Simplicity

I am engaged in a war with you, top-lists.  Whether you are "Top 39 World Destinations" or "Top 7 Ways to Make Lunchbox Art" I work hard and consistently fail at my efforts to not read you.  And I work hard to not write you.  Because you are overly simplistic and don't capture the complexity of real life on this planet.

But you are so so fun.  Like the quiz I don't mean to take, sometimes I read your simple listings with attractive bolds and italics.  And like the quiz that is sometimes so accurate, your simple lists are sometimes kind of true and once in a blue moon - enlightening.  

So maybe it's a love-hate kind of thing.  I hate you because I realize, when I secretly sneak a peek at you, that you raise up a little snag of irritation in me.  Because I have  believe with childlike innocence that a simple path always exists.  Until lately that is, when the simple top-ten-able path got lost among the forest of life drama. And you little lists remind me of that loss.  But I love you, lists, because you come with a little drop of hope - hope that perhaps my life can someday again be distilled into some brief, pithy, witty mini-compendium.  

One fateful rainy day I decided to swallow my list-disdain and give it a try.  I started with a title.  I called it "27 Tricks to a Mellow Life, Happy Marriage, Close Knit Family with Special Needs Kids on a Shoestring!"  That was the working title of course.  But the title perhaps should have indicated the future of my awesome top-list. I knew of course that my topic should be a smaller more bite sized nugget-of-a-topic but believe it or not, I don't have one.  Life is so interwoven, such a complex web that most of the simpler top-lists I could dream up just contained ideas that were boring and flat. 

Marriage, kids, schools, cars, money... It's the sticky stuff that being a grown-up is made of and finding the simple beauty in it all is the trick of all tricks.  But I know that it's there, around every next corner, that sneaky trick to simplicity dwells.  The simplicity is in not allowing ourselves to descend into the rote slogging that our days could be.  The simplicity is doing our best to make meaningful lives. The simplicity is finding the happy moments to celebrate.  

Well, I guess there's my whopping top 3 list. I bolded it in case you missed it and I still love/hate the top lists, that's why I didn't put any numbers on this list. I just can't quite believe that among the urgent and demanding cacophony of cars honking, technology beeping and kids poking, "Top 103 Ways To Calm A Child Screaming In Target" will help me sort it all out, but I'm not giving up on true simplicity or a meaningfully pithy path to enlightenment...  just yet.  

Gifting in a Time of Plenty

8 happy nights of Hanukkah. To spare your busy holiday brains I'll hit you with the math. That's 32 gifts if you are into that kind of gifting and if you have four kids. Which I am and which I do.

To be clear I am into giving kids gifts 8 nights in a row. The kids, however, don't really care that much. No kid can ever come up with a list or any kind of things that they really want. A nice to have here and there and an occasional oo-ah over something in a catalogue is the kind of help I have in selecting thirty two items.

So either my kids have no imagination or their desires are completely sated. I like to think, since they still play swords in the yard, that their imaginations are in tact and they just happen to be satisfied with what they have. They don't have all of the newest and fanciest stuff either, they just seem to have enough. Which means that, in theory, I should count myself lucky and should't get all wound up about “what to get them for Hanukkah”- am I right here? But I DO.

Because, and here's the crazy - I really want them to want something, anything. I wanted a winter coat for hanukkah once so much that I hid in the racks snuggling it. In like 7th grade. I want them to want something so that I can delight them if it's within our means but also so that they know the anticipation and hope of wanting something and a tinge of disappointment if its not within our means. But alas I can't make them want something - no matter how many glossy magazines I shove under their noses with color coded pens for circling their fondest desires.

So, in the end, we do weird themes like "fancy chocolate bar night" or "name plate for your door night" or the ever thrilling "I donated to your favorite charity night" or "toys I hate but you love night". We do a family swap night. Before you know it eight nights of fun have passed and we are at Target for warm hoodie when a small voice comes over to me holding an adorable toy item and says “can I get this”?

And it is in that very moment that I annually realize (and annually forget) that the fun of surprises and gifts and wanting and disappointing aren't just about the holidays.  They are about the every single day - and the vast abundance of lessons that we have to impart through gift giving - hope and delight and disappointment and respect for others who have less - those lessons are for the whole year, not just for holidays and birthdays.   And then I always realize that maybe I should stick with the lesson the kids are trying so so hard to teach me - we have enough, it's plenty.

Since this years largely unrequested gifts are already here and ready though, please remind me that I am committed to the "we have enough" theme night... next year.

Dressing Them Up

Holidays.  And plane flights.  And dances.  All used to be occasions to dress up fancy style.  Right?  Don't you remember that?  Well those days are gone.  Popcorn is now allowed in regular non-movie theaters and that signals to me, the end of the uncomfortable children's clothing requirement.

So we don't have dress up clothes.  Like in the house.  On top of that we have a bevy of sensory issues meaning that crocs are literally the only shoes that will grace 4 of 8 feet in our house.  This should be fine in the year 2014 and for the most part it is.  OK in the winter we add socks and happen to live in a warm climate.  Otherwise crocs work.  But for most legitimately fancy occasions we are the ones showing up with boys in mortifying arrays of t-shirts and athletic bottoms.

So a bat mitzvah of ours happened last year and the athletic gear (by the way they don't do sports, just look like it) came to a screeching halt.  We sat each young sir down and had a long discussion about what clothes might possibly be acceptable.  They weren't just resistant, they refused.  Shoes without holes, shirts with sleeves, pants with zippers.  These foreign items were rejected again and again.  So, desperate, I went online and the items magically appeared at our front door where we had to all take deep breaths and face them.

Our boys are not toddlers, mind you - they are tweens.  They understand logic and the idea of dress clothes and occasions requiring showers shouldn't be a mind bender for them.  They tried the clothes on grudgingly and miserably. The looked like a million bucks from the neck down and like they needed to be admitted to the ER from neck up. Day after day these clothes hung, looming like a threat in the distance.  And their coordinating compromise of a shoe, chucks, sat nearby.  Eventually they wore them and tore them off as soon as possible.  But if you see the pictures you can easily note the discomfort in their sweet little boy eyes.

And all of this drama really made me wonder what kind of massive disservice I had done my boys by not shoehorning them into stiff and uncomfortable clothes prior to this date.  If I had put them in toddler suits with bowties they may have been both adorable and more accepting of formal fashion.  Even if I had forced a khaki or a jean they could still be successful in a business casual future.  Yet, zippers and buttons are a true annoyance and I still can't make myself force it - even knowing as I do that this lackadaisical slice of parenthood will likely limit their careers prospects.

The responsibilities of parenthood are plentiful and substantial - penny loafers I didn't think would rank as high as, it turns out, they and their formal comrades do.  Apparently I have fated my boys to become entrepreneurial internet millionaires working from a coffee shop or scrub sporting doctors.  Dangit - well, at least they are happy and comfie.

Elusive Resilience

I once wrote a blog post a hundred years ago about kids’ resilience.  I said that I don’t think kids are resilient as touted, they are just not emotionally mature enough to be upset about the things that we think they should be upset about.  And I stand by that… it’s stood the test of time. 

My oldest child has lived in 7 houses in only two cities in her tender 13 years.  And we are just about to hop to an 8^th.  A huge consideration in making this house change has been this jaw dropping numerical situation.  She’s not a military kid or anything, just a regular child of divorce and re-marriage.   And she used to love the adventure of a new house.  Now she looks forward to this move being the final one.   She doesn’t even want to travel.  She just wants to sit still in her own walls and settle in.  She was never resilient.  She changed easily but she was little and everything is an adventure when you are little. 

I have four dyslexic kids.  The world doesn’t make sense to them in the crisp way that it does to others.  Letters swim and dance and frustrate.  And their youthful selves become pleasers, comedians, class clowns.  But over time that morphs into a sharp hatred for reading, an anger at school, a fear of certain failure.  They hit a turning point.  And take on a new persona – not a happy go lucky kid but an aire of sorrow and self loathing.  Not because their resilience wore off, incidentally, but just because they woke up one day sick and tired of weaving words and learned that the world just won’t be easy for them.   And the loss of that normalcy has created more pain, more therapy bills and has proven to me that resilience is indeed a mythical creature because it shouldn’t be something that wears off – real resilience should be forever. 

Resilience isn’t something that kids have because they are kids.  It’s something that kids grow into because their parents gave it to them.  Whether through hardship or tough love, resilience is grown, and learning how to carve adversity into strength is the ultimate learning challenge.   Maybe not the simplest trait to nurture but suddenly resilience is, to me, the greatest hallmark of burgeouning adulthood – that we can be flexible and responsible and adaptive. 

Small kids may be have a limited emotional repertoire that masquerades as resilience but ultimately to grow little people into big people who are patient, accepting and kind… well, that, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate feat of parenthood.    

Full Family Joy

I think it’s weird how recent college seems but I do still think of it as a recent occurrence.  So I can still tell you like it was yesterday that I took a philosophy class in college.   The years are a little bit more obvious when I attempt to recall the exact details of that class but I do remember being deeply impacted by the thinking of one Mr. Kant.  I’m not super theoretical – I’m sort of the level of philosophy fan that takes cool quotes and applies them to life, but for some reason this was a minor exception.

The idea (in case you weren’t quite as impacted as I was) is that the best and right things for people to do are the things that maximize utility or happiness – basically do the things that maximize the benefits and minimize the costs*.   I know it sounds sort of like we will all end up drinking at a leather bar all day and night (no? only me?)  but debauchery isn't exactly what it’s all about.  But a tiny bit – whatever makes the most people happy, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, is the good stuff.

I loved this idea for a long time and only recently have struggled with it.   I struggle with it because of having four amazing kids and a rockstar spouse and myself.  And the things that maximize the joy for any one of those people seems to somehow have great potential take away from the rest.  Like date night.  I love date nights.  And we could probably go on date night every night.  Or like 5 times a week.  But then we’d have no money.  And we’d have no time together as a family.  And the kids would be sad (maybe).  So the collective happiness wouldn’t be maximized, see?

But date night isn’t really the ultimate battle in the war for maximizing familial joy.  The ultimate to me is that the kids are so incredible diverse in their needs, interests and approaches to life.  We have the joyful and physically active extrovert and the laid back, physically challenged introvert.  We have the imaginative creative reader and the dyslexic scientist.  There are good pairings and bad pairings but a trip to the pool makes ¾ excited and ¼ so miserable that it cloaks the entire experience in doom.  A festival makes ½ elated and ½ cower in misery.  Something as simple as a walk in the park makes the insect paranoid person cringe and the outdoorsy person leap with joy.  Finding something that makes everyone look like they are having fun for a picture on Facebook is tough stuff.

If you have kids with any special needs or just diverse needs, you know what I’m talking about here because you can’t “force” a kid with a legitimate fear or a true disability to do something.   Because that borders on cruel.  But you also can’t divide and conquer your life away and hope the weekends pass quickly so that everyone can tuck back into their individualized school environments for the week where they each get what they need.

I curse the day that I was struck with the blinding truth of Kant’s theories because success will forever elude me now on the quest for the ideal balance of happinesses.  I’m pretty sure that video games aren’t the answer.  Or private TVs.  Or doing four activities per day to suit everyone’s needs.  But we try.   We try to balance traditions and individual quiet time with loading people up to do something educational and interactive and engaging and not too loud or chaotic.  

In the end I guess Kant was sort of right - it's not a contest for the most amazing, fb worthy activities completed in a weekend,  it's a contest for the most smiles.


*If you are a for real philosophy person - I know this isn't the deep part of the philosophy but that's not even the point.

Foreign Language Requirement

I’m going to come right out and tell you that I know, to varying degrees, a pile of languages.  A pile of five languages.  I was a Japanese major in college for the love of all that is good.  And my joy at the prospect of teaching them to my kids, a long anticipated thrill, has been thwarted.  Four.  Times.  Over. 

One was excused from the Spanish requirement because of his speech issues, one dismissed from the language requirement because of anxiety related to dyslexia, one kid went to a whole school against the learning of foreign languages.  One by one my miniature linguists have slipped through my fingers.  And while it tears me apart a tiny bit I am, in the same breath, thrilled for them because learning a language has been akin to medieval torture.

Actually our entire journey down Learning Disability Lane was kicked off by the study of Hebrew.  And a kid who just couldn’t, no matter what we did, remember the letters or read even a single three letter word that recurred again and again.  There were tears and frustrations and angry stomping to rooms.  There were kit kat rewards and on line games.   And it just didn’t stick.  And what do you know…  Turns out there was a reason for that pain and suffering. 

I’m not kidding about being desperate for my kids to learn another language.  I feel like it expands your mind, introduces you to different parts of the world, changes your perspective.   And so last night in our house you might have come across a crazy scene – the 6 of us sitting on the sofa wildly flailing our arms about with a sign language instructor, possibly laughing her butt off at our tries.  All the while one of my kids shaking his head at me “you are loving this way too much, Mom.” 

I’ll go down trying – you know I'm nothing if not perseverant.  And if it’s not a written or spoken language – it’s gonna be American Sign Language. What the heck, it is the third most used language in the US and it fulfills the college language requirements so why not mine?   Two of the four kids love this adventure.  One even said “finally a language I’m good at”.  One is humiliated.  One is goofy.  One is full of questions.  One is showing off.  One has such performance anxiety that they are hidden behind another.  (I see that’s more than 4 – some are represented more than once, I know…)   

So we are trying this out because of that whole one door closes and another door opens thing.  Or just because I’m stubborn.  Either way – if you see 6 people walking down the street awkwardly practicing the signs for household items and farm animals, that’s us – hitting the homework hard. 

Hats Off to Homeschoolers (who aren't us)

I have an amazing, brilliant wife.   She stepped in as step-mother to four very simple and regular children back in the day when they were simple and regular.  With each successive test or diagnosis she has been unfailingly by my side, willing to do anything to help.  So you get it, I’m lucky beyond reason.  Like I must have saved a whole island of people from starvation in a past life to deserve this gift of a partner and spouse.

I remember the look on her face when we realized that we needed to take our oldest child out of school.  It was clear mostly because that child asked to leave school half way through 6th grade – a school that she loved and was loyal beyond reason to.    She asked tearfully and defeatedly – not in an obnoxious spoiled way.  Her anxiety about academics was through the roof and no combination of meds could control the accompanying outbursts of frustration.  Her best times of the day were when the rest of the class went to PE and she stayed behind and enjoyed quiet.

So that facial expression?  Sort of like a mix of terrified, excited and a sudden bout of nausea.  She pushed down the puke and raised her hand for homeschooling a sixth grader for the second half of the schoolyear while I cried with gratitude.  And we went shopping.  For a homeschool setup, of course!  And books!  And binders!  And a laptop!  We spent a week setting up and tons of cash to fund this new venture.  We had custom t-shirts made in a late night on-line shopping spree.  And, with a great looking school room and an attitude of gold, we launched – me as the planner and grader and support staff, her as the head teacher.

And every single skill that my wife amassed in her life was put to the test, none more than her soccer prowess - dodging and weaving with grace and agility the every day hurdles of a hormonal, mood disordered 6th grader with a learning difference or three.  Field trip Fridays, Cooking Tuesdays, Work-out Wednesdays, Thursday fashion drawing class with the homeschooling community.  She did it all.  But this venture isn’t for the faint of heart.  Our student’s motivation was low, her confidence was shot, her desire to sleep in was high and her interests were low.

Looking in the rear view mirror today I say... enter these hallowed grounds with caution and self-reflection.  You have to have confidence that your kids are getting all that they need to learn, and that you know those things.  You must be dedicated to keeping them social and engaged.  You  must be determined to get them up every single day and get them excited…  And you must above all else be prepared that they will not be bubbling over with gratitude for your efforts.  For these thing we were not totally prepared, I'll admit.

I am exhausted just recalling this roll in the homeschool hay and am grateful for the wonderful traditional school option that 7th grade brought and the incredible opportunity we have to wave goodbye each morning to all four of our kids.  While we declared neither success nor failure at this attempt at homeschooling, we did declare ourselves unfit for a long term version of the task and we did declare all of you who do it with such grace and dignity and still have kids who love you and haven't run away to Australia - basically heroes.

Oh - and in case you are wondering,  I am not even nearly out of gift ideas for the incredible person who gave the gift of her sanity so that the other kids and I may survive only mildly scathed by one heck of a 6th grade year.

*Photo is the ACTUAL shirt we had made.  Yep.  Did that.  Went whole hog.

Homework - A Rant

I hate homework.  So much.  My kids hate it less than I do because they can't conceive of a different option.  But I hate it personally because no matter how much time there is in any given after school day, homework takes too much of that time.  And I really want that time for other things like playing outside or with some friends or a game or reading or drawing or even playing around on a computer and surfing things that I don't want to know about.  I want those things because they are different than what a kid does all day long.  They build some new and different skills like having conversations and filling boring space with fun stuff.  You know, the kind of skills that we all use every single day. 

Practicing what you already spent all day learning and then proving that you learned that all day seems like a mission to lengthen the school day to “all hours available every day” and seems like maybe perhaps kids aren’t learning the really important stuff in a day...  I am in favor of homework that teaches something new or explores a topic that I might not otherwise care to engage in with my kids (like tying a shoe homework or running around after a kid on a bike homework)  but some life skills they are never assigned on that pesky homework agenda.

Before you say "they have to practice what they have learned".... I get that.  And studying and tests and all that.  But I assume that if you have a homework doing kid you have more than once thought that some of that pile of day-stealing work is rubbish.  

So I actually have made in a mini-life mission to find and send my kids to schools with as little rote type homework as humanly possible.   Because I do want to make them uncompetitive with other nations, chiefly.  My mini-mission, if you must know, is pretty much a failure.  For the younger children even in schools that claim no-homework there is most often  something called “here is homework so you get used to doing homework”. For middle aged children there is often something called “see, I told you there would be homework, I’m getting you ready for high school”.  And then for the older child the invariable “life isn’t fair, there is homework everywhere you look in life”.  

I still rage against the homework machine in spite of my miserable failure at its avoidance. Extra credit is my arch enemy, long term projects the bain of my existence, test studying – well that is simply the worst.  Of course, it’s school and I suppose that I have to just resign myself to the fact that kids can’t just come home and spend the evening running around and snuggling with me.  But I’ll make a party out of every last day that we have a homework pass and every single vacation day without a blog entry requirement.  I know it’s education and stuff but I’ll go down working to skirt homework as much for my own gain as theirs  
– just you watch.