Why does everything have to be difficult? I was making dinner this evening - chopping all my lovely CSA veggies up into tiny bits so the kids wouldn't notice them in spaghetti sauce - and M was interested in getting me to pay attention to her. After re-directing for the umpteenth time, I gave up. Now the kitchen and dining room floor are covered with rock salt. (She was practicing pouring.) I've been re-organizing my cupboards and the rock salt was out, waiting for a home. But hey, dinner didn't burn.
Omigosh - what is the moon doing right now? My kids have been the whiniest whiners. I was practicing the Love & Logic approach: "I'm sorry, I can't hear what you say when you use that voice." Repeat until they change their voice. BUT I CAN HEAR THEM. every whiny word. my back teeth are ground to nubbins. Well, they are finally in their beds now.
I've been trying to figure out what to write in that little box that describes me in 500 words or less. How do I do that when I don't really know who I am? That sounds so trite, so 1960's, but that's where I am right now. I am busy with a lot of things right now - 3 kids, 2 dogs, 1 cat, 1 bird, 1 husband, 1 blog... I'm interested in a lot of things - education, books, knitting, nutrition, Napoleonic maritime strategy, books, taekwondo, cooking, books. Somewhere underneath all this mom-stuff there is Lysne. I don't know where she is, or really, how to define her. General Semantics (http://www.driveyourselfsane.com/) suggests not to define yourself as "a Mom" or "a teacher" because those titles limit who you could be. (Both in your mind and in the minds of others.) Instead say "I teach" or "I write" or "I mother" (which sounds wierd to me - I guess I need practice). I'm running out of verbs. AND I haven't practiced that enough, so that my mind is still stuck on being a Mom. I went to visit my best friend from college a few weeks ago - it was WONDERFUL - but it took me awhile to relax and not feel like I was missing something (like an arm) because I was there all by myself.
OK - well, if you're still here, you waded through all that. Thanks. It's been so long since I've written anything more than permission slips, it'll take me awhile to remember how to organize stuff.
I want to write down what I read too: Today I read a book by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes called Demon in my View. She wrote it when she was 15. It's pretty good for 15. I'm much happier with her other, newer series (The Kiesha'ra Trilogy). Demon is a vampire novel with some interesting bits. I have a few others of hers - I'll report back.
My favorite vampire books are the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries.
I'm also working on the third of the Temeraire trilogy by Naomi Novik. Very good. Sort of like Anne McCaffery meets Patrick O'Brien. Dragons, maritime stuff, a little romance.
Adios!
4 comments:
well, you are a great mom, and everything you do is infused with YOU. Its just in the past you could exist all by yourself and that give the illusion that you existed with sharp boundaries. Motherhood and marriage shows just how vague our boundaries really are.
Love and logic is a good program. But I definitely agree with what you feel when your kids are whiny - you really can hear them and your emotions can't help but react, no matter what your brain is telling you what to do.
Maybe that's why reading is so wonderful. You can escape into someone else's world. If you don't like that world, you can close the cover on it. If the kids there are whiny, it isn't your responsibility to do somethng about it.
anyway, love your blog.
I don't know if I ever had sharp boundaries. It wasn't until motherhood that I knew really about boundaries. Ok, well there was this one time, in 2nd grade, when I hugged my best friend and she got all stiff and stuffy and said "girls don't hug girls". I cried.
I am so with you on the reading thing. I can lose (and have lost) myself in books - I do it on purpose often...
So glad you're here, Lysne. Those artificial boundaries seem so real to me and always startle me when I bump against them. Like when I was a Student, then suddenly became a Mom (a Suburban Mom at that). That new box had such different boundaries that it threw me for awhile. Now it's the Wife boundaries that are confuzzling me. Maybe I need to tell those boundaries that they are not real, or that they are more moveable than I realize. Huh. Thanks for making me think!
I understand how you feel on that"who am I" type feeling. For film class I had to do a "self portrait" - still working on it. It's hard to do when you spend so many years as one thing (unloved girlfriend, underappreciated worker, good mom, high school graduate) then go into single unemployed mom/college student...yeah - still haven't finished this silly self portrait.
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