We’re still mired in being sick. Today this made me angry. I expressed that anger by cleaning and running all the errands. Sometimes that makes me feel better. Didn’t really work this time around. I’m still grouchy and angry. Though I am very grateful to friends on twitter who made me laugh more than once today. This was a day much in need of laughter.
It was Sunday night and the convention was over. The attendees had departed for their homes and the hotel staff was doing their best to make everything back to normal. Usually Howard and I try to depart before the hotel is emptied of the people we love, but this time we stayed an extra night. We did it on purpose so that we would have time to visit with some dear friends who were local to the convention, but who had not had time to come. Two hours is not enough time to catch up when you haven’t seen a friend for two years, but we snatched the hours we had.
I sat there across the table from my friends. Howard had already said his farewells and gone, exhausted, to bed. I lingered because I don’t know when I’ll see these friends again. An anecdote wound down and my friend asked “So how are you doing. Really.” And I began to talk. I tried to summarize, but each detail trailed a cloud of explanation. They listened to all of it. At one point I found myself telling the story of the hardest day last Spring, when the Elementary school staff called me down to discuss Gleek and I met with her teacher, the principal, and three other staff members to discuss what steps were necessary going forward. It was the week when Gleek stayed at home for a few days while we figured things out. The same week when Patch’s teacher also called me to say she was worried about Patch. I was telling that story with all the details of the specific incidents, and I realized that I was using my best story teller mode.
We were laughing through the whole thing.
It was an overwhelmingly, ridiculously difficult week and that was why we laughed.
I couldn’t have laughed at that story six months ago. I’m not even sure I could have laughed two months ago. Last Sunday I laughed. Because it is done, we survived, and the details of the story display the cleverness of my daughter even in difficult emotional circumstances. I can’t promise that all hard things will have laughing later, but far more of them will than we ever expect when we’re going through them.
“How are you doing?” a friend asked. We were sitting down together over snacks, neither of us in a hurry to go anywhere. Not only that, but this friend has on prior occasions listened to me for hours while I ramble about all of the many things in my life. I knew she did not want the short polite answer. I started with the short answer. “Good. Things are good.” Because in a general assessment of all the things going on, there is far more good than difficult. When you get down to details things are more mixed, but that is always the case. We could definitely do without all the coughing. I wish I could say that I was approaching the upcoming travel without tension or guilt. I’d really like to never have to deal with an infected ingrown toenail ever again. Yet in the grand scheme these things are small. In fact if I do not write them down, then a year from now I will have forgotten that they happened. I much prefer this sort of trouble to the highly-memorable struggles of last year.
There are a few landmarks scattered about. I sent Strength of Wild Horses off to print this afternoon. Howard and I get to go to a convention together for the first time in a long time. Gleek is enjoying her weekly trip to ride horses. Patch is beginning to discover the frustrations of daily cello practice, but is still enjoying it more than not. The memorable things are good, the difficult things are forgettable. I can handle that.
My house is full of coughing. This is not by preference. We would definitely choose “not coughing” if that were an option. It appears not to be. I am on the very front edge of developing a cough, so I’ve been taking extra measures to get enough rest and eat well. I really do not want to begin a convention already being sick. Particularly not since ConFusion will be the most heavily scheduled convention I’ve ever had. They’ve given me all sorts of interesting programming. I’ll post a full and detailed schedule, probably on Wednesday. That will let those who want to find me at ConFusion have a reference. If you’re near Dearborn, Michigan, ConFusion is packed full of interesting people who will be having interesting conversations.
Between now and departure I have work to do. Much of it is the continuation of projects, but some of it is preparations for departure. There are lots of house and parenting things that must be done to prepare everyone. This includes a major history report for Patch that is running behind schedule. It is due Tuesday. We’ve done research, but no construction. I suspect we’re in for a marathon session.
I’ve you’d asked me at Thanksgiving how I expected to spend the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I would not have answered “sitting in a freezing cold horse arena watching Gleek have her first riding lesson.” Horseback riding lessons were not even on my radar as a possibility back then. I watched Gleek attempting to post and succeeding for short periods of time before losing the rhythm. I listened to the teacher explain how she needs to control her body and also how the teacher spoke to the horse. I realized that teaching a fractious horse is probably not much different than teaching self control to an impulsive young girl. This teacher will be good for both. So each Tuesday afternoon we’ll be travel ling to the horse barn. I will sit, maybe write. Gleek will learn.
We don’t know yet whether riding horses will be something we do for a while and then move on to other things or whether we’ve just opened a door into an alternate future. The same is true of Patch and his cello. His first official lesson will take place next week, but yesterday his cousin sat down with Patch and gave a basic lesson in bowing, plucking and music theory. The fact that Patch paid rapt attention for more than ninety minutes suggests that he’ll like playing cello. Again, we have to wait and see. My focus is on providing opportunities for the next several months rather than on planning futures.
Gift giving was tricky this year because our kids do not really need more stuff. They like having new stuff, but there wasn’t much that they longed for or actually needed. I think this speaks well to how our lives are going lately. Yet Christmas morning without gifts for them would have been a sad experience for us all. Howard and I were stumped until we realized that the best gift we could give our kids was an open door. We picked something for each child that made possible something that was previously out of reach. Kiki got a scanner/printer for her use at college. Link got an old used laptop which will allow him to learn programming at home. Gleek gets to try out horseback riding lessons. Patch got a cello and lessons to go with them. There was an array of other smaller things, many of them designed to make us all laugh. Laughter at the present opening is one of the best things about the holiday.
I hope that you found laughter and new possibilities in your holiday celebrations as well.
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.
One of my favorite moments in the book The Princess Bride is the part where the boy’s father (yes it is a father in the book, not a grandfather) skips a bunch of boring text by simply saying “what with one thing and another, three years passed.” This was not one of my favorite moments when I was reading the book for the first time (after having fallen in love with the movie.) It became a quiet favorite moment many years later when I realized how very useful that storytelling trick is. I can skip the boring bits, simply skim over them, and get back to the important stuff. The only trouble is that no one but me knows I am making a clever reference when I use the phrase “what with one thing and another…” It is not highly quotable nor memorable to most people. It blends into the text of the things I write and no one gets to share a little smile with me and think for a moment about Wesley, Buttercup, and how for about a year when I was twelve I really believed that there was an S. Morgenstern and that I could find an unabridged copy of The Princess Bride. Which means that William Goldman’s own little joke worked on me, so perhaps it is fair to hide a sly reference in my words that no one but me will get. Except you, because you’ve read this, and now you’re in on the joke. It isn’t a big joke, just a little one that makes me smile inside.
What with one thing and another I haven’t had a proper Saturday for a month. The past three were variously disrupted with interesting things, all of which dictated my schedule. This morning dawned with nothing on the calendar and only a list of house things which I’ve been wanting to complete, but haven’t had time to do. So naturally I slept late. Because that is the proper beginning for a Saturday. Then I marshaled my forces (the kids) and compelled all of us to go outside where we made the front of our house look like maybe someone lives in our house. We also harvested walnuts from under the fallen leaves and pears from where they’d fallen on the ground. I discovered that there were still grapes hiding among the vines so we picked those too. I’ve been ignoring these fall things because I was so busy. I didn’t have time to do anything else, or so I thought.
There are many jokes about working for yourself. “Best thing about working for yourself is that you only have to work half days and you get to pick which twelve hours.” It is the sort of joke which is funny because it rings of truth. In theory our lives are supremely flexible because we set our own schedule. In reality there are hundreds of constraints telling us what must be done, when it must be done, and how it must be done. Work and family things don’t blend together, but they do tangle up and often interfere. One thing that has surprised me in the past year has been the re-emergence of Saturday as a housework day. Back when I was not working at business and was instead working on keeping house and raising small children, I used school-free Saturdays as a time to set the house in order and to teach the kids about housework. Then everything got muddled up with work spilling everywhere. But lately I put down the majority of the business work on Friday afternoon and don’t pick it up until Monday morning. It creates a space where I can look around me and realize that I want to sweep the front walk because those grass clippings have been there for two weeks and they’ve clumped up against the front steps so that everyone tracks some into the house. It is the sort of little task which theoretically should just get done in one of the spaces of the days, only the days keep running out of spaces. Or I run out of energy. Often the latter.
I picked up the pears by myself, crouched under the low hanging branches, not willing to kneel lest I discover my knee in the midst of mushy rotten pear. My hair often caught on branches over head, pulling strands loose and occasionally depositing twigs. One of which I discovered later when an acquaintance stopped by, and mid-chat I touched my head to realize that perhaps brushing my hair after the pair project would have been a good idea. The acquaintance was too polite to mention my birdnest-like hairdo, so I just put my hand back down and ignored it as well. Half of poise is deciding that these things are irrelevant. Before that conversation, there were pears, and I was by myself picking them up carefully because wasps like rotting pears and I do not like getting stung. The sun filtered through the yellow, orange, red leaves above me. Sometime next week all those leaves will be on the ground and finding the pears would be much more difficult. My back was aching because I’d done more physical labor that day than I’ve done in quite a while. I was glad because sleep has been elusive as my brain ran overtime considering projects. Devoting myself to clean up and harvesting was setting me to rights in more ways than one.
The kids complained as they pulled the husks off of walnuts. They don’t even like walnuts much and they’d already done quite a bit of work. Though Gleek admitted to enjoying the “cute little worms” she sometimes finds in the husks. The kids don’t even like eating walnuts much, but I do. I sneak them into cookies sometimes or crumble them on my salads. I give them away to neighbors. The walnuts are quite a bit of work because once the slimy husk is removed there is still a shell to crack and the nutmeat to pick out. Lots of packaging and work for something so small, yet having the tree makes me happy and I like having food that grew in my yard. Perhaps I should instead have made the kids help me with pears. They love to eat pear butter, except wasps would have led to kids not helping at all.
The harvesting activites have added to my list of projects for next week, yet they have lowered my stress level by reminding me of things that I love. I can see it in my thoughts and manifested in this post where I abandon the tightly focused presentation of small ideas and instead am content to drift from topic to topic. The whole thing is really one long digression, but then the title of the post should have been a clue. What with one thing and another Saturday passed, which means that this whole post could be skipped by those who just want to hear news of projects. The day was a pause, a side note. It did not forward the plot. The fact that I wrote it makes me remember why I wanted to find that mythical unabridged version of Princess Bride. I knew that the things which had been cut were probably boring, but I still wanted to see them. It was during the same era of my life that I read the 1500+ page unabridged Les Miserables and was fascinated by its meanderings. Sometimes the pauses and the digressions are the point.
Saturday evening with my four kids downstairs shouting and laughing over Super Smash Bros Brawl. Mid battle my two daughters start singing a song together, one with a familiar tune, but non-standard lyrics. It is a pretty good conclusion for a day which began with me getting up before dawn to find the Greyhound stop where Kiki would get off the bus. Our day has also included some design work for me, Art work for Kiki, homework for Link. We took a break to watch giant robots punching giant monsters and to marvel at the tactical idiocy which did not have humanity setting up a patrol to guard the sole entrance from the monster realm. I mean, why let the monsters get a mile from land before trying to destroy them? Granted, they would still have had problems, but lots less property damage and many lives saved. It is a good thing that the monsters and robots are so fun to watch. Anyway. We probably could have spent more time outside in the beautiful weather. So many of my neighbors spent the day clearing their yards an preparing for winter. That would have been a good use of time. Yet it has been a good day.
“I really thought I would be bullied more.” Patch told me as we were curled up for his bedtime snuggle one night. “Being in the A.L.L. program for smart kids, I thought I would get bullied, but I haven’t. I wonder why that is.” Patch’s voice was mildly puzzled as he mused on this topic. I curled my arm around him a little tighter and thought how grateful I am that this has been his experience. I could have said that, and it would probably have been the end of the conversation, but I’ve been trying to do a better job of helping Patch pull his thoughts and emotions out where we can both see them, so instead I asked.
“What do you think it could be?”
“Well, It could be that my school is a good school and doesn’t have bullies. Or it could be that all the bullies have other people they pick on that are not me. Or maybe I just don’t act like a smart kid.” Patch paused a moment for thinking. “I think my school is a good one.”
I nodded my head in the dark. “I agree. What do you think makes your school be a good one?”
“I don’t know.” Patch answered.
It was important for Patch to see the whys of how his school has few troubles with bullying. It all has to do with the culture that has been consciously created at his school.
The importance of school culture became apparent to me when Patch and Gleek attended a previous school. It was a good school, close to home, and full of caring and attentive staff. Then the long-time principal left and took half a dozen of the best teachers with him. The new principal meant well, I could tell that he did, but over time it became apparent that he did not understand behavior modification and sociology. Every policy change and every letter sent home pounded out the importance of safety, rules, and good citizenship. He instituted reward programs for good behavior which then necessitated clearly defining “good behavior” in a series of rules lectures. His policies also emphasized the consequences for those who were not being good citizens of his school. The net effect was to teach the kids to police each other and to watch for infractions. All of this occurred at a time when Gleek was struggling with impulsive behaviors. She knew the rules, she wanted to follow the rules and be rewarded with good citizen slips, but in a fraction of a second she would choose wrong and suddenly discover that she was in trouble. As the new culture solidified, I could tell that it was increasingly hostile to Gleek.
Fortunately we had the option to test our kids for a gifted program, A.L.L, that would transfer them to a new school. Gifted programs have problems of their own. Many times the culture in such a program is one of high expectation and pressure to perform adequately. I approached cautiously, but then I did some research into the school where my kids would attend. I looked at a letter to parents from each of the principals. The old school principal’s letter outlined some new rules and clarified programs designed to manage problem behaviors. The letter from the new school talked about a reading program and was focused on learning. The new school hosted not just a gifted program, but also several classes for autistic kids. The “Life Skills” classes were as integrated into the school activities as possible. This meant that the teachers and staff were teaching tolerance of differences on a daily basis. Older classes had weekly reading buddy sessions with younger classes. We decided to make the switch, not realizing what a godsend it would prove to be.
In Gleek’s sixth grade year, anxiety overcame her. Her impulsive behavior turned inward, to be a constant fear she would do things wrong. It is probable that the high intensity of the academic program was a contributing factor, but the largest reason for it was the hormonal surges of puberty. She began having panic attacks at school, to the point where she would curl up into a non-responsive ball on her classroom floor. Sixth grade is a rough age, kids are changing and generally react by ridicule and avoidance of things that make them uncomfortable. But Gleek’s class was reading buddies with severely autistic kids. They had been taught how to understand and deal with odd behavior. I still remember walking with Gleek to her classroom after she had been out for several days due to anxiety. We were greeted, by kids, with smiles and statements like “we miss you Gleek, when will you be back?” Because of that accepting classroom full of peers, Gleek was able to come back instead of feeling like her anxiety had destroyed all hope of social connection.
The culture of a school matters. It permeates classrooms and the lives of children in them. We were very fortunate that we were able to switch from an (unintentionally) hostile atmosphere to one that was exactly what we needed. We survived the year before I was able to switch by paying close attention to what the school culture was teaching my kids and acting to alleviate it. I’m afraid we deliberately undermined the citizen slip program, teaching our kids that we cared about them being good people, not about them bringing home prizes. I made private deals with teachers about how to handle Gleek’s impulsive behaviors. Even in the much better culture of the second school, I still paid attention. Many of the lessons of public school are taught in the hallways, lunchrooms, and on the playgrounds. How the staff handles those situations makes a world of difference. Thus my panic attack girl was not ostracized, and my gifted program son has not experienced bullying in his elementary school. I wish more school administrators had a full comprehension of how to build such healthy school cultures.
(Also relevant to this post Strategies for dealing with a bully