Now the same acts drew up the ties between them, put them back together, as though shaping the world from scratch. As they worked, they put the sky in place above, the trees in the ground. They invented color and air and scent and gravity. Laughter and sadness. They discovered truth and lies and mock-lies — even then, Essay played the oldest joke there was to play, returning a stick past him as if he were invisible, cantering sideways, tossing it about in her mouth as if to ask, it’s all play, really, isn’t it? What else matter when there’s this to do?

–David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

When we’re young we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water.

MAXWELL ANDERSON, Winterset

There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences the pain of being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as invidivuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.

–Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

To sit without emotion, hope or aim,
In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint under song.

–William Wordsworth

A small speckled visitor
Wearing a crimson cape.
Brighter than a cherry
Smaller than a grape.

A polka-dotted someone
Walking on my wall.
A black-hooded lady
In a scarlet shawl.

–Joan Walsh Anglund

When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.

–James Matthew Barrie

For a long time I let this be so. I figured it was her playtime, and I was content in the beginning to let her drive all the play. The story lines were very repetitive, which is also normal. Periodically I would push back a little, test her boundary, and she would vigorously reject my suggestions and attempts.

My friend Karen says what a child really needs is one hour of a parent’s undivided, nondistracted attention each day, with the child setting the agenda. I did this at first (often longer than that). Months passed; her plots remained rote, and I found her compulsion to control suffocating. For many months I struggled to hang in there the whole hour. I glanced at the clock every so many minutes, dejected that time crawled. I then began to avoid the hour, giving her bits and pieces. Then I began to avoid her; I evaded her, and I dreaded to hear, “Mommy, do you want to play with me?” If I answered yes, I’d only give her a few minutes before fleeing to a chore. Often I’d say no, I had chores to do. I began to feel sad that our relationship had become locked in these rituals. And it occurred to me that Claire was “stuck,” and needed some help moving play to the next level.

Hub and I had been talking to her about the necessity to share the story, to collaborate, and that this is how to make and keep friends. It wasn’t sinking in.

Today she asked if I’d play with her. I sat down on the floor and said, “Claire, I need to tell you something. Can I have your attention, please?” She lay down on the floor at my crossed legs. Then I said, “Claire, a lot of times you ask me to play with you, and I don’t want to. I find chores to do, or I say maybe later. I do this because it really is NO fun to play when you are the one to tells me what to do, how to do it, and when. I feel sad, because I want to have fun with you. But the way you play is not fun.”

Claire replied, “Okay, we can do that. Now you can be the princesses, and I’ll be the animals…” This time I said, “But I don’t want to be princesses. I want to choose my own roles.” She said okay, than handed me two princesses, saying “You can play with the Sleeping Beauties because they match!” I repeated that no, I wanted to pick my own, suggesting we build a zoo with blocks and animals. She continued to try to direct me, and I said, “Right now I’m building a zoo. Why don’t you pick animals to put in?” So she did.

When the zoo was done, I selected a few princesses and a safari guy to be the zookeeper. She was thrilled at the princesses I chose because “These two have buns and those two have long flowing hair — they match! Good job Mommy!” She wanted to tell me what to do with them, and I said if she wanted to be in charge of people she needed to pick some for herself. So she did.

Then she wanted to tell me to move the animals in certain ways, and I pushed back. So she suggested, “Why don’t you control the animals on your side and I’ll do the ones on my side?” Excellent idea! So I had my animals say something, and she responded. Over and over she’d slip into telling me what to do, and I’d say it was my animal to control. I’d encourage her to have her animal do something so I could respond. I did all this in a patient and kind manner.

And you know what? We played for an hour and I never looked at the clock. I had fun! The make-believe play was fluid, original, and created on the spot. I wasn’t doing the same script over and over. I wasn’t carrying out orders. When I had to stop to start dinner, I told her that I’d had so much fun playing this way. I asked if she enjoyed it, and she said yes. And another benefit — when I had to stop playing, she was sated enough to continue the scenario on her own — something she does regularly, but this time I didn’t feel guilty for leaving.

During bath time tonight, she asked, “Do you want to play with me?” I said yes and asked her what she wanted to play with. She told me what squirties she wanted, and then I chose a couple of my own. She wanted to enact a particular plot, and I said I’d go along with part of it, but I wanted to make up my own words for my animals. We spent a fun 20 minutes playing, and I didn’t feel agitated about how bored I felt — because I wasn’t.

I’m going to keep doing this. I told her honestly how I felt, and why I didn’t want to play with her, so we tried a different way, and I helped her get comfortable by gently redirecting her. Imagine that — talking to your child like a real person capable of genuine interaction! It works.

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

–William Penn

Zen Life Kit

There’s a lot of talk about Zen these days, but not much understanding about what it is, or how to be Zen. This kit will introduce you to Zen and how you can awaken to it in your life. The kit contains:

• $50 gift card to East-West Bookstore in Mountain View, CA
• Two books, signed by author Karen Maezen Miller

  Karen Maezen Miller calls herself an errant wife, delinquent mother, reluctant dog walker, expert laundress and stationmaster of the full catastrophe. In real life, she is a Zen Buddhist priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles. She and her family live in Sierra Madre, California, with a century-old Japanese garden in their backyard.

  Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood
  

  Combining humor, honesty, and plainspoken advice, Momma Zen distills the doubts and frustrations of parenting into vignettes of Zen wisdom. Drawing on her experience as a first-time mother, and on her years of Zen meditation and study, Miller explores how the daily challenges of parenthood can become the most profound spiritual journey of our lives. This compelling and wise memoir follows the timeline of early motherhood from pregnancy through toddlerhood. Momma Zen takes readers on a transformative journey, charting a mother’s growth beyond naive expectations and disorientation to finding fulfillment in ordinary tasks, developing greater self-awareness and acceptance—to the gradual discovery of “maternal bliss,” a state of abiding happiness and ease that is available to us all. In her gentle and reassuring voice, Karen Miller convinces us that ancient and authentic spiritual lessons can be as familiar as a lullaby, as ordinary as pureed peas, and as frequent as a sleepless night. She offers encouragement for the hard days, consolation for the long haul, and the lightheartedness every new mom needs to face the crooked path of motherhood straight on.

  –Amazon description

  Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life
  

  It’s easy to think that meaning, fulfillment, and bliss are “out there,” somewhere outside of our daily routine. But in this playful yet profound reflection on awareness, the compelling voice of a contemporary woman reveals the happiness at the bottom of the laundry basket, the love in the kitchen sink, and the peace possible in one’s own backyard. Follow Karen Maezen Miller through youthful ambition and self-absorption, beyond a broken marriage, and into the steady calm of a so-called ordinary life. In her hands, household chores and caregiving tasks become opportunities for self-examination, lessons in relationship, and liberating moments of selflessness. With attention, it’s the little things — even the unexpected, unpleasant, and unwanted things — that count.

  –Amazon description

• A handmade bookmark
• A small statue of goddess Quan Yin, one of the most universally beloved of deities in the Buddhist tradition. She is the embodiment of compassionate loving kindness.
• A Jacob’s Musical Car Charms to soothe and relax as you navigate the busy highways of life. Chime maker Jacob Sokoloff hand tunes these car chimes to produce a musical sound guaranteed to make you smile.
• A box of Morningstar Incense

Donated by the Harper Family
Value $100

Yet I struggle. When I think back over my childhood and school experiences, I don’t wax nostalgic. The first memories that come to mind are not happy ones. In a perfect storm combining my personality, family milieu, and the outside world, I entered kindergarten absolutely not ready for school or the world.

I was a timid, docile child, perceptive and agonizingly sensitive. I had older sisters who were in school full-time when I was pre-school age, so I had no experience playing with peers and navigating the conflict that arises from this. My first day of kindergarten I was so scared I refused to eat snack and cried. Throughout elementary school I seemed to attract unkind treatment. By the time I entered middle school, my way of dealing with peers was to bury my nose in a book and remain detached. I didn’t socialize much with people in or out of school. My self-confidence measured near zero.

One evening I talked with Hub about a school memory that still causes tears (and if I get started, I recall others that do too). My husband asked, “What would you have wished for?” The six-year-old me had a ready answer: to feel safe.

I have since written in a private post at least 20 events at or near school through my youth that generated a lot of pain then and have the power to still. Now, I know that many people experienced bullying or hurtful incidents in school. My husband has even described memories. However, he (and others) don’t carry the pain as I do, and don’t project it all onto their child’s life. Re-reading my list, I have to remind myself that these incidents occurred over thousands of days of school. I’m certain that many of those days were at least neutral, and just as many were happy days, or contained happy moments. My life wasn’t a torment every single day. My list of injuries strikes me as banal.

So what the hell is the problem?

The pain is not something I nurture; I don’t ruminate anymore over my past injuries. It comes unbidden, rising and engulfing me like a rapid tide whenever I observe my child encountering difficulty (e.g., rejection — whether perceived by her or real). I am transported instantly to childhood and respond accordingly, but this is overlaid with the protectiveness of a mother, and so all my energy goes awry. I personalize Claire’s experiences as my own. It interferes with my ability to be present for her.

Part of this pain is just a parent’s burden. We worry about our children. We ache for them. We want to protect them. Yet I feel that somehow I respond internally in a way that many (most?) other parents don’t. I feel raw and unable to maintain composure. Claire detects and absorbs my anxiety.

Observing Claire deal with her hurt feelings brings a mixture of pain on her behalf, irritation that she’s not tougher, and fear for her well-being in the world. I cannot control what she encounters out there when she starts school full-time this fall. However, I can provide a loving, peaceful, supportive home environment; home can be safe haven. But only if I manage to separate my angst-ridden ego from its Herculean attachment to my past.

So here is my question (italicized below), arising from a Mary Oliver poem, “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Tell me your despair. Tell me your childhood school memories. Are they happy or harsh, or a mix? Tell me if they still rule you, and if not, how did you win freedom?

The child is made of one hundred.

The child has a hundred languages,
a hundred hands,
a hundred thoughts,
a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking.

A hundred, always a hundred,
ways of listening,
of marveling,
of loving,
a hundred joys for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds to discover,
a hundred worlds to invent,
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages (and a hundred hundred hundred more),
but they steal ninety nine.
The school and the culture separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands,
do without heads,
to listen and not to speak,
to understand without joy,
to love and to marvel… only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there and of the hundred they steal ninety nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play,
reality and fantasy,
science and imagination,
sky and earth,
reason and dream,
are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there.
The child says no way. The hundred is there.

–Loris Malaguzzi, Italian Early Childhood Education Specialist, 1994

Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear,
Your head like the golden-rod,
And we will go sailing away from here
To the beautiful land of Nod.

–Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Our nighttime routine is sweet, though not exactly simple. When Claire protests bedtime (she’s in bed no later than 7:45 p.m.), we go to the routine written in words and pictures on the bathroom door. It removes the power struggle, to some degree, when we say, “Well, what does the routine say?” These are the steps: Read a story. Brush teeth. Potty. Bath. Put on jammies. Rock. Tuck-in. Next to these words are pictures I’ve drawn so she can “read” the routine for herself.

Daddy rocks Claire down four nights, and I get three nights. It’s a challenge, because she would rather I do every night. There came a time, too, when what I do with Claire became so integral to her relaxation that she began having trouble falling asleep the way Daddy did it. (That’s always been an issue — certain interactions between Claire and me become so ritualized for her that no one else can do it the “right way.” That happened feeding her bottle when she was about six months old.) So he has had to adapt and incorporate what she wants; it’s the rocking and tuck-in that is so important to her.

Before we begin we review the Sleep Rules if she needs reminding (i.e., if she’s been getting up out of bed “just because”):

• Stay in bed.
• Close your eyes.
• Stay very quiet.
• Go to sleep.

Then the non-rocking parent says “Good night, sweet dreams, don’t have bad dreams, I love you and I love you.” And Claire says it too.

If I’m rocking, I first ask Claire what her favorite part of the day was, and then I tell her mine. Claire then snuggles into me (or Hub), and several songs are sung, the same ones always in the same order: Husha My Baby (from our first Music Together class), Go To Sleep Little Claire (sung twice to Brahm’s Lullaby), My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (first stanza sung twice), and the chorus to To Ra Loo. (And if she is sick or having a really tough time, the song lineup is much longer: Husha My Baby; Gaelic Lullaby; Su La Li; Go To Sleep Little Claire; You Are My Sunshine; Daisy Bell (without the second stanza); Home On the Range; My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean; Do Re Mi; To Ra Loo.) Then a few extra minutes of rocking and snuggling.

Then Claire gets into bed for tuck-in. I pull up the covers around her and say, “Claire, I love you. You are funny, smart, brave, strong, creative, beautiful, and fun to be with.” Then she’ll say, “Do Safe In Love.” So then I ask her (rhetorically): Do you feel safe in my love? Do you feel safe in Daddy’s love? Do you feel safe in Stella’s love? And so on for each grandparent, aunt, uncle, and her teachers. She also insists on Do you feel safe in your germs’ love? Do you feel safe in the love of all the wild animals? After all that she gets a kiss, and a promise from me: “I’ll check on you when I go to bed.” At which point she says “Good night, sweet dreams, etc.” and I say it to her. Then I quietly leave, and on most nights that’s all we hear of her until 6:00 a.m.

In December 2010 there was a time when she began getting out of bed and rocking at all hours in her chair because she had “thoughts to think.” We responded by removing the chair and ottoman from her room one night, and the wailing which ensued was loud, long, and almost insufferable. We returned it in the morning. It happened another night, and the chair went away. More crying. Finally we said, “We know you love the chair. We’ll return it. But if it’s too much temptation and keeps you from sleeping, it will have to leave your room forever.” She stopped doing it.

In December 2011 she began to get up and come wake us whenever she was awake, just because. For several nights this happened 8-9 times each night, starting as soon as we put her down, and often every half hour in the wee hours. We employed the gate (attached to her doorframe); we put the potty in her room and shut the gate. That generated a lot of tantrums at first. We told her if she stayed in bed, the gate would stay open. So now what happens is if she gets out of bed once, I’ll tuck her back in, and then I remind her if she does it again, I’ll tuck her in, put the potty in her room, and shut the gate. Sometimes she says she needs extra love, and that one extra tuck-in helps. Then I tell her, “You are loved, you are cozy, you are safe.” (Sometimes she gets out of bed five minutes after tuck-in saying, “I had a nightmare.” It’s pretty clear she hasn’t!) It works so far.

My daddy calls me sweetie pie.
He calls me honey bunny.
He also calls me poopsie,
which I think is kind of funny.

My daddy calls me sugarplum,
and also sleepyhead.
My silly dad forgets my name
when he tucks me into bed.

–Bruce Lansky

“I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.”

–Lauren DeStefano, Wither

Email is one of the few private spaces left in this hyper-sharing age. Sam Biddle at Gizmodo says, “This isn’t about having something to hide — it’s about keeping meaningful boundaries in an era when there are verrrrry few. We all need whatever scraps of privacy we have left, and your email is just that.”

Trust is an important bedrock for any relationship, but this isn’t trust. This is mutually assured trust destruction. Intimacy comes from sharing select private information with people, not giving them keys to your privacy kingdom.

When you share your password with someone, you open yourself up to the obvious downsides suggested by the Times. But you’re not just violating your own privacy, you’re violating that of everyone you correspond with. People send an email to your account assuming you’re the only one who will see it. They realize there’s a risk you might share the news with significant others, friends, family, or a random stranger on the bus, but there’s a reasonable assumption that you don’t have someone else reading your email.

–Kashmir Hill, Why Sharing Passwords With Your Girlfriend/Boyfriend Is A Spectacularly Bad Idea, Forbes

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.

–Edward Abbey

There are two different types of time. Chronos time is what we live in. It’s regular time, it’s one minute at a time, it’s staring down the clock till bedtime time, it’s ten excruciating minutes in the Target line time, it’s four screaming minutes in time out time, it’s two hours till daddy gets home time. Chronos is the hard, slow passing time we parents often live in.

Then there’s Kairos time. Kairos is God’s time. It’s time outside of time. It’s metaphysical time. It’s those magical moments in which time stands still. I have a few of those moments each day. And I cherish them.

Like when I actually stop what I’m doing and really look at Tish. I notice how perfectly smooth and brownish her skin is. I notice the perfect curves of her teeny elf mouth and her asianish brown eyes, and I breathe in her soft Tishy smell. In these moments, I see that her mouth is moving but I can’t hear her because all I can think is — This is the first time I’ve really seen Tish all day, and my God — she is so beautiful. Kairos.

Like when I’m stuck in chronos time in the grocery line and I’m haggard and annoyed and angry at the slow check-out clerk. And then I look at my cart and I’m transported out of chronos. And suddenly I notice the piles and piles of healthy food I’ll feed my children to grow their bodies and minds and I remember that most of the world’s mamas would kill for this opportunity. This chance to stand in a grocery line with enough money to pay. And I just stare at my cart. At the abundance. The bounty. Thank you, God. Kairos.

Or when I curl up in my cozy bed with Theo asleep at my feet and Craig asleep by my side and I listen to them both breathing. And for a moment, I think- how did a girl like me get so lucky? To go to bed each night surrounded by this breath, this love, this peace, this warmth? Kairos.

These kairos moments leave as fast as they come- but I mark them. I say the word kairos in my head each time I leave chronos. And at the end of the day, I don’t remember exactly what my kairos moments were, but I remember I had them. And that makes the pain of the daily parenting climb worth it.

–Glennon Melton, Don’t Carpe Diem