Uncategorized

Some days I can stand in front of a room full of rowdy children and command their complete attention with nothing but my words. Other days it is all I can do to quell my desire to flee from the children because they are noisy and constantly touching me. On the second kind of a day I don’t even bother to aspire to excellence. I just aim for “good enough” and hope to hit it. Today was a “good enough” kind of day. I always feel bad when I have a good enough day on a holiday because holidays call for extra effort. Somehow we muddle through and the boiled eggs get colored and the plastic eggs get hidden. The day was made worlds better by the fact that Howard let me huddle in bed for an hour after church while he cleaned the kitchen and made dinner. I emerged with my headache gone to find a lovely meal ready to eat.

Patch lost his first tooth this morning. This is the last first lost tooth for our family. It is one of many last firsts in Patch’s life. I sometimes ponder at the differences in experience between my older kids and my younger ones. When Kiki lost her first tooth, I shed a tear that she was getting so big. I worried about what was ahead. For Patch I shed a tear not so much for what is ahead, but for what is permanently behind. From the kids’ point of view, Mommy cries either way, so Perhaps there really isn’t all that much difference. I can’t be the person for kindergarten Patch that I was for kindergarten Kiki. I’ve changed. Our lifestyle has changed. The structure of our family has changed. Contorting myself to try to make the experiences match up would be en exercise in frustration and futility. All I can do is do my best to meet the needs that I can see. This means that six-year-old Patch still gets to fall asleep in my bed some nights, when Gleek and Link were not allowed at similar ages. It also means that six-year-old Patch has far more responsibilities and chores than Kiki did at a similar age. Their experiences are different, but this is okay because we are trying to answer the needs rather than create some rigid ideal of fairness.

Today at church Patch decided to turn himself into a human barnacle. He wrapped both of his arms around my waist and could not be persuaded to let go. Leaning sideways like that, threw his center of balance off, and so his weight depended upon me to keep him upright. As we stood there, I realized how difficult it was for me to stand stable and straight with him clinging to me for dear life. His constant balance adjustments and dependence upon me to hold him up, threw me off balance. A couple of times I even had to put out a hand and steady myself on a nearby chair. Much of parenting is like this. The kids reach out and grab me, depending upon me to keep everything from falling into a heap. But their clinging needs can pull me off balance as well. They need me to stand tall and straight at the very moment when they are pushing me off balance. So I do the best I can to keep my feet and get us all through. The time will come soon enough when they will stand on their own more often than not. When time came to go to class, Patch detached himself willingly and left without complaint. He just needed some extra contact before he was ready to go.

I’ve been fretting lately over Link’s regressive behaviors. Link is not thrilled about growing up and so he has been talking in a baby-talk tone of voice and doing other things as if he were 6 instead of 11. It has been driving me crazy. Today I suddenly remembered some basic psychological theory that I’d somehow forgotten. If I want to extinguish a certain attention-getting behavior, I should actually ignore that behavior, not reward it with any attention. Instead I should be seeking out examples of the behaviors that I want to encourage, and make sure that I shower those behaviors with praise. All my scolding and telling Link to act his age, made him anxious. His anxiousness increased his desire to be little rather than big. So my attempts to correct the behavior were actually worsening the symptoms and poor Link simply could not win. I nearly smacked myself in the head when I was finally able to see the bad feedback loop. Hopefully I can start doing better.

There comes a time in every life to let go of something you love. Sometimes it is a relationship. Sometimes it is a hobby. Sometimes it is a toy or possession. The tricky part is really letting go both physically and emotionally. I’ve had to do this many times in my life. Sometimes I’ve even gotten to have the thing I let go back, but there was no guarantee of that at the time I put it down. This letting go is necessary because we all have only so much physical and emotional space in our lives. If we never let anything go, then we lead lives cluttered not just with physical objects, but also with regrets and longings that interfere with daily living.

Howard was a musician when I married him. He graduated with a degree in music composition and his array of musical gear took over half the living room of our small apartment. He loved that gear. I can’t count the number of times he disassembled it and reassembled to create the optimal configurations for whatever project he was pursuing at the time. But then Novell started filling more time and the music business did not succeed in the ways we had hoped. There came a time to let it go and be done. Howard packed up the music gear and put it in storage. We kept the music gear in storage until the day came that Howard was really willing to let it go and not regret having it gone. He still feels the call of music, but each time he does, he consciously decides to not pick it back up. Because he let music go, he has space in his mind and his heart for the stories of Schlock Mercenary. Schlock would not be the success it is if Howard were conflicted, regretful, and still half-chasing music endeavors.

At this time in my life I have put down sewing and gardening. They are both activities I love. I’d spun dreams and aspirations around both of them. I dreamed of having a showplace garden all around my house, a haven of beauty. I dreamed of sewing an amazing couture quality dress that would dazzle everyone. But the truth is that I do not have the time nor energy to pursue these things. I may get some bare minimum yard work done, but I do not have the time to pour over garden magazines, draw up plans, or spend the necessary hours per day outside digging, planting, and weeding. I do not have time to plan clothes, select fabrics, or hand sew fantastic details. Those dreams are still beautiful to me, but I have chosen something else instead. I have chosen the family, and blogging, and publishing work, and writing. The things I have chosen are more important to me than a beautiful dress or a beautiful garden. Those dreams will wait patiently for me and I may have a time to pick them back up later. Or perhaps I won’t. Either way is fine because I did something more important instead.

In January 2007 I put down the writing of fiction. It was the right choice to make, but it was heartbreaking at the time. I fought the knowledge that I needed to do it. But in the end I followed what I knew needed to be done. I quit the writing group I belonged to. I packed away all my story notes. I buried the files on my computer. Even as I put it down, I hoped that it was a writing hiatus rather than the end of writing forever, but I had to let it go completely. In order for me to really focus on other things, I had to behave physically and emotionally as if I was done with writing forever. The most terrifying thing was knowing that this process would change me. The act of not writing would change who I was. I was afraid that after a year, the new person I had grown into would not pick writing back up because she would be different and she would not care about it the way that I did. That possibility was real, and so when I put the writing down, even though I planned it as a hiatus, I had to accept that it might really be forever. I had to rant, and rave, and grieve, and then really let go. Completely let go. Because if I did not let go, then the longing and grief would contaminate the things that I was putting writing down to accomplish.

In my case I stopped writing fiction to focus on learning how to be a working mother and a publisher. I had to figure out how to work with an artist, and a printer, and InDesign. I had to figure out how to make the emotional arcs of parenting and the emotional arcs of business not interfere with each other. And I had to do it all during a time when Howard was traveling constantly. I spent much of that year terrified that I would do something wrong and it would all come crashing down. I could not have survived that tumult if I had also been feeling regret and sadness over my lack of time to write. I could not have handled it all while carrying grief over writing. In hindsight I can see how absolutely correct the decision was. I can see what was made possible by the choice. Then when the emotional chaos had subsided, when I had my feet under me again, I looked around and the writing was waiting for me.

There are times when we must let things go. Sometimes we get them back. Sometimes we do not. But if we truly let them go and are at peace that the decision is the right one, then either result can be happy. I do not regret sewing. I do not regret gardening. Howard does not regret music. I do not regret the writing hiatus. I have always wanted to travel to Europe, and I have not yet because I keep choosing other things that are more important to me. I may never get around to seeing Europe, I do not regret that either. The letting go is hard, but without it we can not be happy where we are.

Today was one of those days where I get all the kids off to school and then I go back to bed. I intended to work, but I found myself staring at an email, wanting to answer it, but unable to find the emotional resources to compose an answer. Bed was the only option. I’d drifted in and out of half-asleep for about 30 minutes. Then the phone rang and provided a better option. I went to hang out with my friend Janci. We talked until my voice was getting hoarse and my head was empty of thoughts. It is so nice to have someone else understand and validate your experiences. It is really nice to be able to do that for someone else. And I was out of my house, away from all of my stuff until almost 2 pm.

When I got back, I discovered that my email had filled up with good news. We have a final draft for the XDM project which means I can throw it into the layout and hand stuff off to our editor either Friday evening or Saturday morning. This is slightly ahead of schedule, which is very good. We were also informed of the Gencon booth assignment and the placement is excellent, right across from the WotC booth. The next batch of magnets are done and I picked them up. So that is one more piece in my hand which is ready for book shipping. Also tomorrow morning we’ll be receiving a sample of the slipcases. This means we can take lovely product pictures and show everyone how much nicer the real thing is than the mock-up I taped together. It is like I came home and discovered that all my work had borne fruit. Oh look. Fruit!

Naturally the good must be balanced by the less good. Gleek dragged in from school claiming not to feel well. I believed her, and when she asked for a pot, I got her one quickly. She later demonstrated that the pot was a completely necessary precaution. It is so much nicer to rinse out pots than to mop floors. She’ll be staying home from school again tomorrow. Kiki also came dragging in, but her ailment was emotional. She did not get the Student Council position she wanted so ardently. So I got to hug her tight, and let her cry, and tell her the the flash of anger she felt against the winner was normal, and that she wasn’t a bad person for feeling angry and sad. We talked about why trying is valuable even if we don’t win, and why we have to get up and try again even if it may hurt. We talked about the stages of grief and she was able to see all of them in her experience. That right there made the experience worth it to me. Kiki learning what grief feels like and how to manage it will be far more valuable to her in the rest of her life than would be a year of putting stuff on bulletin boards at the school. She calmed down far more quickly than I expected and within an hour was back out the door for a youth group fund raising activity that she was committed to attend.

So now I am at the afternoon end of a day that was completely full of things that I did not expect. Not one of the things that got done was on my schedule this morning, but they are all good things and I am glad they happened. ( Well, except for the stomach flu. I could pass on that.) So now I am tired, but calm and happy.
And pondering the fact that it is 6 pm and I really ought to feed the kids.

In the comments to a different entry, a reader asked for details on how I keep track of all the things I have to do. I wrote the following as my answer, then realized that it might be interesting as its own blog post:

My task tracking is a multifaceted system that has grown out of years of applied trial and error. It would probably confuse anyone else who tried to use it, but it works for me because the system and my life have grown around each other.

In my kitchen I have a big wall calendar which displays the entire year. The space for each day is small, so only the major events get written down. I don’t write down when the kids go to school, because that is normal. I do write down if they have the day off, or when they have after school activities. I have a different color of pen for each child. This allows me to tell at a glance the general shape of the day/week/month. This calendar is the one I consult when trying to figure out if an event will fit into our schedule. This poses problems when I am away from the house and I need to schedule an appointment. Enter my franklin planner.

The planner has monthly calendar pages that I keep up to date with the big wall calendar. At least once per week I try to make sure that all items are on both calendars no matter where they were originally written down. More detailed information about each individual day goes into the daily pages. Writing things down in there can get tedious, but the process actually seems to help organize the tasks in my brain, so I have not switched to an electronically based system. Each day gets a full page and here is where I assign all the small tasks of the day and check them off. I can also assign tasks to future days and then forget about them until I get to that day. The planner is used extensively when I am stressed or busy. When life is slower, I just use the calendar on the wall and track the remaining few things in my head.

Even the planner information is sometimes too generalized. I will write “XDM layout” which schedules a block of time, but doesn’t remind me which layout tasks I intended to tackle within that block. Enter my high-tech system of post-it notes stuck to my desk and the hutch above it. These help me remember where I left of working and serve as reminders of random bits of information that I’ll need again. I also use my email inbox to help me remember things to do. For example the notification email about LJ comments remind me that I want to respond to the comments. Things only stay in my inbox if I need to do something about them. The drawback to this is that when my inbox fills up, I start to feel stressed because it feels like I have dozens of tasks on my to-do list.

When life is busy (which is every day lately) I start each day by glancing at the wall calendar to get a general sense of the day/week. Then I go through my planner to see what specific tasks there are to tackle each day. After the kids are at school, I sit down at my desk. This is when I glance through the inventory of post-it notes, discarding any that have become irrelevant. Then I comb through my inbox and resolve things there. Then I can start working for real instead of just organizing the work.

When I write it all out like this it sounds like a tediously complex system, but as I said before, it is what has grown out of my experiences. Other people probably have much more streamlined systems. Howard tracks his tasks all in Outlook on his computer. Of course he also benefits from my efforts on the wall calendar and planner, so perhaps that is not a fair comparison. When all is said and done, I prefer to have some redundancy and the manual transfer of information from one place to another. It helps me to wrap my head around the schedule and to make sure that tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

Apparently the week saved the usual Monday frazzle and dished it out to my on Tuesday this week. At this very moment I am at the opposite end of the house from my layout work, because I need a break to straighten the kinks out of my brain before tackling it again. As I expected the stacking of tasks on the XDM project is creating extra layout work for me. I knew I would have to re-do things several times, but it is still tiring and frustrating tweaking a page that I know I’ll have to tweak in the same way again when the text gets changed. But I have to tweak the page now so that Howard can see which pictures he needs to draw. More satisfying are the whole document tasks where I put in a change that I know gets to stay. Like page numbers. All the pages have numbers now. Next up I get to figure out cross-references. Whee.

At least yesterday morning’s on-the-way-to-drop-kids-at-school rant entitled “It is not fair that I have to do things for you when you could do them yourselves and then maybe I’d get to eat breakfast once in awhile.” Oh wait. That’s more of a summarization of the whole rant, but it was longer and louder yesterday. ANYWAY. This morning the kids were all dressed lickety-split and smiling. (Except Gleek who spiked a fever and stayed home from school instead.) They got to school early and I got to eat breakfast too. I love it when the rant actually has an effect. Although now I worry that my extensive and detailed list will teach my kids that keeping score is part of what mothers do, when actually the opposite is true. Family works much better when no one is keeping score of the services and favors. And yet I also have to make sure that they learn to be responsible for themselves instead of just expecting me to do everything. So I sometimes do one and sometimes do the other. Then I get to worry about being inconsistent. Somehow it all works out and a lopsided balance is achieved.

Today was a Monday and I was not frazzled by 2 pm. I think it has been more than a month since I’ve had a not-frazzled Monday. It feels good to be more balanced. It was particularly good to leave my office by 2 pm and be done with business stuff for the day. It gave me time to pay attention to the house and the kids. I even had some time to think about the family trip that we intend to take in June. I’m sure this new balance will be unsettled once the XDM project switches phases from drafting into editing. At least I figured out that my insanely busy week will actually be the week after spring break rather than concurrent with it.

I am pretty sure that I had other interesting thoughts during the day, but apparently they all went to bed. Perhaps I’ll find them again in the morning.

Kiki sat next to me on the couch, carefully shading her latest drawing with colored pencils. Gleek was just past her, curled up in the comfy chair that has somehow come to be called “the Daddy chair.” She had a friendship bracelet pinned to her knee and was carefully knotting row after row. Patch was on the floor in front of Gleek. He was coloring a maze which I had printed from the file of coloring pages on my computer. Link sat on the floor next to Patch, directly in front of me. He was playing with some lego figures, carefully constructing adventures in brick. Howard had been on the short couch, but had just left the room on an errand. In front of all of us was the television broadcast of General Conference (the twice-per-year conference put on by our church), piped to the television from my small laptop computer. The sound for conference was coming from a different computer behind us and was a few seconds ahead of the picture. This is what happens when you wait until five minutes prior to the start of broadcast to discover that the laptop won’t pipe sound to the speakers. So we got the two video streams as closely timed as we could and tried not to be distracted.

It was joyful to look around the room and see my children peacefully occupied while listening to the talks. There was a time when that scene would not have been possible. When making my children all remain in the same room and be quietly occupied for two hours was about as likely as a hummingbird surviving a Utah winter. But somehow we kept inching toward where scenes like the one this afternoon became possible. We worked on reverence at Church. Then we worked on praying together as a family. Then we worked on having a weekly family night. Bit by bit we practiced being the family we want to be, rather than giving up on the family that we were. Bit by bit Howard and I learn how to be better parents. Bit by bit the kids learn how to control themselves, to think of others, to appreciate their siblings. Bit by bit we all strive to make the family work. And it does. Because we all believe it is important.

It still isn’t perfect, because we are all imperfect. After conference was over, I sent all the kids outside to get some fresh air. They all grabbed their padded swords and began playing a live action version of Brawl. Within ten minutes there were siblings frustrated and yelling at each other, as is to be expected with such mismatched capabilities. But that too is part of building a family. We must know that we can be furiously mad at each other and that does not ruin the family. Because we calm down and forgive and let go. Because we talk it through when we can’t let go. Because we keep practicing this forgiveness thing until we get it right.

And today we got it right. We called them all inside for a dinner with all six of us sitting around the table. It was a special dinner with rolls and chicken and mashed potatoes. The kids love this meal. While plates were loaded I asked them all what they liked best about conference, and they all had good things to say. This made me glad, because it was my idea to make them all sit in front of the television for two sessions of two hours each. In all the years prior to today, we’d listened on the radio. This worked so much better. The visual component was really helpful even if having the picture and sound out of sync was a tad distracting. And so I think we’ve found a new piece to stitch into the pattern of our family. Bit by bit we add pieces and create something beautiful.

For everyone who wondered how we’re all doing after the excitement of Howard’s split lip, we’re all fine. Once the kids saw daddy come home after the emergency room, they all spent a moment examining the wound. Then they ran off to play without a worry in the world. We did have a family movie night watching Bolt, during which we served ice cream. The timing was comforting, but that particular event has been scheduled since last Tuesday. Well, the movie was. The ice cream was a result of the shopping trip that Howard and I took post-stitches.

This morning Howard is doing just fine other than the fact that his lip is swollen and hurts some. We expect most of the swelling to be gone by tomorrow. I’m hoping for a less eventful day today. We have two sessions of conference to watch and I’m intending to make a really nice dinner with home made rolls. There may even be another showing of Bolt.

First I will say that in the grand scheme, Howard’s injury is minor. He has three stitches and some very colorful bruising. For the rest of the story and my thoughts on why I am a better mother than I am a paramedic you can click the link. If you are sqeamish about blood, you may want to skip it.
…

Howard’s split lipRead More »

This weekend is my church’s General Conference. This is a major event that is broadcast all over the world via radio, television, and internet. Today I am listening via Radio while doing housework. Tomorrow I will sit down with the kids in front of the television broadcast and we’ll all do quiet activities while listening.

After listening to two hours of talks, several of which addressed faith in the face of adversity, my stresses seem pretty small and unimportant. When so many people are dealing with the stress of not having enough work, it seems ungrateful of me to complain that I have too much. Especially when my problem can be solved by giving the work to someone else and paying them to do it. This makes me far less stressed and makes the other person less stressed about lack of income. Everybody wins. I really want sales to continue to go well so that I can continue this trend. We would love for Schlock to be able to support multiple households.

There are six more hours of General Conference to go. I’m looking forward to it.