Father's Day

For my 40th birthday my sister gave me a trip with her to a very nice spot in the carribean. My husband was left to his own devices for five days. The morning I left, I got up at 5 am for a 7 am flight. No one was up when I left. I had left notes and detailed "reports" for my husband with everyone's weekday routine written down. Not that any of it was all unfamiliar since he is in charge each weekend when I go to work but having three kids by yourself for five days can feel a bit overwhelming when you haven't done it before.

I needn't have worried. He handled it like he handles just about everything else with some humor and a big grin. There is something about a guy who can just take on a challenge, no matter how big or small and just meet it with a smile. I am not sure how many husbands would smile and say," Sure go to a nice island in March for a week and leave me with three kids and have fun." And really mean it. Of course there were a few phone calls early the morning I left as I sat in the airport waiting for my flight. "What can I feed the baby for breakfast? What time does the bus come? Where is all the clean underwear?" I wrote it all down but who can blame him for not wanting to read it all. A woman sitting near me smiled after the third phone call and asked how many children he was alone with. I was tempted to say one just to see her reaction but I couldn't sell him out like that. I said three and gave their ages. Her face looked rather impressed.

A friend told me once she had read an article that women tend to find a husband who somehow mirrors the personality of their father. I am not sure how true that is. In the case of finances my husband and father couldn't be any more opposite. My father was not nicknamed "Dollar Bill" because he is a big spender. More so for the way he tightly clenches a dollar in his fist. My husband has no idea how to hold onto a dollar or even loose change. My dad likes a quiet day spent lounging, reading playing a little golf. My husband can hardly sit still. Over the years he has calmed his pace a bit but when we first started dating I had to beg for mercy, give me a day without something BIG planned or scheduled. To my husband a day that does not have three or more activities in it has been a lounging kind of day. My father might find that excessive.

So I had to give it more thought.

They both enjoy boating and fishing. A good glass of beer. But that is all superficial stuff. Most guys love a good cold beer and some version of fishing, trout , tuna. So I needed to dig deeper.

I thought back to my childhood and my father spending hours on the beach wtih me and my sister. Taking me out in the Sailfish around the Point. Trips to Watch Hill. I remembered the way our house morphed to suit the needs of my mother's disability and how it was jsut what it was adn then it came to me.

Devotion.

I managed to find a man who mirrored my father's devotion, committment to the words "I do". Both men are devoted fathers, caring and unyielding in their interest and support. My father loved my mother with a genuine heart and never let her down when she needed him most. My husband, although his challenge is keeping up with me mentally, still keeps pace and remains a devoted husband even at the most trying of times. They both give with a generosity of spirit that fills your soul and makes you realize they are paying attention and they love you.

I am not sure that we women try to find a man who resembles our fathers. That might just be too Freudian but if you find someone who loves you unconditionally, who navigates the bad with humor and finds the good at the end of each day then consider yourself fortunate. If you grew up with that same devotion then consider yourself blessed.

The Reward System

A friend sent an article from The New York Times via email this morning. I read it and then went to another one written by the same journalist on happiness and kindness in our children. I found that one even more interesting. It talked about building self esteem in our children and how that is eclipsing creating kindness in our children. Forget about generation Z. Our children's generation will be known as the "all about me" generation. Our meals are planned around our children, as is our waking, our sleeping, our time alone or with our spouse. Our kids pout and we cave in, thinking we have just made some horrible mistake in a parenting choice and now our child will be ruined.


Sometimes saying no feels awful and, at least around here is it certainly repetitious. But there is a virtue to saying no. There is a silver lining to not caving in to everything. To not saying "okay sure you can have that toy for no other reason then to shut you up while I am in this store." It is just easier to take the easy way out but the more I see in my own children the
"give me" attitude the harder I am working to not give what is not necessary and to not use toys or treats as some kind of reward for things my kids should just be doing.


I recently had a meeting at my son's school. I meet once every couple months with his teacher, principal and some others involved in helping him improve his reading. It amazed me as I sat in this meeting and it went from academic discussion to discussion of his "fixation" on getting a "Good Choice Award". I had all I could do to not ask whose brilliant idea is the "Good Choice Award"? Because really you are rewarding children for being good people by giving them some treat from the dollar store. It only sets some kids up for disaster. My son received two good choice awards in one day and was so thrilled at his luck of getting two items from the principal's box of treats he talked about if for days at home. So I can understand why the teachers might have been a little frustrated if he was fixated but they have managed to create their own problem.

It is not that I think we shouldn't recognize our kids for the good things they do, but do they really need a trophy for participating in Saturday morning rec basketball? Will they be awarded when they are out in the workforce each time they do what their job description expects of them? Are we teaching them to be good citizens by rewarding them with dollar store goods or are we teaching them that being good brings rewards other than the feeling of satisfaction that they have done something good for another person.

As a kid I had chores and just did what I was told because, well I was told to do it. I did try to get out of doing those chores but once they were done there was no treat waiting for me or a trip to the store to pick out a toy. I was kind because it was expected of me adn because I watched my own parents and they way they treated people around them. We are our children's best teachers and if we teach them to do good things so they get a reward from it then we are not doing our job and our kids are really missing the greatest lesson.

My kids are completely wired for treats and rewards. They walk around the house with their hands held out in gleeful expectation. It is going to take a lot of work but I think we can change the way we do things at home and give our children the lesson that hard work and being kind has an internal reward that never stops giving.

My friend,the Librarian

When I was growing up our town had a small library. It was a two story building wth the second sotry more or less the basement. The parking lot had about 5 spaces and if it was a busy time you had to park on the street. You walked down a ramp and into the building. To the left was the children's department and to the right was the small elevator and the narrows stairs leading to the adult area. The children's department was cramped, as I remember it. There were cinder block walls above the shelves of books. The windows were small and too high for me to reach or see out of. But that wasn't the point. I didn't need to look out on East Main street I was there for books. My father would take almost any time I wanted to go and it always seemed to me that Mrs P was sitting behind the desk. She was the kind of person who made you feel as though the library was made for you. She had suggestions on books and after a time would know what authors I liked best and would tell me when something new had come in. She introduced me to "Runaway Ralph." She stamped books with the return date and always had a smile. It stunned me then that she could be so happy working in a basement. I had not yet come to realize the thrill of sharing books. I was just learning the thrill of reading.

As I grew older I had to move to the upstairs to get my books and it never seemed as pleasant. The librarians seemed to me to be older and didn't smile nearly as much. As time went on a new library was built. It is a beautiful library. Large and spacious, light pouring in from all directions. Mrs P is still there handing out smiles and books to a whole new generation. Her smile is still the same even though the space has changed. For a time we lived close to that library and I chose it over the large city library where we lived. I walked into the city library and no one knew who I was. No one smiled in a friendly way, the whole atmosphere was out of sync with what I knew growing up.

When we moved out to the country, the first place I went was the library. I fell in love. It is small, but open and light filled and the librarians smiled and commented on the books or movies my young son picked out. It didn't take long for some of the librarians to call us by name when we came into the library.

Over the past fives years we have frequented our library weekly. The librarians know us by name, all three children now. One of those librarians reminds me of my friend Mrs.P. I had quite an over due fine recently , which sadly is the norm not the excpetion for me. I walked into the library and smiled at Mrs.L. She smiled back and said,"What did you do now?" Relief flooded me because really I am , or at least it seems to me, always "doing something" that causes someone else to pick up my slack or help me along the way. But when she said it it was not with frustration but with that same smile she has given me and my children for the last five years. When I explained my dilemma of being unable to unearth four books she looked through the stacks and then renewed what she could and I paid the bill. On the way out she asked if my son had any more bags he might hide his books in and I had a thought. He has many bags adn he likes to hoard thing. We may show up on one of those shows one of these days. But it gave me a thought to look under the back seat of our SUV, a place I really try not to frequent and sure enough there were the books.

Librarians are special people. They are a public servent that most of us probably take for granted or may not even give much thought to what they do. But for me my love of books grew out of a small basement and a special woman with a big smile and has remained because of the other special librarians I have found along the way.

Compost how I love thee

I can see grass. My lawn is appearing after a very long hiatus. I am happy to see some dark green through the grey snow. I can see where my perenial gardens have been sleeping. The snow receded overnight to reveal shovels,sleds and some miscellaneous objects that don't belong on the yard. Our garden fence took a beating and needs more then just some simple repairs. The weight of the snow collapsed the tree trunks that my husband so carefully placed. It looks sad and battered but my husband has already drawn a new plan for this years crops and some seeds have already been bought. A new fence will be in place soon. I passed the garden center on my way to work this weekend and their door was open, not open for business but I can tell it is near. It is March and the rhythym of spring is bouncing in my veins.
My compost bin,which has been devoured by snow since January has been discovered. I had forgotten exactly where it was. My counter bucket just reappeared on the back porch where I eveidently left it before that first storm. It has been cleaned out and returned where it belongs. I hate to admit it but I have not composted this winter. It has been impossible for me to muster the stamina to get to the bin in the backyard. It required too much preparation. Boots, gloves,hat, coat, scarf. It is just like dressing your kids to play outside and having them back in the house in five minutes. Not quite worth all the effort. I did throw many things out into the backyard ,hoping some animals who were scrounging for food would help themselves, but for those of you who don't compost this is not a standard or recommended practice. All I can see now are some very fat squirrels barely able to run through my yard.
This morning I can see more of yard then I have seen since January. There was a layer of fog only seen in a bad B movie, hovering just slightly above the ground. The snow is melting at an incredible clip and the air smells sweet. The metallic smell of winter has faded. I have pulled my gardening gloves from their resting place to replace my winter gloves. My wool hat has been exchanged for the billowing spectacle known as my "shade hat" My Wellies are standing at attention next to my rake. My snow shovel is put away and my flat garden shovel ready to make a new garden in the coming weeks. I can taste the sweetness of food grown in my backyard and smell the tender air that will surround my honeysuckle bush.
My compost is back in business. My counter bucket is full this morning and ready to be placed among the other scraps that will work their magic, turning peels and coffee grinds into sweet smelling soil that will give us another round of cucumbers,eggplant and tomatoes. The walk is easy now, I don't even need a coat and who doesn't love sloshing through the mud?
For those naysayers who say snow could still come, I'm sorry I can't hear you. There are some birds chirping in my ears and I am blinded by the bliss I see just around the corner.

A Moment of Silence: Day One

My children have been home from school for a week now. I won't go into the gory details. We all have our stories, don't we? Last week I was watching Oprah and she and Goldie Hawn were talking about finding true happiness. What in life makes us happy. Oprah swears having time alone and being quiet will raise you up, bring inner peace, be good for your spirit. Dropping my kids off at her house for a week would bring me some inner peace. But since I cannot do that, I decided I would try some silence.
So for my first attempt I did as Oprah suggested I locked myself in the bathroom.
5:05 pm Shut bathroom door.
5:05 pm Knock at the door and it opens, thought I locked it.
Cooper: "Mom why are you sitting on the toilet all dressed?"
Me: "Please shut the door!"
Cooper: "okay but can you get me a drink? I haven't had one for all day." Sticks his tongue out to show me just how dehydrated he really is.
One millisecond later:
Drake "MOM! MOM! Where are you?"
ME:
Drake: "MOM!? " Door opens and a surprised 8 year old stares. "What are you doing sitting on the toilet like that?"
ME: "Privacy! Can I have some privacy in my own bathroom?"
Drake "Okay but you're doing it wrong. And can you tell Cooper to leave me alone? He keeps bothering me, saying stuff like..."
I get up and shut the door on him. I can hear him still talking through the door but it is muffled enough that I pretend not to hear. I look at my watch I have spent a minute in the bathroom and I have succeeded in having one millisecond of silence. I think Oprah asked for just one minute a day. She said give her just one minute. I guess she really doesn't know how long a minute can be in a house with three kids. Oh well there is always tomorrow...

"Tell me ,again, why you're running?"

I was recently complaining to an acquaintance but training for this half marathon. Not someone who knows me very well, but someone who was willing to listen to how much fun training is not. All she said when I was done was,"So tell me why you are running?" The simple answer is because I can. If we wanted to break it down and analyze it further and perhaps make it more interesting I could confess of the deep need for my children to see me in action. To see all of my limbs moving. To witness strength and capability on a physical level emanating from their mother. Something I never got see in my own mom. There is a power to moving your body beyond limitation. Beyond what you thought it was capable of. I want my children to always know I tried and to know that they must also try. Of course right now my children are too young to grasp anything beyond, " Mom likes to run with her friends." Which is s good start.

Each mile I run sparks something new inside me. Another goal becomes within my reach. It is something like that song,"This Little Light of Mine." Sometimes all we need is one shaft of light that blows away the darkness, gives us just enough of an outline to show us that the coat hanger isn't a monster and we have nothing to fear. One of my friends recently ran five miles and was telling me how great she felt afterward. I smiled and responded,"It's empowering, isn't it?" Her own smile tilted and grew and she said," Yes, it really is!" And that is just what it is, empowering. It never felt that way in my twenties and certainly not in my "Kermit" teens. Running was just something to do. Now it feels symbolic, large. I may never run another half-marathon and I can almost guarantee I won't run a marathon, training sucks the fun out of running. But it has made me realize that the only thing that stops us from dog anything, trying anything is ourselves.

When I wake up in the morning and feel tired and tell myself it is going to be bad day or a long day it is like Samantha Stevens has wiggled her nose and made it so. My oldest will miss his us, my husband will forget something important and will need me to bring it to his office, my toddler will only my attention and my four year old will want to finger paint..on my walls. I will discover I have nothing for dinner and no clean underwear. It's enough to make you want to go back to bed and stay there until you can start over with a new sunrise. I was explaining this to some of my mommy friends like this," If I have to take all three kids to Target I just tell myself it is going to be fine and they will behave." It works much better than telling myself how awful it will be because she enough that is what happens. I told them to try it. They all smiled but their eyes said, "You're crazy."

I met another woman a few days ago who is running the same half marathon. She is already up to 11 miles. When I told her I was at 9 miles her eyes sort of bulged and for moment I thought she had some food stuck in her throat. Then I realized she was just shocked that I was so far behind. I started to panic. Perhaps she is right. My training has been anything but regular. I have tried but with three kids, working every weekend and my husband also training it is almost impossible to stick to any kind of strict routine. Not to mention I don't really care for routines. She is at 11 miles. I'm at 9 and my thighs hurt, my knees hurt even my gluteus maximus feels maxed out. How will I make it to the finish line? It was at that moment that I realized I was sinking myself before I even got to the starting line. I was talking myself out of something that I can do. I m running because I can. I am running because it empowers me. I am running because my gluteus maximus has never looked better.

I may take a long time to reach the finish line but waiting there for me will be three little people who won't know how long it took or what it means to me. They will have a memory of a moment when their mom was strong and healthy and ran breathless to them, while they all pointed to the bounce house and Dunkin Donut booth begging for Munckins.

So we can take the pyschologist approach to my running and break it down and beat it like an old rug, spreading dust in a thousand directions and forgetting where it all came from or we can keep it simple and say," I am running because I can."

Signs

When I lived in Arizona, I would call my mother and ask her to call and remind me of anything from my work schedule to a hair cut appointment. I was 25. I suppose one should not brag of such a thing. And today some smart psychologist would certainly accuse my mother of "enabling " me to not be independent or some other kind of blah blah blah. The truth was I could have bought a calendar and wrote things down but how much better is it to hear a voice you love calling you to remind you that you have a doctor's appointment on Thursday at 2 and "wear clean underwear"? My mother enjoyed doing those things for me. On a physical level her life was limited, especially as I got older but her mental self was like solid steel. You could not penetrate through and take a single memory or telephone number away from her. Her body may have been completely disobeying her every command but somehow her multiple sclerosis could not touch a single neuron or basil ganglia that controlled anything remotely to do with memory, intuition or sassiness.

My mother passed away five years ago today. She had a bad heart that went undetected for more than a year. She was misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia and took whatever advice or medication was dispensed by this doctor or that and went about her business. It all came to a head when she landed in the ED with severe pain and it was finally determined she was having chest pain and a cardiac catheterization was done which revealed a blockage in her main arteries of 99%. She would not live out the week we were told unless she had open heart surgery. It all happened very fast and it felt as though I were watching it play out in someone's life, not mine. I almost never felt a part of the whole week. Her time in the ICU after the surgery was, to be frank, brutal. For all the years that she had trouble moving her limbs she could always talk to me. While she was in ICU she remained intubated and I could not hear her voice. When she was awake she could only nod or shake her head and smiling was even tough thanks to that God awful tube poking out of the side of her mouth. You have to understand I grew up with my mother's voice not her body. I hardly had a single friend who had a parent who had any kind of disability so their lives were not divided...their parents walked and talked. My mother talked, she scolded, she loved from her chair. She was as good a parent as any and better than some. She loved with her voice. I didn't need her arms wrapped around me to know I was safe with her. It was always her voice. My biggest fear that week was not being able to hear her voice again. I didn't, at least not the way I wanted. When the tube was removed she was able to whisper a thank you.

So really why would I have wanted a calendar when a sweet voice would happily ring my phone and remind of anything and everything. She felt useful , I felt loved. I was explaining this to my girlfriend last week. She found it funny and probably amazing that my mother would do that. The crazy part was my mother never needed to write it down, she just remembered. I asked my husband that week, when I realized how bad things were going," Who will remind me to do stuff?". He answered he could, which only made me cry harder because that man can't remember where he put his keys.
I was explaining all this to my girlfriend as a way of getting ot my point that I needed to make an eye doctor appointment. I think she missed the point because she said," call and make an appointment." I said,"I keep forgetting."

Last weekend we were having dinner with friends and I had placed my glasses on the table. No one was paying particular attention when our 17 month old grabbed them and proceeded to break them beyond repair. She just pulled at the ear pieces and snap that was all she wrote. I stared in disbelief. I was too tired to get really upset. I am able to balance them on my nose so when I drive I can see where I am going. The same girlfriend who missed the point of my very long story was in the car with me the next evening and just stared at me. "Your glasses are cracking me up" she said finally. I explained what happened and she was very quiet for a moment. Then she smiled at me and said," Did it occur to you that your mother whispered to your daughter and told her to break your glasses so you would get around to making that eye doctor appointment?" This is why I love this particular friend. She sees things in a way that I would not yet I don't find her explanations to be born of craziness. She is crazy, yes but in a subtle and enjoyable way. This was something I would not have thought of on my own. And perhaps for some people that is just plain crazy talk. But for me it was beautiful. It placed my mother right there in my space and I could hear her saying,"Isn't it time to get your eyes checked?" Most people may not believe in signs from those who have left us and those people may not have had that loss yet that makes you crave what is gone and can no longer be.
It is a club, right now a small club, that I have few members in. I am sure they would agree with my friend that my mother was throwing me a sign. Perhaps she sent other signs but they were too subtle, she may have forgotten I don't always catch on that quick, or she might be really busy, I do have a sister. And now I do have Microsoft and a calendar that pops up and dings with reminders of what I have to do. It is not the same but life does go on. I do have doctor appointment to thank her for and all those other things she called and reminded me to do and that is enough to make me smile.