The (Kindergarten) Graduate

Oh, man, you guys. My heart yesterday broke into a million, squamillion, gajillion pieces. It was the second to last day of Kindergarten for my baby girl, and so she came off the bus with a paper bag full of her journey through her first year in school. In the space of ten months, she became a reader, a mathematician, a writer. She went from this:

to this: 

As I poured through the papers she brought home, the books she had made, the stories she wrote, the pictures she drew, her first year unfolded before my eyes. She grew so much as a person this year, with me and without me. I let her out of my sight for 8 hours a day,  five days a week and entrusted her to the care of people who did not hold her when she was born. As I placed everything neatly back into the folders that Alice had unceremoniously dumped out onto the living room floor, all I could think was, "How amazing her teachers are. I must thank them." Who stapled and laminated all these books? Who organized all these folders? Who made her Kindergarten yearbook with the plastic spiral-bound?  The teachers in her classroom nurtured and encouraged this little big girl of mine, and we are so very lucky to be in this amazing school, with such amazing people. 

{I thought about how, had we stayed in the Bronx, there was probably no way I would have this amazing cache of artifacts documenting Alice's first year of school. In the city school that we were zoned for, Alice would've been in a class of 25 kindergartners and one overwhelmed teacher. Here, she was in a class of sixteen kids and her teachers-plural! teachers!- got to know her very well. Don't tell me class size doesn't matter. It matters.}

I don't really remember being five. I remember my classroom, I kind of remember my teacher and I remember some of my friends. I remember Hurricane Gloria. I remember being in a bus accident. But I don't remember being five. I don't remember learning to read or learning to write. I don't remember what it felt like to be five. But I look at Alice. Her ups and her downs, her struggle to figure things out, to understand who she is in the world. I look at her and  I understand. I get her in a way that no one else can or will because I see myself. I look at the emotions on her face and I know what she is feeling because I have felt them, too. Watching Alice navigate five has filled in the gaps in my own memory.

But don't get me wrong. Alice is distinctively Alice. The world she is moving through is very different from the one I experienced. Her family life is so very different. When I was this age,  five going on six, my parents were divorcing, my mother had come out as a lesbian, my father had moved out of the house, and my mother's future wife was moving into our house with her two kids. I was transitioning from special ed into a mainstream classroom.  I was oblivious to the world around me, in part because of my deafness.  Alice, on the other hand, is all ears and tuned into the world. Her life is all song, all the time. She has close girlfriends and a boy-friend. She's so much more sophisticated than I ever was, sometimes to my mortification, but mostly in a precocious way. Her family life is simple-- the oldest of three, a set of married parents, and her cousins across town to play with.

As of today, my kindergartner is a first grader. I am the mother of a first grader. She will move out of the Kindergarten wing. She will eat lunch in a cafeteria. She will read chapter books on her own and learn how to multiply. She will become more of herself, more Alice.

I hope she will write more things like this:

My mom likes pink cupcakes. My mom is Jewish. My mom loves me. 

Micah is my brother. Micah likes milk. Micah like sleeping.

Stella is my sister. She loves the playground. My sister likes to go to school. Stella is 3. 

I have a cat. My cat loves balls of string. My cat likes birds. My cat once ate a bluebird. 

My dad loves work. My dad snores. My dad loves computers. 

A Blessing and A Curse, No. 1: Mothering and Deafness

{Editor's Note: A couple of years ago, I was offered the opportunity to write a piece on mothering with a disability for a major publication, but I froze and couldn't write it. For a long time, I struggled to understand why I couldn't write about myself as a deaf parent and I've settled on this explanation: I'm too close to it. My children are young, I'm a young mother still and I'm terrible at introspection. It takes me a long time to work my around to an understanding of myself. I often arrive at this understanding by talking to others, by reading the work of others and staring off into space while stuck in rush hour traffic on the way to nursery school drop-off. So, I've embarked on a mission to interview mothers with disabilities. Today, I offer the first in a series, by my Clarke School classmate and  friend, Candace. She is deaf like I am, and I found myself nodding emphatically and saying, "yes, yes, that's it!!" while reading her answers to my questions while also considering things that had never occurred to me before. I hope you enjoy it. And if you or anyone you know would be willing to be interviewed, please let me know in the comments.}

Please share a little bit about yourself-- where do you live? How many children do you have and how old are they? Who lives in your house? When you have a break from the physical work of mothering, what do you do with your time?

My name is Candace and I live in a suburb north of the city of Atlanta, with my partner of 12 years, Veikko. I have two children--Cassie, 6 years old and Vincent,  who is three. I am the only person who is deaf in my family. In between being a full-time mother and household manager I pursue my fleeting interests in anything crafty, sewing-related along with home remodeling projects, and lately, fish-keeping!

Of course, we all have some kind of limitation, physical or otherwise. But I'm really interested in looking at motherhood through the lens of physical disability. Can you tell us a little about your disability and how it affects the day to day work of being a mother?

I have been deaf since age 2 ½, after I contracted meningitis, and it was a total and complete loss from the beginning. I have had two cochlear implants and one is still active but I have not used it in any regular way since I was 15. I recently tried using it again last year and it has such a low ratio of information to noise that I just ended up with anxiety and headaches and irritability - quietness is nicer, especially with kids around!

[For more information on cochlear implants, go here]

I grew up speaking and using my cochlear implants, going to speech class and even a school for the deaf (Clarke School) that promoted lipreading and speech, but did not teach sign. My parents and siblings did not and still do not sign--we all speak to each other and I lipread.  After all these years,  it is second nature to me.  I really enjoy speaking and find it very convenient as well.  I enjoy spoken English and feel very connected to speaking as part of my linguistic culture.  I have a pretty ‘deaf’ voice though and my speech is not highly intelligible, so I can’t bank on it all the time with strangers so I often do write and type on my phone to clerks or shopkeepers. I can lipread pretty well and some people I can lipread pretty much at 100% right off the bat. But that brings me to my family’s communication situation - after all, being deaf is really a communication problem - my husband, who is hearing, exclusively signs to me! I simply cannot lipread him, even after 12 years together. A combination of his speech style plus his teeth and lips obscuring any tongue movement made it very difficult when we first began dating (and we wrote back and forth in a journal for weeks in the early days).  So he went and took two courses of ASL [American Sign Language]  and became conversational (though it’s stalled at conversational and never progressed to fluent despite my attempts to further teach him).  I can lipread Cassie very well and she was an excellent toddler signer and still can sign pretty well, but we rely a lot on speech.   Vincent is much less interested in signing and less dexterous, so he speaks a lot and I really struggle to understand him just like I do with his dad.  Sometimes it means I rely on my husband or Cassie to tell me what Vincent said in order to avoid frustration.  So that’s our sort of complicated communication setup and my hearing husband is pretty much the only one who signs regularly in this household.  

Other than the communication stuff, we have issues with the kids getting my attention or me missing something the kids are doing because I’m not able to hear the tell-tale signs of say, constantly running water in the bathroom or thumps indicating a fall.  I arrive at the scene late a lot, needless to  say! I just remind myself that plenty of parents miss things from being busy or on phone/listening to something, and even if I were there sooner,  its unlikely I could have entirely prevented the thing from happening. None of that stuff has really proven to be a huge deal and we just deal if a situation happens. Even when the children were babies I did not worry too much about being alerted to rush to to their every cry - I even eschewed using the table lamp cry detector that flashed each time a cry was detected…. it was very annoying.  I used my baby video monitor with a blinking indicator, for naps and bedtime, and the rest of the time I winged it, using my super-sensitive peripheral vision and mother’s intuition and checking in on things a lot.  When they were very small,  I used babywearing in the form of ring slings and back wrapping techniques to keep them on me and that gave me the ability to respond to things way before they reached crying - something I recommend to all moms,  deaf or not!  I also bed-shared with them for breastfeeding in the newborn phase and I didn’t have to worry about missing their wake-ups or relying on my husband to wake me to feed the baby.  It felt very simple when they were little ones. As they get older and are in their own beds, it is harder to catch things unless they wake me and my husband takes over more night-waking incidents simply because he doesn’t want to interrupt my sleep and he’s nice enough to go and check because he heard it.  I’m very lucky in that regard - I get to sleep through a lot of bedwetting and nightmare wakings!

What would you say is the hardest part of being a mother with a disability?  

Definitely the communication aspect of deafness in a hearing world is the biggest day-to-day frustration.  Communicating with CoDAs (Children of Deaf Adults) is never really an easy thing as I have spoken with other deaf mom friends who sign exclusively but still have issues understanding their child for a variety of reasons such as they sign sloppily and too fast or don’t know enough signs for their astronomically growing vocabulary. Having a hearing spouse also complicates things as well; the families that I know where both parents are deaf and both use ASL 100% of the time have kids with much better signing skills, and there is more cohesive family communication.  Even a friend of mine whose hearing spouse is a CoDA himself and also a professional interpreter can be seen speaking without signing to his children on occasion, or using his hearing ability to further decode the child’s speech if they are signing poorly, and just generally helping out with communication.  Switching between speaking and signing frequently seems to have some friction in all the transitions even though it makes things easier for the deaf person.

I also cannot listen to what the children are saying as I am doing something, and I quite literally feel like I have to rip my eyeballs from their verbose little mouths so I can cut their food without cutting myself, drive, watch a movie (with them), and whatnot.  I only have two eyes, and it really does get a bit frustrating when I have to look away for all of a nanosecond to stir a pot and I’ve missed  a really critical thing in their sentence and they start all over, or a kid is slapping my stomach to get my attention and tell me something and I cannot look away (or really just don’t want to at that very second).  I know some moms complain they have to listen to their kids talk the whole time they do stuff but at least moms who can hear can keep their eyes on another task at hand!  I am practicing training my eyeballs to work independently of each other!

I also have communication difficulties related to things such as getting on with school teachers and preschool directors or pediatricians and the like.  I can’t easily make small talk and tell them snippets and work in information smoothly and both sides have to work a lot harder to get information across, and develop rapport.  I have recently begun homeschooling Cassie for ‘first grade’ and feel a huge relief not having to worry about any more  issues with teachers, school staff or school functions. I hear this a lot from other deaf mom friends. They attend class parties and feel like all the kids are nervous around them, and other parents don’t try very hard to talk with them, and school functions like plays are not interpreted.  It’s also a little heartbreaking to not be able to communicate with my kids’ friends or my nieces and nephews. Even some of my deaf mom friends’ CoDA kids who do signing at home but in a very modified way (because hey, every family’s different) might not understand me when I try to sign to them.

All the challenges aside, what are some positive things you've noticed? For example, I think my being deaf has taught my girls to be sensitive to a person's needs.

Being totally deaf means things are very quiet for me.  I get annoyed by thumps or feel touched out from the constant tapping and waving the kids do to get my attention but no shrieks or yells or hearing the actual whining voice (just that irksome face!). They can sing “what does the fox say” incessantly, play their electronic toys, watch weird YouTube music videos on the iPad and I am blissfully unbothered. I can hold a crying baby and yes, it bothers me and I can feel their stiff heaving body, but I’m not driven out of my mind with my hearing nerves being screeched to a pulp.  I can drive in the car without hearing any backseat bickering, bad kids music, or that incessant stream-of-consciousness talking-to-themselves thing little kids do!  

I also noticed my kids were able to put themselves in ‘my’ shoes just a little bit earlier and better than kids their age are supposed to developmentally. They can rephrase  their requests to make me understand, describing something in a variety of ways.  When Cassie was just 2 and a half,  she was able to tell me something like, “mom,  i want a fruit popsicle” and if I didn’t understand for some time, she could rephrase it almost entirely like “I want a red ice cold stick” and then I would go “AHA,” and then she would repeat her original request after realizing I was seeing what she was thinking, “a fruit popsicle!”  I loved seeing these kind of adaptations through the years. Vinny’s adaptation is that he easily knows how to ask for help from Cassie or Dad.  We have learned a lot of patience for each other with anything communication-related, and how to shrug it off if it is frustrating. Even though we encounter multiple points of communication dysfunction throughout the day,  every day,  we don’t let it break our stride. Cassie steps in, Vinny tries harder to move his mouth in a way I understand, tilting his head backwards so I can see his tongue more, I stop and clarify and repeat what I think I heard, Dad throws out a sign above Vinny’s head behind him. Whatever works - we try to make an effort to understand and help out.

Signing also has had positive things in itself! Cassie is my little signer and she loves doing spelling “tests” where I just finger-spell the word to her.  It has also helped with vocabulary as I can sign a synonym while saying an advanced vocabulary word and it totally clicks quickly and seamlessly as we read through a story or instructions.  I can also sign to her very discreetly in public or from across large distances without yelling, and talk freely in quiet or loud places.  I really do encourage everyone to learn some sign if just for this awesome superpower. Being able to sign to your kid sitting in the car outside while you’re waiting in line to pay for gas at  the convenience store - and finding out they want you to get them a drink? Very useful.

Let's go a little deeper and talk about the dynamics of your relationship with your children, as far as your disability goes?  What have you noticed or learned as your child/ren gets older? How do you feel about this?

Not being able to understand my youngest son Vincent as well as I did Cassie when she was the same age has been painful as he really has had a language explosion this past year and I miss out on the complexity of his expression when someone  relays the shorter essence of his request or his thought. I am also often double-checking with Cassie or Veikko to see if I understood it all. I’ve learned not to react until I’m sure I understand - rigid preschoolers don’t like being given the wrong things or you cutting up food the wrong way as we mamas know!  He and I work on trying to be close in other ways through hugging and kissing and making funny faces at each other because he does get very frustrated that he feels I can’t handle his rambling speech easily but he has adapted.  He understands me far more than I understand him, so I try to keep my end of the conversation going at least and let him know I do want to communicate even if I can’t understand every word he says.  It’s still been difficult because as a typical boy he has a lot of boy ideas and rambunctious tendencies and I still don’t know how to deal with that after being a first-time mom to a girly-girl!    

As Cassie has gotten older, I find myself being careful in how I ask her to step in and help with any communication for me. I don’t want her to feel like an interpreter, I don’t want her to feel responsible for an outcome due to failed communication efforts in which she was a third party. I don’t want her to always feel obligated to relay a shopkeeper’s comments to me or anything, and I cringe when people are leaning in to her having a conversation with her that they would never have if they could talk to the adult freely.  I still don’t know how to quickly and not-too-rudely stop it when I see it going on.   I always try to make sure the adult knows that I am the one communicating, by initiating the communication at the outset and IF there’s a small word or phrase she can help with, I’ll ask very quickly for her to say only that part or clarify a word if we’re struggling.  I also try not to put undue responsibility on her to use her listening abilities - just because she can listen out for my name being called at an appointment doesn’t mean she needs the responsibility, at six year of age,  and she should be able to color without feeling anxious she might miss it called out, so I make arrangements like telling the clerk that  I am deaf and need someone to come directly to me to get me when it is my turn.  I try to be very judicious about utilizing her ability for my own purposes, but at the same time I don’t completely avoid it because we’re a family and we help each other and it is good to be needed and useful.  There’s a big difference between saying, “hey,  come tell me if the doorbell rings” and making her talk to whoever is at the door just because its easier.

Thank you, Candace, for sharing so much and so openly! 

The Good Mother Myth + Giveaway!

{The winner has been announced.  See the Rafflecopter widget below for results. Thanks to everyone who entered!}

A lot changes between Baby #1 and Baby #3. As a new mother, I had high expectations of myself. I had big plans for my first foray into motherhood. I "retired" from teaching and became a pregnant housewife,  which left me with way too much time on my hands to obsess over all things baby on the internet and to read Ina Mae and fantasize about giving birth on The Farm. Alice arrived, and I got to finally earn my earth mother cred, except for that pesky unplanned but planned c-section. We nursed, we co-slept, we played, we didn't sleep train, we took a music class, we Baby-Led Weaned, we babywore, WE DID ALL THE THINGS.

Baby #2 came fast on the heels of #1 and I did it all again, and the same (except for the holy grail VBAC) but with a two year old in tow.  No biggie. But now there was more Trader Joes and more TV and more crying it out (really, just crying while waiting for her turn). It was a total "shit just got real" scene.
Baby #3 came a few years later. I'm doing it all again, and the same, and shit is even realer. More junk, more TV, more yelling, less patience, earth mother cred shriveling up and dying a slow death with every spoonful of frozen peas and Trader Joe's fish nuggets I dish out.

But in between Baby #2 and Baby #3, I did a terrible thing. I left my children for a week. To go to Europe. With a friend.  I'm pretty sure some people thought I should be fired! But I went with Henry's encouragement and blessing. He'd gone to Italy by himself for a week earlier in the year. So, it was my turn. My week in Copenhagen was amazingly revitalizing. I did nothing healthy, mind you-- I completely reverted to my singlehood days, chain-smoking and drinking my face off. But for one week, I wiped no tushes. I woke up when I wanted to wake up. I didn't do laundry. I spent approximately ten minutes in the kitchen. I drank my coffee hot. I walked slow. I walked fast. I had uninterrupted conversations. I peed alone.  Big things, big things.

After that trip, I grasped the importance of self-care. Self-care is not selfish. Self-care is vital to being the best mother I can be to my children. I don't need to go to Europe every time I need a break. A hot shower will do. Or a quiet hour with a cup of coffee and a book in a coffeeshop. Sleeping in does the trick, too.

My point is this: in the beginning, I fell victim to The Good Mother Myth-- mother as martyr, in particular. But I wised up and not a moment too soon because Baby #3 revealed itself two months after my trip. Back to life, back to reality.

Avital Norman Nathman came up with The Good Mother Myth after discovering that her reality of mothering didn't match up with media's portrayal of mothering. Her story, and 35 others are told by the powerful voices of mothers that have rejected the media myth of motherhood to embrace what is real, what is truth, and to let the rest of us know, "hey, it's okay, you're not the only one."

I am so excited to be going to the book release party for The Good Mother Myth at Hinge in Northampton, MA on Friday, January 17 at 7pm. I'm even more excited that this book is finally out in the world. My friend Tara, who is an amazing writer, is a contributor to the book so the book has been on my radar for months. To celebrate, I'm giving away a copy of the book.  Good luck! And remember, if you don't win, you can order the book from your local independent bookseller! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

{Disclaimer: I am personally sponsoring this giveaway and purchased the book with my own funds. All opinions here are my own. I have received no compensation. This post contains affiliate links}

Leading with Acceptance: Q&A with Nancy Rose!

I am the mother of a three year old. A very THREE three year old. Two wasn't so bad and Stella is a pretty sweet kid as far as kids go but man oh man, three has been kicking my tush. The temper, the impatience, the whining...you get it. I know you parents out there are nodding your heads in agreement, and if you're not, I'm going to guess you haven't had a three year old yet!

How many times have I said to myself, "Jeez, I wish Stella would be more mellow," or "Argh, this kid needs to get it together!" It's kind of comical now that I'm typing it out. The idea of trying to make a three year old be anything other than herself is an exercise in futility, and not healthy, to boot.

So, when I saw the title of Nancy Rose's book, I said "cha-ching! That is my problem--I'm not meeting Stella where she is!" It's funny because as a teacher, the mantra was always "meet the kids where they are and take them where you want them to go" but somehow, I'd forgotten about that with my own children.

Today, Nancy Rose is stopping by with some answers to questions I posed for her. Check out the book tour schedule at the bottom of this post for an opportunity to win her book in a giveaway!

Before I get to the Q&A with Nancy Rose, check out this clip from The Today Show:

A big thank you to Nancy for answering these questions for me! If you'd like to connect with Nancy, her information follows at the bottom. 

Q: What do you say to parents who, even after reading your book, insist "but I know what's best for my child!"?

A: Leading with acceptance doesn’t mean that parents don’t know what’s best for their 

children. We do know what’s best for them when it comes to their BEHAVIOR. 

It’s a good thing we do, too, because as parents, we need to be leaders who guide our 

kids’ behavior. For example, your two year old fights you about holding his hand while 

crossing a busy street. You know what’s best for him (staying safe by the BEHAVIOR of 

holding your hand).

But, we don’t know what’s best for them when it comes to WHO THEY ARE. We can’t 

change certain traits and preferences and we can do great harm if we try to. If your two 

year old melts down when you require him to hold your hand while crossing, you can’t 

make him less intense by saying, “Why do you always have to make such a big deal out 

of it?” (trying to get him to be more like his mellow sister). 

Q: How do we strike a balance between being emotionally present for our children and taking care of our needs? Sometimes, we just really need to make a phone call!

A: Emotional presence means being able to handle the full range of your child’s emotions, 

including the difficult ones. One part of being emotionally present is giving time and 

undivided attention, but not 24/7 (this does not apply to infants.) It does not mean 

centering everything around your child and putting your needs last. Children thrive when 

they know they are part of something bigger than themselves, and it’s important for 

them to learn that they are not the center of the universe, or even of the family. They are 

a “citizen of the family” just like every other family member, and everyone’s needs are 

important.

Q: My friend is in the middle of a food battle with her three year old. At what point should she say, "enough is enough" and be more forceful in encouraging her daughter to accept more variety in her diet?

A: It’s hard to respond without knowing more details, but I can share this about food 

battles: just like other “hotspots” in the parent-child relationship, it is useful to use 

leading with acceptance to determine what part of the conflict is due to the CoreSelf of 

the child and what part is due to behavior. This technique is explained in Chapter 6 of 

the book. 

A picky eater may have low Adaptability, low Ease with the Unfamiliar, high Regularity, 

and/or high Sensory Reactivity. Let’s assume that this child is reluctant to try new things 

in general (low Ease with the Unfamiliar). The parents should accept this trait. Here’s 

how they might lead with acceptance: “Sweetie, I understand that trying new foods 

isn’t easy for you. At the same time, it’s my job as your mommy to make sure you stay 

healthy and strong. Maybe you and I could look at pictures of food together and you 

can pick out some things that look yummy enough to try sometime.” Contrast that with 

power struggles, which are so easy to fall into, or criticism of the child for being “too 

picky,” or begging or bribing the child to eat.

Q: My husband works at Yale, and if my children were to be accepted into Yale, their 

college education would be free. How do I resist the impulse to push them towards 

wanting to go to Yale? Should I resist it?

A: Very interesting question. :) It’s natural to want to take advantage of such an incredible 

benefit! That said, if the expectation is that your kids go to Yale, you’re asking for 

trouble, so I would resist the impulse to push them. I would, however, have honest 

dialogue in the family, once the kids are old enough, explaining the situation and letting 

them know that it could be a huge win/win for everyone…IF IT IS THEIR CHOSEN 

PATH.

Connect with Nancy Rose! 

Website: http://nancyjrose.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSpeakerNancyRose

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nancyrosetweets

Visit Nancy Rose's website to receive a free copy of The 9 Traits of The Core Self, which is the cornerstone of her book! {I received a complimentary copy of Nancy Rose's book for review purposes.} 

Virtual Book Tour Schedule

January 6 Review at Home and Never Alone

January 7 Author Q&A and giveaway at  The Seeds of 3 Review and giveaway at Nap Time is My Time

January 8 Author Q&A The Real Nani

January 9 Review and giveaway at Tales from the Crib

January 10 Review and giveaway at A Magical Mommy
Excerpt at Houseful of Nicholes

January 13 Review at Jodifur
Excerpt at Chewsy Lovers

January 14 Excerpt at Mommy Works A Lot

January 15 Author Q&A at Say It, “Rah-shay”

January 16 Excerpt and giveaway at Cupcake Kelly’s

January 17 Review and giveaway at Janeane’s World Review and giveaway at Honest&Truly!

One Month.

It's a month today since I became a mother of three. A mother of three. Just typing that makes my eyes well up. Can I chalk it up to hormones? Because, honestly, I don't know why I'm teary about it. Going from a mother of none to a mother of one was definitely special. Going from a mother of one to a mother of two seemed par for the course. But becoming a mother of three? I'm really in this now.
And I suppose I feel I've learned a thing or two about being someone's mother but how much could I have learned in five years when really, I'm learning more and more everyday. And not even about being a mother but about who I am.

Here's a recent revelation I had: I really suck at mediating disputes and coming up with getting-along ideas. It's not surprising, though, if you know me. I tend to shy away from confrontation and let other people deal with the mess. If it's a battle I feel is worth fighting, I'll make a weak attempt at engagement but otherwise, the drama is not for me. So, most of the time, I let the kids handle it. The rest of the time, I fumble around for a response that'll make every kid happy... which is mostly impossible, as we parents know.  That, or I let my sister Kate handle it. *ahem*

But I know there are other things that I'm good at, so I try not to dwell too much on my shortcomings. But if you ask me what I'm good at, I'll draw a blank. I mean, I must be doing something right because my children are generally delightful little people with good hearts, normal kid behavior nonwithstanding. I don't worry at all that I'm screwing this up, though I do wonder if I can do it better.

{I had to stop working on this to tend to various household chores and living creatures. During that time, I remembered one thing that I do well: answering my kids' "Why" questions, even if I sometimes have to pull the answer out of my ass.}

When I first became a mother, I really struggled with feeling wistful about my life pre-children, and pre-marriage, even. I always felt a mild urge to go back to work, even though I know myself well enough to know that I can't balance a career like teaching with the demands of motherhood. I mean, I could do it but everything would be done half-assed and I'd be a miserable person. That feeling has lessened somewhat since Stella's birth and now, with Micah, I have fully accepted that I won't be going back to work full-time until I'm nearly 40.  It feels like a long way off but I know better now how fast the time goes. Almost 5 years at home with Alice, and it has gone by so fast, in retrospect.

I've learned to be present. I'm not always good at it but I make an effort to try. The moments where I feel most frustrated and impatient are the moments where I think ahead too fast or expect too much of myself and the kids. Stay present. Stay present. It's really the key, I think, to being the mother of any number of kids without losing your sanity.

So, one month down. A lifetime of months to go. It'll be easy. It'll be hard. It'll be somewhere in between. I'm taking it day by day,  learning my lessons as I go.

Lately.

Alice worked on this flip for a long time, taking quite a few spills in the process. I love how proud she is when she finally sticks it! 

As soon as I saw these pencils, I knew I needed to have them. 

This baby is 3 now. In a big way. It's kind of kicking my tush at the moment but her spontaneous "I love yous" and kisses make up for it. 

My sister and I started a garden. So far, so good. Fingers crossed.

The Parent Trap

I hate it when my mom friends are hard on themselves for being human. I had an epiphany the other day, in a comment that I left on a friend's blog:

It’s hard sometimes to be the “parent you want to be,” because that doesn’t always jibe with who you really are, as a person. 

It's not a novel idea, or even a new one but it's easy to lose sight of this reality of parenting, when you're in the thick of it. Who I am, as a person, does not always neatly dovetail who I'd like to be as a parent. There is plenty of overlap, of course. I am, by nature, a kind and generous person and that does carry over into my parenting (I hope so, anyway). The problem lies in the ideal that I'm just not motivated to live up to, quite frankly. Nonetheless, I like to make myself feel bad about it, despite my admitted hatred for the same behavior in other moms.  That's the rub in ideals. They inspire clinginess, no matter how quixotic or Pollyanna the criteria are. It's easy to blame idealistic parenting on shiny, happy mommyblogs and other kid-centric media but I think even without them, we have much higher expectations of ourselves as parents than we do of ourselves as just people.
I long ago accepted and forgave myself for not being the person that I wished I was but that hasn't happened in my parenting persona. Why? I guess because the stakes are higher, aren't they, when it comes to our children? I would love to be the person that reads a book in bed, in lieu of turning on the TV. But so what if I'm not that person. I don't beat myself up over it. On the other hand, if I turn on the TV for my kids to keep them occupied for 15 minutes, instead of finding some creative activity for them to do--holy hell, the guilt.
There's another problem here, I've realized. Why do I separate myself into two parts-- the person part and the parenting part? Shouldn't they be one and the same? Not always. As a parent, I try to model good behavior, healthy habits and so on. The parent in me would never smoke a cigarette in front of my children, but when I spent a week in Europe with friends last Fall, I chain-smoked the entire trip. That's who I was before I became pregnant and that is the person I still am, but as a responsible parent concerned not only about setting an example but about my children's health, I pretend I'm a non-smoker. I mean, that's kind of a common example, I think but it's the most visual one I can come up with.
At my core, who I am as a person is the same as who I am as a parent-- loving, kind, generous, thoughtful but also impatient, easily bored, and unmotivated. I wish I could eliminate those last three traits and add a whole bunch more positive ones. Don't get me wrong. I don't think I'm a bad parent but a lot of times I think I could be a better one. It would be nice to be a perfect one! I'm the first person to tell you that it takes a lot to screw up your kid. I think all of us with imperfect childhoods and imperfect parents can attest to that. Otherwise, all of society would be going to hell in a handbasket, instead of just those unlucky ones who didn't escape the odds.
My goal, though, is to do more than just not screw up my kids. That's kind of a low bar, isn't it?-- "don't screw up your kids." All the time, I think about something my dad says often-- that we are not raising children but future adults. And if I want my children to productive, happy adults, I need to lead by example. That's not to say that I hide everything negative-- I think it's healthy for children to see adults get frustrated, and it's even more healthy for them to see how people handle frustration.  I mean, I get frustrated pretty often, and don't always handle it in the most graceful manner. Sometimes, in watching my children deal with their own frustration, I realize that I need to be better at modeling constructive ways of dealing with emotions like frustration. I suppose that is what I  really mean when I say that I wish I were a better parent, or that there is a difference between who I am as a person, and who I am as a parent. Being a better parent inevitably makes me a better person. Without my kids, I wouldn't have a sounding board that gives me feedback on the effectiveness of my behavior.
My friend Heather told me a sweet story about her son, who is about to turn 5. She tells him all the time, "I love you even when you're being cranky (or naughty or whatever)." The other night, as she put him to bed, he said to her, "I love you even when you're being cranky and mad." I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. I like this story because it just goes to show that kids recognize and accept our faults and love us anyway, so shouldn't we also love ourselves as parents anyway, instead of flogging ourselves for not doing it the way we think it ought to be done?

All You Need is Love...Right?

I have a very small, loose network of people I know, parenting with some kind of disability. This is not on purpose. It reflects the general pattern of my life-- I am a deaf person, living in a hearing world. I do not sign, I did not go to a deaf school (except for one year at The Clarke School for the Deaf) and I was fully mainstreamed in school. And now, I am a deaf person parenting in a hearing world, to hearing children. The deaf parents I know now are people that I've known and been friends with for a long time. I can count them on one hand. I have one other friend with a different physical disability, and while her specific challenges are different from mine, she surely sometimes views her parenting through the lens of her disability, as I do mine. 

In the beginning, when I first became a parent, I spent a little bit of time sorting out what were "normal" parenting challenges and what challenges were uniquely attributed to my deafness. It's not as clearcut in those infant years, where communication is basic. The older my children get, the more time I spend doing this sorting, but it also becomes easier to differentiate between what is universal and what is unique. When my children talk back, I take that as universal and correct the behavior accordingly. When they do or say something specifically because they assume I can't hear them, it becomes a matter of not only correcting but explaining why that is not fair. That actually does not happen too often at this point, and I can't think of any concrete examples.
What I'm learning at this point is I need to strike a balance between letting them help me when I miss something and actually relying on them to be my "life interpreters," much in the same way that I rely on my husband or my sister to do this for me sometimes. It's an unfair burden, I think, to place on a small child, however easy or naturally it may come for her, because she was born with a helpful, authoritative nature.
One of the neat things about my daughter being nearly five is that I'm really able to begin to understand her, to read her, to recognize behaviors that are familiar to me because I was the same way at her age. In the context of parenting with a disability, my observations of her behavior and personality are even more important because I cannot take our ability to communicate well for granted. I'm more careful to make sure that I'm really hearing what she is telling me, looking for clues in her body language and facial expressions. This is really not much different from how I function in social situations-- I compensate for not always being sure I've caught the proper tone in someone's voice by looking for the other cues that confirm my observation, or lack thereof.
I know that as my children get older, the challenges will evolve. Some of it will come from their own heightened awareness of what it means to have a deaf parent, and some of it will come from my own need to adjust accordingly. This month, for From Left to Write, I signed up to read Raising Cubby, by John Elder Robison. I'd not heard of him before this book sign-up but he is a father with Asperger's, raising a son who also has Asperger's. While our parenting challenges are different, I found parallels in the way his parenting evolved as his son grew older. While the tone of the book very much reflects his Aspergian stream of consciousness, I immediately related to his endless anxiety about becoming a parent, and all the questions he asks himself once he actually becomes a parent.
I think the fear,  at some point and at some level, of screwing up your own children is a universal parenting trait and I take some solace in that. The adage "all you need is love" applies just as much to me as it does to any other parent, disability or not.

This post was inspired by Raising Cubby: A Father and Son’s Adventures with Asperger’s, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives by John Elder Robison. Parenting is a challenging job, but what challenges does a parent with Asperger's face? Join From Left to Write on March 12 as we discuss Raising Cubby. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes. Links to the book are IndieBound affiliate links. 

Learning from Reading

Do you ever read something and say to yourself, "Shit. That's what I was trying to say"? Remember my last blog post, which I wrote for From Left to Write, about The Expats? If you recall, I wrote:

A recurring theme in this season of my life, the season of small children and endless keeping of the home, is the lamentation that my life was once more than doling out snacks and wiping snotty noses.

And now check out this passage that I copied into my notebook, taken from Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman:

Most of the women I know feel an underlying and corrosive sense of disappointment and anxiety. The women I know are, on some level, unfulfilled. And the women I know spend a lot of time, trying to avoid wondering whether the sacrifice was worth it. (p 13)

I am taking a writing class, and with some encouragement from the teacher, I am reworking an essay that I wrote about my deafness and my marriage, spun off from an earlier essay that I wrote about being a deaf mother.  There are a lot of kinks I'm trying to work out in the essay but one of them is a section about how no matter how independent I was before I got married, I've become increasingly reliant on my husband for a lot of things, post-wedding day. Turns out I'm not the only one that has noticed this. Check out another passage from the same book:

When I was single and lived alone, I was perfectly capable of getting the ladder out and changing bulbs on my own. So what is it about marriage that has made me so dependent, and why, even witnessing the warning of Ariel's example, do I continue to allow myself to behave like some helpless 1950s sitcom wife? (p 82)

Boom.  Right there. Now, I need to figure out what to do with that. And I need to read more. Get out of my bubble and widen my frame of reference. I've always resisted reading parenting books and books about relationships but I realize that they are not all created equal. Reading Bruno Bettleheim, for example, has been helpful in helping to articulate the ideas behind the kind of parent that I want to be, and thinking more about the psychology behind raising children. Like this, for example:

Striving thus to comprehend one's own behavior and of one's child around a well-known and now also well-understood situation leads to parental behavior which most benefits parent and child. In fact, it such self-exploration which often provides the best clues for understanding and helping one's child. 

When I think about how my deafness affects my parenting, this is what I think about-- how reflecting on my own behavior is even more important in my case because I do things of which I'm not even aware but of which my children feel the effect.

Okay, time to stop expositing. I just can't help myself... you can take me out of school, but you can't take the school out of me. Even if no one reads this blog, writing for an (imaginary) audience is incredibly useful in my attempts to work out my ideas. But of course, the comments down there are open, should you care to weigh in...