family

Things Grace and Whit do alone

I loved this post by Elisabeth Stitt about 10 things children need to be able to do on their own by middle school.  The post, and the topic, reminded me of Jessica Lahey‘s marvelous book, The Gift of Failure, which I read, loved, and reviewed this fall.  Lahey asserts, as does Stitt, that we need to let our children do more, in every way.  Their learning certain skills and activities both prepares them for adulthood and lifts some of the stultifying burden of doing everything from parents.

I share this view.  I want my children to emerge from our household able to do a load of laundry, cook a simple dinner, and interact confidently with adults.  With that in mind, here are a few things that I both encourage and expect Grace and Whit to do by themselves.  These tasks make my life easier (though at first I am always nervous, of course) but far more importantly they build their confidence and sense of mastery in the world.

Cook dinner.  Late this summer, when Matt was away, I went to a late afternoon yoga class and left both the children at home and asked Grace to make dinner. She cooked hamburgers on the stove, cleaned everything up, set the table, lit candles.  It was pleasurable for me and hugely gratifying for her.  She’s asked several times since them to be allowed to make dinner alone, and each time I joyfully say yes.

Fold and put away their laundry.  It was reading Lahey’s book that made me realize I have to stop putting away Whit’s laundry and refolding his tee-shirts when he rummages through them.  Who cares.  He can find what he needs, and the lesson of re-doing everything he does is far more toxic than letting a little mess stand.

Walk to and from school.  We don’t do this often in the morning, since I prioritize sleep.  As soon as our school allows it, I like Grace and Whit to walk the 0.75 miles home alone.  They know the way home that has stop lights and crossing guards, and I think they enjoy the downtime.

Solder metal.  Whit as a soldering iron and he uses it unsupervised.  It took both Matt and I a little while to get used to this idea, but the pride Whit feels when I wear a necklace he fixed for me with his soldering iron – every single time – delights me. Plus, I love that I didn’t have to go to a jeweler.

Shake hands with, address by name, and speak with adults. We are old-fashioned and use Mr. and Mrs. by default.  Grace and Whit still struggle in some cases to make eye contact with grown-ups, but it continues to be an expectation.  We spend a lot of time as a family and rarely seat the children at a separate table.  I expect them to interact with adults, to make conversation and respond when spoken to.  They’ve both learned from a very early age that it’s very important to ask questions of other people.  I’m constantly amazed at how few people do this.

Pack their own lunches.  I still sometimes do this, but the truth is I do that because I love it.  Grace in particular enjoys packing her own lunch and both are hugely capable of it.  Even when I pack lunch, they both know that the first thing they do when they come in the door after school is empty their lunch boxes and put the glass containers from the day in the dishwasher.

Do their own homework, alone.  Both kids know that if they need help or have a question, they can ask.  They do, from time to time.  Otherwise, the expectation is that they manage their own homework.  We received an email from school recently asking parents to back off from “helping” with homework.  In many cases it was clear the work was not done by the children themselves, the email said.  I laughed out loud, since while I have many issues, that is not one of them.  I think expressing interest in what they’re learning at school is vital.  I think doing their homework with them is damaging.

What should Grace and Whit be doing alone that they’re not?  What are your kids doing alone?  Do you agree with me that this is important?

All at once

I’ve written before that parenthood has contained more surprises than I can count.  This is true.  There’s no question that the most startling thing for me is how loss is contained in being a mother.  I did not at all anticipate how bittersweet parenting would be.  Every single day makes me cry.  Every single day also makes me laugh, and smile, and ride waves of joy.  The oscillation between these two poles – and their occasional co-existence in a single moment – takes my breath away on a regular basis.

Another of motherhood’s big surprises for me is the number of thing that happened all at once.  There were many parts of childhood that I assumed would be gradual processes that were, instead, totally overnight events.  For example:

Walking.

Riding a bike.

Reading.

All of these things I figured would happen slowly, with fits and starts, in spurts.  Two steps forward, one step back style.  Instead, in all of those cases, it was basically binary.  One day Grace was rolling from one side of the kitchen to the other in her determination to get somewhere, the next she was standing wobbily next to the couch, holding on with two clutched fists, and the next she was off to the races.  The same with biking.  And with reading.

By the way, this works in reverse, too.  Some things I thought would be instantaneous – notably, feeling like I was a mother, and, frankly feeling like I was an adult – were instead gradual.

Time is playing its fast-slow-instant-slow motion tricks on me right now, too.  All at once I have a teenager.

Grace will be thirteen three weeks from today.  It’s such a cliche, but man, it’s also the true-est true thing: how is this possible?  She was a colicky newborn five seconds ago, and now she’s almost my height, wears bigger shoes than I do, and is turning into a young woman so fast my head is spinning.  There’s nothing gradual about this moment.  Even as I write that, I sense how ludicrous it is: after all I’ve hard thirteen years to prepare for having a thirteen year old.  Yet it happened when I blinked.  As Gretchen Rubin says, the days are long but the years are short.  Another true-est of the true adage.

Do you know what I mean?  Are some things that you thought would be slow in fact sudden, and vice versa?

Fifteen years

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How is it possible?  Fifteen years went by in a blink.

The years have been turbulent and placid, full of adventure and calm, one house, two children, visits to four continents, and over 50,000 digital photos.  We’ve had bad luck both hilarious and terrifying, cars totalled by falling trees that were struck by lightning (true) and children having anaphylactic reactions to nuts (also true).  We’ve also had extraordinary, miraculous luck, in the enormous form of a heart transplant but also in tiny ways every day.

We summitted Kilimanjaro together within six months of meeting, but as the minister said on our wedding day, Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to marriage.  And he was right.  It’s been a walk both more difficult and more breathtaking than I could possibly have imagined.  Our ascent of Kilimanjaro was marked by a golden late afternoon in the sun where you washed my hair for me and a long, slow slog to the top in a white-out blizzard.  Both of those experiences in a single week, along with more than I can count along the spectrum both meteorological and emotional.

Just like life.

I look at this picture and I’m struck by the palpable joy, by the deeply familiar place (we still go there most weekends of the summer, and each time I walk through this space I stop and remember the strains of Maybe I’m Amazed and this exact moment), and by how young we both are.  Young and optimistic and hopeful.  Fifteen years have sanded the rough edges off of us, there’s no question about that, as well as allowed some of our tendencies to harden into traits.  I hope there’s been more gentling than hardening.  Honestly, I think that’s a good a wish for a heading-towards-long marriage as I can think of.

I love you, Matt.  Happy fifteen years.  Here’s to well more than fifteen more.

Anniversary posts from past years are here: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011

 

Summer 2015

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August sunrise, Cambridge MA

Summer 2015 was replete with memories and full of the intertwined joy and sorrow that I now recognize as the fundamental rhythm of my life.

In June, we went to Canobie Lake Park to celebrate school being out.  Grace graduated from 6th grade, which I vividly recall doing myself.  Some combination of this graduation, my 15th business school graduation, and Grace herself made me suddenly, startlingly aware of the ways in which everything is changing.  Parenting a tween, which is rapidly becoming parenting a teen, is not for the faint of heart.

Grace and Whit went to a couple of day camps near our house.  We went for long walks in the still-light evenings, admired sunsets, and read together in bed.  We spent weekends as a family down on the water.  We ate ice cream.

In late June and early July, Grace and Whit spent two weeks with my parents and their cousins.  We had a wonderful reunion of my sister and her family over the 4th of July, which is always a time we gather since my mother’s birthday is July 3rd.  It was a sunny and happy long weekend, full of laughter and shouting and fireworks and my father reading Swallows & Amazons and my mother opening gifts after the traditional angel food cake.  I loved every minute of it.

Grace, Whit and I spent a night at Great Wolf Lodge.  A night was plenty.  They loved the waterslides and the late-night ice cream sundaes though they both agreed one night was enough. While we were there my new goddaughter was born to one of my oldest and dearest friends.  She was born on Whit’s 1/2 birthday and her mother is Whit’s godmother, and that coincidence made me irrationally happy.  I can’t wait to meet her.

Grace and Whit then went to camp.  It was not an easy drop off.  Both of them were tearful, and I was anxious about leaving them.  It didn’t take long for me to realize, though, that in my opinion the value of camp is not in spite of but because of the homesickness.  In fact part of what I hoped to buy with my camp tuition was a few days of discomfort.  So that was fine.  Then things smoothed out, though at the end Whit had some additional challenges.  It’s fair to say that hers was a terrific summer, and his was good though not as spectacular as last year.  They can’t all be The Best Summer Ever, and some difficulty is part of what I’m hoping for, I realize as I walk through adolescence with these children.

I wrote about my favorite books of the half-year at the end of June, and unfortunately did not read a lot else over the summer that I adored.  Kent Haruf’s luminous Our Souls at Night is an exception.  My favorite quotation from the book is here.  I also loved his book Plainsong, and enjoyed some great nonfiction, including Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed (which I plan to review next month for Great New Books) and Julie Lythcott-Haims’ How to Raise an Adult.

After camp the four of us went to Basin Harbor Club, on Lake Champlain in Vermont.  This was our sixth year in a row and we absolutely loved it.  I feel a real tension in my parenting life between horizon-broadening adventures and the comforting cadence of ritual.  Both are important to us as a family, and to me as an individual.  This is a tradition that has come to mean a lot to our family, and a downright glorious week.  There are more memories than I can possibly list from the week, but I wanted to mention two.  Several mornings I woke up at dawn and crept out of the cottage to for a run along now-familiar roads.  Each time the sun rose as I ran, stopping me (literally) in my tracks.  Secondly, on the last morning, as we walked to the waterfront for the last time, a formation of geese flew overhead, honking.  I stood and looked up, hearing Mary Oliver in my head, feeling the brush of fall against my skin.  Here we go, I thought.

We spent the last weekend of August with my parents at the shore, in the place where so many of our summer weekends happened.  It was a weekend of lasts: last sail, last tennis game, last ice cream and sunset.  It was beautiful and bittersweet at the same time.  Just as life is.

How was your summer?

I’ve done these end-of-summer reflection posts for several years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 (an aside: I have been blogging for a long time).

Excited and sad at the same time.

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A short-lived smile, by the flower garden next to her cabin.  Cosmos always remind me powerfully of my maternal grandmother, Nana, and given the proximity of them to Grace’s cabin, I like to think she’s watching over her great-granddaughter at camp.IMG_6039

Right before the final goodbye.  Right before I took this, he looked at me and said “after this you are leaving, really?” nervously.  I nodded, and we took the photograph.  I don’t know if you can see his apprehension in his eyes. 

Last Thursday we dropped Grace and Whit at camp for 3.5 weeks.  This is her 5th summer and his 3rd.  I know, I know, I’m a broken record, but seriously?  It feels like we just took her for her first summer a week ago, so how is this possible?  As usual, I drove away in tears, and as usual, my heart was heavy for days after leaving them at camp.  Not because I doubt they’ll have fun, not because I worry about their safety or joy while away from me.  Not at all because of other of those.  Not even specifically because I’ll miss them, though I will.

But, mostly, the sorrow is due to the realization that I am already here, already at this point teetering on the edge of something very new and very scary, already at the day that many more years with children at home flutter behind me, like prayer flags in the wind, than do ahead of me.

Grace was weepy at drop off.  Truthfully, it was the hardest camp goodbye yet.  Well, maybe not harder than the first time, when she was 8.  But I was a bit taken aback by how sad she was, and by how hard it was to walk away.  Part of that was because we were early and many of her friends hadn’t arrived yet.  Part of it was just because she seemed to be in a cabin without counselors she knew.  And part of it is probably just because of this particular moment in life, which is marked by closeness and intimacy which both makes me anxious (should I worry?) and glad (I am grateful for our bond).

Within 24 hours I had decided, though, that it’s all fine.  Maybe it is better this way.  Perhaps the benefit of camp is not in spite of her finding it challenging this year but because of it.  That was quite a flip of attitude for me and it felt like something heavy had been lifted.  Yes.  Precisely this: the discomfort may be what makes it so valuable.  The uneasiness and tears speak to the growth.

On Tuesday night before we left, I tucked Whit in. He was quiet and visibly wistful. I flicked the light off and climbed into his narrow bed next to him and whispered, “It’s almost time for camp. How do you feel about that?  Excited?  Sad?”  He swallowed and, staring up at the slats of the bunk above him, said quietly, “Both.” I looked at his profile in the faint glow of the Bruins zamboni night light Grace gave him for Christmas, and it occurred to me that’s how I feel about camp too.  And, actually, it’s how I feel about every new vista of this parenting journey.  It’s how I feel about life itself: excited and sad at the same time.

Excited and sad at the same time.  Always.  The goodbyes and the hellos keep coming fast and furious, inextricably wound together.

Previous posts about camp: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014