Light and Momentary

Tra la la!

Thirty-one days, 31 posts. This is kind of a lame one, but hey: it's a post.

In the books

Today is the thirtieth day of my Whole 30. Perhaps I will get up in the morning and have chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. I'm thinking a pumpkin smoothie is more probable, actually. But maybe I will get wild and crazy and use plain yogurt instead of thinned-out tahini. Living on the edge, folks.

Cape Horn Ho

My 12yo has been reading one of Patrick O'Brian's books for younger audiences, The Unknown Shore. He asked me to read a bit of it aloud to him last night and do you know what I did afterward? Reader, I absconded with it.

I went on a Patrick O'Brian tear in 2009. I hadn't loved Master and Commander when I read it in 2006, but something prompted me to pick up the second book back when Stella was a baby. I fell right down the rabbit hole, and pulled my husband along with me. It was great fun for both of us.

Oh! I just remembered what the something was: I pulled this book from the shelf on a whim and as I paged through it I was struck by the author's clear affection for the era he was describing, as well as by his attention to detail. I closed the book to see who had written it. Huh, I thought to myself, Patrick O'Brian. Maybe I'll give the second Aubrey-Maturin book a try.

I know that some people go back to those books again and again, until they find themselves eating split peas on an actual tall ship. Some of those people are described in this book, which I never actually finished although now I am wondering if perhaps I ought to. I know myself well enough to know that I enjoy reading about being sent aloft far more than I would enjoy being sent aloft. So even though it was a pleasant immersion into the age of sail (my husband bought a glossary and the cookbook*, because O'Brian's own books weren't enough for him**), I haven't been tempted to revisit it. Until last night, at any rate.

*The cookbook! Did you know it was co-authored by the Tsarina of Tsocks? She can tell you how to make not only the craziest of crazypants socks, but a drowned baby as well! (For that matter, I can tell you how to make a drowned baby, though I prefer to call it spotted dog. I'm not willing to climb ratlines above an angry sea, but I can (and occasionally do!) make a mean steamed suet pudding.)

**I just saw that there's also an atlas. I wonder whether my husband didn't know about the atlas or if he didn't think it necessary to acquire the atlas. Or whether it's lurking on a shelf without my knowledge.

The Unknown Shore has a Jack-ish young character and a Stephen-ish young character, and I am finding them irresistible. This is pleasant, after weeks of dipping into books in a half-hearted and desultory fashion, but it also means I have to hurry. Joe has told me in no uncertain terms that HE will be taking the book to school tomorrow. 

I suppose if things get too interesting I can always hide it in the officers' mess. The bosun will fix him if he tries to take it from there.

Recipe

Tonight I wanted to cook something stewy that could be a pasta sauce for everybody who isn't doing the Whole 30. I chopped a couple of onions and cooked them slowly, letting them get brown before I added 3 cloves of garlic. I stemmed and chopped a bunch of kale, which I chucked in the pan and tossed around in the hot fat for a few minutes. I added two cans of petite diced tomatoes (the petite-ish cans, 14.5 oz) and a can of quartered artichoke hearts, rinsed and drained. I let it all simmer until the kale was tender. In a separate pan I browned a pound of ground beef. I scooped out some sauce for my vegetarian kid and then stirred in the meat. Three of the kids thought it was delicious, and even picky Stella ate parts of it. 

Plunge

Have you noticed the lackluster nature of the blogging around here in this last week, friends? Does it seem to you that I am limping toward the end of March? I have been casting about for things to say that are not The Thing That's Really On My Mind.

When I finished writing the croissant series I felt so happy. I thought, "Gosh, I have learned some useful stuff about relationships over the years! I bet I could even use some of these ideas the next time I try to talk to one of the substance abusers in my orbit." In my enthusiasm I forgot the first rule of substance abuse: you don't talk about substance abuse. I've been down about the ensuing conversation all week.

You may have noticed bits and pieces about substance abuse here over the years, vague little snippets in which I say, "Wow, this is a big problem for some people I know," or, "I've been praying for years for some people in my life." I've always wanted to be super-careful about their privacy. But this is also my space to think things through, and I am weary of gnashing my teeth in silence. So. That's what's on my mind tonight.

Things I am not knitting

In January I was in the Adoration chapel when I wrote down this dazzling insight: "Knitting is supposed to be a fun and relaxing hobby." It had started to feel like a chore, with inflexible deadlines. Christmas knitting will do that to a person, I guess. Or at least to this person. 

It's funny, though: my knitting mojo has completely evaporated. That Ysolda mystery knit-along? Haven't finished either project. The sweater I was going to wrap up before sweater season ended? Untouched for weeks. The dragon mittens I thought I might whip out before mitten season ended? I'm just past the cuff on the first one.

Oh, dear, sad girl upstairs. Have you ever had your knitting mojo disappear? What prompted its return?

A running update

I am plugging along with the 10K plan from Matt Fitzgerald's 80/20 Running. At the beginning of the book he says, "It's really hard for people to run as slowly as they need to for the low-intensity parts of this program." I nodded serenely at his warnings and thought, "Well, it's lucky I'm so good at following directions. I'm sure I won't have any trouble with that." 

It turns out that it is really hard to run as slowly as I'm supposed to for the low-intensity parts of this program. Who knew??

There are three specific things that I am trying to figure out. One is how to fit six weekly workouts into a life with five children and a tenure-track job and a retreat team position. The second is how to tweak the long runs to account for the fact that I'm slower than his target audience. I want to get a couple of actual 10K runs in before the race, and his plan as written doesn't get me there. (If I were running at an 8:30 pace I'd be golden, but...I'm not running a 10K at an 8:30 pace.) The third is how to handle ups and downs in how a run feels. I experience predictable increases in perceived difficulty that correspond to hormonal fluctuations. (Dead corpus luteum = dead legs.) My last few runs have gone exactly according to plan, which is how I like it. I need a better response for the blah days.

I guess, now that I write it out, that Matt Fitzgerald would tell me to listen to my body on the blah days. If it really hurts to run a mile, then maybe the best I can do that day is a vague approximation of the planned workout. If I can't keep my heartrate in the target range without walking, my body is telling me something.

Most of the time, the scheduled runs are a great match for my abilities -- pleasantly tough but not eviscerating. This is SO much more motivating than the Run Less Run Faster plan, also known as the What Fresh Hell Is This? training plan. So far, nothing hurts at all (superstitiously, I am wondering if it is imprudent to type that out loud) -- great news given my history.

I am feeling kind of like a slacker, since so much of the running is low-intensity. I am very curious to see what kind of 10K time I'll end up with this year. Only a month until I find out...

Let's talk about books

What have you been reading lately? I've been casting about for something good. [she said sheepishly, while typing in a room with close to a thousand books on its shelves]

Tonsil 411

I just read a blog post from someone who didn't know how to find tonsils. If you too are in doubt, this post is for you.

Way back in your mouth, right before it turns into your throat, there are two arching structures. The ones in front are called your anterior faucial pillars. The ones in back are the posterior faucial pillars. Your tonsils lie in between them. In this picture, your tonsils are #3.

You actually have four tonsil-like structures, four sets of tissue whose job is to alert your immune system to incoming pathogens. The set in your mouth is visible. There's another set hidden on the back of your tongue, a third hanging out around the opening of your Eustachian tubes, and a fourth way up in the back of your nasopharynx (your adenoids). You can see them in this picture, a little ring of protection against pathogens.

Here I am restraining myself from telling you more about the faucial pillars. You're welcome!

Saturday Shakespeare on Sunday, for real this time

In high school I was in a play called The Curious Savage. In it a psychologist (or psychiatrist?) quotes Lord Byron: "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep." Words to live by, I'm telling you.

I've been a little stressed out reading Comedy of Errors, which sounds a little silly now that I write it out loud. The misunderstandings! The threats! The what-ifs! On the page, denuded of the silly costumes and the near misses and the slapstick one would see on the stage, it's less clearly a comedy. In fact, I am thinking about Othello as I am reading it, because both plays show how easy it is to be misled by appearances. Sometimes it ends well, as in Comedy of Errors. Sometimes it doesn't.

I didn't expect Antipholus and Dromio to leave me feeling glum.

Day 21

This is my twenty-first daily post and also my twenty-first day of the Whole 30. I've been a little less strict this time -- two days in a row I ate some bits of cheese because I didn't realize it was part of a salad, and I haven't been as rigid about traces of sugar in commercial mayo and corned beef. It's still a pain.

The thing is, it makes a startling difference. The closet-cleaning? The Getting Things Done motivation? Whole 30, I'm telling you. The most telling thing: I've been worried and unhappy this evening about some probably unbloggable stuff. Instead of sinking onto the couch and vegging out in front of the computer, I landed on a totally bizarre stress management strategy. I pulled out my mending pile, and set about dealing with its contents. 

I used to be a person who mended with some regularity, but that was years ago. This mending pile was like an archeological dig, man: some of those layers went back years. I have tossed some and fixed most, but there are two items that need buttons sewn on. Off I go to sew them-- I can see the finish line.

Eating this way is not really sustainable, especially in a family with a vegetarian kid. But I wonder what might happen if I kept it up...

Dispatches

I am writing this missive from the front lines in the Sane Mom Revolution. My 12yo is running track this spring, and he has been a little dismayed to see how quickly fitness ebbs across a winter spent watching Great British Bake Off. He's been asking if he could make a weekend trip to the university track to run intervals. He recruited Pete, who is not quite 10, to hold the stopwatch. 

"Can we go?" he asked me as I chopped onions this evening? "Right...now?" I said. "Yep," Joe answered. "We were going to ride our bikes."

The university track is less than a mile from our house, along a street that is moderately traveled: not so much traffic that you'd worry about cars, not so quiet that you'd worry about nefarious activities going unwitnessed. They know the way. There should be ample spring light. My husband would say yes without a second thought. 

I had to think for a minute. Bike crashes. Busybody neighbors. Sibling conflict that invites a bike crash or a busybody's intervention. I had to weigh the risks against the value of the experience: the step forward in getting around independently, in working toward a goal with no adult breathing down your neck.

I said yes, go ahead.

Joe said, "It's public, right? We don't have to worry about anyone telling us we can't be there?" 

I said, "It's fine for you to be there as long as no university teams are practicing. And don't let anybody give you any guff. Be polite, but don't be afraid to say, 'My mom said it was fine for us to be here.'"

I am still kind of waiting for the police to ring the bell.

Maybe medicine is not his calling

Tonight I was tucking something back into the fridge after dinner. When I straightened up I whacked my head hard on the freezer door handle. The three youngest kids were in the kitchen with me, and they were all very solicitous. Joe raced upstairs to bring me a triangle bandage, which he draped fetchingly across my head to make me laugh. (It's a family joke based on this story: when my fourth son beaned my second son with a flashlight while I was out buying nit combs, my first son said, "I know first aid!" Except he might have been distracted when the instructors were defining direct pressure.)

After Joe had brought me ice and established that I had not in fact concussed myself, he asked me gravely if I needed a neck tourniquet.

It's probably a good thing he's not planning to be a doctor.

(I love it, though, that he has absorbed my #1 strategy for helping people who have painful but non-serious lumps on their heads: if you can make them laugh, you're halfway to making them feel better.)

Good Ideas

Good Idea #1

A Brazilian study followed almost 3500 newborns for 30 years. Their results, just published in The Lancet, indicate that longer breastfeeding duration is associated with higher IQ, more education, and better-paying jobs in adulthood. In the US it would be easy to roll your eyes about these findings, because more educated women breastfeed for longer here and also have more educated kids. In Brazil when the study began, however, it was a different story. (Plus they controlled for the usual covariates.)

I told the boy who nursed the longest that he's headed for the presidency. Perhaps a Gladly dynasty is about to arise. You're welcome, kids.

Good Idea #2

This Slate piece will not be a surprise to anyone who reads older children's books. Ramona Quimby walked herself to and from kindergarten for most of the year, and it wasn't right next door. Encyclopedia Brown and his friend Sally undertook 20-mile bike trips, sans adults, in the days before helmets. When my kindergartner and I walk to ballet, she leads the way. She loves to skip ahead of me. Dear Slate writer, kindergartners can turn corners, and stop at railroad crossings, and even -- believe it or not -- cross streets.

Bring the Sane Mom Revolution! Free the kindergartners!

Good Idea #3 (I think)

I ordered the new edition of Getting Things Done, and I am going to soak in the tub to read and plan. Last night the closet, tomorrow the files, next week THE WORLD.

Life-changing magic, headed this way

I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, because this post made it sound irresistible, and tonight I was seized by the urge to get started. The author instructs her readers to start with clothes, and to keep only the items that inspire a spark of joy.

There goes most of my wardrobe.

We moved downstairs in...let me think...late 2012, but I still had a bunch of clothes in the upstairs closet. I brought them all down, and as you'd expect I put >90% of them in the giveaway pile. The discards included my Up The Down Staircase T-shirt, from my high school's production of the play in 1984-1985. (I was Sadie Finch, the unpleasant secretary: "Hand in on time!") Also in the pile: the pleated-front Guess overalls I bought in 1987 with the earnings from my first job, which I guess I was saving for that future date when pleated-front overalls will reclaim their place on the runways.

I was trucking along on the downstairs clothes until the handknits stalled me out. I put an ugly cowl in the giveaway pile (ugly pattern + ugly superwash yarn = Goodwill bound, baby). I put a too-short curling scarf upstairs to frog and re-knit. And then I opened the sweater bin.

The camo cardigan does not bring me joy. Too much learning curve on display there-- the button bands are an object lesson in why one should feather in hand-dyed yarn, and the underarms are Exhibit A in the case against classic raglans, and the colors scream HAND-DYED HANDMADE NOT IN A GOOD WAY to me every time I wear it. Also, dear 2008 Jamie, you don't want to cable a busy yarn like that.

Even so, I can't bring myself to send it to Goodwill.

Maybe I could start a Ravelry thread for people who are working the life-changing magic of tidying up, in which we could re-home less-loved handknits with people who would know better than to machine-wash them. Because what does a person in the middle of a time-consuming cleanup project really need? A new source of social media distraction, that's what! And what else does a person in the middle of a time-consuming cleanup project really need? Bulky new stuff winging its way to her courtesy of strangers on the internet. Obviously.

I am not afraid of tongues

I went looking for the label for "fear of public speaking," because I thought I might incorporate it into the title of this post. Google is telling me that it's "glossophobia," which doesn't work for me. "Tongue-fear" ≠ fear of public speaking. Should we coin a better one? And push it into the wider world? Like Frindle, only etymologically sensible and without the creepily manipulative teacher?

These days I have almost no fear of public speaking. Today I was sitting in my office, prepping some difficult material for my class, when I thought, "Pssshhh, it's only 50 minutes. That's nothing." I do a lot of public speaking. 

When I was asked to give a talk on a retreat this team, it felt a little different. If 50 minutes is nothing, 25 minutes is only half of nothing. I include only a tiny sprinkle of personal stories in my lectures, but my talk was supposed to be mostly about me. I wasn't really supposed to lecture, and I spend most of my public speaking time in lecture mode.

The biggest question mark for me was style. On the retreat last spring, led by a team of women from a few hours away, the talks were all pretty somber and pretty scripted. I didn't really want to be either somber or closely scripted. This year our team is mostly local, with a handful of women from last year's team Skyping in. I was worried the Skype ladies were going to hate my talk.

The Skype connection was terrible, so they planned to listen via phone. The phone connection was also terrible, so they disconnected not far into the talk. The local ladies, who were all there in the room with me, laughed in all the right places and gave me encouraging feedback. ("Slow down," they said. This is a little like telling me, "Have straight hair" -- it requires considerably more effort than you might think and it never lasts.)

So I guess I'll keep the funny parts and not worry about the Skype ladies. I'm glad the preview is over.

Saturday Shakespeare on Sunday, only not really

Yesterday I had good intentions. I was going to write a wrap-up post for the croissants series, and come back today with a Shakespeare post. But then today happened.

This is pancake breakfast weekend. It's a really good thing, the pancake breakfast -- it's great to see the community support for the Scouts and it's fun, too, to see people from all over town coming out to eat pancakes. It meant two 5:30 alarms this weekend, though, the second one followed by 6+ hours of pouring coffee. Evening Mass, Cub Scout meeting, late dinner...and the only thing I can say about Shakespeare is that there are too many words in his plays for me to get to grips with them tonight.

I'm having a little trouble getting to grips with gravity at the moment.

So. Please do tell me about any Shakespeare you've been reading this week, and please do tell me if you'd be up for 1 Henry IV, which I plan to read between now and the end of March. And then please excuse me, because I'm going to throw up the white flag in the battle against gravity. I'm too tired to finish another

Croissant crumbs

Here's a bullet-point version of my series. It is 2015, after all.

• Be compassionate. It's hard to be a kid. It's hard to be the mom. You both deserve patience. While being compassionate is the right thing to do, it will also make your job easier. (More details in the sixth paragraph of this post.) (Use of the phrase "sixth paragraph" is a dead giveaway that I am not really a 2015 kind of blogger.)
• Pay attention. Put down the phone, the book, the knitting, the worries, and perceive. You and your child will both feel the difference. (More details in the seventh paragraph (oops) of this post, but you can also CTRL-F for "Stella hates" if that's easier.)
• Emphasize autonomy over compliance, flexibility over rigidity. Create a context in which your child makes as many of his own decisions as he can. Push back against a culture that says he's too young for that. Self-direction is essential for self-discipline. And if you model flexibility, you will see it in return. Eventually. I promise it's true.
• Build good habits. You can set up routines that will make almost everything easier, for them and you both. If you have a problem, habit formation is probably part of the solution. Establishing the routine will take longer than you think. It will be worth it. (More thoughts here.)
• Set high standards; enforce them kindly. See my ZETZER post for details.
• Own your authority. You don't have to bellow. You don't have to threaten. You're the mom. Your authority is the lever that can move the world, or at least your apparently immobile child as he lies in the floor wailing. (Some details in the sixth paragraph of this post, or CTRL-F for "motherly authority"; more specific details in this post.)
• Take the long view. You have 18 years with this child in your house, God willing. It wouldn't take that long if they could learn things the first time you showed them. Keep at it. Don't let the naysayers get you down. In 80 years, when your child remembers your kindness tenderly, the naysayers won't matter. They don't really matter today. It will get better; truly it will. And if it doesn't get better fast enough for your liking, you can rest assured that it will get different. (This is the point that kicked off the whole series, so it's a fitting place to end.)

Good luck! I am pulling for you! If you want to read the whole thing, here you go: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Resources for you: Barbara Coloroso wrote the book that revolutionized my parenting; Haim Ginott is really helpful; try Alfie Kohn too. Lissa Wiley wrote a beautiful post about her own journey. I'd love to hear what's been helpful for you in learning to parent your children with gentle authority.

Croissants: from apprentice to master baker

Okay, everybody, this is the last installment.

Almost five years ago, after my defense but before my graduation, I presented my dissertation results to a mix of students and faculty from my department. I wrote about it at the time: my deliberate decision to aim the presentation at the master's students, the eruption of rude and hostile questions from the organizer during the Q&A, the audible gasps from other faculty when my advisor told the story at a gathering two weeks later. That hour marked a change for me, from nestling to fledgling. His final question was prefaced with "There must be a literature on this," which flicked a switch inside me. I realized, "He knows nothing about this topic. Nothing. And I don't know everything, by a long shot, but I know a lot."

In that moment I stepped into my authority as a scholar. I did it with my body, when I squared my shoulders and stood up tall. I did it with my voice, allowing a hint of frosty steel to surface. I did it with my words, shifting into researcher-ese to show that I could in fact speak that language competently. I did it with my attention, purposefully saying, "Who else has questions?" and shifting my focus away from him. Most of all, I did with my inner certainty: I have poured my brainpower and my heart into this project, and in consequence I am the expert on this question. I was polite to him, but I was also clear that I was not there to be steamrolled. 

"You handled it beautifully," my advisor told me afterward. It was hard, you guys. It was really hard. It took me a long time to feel at peace about it. In that post from a month later I was still fretting about what I might do if it happened again.

I see a lot of parallels with my authority as a mother. It was hard to own that authority. It took me a long time to feel confident about it. One of the most striking scenes in Bringing Up Bébé is the moment when another woman urges Pamela Druckerman to say no like she means it, to say it with confidence that her son will listen. He listens.

Motherly authority has the same constituents as scholarly authority. Part of it is in my body, whether I draw myself up or kneel down for a face-to-face chat. Part of it is in my voice, which might range from tender to stern. Part of it is in my words, which can convey much more than a casual observer would hear. A big chunk of it is my attention, about which more below. But the heart of it is in my inner certainty: I have poured my heart and my brainpower into mothering this child, and in consequence I am the expert on him. He is hard-wired to love me and respond to me, and I am not here to be steamrolled.

I want to go back to the issue of attention, because just last night I was reminded about how much of a difference it makes. Stella hates having the earliest bedtime. I was knitting in the floor while she played with Jenga blocks next to me, and she was unhappy when I told her to pick them up and put her pajamas on. Drama loomed, but I did not need a magic wand to defuse it. I needed to put down my knitting. With my eyes on her face, I could read her better. With my face relaxed from its knitting scowl, I could set the mood for the interaction. With my hands free, I could offer to fasten the ziploc bag she filled. She had to pick up the blocks herself, because six-year-olds need to clean up after themselves, but I was available to help her with the hard parts. I could have said the same words while I kept on knitting, but they would not have had the same effect. (Another bit of this interaction that might be useful to somebody is this: I said, "If you briskle, we'll have time for a story." This offers a measure of autonomy to a frustrated kid, because I don't care if she goes fast or slow, within reason. This teaches real-world time management skills: if you dawdle, you might miss out on something fun. Bedtime is coming at 8:30, and you can decide how to use the minutes leading up to it. As it played out, we didn't have time for Curious George but we could squeeze in Good Night Gorilla.)

I think if I had read this post as a young mother I would have been skeptical. "You're telling me I'm not paying enough attention to this kid?" I might have said. "I have never paid as much attention to anybody as I pay to this kid." I'm talking about a particular kind of attention, though. Have you ever felt someone staring at you? It's the same idea, without the creepy: your focused attention has a perceptible weight. For kids it's like a mantle: comfort when they are sad, warmth when you are proud of your achievements, authority that's not yet theirs -- but that they're growing into slowly -- when they're misbehaving. It says something really important; it says, "You are worthy of notice," and that opens a kid right up to hear you say, "...and I know you can do what I'm about to ask of you." 

Rachel asked about what I would have done if Stella had pitched a fit about leaving the childcare room. My answer, I'm afraid, is "it depends." If it were an ongoing problem, I'd be thinking about context. Is this child getting enough rest? Do I need to send myself an automated reminder for next week, to bring a cheese stick to avert a blood sugar crash? Does this child hear me say, "Okay, I can be flexible about that" with some regularity? Does this child have plenty of opportunities to exercise autonomy, to say no? (For instance, I am really laid back about what my children wear to school. If it doesn't have holes in it, it's probably fine. If she puts her T-shirt on backwards I will point it out, but she is free to leave it that way.) Does this child have plenty of happy interactions with me, in which she can see that I genuinely enjoy her company and see the best in her? These are guilt-free questions, Rachel, because I know how hard it is to keep the balls in the air.

Even in a supportive context, though, some kids will continue to push. They may need to see that you are strong enough for them to push against without knocking you over. Even if it gets loud, you can still scoop them up and take them out. I might position a fighter with his back to my chest, flexing his legs all the way up in front of him to minimize flailing limbs. In those circumstances I would do my best to keep absolutely calm, to keep stating my expectations clearly, and to avoid looking at anyone else who happened to be around. I don't need to worry about judgment -- I've got enough to do. Afterward I would be clear that the behavior was not acceptable, but belaboring the point is a bad idea. Kids need space to feel the weight of a bad decision. A typically developing kid will know that other x-year-olds don't act like that. If it doesn't even work to get them what they want, they can decide to pursue other options...especially if you give them room to make the choice freely. This is pretty much my ZETZER approach: set a reasonable standard, and enforce it with absolute consistency and unrelenting courtesy (while making sure you have supportive adults around you to whom you can complain later). Drama only sets you back.

I do want to say very clearly, though, that just as I cannot be authoritative about someone else's scholarship, I cannot be authoritative about someone else's children. I can only determine what works for us. One last example: this is my fourth year in the classroom and this year I am feeling comfortable at the lectern. My evals are pretty consistent. Most often they say, "This class is really hard, but Dr. Gladly is kind and patient with us." They're not all favorable; for some students the "really hard" is "ridiculously hard, so hard that I don't care if she's nice because I'm never registering for one of her classes again." Regardless, I am pretty comfortable with that identity. (When my chair heard me stewing about my fall semester evals, she said, "It's supposed to be hard.") That's what I hope to be like as a mom, too: high standards, yes, upheld with kindness and patience.

The competence curve for academics, I think, looks something like an inverted U. Novices struggle, because presenting complex information is a hard and unfamiliar task. At the other end of the age spectrum, I have seem professors near retirement who are totally phoning it in. They're not meeting the needs of their students, because they're no longer engaged. Parenting can be the same way. Kathy asked me if my younger children picked up on my authority more rapidly, and the answer is both yes and no. Rachel Balducci wrote a post that resonated with me, about how it's easy to let things slide with the youngest kids in a large family. The confidence that kids will learn over time can get tangled up with the reality that a person gets tired of teaching small people to sit on their bottoms and close their lips around their food, every bite every time. Sometimes I have to herringbone myself up from the wrong side of that U-shaped curve.

I don't blog much about parenting these days (except for, you know, the odd 6000 words here and there), mostly because I am figuring out the teen thing as I go. How can I communicate effectively about the hazards of substance abuse when I have SO MUCH BAGGAGE about substance abuse? How can I send a kid out into the world when his bathtub-scrubbing skills are so far inferior to his coding skills? This series has been really helpful for me to write, my friends. I have been down on myself as a mom for years, because teenagers, and it has been encouraging to think, "I can learn useful things and apply them!" I was full of self-doubt as a young scholar, and full of self-doubt as a young mom. But I know that impostor syndrome is a treacherous waste of time. And I have been thinking about the promise of 2 Peter 1, that God has given us all we need for life and godliness. It leaves me feeling grateful, and hopeful, and quietly confident.

Thanks for reading.

Quotable

There's a Guillotine game happening at my dining room table right now. "How do you play?" asked a child who will remain nameless. Elwood explained: "You kill nobles and take their money."

"Oh!" said the child who (one hopes) is a little vague on the definition of "noble." "Can we kill some nobles and get their money?"