Dysfunction

For the record,

I did a Zumba Class today.

And a Core-something-or-other Class that was awful and painful and humiliating.

Then I came home.

Then I remembered the Boston Cream donuts in the cupboard that I'd hidden from my kids and myself.

Then I debated whether to eat the donuts after I just worked out for an hour and probably didn't burn off the calories of one donut.

Then I paused in my debate to take a picture of the donuts so that I could blog about my dysfunction.

Then I ate them both and chugged water from my exercise water bottle.

Dysfunction at work. 

Also for the record,  they were delicious.

dys·func·tion noun  \(ˌ)dis-ˈfəŋ(k)-shən\


1: impaired functioning

2: unhealthy behavior

A piece of my heart

fell off and got digested by my stomach tonight.

I took Eliza to Middle School Orientation.  My sweet, shorter-than-everyone, younger-than-some-4th- graders, best-friends-with-a-first-grader, happy Eliza. 

She was excited and nervous.  She jumped out of the car, held my hand and skipped as we walked into the school.  She held my hand through the heavy metal doors that led us into the school that smells remarkably like my middle school of 23 years ago. She held my hand as we waited in the crunched line of nervous children and supportive parents. 

I saw at once that we were in a different world than the one she occupies at home that is full of Barbies and fairy houses with our 7-year-old neighbor, Avengers shows with Chas, and cuddling with Dad.  I saw teeny-boppers dressed in their favorite "cool" outfit.  I saw kids navigating the complex road of who to say "Hi" to and how.

And then I knew that I had to tell her.  I leaned down and whispered, "Eliza,  sweetheart, I love you, and I love to hold your hand, and I know you're nervous, but 6th Graders don't really hold their moms' hands.  I'll still hold it if you want to..."

And she let go.  And a piece of my heart fell off to have said it.  Good luck, Eliza the Brave. 

 

The Cost of Therapy

I hear that therapy costs between $90 and $180/hour. 

Last week my far-away friend re-capped her therapy learnings for me.  It cost me several puddles in our new patches of grass seed while I let Marko and Lucy take turns watering them.

Most Mondays my walking buddy is a portable therapist.  It always costs sore calves. She walks too fast, but her insights are great.

Today, my phone therapy with my adored cousin cost me 9 (count them, NINE) Fruit-by-the-Foots, four episodes of Mighty Machines and Dinosaur Train, and one small sink area flood.

To those people who say that therapy is worth every penny, I whole heartedly agree!

Apologies

In the last year I've found myself in three conversations apologizing for members of my church as a whole.  Two of these conversations were in the last week. 

It's an awkward place for me to be.  I worry that an apology for behavior seems like an apology for belief.  And I'm confused about why there can be screwballs of all colors and creeds, but not mine.  And at the same time, I'm so sad that our church has the image or is portraying the messages I heard.

They talked about exclusion.  Exclusion from sleepover parties, cheerleading teams, neighborhoods, and heaven.  They talked about persistent invitations that made them angry.  That seemed like the opposite problem to exclusion, but I didn't think to point that out.  And they talked about control.  Parents choosing careers and spouses and all sorts of weird stuff I don't see.  They accused me of being blinded and brainwashed and laid-back about my religion.  I'm not sure which accusation hurt worse.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to apologize for all of us.  I think I'm ashamed.  It's possible that they misinterpreted their experiences.  But it's also possible that in the time-consuming responsibilities of the church, people in the neighborhood were left out.  It's possible that in our efforts to share our happiness, we convey pressure.  And it's probable that my religion, like all other groups in the world, has nut cases too.  Please don't let them define us.

Even though, I've heard how nice, how friendly, how family-centered we are far more times than I've heard the reverse, it still hurts.  I think it shatters my expectations of us as a people.  I feel like, considering all we know about the loving, merciful, parental nature of God; considering the number of hours we spend in classes that teach us how to apply Christ's principles to our lives; considering our very sincere desires to follow Jesus's example, we ought to be the kindest, most helpful, most inclusive people anyone ever encounters.  I know that I'm not, but that doesn't prevent me from expecting that "we" would be.

When I was a teenager, an old man with a hunched back and a warm smile told me not to forget that, "The Church is true, in spite of a few."  Ain't that the truth? 

A Glass Half Full

Joy comes only drops at a time, I've decided.

I've spent a lot of time looking for the faucet, and haven't found it yet.

Now I'm on a quest for a glass to hold my drops in.  I wouldn't want to lose any of them.  I need every single one.

Mother's Day II

Two Highlights from Mother's Day:

1.  The fingerprint on my iPhone lens that made all the photos look timeless and dreamy. 

It's my life--the dreaminess and the fingerprints.

 

2.  Eliza's card:  "My mum...is as special as Dogs to me."
 

Mother's Day

This post hit it bang on, I thought:

http://www.kathylynnharris.com/dear-moms-of-adopted-children/


And it led me to this one, which was pretty close to the mark:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lea-grover/dear-less-than-perfect-mom_b_3184445.html


My walking friend tells me that her mother hated Mother's Day every year for the last 40-some years.  My friend, on the other hand, spends every Mother's Day reflecting on her progress as a mother throughout the year.  Both strategies intimidate me a bit.

My cousin tells me that in England they call it Mothering Day.  It has a nice ring to it, she says.  I agree.

Mothering the verb, not the noun:  I spent the day mothering the people who live here.  Or mothering the adjective:  I have chosen a mothering life.  Either one, just not the noun.  The noun opens itself up to descriptive words that are so daunting: Good Mother, Bad Mother, Helicopter Mother, Strict Mother, Yelled-at-us-all-day-long Mother. 

I'm mothering my way through mortality.  (Did anyone else notice that it almost sounds like "muddling my way through?"  Well, I'm doing that too.)

Happy Mothering Day to all of us!

The Sweet

We waved good-bye to the boys and all their camping gear at 5:30.

The rest of us left for our girls' night out at 5:34.

30 minutes of traffic jam didn't bother us.  We were talking about crushes and first dates and kisses.

Ears pierced in the right spot this time.

Time for Build-A-Bear browsing, Bubble Tea, and Bath & Body Works.

Got sucked into buying a nail stamping kit from one of those mall center kiosks.

Wandered around looking for the highly recommended Sushi place at 8:30 at night. 

Finally found it and got stuffed for $28 of awesome sushi.  It was 50% off night.  Who knew?  

And Lucy wasn't too miserable and noisy even though bedtime was hours ago.

The conversations on the way home were insightful and intimate.

Sometimes life offers a very small sweet piece of bliss.  This was one of them. 


"...if they never should have bitter they could not know the sweet--" 
(D&C 29:39)

I thought...

I thought that if I helped my kids as much as possible, they would become helpful kids.
It turns out, that it makes them helpless to tie their own shoes, put in their own pony-tails, or get their own drink of water.

I thought that if I discussed decisions with my children, that we would come to unifying consensuses. 
It's left me with arguments on every topic from every child every day.

I thought that if I ignored whining and tantrums that it would eliminate them.  That's what everybody tells you will happen.  They're wrong. 
It just makes the whining pervasive, the crying louder, and the tantrums more intense.

I thought that if we had very little screen time in our home that it would help our kids find useful, enlightening, creative, active things to do. 
It actually creates screen-starved children that will glue themselves to any baby show that Lucy might be watching or play solitaire on a one-inch screen with shoddy graphics late at night in their bedroom.

I thought that introducing children to a variety of foods would lead to a broad and accepting palette. 
It's actually led to so many determined preferences that making a meal is like navigating a mine field. 

I think I'm having second thoughts about it all.

Out of Balance

As a child, I loved to get the see-saw stuck perfectly balanced in the middle.  I loved how a heavier person could scoot up and a lighter person could scoot back to achieve balance.

In my adulthood, I still love it at the playground.  I would love it even more in my life. 

Balance in my life is more like a mathematical average than a teeter-totter stabilized in mid-air.  Chas's third grade math reminded me recently that there are four ways to look at average.  I'll refresh your memory:

MEAN--In a data set, the sum of all the data points, divided by the number of data points.

MODE--The number (or numbers) that occurs most frequently in a set of data.

MEDIAN--The middle number in a data set when the data are put in order.

RANGE--The difference between the largest and the smallest numbers in a data set.

I achieve balance in my life by overloading our lives with activities and then retreating to nearly zero in the hopes that when you add them together and divide by the number of years, we will have achieved the all elusive balance. 

If 10 is insanity and 0 is the number for hermits, I'm trying to hit a mean of 5.  Last Fall there were 6 soccer practices, 4 church activities, 3 music lessons, 1 gymnastics class, and 8 swimming lessons, plus school every week.  To average this out, I plan to do nothing until they leave home. 

The MEAN of our lives is 7.5.

The MODE of our lives is tidying the disaster created by the mean.

The MEDIAN is food.  No matter what order you put the data in, the median is always people hungry or people disliking the food in front of them or both. 

The RANGE is 18 hours, not including the outlying data points of 2 am bad sleepers in our bed. 

I sense that the balance is off a bit again.  I yearn for that see-saw suspended in the air.  I'm just not sure if I need to scoot forward or back. 

In the mean time, I guess I'll enjoy going up and down.  It can be pretty fun as long as the weight at the bottom doesn't bail and you're left with a sore tush. 

"Remember, too much of anything in life can throw us off-balance. At the same time, too little of the important things can do the same thing."  (Elder Russell M. Ballard)