Author name: Sandra Tayler

Notes to things I feel grouchy about

/ / 2 Comments

Dear school,
One second grade child does not need four different reading programs each with a log for me to track. Yes I know that minutes-read can count for all four programs, but I still have to write it down four times and make sure that my son turns in four pieces of paper. Seems a bit like overkill, particularly when none of it actually increases the amount of time my son reads.

Dear church,
I understand the valuable social purposes of all the various auxiliaries and activities. We currently have a family member in every single one, which means that we often have weeks when our family routine is disrupted 3-5 times. Please understand that when we skip some of these activities it is for sanity’s sake.

Dear History teacher,
Your humanitarian project, history chapter review, reading assignment, and movie watching assignments are all simultaneous. My daughter has other classes, some of which also have time consuming assignments. I am really tired of her feeling overwhelmed. Can we pick and choose please?

Dear house,
I know you are messy. I’m sorry about that. Someday I will clean you up and make you pretty with paint and decorations. Right now I have neither the time nor creative energy to spare. It would help if you could just perk up a little and stop looking so distressed.

Dear New Gas Range,
I’m not grouchy at you at all. I like you lots and I’m so glad that I have you. Please continue to be wonderful.

Dear book project,
I know I haven’t spent time with you in almost two weeks. I know that you are supposed to be an important priority, but somehow I always do other things first. I’m trying to find my balance again. Hang on.

Dear Son’s Birthday Party,
Yes I know I need to reschedule you. Not this week please? Or next week? Do I really have to? (Yes I know I have to, because you matter to my son and he matters to me. Sigh.)

Dear Social Media,
You are full of things. I may have to ignore you for awhile so I can clear my head.

Dear Daylight Savings Time,
It has been brought to my attention that you will be arriving next week. That timing is not convenient for me. I much prefer being able to get my kids to bed at night after dark has fallen. They complain less that way. Also I don’t want to lose an hour. I’m already behind schedule on just about everything. I need every hour I can get.

Dear Food in My Fridge,
I wish you were different food.

Dear Monday,
I’m about done with you today. When I see you again next week I expect to find that I have re-established a normal schedule, that no one is sick in my family, and that I’ve caught up on all the work which fell behind while I was sick.

Best regards to you all, and please understand that while I’m grouchy I’ll get over it. Small grouchiness is like that.
–Sandra

Notes to things I feel grouchy about Read More »

Managing a bad day

/

Some days, today for example, I feel like a failure as a parent. My logical brain has a whole list of reasons to explain this feeling. It supplies them in regular rotation, proving them to be completely interchangeable and thus not the cause of the feeling. The feeling pre-exists the reasons and can not be quelled by logic or by copious contrary evidence, both of which my logical brain also supplies. It is a mood. It will pass. Some other day, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow, I will look at the same lists of faults and triumphs, and I will come to the conclusion that I am pretty good at this parenting thing. Logic and emotion are often only passing acquaintances in my head.

So on a day like today I cry some, hopefully in private, but more likely in an embarrassingly public location like church. I sort my thoughts into piles so that I can re-examine them on a more energetic/rational day. Then I find something to do. It has to be a small thing because I really need it to succeed. Today I succeeded in pulling copious quantities of lint out of the dryer vent pipe. In theory this will improve the function of our dryer, but even if it doesn’t, I still succeeded in removing a sack full of mess from our lives. Also I gave two kids haircuts and they don’t look awful. That’s three more bits of evidence to weight the scales on the side of being a competent human being. It’s a start.

Managing a bad day Read More »

The Type of Mother I am

/ / 1 Comment

Last September I walked with Kiki into her school and, against the advice of a school administrator, dropped one of Kiki’s classes to replace it with a free period. Throughout the remainder of September and October I monitored Kiki’s every assignment. I set up schedules for her to get everything done and then argued or cajoled her into sticking to them. It was a very time-intensive, hands-on version of parenting and I believe it was the right choice at that time.

In January I washed my hands of Kiki’s homework and handed all of it back to her. In the same six months I have looked at exactly one of Link’s assignments. Gleek and Patch get their homework done more or less on time. I know for a fact that my kids spend far more time attached to video game screens than their neighborhood peers. This is a very lassez faire style of parenting and sometimes I feel guilty about it. Yet I also feel like it has value in allowing my children to experience their own choices and the consequences thereof. Sometimes the best thing they can have is a mother who stands back.

At the end of this month I will deliberately shed my mother duties for a day so I can participate at an author event for a Junior high school. In August I will leave my children for a week while I attend WorldCon with Howard. In September there is an event I very much wish to attend, but it would again require me to hand the care of the children over to someone else. The fact of imposing childcare on another person aside, I can’t help but feel that the choice to pursue these events is selfish. I feel as if I abandon them. I don’t. Not really. I know there are benefits. When I went on a trip a year ago, Kiki made some life-critical emotional break-throughs that she would not have made if I had been home. Being away from mother allows struggle and growth in different ways.

All around me are mothers that I admire. I see them planning educational opportunities, going on family outings, requiring chores, cooking regular meals, and enforcing homework. I want to be all of them. I want to spend copious amounts of time providing a firm and reliable structure for my children. I want to stand back and let them learn through struggle. I want to play with them and fill their lives with joy. I want to escape them so they can grow and I can grow in ways that we can’t do together. I want so many things which seem to directly contradict each other.

Then I remember a long ago guest lecturer in a college course who spoke about women’s issues. She said “You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.” I can be all of those mothers in rotation. I just need to let the demands of the day be my guide. The guest lecturer was also a little bit wrong. Life is limited. Sometimes when we choose leave something for later it means we are choosing not to have it because time will run out before we get there. This is okay too, so long as we choose first the things which matter most to us. Each day I will choose the mother I should be. I will know that what may appear to be inconsistent parenting may actually be a straight and steady course toward well-adjusted children and a mother who still has her sanity.

The Type of Mother I am Read More »

School decisions

/

This week was not a great time to have my focus completely scattered by being sick. Now is the time of year when I make a series of decisions which will affect the shape of the next school year. For the older two this means combing through course offerings, attending registration meetings, and trying to find a good balance between challenge and sanity. Things are even more unsettled for the younger two. Normally I’d just discuss with their current teachers about who would be good for the next year. However this year I’ve dropped their names into a lottery for a charter school and they both tested for gifted programs. I will not know how those things turn out until the end of March. Then there will be decisions to be made. I can’t know the outcomes of those decisions in advance. I am so very tired of making important decisions based only on my ability to prognosticate and whatever inspiration I can glean.

I get very tangled up about these decisions, but then I have to take a deep breath and remember how flexible our local school system is. We have lots of options and if one doesn’t seem to be working, I can switch to another one.

School decisions Read More »

Still recovering

/

We’ve achieved a semblance of normality. It is a slow-paced normality with many naps, but all the kids are back at school and no one has a fever anymore. Howard and I have been tag-teaming for the past five days. We take turns sending each other back to bed. We also pared down to the absolute essentials. Yesterday I had three necessary tasks. I had to finish up the last tax paperwork. I had to attend a registration meeting for my high schooler. I had to make sure that the family birthday celebrations were not delayed or abridged by sickness. I accomplished those things and nothing else. There is an accumulation of tasks which is nibbling at the edges of my consciousness. At some point I’m going to have to find high gear and scramble to catch up. That won’t be today.

I have my list of essential things for today, tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday. These are all parenting and family things which are time sensitive and which will live in memory for decades if I mess them up. I am proceeding cautiously because this particular sickness fills my brain with dumb at unexpected moments. On the list of things I really ought to get done are shipping, house cleaning, and email. A little at a time is all I can do.

Still recovering Read More »

Sick Day

/ / 2 Comments

I will assuage my guilt at postponing my son’s birthday party by chanting “Infectious diseases do not make good party prizes.”

Current sick count:
1 case of pneumonia (Howard)
2 flu cases with chills, fever, and body aches (Kiki and Me)
1 sore throat (Gleek)
1 unsettled stomach (Link)

That’s 5 out of 6 people. Hopefully quarantine will prevent us from being Typoid Taylers. Also hopefully everyone will play nicely all day. I’m in the head cold with body aches category.

Edited to Add: Over night the sore throat manifested as stomach flu with attendant middle-of-the-night clean up. The unsettled stomach is now feeling fine.

Sick Day Read More »

Howard is sick

/ / 1 Comment

“There’s a funny thing about X-rays.” The doctor said as he leaned close to his computer screen. I leaned forward as well and we examined the image of Howard’s lungs together. “X-rays run a day behind because of tissue penetration. So we’re really looking at what Howard’s lungs looked like yesterday.” The doctor lifted his pen and traced over a faint spidery white spot.

Howard lifted his head from his place on the examining table. His hoodie was pulled down over his eyes because the light was too bright. “So what you’re saying is that X-rays time travel.”
The doctor smiled. He was quite familiar with Howard’s jokes, as he is our neighbor as well as Howard’s doctor. Howard continued to crack jokes until I made him stop so the doctor could concentrate on filling out the battery of prescriptions that we’d use to help fight the pneumonia which was not quite showing up on the X-rays yet. Howard felt fine yesterday. This thing slammed into him during the middle of the night.

We used a wheelchair to get Howard to the car. His walk had become a breathless shamble and he shivered constantly from the fever that had taken hold during the two hours we sat in various waiting rooms at the clinic. At home we fed him industrial strength antibiotics and I put the flannel sheets onto the bed for extra warmth. The doctor says he might be able to function again in a couple of days, but that it will be a week or two before he feels well again. Howard has spent the majority of this winter being sick. This new manifestation does not thrill us at all.

Howard is sick Read More »

Dead Men Don’t Cry by Nancy Fulda

/

I met Nancy Fulda when I was four years old and she was two days. I have a vague memory of thinking she was cute, but our mother assures me that I also exhibited significant signs of resentment at not being the baby of the family any more. These feelings were somewhat appeased by the present–From: Nancy To: Sandra–of a small stuffed rabbit. It was a golden orange color and the perfect size for hiding in a coat pocket and sneaking to school. So upon her entry into my life, Nancy gave me something I treasured. She still does. Often.

For many years Nancy was an ancillary character in my story of childhood, but anytime I looked around to check my progress, she was always closer on my heels than I thought she would be. I had to go faster just to stay ahead, though I never once acknowledged that keeping ahead had any importance to me. Years later, when she was pregnant with her first child and I with my fourth, we dropped our defenses enough to lament to each other how difficult it was to have a sister who seemed better at everything. We laughed together and from that time began to collaborate instead of competing. Nancy is one of my best critiquers for my writing. What a loss it would be if I had stayed too jealous to show it to her.

Nancy has a book for sale called Dead Men Don’t Cry. It is a book made out of the best stories she’s written in the past 10 years. These are all reprint stories which sold to various Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines. She’s collected them for convenience sake so that people like me can find them all in one place. You can buy it on the site she created called Anthology Builder. She writes. She runs a business. She has three kids. She supports her husband in his creative endeavors. She does all of this while also battling various personal challenges. She is amazing and she writes stories I love to read because they are about people with problems who happen to live in fantastical worlds. Can you see why I was intimidated all those years? You should take a look at her book and her website.

Dead Men Don’t Cry by Nancy Fulda Read More »

Thoughts on Identity and Categorization

/

I was in High School and the assignment was to create a quick drawing to represent who you are. The teacher did not mean for it to be an important or profound assignment, it was the prelude to a guessing game activity. I was completely unable to comply with the request. I knew I could draw a picture that would allow other students to guess who I was, but somehow I became emotionally tangled in the idea that such an image would be a false representation of who I was. I felt like a person of infinite possibility and to draw an image would be to show only a sliver of who I was. Anything I drew would be boxing me in, limiting my possibilities, and ultimately be a lie. My teacher was quite frustrated with me. He wanted quick drawings, not an identity crisis.

I have always disliked being pigeon-holed or labeled. As a child I claimed all the colors as my favorites. As a teen I entered high school with the deliberate intention to re-define myself in the eyes of my peers. Later I had to undo all that work and re-connect myself with my true interests. It was only well in to my adult years that I learned that I did not have to constantly challenge other people, daring them to accept all the aspects of who I am. Only in the last five years have I learned that allowing other people to categorize me for their convenience is a courtesy I can extend which has absolutely no bearing on my life or what I accomplish. I have an array of labels to describe me, but none of them define me completely. Having lots of labels means I can display whichever one is appropriate to the social situation.

I spent this past weekend at LTUE, a symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is always interesting to me to see what panels I am placed on, because it is a reflection of how I am viewed by the local writing community. I had one panel on organization, one on parenting, and two on business/financial things. It is endlessly amusing to me that I, the person who picked a humanities major in college because it required no math, am now teaching basic accounting and business structure. Yet these are things I know very well because I had to learn them. I think it is encouraging for creative people to know that organization and structure can be learned. I love teaching about these things. They are good things. However I am more than just business, organizational, mommy lady. I would love to teach classes on story, blogging, and creative non-fiction. I believe I could do these well, but I don’t yet have the credentials to back up my belief. I don’t have visible evidence of my capability and thus that is not how I am thought of when the time comes to arrange panels or presentations.

The need to categorize is built into human brains. We have to be able to file experiences and dismiss them or else we will be in a constant state of mental overload. One of the primary drives of early childhood is the creation of categories. No one wants to examine each and every fork we encounter to determine it’s qualities and use. We need to be able to label it quickly as a fork and move on to something else. We do this same thing with people. We have to. Every person in the world is a being of infinite possibility, but contemplating that for every cashier at the grocery store and every person you drive past would overwhelm. Thus to me the young lady with a head full of hopes and dreams is just a cashier. To her I am just a customer. This is good and necessary, no matter how much I hated it as a teenager.

I think I worked so hard to dodge categories because I was afraid to be trapped in them. This is a very real problem. Sometimes the imposed categories of others can limit a person’s potential, particularly if the categories are applied by people in power. A child may have a very difficult time breaking free of being “the smart one” if that is how parents and neighbors see her. I have friends who make a full time living at writing and yet are still treated as if they’ve picked up an amusing hobby. This can be infuriating and emotionally crushing. Repeated application of a particular category can make even a being of infinite possibility accept limitation. I am in a very fortunate position. None of the categories that other people apply to me block my pathways to my goals. I am not barred from my dreams by being too female, white, Mormon, maternal, scattered, reliable, messy, or any other category. Fighting against the perceptions of those who have power over your dreams is hard. The first step is to not accept the limitations of the categories assigned by other people.

I never did draw a picture for that class game. I sat out while the other students played. Several months later I realized what my visual representation should be. It was a dandelion puff scattering seeds on the wind. All of the seeds had the ability to sprout into a new plant and they had the potential to travel far. It still was not a perfect representation, but I liked it because it represented possibility rather than limitation. The fact that real-world dandelions are often treated as weeds was perhaps a meta-commentary upon the fate of people who defy categorization. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I just loved to remember blowing the dandelion puffs, watching seeds sail off into the blue, and wondering where they would land. I gave my teacher a hand drawn picture of a dandelion puff months after the assignment was forgotten by everyone else. He gave me an odd look, not quite sure where I fit. I felt quite good about that.

Thoughts on Identity and Categorization Read More »