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Walking with my daughters, a boyfriend, and my earbuds
This year, our snow days are being used to honor the beauty of May. We get to celebrate our freakishly warm winter with bike helmets and sunscreen since we didn’t need to use those days waiting for the plows to come around.
My six year-old learned how to ride a two-wheeler this week, so we’re heeding the siren’s call of the rail trail. As I push the toddler in the stroller, my big girl stays close. She wobbles as she tries to match my walking pace because, unlike the evening before when she gleefully peddled ahead, she seems to need to be in my orbit right now.
There’s a sweet jolt when I realize “this is one of the perfect moments.” I sense I’m reliving a scene from thirty years ago. It’s a different setting and there are new characters in the starring roles, but here I am hoping one daughter will fall asleep and praying the other doesn’t fall off her bike, just as my mother would have done.
There’s a thread through time, braiding us together. Our connection will never snap, even if my mother and my daughters will never walk the same trail together. I feel my own first-grade memories entwine with this moment, and my pace slows with the weight of my gratitude.
Of course, there’s one vital element that separates this particular idyllic scene from what my mother might have experienced. It’s not 1986. It’s 2016. This mama has an earbud plugged into her head and occasionally has to say “wait, what did you say?” as she fumbles with the pause button.
I’m not even sure why I think I need the extra stimulation. My phone is on my hip (the better to count my steps) and it seemed like a good idea to multitask and keep up with the “you must listen to this!” recommendations from colleagues.
Of course, I am only able to open up to the grace of my children’s magic and my mother’s blessing when I stuff the wires in the stroller and decide to be present. I’m not surprised that being there with my girls is more fulfilling than one more grown up filling my mind with more stuff to do and consider and change.
If I’d still been walking in two worlds, in this perfect spring morning as well as someone’s basement recording studio, I can’t imagine I have exuded the welcoming, present energy that invited my daughter to say, “Mom? I have a boyfriend…”
I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to take a breath and respond with a few gentle, open-hearted questions if I were half listening to something else. I am sure I would have squawked “what!?!” and crushed the moment flat.
But this isn't a post by a saintly iPhone free mother
Thing is, this experience probably isn't going to change my behavior - at least not completely. There will be many more bike riding/ stroller pushing outings this year and I am sure I’ll take headphones with us most of the time.
I want to be honest with myself as much as I want to be present with my kids. That means I need to balance the feeding of my mind with the caring for my children. It means reflecting on my own needs and those of my family, making conscious choices, and practicing compassion through it all.
It also means getting the support where I can get it. If there isn't a loving grandmother or a village of other moms around to help us deal with the tough moments (ahem, MY FIRST GRADER SAYS SHE HAS A BOYFRIEND), the advice and comfort may need to come through that nice recorded voice from my iPhone.
An important note: that podcast I was listening to was Laura Reagan’s Therapy Chat. Do check out this brilliant, vulnerable episode called Worthiness, Perfectionism, and Self Compassion when the moment is right for you.
Writing Prompt: Well, what did you expect?
Our six year-old has never had “a sleepover.” Until last night, she and I had only been apart for three nights since her birth in 2009. Her first night away from family wasn’t spent on her best friend’s floor and it wasn’t part some Girl Scout event in a church hall.
Nope, we sent her to the woods.
We’re blessed to have the Wild Earth organization in our town. They offer legendary summer camps as well as weekend programs all through the school year. We trust these dedicated counselors to care for our girl and initiate her into a forest wonderland that she couldn’t access with her parents clucking “be careful!”
Moira was phenomenal. The youngest kid of the group, by all reports she was up for every aspect of the adventure.
She’s home now and we are so grateful to have her back and hear her stories of the dragonfly she healed, the donuts she ate, and the unicorn she met (the program, Mystwood, has a profoundly mystical element). And yet…
Even after all that magic and bravery and sense of accomplishment, there been has all sorts of frustration and anger and sadness today. As Moira herself said, “I didn’t think I would come home and feel yucky!”
Shifting from a children’s paradise in the woods where fairies cavorted in every tree trunk to a rainy day Sunday with all the same old family rules is hard. Transitions are never without their challenges.
Ultimately, however, this discord is rooted in our expectations.
Our daughter expected the high of her experience to last. We assumed that she would return tired but happy to be back with her folks. At some level, we probably expected her to be grateful to us for sending her somewhere so amazing (yeah, that one is quite silly).
Your expectations - and particularly all the ways those stories are defied - those are often a source of conflict. And, as you probably know, conflict is pretty much essential to story.
Think about when your expectations stirred up trouble or caused you pain. Write into a situation when hope and reality were mismatched. There’s a compelling story in there, I promise...
Learn more about what makes a story compelling. Join me for The Story Triangle, a free online class I am offering on May 11.
When All Else Fails, Tell a Story Like a First Grader
One day a cat was playing in its back yard.
A dog saw the cat and started chaseing after it. They chased eachoter all over town.
The cat did not get tired and the dog did get tired and the cat ran all the way home safe and sound!
The END.
By Moira, age 6
(Mama added paragraph breaks, but flawless punctuation and terrifically cute spelling errors are the author's own.)
What did we learn today, class?
Besides the fact that cat rule, we learned that all good stories have a beginning, middle, and an end.
The status quo (playing cat) is disrupted by conflict (dog appears on the scene), rising action (the chase!) takes you to a climax (cat triumphs) and a satisfying resolution (home again).
Next time you worry that you're not a storyteller, remember that you wrote the perfect stories when you were in first grade.
Refusing Fear Despite All the Unknown Tomorrows
“You working? I so proud of you.”
Sticky palms move from my cheeks to lock around my neck. I still marvel at how much strength is in those tiny arms and how much hug that two year-old body can muster.
It is all childhood trust and wonder. Her words outweigh her in an awesome way. Of course, she is mimicking a phrase my husband and I have offered her and her sister a thousand times in a thousand ways. But in this moment, she is so much more than a sweet-faced parrot. She is offering up the gift I needed right then. She is injecting meaning into yet another morning spent tapping keys and pushing against the digital tide.
At the same moment, Terry Gross’s familiar voice introduced the day’s Fresh Air guest. A man - Charles Bock - had written a novel inspired by his wife’s two year bout with leukemia. Soon, the author was talking about what it was like to throw a birthday party for their three year-old just days after her mother’s death.
I’m making lunch and sipping “tea” poured from a tin pot into a plastic cup. I miss every other sentence of the interview, but I promise myself I will catch the podcast later. But I know I won’t. I know I do not have the time or the strength to listen again. All I can do is spare some splintered attention to entertain one of my darkest fears - that lurking cancer demon that might be destroying this perfect life this very minute.
Even though this story hurts a heart that already feels too sodden and tender today, I do not change the station. After all, there’s nothing special about my pain. My family cancer stories are not so close as to make this conversation unendurable. It’s my childhood friend’s mother who died before 60 and a brilliant woman (who I long to support with more than prayers) who is in the brutal thick of it right now - these are the women I think of as the fear seizes my chest.
Listening began to feel like some sort of test of honor and endurance. Can I hold the exquisite tenderness of my toddler and the terror that we might not always be counted amongst the lucky ones, the healthy ones, the “touch wood all is well” ones?
No amount of prayer or gratitude or pride will guarantee any of our stories have a quiet ending at the conclusion of a one hundred year journey. Switching off NPR and singing along to a forgettable song will not weaken the monsters of accident and disease that might lurk around the next corner.
There’s no way to assure the safety of everyone I love. I cannot force my own cells to behave themselves. But what I can do is make sure that my fear doesn’t steal the sweetness of the next giggle or grown up pronouncement from that little girl’s lips.
All any of us can do is control whether we lose today wondering about an unknown tomorrow.
Can we be honest about the kids' birthday party thing?
It is possible to be deeply grateful, even as you the shudder shakes your spine. You realize that all little girls have the same ear-splitting screech and your daughter is not the only one who could break glass with her heedless enthusiasm.
That's something consider as you cling to the corners of the joyful, germ-infested pit of a childhood birthday party venue. Even if the noise is making your vision blur (funny how the senses seem to get so muddled in the midst of extreme stress), you can also pray that your kid will be so funned-out after the party that she'll be happy to go home and color. Or stare at the wall. Silently.
If it's an especially good day, you can find another parent who looks equally as sick and terrified. You can sidle over and - using hand gestures and exaggerated frowny-faces, if necessary - express that you too understand the birthday party obligation to be worse than 28 hours of labor. You may understand each other well enough to stick to walls of the next celebratory obligation like a small colony of anxious barnacles.
I admit I am this mom. And though I am a little worried about seeming like an anti-social ingrate, I kinda hope it will mean that we'll get fewer invitations.
Except today, we went to one of the loudest, germiest spots of all, and I am still smiling. Even though I briefly lost my two-year-old and I had to bellow like a belligerent foghorn to get my older daughter to get her shoes on, I am still smiling.
In truth, I am a bit concerned. Have children finally broken me? Am I going to be the mom in the bouncy house at the next shindig?
Oh, wait, those spine-quaking shudders just began again. Eek... What if I actually become the mom that learns how to play?
This morning of motherly mayhem seems anything but productive, but it proves that you can use your experiences and craft them into stories that help you connect with your prospective clients. Learn more about how to do this at the free Story Triangle webinar coming up Tuesday, April 5.