Stretched Thin

So I found out today what my current limit is on single parenting (four days, for the curious).  I found out because there were plans in place to give me two hours to myself. The plans fell through and I fell apart. (I'm not permanently a single mom, BTW; my husband is just sick).

Like lots of Moms, I suffer from feeling pulled at all the time. Any time I get to make my own decisions about (without regard to to others) comes in small increments--seven to thirty minutes on average. Getting those few minutes usually requires organizational gymnastics that should qualify me for the Cirque du Soleil. Like lots of Moms, I contribute to the problem, by having a hard time prioritizing myself and my needs.

And, right now, I'm a little burnt out. I guess that makes sense. I've been in the Mom game for seventeen years. (Yes, I know my oldest is only twelve, but the years with two kids count twice each, and maybe should count for four each). That's longer than most people do anything. Think about it. seventeen years is longer than a lot of marriages last. Seventeen years is longer than a lot of people stick to a job that pays in dollars. In some fields, I'd be up for retirement.

Couple this with my career for money (Ha!) choice: teaching. That means, that on most days, I have somewhere between 130 and 150 people who want my individualized attention. There's just not quite that much of me, so I get stretched thin. When I get stretched thin enough, I puncture easily.

So, that's why I'm eating these cookies now. I'm stretched too thin. I must need to thicken up a little. 

Teaching with One-to-One Laptop Initiative

My school district jumped headfirst into technology this year, purchasing a laptop for every student in grades 6-12.  It's been exciting and frustrating and wonderful and awful. I've finally got a few minutes to jot down some thoughts about implementation:

Exciting and Wonderful!

• No more "I left it" anywhere!  If the document is digital, it's with you. Even better, since the kids all got google accounts, it can't even be saved in a incompatible format or on a different thumb drive, or any of the other millions of excuses I've heard in seventeen years of teaching.
• Differentiation (edu-lingo for making different versions of the work based on the needs of individual students) is so much easier!  I can share different documents with different kids and with them all focused on their individual work, no one even has to know that they're not all doing exactly the same thing. I can provide extra resources to only some students with a couple of quick clicks. It's beautiful.
• Collaboration with my colleagues and among my students has never been easier. We can share our work with each other so easily! It doesn't matter if we're ever available at the same time or not (which is good, because, mostly, we're not)
• We're cutting the digital divide. No more have and have-nots. Every kid has access to the same technology and has a chance to develop facility with the various ways we use technology in adult life for work, networking, organization and play.

Frustrating and Awful!

• There's really been no provision to educate kids about using their computers. It's been a hard uphill battle for kids who aren't particularly tech-savvy. I've got at least five ideas for how to address this . . .but the horse has already left the barn and no one asked the people who might be able to predict trouble areas: the teachers.
• Lots of trouble-shooting that didn't happen in advance and could have. Even problems I directly asked about because I anticipate them were ignored.
• Distract-ability.  I guess I should have, but I didn't anticipate the degree of the problem. Most students are so good about using their computers for schoolwork, but there are those few who think that having a laptop in front of them is a ticket to play games all day.  It's been much harder than I expected to pull their attention out of the individual work stations and into the collective space so we can have those whole-class experiences that are so central to education. It shouldn't be surprising--I know plenty of adults who can't get their noses out of their smartphones for four seconds in a row, and these are kids!

Overall, I'm so glad my district took this step.  It's been a hard semester because of it--it's turned teaching into almost a first-year experience again, with the need to create everything anew to make use of our new tools.  But I anticipate an easier semester next semester and it's already easier to draw on the work I've done past years thanks to google's excellent search functions. 

Now, next time, if only they'd ask us to troubleshoot before the trouble shoots us.

Had we but world enough, and time

How can it already be 5:00? I didn't get done with half of what was on my list for today.  (sigh) That's a normal Saturday, too.

It's another busy weekend.  And I really do want to do most of what's in it. But I wish I had an assistant or a maid to iron out all the details so I could just show up and enjoy. How do people without a partner do this?

Item #1: Watch my older daughter play soccer.  Easy enough, right? Preparation: wash uniform & stinky shin guards and shoes; choose, shop and gather team snack; an hour in the car (repeat weekly). Once, I'm there though, I get to sit and talk to other moms about how great our kids are. That's a fair trade.

Item #2: Hosting a playdate for the younger daughter.  Preparation: cleaning up her room, so there's room to play in it; pumping up the balls and bike tires which have gotten flat; planning, shopping, and preparing little girl pleasing foods; making logistical arrangements with the friend's mom. This one stays pretty intense:  managing disagreements, ensuring cleanup of each activity before we move on, taking care of boo-boos, etc. Surprisingly, though, I sat for almost 30 minutes during today's playdate!

Item #3: Going to the movies with the husband. Preparation: finding time to shower and make myself presentable, arranging for babysitting, finding the checkbook so I can pay the babysitter (one of two things I still do by check), emptying that big purse I only carry when going to movies or other events where I have contraband to sneak in, getting movie tickets (it's a movie festival thing, requires a little more plan ahead). If I can just there, all I really have to fight is my own tired-ness.  Luckily, they have coffee!

Item #4: Hosting my writing group.  Preparation: Cleaning house to the point of feeling okay about letting friends enter, preparing food for eight, reading the pieces up for critique and preparing thoughtful commentary, making a plan to keep the family happy enough without me for 4 hours, calming my nerves (it's my work on the chopping block this week).  Luckily, this is a group of busy women . . . they very politely never notice the parts of cleaning I didn't find time for.

Item #5: Gaming.  This is the closest I get to "just show up and enjoy it"  . . .because the hubby is the GM.  Of course, that means I'll need to get the children out of his hair long enough for him to prep. Hmmmm . . .

First world problems for sure, worrying about logistics for my very busy leisure life. I'm a very lucky lady, to get to do all these awesome things with all these awesome people.

Letter to Grandma Liz

Dear Grandma Liz,

Nice trick, dying on your eighty-eighth birthday.  A nice symmetry to that.  And the two eights, like infinity symbols. Very cool. I’ll have to remember that when my time comes.

I kind of wish you could have taken the very end more slowly, and let my mother arrive at the hospital. She was at my house, where she’d been helping take care of my kids, your great-granddaughters, in the week before Kindergarten started up full time for the youngest. She was at the airport, two hours from your side, when she got the news. That was hard.

When it’s time, it’s time, I guess.  I wouldn’t have wanted you to suffer, but Mom would have liked to have held your hand and heard your voice one last time.

She’s staying really busy right now, sorting your belongings and papers, making sure the money and legal details are in place. She’s really pretty amazing.  You’d be proud of her, I think. She’s stubborn like you.  And like you, she’s fiercely proud and doesn’t want to let us help her.  (We’re making her let us help, though).

I miss you, Grandma. I’m glad I got to see you so recently, even if you were kind of angry at the world that day. I can definitely understand being angry. I think I’d be angry, too. Getting old sucks.

There’s all the things you didn’t do yet and it was becoming clear that you were running out of time. Your body wouldn’t do all the things you wanted it to do. And there’s all the things you knew we were going to do that you wouldn’t like. That feeling of not being in control of the things you wanted to be in control of. As you thought back on your life in those last weeks, I hope you thought about the happy things, too, and not just the slights you felt you had received.

I was at your house today, helping sort things and clean up, making it into the space it will next be.  You wouldn’t like the changes we made. We got rid of your gray rug.  We took the pictures off the walls (we’re planning to scan the old ones for all to share and let your children take the ones that apply to them).  We took down about half of the draperies and let the sunshine into your front living room.  I think it looks pretty good!

I hope you understand that none of that was a lack of respect for you.  I think you’ll be happy to know that your old house is going to be home to two young couples in our family as well as to your youngest son.  I’m happy that it’ll still be lived in by people I love. Letting your old house become something different makes it less sad, makes it possible to be there without wanting to cry.

We all really do want to cry. Some of us are holding it in. Some of us don’t hide it as well.  

Looking around at all your pictures today made me both happy and sad. How much you loved us all really showed. After all, you wanted images of all of us around you all the time. So much so that you couldn’t really see the walls at your house for all the smiling faces framed on them. You found something to be proud of each one of us for, and the evidence was everywhere.

Mostly, I liked finding the pictures of you. You as a teenager, taller than the other girls in your class picture, your head ducked down. I had a feeling you got caught about to laugh.

You as a young not-yet-married woman with flowers in your hair, and lipstick on. I imagine the lipstick was red, even though the picture was black and white and I couldn’t really tell.  

You with two babies on your lap, one of them my mother. Already they were pulling in two different directions, my mother and her oldest brother, and you were trying to hold them both at the same time.

You with the big sombrero on. You were so beautiful, and glamorous.  

The ones where you started to look like the Grandma I remember from childhood, your dark-framed glasses and dyed red hair, more orange than your natural red had been, before you decided to let it go white. I liked the one from someone’s wedding where your hair was a big Jackie-O type helmet all around your head.  You were grinning. You must have approved of the match.

And that one of you and me and Mom sitting at Grandma Lena’s grave and eating fried chicken.  That was such a good day.  One of the first ones when I felt like a grownup, included with the other grownups, all three of us missing your mother together.

It was a pretty amazing life, Grandma. I know you sometimes lamented the timing of your birth. That you wished you could’ve had a career like me or my sister and had more independence.  You should know though, that your belief is us is why we can.  We wouldn’t be the women we are if you weren’t the woman you were.

We were lucky to have you.

Enjoy heaven, Grandma. Try not to raise too much hell up there.

Love,
-Samantha

Some Guy I used to Know: Seeing the Ex

I got my daughter back on Friday.  That meant I had to see the ex. Strange how that was still stressful.

It's been eight years since we divorced, and I've never had any doubts that divorce was the right decision for me (and, so far as I know, for him).  It wasn't one of those cases where one spouse clung to the relationship and the other wanted out. It was decisively over. We've both moved, remarried, and started new families.  It's good.

But I still invested way too much energy into worrying about how my house looked and how I looked. Three days before he comes to town is probably too late to get the hardwood floors redone and lose the last twenty pounds of baby weight anyway. It shouldn't matter to me at this point.

Maybe it's just competition? Do I need to one-up him?

Or is it revenge? Like the Talmud teaches, "Live well. It is the best revenge."

Could it be just the strangeness of the situation? We've only seen each other in person three times since our split, all three in connection with getting M to her seasonal visitations.

We're good exes.  We communicate well about our shared daughter's needs and visitation setups via email and phone.  We plan for her future together without rancor. He is utterly reliable for the agreed upon support and not pushy or invasive about the day to day runnings of our lives.

I felt lousy the day they arrived. I had a medical procedure two days before (which shouldn't have left me feeling badly as long as it did). So, in the end, my house was clean, but not sparkling. I looked okay for a sick woman, but not the picture of health and wealth. I didn't even feel well enough to dress nicely. Soft pants and my favorite zombie teeshirt.

During his actual visit (a very brief tour of the house--he'd never seen it and M really wanted him to see her room and home), I felt very little.  I noticed the physical ways he had changed and remembered some things that I don't particularly like about him, but I didn't become awash in angst or have a flash of nostalgia for the friend he once was.

It was rather like having the mom of one of M's friends come by. I care that my house looks well-kept so that they will think well of my family, but I only know this person through M. I have no personal investment.

Maybe he really is now just some guy I used to know.

Facing Upsetting Truths

"What he'd thought of as a personal strength--he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know--was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets--or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them."

-Joe Hill, as character Jude, Heart Shaped Box

I was struck by this quote when I was reading yesterday afternoon (sidebar: I only read this book in daylight hours, btw, because it's too scary to read after dark!).  I was surprised to find philosophy in the middle of my ghost story, but it's spot-on. It describes a trend that is rankling me:  a general unwillingness among so-called adults to step up and have necessary confrontations.

The jerks of the world allowed to continue on their jerky way, shoving the needs of others and even simple courtesy to the wayside simply because no one will call them on it.  They do it because they can. We stand there watching them go by, our broken pieces of precious things in our hands, just gobsmacked that people will be so rude. But do we do anything? Usually, no.

We give up before we begin. We don't think it will do any good.  Maybe we're afraid of having that anger and self-righteousness directed at us.  Maybe we're trying to have a live-and-let-live attitude and feel it's not our place to question someone else's choices. Maybe we wish we had the balls to be such blatant aggressive assholes ourselves. We're kind people, raised right, with an awareness of our needs in relation to needs of others. We take others into account. Or as the bullies would say: we're wusses.

Bullies depend on that. On innocent bystanders continuing to stand by. On people turning a blind eye because it's "not their business." Remember this?

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

-Martin Niemöller 

We've learned nothing. 

It's not just in the big world that this comes into play. It's rampant in the small stuff, too. The day to day.

I watch coworkers afraid to offer any kind of criticism to coworkers, even clearly warranted and arguably necessary criticism that can avert disasters on small and large scales. I see bosses lecturing the whole staff rather than taking a problem up with the person who has the problem. I know parents afraid to enforce limits for their children, unable to face the tantrum.

I think, really? You can't face the wrath of a five year old to help create a better future adult?

When I'm most cynical, I think it's a symptom of how messed up society at large is. I know that I personally have never voted "for" anyone, just "against" the other guy. I am starting to truly believe that a person who can survive to be elected to high office in our country should therefore not be elected, because, obviously they are slippery, sly and not to be trusted. They are players.

Maybe it's really that, when the entire world is an upsetting truth, it's hard to open your heart and engage with any of it. There's just so much. It can swoop in, wash you down and drown you before you can extend the hand you intended to help with. It's dangerous, facing upsetting truths. But it's even more dangerous to pretend they don't exist.

So, let's start small. You don't have to start by taking on Congress.  How about calling your friend on it the next time she slams a gay person in your presence? How about telling a colleague that he is monopolizing the meeting? How about saying "no" and sticking to it even when your kiddo wheedles and whines like a champion?

The truth is often upsetting. It's not easy to face. Facing it might require something of you. But that's why they call us the grown-ups. Nothing will get better if we don't do something about it.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Now, put your big-girl panties on and get out there!

Spoiled Children

Generally, it's not a good thing when things are spoiled. It means the meat has gone rancid, the milk sour, the laughter harsh or brittle. So also with children. Spoiled children are ill-behaved, demanding little buggers.  They shriek and throw tantrums. They leave broken dishware and angry adults in their wake. They grow up badly.

We know this, but the desire to spoil children seems to be pretty universal. It's probably something biological, an automatic indulgence, like the softness women feel when they see infants. There is something really delightful in giving small gifts and treats to a kiddo, in giving them experiences and things. Maybe it's their enthusiasm.  That ice cream scoop (toy, amusement park trip, car . . .) is the best thing ever . . . and, by association, you are the best Mommy (aunt, grandma, uncle, brother, etc.) in the world.

There are plenty of messages against it. Spoiled children in movies turn out badly.  I'm thinking of characters like Marylee Hadley in Written on the Wind, Connie Corleone from The Godfather, Veda Pierce from Mildred Pierce. Fabulous dissolutes. Drunken wastrels with Daddy issues. They drink too much, smoke too much, drive too fast, and screw up fabulously. They act like they don't care, but really they care a great deal. The message seems to be that, because everything was handed to them, because they didn't have to earn a place in the world, they don't really have a place in the world.

In the movies of my teen years, they become an object of scorn, the bully character that you are happy to see the underdog come up and defeat. The Socs vs. The Greasers.  And we're cheering for the Greasers. At least I am. I'm still definitely a Greaser.

With Mitt Romney in the headlines lately, that rich kid bully character comes into my radar again, this time in real life.  As an adult, I run across spoiled, nasty people all the time. Mostly, they seem to drive white SUVs as if they came with entitlement instead of just a title.  They are the moms sitting near me at a coffee shop dissing their nannies, the people cutting me off in traffic only to end up sitting right beside me at the same red light.

I know I have a chip on my shoulder about these people that goes back to playing against tennis club babies in high school and resenting their fancier equipment and years of expensive lessons. A rich person who would like to befriend me will find it a hard row to hoe . . .and they probably have never held a hoe in their lives.

But chip or not, I disapprove of living your life like you are owed something. It's the assumption that stings.  The idea that somehow your needs are more important than those of the guy next to you.

I'm a mom now and it softens my view a little. I know that desire to give my children whatever I didn't have and felt the lack of. And, honestly, I had it pretty good. My parents "spoiled" me plenty. They did also refuse me things, though.  There were limits that had nothing to do with our finances, but about our values. I worry about spoiling my children, about raising them to be superior assholes when I'm just trying to instill healthy self-confidence.

I hope I can balance this for my children, indulging them appropriately, but still holding them to a standard of behavior and attitude about others that means they are good people.  There are limits. I'm not Mildred Pierce, working my fingers to the bone to feed the endless appetite of a spoiled Veda.  I'm not a socialite, leaving the raising of my progeny to the hired help and shrugging when they behave badly.

People can't really be spoiled.  They are not pieces of meat that we discard when they turn.  There is always time to turn around and make a change. Life is a process, and, at some point, we all take over the reins of our own lives.  Our parents influence where we start, but we determine where we finish.  Spoiling a child can give him or her different struggles than depriving a child will do, but in the end, it's the way we overcome our obstacles that shows our mettle.

At least that's what I tell myself, as I purchase yet another toy, another book, another ticket to another event.  Indulging isn't spoiling. It's all about balance.

I hope I'm right.