Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

It Really Does Go by Quickly

Kids_YoungerNoah, Johannah, Caitrin, Liam, and Jacob

When you are in the middle of the muddle (five kids under 9, all under foot), it doesn’t seem possible that you will one day emerge as a woman who will drive to a supermarket alone, buy herself a cafe latte, and stroll through the aisles putting juice and cookies in the cart—items never considered when seven people would devour them in fifteen minutes flat.

There are years where sleep is optional and comes in snatches between bed-wettings and breast feeding, uncomfortable belly bumps and night terrors. Sometimes insomnia strikes on the one night everyone sleeps through. Ah the cruelty. Ah the endless sleeplessness.

You live with an enormous amount of pressure to make it all work:

  • The stuffed bedrooms of two and three children sharing a space not big enough for one let alone two or three
  • The disarray of shoes with matches and mismatches and no time to sort out if you have pairs or not
  • The endless trade of strep throat cultures from toothbrush to toothbrush all winter long
  • The hotel-stays with children sprawled all over the floor to save precious dollars
  • The attempt to be at all soccer, lacrosse, baseball, and basketball games for multiple children with one car and a husband working on Saturday mornings
  • All ballet, band, Shakespeare, theater, vintage dance, and guard rehearsals and performances, sometimes on the same nights
  • All art and science fairs
  • All co-op and homeschool support group meetings (while finding childcare)
  • Saving money from grocery budgets or making trades for tutoring or online classes
  • Working part time with a newborn in your arms
  • Being so sick yet homeschooling anyway
  • Moving across the country in the middle of the school year and praying your children won’t be behind at the end of it
  • Unknotting tangled hair through tears
  • Giving haircuts to boys without any training
  • Living with a kitchen the size of a postage stamp
  • Never updating furniture, hairstyles, or wardrobes for years at a time…

You do it with energy and optimism (most of the time), right in the middle of your marital challenges, work pressures, and postpartum depression.

Your kids keep growing up despite your best and worst efforts.

Suddenly, one of them…goes! Right out the door and you’re packing his room into cardboard boxes…and the fact that you can see the floor for the first time in four years is cold comfort, while you hug this man-child and worry about him in new ways and he leaves, unaware of the big hole he leaves behind in the fabric of this family.

Then the next one: bam! She picks her duvet and laptop covers, drives 100 miles, and never returns…not really ever in the same way.

At the same rate they were born, they leave. Every two years like clockwork—while you try to stay present to the ones still home, still needing all that devoted attention. But a piece of you moves out each time the next one packs a box and finds a new bed. You suffer a little even as you gain old “pre-children” liberties long forgotten.

One day, when you least expect it (only you have expected it for 20+ years), you look up and know (really know) that you are at the end of this long journey called “stay-at-home parenting.” It happens when the last one is still at home, but receives her acceptance to college. It happens when your first one graduates from college. It happens when one of your children marries. It happens whether you want it to or not.

There’s no turning back the clock and all the hard things (the years that felt unending and tiring and overwhelming and difficult) are finished. Just. Like. That. What remains is this air-from-your-lungs-stealing awareness that you can never go back.

But oh how the good memories take over! Like a flood! Suddenly it’s as though your children were the most amazing people ever…because they were (and are), all along. You knew it! That’s why you stayed home with them. Those memories are warm comfort. They are the ones that matter. The long years seem incredibly brief in that light. Part of you wants those years back (oh the insanity!).

When you get to the end of your “small children under foot rope,” hold on. Do the best you can in that moment and remind yourself that there will be a day you will wish yourself back to this very moment, missing the immediacy of your family and their needs. The end will come suddenly, with finality. Then you will know what all these little moments really mean. They are the moments of your life—what you grew up to be and do (among other things, but maybe none so important as this thing—this ‘loving your children’ thing). Your life, written in your all-day-long shared experiences with your children. How lucky we are!

I wish you strength for the journey so you will know the joy of the memories in days ahead.

I’m nearly to the end of my journey. How I’ve loved it.

Kids OlderCelebrating Liam’s high school graduation

Posted in Julie's Life, Parenting | 14 Comments »

When has Worry Helped You?

I spoke with a mom who wanted to know when she should start worrying about her daughter’s writing skills. This daughter is in 7th grade.

I chuckled kindly (promise—it was a kind chuckle). I recognize the question. I’ve lived it, just like you have.

I said to her, “When has worrying helped you?”

I followed with, “If I tell you ‘not to worry’ until 10th grade, won’t you start worrying as soon as we hang up? Won’t you worry now about how to get your daughter to write well enough so you won’t have to worry in 10th grade? Aren’t you already worrying, about worrying?”

Worry has a way of expanding to fill all the spaces, like an oozing purple amoeba.

Ask yourself: how does it feel when someone is worried about you? I freeze and resist. I don’t like being the object of someone’s worry. I feel obligated to release them, but often their worries are “justified” in that I am not performing the way they wish I would. So now I’m not only disappointing myself and them, but I’m creating worry in a person I love which ricochets back to me and makes me feel small and deficient.

Worry is not helpful when it becomes the emotional context for your relationship with your child. If your kid can walk through the front door and feel your anxiety leap off of you onto her chest, I guarantee that your worry is not experienced as productive. Worse, it can feel like a loss of respect and a shriveling of love. We must rise above worry!

So is worry ever useful?

The most important thing to do with worry is to use it for research. Recognize that worry tells you: You are not omnipotent. You have no control. You are limited in how much you can help.

However, worry can alert you to this one truth: I need more information. I need help.

The goal shouldn’t be to fix the other person (to get the child to love writing or see it as fun or to progress to high school level). Rather, alleviate the worry through self-education. Become a student of all the ways you can enhance the context for your relationship—how to invest faith and hope, rather than worry and fear. Don’t stop your research until you have discovered the tools and steps that will give you solid ground to stand on. Sometimes the research leads to a “pause” – a respite, a letting go, a “not-doing” and that’s good too!

I applaud the mom who called me. She took action when her worry spiked—she sought another perspective, found a new way to see her daughter and writing, did the research to help her rise above the oozing purple amoeba-like worry.

The bottom line: you are not in control.

Man, that’s hard to swallow.

On the flip side: what a relief!

Let go of worry and foster a supportive, creative, resource-seeking relationship with your children. That’s the best any of us can do.

Posted in Parenting | 1 Comment »

Look for the good

The Great Flour FiascoImage by GoodNCrazy

Not in a pretend way. Not in a fake, pollyanna, unrelated-to-reality way.

Don’t look for the good at the expense of stock-taking or facing the truth.

There are moments that call for the courage to be clear-eyed about your life: its deficits, its ongoing flaws and the shrinking space for peace and growth. Those moments come after a long season of “trying hard” and “believing the best.” The willingness to admit, “This is not working,” is a brave admission and can lead to a different kind of good—the costly kind, that requires change and overhaul, but leads to a new season of opportunity and tranquility.

The kind of “looking for good” that I mean in today’s message is not the kind explained above.

It’s a different kind. Look for the good beyond the obvious interpretation of events.

Look for the good—in the intention behind the action.

Your child who got glue on the new table to make you a card. The intention is right; the action is unnerving.

The phone call from the teen stranded on the roadside to tell you about a near miss with the family car—the accident avoided, the honesty to tell you the truth, the willingness to risk being “in trouble” with you is the good.

Look for the good—as if you were holding a camera.

Your toddler pours the spaghetti on her head in the new Hanna Andersson outfit—it’s a moment to capture for future memory-savoring.

You feel anxious about bills unpaid and see, across the room, four children building a tower of blocks in perfect harmony. The good.

Look for the good—in progress.

Your child is not reading yet, but he’s more interested in books than he was two months ago.

Your teen is not sharing her feelings with you today, but she smiled at you spontaneously.

Look for the good—in the big picture.

This week might have been hurried and harried, but the overall pace of your life in the last year is calmer, less hurried. You can get back to that.

Your 10-year-old is struggling with division, but your 13-year-old isn’t and that gives you hope for the 10-year-old.

Look for the good—in your home.

Its coziness, not its dust bunnies.

Its family-friendly messes, its corners that house your memories, the taken-for-granted nature of the space you call home, the funds to pay for the roof over all your heads—fabulous good.

Look for the good—in yourself.

You’re trying, every day.

Trying to be kind, trying to trust the process, trying to add new methods to your work, trying to laugh and love, trying to hold back your temper or exasperation, and succeeding sometimes.

You have shining moments of success where you know your children are happily bonded to you. You know that when you are not connected, there is a path back because you’ve taken it before.

Look for the good—it’s there, underneath the muddy shoes, next to the hidden math book that you can never find, behind the eyes of your tired emotional teen, inside where you can be gentle with yourself.

Keep going. <3

Cross-posted on facebook.

Posted in Homeschool Advice, Parenting | Comments Off on Look for the good