40 before 40

As I have entered into that final year before the big 40, I started to think about the things I'd like to do, try or explore, or, honestly, just get back to. Since I do love a good list, I thought, why not make a big list of 40 things I'd like to do before turning 40?

In no particular order, here's what I've got. I've left a few empty to add as things come to me during the year.

1. run a 5K
2. weekend at kripalu
3. hike in the white mountains
4. perform with todd at a coffee house
5. teach yoga
6. travel to northern ca
7. weekend away with ben sans children
8. organize the basement
9. finish switching to organic cleaners
10. go apple picking
11. write a short story
12. develop a regular meditation practice
13. waterski
14. get a pedicure with friends
15. take ella to the nutcracker
16. get rid of all maternity clothing
17. have 5 outfits i really love
18. volunteer for the natick food bank
19. do 'clean' for a week
20. find a regular yoga class to attend
21. lose the babyweight
22. meet with a life/career coach
23. try rock climbing
24. try rowing on the charles
25. learn more about photography
26. go to nantucket
27. have a twice monthly date night with ben
28. have a tv free week once in a while
29. practice being more open about what I feel and need
30. no iphone use on sunday unless someone calls
31. no talking on cellphone when driving
32. try a new haircolor
33. floss every day
34. take a weeklong facebook vacation
35. have a family vacation somewhere other than maine
36. get a massage
37. meet with a personal trainer at the Y
38. return to singing on a regular basis
39.
40.

SAHM

I seem to be able to be a SAHM for a certain number of hours each day, but after that amount of time I am done. DONE.

Today, I have both kids at home with me because my daycare provider had her helper call in sick and can only have 6 kids there with her and since we don't drop off first, we can't drop off at all. In the morning we made a shape turkey, hand turkeys, gratitude turkeys, glitter glue pictures and a dot art coloring book. We had breakfast, we made an event of getting dressed and putting in pony tails and we watched part of a Disney movie.

Now, the afternoon hours are waning and there was no toddler nap and quiet time failed. The infant has not gone down for a nap despite being tired (probably because his big sister is pathologically incapable of being quiet). The toddler is yammering non stop, issued most often in some form of whining proceeded by 'mom, mom, mom, mom, mom...'

I'm out of ideas for distraction I'd love to have her run around in the yard but am not really interested in standing in the cold and don't have a warm enough thing to bundle the infant in to take him out too. Every time I have to nurse him she steals my iphone and starts to watch something on PBS kids. I take it away and then think 'why am I doing that? it only adds to my own misery, let her watch!' I might take that thought back when she is 10 and has ADD.

Basically, I've hit that point when I feel like I'm trapped in some circle of hell and there are hours, HOURS before the hubs will be home.

This too shall pass, but not before I've looked longingly at the case of beer in the kitchen a time or two.

So much to say...

... so little brain power.

Sometimes there is so much noise in my head that I can't even imagine what it would be like if I tried to speak even half of it aloud.

It might go something like this:

Good lord.
I am so f-ing tired.
Is this my life?
Do we have milk?
What am I supposed to be doing now?
I should make a list of all the things I could be doing.
Why do we never have any pens?
I should go for a walk.
I should get off the couch.
What am I going to do for work?
Am I completely messing my child up by spending so much time being frustrated by her?
What is up with my husband's family?
How on earth am I supposed to juggle being a wife and a mother and still be just me?
How do I sort out daycare and my work at the same time?
Maybe we should move to California.
Will we ever have money to take a real vacation?
I want to be fitter.
I wonder if I'll ever sing again.

Seriously, that's what runs through there in any given thirty second segment.

I realize as I listen to the chatter in my head, how I waste a lot of time wanting my life to be one way when it is another and how I don't do much to change it to get closer to what I want. In my fantasy life I am super active and fit, I don't eat crap like crackers, I have a close network of friends who have lives like mine (riddled with small children) and we have families we do stuff with, I expand my cooking repertoire, eat organic, make smoothies, always look on the bright side of life rather than bitching about how tired and frustrated I am, practice yoga regularly, have a job I love that brings meaning to my life... basically the life I envision as being the 'perfect' one for me is the opposite of how I live right now.


I've been reading "Buddhism for mothers of small children" and from that I could glean that I suffer from perfectionist syndrome of always focusing on what isn't there, thinking 'if only' then things would be perfect and I'd be able to do x,y and z. I know I do focus on getting things done as though at the end of doing, something magical is going to happen - oh, if only I organize the basement then.... right.

I know I've struggled the past three years and, honestly, going through the rest of my life this way is going to make me and everyone around me miserable. I don't want to spend my children's childhood hating them for being children and being frustrated with their every mis-step as they learn - I am terrified that I am creating a little girl who is going to spend her life feeling as though she is struggling to be perfect so I'll love her. Lord knows what I'll do to her little brother. I don't want to be frustrated with my spouse because I'm the one with boobs who is stuck at home feeding the infant while he gets to go off to work (as though going to work carries no stress with it....).

Somehow accepting the perfect imperfection of my life might be the thing that actually turns things around for me. Just letting what is be what is. Maybe imperfect is perfect. The book suggests that a loving kindness meditation is the ticket for someone like me. I can see how that might work.

Now, if I can only muster the brain power to remember to do it....
Where did I put that book again?

Doormat Dads

The NYT's blog on parenting "Motherload" has had yet another fabulous post. This one called In Defense of the Doormat Dad.

As I read the post I found myself shaking my head and thinking, 'I believe I've taught children of parents like this at Harvard and been incredibly frustrated by them.' This dad, because of the overly strong method of discipline issued by his father has decided discipline isn't his thing and he always gives in to his child - in doing that he always makes his wife the bad guy (note to the dude who wrote the article: if she doesn't already resent you for this, she will, soon).

It also made me reflect on how things happen in our household. I am, by far, the more strict parent. That is in part because 1. I believe in the power of limits with children - and see them as empowering rather than disempowering, 2. I firmly believe that at age 38 I know better than a 2 year old, 3. I am home much more and deal with the consequences of a child's behavior much more often and  4. I value my sanity.

Just an hour ago, my nearly three year old tried valiantly to convince me that she needed to have music on to be able to nap. That music would, in fact, help her sleep. That this was all issued to me in a whine told me all I needed to hear - her level of fatigue meant if no nap happened the rest of the afternoon would be ugly. From prior experience, when I gave in on music and let it play during nap time (only once), she did not nap and instead was out of her room as soon as the CD ended and was a freaking disaster by the end of the day.

I have seen in our house the role of the parent who gives in to a child's whims and the parent who doesn't and the conflict that can create. For a long time, I felt like the police always having to tell the other two members of the household when it was time for bath, time for bed, time for lights out. It made me resentful. Why was I the only parent who seemed concerned with getting the child to bed on time? Sleep is critical and important to a child's development and mood and to the mood of the mother who will have to deal with said child the next day. Eventually, I stopped saying "okay, it is time for tub," when I wasn't the parent who was going to give the tub. That stopped me from feeling like the police, but it doesn't stop me from wondering why the other parent doesn't seem to see how tired the child is and how getting to bed a bit early could benefit everyone. However, I do realize they have to develop their own way of doing things and develop their own sort of relationship.

What I've also learned is it is hard to be the parent who is gone all week at work, leaving at 8am and home at 6pm and then issue boundaries. It is never fun to the be the parent who says no, but for me, as long as that no comes with a real reason that is ultimately to the child's benefit, I'm okay with it. It is rare that the child flinches when I say no, even when it is issued in a stern voice. However, recently, when she grabbed a knife off of the counter and accidentally poked her father in the arm with it and he said no to her, she immediately sulked and started to whimper. That cut right to the core of him and he felt terrible. She came to me for comfort and he apologized for hurting her feelings.

As we talked about it later and he expressed how terrible he felt about making her cry, I tried to reassure him that he is doing less damage by teaching her things like 'you don't brandish knives and stick people with them', than by saying nothing and letting her do what she pleases. Those are simple lessons she needs to learn, even if they come with a brief crying fit.

When I told her recently that she could not touch the television screen, she replied, "oh mommy, you say no to everything." I stopped and thought about that a bit and realized that I do say no to a lot, but there's a lot of behavior that she'd engage in if there were no limits. I make a concerted effort to say yes to things she requests that are in the realm of acceptable behavior or fun or going to enrich her day - you want to play with playdough while I make your lunch? Great! You'd like to go to the library this afternoon rather than play in the yard? Fantastic! You'd like to watch Sesame Street for the second time today? No. One time through is enough. You'd like a brownie before your lunch? No, we eat our growing foods first. But, if you eat all your lunch, you can have a brownie.

I think we've gotten to a better balance in our parenting of both of us instilling discipline and I certainly have a better perspective on my husband's experience of it and why it presents challenges for him.

For the sake of the dad who wrote the blog post, I hope he learns it is ok to cut short your child's tub at night if it is going to take him past his regular bedtime and that though your child requests you to turn right rather than left on the way home, you might still want to go the way you've planned because a detour might throw off all kinds of other things you (or your wife) may have planned - like, oh, say, a timely dinner that would lead to a timely tub, that would lead to a timely bedtime.

None of us has all the answers as parents but for the future teachers of your children and all the people who will interact with them, please set some basic limits so they don't end up pissing off the world with their entitlement and obnoxiousness.

Just noticing...

One of the things I admire the most about my husband is his seemingly endless well of patience - with me, with our child, with life. As someone who has a patience well that is as deep as the shallowest of puddles, I fully appreciate the value of being with someone who can endure when, so often, I cannot.

At night, when I've had it with the day and the child has had it with the day and the two of us are apt to get on each other's nerves, he is able to negotiate the final hour of her day in a way that I could never. Tonight, she was edging toward wild and he suggested that they 'do shells' before going up to do a tub.

The Hubs is a serious collector of shells. If we are at a beach, he is picking them up and usually bringing a fair number home. We have various containers filled with shells throughout the house (incidentally, my mother also collects shells and I grew up with containers of them in our house, so this was not all that strange to me that he has them too) and the one in the living room is a glass bowl filled with them.

The process of 'doing shells' is to take the bowl down from the bookcase, take the shells out one by one putting them on the coffee table - sometimes remarking on their color, or noticing the shape, or enjoying the tactile experience of touching their ridged edges, or simply just loving the process of taking out and putting back in - something at which all toddlers excel.

This particular container of shells has lots of small scallop-like shells and some others that I can't identify. There are also lots of pieces of shells, scraps of broken up conch shells, pieces of dog whelks and what not.

If it were me, I wouldn't pick up a broken shell, let alone bring it home. But, this, people, is what I love about my husband. He looks at a broken shell and sees the beauty in what is there - ignoring whatever else might be missing. As he pulls those shells out he'll often comment to the Shorty on what parts of it are neat, or how the color changes inside and out.

It is just a truism about him that he can find such beauty and wonder in the most imperfect of situations, beings and things. This, perhaps, is why he is able to love me! The way he views a shell, whether whole or broken, is how he views life. There is always something good and redeeming no matter what is going on or how difficult the situation. He is kind, he is patient, he is compassionate and he can find beauty in the smallest scrap of a shell.

Should be we surprised by this?

Another day of buzz on the interwebs. This one is a true tragedy; the shooting in Aurora, CO at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

It is so terribly hard to make sense of such a senseless act, until you start to wonder how senseless it really is. When we live in a society that, for all intents and purposes, extols the virtues of violence, should we feel shocked when all that is offered as entertainment comes to life?

A line from an article on boston.com jumped out at me: "...maybe it’s worth having a discussion about an entertainment culture that excels at selling violent power fantasies to people who feel powerless." I don't think the violence is limited to power fantasies aimed at the powerless.

It is everywhere from the myriad police-based shows, shows about the mafia or forensics, kids cartoons can be violent, even, frankly, the evening news shows violence. Violence isn't limited to television either. Murder Mystery books are prevalent too. Whether it is Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Faye Kellerman, Sara Paretsky, there probably is seldom a time when a book about violence isn't on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of this week, GONE GIRL and BACKFIRE are two that are clearly crime/violence based.

Frankly, the concept of violence extends all the way down to children's clothes. In recent years a trend has emerged of the use of camouflage in boys and girls clothing. For girls, of course it has the ever-present pink added in, but for boys it is straight up camo, like what you see soldiers wearing. Really? People want to dress their infant, toddler, elementary school age boy as though he is a mini-soldier? Ben and I often discuss what it means to sign up for the military and we both agree that a major part of it is that you are signing up to agree to be okay with killing people. It might come as no surprise that I won't be buying any camo gear for either of my children.

How easy is it for someone to obtain a gun in our culture? Pretty freaking easy. Our second amendment give us the right to keep and bear arms and the supreme court has had several cases to debate whether this applies to individuals and many cases come out in favor of people being able to keep guns in their homes. The original intention, I believe, was to allow for militias and for communities to protect themselves. I'm pretty sure the makers of our constitution never fathomed an assault rifle or the number of bullets it could dispense in a matter of minutes.

That we can get an assault rifle to keep in our own homes seems just so unnecessary. To what end does an average individual need an assault rifle? While I would personally never own a gun, if you are a hunter you would have one or if you are a sportsman you would have one. But in neither case would an assault rifle be your weapon of choice. They are meant for nothing else than killing as many people in one fell swoop as possible. Its not like you are going to take an assault rifle out into the woods hoping to stumble upon a herd of deer and just fire away.

But, I bet we see images of assault rifles all over movies and television. We might even read about the carnage they create in a book or in a story covering unrest in any number of foreign countries. I would argue that the supreme court needs to re-enact the ban on assault rifles it over turned in the 90's. But I might also argue that we as a culture need to start speaking out against the violence that pervades our airways as a way to begin to curb the senseless violence that continues to occur in our society.

Do we need maternity leave?

Yesterday the interwebs were buzzing about the news of Marissa Mayer's Fortune Magazine interview in which she stated "My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I'll work throughout it."

Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo, no doubt a high pressure, high stakes job. She started yesterday at 28 weeks pregnant. In many ways it is progressive for a company to hire a leader who is expecting a child in just under 3 months. But is it really if the expectation is that she has to give birth and immediately return to work? Do women really still have to act like men to get the top jobs?

When I first read snippets of the article I snorted out loud to learn of her plan to just pop her kiddo out and go right back to work. Spoken like a first time mom who doesn't know what is coming. Maybe you'll be put on bed rest before giving birth. Who knows how long labor will last, how tired you'll be, whether you might hemmorage and be told to take two weeks and do nothing but feed the baby (I was). Maybe you'll have to have an emergency C-section. How will your body react to being up every two hours to feed said infant? What if the child has colic or other health issues? There are so many unknowns about labor and delivery and the first few months after that it seems incredibly short sighted to just blithely say, 'oh sure I'll go right back to work', when your company probably offers some kind of maternity leave and you earn enough to take a leave, even an unpaid one.

The cynical part of me guesses that she has a scheduled C-section set up and will immediately just bottle feed with formula for the sake of going back to work and employ any number of nannies to care for her newborn. How else can she accomplish such a feat without going down in flames when she sits down at her computer to send an email in her sleep deprived haze, unshowered, baby poop on her pants and milk leaking through her pajamas and puts together a completely incoherent message to her employees? I should say that I advocate women doing what's right for them on the breast-feeding front, and I know many who have had to bottle feed because nursing wasn't an option from a physical standpoint. But, not nursing because you are pressured to return to work is just wrong.

In the LA TIMES there was a story that quotes Lisa Stone the CEO of BlogHer as saying her phone lines lit up with people celebrating Mayer's hire and impending motherhood as a true sign that women have smashed the glass ceiling. I think there's a serious problem there. Women have gotten into the workplace and gained access to high level positions but they've had to do it by acting like they are men. Men take two weeks off (sometimes) when their child is born and go back to work.  There seems to be no respect for the changes a woman's body undergoes to give birth and the need to heal from that to be healthy and happy. That healing takes time - the 6 weeks of healing your doctor tells you, you need is, from my experience and those I've talked to, really just the tip of the iceberg.

I firmly believe in women making the choice that works for them when it comes to working or not working after having children. I firmly believe that women are just as capable of holding high powered offices and succeeding just as much as a man can. But, I don't believe our workplace model has evolved to a point to allow women to succeed in doing that while actually acknowledging the demands of motherhood.

In the Atlantic Monthly recently there was an article written by a high powered mom of two tween/teenage kids who has decided to leave her high powered position because she realized you simply can't have it all. Something always has to give and usually it is on the family side. She's an older mom with older kids so she has some wisdom with which to look at things and she isn't talking about stepping out of the workplace just to have kids, but to be engaged with them throughout their lives. She discovered the neediness to survive passes when kids get older, but the neediness to thrive is still there.

I admit I was shocked to go back to work 3 months after having my first. I had assumed there was some rhyme of reason to why that was the allotted maternity leave - like, my child would be on some kind of sleep schedule that allowed me to sleep enough to be a functioning human being. Nope. She was up every 2-3 hours, nursing for an hour at a time and then going back down. I don't even want to calculate how little sleep that meant for me and I know I was not the best worker I could be in the first year of her life. I probably wasn't the best mom either, but on both fronts I gave it my best shot.

Now, that my second is due (ironically on the same day as Marissa Mayer and I'm also having a boy), I know I will not be able to take a full 3 month maternity leave. After my first I left the administrative, benefit providing side of my job to just teach part-time, 3 days a week as I believe in being home part-time to participate in the raising of my child. So, I enter into this birth gratefully covered by my husband's health insurance, but with no maternity leave. We have set money aside to allow me some time to stay home, but both of us know keeping as much money in the bank as possible is a good thing. So, I am constantly thinking about how long to take off and when to go back. I should teach 10 weeks of lessons (the fall semester starting, no less, when I am about 36 weeks along). If I did 3 before having the baby, could I do 3 after, starting say in late November? Can I handle that after just 6 or 7 weeks? I struggle to come up with a paradigm that feels right beyond, I want at least 3 months at home. Truth be told, I think women should be granted with pay and a right to return to their position without retribution, a year off after having a child. (My reasoning behind that is probably the topic for a whole 'nother post.)

So, when I read about Marissa Mayer, who probably has the option on paper to stay home for 3 months, or maybe to even have started her position 3 months after giving birth to her child, yet she's saying she doesn't need maternity leave, it irks me. I think it sends the wrong message to the world about what women have as rights in the workplace. It tells me that women haven't risen nearly so high as we like to think. It also tells me Marissa Mayer might be in for a rude awakening.