Posted in Motherhood, Pregnancy | July 5th, 2007 Deborah 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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Posted in Parenting Twins | July 2nd, 2007 Stacy No Comments »
Birthdays, our own and our children’s, are useful moments in that they provide opportunities for us to stop and look back on the path we just traveled over the past four seasons. It’s an opportunity for reflection, contemplation, hopefully some synthesis, and maybe some insights that will help us gain wisdom.
Wouldn’t that be nice! When I look back at my twin’s first year, it is difficult to get beyond a single thought: “Let’s not do THAT again!”
People gaze upon us coming down the street with diaper bags, gigundo stroller and a multitude of waving hands and feet, shake their heads and say, “How do you do it?” When I look back on our first year, I wonder, “How DID we do it?” And the answer is, we did it in a pell-mell rush from one task to the next, mostly because we were too scared to do anything else. If we stopped for contemplation, we probably would have paralyzed ourselves with fear. How will we do this? But you keep on, and you do it, because like the lost swimmer, you don’t have a lot of options except to keep swimming.
Really, it was the twin infancy that colors the entire year and that makes me jump to my negative reaction. Frankly, I’m having a difficult time remembering the first six months of their lives. I have read that high levels of stress can actually inhibit the brain’s ability to manage short-term memory, and I’m pretty sure large sections of my brain were completely blocked off for months. Plus, it feels like there was actually too much stuff going on to remember it all. My body was healing, my going-on four year old was losing his mind, and these new little beings were here and they didn’t really care that we didn’t know what we were doing.
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Posted in Motherhood, Creating Community | June 27th, 2007 Stacy 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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Posted in Motherhood, EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique | June 26th, 2007 Deborah 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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Posted in Motherhood | June 17th, 2007 Deborah 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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Posted in Parenting Twins | June 11th, 2007 Stacy No Comments »
In the course of any pregnancy, you end up with an impressive list of what you want to happen during and after the pregnancy. Much of this ends up causing lots of stress, especially if you’re having twins, and wondering how I was going to nurse both my babies was high on that list. What if my babies were premature and couldn’t nurse right away? What if the birthing center didn’t give me support in my desire to nurse? What if I didn’t make enough milk?
Well, suffice it to say that I was one of the lucky ones, and not only were my babies full-term, but they were immediate champion nursers. Plus, I was lucky to have already nursed my first son, so it wasn’t new to me. At least, not all of it was new. It turns out that nursing two at once gives rise to interesting challenges and experiences, and it just gets more interesting as they get older!
Certainly, it is just amazing to nurse both babies at once, especially once they hit the three-month mark. I settled in on the football hold pretty early on, which is when you have a baby on each side of you with their heads at the breast and their feet behind you. This hold worked best with the enormous, just-for-twins nursing pillow my friend gave me, and I would just watched my babies watch me. And how wonderful it was when my boy, Quinn, first noticed his nursing partner and would gaze upon her with such contented adoration as to make my heart skip a beat. It took my daughter another week to notice she wasn’t alone on the couch with Mama, but once she did, Moia beamed at him. Babies trying to smile while they nurse is a pretty funny sight, and results in damp pants for Mom. Soon enough, at about four months, they were watching each other nurse as often as they watched me, and they would often reach out to touch hands or pat me together gently on the chest. At night, with me on my back and each baby propped up on an arm, they would reach across and play with each other’s fingers while they drifted off to sleep.
Ah, for those gentle, quiet times.
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Posted in Motherhood, Homeschooling, Creating Community | June 9th, 2007 Deborah 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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Posted in Parenting Twins | June 9th, 2007 Stacy No Comments »
Few people get to experience more than one baby at a time unless they are day care providers, and I imagine their experience isn’t quite like the twin experience. I hope one day my twins will be eloquent enough to describe what it was like to grow up with someone else constantly in their lives, even while in utero. But I know one thing—I’m jealous of their relationship already.
I can hardly believe the amazing patience my babies already show each other at the tender age of 11 months, though I have to admit it wasn’t always so. When my twins first began sitting up, my boy Quinn’s preferred method interaction with his sister Moia was to take her toys away, which resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I would run over, comfort her, return the toy, and then go back to the mountain of insert-household-item-here. Eventually, Quinn stopped the constant toy stealing, but Moia kept squawking anyway. Quinn would just touch her on the leg or shoulder, and she’d burst into tears. I sometimes wonder if the memory of him crowding her space in the womb was still fresh in her mind. Even as a tiny infant, Moia slept like a starfish with all limbs completely outstretched, a blissful half-smile on her face. “Aaah!” her face said, “Finally a bit of room around here!”
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Posted in Motherhood, Parenting Twins, Creating Community | May 28th, 2007 Stacy 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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Posted in Motherhood | May 24th, 2007 Deborah 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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