Tag Archives: parenting

The Space Between Things

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Last weekend, the Cool Kids were hanging out in the deep end of my pool. Floating there on foam noodles and drinking wine out of plastic cups with girlfriends–a little hour in heaven. Wise Heather shared the news that her new job was pretty much a done deal. Good for her, but sad for us who were hoping that she would work someplace close enough to meet for lunch.

I asked, “Is the drive going to bother you?” and she dropped a truth bomb: “It’s nice to have 30 minutes in between BAM and BA BOOM to think my own thoughts.” Ain’t that the truth?

She got me to thinking about the space between things, the moment when we’re going from Point A to Point B (and if you’re like me, using that time to anticipate out all possible problems that might arise between Points C – ZZ). I think my days have left me short of breath lately because I’ve shoved more and more work and worry into the space between things.

This little gem floated into my Facebook feed last week: tumblr_n74fyou6W81r0sn0fo1_1280

Well, hell. I haven’t observed Items 1-4 since my kids were born. Trying to, but…damn. I pride myself on answering emails while I’m on the phone and checking Facebook while I’m walking the long way to a meeting so that my Fitbit will approve of me. Multitasking is supposed to be a good thing, right?

Not so much. Not when it’s ALL THE TIME.

Today at 4:55 p.m., while I adjusted user permissions on a site and posted news stories and sent an optimization idea to the developer and questioned the life choices that have led me to use words like “optimization,” I also texted G to see who was picking up Vivi from day camp. Ding! He was already on the way. OK, I could get a feeeeeeew more things done before fetching Carlos.

But I made the mistake of glancing at my desk calendar and seeing BLOGHER in big yellow letters next week. NEXT WEEK? Shit, I need business cards. So I flip over to a website to design and order something fresh and amazing that’s going to be The Ticket To Next….but the logo I want to use isn’t the right dimension and the website warns me that my design will have “possible white space.” No worries. I can fix it with some clever cropping in this other application over here…

Next thing I knew, I looked up and it was 5:25 p.m. and the Mom Guilt kicked in. “Please don’t let my baby be the last one waiting in the room, sitting over in the book corner while the teacher mops the floor.” I grabbed phone off the charger, chugged down the last of my 100 oz of filtered water, slapped the Fitbit to see how many blinky dots I racked up, sighed in disappointment, shoved the stack of bills that I meant to pay on my lunch break back in my purse for another day, I turned to the whiteboard behind my desk and crossed of ONE DAMN THING from the long list, even though I kept the hammer down for the last seven hours, since I got to work after my early morning dentist appointment for a filling.

I turned out the lights and locked up the office, Mom Guilt squeezing my chest until there’s no room for breath. Turned left to take the stairs and walked past the scale that stands in the hall. Checked the Fitbit again. In the stairwell, I held on to the railing because no one would find me there if I slipped and fell. Last one leaving. Then the “You’re going to die alone!” fears stop in to say hello because why not? All my kids will remember is that they were the last ones picked up from daycare and the smell of mop water will trigger depression for the rest of their lives. As I stepped out into the sunlight, I tallied all the phone calls I need to make…that I never seem to have time to do. Like to check on my own parents.

Two minute walk to the car. Just enough time to catalog all the things I meant to achieve between last year’s BlogHer and this year’s. And I forgot to lose fifty pounds. AGAIN.

Got in the car and the gas light came on. I need to find a way tomorrow to drive across town to the place where I can save 50 cents a gallon on gas with my fuel points. That’s like eight bucks. That matters.

It’s a three minute drive to get Carlos. The first thing I see is a note taped on his cubby, and it’s not just a note, it’s a note with a STAPLE in the corner, a multi-page record of his transgressions. He’s been fine for months…now this shit AGAIN in the last month before he starts Pre-K.

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He beams to see me and gives me a gigantic hug. Four other kids line up to get hugs, because I make time for that. As we make our way to the car, the weight of the note makes me think that I should start the “Good Choice/Bad Choice” speech and break it to Carlos that he’s not going to have screen time tonight, but part of me just wants to have a few minutes of happy with my happy kid while he’s actually happy instead of immediately talking about that time six hours ago when he was angry.

Where is the space between things for a working mother? In music, it’s called a rest. In painting, it’s the negative space. In graphic design, white space. Where is the space between things that gives me room to breathe? That, in its emptiness, gives the heart a place to stand in order to see the life as I’m living it?

Sometimes when I find myself standing in front of the refrigerator, foraging for junk, I realize that what I’m really hungry for is a big gulp of breath. A heaping plate of rest. A space. A pause.

Know what I’m saying? What do you do to maintain the space between things?

IRONIC POST SCRIPT: I looked up the principle of “the space between things” in art. The Japanese have a word for it, and that word is…………..”Ma.” I guess my kids have been yelling at me about theories of Japanese spatial design for all these years.

Mom Haiku

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Pack three lunches at

midnight. Smile to think of them

crunching fresh carrots.

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Pick up this and that

Put it there and here and there

Then do it again.

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Peek in dark bedroom

Pull covers up to his chin

Tuck Hulk in tight too

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A Blue Slip

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Due to my ‘advanced maternal age,’ I got to go to the high-risk doctor for special tests and lots of ultrasounds with his super high tech machine. Like if a regular ultrasound can show you the sex of the baby, Dr. Rosmond’s machine could tell you if the baby was going to have good hair. Serious testing. We used to call Dr. Rosmond “the geriatric uterologist.”

And all that testing meant that we got to find out the sex of the baby a few weeks earlier than most. G couldn’t make it to the visit that would reveal whether Baby #2 was going to be a Carlos or a Lucretia. When I told the ultrasound tech about our dilemma, she told me that she would write the sex on a piece of paper and seal it up for me, so that G and I could open it together.

He called just as I was leaving the doctor’s office. We agreed to meet at my friend Marti’s restaurant next door. I ordered a huge blueberry muffin and took it out onto the patio to wait for G. I remember being nervous as a cat–jangly nerves and swooping stomach. By the time G got there, I felt like an overcooked noodle. We set the envelope on the table and looked at each other.

We had two girls. We knew what to do with girls. We talked about “the girls.” We had lots of girl clothes and girl curtains and girl…everything.

I opened the envelope slowly. Slid out the folded white paper inside. Unfolded the crease.

A blue slip.

G cried. He always cries. We knew right away that we would name our son Carlos after G’s late father. We had already decided on that the first go-round.

I admitted it then and I’ll still confess it now–I felt the least little bit of disappointment when that blue slip fluttered out of the envelope. A boy? What were we going to do with a boy? A boy?? I didn’t know anything about boys (except for the five nephews, of course). A boy seemed so different. How do you raise a child for a life that you have never experienced yourself? I felt like I would be starting all over again with the learning curve. I knew how to mother a girl…now a boy?

My friend, Libby, and I were laughing about this the other day. She remembers me being dumbfounded at the idea of mothering a BOY.

But y’all. This boy? This boy is my whole heart. Big Gay always said, “You will NEVER understand how much your parents love you until you have children of your own.” Damn if she wasn’t right.

As much as I’ve worried over his development the last year or so, he astonishes me every day. I looked down on the carpet where he was playing with puzzle pieces to see this:

My boy knows how to spell.

My boy knows how to spell.

He can spell. And he spelled “MOM.”

At work, we call the form that you fill out for a job change a “blue slip.” Even though it’s been many years since it was an actual form or actually blue. I feel like Carlos gave me my blue slip into a different kind of mothering. Mothering someone who isn’t like me, who won’t live in the same world as me. I know it’s projection–this idea I have that Vivi is more similar to me because she is the same sex. But as a woman who was a girl, mothering a girl seemed like one less degree of separation. Mothering a boy taught me that degrees of separation don’t matter when it comes to the ones we love. With him, I am learning to mother the person-ness of him, not the girlness or the boyness. And that has made me a better mother to Vivi’s person-ness and Victoria’s person-ness.

My son’s differences are few compared to our samenesses. When I’m in the hammock with a book, he climbs in beside me…even if he uses his feet to turn the pages.

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Oh, Beths–I Get It Now

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Tonight, when I was on my knees shoving a plastic knife up into the roller thingy of my carpet steamer in order to extract wet globs of dog hair…I had a moment. A good moment. A laughy kind of moment.

I thought back to a Sunday morning about fourteen years ago. Sun streamed through the French doors of my bedroom. Moxie and Zoe, the dachshunds, lay in a snoozy little pile on the white carpet. The phone rang–it was my friend, Beth.

She asked, “Hey! What are you doing?”

I glanced at the clock. 11:30 a.m. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Cleaning up a little.” I was lying like a rug. Beth had a toddler and another one on the way. I frequently lied to her about how busy I wasn’t. I didn’t want to rub it in.

A pause fell between us, a silence on the line before she screeched, “ARE YOU STILL IN THE BED??”

I snorted then confessed. “Yeah, but I’m not even sleeping any more. Just laying here with a book.” I didn’t tell her that I had been reading for three hours. That I was eating fresh cherries and orange juice that I had driven all the way in to Atlanta to get.

“Oh. My. God. It’s been YEARS since I got to do that.”

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Now Beth’s toddler is driving and on the golf team. Tempus fugit and all, y’all.

And me? The one who was lolling around in bed at lunchtime on a Sunday? I’m living the dream. I left the feverish toddler at home with G so I could go to work. Went to therapy on my lunch hour to clean out my head. Picked a logo for the new project at work. Did some moving, did some shaking. Picked up Vivi from school and took her grocery shopping, where we practiced math in the produce department and made up a song about Froot Loops. Two hundred dollars poorer, we drove through Chic-fil-a to pick up dinner. I fed the kids, talked about girl drama with the teenager, patted the sick boy, fed the dog. Got the kids in bed then cleaned blueberry smoothie barf out of the carpet. Then cleaned the steamer with a plastic knife because I should have vacuumed first. Then did two loads of laundry and addressed 25 birthday party invitations. Now it’s 11:39 and I’m sitting down to write this because I start to nut up if I go too many days without writing.

I get it Beth. I swear I do. Thank you for being patient with me back then. It’s been years for me now, too.

Another Sunday morning and a different Beth….One time, about the same thirteen years ago, I needed to call my brother’s house about something. I waited until 9 a.m. because I didn’t want to be rude. My sister-in-law, Beth, answered.

“Hey! It’s Ashley–I hope it’s not too early to call. I didn’t want to wake up the boys.”

She hooted. “OH RIGHT! Please–they’re both in time out and I’ve already had to use Liquid Stitches! What’s up with you?”

THAT is the life I’m living right now. Both Beths–I totally get you.

The Left Way

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11048706_10205359734385867_7995798829086982539_o“I cut paper wif scissors!”

Carlos plopped down on the carpet in the den with a few pieces of white paper from the printer tray and a pair of green safety scissors. He held the silver blades tightly with one hand while he got the fingers of his right hand positioned in the grips.

“Way to go!” I exclaimed, before he even began to cut. Holding scissors the “right way” is one of his goals in school. It has been a goal for a while. I’d never seen him get them in position like this, so I was already excited. Ever so slowly and carefully, he moved the grips of the scissors between his fingers and began to make tiny snips around the edge of the paper. G and I clapped.

As his cuts traveled farther down the sheet of paper, the paper began to wobble and slip away from the scissors.

I got down on the floor with him. “If you hold it like this, the paper won’t shake.” I moved his hand up closer to where he was making the cuts. He snipped a couple more times. Back on track.

Huck scratched at the back door so I turned my attention away for a moment. When I looked back to Carlos and the paper…

Y’all probably think I’m going to say that he had cut all his hair off, right?

Nah. But he had gone back to holding the scissors with two hands, otherwise known as “the wrong way.” I hovered in hopes that he would correct his grip. He snipped away happily as well as he could with the scissors all wonky.

“Baby? Don’t you want to hold those the way you had them before?” He ignored me.

“Here,” I offered as I sat down beside him. “Let me show you the right way.”

He pulled the scissors out of my reach.

“No, Mommy! I do it the LEFT WAY.”

So I kept my mouth shut while he snipped the paper in a clumsy line. He’ll learn eventually that the “right way” became the right way because it makes controlling the scissors easier. It’s the way of precision.

Tonight’s little moment reminded me that, until he cares about precision, the left way is a perfectly fine path to travel too. Two paths diverge, the right way and the left way.

This Is All My Fault

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I started this post in February 2014. I figured out where it was going today.

Back then, I was thinking about the internal stories that I return to over and over. The stuff I just can’t let go–the stories I tell myself about myself all the time. I might have been reading Brene Brown’s ideas about shame and the difference between shame and guilt. Guilt is a reasonable reaction when you have done something wrong; shame is the unreasonable belief that you ARE wrong.

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Here’s an example of a story I keep carrying around. When I was a kid, I loved to wrap Christmas packages. I wrapped presents for our family, for my grandparents, for my aunt and uncle. My dad taught me how to tie fancy bows and finish the ends of the package with no overlap. So when I was about 13, my mom heard about a group at the mall that was raising money for some charity by wrapping presents. She signed me up for a shift and I was so excited! I wrapped many gifts beautifully that day, but there was this one package that got the best of me. A girl about my age and her mom brought me a large, not quite square box and asked me to wrap it for her boyfriend. I chose a simple gold foil, then I started on a double bow with contrasting colors of satin ribbon. Only the pre-cut ribbon didn’t quite fit around the awkward box. I didn’t want to cut new lengths because the volunteer coordinator had given me a very serious orientation about how this was for charity and we could not waste ribbon. So I taped the ribbon on the bottom of the box even though it didn’t quite meet–there was a messy gap of about an inch in the center on the bottom of the package. Everything you could see was perfect, but the bottom was messy. And I hadn’t wasted ribbon. Right choice? I thought it was the best path.

Well, five minutes later, the mother and daughter came back with the package and complained to the volunteer coordinator that the bottom was so ugly and the ribbon didn’t meet. I was mortified. I had been found out. When they were asked who had wrapped the gift for them, the mother looked around the room and pointed to me, “She did it.” When the volunteer brought it back to me to fix, I apologized and said that I hadn’t wanted to cut more ribbon. She looked at me like I was an idiot. She said, “We can’t CHARGE people for a mess like this!”

So yeah. I finished out my shift in red-faced shame and never went back. I still feel shame when I think about it. Because I was doing my best but I messed it up. I was a 13 yr old kid faced with the desire to do it right but working under the “don’t waste ribbon” edict. I opted for the wrong choice. And when it was pointed out as wrong, I fixed it. Fixing the package with a perfect ribbon took care of the guilt for the mistake. But the shame? That’s what I’m still carrying.

Now let’s return from 1982, shall we? Back to a year ago when I first started thinking about the stories that linger. Given that I have stories I can’t seem to let go of or reframe, I asked myself, “What is the theme of these stories? The continual story I’m telling myself about myself?”

Immediately, the answer popped into my head: “This is all my fault.”

This is all my fault.

Flash forward a year to today, when I was having my regularly scheduled crying jag in the preschool parking lot. Carlos has been sent home from school two days this week for hitting, biting, climbing on tables, screaming at another kid because he thinks it’s funny, throwing stuff….you name it. But by the time I pick him up, he a chirpy little angel who says, “I love you, Mommy!” Even on the days when he got to stay at school, I received a two-page note of every transgression. And Vivi didn’t get to go on her class field trip yesterday or today because she was acting up in class earlier in the week and didn’t get herself back to green. Today, as I sat there in the parking lot, just knowing that my kid was going to get kicked out of daycare and wondering what to do next–what to do to FIX THIS–I realized that this phase in my kids’ lives was triggering a lot of shame in my own mind.

And that’s when the words popped into my brain and heart simultaneously: This is all my fault.

THAT’S what has been turning my face red every time I answer the phone and it’s daycare calling. If only I were a better mother, my kids wouldn’t be having any problems in school. If only I didn’t work. Or if I took them to yoga. Do they get enough sleep? Does this milk have enough protein in it? Do other kids wear socks voluntarily? If I were a good mother, my kids would keep their shoes on.

Whoa, Nellie. I felt just like that 13 year old kid, watching as the woman’s finger stretched towards me: “She did it.”

The tears I’ve been trying to tamp down for weeks now came rushing out in the preschool parking lot. It’s not my fault. I’m worried over my kids because they’re my kids, but their actions aren’t my fault. I want them to walk the paths of their lives with joy in their steps and no rocks in their shoes. But they’re the ones who have to do the walking. I can’t carry them.

As I cried it out and reminded myself that I’m not a bad mother and these kids might even maybe somehow be a teensy bit lucky to have me as a mother, the fear and shame began to melt away. Vivi will figure this out by living with the natural consequences of her actions. Carlos’ language will catch up with his heart. We’ll all learn how to deal.

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Do you have stories that you can’t let go? What’s the theme to those stories that you tell yourself about yourself?

R-E-D

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alphabet-150781_1280We have a Sunday morning tradition at our house. Vivi and Carlos pile on to The Big Bed and snuggle up with G and me. (Victoria outgrew this a few years back and opts for a good ole teenaged sleep in until noon.)

Carlos climbs up from the bench at the foot of the bed then folds himself quietly into my side. Vivi pounces onto the bed with her Pengy then settles under G’s arm. They kick and wiggle and make up games about the cave (under the covers) or the waves (over the covers). It’s delightful.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Carlos said, “No, Mommy! Cover up your feet, Mommy! Go to sleep, Mommy!” so that I wouldn’t leave The Big Bed. I promised him that I wasn’t leaving, I just wanted to sit up for a minute. This morning, I was wearing my Heart Month t-shirt–the one that says “Keep Calm and Go Red.” Carlos saw the message on the back of my shirt and started naming letters. He’s been doing that for a year now–no interest in writing them, but he knows all the letters and the sounds they make.

But today, something magical happened, right there on The Big Bed.

I felt his little finger poking the back of my shirt. He chirped, “R-E-D…RED!”

alphabet-150768_1280G and I shared that look, that “Is it OK to freak out a little right now or would we scare him?” look. We kept calm and let him carry on.

“R-E-D spells RED! Exactly right, buddy! You are so smart!”

He read each letter.

“K-E-E-P….” He didn’t know what to make of these, so I said, “Keep!” He echoed, “Keep!”

“C-A-L-M…” I jumped right in with, “Calm!” He repeated it.

“G-O!” He waited for me to tell him the word. I said, “What’s the opposite of stop?”

Vivi shouted, “GO!” before she could stop herself and we all chimed in, “GO!”

Then he stopped. No pressure. But the moment happened and we had been there to see him take letters and pull them together to read a word. RED. R-E-D.

This afternoon, I had crept off to a quiet corner to read a few chapters of a wonderful book that my friends Abby and Rachel recommended: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. Get it. Read it. Love it. Thank me later.

Anyway, there’s a young girl in the book, Maya, who grows up in a bookstore, surrounded by people who love letters and words and stories. Yes, I cried a couple of joyful tears when I read this passage:

A.J. reads, “. . . on the very top, a bunch of red caps.”

The picture shows a man in many colored caps.

Maya puts her hand over A.J.’s to stop him from turning the page just yet. She scans her eyes from the picture to the page and back again. All at once, she knows that r-e-d is red, knows it like she knows her name is Maya, like she knows A.J. Fikry is her father, like she knows the best place in the world is Island Books.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Red,” she says. She takes his hand and moves it so it is pointing to the word.

alphabet-150767_1280When I made my bucket list all those years ago, one of the items on it was “Teach someone to read.” I didn’t know then that it doesn’t work that way. We don’t set out to learn how to read as something separate from our lives. We just grow up around letters and one day, they click in place and we realize that R-E-D is the way of expressing the idea that is the color RED. So my bucket list item should have been, “Watch while someone makes the leap from letters to words.”

Thanks, Abby and Rachel, for sharing this book with me. Thank you, Carlos, for sharing your world with me. I promise you a life of letters and words and stories.

Do you remember the first time the letters lined up into a word?

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