Light and Momentary

Croissants, in the wild

Part 1 Part 2

Your requests for more details were well timed, since I had to kick into "inhabit the authority" mode twice yesterday. It was a crazy evening, CRA to the z^th power, and we needed to have done a little more planning yesterday morning. (You know the parts in the Aubrey-Maturin books where they re-enact Trafalgar with biscuit crumbs? My husband and I joke about doing something similar to plan movements of cars and drivers. Last night we wound up a few ships short of a fleet.)

I was at the gym and I needed to get Stella (a NOPE girl) into the car immediately. She's often dawdly when it's time to leave the childcare room, and I did not have time for dawdly. I said, "Stella, look at my eyes. We need to go right now or we will be late." And she came. She cried for a minute in the car because she hadn't finished her picture and she wasn't sure we had the right blue at home to match the section she'd been working on, but she did not give me a single second of pushback -- she got right up, walked willingly to the car, and fastened her own seatbelt even though she was sad. 

There were a few important things hidden in the interaction. I called her name with a falling intonation: this is not a question but an declaration. My tone of voice was deliberate; it said, "This is important. Not panic-inducing, but important." When I say "look at my eyes," it means "you have my full attention, and I need yours." (<-That right there is one of the Golden Keys of parenting with authority. In those moments I was lamenting at the beginning of yesterday's post, I was busy chatting. Inattention fuels limit-testing.) I pulled out a couple of big-gun phrases: I try not to say "right now" unless I really mean "right now," and "we will be late" comes with an unspoken "and that's serious." Both of those nuances, for what it's worth, have taken a long time to cultivate.

Some broader context: I am a huge, HUGE fan of giving my kids autonomy and modeling flexibility. Stella usually needs a minute to wrap things up in the childcare room. Sometimes I will offer the option of popping back in a little bit later. (We're usually waiting for her brother to finish his karate class, so it's no big deal to me if she hangs out with me or with the other kids.) Sometimes I will say, "Go ahead, watch the end of this scene" or "Finish using that color -- I'm not in a rush." I believe that my usual willingness to give her time contributes to her reciprocal willingness to listen and obey on the rare occasions when I say "right now, even though you don't want to."

When we got home, my NOPE teen had made plans to meet his girlfriend at 7 (and OH does he hate to be late) but I needed him to run me to church. "No," he said, "that's not going to work." I said, calmly, "There's a room full of people waiting for me. I know you're disappointed, but I have to get to church on time." He paused. Politely, he said, "Okay. Let me send a message to M."

There were three important things in that interaction: first, calm is critical. The authority I invoke if I get het up is not motherly authority; it is the dubious authority of the impending explosion. It invites a NOPE kid to explode right back, because in that scenario the bigger explosion can carry the day. Second, and this might be the single most important thing I know about mothering, compassion makes everything better. Letting a kid know that you hear and respect his feelings, even in a moment when you can't do anything to make them better, allows him to move past them instead of clinging to them. This was life-changing for me as a young mother, to learn that I shouldn't try to argue my toddler out of his feelings. Instead I could say kindly, "You really wish we could stay at the library. [slipping his arm into his jacket sleeve] What would you do if we stayed? [other arm] Maybe if we stayed we could build with the wooden blocks. [zipping up the jacket] Wooden blocks are super-fun, [taking his hand] and they have so many of them here. [heading for the elevator] I know it's a bummer to go. Would you like to push the button to call the elevator?" It was magic. And decency, all rolled into one. (On that topic, be sure to read Carol's lovely comment from yesterday. Carol is my dear friend and mothering mentor, the person whose prayers I request when I am feeling really stuck and uncertain.)

This thought really belongs in the previous paragraph, but it's a long paragraph already. (This is a long post already, and I have so much more to say!) The third important thing in my interaction with my son last night was that pause. Everybody -- everybody -- makes better choices and makes them less resentfully given a little time to own the decision. I did not leap in and say NO, RIGHT NOW, and I feel certain that contributed to the peaceful outcome. I got to church on time (although further scheduling FAIL moments meant that Stella wound up coming to the ladies' retreat team meeting a little bit later), and when I apologized afterward to my son for the interruption to his evening he said, "Nah, it's all good."

I keep thinking about Our Lord with the rich young ruler. He asked something huge of the man, something crazy, as he "looked at him and loved him." He gave the man space to choose freely. We also ask something huge, something crazy, of our children. In effect we say to our newborns, "I know you can't hold your own head up, but your task is to live independently in a fallen world and make it a better place. Ready?" So, too, we must look at them and love them, seeing how genuinely hard it is for them to learn to do what's right again and again. We know that sometimes they will choose the wrong thing. We know that free will is one of the greatest gifts of genuine love.

Last night as my daughter was drifting off next to me she said sleepily, "I love God. And you remind me of Him." Although my knee-jerk response was to think, "Oh, honey, I am SO not God," I am trying instead to be grateful for her words. I am thinking about all the freedom God affords me to serve him in ways that bring me joy. I am thinking about how uncommon it is for God to compel immediate obedience, and about how much I want to do the right thing in those moments.

I am thinking that's the kind of mom I want to be.

---

OH MY GOODNESS, nobody reads 1200-word blog posts in 2015. For Miriel and Rachel in particular I have some thoughts on the links between parenting authority and professorial authority. I have some more thoughts on the contexts that facilitate mothering with authority. But I will pause here for today. Tune in tomorrow...

Croissants, the follow-up

I woke up at 4:00 this morning and writhed -- writhed, I am telling you -- at the thought of the people who might read that post from last night and think, "Perhaps a better strategy than inhabiting your authority is in order, Jamie." I remembered the day I met Kira, when my daughter beaned her daughter on the head. (More than once.) I thought about the times that my daughter bit my brother's little boy when they were both smaller. She was not the sort of toddler about whom people said, "She's so well-behaved!" 

The point I wanted to make in yesterday's rambly post is that a short-term goal of instant compliance across contexts may be at odds with a long-term goal of thoughtful self-discipline. Like adults, kids need space to feel the consequences of their actions and respond appropriately. (Surely I am not the only one who needs a little time to offer a heartfelt apology, even when I am wrong.) Like adults, kids do better when they feel better. (Ergo, post-swim-lesson preschoolers might take some extra wrangling.) It may seem overly obvious to point out that day by day, kids are turning into adults. It's particularly clear to me given the spacing of my children: if I wouldn't say it to my 18yo, should I say it to my 15yo? to my 12yo? to my 9yo? to my 6yo? They are all heading to the same place, and while they need different responses from me those responses should have the same overarching goal.

I have two children who are temperamentally meek and pliant, and three whose default response to authority is NOPE. We prize meekness and pliancy in preschoolers, forgetting that those kids are more vulnerable to bullying and peer pressure as they grow because they're accustomed to saying yes. There is a place, a critical place, for saying NOPE. So I am muddling through, doing my best to teach the meek kids that there's a time to be less meek and the NOPE kids that yes is usually (but not always) a better response. Some days I still worry that I look like a bad mother. Some days I still worry that I am a bad mother. Some days I still wish it were faster.

Mostly I know that good things take time.

Croissants

One of the blessings of having a large family is that I can see more clearly where I'm going these days.

I knew, intellectually, that I was raising children who would one day live on their own out in the world, but it was so hard for me to feel that truth when my first few children were small. The idea that preschool discipline strategies might shape a future relationship seemed implausible.

It is the worst parenting cliche to say it goes so quickly, but WOW does it go quickly. My firstborn was just 3 years old, like, last week, and he is moving away from home in May: a summer job far from home, and then his freshman year of college. As I see his strengths and weaknesses and the places where we struggle, it shapes the way I am mothering my youngest. I know it's true now: it will actually be 12 years before she goes to college, but it's going to feel like I blinked and it was over.

These thoughts are brought to you courtesy of swimming lessons. Twice a week I find myself in the locker room with parents who are trying to wrangle their little swimmers into dry clothes and out the door. There is a fair amount of unhappiness in the accompanying cacophony. 

I think it's easy to forget that some kids find swimming lessons particularly exhausting. The noisy echoes of an indoor pool make it harder to hear the instructor, amping up the work of listening and following directions. The shallow end is not so shallow for preschoolers, and some of them find it stressful to be immersed there. Skinny little bodies are not as buoyant as well-padded adult bodies, and they may need to work harder at staying afloat. Small kids get colder faster because of their unfavorable volume-surface area ratio, and the locker room can feel like Siberia in January. The noisy echoes of the locker room make it harder to parse a parent's instructions, and the bustle of bodies in various stages of undress is highly distracting. I myself am not at my most cooperative when I am cold and tired and hungry and overstimulated.

These are the things I have been thinking about in the locker room. I am remembering evenings when I was so frustrated after swimming lessons that I could have cried, or punched somebody. I am also observing my own reactions to the Hulk Smash version of Jo Frost, who pops up there with some regularity.

Recently I watched a woman hissing at her slow-moving daughter: "You have CHOSEN to sit on the naughty chair when we get home. Are you going to CHOOSE to sit in the naughty chair even longer? Are you going to CHOOSE to forfeit all your videos? Are you going to CHOOSE to lose your American Girl doll until you learn to behave?" At this point my shoulders were up around my ears and I was twitching. (NB: I have issues -- big, ugly, old old issues -- with adults saying to kids "It is your fault that I am out of control.") I have thought about it again and again, and the thing I keep coming back to is that threats and bribes are not good long-term solutions.

One of the gifts of fifth-time motherhood is that I have learned to inhabit my authority as my daughter's mother -- to say "That is not okay" and expect to be obeyed. I have seen that kids do eventually learn: it feels better to do the right thing than the wrong thing. There is joy in duty, as implausible as it sounds. I have also learned, alas, that there are no reliable shortcuts. Threats may change behavior in the short term. (Or they may not, as I learned from my firstborn. He's the one who said to me, at age 5, "it was one of those 'better to reign in hell than serve in heaven' moments.") Threats don't change hearts.

Today I made croissants with my 12yo. It's a slow process: mixing, rising, turning and chilling to make the flaky layers, cutting, baking. "They were awesome," he said enthusiastically. But I think it is a frozen crescent-roll kind of world, in which we want tips and tricks to get the 2yo up from the locker room floor RIGHT NOW, to make her stop gawking at the naked lady next to us RIGHT NOW, to compel her into her clothes and out the door RIGHT NOW. If I were still in the intransigent 2yo stage I might be annoyed by this post. "What do you MEAN, I should inhabit my authority as her mother?! I just want to eat my DINNER before the next geologic AGE rolls around!"

And I do not mean to say "Moms of America, you're doing it WRONG!" I only mean to say that it will get better, it really will, and that love, and motherly stubbornness, can conquer all. Or at least most.

(O-kay, this post could invite a slew of unhappy comments. If I had not planned to blog daily this month, it would go straight back to the drafts folder. I stumbled across this post earlier today, which contains many of the same thoughts from the perspective of a younger me.)

Follow-up post here, and another with specifics here.

ZETZER

Sarah emailed to ask if I had any ideas about stemming the "tsunami of whining" that has invaded her home. In general, my response to whining is feigned deafness, with a healthy dose of goofy. "What's that? [furrowing of the brow] It... sounds... almost... like... English, but I just don't speak Whining." Or I will sing, "Oh where, oh where, has your pleasant voice gone? Oh where, oh where can it be? You can't get what you want if you whine, my friend, so try your nice voice out on me." (So, yeah, the scansion doesn't quite work. But hey, they're preschoolers.)  If the whining is tsunami-esque and you are pulling out your hair and they are whining even louder, I suggest a different strategy. I call it ZETZER.

I believe that most annoying kid behaviors are incidental -- they just go with the territory. Have you ever shaken your head at a rant from the ranks of the child-free? "Those kids! They were whining! And not listening! And-- and-- breathing to boot!" Part of the work of the early years of motherhood for me was getting it through my thick head that my child was usually not being deliberately annoying.

Occasionally, though, I found that a negative emotional reaction seemed to be weirdly appealing to my oldest son. "Hey, I can't get what I want," he seemed to be thinking, "but neither can you. Fair's fair." Out of desperation, ZETZER was born.

ZETZER stands for ZEro Tolerance, Zero Emotional Response. It started in response to hitting -- I expended so much energy trying to teach my oldest son not to hit. Say what you will about spanking in general, I think it's a bad idea for parents who are dealing with aggression. "No! We don't hit! Hitting is wrong! And to enforce that moral teaching, I'm going to...hit you!" But what to do?

In those days the consequence for hitting was time-out; now I usually require acts of kindness or service. Even a two-year-old can put away his brother's clean socks for him, and I think that right actions can nudge kids toward right thinking. The ZET- part of ZETZER is to be absolutely rock-solid consistent in following up, because the "ignore it and it will go away" approach is not your friend in a tsunami situation. To crib from Barbara Coloroso, what is a practical response to whining that leaves everybody's dignity intact? How can you best send the message that whining is a waste of time because it will never, but never, get you what you want? How can you handle it if they are whining about a need that is actually urgent, and not just a preference that you can safely ignore until they lose the awful torturous gouge-your-eyes-out voice? (It could be as simple as saying matter-of-factly, "You really need [fill in the blank] right away. Next time you need to use a nicer voice to tell me.")

The -ZER part is the harder element for me: I respond to infractions as if I am discussing something as remote and uninteresting as infrastructure improvements in Myanmar. If my negative reaction is feeding a behavior in a kid who enjoys a little chain-yanking, I'm going to starve it out. 

Do not underestimate the difficulty of -ZER. You cannot will yourself not to twitch internally when they do the same STUPID thing YET AGAIN. You can only choose to moderate your visible response, a practice I find exhausting when the problem behavior is at tsunami level. In advance, figure out a place to vent your frustration -- a friend, perhaps, who will not be alarmed by a Krakatoan cloud of invective. Don't try ZETZER when you've got a looming deadline, or when the weather is going to keep you stuck indoors for three days, or when you anticipate hormonal chaos. Nobody, but nobody, can push my buttons like one of my children. I wish it weren't so, but alas, it is. If it's true for you too, plan accordingly.

If you are thinking about ZETZER, I suggest a little preemptive problem-solving first. Are they whining because bedtime has been late and they're overtired? Are they hitting because they're bored watching you read blogs and negative attention is better than no attention? Are they disobeying flagrantly because things have been tense between you and your husband and they're trying to draw your fire to divert you from fighting? The fewer times you have to respond in a bland and neutral voice to this behavior that's driving you up.the.freaking.wall, the easier it will be for you.

Verb. sap.: I have found that I often see a temporary spike in the target behavior when I begin to work on it assiduously. "We do not hit." Oh, yes, we do. "We do not hit." You just watch me! "We do not hit." Tra la la, were you saying something, Mom? I'm busy smacking my brother over here.

Despite its difficulties, I have found that ZETZER can be really effective when I am caroming toward crazy and my kids seem to get a kick out of pushing the cart toward the cliff. Most of the time, patience and consistency will do the trick with annoying behaviors. But when they are creeping up (or exploding) instead of inching down, ZETZER is my secret weapon.

On Childbearing and Christian Womanhood

"Women will be saved through childbearing," wrote the Apostle Paul in his first letter to Timothy. I puzzled over that verse as a college student, ultimately dismissing it as irrelevant in this culture. If it even made sense -- and my soteriology as a Protestant left me skeptical on that score -- surely it was just a relic of a time when few women had a choice about motherhood.

On a September morning eight years ago I was six months pregnant with my oldest son and I was grumpy. I was tired of eating spinach, tired of avoiding chocolate, tired of Kegel exercises, tired of night leg cramps. I had a constant backache and a tender vein in one leg that had been bothering me more and more often. Driving to work that morning I flung back my head and bellowed, "I'm too young to have varicose veins!"

And out of nowhere that verse from 1 Timothy smacked me right between the eyes. My views on salvation had changed (Catholics see it as a process rather than an event), and I realized that pregnancy and childbirth offered a unique opportunity to follow the example of Christ. With my own body, I could give life to another person. Instead of complaining, I could say, "Here is my body, offered for you." When I learned that mother's milk is synthesized from a mother's blood, it completed the picture: here is my blood, given for you.

This post began in response to a recent post of Summer's about how pregnancy changes a woman's body. (I'm running in a completely different direction here, Summer; hope you don't mind!) One of my sons left a web of silver lines on my belly. Another left a small blue spider on the back of my thigh. Some days I wonder if my breasts are taking the direct route to the antipodes without the rest of me.

But here's the thing: most of what I know about patience and generosity I have learned as a mother. The "opening of the womb" was also an opening of the heart, an initiation into a kind of love I could not have imagined before I experienced it.

A friend of mine went to confession once and said, "You know, every time I'm here I'm talking about how selfish I am. Why can't I get past it?" The priest (who knew her very well -- he would not have said this to a random penitent so don't freak out) said, "You know what the cure for selfishness is, don't you?" "What?" my friend asked eagerly. He told her: have a baby.

When my first son was born I was transformed into a person who would instantly dive in front of a bus if it could save his life. I suddenly knew with my heart and my gut, not just my head, that someone else's needs took precedence over mine. I don't look or sound much like a mama bear. But there it was: I would gladly have done anything for that little boy.

The defining moment of motherhood for me is stomach virus time. When one of my children climbs into my lap and says, "Mama, I don't feel good," seconds before he pukes all over both of us, my first reaction is, "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry you feel bad." Only after the child is more comfortable do I think about starting the laundry and washing the vomit out of my hair. I'm not saying this boastfully because it's not something I've cultivated. It's a gift, a gift that has challenged my whole Weltanschauung. When I think of the greatest commandment I have to ask myself: do I love my neighbor as I love my children?

Mothering my children pushes me constantly to be more of a grown-up: to moderate my tendency to be dramatic, remembering that my children need me to set a peaceful example; to be willing to see the best in a child who is pushing my buttons more adroitly than anyone else on the planet can; to respond wisely to the octotrigintillionth sibling conflict of the day. (Oops -- what was I just saying about drama?)

I don't mean to make it sound like motherhood is all about self-sacrifice, though; my children make me laugh out loud every day. And when I see my youngest one wiping the oldest one's tears, or when the oldest offers unbidden to share the last granola bar with the four-year-old, they give me hope that they will grow into men who make the world a gentler place. Because of my children, I have seen more of the brightness and beauty and breadth of this world than I ever knew I could. If a saggy belly is the price I pay, I say it's a bargain.

(Candor compels me to note that I would never have done all those thousands of elevator Kegels if I had never been pregnant. Some might argue that a toned pubococcygeus muscle more than compensates for saggy abs, but let us not linger in TMI territory. While we're on the subject of pleasant pregnancy surprises I should add that my subsequent pregnancies have been way more comfortable than the one in '96. I remember wondering at the time how many children I could hope to have if pregnancy was going to be so miserable. I shouldn't have borrowed trouble; it's been easier ever since.)

A few disclaimers are probably needed here: some of the women who find their way here are infertile, and I do not mean for it to sound as if I think bearing children is the one route to holiness, or the surest route to holiness, or the preferred route to holiness. Many women have vocations other than motherhood; some mothers choose not to answer the call to grow along with their children. Also: I am no theologian and I am not equipped to debate Paul's views on women. And: my selfishness has not been cured; I am in that confessional regularly seeking grace to be more patient with my boys. Finally: I do not mean to suggest that mothers who adopt or mothers who bottle-feed are somehow less than mothers who birth and breastfeed their babies.

But I know that in the physical work of bearing and rearing my children, too often disparaged as just diapers and dirty noses, there are transcendent moments mixed with the mundane. A comparison: in 1996 my mother-in-law gave me a small ceramic dish she had purchased for use in a Mass. As a Catholic I believe that in the Eucharist Jesus is physically present, body and blood, soul and divinity. That dish is now a sacred vessel because in it the One who contains the whole of creation, the One in whom we live and move and have our being, chose to be contained. In those eight years we have never had a home Mass, but with each of our moves I have kissed it reverently and packed it carefully. Before our last move I was pruning our belongings recklessly, feeling hurried and harried. When I came to the shower curtain I had used in Joe's birth, I stopped in my tracks. I pressed it to my cheek -- and I do not say this lightly -- with an echo of the same feeling I have about that sacred vessel: right here, love incarnate -- enfleshed -- appeared. This ordinary object was the scene of a breathtaking transformation.

Summer's post about a plastic surgeon's wife who was afraid her second pregnancy would wreck her body put me in mind of something Scott Hahn said to his wife Kimberly. He told her, "Your body says you have loved me enough to bear my children." Put that in your pipette and ponder it, Dr. 90210. It made me realize something important: if you could stand the 17-year-old me next to the 34-year-old me there would be no question about which one of us looked better in a bathing suit.

There would also be no question about which one I'd rather be.