and the kids are saying things like “when are we going to get out the Christmas books?” and “Shouldn’t the tree have lights on it?” I’m consoling myself with the memory of one of my childhood Christmases when we didn’t put up the tree until halfway through December. Now I wonder what crazy mess of things my mom was dealing with that year. At least this year I have zero involvement with the church Christmas party, which is a nice change from the past three years. I get to show up and just enjoy it. Theoretically. That is also the day I retrieve Kiki from college, so it is possible we’ll be delayed getting back.

In other news, we got to treat for possible head lice only twenty four hours after decontaminating for stomach flu. The treatment was preventative more than anything because the child in question had been quite thoroughly (and accidentally) exposed to an active case. I’d rather be thorough now than have to deal with a more widespread case later. Patch announced a burning desire to have cello lessons. Link has been taking more control on his homework lately. All of the kids were quite sweet and helpful to me while I was sick. And I can tell that I’m still not 100% because I planned to keep this post far more focused and I ended up rambling.

I thing a few more days will clear the backlog of obligations and I’ll be able to focus on one day’s work at a time. Tomorrow: shipping packages and sending surveys to all my Kickstarter backers. Tonight: sleep

The Day Ends and Not Everything is Done

By / December 3, 2013

There comes a point in the day where I just have to ignore the voice which tells me that there is something I ought to be doing. It is 10:49pm and that voice has a list of things which I could do right now to promote my Kickstarter, or make my house ready for tomorrow, or prep for shipping out the sketched calendars or to be a better parent. I’ve been whittling my way through the list all day. It keeps getting longer, not shorter. So at some point I just have to accept that I need to take time off even though not all of the things are done. I need to sleep, to rest my brain. Though sometimes it makes me sad because the things on the list are things I really want to do. Gleek had a choir concert today and I have thoughts about it that I’d like to explore in writing. I also have thoughts about Gleek, therapy, and Frozen. Finding a conjunction of time, energy, and brain space is tricky. Maybe tomorrow.

Things and Thoughts That Happen Because of Road Trip

By / December 1, 2013

In order to have Kiki home for Thanksgiving, I had to fetch her from college. That’s a three hour trip each way for a total of 12 hours of driving split between Tuesday and today. Driving time is excellent for my brain to wander and often it latches on to various thoughts and tells me that I really should flesh them out into full blog posts. Then I get home and realize that they’re really only interesting enough for snippets, not a full post. Except I collected enough snippets that I can make an entire post about them.

I spent a good hour of driving time thinking about how traffic patters on a two lane (each way) interstate are changed by holiday traffic. I developed an elaborate if-then driving strategy which I was going to detail in full. Of course that sort of thing is not actually interesting unless one is bored because she has to drive for two more hours and needs to occupy her brain somehow. So, I’ll spare you all from a thousand word screed about driving tactics. You’re welcome.

At one point on the drive I rode along side a tall cattle fence. Something about the design of the fence and the landscape made me think back to when I was in South Africa. We drove along roads similar to the one I traveled, but the fences were far more impressive. They were elephant fences, three times taller than the tallest cattle fence. My guide informed me that they only served as guidelines to encourage the elephants to pick a different path. Very few fences were able to withstand an elephant who really wanted to get through. So I pictured elephants wandering across the landscape. Then I pictured dinosaurs, because Jurrasic Park had animal containment fences too. Those worked about as well as the elephant fences really. Then I drove over the hill, left the fence behind, and found new thoughts to think.

I recently re-watched The Abyss because I wanted to see if it was still as good as I remembered. It was and it wasn’t. I watched the director’s cut, because that is the only version where the ending makes sense. The first two thirds of the film were excellent. I really engaged with the characters and their situation. I remember the final third being good, but this time it was very unsatisfying. On one of the drives, I figured out why. The ending speaks directly to people of the cold war era in 1989. Everyone felt pretty much powerless in the face of possible nuclear desolation and the average person really longed for some greater being (or aliens) to show up and demand world peace. That is what the aliens do. I think the fact that this ending was deemed satisfying in 1989 says something about the collective desires of many people. I find it interesting that the zeitgeist of the time was already tempering and ending the cold war. Some movies teach us a lot about the society that created them.

When I got a new journal, I got one with a plain cover. On the back I’ve started writing quotations that strike a chord with me right now. I find it interesting that four out of the five have to do with courage. I’d no idea that courage in the face of fear was so resonant for me right now. I’ll be pondering why.

Possibly because all the driving shook so much loose in my head, but church was a full pack of tissues event. It was a day where my heart was cracked open a little and it all leaked out my eyes. As I walked home, which is not technically part of any of the road trips, but was still a transit, so I’m putting the thought here. That sentence got away from me. Start over. As I walked home, I was thinking about my recently funded Kickstarter and the things I’ll need to do in the next few days before it closes. I was also thinking of all the other things I had to do, including six hours of driving (see, it relates.) The thoughts chased themselves around my head, then between one step and the next, I had a very clear impression. This year has been rough and wonderful in a hundred small ways. Most of the things that happened were ultimately good, but that doesn’t make going through them easy. I have been the shepherd of all these processes. I have guided my children, Howard, and myself through a dozen different transitions. I have worked long hours days upon end, switching from business work to family support, and back again. I saw all of that as a gestalt encapsulated with the feeling You have worked very hard, Strength of Wild Horses is a gift. I don’t get to have this project because of that work. The two are mostly separate. But it is more like a loving father who sees a hard working child and says “Well done. This is for you.” It has been a long, long year. We’re almost through with many of the transitions. I have just as much work ahead as behind, but right here–today–I get to have a project. It is one I longed to have for a long time. It has already given me so much, and it will continue to give to others. Strength of Wild Horses is a gift.

The phone rang when I was five minutes from home (we’re back to road trip stories now). “Mom! What is wrong with the microwave!” Gleek asked urgently. I’d been away from the house for seven hours. I’d no idea what may have occurred to make the microwave not-normal. I pointed this out to Gleek, while also mentioning that perhaps she should go inquire of the parent who was at home with her. It turns out that the turn table had been removed for washing.

I came home to Christmas lights in our front yard. I put them up yesterday and made sure to plug them in before I left, so I could see them when I came home. The tree is pretty, the lone strand around the doorway looks like our house was decorated by someone who only had a step ladder. Which is the case. We own a much taller ladder, I just didn’t want to climb it. The cost of falling is too high. Perhaps some other year we’ll spring for professionally strung lights put up by someone with proper equipment. I came inside to see that Gleek and Patch had assembled the tree. They’d also pulled out the Lego advent calendar. For the last three years I’ve bought one on clearance during the last days of December and then put it away for the next year. Patch opened the first door and assembled the little speeder. I’d only been in the door for a few minutes when Gleek asked where our advent candle is. I took a taper and quickly painted numbers on it. It is always interesting to note which of the family traditions matter to the kids. They’re not always the ones I work hardest on. The best traditions are the ones that spontaneously continue because they make everyone happy.

In two weeks I’ll get to road trip to fetch Kiki again. That time we’ll have her home for a month.