License To Love

How To Be a Crappy Mother Part I

Morning

Stay up really late reading a book about a woman in medical school. Try to, but don’t pull yourself away from it, because you have gotten it in your mind that you, too, want to go to medical school. Read and read until your eyes drip tears of exhaustion. Crawl into bed with your children. Program ‘911’ into the instant dial function of your portable telephone and nestle it next to your ribs, in case someone breaks in and you have time to hit only one number. Your husband, the lucky duck, is out of town on business and staying (hopefully) alone in a hotel very far away. Go to sleep and dream about vampires. Wake up to the sound of crying. It is the baby: let him nurse you dry. Notice the deflated shape your breast takes as it lays across the mattress. Go back to sleep. Roll over and accidentally pull down the twin fitted sheet that you have nailed over the window, as you have been too busy to repair the curtain rod that fell down last month. Go to sleep wrapped in the sheet. Start to wheeze because the cat, to which you are allergic, slept on the sheet when it fell down the day before, but don’t take your inhaler because the medicine keeps you awake. Wake up again to the sound of crying in another room. Feel around in the dark for the bodies left in your bed. Touch the five-year-old’s long leg. Don’t find the three-year-old. Think: she is abducted! Panic. Change your mind when you hear her crying from the other room. Peek out the window to see if it is light yet. Squint as the street light directly across the street drills into your eyeball, causing you to hiss like a witch and recoil in pain. Note that it is not yet light, yet your neighbor, the bakery guy, has already left for work. Estimate that it is somewhere between five-thirty and six a.m. Based on these few facts, use your diamond-cut parental logic to correctly guess that the child is crying because she has blown out her night diaper, as she had a glass of cider before bed and has a bladder capacity which can’t be contained in one pull-up. Kick the dog off the bed, call it a nasty name, then trip over it in the dark as you stumble to the children’s bedroom.

 You did not close their curtains last night – and the same brutal street light that made you spit and cower shaves the warmth from this room too. Find your daughter sitting on the floor in an angled swath of ghostly white. See that she is marinating in a pool of pee, her footie pajamas half off, yet twisted and inside out enough to render her as helpless as if she wore a fuzzy, size four - T straight jacket with a Winnie the Pooh over the left breast. Note the eviscerated night diaper oozing from under her buttocks.

Croon to her. Ask her why she didn’t just call out to you instead of trying to take those dern complex jammies off by herself. Suck air through your teeth when says she has been calling you for a long time.

Change the child. Sop up the pee on the floor with your husband’s favorite bath towel. Pray that the child was not sufficiently stimulated to be interested in really getting up. When she rubs her eyes and says, “Mommy, I’m sleepy,” give yourself a mental high five and put the child down in her own bed. 

 Don’t dare wake the other children left in your bed, but instead crawl over them into your drafty sliver of space. Fling the cat off the bed, accidentally landing it on the dog. When the dog leaps up, thrilled to have actually touched the cat, it attempts to chase it. Scream silently when the cat rebounds onto you, leaving ten holes in your chest you could insert Lite-Brite pegs into.  Fling the cat off the bed again, this time at the door, hoping it will lead the dog downstairs and temporarily out of your life. Forget that the baby gate is up and the dog cannot go downstairs. Say “Spit on a shingle” when the cat flees by hurdling the gate, and the stimulated dog has no recourse but to go to your now sleeping three-year-old and bark several times directly into her face. The child says, “Mommy? I can’t sleep.” Note: it is five thirty-seven. 

 Play “quietly” with the three-year-old in her room. Beseech her repeatedly to use her inside voice so you don’t wake the baby. Crawl into her bed with her and read stories, thinking everything is going well until you wake up from the sound of your own snoring amplified inside the Little Golden Book covering your face to find the child is gone. Groan loudly when you hear her in your room shaking her tambourine and shouting the same, “Stick out my wiener, stick out my wiener!” she heard the boy next door chanting two days before. Assume correctly that she is standing on the bed dancing directly over the baby and the five-year-old.

Count one, two, three, four….and on five bring your hands up like a conductor and cue in the baby’s cries. Get up for good. Unzip the five-year-old’s footie pajamas and tell her to go to the bathroom and empty her bladder. Dress the younger two, while they play pinball with their bodies by bumping into or bouncing off of everything three-dimensional. At six-fifteen, take them downstairs for breakfast because, even though you are exhausted, the onus is on you.

 Make frozen waffles because they are easy, even though the children ask for something else. Add sliced bananas to their plates so you can at least say, no matter what awful things happen between you that day,  that you offered them fresh fruit. Let the baby transfer all of the food in the dog’s bowl to its water dish, because he is happy doing it and, for three minutes, not hanging off your kneecaps. Occasionally fish hard chunks of kibble out of his bow-shaped mouth, letting him chew on them first because he is teething. Think: how am I going to fill thirteen and a half hours with three children devoid of reasoning skills, twenty-nine degree weather, and ten dollars?

Decide to take them to church because the day before the three-year-old asked, “What is church?” and because church is free. Remember the few times in your single days when you went to church – it was a Unitarian Universalist one which offered a loose Pagan ceremony culminating in a barefoot group dance down the aisles with percussion instruments and pan pipes. Look up “Churches” in the yellow pages and find a Unitarian church not too far away. Without yelling at the children or the dog, who you find eating the crotch out of your only pair of stockings, manage to get everyone ready. Notice how, in their winter clothes, your children look like blood-stuffed ticks. Pack them, as they whine about being too hot, into the twelve-year-old wreck of a Saab with which your husband is having an affair. Wonder if he is up yet and reading the paper in a quiet, clean hotel bed on other side of the country.

 Find the church and park in the parking lot, which in the pouring rain looks impossibly far away from the church door. Carry the two younger children, who are now crying because the freezing rain is whipping them in the face, into the church, dragging the hem of your long velvet skirt in mud puddles as you go. Ignore the five-year-old who is complaining because she is convinced that you love the other children more because they got carried. Endure the service, which the children criticize and yell through, then go to the coffee hour in the basement. Look around for people who don’t have that glazed, New Testamentesque appearance. Get nervous when you notice that everyone is white and older than you, and the L.L. Bean denim jumper/hunter green turtleneck factor is too high for your comfort. Try to leave, and get immediately cornered by a pushy woman in one such jumper whom you fear is a designated ‘greeter’ after she immediately begins asking you questions about yourself. Act distracted and crane your neck around rudely, trying to locate your children. Spot the three-year-old across the room taking one bite out of a cookie then putting it back on the plate at the food table she is just tall enough to reach. Watch her take four bites out of four more cookies and put them all back before you can make it through the crowd to her. Corral the children and force them out of the church, which they now don’t want to leave, and back into the car. Insert the key into the wretched Saab. For good measure, since you are in the church parking lot, pray that the car will start. When it doesn’t start, wipe the rain from your dripping eyebrows and curse. Turn the key and accept the dull ‘click’ that follows to be punishment for consistently making life hell for that kid, Jeffery, on the school bus in fifth grade. Admit that you deserved it at some point, it might as well be now. Pop the hood and get out. Suck on the rain dripping off of your lips and stare into the engine like you know what you are looking for. Jiggle the battery connectors and see a spark. Hear the children whining from inside the car. While you sit back into the car, note that a Range Rover, a Suburban and two Volvo wagons pass by in the parking lot driven by blank, faceless drivers. Think, ‘Yuppie flipping fishbreath!” at them for not stopping to help, and marvel at this particular combination of almost-curses you have vowed to use ever since the five-year-old has asked you to stop being so foul.

 Try to start the car. Sense a slight difference in the way the car doesn’t start and guess that you are on the right track. Get in and out of the car eight more times, jiggling the battery cables and listening to the car almost start before it finally does. Drive away in pouring, freezing rain, blasting whatever you can on the radio, which is Hootie and the Blowfish, to drown out the sound of angry discourse between the three-year-old and the five-year-old in the back seat. It's time to go home.

 See How To Be a Crappy Mother Part II

Trapped! One Woman's Journey To Hell and Back

Anyone will tell you: this is not supposed to happen.  Hospital machines don't malfunction, and no one but a direct descendant of Joseph Mengele would ever design a machine that you lie inside like a corn dog that offers no escape hatch in case of malfunction.

Nobody likes an MRI machine. It is not natural to be happy, or even okay with being in a space that encloses you all all sides. In fact, it is so unnatural that they must mask your senses with things like fans blowing on your face, and big fat headphones playing Jimmy Buffet, or worse -- Nickelback--  to help you think you are somewhere else for 45 minutes. Some people even take drugs (given to them by doctors) in order to manage their time in one of those curvy, coffin shaped copy machines.   I should have. 

I showed up on a windy Friday night to have an MRI of my neck.  Since I was in eye-crossing pain, I had nothing better to do that evening.  I sat in the faux Tuscan waiting room and watched the path of Tropical storm Fay beat a path to my city's doorstep on a television that was nicer than the one at my house.  Masochistic weather reporters were getting whipped by the wind and rain, saying things like, "Be careful!"  "It may be more dangerous than it looks," and "Anything can happen," and I should have heeded their warnings.

The heavy, lead-encased wooden door creaked open and Lurch's mother, with an open folder in her hands, called my name.

She asked me to strip naked, even though she would be taking films of my neck, which is located very high up on my body. I  think this was her way of kicking up her Friday night, because when I came out in a little speckled gown, knock-kneed and shivering, she smirked behind her folder.

She asked me some questions very slowly, as if she thought I was mentally impaired, or she herself were in some sort of special work program.  She asked questions about numbness, tingling, movement, and accidents, and she explained how things would go, while I stood shivering with my buttocks hanging out of the back of the gown for no real reason, since, again, she was about to take pictures of my neck.

"First, we are going to take some images of you.  It is important to not breathe or swallow during the cycles, as the machine is very sensitive.  Then, after we do about a half hour, I'm going to inject some radioactive dye into your body and we'll take some more images.  You don't have any kidney disease, do you, because this dye is known to cause death in people with certain types of kidney problems."

My chilly shivering turned to trembles of fear.

"Hop right up," she said as she patted a long tray with a sheet on it. Within 45 seconds she had expertly locked my neck in a plastic and foam neck holder with what I think were Rollerblade lock mechanisms, and I was unable to move my head at all.  She also strapped my arms to my sides so, you guessed it, I wouldn't claw my way out of the tube, which is what I was already thinking of doing. She then stuffed foam ear plugs into my ears and shoved a turkey baster bulb up into one of my clenched fists.  Once the earplugs had expanded in my ear canals and I couldn't hear anything, she started giving me instructions.

"Squeeze the bulb if you need to come out at any point during the procedure."

"What?"

"The test takes about an hour."

"What?"

The woman left the room and I started to hear mechanical noises. My buttocks clenched as the tray slid slowly into the coffin tube.  I kept my eyes closed until the tray stopped moving, then took a peek.

My face was so close to the top end of the coffin tube that if I had one more inch of tongue, I could have licked it. My own breath on my hot face made me grateful that I had brushed my teeth.  Then a fan started blowing fresh air against my face.

The machine started to buzz and click and hum, and I closed my eyes and began to enact my MRI Sanity Plan  -- I started visualizing my entire life in detail, from the first moment I could remember.  The magnetic pull of the machine started to do strange things to the images I saw underneath my eyelids.  I was all the way into my first day of Kindergarten, where I was smelling my long, brand new cable knee socks and Buster Brown shoes, when the humming stopped and started and stopped again.  I opened my eyes and saw that it was completely dark in the windowless room. 

"Surely, she'll come for me,"  I thought.  I couldn't hear anything because of the earplugs, and I couldn't move my arms to unstrap my neck and slide myself out.

The only sound I heard was the ringing in my own ears and after a few moments, my heart pounding in my chest.  I started to count my heartbeats.  After about three hundred heartbeats, the woman came back in and shouted something at me that I couldn't hear.  She gave me a thumbs up and an "OK" sign, then left again.

The lights flickered, then went out, then flickered. The machine began to hum and vibrate, then....nothing. 

I waited.

I waited.

I waited, thinking, "No one would leave someone stuck in an MRI machine.  Right?"  My heartbeat answered me.  I began to squeeze the turkey baster bulb over and over.

The woman came back in and shrieked, "Look,  I'm rebooting the whole system.  If we stop now, we'll lose everything and you'll have to come back again.  Can you hang in there five more minutes?"

I shrieked back, "YES!" and closed my eyes to wait.  I will not freak out I will not freak out I will not freak out I will not freak out, and when I did not, I realized that I wasn't in danger and it wasn't so bad.  All it took was a little mental control to stay put --simply stay put and not move -- which brought me to one of my favorite child-rearing themes -- raising children who have self--discipline.

How do we raise children who are able to discipline themselves, to put their needs before their desires and become the kind of adults who don't freak out?

We make them wait for rewards.  We let natural consequences happen - -a far better teacher than a nagging mother or father.  We model self discipline by saying aloud things like, "I'm really going to enjoy reading my book once I've finished the dishes."  We don't bail them out unless they really need a hand, preferring instead to let them extricate themselves out of little pickles they get into during the course of growing up.

I struggle with self-discipline.  I really do.  Sometimes I call it "ADD," sometimes I call it "overwork," or "fatigue," and sometimes I call it "laziness." Of all my faults, lack of self-discipline may be my worst one. I struggle, okay, suck at naturally modeling it for my children.  I have to fake it much of the time, and do things that aren't natural for me, like finish one book before I start another, or worse -- keep from cussing when I get angry. Strangely, this actually makes me more self-disciplined.  Even at my "advanced" age, I can work to improve it in myself, and strive to be a better example.  This is so important.  I'll say it again: your children are your mirror.  What you do, they will copy.

I waited patiently without moving in that MRI machine for 30 more minutes, while the technician worked to reboot the system.  It never did work, and I never did freak out.  I waited calmly and thought about my life.  Somewhere around my 9th grade dance, where I slow danced with a tall, smooth Senior to a Lionel Richie song, the woman and another tech manually slid me out from the machine, and I had to go back another day.  But I had a cool story about keeping my cool when I went home that night, even though my neck still hurt and I had a pulled muscle from the uncontrollable buttock clenching.

Child Torture in the Spirit of Fun!

Two of our five kids are all about fun.  They learn differently than the rest of our kids. They retain information when they are having fun, not when they are promised fun after the learning is over.  Although all kids enjoy learning when the activities are fun, there are some learners, probably kinesthetic ones, who learn best when you whip a beanbag at their heads for each wrong answer, or let them read while dangling upside down, putting their heads where their bottoms should go, and their feet straight up a wall.  These kids like being timed, they like drills, competition, and the challenge of a predictable event ( one extra M&M in their stack for each right answer, one M&M eaten by you, from their stack, while they watch, when they get a wrong answer) and so on.  You have to keep it light -- whipping a beanbag at someone can be done in the spirit of fun!

It is not surprising to know that these two children are also competitive is sports and both have been major contributors to several different teams.  Not only do they learn through playing, but they play when they are bored -- appreciating word games or puzzles or riddles on long car trips, "Quiz Nights" during supper, and races to see who gets done with unpleasant jobs the fastest, bestest, or with the mostest style. They are also the children who are the most sensitive to discipline.  A hard look of displeasure from us could reduce them to quiet tears, and time-outs were pointless -- the would just play.  If you took away everything, they would play with carpet fuzz, or threads, or their own eyelashes.  Aside from "hitting them where it hurts"  you could also hit them where it hurts by taking away their favorite activities. They care so much about doing the right thing that by the time each of them was ten, they almost self-corrected.  Along with the tackling, tickling, competition and beanbag whipping, they require a gentle tone of voice, quiet explanations sometimes days later, and a thoughtful disciplining of their puppy-like ways.

Parents often make the mistake of correcting the essence out of these learners, telling them to "smarten up," "pay attention," "focus,"  "stop messing around," "quit clowning, "sit still," and so on.  It is a shame to squash this playful spirit, and akin to trying to make a dog meow.  It is not in their nature.

Sure, you can force them to sit and study quietly, to "knock it off" and get the work done first, but that takes some of the joy away from their very nature, turning them, instead, into children who learn to view study and work as a terrible chore they will spend much of their time avoiding. It's hard to get into a good college or be an asset to any employer when you shut down at the first sign of work.

What you should do with these children is identify how they best learn and work, and help cultivate that in your home,

Work along side of them. Make it fun.  Dictate or list as little as possible:

• If we get done with this weeding in 20 minutes, we'll have time for a Slurpee.

• Balance on the exercise ball without your feet touching the floor once and recite the entire poem.  If you touch, you have to do it again.

• I'll bet you can't finish this bedroom in 20 minutes and still pass a "white glove test."

• Do your best Zebra/Gibbon/Ronald Reagan impression while we fold this laundry.

• I'll bet you can vacuum up more carpet fuzz than last Saturday, since the dog was in here twice as much as last week.

Now, to some children, specifically two others of ours, making them balance on a ball while reciting a poem isn't a challenge, it's a punishment, and whipping a beanbag at their heads is downright cruelty. Kids, even in the same family, need to be treated as individuals.

You have to know what floats your child's boat.

Rats!

We once had rats in our attic.  Living in a neighborhood surrounded by canals that lead to the ocean, this is not an uncommon experience, nor is it an indicator that we live in filth, although we actually do at times because we have a Labrador Retriever.  If you know that breed of dog, you know that it's not our fault. It's a filthy, filthy breed, what with the hair droppage, mouth leakage, and chronic yeasty ears that plague my hausfrau sensibilities enough to make me want give him away at times, even though I adore him.

This Labrador, although genetically tweaked to find animals in brush, hedges, fields and bodies of water, could not have cared less that we had a debauched bevy of rats partying like it was 1999 in our attic at all times of the day and night. He was of no help. I must also mention that it was one hundred and fifty degrees in the attic during the day, and we don't know how they didn't melt, and the perimeter of the property was patrolled by a busy Cairn Terrier, who cared very much that rats had invaded his land holding, and was hellbent on shaking each and every one of them, so we don't even know how they got there in the first place.  The terrier was humiliated, and confused by why he could smell them but not see them, so he barked constantly, racing from room to room at all hours of the day and night.

After a few sleepless nights of partying, whereby we could hear the rats hauling food away from our pantry and up to the attic, they turned up the Barry White and we could hear their little mattresses thumping.  It was time to do something.

My husband read about a wonderful concept of rat poison that, once ingested would cause the rats to experience an enormous thirst and race away from the house in search of water before they died under a bush somewhere off our property. We planted this rat poison around in strategic places and waited.

One day.

Two days.

It is possible that the malt liquor they may have been consuming reacted with the poison, because when they ate the poison, they never made it to water, but just fell over very quietly dead right there in the attic, without any time to call 911. We hadn't a clue that they had died.  We took the silence to mean that they had left in search of relief from the promised cotton mouth, and expired, as planned, without us having to see them, hopefully under the Stashewksy's back deck.  About five days later we suspected that our rattucide theories were faulty when we started to smell something mysterious and unpinnable, yet able to cause nausea among our entire household.

My husband and I took a couple of flashlights and bandannas and some rubber dish gloves, and headed up the the attic, expecting to have to flip a few rats into a plastic trash bag. But it was something else entirely.

It looked like Jonesville up there.  Tiny little bloated, mostly liquid rat carcasses were scattered in several places around the attic, in various states of decomposition. I dry-heaved until I hyperventilated, all the while thinking about how to get  liquid rat out of yards of fiberglass insulation.

What does this have to do with parenting, you ask?  Here's where I reminisce about the strange and  horrible things we parents do to our children, things we are sure will warp them, but actually end up turning them into something better than they would have been without the experience.

Our attic was so narrow in places that neither my husband nor I could wedge even our shoulders in to get to a few ample carcasses. 

"Hey, kids," my husband hollered down the attic hole. "Send up whoever is smallest. Get in long pants and long sleeves and bring a shovel."

"Aw no fair, she always gets to do the fun stuff!" the younger ones cried. The teenagers, suspecting what they had escaped, gratefully gathered the required items and shoved the very small child up the hole without saying a word, lest we remember that they were down there and possibly well-suited to scraping some carcass.

Up popped a delighted five-year old, with twinkling eyes,two missing teeth and big, fluffy pigtails, looking for the time of her life. She held a little shovel in her sticky fist, and said, "Here I am! What are we gonna do?"

We shot straight with her.

"There are dead rats in this attic.  Because they ate rat poison, and because it is so hot up there, their bodies are turning to jelly.  We are too big to reach some of them.  You have to crawl into the tiny corners and use this shovel to shovel the dead rats into this garbage bag.  If we can, we'll hold it for you.  We have to get them all the first time, and we won't ever do this again."

"Ew," was all she said, and then got to work, matter-of-factly, scooping up carcasses in the tight edges of the attic.  We hunted with the flashlight, pointed her toward them, lay on our stomachs and held the bag for her when we could reach, and cheered her on each time she bagged one.

This was a terrible thing to ask of anyone, let alone a pig-tailed princess who wore Little Mermaid panties and who, fifteen minutes before, was happily playing with her Polly Pocket dolls. It was very hot up there. The rats were liquefied and swollen and dripped when you scooped them. They smell was like nothing we had ever smelled before. The child worked like a full grown woman, doing a job most adults couldn't handle, and did it without a single complaint.

Here's why:

• We didn't let her hear us complain or even suspect we had a bad attitude
• We did the job as a team
• We shot straight with her about what needed to be done
• We kept the atmosphere positive and pleasant at all times
• We had a history of not nagging or complaining or criticizing the children when we asked them for help

Children take on the attitude of the adults around them.  In most cases, they will do whatever it is you are doing with the same attitude you exhibit, no matter what it is.

If you are overwhelmed with housework and begin to complain, guess what they will do next time they are faced with chores they are not in the mood for?

If your car breaks down on the side of the road, are you going to cuss and throw a tantrum, or play word games by the side of the road until help comes?  It depends on what you want your children to one day do when they are handed an inconvenience.

This matter-of-fact attitude works for trying new foods, unpleasant medical procedures, taking nasty medicine, and many other experiences that have the potential to reveal character.  You don't want to raise a weak, whiny brat. You want to raise a person who gets the job done, no matter how rotten of a job it is.

Remember that your child is your mirror.

Some time later, when the job was finished and we were heading down the attic ladder, the child turned to me, wet with sweat, and said,"Those rats ate poison?"

"Yes, dear heart, don't ever eat poison."

"I won't," she nodded solemnly.

Seven years later the child is a delight and remains happy and healthy and unmarred from the rat incident.  She still wants to be a vet.

About License To Love

In the movie Parenthood, Keanu Reeves' character says of parenting, "You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car - hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any #$%$@#$%%! be a father."

I've always wondered why the only thing required to show that we are ready to take a new baby home is proof of an infant car seat.

Wow, we're pregnant!
Could I possibly get any fatter?
Push! Arrrrrrrggghhhhhh!
Congratulations! You have a baby boy/baby girl/squalling red alien/milk-sucking parasite/lifelong obsession!

Then, the rest is up to us. No license, no training, no degree, no residency require to operate a child.

The physical stuff is the easy part.  Any roob can learn what a new baby needs, because largely, if you do something to it and it makes a loud noise, it's not the right thing, so you try something else until the critter stops turning purple from screaming, and your ear drums move back into your head.  Even as the child ages and requires different things, you can figure out it's physical needs fairly easily. Change it, bathe it, hold it, feed it, keep it appropriately warm or cool. Daycare workers with very little education can take care of the physical needs of a child.

It's the more complex stuff that, unless we come from very deliberately raised families, we know little to nothing about.

When it comes to capturing the hearts of our children -- teaching them how to stay even-keeled, logical, loving, and training their minds to be disciplined and turned toward goodness  -- that's where most of us  need some training.  This does not come naturally to a lot of us, certainly not to me.  It requires patience, wisdom, and a view of the big picture that we may not even have. By the way, I am not claiming to know much.  I am just claiming to know a little bit more each year than I did the year before.

The truth is: there is no license to be had that entitles us to love a child, because you can't license something that grows from within, that takes so much deliberation, and care, and wisdom, even though you can develop "parenting skills." Good parenting is not just a measure of skills that you can pick up in a magazine or class, although they can help.  Nor is it a measure of education, or even intelligence. It is a measure of wisdom.  An eighth grade dropout can be a better parent than an Ivy League Ph.D. 

Raising up a child right requires constant vigilance as to the state of the child's heart, and a willingness to go deeper into the finer points of parenting, such as discovering what lights your child's fire, and then supporting her in keeping it lit. All children are different, and siblings often have subtle differences in needs.

Is he more sensitive than his sister? If so, you need to be more gentle with jokes and teasing, or tease in a different way, or model gentle teasing so he can see it is okay.

Is she too serious and gets bogged down with her struggles instead of seeing the joy in life?  Then you need to model joy, and find a way to lead her down the path to it.

Or is she bent on playing all the time? If so, you recognize that she may learn best during play, and help her set some goals and work/play ratio guidelines, without simply nagging and ridiculing her to be someone who she isn't.

Is he shy? Then you need to know when to push him forward and when to recognize that the social thing he did just required herculean effort on his part.  You also need to recognize when you are coddling his shyness and not let it turn in to an excuse for bad behavior.

Does he like argumentation, debate and discourse?  He may have a natural instinct to ask "why" when you require something of him, without intending to be a brat.  As soon as you are sure he will do what you ask without questioning him, and he isn't challenging you, you may adapt your parenting to include after-the-fact discussions of "why" that his siblings may not even be interested in.

Parenting to keep the hearts of your children "simply" requires constant tweaking, assessment, reassessment, and for those of us who do it, prayer. You don't need to raise perfect children.
You don't need a soccer star, or valedictorian, or varsity quarterback, or even a child who goes on to college.  You just need to raise a child who is better than you, who more often than not, thinks about the impact of his actions on others, who inspires others, and who lives a life spreading love, not hate.

Easy, right?

A Real Pain in the Neck

Last week I experienced the most recent in a series of terribly painful  neck episodes, whereby I could not sleep without narcotics, drive a car safely, get up from a lying position without cradling my head, or carry on a civil conversation for the better part of a week.  When I get like this, I have an almost constant need to talk about my pain. See?

I was popping Darvocet whenever I didn't have to operate an automobile, alternately chuckling like a monkey and weeping during inferior television shows,  living with either an ice pack or heat pack on my neck at all times, and wishing my children would go away and ask somebody else the infinity + n number of questions they ask during the course of a day. If I could have moved fast enough, I may have even been led to kick the dog.

Darvocet is not my drug of choice.  My drug of choice is a fat bout of exercise, but you can't really exercise when simply waking up makes you want to cry. Due to biopsies taken from an endoscopy and colonoscopy the previous week that left vague  parts of my guts a little bit raw and bloody, I was only allowed to non-aspirin products, so it was Darvocet or nothing. (*I know -- it sounds like I am falling apart, but it's actually a long story and I have promised people who know me to never mention "gluten" in my blog, so I won't mention my own Adventures in Endoscopic Theater. Also, no one can ever write about getting scoped better than Dave Barry.)

But, back to the Darvocet. Darvocet reveals to me the house gnomes that  live in the darker corners of our home, and also lets me see music even better than I used to see it as a child.  Plus  I dream about famous people when I take  Darvocet, and the whole next day after one of those chalky little suckers, I feel like I am floating about an inch off of the floor. It also provides the added insight of letting me understand how the English language sounds to someone who does not speak it.

I must not take Darvocet unless someone else is home to help with the children.

So, for the first time in several years of putting up with it, I addressed the Neck Thing, partly because I don't at all like Darvocet, and partly because the pain was so intense that I was starting to think about whacking my own head and neck with an aluminum baseball bat, just to stop it from hurting. That made no sense and scared me into finally seeing to a doctor.

She walked into the exam room while I was sitting carefully in a chair with my head resting back on the counter. I made eye contact with her by grabbing my own hair and lifting my head into an erect position.

"Were you in an accident?"

"No.  It just does this about four times a year."

"How many?"

"Four or so.  Maybe more.  Sometimes less. " I shrugged. "I did a lot of Aikido, running, and jumping off of really big hills on my mountain bike.  I'm figuring this is my penance for having fun in my youth."

"You're still in your youth. This is not normal, you know. Did you drive yourself here?"

Then came a muscle relaxer which made Darvocet feel like Necco Wafers, the X-Rays and the adventure of a lifetime -- an event more exciting than 10th grade Band Camp, more adrenal-draining than an Immelmann loop, more claustrophobic than being buried alive in an avalanche, only colder -- getting stuck in a malfunctioning MRI machine.  Stay tuned for Trapped! One Woman's Journey to Hell and Back.

Blog Writing Course

Not that we don't have an excess of blogs out there, but I have revised my previously snobbish viewpoint about blogging, which was this: blogs are a pointless display of internet preening that may people would be better off walking away from, and should choose instead to invest their time in a good bible study, or perhaps some space-saving, closet hydroponic vegetable gardening.

I now think blogging is like government education to the Democrats -- everyone should suffer under one, I mean, everyone deserves one, and even if you've never blogged before, you can and should give it a try. On the palest end of the spectrum, it's interesting, and at the darkest, deepest end, it can become a nearly life-sucking obsession, but you don't have to let it get that far.  Temperance is as much of a virtue as patience.

If you would like a blog, but don't know what the heck to do to get one started -- trust me -- there's more to it than just writing it -- you might want to take this blog writing course. This eight week course is a  hands-on, simple way to learn about blogging, and even the most dense of doofi can get a healthy little blog going in just a few short weeks, as well as learn the finer points of blog promotion and social networking. It also gives you a built-in group of peers who will read your stuff and help you feel like you are not writing in a vacuum.

I'm not advertising this course for personal gain.  I took it and it helped me.  Look what a blogger I am!

It's Not My Fault

"It's Not My Fault" is a favorite escape application commonly used in various circles of buck-passers, especially government school administration employees and politicians.

It is also an essential tool for the chronically lily-livered, and an easy phrase for children to parrot -- if you let them get away with it even one time the phrase will be psychologically imprinted on their little souls like a cop-out tattoo, which they will then use forever in a variety of serious life situation.

"It's not my fault he's crying.  Joey threw the sand at my face first."

"It's not my fault!  That teacher is crazy and didn't tell me about the homework assignment."

"You didn't tell me to turn down the stove.  You just said to watch it. You're the one who ruined dinner."

"It wasn't my fault. He didn't tell me he had a gambling problem when we got married."

"Fat genes run in my family."

"I'm sorry.  It's school policy, not my rule."

It's not my fault. I don't like using it, and I don't like hearing it.

Sometimes I think it, though. I haven't posted for nearly two weeks, although I wanted to, and if I wanted to I could claim that it was not my fault.   Due to an error on Typepad's part, which involved them thinking that my account should be suspended, then suspending it, then apologizing for it and sending me emails saying my account was reinstated, and then not reinstating it, over and over again, I was locked out from posting for two weeks, which I suspect may have put a dent in my massive Google ranking.

I could have been writing and saving up posts, but I wasn't. I was busy muttercussing Typepad, writing them emails with an increasingly large number of "all caps" sentences, and eventually, researching other blogging platforms.  I didn't make the best of my time.

How do you grow bold kids who either take responsibility for their contributions to less than perfect life events or suck it up and fix "it," even though "it" really wasn't their fault?

You speak the truth. Make them apologize and ask forgiveness when they screw something up.  Don't make excuses for bad events in your own life.  Apologize and ask for forgiveness when you screw something up.

I'd like to say not posting for two weeks wasn't my fault, but it was. I was the one who signed up for Typepad.

The Starbucks Virus vs. the Idealist

I had some Starbucks today, which, as a rule, I tend to stay from unless I am in an airport, which I almost never am due to an active and profound terror of flying.  This terror, which to me is clearly rational and not at all vague, stems from a deep understanding of exactly what it would be like to get cavity searched, then locked up with a hundred strangers and a few snotty "air servers" and a possibly demented  or drunk or food-poisoned or aneurysm-prone pilot and hurling myself in a metal tube far too many feet above the earth to make it down safely if something went wrong. I know what this would be like. I know how the air would smell, I know the sounds the engines would make.  I know what it would feel like when the nose dips down and we start to plunge to the Earth where we should have been all along. I can see  the expressions on the faces of the people around me, and I believe I know the things that will go through our minds when we first understand that we are going to crash. I can picture my family members playing and replaying my last cell phone message, my daughters doing their own hair for their proms and my son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, being globally misunderstood for the rest of his life. 

Just to prove how absurd I am let me tell you this: my obscene, adventure-squelching fear of flying can't keep me from putting people I love on an airplane, such as my bifurcated children, who are hurled very far away in stranger-filled metal tubes to visit their father several times per year. You'd think, since it is so frightening to me, that I would want to keep my children from it, but I don't. Actually, I can't. They have to go, even when they cry and ask not to, so I sit in the airport with them, missing them in advance, sneaking a nuzzle of a thin little  neck,  squeezing a bony little shoulder, watching the airport light  play off of their perfect features, and trying to teach them my love of people watching to pass the anxiety-riddled time. Essentially, I am consumed with emotion and fake everything, clutching a hot Starbucks to try and take take my mind off the fact that I am putting my young children in a metal tube going in a direction that is away from me.

Let me make it perfectly clear: I don't, as a rule, consume Starbucks products.  For one thing, Starbucks coffee, when ingested by me, drives my heart to sing with such a feral syncopation that it makes me want to call a cardiologist. And second: Sarbucks is a virus. Starbucks, like many other massive retail businesses that selfishly repopulate themselves at the expense of small businesses around the world, is the economic equivalent of the Asian Carp.

Someone once thought the Asian Carp was a good idea. Someone, without foresight thought it would be beneficial to bring the Asian carp, a fish that can grow to 100 pounds and still eat 40 percent of its body weight in plankton per day, to catfish farms in the US to put a damper on the algae overgrowth.  What it did was put a damper on native fish species, becoming a plague of the North American tributaries, eventually  putting smaller fish out of business all over the continent. Sound familiar?

I did once give a Starbucks card to my father as a gift, as I thought it might help him pick up better chicks than one can find in  Eastern Pennsylvanian bars, but under nearly all other circumstances -- I can't abide a Starbucks. I don't want a cappi-frappi anything, and I don't want to pay $4.50 for something that put Ma and Pa's Coffee shop out of business and left Ma and Pa with nothing but days filled with the Game Show Network, SHARE food, and bus trips to the library.

Here is something else I'll reveal: It is hard to live as an idealist.  I'm all about yearning for things to be as they should be, not as they are, which makes it hard to embrace progress, technology, and "the moment."  I can't live in the moment, standing in line at Starbucks and forking over what could be tuition money for one of my children, when I could be having a cup of plain coffee in Lester's, the diner I used to go to before it changed to try and act more like Starbucks, or at home at the kitchen table with my own children, when they are with me.  I can't be blase about putting my children on a plane to visit their own father for nearly every day of every vacation, whether they want to or not. Constantly packing suitcases and saying goodbye to friends who can't include them in their summer or Christmas plans, travel during the holidays without their parents, and constant texting and phone calls when they are gone is not a good way to live. It's just not right. There is a lifelong burden that comes with living as an idealist, and living as a divorced idealist is a special kind of hell.  Things should always be better, people can always be better, I could always have have done better, and although I am no longer surprised when people don't do the best that they can, it still hurts to experience it.

Change does not always equal progress.  Someone once thought that expanding Starbucks past Seattle was a good idea.  Someone once brought a barrel of Asian Carp over on a boat. Someone one thought divorce was something kids could just "get over."

Guerrilla Homeschooling

If you are not careful, homeschoooling can be expensive.

It is easy to be lured by the latest piece of software that others are telling you will make a long-lasting difference in your child's education, the newest book that just happens to be on sale on Amazon.com or the "complete program" that will make your homeschooling life easier and prepare your child for an Ivy League college. Plus, that impressive homeschooling library looks so good when people come over.

Couple this with a common reduction in income -- most parents who stay home to homeschool are not generating a lot of income anyway-- and you can find your already tight purse strings stretched by a desire to buy much homeschooling " stuff." Be careful. Don't be a sheep.  It doesn't have to be this way.

Here is how to homeschooling the Guerrilla/Bare Bones way -- spending $100 or less per year per child.

What you need:

a library card
a way to get to the library
a sack to carry books home in
paper and pencils

Examples of how to do it:

Go to the library as often as you can. Check out books on whatever subjects interest you and your child. The library can also lend videos, music, books on tape, computer software, and even copies of art to hang on your walls for a time. Read books, ask lots of questions about what your child read.

Use the internet to look up a Freecycle group in your area and use Freecycle for school supplies, old electronics to take apart, and materials for crafts and projects. You could also go to Amblesideonline and use their entirely free curriculum, including copies of e-texts to supplement your homeschooling, or give you a guide to follow if you feel that you need a guide.

Check out books on birdwatching and then go watch birds.  Let your child draw pictures of the birds he sees, labeling the anatomy. Use this to fuel a study on anatomy, or ornithology, exploring it as far as your child is willing to go.  If he likes art, draw the birds in detail.  Let him draw many, then have relatives over for an art show.

Get as involved as the child wants to get with every subject he shows an interest in.  Often subjects act like springboards for other subjects.

Go to free concerts, free cultural events, and and free community lessons. You can often barter services for tuition for a local class. Ask local theater groups if you and your child can see a dress rehearsal for free in exchange for a written review. Although a review written by a child is likely to be worthless to a theater company, they will often support a child's interest in theater and say yes. Have the child write the review, and then send it  along with a thank you note to the theater company.

If your child is interested in computers, dig some out of people's trash.  Let the child take the computers apart. Support him putting them back together again. Get books from the library on computer hardware and design and go through them together. Use the internet together, letting the child research topics he is interested in. If he likes writing, let him start a free blog.

If your child is interested in gardening and plants, ask people whose plants you admire for clippings and old plastic pots.  You can create a beautiful hobby that enhances the home and opens up a portal to the study of biology with just a few clippings.

Cook together.  You have to cook anyway, so why not teach your child?

Even long after the child can read well to himself for entertainment, read aloud to him.  Pick books that are just out of his "reading reach" and give him the gift of literature and your time.  Encourage him to draw, build models, legos, or do another hobby while you read.

Then, take the money you didn't spend on textbooks and workbooks and pay your rent, start a college fund, save for some land, or travel together. 

What matters to his education isn't the money you spend, but the  love, interest, and intellectual support you provide.  Being available emotionally, intellectually, and physically are worth more than the most expensive private school tuition.

Miss Suzy's Glossary

If you find any words in my posts that you believe should belong in the glossary, please email me or leave me a comment.  This is an expandable list, with, it seems, a theme.  Who knew?

birth an alien, verb: to have a bowel movement

doofus, noun: a foolish, stupid, or otherwise incompetent person

doofi, noun: plural of doofus

grow a trail, verb: to have a bowel movement

knick-knack, verb:  to spank, or otherwise aggressively admonish

jabberwockies, noun: the news media

lay wolf bait, verb: to have a bowel movement

mutter-cuss, verb: to say in complaint, under your breath, sounds and words that convey displeasure

paddywhack, verb: see "knick knack"

take the Browns to the Super Bowl, verb: to have a bowel movement