Tag: parenting

The Weekly Re-Motivator: It Even Snows in Atlanta

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The world is not equitable. The playing field is not even.

Sure, most of us start with more or less the same genetic code, and people are generally people wherever you go, but there’s no telling who’s going to be naturally gifted at this thing or that thing. Some great writers languish, undiscovered, for their entire lifetimes, while the Stephanie Meyers and the E.L. Jameses of the world spread their cancerous tripe like a brush fire. Some of the best athletes the world will ever know have never set foot on a proper field or court.

All of which makes it pretty darn reasonable to throw in the towel. Getting discovered is a mug’s game. It’s who, not what, you know. Probably, you’re too old anyway to take up anything new. Old dogs and all. Right?

And that’s the problem with our culture. We think that we’ll never get to the top, so we give up on our dreams before we even take the first step. I’m never going to lose the thirty pounds I’d like to, so let me chomp down on this pile of cheeseburgers and watch reruns of House all day. This or that measure won’t solve every single problem with gun violence, so let’s not even bother disrupting the status quo.

We have such a distorted view of success that we’re afraid to reach even for the hem of its garment. We might not be perfect, so let’s not even try to be decent.

But that’s bullshit. Kids know it.

Give my kids a couple of crayons, and they will gladly launch into a whirlwind of artistic expression. They’ll branch out from doodling on paper to scrawling on the walls to decorating the family cats, then bring their work to you with a face-splitting smile saying “look what I did!” They take pride in their work, even though it’s crap, because they have no conception of what good work is. They have no idea — and are therefore not concerned — that there could possibly be somebody else out there doing anything better than what they are doing right here, right now, at this moment.

And that’s where this insecurity stems from, isn’t it? The constant comparison, the inescapable knowledge that while I’m sitting here tying myself in knots to bang out a few more words on my novel, Stephen King is somewhere in a mahogany study probably twenty pages deep into today’s copy. Every word better than mine, and by dint of that betterness, more valuable, and once we start talking about value, well. Steve’s words have value and mine don’t. It is as unlikely as a blizzard dumping two feet of snow in Atlanta that my words will ever be as valuable as Stephen King’s.

So why bother?

When we focus on the prizes that the things we could do bring — publication, wealth, an adoring audience … or a slimmer waistline, or a smaller number on the scale, or a promotion at work, or a new car in the driveway, or a medal or a trophy — we take our eyes off the road at our feet. Now, having a goal in mind is great. You have to dream big and aim high or you really won’t have a shot. But the prizes we’re aiming at — or the prizes we’re told we should aim at — aren’t the only prizes out there.

You can run for the serenity of it rather than to be the fastest. You can play pickup basketball for the distraction and the exercise and never have to worry about getting picked for a team. You can write for the sheer joy of it, or for the rush of playing god with the lives of the tiny beings you’ve created, or because it relaxes you, or simply because you have a story to tell.

I may never get published, or never reach the audience I hope to, or never make a dime off my writing. But I think I’d be okay with that. (I mean, it’d be a bummer, but I like to think I’d be okay with it.) I’m having a damned good time telling stories, even if it’s just to myself. Even if I’m never even a patch on Stephen King.

Then again, every now and then, it even snows in Atlanta…

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This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cloistered In

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When a nun pledges her life and her various other parts to God, she goes to live in a convent. Those convents have some fairly archetypal architecture, like what you see below:

File:Cloister of the monastery Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg.jpg

This covered walk is called a “cloister”, and this particular feature of religious buildings led to the expression of something being “cloistered”, or shut in and closed off from outside influences.

We won’t be going, today, into the particular irony of a religious institution requiring its most devout believers to live such a cloistered existence, or the fact that such an idea itself comes from religious ideology.

Rather, the metaphor of the cloister. It’s an important one, a powerful one, because so many of us live cloistered lives. We wake up at the same time, drive the same roads to work, see the same people, eat the same things for dinner. Our own footsteps mark the boundaries beyond which we dare not tread.

And there’s something to be said for that. Routine is important, and not only to the writer. (Just try moving naptime up by an hour on your three-year-old, for example.) But as much as time inside the box is vital for our comfort, well-being, and peace of mind, so too is time outside the box critical to keep us from living life in a rut. I realized the other day that I have some co-workers who are almost friends (as close, I guess, as a co-worker that you only ever see during work-related functions can come to being a friend) whom I have not seen in months. The reason? Their classrooms are on the other side of the building from mine.

You can find the cloister as deep down as you care to drill. I write at pretty much the same time every day, even down to the weekends. I park in the same parking spot at work, even though we don’t have assigned parking. I run the same routes over and over when it’s runday funday. We even try to have the same meals on the same nights of the week, just to cut down on that tiresome discussion: “well, what do YOU want to eat?”

It takes effort to break out of the cloister. We’re so closeted in with our routines, with what’s normal and easy, that we resist doing anything else. Our cloisters are climate-controlled, with blackout curtains and indoor plumbing. If we don’t make the effort to leave them behind now and then, they can and will swallow us whole.

So, how will you break out of your cloister this week? This month? This year? (Don’t wait to make a New Year’s Resolution — start today.)

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image above is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloister_of_the_monastery_Unser_Lieben_Frauen_Magdeburg.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

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Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.

Hooray for Time

Pavowski11 Comments

Scientists have determined that the exact measurement of time at the molecular level is impossible.

In other words, time is complete and absolute bunk.

At no time is this more evident than Daylight Savings Time, an outdated and archaic practice that arbitrarily picks a day in the fall and stretches it by an hour, then arbitrarily picks another day in spring and shrinks it by an hour.

Now, a lot of people go about gleefully talking about the extra hour of sleep they get when we “fall back”, which is fine and dandy. But those of with kids know the truth.

DST means NOTHING.

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The kids are still going to wake up when their rhythm tells them to wake up, regardless of any “conditioning” or “preparing” you might have done.

My wife and I thought we were clever. We had slowly been pushing the sprouts’ bedtimes back since about a month ago, so that they could go to bed at the same “time” regardless of the numbers on the clock face.

HA.

Last night was Halloween, so any sort of regular sleep schedule was out. And this morning sprout #1 woke up to poop, which he cannot do by himself yet even though the attending adult is nothing more than a cheerleader and heinie-wiper. Oh, did I mention that he was up thirty minutes before his regular time, which was a full hour and a half ahead of the clock time?

Not only did we not gain time, we actually lost time on this exchange, which has me superjazzed about “giving the hour back” in Spring, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, it’s currently seven PM and it feels like midnight.

Thanks, Obama.

Seriously, DST is a joke. You want a non-arse-over-elbows, earth-specific time anomaly to get psyched about? Try the leap-second.

The Toddler Wobbles (or, the Tripwire of Self-Doubt)

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My daughter is this close to walking.

She’s been doing the “cruising” thing for about a month now, where she’ll grab the edge of a table, or the couch, or the leg of my shorts, and just sort of shimmy along, one shaky step after another; but of course, she can only go where whatever she’s clamped onto can take her. And she’s been walking assisted for several weeks beyond that, holding gleefully to the hands of whoever has the patience and the dorsal fortitude to bend over and escort her around the house. Again, of course, she can go only where her guide takes her.

There is an unmitigated joy about her as she does any of these things. Her little stumpy legs clomp along not unlike those of the imperial walkers in Star Wars, stable enough only if everything goes according to plan. She laughs, shrieks, smiles. Then tumbles.

But she won’t walk on her own.

And I know, I know. She’ll get it in time. But there’s something frustrating and heartbreaking in seeing her shuffling along, a wobbly snowman on stilts, and knowing that she could walk if she would only decide that she had the capability.

She’s done it before.

She’ll cruise along the table for a minute, then pick up a toy and turn and totter over to the sofa — a yawning gulf of two steps or so, but a moonshot in the scope of toddlers. I’ll stand her up in the floor across from her mother, and she’ll hold my hands until she’s within a step of her mother, then detach in time to fall forward into her mom’s loving embrace. She has the strength. She has the balance. What she doesn’t have is the knowledge that she’s perfectly capable.

Now, she can crawl with the best of them. In fact, she can muster so much speed on her hands and knees that it’s a little startling: she can cross a room in just a couple of seconds, and be sitting there angelic as ever when you come back in from getting a glass of water. This, paired with her propensity (and joy) for grabbing things and sticking them in her mouth is enough, almost, to keep you from leaving the room at all when she’s around (what if she pulls the TV over on herself, or what if she swallows the dog, or what if she goes into the garage, fires up the pneumatic hammer, and takes out the retaining wall?). An inability to walk isn’t, in other words, keeping her from getting around.

But when she starts walking, she’ll be so much better off — she’ll be faster, she’ll be able to take things with her, she’ll be able to reach her hands up and hug your knee when she walks by. She needs to walk. She just won’t.

I can’t say it’s fear, because she isn’t afraid of falling. She’ll gladly pitch herself sideways while my wife or I holds her, despite the five-foot drop to the ground that surely awaits if she manages to escape. It’s as if she simply doesn’t grasp the idea that walking instead of crawling might be a better way to do it. Like cave dwellers who won’t take the ipod that’s being proffered to them, believing instead that eating worms and running from daylight is better than the natural next phase in human evolution (selfies and social media, of course). She just doesn’t realize that she’s hamstringing herself by keeping to all fours, doesn’t understand that her muscles and her sense of balance are ready for her to walk, doesn’t get how much her world is going to open up for her when she begins to walk.

She’ll get it eventually. One day — maybe tomorrow, maybe next week — she’ll shuffle off on her own and then my wife and I will really be in trouble — but until then, she’s stuck crawling, cruising, and being escorted everywhere she goes. Which works, but when you consider the alternative, is a bit lousy.

But then it got me thinking. (As such things often do.)

If my baby has the capacity to walk, but lacks the knowledge of that capacity, what am I capable of that I just haven’t grasped yet? If she’s only holding off on taking her first steps because she doesn’t realize that she can, what am I keeping myself from just because I lack the belief in myself?

How much more could we be, if we could only believe we were capable?

Are you crawling, when you should be walking?