Changing Gears

The best laid plans sometimes need to be amended.  You plan on taking the bus, but you’re running behind, so you have to grab a cab.  You plan on paying cash for a large purchase, but you don’t have enough “change” to cover the sales tax, so you put it on your card.  You order the sushi special, but it’s sold out, so you settle for a California Roll.  No brainers, right?

Even though I pride myself on my ability to roll with the punches of most situations, the reality is that it’s really hard to change courses on the fly sometimes.  I do well through the decision-making part, as I’m a doer….when things need to get done, I do them.  But then I inevitability immediately mourn the change of plans afterwards.  It’s a vicious cycle that needs to stop.

The entire cab ride is spent silently lamenting the fact that I’m wasting money on a nausea-inducing cab ride all because I decided to flat-iron my hair at the last minute.  The second the debit card is swiped at Target, I kick myself for not grabbing the two extra $20’s that were sitting on the table, as now I’m going to have to make two more stops at home and the bank to even up the accounts.  I have buyer’s remorse the second the waiter leaves the table, as I ALWAYS order the California roll.  Can’t I possibly come up with something I’ve never tried before?

Over the years I’ve gotten better at hiding my agitation at last-minute changes.  I still complain in my head, but I try not to talk about it out loud.  I think if I don’t talk about my compulsive thoughts, they don’t really exist.  They do exist, though, and my face always is a dead giveaway.  The people who know me well can see the wheels turning every time I suddenly alter a plan.  The saving grace is that the pace of our lives is so swift that I don’t have time to linger on the duress because I’m forced to immediately move on to the next topic or decision that’s thrown my way.

Over the weekend, I asked my eldest daughter to take a run with me.  I was desperate for some exercise to clear my head and I knew her mood could use a reboot as well.  She unenthusiastically suited up in her pink running shirt and patterned shorts and moodily met me at the door.  Before we had a chance to lace up our shoes, her friend came to the door to get her bike that was left at our house the day before.  The friend was swimsuit-clad and ready to ride her bike to the neighboring block party we planned on attending later in the day.  Knowing my daughter’s spirit was more likely to be lifted from the waterslide than with our jog and balancing that against my selfish yearning for a few minutes to myself void of conflict with my nine-year-old, I changed gears.  The running clothing was donned for a swimsuit and the bikes were brought out of the garage to the front.  My daughter went on to the party with her friend and I grabbed my music for my solo exercise session.

Not two seconds after the front door shut, I started bullying myself over the change of plans:  my child needed the exercise and it would have set the tone for her day; I gave up the cherished one-on-one time with my child in exchange for some solitude; there’s no need to go to the block party this early in the morning; who’s going to watch her while I’m not there?

I took my grief on the road and headed to the kitchen, where my girlfriend took one look at me and without even asking what I was thinking, said, “Get over it and go on your run!”

I wanted so badly to review the negative implications of the modified schedule with her, but she shooed me out the door, where my anxiety melted away with the first pop lyric that screamed out of my ear buds:  I think I’ve finally had enough, I think I maybe think too much…my head is spinning so blow me one last kiss.  P!nk always says just the right think at the just the right time!

Here’s the gig:  with life coming at us so fast, our maps inevitably change at a moment’s notice.  We can plan and prepare and primp for what we think will happen in the days, weeks, and months ahead, but ultimately we never know exactly how things will pan out.  The only thing we can be certain of is that things will change.  If you can roll with change, you’re as prepared for life as you can be.

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!

Life is a Highway

For the past six weeks, I’ve been absent from my life.  I’ve let the laundry go without washing, allowed the dust to accumulate, and let the dishes stack up.  I haven’t had time to wash the sand out of the kids’ swimsuits or mend the hole in my bra that gives the underwire permission to poke me each day.  I haven’t paid the bills, balanced the checkbook, or planned our road-trip vacation that starts tomorrow.  But worst of all, I’ve plain out ignored my children.  I’ve been here with them, but not so much in a parental role, but in more of a peaceful co-existence.  

My attentive parent hat was replaced with the all-consumed home buyer dunce cap.  Somebody had to take the job, as we need a place to live.  Half of my carefree summer has been eaten up by my full-time house-hunting gig.  Our building owner decided out of the blue to sell the two-flat we live in, and while the sale itself wasn’t a big surprise, the timing of having to move within 60 is stressful, to say the least.

Leisurely walks around the neighborhood pointing out different types of birds and flowers have been substituted with brisk speedwalking down each and every street in the neighborhood, hunting FOR RENT and FOR SALE signs.  Relaxing trips to the beach have been interrupted with quick exits to get to a showing with the real estate agent.  Movie nights with popcorn and M&M’s still happen, but without my presence, as I’m busy negotiating out the terms of the proposed sales contract for our new home.  And finally, early evening bike rides to the DQ have been usurped with harried phone calls to building owners regarding their potential interest to sell their building, when the house deal finally fell through. 

It’s been a necessary step in our journey this summer and I’m guessing I could feel discouraged that we’re back to square one with no apartment to rent and no home to buy.  Ironically, I feel relieved, though.

 I looked at my kids today and listened, for the first time in weeks, to what they were saying.  I hugged them and kissed them, and let them linger in my lap without pushing them away so that I could address a parapet wall repair estimate.  I ate breakfast alongside them without excusing myself before my last bite.  I ran behind them as they rode their bikes as fast as they could, and didn’t even stop to talk to the seller of the building we had been trying to buy, as we ran past her down the block.  I wasn’t even mad at the woman for reneging on the deal that would now take us back to the drawing board in regards to finding a place to live.  She gave me my life back.  

I say to my kids often that it doesn’t matter if we live in a straw hut, so long as we’re all together.  I should amend that last phrase to be ‘so long as we’re all together and present.’  I can’t even begin to justify letting six weeks float by without really having any idea what’s been going on in my kids’ heads.   Throwing caution to the wind by leaving our housing situation up in the air to deal with when we get back, I'm going to follow the "Life is Highway, I'm gonna ride it all night long" chorus and just focus on my family and our fun for the next ten days.  The daily stresses of life will still be there when we get home, but my kids' being receptive to my attention will be gone before I know it.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

My 8-year-old daughter injured her foot in a head-on-collision with the pavement a few days ago.  Even though the scabs have mostly healed and her pride has since recovered, she thinks it necessary to walk with a limp, to remind us of her unfortunate mishap.  She only does the limp when she’s bored, is in no rush to get anywhere, or when she has a captive audience.  Today was the latter.  With my mother and my best friend in town staying with us, my daughter really played up the gimpy routine.  As we all watched her shuffle down the hall to her room, taking one regular step with her good leg and then dragging the bad leg behind her, we were amused to see my 3-year-old daughter following her lead and limping with the same foot.  We stifled our giggles so as not to promote it, and returned to our conversation.

A few hours later, I walked into the living room and asked my older daughter to close her eyes in an attempt to hide the red velvet batter for her birthday cake that I was carrying in my bowl, and open her mouth for taste.  I gave her a bite and turned to offer my littlest girl a sample as well.  I found her sitting on the other end of the couch with her eyes closed and her mouth wide open waiting for a bite herself.  Monkey See, Monkey Do.

The imitating and copying our kids do can be adorable, endearing and encouraging, as it means they’re picking things up without having to be actually taught how to do something.  The mimicking they do can also be a reality check for your own behavior.  When your 5^th grader drops the F-Bomb in your presence and your kindergartener smokes an imaginary cigarette with her imaginary tea, you realize as a parent, ‘you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.’

We’re going to pass bad habits down to our kids.  There’s really no way around it.  I challenge you, though, to take two minutes and think about the things you do and say to, and around, your children.  Model the future by imagining how it feels to you when your child duplicates that action, those words, or that belief on his own.  Will you be proud of him?  If the answer is no, get rid of it when you’re around your kids, at the minimum.

Imagine what it would feel like to take it out of rotation all together.  Would it be the end of the world?  If you can fathom existing, maybe even happily, without that behavior, belief, or language, just go for the gold and drop kick it out of your life. 

If you can’t envision your life without the drunk driving, name calling, heckling, obsessive cleaning, ambulance chasing, or whatever idiosyncrasies you own, then hold on to it; to each his own.  Just be prepared for your little monkeys to do what they see.

  

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.

Make Up Your Mind Already

When it comes to making decisions, I teach my kids to consider their options thoughtfully, but ultimately, to make a decision, any decision, even if it’s wrong, instead of waffling indefinitely, as it builds character.  We can learn through both positive and negative results in decision-making.  If you choose the red lollipop instead of the yellow one and you like it, you know you like the cherry flavor and will know to choose it again next time or decide you want to try something new.  Lesson learned.  If you have the option of swimming at the indoor pool or at the beach, and you choose the beach and it rains, forcing the beaches to close, it teaches you that weather is a factor in outdoor activities and can always make or break an outing.  It teaches you risk factoring.  Again, lesson learned.

When gauging a decision, I try to teach my children to trust their guts and go with the first answer that comes to their mind, as it’s usually the best one.  It’s harder with kids, because they don’t have the same level of accumulated knowledge as adults have, so sometimes their instincts are wrong.  I think we all naturally, when given a choice, gravitate toward the prettier, more handsome options, based on surface appraisal.  As we age, though, we develop knowledge that teaches us sometimes otherwise.  A five-year-old will most likely always choose a whole crayon over a broken one, whereas an older child or adult may choose the crayon based on the color, because they realize it can still be valuable.  Similarly, a teen may naturally be initially romantically attracted to a good-looking kid first, before considering the personality, whereas a young adult may look for security and trustworthiness in a mate before considering other attributes, and an even older person, who has been widowed mid-life, may not even consider any of the above, but use the prerequisite of living life to the fullest each day as a criteria to find a mate. 

We change how we make decisions as we get older and accumulate experiences.  When faced with the decision to stay out all night and go straight to work the next morning after a late night of drinking or going home and getting a few hours of shut-eye before heading off to work, a 22-year old may choose to stay out, as the consequences aren’t too life-altering for a young single.  When faced with the same decision at 45, though, most middle-aged adults would choose to go home and get the sleep, as experience has shown that function ability will be at a standstill the next day. 

If you subscribe to that school of thought, you’d assume that as we get older, we tend to get better at making decisions as well.  Because we have learned from our accumulated experiences, we know who to trust, what to expect in terms of consequences for our decisions, when to anticipate problems, where to look for inaccuracies in our reasoning, and why we make the decisions we make.  It’s definitely true for me and most of the folks I’ve grown up with and currently affiliate myself with. 

This must not be true for all, though, as I’ve been shocked to witness the unpredictable decision-making method of the seventy-some-year-old man who owns the building we live in.  At first I thought I had just misjudged this kindly man who had shown so much pride in the unit he rented to us a few years ago.  He claimed that his father had immaculately polished and maintained the woodwork each week and that later in life he took over the job himself.  After moving in and requesting a few broken items to be repaired, we got a mouthful of venom from the owner, telling us we could just pack our stuff and leave if we needed to have the stuff fixed.  Since he snapped, we quickly learned to fix whatever needed repaired ourselves, and deduct it from the rent.  While our first assessment was that he was certifiably crazy, we went on to psychoanalyze him and finally deducted that his issue was that he didn’t like making decisions.  If presented a problem, he didn’t know what to do first.  Should he call the woodworking guy to fix the window carpentry first or call the repair-main to get a custom piece of glass first?  Unable to decide, he would usually resort to doing nothing.  Should he repair or replace the roof that is leaking water into the 2^nd floor unit, or take care of getting new drain tiles for the basement that looks like a piece of Swiss cheese when it rains, with water pouring out of every divot?  Since he couldn’t figure out a way to decide, he’d do nothing and let damage continue to accumulate. 

We maintained a doable relationship for 2 years, where we’d fix anything that came up in regards to repairs. Appliance repair and replacement?  No problem, we've got it covered.  Replacing 20-year-old mini-blinds?  No issue at all.  Done.  New door handle to fit into the existing hole in the entry door?  We trolled antique and resale shops for months before finding the right one, but we're finally good. Then last month, he showed both of the apartments in the building to a woman brandishing a tape measure, with a small child in tow.  It didn’t look good for us, as he told us later that he’d received an unsolicited offer for purchase from the woman, and that he was considering the offer.  Even though he said he wasn’t sure if he was ready to sell, the next day he slipped a hand-written note in block letters under our door, letting us know he was not renewing our lease, which was expiring in 3 days time.  Bummed that we didn’t get the opportunity to present an offer of our own to him for the building, as we’d always talked about buying it if he ever decided to sell, we started looking in earnest for a new place to live.  Two weeks later, we were preparing to submit an offer on another building when we received a call from the landlord, telling us he was making his decision tomorrow and he was tired of dealing with this and he wanted to be done with this building.  He told us that if we wanted to submit an offer to buy the building, we’d better put our best foot forward and present it to him the next day.  We jumped through hoops and did just that, only to have him tell us he had no idea what he wanted to do and that he may decide to keep the building and rent it or move back into it himself!  To him I’ll say the same thing I say to my kids, but usually in more palatable language, shit or get off the pot!

Setting the Tone

One of my favorite quotes is from Eleanor Roosevelt:  "Life is what you make of it."  I believe that 100%.  While we can’t control all the variables in any life equation, the way we handle the unexpected can be the difference between a positive or negative experience.  Don’t make a big deal out of something you didn’t expect, and it won’t turn into a major hurdle.  Assume the worst of something, and you’ll get what you expect.  Having proved this mantra to myself over and over, both with my own thoughts and actions, as well as witnessing the words and behavior of others, I’m now at a place in my life where I really try to just have faith in this quote’s meaning.  

When I embark on a potentially tricky task, like sewing a dress from scratch for my daughter with my new sewing machine, even though I haven’t sewn with a machine since the 7^th grade, I tell myself how easy it’s going to be and downplay the risks and highlight my ability to complete it. 

“It’ll be great.  It’s like riding a bike, it’ll come back. I’ll figure it out as I go along.  If I need help I’ll ask for it.  I can’t wait to get started!” I tell myself and anyone that will listen.  

I try to put positive energy out there as much as possible, and I’d say a good 90% of the time, I get positive results in return.  While the dress took significantly longer than I expected to finish, and was too short for the older daughter I made it for, it came out super cute and I gave it to my younger daughter, who wears it weekly and thinks I jumped over the moon because I made her a dress.  

On the flip side, although I don’t do it often, when I do set the stage of a situation with a Debbie Downer “wah, wah, wah,” I almost exclusively get smacked down with bad experiences. If I’m tired or trying to do too many things at one time, I’ve been known to put a negative spin on something that hasn’t even happened yet, like going to an organized event.

“I know this party is going to be a beat-down,” I told my partner, Katie, of a recent gala.   

Of course it sucked because I pulled all the negative energy to my side of the room!  The people who started out the evening by being excited about the fun party they were going to, had a freakin’ ball on the other side of the room!  Bottom line is you get back what you put out there in the universe.  

Our recent emergency visit to a local hospital was no exception to this rule.  While driving to the ER, Katie and I realized we had no idea which hospital we were going to.  There are quite a few options for medical attention in our city and Katie was having some unexplained, excruciating pain that needed to be addressed.  We quickly got someone to watch the kids and jumped in the car.  Our general practitioner, Dr. Paine, whose name I mention just for your amusement, had just picked up his 30+ year practice and moved to California within the last month.  We weren’t bound his hospital anymore, but we had yet to choose a new doctor, or hospital for that matter.  We might not even have been having such a conversation about where to go if I hadn’t been so delirious because I was tired.  It was 10pm when we headed out the door for the hospital, and I started in on the over-analyzing I sometimes do.  I brought up the fact that the hospital we were considering visiting was a Catholic affiliate, and that maybe it wouldn’t be the best option for us in case Katie had to be admitted.  The last thing I wanted to deal with tonight was not being able to visit my girlfriend because I’m not family.  We decided we were being ridiculous, as we’d visited this hospital at least a dozen times before in so many years, although never on an in-patient basis, but had never had a problem.  So being of the “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” variety, we headed off to the Catholic affiliate’s ER.   We decided we’d make it a good experience.  Apparently, my take-back did not suffice, though, as my negative vibes were already out there.

There was no one in the waiting room when we arrived, and Katie was immediately ushered into triage.  While the nurse assessing Katie’s situation was not rude or mean to us by any means, she certainly was not up for any congeniality award.  She checked the vitals and wrote down Katie’s responses very matter-of-factly, then ushered us into a filthy, cluttered room to wait for a doctor.  As the nurse walked away, we heard her tangle with another nurse about how she had “f***ed up her paperwork by not getting the right information from a patient.  We instantly decided we didn’t want to cross this nurse.  The doctor came in within a decent period of time, politely asked questions, and ordered a CAT scan.  He said he’d give Katie something to “take the edge off” before the scan.  The pain medicine never arrived, and after three hours in the ER with no conclusive results for any ailments, we again asked for pain management.  It was given, but was not effective for the ultrasound that was to be performed next.  While I wasn’t there in the room for the actual sonogram, I can suffice to say that things took must have taken a downhill turn, as Katie was wheeled back to the ER almost 2 hours later (the test should have taken no longer than 20 minutes), pale as a ghost and in tears.  She was still in pain, but apparently the attitude, actions, and general nasty demeanor of the nighttime radiologist, Nurse Ratchet, had put Katie into a tailspin.  We then watched the ER nurse go rounds with confrontational Nurse Ratchet, and more profanity was flying.  It was like a street fight in there.

All in all, we were in the Emergency Room for 8 hours before Katie was admitted to the hospital for observation, as no source of pain or problem had been detected.  She was released 12 hours later with no further answers, but with a Dilaudid hangover.  It was a rotten experience.  I truly believe in my heart that if I had not set the tone with my Nancy Negative second-guessing how we were going to be treated before we even got to the hospital, our experience would have been completely different.  I’m not saying that the hospital personnel would have necessarily acted any differently or the results of the visit would have changed, but merely that our impressions might be different had we started out with a Patty Positive outlook instead.   Maybe we would have shared a private giggle with the cussing nurse instead of trying to stay out of her way.  Maybe we wouldn’t have noticed the dirt and disorganization of the emergency room, as Katie would have been busy feeling better because of the good drugs she received right off the bat from the doctor who remembered to put the order in because one of us had made a positive impression on him.  Who knows?

What I do know, though, is that we’re all responsible for setting the tone of our lives.  Bitch, moan, and complain all the time and you’re going to bring on more grief in your world.  Make a point of making lemonade out of lemons on a regular basis, and you’re setting yourself up for one sweet life.