Can Stilts

When I was little my mother used to make us toys out of junk.  This was before it was the hip thing to do.  I loved coffee can stilts the best.  She would use the big cans of coffee.  These are pretty hard to find these days as large amounts of coffee now come in plastic tubs with a handle.  When we ordered huge cans of coconut milk from our coop I was all psyched to make the stilts for my kids.  It's taken quite a few months to get through enough coconut milk to make a set for both of them but today was the day!!

My super safety-conscious five-and-a-half-year-old asked me, "Are these safe? 
"No," I said, "But when I was a kid fun was really dangerous."

Reassessing

I am in a process of reassessment. I originally intended this space to be a place for tips, recipes, craft ideas and advice on what (not to do) when creating your backyard homestead.  But in the spirit of my spirit, I guess, I have added my thoughts and feelings on mothering, life, and all that mushy stuff that comes along with reflection glimpsed in between maddening moments of failed experiments and lovey little kid hugs.  I thought that with the start of the spring and summer, with all the projects already begun, failed, going well, and the yard coming together in a way that has yet to be seen, I would jump back in the this-is-how-we-do-it (and this is what you should probably do for yourself) swing of things.  But, alas, I've been thinking again.  I can't seem to help myself!

Wild Strawberries

And tame ones

I've been reassessing, again.  A few incredible things have happened to me over the past few months.  They have been both sad and miraculous, and I'm still not sure which was which.  Some of these "events" have been quiet eruptions of self and heart, some trips to the past and all that can bring, others have been family events and still others are brought on by the changing of the seasons and all the work and fun that come along.  I recently stayed with my brother through the night waiting to bring him to detox in the morning.  Witnessing the pain, relief and bravery that accompanies making a huge life-altering decision was so powerful.  I felt honored to be able to be the person to share this pivotal moment, and to be able to be support him without negative judgment.  In the morning, we got in the car and drove up to the hospital.

The one blackberry bush that survived the aphids, we'll have to wait until next year for jam and juice.

When we were nearly there, I recognized the route.  It slowly became clear to me that we were on the way to the same hospital I was involuntarily hospitalized in twice when I was a teen.  It was like watching a car accident happen.  I could feel the past sneak up behind me like that scary story about the knife wielding maniac in the back seat of the car.  Luckily, I have (apparently) healed enough to know what my priorities were in that moment, and I just told myself, "Not now, baby, we have more pressing work to do."  I was like a superhero of awesome zen love.

A table we found on the side of the road that promptly fell apart as soon as wee took it off the truck. It is now siting int he driveway as another piece of junk we'll have to dispose of somehow. 

When that was all over, I packed up the car, drove back over the Tapenzee and headed home.  I knew I was driving home to something.  I knew there was a lot waiting on me.  Waiting for me to let out.  I knew there was a reckoning coming.  I had told my heart to wait, and it wouldn't wait forever.   I got home and cried.  I cried for myself, I cried for my brother, I cried for the road ahead for my own children, I cried for my mother and for my father.  I cried so much with love, pain, loss, and hurt for three days that I decided to shut it off. I knew there was more waiting for me.  Deeper stuff, the stuff I piled new stuff on top of, and I wasn't ready.   It was all too close. I used a couple of old coping mechanisms, and some new ones.

Forty or so paste tomato plants.

The new ones were a bit less harmful than the days of old.  I gave myself about a week, maybe two.  I lost myself in audio books, keeping that earbud crammed in my ear for about two weeks, pausing only to have the interactions necessary to be a mother, a wife and a friend.  But when there was any chance of distraction, when there was any chance that I might slip into the present moment or the past, I had Harry potter in my ear.  Man that Lord Voldemort is a real jerk, and thank God Harry has Hermione Granger to keep him out of trouble, and oh, Dumbledore...  it is true what he says in The Prisoner of Azkaban: "If I thought I could help you by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you would have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it." Man is he ever right, that guy. 

But I guess it's not too bad when your "weeds" are all lemon balm and cilantro.

Even for this attempt to escape I judged myself harshly.  I am now healed and conscious enough to know what I was doing.  But I guess that's the difference, I knew what I was doing.  I made a choice to leave my head, to run, temporarily, from what was coming for me. A coping mechanism is just that--a mechanism for coping with something to big and too scary for you.  There are healthy ones that hasten healing, like yoga, writing, praying, loving, meditating.  And there are unhealthy ones that bury the pain down so that it festers and poisons, like drug use, cutting, throwing up, starving, and compulsively eating.  I have done all of this and more in my past, so all things considered, briefly revising the least of my unhealthy techniques, or making a conscious choice to compulsively listen to Harry Potter on audio book are not the worst choices I could make.  I guess.

One mostly finished new chicken coop (more on the how-too of this later).

The past is breaking over me like waves crashing on the beach.  It is amazing to experience this, not in the hurricane everything-flying-all-over-the-place fashion of my youth, but in the slow steady wash of past on stone.  The wave comes in, covers me and recedes.  With its steady pull back out to sea it takes with it some of what I'd like to let go and maybe some of the calm and safety I'd like to keep with me. But it comes back with the next  wave, mostly. 

A new house for the girls, made form most of the wood I'd like to clear out of our basement. 

How does this relate to my homesteading adventure?  What does this have to do with the chickens, the gardening, the kids, and the food?  Well, nothing and everything.   All these thoughts, of course, are informing the way I look at my kids, the way I see myself as a parent, and a woman.  These experiences of pain and peace I have while I heal old wounds I thought had been healed has made me slow down a bit, and look at my life again with more conscious open eyes.  I am realizing that a lot of the things I am doing I didn't actually agree to.  Make no mistake, I haven't been pressured into doing something I didn't want.  No passing strangers have pulled up to the house, a box of squawking chickens under one arm and a cudgel in the other.  I haven't been given an "offer I couldn't refuse" to grow sugar snap peas and native flowers.  I just haven't thought to ask myself  what I want to be doing.

"Found" garden of motherwort and chickweed.

I suspect I do want to be doing what I am up to.  I like the reasons we live the way we do. I like the outcome from a life lived as close to the ground as we can.  It's comfortable, the rhythm is beautiful and the Spirit of Life is ever present. I am wondering, however, if I had consciously agreed to these tasks I take on how many of them I would still choose.  What if I looked at a new opportunity (or job) with full understanding of  the amount of energy it would take?  What if I weighed it against the other things I might like to do, or am already doing, would I still say yes?  How much more would I love what I'm doing if I had a memory of choosing with open eyes and an open heart?  How much more forgiving of myself would I be when I failed to complete/succeed/start said project if I didn't feel the weight of responsibility, not only for myself but for my husband and kids also?  What is my responsibility anyway?

Snow peas climbing on the old twisted frame that remained after we burned an old box spring.

I suppose I am re-choosing my life.  Seriously, I do like what I do, I'm just not sure I like why I do the things I do.  Or maybe I just feel uncomfortable not knowing if I actually chose them in the first place.  It's not pleasant for me to realize I've let life push me along, even if it's pushed me to a beautiful place. Maybe.  Perhaps the lesson is to be present for the pushing. To watch, enjoy, and live during the journey.  Maybe.

For now I'll just wait here while another wave comes washing over me.

Imbolc and a Happy Marriage

 I am a Unitarian Universalist.  My family has been attending a UU church for almost two years; we love it, are highly involved, and our kids love it.  It has added a boat-load of love and community to our family life that I don't know what I would do without.  My journey to this particular church in this particular religion has been a long and meandering one, as is the case with most people's spiritual journey. Briefly, I was raised without a formal religion, with Catholic tendencies on one side, and New Age-y tendencies from my mother, during my teen years I dabbled in Wicca (isn't that one of the required courses to get your "I Was A Teenage Girl In America" degree?).  I distanced myself from that when I started throwing out all the evidence that I was a fool-hardy teen. It was a pretty indiscriminate purging and a lot of babies went out with the bathwater.  I shopped around for a religion I could pass on to my children and after many visits to many churches and temples I decided on Catholicism.  I was baptized into the religion of my father's family when I was 19 years old.  That stuck for a while, but when I did finally have kids, I found I was reluctant to pass on many of the ideas about this religion to my children.  I realized that I would more than likely find myself saying that I don't believe this or that more than I would want to.  The easiest to put my finger on begin my stance on gays and gay marriage (I'm for 'em) and my belief in the right to choose (I'm for it).  But there were deeper spiritual beliefs that are harder to tackle in a few sentences, like my stance on hell and Divine punishment (I don't buy it), and  there being only one true form of God (I don't buy that either).  So I stopped going, worried about the kid's, and fretted about my own need for a spiritual home.  Finally, after a score of 100% Unitarian Universalist on the Belief-o-Matic (a higher score than even our minister!), we decided to check out the church with the full parking lot, who's bell we can hear ring in our kitchen, it's so close.  It was love at first sermon and now we're all hooked.  What is especially nice is that my husband and I, who have slightly different spiritual views, can both find comfort and insight in the same place, and should our children hold dear something that we don't, they too are free to express their beliefs in this church. 

So there you have the background.  Now, I really love ritual.  I love the idea of doing something over and over again, especially something that has been done over and over again since the dawn of the ages.  It makes me all misty and swoony.  To tell the truth, that was one of the things  I loved the most about the Catholic Church, prompting my husband to ask me:  "You know that everything you love about the Catholic Church is Pagan, right?"  "Of course I do! Haven't you seen my degree in Teenage Girl?"  I love ritual, but I wasn't raised with it, so it's sort of tricky for me keep up with, but I'm working on it.  We say a blessing at meal time, and go to church every Sunday, where there are plenty of rituals throughout the year. I would love to start a daily mom-and-kid's prayer time but that's getting into Future Me's territory.  Instead of going crazy, my friend and I have decided to bring into our families' circle all of the Pagan Holidays.  These celebrations of the earth and of faith and renewal are super spectacular, with lots of symbolism, ancestral knowledge, and baking.  I think they are a really tangible way for the kids to relate to the Divine.  They see the earth changing, we talk about faith, there's a little bit of wonderment thrown in there..Viola! You have a sacred ritual.

We decided to start with Imbolc, the first celebration of spring.  At this point in the winter the pregnant ewe's would start to lactate signaling the up-coming birth of baby lambs, spring, and warmth.  Because winter can be long, cold and serious, and because there were no grocery stores way back in the day, it would have been a scary time, filled with hunger and sickness, and even death.  Believing that spring will come, when it isn't readily apparent (East-coaster can appreciate that this winter) is a real act of faith.  Now, of course, we know that spring is coming, it doesn't rely on gifts or offerings to a deity to make it come.  As far as I know there is no actual Goddess-bride waiting for a Sun-God husband to come to her, but it's nice to take advantage of this time to clebrate something ancient and to infuse or modern-day hopes and faith in the things to come with the spring.

My friend and I ordered about a million pagan books from the library and searched over for kids' activities and stories about Imbolc.  We picked and chose the rituals that resonated best with us and ones we thought the girls would like.  We started the day out with a ritual cleansing (cleaning the house).  We baked a gluten-free honey cake, a traditional Imbolc treat.

 While that was baking we took a big stack of strips of red, orange, and yellow, construction paper and wrote, colored and decorated them with our hopes and intentions for the spring.  These have everything from sentences like, "A healthy family," to "getting better at gardening," to a drawing of a baby giraffe (don't ask, somehow I was just being asked to draw baby animals on them for the girl's to color.)

By the time we were done talking about what the holiday means and what we want and hope for the future, the cake was done.  At this point the kids were a bit stir-crazy from being inside most of the day and it being...well..the middle of the winter.  I foolishly tried to get them to calm down so we could make the orange icing for the cake (not traditional, I'd guess).  When they didn't calm down and got more incredibly out of control, I, in my infinite wisdom and sacred-ness threw my arms wide and yelled, "OK, I'M GOING TO START HITTING PEOPLE!" To which my friend responded with her more infinite wisdom and sacred-ness, "Why don't I take you girls in the other room and we can read a story.  When we're done I think everyone will be ready to make the icing."  She didn't give me a dirty look or anything, that's just how wise and sacred-ness she is. 

We made the icing and had some cake, which was great.  After that they played, we made dinner and when the husbands got home we ate.  Now, that story thing definitely made the icing making possible, but it didn't really get the kids into a better head space.  They were still kids in the middle of a stormy New England winter, cooped up and feverish of the Cabin variety.  They were sort of driving everyone crazy.  No matter, carry on with your sacred, bad-self says we!

When Dinner was over, I turned to my husband and asked, "We're going to do the ritual now, will you take pictures?"  He said yes (eventually).  We told the girls that in some parts of the world on this day girls would dress up like the Goddess Brigid in her wedding clothes and go around from house to house, she would be invited in and there would be treats.  We put on some little veils I had made for them and sent them outside.  Once outside, they knocked on the door, we invited them in and read a poem.  Then we offered them a small piece of honey cake, lit the candles and set the cake on our little make-shift alter.  Then we wished, silently, on some seeds, placed them as offering to the Goddess with the cake, and took some photos.

 The plan at this point was to stand in the candle-light in silent contemplation of the things to come.  Remember, the space was sacred, filled to bursting with sacred-ness.  My husband, however, took is directive to take pictures very seriously and hadn't quite gotten the photo he was looking for.

 

 His pleading with the girls to look contemplatively at the candles in their cute little veils got more and more demanding.  "Keep the veil on, JUST keep it on for one more minute. Turn around, HUNTER turn around. Stand still. Stand still so I can take the damn picture. JUST stand still.." This went on for a little bit with me interjecting helpful things like, "Honey, it's not important.  They're done.  don't worry about the picture. You're missing the point."  Which together sounded something like this:

"Just keep the veil they're just kids stand still I'm trying it's not worth Hunter honey turn around you're missing the point here Just. Keep. The. Veil. On. can you listen to me for a minute? Hunter!! Oh just give me that Damn camera!"
This last one was me, of course, said as I wrestled the camera strap from around my husband's neck.  After which he stormed up stairs and I stormed into the kitchen crying and yelling something like, "You ruined Imbolc, this is just like the time we flew that kite!!"  My friend met me in the kitchen giving me compassionate looks over the slices of honey cake while I sobbed.  My husband had almost immediately come back down stairs, he was clearly retaining more of his sense than I was.
"Do you want me to take over the cake so you can go give hugs?" says my friend in gentle offering.
"No," I sobbed, "I want to do this."
It was immediately clear that I was incapable of serving up the cake so I opted the making it up job.  I went to my husband who was sitting on the couch being not-as-mad-looking-as-he-felt and said in my most calm and conciliatory voice, "You know you ruined Imbolc, right?"
Despite this somewhat inflammatory attempt at reconciliation, my beloved husband heard me, and we talked it out.  I think I said something along the lines of (through tears), "We should be having honey cake right now, but it's all ruined...ruined...whaaahahaaahaa..."
"We still can, honey, it's over. I'm sorry."

I retreated upstairs to stop all my blubbering and get back in the mood for the Pagan festival.   When I was ready to come downstairs, where do you think I found my husband?  That's right.  In front of our make-shift alter telling those girls to stay still.  He got his shot.  He got it while I said, jokingly, "I will forever tell the story of the price of this picture!" Haha.  (But seriously, I will).

We had cake, and put our favorite articles of clothing in a basket to be placed outside for the Goddess to bless as she makes her way 'round the earth turning the wheel toward spring.  The girls went to bed and the adults followed shortly. 

I will tell the story of that picture, however.  I will humbly tell the story of two people who, in a moment, lost sight of what they were trying to accomplish and what the other was needing.  This story happens in a marriage all the time.  My husband and I are learning that happiness doesn't come from lack of conflict, but from the way it's resolved.  This particular issue had to be brought up again, when we weren't attempting to have a reflective ritual.  We talked it out with love and understanding.  I had to sift through a little bit of feelings related to my own childhood, where there were many a holiday punctuated with shouting and acts of semi-violence.  The Imbolc stunt we pulled wasn't quite the same thing.  This was a (fairly humerus) argument between two individuals who love each other and want to not fight.  My children, during this brief episode, where seemingly unfazed.  They don't seem to feel frightened when my husband's Sicilian nature collide with my German side.  They don't seem to worry about our union when I forget myself and chuck a spatula across the room.  Don't get me wrong, these are pretty embarrassing losses of control over here.  I'm not saying this behavior is ideal, but I think it might be more "normal' than I had originally thought.  More normal and a lot less traumatizing than I would have thought.  We can't really avoid conflict.  We're both strong people with lots to do and we forget ourselves, and sometimes each other.  We do make sure that we don't hide our resolutions either.  Our kids hear us talk it out; we say "I'm sorry" loud and clear, and we mean it.  A happy marriage looks different than I thought it would.  In my made-up fantasy of a happy marriage I didn't think people would be yelling things like, "You ruined Imbolc."  I guess I didn't think people would be yelling at all.  I guess I didn't think there would be people in this marriage. 

Life is filled with all sorts of lessons like this.  Grown-ups make mistakes.  Parents don't have all the answers.  Your own kids sometimes seem like you they want to kill you.  And marriages are made of people, who make mistakes and sometimes yell, and then say sorry, I love you, I will try to handle that differently next time.  Despite it being a bit different than what I had imagined, I'll take it, with all its complications, yelling, forgetting and spatula-chucking.  Really, for two people who don't have a lot of foundational experience with happy marriages, we're learning as we go and doing alright.  

Whew! It's Been A While

I have a problem.  Sometimes I have a project to do, a home improvement, or a thank you card to write and I build it up in my head until I feel like I have to block out an entire child-free day to get it done.  Those days, of course, are relatively rare, and so the projects pile up, the house remains curtianless, and no one knows how grateful I am (really, really grateful by the way, thank you for all your kinds gifts and thoughts, All-The-People-In-My-Life). 

I know no one else suffers from this sort of affliction, so just try not to judge me too harshly.

Most recently I have been neglecting this space.  Partially because I have such a big and exciting arrangement to share.  I would love to get into this in great detail and let you know all the thoughts, rules, discoveries, and joy in it, but partially because of this new arrangement, I am in a different sort of routine and haven't figured out where my computer time fits in.  To top it all off, this new thing seems so big that I haven't really felt right going ahead and giving you information on my salt dough ornament recipe, the progress of our cold frames, our freezer full of grass-fed beef, toothpaste failures, and all the other things going on here until I let you know the big and interesting news.

So here it is, in brief.  I'll get back to it someday soon, but for now, so we can all move on:  Our dear friends and their two dear children have moved in with us and we are sharing (quite beautifully) the space of our 1,000 square foot home.  Just when you thought it couldn't get more colonial over here, it does!  So now, for the first time in approximately fifty years, my home has the grand total of eight souls living and loving within its walls.  There really is so much to say about how this works, the numerous benefits, and the potential pitfalls (I say potential, because so far we haven't stumbled into them).  Any parent can appreciate how wonderful it would be to have another set at hand to help when you get into the danger zone with your kids.

Just last night I had a horrifying bedtime showdown with my darling three-year-old.  When I got up from giving her some pre-sleep snuggles she promptly lost her mind completely.  Her sister had to be sent into my room so she could actually sleep and the little one had to be barricaded into her room by a mommy against the door.  Just when I thought that maybe this was the day I would finally loose it and accidentally thrash my child to kingdom come (actually, I decided to read damnyouautocorrect.com on my phone to keep myself entertained and distracted and from twitching--that is one smart phone!) a vision of a mom came up the stairs to help me.  Oh, lovely, lovely Other Mama! We proceeded to hang out in the hallway taking turns silently putting a hysterical three-year-old back into her bed while the other husband in the house (mine was still at work) fed us hummus covered pita chips from the stairs.  When the hysterical child switched tactics from "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED!" to "I NEED TO GO THE BATHROOM" to "I FIRSTY!" to "HEY! YOU NOT MY MAMA, I WANT MY REAL MAMA" I had another mother there to keep my spirits up and my will strong.  With pre-boxing match pep talks and quick neck massages, I was able to (after one hour!) lay my child down, now stripped to a diaper) in the bed, cover, her up and have her not get out of bed until 7am.  Let me tell you how horribly this would have gone down if there had not been a friend around  to help me hold my space.  No, on second thought, I don't want to write anything down.  Just in case I do finally go completely insane, I don't want the authorities to think any of my actions were premeditated.  Let's just say that I'm not sure how I could have gotten through that particular night without help. 

This makes me have a lot of feelings and thoughts about the nuclear family.  These are the thoughts I'd love to go into in a lot more detail but haven't quite made the time for in my new day-to-day format.  But basically I think the nuclear family is bunk.  Really, what a rotten idea.  I'm no sociologist, but it doesn't seem quite natural, and now that I have something a little different going on for a while, and even though we're all adjusting to sharing our space with double the people, it is so much nicer to have more people to help with the junk and expand the love and happy moments. 

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, You're Only A Day Away...

A super fabulous idea was suggested to me recently.  A "Tomorrow Drawer" for my kids to put everything they will need for the up coming day.  My kids share a pretty small room where there is only enough room for one dresser (don't ask me what they will do when they're teens).  They have three drawers each so I can't really spare a drawer for staging the next day.  I did however have two hot pink beverage tubs (leftover from the best 30th birthday party ever decorated in riot grrrl colors!).  The girls are using these to put in everything they need for the following day.  Their outfits down to shoes, any dance or swim stuff, even jammies.  It's been working out really well.  I am primarily filling the drawer of the soon-to-be three-year-old, but my oldest (the soon-to-be five-year-old) is having quite the time picking out her crazy fashions the night before!

Ahhh! Sweet, sweet morning sanity...

Parenting: Sometimes I'm Just No Good At This

I don't read a lot of blogs.  A friend once accused me of being something of a technology-phobe, and I blurted out that "I can't read the computer!"  It's true, I have an astigmatism and it's tricky and a little annoying to read on the computer screen.  (Now that I have glasses, so that makes it a little easier.) I also don't have a lot of time to sit and read anything.  Shortly after this surprising observation I and went in search for some blogs I could read (I'll show her who's a techno-phobe!).  I found the whole culture kind of scary and intimidating.  You have to find these "bloggers" in the Internets and then "catch up" with them so you can get to know them a little.  It's quite an investment, you have to start at the beginning so you can get a sense of where the person started from and where they're going.  But I found a few that I started reading regularly.  So regularly, in fact, that I started talking about these people to my husband like they are my close friends.

"You know what Hannah said?  She said that she just uses a  meat grinder to process her zucchini and then she freezes it like that."

"Who's Hannah?"

"She's my friend on the internet."

"Does she know who you are?"

"No."

"Oh."

What I have found in the internet is a community of women who are very similar to me.  They homeschool, garden, can, craft, take pictures, and want to do their best at loving their kids.  They just seem a lot better at that last part than I am.  Admittedly just about all of these mothers have stated somewhere on their blog that they are intentionally leaving out aspects of their lives that they don't want to focus on.  There are raised voices, tears and impatient moments, but these are not the moments to be reveled in and are left by the wayside.

I admire this so much, and gain a lot of focus and gratitude in my days with this philosophy in mind.  Whatever your mind is on is the reality, you know?  Your focus is your life and all that.  However, in most of my days, these less than ideal displays of impatience or frustration  are so dominant that to leave them out would be pretty much like lying. 

I have a hard time with parenting (what seems like to me) most of the time.  I have not-so-proud-moments more frequently than I would like to admit.  I worry a fair amount about messing the kids up or missing my chance to give them the mother I thought I would be giving them.

You see, I've thought about "Jannelle the Mother" for a long time.  Way before I was ever in a position to have kids I imagined the little dears, but more than them I imagined me.  I imagined the things I would do with them, the way I would listen to them, the patience I would have, the hugs I would offer, the appreciation and interest I would take in them. 

I fixated on this future dream mostly to heal the part of me that didn't get the things I felt I needed in my own relationship with my mom.  We had a rough time when I was younger.  We didn't talk for a long time after I left home.  In the end, things were so bad that I had forgotten a lot of the good things, pushed them out of my mind like they were the painful memories.  The good times were so jarring and incongruous that I couldn't have them co-exist with the hurtful memories of my childhood.  I needed a clear definition--either it was good, or it was bad.  It couldn't be both.  So I chose all bad.  I got angry, I got sad, I got older, and then I got pregnant.  When I was pregnant the tiny, careful relationship that had been forming with my mom sort of exploded.  She seriously called me almost every day.  All of a sudden she was so there, and I found myself withdrawing.  It was freaking me out!  So with long letters, some miss-communication and a few phone calls, I explained that I was still carrying around some hurts and that it would take me some time to warm to this new way.  All of this resulted in me remembering that it wasn't all bad, that my young mother absolutely did the best that she knew how.  It left me with a new choice.  And I chose the future instead of the past.  She is a great grandmother and our sometimes cautious relationship becomes less so with every passing visit and conversation. 

 I figured with all this healing and fixating and planning that my heart's desire to be a patient, elastic mother would just, you know, happen.  Doesn't that make nice neat sense?  And it was true when I had one kid.  Hunter wasn't born until Athena was 22 months old, and for those 22 months I was the best mother in the world. Well, it sure felt easy anyway.  I had wells--no giant aquifers of patience.  I could listen to a scream forever and not respond, making sure that the screaming fits never lasted for long.  I could hold out on a tantrum longer than you would believe, so those tricks weren't tried very much either.  After I had Hunter my patience started to stretch to uncomfortable lengths.  I remember lamenting the loss of my patience to my mom friends.  I was assured it would return once I got the hang of things.  Well it's been almost three years now, is that going to happen?  To be fair, I have gotten better at it. Much of my patience has returned.  I even manage to find time with each of my kids alone which helps tremendously in actually seeing them and their person hood.  Even when they're together I can hold it together for a good long while.  I hear them screaming at each other--I've read the books, I know not to get involved--and I'm good, I know it's important for them to work it out themselves.  I focus on whatever task I'm doing while I monitor from afar what's happening in the bedroom next door.

"I WANT TO KNOCK IT DOWN!!"

"no.  No.  NO! I'm not done yet.  stop. STOP!!"

"But it's taking so looong..."

"AAAAAYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!! DON'T! GET AWAY! SIT DOWN!"

(scuffling, blocks begin thrown,  the "FWUMP" of someone hitting the bed)

"High pitched screaming" (I'm not sure how to spell it)

"DON'T. KNOCK. IT. DOWN. YET!!!"

At this point I have a slight nervous twitch forming in my right eye and my upper bicep has gone spastic.  I'm gritting my teeth and telling myself things like, "If I hear that scream one more time I'm going to go completely insane and have to be institutionalized."

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE"

And now I'm charging into their room, heading straight toward the tower-in-process.  My mind has somehow laid the blame of this argument on the fact that this tower exists. Without thinking clearly (obviously) in any way at all I pull my leg back and land a kick right into the middle of the thing.

Before my foot makes contact, I know I am wrong, and can't stop myself. 

Before you use your energy to judge me, know that I probably have it covered for both of us. Just take this time to feel good about how you handled this. 

On days like this I have to console myself by pointing out that no one was physically hurt.  Which wasn't always the case in my childhood or the childhoods of my parents. I have to make pleading prayers that sound something like, "Please make them able to see my effort."

Because, really, my effort is so tremendous.  I am trying my very hardest to do something that I don't know how to do.  I'm trying to be a parent that I didn't see in action.  I am attempting to have a family that I have no model for.  And when I'm pushed to the edge of my person by repeated accidental kicks to the stomach, relentless bickering and screeching, or nagging, or whining, or pinching, I snap out of the carefully crafted person I have created and into the well-defined grooves of my core patterns.

I'm not trying to give excuses for childish or impatient behavior.  Really, I'm not.  Neither am I being overly hard on myself.  It's just that the older I get and the more I wittiness this sort of personal primitive behavior, the more I realize that my intentions are not stronger than my defenses. This news is a total bummer.  It's a bummer because it means it will more than likely take (more) time to remedy.  My imperfect person-hood will never be remedied, but I'm sure I will be able to learn how to not take my internal frustration out on my kids.  But I won't be able to do it right this instant! And this is the time that really counts!

I knew I would learn from the mistakes of my childhood and that I would find new and exciting mistakes to make.  (I am very creative, you know).  But I didn't realize I would unwittingly take up some of the same patterns of my childhood, however faded they may be at this point.  And they are faded.  They were already beginning to fade when my mother took them up in her parenting with me.  If any one out there is a child in a long line of what is now called child abuse, but used to just be discipline, maybe you have seen these tendencies lessen and fade over the generations.  Maybe you have been lucky enough to see the Herculean effort in your mother not to make the mistakes of her mother.  Maybe you've even heard her tell stories of how her mother attempted not to make the mistakes of what would have been your great-grandmother.  If you haven't been one in this line, let me just tell you, it's harder than you think not to repeat these mistakes. 

 

On really hard days, when I've screamed myself horse, carried children upside-down to their rooms for time-outs, or smacked my little one on the hand for pinching me for the 1,000th time, when I have completely lost myself in impatience and anger, I...well, I cry.  But then, maybe the next day when I figure I'll try again because motherhood is one job that you really can't quit, I remember that no one in the house is terrified.  No one is questioning whether or not I love them.  No one is getting bruised or bloody.  I imagine the tendency to loose control of my anger with the kids like poison in a glass.  With each generation's effort of love toward their children and forgiveness of the past the poison is diluted.  I had thought that I could just take up a new cup, but that now seems highly unlikely.  My mother before me, my grandmother before her, and now I am doing my very best to pour so much love and understanding into my relationship with my children that the cup will overflow and wash the poison out forever.