parental struggles

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Three Things Thursday

Let’s face it, Three Things Thursday is just Randomosity in a different jacket. 

Tonight is the last night of NaBloPoMo, and I am here not through gumption or grit but through gin. 

  1. Kids and Homework: My daughter attends a cushy private school and this is the first year that she has had homework. (I know.) (I was a public school kid; it is very different.) Being a parent while your child works on school projects is its own kind of challenge. You want to be supportive but also encouraging. You want to make sure your kid does their assignments but you want them to have their own autonomy and also you don’t want to exert undue pressure. You want to be available to offer help or support but you don’t want to hover. IT IS VERY CHALLENGING. My husband came to the dinner table tonight and hissed that one of the sentences my daughter wrote didn’t make sense, and he tried to talk it through with her, and she decided to leave it as it was. As a Straight A Student, Ivy League Educated Physician, this is VERY DIFFICULT. But. As his mother kindly pointed out: It is our job as parents to support and encourage. It is the TEACHERS’ job to correct and instruct. 
  2. Cooking for Not My Immediate Family: I made salmon and green beans and potatoes. I followed a recipe. Everything was cooked but it was not great. My husband, who is to-a-fault honest about these things, gave a shoulder-shrugging “meh” when I mouthed “how is it?” across the table to him. And, sadly, I agree. I HATE THAT. I want to be The Best Cook. I want my in laws to go home and talk about my cooking. I want them to request my recipes. I want my mother-in-law to brag about how great a cook her daughter-in-law is when she plays majohng. But the truth is, I am a mediocre home cook. My husband and I have a few recipes we jointly love, and the rest are just meh or winging it. And that’s got to be okay, even if it hurts my ego. The other problem I have is in not having ANY CLUE how much food to make for more people than my husband and myself. I think he and I tend to eat pretty giant portions, so maybe that skews things? But I made WAY too much food. Like, we are going to have to eat multiples of this exact same (mediocre) meal before all the leftovers are gone too much food. I have literally no idea how to figure out the right amount of food to cook. Recipes are no help. One person’s six portions is another person’s three.
  3. Introverting Hard: Tonight, my husband was falling asleep, my father-in-law was falling asleep, and my mother-in-law was on the phone, so I nudged my husband and told him I was going to bed. Yes, it was 9:10 pm. He narrowed his sleepy eyes at me and said, “But you aren’t really going to bed, are you.” This is after having come into our bedroom last night 45 minutes or so after I’d excused myself to go to bed, and I was sitting in our bedroom typing on the computer. I NEED TIME TO MYSELF, MAN. How does he not know this, after 15 years of marriage and 22 years of being together???? I am worn out! The thing is, I had a FABULOUS day. My in laws were out of the house all day, doing whatever it is they do when they visit. My husband was able to pick up my daughter from school. I had nearly unadulterated alone time from 9:00 to 5:00 and it was BEAUTIFUL. So why, after a mere two hours with my in laws, am I ready to throw in the towel and secrete myself away in my bedroom? Because I am the introvertest of introverts, I guess. 

Well. That’s all I’ve got tonight, Internet. Thanks for sticking with me, these past 30 days of NaBloPoMo. I cannot promise to post tomorrow, but I am sure I will be back soon with inane topics to discuss. In the meantime, I appreciate you for reading. And thank you, so much, to San for leading the charge.

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Ghosts of Christmas Past Except Not About Christmas and Not Involving Ghosts

My brain is doing that periodic thing that it does which is to torment me with things that happened long ago about which I can do nothing. And then dwelling on those things until I cannot think about anything productive. 

HOW do you stop that? I am not even talking about middle-of-the-night perseveration, although that has been happening too. I am talking about straight up driving home from taking Carla to school and then BAM, “Remember when you did this totally awful and stupid thing? No, but do you REALLY remember it? Let’s go through every moment in excruciating detail.”

There WAS a stupid thing I did, last fall, and I’d managed to forget about it. Until my brain slapped me with the memory.

It was one of those horrible errors that is totally preventable and has an actual cost to it. Like forgetting to return a pair of shoes that don’t fit before the 30-day return period ends. Or backing your car into the garage wall. Or leaving your car windows open all night during a rainstorm. Things that could have been prevented had you been slightly less lazy or more proactive. I can feel my face heating up with residual shame. Such a waste! A preventable waste of money! And not a SMALL amount of money, either. We were so fortunate to be able to pay for my mistake, and my husband was extremely kind about it even though he would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS make that kind of mistake. Why? Why did I let that happen? And why am I thinking about it NOW?

I would say that it’s because I just did another stupid money-wasting thing (My phone has been disconnecting from our wi-fi, and I didn’t notice, and I have just willy nilly been watching Instagram videos and scrolling through apps and downloading – good gourd – a ONE POINT NINE GIGABYTE package of bird sounds from Merlin Bird ID, all while connected to the cellular network. We do not have unlimited data, and in fact only use about 5-6 GB of data per month among the three of us, and I have used NINE GIGABYTES, all by myself, in five days. And we have 25 days left in the month before our data resets. And yet, we can buy more data, a GB at a time, but each GB costs $15 which is not nothing!) but I have been torturing myself with the earlier money-wasting thing for weeks now. So who knows. 

Anyway, it’s good for internal piling on: I am the worst, stupidest person, totally oblivious to important things. I am costing our family money for NO REASON. No one else would make such a dumb mistake! I can see that I’m not connected to wifi just by looking at the top of the phone, and I am on my stupid phone all the damn time! I am a drain on our finances and worthless to boot! 

It’s not even just things I DID, it’s all sorts of things, like how I was going through old yearbooks a few summers ago, and discovered that this boy I’d had a crush on for years had written something filthy in my sixth grade annual. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I can imagine all the other middle school boys giggling about it. And WHY did he write such a thing? We were friends! I may have had a crush on him, but there was never anything but friendship between us. And I was friends with him for YEARS after he scrawled that crude suggestion in my yearbook. 

Should I throw out my yearbook? Scratch out those awful words with permanent marker? Re-evaluate all my relationships?

Why am I thinking about this? I didn’t even find the yearbook recently; it was AT LEAST two years ago, if not more.

Or the other day, I was out for a lovely walk in the snow and instead of enjoying the feeling of snowflakes kissing my cheeks and the sound of my boots crunching in the snow, I started thinking about another awful boy, this one in high school, who once mentioned he’d seen me outside my music teacher’s house after my lesson, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, waiting for a parent to pick me up. He told me I looked like a hooker. A HOOKER. We were in high school. Why would his mind go there? And why would he TELL me such a thing? And why am I furious about it NOW, a million years after the fact? 

Why are schoolage boys so awful? Not all of them – not yours, surely. But enough of them to make a difference. Will Carla have to deal with boys like this? Will they write grotesque things in her yearbook? How am I going to protect her heart from being infected by terrible people? I have no idea how to protect her or prepare her. I really have no business being a mother if I can’t help her understand that there are people who are mean and hurtful for no reason… but without crushing her spirit.

And then there are more examples of me being a terrible person and parent. Like how last summer, there was a mortifying incident involving another mom and her kids of the sort that makes me a) wonder how, when a child knows The Rules and has shown that they know them and can follow them, they can occasionally not just forget The Rules but flaunt them? And b) how am I possibly equipped to be a parent if I can’t convey the importance of The Rules and how they are meant to be followed always, not just on a whim? I’ve been going over and over that event (which turned out fine! everyone is fine!) and coming up with The Exact Perfect Thing that I should have said or did at the time, instead of saying and doing what I did say and do, which was nothing is except standing in gape-mouthed mortification and letting the other mother take the disciplinary lead. How is this helping anyone, to go over and over it? 

Oh, lord, and there was that other time? With this same mom? When I saw her kid on the sidewalk, by himself, two blocks from home. I was in my car and stopped and asked him if he was okay and if his mom knew where he was, and he said yes and yes. So we kept driving. I pulled up my phone so I call his mother but before I could do so, we saw her on the sidewalk. She was frantic with worry, because she’d lost him. I was able to tell her where he was, but I keep kicking myself for not STAYING WITH HIM and calling her. I could have just stayed right there in my car! But I didn’t! I kept driving! Why? Why did I do that? It all worked out okay, but WHY DID I DO THAT?

You see? It’s not enough that my brain torment me with one thing. It’s got to get right in there with hit after hit after hit. Why can’t it just leave the past in the past and focus on doing the best job possible NOW?

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Tuesday Randomosity: Sleep Award Edition

I have done it! I have done the thing I always think I should do, and never do, which is to GET UP when I awaken in the middle of the night and do something more useful than lying awake, counting how many hours of sleep I could get if I fell asleep right then.

Lest you think I am no longer susceptible to the patterns of the past: I woke up at 3:00 a.m., almost on the dot, and then lay in bed/read soothing blog posts until 4:00, and then lay in bed in the dark, telling myself I should just GET UP ALREADY and start the day until 4:37. That’s when I finally Did The Thing and put on my glasses and came downstairs. I deserve a Sleep Award. Although, now that I think of it, a Sleep Award seems more appropriate for sleeping restfully through an entire eight-plus hours, so perhaps I’ll have to relinquish my claim.

In lieu of an award, I am drinking tea, as I do when I wake up. My stomach is a little uncomfortable with this idea – it thinks it is Sleeping Time, rather than Accepting Sustenance Time. It is also a little concerned about what time we will want lunch. 

If only the grocery store were open now, and I could get that over with! Oh well. I will blog about random nothings instead! 

  • Carla has been having extra trouble getting to sleep lately. Firstly, I feel just terrible that she has apparently inherited my fraught relationship with sleep. She has had trouble falling asleep her entire eight-and-a-half years, and that doesn’t bode well for the remainder of her life, which I hope is very long. At least, I suppose, she seems to be able to maintain sleep once she gets there. While I occasionally have trouble getting to sleep, my main issue is staying asleep.
  • Well, I suppose my brain is smoothing over the many, many times that Carla has come into my room at 3:00 or 4:00, or that I have awakened to learn that she had been awake for hours already. BUT, it seems less frequent than her troubles drifting off. The power of posting about something of the internet will immediately ensure that she wakes up at 3:00 every morning for the next month.
  • The only thing that comes close to the frustration of not being able to fall asleep is the frustration of one’s CHILD not being able to fall asleep. Last night, my husband and I were watching the first episode of Sex Education and I kept hearing suspicious thumps coming from upstairs. It was quite windy outside, and my husband felt that the thumps might be exterior noises, while I was quite sure they were human. And then we had one of those mildly irritating conversations I imagine happen frequently in any longterm partnership, where he said, “Do you want to go check on her?” and I said “yes,” because I’d HEARD “Do you want ME to go check on her?” And then he had to correct my misperception and I had to glare at him briefly before I went to investigate the source of the thumps. 
  • Thump source: Carla. Instead of reading quietly or thinking about sheep or doing deep breathing – all of which we have discussed AT LENGTH in regards to their soporific powers – she felt the best way to induce sleep was to get out of bed and gather some toys and play with them, in the bed. On the bed. Preposition the bed. Exasperation! Incredulity! How did she think this was a good way to get to sleep? And yet she seemed very sincere that she thought it would help. Trying to turn down the scold volume on my lecture, I removed the toys and reminded her of all the other options that we have discussed for helping lull our brains to sleep. Count backwards from 100. Count backwards by 5s from 1000. Imagine yourself, in great detail, walking along the route to somewhere you love. List 50 things you are grateful for. Go through the alphabet and name an animal beginning with each letter. Do some deep breathing. Read a book. Recite a poem over and over in your head. When I went back to check on her about 20 minutes later, she was fast asleep. Sometimes it seems like the BEST way to induce sleep is to scold her about it. Which seems… not right. 
  • Carla mentioned to me that she cannot see pictures in her head, so the “walking along the route to somewhere you love” isn’t a viable option for her. I love that she’s so aware of what it’s like inside her head. I don’t see pictures in my head either, but I guess my internal travel writer is so descriptive that I can still make that option work. Or I can drum up a feeling of a place that is almost as vivid as an image. 
  • Also, it is unfair of me to expect that she remember these techniques when I am terrible at remembering them myself! Only when I am DESPERATE for sleep do I recall most of these strategies. The one that I use most often – mentally reciting Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” until I fall asleep – sometimes doesn’t even occur to me in the middle of a 3:00 am wakeup. Instead, I turn to my phone, which almost certainly makes it HARDER for me to sleep. 
  • There was supposed to be a secondly somewhere up there. I suppose you have forgotten about it as well. But on the off chance you were waiting on tenterhooks – “You did the ‘firstly,’ what’s the ‘secondly’? WHAT’S THE SECONDLY?” – I cannot remember. 
  • I have finished my first book of poetry for the year. One of my 2022 aspirations is to read a poem every morning, and I have been keeping up with that so far. However, I may not have chosen the best book to start out the year. I selected a book at random and came up with The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck. She has an umlaut over the u in her surname; I don’t how to do that on my computer. I adore Louise’s poetry. (This makes it sound as though we are on a first-name basis, which we are not. I did meet her once, though. We went out to lunch and she is as fascinating as one hopes a famous poet would be.) But The Seven Ages is all about her contemplating her own death. That’s all fine and good, and it resonates, and I appreciate reading her thoughts from the perspective of being 50ish because I am nearing that age. But it was also a little depressing. Perhaps I will try a Billy Collins book next; I own two of his collections, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the poems; my impression is that they are lighter and sometimes attempt to be humorous.
  • One of the Gluck poems has really stuck with me. It’s called “The Sensual World,” which, in my opinion, mis-implies what the poem is about or how to read it. But poems are very personal, so you do you, boo. Anyway, the poem is about how the world will grip you in startling and unpredictable and inescapable ways. There is this moment of exquisite beauty that the narrator recounts, in the kitchen of her grandmother. A tiny moment: a glass of juice; its taste; the way the light refracts through it. But it leads the narrator to offer an urgent warning about the trap that life has set for you: “you will never let go, you will never be satiated. / You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. / Your body will age, you will continue to need. / You will want the earth, then more of the earth – / Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. / It is encompassing, it will not minister. / Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, / it will not keep you alive.” It makes my heart pound, it resonates so deeply. I am so familiar with those moments – of shocking beauty that flares suddenly out of the mundane, of intense love provoked by the smallest, most inconsequential thing (a kitten at the pet store, butting its head against your hand; a child seeing you in distress and trying to soothe you with the very techniques you use to soothe the child; an unexpected kindness from a stranger; a moment of private humor with a spouse; a child, asleep, with hands folded beneath the chin as though posed). And I know the exact feeling of wanting to clutch those things with both hands even as I know – we all know – they are not ours to keep. It is not our lot to hold them forever, but only for the short time we have on this plane of existence. You will never let go. It will not keep you alive.
  • Yesterday, I experienced one of those moments of satisfaction/guilt that seem to be a hallmark of parenting. Carla was really anxious about returning to school (who knows why?!?! Is it the constant barrage of contradictory information, such as “Covid isn’t a big deal since you’re vaccinated; don’t worry too much, it probably won’t affect you too much if you get it” but also “make SURE you wear your mask and don’t breathe on anyone and for Todd’s sake, please don’t let anyone breathe on you!” Is it the fact that she hasn’t been in school for a month? Is it the fact that “school” could mean home/not home at any given time?) so I had to bribe her to even get her out the door yesterday morning. The bribe is not the satisfaction/guilt part, although perhaps it should be; it worked. I bribed her with a chocolate chip cookie for dessert (we are reverting to a “desserts on weekends” kind of schedule) AND with “something fun.” (She claims she never ever gets to do what SHE wants, all she does is go to SCHOOL.) I told her she could pick anything non-screen related, and she picked playing Barbies together. Sigh. I haaaaaaaate pretend play. It is the worst. But I agreed, and after school we played Barbies for 30 minutes exactly. Which is nothing. A tiny amount of my day. Then, when we were doing our bedtime mindfulness routine, and we got to the part about “what were you grateful for today?”, Carla said, “I was grateful that I got to play Barbies with Mommy.” No hesistation. Awwww. What a worthwhile way to spend our time together! But also: guilt, because I HATE playing Barbies. And yet it is such a simple way to make my beloved child so happy! Ugh ugh ugh. Well, I am not promising anything, but I will TRY to do more Barbies with Carla. 
  • A thing it turns out I DO enjoy is playing Sleeping Queens. Do you have this game? I ordered it on a “my child is not doing enough math” whim last weekend and it is QUITE fun. There’s a video on the product page that describes how to play; it seems much more complicated than it is. And it’s a much faster-paced game than I anticipated. The basic object is that you want to get as many queens as possible. To get the queens, or to keep your opponent from getting queens, or to prevent your opponent from getting your queens, you need special cards. Your only chance to get the special cards is to discard a card from your hand. And – here’s the math element – you can draw more cards if you have an equation. So if you have cards in the values of 1, 5, and 7, you can only discard one of them and pick up one new card. But if you have 2, 5, and 7, you can make an equation and discard all three; then you can draw three cards. If you have/know a child in the young elementary age group, I highly recommend it. Because the number cards only go up to ten, the math is quite easy for Carla (although there’s no harm in keeping up with basic addition and subtraction), but it would be ideal for someone who is just learning to add/subtract. We also do multiplication, when it’s possible. I really wish there were an expansion pack with higher-value numbers. Anyway, I find it to be a really fun game and we have already played at least a dozen times. BONUS: This is a game that you can easily play with two people, which means that we don’t have to wait for Daddy to be home. 
  • I made my first foray into baked oatmeal. I am a little reluctant to post about it, because I didn’t love it. And I WANT to love it. It was both better than I thought it would be and worse than I hoped. But I think I chose the wrong (for me) recipe. It called for coconut oil, which – to me (though not to my husband) – ending up being the predominant flavor. I wanted an APPLE flavor. Also, I don’t think I put in enough nuts. The nuts were my favorite part. I need to do more experimentation before I can make a firm decision about not liking it. I think I will try this recipe next. 
  • I had a mildly negative interaction the other day that is still gnawing at me. It’s one of those things where the situation felt very fraught, almost purely because I am overly concerned with what people think of me. And the rest of it was fraught because it involved Covid, and I am caught in a wildly swinging internal pendulum of “you can’t control it and you need to find some way to live with it without forcing your child to be a miserable hermit” and “it is perfectly reasonable to continue to take precautions for the sake of those who aren’t protected/in order to keep Carla in school ” and “if you allow Carla to go to school, then how is this situation different” and “it is okay to have boundaries and limits even if they seem arbitrary; everything seems arbitrary right now” and “you and Carla are both vaccinated, you really can relax a little sheesh” and “arrrrrggghhhhhh.” I fervently wish I were the type of person who a) knows the exact right thing to do in any given situation and b) doesn’t care what other people think of me. I am neither of those people though, I am me. And as much as I try to be breezy, breeziness is not in my nature. And I DO care what people think, and I hate that about myself but I do.
  • Totally related to the above point: It is not fair to present a situation in one way, with clear parameters, and then to change the parameters in the moment. It is especially not okay to then pressure people into accepting the new parameters. 
  • Gah.
  • We have a new addition to our Dinner Plan this week. My husband requested Taco Tuesday. I think you know that I will never turn down a request for tacos. This is the beauty of planning out fewer meals than one intends to eat. You can just slide tacos right into the mix, no biggie. It is especially helps when you haven’t yet made it to the grocery store.
  • That reminds me that I have my check-up this morning. It is a totally normal check-up, so it should be fine. But it’s with a new doctor, in a new office, in a new location. So I am a little anxious about all of those things. Will I find the office okay? Will I get there on time? Will I like the doctor? Also, will I meet her for the first time while naked? That’s never fun. And then I have to do it all over again in a couple of weeks, because my PCP is retiring and I had to find a new one. (Hopefully I won’t have to meet her naked, though.)

Well, that’s it. I am already painfully aware that today is going to be a grind to get through; my 3:00 a.m. alertness has eroded into fatigue. But blogging is a much better way to spend the early hours of the morning than tossing and turning next to my blissfully sleeping husband, waiting futilely for sleep to bless me with its presence.