"Good Part, Sad Part"

For the past several months, we've been doing "good part, sad part" of our days at the dinner table.  It took a little while to catch on, but now it's a regular thing with our family and Ella is often the one who initiates the conversation, which I love.

After a particularly rough afternoon and naptime debacle,  we sat around the table and Ella said, "Mommy, ask me what my sad part of the day was."  (Usually, she asks one of us first, so this was kinda different).

"Okay, what was your sad part today, Bug?"

"When I was crying in my room and you locked the door.  I really wanted you to come in and wipe my face.  If you had just come in and wiped my face, I would have gone to sleep."


{Did you hear that sound?  That would be the sound of a knife ripping through my heart}.




She said it just like that, too.  I've always known that she's an old soul, but she sometimes speaks with such concision and maturity that it frightens me.  I looked at Jake, searching his eyes for some kind of response of my own.  Then, his mouth turned down a little at the corners.  Crap.


Yes, she had thrown another of her stellar tantrums.  And yes, I had locked the door because I had warned I would do so if she continued to get up.  From downstairs, the muffled sobs really all sounded about the same, all of them intermittently laced with "mommy.." and "come in here..." and "nap.." and well, I just tuned it out.   Eventually, it got quiet and I had patted myself on the back for sticking it out and not giving in.   Not only did I need to follow through with what I had told her would happen, but, whether right or wrong, I also felt a certain amount of entitlement to my own rest time.  

But something about the way she spoke at the table last night broke me.  After a few minutes, I realized why.  It wasn't about "discipline versus no discipline" or because I felt that I shouldn't have followed through on what I had told her I would do.  Instead, her words made me realize that often, I treat parenting as a "cause-effect" relationship, not always a "mother-child" relationship.  It's easy to do, especially in the three's, with all of it's button pushing, negotiations and boundary-drawing (then erasing, then re-drawing).   But Ella doesn't recognize this yet.  The only difference between these two scenarios, to my three year old, is a comforting snuggle or the wiping of tear-stained cheeks, even if those tear-stained cheeks had been warned, multiple times.   So, while it didn't seem like much to me, it was HUGE to her.  

I sometimes forget, from high atop my mountain of discipline justifications, to climb down and see things from her vantage point.

"Oh.  Oh....Bug, I'm so sorry about that.  I didn't know that's all you wanted.   Mommy will listen better next time, okay?"




Her face instantly brightened up.  (Man, I'm so thankful she doesn't know how to hold a grudge).  "It's okay Mommy. I know you didn't mean it....  She looked down at her plate, then back up at me.


Hey, mommy??"  




I winced just slightly, waiting for her to twist the knife a little more.


"If I eat all my pasta, can I have some mango ice cream??"






And suddenly, we're on to the good part of our day.  Just like that.   This is life with a three year old.

Just Keep Swimming

I honestly can't remember when I last wrote a post.  (bad, bad K).   It usually only takes 3 or 4 days of no writing or some other creative output to cause me to shrivel up like, well...like my plants in our brown front yard.  I've been throwing all of my spare time and energy into starting up my photography business and wow, is it overwhelming.  Fun, but overwhelming.  Between reading blogs and tutorials, studying rules of exposure, composition, color, etc., researching marketing and branding strategies, and working with Jake to launch a new website and corresponding blog, there just hasn't been much time to do anything else that I love.

But admittedly, I haven't been the best at managing my time.  When I first decided to pack in the piano-lesson teaching and shift my artistic gears into neutral, I figured I would just take things day by day.  I'd work from home, when I could.   I heard and believed rumors of phenomena like napping children and creative space.  Oh, and energy (how silly of me).  A few years from now when my babes are in school, I'll probably shed a tear or two (they miiiight just be happy ones) and be grateful to have had these precious, fleeting and frustrating years with them.  But I also think I might find myself standing in my silent kitchen, which for once isn't littered with tupperware lids and bread crusts, and think, "I saw that going differently in my mind."

The truth is, I'm not good at making choices.  Never have been.  Even now, standing in the makeup aisle of Target can nearly give me a panic attack.   Jake learned early on in our relationship to never, ever ask me where I wanted to eat.  I'd change my mind seventeen times before we finally landed on a restaurant and by that point, we were both too crabby and hungry to talk to each other for the first half of our meal.

But those are just little things.

There was the time I lost a scholarship to VCU because I decided at the very last minute that I wasn't sure I actually wanted to major in music anymore.  I decided that maybe I'd like to write, be a journalist. So I picked a track in mass communications. And precisely one semester later, I was back in the music office filling out a change of major form.

Seven years and one Bachelor's Degree in Music Education later,  I'm now using the years I spent holed up in musty practice rooms to....um, launch my photography business.  The piano is sitting dormant in the corner of our dining room collecting dust, and if given the choice, I'd still grab a pen and paper before I'd even think of parking my butt on that piano bench.  I've also decided that if Ella or Milo should tell me they want to major in music, I will probably have to bite clear through my own tongue to keep from saying anything.  It will be their choice, not mine.  (Repeats over and over).

And it's ironic, how much I hate having to choose, because I find myself in a season of life where I'm having to make more choices than ever before.  Some I make all by myself.  Some, life makes for me.  (I'm still not sure which ones I tend to resent more).  Hands down, the easiest decision I make in a given day is deciding which creamer to put in my coffee.  From there, it gets much more complicated:

"Do I sit down on the floor and play with my kids or do I turn on a movie so I can send out those emails?"  

"Do I clean the bathrooms while they nap, or do I finish editing those photos?"  

"Should Jake and I take the evening to reconnect, or should we work on our individual projects after the kids go to sleep?"  

"Do I play with my camera, or do I write?"

"Meditate, or work-out?"

And somewhere, in between every choice I make or don't make, there's that tiny voice that tells me I shouldn't have to choose.  Why can't I just do it all?   Because I can if I really try.  I'm just not doing it right yet.  

It reeks of immaturity.  A voice that preys especially on the young, the energetic, the eternally optimistic.  It dupes us into believing exactly what marketing companies around the world are paid the big bucks to make us believe:  we can do it all, have it all, be it all.  And if we can't, don't, and aren't- then we're obviously not trying hard enough.  Period.  

So this voice accompanied me out of high school, into college, through my engagement and early years of marriage, and got ever louder until I couldn't discern which was my own voice anymore.  It finally took panic attacks and trips to counseling to make me realize there was no other choice than to have it bound and gagged.  

And yet, like a cockroach in a nuclear holocaust, it refuses to die.  Although not anywhere near as loud and obnoxious as it once was, there are still echoes of it in my day to day life.  Like, my first inclination to be frustrated with myself that I let my blog fall to the wayside.  Because, why shouldn't I be able to have the time to write up my business plan, blog, have tickle fights with the kids, cook, take care of the house, go to doctor appointments, have playdates, have long conversations with Jake over dinner, visit with family, balance the checkbook, shave my legs, actually open the new Pilates DVD I ordered 4 months ago.  In reality, I'm extremely lucky if all of the above happens in the span of a week.

Big time reality check.

I don't have anything figured out.  I don't know what I'm doing.  Both my kids are screaming upstairs in their rooms, fighting naptime, I have paperwork to fill out and submit for my business license, and I haven't figured out what I'm making for dinner tonight.  But for now, I've decided that the best way to reel myself back in is with an open bag of chocolate chips and a cup of coffee.  

There are many people and forces in my life that require my steady grace and patience.  But it never ceases to amaze me on days like today, that the person who always needs it most, is myself.

And so I take comfort in the words of a beloved blue fish on Ella's current favorite movie:

"Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.  Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do?  We swim, swim."

(And also, don't forget to come up for air).  

Wise fish, that Dory.