Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

Five Magic Words

5 Magic Words to Improve Your Home Environment

Get a dose of at least one of these per day and see if your home environment doesn’t improve.

I’ve provided two possible examples of each one to get your creative juices going. Build from these! Please post your own ideas for how to apply these to your homeschool in the comments section.

1. Surprise

  • A margin note in the math book
  • Cake for breakfast

2. Chance

  • Roll of the dice—numbers represent “how many” of whatever work for the day (number of math problems, number of letters traced, number of pages or sentences or words read…)
  • Flip a coin—heads means working independently for ten minutes; tails means working with a partner for ten minutes (child chooses which subject for independence or partnership)

3. Mystery

  • Handwritten clues leading to a new board game or snack or treat
  • Invisible ink to reveal a new copywork or dictation passage

4. Secret

  • Provide a lock n key diary for secret entries
  • Tell a child a secret plan to spend time with them (that day, later in the week…)

5. Discovery

  • Walk, bike, kayak somewhere new
  • Explore little known works of authors or poets you love

Good luck!

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15 Ways to Leave a Love Note

15 ways to leave a love note

Leave a love note!

Today’s task is to leave a love note for someone. Everyone in the family can participate. Help the ones who can’t transcribe their own thoughts (who don’t read or may not write, yet) to get in on the act. They can add little picto-graphs or stickers, if they like.

Leave the love notes in surprising locations and use unusual tools.

For instance:

  1. Write a note on the bathroom mirror with lipstick.
  2. Use Post-it notes and leave little notes all over the house for someone (or all over the inside of their car or all over their office or bedroom).
  3. Write a love note on the brown paper bag used to take a lunch to work or to a park day.
  4. Send a text!
  5. Post a status update on Facebook tagging the person you want to love up.
  6. Tuck love notes inside the book the person is reading, a few pages ahead of where they are.
  7. Write love notes on the edges of today’s newspaper for the newspaper reader.
  8. Put a love note (use a Post-it note) on the favorite beverage of your loved one that is lurking in the refrigerator.
  9. Sock drawers are a great place for love notes.
  10. Stick a love note on the left and right shoes of a favorite pair (maybe make a pun about left and right).
  11. Use shaving cream to squirt a note on the shower wall before your loved one showers.
  12. Stomp a note (maybe just a word) into the snow in the front yard. View from an upstairs window.
  13. Create a love note out of seashells and spell it on the kitchen table for a center piece.
  14. Write a love note on your palm. Close your hand into a fist. Approach the loved one. Tell them to tap three times for a surprise. When they do, open your hand and show your palm.
  15. Create a love coupon (in any form) and tuck it into your loved one’s purse or wallet.

Or think of your own!

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Today is Not the Blueprint for Tomorrow

Today is not the blueprint for tomorrow

In the last post, we talked about listening. I ran across this quote in some of my old writing that was shared with me when I was a graduate student. It seemed apropos: “Listening is the willingness to risk my assumptions so that I am changed by what you share.”

That’s how you know you’ve listened:

What you heard changes something in you.

Listening might change your appreciation for the struggle or pain, it might change how you understand what happened, it might change how you see a situation or belief structure, it might cause you to make room for more perspectives than your own, it might cause you to cry or heave a sigh of relief.

Sometimes, however, the damage between two people is great—our kids are harsh in their assessment of us and we feel battered and bludgeoned by their (seemingly) unending invectives—we don’t feel we can listen any more, after giving it our best. I do understand self-protection in those moments and the need to take breaks.

Remember:

Things change.
Today is not the blueprint for tomorrow.
It is only today.

Risk your assumptions, be changed by what you hear, self-soothe, get support, create healthy boundaries, but make them permeable so that an adult child may return. Stay open to the possibility that there is more to know, understand, appreciate, and hear.

Listening doesn’t happen all in one go. It is a process over time, with ever increasing awareness of the depth of a context or circumstance or relationship.

Peace.

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Give Your Children a Gift

Give Your Children a Gift:

Whether your child is 5, 15, or 25—that individual human being product of your love will one day tell you that something you did harmed him or her. It will show up in a five year old’s “You hurt my feelings” or “You’re mean!” or “I hate when you do X.”

The fifteen year old may tell you that back then you were much more controlling than you are now. A fifteen year old may remind you of punishments that were unjust or harsh words you uttered at the point of exhaustion and morning sickness that hurt that child nonetheless. A fifteen year old may be upset to have been homeschooled, or that the other parent yells so much, or that s/he is unprepared for advanced math.

A 25 year old may see childhood through a different lens—wondering about the impact of political or religious views on family life, re-evaluating the family hierarchy, identifying abuse, calling out discipline tactics.

It’s really tough to listen to your child—the one for whom you’d gladly throw yourself in front of a train—tell you that you failed somehow in your parenting. It’s too easy to dismiss the child’s viewpoint by saying, “I’m not so strict now” or “That was a long time ago and you know I’ve changed” or “It doesn’t seem to have hurt you any” or even, “You’ll understand better when you’re a parent.”

All of these may be true. But they don’t address the central point of the complaint—pain.

When someone tells you that you were a meaningful constitutive part of their pain, it is your right and responsibility to hear them out and to be open to the possibility that you had a role in creating/fostering/causing it.

It’s especially difficult to listen to our children when they are right—when we were too harsh or we permitted the other parent to be cruel. We don’t remember the punishments or the emotional outbursts in the way a child does. Children are vulnerable and small (as in, they have small bodies). Their memories will seem disproportionate to what we remember because for us, we operated from a place of power and size which diminishes the volume and scale of the disciplinary choice.

Think of it like this. Imagine that you are happily walking along on the street, and out of the blue you hear a bullhorn saying this: “Stop walking. This is the police.”

Without a single additional word, your body will go into what I call “tuning fork” mode. The volume and the authority of the speaker will cause your nervous system to immediately ping into electricity and anxiety. You’ll feel in trouble, even if you are not.

This is how our kids feel when we yell at them.

When we raise our voices, we put our children’s nervous systems on high alert. Naturally. Automatically. We are big and powerful, and they are not. Their memories of those moments will match what happened to their insides, not what we explain with logic and reason on the outside.

When your child inevitably comes to you in pain (I hate writing, this is too hard, you are mean, why won’t you listen to me?, I don’t agree with X), it is your privilege as the person closest to that child, the one who loves that person more than anyone else on the planet, to simply hear what he or she has to say.

Sometimes it takes all the courage your can screw together to sit on your hands, and zip your lip, and simply listen without recourse or response. It helped me to have a few key phrases I could say when confronted with my children’s memories that were unpleasant for me to hear.

  • “What else…?”
  • “Can you tell me more about that?”
  • “How else did you feel?”
  • “What do you wish had happened?”
  • “Am I still doing that now in some way?”
  • “I bet it feels awful to not have the power to make the choices for your own life.”
  • “I regret that too.”
  • “I wish it had been different for you too.”
  • “I’m sorry.”
  • “I’m so sorry.”
  • “I am here if you need to discuss this again or any new thoughts come up.”
  • “Is there anything else you want me to know?”

My parents are divorced. When I was about 30 and in therapy, my mom came to me one time (she, too, was in therapy) and made me the most meaningful promise of my life. This is what she told me.

“Julie, I know that there are many ways I failed you as a mother, particularly during the divorce years. As long as I am alive, I want you to know that there is no time when you can’t come to me to tell me about the pain I caused you during that time. I know there will be new moments where the divorce is painful to you now, as an adult. I am willing to hear you and talk with you about any of it, as long as I’m alive. There is no expiration date on discussing your pain.”

I can’t tell you the relief it was to hear those words—and I have taken her up on that commitment more than once. However, conversely (and ironically) because I know that door is wide open, I don’t always need to walk through it. I feel heard and known.

I, too, have caused my children pain. Recently I remember Noah and I discussing a hard season in his childhood. I began to describe it as I remembered it and he said, “Mom, let’s not get into revisionist history here. THIS is how it happened.”

It stopped me cold. I remembered—he owns his story of what happened to him. My memory will never be as important to him as his is. And because I was not the vulnerable child, I am far more likely to whitewash my role in his pain. So I stopped, and I listened, and I suffered a little.

We all want to be heard. We want our version of our life’s events to be acknowledged as real for us. We want someone to say, “You were hurt. I’m so sorry.”

Our kids want that from us. Give it to them. We enhance the space for connection and love when we do, which is the goal all along anyway, right?

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Complexity is Your Friend

Complexity is Your Friend

A while ago, I interacted with a friend who is childless and has never been married. She’s a wonderful person with a number of gifts, not the least of which is her career in banking where she is a skilled, talented, responsible manager of a branch (many people report to her and she does her job quite well). She is smart, a good leader, and a financial wizard. She is also a wonderful auntie and loyal friend.

We got to talking about our families of origin with a couple of my other friends (who had been married or were still, and who had homeschooled their kids). When an issue came up, this unmarried friend gave advice based on her experience of being an auntie and a daughter (both valid sources of information about family relationships, to be sure).

Sometimes her advice felt helpful but sometimes it felt out of tune. I was trying to put my finger on why.

Then she made a remarkable statement: “It always amazes me when someone says that they have changed their ideas about important issues—like how to parent or what they think of marriage or social and political issues. I’ve held the same views for as long as I can remember and I don’t imagine them ever changing. It seems like people would be much happier if they just stopped re-evaluating their beliefs all the time.”

And that’s when it hit me. Untested theories about life can remain peacefully in tact. If you aren’t married, it’s easy to have rules about what would end a relationship… until you are in a relationship with children at stake, intertwined incomes, and shared meaningful history. Suddenly your sense of what is a “deal breaker” can, and often does, change.

If you don’t have children of your own, enforcing a set of rules for etiquette, bedtimes, and schoolwork seems so reasonable, so easy to implement. Adults mis-remember their own childhoods all the time—they pretend to themselves that they liked their parents’ harsh rules or that they were made better people by the discipline of a school principle, or at the least, that whatever befell them wouldn’t have, had the adult authorities in their lives been more stringent or more involved or more kind or whatever.

Complexity quote 1Likewise, it’s not difficult to continue with the same set of basic beliefs about how the world should work, if you haven’t had to face the unforeseen consequences of some of those beliefs, nor had them tested personally.

I say all this for a reason. This is not you. You do not have the luxury of a simple, satisfying worldview.

You are in the murkiest, most-life-testing context of life. When you sign up to have children, you are volunteering for a mental and emotional overhaul of all you thought you knew to be true. Your theories will now be tested. You will explore ideas and practices you didn’t believe in back when you knew everything.

Your need to “do it right” so nothing bad will happen to you or the people you love, will morph over time as hair-raising circumstances challenge you to reconsider. You’ll discover that “happily ever after” doesn’t exist for you (or anyone).

The competing needs for attention, affection, nutrition, and sleep between people sharing a household is of Olympic scale! Everyone goes all in, and there are clear winners and losers in each category every day. You’ll be pushed to your limits, which will then force you to figure out how to help everyone take better care of themselves a little bit at a time (including that spouse of yours, and yourself – the last one you usually manage to help).

It’s incredible, really, that anyone sharing a home for years on end keeps at it. Really. Truly. Does anyone sync up perfectly in terms of their needs? Married couples can hardly get on the same page about sex and finances—add a couple of kids with high energy, sleep disorders, bed wetting, learning disabilities, and allergies—well, the capacity to match up and have peace is out the window right there.

The Magical Silver Lining

But here’s the magical silver lining to the whole absurd “Get Everyone On the Same Page” project: you all grow. You grow and you grow and you grow. You have to. It’s the requirement of non-monastic life!

You figure out sleep—by sharing and caring and swapping who stays up late and who gets up tomorrow night and how you sleep (co-sleep or using cribs or putting a mattress on the floor in your bedroom for the one scared child who needs you every night). You stop shaming the bed wetter, you take more naps, you require days off, you start exercising and drinking chamomile tea. You keep at it until you get sleep. It might take years, but you work on it every day.

You figure out food—little snack trays, or low shelves with easy to open food stuffs, or six weeks of dinners made and frozen in a freezer, or crock pots, or take out Chinese every Friday night. You handle allergies and learn to cook. You read more books about food than you ever imagined needing to.

You figure out romance—the date night or the one candle that tells the spouse: Yep, I’m open to sexual contact tonight. You swap babysitting with the best friend to have the house alone once in a blue moon, or you read to your honey-bear every night before you sleep. You trade flirty texts throughout the day or you take a few months off postpartum so you don’t have to negotiate “Do you want to?” every night.

You figure out life—how to survive the overwhelming crushing disappointments that come from failed ideals (friends who betray you; religious communities that stumble; the marriage that can’t and shouldn’t make it; the illness you didn’t plan that robbed you for three years straight; the miscarriages; the house fire; the hurricane; the lost job, lost income, and home repossession; the embarrassment of gaining all that weight due to diabetes, after you had been a dancer in college; the heartache at having hurt your own child; the alcoholism or drug addiction that are destroying someone you love).

Complexity quote 2In the same ways, you figure out education—one idea at a time, one child at a time, one input at a time. You keep revising your ideas, and then you find new ones that really click. But you know what works and doesn’t because you lived each one sincerely. You know your children—you keep letting them teach you about who they are, and that changes how you understand yourself, in addition to them.

Slowly you expand how you operate to accommodate other personality types than your own. You give up notions of phony perfection between parent and child. There is no tactic that ensures a child will match a parent’s fantasy of who he or she should be by 18. There is only love and trying, over and over and over again—until the child knows he or she is loved, and the parent knows that the child is irrefutably a unique worthy person wholly separate from either parent.

Creating a family is the most exasperating, philosophy-destroying, crash-course in love I know about.

No two families will get there the same way—but the end goal is a shared one (and a worthy one): to like each other as much as we love each other.

It takes a lifetime.

Complexity is your friend. It will make you into a humble, generous, open-minded, caring, attentive human being, if you let it.

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Top image by Derek Gavey (cc cropped, text added)

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