Fiona's impression of "panic" -- with a mouthful of chocolate doughnut.
Hello, my name is Faith, and I’m a perfectionist.
Actually, I’m a recovering perfectionist. I expect to be in recovery for the rest of my life.
This is not intended as a cute, “Boo hoo, I’m soooo perfect!” quasi-lament. On the contrary, I consider perfectionism to be equally as addictive as controlled substances, and potentially as damaging.
It sounds so positive, so socially acceptable: PERFECTIONISM. Like you’re packaging an admirable quality as an -ism so that it doesn’t come across as bragging. Saying “I’m such a perfectionist” is in the same league as, “Gosh, I wish I could put on weight!” or “Really, celebrity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
But don’t be fooled: if you truly desire perfection, you have put yourself in an untenable position. NOTHING in life is perfect — or if it is, it doesn’t stay that way for long. So, by proclaiming yourself a perfectionist, you are placing yourself in opposition to the universe. And if that isn’t a recipe for bitterness, disappointment, and strained relationships, I don’t know what is.
Just as there are a variety of substances available for addiction, there are a variety of outlets for perfectionism. You may be a perfectionist when it comes to your work, your food and coffee (that was a big one when we lived in the Bay Area), your appearance. I am a (recovering) social perfectionist, which means that I care too much about what other people think of me in social situations. I believe this is the perfectionism equivalent of crack cocaine: you can’t win.
One thing that my perfectionism sometimes leads me into is a little game I call “Script the Social Interaction.” In this game, before I head into a social situation, I script it out in my head beforehand. I think about how I want to come across, and I plan what I’ll say to the various people who will be there. Then, during the social interaction, I will actually give myself direction (“Nod less, smile more. NO, don’t talk about your kids!”). And of course, afterwards the critics weigh in (“Idiot! NEVER ask an economist about their research!!”). It’s like having the entire motion picture industry inside my head: crowded and exhausting.
(And please tell me that some of you do this, too. Even if you’re telling me very slowly and hoping that I don’t notice you dialing 911 behind your back).
ANYWAY, my point is that sometimes I do this, but I’m trying to stop as part of my perfectionism recovery. Because if you can’t be real and open with people, it’s impossible to have genuine relationships. If I’m only concerned with maintaining a perfect front during social interactions, what’s the fun in being my friend? I’ll bring nothing interesting to the relationship, and will only make you feel bad that you’re not as perfect as I appear to be. If, on the other hand, I’m able to relax and be myself and share imperfections like (theoretically): “Sometimes I yell at my kids and feel like a horrible mom,” or “Sometimes when my husband is talking about his day, I’m really wondering whether he’ll make us popcorn after dinner,” — well, you still may not want to be my friend, but at least you won’t feel inadequate by comparison.
And you know what’s really helping me get over this perfectionism? KIDS.
One of the greatest things about children is that they force you to be real. I can script out social interactions all I want, but it’s hard to maintain a slick front when a little person is pulling at my sleeve yelling, “Mommy, I need to pee! RIGHT NOW!”
I’ve found that the power of kids to cut through my social perfectionism is exponentially stronger in a small town. Since we moved to Vermont, we see the same people EVERYWHERE we go: the park, the library, the playgroup, the pizza place. So when Campbell pitches a massive tantrum at the library (not that this happened just last week or anything), we likely know every single witness. Not only that, but we’ll see them all again the next day, and the day after that, until forever. The lovely thing about this is that when this tantrum happened (okay, it was last week), I had several moms offering to help push our stroller out. The drawback is that I worry that I’ll always be known around here as “That poor gal from California who’s in over her head with those three crazy kids!”
A perfect example of this happened last summer at the A & W. This is a classic drive-in restaurant with simple, greasy food. It’s only open during the warm weather months. (The A & W is Campbell’s favorite place; she calls it “The ABC,” and all summer long, whenever we’d drive past it, she’d scream: “Look! The ABC!!”) You can either eat right in your car, or at picnic tables in a large grassy field next to the parking lot. The Gong Girls prefer the picnic tables, because there’s a big bucket of plastic outdoor toys (balls, bats, frisbees, etc) nearby. The Gong adults prefer the picnic tables, too, because WHY would we be having 3 kids eat in our car if we could have them running around in a grassy field instead?!?
One evening in late summer, we met the girls’ friend Ruth and her parents for dinner there. It was a magical summer night: golden sunset, pleasant adult conversation, the girls running through the grass pretending they were being chased by aliens. It was when all three girls were happily dancing on top of an unused picnic table that we heard it: “Mommy, Mommy, I’m POOPING!” Turns out Fiona had been having so much fun that she’d neglected to tell us she had to use the bathroom. So there she was: holding up her dress, laying one right on top of the picnic table in full view of Rte. 7 and the other A & W diners. (This was one of those moments when my entire parenting life flashed before my eyes. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be horrified, so I sort of did both).
This being a small town, the A & W diners were: us, Ruth’s parents, and another family that we know from church. So the good news was that everybody there knew us…aaaand the bad news was that everybody there knew us.
So, if you’re ever in Middlebury and you’re not sure where to find us, just ask anybody for “That mom whose kid pooped on top of the picnic table at the A & W” and they’ll point you the right way.
And yes, we will be telling this story at Fiona’s wedding.
Bonus post! I have a piece published over at On The Willows today — a little reflection on Fiona’s birth in particular and maternal health in general. Click here to read it.
So, the very next time you happen to be Just sitting there quietly watching TV, And you see some nice lady who smiles As she scours or scrubs or rubs or washes or wipes or mops or dusts or cleans, Remember, nobody smiles doing housework but those ladies you see on TV. Your mommy hates housework, Your daddy hates housework, I hate housework too. And when you grow up, so will you. Because even if the soap or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach That you use is the very best one, Housework is just no fun.
-Lyrics to “Housework” by Marlo Thomas, from “Free to Be You and Me”
People often say to me: “Faith, your house is so clean and tidy. How DO you do it?”
HA HA! No, not really. In fact, nobody has ever said anything remotely like that to me. (The closest I’ve ever come to this kind of praise was a friend who complimented me on having it “all zipped up,” but I assume she was talking about my pants).
I’ve never been a huge fan of housework. This probably springs from growing up in the cleanest house ever. You may think that your moms kept their houses clean, you many even think that YOU grew up in the cleanest house ever, and that’s very sweet…but you’re wrong. Of course, the natural outcome of growing up in the cleanest house ever was that I vowed never to spend as much time cleaning as my mom. And the PROBLEM with this is that I have high standards of cleanliness — I can see the mess, it bothers me — but I don’t want to be the one dealing with the mess. It gets ugly, I tell you: it’s like Fight Club up there in my brain, with Tyler Durden played by my cleanliness standards.
My war with myself over housework had the potential to become a huge problem when we moved to Vermont. Back in Berkeley, our family rented a 900-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 1-bath bungalow; upon moving to Vermont, we tripled our living space. I’m still embarrassed about this, because I’ve never considered myself a Big House Person. Big houses tend to get filled up with more stuff (I fear accumulating too much stuff), and they tend to require more time spent cleaning (enough said). But we chose the house we are in because: (1) we had 3 days with a month-old baby to find a place, and this was the obvious best choice, (2) we are now a family of 5 and also want space to host people (especially grandparents), (3) we moved to Vermont, where real estate is waaaaay cheaper than anywhere else we’ve lived. So, here we are, and I have to say: the housework hasn’t been so bad.
How have I managed the increased housework load? Well, I had this little revelation shortly after we moved here: Did you know that big tasks become more manageable if you break them into smaller pieces? (That’s how it is with my revelations: takes me a decade to achieve an “Aha!” moment, to which everyone else says, “Duh!”). For instance, it doesn’t take long to clean one bathroom (at least not the way Iclean a bathroom). We have 2.5 bathrooms, so I clean one a day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And so on with the other chores. (This all, of course, until I can get the girls to take over for me — and trust me, that’s already beginning). Eat your heart out, Good Housekeeping!
Aside from basic housework, however, we have another issue: creeping kids’ stuff. Back when we had only one child, I was determined that kids’ toys, books, and other kid-related paraphernalia would not take over our house. When I was growing up (in the cleanest house ever) there were certain rooms that were set aside for adults, like the Living Room and the Dining Room. It seemed right and proper that adults — who, after all, OWN THE HOUSE — should have spaces where they can walk freely, unafraid of stepping on Legos or tripping over Exersaucers. We handled the problem of kids’ stuff in our Berkeley bungalow by stacking everything in a towering pile in one corner of the living room.
But that pile grew and grew, and we kept having more kids. Then the older kids needed new toys, because an Exersaucer isn’t much fun when you’re 3, but the new baby still needed the old toys, so we couldn’t get rid of them. The kids’ stuff took over our house like kudzu.
Moving to a bigger house should have solved the problem of creeping kids’ stuff. But it didn’t.
Here was the plan: in our new house, we have a room we call the Rec Room. It’s a funny room built over the garage, up a small flight of stairs from the Mud Room. As such, it’s separated from the rest of the house in a way that makes it unusable for much, but PERFECT as a dumping ground for kids’ toys. The idea was that all of the girls’ toys would live in the Rec Room, keeping the rest of the house clutter-free.
It hasn’t worked. Oh, the girls were initially excited about having a toy room, but they quickly saw through the plan. The first problem is that the Rec Room is far away from wherever I tend to be. Of course, this is precisely the point, but it turns out that our girls prefer to play directly underfoot so that I’m immediately at hand to help them change clothes 53 times, mediate disputes every 3 minutes, and wrestle Barbies into complicated outfits.
Then winter came, and the problem became one of climate. Our Rec Room is so cut off from the main house that it has its own heating zone. It’s also cut off by a door that we close in the winter to keep cold air from the garage/mud room from entering the main house — which means that the heat from our wood stove doesn’t reach the Rec Room. In other words: the Rec Room is completely impractical to heat, so during the winter it’s freezing. Unless I go up there an hour in advance of any playtime to crank up the heat, the girls have to wear full winter gear just to play with their toys.
Result? Our sun room, which I’d envisioned as a space for quiet reading and art projects, now looks like this:
And our living room, which I’d imagined would remain a completely “adults only” zone, looks like this:
The girls and I tidy it up, but the creeping kids’ stuff inevitably re-explodes. So I’ve decided to relax. I’m not going to waste too much time or energy fighting it. These kids outnumber us now; it’s natural that their stuff is taking over our house. Instead, I’ve decided to file this situation under the “I have three young children” excuse.
This is another nifty revelation of mine: if you have three young children (say, between the ages of 1 and 4), most people tend to cut you a lot of slack. My theory is that they’re just so relieved that you’re not lying on the floor sobbing with exhaustion and desperation, that people are willing to excuse all manner of bizarre behavior from mothers of young children. Behavior that in any other situation would earn me a label as a substandard person suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even understandable. Twenty minutes late? “I have three young children.” Wearing sweats for the fourth day in a row? “I have three young children.” Chugging a third cup of coffee and wolfing down old birthday cake for lunch? (That’s just a theoretical situation, mind you). You guessed it. Certainly Playmobile figures strewn across the carpet, applesauce on the walls, and marker on the couch fall into this category as well.
Obviously there will come a time when the girls will be older and more mature, and the “I have three young children” excuse will no longer work for me. At this point, I will have to begin behaving like an upright citizen with a tidy house. OR, it’s just struck me that there may be another solution:
Keep having more children, for as long as possible!
That’s clearly the answer! I can get away with a messy house for years! What a revelation!
I can’t wait to tell Erick when he gets home from work.
Here’s a little insight into how I work: my sacred times of day are naptime (roughly 1-3 PM) and bedtime (after about 7:30 PM, depending on how long it takes the girls to unwind), and it’s during those times that I sit down at my laptop and write things for this blog. It’s also during those times that I clean the house, prep meals, and work on any other household projects. (And shower, although not very often). But lately, the thing I’ve been enjoying most is writing these posts. That may not be saying much when the other option is scrubbing toilets, but I truly love writing. I’ve always loved writing, but now that I’m home with three girls it feels particularly necessary. It feeds the creative part of my brain, as well as the adult conversation part of my brain — even if the conversation is one-sided most of the time. I suppose it’s kind of like writing in a journal. The “social media” aspect is nice, because I’ve never been much good on the phone, so this saves me having to make 50-some phone calls. But even if nobody read this blog, I’d still keep writing it.
Because my brain is usually dealing with about 50 things at one time, and maybe also because of pregnancy hormones (Georgia’s not one yet, I can still blame pregnancy hormones, right?), I really need to write things down right when I think of them. So that means that I have a lot of partially-completed drafts for this blog sitting around, waiting to be freed into the blogosphere. I was going to post one of the more generic drafts today. But then I decided to go ahead and be real. Because the truth is, it’s been a rough couple of weeks at Casa Gong.
As often happens in winter, there are a LOT of sicknesses going around here in Vermont. Thus far, we’ve been lucky; we even (knock on MacBook) managed to avoid the STOMACH BUG that was so bad they sent an email out to the entire Middlebury College community telling everyone to wash their hands. (Which made me chuckle; the only time Erick got those emails at Berkeley was when there was a bomb scare or an armed vigilante on campus). But this last bug got us, and it got us good.
It’s an upper respiratory thing, marked by a sore throat, post-nasal drip, a horrible cough, and loss of voice. I was Patient Zero. I don’t often get sick, because frankly I don’t have time. But this virus got me when my guard was down, because Erick’s parents were visiting. The first weekend they were here, Erick and his parents took all three girls to the aquarium in Burlington for FIVE HOURS, which meant that I had FIVE HOURS ALL TO MYSELF! The last time that ever happened was well before we moved to Vermont. So there I was, able to breathe normally for five hours, and my blood cells apparently just sat in their lounge chairs with beers and said, “Hey, let’s let this friendly-looking virus in!”
And then everybody else got it. Amazingly, this is the first time that every member of our family has been sick with the same thing. I’ve always heard about this happening, but it’s never happened to us — until now — because on the whole our family has been blessed with very good health. Which is something that I will never, ever take for granted again …for at least two weeks.
The three sick Gong girls with Granddaddy and Grandmommy at the end of their visit.
Here’s how the various members of our family get sick (in the order of sickness):
Me: I mostly just keep doing what I normally do, but I just feel extra sorry for myself. The problem is, I don’t have a good model for how to be a sick adult; growing up, I can’t ever remember my parents being sick. Certainly I can’t think of a single time when they took to their beds because of illness. The only exceptions: when my mother broke her pelvis falling off a ladder, and this past November when my father broke 2 vertebrae and 4 ribs falling off a ladder. My family is TOUGH, and if they’d just keep away from ladders, they’d probably live forever.
Georgia: Poor Georgia is like an adorable sick puppy dog. She doesn’t get fussy when she gets sick, she just snuggles up to you and moans. When she got sick this time, her eyes and nose got red and swollen and started oozing. Turned out she also had an ear infection, which is the first ear infection we’ve ever had in our family (knock on MacBook).
Fiona: Fiona loves the drama of being sick, so she kept reminding me throughout the day: “I still feel sick.” Unfortunately, this particular bug was just gross enough to keep her grumpy and home from school for a whole week, but not enough to wipe out her energy. So she was like regular Fiona, just grumpier and with frequent illness announcements.
Campbell: Campbell gets sick like me — she just denies it. “I’m NOT sick, Mommy!” she’d say. I’d take her temperature and it would be 102. “I’m okay!” she’d insist, “No medicine!”
Erick: Oh, Erick. When Erick gets sick, it completely takes him down. This time was no exception — he’s been the sickest of all of us. His cough is so bad that he can’t sleep at night. And, as I type this, he has not been able to speak for four days. Which is a huge problem because this past week was the first week of classes, so he had to teach with no voice. Then he’d come home from work and, after the girls were in bed, we’d sit at our laptops and Google chat about how the day was. Really.
It’s been bad. And hard. And I’ve been grumpy because, as the first one to get sick, I was also the first one to get well…just in time to take care of everyone else. The highlight of my Wednesday was (I’m not kidding) walking down the driveway to bring in the trash bins, because that was the only time I got to leave the house.
What I’ve realized: I’m not very sympathetic when my family gets sick. This kind of surprises me, because I like to think of myself as a compassionate person. I want there to be more justice and peace in this world, I like helping people when they need it, and I try to make my life about loving my neighbor as myself. But then my kids and husband get sick, and I get…grumpy. Why is that? Why is it always so much harder to love the neighbors who live in your house than to love the neighbors who live next door?Maybe it’s because my parents never got sick when I was a kid (although my mom certainly took great care of ME when I got sick), so I never grew up having to be sympathetic to sick family members. Maybe I have trouble understanding why other people can’t power through illness like I tend to do. Maybe because at heart I’m a deeply selfish person and I resent having the needs of others impinge on my schedule in unplanned ways.
Probably all of the above, but to quote G.I. Joe: “Knowledge is half the battle!” I’m going to make a greater effort to be more sympathetic towards my own immediate family. Consider it my Presidents’ Day resolution. Feel free to ask me how it’s going 🙂
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.
Can you spot the cook in this picture?
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?
See? Happy eater!
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!).
The amazing Celeste, with her girls.
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.
Another satisfied customer.
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?
Love me, love my cooking?
*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).
Michael Pollan, not on his bicycle.
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.
Everybody's happy with a car cart.
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.
Another tip: when baking, it's a good idea to get your kids to do the tasks you hate, like sifting flour.
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!
Final cute kid photo. Aren't you glad you read to the end?
One of the things that Erick and I try to do, with varying degrees of success, is to each have one monthly date with each of our two oldest girls (Georgia’s time will come). During December, this got lost in the Christmas festivities, but now we’re back on track. Fiona and Campbell got ice skates for Christmas, so I decided that for my “mommy dates” with them this month, I’d take each of them skating at the town rink. This past Sunday it was Fiona’s turn.
Most of you may not know this about me, but I really love ice skating. Back when I was in college in the northeast, I even took lessons. And I haven’t skated since then, partly because I married Erick, who has flat feet and isn’t very comfortable in ice skates, and partly because I lived either in New York City or Berkeley, where most ice skating options involved waiting for four hours with a bunch of tourists for some overpriced city skating.
But here I am, back in the northeast in a town with a rink that has open skating hours, and with two daughters who are willing skate dates.
Fiona had never been skating before. I don’t know about other kids, but our girls are still pretty unpredictable in terms of what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “trooper-ness,” from one situation to the next. One day they’ll voluntarily hike barefoot three miles through the snow; the next, they’ll whine endlessly and demand to be carried the second we leave the house. So before hitting the rink, I gave Fiona a pep talk. It went a little something like this: “Fiona, you’re going to fall on your butt. Probably more than once. When this happens, are you going to cry and ask to go home, or are you going to get up and keep trying?” What can I say? I’m a tough love kind of mom.
So we got to the rink, and it was great. Because we live in a small town with limited recreational options, about half of Fiona’s preschool class was there, including one of her favorite preschool friends, Ruby. Ruby had been skating a few times before, so she was whizzing around in the middle of the rink, holding onto a nifty contraption that they have here for beginning skaters: two milk crates zip-tied together. Here’s the idea:
Fiona’s main objective immediately became: get to Ruby. And that day, Fiona’s “trooper-ness” was at a high level. She fell a couple of times, but bounced right back up again. She tried the milk crates, but wasn’t actually a big fan. (I don’t think her visions of ice skating had involved being hunched over a couple of plastic crates). So before too long, she was venturing out on her own, and doing pretty well.
And then it happened: she reached Ruby, turned to me, and said, “I’m okay, Mommy; you can go now.”
HUH?!?
“I’m okay, Mommy; you can go now.”
Isn’t this the moment we hope for as parents? When Fiona was born, Erick and I laid out this mission statement, which is probably not that unusual and which we often circle back to: our main objective in parenting is to get our kids to leave us. (Seriously, I have very low standards. As long as they’re self-sufficient, relatively happy, and not breaking the law, I will consider my job well done). And, barring the normal periods of attachment, Fiona has not had problems with independence, it’s just that up to this point, it’s always been me pushing her off. Sleep in your own room, stay with a babysitter, go to Sunday School, go to preschool. I really think that this is the first time that Fiona has pushed me away — and I mean that in the best possible way. (Campbell is another matter; she’s been telling us — verbally and non-verbally — to “Go away!” almost since birth). But of course, when Fiona said this to me, my first response wasn’t joy, it was shock.
GO WHERE?!?
Anyway, I went. I skated away from my daughter and joined the brisk oval of skaters circling the outside of the rink. And I have to say, it felt amazing. It was a little strange not to be hunched protectively over a child, but didn’t take long to rediscover my balance, my speed, and that feeling of soaring that I’ve always loved about skating. (And thankfully, because of the layout of skating rinks, it was also easy to keep an eye on Fiona and Ruby, who were having a blast in the middle of the rink).
I guess I’d better get used to it.
Fiona, circa 2009. "I'm okay, Mommy; you can go now."
The Pickle Patch 