It was a case of felicitous happenstance that the kids had no school – a professional day – on what turned out to be a beautiful early-spring day, one of the first of the year. The sun shone and temperatures reached nearly sixty degrees. Tim went over to play at a friend’s house; Holly and I headed out for her first solo biking excursion, retracing the mile-long route via gravel footpath to the town Center that she had done many times on the tagalong attached to my bike but never on her own two-wheeler.
I was apprehensive. Holly developed her biking abilities last fall. First we practiced on a paved track, then in a nearby neighborhood with wide, flat, interlacing streets. The footpaths in our town are, by design, rough and unpaved, but this makes them challenging for small riders. The terrain is uneven and the paths wind a lot, so attention to both positioning and steering is critical. I wasn’t at all sure Holly was up to the challenge, but she insisted she wanted to try.
As I pedaled along behind her, it occurred to me that there’s really no way for a beginner to learn to ride a bike without falling a fair amount. No matter how much I coached her along, it was bound to happen. Bicyclists fall; it’s that simple. In general she seemed fairly steady and quite confident, but I knew it was inevitable that she’d take a spill at some point. There’s just no other way to develop biking skills than by practicing and trying and occasionally wiping out.
She did well heading up to the Center. On the way back, she started going a little too fast down a slight slope, lost control, and flew into the gravel. She skinned her knee and the side of her palm. She cried a lot. A police officer who happened to be driving by pulled over, lights flashing, to check on her, which I thought was very kind of him if a bit of an overreaction. For a moment, being a typical twenty-first century parent, I wondered if it was possible he’d say I was doing something wrong. Had I overlooked some obvious safety measure or allowed her in an area where she shouldn’t be biking? But he merely echoed what I had been thinking: Kids learning to ride bikes fall. There’s no way around it.
Holly and I sat on a stone wall until she felt well enough to stand up. Then she said, “I don’t want to bike anymore!”
We were just under a mile from home. “We can walk our bikes if you’d rather,” I offered.
“I want to drive!” she wailed.
I thought about it. Fetching the car wasn’t out of the question. We happened to be across the street from the home of a close friend of ours; I could park Holly there while I biked home to get the car, or I could ask her for a ride. We were also close to the library, and even though I know it’s not ideal on principle to leave kids at the library, I also knew she could rest unnoticed for fifteen minutes while I hurried home for the car.
But I also know how quick Holly is to flare up when she’s upset and how equally quick she is to calm down. Which made me suspect that if I didn’t leap in to find an elaborate solution to the problem – one that involved leaving her and her bike while I hurried home for the car and came back again to pick her up – she would soon get past the feeling that she needed a ride.
I fought the temptation to come up with a complicated solution, something that would assure that Holly would stop crying. I made myself refrain from trying to fix everything instantly. “We can’t drive; we don’t have the car,” I said calmly. “If you don’t feel like biking, why don’t we just walk our bikes for a while?”
I gave her a drink of water and dabbed off the drops of blood with a Kleenex. We started walking. After less than two minutes, she said in a very tear-worn voice, “I want to ride now.”
So we rode the rest of the way home. No more accidents; no more tears. And I had the satisfaction of knowing I’d had a chance to practice overcoming one of my faults as a parent: being too quick to try to fix things when they go wrong. I’d held back, made myself be patient, waited out Holly’s need to go home in the car. I’d suppressed my natural tendency to start making arrangements and devising solutions and generally being as proactive as possible to ensure that everyone is happy and everything works out. “We don’t have the car; let’s just start walking,” I’d said instead. And walking had worked. Walking had calmed Holly down until she was ready to ride again.
It wasn’t merely the age-old lesson of getting back on the horse – or bike – when you’re thrown off, though there was that too: certainly Holly ended the day feeling like a successful bicyclist rather than one whose first excursion had been cut short with a bad fall. And that’s an important one. But for me as a parent, it’s even more valuable to remember not everything that happens to the kids is a problem waiting for me to step in and fix it. This time, fixing wasn’t necessary; only waiting was needed. And waiting was exactly what worked.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Playing after the flood
Yesterday’s Boston Globe carried an engaging op-ed piece by Julianna Baggott, a college writing instructor who suspects her late-teen students have little experience with spontaneous, non-electronic, outdoor play, having grown up amidst organized sports and video games. Knowing the Globe’s lead time, I suspect it’s just a coincidence that the essay ran on what felt to us like, if not the first day of spring, then at least the first day of potential spring. And my kids, though no strangers to video games, did in fact play spontaneously outside.
The weather had a lot of meaning for us yesterday. We arose in the pre-dawn darkness as usual, and because the past three days have been dominated by dark gray skies, steady rain and the most massive flooding in this area that I’ve seen in four decades, I imagined that another gray and rainy day lurked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness.
But I was wrong. When light filled the sky, it wasn’t the dull gray light of the past three days; it was sunlight. Thin, white clouds scudded across a pale blue sky. The rain was over. And while the remnants of the storm were still somewhat jaw-dropping to behold – our barnyard and west pastures still under water, a whitewater deluge rushing across our driveway in the two spots where it crosses the brook, and all over town orange safety cones and detour signs scattered amidst the roadways – the sunshine promised that we’d have at least this one day without more rain.
The kids felt the sun not only on their faces but in their bones. After school, Holly rolled out her two-wheeler for only the second time this season and asked if she could pedal it around. I pulled a lawn chair out onto the front step so that I could keep an eye on her. She fetched three favorite stuffed animals and had them take turns riding on her bike with her. The dog lay next to me on the sunny stoop. Tim and his friend Will invented a game of nerf baseball, smacking a soft round orb around with a padded bat, yelling, chasing each other, occasionally tackling. For once, they didn’t even ask to play computer games or video games. They knew they needed fresh air and sun.
The cows and sheep bravely crossed the flooded pasture to make their way to a dry hillside, and the floodwaters started receding. The kids admitted it was kind of exciting to have to trek along a trail through the woods to get to our car, which we’d moved to a cul-de-sac that backs onto our property just before the driveway became impassable.
So Julianna Baggott writing in the Globe is right; kids don’t play spontaneously outdoors the way they did in past generations. But once in a while, when the mood and the weather are right, a more primal instinct takes over and they give up all their usual distractions to bike or run and just be outside. My kids were like that today on what felt like the kickoff to spring, and it made me hope we have a lot more afternoons like that in the oncoming season, and that we still appreciate the warmth of the spring sun even when the floodwaters are just photos.
The weather had a lot of meaning for us yesterday. We arose in the pre-dawn darkness as usual, and because the past three days have been dominated by dark gray skies, steady rain and the most massive flooding in this area that I’ve seen in four decades, I imagined that another gray and rainy day lurked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness.
But I was wrong. When light filled the sky, it wasn’t the dull gray light of the past three days; it was sunlight. Thin, white clouds scudded across a pale blue sky. The rain was over. And while the remnants of the storm were still somewhat jaw-dropping to behold – our barnyard and west pastures still under water, a whitewater deluge rushing across our driveway in the two spots where it crosses the brook, and all over town orange safety cones and detour signs scattered amidst the roadways – the sunshine promised that we’d have at least this one day without more rain.
The kids felt the sun not only on their faces but in their bones. After school, Holly rolled out her two-wheeler for only the second time this season and asked if she could pedal it around. I pulled a lawn chair out onto the front step so that I could keep an eye on her. She fetched three favorite stuffed animals and had them take turns riding on her bike with her. The dog lay next to me on the sunny stoop. Tim and his friend Will invented a game of nerf baseball, smacking a soft round orb around with a padded bat, yelling, chasing each other, occasionally tackling. For once, they didn’t even ask to play computer games or video games. They knew they needed fresh air and sun.
The cows and sheep bravely crossed the flooded pasture to make their way to a dry hillside, and the floodwaters started receding. The kids admitted it was kind of exciting to have to trek along a trail through the woods to get to our car, which we’d moved to a cul-de-sac that backs onto our property just before the driveway became impassable.
So Julianna Baggott writing in the Globe is right; kids don’t play spontaneously outdoors the way they did in past generations. But once in a while, when the mood and the weather are right, a more primal instinct takes over and they give up all their usual distractions to bike or run and just be outside. My kids were like that today on what felt like the kickoff to spring, and it made me hope we have a lot more afternoons like that in the oncoming season, and that we still appreciate the warmth of the spring sun even when the floodwaters are just photos.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Worry, worry, worry
"Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy." Leo F. Buscaglia
In the wee hours of Sunday morning, I woke, anxiety-ridden, and lay in bed detailing to myself my worries. I was worried about the fact that I needed to get to church early to prepare for a small presentation I was giving, and I was worried that I would forget the materials I needed for the presentation (the written text I planned to read, plus my laptop to take notes during the discussion that would follow). I was worried it would be too hard to get up on time due to the hour of sleep lost to daylight savings. I was worried about the forecasted rain and whether we’d have problems with flooding. I was worried about how I would fit in my imperative daily run if the flooding was bad, and I was worried that the forecasted high winds would cause a tree to fall on me while I ran.
As I slept, I could hear the wind and rain; I woke worrying about how my mother’s flight home from London was going to be able to land the following night in such bad weather. I was worried that my daughter would dawdle throughout the morning and be late getting to her friend’s birthday party, and probably arrive in a cranky mood for having been rushed.
When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” Winston Churchill
And then Monday I woke even earlier with even more worries. This despite the fact that as far as I knew, everything I had worried about before dawn on Sunday had worked out. I’d arrived at church on time and the presentation had gone great, as had the discussion afterwards. Holly had been good about getting ready for the party and had enjoyed it greatly once she was there. I’d fit in my run before the heavy rains started, and the forecasted heavy winds never arrived. When I’d gone to bed on Sunday night, my mother’s flight was still scheduled for an on-time arrival, though I didn’t know for sure that she’d landed.
Still, it seemed that by 4:40 AM on Monday, I had a whole new set of worries waking me. The flooding had indeed begun as predicted on Sunday, and our driveway was starting to wash out. I wasn’t sure how I’d get the kids to the bus stop if it was impassable by daybreak. I was afraid when daylight came I’d discover that the whole farm was under water. I didn’t know how I’d feed the cows if the barnyard was flooded; I wasn’t even sure the sheep would survive a flood. I worried and worried and worried.
Worry is like a rocking chair--it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you anywhere.” Unknown
Meditation and other prescribed mind-calming measures don’t work for me at times like this. Instead, I arose from bed even though it was an hour earlier than I usually get up and tried to write out possible solutions to everything that was concerning me. Our house is built on a slab; even if the fields were flooded, the area around the house always stays dry, and I knew I didn’t really have to worry about that from the perspective of flooding. The woman who owns the sheep had been here the evening before; surely she had taken some kind of precautions if she thought they might be in danger. Getting the kids out to the road if we couldn’t get through in the car would just require leaving a lot of extra time, and if Holly balked too severely at walking in the flooded driveway, I could pull her in the wagon. My father, who’s the real farmer here – I just help with morning feedings – would surely know what to do if the barnyard was flooded. And there was no point, two hours before sunrise, in worrying about what I would see when the sun came up. I wrote all of this out and tried to let it go. I reminded myself that most of the time, getting up early is one of the best ways to counter worry: there’s quite a lot you can fix or prevent simply by having extra time to deal with it.
There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever” Mahatma Gandhi
And most of it turned out all right, except that when daylight broke I discovered the barnyard situation was even worse than I imagined: the entire pasture west of our driveway was under a foot of water. Rick headed out to work and called me to say the driveway had indeed washed away during the night and I shouldn’t even try to get the kids to school; it just wasn’t safe. So there went that worry. I called my father to express my concerns about feeding the animals, and he said he’d take care of it. One less burden on my shoulders. I saw for myself that the house and the land around it were still dry and not in any threat from the continuing rainfall at all.
I tried again to tell myself how unproductive worry is. My mom called a little later in the morning and said she’d safely arrived home from London and that dad had managed with the animals and they were all safe and well, even the sheep. Things were turning out okay.
Worry is such a bad use of time. Listing your problems and figuring out how to cope with them is such a better idea. Getting up early to solve things is often the best strategy of all. Simple guidelines to remember at fretful times like this. It’s not always that easy. But it’s a start.
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” Arthur Somers Roche
Monday, March 15, 2010
Wear the baby? How about Give Mom a break?
This well-circulated article from the New York Times about the popularity of baby slings brought me back eleven and a half years, to when my son was an infant. Like the parents in the article, I wore my baby all the time. Everywhere. It soothed him; it entertained him; it kept my hands free. And then I realized something: I was really getting tired.
Though I wasn’t a full-throttle Attachment Parent – both my children slept in our bed only their first night home from the hospital; my son started daycare at the age of three months old; and we used a combination of breastfeeding and bottle-feeding - I definitely bought into the baby-wearing part of Dr. Sears’ equation. When Tim was a newborn I used a Snuggli pack that kept him tight against my chest; then we graduated to the Baby Bjorn, which allowed him a little bit of limb extension. When his neck grew stronger, I turned him to face outward, so that he could stare out at the world with the same perspective I had (literally if not figuratively). And when he was eight months old and could sit straight up on his own, we moved on to a backpack.
Especially for those first six months or so, I loved wearing that baby. Around the house while I did housework or cooked. On walks around the neighborhood. In stores. It was a wonderful thing. My baby was content; we were bonding like mad. It was just like the parents in the article say.
Except did I mention I was becoming really tired?
Still, it kept him happy. Not until my second child was born four years later did I rethink my passion for baby-wearing. And this time, four years older and that much farther into parenthood – as well as having experienced toddlerhood and begun the preschool years – I had a revelation. I’d already carried this new baby for nine months. And from what I knew about babies and small children at this point, there was going to be a whole lot more lugging, lifting, toting and hefting in the months and years to come. So maybe, I slowly came to realize, I didn’t want to spend quite so much leisure time with this baby strapped to my body.
Even the New York Times, normally the last bastion of evenhanded presentation of an issue, seems to suggest that the only downside to baby-wearing is that it could possibly be hazardous to the baby. And of course, that’s a huge downside. But I’ve never heard anyone except for me take a peek at that other downside to baby-wearing: it’s exhausting. And maybe, possibly, the last thing that tired new moms need is the message that they should be expending even more physical effort on parenting than they already are.
So my second child spent more time on a blanket on the floor, more time sitting on my lap rather than on my back, and yes, even more time in a stroller than my firstborn ever had. And I came to see that as a wonderful thing. It turned out my baby didn’t need to be borne by my musculature in order to be happy. It turned out that playing on the floor or even being rolled along in a stroller was just fine with her. It turned out the view she took in as she sat in her jog stroller as we traversed the neighborhood, or even as she perched in the cheap fold-up stroller as we made our way through the mall, wasn’t so bad either. She could still take in the scenery and sounds and enjoy the passing view. Only it wasn’t my spine doing all the work this time.
I’ve heard that attachment parents eschew strollers, though not until I read this article did I come across the amusing term “isolation pod.” Isolation pod? Really? How about “independence unit?”
Because that’s what it came to symbolize for me, really. Putting my baby in a stroller rather than in a Baby Bjorn made me feel more like she was my counterpart rather than my, well, extra weight to lug. I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t willing to carry them when they needed to be comforted, or in places where a stroller didn’t make sense. I loved hitting the hiking trail for a good two- or three-hour workout with the baby in the backpack. There were times that baby-carrying was a great option. But there were times when it was even better to not be bearing the baby’s weight. And I came to see my children as people whom I could love and lavish attention upon and enjoy spending time with – without stressing my skeletal system in the process.
The first couple of years of each of my children’s lives gave me plenty of opportunities for skeletal stress, from pregnancy to nursing to middle-of-the-night soothing to lifting in and out of the car seat. And all of that was before the toddler chase-around phase set in. My point is not that there’s anything wrong with baby-wearing per se but that this might be an area in which more parents could use a break. Trust me, you’re just as good a parent rolling your baby along as you are lugging him on your back. And your vertebrae might very well last a lot longer for it.
Though I wasn’t a full-throttle Attachment Parent – both my children slept in our bed only their first night home from the hospital; my son started daycare at the age of three months old; and we used a combination of breastfeeding and bottle-feeding - I definitely bought into the baby-wearing part of Dr. Sears’ equation. When Tim was a newborn I used a Snuggli pack that kept him tight against my chest; then we graduated to the Baby Bjorn, which allowed him a little bit of limb extension. When his neck grew stronger, I turned him to face outward, so that he could stare out at the world with the same perspective I had (literally if not figuratively). And when he was eight months old and could sit straight up on his own, we moved on to a backpack.
Especially for those first six months or so, I loved wearing that baby. Around the house while I did housework or cooked. On walks around the neighborhood. In stores. It was a wonderful thing. My baby was content; we were bonding like mad. It was just like the parents in the article say.
Except did I mention I was becoming really tired?
Still, it kept him happy. Not until my second child was born four years later did I rethink my passion for baby-wearing. And this time, four years older and that much farther into parenthood – as well as having experienced toddlerhood and begun the preschool years – I had a revelation. I’d already carried this new baby for nine months. And from what I knew about babies and small children at this point, there was going to be a whole lot more lugging, lifting, toting and hefting in the months and years to come. So maybe, I slowly came to realize, I didn’t want to spend quite so much leisure time with this baby strapped to my body.
Even the New York Times, normally the last bastion of evenhanded presentation of an issue, seems to suggest that the only downside to baby-wearing is that it could possibly be hazardous to the baby. And of course, that’s a huge downside. But I’ve never heard anyone except for me take a peek at that other downside to baby-wearing: it’s exhausting. And maybe, possibly, the last thing that tired new moms need is the message that they should be expending even more physical effort on parenting than they already are.
So my second child spent more time on a blanket on the floor, more time sitting on my lap rather than on my back, and yes, even more time in a stroller than my firstborn ever had. And I came to see that as a wonderful thing. It turned out my baby didn’t need to be borne by my musculature in order to be happy. It turned out that playing on the floor or even being rolled along in a stroller was just fine with her. It turned out the view she took in as she sat in her jog stroller as we traversed the neighborhood, or even as she perched in the cheap fold-up stroller as we made our way through the mall, wasn’t so bad either. She could still take in the scenery and sounds and enjoy the passing view. Only it wasn’t my spine doing all the work this time.
I’ve heard that attachment parents eschew strollers, though not until I read this article did I come across the amusing term “isolation pod.” Isolation pod? Really? How about “independence unit?”
Because that’s what it came to symbolize for me, really. Putting my baby in a stroller rather than in a Baby Bjorn made me feel more like she was my counterpart rather than my, well, extra weight to lug. I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t willing to carry them when they needed to be comforted, or in places where a stroller didn’t make sense. I loved hitting the hiking trail for a good two- or three-hour workout with the baby in the backpack. There were times that baby-carrying was a great option. But there were times when it was even better to not be bearing the baby’s weight. And I came to see my children as people whom I could love and lavish attention upon and enjoy spending time with – without stressing my skeletal system in the process.
The first couple of years of each of my children’s lives gave me plenty of opportunities for skeletal stress, from pregnancy to nursing to middle-of-the-night soothing to lifting in and out of the car seat. And all of that was before the toddler chase-around phase set in. My point is not that there’s anything wrong with baby-wearing per se but that this might be an area in which more parents could use a break. Trust me, you’re just as good a parent rolling your baby along as you are lugging him on your back. And your vertebrae might very well last a lot longer for it.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Extreme De-Cluttering: Yes, it's morbid, but it works for me
I love reading articles like this one from the Washington Post about housecleaning. I especially like reading about de-cluttering. It’s the lure of preaching to the converted, I realize. I’m good about anti-clutter. In fact, I’m almost to the other extreme. A new acquaintance visiting our house for the first time once used the word “barren.” I prefer to think of it as minimalist, or Shaker, but the fact remains that my spouse and I both favor clean, bare surfaces rather then clever arrangements of knickknacks.
But I still love reading decluttering tips. I always think maybe I’ll pick up yet another one that will make it even easier for me to keep picked up. And sometimes I do. In early January, I read an article that discussed the value of putting aside just fifteen minutes a day for little household projects rather than stockpiling them for a rainy day. “With fifteen minutes a day, you could finish 30 projects by the end of the month,” the article proclaimed. I didn’t keep count, but I did find it useful. Now I spend 15 minutes each month clipping out articles I’ve had published and putting them in plastic sleeves, one 15-minute session putting photos in my photo album, one 15-minute session each week entering credit card receipts into our electronic checkbook, and so forth.
I have one more de-cluttering tip to add to the list. I concede that it’s a little bit severe, but it has served me well. If you were to die suddenly, would you want someone else to have to deal with this particular mess?
The first time I remember thinking this way was one early evening when I was taking a run around our old neighborhood in Framingham. That neighborhood was full of smallish houses close to the street, and one day I happened to glance over and see what must have been a two-foot-high stack of dusty and faded folders piled lopsidedly against the window. I didn’t know anything about the house’s occupant, but at that moment the thought came so clearly to me: “Whoever those folders belong to is never going to sort through them or do anything productive with them. No one is going to touch those folders until their owner is dead and someone else is charged with cleaning out the space.”
Of course, I couldn’t have known this. Maybe the owner of the folders had every intention of sorting through them, or maybe they were the kind of records that you are supposed to keep for a prescribed amount of time and then discard. Even more likely, maybe the owner was nowhere close to his final years and would sort through them himself upon the occasion of moving out of the house, rather than dying.
Maybe. But for some reason, the sight of those folders had a lasting effect on me. Now, whenever I come across a pile of unsorted or out-of-use items in my own house, I ask myself the same thing: am I just leaving these here for some distant day when someone else has to decide what to do with them? Sometimes the answer is no, such as the kids’ school papers, which I store in paper bags but weed through occasionally to keep what I think best represents their work for any particular year and recycle the rest. Same with books: I might stockpile them for a few months, but then I pull out the ones I don’t want anymore and bring them up to the library’s yard sale. But other times I find items like clippings of travel stories on destinations I’d love to visit and think, “No; these could sit here forever.” And then I try to get rid of them.
If this was a sport, would we call it Extreme De-Cluttering? Probably. No doubt there are more upbeat ways of decluttering that don’t dwell on morbidity, but for me, this provides the last and best measure of what to keep and what to toss. And our closets, shelves and file drawers are a lot tidier because of it.
But I still love reading decluttering tips. I always think maybe I’ll pick up yet another one that will make it even easier for me to keep picked up. And sometimes I do. In early January, I read an article that discussed the value of putting aside just fifteen minutes a day for little household projects rather than stockpiling them for a rainy day. “With fifteen minutes a day, you could finish 30 projects by the end of the month,” the article proclaimed. I didn’t keep count, but I did find it useful. Now I spend 15 minutes each month clipping out articles I’ve had published and putting them in plastic sleeves, one 15-minute session putting photos in my photo album, one 15-minute session each week entering credit card receipts into our electronic checkbook, and so forth.
I have one more de-cluttering tip to add to the list. I concede that it’s a little bit severe, but it has served me well. If you were to die suddenly, would you want someone else to have to deal with this particular mess?
The first time I remember thinking this way was one early evening when I was taking a run around our old neighborhood in Framingham. That neighborhood was full of smallish houses close to the street, and one day I happened to glance over and see what must have been a two-foot-high stack of dusty and faded folders piled lopsidedly against the window. I didn’t know anything about the house’s occupant, but at that moment the thought came so clearly to me: “Whoever those folders belong to is never going to sort through them or do anything productive with them. No one is going to touch those folders until their owner is dead and someone else is charged with cleaning out the space.”
Of course, I couldn’t have known this. Maybe the owner of the folders had every intention of sorting through them, or maybe they were the kind of records that you are supposed to keep for a prescribed amount of time and then discard. Even more likely, maybe the owner was nowhere close to his final years and would sort through them himself upon the occasion of moving out of the house, rather than dying.
Maybe. But for some reason, the sight of those folders had a lasting effect on me. Now, whenever I come across a pile of unsorted or out-of-use items in my own house, I ask myself the same thing: am I just leaving these here for some distant day when someone else has to decide what to do with them? Sometimes the answer is no, such as the kids’ school papers, which I store in paper bags but weed through occasionally to keep what I think best represents their work for any particular year and recycle the rest. Same with books: I might stockpile them for a few months, but then I pull out the ones I don’t want anymore and bring them up to the library’s yard sale. But other times I find items like clippings of travel stories on destinations I’d love to visit and think, “No; these could sit here forever.” And then I try to get rid of them.
If this was a sport, would we call it Extreme De-Cluttering? Probably. No doubt there are more upbeat ways of decluttering that don’t dwell on morbidity, but for me, this provides the last and best measure of what to keep and what to toss. And our closets, shelves and file drawers are a lot tidier because of it.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Outside of Aesop, the moral of the story isn't always easy to find
Because I was about to teach a Sunday School class on conscience, I picked up an old collection of Aesop’s Fables last week to see if I could find a tale that would help illustrate the point. Aesop made my research easy: each tale in the collection ended with a sentence summing up the moral.
But usually, of course, it’s not that easy. Over the weekend, a real-life anecdote unfolding in front of me proved itself elusive of a concluding message, much as I would have liked to find one.
My 11-year-old son and I went out together for a late breakfast. While we stood in line waiting to order our bagels, another customer started making a commotion that caught our attention. In fact, it quickly caught everyone’s attention. “I am so offended!” she exclaimed. “I am just so offended!” She repeated these same phrases two or three more times.
I suppose it’s a sign of the times that when you hear someone emoting in public too loudly and a little too passionately and can’t tell whom they are talking to, you assume that they are either mentally ill or talking into a phone clipped somewhere to their person. And I suppose it’s also a sign of the times that you, or at least I, then look them over quickly to try to determine whether they might be carrying any weaponry. This was definitely a situation that brought the phrase “going postal” to mind. I glanced behind us to reassure myself that we were closer to the back door than she was.
But once she stopped repeating, “I am so offended!”’, everyone in the store learned what had happened. She had waited in line for what felt to her like an unnecessarily long time to order a bagel sandwich and six additional bagels to go. Once her $7 order was finally filled, she had set her bags down on a table and then went into the restroom. When she came out, the table was bare. “I cannot believe someone would steal my bagels!” she ranted on.
The Brueggers staff reassured her that they would immediately refill her order at no charge, but this didn’t appease her as she said she had no time to wait for another order; she’d already spent more time than she had to spare waiting for the first one. Instead, she stormed out of the store, still exclaiming over her bad luck.
When Tim and I sat down to eat our bagels, he wanted my take on the situation. It would have been a convenient time for a straightforward moral to emerge, like in the Aesop’s text, but none did. The simplest response would have been that the woman was right to be outraged (and I would actually quibble with her semantics: I don’t see it as offensive to have someone steal your food but rather outrageous and upsetting). As Tim knows, it’s wrong to steal food, and the invisible and apparently long-gone thief was the clear-cut villain in the story.
But the customer wasn’t winning anyone’s sympathy by being so dramatic about it: in truth, the other customers were laughing at her after she left. And this is sort of a disturbing-but-true lesson: losing your dignity can make people far less likely to sympathize with you.
I shared with Tim my initial suspicion that it was unintentional. This was Bedford Center, not the kind of area where people steal in public places. Although I would never leave my purse on a café table anywhere while I went to the bathroom, at this Brueggers, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could do that and return to find your items untouched. At the Whole Foods in the same plaza, women leave their purses in their grocery carts while they wander down the aisles. But as we ate our breakfast and minutes passed, no one returned to apologize for picking up the wrong paper sack.
So I talked to Tim about how there are two sides or more to every story. Maybe it was an accident and the person who took the bagels hadn’t realized it yet. Or maybe the person who took them really truly needed the bagels. Not terribly likely in this particular neighborhood, but always possible. As the woman herself said when she was ranting, it was a seven-dollar order. That's not a lot to give up to charity if you’re genuinely helping someone in need. The same woman quite likely would have written a check for five times that amount to aid a hunger-related cause. I wondered if she had considered that possibility.
But there was also my own reaction to examine: wondering if she was mentally unbalanced and dangerous. To some extent, there was a teaching moment in the way the other customers reacted nervously, ready to make a quick escape if necessary. It’s unfortunate, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Being wary of strangers who over-emote in crowded places is really not such a bad lesson in this day and age.
And too, there was a point to be made about how people would have sympathized with the woman more if she hadn’t acted so odd. Keeping your dignity under duress, though challenging, is a good skill to develop. And then there was the quick and obliging response from the store’s employees, offering to replace her order: a teaching moment about kindness and customer service.
So in the end, I couldn’t extract one crystal-clear moral. Unlike in Aesop’s fables, you don’t always know how to spin situations for your children. It’s not always clear what lesson you want them to take away. So you look for a bouquet of learning experiences in the scenario, offer them to your child as a collection of possibilities, and hope that somewhere along the way, a useful lesson is learned.
But usually, of course, it’s not that easy. Over the weekend, a real-life anecdote unfolding in front of me proved itself elusive of a concluding message, much as I would have liked to find one.
My 11-year-old son and I went out together for a late breakfast. While we stood in line waiting to order our bagels, another customer started making a commotion that caught our attention. In fact, it quickly caught everyone’s attention. “I am so offended!” she exclaimed. “I am just so offended!” She repeated these same phrases two or three more times.
I suppose it’s a sign of the times that when you hear someone emoting in public too loudly and a little too passionately and can’t tell whom they are talking to, you assume that they are either mentally ill or talking into a phone clipped somewhere to their person. And I suppose it’s also a sign of the times that you, or at least I, then look them over quickly to try to determine whether they might be carrying any weaponry. This was definitely a situation that brought the phrase “going postal” to mind. I glanced behind us to reassure myself that we were closer to the back door than she was.
But once she stopped repeating, “I am so offended!”’, everyone in the store learned what had happened. She had waited in line for what felt to her like an unnecessarily long time to order a bagel sandwich and six additional bagels to go. Once her $7 order was finally filled, she had set her bags down on a table and then went into the restroom. When she came out, the table was bare. “I cannot believe someone would steal my bagels!” she ranted on.
The Brueggers staff reassured her that they would immediately refill her order at no charge, but this didn’t appease her as she said she had no time to wait for another order; she’d already spent more time than she had to spare waiting for the first one. Instead, she stormed out of the store, still exclaiming over her bad luck.
When Tim and I sat down to eat our bagels, he wanted my take on the situation. It would have been a convenient time for a straightforward moral to emerge, like in the Aesop’s text, but none did. The simplest response would have been that the woman was right to be outraged (and I would actually quibble with her semantics: I don’t see it as offensive to have someone steal your food but rather outrageous and upsetting). As Tim knows, it’s wrong to steal food, and the invisible and apparently long-gone thief was the clear-cut villain in the story.
But the customer wasn’t winning anyone’s sympathy by being so dramatic about it: in truth, the other customers were laughing at her after she left. And this is sort of a disturbing-but-true lesson: losing your dignity can make people far less likely to sympathize with you.
I shared with Tim my initial suspicion that it was unintentional. This was Bedford Center, not the kind of area where people steal in public places. Although I would never leave my purse on a café table anywhere while I went to the bathroom, at this Brueggers, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could do that and return to find your items untouched. At the Whole Foods in the same plaza, women leave their purses in their grocery carts while they wander down the aisles. But as we ate our breakfast and minutes passed, no one returned to apologize for picking up the wrong paper sack.
So I talked to Tim about how there are two sides or more to every story. Maybe it was an accident and the person who took the bagels hadn’t realized it yet. Or maybe the person who took them really truly needed the bagels. Not terribly likely in this particular neighborhood, but always possible. As the woman herself said when she was ranting, it was a seven-dollar order. That's not a lot to give up to charity if you’re genuinely helping someone in need. The same woman quite likely would have written a check for five times that amount to aid a hunger-related cause. I wondered if she had considered that possibility.
But there was also my own reaction to examine: wondering if she was mentally unbalanced and dangerous. To some extent, there was a teaching moment in the way the other customers reacted nervously, ready to make a quick escape if necessary. It’s unfortunate, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Being wary of strangers who over-emote in crowded places is really not such a bad lesson in this day and age.
And too, there was a point to be made about how people would have sympathized with the woman more if she hadn’t acted so odd. Keeping your dignity under duress, though challenging, is a good skill to develop. And then there was the quick and obliging response from the store’s employees, offering to replace her order: a teaching moment about kindness and customer service.
So in the end, I couldn’t extract one crystal-clear moral. Unlike in Aesop’s fables, you don’t always know how to spin situations for your children. It’s not always clear what lesson you want them to take away. So you look for a bouquet of learning experiences in the scenario, offer them to your child as a collection of possibilities, and hope that somewhere along the way, a useful lesson is learned.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Google searches, or why I love being a freelance writer
Almost every day, the work I do reminds me of why I love being a freelance writer, but as I was wrapping up last night, I hit on a tangible representation of what’s so pleasing about my work day. Imagine, I thought to myself, if I kept a list of every term I searched on Google each day?
Of course, the idea occurred to me at 10 PM, so I hadn’t done it for that day, but I tried to re-create my Google search list from memory. It looked like this:
• Homeschooling in Maine
• Pseudomonas bacterium
• Average age of Iraq war veteran
• NFL players religion
• World War II spy doll collector
• Bariatric sleeve surgery
• Littleton school budget FY 2011
• Acupuncture for weight loss
• De-cluttering tips
• Security Tools virus
Okay, I admit that last one wasn’t for an article I was being paid to write: it was because my computer caught a nasty virus and I was trying to figure out how to fix it. But all the rest were for projects I was on deadline to finish. Some of them I wrapped up yesterday; others I’ll finish before the week is over.
When I look over the variety in that list, it makes me feel so privileged that this is how I earn my living. I’ll never be an expert in any of these topics – not a single one of them – and I’m not sure I could give a cogent explanation of pseudomonas bacterium even after spending a half-hour researching it, though I could tell you quite a lot about a microbiologist in Washington state whose postdoctoral research topic and its relationship to cystic fibrosis would eerily come to transform her personal life when her daughter was born with that very condition. And I can’t claim that the article on the Littleton school budget was one of my most fascinating. But it was short and easy to write, and again, I learned something.
My 11-year-old came home from school earlier this week saying he needed to research Colonial taverns. I sat down to help him, but I practically had to physically restrain myself from taking over. Because I simply love research. Never mind that I attracted 17 on-line comments, half of them derogatory, last weekend on boston.com for an essay I wrote on not liking to get involved with the kids’ homework; this was Tim’s first research project, and all of the sudden I saw homework in a new light.
“Mom, it’s my project,” Tim said gently. I made myself give him the desk chair and move across the room, but I was practically salivating. Colonial taverns? I know nothing about that! Hey look – they doubled as inns! They were the place where locals got their national news and debated politics! Strangers were sometimes expected to share overnight accommodations – which appalled European travelers! I could feel my fingertips itching to take notes.
But this was Tim’s project. The others were mine, though, and I got to spend six hours yesterday the way I like best to spend my workdays: immersed in scratching the surface of random topics. Unlike the microbiologist I was profiling for an alumni magazine, I’m no expert in anything (though I fear I might reluctantly become an expert in computer viruses). But I love having the chance to take a quick look at a dozen or more different topics every work day. And that’s why there’s nothing I’d rather be than a freelance writer.
Of course, the idea occurred to me at 10 PM, so I hadn’t done it for that day, but I tried to re-create my Google search list from memory. It looked like this:
• Homeschooling in Maine
• Pseudomonas bacterium
• Average age of Iraq war veteran
• NFL players religion
• World War II spy doll collector
• Bariatric sleeve surgery
• Littleton school budget FY 2011
• Acupuncture for weight loss
• De-cluttering tips
• Security Tools virus
Okay, I admit that last one wasn’t for an article I was being paid to write: it was because my computer caught a nasty virus and I was trying to figure out how to fix it. But all the rest were for projects I was on deadline to finish. Some of them I wrapped up yesterday; others I’ll finish before the week is over.
When I look over the variety in that list, it makes me feel so privileged that this is how I earn my living. I’ll never be an expert in any of these topics – not a single one of them – and I’m not sure I could give a cogent explanation of pseudomonas bacterium even after spending a half-hour researching it, though I could tell you quite a lot about a microbiologist in Washington state whose postdoctoral research topic and its relationship to cystic fibrosis would eerily come to transform her personal life when her daughter was born with that very condition. And I can’t claim that the article on the Littleton school budget was one of my most fascinating. But it was short and easy to write, and again, I learned something.
My 11-year-old came home from school earlier this week saying he needed to research Colonial taverns. I sat down to help him, but I practically had to physically restrain myself from taking over. Because I simply love research. Never mind that I attracted 17 on-line comments, half of them derogatory, last weekend on boston.com for an essay I wrote on not liking to get involved with the kids’ homework; this was Tim’s first research project, and all of the sudden I saw homework in a new light.
“Mom, it’s my project,” Tim said gently. I made myself give him the desk chair and move across the room, but I was practically salivating. Colonial taverns? I know nothing about that! Hey look – they doubled as inns! They were the place where locals got their national news and debated politics! Strangers were sometimes expected to share overnight accommodations – which appalled European travelers! I could feel my fingertips itching to take notes.
But this was Tim’s project. The others were mine, though, and I got to spend six hours yesterday the way I like best to spend my workdays: immersed in scratching the surface of random topics. Unlike the microbiologist I was profiling for an alumni magazine, I’m no expert in anything (though I fear I might reluctantly become an expert in computer viruses). But I love having the chance to take a quick look at a dozen or more different topics every work day. And that’s why there’s nothing I’d rather be than a freelance writer.
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