Monthly Archives: July 2007

Pedantic and Pushy

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As someone who has worked most of my sentient life to be more gentle and responsive (mainly because I had such a long road to walk in this area) I have always been a bit sensitive to the label of being pushy or bossy.

(This, of course, presupposes I wasn’t attempting to be either at the time of the observation.)

I don’t want to be rude, but I do want to be understood, and as long as I have the energy I won’t pretend to agree or it that doesn’t matter, when there’s a dispute of fact or emotional honesty.

If any reader has not heard me say it before, I strongly believe silence (in the vast majority of cases) is seen as agreement. Even permission.

If someone makes a joke at your expense and you don’t voice that it bothers you, watch out– you’ve tacitly given approval for that to repeat.

So when I’m trying to communicate something, I don’t (usually) like to quit before my point is made.

Tonight’s point, courtesy my gradually increasing awareness of Belarus: Belarus is distinct from Russia.

I was talking with someone about my story and she kept referring to the story as Russian. I protested/corrected that the right name was Belorussian (or some variant on that).

And in four or five iterations on a theme I continued insisting, no, they are not, and haven’t been, and are distinct, in their own culture, and background, from Russia.

“I’m not trying to be pushy,” I said, feeling horribly embarrassed to be arguing after so little time spent researching, but convinced and not ready to back down.

My interlocutor didn’t say she thought I was pushy (Mom did, though she clarified later that wasn’t bad). The woman did call me pedantic.

Not that that’s better, as the topic was already narrow and I hope I wasn’t “ostentatious.”

Why does this matter to me so much? I had to ask myself. And the answer came out more emotionally charged than I expected.

I have alway felt heartache for Korea– I know little about its now but I’m a bit more familiar with its past because of my folktale collecting. Best as I can tell it has been almost continually occupied or “influenced.” Many times horribly oppressed, it somehow maintained its own ethnic identity.

I had made the parallel leap to Belarus– though I’m sure it’s not unique in this position of maintaining identity through continued oppression.

If I didn’t already have the emotional connection to Korea, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but I did, so I just couldn’t let it go.

Finally, far past wishing the conversation was over, but feeling the point needed to be clear, I said, “Belarus is the European Korea. You can’t call it Russia any more than you can call Korea China or Japan because of their occupation or control.”

~

C.S. Lewis in his Mere Christianity argued that no impulse is utterly good or bad, some just need curbing more often than others, resulting in a negative label.

With both mother-love and sexual impulses there are situations where an excess is unhealthy, but that doesn’t make the impulses themselves wicked.

In a similar way “pedanticism” and pushiness more often than many other things must be curbed, resulting in my assumption that they are bad.

While discussing the incident with my mom later that evening she reminded me that, really, sometimes you need to be pushy to get something done.

I needed to be pushy because it was important to me, to be understood.

I appreciated her helping me think through this, because I’m still learning the maturity to evaluate the less-desirable behaviors and decide when they are appropriate.

No doubt there was, somewhere, a more mature way of handling the conflict that arose this evening. But as things fell out, my mind is now working in new directions, and I’ve usually found that to be healthy.

And, often, this opening of a new way of thinking becomes a training ground for the real-stakes event. Something where I have to know how to apply what I’ve learned.

Kind-of turns up the pressure to be an attentive student…

Work is Not Abuse

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More and more now, as I tell stories to my children, I find myself changing the Cinderella figure’s relationship with work.

This began more than a year ago, with that bad Hansel and Gretel rewrite we got rid of.

In that version Gretel knew the owner of the cookie house was a witch because she made the children work. My husband was very offended by this, and always changed that line to one emphasizing the importance of doing your share of the work.

~

This last Christmas, the girls were given a collection of “Disney Princess” stories.

I actually have very little problem with the Disney versions of things, mainly because I think my kids get enough other tales that these are just additional variants and do not dominate the story landscape.

Snow White was a favorite for a while, but again I was bothered by the idea that having to work hard all day was the worst thing that could happen to you.

When Natasha became excited about having her own little house to take care of someday, “like Snow White,” I said, “Wasn’t it a good thing she had to work for her step-mother in the beginning? That’s how she knew what to do when she finally had her own place.”

Natasha was delighted with the idea, and this observation about the value of practicing work worked its way into every telling, question and response.

~

Lately, while I will include work as part of her mistreatment, I try to place the emphasis on this as one way the others were unkind. The complete list included refusing to do their part of the work, not including the poor heroine, and cutting her off from basic comforts and relational encouragement.

Someone will say I’m over analyzing, or working too hard at this, but the shift only takes a few lines, and I’ve always believed a child’s stories do a lot to shape her attitudes, so they deserve a deal of thought.

I really want my children to realize the significance of cutting off someone from relationship, or leaving them to carry the full load alone. These are parts of unkindness, just like cruel words and too-little food.

Work is something they will be doing all their lives, and my goal is to help them understand it as a meaningful, shared necessity.

It is something of value, not necessarily because we enjoy it, but definitely because we benefit from the results, and because it is a gift we can offer to others.

Remembering and Missing

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I am exactly one year out from the intense-est two weeks of my life. The two weeks I watched my grandmother (and mother) in the hospital before my grandmother died.

(If observing someone process all that is actually of interest, you may visit the archives to read the end of July last year.)

It was a surreal, intense, time, as I was adjusting both to the arrival of my third child and to the idea of losing an important fixture in my life.

~

When my second baby was born, two weeks after my grandfather died, my grandma spent several mornings a week at my house. She helped me in my goal of allowing my 17 1/2-month-old to continue being a baby.

It was something Grandma felt she denied her own 17 1/2-month-old when her next baby arrived.

She came, and held babies, and swept carpets (my vacuum was too heavy for her), until that amazing day when my baby-baby was 3 months old and I realized I had managed both the children and the house alone. Managed them competently and well.

During those same adjusting weeks with #3, I was calling around for babysitters to watch my girls a couple mornings a week so I could spell my mom, who was now living at the hospital with Grandma.

~

We always had someone beside her bed, to take care of the myriad of little things a person needs, but someone like Grandma would go without before she called a nurse in for help.

I borrowed a rolling infant bed from the birthing wing, so I’d have a place to lay my miraculously sleeping baby for the hours I was with Grandma.

And Grandma and I would talk. About everything that was on her mind or mine.  Talk like we’d done for months before we’d even thought of hospitals.

Only with my husband have I had a deeper communion of thought
with another human being.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116
Shakespeare

Kids and Questions– Update

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(Check out Rocks in my Dryer for more parenting WFMW tips.)

I shared my tips for dealing with kid questions a couple months ago, and wanted to give a bit of an update, having written about those things as I was only beginning to use them.

I’m a believer. These are tips that still work for my kids.

More than anything else, turning the questions back to them when I don’t have an easy answer (or when I know they know the answer) has been an awesome tactic.

It’s taken on a new life too, because it’s sort-of “taught” them to create a segue to change the subject (Hey, I’m still learning how to do that graciously) and now the girls will ask a question when they want to talk about a topic. Great skill to practice, especially starting so young.

For a while now (I’ve been sick and tired– read: thinking slower– these last three weeks or so) they’ve been asking questions and been ready and waiting with whatever it was they want to say.

When I’m too tired to answer and ask them, “What do you think?” they dive right in, eager and delighted for the opening.

It really is nice, this moving into a feeling of “real” conversation. Maybe embryonic conversation, at times.

Now if we could only find a way to get them to drop their “place-holding” sounds (uh-ah-um-um-ah) while they’re thinking what exactly they want to say…

It’s really hard to say “take as long as you need” when you know the long-as-you-need will be entirely filled with that increasingly frantic noise.

Sometimes it seems related to the impulse to speak louder when someone doesn’t understand your language. When they feel they’re not being understood they try to hold the floor longer and get louder and louder as they search for the missing information.

In those times I always feel torn between my impulse to supply the word and the advice that says children need to struggle in order to learn how to think for themselves.

Just now I’m trying to remember a 7-second rule. It runs that many children (thinking more slowly than adults, as they have less-experienced minds) require up to 7-seconds to make some connections.

If I give her that long she usually comes up with what she needs. If she hasn’t got the word(s) by then, hearing them is a relief.

The Wonder– a Tuesday Tale

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From Gary Schmidt’s book, Mara’s Stories: glimmers in the darkness.

Framed within a story of a rabbi’s daughter telling tales in a death camp during WWII, all the tales are a mix flavored by older ideas and images, and embedded in the un-ignorable “now” of Jewish oppression and the camps.

Chiam (whose name means life) had just lost his father, and now his faith. Immersed in the destruction and death of the camps the boy fought to simply stay empty.

This particular morning Chiam had an assignment, and waited in the mud with a line of other boys and old men for his turn to help carry a huge vat of watery soup back to the barracks.

When he stepped forward he saw it was his own rabbi who would be helping him carry the load back through the cold and slippery yard.

Somehow the rabbi knew at once that Chiam had lost faith, and gently probed the boy’s wounded loss, insisting,

“He is the all and ever-present. He is here… even in this place.”

Chiam resisted the suggestion.

“I have seen the world, Rabbi, and I know that God cannot be here.”

“What would God have to do,” asked the rabbi, “to prove Himself to you, young Chiam who has seen so much of the world?”

“He would have to make a wonder, Rabbi. God would have to make a wonder.”

As they talked and walked, the muddy ground grew more and more treacherous underfoot. As they approached the steps of the barracks the old rabbi’s grip slipped and hot soup sloshed on the shins of the guard at the door.

Chiam braced himself for the blows he knew would come next. He knew the old man would be killed for his clumsiness, and maybe Chiam too. The boy felt ready to welcome death in such an empty and meaningless world.

But two heartbeats, then three, passed without the guard looking at them. The rabbi steadied himself and they entered the barracks together and setting down the vat of soup.

Chiam looked up into his rabbi’s face, eyes shining with a new hope. The old man leaned forward, cupping the back of Chiam’s neck in his hand, and drawing the boy forward until their foreheads touched.

“Even here,” the rabbi whispered. “In this place.”

Growing through 2 Peter 1:5-8

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This actually came up in Sunday School several weeks ago, but I was thinking of it again and wanted to share it.

In 2 Peter chapter 1, the author reminds us that God’s “divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness,” then goes on to list a progression:

Make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.

As the mother of young children who’ve made a confession of faith, I suddenly saw this differently than I had before.

I saw this as a list of spiritual development paralleling stages of natural development.

The girls have each made a confession of faith, so that is their starting place. In this new context, with the Spirit’s help, they are now learning goodness.

As a few more years go by their main occupation will become their schooling (adding knowledge). Then, I see this exponentially applying to the adolescent years, they add in increased self-control.

As a young adult (I want to say especially as a young parent) we add endurance, because I think we never truly learn how much we can be stretched until “child(ren)” happens to us.

I see godliness as something we all are working toward, but that we see most consistently in, well, in people older than me.

As a tendency to base the majority of your behaviors off of obedience to a very clear understanding of what God would have us do, I see godliness as something that takes a bit of familiarity with the Word and sensitivity to God’s leading in your life.

Something, in short, most visible with spiritual maturity.

And to finish with the brotherly kindness and love, I think this is the natural progression of our interaction with others. Initially (and this is where I’m at in teaching my children right now), we choose to be kind, because it’s the right, God-honoring thing to do.

Ultimately, we want everything we do to be motivated by love.

When we are genuinely doing everything out of a pure love, that, I believe is the measure of maturity.

9-Month-Old Issues

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This advice may or may not be good enough to return to. But I spent some time putting it all down is someone else’s “comments,” and figured I would tuck it away in my archives for future reference.

The main content is in response to a three questions raised by the mother of a 9-month-old:

  1. Katherine frequently screeches as loudly as she can…I’ve been trying to figure out why and if there’s a pattern…it seems to be when she’s frustrated or mad or annoyed. Is there any way I can teach her not to do this? And/or teach her a better way of expressing herself?
  2. She has started squirming all over the place when I try to change her diaper or her clothes. When I lay her on her back, she flips to her tummy and scoots away. How can I train her to hold still while I’m changing her?
  3. She’s really mobile and crawls like a sprinter. She loves to explore and get into everything…especially the cats’ food and water dishes. We have a Pack-n-Play, but that’s where she sleeps at night, so I don’t want to use it as a play pen – I want to keep her play space and her sleeping space separate in her mind. I feel like I can’t get anything that requires thinking done while she’s awake because I’m constantly diverting one disaster after another. I’ve taken to staying up wicked late to work on things after M and K are asleep, but then I wind up tired and grouchy in the morning…because as soon as Katherine wakes up, I’m up for good too.

My response:

For “physical discipline” before K is ready for “flicks” or whatever, I defer to a friend of mine who primarily uses immobilization (e.g. holding her hands between yours) for a number of counts.

As Kathy points out, the primary purpose of disciple is memorable discomfort (I think she actually uses the word pain, but it doesn’t have to be painful (in the literal sense) to be memorable.

That said, I wouldn’t use “discipline” for any of these three issues yet. Not at 9-months.

For #1, definitely start working on the please sign. This should cut down on the frustrated screeches.

However it will do nothing for the “thwarted” (my preschoolers are quite familiar with this word) screeches or the “I’m glad I’m alive and have found my voice” screeches that are delightful in their own way, but never comfortable in the hard-surfaces (loud) home I understand you to have.

For the times when you don’t like the attitude of the screeches (I did this with a wild 3-y-o just a night ago, so it has broad application) you can Puh! a pop of air in her face (instant/temporary mute) and use your cue-phrase. Ours is “low voice” and we still use it with our older kids when the volume gets just too big.

When it’s a happy screech you can encourage clapping, “wah-wah” her mouth with your hand or hers to break up the sound and/or encourage a new one, or model a lower pitch to express delight. (pitch exchanging, like sound-copying/exchanging is a good thing to do with your kiddo).

You could introduce (though expect it to take decades to nail-down) the concept of indoor-voice, allowing special play-time outside to use/encourage the outdoor voice.

#2: Never make her go through a diaper change empty-handed.

Yes, sometimes the squirming is defiance, but sometimes is the roar of “No fair! You’ve got candy (mobility) when I don’t!” And that will drown out *any* attempt at discipline. She only knows she can’t do what she wants most in the world.

Give the kid something to do. Be creative. It will be a long time before she understands the delayed gratification diaper changes are an example of.

This is the age I wouldn’t flick/slap yet, not even if you think it’s defiance. I do all my diaper-changes on the floor, and (when necessary) I hold down the upper body with my feet.

Side note: I think if you start the physical discipline too soon, the child learns too soon it’s your big gun, and how if they can tough-it-out it’ll unnerve the parent.

This isn’t the age where you want to be asking yourself, “Am I hitting hard enough? Do I need to do it more?” when (and she won’t yet– I think this is still too young to truly make the connection) she doesn’t modify her behavior in line with your efforts.

#3 Get an ergo. All the stuff about 3rd-world moms being wonderful b/c they wear their babies all the time is connected (in my mind at least) to the reality that most of them don’t have other options– who wants to set their babies down in an un-safe place?

That may sound snarky about those moms (I don’t mean it that way of course), but praising necessity… well, it has its purposes I guess…

You may already have a challenge getting started with this, because I don’t know if K’s been “confined” regularly up to this point, but the earlier you start the “Normaler” this will be for her.

As long as you’re actively working around the house (and afraid she’ll get into trouble), I’d say wear her.

Definitely for “witching hour” (that challenging time of dinner and transition in the afternoon/evening) if no other time, you’ll find it useful to have her on your body.

As to letting her play in bed, I differ from what seems to be general consensus so far. I think she should play there at least a bit.

Baby Whisperer brings it up, and I think it’s valid, that you want baby to have positive associations with her bed, and if you can get her used to being there as a play place (depending on her personality) you may get more sleep time because she won’t feel the need to get out to start playing. A few crib-safe toys or (eventually) a snack-trap of cheerios could keep her entertained that blessed 5-15 minutes extra your snooze button doesn’t offer any more.

Naturally you want to keep those play times as obviously distinct from sleep times as possible, and I wouldn’t use the bed for time-out’s or any punishments for that same reason– wanting to keep as positive an association as possible with bed.

And, yeah, I know that’s long, but you did ask. ;-)

Write Like a Man

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Kaye introduced me to The Gender Genie a while back and I thought some visitors here might be interested in my results.

I tested my novel (the opening chapters at least) and they came back accurately guessed to be written by a female. So, as there was a “blog post” catigory, I started playing with random posts to check the genie’s continued accuracy.

I found the results interesting, and possibly inflammatory, depending on who wants to interpret them.

The personal story/relational ones I checked came back with the guess they were written by a female:

And my analytical/practical advice stuff came back with the guess it was written by a male:

ETA: I checked a number of my male-centered Tuesday Tales and these also came back as male-written.

I find this somewhat gratifying, maybe for the same reason no woman wants to hear “You throw like a girl,” when playing a sport with men.

Going beyond basic politeness, I like to be able to hold my own and prove myself a reasonably competent participant on the neutral terms (i.e., by the rules) even if they might be a bit skewed to begin with (we all know that the strongest man will always be stronger than the strongest woman).

And I’m speaking literally here, so, please, nobody pick a fight. I’ll ignore it. ;)

Mama Tip– Pedialyte

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If you have a kid (or a spouse) who’s been sick, odds are you’ve been told to push fluids– especially Pedialyte. The main problem: they have to include suggestions on how to make it more palatable.That’s how simply nasty the stuff tastes.

The last time I was forced to think about this I bought some Pedialyte of the “unflavored” variety and mixed it (instead of water) with apple juice concentrate.

No complaints and great compliance. Works for me!

Power?

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There was an excuse for soft-porn in the paper the other day.

It was an article about sex-is-power, and had images from a “girl-band tryout” and a several-years-old image of an (also) under dressed Britney Spears. I was thankful the pictures were B&W, but it still floored me they fronted a newspaper section (okay, so it was both surprising and not that the paper would do it).

Jay and I both read the whole article.  It talked about the wave of exhibitionism on youTube and other places, and how “sexy” is the path to *power* in today’s world– and how these young women will do anything to feel powerful.

At the end of the article all I could feel was hollow, and sad. I didn’t really feel like it was inaccurate. On some level I felt that it was rubbing in my personal powerlessness as an (average-looking) mom, knowing that even well-written words are not going to compete with images for the minds of “the masses.”

But more than that, and at the top of my mind enough to be the first thing out of my mouth when Jay and I finally could speak again, was, “No wonder the elderly have no power in this society.”