Get Prepared

Most mornings my kids get up early.  They have plenty of time to wash, get dressed, eat breakfast, practice instruments and homework, and still usually have plenty of time left to play, all before school.  Why then, do we end up scurrying around like mice three minutes before the school bell rings each weekday trying to make it out the door in time to run to school without being tardy?

I think it has to do with overconfidence.  They get so proud of themselves for doing their morning chores without being prompted that they pat themselves on the back, and kick back on Easy Street to relax the morning away.  Conversely, I start each morning quizzing them if they’re on track in their morning routines, and am usually pleasantly surprised to find out they’ve already completed most all of their morning tasks.  I then congratulate them on a job well done and go about busying  myself with some other task that needs done.  We all then look at the clock in horror five minutes prior to the school bell time, realizing everyone still has to hit the bathroom, find shoes, coats, and book bags before we can leave to sprint to school.

It’s the same every day.  No matter how early or late we get up, or how much we prepare the night before, we’re always manic for a few minutes before leaving because we’re not totally prepared.  It makes no sense how we start out so strong and then fizzle out in the preparations.  It’s like singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and getting all the way down to 1 remaining bottle and not finishing out the chorus.  It’s like spending all day hanging outdoor lights and then never turning them on.  It’s like taking the time to write a book and then never trying to publish it.  It’s nutty.

My gut instinct is to get angry with my kids and ask them what they’ve been doing that they’re not ready to go to school.  Then I look down at my own pajamas and bare feet and wonder what I’ve been doing that I’m not ready to walk them to school.  I realize they’ve learned their preparation techniques from me.  How can you not pick up my smooth moves when you’re faced with it every day?

When invited to the Mother Daughter cookie exchange I immediately have my daughter pick out the cookie recipes, quickly scan the ingredients needed so I can jot down the things I need at the grocery, and buy them 2 weeks in advance so I’ll be ready to roll on the day of the party.  I get so confident in my prep work, though, that on cookie-making day, I realize I don’t have the pan I need to make them, and send my daughter to the neighbors upstairs to borrow a pan.  Relieved we don’t’ have to run out to buy one, I quickly realize I have no parchment paper, and then run to the neighbor across the street to borrow that.  Finally fully prepared to bake, I get the layer cookies in the over, leaving myself 30 minutes to prep the next layer that will be added as soon as they come out of the oven.  Impressed with my own ability to pull off the first half of the layer cookies, I spend this prep time doing dishes and busy work, so that when they come out of the oven, the whole family has to be drawn in to scramble to chop the chocolate that needs to be melted on top of the piping hot cookie base layer.

Maybe it’s self-created drama, this preparing almost to completion, then leaving the last step undone, so as to elicit intentional hysteria in the 11^th hour.  Maybe it’s learned behavior, as I’ve witnessed my mom doing the same type of stuff both when I was a child and now as an adult myself. Maybe it’s genetically encrypted in my makeup, as I can’t help but think of my dad’s recurring taunt that Heredity is a Bitch.  Or maybe it’s just what it appears to be where we get proud of ourselves for accomplishing so much so quickly that we then overcompensate by backing off too intensely. 

Whatever it is, I wouldn’t actively change it if I could.  While I love the idea of always being on time, fully prepared, and ready for action, the reality is that life doesn’t happen that way. Life in general is messy and unpredictable, with lots of curveballs being thrown.  If my kids are always ready for school on time and never have to hustle to beat the bell because we’re too busy futzing around at home, will they ever have the wherewithal as teens to run after a bus they just missed, filled with the possibility that they just may be able to catch up with it at the next stop?  If they never have to settle for one blue sock and one black because there’s no time to find the matched set, will they ever be able to improvise in the moment when a full cup of java is spilled on their work suit on the way into a client meeting?  If my kids didn’t forget their lunch or homework or show and tell every so often and be forced to deal with the ramifications of hunger, punishment, and embarrassment, would they ever learn how to handle life’s bigger disappointments like failure and loss?

Maybe, just maybe, the lack of preparedness my kids are learning from my actions, is actually helping them prepare for life on their own one day.  Whether they keep my trait or they've already decided that this one quality is going to be the thing they handle differently as adults than their parent did when they were kids, they're unconsciously growing into the adults they'll one day become.

They Listen All Right!

My eternal complaint with my kids is that they don’t listen to me.  At school, at other’s homes and in the presence of my family, my daughters mostly pay attention, follow instruction, and respond appropriately to requests.  It’s in my presence where they seem to turn their listening ears off.  I am forever badgering my girls to listen to me.

“Please listen to me and do as I ask,” I warn them on a regular basis, in response to an initial request of shutting the door, turning off the light, or bringing the noise level down a notch, being blown off.  While the even yet stern tone of my voice usually grabs their attention, it doesn’t always yield an immediate action.  Sometimes they’re having so much fun doing whatever they’re doing, that they feel it’s just not possible for them to pull away at that moment.

Today’s laundomat excursion followed that line of thinking.  The girls helped separate the clothes, pre-treat the stains, and load the washers.  They sat on a high folding table together, reading Highlights and playing Go Fish.  After spending their quarter rewards on bouncing balls from the toy dispenser, they got a little rambunctious playing hide and seek in the empty Laundromat.

To keep them from getting so wound up that someone gets injured, I asked them to help me with gathering up the clean clothes and getting them to the car.  They took turns filling the big portable carts with baskets of clothes and supplies and wheeling them to the car.  When my eldest came in to snatch the last basket of clothes to put in the cart, so she could do the final trip to the car, I asked her to instead collect the wet clothes that were hanging on the various carts to dry, and take them out to the car.  As I was folding the last of the clean dry clothes, she ran back in to ask me what to do again with the clothes. 

Sometimes I think she hears what I say, but doesn’t always process the words in her head, so I frequently ask her, like I did today, to think back to what I had asked, and then do what I asked, instead of me repeating the request.  She seemed to remember the task about the wet clothes, but still didn’t remember where to put them.

“Just anywhere is fine, honey,” I responded.  “It doesn’t matter.”

When I came out to meet the girls in the parking lot, 5 items of hang-dry-only clothing were draping the outside of the car, drying casually in the sun.  I started to ask what in the Sam Hill is going on but then caught myself as I remembered my own words. 

My daughter was so proud of herself for coming up with the idea of finding a place for the wet clothes where they would also get dry, that I swallowed my laughter, and praised her for the creativity in her solution. 

Never mind that the clean wet clothes were draped over the filthy, dirty car that had just transported us over 2000 miles in the past ten days.  Forget the idea that as recently as last night, the girls were squealing with fear over the hundreds of bugs that were covering the roof and hood of the car after parking in a knat-infested lakefront motel parking lot.  The point is that my girls DO in fact listen to me.  They also do what I freakin’ ask!

Recognize Your Impact

As parents, we are usually aware, in the moment, of those occasions that define us as good parents and those that render us bad parents.  Giving your child a shoulder to cry on when he faces his first disappointment, without weighing in your two cents on the matter = good parent.  Leaving your child sitting on a bench at the bus stop in town while you score some dope a few streets over = bad parent.  The extremes are no-brainers.  It’s the in-between occurrences, which make up the majority of interactions with our kids, we don’t always recognize as having the ability to mold our children’s perceptions.    Chastising your child because she doesn’t know how to decipher between the various tools in the toolbox = ambiguous. 

“Goddammit, Stacy, it’s the Phillips head I need, not the flat head,” my dad yelled at the 8-year–old version of me, from underneath the ’79 Buick, when I handed him the straight-edged tool. 

I was running in and out of the garage bringing tools to my dad, trying to help him with his task of getting the car back up and running.  A natural fixer of all things broken, he was trying to impart some fix-it knowledge onto me by letting me be his assistant for the job.  Unfortunately, what I took from that day was that I was a dumbass for not knowing the difference between the two screwdrivers.  Even as a kid, I knew I was smart, so I wasn’t concerned about not being bright enough to know the difference between the two tools. I was simply upset that I had disappointed my dad. 

Fast forward thirty-some years and I create the same scene with my own child.  I use my 8-year-old daughter’s previous attempt at dusting as an example of how not to dust the house.

“Do you seriously think this clean?” I ask her incredulous.   “If you’re going to do a half-assed job, I’d rather you not help at all.”

Same shit, different year. 

Before I even looked over to see the hurt look in her eyes, I knew the harm I had caused.  I had just hammered her with disapproval.  A super sensitive kid with a sincere want to always be helpful, as well as a need to please, she amazingly held it together for what I thought might be the rest of the evening.  I continued my sweeping, until I opened her bedroom door a few minutes later and found her curled up in my girlfriend’s arms, crying her heart out. 

All the kid was trying to do was help.  In fact, during family cleaning hour, her task was supposed to be mopping, as she loves to mop.  My youngest daughter couldn’t seem to wrap her head around her own dusting assignment and had sauntered off to play dollies, so my older daughter had offered to stand in for her, taking on the additional responsibility.  It was while performing this act of kindness that I spewed such harsh words at her. 

Once she calmed down, I apologized for my harsh words and asked for her forgiveness. 

“It’s OK, Mom,” she said in her sad little voice.  “It’s just not fair that I was just trying to help you and you yelled at me,” she said as her almost-swollen-shut eyes welled up with tears yet again.

No, it’s not OK and it’s not fair.  No amount of stress or craziness is an excuse for taking out your angst on your kids, especially over a dust job!  Enough of those types of interactions with a parent can cause not only problems in parent-child relationships, but also can crack away at the self-esteem of children. 

 

In trying to figure out how I got the breaking point where I would yell at my kid over something as unimportant as her dusting skills, I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how I got there.  I just needed to stay the hell away from that point in the future.  The truth of the matter is that no matter how many bits of useful knowledge and skill that my dad has passed down to me over the years, like bleeding the brakes on my car and taking apart my computer and replacing the parts before putting it back together again, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of his ability to fix things is the inadequacy I felt when he yelled at me over the freakin’ screwdriver thirty-some years ago.  I pray that I have not etched my daughter’s memory bank with the same feelings of deficiency over the dust rag.  

Odds are, the damage has already been done.  The good news is that if I’ve done my job right as a parent so far, like my parents did with me, my kids will grow up unscathed by my occasional lapses in parental judgment, and will be able to decipher between a bad parenting interaction and a bad parent.  Only time will tell.

Time Without Fanfare

The washer hasn’t been right for months now.  We live in an apartment and the landlord has been informed.  He’s not jumping through hoops to get anyone out here to assess the damage anytime soon.  I’ve had the machine rigged for weeks.  The Bic pen point stuck into the chamber that usually accepts the lid post, keeps the washer running through the cycles.  Without the pen, the cycle stops right before the rinse cycle, leaving the washer full of dirty water and clothes.  The smell is enough to make you seriously consider ever wearing that outfit a second time!

This week, the machine took a turn for the worse. I knew something was amiss when I noticed the pen cap had laying on the top the dryer.  It looked as if it had been chewed off the machine by a rabid K-9, by the looks of the twisted metal.  My neighbor’s clothes were fully submerged in stagnant water that smelled as if it had been marinating for days.  After lamenting over the fact that it had to be this week, the week of the broken washer, that my toddler had an accident overnight which required an immediate change of bedding that I did not own, that I decided to walk away from the machine.

I loaded the sheets, blankets, and covers into the car, along with the kids and the rest of the dirty laundry from the week.  We headed out for what I always remember to be, an unpleasant experience, at the laundrymat.  I asked the kids to bring a backpack of coloring books and crayons to keep them occupied while we waited.  Little did I know the backpack would be unnecessarily taking up space in my car, as those girls didn’t even have time to open it.

From the moment we parked the car, the girls were unloading baskets of clothing and cleaning supplies, transferring it all to those big wire baskets on wheels, and choosing machines that would correctly house the loads.  We talked about what the machines do, how much they hold, and why they exist.  They surveyed the articles of clothing, learned how to pre-treat the stains, and had a ball loading up the machines with laundry.  They chose wash cycles based on colors, read instructions on the machines, and poured out detergent to the little line on the cap.  My eldest daughter carried around a detergent cap filled with quarters and the two girls took turns filling the slots with coins when it was time to turn the machine on.  The three of us worked together, moving like a swarm of bees from machine to machine, chit-chatting about laundry and life, taking time to point out the cool gadgets on the machines, and what television shows were playing in the background, until six loads of laundry had been completed. 

My kids have never done laundry before.  At three and eight, it’s completely feasible that the eldest could have been doing her own laundry for a few years, like some of her friends.  She hadn’t, though.  She’s never looked at a machine, asked to pour the detergent, or voiced any curiosity about the laundry process whatsoever. They don’t want to come near the basement in our building, which houses the washer and dryer, because it’s dark, dirty, and damp.  They’ve most certainly never offered to help.  Shame on me, as I’ve most certainly never asked for their assistance!  What’s more astounding is that I hadn’t asked them for their company.

We had more real conversation in the hour and a half we were at the laundrymat than we’ve had in the past two days of bike-riding, swimming, and playing Go Fish.  We talked about things that matter, like how many quarters it takes to equal $2, and how many minutes it will take to dry a down comforter.  We wondered what type of dessert someone might have spilled to create that type of stain and laughed at the designs the soap bubbles made in the washers.  It’s not the activity that matters, it’s the quality time spent.  When the expectation of “an event” is removed, most folks, including kids, naturally relax and open up.

Sometimes I think we put all this pressure on ourselves as parents to create a rich and varied atmosphere for our kids so they will thrive on the challenge and ingenuity of the activity.  While some of that is important, I’m here to tell you it’s not the activity that matters, it’s the time spent together.  The things kids remember are the experiences with their parents, grandparents, and friends, regardless of the events those experiences were derived from.  Their memories fade of the carnival, the rides, and the treats, but they always make mention of that one time with Pops when they trimmed the trees together.  I truly enjoyed myself with my children today.  After laundry, we went to the post office, the farmers’s market, and the grocery store.  They assumed active roles at each stop, without me asking them to do a thing.  They took pleasure in completing their self-initiated tasks of shopping, checking things off lists, and price-checking.  They took time to window-shop at the farmer’s market for flowers and treats, and they welcomed the responsibility of affixing stamps to the envelopes before dropping them into the mailbox.  I looked at them not only as my children and my companions today, but also as dependable little people.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think they could almost function on their own!  

Kids like being useful and having purpose.  They’re proud of themselves when they learn something new, and most times they enjoy collaborating with others.  Interact with them outside of the formal activities we seem so anxious to plan for them, and you can see that for yourself.  Our kids are people who just want to be part of something, yet we tend to treat them as clients that we need to impress with celebration and sport.  They don’t need the royal treatment.  They just need some of your time.