Tag: parenting

The Summer Rhythm

Pavowski1 Comment

Teaching is weird.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great; having those two months off during the summer is fantastic, and it’s enviable to people who don’t work in education. (It’s maybe the only enviable thing about the job, but hey, you take what you can get.) And I’m certainly not complaining about the time off: that time translates into lots of opportunities to sleep in, go running during earthly waking hours (during the working months I’m out there before the sun is up, which has its own sort of ethereal calm about it but also sorta makes me feel like a vampire  — NO I MUST AVOID THE SUN), be a dad who’s actually present in his kids’ and his wife’s lives, check out some horrible daytime television.

Problem is, when I’m working, I have this routine, and over the summer, that routine is shattered. Not just shattered, but then stomped on by little toddler feet and flung at my face by little toddler hands and then not only do I have to deal with the shards of shattered routine embedded in my corneas, I also have to stop the toddler and the infant from swallowing the broken pieces and…

By the way, can you still call a three-year-old a toddler? It seems idiotic to do so, all of a sudden, since “toddlers” are named for their toddling, that wobbly, baby-goat stumbling gait that’s the hallmark of an uncoordinated, top-heavy biped learning to walk. But sprout #1 is well past wobbling. He can still lose his balance and go crashing into a table edge or fall down the last stairs, bouncing off like he’s made of rubber, but when it comes to walking, running, galloping, skipping… I mean, he’s mastered it. So he’s not toddling anymore, but what is he? Still too little to be a boy, I think. Is there a word for that? Fargo, the kid is going to be in preschool next year. Look, let’s just dial the clocks back a little bit…

Okay, enough of that sentimental diversion. (Seriously, though. Kids grow up FAST.) I was talking about routines and how over the summer my routine breaks down worse than my old Chevy Malibu (god rest its hunk-of-junk soul). I’m trying to find the routine for getting my writing done over the summer, because even though my 9-5 job is on a little hiatus, the writing dream NEVER SLEEPS, and its hungry maw must be fed a steady diet of word count, despair and whiskey.

Nice thing about doing my writing on and around the job is, there’s structure there. Typical work day: Wake up, exercise, get to work, do the teacher thing for four hours, break for lunch, write for about thirty minutes while pounding down a salad or a sandwich, do a lightning session of grading papers and planning the next day’s lessons, and write for another fifteen minutes or so before my last class of the day comes in. Patterns. Regularity. You can plan for that and the body adapts nicely to it, not unlike it adapts nicely to a bowl of raisin bran in the morning and a visit to the crapper in the afternoon. Easy to plan your day that way.

Over the summer, there’s no such luck. One day, my wife’s at work, so I’ve got the kids for nine hours, then a spot of cleaning and cooking in the evening, then it’s time for a glass of wine with a nice TV show in the evening, and then, whoops — it’s bedtime again. (Here my wife is rolling her eyes: “I still find time to get things done!” and that’s true, honey, you do. But you have superpowers, and I don’t, and it’s virtually impossible to maintain the focus needed to hold a narrative together when you’re constantly stopping to make sure the sprouts aren’t devouring a bucket full of chalk, or shaving the cats, or trying to feed your lunch to the dog, or taking markers apart to see how they work and then smearing the magic ink on their faces, or pretending to be dinosaurs and stomping all over creation and, again, eating everything in sight.) Next day, wife’s home, but we’re prepping for a yard sale. One minute we’re taking sprout #1 to Grandma’s house for the day, next minute we’re hauling stuff out of the garage, next minute we’re hauling stuff into the garage, a bit later on I’m off to the Home Depot to get some cleaning supplies, then it’s more sorting and prepping and cleaning and don’t forget changing sprout #2’s diaper and keeping her from sticking her fingers in it as you do so (her new favorite habit, and there go my wife’s eyes again because I think she actually cleaned more diapers today… again, she’s just better than me at handling that stuff promptly, whereas I’m maybe better at letting things be), then holy carp it’s time to put sprout #2 to bed and hey did we eat yet, no we probably should so it’s time to cook and whoops the sun is down, hey let’s go to bed. Which is a fine day, very productive and all, until I realize about 9pm SHARKNADO I forgot to write today.

Do you let it slip? Or do you gird your loins for battle and go in to do battle with the Word Monsters when all you really want to do is go to sleep to prepare yourself for the unpredictability that tomorrow will surely bring?

Problem is, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, momentum matters. I know that if I let the writing slip today, it’s twice as easy to let it slip again tomorrow (well, I missed one day this week, what’s one more — I can rest up and hit it properly next week), and so on and so forth until whatever dubious progress I’ve managed in this little endeavor is lying in a twisted heap at the bottom of the chasm, smoke pouring from its innards as I crawl toward the couch for a nap.

Anyway, I’m looking for that rhythm, that pattern that will let me get my writing done during these oddball summer months without feeling like I’m taking away time from the wife and kids. And yeah, I know these are totally first world problems, and I own that. But, privileged problems or no, when there are things throwing your life out of balance, I think it’s worth slowing down a little bit to see if you can work toward restoring that balance, rather than just riding it out. We humans, we seek the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, nothing worth having is easy.

So, the question: when your regular routine is thrown off, how do you make sure you get everything done? Technically I have more time than ever in my days now, but it feels like those hours just slip away.

The Deuce Horizon (Where did my life go wrong?)

Pavowski2 Comments

I sat down tonight to write a blarg, and all I could think about was poop.

Not my poop. Let’s get that right. Baby poop, cat poop, dog poop… I’m inundated by Poops Which Are Not Mine, and inevitably, regrettably, it oozes over (ew) to my recreational writing. And as I sat here, pondering the poop I was trying hard not to ponder, I realized that my life has taken a series of unfortunate turns to bring me to this point.

To be clear, that point would be the point where I feel compelled to write entire blog posts about poop.

It wasn’t always this way. My life used to be ordinary. Go to work. Talk to some friends. Party hard on the weekend and reload on Monday, then do it again. There’s very little about poop in the cycle that used to be my life, except of course for the unmentionable one or two per day, and it certainly didn’t occupy my thoughts the way it does recently.

But then I got married. And we got some cats. And some dogs. And now we have a couple of kids. And at some point, my life changed over from never think about poop even when poop is happening to poop is the gravitational sun at the center of my universe.

Cleaning poopy diapers. Trying to get the sprout to poop on the toilet. Baby sticking her foot in the poop while I’m trying to clean the poop. Cat poop in litter boxes. Cat poop out of litter boxes. Letting the dog out to poop. Dog pooping on the carpet because we were at work all day. Cats dragging their poopy butts on the carpet. Carrying kids’ poopy diapers straight out to the curb because they’re too horrific to keep bottled up in the house.

Didn’t the Talking Heads have a song like that? This is not my beautiful life! Who knew I would hear that lyric and think only of poop.

Here’s a true statement, without embellishment: I have to deal with Poop Which Is Not Mine at least four or five times a day, which is enough, I think, to cause anybody to fixate a little bit. In short, for me: poop is a problem.

And the problem goes beyond the poop itself (which, let’s face it, is more than enough problem in its own right). Since I deal with it so much, I fixate, as I believe I may have mentioned. And that means it’s floating around in my subconscious, not unlike turds in the crapper, just waiting to back up the septic system of my brain. So I sit down to write a blarg topic, and all I can think of is crap. Literally.

There’s the second problem. Who wants to read a blarg about poop? Nobody, that’s who. To be honest, I don’t even want to be writing about the poop. Even thinking the word makes me feel icky, let alone typing it out over and over again as I’ve done tonight. Sure, I’m desensitized to it in a sense, but then it all comes bubbling back up while I’m sitting here trying not to think about it.

This is not a blarg about poop. This is not my beautiful life. I want this blarg to be a place where I write about writing and funny and quirky and interesting things that happen to me and that flit through my mind like butterflies through a fragrant meadow, but the percentage of posts about poop is really skewing the numbers around here.

And here, I’m exacerbating the problem by writing an entire post solely about poop.

If there’s a poop event horizon, I’m pretty sure I’ve crossed it by now. The poop in my life (Poop Which Is Not Mine, I hasten to add) is taking over, and I am not okay with that.

But the fact is, I don’t know if I can be saved. I have several years yet before I can stop thinking so much about these particular biological functions in my children… and let’s be honest, even when these functions are done, there will be an entirely new host of biological functions I will have to worry about.

If nothing else, I can perhaps serve as a warning.

If there’s Poop Which Is Not Yours in your life… in any capacity at all… run. Get out now, while you still can. The word “poop” appeared thirty-five times in this blog post. That’s too many for any sane person.

Search Term Bingo

Pavowski2 Comments

If you run a website, or even a modest blarg like this one, at some point you will ask yourself the question: “who is reading this?” and maybe, “why are they reading this?” and possibly, further, “shouldn’t they be doing something productive, like culling wombats from their backyards, instead?”

WordPress, in its wisdom, hides a lot of search results — apparently google searches automatically hide the search terms that leads its users to wordpress sites, so I’ve heard (correct me if I’m wrong) — so most of the searches that lead people to my blog are redacted. However, there are some gems in there, and reading through them never fails to make me laugh. In particular, I get a lot of enema-related searches, due in no small part I’m sure to the post I made last year about giving my son an enema. (It remains one of the most frequently visited on this site, despite also being one of the shortest, and contains, sadly for visitors no doubt, very little information about the actual giving of the actual enema.) But not all of the searches are tied up in poop. Here are some of the best ones this year, so far, and I have tried to theorize about what they mean.

“he hadn’t pooped in five days” — quotes were included, not by me. Okay, so searches about enemas notwithstanding, searches even tangentially tied to poop can still land you here. Maybe I need to examine my lifestyle.

how to write a charasmatic [sic] valedictorian speech — I don’t write about it much any more, but I am still a high school English teacher, and I did write some (I feel) helpful posts about speeches. I am pretty sure I spelled all my words correctly. Charasma seems like one of those things you don’t want to exude so much as perhaps see your doctor about.

my wife is an overachiever / homemade wife overachiever — I’ve written now and then about my wife and how she’s better than me in practically every way. I am not sure what a homemade wife is, but I can only assume that the searcher has built an artificial wife out of toaster parts, and is pretty proud of himself for doing so.

occams parenting — I am pretty sure this is not a thing, but if it is, I don’t know if I want to be associated with it. Razors and children don’t usually play well together, and I do not endorse this product.

arsenal never give up — In addition to being a high school teacher, I am also the coach of a high school soccer team, and mentions of that have crept in here from time to time. I can only assume that this is somehow related to the Arsenal football team (that’s proper football, not American football), although I must recognize that it may also be about maintaining and not relinquishing your own personal arsenal of automatic, lethal, and totally necessary weapons for “home defense”. Because America.

poopy toddler story — I won’t lie, I tag all my relevant posts with “toddler poop stories” so I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. Still, the fact that somebody is out there searching for such things is firmly in the neighborhood of troubling.

parental exhaustion — yup. You have come to the right place.

jenker what does in mean — Language are no meaning. Jenker in cat. Cat only cat.

freelance exorcist — the searcher, who I can only assume has a very real problem and is looking for a very real solution without all the red tape of dealing with procuring a legitimate (lol) exorcist from the legitimate Catholic church, was probably disappointed to be directed to my blog full of drivel about toddler poop and dubious writing advice. Still, that’s more views for me.

mum and daughter strengthen bonding by pooping together — *heavy sigh* I guess the family that poops together…

Maybe it’s time to accept reality and re-write my blarg’s tagline: “your internet destination for poop: figurative, literal, and copious.”

Kid Art: In which my 3-year-old teaches me a thing or two about creativity

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I’ve been sitting around for the past couple of days when I have a spare minute, watching my son playing with his new chalkboard table.

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Just a sidenote: if you have kids, and the kids are in any way artistically inclined, you owe it to yourself to make one of these. Just take any old crappy coffee table, go to Home Depot and buy a $15 can of chalkboard paint, lay down a couple of coats on top of the table, and let it dry overnight. Easiest and most rewarding DIY project I’ve ever undertaken.

Anyway, my boy has a dubious approach to the thing. He loves coloring but lacks any kind of… I don’t want to say the motor control, because he seems to be doing what he wants to do… what I’m trying to say is, the things he draws aren’t shapes I recognize from this universe. Everything looks like a sea urchin, or a squiggle, or maybe just one long shapeless line. He will draw these designs, over and over again, one on top of another, until the table literally looks like a bucket of chalk vomited all over it, then he will gleefully take a rag, wipe the table clean, and start anew.

The crazy thing is, he knows what he’s drawing. I can point to this squiggle, say “Sprout, what’s this?” And he will say, confidently, “apple.” Point to this two-foot-long wobbly line: “water fountain.” This wonky-looking unidentifiable polygon: “dinosaur.”

Which is, in itself, adorable and delightful; hours of fun just asking the boy what he’s drawn and trying to imagine how exactly he sees these things.

But it goes a level deeper.

Because sometimes, he’ll decide to draw something himself. “I going to draw a car.” Okay, sprout, go ahead. *scribble, scribble.* He works with such intensity sometimes that I find myself looking over his shoulder to see exactly how he’s going to describe the shape of a car. Of course he isn’t. It’s just a shapeless blob of color. But he will finish, stand back to admire his work, and say, “Oh, that’s not a car, that’s a banana.” And then go on drawing something else.

Or I’ll ask him to draw something. “Draw daddy,” I’ll say, and his eyes will light up with glee, and he’ll begin the painstaking, arduous work of outlining my bald head and bugging eyes and ha ha just kidding, he scribbles a little bug-splat of color, stands back and looks, and announces to me, “Oh, that’s not daddy, that’s blocks.”

This little game simultaneously cracks me up and creeps me out, because I know he knows his shapes from any of the myriad of little puffy books or kids’ youtube videos we’ve looked at together. He can identify a triangle without batting an eye, can tell the difference between a duck and a penguin, and knows his boats from his spaceships. He knows things. But he also has the ability to recognize his nonsensical artistic representations of these things as these things, despite the fact that the two bear no resemblance whatsoever to one another. And I know he’s not just making it up, because he can lay down five or six spaghetti-tangle pictures which he names as completely different things than he originally set out to draw, and then he can point to each one again and tell me what it is with 100% accuracy. And I’m sorry, if he’s just making this stuff up off the top of his head, I don’t think he has the wherewithal to piece together a fiction. I really think that to him, that squiggle somehow says, “dinosaur,” while this one says, “grocery store.”

It’s a nifty little parlor trick, I guess, for a three-year-old to be able to do, but I started thinking about the boy, and I started thinking about creativity and art in general, as is my wont, and then came the lightning strike moment. The moment where the mundane, not-at-all special and completely-by-accident whimsical actions of a toddler shake my preconceived notions of the world to the very roots.

How many times have I found myself banging my head against a moment in a story? A character who just doesn’t seem to behave the way I want him to? Or a fiddly bit of plot that just won’t jive with the pieces all around it? Or an element that I need for the story to move forward, but I can’t figure out how to work it into the story? Or, maybe, the problem is more intrinsic to the story: I’m trying to write a science fiction thriller but it detours into comedy, or I’m trying to write a lighthearted romantic-comedic bit, but suddenly things feel all melodramatic? I always talk about how stories have lives of their own, how the characters have drives and desires buried within them that are sometimes a surprise even to me, but I still find myself trying to force square pegs into round holes. No, the story is meant to be this way. No, I need to focus on this aspect of the plot now. No, I’m trying to send this thematic message.

But not my son. The art takes him in a new direction, he’s happy — even ecstatic — to detour and abandon the thing he thought he was working on. The story changes, he changes with it. He has no preconceived notions of what it should be, there is no consideration for creating the wrong thing. The thing he creates is fine by him, whether it’s what he set out to create or not.

And I think that’s pretty freakin’ awesome. Because when you don’t get hung up on the problems in your story, when you don’t wander off into the bog of unrealized expectations, you can process the project in front of you with the unbiased perception of… well, of a child. To a kid, things are what they are. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not for Naught

Pavowski4 Comments

This has all been said before.

My book, my blarg, my parenting foibles, my running follies… none of it is particularly unusual or original. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to attempt any of these things on their own or, even, in combination. So what the heck am I bothering to write about all of it for?

Originality is a big deal. Being “the first” to do a thing matters. First man on the moon. First woman to become a doctor. First guy to pedal backwards on a unicycle for five hundred yards while juggling machetes and whistling the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Originality equals notoriety. But ours is a big world, and let’s face it… you have to go pretty far down the list of possible things before you find one that hasn’t been done already. And documented. And repeated under scientific conditions. And then tweeted about.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows sums this concept up nicely with the word, “Vemodalen”.

There’s something in us that drives us to attempt things that stretch our limits, even though they have been done (and probably been done better) before. The futility of that knowledge is a futility that can seep into the bones, grind the hard oak of gumption into sawdust, and rot away the steel supports of sticktoitiveness like so much battery acid. What matter is my voice, or yours, or anybody’s, in a swelling sea of millions of voices? No, scratch that, an ever-blossoming infinitude of voices?

It’s all for naught.

Or, at least, it can seem that way. But I think, ultimately, it’s foolish to think in terms of the big picture in that way; the way of adding one more voice to the howling snarling mass of the internet. In the scope of human communication, human achievement, human history, even the gods and giants among men are grains of sand in a kiddie pail. So you have two million followers on twitter? In a few years, the next big thing will be here. So you sold two million dollars’ worth of books? In ten years, your book will be on the bargain rack, if people are still talking about it at all. So you ran ten marathons in a year? Well, so did that guy… and that girl… and this other guy, except he did it wearing a tuxedo.

If you set out to have a universal effect, you’re setting yourself up for failure. The universe — even the earth, or even your country, your city — is too big to be moved by the likes of one person’s achievement. Nothing I can ever hope to write or teach my kids or accomplish in any other area of my life will push the planet from its orbit.

What I can do, though, is enrich a few lives around me. Maybe I can teach the kid on my soccer team to keep his cool when the other guy is cheating and let his talent speak for itself. Maybe I can teach my kid that it’s wrong to throw cars at dogs, or to smear peanut butter on the curtains, or to take off his pants and dance in circles. Or maybe I could teach him that those things are okay if they make him feel good. Whatever. Maybe I can do the dishes without making my wife ask me to do it, and make her day a little brighter by removing a smidgen of darkness from it. Maybe I can pick myself up a little bit for going on a run, or maybe I can forgive myself for not squeezing in that run this morning. Maybe by writing about all of it I can clear my own head and hammer some understanding out of the soft metal, maybe by getting the minutiae of the day down in this blarg I can get some perspective, like climbing to the top of a mountain just to see what my backyard looks like from a mile up.

Who cares if my voice isn’t unique, or original, or if some days I don’t know what to write, or if I take a few weeks off from the project because I’m staggered? As long as I keep coming back to it, as long as I’m moving forward instead of stagnating, the journey has value. Even if it’s just for me.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.