Archive for the 'Motherhood' Category

Life is Good, Realizing my Vision

Posted in Uncategorized, Motherhood | Thursday, July 26th, 2007 | No Comments »

I have nothing troubling to write about today.  It’s sort of a weird

feeling feeling really good.  I like it.   I feel very comfortable in my

own skin and feel very connected to my children.

I have a vision board that I play with — it’s in powerpoint and consists of pictures and music and statements of what I want to create and attract in my life.  I love working on it and coming back to it to see what’s come true, what’s shifted and what I want to add.  What’s very interesting about working on vision statements is that when I focus on what I want, I can be more open to allowing different ways of it happening.  For example, I have been very focused on my body weight. 

But it doesn’t feel very good to do that and I wasn’t feeling inspired to take much action.  I got very clear and realized what I really want is to feel great in my body.  Since I clarified what I want, I have started running and taking karate with my son.  My weight isn’t changing but I love feeling stronger and more athletic and great in my body.

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Give Me Community!

Posted in Motherhood, Creating Community | Monday, July 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »

As a mother of three, two of whom are one-year-old twins, my solitude is eked out in small doses on a semi-daily basis. I’m even more rarely out of the house without an entourage, but I managed a trip to the grocery store by myself the other day. Yes, quite the excitement, wouldn’t you say, but I approached the trip with great relish. Ah, solitude!

The trip turned out to be no fun at all. It turns out that I like discussing the various bizarre fruits and vegetables that now populate our grocers with my four-year-old, and watching my one-year-old boy pointing to everything he sees and using his new vocalization of “Whatsat?” while his twin sister smiles and waves at every passersby, her own newest trick. I am used to being a point-worthy sight, one baby in a backpack, one in the grocery basket, and the child running circles around us. But this day, it was just me.

And it was so strange. No one smiled at me. No one spoke to me. Heck, no one looked at me. I walked through the store with complete anonymity, and I found it extremely demoralizing. Now that I’ve (mostly) mastered the art of navigating the outside world with my gaggle, I usually find the experience invigorating. While this trip was more relaxing, it certainly wasn’t invigorating.

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Honoring My Journey: “Recovering” From Pregnancy and Nursing

Posted in Motherhood, Pregnancy | Thursday, July 5th, 2007 | 1 Comment »

I have been grumpy for the last six years of my life.  After my first son was born, I recovered quickly.  By recover, I mean regaining the

same state of health I had before my pregnancy.   After my daughter was

born less than two years later, I didn’t recover quite as quickly.  I found myself more stressed and worn out and short-tempered.  Afterr my third child was born, I became permanently grumpy (well almost.)

I told myself that once the children started sleeping through the night

(which took years each), I’d feel better.  But I didn’t.   I told myself

that I just needed some time to myself.  Or I needed more time connecting with the children. Or I needed to develop more outside interests.  Or I needed to spend more time at home  ….

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To Know What They Know

Posted in Motherhood, Creating Community | Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 | No Comments »

We as adults often take for granted that we are the ones “in the know.” I’m the one with all this life experience, right? I didn’t reach 37 years without getting SOMETHING for it, yes? But I think in actuality, my brain of which I have been so proud has actually been causing me nothing but trouble. When did I decide it was so gosh-darned good at running my life? My husband once said that adults needs children in their lives to make us humble, and by now, you would think my humility meter would be off the charts. My children are so superior in observation, sensing, and understanding that I’m left wondering what I’ve been doing all this time. Living in a self-congratulatory cave, perhaps.

            People often compare children with animals, though it’s usually in an “Isn’t that nice but we’ll soon beat THAT out of them” way. But how astounding is that? Animals sense when someone is watching them, they know when it’s time to play and when it’s time to hide, they know when a big storm is coming. Babies and young children know so much more than what we give them credit for, and we do them such a disservice to their knowing by treating them as lesser than us.

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How Birth Affects Life: More Life Lessons from Martial Arts as 40 Year Old

Posted in Motherhood, EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique | Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 | No Comments »

When I last wrote, I described my fear of tumbling and rolling in karate.  Since then, I have made huge steps in how I feel about rolling.  I would call my fear a phobia - it was that intense and limiting and irrational.  No matter how much I tried to talk myself out of it, I couldn’t move.  If you have a similar fear of heights or spiders, you’ll know what I meant.  I spent one hour working with a sports performance EFT practitioner and completely released my fear. 

[It was great work and once again I am humbled by the power of EFT.]  My fear traced back to two incidents — one which makes sense and one which is amazing to consider.

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Life Lessons from Martial Arts as a 40 Year-Old

Posted in Motherhood | Sunday, June 17th, 2007 | No Comments »

A few months ago I started studying martial arts with my 8 year old son.

I have a phobia about tumbling so I was dreading learning rolls. Now that the time is here, it is as hard as I feared; it feels like one of the biggest challenges of my life. Harder than natural childbirth, public speaking, starting therapy, attending a new school, having surgery, or moving to a new country.

I have always felt gifted intellectually; emotionally I have done my work and am becoming more insightful and skilled; spiritually I feel at peace and honored to have found my connection; physically — physically, I have always felt inadequate and unskilled, especially when it comes to balance and tumbling.

I used to think I was clumsy and uncoordinated – that I was doomed to admire others’ physical ability while regretting my own inability. I used to think that if someone wasn’t a natural athlete, there wasn’t any chance of being skilled physically. It’s only recently that I am discovering that physical skills can be learned and that my block to tumbling can be shifted.

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Finding Meaningful Work for My Children as A Middle-Class Family

Posted in Motherhood, Homeschooling, Creating Community | Saturday, June 9th, 2007 | No Comments »

I was recently re-reading Teach Your Own by John Holt and A Different Kind of Teacher by John Gatto. [For those of us unfamiliar with John Holt,  he was a leading author and advocate for a different way of learning for children. He’s one of the primary influencers in the unschooling approach to homeschooling.  John Gatto is the former outstanding teacher from NY who won several awards and has since left the school system and is also an advocate for alternative approaches to teaching our children.]

Every time I read these books, I am able to understand and absorb more of what they mean.  One key theme I get from both books is the advantage of involving and exposing children to real work.  Children are incredibly smart and like to feel and know they are doing something meaningful and important.  When I think of involving children in a family’s work, I think of children helping their parents on their farms and in home businesses.  As I contemplate this, I get a bit antsy because it feels impossible for us to accomplish.  My husband is an engineer and works for a corporation and my work as an EFT practitioner doesn’t seem conducive to involving the children.  I think that maybe we can start raising chickens or some other “project” to get them involved.  [I hold the ideal of a farm-based family as one I should be aspiring to, I just haven’t gotten there yet. ]

And then when I look around the house and think of my to-do list, I notice how much work I already have and the thought of another project to involve the children feels overwhelming.  I am just now realizing the irony of the situation.  I already have too much to do;  why do I want to add another project just for the children to have something to do?

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The Stay-At-Home Community Conundrum

Posted in Motherhood, Parenting Twins, Creating Community | Monday, May 28th, 2007 | No Comments »

You know the idyllic story of your parent’s (or maybe grandparent’s) youth—a small neighborhood where all the children played together in a pack all day long while moms stayed at home to take care of the babies and have cookies and lemonade waiting when their children came home in the afternoon. While I know that idyllic stories tend to gloss over painful realities, the basic concept of mom staying home while children played together (and I mean played—they did not participate in group sports in faraway towns), was, in fact, the reality. I don’t know when that changed, exactly; I just know that by the time I had my first child, every mom I knew went back to work. This makes sense—I previously only knew working mothers, being a working person myself. But I looked it up: only 45 percent of women choose to stay home and raise their children, and that’s an improvement in the last ten years!
            The fact that the numbers are improving surprises me a bit, because the going-back-to-work trend has given rise to so many unintended consequences. I’ll use my own example—when I decided to stay home, I was the only woman on my block doing so. Each morning I’d walk around the neighborhood with my baby, and each morning was a completely solitary experience. No one was home. Even the families with under-fives were gone. Now what? You’re alone with your baby and without a community of adults to keep you company. Not only do you go nutsy from lack of adult contact, you have to single-handedly figure out this raising children thing.

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About Dad, My Dad

Posted in Motherhood | Thursday, May 24th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Even though I’m 40 years old, I don’t know how to be with my father. 

He disapproves of almost every parenting choice I make.  How do I maintain a relationship with someone who doesn’t value what I value?  I bruise easily; I am very sensitive and empathic and intuitive (traits I admire in myself and that bring great good to the world).  When I’m with my dad, I have to put on my tough skin and move into the logical, analytical world.  I’ve had practice there (I earned two engineering

degrees) and I don’t like it there.   I come from two different worlds. 

My mom lives an eclectic life in Spain and Morocco.  My dad comes from a conventional world; he’s a very successful businessman who lives a mainsteam lifestyle.

So how do I make peace with both worlds?

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Nursing Twins

Posted in Motherhood, Parenting Twins | Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Deciding to nurse your new twins puts you into a fairly select category. So few women in this country nurse even singletons for any time at all, and so many twins are born prematurely that the difficulties in getting started are often insurmountable. I was lucky—my twins were full term, they were dedicated to figuring out this nursing thing, and I was fortunate enough to figure out the process with my oldest singleton.  My main obstacle to nursing was my very exhausted body. But I give women who learn nursing with twins a tremendous amount of credit, because you’re so insecure when you’re starting, and twin nursing often takes more time and resources than one would think possible. A first time nurser might think she wasn’t doing it properly and give up too soon, but I’m here to tell you that it absolutely can be done so long as you don’t mind being patient with yourself, your babies, and with watching your food bills double.

I hadn’t noticed this with my singleton, but as the nurses in the birthing center explained to me, it takes a tremendous amount of resources (i.e., food and sleep) to get your breasts up to speed in the nursing department. Colostrum is right there for the taking, but it takes the body time to get the breasts producing milk full time. I’m glad someone told me this, because the second night in the hospital, my daughter finished nursing what I had and was left hungry. I was completely terrified—I had to give her something more, but I’d read too much about the slippery slope of formula. What if I gave her formula today, and she needed it again tomorrow, and my body just never made enough milk? What if my body wouldn’t make enough milk anyway? I had also heard too many women explain to me that they did not nurse because they hadn’t enough milk, which I had never understood… but now maybe it was happening to me. Now I had twins, and maybe my body wasn’t up to the task, especially after the last terrible trimester. I was so frightened that my body had been broken and couldn’t take care of itself or my new babies.

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