Author name: Sandra Tayler

Despite it all Life is Good

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It feels like the kids and Howard are always extra rambunctious or grouchy on the days when I am tired. Those are the days where I drive up to my house and see the scattered pieces of some broken plastic toy across the pavement in front of our house. Then I remember that Gleek and some neighborhood kids had made a game of smashing the thing and they’d wandered off leaving the pieces. Of course they didn’t clean it up. Cleaning up rarely occurs to children and only sometimes to teens. Cleaning up becomes automatic for people who’ve been in charge of cleaning up long enough to know that life is better if the work is done first. The garbage cans were out by the curb too, waiting for me to bring them in. I looked at these small tasks, only a couple of minutes each, and realized that it fell to me, not to do the tasks, but to make someone else do them. The tiring part is that making someone else do them takes longer than doing them. It takes more energy too, but I simply can’t do all the tasks all the time. I have to make sure that others do them enough that they learn the “clean up the messes” impulse that they’ll need for the rest of their lives.

The house is a wreck, of course. I have been busy over the last month. We had vacation, then a major convention, then the Strength of Wild Horses shipping, then fetching Kiki from college. I haven’t had time to do things nor to make others do them. So I haul the kids from their games and require them to carry in the groceries that I fetched from the store. Then they eat the dinner I provided by spending $5 at Sam’s club for a rotisserie chicken. Not exactly home cooked, but more suited to our newly frugal budget than ordering pizza. The budget is new too. I remember how it goes from the years when we first launched into cartooning full time. But the habits are rusty and I’m still figuring out how they fit with the newer configuration of our lives. Back then I had time to bargain hunt for the cheapest whole chicken available and then to roast it myself. I work differently now and my solutions must be different.

Howard is having a rough day. He alerted me to the fact via text while I was still at the store. I look around the chaos of the kitchen, dirty dishes everywhere, kids wandering around and squabbling while they serve themselves food. I try to gently correct the rudest interactions and remind them that they can speak kindly to each other and still get the outcomes that they want. The kids listen. Maybe it will take this time. Probably not, but it is like making them clean. I have to keep modeling and reminding so that they can practice the empathy for others that they’ll need their whole lives. The chaos in the kitchen is perfectly calibrated to punch all of Howards anxiety and stress buttons. I am not surprised when he disappears back to his office, it is good of him, because he chose the kinder and more empathetic disappearance rather than venting his stress out loud. I am sad that he’s having a rough day, not just for him, but for me. When I’m tired and he’s happy, then I’m not so tired. That’s the truth of hard days. It is not that my family saves up chaos and grouchiness for the days when I’m tired, it is because I’m tired that everything feels extra grouchy and chaotic. Even things that would normally be fine.

I load the dishwasher, because that makes the kitchen better. The kids eat and are re-directed toward their evening homework activities. In the wake of all that, there is some quiet and some order. I sit facing the cleared counters, my back to the rest of the house. I’ll deal with the rest tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a full night’s sleep instead of the insomnia I had last night. Tomorrow I will do the laundry and vacuum, or make one of the kids do those things. For now, I will rest as much as I can. And I will remember how very fortunate I am to have all of these things which sometimes make life feel chaotic.

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Strength of Wild Horses Available Now

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There it is. The Strength of Wild Horses made into a book. I wrote it. Angela illustrated it. Three hundred people backed the Kickstarter project that funded the printing. The books arrived. I sent rewards to Kickstarter backers. And now the book is available. You can buy it in our store by clicking that link or on the picture above. Or on Amazon.com


Don’t the books look pretty together? They match.

It has been a long road getting to this point, but here it is. Excuse me while I go happy dance for a bit.

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Taming the Garden

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Somewhere in the years, Mother’s Day became and emotionally complicated holiday. It didn’t used to be. I try not to make it so now, but sometimes it is because my children and husband want to do something nice for me and I want to let them, but I don’t want them to feel obligated. Sometimes it slides by without a ripple and all is happy. Other years it is a fraught day with emotions other than happiness and contentment, even though all of the scripts state that Mother’s Day is supposed to be a day when Mom is happy. This year I saw the holiday coming. I also know that money is tight and so the last thing that would feel happy is extra expense. I sat everyone down yesterday and declared that what I really want for Mother’s Day is for our yard to not be an absolute wreck. I was surprised at how willing the kids were to go along with this plan. I think they liked having a clear goal.

This morning the work began with clipping and clearing. We broke out the mower for the first time and trimmed back various bushes and vines. The pom pom spruce got sheared back. We stared at the apricot tree and the pear tree, but both have gotten so tall that we’re going to need some sort of a pole saw to give them the trimming that they need. Four hours of work across five people and we’ve cleared away a significant mess. This evening some of the dry branches will have a second use as fuel for our fire pit. There will be smores. Next week will all be hands and knees work. We’ll need to get down into the flower beds and pull out all the extra grass. I want to clear the dirt enough that I can sprinkle seeds. I’d love to plant flowers that will bloom this year, but I don’t have the funds for that. I can do seeds though. I have a big stock of them that have accumulated over the years.

At one moment during the morning I stood and watched my kids at work. They were all focused on their tasks at hand, which is not at all how family work days used to go. They functioned as a crew and got lots of work done. Then afterward they did more things together. I have to remember that we play together more happily when we’ve worked together first.

It would be so lovely to spend this summer glad every time I step outside my door instead of sad and guilty. That would be a lovely gift indeed.

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Drifting Day

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I finished the Strength of Wild Horses shipping except for a few odds and ends. I expected to spend today clearing those away and preparing for Kiki to come home tomorrow. Instead my brain declared a jellyfish day and I’ve accomplished very little. Or rather, I’ve done some important things, but not in any sort of a focused way. That four hour nap was crucial to my ability to drive safely tomorrow. So I meandered my way through the day, getting the most important things done. Everything else will sit until Friday.

It turns out that after a sufficient period of focused drive, my brain just stops and I drift for a bit. If I embrace the drift and let it happen, then I can get moving again on a different day. Excuse me, there’s a hammock there outside my window and it needs someone to sit in it for awhile.

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Learning to Divide the Load

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At 2am this morning I had a brilliant opening sentence for this blog post. My brain worked, crafted, and whittled to make sure I had a sentence that was balanced and clever. Of course at that hour I was attempting to be asleep and so I did not get up and write it down. Naturally I can’t recall it this morning, partially because my brain is fogged from lack of sleep. Stupid brain.

I haven’t been writing much in these past few weeks. I’m juggling too many things and holding them all in my head. The logical thing to do would be to reach out to one of my many willing friends and say “Hey, can you help me with this?” That would make a lot of sense. Tasks like shipping 300 Strength of Wild Horses packages would be far more enjoyable with company. The trouble is that the things to do arrive in such small pieces. I always have trouble deciding that this one additional email means that I should stop and figure out how to reconfigure the load so someone else can help me carry it. It always seems like stopping to shift things around will delay progress. Surely I should just carry on. Besides, other people are busy too. I don’t want to bother them.

I want to say that this “do it myself” tendency is some sort of virtue or at least not a symptom of pride, but I suspect the opposite is true. It is a flaw which frequently leads to me being overwhelmed. I don’t have to be. Many people have told me on many occasions that they’re happy to help out. Yet somehow I always fail to stop and decide to divide the load.

I’m hoping to change this when Kiki gets home from college. She’s going to spend the summer with us dividing her time between art commissions and being a Tayler Corporation employee. I will have someone in my house to whom I can assign work because she is getting paid. I’m certain it will not all be sunshine and roses. I’m still going to have to fight my tendency to not want to bother other people. Yet hopefully by the time she heads back to college, I’ll have learned some things about where hired help is helpful in my business processes. Also hopefully, I will have figured out how to budget and pay for that help. It will be a learning experience for us both.

Of course between now and Thursday when I drive to fetch her from school, I have much work to do. Not the least of this work is turning our dungeon basement room into a space that Kiki can live in for three months without feeling opressed by the bare concrete walls. We don’t have the money to fund framing and finishing. Instead I’ve put up sheetrock on the one framed wall and I’ll be hanging unbleached muslin over the remaining concrete. ($40 can cover most of the room.) The walls will still be hard to the touch, but hopefully we can trade Dungeon-bedroom for blanket-tent bedroom, which seems lots cozier, if still odd. Planning how to make it work is one of the things my brain was considering late last night while also crafting the perfect blog opening.

Perhaps I’ll do some before and after pictures later today. For now, I need to head over to the warehouse. I have 90 more packages to mail and then I can call the SWH shipping complete.

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Learning is not Always Fun

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I read a blog called Mayaland. I love reading Maya’s blog. Her approach to life and raising kids warms my heart. They have adventures, a pond which sometimes has a turtle, a dog, there used to be goats, and they build houses out of found parts. I truly respect Maya for the life she has built and how she is raising her kids.

Maya unschools her kids. This is a form of homeschooling that doesn’t require structure or formal lessons. Instead it lets the kids follow their own interests. Maya wrote about how it works for them. I’m so glad that it does work for her family, but that post made me cry. In particular, this sentence hit me hard:
“learning is easy when you’re having fun”
Because I do not think that all learning can be fun for all people. I do not believe that a dyslexic child, left to herself, will automatically learn how to read when she is “ready.” There are a host of other challenges and disabilities which act as road blocks to learning because the associated activities can’t be fun. At least not until a certain level of skill is acquired first. Yes it is possible to use future fun as an incentive to get over the hard bits, but for some people learning itself is hard. Worthwhile, rewarding, but hard.

I remember fourteen years ago when my two and a half year old son was tested for developmental delays. That test revealed much, as did the classes and education that came afterward. The classes taught me how to teach him. My son did not know how to communicate beyond a couple dozen words. He did not even know how to point to indicate something he wanted. Toddlers point and insist on the things they want. They demand and reach to communicate. My son didn’t. The teachers gave me a simple activity to teach my son how to point. An M&M candy in a cup with a black dot on it. I put my son’s finger to the dot and gave him the candy. We played the game four times and the lights went on. Suddenly he pointed at all the things he wanted and his world was larger. A simple adult-structured activity gave him a tool that enabled him. Yet that first time, I had to grab his hand and put his finger on the dot. I had to push him to do something that did not come naturally to him.

When the time came to teach my son to read, I used exactly the book that Maya dismisses as a waste of time. I didn’t need a structured reading program for my older child. She took to reading easily, but my son needed someone to break things down for him. He needed smaller steps, different steps. Truthfully, he probably would have been content to grow up without ever learning to read. He’s sixteen now and still does not seek out reading, but the fact that he can read enables his life in hundreds of ways. I suppose it is possible that left to himself, he would have tackled reading in his own time. But back in first, second, third grade I had to choose whether to push or to let him continue not knowing. I chose to push, to create structured activities, to insist that he learn skills that I knew would make his world a larger place. It was learning to read that finally taught him how to speak comprehensibly to the world at large.

My son has an auditory processing disorder. All language was scrambled on the way into his brain. This was a large part of his developmental delays. It was why, even at ten years old, he spoke in sentences that sounded like he’d thrown the words into a cup and pulled them out in random order. Given context and familiarity with him, we could figure out what he meant. But when he started reading sentences, he finally learned that spoken sentences should have a natural rhythm and order. Requiring him to learn to read made it possible for me to talk to my son, and that is truly worthwhile. He is amazing inside his head. He sees things that I don’t. He thinks in ways that are unique to him and now he can share that with me when he couldn’t before. It is possible that his innate brilliance would have eventually led him to read without my structured lessons, but I would have missed out on years of being able to talk to him. I don’t regret those years, nor the educational pushing that gave them to me.

My choices are different than Maya’s, which does not mean that either of us is wrong. It just means that we have diverse challenges, children, resources, and capabilities. We definitely agree that people learn best when the process is enjoyable. I structured my son’s lessons in games as often as I could, because games spoke to him. I just think there is also value in learning that comes in ways that require a person to do something hard that they dislike.

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Enjoying Spring

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Spring is hope. I breathe it in the mild air. I see it on all the trees which have begun to leaf out after looking dead all winter. Spring is when the world turns green again after the darkness. For the first half of my life I did not have a favorite season. Ever since I went through a dark winter which included radiation therapy, Spring has been my favorite. Summer is good. Autumn is fine. Winter can be beautiful, though it wears at my spirits. Spring is hope. I like hope.

My kids feel the hope too. Yesterday Patch’s teacher requested a quick meeting with me, and my heart sank, because the last two quick meetings about Patch were filled with concern about the levels of anxiety he carries. This one was markedly different. “He’s doing so well.” She said. “It’s almost like he’s a different child.” We talked for awhile, trying to figure out what caused the change. Maybe it was his long-time best friend moving back into town. Maybe it was when we passed the anniversary of when everything fell apart last year. Maybe it is the cello lessons which are giving him confidence. Maybe he’s finally made peace with the fact that life changes. Maybe it’s because Kiki comes home next week. Or maybe he just blooms in the springtime like the flowers do. I’ve seen it year after year. He struggles in the winter and is happier come Spring. But each year he struggles less and blooms more, so it is progress of sorts.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told “It’s like he’s a different child” by teachers, though sometimes the pronoun is “she” instead. It is one of the reasons that I was able to survive last year. I knew that the struggles were not our destiny forever. I don’t know if all kids go through cycles where they flounder, turn inward, lash out, and worry the adults who love them. I’d like to think so, rather than believing that my kids have more intense experiences than average. In the hardest moments I look at my child and know that the capability to soar is in there, that they have to find it themselves, and once the child taps into it, everyone around will say “It’s like she’s a different child.” No. She is what she has always been. He is what he has always been. It is just that the potential has burst forth, and where there were only bare branches, now there are blooms.

We have five weeks until summer. Technically summer doesn’t begin until June 21st, but for all practical purposes, once school lets out–it is summer. It feels like we’re heading into a season of summer for our emotional lives as well. We had our year of transition. Now it would be nice to have a year of stability and plenty. A year where the kids all stay in the same schools and we enjoy a quiet routine. We’re almost there, but I’m not going to rush forward. Because it is spring now, and spring is a season to be relished.

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Tending and Blooming

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I used to be a gardener. It is still a thing that I love and someday I will again make time to tend the ground and grow flowers. Right now it is simply not as important to me as a dozen other projects that I have. I find time to get outside and beat back the weeds, but that is not the same as being a focused gardener. A tended garden is a thing of beauty. My garden is a wilderness where plants have a survival-of-the-fittest battle with only occasional intervention from me. I’m pleased that sometimes the flowers win.

Every year Thanksgiving Point Gardens hosts a tulip festival. I always intend to go. One year I even scheduled an outing to go, but then one of my kids picked that day to pretend to be sick. All of the other years, at least five or six of them, I simply missed the window. Somehow the two weeks in April when the tulips are in full bloom always were busy. I would look up at the end of the month and realize that I’d missed my chance yet again.

This morning, for the first time ever, I didn’t miss it. My friend said “Do you want to go?” and I said “Yes.” So we both ditched our piles of work and we wandered the gardens.

Beauty can be found wild, in untended corners, or even wide open spaces. Yet there is an art to a tended garden, I walk there and I know that it is loved because someone had to get down on hands and knees and dig. They had to get dirty, tired, and sweaty to make sure that all goes well. A tended garden takes a sacrifice of time. I’ve spent my last few years tending other things. This year I’m watching my children bloom when last year was life torn up, mud, and despair. Sometimes tending something is like that, you have to make a big mess before beauty can happen. I’ve also tended many books and last week I got to see them arrayed in a booth where others could see the results of all those invisible hours. My garden is full of weeds, but my life is full of things that are beautiful because of the effort I’ve put into them. So perhaps I am still a gardener, just not of flowers right now.

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Some Updates

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One day of laying down and watching shows all day with breaks only for eating and sleeping. A second day of slow-paced work where I’m not particularly efficient, but things get done. Then on the third day I feel normal again. Thus does the regular pattern of our lives reassert itself after the massive strain of FanX. News reports put the attendance at the show as over 100,000 people. This means it is the largest show that Utah has ever seen and it begins to rival San Diego Comic con for size. We only saw the portions of the crowd that made their way past our booth. Since the aisles were wider than last year, it actually felt less crowded. The show went much better, but we’re still not convinced that a massive show like this is a good return on investment for us. When I finished all the math on hours and dollars, we made around $10 per hour. That’s much improved over last year’s $0 per hour, but still not great money. We may give this one more shot with yet another experimental configuration of booth and people.

But that is not my focus for this week. I’m just trying to re-establish normal patterns, because we haven’t had them for two weeks between spring break and massive convention. I’m also fighting the spring impulse to just let everything slump because we only have five weeks left in the school year. Instead I’m trying to re-establish healthy eating, homework, and chores for all of us. I’m also looking at the plants growing in my yard and remembering that I should really get out there with some tools to beat back the weeds.

I’m also looking at fulfilling Kickstarter promises. I’ve got Strength of Wild Horses to ship. (It arrived last Wednesday while I was in Salt Lake setting up the booth. So I didn’t get to greet the truck or write a lovely post about happiness and triumph. Hopefully those words will come to me when I’m doing the shipping days.) I’ve got challenge coin stories to sort.

The third thing on my plate this week is prepping for Kiki to come home. Nine days and she’s here for the summer. This makes all of us glad, as evidenced by the fact that when I’m on a skype video call with her, all the other kids come flocking. Kiki and Link got nostalgic for our old Nintendo 64 during their portion of the conversation, so now Link wants to pull it out and see if he can make it work. I recall that it was flaky because it had been accidentally pulled off the cabinet a few too many times back in the days when all controllers had cords.

So that’s how things are here.

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Altered Perceptions

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When I wrote Married to Depression I mentioned Robison Wells whose experiences with mental illness were pivotal in convincing Howard to seek help. The severity of Rob’s struggles far outstrip what Howard and I deal with, yet Rob continues to turn his struggles to good purpose. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Rob is now insured for the first time in years, unfortunately he spent most of his diagnosis and treatment cycles with no insurance at all. His mental health related medical debt is large and the weight of that debt increases his struggles with panic disorder. As a person whose anxiety is heavily linked to finances, my heart goes out to him.

This is why I’m supporting the Altered Perceptions anthology. The book will contain my essay Married to Depression. It also has a very personal piece from Howard which illustrates his depression from inside his head. Howard was a little afraid to let me read his piece, because he worried it would make me cry. It did, because it so accurately portrays moments that we’ve had. Most of the anthology will be filled with alternate endings and deleted chapters from many popular book series. The list of authors involved is impressive. I invite you to go take a look and please consider supporting this fundraiser. It can change lives.

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