The New Girl

In Case You Thought You Were Scarring Your Children The Most.

This morning, I caught my Pretty Much Totally Potty Trained son in my closet. Pooping in his new pajamas. Sans underwear. Yes, yes. Lets all observe a moment of silence for the brand new pj bottoms.

I, erm, handled the situation [like a reptile] in such a way that, how should I put it? My child might remember until [the therapy couch] next week or so.

Here's our [first of many, I'm sure] conversation on the topic:

The Boy: Hey, Mommy! Member when I pooped in my pants?

Me: Yes, I remember.

The Boy: That was not good, when I pooped in my pants.

Me: No, it wasn't really good.

TB: That was BAD, when I pooped in my pants.

Me: (omgINeverSaidBad) Welllll, it wasn't really *BAD,* it just wasn't...great.

TB: I'M VERY SORRY I POOPED IN MY PANTS, MOMMY!

Me: [Insert your own witty ending here because I'm all balled up in the corner, rocking back and forth, baaaaaaack and forth.]

That Shit About Your Heart Walking Around Outside Your Body After You Have A Kid Is True. Or, Why I Want To Cry About A Game Of Freeze Tag.

"Unfreeze me!!" cried her cousin.

She came barrel-assing around the car, running to get to him, both arms extended. She collided with him, hands to tender tummy, and unfroze him--he stepped backwards, scowled and scolded.

"NOT LIKE THAT! THAT HURT!" and then he turned and walked away from her.

While she stood, frozen for real, the look on her face--heartbreak.

I watched from the porch, where my BIL and I were waiting for the bus to come, watching our kids work shit out. But that look of heartbreak...

It broke my heart.

I put myself in her place. Running, exhilarated, playing big-kid games, rounding the corner, excited to team with her cousin, against her little brother. Thinking she was doing something good, something right. Only to be met with disapproval, reproach. The confusion, the shame, it froze her solid. Even though the freeze tag was over.

***

She is getting bigger. She takes a bus to school. She dresses herself. She does homework. She opens her snack box by herself. She puts her pencil case in her cubby. She picks up her room and makes her bed. She keeps her library book on her self, like the teacher told her. She practices writing and counting.

For her, though, the challenges are mostly emotional. Her struggle isn't writing the numbers, it's withstanding the immediate and overwhelming frustration she feels if she can't do it perfectly the first or second time. The frustration is fast and furious, sometimes leading to impulsive and destructive acting out. Her struggle is in taking correction, trying it another way, listening and following suggestions. Keeping calm enough to listen and reason when she's upset.

When she was little (you may recall,) it was impossible for her to hold in the pushes and the bopping other kids on the head in group activities. When she got a little older, I learned more about her.She started to say to other kids, "You're standing too close to me!"  So we learned that her comfortable zone for personal space is almost twice the size of what would be considered average.

But now, as she gets bigger still, she's been trying. Really hard. Our behavior charts are about kindness, responsibility, and persevering calmly while doing something frustrating. She's been collecting "smiles" on her chart and feeling pride when she completes things that are hard to do with calm perserverance.

Back on the driveway, I watched her eyes well up with tears and my heart hurt. I helped them through it, giving each their lines to say. The Nephew gave her a half-hearted hug and I watched her try to discreetly wipe her eyes.

And then, before I could talk it through with her, the bus came.

She was quiet as we walked across the street. She climbed onto the bus, into the seat, and looked out the window. She raised a hand and gave a sad, little, wave. The bus pulled away and took my heart with it.

The incident has been forgotten, I'm sure. She will have shaken it off, distracted by the business of kindergarten. She gets to go to the Treasure Chest today to pick a prize. Tonight, the whole family is coming to sing Happy Birthday to her brother. There will be a couple small gifts for her, too, I'm sure.

The rejection that she felt this morning is probably already long gone for her. Yet, I am at home, with that persistent, vague, uneasy feeling of something nagging at the back of my mind.

Then I remember. That face. The quick swipe of the back of her hand across her eyes. Her sad little wave.

The breeze rattles through the hole in the middle of my chest.

I can't wait until my heart gets back.

 

Just Say Yes.

Once, when I was in a clinical supervision meeting with a bunch of other mental health professionals with whom I worked, I rolled them in the aisles with a joke I made about a theoretical support group for adults with social skills deficits. The joke wasn't about having a support group, because, there's no joke there. Living as an adult with issues that affect your ability to make or sustain relationships is trying and difficult and there are lots of things for these folks to overcome. In case you don't have a lot of first-hand experience, here's a little, tiny bit of background (so you can understand my joke, yo.)

Children and adults who have difficulty with social skills are often "their own worst enemies," when it comes to the finer points of dealing with others. They are frequently ridgid thinkers, often inflexible and have difficulty changing their minds enough to make (sometimes even basic) compromise possible. So, it can be challenging for them to establish and maintain intimate relationships as they get older. Successful, fully functioning adults often enter therapy for something unrelated, and find themselves diagnosed with these deficts, which then explains lots of things about their pasts.

So, (yep. That was all background for one joke. I'm baaaAAAAaaaaack.) SOOO one of the psychologists said, only half in jest, "You know, we should start a dating service."

And my joke was that I thought we should also get them t-shirts made, emblazoned with the big, bold, logo:

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JUST SAY YES.

 

~~~~~~~~~

A while back, Liz from Mom-101, wrote a post about an unironic argument about lollipops. (LONG LIVE THE INTERNET!!) The post itself was fun and funny. But, as is the way of Liz's posts, it also percolated in me and made me think. This time, it was a kind of passing comment she made in the post which, in part, shaped the direction of the conversation in the comments. As I read through the comments, I found a community of parents who said that they often default to "No." I do it, too. And as parents, there are lots of reasons for it. Some nos are necessary, having to do with safety, security or punctuality. If I'm being completely honest, though, a lot of the nos I have for my children could be yeses, if only.

If only:

I could get the living room picked up first.

I hadn't just picked up the living room.

They weren't already dressed in regular clothes.

I wasn't in the middle of making breakfast/lunch/dinner.

It wasn't so cold/warm/wet/sunny outside.

I didn't want to look at my twitter feed/facebook/email on my phone.

It wasn't so messy.

It wasn't so early/late.

They could ask without whining.

I would just slow down and let them 'help' me.

These aren't earthshattering news flashes. It's not an alien concept, I know, you can most likely relate. I'm trying not to judge myself harshly. I don't find guilt ("mommy-type" or otherwise) to be very productive. But when I examine the whens and whys of my nos, the common theme generally boils down to one thing:

My own anxiety.

So, it's not a social skill deficit, but my own anxiety that makes me rigid, inflexible and unable to change my mind. Anxiety makes me say no without really considering. 

After all, I have a lot to do. All parents do. It doesn't matter if you are a mom or dad, or if you work from home, outside the home, stay at home, whatever. Taking care of other human beings is a lot of work. So, when I'm making breakfast and trying to unload the dishwasher and make my tea (FFS,) and get the snack for my daughter's backpack and get people's clothes on and their teeth brushed, all to the tune of the two kids whining and bickering in the other room, when my son rockets into the kitchen and head-butts me in the hip, while sucking his thumb and holding his wubby, and mumbles, "Hode me, Mommy," it's all I can do not to push him down and step over him to get to the refrigerator. So anxious am I to get us all out the door on time, to hit my caffeine quota, to put just onnnnne more load of laundry in the washer. As it is, I offer a sympathetic, "I can't, right now, baby, I'm _________," as I twist by, sidestepping him, continuing on to the next item on my to-do list.

Think about that for a couple seconds.

When I think about it, what I'm left with is this: I'm so busy and anxious about the job of taking care of them that I'm missing opportunities to actually care for them. To show them love and care and comfort. To stop my spinning and doing and fixing and making and picking up toys and clothes long enough to pick up an actual, real life child who is asking me to. To show them what is really true, they are more important than the laundry, than the dishes in the dishwasher, than even my tea.

These days of chocolate-smeared hands gripping clean pants are fleeting. Of course we all know this to our bones but it's so easily forgotten in the crush of chores to be done. There will come a day, too soon, where there will be no more requests to be held. Laundry, on the other hand? Not so fleeting. This is my kids' childhood. It's happening right this very second. They only get one and it's now and the clock is ticking.

And so, this is what I'm doing.

Every time I want to say no, I'm going to pause, take a deep breath, count to five and then answer. I'm going to try to say more yeses. Sometimes, of course, there will be nos. I'm not talking about letting my kids run naked outside. I'm not swapping out my brain for another brain. But, really. The laundry isn't going anywhere, while the child is slowly receding from my kids, a little bit each day. Soon there will be none left.

(So, I'm also going to, without fail, pick up a child who asks.)

In an instant, this time is going to live only in memories and, well, most of the great memories come from the times we say yes. The times when we're brave enough, flexible enough and compromising enough to say yes. Yes to the mess, yes to the ice cream before dinner, yes to the "help" offered with the baking, yes to the playing in the rain, yes to painting on the driveway and yes to after-lunch autumn leaf collecting.

What I don't want to have to remember is loads of moments like this:

Nimbly sidestepping an affection-seeking boy because I needed to get to the fridge to fill his water bottle.

 

Friday Night Dinner

As a lot of you know, I host my MIL for dinner every Friday night. The tradition started when TLNG would not allow her super-sweet grandmother to hold her without screaming and we decided to get together once a week to [systematically desensitize my kid] allow for some bonding time. Then, my dad moved here and scored an invite as well. So, it's our regular thing. I usually make some kind of pasta dish, a salad, maybe some bread and a nice dessert.

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you see the oft-posted photos on Friday and a [couple] ton of people have asked me for recipes, etc. So, here is my first Friday Night Dinner post. I'm cracking myself up because, OMG, I couldn't be a WORSE food photographer, nor a more INCONSISTENT one. The photos I have are patchy, at absolute best. (Also, I plate in the kitchen and it would look a little *odd* to my MIL if I whipped out my phone for a quick photo of her plate before handing it to her, so.)

But, we shall continue on, undeterred. Well, I will continue on, undeterred. You may just click the hell on out. I wouldn't hold it against you.

ANYWAY.

Yesterday, I made Rigatoni with Artichokes ,Olives and Lemon, Green salad with Mustard Walnut Vinaigrette and Chocolate Nutella Icebox Cake.

For the Rigatoni, I don't use a recipe. It's pretty simple. But here, I took photos. Because I'm silly.

Rigatoni with Artichokes, Olives & Lemon

 

The pasta in this picture looks like it's going to slide out of the frame.

 

Ingredients:

1lb Short Pasta
3TBS-1/4c Olive Oil &/or butter (I use Earth Balance but we'll call it butter)
2 Cans Artichoke hearts
2 Cans black olives
Assload of garlic, chopped (I use 6-7 cloves but we all love garlic.)
Juice of 1 lemon
1/4 c shredded/grated parmesan (optional)
Salt & Pepper to taste

Instructions

1) Boil water for pasta. In the meantime, chop artichokes, olives & garlic. When water boils, cook pasta. (As if you'd forget that part.)

 

These artichokes are so emo with that lighting.

 

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Olives. Chopped. OMG, Food Network, why haven't you called me yet?!

 

2) Heat oil and butter in the pan and saute garlic for 1-2 minutes, being careful not to burn it. Toss in the moody artichokes and the olives and stir well, just to warm through. Add 1/2 the lemon juice, salt & pepper and taste. Adjust seasonings and add the rest of lemon juice if desired (keep in mind, the lemon juice doesn't taste quite as strong when it's tossed with the pasta, but I tend to prefer stronger tastes, so you should try it first and add more if you like.) Cover pan to keep warm.

3) Reserve some pasta cooking water and drain pasta. Put sauce over pasta, using a rubber scraper to get all of the oil and garlic and lemon. Add cheese to taste & stir well. Add pasta water in 1TBS measures, if needed.

Here was the salad:

 

Nothing to it, really, but it's the only picture I actually LIKE, so.

 

The dessert was a Chocolate Nutella Icebox Cake. It came from the blog Apron Strings. I substituted mascarpone for the cream cheese because I like it better. I followed the instructions but I'll tell you that I may have overwhipped my cream (or maybe the mascarpone doesn't have as much moisture, although I doubt that) because despite adequate time in the freezer and the fridge, it still had a semi-crispy consistency.

But let's not front.

 

No one was complaining.

 

There was one [tiny] piece that was leftover that [I inhaled] sampled the following day and it had softened a little. I don't think I put enough cream in the layers and/or maybe whipped too long. Next time I make it, I'll do it the night before and just leave it in the fridge.

 

Not as pretty but pretty damn tasty.

 

Fat. And Skinny.

I went to pick them up from the gym's kids' club and my daughter looked at me, smiled, and out of the blue said to me, "I want to be fat, Mom, not skinny.*" At the sound of that sentence, my head spun and I looked at her and she had the nervous grin she gets when she's testing the waters, gauging reactions.

My heart started thumping. She has never, ever heard those two words uttered in our home. Never. Of this, I am entirely sure. Having made a conscious choice, I don't make comments, critical or otherwise, about my body or my looks or my weight--to her or others, in or out of her earshot, since becoming a mother to a daughter.

"Where did you hear that? Who said those words?" I asked, none too gently.

Sensing my intensity and upset, she froze, unsure.

I'm not naive enough to think this was never going to happen. I'm not even naive enough to think I had until middle school for it, as steeped as we are in this female-body-critiquing culture. A culture in which we feel free to assess, discuss, analyze women's bodies, their weight, their shape. A culture in which women casually and openly castigate themselves and their bodies in the presence of their impressionable children (both boys and girls,) passing to them the mantle, unconsciously, modeling the expectation and the behavior and the language.

Fat. And skinny.

*****

When I was a girl, my mom was fat. I knew this not because she looked appreciably different from the moms of my friends, not because she was disabled in any way by her size, not because other kids made fun of her or picked on me because of her.

I knew she was fat because she told me she was.

Consistently, overtly, expressly, regularly.

Not only was the messaging that she was fat, overweight, heavy, but that she was different and unsightly and embarrassing to me. I remember the sharp spike of fear, bewilderment and guilt I felt when she'd accuse me of being embarrassed to be seen with her because of her weight. I wasn't. I told that last to my therapist once and she replied, "Weren't you?" It was her way of asking me to think past a reflexive statement, perhaps a defense.

So I gave it some real thought.

And no, I really wasn't embarrassed. That had been my mother's projection. I didn't see her the way she saw herself. Even now, when I look at pictures of her from that time, she was surprisingly groovy in the seventies, with her frosted hair and her white polyester and her big glasses. She had maybe an extra 30lbs. That's it. And although she would become heavier through the years and end up morbidly obese (and truly different looking than the moms of my friends) when I was a kid, I only knew what she told me.

As confusing as it was.

****

Back in the gym, I struggled to cool down. Reeling in the tangled lines of the still-intense past and the dreaded worst-case-scenario futures, I forced myself to just be present in the moment with my 5 year old daughter, who just heard some words for the first time and was trying them out. (*Because if she's telling me she wants to be fat and not skinny, I'm thinking she may not totally understand the finer points.)

So I changed the subject and we walked to the car. When we were underway and both facing forward, I asked, "Do you know what 'fat' means? Do you know what it means to be fat?"

And her answer was, "It's not a nice thing to say about someone. A girl called someone it at recess and the teacher told us all it wasn't a nice word to say."

She had no idea.

So, we had a talk. A long talk about words and how they can have more than one or even two meanings. A talk about body sizes and shapes. About differences. About how people are built, bigger and smaller, and how we eat and why we exercise, and brush our teeth and take baths and how people look different on the outside but everyone has feelings on the inside. And we talked a little about the world.

And I had to tell my sweet girl that there are people in this world who think that if a person is 'fat', she's not smart or healthy or worthy of love. There are people in this world who call themselves 'fat', condemning themselves, in their heads or out loud.

And there are people in this world who call others 'fat', as a taunt. As a way to say, "You're different from us, you're not good enough."

Some of them are 5 years old, on a kindergarten playground.

As confusing as that is.

Yummy Quinoa Salad

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram it's no news to you that I have been on a whole food kick.The idea first came to me from my bestie Lori, who after a weekend of [Truly Whorish Chocolate Processed Carb and Fattttttttty Food Debauchery] over-indulgence decided that she needed a routine "Whole Foods Cleanse." It was a new concept to me, kind of, and I was intrigued. I am SO not an expert but what I took away from our conversation was the willingness to try a whole food experiment that consisted of: Smoothie in the morning, big salad for lunch or dinner, grain & veggie dish for lunch or dinner. No processed, refined food and no added sugar.

I didn't quit caffeine (black tea) because I wanted a cleanse, not a homicide charge.

I am happy to talk about this more in-depth if it's something that [doesn't bore you to tears] you want to discuss. After an initial adjustment, I found it to be not as difficult as I'd envisioned but I should add these caveats: I haven't eaten meat in almost 20 years. I also had recently cut out lots of dairy from my diet, so, it wasn't a toooooootal departure from the kinds of foods I eat anyway. By FAR, the biggest issue for me is added sugar and refined flour. I am surely addicted to sugar (chocolate, really) and pastas, Italian breads, pastries etc. And when I get going, I'm like a goldfish or a Cocker Spaniel. Or a carp. You know what I'm saying right?

Anyway.

The cleanse was designed to sort of [put me into rapid chocolate/sugar withdrawls] reset my eating. I found that I like it, overall, and have made some flexible but longer term changes. There are a few things I find helpful when eating this way. One of them is batch cooking. I make a batch of one or two grains and keep my fridge stocked for putting together meals with the quickness. I regularly make quinoa, farro (unprocessed wheat) and brown rice.

One of my favorite things to eat is this quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) salad.

It's simple if you batch cook, it's basically just building it.

Here's how I make it: (P.S. I don't even need all these pictures because basically? It's just LAYERING A SALAD but I like pictures with food posts and I took them, so HERE THEY ARE YOU'RE WELCOME.)

I measure out 1/2 -3/4 cup of quinoa. This is 3/4 of a cup because I was pretty hungry.

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I also open a couple cans of beans and keep them in the fridge for use in lots of things. Here I scooped about 1/2 c of black beans on top of the quinoa.

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Grape tomatoes. Obviously. See? CRAZY TO HAVE THESE PICTURES! HO, HEY THERE! WE ARE TOMATOES!

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I didn't get an action photo of me grating the carrot. (You: thankthesweetbabyjesus.) It was a little carrot and I prefer them grated so there aren't some random super crunchy hard carrot chunks but if you want to get right to the eating, you don't need to slice the tomatoes or grate the carrots like my finicky, fancy ass.

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I seed the cucumber. SEEEE?!

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Avocaaaaaaaaahdo. I love it so much. This is 1/4 of an avocado. Okay, it's really more like 1/3 of an avocado. But whatever.

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I also love cilantro. I'd like to tear up my whole lawn and replant the front yard with cilantro and my back yard with basil. I rip off a handful, run it under water, squeeze it in a paper towel, chop it up and throw it on. Everything.

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When I think about it, I'll make a simple dressing for these kinds of salads and keep it in a jelly jar in my fridge. I was all out but I put 1 tsp olive oil and about 1 TBS lemon juice, salt and peper. I enjoy the tangy lemon, the creamy avocado and the zippy cilantro. I ENJOY IT VERY MUCH.

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This picture isn't as artful as the one I took the day before on Instagram.

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I mix it all up with a spoon and then just shovel it into my mouth hole with that same spoon. Totally yummy.

Enjoy!

 

Part Of Me Just Wanted To See If I Could Still Log In.

I've been thinking of coming back to blogging. In truth, even though I haven't blogged for ALMOST A YEAR (OMG) I still think of myself a blogger. Really, I suppose, I'm more of a Twitterer these days. I can whittle most blog post topics down to a cool 140. Or 280. (Who am I kidding? You know me, right? 420.) I love the immediacy of Twitter and the feedback, conversation-style, real time interaction but I find myself *thinking* in blog posts. Wanting to share with you. Tell you things. I haven't been reading, though, or commenting much on your blogs for the past year (OMG) and so it feels, I don't know the right word, disingenuous? Maybe? To write here and expect you to read and comment. Not that I do.

I don't know.

I'm still crazy. I suppose there's no hiding that.

I miss it, though. Sharing and telling you things. Gazing at my [fuzzy] spectacular navel.

In the last year, I've gone back to the gym in earnest and lost about 40 pounds. My husband got a new job and went back to school (again.) My son fell and got stitches, turned 2 (and is about to turn 3) and has been [almost entirely] potty trained. My daughter finished preschool, turned 5, went to pony camp and started Kindergarten.

So, what's new with you?