Static

Life gets busy and, I think, most times it goes unnoticed.  I mean, we're all accustomed to the daily grind and so what's one more thing?  Get up, drop off the kids (figuratively and literally), go to work, work, pick up kids, homework, baths, dinner, bedtime.  Repeat.  Sometimes there are dance classes or sports practices, meetings, swimming lessons, trips to the market, or doctor visits mixed in, which can make the day/week/month seem even longer.  But because this model is pretty much the standard for many of us, the things we might lose sometimes go unnoticed and unmourned.  And then it hits you and you can't believe what you took for granted.

Because everything's alright until it isn't, and the isn't can (and usually does) come without warning.

My house falls prey to this, too.  There's always so much going on between the four of us that all it takes is for one hair to fall out of place and disaster strikes.  Okay, maybe not DISASTER, but certainly frustration.  It's just a matter of running out of steam, usually.

And then we have a day like yesterday where nothing stood in our way of being together and having fun. We had no class to make, no party to attend, no appointment to meet and so we played.  Without rushing. It was like a mini vacation the way we squeezed it all in.  The way we had time to smile at each other, to talk to each other, to shoot zombies together, to roller skate in the park or sleep in the shade together.  In the usual course of a day, I forget how relaxing and fulfilling a day like that can be.  And not just a day like that, but even MOMENTS like that.  Just those few minutes that Lucy and I talk about being animals in the forest while looking for mongoose in the grass, for example.  Or Noah and I getting a chance to talk about the books we're reading.  Or being able to embrace my husband for more than the 10 seconds we take to say goodbye in the morning.  Sitting on the wall at Diamond Head, knees propped up between your arms, watching the surf roll in and remembering the importance and necessity of silence.

I look forward to summer-- to the long days at the beach, to camping at Bellows with my entire family, to working only half a day and spending the rest of it with my kids and Charlie.  And I can't wait to see more of you, too, at the zoo, aquarium, or park :).  Here's to hoping we all get more time to be with those we love without all the static of responsibility.

The Sweet Wound

For Sappho, it is the "sweet wound" that makes possible the soul's awakening. To love is to feel that opening. it is to hold the wound always open.

That's a passage I read in an issue of Parabola magazine back in 2004, an issue that focused on friendship.  That winter issue was so powerful for me, chock full of empowering and uplifting messages, giving me lots to reflect on.  

This passage, however, I think is one of the more powerful pieces for me because it resonates so completely with who I am.  As Emerson says, it is "native of the same celestial latitude" and "repeats in its own all my experience."  This is one of many ways that I experience love, this is how it can feel to me.  It can be painful and interminably so.  But to close the door on that pain, to medicate it and suture the wound would be to close my heart to love.  It would be a hardening of the heart that would only close me off to the source.  And while it hurts, while I anguish, while it sometimes feel like the very fabric of my being is unravelling in every direction, I have to continually choose to keep my heart open to it. 

I've read somewhere that the ultimate nature of effort is to allow something to happen.  This is completely at odds with who I am and the way I function.  I want to move and do when what I need is to sit and meditate.  I am impulsive and brash and passionate and dramatic.  I see weakness where tenderness and vulnerability reside within me, and shy away from embracing those aspects of my personality for fear of being thought of as weak or stupid.  John Keats says, "It seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the bee ... let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive..."

It seems impossible to me that I should forever be the flower, but it also seems important that I learn to be the flower at least some of the time.  I can't help but feel that it's imperative to embrace that sweet wound, to make room for it in my house, and welcome it as openly as I welcome my many blessings.  That when the occasion pops up that it should burst wide open, that I listen for the lessons that invariably ensue.  That instead of screaming out in pain like a child waking from a nightmare, that I calmly tend the wound-- to inspect it and then provide whatever care it requires.

What a hard lesson to learn, and what a hard practice to perpetuate.  To accept that life will inevitably hurt you sometimes and to remember that the pain is necessary to teach us the lessons we might otherwise never learn.  That we can't always (and shouldn't always) sever the pain and simply and mindlessly medicate until we feel nothing.  To train ourselves to temper our instincts with understanding.  To learn that sometimes keeping that wound open might mean someone will betray the trust we give and hurt us even further. But that's just the chance we take when we decide to open ourselves to love and life-- it's a choice we make that when we welcome in the light, we also must let in the dark.  And it's how we decide to deal with both that determines how we grow or heal and enjoy life.

Alan Watts writes, "A mind which will not melt-- with sorrow or love-- is a mind which will all too easily break."  I think he's onto something there...

Michelle

Today is the birthday of a childhood friend.  She would have been 37 had she not passed away in March. I haven't gone to her facebook page in a few weeks, but I went today and was met with a ton of birthday greetings for our friend who died too early.  One day she was at Kawaii Con, the next her husband posts the news of her passing.  Life changes on a dime.

In the days leading up to her death, she posts on her facebook her love for her daughter.  She is happy because she is close to her and loves her and has great communication with her.  She says she will continue her medical treatments and continue living because she loves her daughter.  It is heartbreaking.  It is gut-wrenching.  I want to hold her hand and give her daughter a hug.

And today of all days it serves as reminder that this day is a gift and the love I have in my life is a gift.  That I should return it to the world with intent.  I am blessed.

Proud Mama

Even as I've come to hate standardized testing, I have to say that I'm so proud of my little girl for not only passing the grade 3 HSA reading test, but for scoring in the "exceeds" range.  This is pretty monumental for her for several reasons.

1.  Lucy did pretty poorly the first time she took the HSA test last month.  Like really poorly.  So poorly, in fact, that I wondered if she would even pass it this year.

2.  Lucy wanted to take contemporary dance lessons (in addition to hula), but I thought we should wait until after third quarter because I was pretty disappointed in her second quarter report card.  Even knowing that her report card greatly differed from her ability, it still said she wasn't doing her best work.  She and Charlie, however, convinced me that Lucy should take the dance lessons because she would work hard to improve her grades.

3.  I don't like the Accelerated Reading program and don't force my kids to participate.  They read every day, and I use the AR reading levels to help guide me when I go pick out books for Lucy at the library, but reading should be FUN!  And the more they read for fun, I posit, the better they'll get at reading.  That being said, I haven't really pushed Lucy to read more chapter books because she doesn't finish them.  It's not that they're too hard, it's that they're too boring.  She loses interest and moves on.  How can I fault her for this when adults do it ALL the time!?  But I told her we were going to start moving on toward longer and more difficult books, and we did.

So, all this is the long way about saying that Lucy totally earned this really great HSA score, and if you haven't guessed, she improved her grades as well.  She's been reading different books and, of her own accord, pulls out the Usborne math dictionary (which is a totally great resource, btw) when she has trouble with her math homework.  I cannot express how proud of her I am!  She set some goals and accomplished them.  True, she hasn't yet passed the math (missed passing by one measly point), but I'm confident that she'll nail it next month on her third and final try.

My little girl is growing up, folks, and it's bittersweet.

Different Paths

I read an article in which a mother talked about raising her children to hold the same values that she possessed.  To this end, they volunteered together, recycled and gardened together, and she limited (if not altogether banned) things like tv, video games, and outright banned gun play.  Not REAL guns, of course, but water guns, toy guns, fingers in the shape of guns, etc.  But her kids, the author recounted, weren't excited about volunteering, wanted to eat the kinds of things their friends ate, and eventually wanted to play shooter video games.  When her teenage son broached the subject of the gun games, he told her (and I'm totally using my own words here), "You brought us up to recognize the dangers of real guns and I know the difference between real violence and video game violence."  This was a paradigm breakthrough for her, she reported, because she realized that there really were different paths to the same places.

If you looked through my Easter photos that I posted on my wall on Facebook, you've seen the picture of my 12 year-old son, Noah, jumping into the pool with his grandma and cousin.  His pose as he's jumping into the air is not very masculine.  My son is being funny.  He is trying to make people laugh.  Some might look at the picture (and the repeated silly behavior) to be indicative of aberrant boy behavior-- like he's some kind of sissy.  But what I love about my family and friends is that this silly kind of behavior is not only NOT seen in that light, no one thinks less of him for it.  No one's telling Noah he has to stop acting like that-- making girly poses and ugly faces when a camera is pointed at him.  Friends and family know that Noah likes to make weird noises and poses and faces, he likes to make strange, disjointed comments, and he likes to gross people out with jokes about poop and farts.

And yet it's only occurred to me recently that in this way, we're all teaching him tolerance and acceptance.  All these people that surround my son are teaching him without actually coming right out and saying it that it's okay to be who you are.  It's okay to be weird and silly and sometimes scream like a girl or make ugly faces into the camera.  They're telling him without saying a word that you don't have to take yourself so seriously, you don't have to Look Good in pictures, and you can laugh at yourself.  No one's giving him long speeches about the virtues of humility or tolerance (although it does come up every so often), and it isn't something any of us are really even conscious of, I think.  Creating this environment where my kids can be who they want to be and feel safe to try new things has just HAPPENED.

So while I know that this is also true for bad habits (what bad things are we inadvertently encouraging?),  I'm going to keep this positive.  I mean, our broadest goals as parents is to raise happy, compassionate, and productive adults, right?  And we do things to nurture our values in our offspring in hopes that they will be those adults we're hoping for.  We teach them manners, we take them to church, we enroll them in group sports.  We teach them to share, have good hygiene, and eat good foods.  We DO in hopes that they'll be the kind of adults that we like.  It's easy to forget that many of the lessons we teach are tacit... implied... taught in our actions, smiles, and responses to danger or conflict or good fortune.  And it's good to remind ourselves to trust in our kids as they grow-- and to remember that there are different paths to the same place.  I like to think that I'm a good person, that Charlie's a good person, that my parents are good people... but we didn't all make the same choices along the way to being good people, you know?  And we still wouldn't.  It doesn't diminish our goodness that we took differing paths to get there, and I have to believe that it won't diminish who my children grow up to be, either.

The New Tipper

Was trying like the dickens to remember exactly what PMRC stood for in my teens, and I think it was the Parent Music Resource Center (I totally didn't cheat and came up with that from memory).  I have no trouble remembering that Tipper Gore was at the forefront of the group who rallied to get music labeled and censored.  Following in the super-cool footsteps of my older cousin, Jenn, I often doodled the big no circle around bold PMRC letters, showing the world just what I thought of it telling me what I could and could not listen to.  I wrote and delivered many a speech in high school speech classes speaking of the dangers of censorship.  I believed even if I didn't quite understand.

And here I am, trying to make the internet a safe place for my kids to venture into.  Looking for recommendations for sites I should block and those we should support, unsure if the work I'm putting into it will be worth it in the end.  Because, really, how often will they go onto the computer without us knowing when they're almost never at home alone in the first place.  And the computer is in our bedroom.

Do I feel like a hypocrite?  Not at all.  It may sound contradictory to my usually live-and-let-live-inclined nature, but I believe in boundaries.  Just as we have deemed most rated R movies inappropriate viewing material for our kids, so are many websites that promote nudity, sexuality, and excessive violence.  And I can make these decisions for my kids because I know them.  I'm not making these choices for someone else's kids or for ALL kids--  I'm no Tipper Gore.  But it makes me feel all mixed up about ratings systems in general because as a parent, I like to have some idea about what my kids are consuming-- I just don't like how other people abuse those systems for their own greedy agendas.

Anyway, have you gone through this already?  Do you have any tips for me?  Oh, and just for the record, the kids always had access to the internet, but because it was usually on one of our laptops, we were always looming nearby, and access was really only on a need-to basis.  Please feel free to share any anecdotes or bits of advice if you have any.  Have a blessed week, everyone!