Barnmaven

Lowering the bar

Its been about three and a half years since I wrote this post, which included some of my birthfamily history and my thoughts about finally putting the past behind me and reaching out to speak to my birthmother.

I never got as far as picking up the phone.  I did make contact via Facebook, and we exchanged a few PM's.  It never got beyond that. I decided that I didn't want it to.

I thought about going to visit her.  I thought about introducing her to my kids.  I thought long and hard, considered my feelings, motivations, intuition and, mostly I just asked myself the question "Why?  Why would I do this?"  I felt that if I was considering introducing my children to someone I had previously considered so emotionally toxic that I wanted nothing to do with her, I would have to come up with some sort of logical reason that it made sense to do so.  Know what?  It didn't. Not whatsoever.  Even if I wasn't going to involve my children, I still couldn't manage to fan the flames of any desire to spend the time and money to make the trip. I never went.  I don't regret it.

Thinking about my birthmother and her relatively recent admission regarding her part in the systematic abuse of her children in the context of my very normal human pondering about my existence and purpose, I realized that forgiving was not the same thing as wanting to have a relationship.  There were so very few potential good things that could come from opening that door, and quite a lot of potentially not-good things. 

I started to write "It's not her fault," but then I had to take that back.  It is not entirely her fault. She wasn't the only abuser of the children she kept, but she did abuse them and she sat back and let others abuse them in especially horrific ways while she spent her time getting drunk and high. When my older sister left home at the age of fourteen, she was a child who had experienced things most adults have never experienced. She left to save herself, but in doing so she had to leave behind her four other siblings.  We've had so many long, tortuous conversations about the knife's edge she walked.  She was homeless, she was just a kid, and she could barely take care of herself much less four children between the ages of five and twelve.  But she was, in many respects, the only mother they'd really had.  When their mom was absent or too busy drinking and drugging, my sister fed them and changed their diapers, tried as best she could to protect them, though she couldn't, not really, nor could she protect herself. She left.  She had to.

She ended up as far away as she could have gotten geographically and still be on the same continent.  She spent 24 years on the opposite coastline, trying to heal, trying to both distance herself from the situation and at the same time trying to figure out how to get her family to be normal.

Normal they have never been, and the resulting fractures from so much dysfunction have created a situation so toxic, so filled with narcissistic, passive-agressive, unrealistic drama that I've made the conscious decision to just not be a part of it.  Periodic exposure has done nothing but solidify that resolve.

I think it is normal for most families to experience a fair bit of sturm und drang when a family member passes, even when they have functional, healthy relationships.  Our ties with those we love get interwoven with material things, and unless someone has made a very complete and detailed will (and sometimes even when they have), relationships are strained when two or more people have a strong emotional attachment to a particular item, or when children feel they are competing for their fair share of what is left behind.  When the family is deeply dysfunctional to begin with, these situations quickly begin to make even characters in shows like Dallas look benign. 

I saw a bit of this when my grandmother passed.  I had no attachment nor sense of entitlement to anything; I was beyond grateful when I found out that she had left a little bit of something for me and also for my children in her will.  My birthmother and the rest of her grandchildren most certainly did feel they had a stake in who got what, and there are those who still speak to certain others with barely repressed rage over certain prized items that ended up in one or the other's possession.

Now, sadly, my birthmother is dying.  She has been given a very short window of time and will be entering hospice care.  I feel bad for her, of course.  No matter how awful a person has been, no matter what they've done, I would never want them to have to suffer through what will most likely be a pretty horrific end-of-life experience.  I even thought, for a brief moment, that it would probably be a good thing to make a short visit to make peace with her.  It felt like it might be the right thing to do, for her, for me.  Almost before that impulse could begin to take shape, however, the infighting and absolute dumbfuckery of this extraordinarily damaged family made it completely out of the question.

I'm not angry, I'm not hurt.  But my sister surely is, and although I'm here for her and she has my shoulder and my ears and my heart, nothing can take away the sting of being unable to go say her last goodbyes to the woman who, while not a mother, was certainly the crucible that shaped the woman she eventually became.  If I didn't love my sister I'd be content to just wish them all well from a distance and let them tear one another apart, piece by piece.  You'd think a dying parent wouldn't be the source of so much angst, but somehow they manage to make this an opportunity to draw lines in the sand, to knock each others' chess pieces off the board, to try and get something, though I'm not sure they even know what it is they want.  I believe, watching them, that  the prospect of watching a pit full of hyenas tearing apart a screaming antelope would be more peaceful.

Distance is a thing of beauty, no doubt about it.

If you need me, I'll be with my mom, hugging her so tightly she can't breathe, thanking her repeatedly for just being my mom.  I'm only sorry Dad's not here so I can thank him too.  There's no substitute for them.  As mildly dysfunctional as we might have been, they were in all the ways that count exactly the kind of parents a person should have. 

Without them? I'd just be another hyena picking antelope carcass out of my teeth.

 

 

 

Larger than Life

I've not written much about my dad here.  Our relationship has been, for as long as I can remember, complicated by our similar natures - emotional, prickly, invested.   Most of my memories of my dad from my late teens through my early twenties involve yelling and tears.  Neither of us seemed able to stop trying to be "right" louder than the other long enough to listen to what the other was saying.

Dad is larger than life in a million different ways.  People don't meet him without being impacted by his huge personality.  I like to think I take after him in that way, but for both of us this is often as detrimental as helpful.  He is deeply emotional, and most of his words and actions bear testimony to it. 

Dad grew up dirt poor.  The youngest of six, he was born to working class parents in Ononta, MI on the Upper Peninsula in 1927,  just before the onset of the Great Depression.  Dad recalls never having new clothes, only hand-me-downs, and when the weather was warm they went barefoot.  When dad was still very young, his family left Michigan on a train bound for Idaho.  Like many depression-era families, his parents hoped to find work, and a better life. 

After the family settled in Post Falls, Idaho, my grandfather did find work, on the CCC and WPA government projects.  He drowned while working on a WPA project on the river in Post Falls .  My father was only 12 years old.

Loss, poverty, hard work - these things shape a person.  Dad is one of the hardest working men I have ever known.  He dropped out of high school at 16 to start earning a living wage in order to help out his family.  He served one tour as an enlisted marine.  He worked on Foss tugs in Alaska, earning his captain's license.  When he met and married my mom he already had a decade behind him as a fireboat captain for the Seattle Fire Department.  In those days, firemen didn't make a terrific living, and so he worked weekends too, taking carpentry and painting jobs to supplement his income so my mother could stay home with my brother and I. 

 

Before he retired from the SPD he and mom bought some acreage on Marrowstone Island.  He built a house there, working on it on his days off.  Retirement didn't last long, however, and it was not long before he started a second career, working on the decks of the Washington ferry system. 

Whenever I recall my dad during the years of my childhood, I picture him working constantly. If he wasn't at his job, he was fixing a car, putting up fence, building a barn.

I will never in my life hear the phrase "Hard Working Man" without picturing my dad.

I spent most of my childhood thinking that my dad was angry.  It is only with the perspective of a working adult that I realize he was probably more tired than anything.  He was also a man of strong conviction about how people ought to treat other people, about doing the right thing, and those beliefs drove almost everything about him - and to others, often translated into orneriness.  He had no patience for cheaters or people who took the easy way out. 

There's another word that comes to mind when I think of my father:  Love. 

My dad has loved me unwaveringly for my whole life.  Even though I can think of only a handful of times he has said so in words, he has spent my lifetime showing me his love by giving of himself.  Anyone who knows my father knows that his family is the most precious thing to his heart.  He gave me endless hours of his time, teaching me to drive, teaching me to change my oil, driving me to horse shows and basketball camps, coming to my musicals and plays and games to cheer me on.  He valued education, particularly because he had to interrupt his own, and he and my mother put a priority on making sure my brother and I would have a college education available to us.  

Dad has always seemed larger than life to me, and in retrospect maybe I argued with him so much because if I could convince my Dad that I was right about something, nothing else would ever again seem difficult or impossible.  He was that stubborn.  Earning his approval has driven me for nearly all of my life.  It wasn't until I was in my forties that I realized I didn't need it.  Having his love was always more important, and his love was always unconditional.

Dad's in the early stages of dementia now, but he's still larger than life and his love for his family is undiminished.  He's difficult, to be sure, but then again, he always has been - another trait he so generously passed on to his daughter.  Living with his difficulty was the worthwhile price for being one of the people he loves.  

The relationship between a father and his daughter is the relationship by which she will judge all other men.  If our relationship was somewhat codependent, it was also resilient.  I could always, always trust that my father would love me and that he would be there for me, and that trust has been the rock solid foundation I could rest on.  No matter what goes wrong in my life, my Dad still loves me.  That is a priceless gift to give your child.

I owe him far more than I could ever repay.  Happy Father's Day, to the first and best man in my life.

 

Fear, Stasis, Transformation

My phobias:  Pooping in public bathrooms, spiders, drowning, tornados and confrontation.

Spiders, because of obvious reasons.  Drowning thanks to my brother and his tendency to hold my head under water whenever we were in a pool together.  Tornados?  I think that comes from the Wizard of Oz, because I've never actually been in a tornado.  They terrify me, though.

The pooping?  A delightful tale of two older girls bullying a first grader in the school bathroom when there were no adults or other students present.  Having two girls stand on the toilets on either side of your stall and mock you while you perform a perfectly normal human function apparently puts a mental lock on the sphincter.  For years.

Confrontation.  That might surprise some people.  In my comfort zone, not much of an issue.   Competition is part of my nature.  On the basketball court, any kind of game or contest,  no problem.  I'll go toe to toe with you.  With strangers, often not a problem.  With people I really care about or spend a great deal of time with, though, I've spent years choking on my fear whenever I've had to deal with others in a confrontational way.  I've gotten amazingly creative at hiding how absolutely horrifying it is for me to deliver bad news or confront someone's behavior.  

This is not in any way a poke at my parents, because like most parents, they had the tools they had and they did the best they could with them.  I can't fault them because I tend to use the same parenting toolbox.  The downside of this is that I had to learn as an adult how to find the language to explain my boundaries.  "You have to stop doing that because I said so" is really not the most useful way to confront a problem. 

Developing a lexicon to communicate about uncomfortable things is hard work, but I find it is also important work.  SG and I are a normal couple, which means we fight, we have bad days, we get cranky with one another.  Sometimes things get blown out of proportion.  Like everyone else, we either have to find ways to wind back down or we jeopardize the survival of our relationship.    In the same vein, learning this lexicon helps me to communicate better with my children and my family, my friends, people I work with.

Sometimes you have to find a way to express feelings, and I'm just as uncomfortable with that as anyone.  What I used to be really bad at was identifying the real what behind my emotions and learning to deal with the what instead of transferring or projecting.  I also have to remember in a conflict that the other person may also be engaging in transference or projection.  I might not know why, and instead of throwing gasoline on the fire by being angry, pointing fingers or placing blame, it may be more productive and compassionate to ask some questions, to seek understanding.  That doesn't mean I have to accept or condone certain behaviors, but I find it serves the relationship I have with another person for me to spend some time working on untangling that knot.

There are other times where you have to transcend feelings and cope with things on a more practical level, times when you need to let yourself and the other people involved be responsible for taking care of their own feelings and attending to the current issue with maturity and poise.  Its easy to say, harder in practice.  My children, who are not yet practiced in managing their emotional responses, are a perfect example of how feelings get in the way of progress.  The moment things go in a way they did not anticipate or expect, their emotions rise and so does their volume.  This of course is counterproductive toward achieving whatever end they had in mind, but they already lost sight of that the minute those emotions took hold.  They haven't yet developed the ability to delay reacting to an emotion in order to give themselves time to understand what is happening and how they might best react.

I meet plenty of adults who have the same problem, which I would guess is a result of never having had the honor of being around someone who was able to provide a better model of behavior, or perhaps they have not yet reached the point of being comfortable enough with self-examination to identify how and why this might be a problem.

What is interesting is the more I am able to witness other people modeling good confrontation skills the more I am able to find ways to practice those skills and have more positive outcomes.  As a result, though I still have old habits that it would serve me well to discard, I'm no longer afraid of confrontation.  I find I look forward to the opportunity to solve problems and seek resolution because I'm better at both listening and expressing myself.   No wonder -- just as it is often not much fun to have to do things you're not very good at, the opposite is true as well.

We all have different paths to walk; my path led me to the writings of David Richo, Wayne Dyer and other wise folks whose writings and lectures engaged my interest and had me wanting to learn more.  I've been privileged as well to encounter some very mature people who possess terrific conflict management skills.  Those individuals have provided me with many opportunities to learn in real-time by observing their ability to navigate situations that might have gone terribly wrong otherwise.  I've learned from my husband, who when he isn't being silly or stubborn or just a pain in my ass is remarkably compassionate and dedicated to trying to understand me and to nurturing the positive in our relationship.

If I could only apply the same principles to spiders and tornadoes.  

Not bloody likely.

 

 

 

 

They are not ours

Having a friendly relationship with my ex makes it a lot easier for all of us.  The best part is that we have flexibility in our parenting time.  Because of projects at work, I've had to work on some of my weekend days and go in much earlier than normal.  Rather than send the kids to their grandparents I simply gave their dad a few extra days on his parenting rotation.  By midweek I was feeling lost without them and he had no problem letting me have them for after school and dinner.  

It helps soothe my heart to know that even though they're with their dad every other week, I can still see them whenever I need to.  They are growing so quickly that even just a week makes a difference.  

It nearly takes my breath away to watch them.  

My daughter is at that stage where the awkward angles of puberty and the gracefulness of a young woman co-exist in uneasy measure.  She is yet clear-eyed and innocent, despite intermittent episodes of what appears to require the exorcism of a  a snarling teenager demon.  I study her surreptitiously, trying to reconcile this tall young woman with the sturdy toddler I remember trying to keep up with.  

When I wake my son up in the mornings he automatically reaches his arms around my neck, even as he is trying to snuggle his face deeper into his pillow.  He wants me to pick him up and carry him out to the couch as I have always done, but this summer he gained 13 pounds and he is getting too heavy for me to lug around.  He's a skinny drink of water, my boy, all kneecaps and elbows.  He plays his games on the iPad or computer with remarkable intensity; it is a serious business, in his mind.  His wish lists include game manuals and mods.  

Walking in front of me are two human beings who are soon going to grow up and leave me behind.  That's how its supposed to work, we all know that.  But what happens if they make decisions I don't agree with?  What happens if the paths they choose are not safe for them?  We have babies because we want children to love; what probably never occurs to most of us is that they don't belong to us even a little bit.  

I have friends who were on their own the moment they turned 18 -- mom and dad expected that from then on they were no longer responsible for the well-being of their kids.  Others were on their own even before that, thanks to absent parents, neglect or abuse.  I find that heartbreaking, and I'm continually grateful for my own parents whose philosophy has always been that even though your children won't always need you to parent them, you are still their parents -- from "womb to tomb," as my mother says.  Sometimes this has meant helping out when finances were tight or nonexistent - buying groceries, making a payment for one of us, buying something as a "gift" for us that we really needed but could not afford.  My parents have been the people in my life I could always count on, even when they haven't been too happy with my choices.  They've stood up for me even when I haven't wanted to recognize or appreciate the things they've done to make my life better or easier.  They know who I am, the good things and the things that aren't quite so good, and they love me anyway.

That's not to say they have lived every moment of their lives waiting on their children to need them. Practically as soon as they dropped me off at my dorm freshman year of college they sold our old home and built a smaller house with a guest bedroom.  If I'd ever ended up homeless, of course they would have taken me in, but it was pretty clear that once the door closed behind the last child to leave home they did not believe it necessary to keep living in a larger house than they needed.  As soon as it was certain I was accepted at the UW and starting classes I think they breathed a huge sigh of relief and started booking trips to all the places they'd never been able to visit while honoring their responsibilities as parents.  

I learned some great lessons from my parents about being pragmatic rather than sentimental and about how it is possible to love and care for your children even when you don't care for the things they are doing or the company they keep.  They weren't perfect parents, of course (sorry Mom) but then again I haven't been a perfect daughter.  (Sorry again, Mom.)

I hope I will be handle my childrens' evolution into adulthood as well as my parents handled mine.  Its easy from this viewpoint to think that I will cope just fine; in reality I am sure SG will be called upon fairly frequently to dry my tears and there will be numerous discussions with my ex that begin with "CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOUR SON/DAUGHTER JUST DID?"  We'll survive.  We'll still have parenting to do; the things we will deak with will have a higher difficulty rating. 

 

 

Counting on it

About a month ago I took my horse to a schooling show.  We've had a lot of fun doing various things all this year, and I was excited about the progress we've made.  I was sure that we would have a great outing.  

I might not have minded so much about the serious show people that showed up (at the end of the year?  For a schooling show?  After you've clearly cleaned up on the real show circuit?) if it weren't for the fact that my own horse and I had a really rotten day.  I'd brought his two stable mates and on top of that his half-sister and one of his trail riding buddies were there.  He couldn't stop worrying about where all of his friends were for more than two seconds, and if he couldn't see any of them he'd get panicky.  He was prancing and trying to take off, wouldn't stand still, wouldn't stop calling to them.  In the ring he kept trying to angle himself toward the exit.  All in all the day was horribly frustrating and disappointing.  The judge hated us, but that's OK because I wasn't super fond of us, either.

I try not to care about competing.  At this stage in my life if we are doing something that actually awards places, I'm pretty happy either way, so long as I'm happy with myself and my horse.  But for days after that schooling show I felt so small and incompetent.  My thoughts kept spiraling downward.

Maybe I really don't know what I'm doing.

Maybe I'm doing everything wrong.

Maybe I should just quit trying to do anything except trail riding.

Maybe I'm just an idiot.

I had a couple of really good rides at home in the weeks after that, and a fairly good lesson.  Then this weekend we did a half-day western dressage clinic and a dressage schooling show.  I entered the Introductory test for the senior age group and the open group, along with a few friends of mine that also take lessons with me.  

We placed well, but more importantly Bugs and I had a really good day together.  He wasn't perfect, but he was better than he has been and we didn't break our patterns or have a bucking fit across the arena.  I really enjoyed the whole day, and being around my friends and watching everyone ride. 

I liked the format of the show.  It was my first dressage experience, so it was new to me.   In dressage each rider goes individually the judge gives scores on each element of your ride. There are a LOT of elements, and even if you mess up on one of them, your whole ride isn't a wash.  Not only does the judge give you a score, but you also get comments as to why it was a better or lower score.  Those comments not only let me know what we need to work on but also helped me to feel some confidence about the things we are doing right and the direction we're moving.

Last night as I was reflecting on how much better I felt after having a positive show experience, I recalled what I often say to others and what has been a powerful message for me at other times of my life:  

Everything changes.

No matter how well or how badly things are going, you can count on things changing.

Race Car Man is struggling so badly in school right now.  We've had a meeting almost every two weeks all year long, but things are not moving in the right direction.  The strategies that have been implemented that are supposed to help him are not helping him; they are escalating the situation.  His teacher is frustrated, his dad and I are frustrated, but most importantly, my son is frustrated.  His therapist was able to get him to discuss how he was feeling through some indirect questions, and he expressed to her quite clearly that he feels like he is a "bad kid" who makes "bad choices."  

I can't adequately explain how devastating that was for me to hear.  The tears flowed.

This year has been so difficult.  We had asked for an aide for him full-time, and we got one, but the first one didn't last and the second one is still new and in the words of the district "needs training."  In other words, not qualified.

The district psychologist has observed him once.  I've been pushing for the district to engage the therapist he sees, who is the director of our local autism resource center, to do some classroom observation and feedback for the teacher, and they've resisted.  They spent four weeks observing him, had an aide assigned and we had one conference call with the psychologist who still, despite saying he would, hasn't contacted our therapist to discuss the situation.  Two months into the school year and things are worse than they were the week he started.  My son is not accessing any learning, and we've had to pick him up more than five times in the last four weeks.

Last Thursday he was suspended for two days after a morning in which his behavior escalated almost from the time he arrived at school.

I feel like his disability is not being taken into account when he begins to react to his choices.  If he isn't making good choices, maybe none of the choices he's being offered are incentive enough for him.  If his behavior keeps escalating, clearly the strategies they are using to try and calm him down are having the opposite effect.  Rather than expecting my son to change, I want the school to change their approach.  I don't blame his teacher.  She hasn't had another student like him.  She's been begging for help for quite some time, stating clearly that she has exhausted all the tools she knows and needs help with some new ideas.  Its not that she's not open to changing things -- she doesn't know what to change to.

I was feeling really hopeless on Thursday.  And in truth, I'm not sure I'm not feeling a little bit that way today.  But on Friday I talked to our therapist and she got me in touch with a local volunteer advocacy group, and she was able to give me some bullet points to request from the district, and she provided some potential options for us that I haven't looked into before.  I was able to request a meeting with the district special services director and the advocacy volunteer is attending along with my ex and I. 

This morning we met with the school administrators and his teacher so that he could come back from his suspension, and I feel like we got a great deal of support and agreement from his teacher, the principal and the school psychologist on the things that we want to see happen from the district.  

I needed a reminder that even though things feel hopeless and difficult, they won't always be that way.  Nothing stays the same.

I got one.

I can only hope that the direction will be UP.

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Sometimes Vain

I like to think I'm approaching aging with the same philosophy I approached parenting babies - somewhere in the median between crunch and plastic.  I didn't cloth diaper, but I did extended nursing.  I vaccinated, but selectively.  I did sleep training, but gently and over time.  I co slept but not until they were walking and talking, only until they could sleep through the night without nursing.  I was too crunchy for the mainstream circles and too mainstream for the crunchy.  Like every other aspect of parenting I tried not to judge other people's choices, vowing instead to focus on my own choices and let other people do what worked best for them.  I fell to judgment on many occasions, but I tried to keep it under my breath.

As I've crossed over the top of the hill and the aging process has most definitely gained some momentum, I find a precarious lack of control on my balance in the  middle.  I have long stated - emphatically, I might add - that while everyone has the right to choose for themselves whether they would undergo the knife or the needle to be comfortable with their looks, I personally eschew such dramatic measures.  I've even had the dishonor to be proud of myself for my lack of skin care regimen.  "Oh sure," I'd laugh, "I have one,  if you can call falling asleep in my makeup and never remembering sunscreen a 'regimen'!"

"Oh, I don't color my hair to cover gray," I have been known to say.  "I color it because its so fun to be a [insert color here]!"  

I humbly assert that these things are far easier to say when one is young.

Menopause, evil-hormone-sucking-she-ninja, entered swiftly and with deadly intent.  She stole my sleep with surges of heat and sweat and suddenly the undereye circles I've laughed off since my twenties made me feel disheartened and teary.  The drying skin and hair and nails that were merely annoying a decade ago became insurmountable overnight.  I started looking in the mirror less and less; this "aging gracefully" thing isn't happening AT ALL as I imagined it would.  The "aging" part, hell yes, but without very much of the "graceful."

Several weeks ago SG gifted me with a spa massage and facial package.  It was a day of pure bliss, and the crunchy mama inside me crumpled and added the glycolic peel to the package without one ounce of remorse for vanity.  I impulsively bought the skin care items the aesthitician suggested, and they really did work and my skin looked and felt better.  So much so that as I waltzed through the hair care aisle on a trip to the store I made another impulse buy and threw a reddish haircolor kit a few shades lighter than my own sturdy brown into the cart.  

For whatever reason that haircolor job was an unmitigated disaster.  It didn't cover my grays, and over the weeks since I've noticed that the grays seem to have gone into unmitigated copulation mode, bursting into existence in numbers heretofore unseen. I even found that the hairs growing in along my part were alarmingly populated with silver.  

All the self-assured platitudes have gone right out the window.  

I'm not aging gracefully -- I'm just AGING.

I tell myself that its OK to just let my gray hair arrive naturally, but the minute it does I'm hitting the haircolor aisle at the drugstore trying to find the magic solution that doesn't make it look like I'm trying too hard but doesn't give off the suggestion that I'm not trying at all.  

I've reached the point at which my self-talk has devolved into an ongoing wrestling match between my crunchy better angel and my inner narcissist.  There's a lot of finger pointing and things have been said that can never be taken back, never forgotten.  I look in the mirror and words and phrases pop into my consciousness uninvited:  "Botox!"  "Boob Lift!"  "Tummy Tuck!"  At one point (or two) I may have even pressed my fingertips against the skin at the end of my eyebrows and swept upward, wondering just how much it costs to get a facelift.

What have I become?

More importantly, when does this stop?

I reassure myself that I "have" to do these things, that I'm still in the workforce, and we all know that the career field can be unkind to women who are growing older while rewarding those who maintain a youthful appearance.  But we all know its more than that.  

Its not "career-mindedness."  Its vanity.

I imagine every woman who has ever fancied herself a rugged individualist and self-appointed icon for young career women everywhere has run into the same, painful brick wall:  Its beautiful and admirable and amazing when someone else does it but GOD FORBID it should happen to YOU.  Its all great in theory, but when the push comes to shove (or broken capillaries come to nostrils), all bets are off.

This is the time when we start taking selfies carefully, judging the quality of light and the capability of our photo editing software.  This is the time when we admonish everyone to "keep it real" while hiding our own true face.  

This is the time that I realize that age will catch me no matter how I try to avoid it, and it will not only put to test all of the things I decided I would be when I reached this point in my life, it will reveal many of those things as nothing more than lies I told myself.

This morning I plunked a box of "darkest brown" haircolor on the bathroom vanity after my first cup of morning coffee.  Ten minutes plus one shower later, that crappy gray red dye job had swirled its way down the drain and SG met the newest version of his wife.  Unfortunately she still has the same set of luggage under her eyes.  One hopes, ever so fervently, that the new haircolor makes them somewhat less noticeable.

 

 

What do you mean its halfway through June already?

Aside from being a great source of career satisfaction, my recent changes in job duties have also played whack-a-mole with my ability to meet deadlines and get things accomplished.  My normal duties didn't go away with the move to our business partner's offices, and so I where I used to work in shorter, intense spurts, now I find I have to increase the intensity and the amount of time involved in order to have any hope of getting even the minimum done needed to keep the hungry hordes at bay.  

By the time I get home I'm mentally wiped out, but with SG working the outage, I'm still flying a bit solo when it comes to laundry and kids and animals.  He's a huge help when he gets home in the mornings, covering those last details of getting the kids ready so I can leave for work.  Evenings when the kids are home are a chaotic, lovely jumble of feeding humans and animals and trying to skim at least the worst of the days' messes before I collapse in my chair with an ice pack on my sciatica.

Despite feeling tired and sore, I'm making more effort this year to ride as often as possible and engage in more social activities.  Last year when SG was out of town I had a tendency to hide when i was down or lonely (which was a lot) and I think that was not so good for me.  This year I'm committed to every other week dressage lessons and riding every single weekend.  I have plans for going out with friends and with SG (once the outage is over.  TWO MORE DAYS!)  Last weekend was the only weekend in months I didn't ride, but it was my 30th high school class reunion, so I have a good excuse.  I was too busy having fun and waxing nostalgic over days gone by, and after being out of town since last week I'm now paying the price at home and at work.  Not to mention I've been trying to get the pool put up for the last three weeks - not by actually doing anything but by continually reminding SG to call his nephew to help me do it.  Monday night I finally bit the bullet and started working on it.  Damn if I didn't get it half done when the skies started thundering and flashing lightning before dumping rain all over me.  Its rained every day since.  

The kids are on their second week of summer break.  I didn't get much scheduled for the month of June, but come July and August they've both got camps to go to.  Amazon Girl will take swimming lessons again and go to a horse camp and then two art camps and a music camp.   It was harder to find camps for Race Car Man.  There are some science camps locally but none with the appropriate staffing or resources to deal with his complex behaviors.  I was torn about signing him up for camps through a local disability resource center, but when I reviewed the curriculum I felt like it would be a lot more enriching for him than just having him at home or at daycare.  I've managed to set up a schedule for him that inludes several weeks at the ARC camp, a vacation bible school, some time at daycare and some time off with me and time at his dad's.  Overall I'm satisfied that both kids will have an enjoyable summer.  I'm avoiding adding up all the various costs for the camps because I'm pretty sure I don't want to look at the total.  Oh, its worth every penny of it.  But its a lot of pennies.  

The last week of school for the kids was a bit poignant for me.  The moving up ceremony for the fifth graders was on Wednesday.  I managed not to cry when Amazon Girl was handed her certificate for a Presidential Award for Academic Excellence.  Thursday was field day, and I spent the morning with Race Car Man.  He wanted very much to do two activities - the rope climb and the sack race.  He was not at all interested in trying anything else.  We talked about it for a little bit and eventually he agreed to try a few things.  When the 11:30 bell rang for his group to go back to class he'd thrown the football through a hoop, tried the frisbee toss, rolled a ball at a stack of cans and chucked a nerf ball as far as he could get it.  I was proud of him not only for making the effort to try new things as I was for his ability to change his mind about doing so.  It was a little bittersweet;  spending time with him in the comapny of other boys his age reminds me in a way I'm not used to just how different he is from neurotypicals.  At the same time, I recognize that those differences aren't necessarily bad.  Yes, he has what might be considered deficits, but he has an amazing number of positive attributes as well.  

Next fall Amazon Girl starts middle school.  It will be a big change for her -- for both of them, really.  Race Car Man has had his sister to lean on ever since kindergarten.  They ride the bus together, go to aftercare together.  In some respects its probably been as hard for them as anything.  They're typical siblings in the way that they both fight with and love one another fiercely.  Next year Race Car Man will have to learn to navigate alone, and as much as I think it will be a challenge I also think it will be really good for him.  Amazon Girl will finally have the chance to concentrate on herself and not need to worry about trying to keep her brother out of trouble.  It will be a most decidedly interesting year, for all of us.

I have a feeling it will be here sooner than I'm prepared for.

So this is what they mean by that

I know I have a reputation for being a hippy-dippy "bloom where you're planted" sort of mouth breather from time to time.  I'm not always that way, sometimes I'm not even remotely that way, but just as with many of life's Grand Lessons, I think if you repeat something often enough to yourself you start to maybe "get" it.  And in the grand scheme of life's plans I firmly believe in the value of striving to find peace - if not outright pleasure - in accepting the material circumstances I find myself in.  

There have been times in my life I've been truly unhappy in my circumstances.  Sometimes I really did try to make the best of things, sometimes I didn't.  When I did try, though, if honest trying didn't bring about a level of situational peace I really could live with, I moved on.  In retrospect I believe that often those situations really weren't a good fit, and divorcing myself from them was the best choice.  Not always, of course, but I can live with that.

I've been with my current employer for a little over six years now.  I genuinely mean it when I tell you that I want to be working for them until I retire.  Its a great place to work, great people, great products, interesting business and I've learned much.  The last year or two, though, were a lot of stretching for me.  We partnered up with another company and began to third-party some of our business processes over to this other group.  Some of those processes happened to be what I liked to think of as my business processes.  This new partnership meant my life and the lives of many of the people I work with would change, in some cases significantly.  This new partnership is also vital to supporting the long term growth of my company.  Without it we might still grow, but not in an efficient way, not in a way that maximizes our use of space, time and people.

There are a lot of people out there who make a living off of helping people to implement, drive and survive change. Its a growth industry.  Pick your program, there are lots of them -- everything from the basic "Who Moved My Cheese?" series to Spiral Dynamics.  You can have anything from a course-completion certificate to a PhD and make a comfortable living as a writer or a consultant in the field of corporate change management.  And no wonder -- most people don't like change.  The most successful people in the world thrive on it, the happiest people in the world either already know or have successfully learned how to live with it.  There are a lot of different folks with a lot of different formulas that can tell you how to how to get there, but I believe ultimately people can't - or won't - learn how to successfully navigate change until they are faced with a situation where the reward for making the change is so meaningful that it completely obliterates the alternative as a viable choice.  

Some change management programs try to teach people to embrace what can't be changed in the hopes of finding peace, if not meaning, in the new reality.  Other programs explore the psychology of change.  Spiral Dynamics teaches that successful change happens when people have both the need for change and the resources to navigate the change.  Without the resources necessary to make the transition, many people will experience great stress and ultimately be bypassed by a change they are not able to make.

That's where I found myself the past year or two.  I struggled at first.  Visibly.  It was noticed.  I didn't help myself or my future opportunities; in fact, I hurt them.  But I was fortunate in having a lot of support from a few peers, from friends, from SG.  I was able to evaluate the need for me to change with a clear understanding of what both the costs of and the benefits to change might entail.  Eventually I made a decision to not just fight the change but to go along with it in a positive way.  It was hard at first - I had to pretend.  A lot.  Paste on a smile and say "OK" when I felt like flipping everyone the bird and hiding in a corner with a bottle of chardonnay and some powdered donuts.   Eventually a day came when I actually found myself embracing the changes, and beginning to finally live in the moment, enjoying what I happened to be doing at that moment instead of worrying about what I would or wouldn't be doing in the future.

Because of that I was given the role of working on assignment at the location of our new business partner as a problem solver and a liaison between them and our transition team.   I'm busier than I can ever recall being in any job - not just task-busy, but mind-busy too.  Every day brings new opportunities to find solutions, to support people and to help make something happen.  Every day I get to experience success in both small and large ways, and I get to enjoy it in a way that I could never have if I hadn't found the way to not just live with my new normal but to completely embrace it.  Even better?  I've had an opportunity to have a very positive impact on an important project and the visibility can only improve my career outlook down the road.

Embracing this transition has involved releasing some deeply-held fears.  I have feared no longer having importance.  I have feared loss of status.  I have feared confrontation and having other people be right where I was wrong.  I have feared being left behind, left out, held back, pushed out.  At some point I was drinking from the end of a fire hose full of fear, and I realized that my fear was what was hurting me, not the change itself.  I had to stop worrying about what might happen and start being part of what was already happening.  And so I decided that was what I would do, and from that point on, everything has felt different.  Not perfect, not always , but so much better.

I realized after going through all of this that I didn't actually know or believe as much as I thought I did about living in and through change.  And honestly, I really did think I knew a lot.  I've been through a lot of change, but apparently not as gracefully as I could or ought have.  That's humbling.

(Not only is it humbling but it leads me to consider all the other things I think I know lots about and wonder when those "learning opportunities" are going to present themselves.  Oh, GREAT.)

 

 

Our real lives

 

I was thinking about my brother the other day.  I wonder sometimes in those last days of his life what thoughts were going through his head, if he was in pain, if he knew he was in trouble.  I wonder if he knew he was teetering on the brink of dying and whether he was OK with that or if he would have wanted more time to change things.  I prefer to cling to the latter notion.

I don't believe he was living the life he envisioned himself having, not by any means. That's the thought that inevitably leads me to the rabbit hole, the endless conundrum of the probability of any one person ever fully achieving self-expression versus the actual necessity of this occuring. 

Bloom where you're planted.  Be happy in the shoes you're in.  Success is the path, not the destination.  I want to believe these things - and in many ways I do believe these things - but I also believe that these are things we are taught to make us feel better about being forced into lives many of us have no viable option of escaping.  We gratify our need for expression and validation by telling ourselves - and asking others to confirm it for us - that we're OK.  

Its a beautiful, terrible thing, the human condition.  The ability of this world we've constructed to continue functioning, like the Matrix, relies on our inability to slow down and think too very hard about these things.  You can't grease the wheels of society if you are busy throwing aside convention to follow your dream or die trying.  It doesn't take too much imagination to believe that there are forces at play in our world that depend on this, on the natural tendency of tired, overwhelmed people to smooth over the wrinkles between reality and their sense of how things ought to be.

Tradition tells you to keep your nose to the grindstone, that life isn't fair and that conformity is essential for the majority.  We can't be all airy-fairily gallivanting off to chase our dreams.  Someone has to stay home and keep the lights on.  And so we make the sacrifices, pluck our dreams apart brick by brick until they are small enough to fit the lives we're living instead of changing our lives to fit our dreams.

And I don't know whether it is right or wrong - or if those words can really be applied - to follow one path or the other.  

Some of us tread the middle, and maybe we're okay with it, even more happy than not about it.  We all know people who are desperate to unhook the yoke and can't - or won't - because they didn't realize their dreams until too late and they don't know how to untangle from the obligations they've created, or they lack the resources to step out of the life they're in to find the one they want.  I would guess that's probably the case for most people.  And I would also guess that many people spend a lot of time trying to convince themselves and everyone else that no, they really are doing just what they want, even if inside them the dreams they once held shrivel up into nothing.

I wonder what Ken's dreams were, the ones he held inside and was never able to nurture into reality.  I wonder where his tipping points were and what he felt about them.  

Do we get a medal for being brave enough to learn to be happy with the life we have even if it isn't the one we wanted?

You know, I don't know what I really wanted to be in life.  Mostly I just wanted to be an adult (and its questionable whether I yet qualify).  I feel that I've spent a lot of my life mostly living in the moment and coping with the results.  Like everyone else I wanted to be famous.  If pushed - very hard - I could tell you that I wanted to sing for a living, but when no one ever came leaping out of the wings to offer to make me the next radio star, I suspected it wasn't really an option.  I always considered my horses to be a hobby, and it wasn't until the last few years I've wondered why I didn't think of them as a possible career.  Sure, I wouldn't have ever been rich, but I'm not rich now anyway.  

No, like most of the rest of the human race, I fell into a job that turned into a career and I've worked as hard as I needed to get where I've gotten and if I'd worked harder or been smarter I might have made if further by now but I'm not sure I really care.  

Don't get me wrong -- my life is really pretty great.  There are areas that could definitely use some improvement, and whether I want to admit it or not, I can see the places where I've painted myself into corners.  They aren't forever corners, not a one of them.  They are the obstacles I've chosen and I can either let them stop me or I can let them motivate me to do things differently in the future.

I imagine I will spend the rest of my life trying to identify the things I really want to do and trying to find ways to do more of those things before I'm too old to enjoy them.  And that's OK, and I don't necessarily think its sad in the context of my own life until I recognize the places I see it in the lives of others.  My brother didn't live long enough to start finding the ways to make his inner self become real again.  That's at least as tragic as the fact that the person he was supposed to be got lost in the first place.

Ken is the poster child for those of us whom circumstance dictated a life other than the one we would have chosen for ourselves.  Too many people don't have the resources or the support to self-actualize, to do anything more than try to survive, and just thinking that makes me start to feel a sense of panic, because I know deep down inside that we're meant to be and do more than just survive.   

I could spend my time wishing things were different, but I suspect, rightly, that my efforts are better spent doing things to change the equation for myself, for those I love.  

This self-actualized little boy is following his dream of being the cutest cowboy that ever lived.

Finding my speed

My daughter is growing up so quickly.  I am starting to see her reacting to peer pressure, to worry about being noticed for the wrong reasons.  I often find myself thinking back over time and wondering if I've been careful enough with my words to help her avoid the body awkwardness that has plagued so many women.  When I compliment her I try to remember to not just say how beautiful she is (and oh, she IS) but also how loving and smart and funny and creative she is.  The time left I have to truly influence her is nearly over - very soon she'll be at that age where her classmates have far more power than her mother over her self-image and the directions she chooses to take her life.  Like most of you I have plenty of sweaty-palm moments when I realize just how powerful peer pressure can be and pray like mad that I've been the mother I want to be so that my daughter has an inner compass with a strong enough magnetic north to overcome the negativity and shallowness she is sure to encounter.

I want to be a guide for her just as my own mother was for me,  leading the way for me to appreciate the value of having outside interests and staying active. 

Riding and caring for my horses, my home and my yard do a lot to keep my body moving, but with a job that mostly involves driving a keyboard, I know those things are not enough.  Over the last decade or so I've focused more on being healthy than on losing weight, although after the kids were born I had quite a lot of extra weight to lose.   I prefer exercise that feels good, particularly yoga, but I've been aware for some time that I frequently don't pay enough attention to my cardiovascular health.  SG frequently cites a study he read which concluded that one of the biggest contributors to longevity is the one's aerobic capacity.

Now I'm no stranger to cardio.  I was a rower once, and in the sprint races your typical rower goes anaerobic within the first minute or two of a 2,000 meter race.  Rowing uses every one of the large muscle groups, so the lungs must work extra hard to meet the body's demand for oxygen.  Of course that was a long time ago and nothing I've done since has been quite as phsyically demanding, childbirth notwithstanding.

 Back in 2011 I had started a C25K running program and was in the middle of my fifth or sixth week when I managed to give myself a severe bilateral sprain.  That put me off my feet for a while - fortunately NOT during the time of year it would keep me off my horse.   Six weeks on my lazy ass helped me go soft in a way I was not entirely comfortable with, but my vow to jump back on the exercise wagon had about as much veracity as my frequent threat to sell my children to the highest bidder.  Then last summer I ended up losing a lot of weight due to severe gastric issues. Instead of encouraging me to start exercising again, all it did was give me a good excuse to be lazier than ever.  When you are like me and you keep several sizes of clothes and the smallest ones fit without even having to try hard, complaency is easy to come by.  Unfortunately, lazy eventually catches up with you.  And it has.  I haven't weighed myself since I was pregnant with my daughter, but my clothes started telling me I had one more size to go before I was right back where I was at the beginning of the summer.

I made a few attempts to restart my C25K program.  Its bitterly cold here, though, and I have little time as it is -- I don't enjoy spending an extra half hour putting layers of clothes on just to stay warm enough to suck in freezing lungfuls of air as my out-of-shape body tries to make itself jog.  Screw that.  But now what?

As often seems to happen in my life, fate - a/k/a my parents - intervened.  About a month ago my parents told us they wanted to give SG and I a wedding gift.  Yes, that's right.  We got married three days after I sprained that ankle in 2011 and they are just now getting around to the wedding gift.  But who am I to argue?  Better late than never.

They bought us a treadmill.  Not a crappy, cheap treadmill - a really nice treadmill.  Probably the nicest treadmill I've ever been on.  Its got a Wi-Fi connection and an 11 inch touch screen and will also hook up to your iPod and mix you a martini.  In fact, I think might actually be smarter than me.

The days of coming home, dropping my briefcase on the floor and pouring a glass of wine have gone by the wayside.  The New Me comes home, puts dinner in the oven, throws on my running shoes and climbs on the treadmill.  Its taken a few weeks but I'm starting to see some results.  I'm able to run two miles now, and twice I've actually run three.  Okay, maybe I didn't exactly RUN.  I am not exactly anyone's idea of a runner.  But I'm doing a nice imitation of jogging.  I'm moving and I'm breathing and its getting easier.  I actually had a hard time zipping up my english riding boots this weekend because my calves seem to be growing a muscle.

Will it last?  I'm determined to make it so.   I think back to all the things I've started in my life that eventually faded away.  In context, however, I've always exercised.  Just not always consistently.   What I'm more keenly aware of now is that the older I get the less attainable fitness becomes.  Its not the weight I care about so much as longevity and quality of life.  With my arthritis and structural issues, being fit is the best way to keep myself active and pain free for as long as possible.  Its the best way to give myself a shot at being around for my kids for a long time to come. 

If ultimately it also helps to show my daughter that there's no such thing as "too old to get fit," so much the better. 

Just doin' my job.

 

You've wasted another perfectly good ten minutes reading my blog.  THANKS!

 

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