Grady won a cake in his school’s fall festival. It was a perfectly shaped chocolate bunt cake placed on a brightly patterned plastic tray. This “trophy” cake sat on our counter for a few days following the festival until my husband Scott and I cut into it to enjoy.   When Grady discovered that Scott and I had helped ourselves to a piece of his prize cake he was very upset. He dramatically stormed off to his room to demonstrate his anger. When I went in to inquire more about his hurt feelings this very mature, calm, conversation ensued:

G: “Mom, if you had won a cake in a cake-walk that was precious to you, and someone ate it without your permission, how would you feel?’
Me: “I would probably feel irritated and maybe a little bit hurt?”
G: “Yes. That is how I feel.”
Me: “Gosh I am sorry Grady, I should have asked first. I didn’t realize how important it was to you.”
G: “It was my prize, I won it, I wanted to save it.”
Me: “Well it is a cake- it will go stale if we don’t eat it you know.”               

His composed, mature communication breaks down into big sobs….

Me: “What’s wrong? Why the tears love?”
G: (while sobbing) “I don’t like cake!”

For me, the Story of the Cake Walk is a lesson in remembering to see things through another’s eyes, through his eyes, and not assume that what is meaningless to me does not hold great meaning for another.

For him perhaps this memory will serve as a lesson in learning to savor experiences-to know that the memory of an experience or something symbolic of that experience is as precious as the thing itself.

Now let’s have some cake!

I’ve been poised in our bay window for about 20 minutes now, trying to capture a photo of what has had me mesmerized; A male cardinal sitting on the bird feeder cautiously monitoring the happenings all around him. At the same time, his mate nervously waits on a branch above.  When he makes his move, he  takes the seed from the feeder, looks around again and then flies up to his companion to place the seed in her mouth. I have been watching them do this over and over-hoping to capture a photo of his caretaking of her.

As the scent of homemade pesto fills our home, the irony of the moment waves over me; my husband Scott is preparing to feed me-just like the cardinal was feeding his mate. Of course, the only stress in Scott’s meal preparation is perhaps the timing of things, no danger lurks around the corner that he needs to protect us from. Yet his act of food preparation, the love and joy with which he puts into his cooking, is without a doubt his way of providing care for us, something I often take for granted in our relationship. Cooking is by no means a way that I care for scott, far from it!  So much so that he politely declined my offers to cook on his birthday and father’s day this year, preferring to prepare his own favorite foodie dish (no offense taken I do NOT find joy in cooking). My care and feeding of the family is more emotional and logistical in nature.

I began the reflection above a few months back, deciding to set it aside to let my thoughts on caring for one another germinate a bit more in my mind.  In the meantime, Scott fell off a ladder while removing debris from our roof-ten feet down onto concrete. He broke his back in two places,  a narrow miss for a life altering injury (not that this isn’t life altering… but he is walking and he will heal!)! One of the breaks was an unstable fracture requiring surgery.  For 48 hours before his surgery and immediately after, he had to lie perfectly still on a hospital gurney while wearing a neck brace to stabilize his spine. When he was given his first meal in the hospital, we realized that between not being able to sit up or take off the neck brace, he could not feed himself. So there I sat, for the first time in our twenty some years of coupling, feeding him small bites of food, like that Cardinal in the tree or a mother feeding her young child.   I carefully cut up small bites of food, knowing that swallowing while lying flat is not easy or particularly safe. I slowly raised the fork to his mouth and placed the food in, one bite at a time. As I watched him eat and selected each bite to follow, I felt an intimate vulnerability between us. I was keenly aware of his physical vulnerability of course, but also the vulnerability that comes from being dependent on another human. I was also aware of the vulnerability that I felt-in seeing someone i love in pain and helpless.  Coupled with these vulnerabilities was the simple act of feeding him, which felt somewhat intimate. As I continued to feed him, my mind went back to the scene that had mesmerized me months ago and stirred my thoughts about caring and protecting one another -the cardinal feeding his mate.

I don’t know about other peoples intimate relationships, but for me, the daily routines of work, home chores, kid care, and simply the worry and dreams of my own imagining, often mean I am not mindful on a daily basis of the care of our coupling or my partner’s individual needs. If I am being truly candid, I’ll admit that in the course of a weeks time sometimes I have more selfish or irritable thoughts than I do loving. Loving someone else, especially someone you share a closet with, has an element of choice and discipline to it. It’s a practice to focus on the good, on gratitude, and to consider the other person’s needs.

I once heard someone say that when you look at your partner, you should try and see the five year old kid in them;  That kid full of goodness, joy and need. For some of us who are parents, on occasion we think of our partners as another child but more out of annoyance because of dirty socks left on the floor or dirty dishes left on the coffee table! The message of course was to recognize that as adults we carry those old needs, fulfilled or unfulfilled into adulthood and that we should strive to look beyond our irritations and see the goodness, and the vulnerability in one another.

That being said, a misunderstanding of romance for sure is that our partners can and should meet all of our needs. That is not at all my implication. However, balanced with the independence of self which requires us to learn to identify our own needs, learn to care for ourselves and to ask for what we want, should be in my mind, a commitment of care for one another.  The inevitable irritations of sharing life with another imperfect human demands that we rise above (or at least manage) the messy to attend to one another, to be each other’s “soft place.”  This is the work of a lifelong relationship-carefully placing  seeds in one another’s beaks.

Since those days of my feeding ‘seeds’ to him, there have been many more moments of vulnerability and caretaking, and I suspect there are more to come as he heals, and frankly as we continue to share our lives together. I feel keenly aware right now of Scott’s need of my care, and more sensitive to the ways in which he provides care to me.

Who has put seeds in your beak recently?

I turned the corner a little too sharp and my overpriced large iced tea went cascading like a waterfall to the floor board of the car. My thoughts also instantly cascaded in a negative spiral: ‘Why didn’t I hold that tea in the turn’? ‘Why did I spend so much money on a tea’! ‘These things always happen to me.’ My anger and outburst was most definitely NOT parallel to the incident, after all it was just tea. However, I was looking forward to it and felt as if I personally had been wronged by the event. I let out some choice words to express my frustration. And in that moment, a little wise voice from the back seat said:

“I’ts ok mom, at least I didn’t spill.”

I felt like the air was sucked out of me for a split second-like the hypnotist snapped his fingers and I was now alert and aware. I felt instant remorse and humility for my ridiculous outburst and overreaction. Afterall, I am the one who is supposed to have self-regulation, perspective, right? I am supposed to teach him not to “sweat the small stuff” to keep perspective when things go awry, to manage big feelings when they are about small things.

Alas it was him, in his less than a decade of life experience who had to remind me what matters. He didn’t spill.

Some more philosophical than me have said that children choose the parents they need. The idea is that we choose our parents in some spiritual sense based on what we need to learn in this lifetime. I am not sure about all of that- as certainly, there are many examples that don’t seem to fit with this notion-examples of parents not capable of meeting even basic needs to exploiting and abusing children-certainly not something one would choose. But For the sake of reflection, let’s go with this notion for a moment.   Perhaps our children do choose us for what we have to offer and teach them,  perhaps  we are the perfect parent to our child. I think about this awesome responsibility when I am not in a “spilled ice tea regression” and  I wonder:  “Why did he choose me”? With his old soul  thinking, his playful, active self, his dyslexic brain. What is it about his soul that chose mine? What is it that he needs most from me that I am uniquely suited to give?

I also think that this notion of choosing our families can go both ways; Perhaps our children not only seek us out for what they need from us, but also what we need to learn from them. Our children, or at least my child, offers me constant opportunities for my own continued development. Some moments I have felt that my own growth comes at his expense. Mistakes I have made in my parenting that his reaction or presence makes me aware of helps me to grow, but often at a price of hurt or disappointment for him. Hopefully our mistakes also teach our children to be forgiving and to recognize that even people who love us will disappoint from time to time and make mistakes. We can all survive those moments of imperfection, forgive one another, and be a little better for it.

Regardless of what you or I believe about how we end up together- our kids choosing us, a higher power bringing us together, or a random accident of the universe, wise adults have realized for centuries that children are our teachers as much as we are to them. When we are willing to open ourselves to what they offer us-the gift of perspective and growth.

 

Thanks for cleaning up my spill kid. Now I am going to go hold tight to a tall glass of tea.

Well I did it. I reunited with my 1988 high school classmates over the weekend sans white teeth, collagen treated skin or a professional make up job. Here’s my top 10 post reunion musings:

1. Nametags at 30^th reunions should ALWAYS be accompanied by reading glasses. Preferably, in school colors with a mascot themed lanyard, that way they could double as a party favor.
2. Learning that some classmates are grandparents, some are empty nesters, some have high schoolers and some, ahem, like me, are still packing lunch boxes and watching Paw Patrol, is frightening and delightful all at the same time. And serves as a reminder that everyone’s journey and timetable is perfectly imperfect for them
3. Asking your parents to borrow their car, and a little cash, is a good way to get in the high school mindset. And it probably makes them feel good too.
4. Having someone buy you a drink is a small pleasure I’d forgotten.
5. Talking in a loud room with loud music makes you feel like you need a hearing aid to go with your party favor reading glasses.
6. Engaging in a few deeper dive conversations, however brief, is lovely. And so is longing for more.
7. Brief encounters that leave you thinking-“She/he is special-I wish I had known them better/hung out with them more” are bitter sweet.
8. Despite our anti-wrinkle culture/preference, I think peoples’ smiles are even more charming and genuine with laugh lines.
9. When you can allow yourself to transcend your insecurities and dynamics of the past and remind yourself that no one is one-dimensional; we all have sorrows, joys, untold stories, and aspirations- -good things can happen.
10. Staying up and out past 2:00 am two nights in a row makes you feel like you graduated from high school 30 years ago…oh wait, I did.

Looking forward to the next time…

 

Picture this: It is four days before I leave for my 30^th high school reunion and I find myself standing in the beauty isle of a local retailer. I am looking at anti-aging products with key words such as collagen, firming, retinol, rejuvenating. However, without my reading glasses in tow I have to squint to attempt to read the “promise” of the product on the box (do any of them produce reliable results in four days?)? Alas, I cannot read the box. I sigh and admonish myself for not following through with ANYTHING my reunion vanity/insecurity list of six months ago:

• whitening strips for my teeth
• see the dermatologist about my skin
• finally schedule that professional make up consultant to deal with droopy eyes
• lose those extra holiday pounds
• get in shape

Life got busy and as things often go, I did not get around to my reunion to-do list. It is silly I know, to worry about such superficial things. I am generally not a superficial/vain person beyond the norm-in fact I sometimes think my more internally focused obsession on analyzing my thoughts and behavior is a bit much for my own good. Yet it seems that events such as a class reunion bring out the insecurity in force. I doubt that my worry about anti-aging or looking “good” for this occasion is out of the ordinary. In fact, as I have shared my trip plans with others, often the first thing I have been asked is “What will you wear?” or “Are you nervous?” or a comment like “Good thing you just went to the beach, you are nice and tan!”

It seems that for many of us these events throw us back to the mentality of our youth where having a hair out-of-place can ruin one’s day and having the latest, greatest fashion item is of paramount importance. As adolescents, we are developing more fully our identities, seeking approval and alignment with peers, while differentiating ourselves from our parents. I think these developmental tasks and realities make many of us feel (at least in reflection) a bit inauthentic, insecure or unknown. (for me all of those things were true and were compounded by some other personal realities at the time that made me feel particularly invisible –but that is a longer reflection for a different day).

The irony of this worry is that for me, and I suspect many other of my same age classmates, I feel like I am at more peace with my physical and emotional self than ever before. Of course, I still worry about my appearance and have negative feelings from time to time about the ways in which the “calendar” is beginning to affect my body. But those feelings are balanced with a deeper comfort with myself and my life, and a more reflective and humorous view of the realities and dynamics of the past etc. This comfort makes my “reunion to do list” and failed attempt in the beauty aisle particularly curious to me.

So why would we want to reunite with those old feelings as the backdrop? Well of course what I have described is not a holistic view of our experiences in high school-many of us have deeply rooted friendships that have stood the test of time, fond memories that connect us, and certainly nostalgia for our younger days that drive our desire for reuniting. Perhaps the aforementioned comfort we come to know in our own skin that drives us to go and reconnect. Despite my last-ditch attempt to reverse the years on my face, when I think about what I hope for in my attending this reunion it is this; I hope that with as many folks as I can, I am able to genuinely connect and re acquaint. I hope that I am able to share bits of my life as it has evolved, not the collagen treated version of my life, but my real life in all of its hills and valleys. I hope that I am able to put others at ease such that they can feel genuine in their connection as well.

So here I come, with droopy eyes, laugh lines forged from joys and sorrows, and teeth representing a life fueled by good cups of coffee. I sure hope no one wears their reading glasses!

 

Me: “…I was in a car accident in the past.”

Son: “What!? You lived in the past?”

 

After I finished chuckling to myself, I thought; “Oh goodness, if you only knew how much I live in the past!”

Children as you likely are aware, are generally “present centered”; What happened yesterday for them is easily released-their mood and thoughts changing sometimes moment to moment. At the same time the promise or worry of tomorrow is hard for them to want for or imagine-so they live in the now. My kiddo is particularly “nowish” in nature-save the anticipation of Santa Claus. Whether he is deep in imaginary play or outside immersing himself in the earth with all of his senses, or reaching out to me for comfort or affection-he is all in the now.

Then, there is us grownups, or perhaps I should just speak for myself, there is me. If I am not ruminating about, repeating, or longing for the past, I might be worrying about or hoping for something in the future. When it comes to my child, I probably spend more mental time replaying my last parenting blunder or worrying about how I will handle a future parenting challenge, than I do truly being present to him. In the car, on the couch, even sometimes (gasp) while reading him a story-I struggle to just be all there, the way he is. My version of being in the now with him often looks like this: He is playing by himself nearby while I am frantically working or doing some household task. Certainly, my job has demands I must meet, but if I am being honest, there are many occasions where I have a choice to do or think about work versus what is right in front of me for the taking. And I am not even going to mention my over-preoccupation with the various distractions my phone provides. Not much room in there for the now, is there?

What message do I send to my son because of all of my mental time travel? At minimum, he is experiencing “Mom is busy, mom is here but not here.” At worst, he may experience me as not truly caring to be present to him-that my distance is about him (after all, kids are not only in the now, but also self-centered by development and therefore assume most things are about/because of them). My difficulty being present can be/is hurtful to him, and to our bond. It is my loss too–our loss-all that we miss by being in the past or future or just somewhere else in our minds and actions.

Despite my best efforts, I am not sure if I will ever be a fully in the now human-but what I know I can experience with my son, if I allow myself, is to be fully present in as many moments as possible and to catch myself when I drift away from him. It is a discipline and decision for sure-to set aside the worry for the future, the stress of the work, or rumination about the past. But I know it is worthwhile challenge. So here’s to putting down the phone, tuning out the email, turning down the noise in my head, and immersing myself in the delicious now that he offers.

Here’s to more now.

Red Light-Green Light-Red Light… So the childhood schoolyard game goes. Start, stop, resist the urge to move, listen, move, stand still.

It was a game of Red Light Green Light that morning on the school playground that left me feeling like I was approaching an intersection where the light had just turned yellow: Do I stop and wait? Or am I far enough in I can go? Sometimes it is not clear.

There I was, dropping my son off on the playground as I have for the past four years. Our goodbyes in the morning have always been the kind every parent treasures-a big heartfelt embrace or two, kisses exchanged along with ritualized wishes and guidance to “be kind, have fun, work hard, see you after school”. Sometimes my parting is immediate, but not without the rituals, due to the demands of the workday. But more often he would dart off to join friends or start or join in on an imaginative  game. I would watch with delight while visiting with parents and teachers. There were no yellow lights then-I knew that he wanted and needed our affectionate parting rituals. I would wave or call to him and he would come running from wherever-often at full speed into my embrace. A time or two I snuck away only to be met with a tearful admonishment at the end of the day “You left without giving me a hug.” No yellow lights at all.

But on this day, that game of Red Light Green Light pulled him away immediately and things felt different. He was having so much fun and so deeply engaged in the game, that I was uncertain of what to do. Standing at a yellow light so to speak, uncertain if I should go or stay. I stood awkwardly like I was at a middle school dance standing on the sidelines wondering if I was going to be asked to dance or if I should ask someone to dance.

My gut told me that this day was different. So I waved and blew a kiss and went on my way. And so here I find myself, on the cusp of another mile marker in his development and our parent child relationship. It is another moment of letting go a little in little ways. Watching him slowly turn his attention, as he should, to his peers and the world outside of my embrace.

Obeying traffic signals and signs is a bit more cut and dry than this parenting thing. Sure, there are judgements we make and risks we take or refrain from taking. But in parenting, few things are as clear as a red light or green light-there are yellow lights at every turn, at least that is my experience. So I’ll continue to stay observant, let go a little following his cues, and always be ready to embrace when he returns from his adventures into the world.

Red Light-Green Light.