Life. Motherhood. Vermont. (Not necessarily in that order.)
I was at Ilsley Library with my daughters, when we ran into a friend whose daughter attends preschool with our middle child, Campbell. We greeted each other, and then she spoke directly to my two-year-old, Georgia. “Georgia, is it true what I hear?” she asked, “Did you really throw all your mommy’s makeup into the toilet?”
Apparently Campbell had been over-sharing at preschool again.
Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.
Today is my due date, AND (update as of 6:21 AM): still no baby in sight. Funny how I’m constantly re-learning the same lessons; I made the mistake of assuming that because this is our 4th child — and from the look of things, our largest child — he/she would arrive early. So I’m re-learning a lot about waiting, and patience, and giving up control…. But those are subjects for another day.
Here’s the cool thing: Today, June 6, is also the 2-year anniversary of the day we arrived in Vermont. I didn’t realize this until I started looking back through my old posts and found this one, which I published exactly a year ago to mark our 1-year anniversary. Since then, Mumford & Sons has come out with another album and won a Grammy. So it’s a little dated, but still true.
Songs are the road markers for my personal history. Like most people, I have very strong associations between certain songs and specific moments or people. Alphaville’s “Forever Young” immediately transports me back to high school. “Omaha” by The Counting Crows reminds me of the football player who lived next door in my freshman dorm and used to belt out that song on sunny Sunday afternoons. And almost any song by the Indigo Girls, Elvis Costello, or Diana Krall will recall various memories from my relationship with Erick.
Each of our girls has their own song. Georgia’s is the most obvious, since we named her after Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind.” Fiona’s song is “And She Was” by Talking Heads — a song that I heard repeatedly on the radio when I was pregnant with her, to the extent that I finally said, “If the baby’s a girl, this will have to be her song.” And she was. Campbell’s song is a little trickier (figures). I’ll always associate her with U2’s “Yahweh,” which I was listening to as I started labor with her, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows in Kaiser Hospital as the sun rose over downtown Oakland. But this past year, our family was listening to Ray Charles sing Georgia’s song, and the next song to play was “Hit the Road, Jack.” Fiona turned to me and asked, “Is this Campbell’s song?” And I thought, Yup, that’s a much better fit.
*****
Erick and I tend to make multiple major life transitions all at once, and then I look back and wonder, How did we do all of that?!? The craziest time in our family’s history was a two-week period in February 2011. During those two weeks, Erick flew to the East Coast to do four consecutive second-round interviews at various colleges, universities, and organizations (including a certain small liberal arts college in Vermont). These were the interviews that would ultimately land him a post-PhD job (we hoped), and thus would determine where our family would spend roughly the next decade of our lives. I stayed at home, nine months pregnant with Georgia, caring for a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old, and finishing out my part-time job. It felt like we’d thrown all the puzzle pieces of our lives up in the air, and whichever piece landed first would determine our entire future. In other words, everything felt unknown, and everything felt hugely important.
The song I associate with those two weeks is “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons. (You can watch the original music video here, or see a breathtaking live performance here). I first heard this song on the car radio, on one of the rare times during those 14 days when I was running child-less errands (Thanks, Grandmommy & Granddaddy!). I listened to it and said, “WOW.” And I immediately felt like everything was going to be okay.
I can’t tell you exactly why this song spoke to where I was at that precise moment. I couldn’t even tell you what all the lyrics mean, or what the songwriters’ original intent was. But to me, at least, this song is all about hope. The music itself, as it swells at the end (Those chiming guitars! Those trumpets!) is hopeful, uplifting. And my favorite part is the chorus, particularly the last line:
But I will hold on hope
And I won’t let you choke
On the noose around your neck
And I’ll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again
Isn’t that really what we’re all after in life? To know our names as they’re called again? Isn’t that basically the point?
I suppose another phrase for what I’m talking about is “finding yourself,” but I prefer the idea of knowing your name. Names are slippery things; to a large degree they completely define us – we are called by our names, sign our names, we are our names — but do our names describe the truth of us? You may like your name just fine, but chances are that it was bestowed upon you within days of your birth, out of some combination of family history and parental inclination. Through repeated use, our given names tend to lose all meaning; most of us probably never think about our names — we take them for granted. Names don’t really tell you all that much about a person; I can recall all sorts of facts about someone I’ve just met, but their name is always the hardest thing to remember.
Of course, we acquire other names throughout our lives: daughter, sister, Mrs., Program Director, B.A., M.D., Mommy, Nana. These names describe parts of who we are, but I doubt that any of these names, or even all of them together, accurately describe the totality of who we are — our core selves.
And who ARE we? I suspect that most of us feel that we aren’t quite the people we should be; we don’t fully know our names. We spend our lives circling the goal of being who we are, and everything we do gets us nearer to or farther from that goal.
*****
One year ago today, June 6, a green minivan carrying the five members of the Gong family pulled into Vermont for the first time. The 9-months-pregnant me who listened to “The Cave” while running errands around Berkeley feels like a character from another life. The song still speaks to me, though. And looking back over the past year, I see that moving to Vermont brought us all a little closer to knowing our names.
I think of 2011-12 as the year we finally became grown-ups. For starters, it’s the first year since our marriage that neither Erick nor myself has been in graduate school, so it lacked the sense of impermanence that goes along with student-hood. Erick has a real job, and we came here to settle. We have three very real kids. This year was our first experience with home-ownership, and all that responsibility and hilarity. It was also a year book-ended by loss: the death of a friend we were just getting to know right after we moved here, and the death of a friend’s baby last month. Both deaths were untimely, unfair, and hit close to home — and our girls were aware of them, so we had to figure out how to quickly process these losses through the filter of what we believe.
In brief, this was the year we bought instead of renting, in every sense of the word.
Here’s how I’ve come closer to knowing my name this year:
I‘ve learned the importance of being honest about who I am. When we moved to Vermont, we had no prior history here. We didn’t know a single person in our town, and we have no family anywhere nearby. Clean slate. So it would have been easy for me to fool everybody by constructing a perfect front, by pretending to have it all together, by trying to make everybody like me.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t do that. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t. Partly, I’m just too exhausted to bother. Writing also helped; as I tell my stories on this blog, it’s the most honest ones — the ones that are scariest to publish — that tend to get the warmest response. I think this carries over to life: the more honest we are about ourselves, the more open we are to honest relationships. So I’m learning that it’s not a virtue to put up a good front. I’m supposed to love my neighbor, which does not mean that I have to please my neighbor.
This fresh start in Vermont also helped me realize that I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels over what I should do. What should I be doing with my kids? Should I be volunteering? Looking for a job? Staying home full time? Finally, one of the wise women whom I’ve gotten to know here said to me (well, she said it to God, but really to me) something like: “I hope that Faith won’t worry so much about what she does, as about who she is.”
Huh. That brought me up short. And she’s RIGHT. If I don’t know WHO I AM — if I don’t know my name — then it follows that I won’t be doing whatever I DO very well. It matters less what I do with my daughters than that I provide them with an example of a woman who knows her name. And whatever future work or volunteer duties I take on will also benefit from me knowing who I am. It’s like one of my favorite Anne Lamott quotes: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
Here’s who I am after a year in Vermont: I’m a wife, and I love my husband. I’m a mom, and I love my kids — most of the time. I’m a daughter, and I wish I were a better one, but I’m working on it. I believe in God and Jesus, and I’m working on that, too. I’m kind of a flaky friend right now, but I trust that’ll improve once I can sustain conversations for longer than 2 minutes. I don’t particularly excel at anything around the house — cooking, housekeeping, crafting — but I try to enjoy all these things while keeping them in their place. I have a messy, imperfect past, mostly because I was trying to be too perfect and kept falling on my face (I may write more about this soon, but it’s scary). I have a messy, imperfect present, too, but at least I know it’s covered by grace (God’s, mine, others’).
I LOVE to write and to tell stories, and rediscovering that through this blog has been one of my favorite things about the past year. Thank you so much for reading.
First published in January 2012. Still true today, except that the list of foods my girls will eat has NARROWED since then: now I have one girl who will only eat PB&J, one who will only eat bagels with cream cheese, and one who wants a little bit of whatever her sisters are eating. Somewhere along the line, they started boycotting mac & cheese. I even have one who won’t eat bacon. Sheesh!
When we moved to Vermont, it wasn’t just a change in location, weather, lifestyle…it was also a change in our cooking arrangements.
Let me ‘splain: When Erick and I met, my cooking repertoire involved either a) walking down the block to Burritoville, or b) opening a carton of yogurt and stirring in some granola. (In my defense, I was living in a New York City studio apartment smaller than most walk-in closets). Once we got married and acquired all kinds of nifty kitchen tools, I entertained brief visions of the delicious meals I’d cook for my husband. I even recall making gazpacho, once.
Now, for virtually our entire marriage, Erick has been a graduate student. While he was a hardworking graduate student and disciplined about going into his office daily (in Berkeley I suspect this was mostly to get away from the house filled with babies), he did have a great degree of flexibility. If he left the house at 10 and returned at 4:30, it was no big deal. So, a brief time after our wedding, Erick announced, “You know, I actually enjoy cooking. All day I’m working with ideas and I feel like I have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. It’s nice to come home and create something useful. I’d like to take over most of the cooking.” I can’t remember if this was before or after I gave us both food poisoning from undercooking pork dumplings, but either way I was happy to turn over the cooking to Erick.
And that was our arrangement…until this year. Now that he has a real job — not only a real job, but a job in which he will be judged closely for 7 years to determine whether he’ll make tenure — Erick is no longer flexible. His hours now are more like 8:30-6; reasonable enough, but bedtime for our girls is at 7 (as it will be until they turn 18), which means that we need to eat right when Erick walks in the door. This conundrum became clear to me shortly after we moved here. I looked around for other willing cooks, but as I’m the only other member of the family who can currently reach the kitchen counters, the cooking duties fell to me.
But guess what? We’re doing okay. For those of you who’ve been worried about the health and well-being of our family, I will refer you to the photos in this blog. Don’t we all appear healthy? Well fed?
So, how did I do it? Here are 5 Tips For How I Found (Some) Joy in Cooking and Kept My Kids on the Growth Curve:
1. Make friends with people who can cook. Back in Berkeley, I knew a lot of REALLY GOOD cooks. Perhaps the best was my friend Celeste, who somehow managed to be an outstanding cook while working as a nurse practitioner at a Spanish-speaking health clinic and being a great mother to two beautiful girls. (Miss you & love you, Celeste!).
Because Celeste is an amazing friend, when I was pregnant with Georgia she asked me about throwing a baby shower. Now, I happen to think that by the time you’re having your third child, you’re done with baby showers. I didn’t need one more baby thing (although if Georgia had been a boy, he’d have been wearing lots of pink), but what I DID want were: 1) a girls’ night out with friends, and 2) recipes. Because Celeste is an amazing friend, she made both things happen. Here is the recipe book she put together, with recipes from my Berkeley friends:
This was one of the best gifts ever. I’ve made almost everything in it, and it’s all family-friendly and delicious. Better yet, I get to think about my friends while I’m cooking. (I especially appreciate the little personal touches they added to their recipes; for instance, my friend Laura confessed that she sometimes feeds her kids her peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, which is something I will definitely try someday!).
By the way, if you’re a friend who cooks, and you have a delicious, simple (preferably involving a crock pot) recipe up your sleeve that I do not yet have, I’m still accepting submissions. 🙂
2. Make friends with your crock pot. This is our crock pot:
We’ve had it for a while, but this year I’ve come to appreciate it on a new level. It is, hands down, my favorite kitchen tool. Why, you ask? Here’s what it’s like when I try to make dinner WITHOUT a crock pot:
It’s 5 PM. We’ve recently gotten home from picking Fiona up from preschool. Because she’s been on her best behavior all day, she’s exhausted and ready to cut loose. She incites Campbell to join her in a game that takes on different names, but basically involves putting on dress-up clothes and running in circles around the house while taking out all the toys within reach and dumping them on the floor. Oh, and screaming at the top of their lungs. They’re happy enough, so I prop Georgia up in the kitchen with some toys and try to prep dinner. Interruptions every 5 minutes or so because: Fiona has to use the bathroom, Fiona/Campbell wants a drink, Campbell hit Fiona, Fiona/Campbell injured herself, someone needs a costume change, etc. By 5:30, I give up and put them in front of a video. At that very moment, Georgia decides she’s DONE being good & quiet, and she wants her dinner RIGHT NOW! I put Georgia in her high chair, fix her a bottle, throw some Cheerios at her, and attempt to fix dinner with one hand. Shortly thereafter Erick walks in the door, dinner’s not yet done, the other two girls are getting hungry so all three girls are screaming, and I’m a wreck.
Now, here’s what it’s like when I make dinner WITH a crock pot:
It’s 9 AM. We’ve just returned from dropping off Fiona at preschool. I put Georgia down for her morning nap. Campbell plays or looks at books or eats a snack while I toss some ingredients into the crock pot and turn it to “Low.” By 5:30, dinner is ready.
Which scenario would you rather live out?
My best crock pot resource, to date, is this blog (suggested, I believe, by the amazing Celeste). Usually what I do is to search it (most often the night before) for whatever ingredients I have in the fridge.
3. Do not expect your kids to eat what you cook. All kids are different, but with very rare exceptions, here is what our girls will reliably eat: mac & cheese, peanut butter & jelly, grilled cheese, pizza, crackers, and potato chips. This is not for lack of trying; our girls were born in Berkeley, for crying out loud. They have all been offered spinach, broccoli, carrots, and all other manner of healthy and wholesome options. They just won’t eat them.
So for lunch, they pretty much get a rotating selection of things that they will reliably eat; they’re happy, and it’s easy for me. But when dinner rolls around, there’s someone else to consider: Erick. He’s a good guy, and he spends all day teaching undergraduates the principles of economics, and when he’s not teaching, he’s conducting research that deals with how to stamp out HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. It just doesn’t seem right to welcome him home with: “Hi, honey, how’s the AIDS stuff going? Here’s a PB & J!”
It took a couple of months of having my heart broken when my girls would not eat my dinners, but then I realized that I could make the most delicious meal on earth, and if it didn’t fall into one of the six food groups listed above, they’d have none of it. So I just stopped sweating it. I make grown-up dinners that Erick and I will enjoy, and this is what I serve. And I don’t cook a separate dinner for the girls, because that’s just craziness.* But I don’t fight with them either, partly because they’re girls and I have firsthand experience with eating disorders, and partly because this is just not one of the battles I choose to spend my energy on. If they don’t eat dinner, we have more leftovers for later. If they’re hungry, they should have eaten dinner. And I have confidence that they’ll make up the calories later. Possibly through consuming massive quantities of crackers, but isn’t that what multivitamins are for?
*I do break this rule when I’m preparing something fancy and expensive for dinner, like rib eye steak. Rib eye steak before my girls = pearls before swine. They get mac & cheese on those nights.
4. Practice the art of one-stop shopping. Especially if you have young kids, the worst part of cooking is having to SHOP for the cooking. I have partially solved this problem by doing my shopping in one place (Hannaford’s) at one set time (Friday morning) each week. If we run out of food before the next Friday rolls around, it’s just too bad.
One-stop shopping is much easier to do here in Vermont than it was in Berkeley. Berkeley, the beating heart of the locally-grown, organic, free range food goodness movement, had an overabundance of fresh and wholesome EVERYTHING, but it wasn’t all located in one place. By the end of our time in Berkeley, “we” (by which I really mean Erick — in our house, the cook does the shopping) sometimes had to visit no fewer than FOUR food stores per week in order to gather all of the produce, meat, and grains that “we” needed.
There’s something to be said for simplicity. In our small town, there are basically two chain supermarkets (one on our side of town, one on the other side), a local food co-op. The Middlebury Food Co-op could have been uprooted from Berkeley by a tornado and deposited down here in Middlebury (and somewhere along the way, you’d look out the window and there would be Michael Pollan riding a bicycle outside. Taking the Wizard of Oz reference too far? Okay, that’s all).
It is filled with locally-grown, organic, free range goodness. And — I am about to utter blasphemy here — I do not shop there. I hope to, someday, like when all three girls are in school, but right now I can’t convince myself of the logic — or the economics — of shopping at the Co-op. Expressed in an equation, it would look like this:
Less consumer guilt < Cost of my time + cost of my sanity + more expensive food
I haven’t run that by Erick yet, but it seems sound to me. So I shop at Hannaford’s, and I do so for one reason, and one reason only: the car carts.
The car carts can keep our girls entertained for almost an entire shopping trip.
I shop on Friday mornings because Fiona is in preschool so I only have to wrangle 2/3 of our girls, and because for some reason I am always able to get a car cart on Friday mornings. (If you are from Middlebury and you are reading this, DO NOT take my car cart! I will sic Campbell on you. Also, if you have a car cart and only one child in it, I fully expect you to remove your groceries and hand over the cart immediately, because I WIN! Okay, that’s all).
Here is my shopping routine:
-Grab a car cart, stuff Campbell and Georgia into it and hand them snacks
-Using my very organized shopping list that is divided according to the various zones of the store (guess which Gong grown-up created the shopping list?) to guide my shopping, throw groceries into the cart as fast as I can (I’m always AMAZED at how many groceries a family of 5 needs each week — by the end of the trip, the front of our cart is actually dragging on the ground)
-Choose the check-out line that’s as close as possible to the lottery ticket dispenser (which has enough blinking lights to hypnotize the girls during the worst part — checking out a cart filled to dragging with groceries).
Done! As one of the girls’ friends is prone to say: “Easy peasy, mac & cheesy.”
5. Accept who you are, but don’t rule out miracles. I am more of a baker than a cook. I appreciate precise directions and sweet results (as opposed to Erick, who hates having to follow a recipe). So when I have dinner going in the crock pot, it enables me to use the girls’ naptime to bake. This way, even if my dinner wasn’t so hot, I can redeem myself with a yummy dessert that EVERYBODY in our family will eat. Play up your strengths, I always say.
But sometimes miracles happen. Like this Fall, when I actually invented a pretty good pot roast recipe. I will share it with you below as a reward for making it through a long post that included very few pictures of cute children. I promise more pictures of cute children very soon.
Faith’s Pot Roast (That the Gong Girls won’t touch)
3 lb beef roast
1/2 c. water
1 c. beef broth
1 package onion soup mix
1 bay leaf, crumbled in 1 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. pepper
handful of rosemary
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 onion, chopped
Throw it all into a crock pot and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Voila!
As per The Plan, this is the first of my re-posts from The Pickle Patch Archives. First published on March 18, 2012.
A brief note about how I selected this and the other re-posts that you’ll be seeing for the next bit: I chose pieces that were some of MY personal favorites. I took into account whether they were dated (i.e. anything chicken-related was out, R.I.P. chickens), and I favored posts that hadn’t received too much attention — for various reasons — the first time around.
WordPress actually has a tool that allows one to see the most-read posts on your blog, so for about 3 minutes I considered just re-running the top 10 most popular pieces from The Pickle Patch. But then I saw what they were, and I was humbled. The #1 most popular post? “Like Lambs to the Potty,” which is cute, but it’s not popular because of my writing; it’s popular because apparently search engines send anybody looking for “lambs” (or “jehne” or “kuzu,” which apparently mean “lamb” in other languages) to this post. Ditto most popular post #2: “Luke… I Am Your Father.” That one gets lots of hits because of all the Star Wars fans out there. And most-read post #3? I didn’t even write it: it’s the Valentine’s Day guest post written by my husband.
So much for popularity! I hope you enjoy my personal picks; feel free to let me know if you have any favorites that you’d like to see again.
********
Yesterday, an unseasonably warm and sunny Saturday, I took the girls to their friend’s 5th birthday party. In one of those perfect moments of synchronicity, the party was being held at the playground of the local elementary school, so we were all able to bask in the glorious springlike weather.
At the end of the party, each child was allowed to pick a helium balloon from the big balloon bouquet that decorated the picnic table. Now, Campbell loves balloons. She also, recently, has declared her love for the color yellow. So she was just about beside herself when she was handed the string of a big yellow balloon. Various adults urged her to allow them to tie the balloon string around her wrist. “NO!” protested our two-year-old. “I DON’T WANT TO!” Then, in more reasonable tones, “I’ll be careful, Mommy. I’ll hold on.”
So the girls and I headed off across the field that separates the playground from the parking lot, me pushing Georgia in the stroller, Fiona and Campbell bopping behind with their balloons. And I didn’t have to turn around to know what had happened when, 30 seconds later, Campbell started screaming: she’d let go of her balloon, and it was heading straight up into that blue, sunny sky.
I had to hold her to keep her from running after it, and all the while she was screaming, “GET IT, MOMMY!!! Go get it back! GET IT!!!!” Here’s what I said: “I can’t get it for you, Campbell, because Mommy can’t fly. It’s gone. BUT now so many more people will see your balloon, and think how happy it’ll make them. Maybe it’ll fly all the way up to an airplane, and everybody on that plane will look out their windows and see it. Maybe it’ll fly all the way to China, and some little girl will find it and take it home. Maybe it’ll fly all the way to Africa, and a pride of lion cubs will play with it.” Fiona started getting in on the act, too: “Maybe it’ll fly all the way to California, and Grandmommy and Granddaddy will find it!” Before too long, Campbell was smiling again.
Thinking back on it, this whole episode strikes me as a micro-example of our job as parents. The world is rough, life is full of tragedies and disappointments, and our job is not to fix these things for our children, because we can’t — anymore than I could fly up into the sky and retrieve my daughter’s balloon. But what we can do is teach our children to frame these tragedies and disappointments into stories with happy endings.
That might be a good place to end this reflection, except that if you stop and think hard for a minute (which you probably will, because everyone who reads this is pretty smart), you will start to wonder whether I am saying that our job is to lie to our children. After all, in framing Campbell’s little tragedy into a “story with a happy ending,” wasn’t I essentially lying to her? I know perfectly well that odds are that Campbell’s balloon will end up tangled in some tree branches a few miles away, where it will flap like the wayward piece of trash it is, as cheery yellow slowly turns to grey.
Okay, fine. But if, as Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the question is: what kind of lives do I want my children to live? Do I want them to have the kind of lives that would conclude the runaway balloon story as: “It’s gone, too bad. You should’ve held on to that string like everyone told you, so it’s your own fault”? Or do I want them to have the kind of lives that believe that, maybe – just maybe – the story ended when some little girl in a dreary Chinese city found a slightly deflated yellow balloon that made her smile? I know what the odds are, but for all I know it could happen.
I believe it’s called “hope.” And I believe we all need it in order to live, or at least to live well.
In my previous column, I confessed that what I missed most since moving to Vermont from California’s Bay Area were sidewalks.
If you asked my husband what he misses most since arriving in Vermont, he’d respond, “Food and produce.”
Click here to continue reading about our Vermont food experience in The Addison Independent.
Were she better able to express her emotions, my two-year-old daughter, Georgia, would probably tell you that it’s no picnic being the youngest of three girls.
Click here to continue reading over at On the Willows.
As per my last post, I’m not supposed to be generating new material here at this point. But I’m breaking my self-imposed maternity leave because inspiration has struck! Today! On Facebook (of course)!
Here’s the thing: today I am 38 weeks pregnant, and I have been stuck at home with all three girls ALL DAY. Stuck this morning because Erick had to take the minivan to Burlington for servicing; stuck this afternoon because of greenish skies that come with a forecast of severe thunderstorms and flash floods. Have my girls risen to this situation by being on their best behavior? They have not. Instead, they’ve taken turns having meltdowns and squabbles about crucial issues like: not wanting to wear bug spray, not having a roof for their pillow fort, and why their sisters won’t play with them when they’re in the middle of a temper tantrum.
So, of course, this is the day when multiple friends (beloved, respected friends and wonderful mothers) shared a viral link on Facebook about the importance of not yelling at your kids.
Guess what? I yelled at my kids this very morning.
Guess what else? I don’t really feel guilty about it.
Mind you, I’m not a fan of indiscriminate, totally out-of-control screaming at my kids. But:
-There are definitely times when I think a well-placed yell is completely appropriate. The author of the Facebook article writes about seeing the fear in her daughter’s eyes after spilling a bag of rice as her inspiration to stop yelling. I would not consider food or drink spillage — which my girls do countless times each day — as appropriate grounds for yelling. However, there are PLENTY of times when I’d like to see a little fear in my children’s eyes when they look at me. “Fear” might be a loaded word; I’m talking about “respect,” “knowledge of wrongdoing,” and — at the very least — “attentiveness.” These situations include but aren’t limited to: hitting/biting/spitting at your sister, refusing to hold hands and running into the street, and all three girls screaming at the top of their lungs — just for fun — after repeated pleas to tone it down.
I’m all for taking a deep breath and using a reasonable voice the first time (or two) that I ask my girls to stop a certain behavior. After that, if I don’t raise my voice to get their attention and show that I’m serious — as the saying goes — shame on me.
-There are definitely times when I yell wrongly, but I wouldn’t trade those moments. Do I sometimes lose it too much? Is my yelling sometimes less about my kids and more about me feeling (theoretically) exhausted, swollen, and sweaty? You bet.
So guess what I do after those bad-mommy moments? I apologize. I apologize sincerely, ask my kids to forgive me, and emphasize that I, too, am human and make mistakes. I think that’s a really important part of parenthood: letting our kids see that we’re not perfect, that we regret certain behaviors, and that we can confess to those behaviors and ask forgiveness and move on. This gives them permission to acknowledge their own inner darkness, and an example for how to handle outbursts in a healthy manner. In the end, I’d rather be a mom who’s human than a mom who always speaks at the same calm pitch.
I’m certainly not advising anybody to yell at their kids. I just wanted to say that, if anybody read that Facebook article and felt guilty, felt like a bad parent — DON’T. We’re all just human moms (and dads), doing our best, trying to simultaneously love our kids and guide them towards being functional members of society. That ain’t easy work. At the end of the day, like so many things we feel guilt about, worrying that we yell too much at our kids is a first-world parenting problem.
And I’ll shout that from the rooftops!
When I was preparing for Fiona’s birth, I had A Plan. An actual, pen-on-paper plan that I’d written on the “Birth Plan” worksheet given by Kaiser Hospital to all expectant parents. I made a music playlist called “Birth.” My suitcase was packed. My mother was scheduled to fly out and be my birth coach.
Confident in my plan, I worked until two weeks before my due date, and scheduled my baby shower for the weekend following my last day at the office.
Fiona arrived, in what I’ve come to think of as “her customary dramatic style,” via emergency c-section at approximately the time my baby shower was supposed to be ending. I went to the hospital hoping for relief from what I thought was history’s worst case of heartburn; I returned home five days later with a teeny-tiny baby to a living room full of unopened baby shower gifts.
So much for The Plan.
When I was preparing for Campbell’s birth, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. I didn’t bother with a birth plan, didn’t schedule any relatives to fly out in advance, and skipped any baby shower. Instead, I focused all of my energy on preparing myself and my house for the new baby: I stopped work a full month before my due date, and during that first week off I stocked up on enough diapers and baby supplies to last until Campbell turned two. (Not exaggerating: we still had newborn-sized diapers left over when Georgia was born).
Campbell arrived, in what I’ve come to thing of as “her customary laid-back style,” ONE WEEK LATE. She even pulled a bait-and-switch by causing enough contractions to send me to the hospital (after calling my parents to tell them to GET ON A PLANE – THE BABY’S COMING!); a few hours later, the contractions stopped for another 36 hours, until Campbell decided that maybe she’d like to be born after all. (It shouldn’t surprise me that, to this day, Campbell is the HARDEST kid to get out the door). By the time she was born, I was about to lose my mind with the impatience and boredom of waiting.
When it was Georgia’s turn, I tried a more moderate approach: I worked a little closer to my due date, but made sure I was prepared well in advance. (By your third child, “preparing” involves buying one pack of newborn diapers). While I didn’t have a birth plan per se, we did book a doula to coach me through the delivery because Erick was so busy finishing his PhD.
Georgia arrived exactly one week early, and in what I’ve come to think of as my customary, “‘Hey, Georgia, you doin’ okay?’ style,” I barely even noticed; just prior to her birth, Erick had accepted a new job in Vermont, so my mind was full of the logistics of buying a new house, preschool registration, and packing-and-moving. (Of course, when we called the doula to tell her that the baby was coming, it turned out that she had the flu, so poor Erick ended up being my birth coach after all).
All of which is to say that I no longer put much stock in plans when it comes to birth. The old adage, “Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans,” seems to apply particularly to labor and delivery. I know almost nobody who got the birth they’d planned, and the odds diminish the more children you have. The few people I know whose Birth Plans progressed flawlessly always seem a little smug — at least, I have trouble judging them charitably. When they tell me about how they gave birth on a bed of roses surrounded by candles, listening to the soothing music of their labor playlist, while attended by a unicorn, I want to say, “OKAY, so you got a perfect birth experience. Let’s check in again in about 18 years, shall we? See if everything’s STILL going according to plan?”
I have no idea what to expect from Kiddo 4. He or she could come early or late. We’ve got some plans for grandparents to arrive in advance of my due date, but who knows? I just hope I’ll have time to buy a pack of newborn diapers and dig the baby clothes out of the bottom of the closet.
Despite all of these unknowns, I do have a plan for this blog. So here it is: you’re reading this post about 2 weeks in advance of my due date. For the next couple of months, the only new material you’ll read here (aside from a baby announcement when the time comes) will be my regularly-scheduled articles for The Addison Independent and On the Willows.
If that doesn’t seem like enough, have no fear! Here’s what I’ve done: I’ve had a lot of fun going back through the archives, pulling up some of my favorite posts from the past two years. I’ll be regularly re-posting these pieces through mid-July. The Pickle Patch readership has increased A LOT over the past year, so for many of you this will be a first look at some older material. For faithful readers who’ve seen these before, I hope it’ll be a fun re-read (or maybe you’ll say, “Boy, Faith sure was a lousy writer back then!”).
While I’m away, in addition to caring for a newborn, I hope to work on some new material. I have lots of ideas, and there’s nothing like round-the-clock feedings to spur the creative process. Stay tuned!
Thank you all so much for taking time from your busy, overstimulated days to read what I write! Have a wonderful start to your summer, and I’ll meet you back here in July!
Kiddo 4 is officially full-term today, which means that his/her birth date is fast approaching. To be honest, I’m kind of hoping this baby arrives on the early end; I’m feeling tired, and it takes a lot of effort to get our family’s “ducks in a row” EVERY NIGHT, just in case the baby comes. Then again, my personal deadline keeps on moving to accommodate major life events; at the moment, this baby can’t be born until after: tonight’s preschool potluck, Erick’s poker game on Saturday night, my cousin’s law school graduation on Sunday…and definitely not until I’ve watched the final Season 3 episode of “Downton Abbey.” (Got it, Kiddo? That last one’s especially important).
While looking though all of my past blog posts in preparation for my maternity blogging plan (to be announced shortly), I noticed something distressing: the overwhelming majority of them had to do with parenthood. This was distressing because, in all honestly, I don’t think of myself as writing a “mommy blog.” I try to keep motherhood and my children in perspective, and there are MANY things that I find MUCH more interesting than child-rearing.
But I write this blog, it reflects my life, it’s full of my thoughts and experiences — and I am a mother. So I suppose it’s inevitable that my parenting should seep into my writing.
As I prepare to become a mother for the fourth time, I’ve been thinking how 5.5 years of parenthood have changed me. Here are a few things that I came up with, some of which are a little hard to admit. (Please note that this is NOT advice! No no, just changes I’ve observed in myself.):
1. Passing the baton? Erick brought home a couple issues of Vanity Fair magazine from his recent travels, which I’ve been reading slowly as a guilty pleasure. While perusing the glossy profiles of the fabulously rich and famous, I noticed a change in my thinking: No longer was I imagining what I would say if interviewed for a Vanity Fair profile. No; instead, I was imagining what my children would say about their childhood — specifically, their blissful childhood with their loving, supportive mother — if they were someday interviewed for a Vanity Fair profile. I don’t think you can call this “humility,” but it’s sort of close: abandoning grand plans for self, recognizing that one has to step aside and let the kids shine. Something like that.
2. Shifting goals. I’ve realized lately that what would make me happiest at the end of my life — my ultimate marker of success — would be if our children all still love each other and still enjoy family time together, even when they’re grown. Needless to say, this is a life goal that wouldn’t have entered my thinking six years ago. It doesn’t even seem all that lofty, but IT IS. To have adult children who still like each other and their parents — how many families can claim that? And how wonderful for the families that can!
3. A looser grip. This probably has more to do with the number of children we have rather than parenting itself, but here it is: I don’t worry about my children nearly as much as I did when I had my first child. I can’t worry about my children nearly as much as I did when I had my first child, because I just don’t have the capacity to store that much worry. When Fiona was first born, it would rip me to pieces if she screamed in her car seat. A fever was cause for a call to the doctor and a day spent in quarantine. If I wasn’t stimulating her in some way during her waking hours, I felt horrible.
I look back at the mom I was then and think it’s pretty cute. Because NOW I am deaf to screams. NOW fevers don’t scare me, I just want them to go away quickly so I can send the kids back to school. NOW, as long as the kids aren’t asking me for anything, I will leave them playing and go about my business for as long as possible. True confession: I’ve even left Georgia alone in the backyard for short periods of time as long as the dogs (Gracie and the neighbors’ dog, Brinkley) were with her. Large, protective dogs are considered appropriate childcare, right?
4. Never say “never.” I made a lot of proclamations as a younger mother. I laid down my laws because I was terrified, because more rules made me feel more in control, and because I naively put (well-intentioned) principles ahead of sanity. So I said things like:
“Absolutely NO T.V. until age 2, and then only 30 minutes a day!”
“I will never, ever make meals to order. Dinner is what’s on the table!”
We don’t own a T.V., which I’m glad of for many reasons, and I really do try to limit early exposure to the DVD player, and to limit consumption to 30 minutes a day. But never say never! What do you do with the 18-month-old who wants to watch what her sisters are watching when you need to make dinner? What do you do with three kids in the car during a three-hour drive to Montreal? I’ll tell you what you do: YOU LET THEM ZONE OUT IN FRONT OF THAT VIDEO, AND YOU GIVE THANKS TO GOD FOR PORTABLE DVD PLAYERS!
As for food, I do try to have everyone eating basically the same thing — especially for dinner. But I ask you, what do you do when your first child only wants bagels with cream cheese, your second child only wants peanut butter & jelly, and your third child wants a bit of what everyone else has AND a grilled cheese? Then comes the day when everyone decides they no longer like your go-to crowd pleaser: macaroni & cheese. Really, all you want is for everyone to enjoy dinner with a minimum of screaming, to stay at the table as long as possible, and to consume some calories. What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do: YOU MAKE THEM WHAT THEY’LL EAT, PLUS OPTIMISTIC SAMPLES OF THE FOOD YOU & YOUR HUSBAND ARE EATING, AND YOU RESOLVE TO ENFORCE ONE-DINNER-FOR-ALL NEXT YEAR!
So, there you have it: the collected wisdom of six years and three children. I’ve changed, I think mostly for the better. Whether this fourth child will push me over the edge is yet to be seen….
If you were to ask me now, almost two years since I moved to Vermont, what I miss most about the other places I’ve lived – the Virginia suburbs, Manhattan, the San Francisco Bay Area – I would answer: “Sidewalks.”
To continue reading the harrowing details about what it’s like taking sidewalk-less walks with our whole family, click here for my “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.
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