Tag: parenting

Ostriching

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Sometimes when tragedy strikes far away, I can’t help but turn off my TV, avoid the internet, and limit my exposure to the horrors.  We are not a family that watches the news every day, and where I am very open and honest with my child about the day to day tragedies that happen to people we know and love, I have a hard time explaining coordinated suicide/murders in a city she only knows from watching cyclists race through at the Tour de France.  There is nothing in her worldview to help me explain what happened in Paris.

That said, this evening Facebook provided me with a quote from Fred Rogers that at least gives me a starting point.  He says:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”

– Fred Rogers

I love this.  It takes the focus away from the terrorists and the death and puts the focus on the people who are forced to be heroic when horrible things happen.  Those are the images I remember from tragedies like 9/11, Katrina, the Nepal Earthquake this past year, and the Boston Marathon bombings.  I remember the helpers.  With that context, I might be able to turn on the TV tomorrow and instead of focusing on the hopelessness of violence, I can focus on looking for the helpers, and I can help my daughter focus on the helpers too.  I can’t promise her that I will keep her safe.  I can’t promise that bad things will never happen to her, but I can tell her that “she will always find people who are helping,” and I can remind her that sometimes even we get to be those helpers.  That gives me hope, which will allow me to pull my head out of the sand, but not until tomorrow.

Bittersweet

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized5 Comments

Today was a hard day, but a good day.

The Afthead family foster kittens went back to the shelter to get adopted after two months in our home.  It is sad and quiet now, but there is joy in the fact that they survived and now have a chance to find their permanent home.

Last night, when my daughter and I talked about the kittens going back she said, “Do you know what word describes this feeling?  Bittersweet.”

“That is the perfect word, sweetie.  Where did you learn it?”  I asked, giving her a hug.

“My teacher taught me.”

Today, I sent my kiddo to school with a note to her teacher that said:

Our kittens have finally gained enough weight so they can go back to the shelter.  Little Afthead wanted you to know in case she is sad.  This is a bittersweet day, and we thank you for giving us the word to describe how we feel.

After reading the note my daughter’s teacher made the word of the day “bittersweet” and asked if she could read our note to the class.  My daughter said “Yes,” and was so proud to share her foster story with her class.

Today is bittersweet.

You play the hand you are dealt

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized20 Comments

My dad is a poker player.  He has been a poker player for as long as I can remember.  When I was a child he played in various neighborhood games.  Then gambling was legalized west of Denver and he added Texas Hold’em to his repertoire.  While I am not a poker player, lacking the poker-face and calculating-odds-on-the-fly genes, I have always enjoyed watching my dad play the game.  When I was in my teens I would go up to the mountains with him and watch him play against the other players at the table.  I’d watch reckless players flamboyantly going against the odds, and methodical players never deviating from what math would tell them to do.  The good players, like my dad, would know the odds, but play the game to maximize the hand they had and the players at the table.

One thing you learn from poker, especially Hold’Em, is that you have to play the cards in your hands.  In draw poker you can trade in the cards you have for other cards that might make your hand better, but once you get those cards, you don’t get other ones.  In the end, you always have to make the best hand you can out of the cards you have.

I think life is like Texas Hold’Em.  You and your family sit around a table and each are dealt cards and you have to play those cards.   Maybe the rules are different because you get more opportunities to trade in your cards, and the stakes are higher, but one thing is the same: once you are dealt a card you have to play it.   You can’t untake a card.

Let’s look at my life.  When I was 23 I traded in my “single gal card” for a “live with a guy card”.  I still had my “loves bad boys who ride motorcycles” card, just in case living together didn’t work out.  Seven years later, the bad boys got traded in for a marriage card and my mate hand was set.

What I didn’t know, and my husband didn’t even know, was that he had a depression card in his hand.  His first episode hit right after we were married.  It took months to diagnose what was going on.  His symptoms manifest themselves physically and he went through a barrage of medical test to determine what was wrong.  In the end there was only one possibility left: that his sickness was in his mind. Therapy, time and medication eased his symptoms and eventually cured him a year later.  We were told that there was a good chance this would be a one time episode, but if he had another it was probably going to plague him throughout his life.

So he had the depression card.  He couldn’t trade it in.  Maybe he was lucky and just had the “one episode” kind, but maybe not.  I had joined my life to a guy who may or may not have another breakdown.  Sure, it wasn’t my card, so I could have left him.  I could have decided that staying with someone who had a chance of another breakdown wasn’t worth it, but I didn’t, because I loved him and I wanted a life with him.

We had a baby together, and when she was four, it happened again.  Now I had a new card, a mom card.  That’s one powerful card, and I spent almost a year keeping her alive as my first priority, and keeping my husband alive as my second.  Again, he has the depression card, not me, but with us drawing the parent card together I was permanently tied to him.  I could help him get well again, or abandon him and risk being alone, divorced from my husband, fighting some future custody battle.  I wouldn’t be married to him, but I would know that he could get sick again and if we weren’t together I couldn’t help him or my daughter.  Worst case I’d have a child whose father killed himself.  I loved our family too much to not try, so I spent another year fighting and we all came through together, but this time I know that it will happen again.

I was frank with my colleagues, family, and friends with the second episode because I needed all the help I could get.  Some asked “How do you do it?” “Why do you do it?”  The reality of the situation was that I didn’t want to do it.  I didn’t want to be married to a man with depression.  I didn’t want to worry day and night about my daughter and him.  But I had to play the hand I was dealt.  The words that meant the most to me while I was struggling was, “This just sucks.”  It didn’t do any good to think about “What ifs”  “What if he hadn’t gotten depressed?”  “What if we hadn’t had a kid?”  He was and we did and we had to do the best we could.  The words that meant the second most were, “How can I help?”  “Can we have you over for dinner?”  “Can I take him out to give you a break?”  What didn’t help were suggestions from people unwilling to jump in and get dirty with us. “You should” and “Why don’t you” drove me crazy.  Those are words of judgement made from the outside and weren’t worth my notice.  No one who didn’t have my hand could really understand what our family was going through, and if you don’t understand you have no right to shout advice from the sidelines.  Trust me, in the World Series of Poker the audience doesn’t get to shout “You should fold” to the players.  The players make the most they can out of the cards they have and the people at the table.

I hate that our family has these cards.  I hate that the cards we have make us fearful of other cards: my daughter becoming depressed; me dying and my husband falling apart; another episode of depression.  We do what we can to arm ourselves against those possibilities.  My husband visits a psychiatrist every 6 months so he has an active relationship with her in case he gets depressed again.  We’ve learned to teach our daughter to stay away from hard drugs as she gets older, because that’s a huge risk to damaging her brain chemistry and causing her problems in the future.  We have a will set up to protect her in case something happens to me and my husband can’t make decisions anymore.  All of that sucks, but it’s part of making the most of the hand we’ve been dealt.

The one thing that makes me grateful for what we’ve been through is the empathy I have for others.  Friends of ours just had their child diagnosed with a terminal illness.  She probably won’t see her third birthday.  I could hide from their sadness.  I could ignore their plight, or I could tell them what they should do.  I don’t do any of that.  I do whatever I can do let them know that this just sucks.  Sucks in a way I can’t imagine, because I don’t have that card, and I can’t imagine having that card.  I can’t understand a situation I’m not living, but I can interpret from the pain of my past the pain of others.  I can acknowledge their anguish, and do what I can to help.  I can’t make it better.  I can’t take their card away.  I can’t make the card never happen.  But I can use what I have in my hand to make their hand the best it can be.  You live the live you are dealt, and sometimes that sucks so bad it’s unfathomable.  You sit at the table with all your friends and family and you do what you can to give everyone the best hand they can get, because unlike poker, there isn’t one winner and everyone else loses.  The players make the most they can out of the cards they have and the people at the table, but in life the winner doesn’t take all.  We are all in this game together.

Sob!  My kid doesn’t need crayons? 

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized17 Comments

Okay, a slightly misleading title there, but I was looking at the third grade school supply list (my daughter is headed for second grade) and I scrolled to the end.  No crayons.  There I was being a good working mom friend to a coworker whose child is starting kindergarten at our neighborhood school.  She doesn’t have the supply list yet, so I sent it to her.  Yay me.  I got curious about what other grades need, was scanning along, and sob!  I’m crying.  Literally crying at work because next year my daughter won’t need crayons. How is that possible?  Where did the crayon years go?  How can they almost be over?
I love crayons.  Here’s a picture of the shelf above my desk:


See crayons!  I’m the age equivalent of 36th grade and I still use crayons at work.

Children’s lives go by so fast.  Everyone tells you to enjoy the moment or it will slip away.  Well let me tell you, I’m going to enjoy the heck out of the crayon moments from now on!  Off to get some new paper and coloring books.  We’ve got just over a year.
<sniff>

The Trash and Dish Fairy is out of Town

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized8 Comments

A year ago Mr. Afthead was just coming through the second major depressive episode of our marriage. Two years ago he was a shell of his normal self, both physically and mentally, and our family was in a pit of trying to survive. Today he is in England on a work trip he found out about on Thursday when he was on another work trip in San Diego. I wish I had some kind of time telephone so I could call two-years-ago me.  I’d tell her that not only would my husband get better, but that he didn’t have to quit his job, that they actually ended up being great to him through his depression and recovery, and today they had enough faith in him to send him on a huge business development trip to another country. Two years ago me would have liked to hear that news. It would have helped.

I’m so grateful we weathered that storm. All that said, right now me is aggravated because my husband is the person in our family who does the dishes and takes out the trash, and he’s been gone for a week and just left for another week. I have been patiently stacking dishes in the sink and responsibly sorting trash into recycling, compost, and trash. (We Aftheads are very trash savvy.) Imagine my annoyance when I went to go balance one more empty box in the recycle bin. I’d already left a trail of cereal boxes to the recycling bin so the trash fairy could easily find the problem and resolve it for me.

Then, you go around the corner and the dish fairy is also completely shirking his responsibility. Gross dirty dishes fill the sink. The dishwasher is full of clean dishes that the dish fairy has not yet put away. I ask you, what’s a person to do? Let me tell you, this person may or may not have thrown all her dishes away in college because they got too gross in the sink. To be fair, that may or may not have happened twice.

Then it hits me. The trash and dish fairy was out of town. He was home for less than 48 hours, and he left again. While home he took out the compost, thank you very much Mr. Afthead, but that was all.  If I didn’t take personable responsibility for the recycle mountain, trash mountain and dish mountain they were going to grow to epic proportions. And if trash mountain kept growing and dish mountain got gross enough I would have no nuclear option.

“Oh no honey, I have no idea where the plates and silverware went. Guess we’ll just have to buy new ones.” Little shrug and grin as the trash bag jingles and clanks on it’s way to the curb.

So this morning I took action and took out the mountain of recycling.  Of course the recycling bin outside was almost full so I had to touch a bunch of gross trashy stuff to get it all to fit.  (The trash fairy never complains about all the trashy bits sticking to him and sometimes doesn’t even wash his hands after.)  Then I unloaded the dishwasher, bleached the straw that had a dead earwig on it – GROSS – and loaded the dishwasher, for the first of many loads.  Little Afthead and I will unload the washer together tonight and then I’ll load it back up.  I’d have her help me do the dishes, but you never know what kind of creatures are lurking in a sink of dishes left for a week (LIKE SAY AN EARWIGS).  I’ll get it all taken care of this weekend, so the mountain can start growing.  That way when the gloriously sane Mr. Afthead returns from England on Friday he’ll have something to do.  I mean, other than being jet-lagged.  He’ll probably be missing those trash bits anyway.

A Wild Rumpus Tradition

On By aftheadIn Traditions8 Comments

There is somewhere you must visit if you are in Minneapolis, Minnesota if you are a reader, or a parent; if you are a parent of a reader; if you are a lover of books; or if you are a lover of pets.  You must visit Wild Rumpus.  You know the allusion right?  From Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Thing Are.

 “And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

Let’s start at the door, shall we?  The youngest Afthead is almost too big for the small purple door built into the normal grown-up sized door.  Almost too big, but not quite.  5 years now we’ve been making an annual trek to the purple door.

 

 

You walk in and the store is half zoo, half pet shop, half bookstore, and half magic land.  (Yes, I know that equals two, but this bookstore is greater than a single bookstore.)  It has cats with no tails, chickens, doves, creepy albino rats, cockatiels, chinchillas, ferrets, tarantulas, fish hidden in the mirror in the bathroom, and a really ugly lizard.  The cats are free to roam the store and their tailless ends are usually followed by a parade of children trying to grab a pet or a snuggle.  The chickens are also free to roam with a similar parade of kids, but they aren’t normal chickens.  They are like poodle chickens cute but a little foreign.  If chickens and cats need a break they retreat behind the sales counter taunting the children with their proximity and inaccessibility.

When you are done staring at the floor looking for animals your eyes travel upwards to the shelves and shelves of books.  There are books taller than you can reach: picture books, beginning readers, later readers, science books, geography books and even grown up books.  In the back of the store there is a scary section.  The albino rats live there, and there is a hole in the floor where some other creature lives.  When I was a kid, this would have been where I lived.  I’ve always loved scary books.  Not my kiddo though, she’s in the beginner readers picking out books she’s never seen outside of her classroom and she’s delighted.

About this time you glance up to stretch your neck and notice the boat carving a path through the ceiling.  Yep, in case there isn’t enough magic in this place the ceiling is actually a river with a rowboat carving a path through the white ceiling and leaving a path of blue green water behind it.

If you are in Minneapolis carve out an hour and go visit.  It’s right by the airport.  You won’t regret a moment there.  In fact, you might end up feeling like you’ve doubled your investment.

Baby Names

On By aftheadIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

32 weeks along and the baby girl growing inside me had no name.  I was searching everywhere for a sign for what we would call this new life.  I went to the bathroom and while negotiating my huge body in the stall something in the toilet bowl caught my eye.  It was a tiny slip of paper: pink with green letters.  It said “Amanda.”  My pregnant bladder couldn’t wait, so I pondered while sitting.  “Amanda?”  It wasn’t on any list we had.

Pink and green Amanda

Was this the name of our little girl?  I wiped, dropped the tissue and flushed.  Nope.  I didn’t like “Amanda.”

My Happy Place

On By aftheadIn stories6 Comments

The log house sits at the end of a long gravel driveway.  After four hours of driving I welcome the colorful flags of Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, and Mardi Gras fluttering hello as we drive past.  I park between the garage and the bunkhouse and open the car door to breathe in the humid fresh air.

The simple house blocks our view of the lake, as my daughter and I unpack the car, but the mosquitoes and horse flies nibbling our DEET free ankles remind us where we are.  We rush in to hello kisses and hugs and then down the stairs to the walkout basement where our bunk bed waits in the middle of the family room.  We open our suitcases and strip down to nothing and then shimmy into our stiff clean swimsuits.  No matter what time we show up the first thing we must do is jump in the lake.  Traditionally it is evening.  The setting sun makes long back lit tree shadows stretch up the hill.  Minnows dart around our feet and bald eagles soar overhead.  Laughing we look for the three loons that inhabit the lake every year.  Loons mate for life, so why are there three?  Two wives and one husband?  One wife and two husbands or something even more exotic?  Three husbands?

Every year, and it has been five now, the passage of time is clarified.  My two year old daughter with her sand filled diaper has grown to a long lean girl on the edge of bravery.  Each year she stretches farther and risks more because at the lake parent worries are leeches and ticks between toes and not the unspecific fears of city life.  Wonders await: berries are plump waiting to be picked; frogs are hiding in the twilight waiting to be grabbed; sunfish after sunfish fly out of the lake on shimmering lines waiting to be fried up for dinner by grandpa.

Some traditions are made, Easter brunches, Passover senders, Christmas Eve and Day all have their arbitrary flow.  Other traditions just happen when the “if we are going to the lake this year” becomes a foregone conclusion of when.  When will we pick berries?  When will we picnic on the pontoon boat?  When are the turtle races?  When are we going to light the bonfire and have s’mores?  The magic is new every year as the kids grow and the families change and the tradition morphs to a new fun.  Every year we stay a little longer and every year we wish we had just one more day.

Nightmare of a Working Mom

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized6 Comments

This Thursday it happened. I was walking from my office to my car reveling in my accomplishments of the day. I’d given a great presentation. I was creating a valuable partnership with our CIO. My curling offsite the day before had been a really great team bonding event. Kudos were flowing. Yep, I was pretty awesome. Then my phone rang. It was my husband asking if I had remembered to pick up our daughter. Our daughter who had finished play practice 15 minutes earlier at school, 40 minutes away from where I was. Our daughter who I hadn’t forgotten in 6 and a half years.

My stomach dropped as I realized what I had done. The other line rang. It was a friend of ours who’s daughter was in the same class. (We’ll call our friend E.) I clicked over. E was calling to tell me that another mom, S, had called her because S didn’t have my number. My daughter was with S, and S was willing to take her home, or E offered for my daughter to go to her husband’s classroom to wait for me. (His name is K.) I took her up on the offer of going to the classroom. I called S, thanked her for saving my daughter and asked her to take her up to K’s classroom. S agreed and said she was happy to help. I then called my husband who headed out to get our daughter from school. All this happened in less than 10 minutes, and by the time I was in my car, 30 minutes from school, I knew she was safe.

As I drove home I felt horrified at myself, awfulized what could have been (my own specialty), and then realized that it was all okay: really honestly okay. The village had made sure my kiddo was safe.

This is the schizophrenic life of a working mom. There are a lot of balls in the air. In one half of your life you are a rock star and in the other half you cut corners. Then you flip it. This week I missed my daughter’s weather presentation and forgot to pick her up. The week before that I skipped out of work two days to help take care of my sick brother. Two weeks from now I’m missing spring break for a work trip, but that Friday I’m skipping another work meeting to spend the last day of spring break at home. It’s constant negotiation, and I am so lucky to have a job and a family situation that gives me this kind of flexibility. My mantra is “You can have it all, but you can’t have all of it all the time.” That’s easy to say and hard to live. I make mistakes. I cut corners. Sometimes I totally mess up. I am way too hard on myself, but I’m working on it. Perfection just isn’t a reasonable expectation anymore.

I wouldn’t trade it though. I wouldn’t give up my job to ensure that I never missed a pick up from school. (Because the truth is, I probably would forget her at some point. My mom forgot my brother once and she stayed home with us.) I love my daughter, but I know if I was home all the time I would get sucked into her life. I’d become a helicopter parent because I wouldn’t be able to separate my life from the most important person in my life. I also know that one of the things that helps me be the best mom I can is my mom network and lots of those ladies are in the office. I couldn’t give up my deep, meaningful conversations about our families in the 2 minutes it takes to pee.

Stall 1: “My daughter was diagnosed with a severe learning disability.”
Stall 2: “Oh no, how did you find out?”
Stall 1: “Testing at school” FLUSH
Stall 2: “Do you have someone you can talk to?” FLUSH
Sink 1: “No. This really sucks.”
Sink 2: “I am so sorry. I have a friend who is a child therapist. Do you want her number?”
Sink 1: “That would be great.”
Sink 2: “I’ll send it before my next meeting starts.”
Sink 1: Drying her eyes with the wet paper towel, “Do I look okay.”
Sink 2: “A little red-eyed, but no one will notice.”
Hugs

Being a mom is hard. I have harshly judged others for mistakes I then made. I strive to be patient with myself and all the other parents I know because all the choices are hard. All the decisions have upsides and downsides. We all do our best, and then help others when they aren’t doing their best. A working mom, a stay-at-home mom, another working mom, and two working dads all helped make sure my kid was safe this week. While I don’t EVER plan on doing that again I’ll sleep a little better knowing that my nightmare actually had an okay ending.

Being a Grown-Up

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized7 Comments

Remember when all you wanted to be was a grown-up?  People would stop telling you what to do, what to wear, and how to act and you would be in charge?  Well, I hate being a grown-up.  Some weeks I’m okay with the fact that when I’m lying in bed throwing my booger filled tissues on the floor that two days later, as the grown-up, I am going to have to pick up the remainders of my cold.  Some weeks I can deal with the fact that I can’t blame anyone else when my sweater shrinks, we run out of diet Dr Pepper, or when the back door is left unlocked.  My husband and I use grown-up as the code word to tell our kid she can’t do something she wants to, like sliding down the booth to the floor of the restaurant to enjoy a fine whine.  “Be the grown-up,” the one sitting across from her will snark at the one sitting next to her.  The grown-up will have to haul her up, lecture her, and be the bad guy for the rest of the day.

This week grown-up went a little too far.  Do I go to my friend’s dad’s funeral or go visit my brother in the hospital?  Do I keep my cat on dialysis, at the cost of $1000 per day, or do I let the 7 year old feline we adore die a slow painful death?  Do I go see our family shrink so she can shed some light on familial turmoil or do I make that critical meeting at work that will build bridges and may set me up for my next promotion?  Oh, and the damn dishwasher broke, so I have plenty of time to ponder these decisions while I scrub gross cat food bowls and egg crusted pans.  This morning while I was scrubbing I really should have been working on that $700,000 proposal for work, but whatever.  The manual labor grown-up task won.

I don’t want to be 18, or 23 or 30 again, but I want one day as not a grown-up.  I want to go lay in the hammock because it’s a nice day.  I want to go meet my girlfriends for happy hour and not worry about when I need to get home.  If I decide I want to get drunk I want to get drunk.  I want someone else to pick up my snotty tissues for me if I do the not-grown-up thing and cry about all this crap going on.

Now, I have to stop playing on my blog and go do some dishes, or write a proposal, or call my brother.  Ugh!  Grown-up sucks.