November 2008 – A Design So Vast

thank you, thank you

November 28, 2008

Last year’s Thanksgiving gratitudes are all relevant still today. I have Dido’s Thank You running through my head this morning. Yesterday was 35 people for dinner in Marion – a big crowd, lots of chaos with 7 rambunctious children running around, and a rich assortment of family and old friends.
I’m tired from poor sleep and can only muster this list of simple things I’m thankful for today (despite exhaustion I know I am very, very thankful, and enormously blessed).

red licorice
Oyster Bay on the rocks
cross country flights
Weeds, The Office, and Chuck (only TV I watch these days)
great books and time to read them
my Sunday afternoon runs
Starbucks venti skim lattes
“Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” and “The Luckiest” (current favorite songs)
homemade chocolate sauce
Anastasia, who takes care of me
tucking Grace and Whit in (and having them stay there)
Amazon Prime
Lego
my Nike + running sensor
The nursery school both Grace and Whit went to
homemade chicken nuggets
bookstores
iChat sessions over wine with Hadley
Christmas carols
my Subaru
potty trained children
my black fleece North Face vest that I wear constantly
Diet Coke
the smell of laundry
Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich
Christina’s daily phone call to check in
my annual December movie
Armando’s pizza

Tuesday night thoughtful

November 25, 2008

Am feeling quiet and contemplative tonight. Thinking about thanksgiving, and gratitude, and about rounding the curve to the end of another year. Thinking about those I love most and those whom I’m lucky to know love me, in all of my messy complexity.

She was so restless, liked so much to be alone. – Ellen Gilchrist, The Anna Papers

In the struggle lies the joy. – Maya Angelou

My life is like that – I don’t stop myself from going into the feeling, the emotion that pulls like gravity. Surely there are gentler courses, switchbacks, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to take them. – Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

She could only stare at the absence inside herself for a few minutes at a time. It was like looking at the sun. – Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

I wanted to feel the sheerness of space, to somehow reach what was empty and quiet, to hold what was right beyond my grasp. – Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. – Adrienne Rich

Still, something deeply sad had been born buried in me, stirring occasionally inside like a creature moving in sleep. – Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams

… in the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart. – Sigmund Freud

random quotations, November 2008

November 25, 2008

Tonight, I tucked Whit in, prying his Legos from his hands (treasured Lego creation in bed = waking up desolate, surrounded by pieces, with Lego imprint on cheek) and kissing him before shutting the door.

I hear feet running to the door.

“Mummy!! Plug in my nightlight!”

“Okay, Whit.” I plug it in. “Now get back in bed. Remember what I told you, your eyes will get used to the dark.”

“No, Mummy, my eyes will not get huge.“

“Not huge. Used to the dark.”

“No. They don’t get hused to the dark.”

“Fine, so shut your eyes and see through your eyelids.”

“No, Mummy, I can’t do that.”

“Okay, so shut your eyes and see the bright colors and happy stories in your head.”

“Oh, okay, Mummy. Good idea.”

“Gracie, how is school going? Who are you playing with, who are you friends with these days?”
(making conversation, trying to follow up on areas of concern – seemed natural at the time!)

“Fine, Mummy. I have a new, bestest friend at school. The best.”

“Oh really, Grace? That’s great! Who?”

“The computer is my friend.”

A deep desire to raise hopeful children

January 20, 2011November 24, 2008

I really enjoyed this article/book review from the New Yorker (thank you Kara!). The discussion of the perils of overparenting resonates with me. I am so opposed to doing this that sometimes I think I overcorrect, to Grace and Whit’s detriment. I especially like the reality check at the end of the article, where the author’s call to arms is calibrated against the much more real urgency (in my view) of one in six children in America growing up below the poverty line.

I love this line: “It may be that robbing children of a positive sense of the future is the worst form of violence that parents can do to them.” Many of my instincts about parenting strive from the deep desire to raise children who are hopeful and not afraid of the world (to me these two things are inextricably linked). This is precisely why the allergy diagnosis in Whit bothered me so much (well this and my tremendous guilt that my lackluster nursing performance visited this onerous responsibility on him): to carry an epipen, to read labels, to know you are one bite away from a 911 call and the ER is to live in a world that seems scary. Anybody who knows my aversion to vacuuming (I do not own a vacuum cleaner and never have) will know that the hygiene hypothesis is not at work in my son’s case. My Lord that child ate more dirt and boogers (he often, to this day, tells me how yummy his boogers are) than most – and somehow he’s still allergic.

Feeling safe is something I crave profoundly, so I am not surprised that this desire to help my children feel at ease and not at risk is a priority for me. It is the reason I put Grace on that airplane by herself (the parenting decision that has caused me the most insecurity, bar none). Of course if she had not wanted to go I would never have done that. I think one can only support and promote qualities and inclinations that are already there; I think pushing a child to do something that he or she is uncomfortable with is by far the wost offense.

As I drove this morning I thought more granularly about my parenting, about where I am strict and where I am lax. I believe in the notion of a few, firm rules. This is my current thinking:

Things I am strict (rigid, inflexible, Nazi-like … pick your adjective) about:

– sleep
– manners (please, thank you, look adults in the eye)
– treating all other people with respect
– not behaving in a spoiled or entitled way
– safety (hold hands crossing the street, in parking lots, etc)

Things I am loosey-goosey (cavalier?) about:

– food (you want string cheese for dinner? breakfast as bag of Kix in the car? fine)
– baths (routinely skipped bc I am lazy)
– cold (you want to take your gloves off? fine by me)
– television
– being away from G&W for work travel (more than fine, awesome by me)
– germs (share toothbrushes? cool. bring 4 week old into the MGH ICU? sure.)