My Blah-Blah-Blog

Do you remember being a kid? Do you remember feeling like an eternity was passing by waiting for your mom to get off the phone? For your dad to come home? For the car trip to end? Do you remember getting older and feeling like people didn’t treat you fairly or give you a chance to prove you could be responsible? I did. I tried my best but I remember feeling really let-down when I wanted to prove I’d learned from lessons taught but nobody would give me a chance. I remember hearing family members talk down to me in condescending tones just because I was younger. I’m talking early teen young – old enough to be taken more seriously than I was, but not having a “I know it all” attitude. Not yet anyway.

So being a mom myself, I try to remember how I felt when my parents, peers or adults in my life made me feel small, stupid or insignificant. I HATED asking if I could get something, do something, and the reply was “I’ll think about it” or “maybe, we’ll see.”  What does that mean!? I had to sit and wait it out, minutes, hours, days… it would have been nice to have more information or a flat-out no.

All these things I try to remember with my own kids. I try to give them appropriate information when necessary, so they GET why I say no when I do, or yes when I do, so that if the situation presents itself again, they can already have an idea of this or that is appropriate or possible. It’s helped TONS when going to the store and I *know* my kids want to get something in the checkout lane. I am proud to say my children have never, ever pitched a fit at the grocery store. Sure, they’ve been cranky at the end of a long shopping trip, fussy, hungry and tired, but never something out of my control. I’ve never allowed it to happen, and I’ve staved off such fits by setting standards for them and creating a situation to minimize such risks. For example, don’t take your toddler to the store at nap time or snack time. Duh.

Still wondering where I’m going with this? Read on my dear friend.

I wanted to get to a specific point in this post, but I had to sort of set you up with where I’m coming from first. So just bear with me here.

I have to admit it – while I’m the mom of two kids, I’m really not a kid person. Surprised? It seems that a lot of women have that built-in mommy-ability to be sweet, soft-spoken, patient and nurturing with children, their own or someone else’s. It’s a trait I see often at the kids’ school: teachers who have that gift to work with and handle children like magic. But for some of us, kids are like untrained dogs who push when you pull and run off leaving you feeling helpless, powerless, and ready to pull out your hair.

The thought of babysitting someone else’s kids usually makes me cringe, especially if they aren’t well-behaved kids. I had an experience once of having a gal come over to play with us and she decided to squeeze glue all over someone’s bedsheets and pillow, and to hack to pieces a $200 Lego Star Wars spaceship. I called her mom to pick her up asap.

Having just that one experience (oh, I’ve seen more, trust me) it’s really no surprise to me when I hear people (USUALLY younger, single boys males) say how kids are little *expletives* and that they’d never want to have kids or be around kids or date someone with kids.  You see the screeching, snotty two-year old pulling on his parents or hitting a sibling at a restaurant, you see a 13-year old girl flip off her grandmother, well you get the point. It’s no secret that there are some spoiled, poorly raised kids in the world.

But if they are GOOD kids, kids who do well and try hard with the occasional hiccup because they have yet to refine their own social graces and manners, or they forget, or they run out of patience after 15 minutes of waiting for something and ask again “are we there yet” or “is it done yet” – well, is that really enough to make you hate a child? To cringe to be around them?

Kids in general don’t bother me. As a matter of fact, I find quite a bit of humor while just hanging around kids. They really do say the darndest things. They’re little people, not yet full of all the information they need to be adults like the rest of us. The only time a kid really bothers me is: if they’re incredibly rude; they won’t listen to ANYONE; they pick their nose and eat it in front of me; they are mean to or hurt my kid (or someone else’s). Even then, I’m not mad at the child. I’m annoyed at their parents for not teaching them and enforcing rules of acceptable behavior. The mother who says quietly “Now Johnny, don’t hit mommy. Now Johnny, stop biting the baby. Johnny we don’t throw knives at kittens” without giving discipline for repeated offenses, well, she deserves to be knocked upside the head. “Now Johnny” doesn’t cut it for some kids.

You probably want me to get to the point already. Ok ok, I’m getting there… read on to my next post.

PET PEEVE: I really hate it when I’m talking on the phone with another parent and their child starts talking to the parent. It’s not the child’s talking to the parent that bothers me at all. It’s the parent stopping in mid-sentence when talking to me, chatting with the child for 30-60 seconds and then saying to them “I can’t talk right now, I’m on the phone.” Wait, what? You just talked to your kid – which told them you can talk while on the phone. So telling them that now you can’t probably doesn’t make much sense to them and they will continue to talk to you when you are on the phone on other occasions.  On the other hand, it would not bother me if the parent said to me “excuse me for just a moment”, told the child that they were on the phone to come back later, and got back to me.

Looking over my last few posts, I see that I was really struggling quite a bit with the job loss and all the drama with the kids’ dad. It’s really frustrating, not just because I feel like he does everything he can to make my life miserable, but because he does things that harms the children and there’s not much I can do to stop it. So every day that I can, I try to make sure my kids are happy and healthy and are emotionally strong and resilient.

One way I’ve tried to keep myself strong and resilient the past ten years of difficulties and hardships was to keep my faith. Not necessarily faith in God per se, but faith in something better. Faith in relief. Faith in better times to come. For me, using my faith is like this:

Imagine you are drowning in the ocean. The harder you fight, the more you lose your energy, or the more you are tangled in seaweed or any other thing that could ensnare you. It’s like a losing fight and you are doomed from the beginning.  When teaching Mason to swim in the deep end of the pool earlier this summer, I told him that if he couldn’t make it (swim to) the edge of the pool and started to be afraid, I told him all he had to do was take a breath in and relax his body and go under the water. I told him to do what he was afraid of: going under. Oddly enough, it’s the relaxing, the ‘giving up’, the not fighting anymore that could save you. If you can take a breath and relax in the ocean that can swallow you whole, you can lay on your back supported by the water until you regain your strength or until blessed help arrives.

After a few weeks of fighting I decided it was time to give up. At the time, my giving up wasn’t taking a breath and relaxing or going under to get my strength back. It was the giving up that said I didn’t really care anymore and I didn’t know which way was up or down and would never figure it out. I lost faith in my faith, in my reality, in my self.

It’s obvious that I’m not in the throes of death in the middle of the ocean, so I didn’t drown from seawater and I wasn’t eaten by any sharks. But after I cried it out and pitched my fits, I allowed myself to take a breath and go under and let the water lift me back up to the top.

That’s when my perspective changed. I didn’t see endless waves of ocean without start or finish, I didn’t see the impossibility of my situation anymore. I saw the sky, the bright warm rays of the sun. I heard the call of the seagull and the gentle lull of waves. I know I can float on my back for quite a while.

I’m learning to seek out hope. Not just faith. Hope is like the fuel of faith. We can’t find what we want without hoping for it. And when we start to hope that something might happen for us, we need faith to get us there, faith that it will happen. Believing it will happen. Hope allows me to want something for myself and to feel like I deserve it. It allows me to be selfish in a good way. Hope says I would love to have a bowl of ice cream. Faith is what gets me into the car to drive to the store to see if they have the flavor I want.

I hope for many things today. I hope for my kids to be greater than I am. I hope to give them what their little hearts desire, things that have been for so long withheld from them. I hope they will grow up to be leaders and givers, people who carve their names on the heart of this world through actions of goodness and kindness and love.

It’s also for myself that I’m hope-full today. It feels good to entertain hope. I don’t have to try to figure it out or make it work. I can just lay in the water and let hope take me where I need to go.

Got this in an email from my pastor today. It was very thought provoking and helped me stop and still my thoughts for a moment. I hope it does the same for you:

Dear Church Family:

I read a devotional book each day written by Leo Tolstoy about 100 years ago.  It’s a collection of ancient wisdom.  He worked on it for years, drawing wisdom from all the major traditions, and particularly from his own as a Christian man.  I was particularly taken by the reading on December 12, so I thought I’d send along a few of the points from that day’s reading.

God bless you

Doug

—

DECEMBER 12

On Anger and Hatred

In your quiet, inner thoughts, always try to find the good in others.

Make it a habit not say anything bad about others, even in your own thoughts.

When you interact with a person, try to find as much common ground as possible, the more the better, and try to nurture this feeling in yourself.

To cease being angry with a person and instead to seek peace, forgiveness, and love toward him, remind yourself of any sins you may have in common and compare them.

I like to laugh. Who doesn’t?

Way back in junior high school, I realized that making people laugh by making funny jokes and comments really got me up higher on the popularity list. Don’t think I’m shallow: you KNOW how kids can be in jr and sr high. Being popular pretty much meant you were just made fun of way less than the not-so-popular kids.

It took me a while to refine my humor from lame funny comments to true snarkasm: snarky and sarcastic responses. Going over my old blog and some of my new posts, I’m realizing that I’ve come a long way from delving into more serious matters of the heart and of life and typically cover up any and all seriousness with sarcastic and cynical comments.

Not too long ago, I found a poem I’d written for my grandmother. She died in 1984 from liver cancer. I wrote it in 1992 on a day I must have been feeling particularly inspired because it was one of several poems I’d written that day. Rereading it I was surprised at how blunt and honest I was about my feelings and how the loss still impacted me so many years later. I wanted to chide the 18-year old me for being so melodramatic but stopped myself as I realized the importance of the entire emotional spectrum, even if its the kind of emotions that result in people saying you are dramatic or over emotional.

Oddly enough, my ten year old daughter is just that: her picture is actually in the dictionary next to the words “drama queen.” How many times have I scolded her for being “too dramatic” or “overly emotional” about something? Too many times I’m starting to think. Granted, all prepubescent girls (and boys!) experience their emotions much more intensely than we do. But my daughter… well she feels things with her whole heart. When a close friend of the family died, she cried as we expected (I did too) but she took things a step farther: she lamented and imagined that perhaps in a dream she could say goodbye to this person, and she recounted to me how she would do so. She was very upset about the fact that she had seen our friend only days before his sudden death but didn’t run up to him to get a hug like she usually would have.

I tried to be matter-of-fact with her, not so much to stop her from being over dramatic, but mostly because I wanted to shorten the grieving process for her. So guess what I did? I made a joke. I said if our friend saw her crying so much and being so sad, he’d likely give her a noogie and tell her to move on with life.

In reality, we both grieved just as much but with different expressions: I made the jokes and tried to lighten the mood and kept my emotions in check, she cried and shared her feelings with anyone willing to listen. She even wrote our friend’s wife a beautiful letter declaring her undying love for our friend and how he would never be forgotten.

Sweet girl. She reminds me of Montgomery’s Anne Shirley.

So what’s my point? Well, I guess I’m going to have to allow the sentimental, emotional (dare I say girly?)  part of me to come out and write a little bit once in a while.  I may not be sending out any poems any time soon, but I will find some time to share with you a bit of what I’ve experienced in life.

But I guarantee I’ll STILL find a way to sneak some sarcasm in there. Seriously.