Summer's Lease

I understand most of the country has been sweltering through a miserable heat wave, but we have been having an unbroken streak of perfect weather (except for one day that dipped its toe in the 90's): morning after morning of cool air and clouds blowing in off the ocean, to burn off to sunshine and 70s by mid-afternoon. 

With only the twins around (Deux is helping out Bookworm until the addition is finished), and them having achieved the all-but-adult age of 17, summer looks very different from years past. Dash is working at a couple of different things and drives himself everywhere he needs to go, and a few places we need him to. Dame is plowing through 18-book series and occasionally emerging to pontificate on centaur spines and whether harpies would lay eggs. The only thing that carries over from years ago is the usefulness of stocking the freezer with ice cream sandwiches.

It's a mercy the summer is mild, because at the current state of the addition not only do we not have air conditioning, which we have never had, we also have minimal air circulation with one whole side of the house blocked off. However, after a stall of a few months work is supposedly going to resume soon. 

Having set the goal of climbing a mountain, and finding myself with the forgotten luxury of a little more time and energy than is strictly necessary for survival, I've been adding to my daily routine a mile and a half loop around as many neighborhood hills as I can manage with a loaded pack on my back. It's been rather exciting to actually be growing detectably stronger--a month ago, I needed to pause a few times on this loop. Now, even at the end of a long day, I can do it easily with increased speed on the uphills. Two weeks ago Dash and I hiked up a smaller, closer mountain and I struggled to go more than a dozen steps uphill at a stretch and never made it quite to the summit. Yesterday we did the same trail again and I paused less than a third of the times, made it to the summit, and still cut 45 minutes off my time. Right now the main concern about our goal hike is that the trails are closed due to a threatening wildfire, and while the weather has not been hot, neither have we had any rain to speak of nor are likely to before September. 

Thanks to this gorgeous arrangement getting stuck in my head, I've been memorizing Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. It's always struck me as odd. Beautiful, expertly crafted, but weird. It's not really about the beloved--in which, to be fair, it is not unlike most love poetry, which tends to be about the sensation of love rather than the parties involved. But it's not really about being in love, either. It's about the poet's expectation of the immortality of his own poetry. (About which, to be fair, he was not wrong.) But perhaps that is because a large part of what love, or at least the feeling of being "in love" is about--the sensation of touching immortality, even though, paradoxically, only for a moment. 

It seems, at least to me, that a large part of the transition from falling in love to mature love is letting go of the vision of the idealized and immortal beloved and accepting the messy human that they are now. It is like in the movie Inception where Cobb rejects his dream-wife to return to the reality where his real wife is dead: "But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough." In time it is the annoying, imperfect, mortal being we come to love. 

Perhaps parenting is a bit like that, too. Babies are, for the most part, very easy to fall in love with because they are wide open for the imagination, because they give us a brush with immortality. And to a baby or toddler, a parent is all wise and all powerful. It would be heady stuff if one weren't so sleep-deprived. But adolescence comes and not only does the child realize his parents are human, the parents have to come to term with the child being human, of growing up into an ordinary person with an ordinary skill set and ordinary range of foibles. It's a difficult process for the parent, not just the child, but both of the alternatives--the parent who sees the grown child with all the rosy intoxication of infancy, and the parent who has never gotten over the disappointment of humanity--turn into something hideous in time. 

Farewell Picnic

The time of this has been imminent but shifting for the last six months as Mr. Duchess worked out his military path, but the time has finally come and Duchess moved out of state yesterday. They won't get housing until he is further in his training so her stuff is all still here, but she can stay with some of his extended family and see him on weekends. So. It was time. 

We decided last Sunday to gather everyone up and do a picnic in the park. We hadn't all been together since Christmas, as Dame is still living in Seattle with Bookworm awaiting the completed addition. And we hadn't done a picnic in the park since . . . I'm afraid it might have been pre-Covid. I took the kids on some local hikes during Covid but DOB was not doing well enough to venture out, and then when he was better everyone was bigger and busier and everything had changed. But when they were little it was something we did pretty much every week the weather was remotely tolerable. 

It made the most sense to meet up with Dame and go to a park in Seattle and it proved to be the sort of glorious spring day that occurs much more in fiction than in actuality. We had been to the Asian Art Museum last month and I thought it might be fun to visit the park around it, especially since there was an old water tower you could climb for a view of the city. When I saw how nice the day was I was worried it would be too crowded, but it was just pleasantly populated. 

However, by the time we arrived, DOB was in desperate need of finding the restrooms and parked near one, while Deux and Dame immediately hopped out of the car and made a beeline for the tower at the other end of the park. Dash and Duchess and I unloaded the folding chairs and lunch and then were trying to catch up, while DOB followed along in a faint hope that there would be a restroom at both ends of the park and he could watch the stuff while we climbed the tower. 

There was not a restroom at the other end of the park, nor was even the approach to the tower accessible, so DOB wheeled back to the other one by the car while the rest of us trailed the first two to the top of the tower, Dash and I ladened with three folding chairs and a cooler bag full of lunch. After we had briefly caught our breath and admired the view at the top of the tower, we all went pell-mell back down again, back across the park to the car only to encounter no sign of DOB along the way. 

At this point we had had about enough of walking about with everything and so we decided to just sit down where we were (there was plenty of nice grass handy) and hope DOB turned up. Dash went off to look for him but apparently they both just spent some time wandering separately on some of the trails and enjoying the view. Eventually everyone and the food all made it to the same location and we had lunch and a resounding game of 6-person Spades (scoring invented on the spot) and the sort of conversation that would horrify people if it were made into cute little cards to stimulate conversation but the more printable of which was, "If you swallowed sunglasses whole, would you be able to digest them?" (Which was itself a spin-off of, "If I swallowed your sunglasses, would they still be in the car?")

Like every perfect moment it was over far too quickly and it is a thing that will almost certainly never occur again, but also, to steal a bit from Winnie the Pooh, in an enchanted place on the top of the Forest, four little ducklings will always be playing. 

 

On the Plate

Dame was ranting a bit about parenting tactics she had observed with which she did not agree:

Dame: "How can people become parents without *any* of the necessary skills?"

Me: "Actually, it only takes one skill to become a parent, and you don't even need to be that good."

Dame: <eyeroll>

One of the great pleasures of parenting teenagers is being able to make obnoxious off-color remarks to a captive audience.

Anyway, one of the ones she was disagreeing with was requiring a child to either eat the meal served or go hungry. I understand the desire not to waste food or encourage pickiness, but we didn't wind up going that direction. And I had just been thinking today what a good thing that was. 

You see, it was Dash who had the most trouble eating what was served. It also turns out Dash has extensive allergies/food sensitivities which vary depending on exposure. Odds are most if not all of his emotional reactions to dinner were physical reactions he didn't know how to explain. 

Instead I tried to make sure something everybody could eat was available at each meal, treats were only present in small quantities, and if you really needed to, you could go fix something for yourself. Not that this made things easy, necessarily, when you have a small child with a tendency to anxiety and the metabolism of a hummingbird, who is already to the point of hysterics just making it from snack time to dinner time, and now has to think of something to eat that's not actually visible. (We never could figure out a reliable standby.) 

I am quite certain I was not always very patient or understanding through this process. But at least I didn't make things actively worse. And no one ended up unreasonably picky. It's been a good rule of thumb to assume that I don't know everything, and usually kids are acting they are for a reason, even if I can't figure it out right away. 

Teaching Tidiness When You Are Not

Parenting ideas tend to fall into two categories: Those of parents currently in that stage who are often very enthusiastic about something new but (without realizing it, usually) have no idea of its long-term consequences or sustainability, and those of grandparents who have forgotten what really happened and also failed to account for changing times. So I would like to post something in the sweet spot where I can actually tell if something I did worked long-term *and* can still remember what I did. I am banking on this being an area where the times have changed little, we still don't have robots that will pick up after us. 

To begin with, I have (diagnosed) ADHD, (undiagnosed) probably some degree of dyspraxia, and it is just so. dang. hard. for me to do any cleaning that involves sorting, tidying, putting away. I literally cannot sort laundry into darks and lights. (The solution to this: Wash everything on cold. And if someone wants to buy purple pirate pants from a dubious online retailer, they can wear lavender socks for the next two years.) Also I cannot follow any regular sequence of activities that is more than, say, two items long. On the other hand, I can do the physical cleaning just fine if the stuff is out of my way, and I am capable of great feats under unpredictable bursts of inspiration.

So when the kids were small, there was no way I could implement any of the nice little things people do about having regular tidy-up times to teach children to keep their things in order. Attempting to do so would only lead to misery and no greater tidiness. I also had unpleasant memories of my mother, almost certainly also dealing with her own ADHD, alternating between heaps of chaos and massive projects accompanied by wailing and gnashing of teeth at our failure to measure up to The Right Way to Do Things.

I had to go with what I could do, intermittent bursts of cleaning and sorting, followed by a slow descent into chaos, but I figured we could at least ditch the wailing and gnashing of teeth. I made it my mission to make cleanup days (whenever they occurred) to be relatively pleasant experiences. I involved the kids to start with and they in the early part of the day had the pleasure of discovering many lost and forgotten items. If they wanted to put those items where they belonged, great. (We kept a few categories of toys in designated bins.)  I let them go when their attention or energy lagged as long as they were out of the way. 

Meanwhile, I started piling whatever was uninteresting to them. Given my difficulty with sorting, I usually focused on a very few functional categories: Clothes/blankets to be washed, books (esp. library books), obvious trash, and All That Other Stuff. There were usually one-two garbage bags of obvious trash. All That Other Stuff went into boxes or baskets that were then stored in the garage indefinitely. 

Anything that we couldn't manage to put away just went in the boxes or baskets in the garage. There was no shame or punishment attached--if you wanted to go dumpster diving in the baskets to find a lost item, you were always welcome to do so. I just knew that there was no way I would have the energy left at the end of the project to actually vacuum if I tried to sort. 

I tried to make things as simple as possible to maintain for those with the desire and ability to do so. For instance, some of the children still have just two locations for clothes: Clean basket and Dirty basket. (TBH, except for my work clothes, this is how I operate as well.) They all started doing their own laundry when they were tall enough to use the machines easily, so maybe 10ish. We never bought a ton of miscellaneous toys, usually just a few large collections that everybody played with (blocks, duplos->legos, dressup, little plastic dinos/knights/soldiers). And stuffies. So many stuffies.  Over the years, when a toy category had clearly been outgrown and everyone was ready to part with it, we passed it on. I never made them give up something they wanted to keep. 

Anyway, at the end of cleanup day there was a nice, empty, freshly vacuumed space which--guess what?--*immediately* inspired a massive burst of creative play that turned it into a mess again. But with all the trash and most of the miscellaneous small items out, the mess was much less perilous to the feet for quite a while. And I made a point of never bewailing this, but rather treating it as the natural reward of the labor of cleaning--having an open canvas to begin again.

These days probably occurred about quarterly during good times and maybe as far apart as annually when times were tougher. We also moved a fair bit during the earliest years and of course that provided a natural opportunity to do this. 

Over the last seven years, I gradually did this less and less with the kids and finally stopped altogether. There wasn't a particular set point for this, mostly I was just too tired to do anything not immediately necessary. If a child ever *wanted* to do something in their room and requested my help, I did everything I could to provide my assistance. So over the last seven years they gradually took over doing it themselves, when it mattered to them. This also coincided with getting rid of nearly all the toys as they outgrew them, except some showpiece legos and of course books will be always with us. 

The end result with them now ages 15-19: they all maintain their own rooms at a level of neatness somewhere between functional but sanitary clutter and showpiece tidiness with zero requirements or involvement from me. (I continued helping Dame for much longer than the others because her combination of ADHD and chronic pain/fatigue made it particularly difficult. However, this week she decided to do it and made it through the whole thing herself, over a couple of days.) They wash laundry with sufficient regularity. Rooms do not stink. 

Mostly up until recently we have not allowed eating in bedrooms which prevents the worst nastiness. However, Deux's extended and intense migraines have made it necessary for him and it is gradually slackening elsewhere. I can always tell when I get home from work whether Deux's migraine has ended by the stack of bowls in the sink. (I use large glass mixing bowls for his meals so that I don't need to bring him seconds.) Having lived with many other adolescent and post-adolescent males in my life, I know the habit of returning dishes to the kitchen is not one to be taken for granted. 

Anyway, I had a lot of misgivings when they were young about my approach so this is, at least, a letter to my younger self: Hey! It worked! And perhaps it might have some helpful ideas for someone with small children coping with similar issues. 

It Has Been Too Long

Somebody (perhaps Lewis Carroll?) advised that one should never begin a letter with an apology for how long it had taken to write back, and I suppose the same should apply to blog posts. I took an actual Day Off this week, an extremely rare event, and even though I spent a pretty large part of it scrubbing the kitchen which was sustaining several new ecosystems, I took some time to sit about long enough to remember that I needed to hunt up photos for Duchess' graduation slideshow. And the only place I really have photos is on here.

I have always figured that one of my glaring failures as a mother would be a lack of photos for the graduation slideshow (since graduation classes at Duchess' and Dash's school generally consist of 4-6 seniors, everyone gets star billing), but I was pleased to discover I was able to supply quite a respectable number even before she turned 13 and started keeping her own. Of course, most of them have Deux in them but they are quite tolerant of each other these days. 

I don't know if other people find this about growing older, but I realize that I don't feel my life stretching behind me as a sequential thing. Myself as a 12 year old scrappy know-it-all and myself as a 25 year old new mother or a 36 year old trying to juggle everything are all still here and the people and the worlds of those times do not stretch out behind me in receding distance. They are like the blog posts, just around the corner. I could step into them at any time; I might go into a room and find my mother and grandfather deep in a friendly argument, or step into the back yard and find a troupe of little Ducklings constructing a monument to unspeakable chaos out of scrap lumber. I could, but somehow I don't. 

Instead, the former Ducklings remain distressingly tall (Duchess is the only one who is shorter than me, and likely to remain so at this point) and disconcertingly independent. Somehow, as attested by the datestamps on the blog posts, eighteen years of parenthood are behind me, and Duchess is about to graduate and start her first job and college, Deux is in Running Start (at which he needs absolutely no parental guidance whatsoever but fortunately he does still appreciate parents who will play a round of Magic: the Gathering), and the twins (Dot now prefers Dame, but Dash will always be Dash) will enter high school in the fall. I feel less prepared for parenting than I did at the beginning when the first panic of having a small human in care hit me--and yet somehow, incontrovertibly, we have made it this far. 

I never did get much better at the things I was bad at (I still have boxes and boxes in the garage of Miscellaneous Things I Didn't Have The Patience to Put Away). I have faced many challenges I never expected and given up on many things that were important. There were quite a lot of things I never got to until it was too late. We never did music lessons, or sports, or make beautiful nature journals with watercolors. We did much fewer read-alouds and much more screen time than I would have believed. But I still think--hope--I managed to hold onto everything that was truly essential. 

I spent a lot more of these past seven years working than I ever wanted. I can't get that time back and it hurts every time I think of it, though it was what was necessary. But I made quite a lot of good soup, and we still had a backyard (however overgrown) and books were at least about the place and everyone learned to hate bad grammar, verbal ambiguity, and Christmas songs before Thanksgiving. And DOB is doing better, mentally and physically, than he has in many years and is finally able to return to work. 

A fair portion of my work is estate planning and so I sit down with a lot of elderly people--often their children are older than I am--and they talk about their lives and families, and sometimes it's beautiful and sometimes it's heartbreaking. In the end, not a lot matters. Not the type of diapers or the dietary plan or (within reason) the type of discipline. If your children are honest and reasonably responsible and still on speaking terms with you, you have done about as well as anyone can hope for and been luckier than many. 

And since this is a good place for my pictures, here is one. It's actually a year old (from my oldest niece's wedding--I now have three married neiphlings and two great-neiphlings), so add an inch to Deux and three to Dash, but otherwise it's pretty on target .

The Pox Departeth

We have survived.

We are never, ever, ever going to do that again.

I hope.

Duchess came down on Tuesday night and the twins followed on Thursday and Friday. By Saturday everyone was pretty much down to sucking on Pedialyte popsicles and watching endless episodes of Get Smart while lying limply on the couch.

Well, except for Deux who was feeling very left out, since he had never gotten that sick. So he had to get his being sick time in with everyone else even though technically he was much better. He didn't rank a seat on the couch, though.

Fortunately the grownups' immunity held strong, although I did get a nasty cold that was much exacerbated by sleepless nights with itchy kids. So I think this weekend I get to lie around and be sick, although I don't care for Pedialyte popsicles or Get Smart that much.

A Message to the Past

Sometimes I like to go back and reread old years of blog posts and remember what things were like back then. Then again, some things don't bear remembering. Sometimes I wish I could send messages back through to my past self. Sometimes I almost feel as if I can. So, this is for me then.

************

When the twins were on the way and our church was very kindly helping out with meals and sometimes people would stay and help catch up on dishes or something while I lay on the couch and didn't speak or move because if I did I would throw up. One lady, a tall and imposing and efficient woman without much experience with small children, took advantage of the opportunity to look around at our house knee-deep in toys and point out that I was neglecting the necessary task of teaching my children to pick up after themselves, and they would certainly need this for life, and it really was quite horrible that I was failing them in this regard.

I didn't say anything at the time, mostly because I would have thrown up if I had, such as pointing out that it is very hard to direct small children in picking up when you can neither move nor speak. I just tried to be grateful that she had washed the dishes and brought supper and not to worry too much about it.

And, though I tried not to let it worry me, sometimes it did, because even when I could move and speak, I never was one of those people who could make sure there was A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place. Sometimes we got things cleaned up (usually in time to show the house and move) but more often we didn't. When we did get things cleaned up, it was often by dumping everything higgledy-piggledy in a box and shoving it out of sight somewhere.

But I figured if I couldn't keep on top of things enough to teach them good habits of cleanliness, I could at least not make them hate cleaning, so on the days when we did clean, I tried to make it fun as long as I could, and then I let them go, even though I feared this was a terrible mistake. (And I didn't always manage that. Sometimes I freaked out about the mess, too. Sometimes, everybody cried.)

I read once that children who had plenty of time for free play were actually better at picking up and taking care of things, owing to their more highly-developed executive function. It seemed too much to hope for, and I certainly didn't see any evidence of it yet, but it did give a glimmer of hope.

And then, slowly, I started to notice that things were changing. The children's cleaning-up capacity started to outstrip their mess-making capacity. The older two, especially, could actually participate in cleaning for quite a long time and even enjoy it. Sometimes, if they wanted to beg me for a special favor, they would even clean an area up on their own initiative.

Two days ago, they decided they wanted to move some furniture and beds around between the bedrooms and play room. (Essentially the whole upstairs of the house belongs to them, and it runs pretty wild most of the time.) I didn't want to deal with it. We hadn't done much housework in two weeks and everything was a mess. But DOB agreed to their pleadings that if they really got the whole area--all three rooms--cleaned and organized, they could do it.

They started right into that evening. They worked a lot of the next day (but they still did their weekly chores of laundry, mopping, scrubbing chairs and cleaning the bathroom and they also went swimming with his Majesty). And they did it. No grownup help, supervision, or even ideas. They cleaned out areas I had been afraid to touch. If I had tackled it, I would have scheduled at least three days, meals and laundry would have been late, and I would have been horribly crabby the whole time.

Now, I haven't been up yet but things are probably going to be messy again. But they *can* clean. More than that, they can tackle a big project on their own.

So, dear past me, lying on the couch: You're doing fine. They'll get it. Give them time, and let them play.

Proper Nouns

There are many ways in which I fail at being a good modern parent, ranging from seldom insisting on baths to never once having done a craft off of Pinterest.

However, probably the most important is in teaching children proper names for body parts from earliest ages. You know, *those* body parts.

This is really important for their proper development and safety and what-not, or so countless articles and other, more successfully modern, mothers tell me. Nonetheless, I continue to fall behind on this count.

There are reasons for this.

One is that I tried once, and I got so tired of hearing about *that* body part that I never wanted to proceed to others. "Hey, that comes up as high as my (body part)!" "Watch out, you bumped my (body part)!"

Another is that I am still pretty dicey on anatomical details myself. I mean, I know a lot of names and I know the general area, but it's kind of like trying to remember the difference between Estonia and Latvia. This shocking ignorance has not prevented me from reproducing four times and having a lot of fun in the bargain. So it can't be completely necessary for a good life.

I'm a lawyer, not a doctor. My kids may not know where their spleen or other, more interesting, body parts are, but they can dissect a verbal ambiguity in ten seconds flat, much to the bewilderment of their peers.

So, kids, if you want to know the names for body parts, consult the anatomy diagrams in the science dictionary. If you want to know about your rights and duties with regard to your insurance, I'm happy to help.

From the backseat: A lesson in patience

Deux: Arrrghhh!

Duchess: Stop that, Deux! You are so picky!

Deux: I can't help it, Dash is being so annoying!

QOC: What are you doing, Dash?

Dash: I'm putting on my coat.

QOC: Well, Deux, if someone is not trying to bother you and it won't cause you permanent harm, it's best to just ignore it. Life is much smoother that way.

Deux: I can't ignore it when it bothers me!

QOC: The trick is to think about something else. Like how many prime numbers there are smaller than 100.

Deux: How many prime numbers smaller than 100 . . . most odd numbers are primes . . . except the ones that end in five, like 15, 25, 35, 45 . . . .

Duchess: Arrrrrgh!

The trouble with parenting advice

Suppose you were growing tomatoes, something I try to do and fail spectacularly nearly every year. This alone would suggest to you that you should not ask me how to grow tomatoes. However, you could probably find someone in your neighborhood who had a bumper crop in tomatoes and ask them how to do it. And you would probably get pretty good advice, although your results would vary because your soil would have a little different composition and the sunlight would strike your yard a little differently.

But tomatoes are an annual crop and the desired result is pretty easy to define: plenty of tasty tomatoes. Kids are . . well, not a crop at all, and different people hope for different results and it takes a whole lot longer than a year to raise them. Results vary.

And people have very fuzzy memories. When it comes to our own lives, we're always rewriting our own histories, casting things in a different light as new events come. By the time a child has been alive long enough to show some kind of evidence of how their parenting was, the parent has already forgotten what they actually did. Much of what we do we don't even know we are doing. I might think my children's love of reading is attributable to my stellar educational program, when it might in fact be attributable to their desire to be out of sight when chore time comes.

I am amazed at how quickly forgetfulness happens. A couple of weeks ago I took my three year old niece for a walk along with the twins. I had already forgotten how short three year old legs are. Five year olds look small, but they can keep up with a leisurely adult stroll. Three year olds just can't. You have to slow down to wedding march slow. And I'd forgotten. I've forgotten what it's like to be awakened all night long, to watch for a chance to dash to the bathroom, to have dinner prep interrupted thirty times (we're down to ten), to have nothing in the house happen without my direct involvement, to know that my child could be in a life-threatening or house-destroying situation within twenty seconds of turning my attention elsewhere. I remember that these things happened, but I have no idea how I actually coped with them, or what I might have done to deal with naps and pickiness while all those were occurring.

So, even though I am currently the parent of four school-aged children, anything I might say about parenting infants or toddlers should be taken with great suspicion. On the other hand, anyone who's currently in the trenches doesn't really have any idea how their actions are going to pan out over the long haul. (Wow, how many cliches can I pack into one sentence?) Then there are the parents who have multiple stages, but any older child from one of those families can tell you just how fuzzy their recollection of what they did with the older children is.

Not to discourage asking for help when you need it. But most of it boils down to: Do the best you can and wait for them to outgrow it.

On Ends, Means and Obedience

A certain article by John Piper on obedience popped up in my Facebook feed a lot last week (or two . . . I have never caught up with the pace of internet discussions.) Apparently it struck a chord.

It struck a few chords with me, too: dissonant ones. For starters, anytime someone starts turning parenting choices into a matter of life or death, they have lost my ear. It's like the vaccination debate. Vaccinate and your child will die of horrible complications! Don't vaccinate and your child will die of preventable diseases!

The truth is, death is highly unlikely in either scenario, so let's set that aside and look at reasonable risks. Similarly, disobedience might, in some circumstances, lead to death, but so might unquestioning obedience. ("Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do and die.") In any case, cooperating with people pointing big guns at you or with people about to take you six miles into the air are both more matters of self-preservation than obedience. Forget obedience, I hope I can raise my children not to be stupid.

But the real problem I have with the article is its open twisting of Scripture. No, the Bible does not say, "Parents, make your children obey you." It never, ever does. And John Piper of all people should know better than to put things into the Bible that aren't there. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense to him that God would tell children to obey and not tell parents to make them obey: God is perfectly capable of saying exactly what He means. God also never says, "Wives, make your husbands love you," or "Masters, see that your slaves obey cheerfully, as unto the Lord."

Now, if I don't believe that God tells me to force my children to obey, does that mean I sit back idly and let them do whatever occurs to them, however wrong or dangerous? Of course not. If it was my small boy playing with an electronic device on the plane, and they didn't turn it off, it would be spending the rest of the flight in my purse. (And then, if it WAS one of my small boys, we would have a long and vivid discussion of the possible consequences of interference with radio transmissions, and all the people within earshot would be traumatized for life.)

So if the end result is the same, why do I bother to differ? Because I think it makes a difference where you start from. Piper's article, and many articles and books on the same thing, makes it sound like the beginning and end of parenting is authority--that our purpose as parents is to exercise our authority so that our children will learn to submit to authority because authority is the Way Things Ought To Be.

But authority is a means, not the end. The end and beginning and summation of all things is love. God is love. God is not "authority." (He is the King, but note that a king is a person. Someone we can love.) The whole point of the change from the Old to the New is that obedience out of coercion was no good at all. We need a new heart, and then we obey out of our new heart, because we love Christ and pick up his mannerisms. Authority as a parent is not an end goal, but something given to us to serve our children in teaching them to be an independent adult and modeling for them how to be a follower of Christ.


Even if the issue is exactly the same, it makes a big difference whether the reason for making a child obey is, "They are the child, I am the parent, and I must make them obey," or "It's my job to help them grow in this area." It's important to remember that parents are sinners, too. And too much harping on our own authority is a dangerous temptation. It's very easy to slide over . . . I have done it many times myself . . . into "You should not DARE to challenge me," or "How can I make you hurt enough to stop this?" And neither of those attitudes are Christlike at all.

In a practical example, suppose a child is told to pick up their toys and doesn't want to. Looking at this through the lens of authority, this can only be interpreted one way: Disobedience. Challenge to authority. Child must be coerced into obedience so that authority is not disrupted. There might be various ways the coercion is applied, but there must be no doubt about the coercive force. Any approach that might distract from authority (making a game of it, using an incentive) is suspect if not outright forbidden.

However, if I'm looking at it simply with the goal of helping my child grow up, I realize that the child probably isn't thinking about my authority one way or another---they just don't want to pick up their toys, something I identify with very much. (By the way, I have been amazed as a parent how seldom, if ever, my children actually challenge my authority if I don't bother to assert it for its own sake. It's been a complete non-issue.) My job is not to bend them to my will, particularly, but to help them learn to overcome that natural reluctance because it's an essential life skill to do stuff you don't want to do and to take care of your own things. Now games and incentives, or just doing it alongside them, are back on the table, because those are all great strategies for learning to do stuff you don't want to do. Even if you do a consequence that might look like punishment (like removing toys that aren't cared for), it can be done, not as the authority setting yourself in opposition to the child, but as a sympathetic guide helping them streamline their life.

After all, obedience to earthly authority is not the sum total of righteousness. Quite the opposite. One of the other things I want to teach my children is that there is a time to disobey. That someday they may need to stand with William Tell and John Adams and Christ's own apostles and say, "This is an unlawful use of authority and I will not obey."

Training Wheels

I took them off all the bikes this week. They had already been twisted round out of the way for a long time, so it was time. It was a bittersweet moment. Teaching your kids to ride bikes is supposed to be one of those iconic parenting moments: running alongside and then letting go as they fly off under their own power.

I tried it with Duchess, several years ago, holding the handlebars and struggling to balance her. She made little progress and I got tired very quickly. I gave it up and never got back to it. They figured it out on their own, instead. Deux did it with a small bike last summer--starting with just walking and balancing and then gradually adding pedals. This year he moved up to a properly-sized bike and Duchess followed suit. Now the twins are practicing on the small bikes, walking, coasting, and slowly adding pedals. (No fancy pedal-removing bikes here--they just work around the pedals.) I am proud of them for being self-reliant and a little annoyed at myself for not being more involved.

It's been a few days of glorious sunshine after a week of downpours--the world all over green and fresh after the dry summer. It's supposed to rain again tomorrow, but bikes are the perfect thing for chancy weather--a quick dry with an old diaper and they are ready to go.

I found this note on my reading from December of 2009:

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge. A book that made me wish that the Duchess was eleven, so I could give it to her right away. And then made me glad she was not, because like all fairy tales these days, it reminded me of how very quickly little girls grow up. A fairy tale by someone who knows how a fairy tale is supposed to go and gladly complies.

She is not eleven yet, but she is nine and I think it is time. For months I have been dropping hints and encouragement to broaden her reading horizons from series books, to little avail. And then I found her already deep into Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I warned her it was sad, but she insisted on carrying on. If she's ready to listen to a suggestion, I think she might enjoy something a little lighter.If not . . . there are plenty of other good books on the shelf for her to find on her own.

Beauty and Brains

I was recently part of an online discussion about raising daughters to have healthy body images. One surprising thing that came out was multiple women mentioning that they had been told consistently as children that they were beautiful, and yet they still grew up with a negative body image. On the other hand, my parents talked very little, if at all, about how I looked, and I grew up with a healthy body image.

It's been established in several recent studies that telling children they are "smart" is actually counter-productive--it causes them to be more fearful, less willing to struggle with problems, and therefore causes them to learn less. It communicates that smartness is an innate factor that they cannot change, and therefore the important thing becomes to look smart at all costs, mostly by avoiding anything difficult. Children praised for hard work, on the other hand, feel that learning is something within their control, and are more likely to tackle more challenging work and learn more.

I wonder if telling children they are beautiful (or handsome, but this seems to be a lesser issue for boys so we'll gloss over it for now) has a similar effect. After all, listen to the subtexts of that statement:

• Your body is valuable because of how you look to other people.
• That appearance is something innate, out of your control.
• Oh, and incidentally, for now, to me, you meet up to that elusive standard.

No wonder praising girls for being beautiful doesn't help much in ensuring good body image. Like praising them for being "smart" it puts all the emphasis on things that they cannot control and on what other people think.

If I think instead about the message I *do* want to send, it would be more like this:

• Your body is valuable because it is there for *you* to do things with. (Therefore drawing attention to and noting when they seem to be at peace with themselves--when they are learning to use their bodies well--when they have found activities they enjoy--when they work hard and grow in skills.)
• Love is the most important part of beauty. You will always be beautiful to the people who love you. And while love cannot be guaranteed, it can be nurtured. (Therefore learning to give and receive love, without regard to appearance.)
• You can and should take good care of yourself and your body. (Therefore encouraging and praising good hygiene, good health, good--individual--taste in clothing, etc. )

The Highest Calling

It's Memorial Day, but I never got around to finishing writing the things I wanted to write about Mother's Day. If I were a cool blogger I would have announced a series and published them on a schedule and invited other people to weigh in, but I am not a cool blogger.

One of those floating phrases that tends to draw fire when it passes is that motherhood is "the highest calling of a Christian woman" or something like that. And then comes the shots--What about those who can't have children? What about those whose children have (it happens) grown up? Why isn't fatherhood so important?

Those are all good questions, but they don't get down to the heart of the matter, which the "highest calling" people have expressed so poorly as to obscure it entirely. The highest calling of anyone, of everyone, is to love God and love people. Mostly to love God BY loving people.

So if you have small children depending on you, then yes, your highest calling is to love and care for them (ahead of others simply because of their dependence). But even if you don't, or never will, somewhere, somehow in your life there are people to show God's love.

Motherhood may be challenging, but caring for the sick and dying is just as challenging, and devoid of cute photo-ops. In many ways it is more profoundly human and divine than raising children. Even animals care for their young, but only humans honor the past.

But whether it's caretaking or missions or generous donations or just working a job that other people need and being nice to the janitor, all of us have the same calling and the same opportunity and the same commandment: Love one another.

Stress and Motherhood

A survey is showing that three kids is the most stressful number to have, and after that it's easier. Since that is what my mother always told me, I will not complain to much about the lack of meaningful statistics given. She had cause to notice, having spread seven children out over nearly two decades. (I was the magic stress-reducing fourth child, too, so that may be significant.) I also noticed my stress level go down significantly when we went from three to four children, probably because I spent the whole time in between in labor.

This has not been enough to entice me to further exploits--not that an extra child would be so hard, it's the acquisition process I no longer have the stomach for (quite literally). Also, it was enough of a challenge finding a vehicle that would fit four kids and a wheelchair. Upgrading is not really an option.

But, I definitely believe I am less stressed than mothers with three, or two, or maybe even one child. There are so many things that just don't matter once you realize you don't have time or energy for them any more. I saw one mother write about how she found it so freeing to be reassured that "As long as your children are fed, clean, clothed, and loved, you are doing a good job." And I thought: clean? clothed? Why? Fed, yes. You can't get away without feeding them, although here economies of scale come in. Clean and clothed are definitely optional.

Or again, a lovely mother of one little girl posted on Facebook about the challenges of getting stains out of socks. And I thought: stains? socks? What are those?

Also, once you have four you have hit critical mass for playmates--chances are anybody can find somebody to play with at any given time. 

There are stressful things, like looking at the grocery cart and bill and imagining what they will look like with four teenagers. I try not to think about that. It's too noisy around here to think, anyway. I'm getting very good about not thinking about things. Which is, I suspect, the key to a low-stress life. 

Bad Parenting Confession

At Easter, the ducklings got bags of candy from the church Easter egg hunt. In a fit of hurried Easter cleaning, I tucked them out of the way up high in their closet, intending to get back to them later. We do not take a Wonka Sr. approach to candy, but we do try to dole it out very slowly and, in the past, under supervision.

Then I sort of forgot about the candy, or at least it sifted down to the very large receptacle in my brain labeled, "Things I Really Ought To Do Something About One of These Days." Until one day I was tidying up their room (let's not go into THAT parenting question) and came across a sizable stash of candy wrappers. Evidently they had not forgotten about them. So then I thought perhaps I really should address it except I wasn't quite sure how. They hadn't eaten all the candy, so evidently they were not consuming it recklessly, I hadn't expressly forbidden the candy, and mostly I just really didn't want to be bothered with it.

I continued taking the blind-eye approach until I saw the boys dashing past me outside with something in their mouths. This raised two red flags in my mind--one being that actively hiding something from parents is a different category from not bothering to mention it, the second being that just possibly they were eating something dangerous from outside (though on reflection, the latter was very unlikely). So I made them tell me what they were eating and assured them that it was fine--eating a piece or two of candy once a day was not going to hurt them, just not to bother me about it.

No such luck. Immediately, and ever since, I have been barraged with questions. Can you get the bags down? My bag is out and everyone else still has some! How many can we eat? Can we eat this kind?

I kind of wish I had just let them keep hiding it.

Toy Stories

Dear Sunday School Teacher, VBS Worker, Person Behind the Counter, Random Person Who Likes Playing Santa Claus,

I appreciate that you are delighted by the presence of little children and like to make them happy. I am very grateful for your vote of confidence in my decision to spread my genes around. I understand that gifts are delightful to children and that you love to see them squeal and open them. I also realize that gifts are a safe bet and that there are many, many inexpensive options out there.

That said, I would appreciate it if you would take into consideration the effect your gifts will have once they have come over to my house (times four) and been subjected to the churning process that is family life for a couple of days. Or, if imagination fails you, consult this handy guide. Remember, kids will be happy opening anything, including toilet paper,* so you might as well pick out things that will not tempt me to hate you.

Sincerely,

The Mom.

*I am referring to small children, of course. Teens and pre-teens only want cash and food, so don't waste your time. Medium-sized children are unpredictable.

Candy *
Thank you for another opportunity to rot their teeth and wreak havoc with their immune system. And I don't even have the kids with allergies, who must hear yet again why they can't have that. When you are going to pay for dental visits and sit up all night with a cough, then you should consider offering candy to children.

Stickers ****
Not bad, really. Yes, they get stuck to everything, but then, if you have kids, you have things stuck all over your walls (and their clothes) anyway, and stickers are far from the worst. Goo Gone works wonders. They don't have sugar and can be thrown away without a qualm in a few days.

Small Plastic Toys *
Oh yay, more things to step on in the night. And lose parts. And cause the children to cry when they break and get thrown away. And they WILL break, probably in the car on the way home, causing an emotional storm that will distract the driver and cause us to wreck. Do you want that on your conscience?

Legos ****
Although they are small and plastic and painful to step on, they at least do not break on the way home, and it doesn't matter so much when the parts get lost, I already have a large bin devoted to them, and I'm already stepping on Legos  all the time, anyway, so it really doesn't matter to have a few more.

Pencils, Erasers, Etc. ***
I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, they don't involve sugar or injured feet. There is usually a logical place to put them. On the other hand, the pencils and erasers in colorful designs that you always choose are terrible quality and will neither write nor erase, and when I want to write something they are ALL I can find. I hate that.

Notepads *****
The kids can always use more paper to draw on. They are like little machines for converting stacks of paper into messier stacks of paper. I appreciate your contribution to their obsession.

Bubbles *****
Fun, disposable, active, and the worst that can happen is something gets soaked with soapy water. I'm a fan now. I wasn't when I had children under three, because then something getting soaked with soapy water was the ONLY thing that would happen.

Balloons **
Yes, balloons are fun and filled with joy and hope. Until they burst. And then all that built up happiness reverberates into despair. Have you ever spent the evening with a toddler who has just discovered the transience of human existence? (On the other hand, bigger kids are just after the biggest explosion possible. Which makes this a particularly bad choice for a house with multiple sizes of children.)

Noisemakers
Is there a way to do a negative number of stars? Really? I think I will make a recording and blast it into your house at two in the morning. 

Heroes of the Coast

If you are still casting around for a good piece of advice for the new year, I'll recycle some of C.S. Lewis's advice: read old books. There's no substitute for it. It's helpful, yes, to read modern books by people from different perspectives, but they're still coming from the same set of assumptions, addressing the same set of issues. A good book from a different era has the power of cracking your head open in a way that a modern book never could.

And there's no excuse about availability: almost every book that is in someone's library somewhere and is more than a hundred years old is available for free online somewhere. Whatever might slightly interest you is out there, and you can download it to your e-reader and read it in bed.

One book I came across recently is a collection of legends from the tribes of the Northwest coast. It's called Legends of Vancouver, which is a bit to the north, but the cultures were very similar up and down the coast before the Americans and English decided to draw the line somewhere. This is the world my great-grandparents invaded, looked at from the other side.

The author was one of those people uniquely positioned at a conjunction of cultures. Pauline Johnson, or Tekahionwake, was the daughter of a chief of the Six Nations in eastern Canada and a woman from England. She grew up on tribal lands reading the classics of English literature, traveled widely lecturing, including to England, and settled down in British Columbia in the early 1900s, becoming close friends with the local tribal leaders. This book is of the stories they told her.

Nothing tells on the values and goals of a culture like its legends. Not just what behavior is rewarded, but what the rewards are. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these legends is that the most exemplary persons are rewarded with being turned into stone and forming one of the numerous coastal rock formations. Imagine that happening in a European fairy tale. The typical rewards of a European fairy tale--wealth, power, and sex--are notoriously hard to enjoy in a petrified state. However, once you realize that the reward is meant to be never being forgotten, it translates a little better.

As for the behavior being examined, it is, strangely to us, nearly all about parenting. Chief Joe Capilano, the teller of most of the tales, begins the first legend by explaining their custom of throwing a feast for a girl upon reaching womanhood: "During these days of rejoicing the girl is placed in a high seat, an exalted position, for is she not marriageable? And does not marriage mean motherhood? And does not motherhood mean a vaster nation of brave sons and of gentle daughters, who, in their turn, will give us sons and daughters of their own?"

And most of the stories turn on this theme: the young father-to-be so concerned with following the purification rites before the birth of his child that he won't even get out of the way of God's canoe. The tribe foolish enough to ask for a boy-child for their chief's first offspring, instead of welcoming a girl and the accompanying good salmon runs that would secure the future of the tribe. The father who devotes himself to ten years of solitary confinement to guard against an evil omen that may come on his tribe from the birth of twins. And most beautifully and sadly, the deluge story in which the adults place only the children of the tribe in the great canoe together with one young mother and one brave to look after them.

The thing that strikes me as so very different about these tales is how parenting is treated as the execution of the noblest service to the tribe. Imagine telling Chief Capilano about surveys attempting to determine whether people are more or less happy after having children. He would not see how the question could even be asked. What is more noble than securing the future of the tribe? And what greater happiness is there than in doing what is noble?

Compared to that, moderns of every persuasion treat parenting as a high-end hobby, and one that comes at a high cost in the things our society does value as rewards: achievement, wealth, sex. Something to be evaluated on the basis of personal fulfillment. Something to be tolerated in other people if it doesn't get in the way. Or, alternatively, something to be promoted rabidly as justification for the vast amount of personal investment it has taken.

Mothers and fathers are recognized as doing something valuable for their children but not for everyone. Yet, even though we do not face the fear of extinction as a culture as they did, what is more important for the future we must grow old in than that children have, before they have schools or streets or social programs, parents who love them?

This, I think, is the root of the "Mommy Wars." We feel the need to imbue with significance a task whose cost is vastly out of proportion to its shrinking returns. And so we add to the labor, stake out our own territories and proselytize our various approaches. Parenting is personal and therefore competitive.

When perhaps if we listened to Chief Capilano we could recognize that we are already heroes. Everyone who brings a child into the world, everyone who feeds them and rocks them and gives them a roof to sleep under and tells them stories is serving all of us. And maybe we could face our tasks with more calm and courage if we knew we were performing, not a personal act, but a public service.

What are We Good For?

The Veggietales situation as well as an interesting discussion on the homeschool forum that I seldom wish to be snarky on reminds me of one of my ongoing issues as a parent: What is the point of teaching children to behave?

Yes, I have to think through things like this. I cannot do something consistently if I don't have a good reason for doing it. When the children were very small, this lead to conversations with Wondergirl like this:

Wondergirl: Are your children allowed to climb on the coffee table?
Me: I don't know, none of them have gotten up there before. Let me think about it.
Child, falling off the table: WAAAAHHH!!
Me: OK, that's a reason. I guess not.

When it comes to moral behavior, though, I think it's an especially important question. Not only is it important for me to be clear in my mind why I am requiring good behavior of them, it's important for me to communicate it clearly to them.

Most of the books about how to be a Good Christian Parent take the duty of inculcating moral behavior very, very seriously, but I'm not usually very comfortable with the idea of why. Are we hoping to make our children better Christians by teaching them to behave? Well, that's patently wrong. Anything that gives them the impression they are more acceptable in God's sight because they behave themselves is just raising a little Pharisee who won't even think they need a savior. (And, as icky as I find it to imagine saying, "You make Mommy very sad when you do that," I find it ten times ickier to say, "You make Jesus very sad when you do that," as if Jesus gets his feelings hurt and is going to sulk until we apologize nicely.)

Then there are the people who come in opposition to that to say that the point of our parenting should be to reveal to our children just how evil their little hearts are. If we come down off Mount Sinai with smashing tablets, or just preach a come-to-Jesus sermon every time they slug their little brother, we may, someday, lead them to cry 'mercy' and find Jesus. While this has some internal logic, I have yet to see it be effective in practice, leading usually to children who simply give up before they get to the grace part.

I am not the Holy Spirit. I cannot convict of sin. I cannot bring repentance. I cannot bring forgiveness. I cannot bring sanctification. I am just a fellow sinner and recipient of grace, sharing what I know.

So what's the point of teaching them to behave? It's kind of like the exchange between George Bailey and Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life:
George: You don't happen to have 8,000 bucks on you?
Clarence (chuckling): No, we don't use money in Heaven.
George: Well, it comes in real handy down here, bud!

Good behavior isn't needed for Heaven. But it comes in handy down here. It's not always the easiest or most pleasant thing to do, but overall, it was given to us for our good. And knowing about what is right helps us understand more about who God is--about the beauty and order and relationships he made us to have.

Ultimately, we learn to behave simply because it's right. You don't hit your little brother, not because of how it makes Jesus or Mommy feel, but because it's wrong to treat other people that way. Jesus can take our badness (in fact, he already has), but little brother is smooshable and needs to be treated rightly.

Hygiene, Fluids, and Why I Don't Care That Much for Veggietales

Some day, we will have had all the stomach viruses there are. Except maybe dysentery, I'm hoping we can skip that.

Another possibility is that we will someday convince the children that licking their hands in public places is not a good idea. But they are like the Bulgy Bears in Prince Caspian and all our prayers and tears and threats cannot seem to keep them from absent-mindedly stuffing them in. 

Anyway, this was the second round this year, though thankfully this one did not affect grownups nearly so severely. I think I had it last week, but mostly I just felt tired and icky for several days. Duchess threw up once, spent the next day moping about and sipping clear fluids, and demanded to start school last Monday.

The rest of the kids waited until this weekend. Dash got it first and worst. By the time we got to Monday morning, he had kept nothing down for four days and was barely opening his eyes. I had tried the full round of hydration tricks to no avail. I took him in to the doctor, who put him on an IV for a couple of hours. That got him coherent enough to comment on the numbers at the pharmacy windows, but not enough to stand on his own two feet. He spent another two days inert on the couch. I figured he was better this morning when he started yelling for more breakfast to be brought. He hadn't spoken above a whimper since Saturday. When he started telling knock-knock jokes, I knew for sure. Dot and Deux were never in danger, but they were still very out of it for a few days.

The funny thing is, thanks to the three messiest children being unable to get up, the house stayed tidier than ever throughout the course of the sickness. They're out busy messing it up right now. But it was good while it lasted.

Yesterday I finally gave in and permitted them to watch some Veggietales to pass the time. We have some Veggietales from pre-children days. We have not, up until now, really allowed them to watch them. But they were handy and it kept everybody from hollering while I took the garbages out and scrubbed the bathroom.

My misgivings about them were confirmed when Dot chirpily said to me at supper, "Did you know God is happy when we share?" In other words, the message is (a) we learn about God so that we can know how to behave properly and (b) our good behavior makes us acceptable to God. Not to mention the whole talking down to children, as if all they can handle is sanitized moralizing in the simplest terms. (This is, after all, a child who carried on a prolonged conversation with me about whether God could be real or not if we couldn't see Him. She can handle richer fare than "God wants us to share.")

I do like the humor in Veggietales. But the only part I really find suitable for impressionable children is Silly Songs with Larry: "If you go a little loopy better keep your nurse well-paid." Now there's an important moral.