Kitchen or the Egg

I experienced so many powerful shifts and insights during Anne Ohman’s recent We Shine! unschooling conference that Mike and I attended with the kids in Niagara Falls, Canada. And some other things settled in without fanfare but continue to echo surprisingly deeply every single day.

Here’s one. I heard so many times, not just at the conference but on the related e-mail list, how great it is to “let kids be themselves.” I truly believe in and agree with this concept. But at the conference I got to see it for myself day after day, from the elevator to the Ball, kids who are vibrant and fun and just *alive* with wonder and excitement and sensitivity and joy and play, and full of energy. I’m also, in general, very (overly?) sensitive to bothering people in shared space, such as the hotel or group activities. I love how the universe helped me to reach a deeper level around this.

So, my typical way of honoring my kids during times of rich, loud, space-taking (-claiming) exuberance has been to redirect redirect redirect. I did this for 10 years as a seasoned teacher, and I did some of this with my children at the conference, including at the dance when my son was racing around. I was concerned he’d wipe out a smaller child (hard to see that quickly in the special lighting) as well as just detract from the experience for other people, dodging a fast little boy darting in and out of the chairs and tables. But mostly, I was uncomfortable with his energy. Even when he was just stacking chairs. It really set off some powerful triggers for me, even as my husband jumped in to help him. When we moved to race around in the adjacent room, I asked my husband, who seemed surprised we’d moved, if he thought I was being too conservative. He said, yeah, maybe, but whatever.

I’ve thought about this for a week now, and I am delighting in a huge, grounding discovery — how often I am uncomfortable with the “bigness” of my children’s expansiveness, how much of the world they claim just in physical space and sound. I. had. no. idea. I am so used to redirecting, or bailing after an activity that seems “too much” that it had never occurred to me until the Shine! conference — What if I just go with it??

I’ve done lots of work in this realm already around releasing arbitrary limits. But wow. Their basic selves. I had no idea I was limiting their Selves due to *my* discomfort in some way. Not aligning myself with them or engaging in the thing along with them, but witnessing and in some way distancing mySelf from my children.

I’d say I’m horrified by this realization, but honestly, I see this as the beginning of the rest of my life. As I heard Anne Ohman share at the conference, “Yesterdays are just that, yesterdays. We can’t change that.” We’re looking at right now and moving forward.

So, back to this morning, what cemented this idea for me and led to writing to you…

When my son woke up, and I saw him getting out of bed, I went to him. We snuggled. We snuggled for a really long time, just holding each other tightly and Being. And after a long while, Declan started playing “I Spy…” and we played a bunch of rounds. He emerged from our comforter cocoon and raced wildly around trying to guess what I’d Spied. I felt desperate to give him a clue, to end his “pain” and “frustration,” (WHICH HE WASN’T EXPERIENCING, HELLO, *I* WAS!), and he felt triumphant when he finally guessed it all on his own, the way he wanted it. He even covered my mouth at some point afraid I’d give him a clue.

I was also desperate to end his crazy excitement, jumping around pointing toward this and that, and at some point, I realized, wow. This is truly who this Being is. This is who he is. An “Ah, this is a what-we’re-all-talking-about-but-I’m-seeing-a-new-level-of-it” kind of Who He Is. This amazing, dedicated, persevering, excited, fun soul I get to spend my life with. How often do I just let him be like this in his own time and in his own space? Without a “redirect.” (read: energy diminisher) Yes, he gets that freedom a lot of the time. But I suddenly found so many *more* places to release and *more* ways to let go and celebrate my boy just being my boy. And same with my daughter.

That other stuff? My stuff? Hypersensitivity to others? Sure, of course, I still believe in respect for shared space. But I’m suddenly consciously pulling back from perceived or imaginary boundaries around it as I find my new way with it. I’m going “bigger.” And I’m infusing this new way with loads more respect for *my children* in that space. Who have a right to be there too, in all of their fullness and majesty. I just feel more relaxed in general, more soft, more loving, more open, filled with joy where fear-of-perception has had such a stronghold in me for so long.

I love how Anne put it in her opening remarks. She reminded us of how much kids can open us up, show us new experiences we might never have otherwise. And how awesome it is when our kids say this to us (whether directly or in essence), like how I imagine Declan and Quinn are saying to me:
“You’re Welcome!”

Love,

Erica

I love this fable, and a friend led me to this other, fuller brief movie-version. I invite you to check them out! Beautiful reminders about our children, each other, and ourselves.

Click on the Animal School video for the brief movie version:
http://www.raisingsmallsouls.com/

Here’s a written version.
The School For The Animals

An old story tells of the creation of a school for the animals. In this school, everybody took the same four courses: flying, swimming, climbing, and running. Among the students were a duck, a flying squirrel, a fox, and an elephant. These four were highly motivated, and wanted to get good grades, so they all tried very hard.

The duck did fantastically well in swimming and flying, but he lagged behind his classmates in climbing and running, so focused special attention on those two subjects. However, his feet became so sore from trying to run and his wings were so bedraggled from trying to climb that by the end of the year he not only failed both those subjects, but made C’s in swimming and flying, which had once been his two best subjects.

At the beginning of the school year, the squirrel was first in his class in climbing and running and was second only to the duck at flying. But as the months wore on, he missed so much school from catching pneumonia in his swimming class that he failed everything. To make matters even worse,
because the squirrel constantly squirmed and chattered in class, and had difficulty paying attention, he was diagnosed with a learning disorder. The squirrel eventually was placed in remedial classes and had to be medicated in order to continue with his school work.

The fox was a natural in his running class and scored well in climbing and swimming, but became so frustrated at his inability to get good Grades in flying that he began assaulting his classmates. He even tried to eat the duck. His behavior was so disruptive he was expelled from school. He fell in with a rough crowd and eventually wound up in a center for animal delinquents.

The elephant, meanwhile, developed low self-esteem because he couldn’t do well in any of the subjects. When he sank into clinical depression, his therapist persuaded him to try a different school that focused on subjects such as lifting and carrying. The elephant was disappointed, because careers in lifting and carrying were not as prestigious as careers in flying, swimming, climbing, or
running. Even though he always felt inferior, he managed to make a decent living and support his family.

I love this quote.

Mothering is reciprocal. It is not just something we do for our children. It defines us, and it liberates us. When we can mother in a powerful, creative, and transformative way, we can more easily move between our role as mother and our other roles as women, embracing all of our passions, without believing that being a devoted mother compromises us…… Peggy O’Mara, Publisher and Editor, Mothering Magazine

I want this to be the last time.
I want this to be the last time I cancel plans for someone else.
I want this to be the last time I’m not present with my kids while I’m waiting for my tentative plans to firm up.
I want this to be the last time I miss the scheduled activity trying to clean my house and make dinner for a maybe.
I want this to be the last time I skip my workout in the morning so I can fit everything else in to be the hostess with the most-est.
I want this to be the last time I don’t put my own family first.
(When. am I going. to get this?)
You. do. not. come. first.
My. family. comes. first.
Here’s the best part - you never asked to be the top priority! I put you there all by myself.
It’s not about you or the dozens (scores?) of other people I’ve done this for over the years.
But you helped me finally see it.
*Thank you!*
And now I’m really excited to see you when we do finally get together. Because I’ve finally got the equation right: you put your family first; and I do the same.
And it will be perfect. However it is.

Written stream-of-consciousness after my latest screw-up.

Here’s my favorite advice about love and wondering if someone is *the* one. Wish I could remember where I got it from.

1) What if this person never changes?
2) What if I had a child exactly like this person?
3) What if I become more like this person?

A friend of mine shared recently, “I know, as a grown up, that we can’t always get what we want, (thanks Mick), but for a 5yo, this is a heartbreaking reality.”

As grown-ups, we know that you can’t always get what you want. But how can we best support our children when this becomes a new awareness for them?

I am finding myself focusing more on personally connecting with the need/desire being expressed by my child instead of maintaining more neutral, matter-of-fact objective territory.

When my five-year old and I run into scenarios like that, I’m trying to *be* with where he is. It’s still feels new for me and takes a lot of effort for me to remember to approach things this way, but I’m trying to help the shift from squelching my child’s wants and needs to supporting them.

When he says he wants to buy something he sees and it’s an impossible purchase at that moment, it still matters to me that he wants it. I mention how excited he sounds, then kind of “dream” together — if it were a baseball mitt, maybe I’d throw in how that baseball mitt could
catch home runs, how soft it is, how the leather smells, how cool it is to stick our fingers in the finger slots, and how it would be cool to buy 10, or 20, or 100, or a million of them and how cool it would look to see a million people catching a million baseballs! And let’s write down “baseball mitt” on our Vision Board at home (writing it down on paper or in my check register or anywhere, in the meantime). “And check out how much bigger this mitt is over here!” kinds of comparisons. And make our way through the store, including my own fantasizing around a golf club or exploring/trying out/discussing whatever interesting things we pass along the way.

I’m finding that writing my son’s “wishlist” on our Vision Board, along with my own dreams and those of the rest of the family, helps give it “legs” and he appreciates just feeling *heard.* Then when we run across the thing again, it’s more of a reference, “You wrote that one down, right Mom?” and it helps us to focus on the fun and cool aspect of the thing instead of just the need-to-have-it-and-need-to-have-it-now energy.

I’m also talking more openly and casually about my purchases when we’re together, mostly groceries: the things I did buy and why (”I can’t decide between this one and this one…let’s look at the price….”,) the purchases I made with coupons, the things I bought on sale, and the ones that “got away” that I’m disappointed to skip this time but really excited about the stuff we *are* making with the things we *do* have. I’m not trying to do this in a condescending
this-was-all-pre-determined way. I’m just trying to vocalize more of what’s going on in my head *while* I’m doing it. Anyway, he seems to like this stuff.

My son loves playing Club Penguin (clubpenguin.com) and it has been an amazing experience in so many ways. It’s a community of penguins, and you personalize your penguin character and the igloo. You need penguin coins to do this, which you “earn” playing video games embedded within Club Penguin. You always know how many you have, and you can “shop” from the catalog or do various things with your money.

My son has played loads of games to “save up” for various igloo accessories, completely conscious of having enough yet, or not, in a way that’s really clear to him. It’s so much less abstract for him now, having enough money for something, or not. Or having enough for
something cheaper instead, or saving coins to get the more expensive thing.

I’m convinced these things are part of what led him to sell these scarves he’s been making and selling lately. All *totally* his idea and all his own work, he could not BE more proud to have created a way to earn, and spend, his very own money.

To me, the key (for us) is to be honest with my own feelings and ideas, feeling free to express them from my heart as opposed to telling my son something that *sounds* disappointed but fake, in order to make a lesson out of it. Something I’ve done and I’m happily growing out of.

Sometimes the *bigness* of my son’s feelings can feel threatening to me, something I want to make stop because I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting better about recognizing that, too, looking beyond the thing that triggers something in *me* and being able to celebrate his openness and willingness to share that emotion with me.

I’ve done Pilates about once or twice a week for 5 years now, and I can honestly say it’s one of the most awesome parts of my life. The “Aha!” moments I experience there are profound, and the ripple effect into other areas of my life is powerful.

I felt led to go to Pilates after suffering severe back pain from carrying my infant son. I’d previously taken a mat class at the YMCA but didn’t like it and never felt the same bliss everyone else in my group was raving about. So coming to this local studio was a chance to try again, this time with the machines. I was hooked after the first session and have continued ever since.

In addition to strengthening my back muscles, it has helped to prepare me through my second pregnancy, it has relieved stress during challenging times, it has led to new friendships with people I’ve shared classes with, and I marvel at the clever ways my body tries to avoid the deep muscle work as I try to maintain being present with a given exercise. My teacher once told me, “It’s not intuitive to go to the area where the muscles are weakest.” The other muscles are constantly trying to cover, to compensate for these weaker areas. It occurs to me how often I must do this misguided “helping” in my life, if I’m doing it here in Pilates.

As I go deeper, it is just really hard. No way around it. I don’t want to do more repetitions of this same tender, challenging area. I want to leave, I want to go home, I want the session to end, I hate this. And then we finish that series, and I feel amazing. Not just finishing class, but finishing a given sequence in class. It feels unbelievable. Like a new awakening within myself.

With years of experience with this style of exercise, I am surprised to find how much more I am needing instruction and coaching. I’m finding pockets of complacency in my positions and efforts, and the attentive cues and corrections from my teacher helps me to re-engage. I’m also appreciating instructions for more advanced modifications of a familiar exercise, or a more detailed description for a certain movement.

My teacher’s invitations last week to “have a conversation with my body” about my feet being in parallel position without turning my knees in, or “feel this one in your hip flexors, not your thighs” helping me to refocus the work where it belonged instead of the larger muscle group taking it over, all centering and returning my power to me, going inward, seeing what’s going on in my own body. It also keeps things interesting, there’s always something to release and something to contract.

One interesting shift in my thinking happened a couple of weeks ago. My teacher, like all Pilates teachers, is constantly reminding us to lower our shoulders. It’s easy to hunch them up when we lift our arms up and it happens all the time. I’ve always mentally beaten myself up about this common tendency. “How long have you been in Pilates? How many times have you done this exercise? Why can’t you remember to get those shoulders down?” No one else is saying this, mind you, just me. But last week, she mentioned something about releasing our shoulders to engage our back muscles. What?? Huh?? I had no idea there was actually a *reason* for doing this. I just assumed there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a given exercise, and that lifting my shoulders was a perennial breach of correct positioning.

I love the idea of moving *toward* something instead of just focusing on *not* doing something else. It brought in for me the idea of micromovements, honoring a process that takes place in very small steps. Every step counts, doesn’t matter how big or “useless” it is. There’s no judgment in engaging my back muscles. I do that at the level I am able. But raising my shoulders? It’s like taking a test and receiving a big fat red X from the teacher. That one small cue was cathartic. It helped me to see how much I criticize myself during the class. Which again, helped me to question how much I do that in the rest of my life in brief, insidious ways, whether to myself, or to my family.

If it’s true that “what we tend to, grows,” then I am enjoying this shift from “failure” focus to celebrating the awakenings.

In homeschooling, we’re living and learning all the time. There isn’t a point in the day where we say, “Alright, that’s enough learning.” We try to live our lives to the joy-fullest each day, follow Declan’s questions, Quinn’s interests, without an arbitrary “on” or “off” switch determining when that begins and ends.

I’m seeing my own habits starting to shift as I witness the seamless flow in my kids’ daily lives. I have a habit of trying to compartmentalize my life. And how that can be an escape route from getting things done if it’s not the “right” time to work on something.

I’ve got mountains of projects, including clean unfolded laundry, waiting for just the right “time in the schedule” to be put away. It feels too daunting to chip away at five or ten minutes at a time, as I’m able to go back and forth to it. My “preference” would be to just get it done all at once - to spend hours folding it, putting it away, reorganizing the kids’ drawers with the cold-weather garb, sorting through the outgrown items, etc. But really? Do I really want to spend hours doing a specific chore? No.

Then why do I resist getting things done a few minutes here or there? Does it seem like a wasted effort? Not working hard enough? It will just get “undone” anyway so why bother?

Really, it’s like a leap of faith approaching things in this way.

Today was hard at first.

I grumbled to myself that if I was meant to get up at 6am to workout, I shouldn’t have to depend on an alarm clock. It should just “happen.”

As I unrolled my yoga mat and did some side stretches, I looked hard for something, anything, positive to think about. And I finally realized one huge gift in setting the clock.

Five days a week, that loud beep enables me to set the tone for my morning on *my* terms.
I wake up at the time I prescribe, not one determined by enthusiastic children jumping on me gleefully shouting MOMMY! MOMMY!

The rest of my work during that hour felt a lot more joyous after that.

I love the way Jenny Joseph’s Poem, “Warning” weaves in and out of my life. I thought of it again this morning. Here’s an excerpt:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

So, this morning I was in the downstairs bathroom and noticed the sink was covered in blue, a casualty of Quinn’s earlier mission of washing her hands “All by myself, mom!!” after painting gourds. And her palms. My habit was to say (really!), “I’ll wash that ‘when I clean the sink.’” As in later, not now.

I do that all the time. I create a reason to “get out” of doing something because arbitrarily I consider it not to be the right time to do it. Plus, I figure when I’m really focused on doing the thing, such as cleaning the sink, I’ll do *such* a better job on it then, since that’s the job I’ll be focusing on, instead of just doing a quick “non-good-job” wipedown.

Then I remembered that poem for some reason. “When I am old, I shall…”

I cracked up realizing this. “Great, Erica. So, when you are old, you’ll clean this sink?”

So I turned around and got the spray cleaner and sponge and cleaned the sink. Right then.

The poem ends:
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Might as well start now. I don’t want to shock anyone later when my house starts looking immaculate. ; )