Barnmaven

Not doing what I can't

I think I'm starting to get better at this grownup thing.  Perhaps, just maybe.

Race Car Man started a few weeks ago with a new therapist, this time one at a place whose clientele are people with autism (as opposed to a therapist who deals with autism among other things, which for us did not work so well).  I think its helping.  He's had more good days at school, he's starting to get homework again.  My ex had a schedule change at work that allows him to go to our son's classroom two days a week for a couple of hours which is fantastico.  If I could only find a way to make life outside of Minecraft even remotely palatable for this child all would be straight up and down.  You can't have it all. 

Amazon Girl also started with a therapist last week, as the doors of pubescent hormonal hell have apparently opened wide and beckoned her therein.  She's struggling emotionally and needs some support from an adult she can talk to about life, about her parents, about her brother -  which means a third party is required.  Fortunately the last therapist she saw, the one I really really liked, is still practicing and takes our insurance. 

Then on Wednesday nights I still have obedience school with TBone.  And Sundays there's church and then Amazon Girl has her riding lesson, and most Saturdays from here until the sun goes away in the late fall again, I have something to scheduled to do with my horses.  SG has guitar lessons every Tuesday and just got started with some group political thingamajig.  And so on.

Sometimes in between all of that we sit down for a few minutes and breathe and maybe fold a load of laundry.

Last week Race Car Man's therapist asked if we wanted to start him in her next social skills class.  "Sure, when does it start?" 

Next Tuesday. (Two days ago)

Its a class he needs, BUT - it starts at 3:45, just 5 minutes after he gets out of school, AND its a half hour ride away from his school.  And I work full time.  And my husband works full time.  And if I had some time to sit down and sketch out a plan it we can do it but Next Tuesday just does not work for me right now and I for ONCE in my goddamned adult life opened my mouth and said the magic words:

"I'm sorry but that doesn't work for our schedule right now."

I didn't even feel guilty about saying it.  I felt relieved.  I am doing all that I can do for my family and myself right now and I am not going to try and cram one more thing down our collective throats, not at this moment. 

There have been a lot of times in the last several years where I've felt almost all of my waking time was consumed with trying to frantically get everything done that I am supposed to do and failing miserably at it.  Its a horrible pattern - try to do more than you're capable of, fail, drop two or three of the balls you're juggling and then spend a month trying to dig out of the hole you've just created for yourself.  

Perfectionism just isn't going to happen for me right now.

There will be a point where our schedule will open enough to make the social skills class do-able for us.  It will happen.  Just not two days ago.  

Slow down. The tempo isn't as fast as you think it is.

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Pig Wrestling

The first week always sucks

Pig Wrestling

My mother likes to tell people stories about how, when I was small, it would take five adults to hold me down at the doctor's office if I was about to get a shot or a blood draw.   The fear still lingers, but I have learned to willingly submit, even when I know its going to make me feel nauseated, break out in a cold sweat, and probably fall over.  (This is why I'm more than six months late for my six month dental checkup, why I hate to see my doctor even though I love him and why I frequently turn pale when my father takes his blood sugar or gives himself an injection.  Urp.)

My children have inherited my fear of shots.  Amazon Girl outdid me by miles during her preschool years, though she's much better now.  At her most recent checkup she needed four vaccines.  I requested they give her two and have us come back for the others -- I don't like having that many done at a time.   She sat still for them, but she was super mad at me - I didn't realize when I made the appointment that she would need shots and therefore didn't warn her ahead of time.    After I bought her a treat to compensate for her suffering, the lightbulb in her pointy little head went off and now I'm bound by contract for a trip to the ice cream parlor when the next two shots are given.

Race Car Man, on the other hand, still requires far more than a bribe.  He came home early from school yesterday.  Rather, the school nurse called and said to send someone to come get him right away as he had appeared in her office with pinkeye.  Joy!  Cue the dark thunderclouds and Wagner, because any condition that requires the application of anything - particularly in something as sensitive as an eyeball - falls unti the category of Things That Are Traumatic.

The pinkeye doesn't look like its a raging case. so I opted not to bother the doctor and dug out the antibiotic drops from the last round of the dreaded eye crud. I showed him the little bottle and asked him to stop what he was doing so I could put some into his eye, which immediately resulted in screaming so loud you'd think I'd set the little bugger on fire.  I quickly decided that rather than engage in a wrestling match, I'd try again later.  'Later' turned out to be a text to his dad as he was on his way to pick the kids up:  I'm sending some drops for _____'s eye.  He wouldn't let me put any in."

Ex:  So he hasn't had any yet?

Me.  No.

If dead silence on the other end translates tone, I'm pretty sure he's plotting his revenge.  I deserve it.

I don't blame it entirely on the autism, but I will say that having a child with sensory issues makes certain things much more difficult.  Pills, for instance.  He can't swallow pills.  Or at least he thinks he can't swallow pills, which is pretty much the same thing.  Textures are another thing, but the absolute worst is anything that requires him to submit to something being done to him.  The dentist, the doctor, a sliver in the finger or a scrape needing to be washed out -- all of these things require the person attending him to have cat-like reflexes, the ability to lift and secure the equivalent of an 8 armed chimpanzee and the patience of Job.  I still recall the first time the nurse at the doctor's office wanted to take his blood pressure.  When we finally got his fingernails pried out of the ceiling tiles we gave up because it was a sure bet any reading we got at that point would be abnormally high.  Mine was, at any rate.

My good friend whose son not only has an autism diagnosis but also has a congenital heart defect deals with this but multiplied by an easy thousand.  I not only don't envy her, whenever her son has to go for tests or a procedure I want to give her a trophy and a bottle of vodka.  They make it through, and so through our small challenges do we.   

Its one of the harder aspects of parenting for me, that situation when I have to ask my child to tolerate something that hurts or causes them discomfort, especially if I'm asking them to deal with something I can barely deal with either.  Do you suppose that if we'd had an inling that parenting came with an honorary degree in greased pig wrestling we might have at least had a moment or two of doubt about the whole thing?

Girl things

My left shoulder hurts.  It has for years, but not like it has lately.  Lately whenever I try to put my arm up over my head, do pushups, carry hay or saddle my horse it really really hurts.  I went to see the shoulder guy at the Orthopaedic clinic, and he gave me a shot of steroids but that only worked for a little while, so I was back there this morning.  He wants to rule out a small tear in the rotator cuff before he puts me in physical therapy, so they're scheduling an MRI. 

I'm so excited.

I've never had an MRI.  And what if I have to have surgery?  Another scar to show off!  Cool!

Yes, I'm that person.

I'm the person who sees snow falling and I might pretend to be annoyed, because that's apparently what you're supposed to feel when it snows.  Inside, though, I can't wait for the adventure of driving in it.  There might even be an accident!  I might end up stranded in the wilderness and have to hike through the mountains and eat my companions to survive!

I'm the person who gets a scrape or a cut and the only reason I go looking for a bandage is so I can walk by my husband and kids and say "LOOK!  I'M BLEEDING!"  If the cut isn't bleeding enough I'll probably squeeze it a little to see if I can get more out of it.

I'm the person who hates needles and gets tattoos.  "How many hours did that one take?"  "Four two hour appointments."  "Didn't it hurt"  "Oh, yeah, it hurt like hell.  It was awesome."  And when I'm under the needle and the artist asks if  I need a break and I say that I'm fine and they respond with "Wow, most people would have had to take at least a couple of breaks by now," I'm all "FUCK YEAH."

I'm the woman who will smack a volleyball into the face of the guy on the other side of the net with barely concealed glee, run over the shortstop on my way to second base and barrel through the guy trying to set a pick on me when I'm guarding the guy who's driving the baseline.

I put on my coveralls and a baseball cap, put my truck up on ramps and change my oil, change my filters, refill my washer fluid and try to see if that pesky leak is just a loose bolt that I can fix myself.  I look like a greasemonkey, and I could care less.

And this may sound crazy, but at the same time I like that I can put on a fancy dress and get my hair and makeup all just so and knock my husband's socks off with my awesome female self.  I very much like my femininity and all that it entails.

I'm not alone in this.  So many women I know are just like me, strong and soft.  Tough and tender.  My daughter is one of them.

Pink, bright hot pink, is her favorite color.  She loves My Little Pony and Dragons, stuffed kitty toys and light sabers.  She wants to be a princess and a ninja. She has beautiful hair to her waist and she prefers jeans to dresses.  She came to me on Christmas day to talk about how upset she was when some relatives and friends gave her brother "boy" toys and gave her "girl" things like body wash and perfume.  She was upset to think anyone might think that she was a "girly girl." 

There is so much to love about being a woman.  While its a sure bet that my childhood in the late 60's/early 70's subjected my psyche to a great deal of gender role absolutes, I enjoy wearing makeup and dressing in clothes meant to showcase what I think is attractive about myself.  I care about how my hair looks, and I struggle like many women about the impossible-to-walk line between having fingernails that are neat and pretty or fingernails that allow you to do things like cinch a saddle, throw hay bales and repair fencing. 

In 1983, the year I graduated high school, 95 percent of autobody repair workers were male.  There must have been something brewing in us and the classes of women that followed.   As of a decade ago, the number of women in that industry tripled -- a 369% increase.  Other typically male-dominated industries have seen similar jumps in female workers - firefighting, millwork, engineering and law enforcement, to name a few. ¹  I've been a lot of things in my work life, but the bulk of it I've spent in transportation. 

I might have grown up watching Charlie's Angels, but I think I still understood at a very deep level that those women were still playing to male sexuality and that they represented very little that was real.  Anyone with half a brain knows that television and movies tell you lots of lies about how people look and what they say and do.

So when Amazon Girl complained about some of her gifts, I told my daughter that people weren't trying to be unkind if they bought her "girly girl" presents.  I told her even though she might not be a perfume and flowers kind of young lady that it wasn't demeaning for people to think of her as feminine.  Besides, isn't a gift is more of a reflection of the giver than of the receiver?.  But I get it, as might any woman who in the hormone hell of early puberty was mistaken more than once for a boy.  But I want her to know - to believe - that she doesn't have to be one or the other.  Both aspects of her exist together and there's nothing wrong with that.  There's nothing wrong about being a woman who can both take care of herself and look good doing it.

The dividing line between two worlds that were once very separate has become thin and transparent.  We may be very different physically, we may in large part have critically different ways of thinking and organizing our lives, but in so many ways we have broken free of the gender roles that at one time were used to contain and limit us.  I think thats a good thing for all of us, men included.

So hey, do you want to arm wrestle?

 

^{1.  Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005 Current Population Survey}

 

Thanks Blogher for featuring this post on Blogher.com!

 

 

I Need Some Wind for my Sails

Its the end of another week and I am so pathetically grateful to not have to get up tomorrow and put one foot in front of the other while pretending I have it all together I could cry. 

The stress of fending off the world seems to be cumulative, and yesterday I got the good/not so good news that SG might be staying longer on this Nebraska job.  Yay, because its more money into the pathetically empty coffers, but really, BOO because he won't be here for Thanksgiving and I'm so lonely and so tired of dealing with everything and not having my husband at home to sit down after a long day and talk to over a nice glass of wine.  I still have the glass of wine, but the dogs are less interested in hearing about my day than they are in having their dinner RIGHT NOW PLEASE.  If it wasn't for the evenings I get to stop at my parents and visit before I take the kids home I think I would give up the attempt to stay sane.

My struggles pale in comparison to what's happening over in New Jersey and the outside buroughs of New York City, so I should quit complaining.  No matter what's happening in my life, there's someone somewhere dealing with something a hell of a lot worse.  See?  Mindset changed.  Gratitude abounds.

Mr. Race Car Man had a good start to his school year, but has been struggling the last few weeks.  His good days still outnumber his bad days. Last year he had to earn the letters K-I-N-D-L-E by displaying expected behaviors.  If he earned all six letters, he got to either play on my Kindle Fire or play games on the Wii.  This year, since he's older and has gotten better with his skills, his teacher upped the ante and now he has to earn the letters P-L-A-Y G-A-M-E.   If he doesn't earn all eight letters he doesn't get Wii at my house or Playstation if he's at his dad's.  Since he's absolutely mad about gaming, this is a very big incentive for him to master his behaviors and his responses.  He earns his games more days than he does not, but the days he doesn't are really tough days, not just for him but for his teachers and classmates.  Monday morning he decided to run away rather than get on the bus, and my friend Debbie who watches them in the mornings, the aide from the bus and my daughter had to go on a merry chase around the neighborhood to catch him.  The upside of having a very tall and strong daughter is that she was able to nab the little turd and carry him on to the bus.  He then went on to have a very rotten day at school.  I hate those days, because he is so upset and fixated over over not getting to play his games.  Eventually he can be distracted, but he's got to go through his process of coping and folks, it ain't fun.  I feel bad for him, for his classmates, his teacher, and for those of us at home with him.

Fortunately we already had an appointment scheduled with our psychiatrist for Tuesday morning.  One thing I like about our psych is that he doesn't just ask me questions, he asks my child questions and carefully responds to him.  Throught a very calm and methodical interview, we were able to piece together some of the things that were going wrong for Race Car Man at school.  He is having great difficulty focusing in class.  He is very easily distracted by other students physical and verbal behavior.  This frustrates him greatly and makes him more likely to have difficulty controlling his behavior.

The psychiatrist made a med adjustment which we started immediately, and so far it seems to be helping.  Two fantastic days in a row doesn't mean as much as a couple of good weeks, so I'm not going to commit to saying "it worked!" -- but I'm encouraged. 

He can be such an engaging child.  A lot of adults we encounter who don't know he has autism, if he's having a good day, are usually charmed by the way he interacts with them.  He loves to explain things, and with his extremely detailed memory and his love of reading information books rather than fiction, he can actually converse about a lot of things.  Combined with his extensive and very precise vocabulary, he seems far beyond his years. 

I wish he'd eat, though.  We weighed and measured him at the doctor's office.  Since last school year he's grown three inches but gained no weight whatsoever.  I can't find pants to fit him that don't leave his ankles and half his shins exposed.

One of his favorite new activities is to brush his sister's hair.   Its almost to her waist now, and I found a special brush at the local beauty supply that lives up to its claims of being "ouchless."  He will sit behind her in the chair at my desk, and while she plays a game he brushes her hair.  Whenever they do this my heart just melts.

So things aren't as good as they could be and they aren't as bad as they could be.  I just feel drained right now and unable to cope with even the smallest setbacks.  Maybe Race Car Man isn't the only one who needs a medication change.

 

Partway there

This school year has been markedly different for both of the kids.  My daughter is coming along swimmingly in the personal hygiene department, and you busy moms out there will know what I mean when I say that its a quantum leap forward to have one kid who doesn't need your help in the shower.  Race Car Man is better too.  He now takes showers instead of baths, and his biggest accomplishment has been to teach himself to tolerate the water on his face so that I can wash AND rinse his hair without major histrionics. 

They've both gotten medication compliant, which is another huge relief.  They were pretty good for SG over the summer, but I noticed that if I was home when it was meds time, at least one of them would raise hell for no apparent reason.  I surmised, probably correctly, that the drama was simply for my benefit.  After all, don't most kids behave better with people who are not their parents?  With that assessment of the situation in mind, one of the things I was most dreading about SG being gone this fall was mornings.  I was completely prepared for the marathon mornings I remember so well from last year.  I spent quite a bit of time girding my loins, as it were, for the morning battle, only to find myself completely shocked (and about as delighted as a dog rolling in horse shit)  when no one actually wanted to engage in it.  I put together their meds and deliver them to my kids...and they take them. 

While you finish picking your jaw up off the floor, let me also say that Race Car Man has improved so much over last year with his efforts to manage his behavior that he actually got an award at the school assembly last week.

I KNOW, RIGHT????  I'm shocked the local paper didn't see this as a newsworthy event!

There are still struggles, of course.  Last year my son's nemesis was a bigger kid I'll call "Abel."  Abel is the same age as my Amazon Girl and he is on the spectrum, as are all of the 10 kids in Race Car Man's classroom.  For whatever reason, Abel was my son's kryptonite.  Everytime he made a noise or soothed himself with rocking or flapping, Race Car Man would lose his MIND.  He got suspended for three days because for no apparent reason whatsoever, he hauled off and hit poor Abel while the kid was doing nothing more than sitting on a bench and talking to himself.  We worked very hard at challenging these behaviors, removing desired activities and having many many discussions on making choices about behavior.  There were a few times I simply lost my temper and yelled at him, I'm not proud to say.   How long does it take to teach a kid with ASD that hitting people when you're a grownup doesn't just get you in trouble at school - it gets you fired, and possibly even arrested. 

I anticipated we would see continued problems with Abel, but since the universe frequently likes to remind me I'm not as smart as I think I am, Abel and Race Car Man are best pals this year. 

We are not free, however, of the joy of a mortal enemy.  Race Car Man's kryptonite presented itself this school year in the form of a boy I'll call "Sam."  Sam, like Abel, tends to make a lot of noise as he copes with the messges his brain is sending him.  He also - in my opinion - is kind of a little shit.  (And yes, my son is kind of a little shit too, sometimes, but he's MY little shit and therefore adorable).  Almost every day my son comes home in tears because Sam has called him names or made fun of him.  The day my son got in trouble for hitting Sam, it was (according to Race Car Man) because Sam called him a 'DUMBASS.'  I was so tempted not to punish him, because dammit, I think being called a Dumbass is pretty antagonizing even if you don't have autism.  BUT, I know we need to reinforce the hitting is a bad idea thing, so I made him write "I will not hit" twenty times before doing his homework.  Then I gave him ice cream.

Each week I get an average of three emails from his teacher, updating me on the latest thing my son has done to Sam.  Then the other night I was looking through some schoolwork he had brought home.  My son's class, which is a special program for children with autism, works on social skills and behavior management.  They do a lot of work on identifying emotions and interpreting facial expression.  In his folder was a sheaf of papers stapled together.  On the front of each page, he had colored in the face of a monkey making various facial expressions, and he had correctly identified the emotions the monkey was displaying - sad, mad, happy.  On the back of each sheet, he had written a series of sentences about his own experiences.  On the sheet for "sad," I read:

I feel sad when:

I get (sic) bullied.

The next day I sent an email to his teacher requesting more information on how these two boys are interacting.  I told her about the name calling incident and other things my son has told me Sam does to him, such as enlisting other classmates in making fun of Race Car Man or deliberately excluding him from activities.  I inquired as to which kid was instigating the conflicts.  I suggested we might need to meet to discuss ways to help my son cope with this other boy in a more positive way, but that from what I was hearing from my child, there may be more going on than two boys who just don't get along.

In her response she promised to investigate the name-calling and to pay closer attention to the dynamics between the two.   I trust her judgment - I know she will fairly evaluate each child's part in the conflict and report back to me,  and do everything she can to help them both make better choices.

When my son was enrolled into his current program, I was kind of in love with the idea that he would be with other kids just like him.  I had this picture in my head of some sort of Autism Utopia, where all the spectrum kids hung out together and were a big support group.  Because they all were coping with the same differences, they wouldn't seem...different.  At least not to each other.  And because they don't always share recesses with the other kids, they wouldn't have as many opportunities to get picked on by the neurotypical kids.  To find out that my son is being picked on by one of his own is enormously deflating.  I guess its not that crazy to assume that kids who struggle with their behavior would struggle with their behavior in regards to each other.

Still, I think we're making progress.

Ten for ten

In ten days she’ll be eleven years old.  For the moment, she is ten, and quite content to be so.  No longer a baby, not yet a young woman.  Not a little girl, but a girl in every sense – long-legged, unrestrained, full of joy and life. 

When I get her out of her bed in the mornings she goes to my room and crawls into mine, watching TV and eating her cereal and talking to me as I shower, primp and dress.  She watches me choose my clothes, watches me put on my makeup and fix my hair.  She giggles at something on the television and then asks me how long it will take for her to need a bra like the one I am wearing.  “Forever” I say, hopefully, knowing that it will likely be far sooner than I am prepared to accept.

She tells me about a boy in her class who always seems to be staring at her.  She confesses that she likes him and that it makes her feel very nervous and distracted.  She’s old enough to wear a bra and young enough to still want stuffed animals for her birthday presents. 

She writes constantly.  She keeps three or four journals, and she writes her most honest thoughts in them, good and bad.  She wears her heart on her sleeve and she hasn’t yet learned how to put up a protective wall around it.  She is astute enough to recognize her parents’ faults and to love them anyway.  She is wisdom and innocence intertwined. 

She reminds me of all I once wanted to be. She makes me both hopeful for and afraid of the future.  She is my touchstone, my muse and the embodiment of the best aspects of her father and myself.   She is the reason I breathe and when I watch her move she takes my breath away. 

She gives the best hugs of anyone I know.   No little weeny squeezes from this one, not ever.  She hugs you like she means never to let you go.  When she hugs you, you have been HUGGED.

It is the nature of children to change right in front of your eyes, for the babies they once were to disappear and be replaced with older and ever more refined versions of the adults they will someday be.  I try to picture her in my head as the sturdy toddler, the unrestrained preschooler, the shy first grader, and though all of them are part of her, she is as far removed from them as the moon from the sun.  She is everything I ever hoped for in my daughter and a million things more.

She is ten for ten more days.  I will treasure each day as I have treasured each day since the day she was pulled, protesting at the top of her lungs from my womb.  I am blessed by every day I have been privileged to witness the becoming of her.  I pray I am privileged to witness many, many more.

 

Arms around the whole world

It was a gray, wintery day, the clouds angry and spitting sleet.  The kids and I were headed to the local Target to pick up a few needed items.  As we pulled into the parking lot, I saw her -- a somewhat older woman in jeans and a heavy jacket, gray hair pulled back into a long ponytail.  She was sitting on a pavement bulkhead just at the parking lot entrance, holding up a sign.

Husband sick, can't work.  Lost our home.  Please help if you can.

I winced in empathy, sorry for her situation.  Divorced, feeding a zoo and a household on one income, I understood (and still do) very well how most people are just a paycheck away from disaster.  Before we'd gone ten feet past her, my daughter asked in a very concerned tone, "Mommy, what's wrong with that lady?" 

"I think she's homeless, honey.  She's hoping people can give her some money."

We all got out of the car and headed in to the store.  My daughter pulled on my hand, and I turned to look at her.  Two wet streaks glistened on her cheeks.

"We have to help her, mommy!  Its so cold and she doesn't have anyplace to live!  That's horrible!"

I glanced across the parking lot to the woman, and I thought of my empty wallet and my tight budget.

"Honey, I don't have anything but some spare change in my wallet right now.  When we check out from the store I'll use my card to get a little money back and when we leave you can give it to her, okay?"

"Okay, mommy.  Thank you."

By the time we left the store, however, she was gone.  At my daughter's insistence we drove around and around the various stores on the boulevard, hoping to find her, but we never did.  I realized just that day how deep her compassion and regard for humanity really go.    She has the heart of an angel, longing to heal the world and take away its pain.

The other day I was recalling to SG an account my neighbor related to me.  An old man came up her driveway and wanted to talk about a horse he was boarding (he'd seen the horses in her pasture and decided she might be able to help him).  Suddenly out of nowhere he asked her, "Will you take care of me?"

Obviously taken aback, she said "What?"

"Will you take care of me?"  He was 96, he explained, and he lived by himself.  He didn't have anyone to care for him and would it be alright if she came over to his house every few days just to make sure he hadn't fallen down or died? 

How can you say no to that?  She certainly couldn't. 

About thirty seconds after I finished telling SG about this, I heard sobs coming from the back seat of the truck. 

"Amazon Girl, are you okay?"

"THAT'S SO SAD, MOMMY!" she sobbed.  "That man is all alone!  I feel so bad for him!"  She cried, loudly, for about the next fifteen minutes.  She was completely undone.  I promised her I would touch base with my neighbor and perhaps we could go visit him as well.

I recall a younger me, a young adult who couldn't pass a dog or cat on the side of the road without stopping to collect them, or couldn't stop crying if she saw one that had been killed by a car.  I remember being the person who always gave change to someone begging if I had it to give.

Even though I have grown more cynical in my old age, that younger me is still present.  I don't always stop for strays, which causes my daughter to lose her temper with me, but I try to help when I can.  I am not always the person I want to be, like most people I have times when I feel selfish about giving away what I have. There are times when I have to be realistic about my capability to help every creature - I've had to say "no" to fostering and my husband is trying to convince me to allow our critter count to drop via attrition.     

Her giving nature is something she was born with, but its also something fostered, just as mine was.   My parents were always volunteering their time, to the food bank, to the literacy groups, donating blood. My dad was a volunteer ambulance driver and EMT long after his firefighting days were over.  In his younger years he rarely hesitated to pick up a hitchhiker, even though it kind of drove my mom nuts.

Just as my parents modeled giving for my brother and me, I hope I do an adequate job of model those values for my own children. If I never pass anything else along to them, I can rest easy knowing that at least one of them is growing up to be a person who will do what she can to help others.  I ache a little for the inevitable pain she will suffer when she encounters situations where the help is too little or too late and for the scorn she will likely receive from those who are less compassionate.  I know she will learn, as I have, that its worth it, even when it hurts.  

"I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending love letters to the world."   ~ Mother Teresa

 

You're Beautiful. No, Really.

Jane Devin wrote another great thought-provoking blog post yesterday about beauty.  I'm a huge fan of Jane's writing.  Her book Elephant Girl was as haunting a memoir as I have ever read, but her use of language as an art form makes it impossible not to read her, even when what she's written about is ugly and painful.

So anyway, beauty.  Jane writes, "We’re never going to make it okay to not be physically beautiful if we don’t get off this beauty kick we’ve been on for so long. We’re not going to change our futures and those of other women as long as “beautiful” remains a priority. We’re not going to change the culture that places such an inordinately high premium on female attractiveness as long we keep promoting beauty myths through the lies we tell ourselves and each other."

  I posted on her FB wall that I wasn't sure I agreed, and I mentioned my now-deceased friend Peg, who was morbidly obese and losing her hair thanks to Rheumatoid Arthritis and a cupboard filled with medications both toxic and ill-suited toward maintaining one's weight and hair volume.   Whenever I saw Peg, or when I think of her now in my mind's eye, I see beauty.  I see large brown eyes with impossibly long lashes and I hear the softest, most soothing voice imaginable.  I hear her tinkling laughter as she regales me with yet another story about her Boston catholic family. 

I concede the point that we give too much emphasis and value to the concept of beauty when we try to compliment someone or try to boost their self esteem.  But I also believe we misuse the word "beautiful." The term has been warped by our media to mean an almost impossibly achievable standard of physical appearance.  And Jane isn't really talking about the people who miss this standard by some small or even medium mark, she's talking about when the whole person doesn't come close due to physical deformity or flaw and that the act of trying to make someone feel beautiful when they aren't phsyically attractive is to her a disservice.

I know Jane's opinion comes from experience and from her own sense of self, her dedication to speaking the truth as she sees and feels it.  We talked about it back and forth on Facebood a little, and to a large extent I agree with her...but there is a space between that extent and my own feelings about looks and attractiveness.

What I wish were possible was for the propensity toward shallowness to somehow disappear from the human gene pool.  Its not ever likely to happen, but I can still dream about it.  I'm raising a girl, and there's no doubt that females are held to much stricter standards than the male population.  (In general, that is, because there are certainly men and women who possess no such incremental measurements of beauty when appreciating one another or their partners. )  It starts so young, with the TV shows for tweens that have mostly very attractive and thin lead characters, and their not-so-cute and maybe-a-little-dorky and often a little fat sidekicks.   Its pretty easy to decide which character you'd rather be -- and pretty easy to look at yourself and see all the reasons why you could never be her. 

It only gets worse as we get older.  Movies and television use all the tricks of makeup and lighting, props and camera position to disguise that which is unacceptable and magazines taking it a step better and photoshopping models and movie stars to the point where the real person and the picture no longer resemble one another.  And these are the people we are supposed to emulate?  How can we emulate them?  Trust me, if I could photoshop my ass for real to make it a couple sizes smaller, I would.  Well, maybe I would.

I'll never forget the really average-looking guy who came up to me in a bar when I was in my very early twenties, and said (right to my face!) "You'd be a really attractive girl if you didn't have such a big butt."  I spent every day of my life from that day forward feeling horrible about the size of my posterior.  One doesn't forget that sort of comment. 

How do we teach people to value themselves and others by non-physical standards?  How do we teach people that diversity in size and color are not marks of shame but badges of uniqueness?  How do we get human beings to learn how to give a compliment that doesn't include the words except, but, if only and however?

To address Jane's point, what about those who fall far short of the current physical standard of beauty?  Is it a disservice to seek beauty in those who feel they have none?  Do we need to know we are beautiful?  What is beauty anyway? 

And maybe that's where I see the difference in people -- my definition of "beauty" is subjective.  It isn't necessarily the same as others.  I see people as a whole picture.  I look at my husband and even though I could give you a short checklist of things about him that aren't what might be considered conventionally handsome, those aren't the things I see.  The things I see are the things that make him handsome to me -- his big smile, his broad shoulders, his warm brown eyes, and the one thing I can't see but I can hear it the moment he opens his mouth -- his intelligence and his sense of humor.  I'm NOT LOOKING for the other things.  I suppose its the same for him -- when he looks at me he sees the things he likes and discards the rest as unimportant.

I think I could look at anyone, even someone I don't particularly care for or someone who copes with a serious lack of conventional attractiveness and I could still see beauty in them.  Beauty and ugliness coexist in all of us, and they can't always be seen with the naked eye.  No human being who has ever lived is immune to the ugliness of that petty, selfish little voice in our heads, and no human exists who doesn't display physical and emotional moments of pure, unadulterated beauty. 

Childbirth -- not the prettiest sight imaginable.  And yet, that slime-covered, squalling purplish red infant with the pulsing cord still attached is beautiful in a way that cannot be described in words.  The physicality of the act of giving birth - blood, fluid, poop on the table, maybe an emergency cesaerean with intestines being pulled onto the table to get them out of the way!  There is ugliness but the spiritual and emotional experience of expelling life into the world was for me and for many women as beautiful as it was painful.

I postulate that we are all - every one of us - both beautiful and ugly.  The outside may lean far more one way than the other, but to deny the existence of beautfy at all is to deny that inside this flesh wrapper is tethered a being made up of nothing but spirit.  We are not our bodies.

Like Jane, I tend to find things other than physical appearance to compliment others on, regardless of how physically attractive they might be - or not.   But I'm going to politely, compassionately and lovingly disagree that we do service to another by refraining from letting a person know we find something about them beautiful.  Insincerity is in itself not at all useful, but a sincerely meant compliment is another thing entirely.  I compliment my daughter on her sense of humor and her strength, her sensitive and loving heart, her ability to write amazing stories and her fierce protectiveness of all things  furred and feathered.  I try to compliment her on these things more than her beauty, because I want her to always have those messages in her mind when she remembers what her mother thought of her, but she also knows I think she is stunningly beautiful. 

Jane of the amazing large eyes, I only know you from your photos on your blog and your book, but know that I do see beauty when I look at you.  We both have voices in our heads that spit out reminders of the things we know about ourselves that are the antithesis of "pretty."  Nonetheless, you have beauty that is not limited to the inner you.  Its there on the exterior as well.

 

 

Coming soon to Barnmaven.com:  My colonoscopy!  And yes, even THAT is beautiful!  I KID YOU NOT.

 

 

Passages

Over the years I've fallen in love with so many blogs.  Every so often I'll see someone I really look forward to reading stop posting with any regularity, and I wonder if they're OK, if this is the beginning of the long decline to the end of blogging altogether or just the silence while they weather a crisis or a dry spell.  When I first started blogging I was so enthralled with the form and the media I couldn't imagine ever wanting to stop.  I'd see someone I really like put their blog on haitus or take it offline entirely and I'd be so perplexed...why would anyone want to go silent like that? 

I also remember being a woman without children and I'd watch people who were parents say and do certain things and I'd be absolutely flummoxed why parents were so crazy.  I, after all, would never say or do such things.  I'd never buy my kid a happy meal just to make him stop crying for one goddam second.  I'd never fill my kids rooms with plastic crappy toys or ignore them just so I could have one minute of sanity in the bathroom or let them wear clothes made in third world countries by indentured servants to the smiley face or...and so on.

I gather this is the standard process for most people.  When something is new or not yet experienced, we bury ourselves under the weight of uninformed opinions and find ourselves surprised when we one day find out just how little we actually know about anything.

The good news (depending, I suppose, on your point of view) is that I'm not planning on falling off the web into that large graveyard of discontinued blogs.  The bad news, if there is such a thing, is that I have no current urge to write much at the moment and no idea how to solve that problem.  Or even know if that's actually a "problem."   My health has been a bit difficult of late, work has been very challenging and stressful, and the things that need doing far outnumber the hours of time available.  In truth, my attitude about blogging and bloggers has changed dramatically over the last year or so, and my reasons for writing, such as they were, are no longer the same.  My goals for blogging have changed significantly, and my self-knowledge of my place in the world of blogging has clarified.  I'm ok with where I am and who I am, and I'm less worried than ever about accidentally offending anyone or even whether or not anyone "important" is reading, because I DO get, frankly, that everyone who takes the time to come here and read my continuing attempts at writing has given me a great gift of time and attention, and I'm grateful for every single one of you. 

Lately I'm in a state of wonderment at the ability life has to be simultaneously amazing and awful.  Or joyous and depressing.  Or stressful and flatlined.  Pick your metaphors, they all fit. 

My friend Debbie, who has taken the reins over organizing my barn, my pastures, my horses and trying to convince me to implement ten thousand fabulous ideas all at the same time, says constantly "Its amazing how you're just so normal!"  I think she has it ass-backwards.  I think we get along really well because on a certain level we have brains that work the same (wrong, not-normal) way and we don't get frustrated by the tangential nature of practically every conversation we've ever had.  Over the course of the summer we've repaired stall doors and expanded so that I now have three working stalls.  When there was only one stall functional and three to four horses being fed with different requirements for supplements and each with the right to be able to eat without someone else chasing them away from breakfast, things were a little crazy out there.    She's also picked my dry pen clean of weeds and rocks.  She's found someone to haul away the manure pile.  She's found someone to put up wall racks for tack and someone to paint.  She's cleared the area behind the barn where all the scrap lumber and fencing materials used to get tossed (don't look at ME, the old owners started it, I just kept the tradition alive) and put down pallets and tarps and quadrupled our ability to store hay.

She also drives my husband a little batty because he is used to being along much of the time and she is by nature a very chatty person.  I can tell he likes her though. 

The kids this summer...what an amazing change in both of them.  My daughter is getting taller and more beautiful by the nanosecond.  She's taken two sessions of swimming lessons, gotten to level three and only needs to perfect two things to get to level four.  She's at that stage of transformation between little girl and startling long-legged tween and she's just stunning.  That's not even subjective mother-pride.  Its just God's honest truth.  What I find fascinating is her ability to verbalize her understanding that she knows she's growing up but she's not in any hurry to do so.  "I just want to be a kid, mom.  I don't want to grow up yet," she'll say, and my heart melts with love and pride and bittersweetness all at the same time.  She will grow up whether I will it or no.  I know that little girls can change dramatically as they age, and I hold onto the firm hope that the person she is, the things about her that make her so awesomely her will stay intact.   She gets more out of my reach every day, and as I let go with a heart that strains under the hope and fear, I simply pray that God lets life be gentle with her for as long as possible.  In les than two weeks she will be a fifth grader. 

My son is learning to negotiate.  His anxiety and ODD issues make certain things difficult.  He hates taking showers because he doesn't want to get any water in his eyes, but baths take too long and his anxiety informs him that soaking in your own dirty water is just YUCK.  So showers were always a struggle, until he came home from his dad's one weekend and announced that he and his dad worked out a deal:  Daddy bought him swim goggles and now he doesn't get upset in the shower.  I'm not sure who thought up the idea, but hot damn if it hasn't made getting the little dude clean a much less stressful event.  Hallelujah and pass the cornbread!  He's gotten tons more compliant about taking his meds, and he's learned to negotiate that as well.  We've also had to learn to listen when he starts to refuse things - sometimes we have a hard time remembering that his anxiety makes certain things far harder for him to tolerate than we can understand.  

SG has been a stay-at-home stepdad all summer and has had both kids pretty much every day of the week since their dad and I are both working, and I really believe his even-tempered nature has had a positive impact on both of them.   Their dad and I both tend to moodiness, and I sense that our unpredictability has been stressful for them.   They have evened out much, both of them, they fight with one another a lot less, and its clear that they both adore their stepdad.  School starts soon, so my husband will be joining the ranks of the employed unless I either get a highly unexpected and very large pay raise or I actually buy a lottery ticket and it turns out to be a winnah.  He's been my rock the last month or so while I've struggled physically and mentally.  That's love for you.  I am not afraid to admit that my patience is thin and my attitude bad, and he has endured it with a great deal more grace than I would likely exhibit were I in his shoes.

We lost Mojo kitty this summer.   He disappeared in the spring for a few weeks and when we finally found him he was so skinny and deteriorated we weren't sure he would make it.  He recovered for a while with special food and supplements and monitoring, but then he went suddenly downhill and we had to make the tough choice to say goodbye.  I suspect it was cancer.    He's joined Hercules, Lady and our little old banty hen Cin-Cin under the tree out in the back pasture.  I think I've learned pretty well the last few years that people and animals too often leave our lives far sooner than we are prepared for them to do, and it reminds me to make a point of taking time each day for each animal to have some attention, for me to be more vigilant about picking up the phone, and to treasure every opportunity to play with my children and create memories to sustain me when they have grown up and begun lives of their own.  It will happen sooner than I think.

How's your summer been so far?

 

Do Re Mi

When I was very little, a neighbor died and gave us a piano.  My mother was the only person she knew who played, and so she made a specific bequest in her will.  I took to it like a duck to water, and it wasn't long until my father had to draw a line in the sand:  Either that kid gets lessons or I get out the chainsaw.

And so began my first passion:  music.  We had that piano until I was well into college, and I took fourteen years of lessons on it.  I love to play.  I'm not a concert-level pianist, I lack the true gift for that, but I can sight read like a house on fire and I can sing.  When horse therapy isn't possible due to weather or timing, music therapy is where I turn to ease my troubled soul.

As a kid whenever we had a dinner party my mom would sit me down at the piano and I would play all of our favorites out of a big hardbound book of standards.  I knew most of the popular songs from the first and second World Wars and every hymn in the Episcopal hymnal.  Everyone would sing along, and no evening was complete without a round of When Irish Eyes are Smiling, during which my mother would inevitably cry as it is the song that reminds her most of my grandpa who died when I was seven.

There has always been a piano.  Until last year.  When my divorce was final, my ex got the piano we'd been given by his parents.  It was from his family, so it was only fair, but it was painful for me as I was the only person who for a long time ever played it.  When he finally arranged to pick up the household furnishings that were his, the one thing I hated to see go was that piano.  Christmas last year was the first time in more than 40 years I didn't have a piano to play and sing Christmas carols with.  Oh, I made do with my guitar, but it really wasn't the same.

A home just isn't home to me when it doesn't have a piano.

A few months ago I found an old Vose & Sons cabinet grand on craigslist.  Over 1,000 pounds, with a rosewood cabinet and original ivory keys, it had been in the owner's family since the day it came new off a Boston showroom floor in 1890.  It hadn't been tuned in nearly two decades so it was hard to tell if it was going to be able to be put into playing shape, but he only wanted $350 for it and so we brought it home.  It cost more than twice that much to have it moved to our house and to have it repaired and tuned.  It had a cracked base stringboard, a broken string or two, and all of the pegs needed to be reset and glued in so they would hold tune, but it was worth every penny.  Once it was repaired and set back on its feet, the beautiful tones it produces told us we had made a good choice.  Its holding pitch and with those long strings I can really crank up the v0lume when I need to blow off steam or raise the roof with joy. 

Our piano is worth so much more to me than just the cost of buying and repairing it.  Like my horses, piano is one of the things that I do that makes me feel like my puzzle piece is in the right place.  We make a lot of music in my house, and it is time for the torch to be passed to the next generation. 

My kids got their first piano lessons yesterday.  Its hard to put words to all that I was feeling and thinking of as they each sat at the piano and learned to find Middle C, to identify first through fifth fingers on each hand and to start practicing their first scales.  Amazon Girl plays her scales in a measured temp, wishing to get each note perfectly.  Race Car Man wants to be fast when he has it right and asks many questions about how the keys and the hammers and the felt and the strings work.  They both picked up on the basics pretty quickly. 

I am filled with pride, wistfulness, deep joy, a sense that everything is right with the world. 

We have a piano.  And we are playing it.

 

 P.S.  The photo is of a piano at the recording studio where SG laid tracks for his song.  Mine is prettier.