ElementalMom on September 1 2010
No idea who these people are; spotted them on a random day at Stinson Beach. And while it was cool watching them, the really neat part was turning around, and watching all the other adults on the beach breaking into goofy, happy smiles, watching them as they strolled by.
ElementalMom on August 30 2010
Aurora has grown up around our dog, Kaia.
Kaia scares strangers, because she looks all feral and wolfy, despite the fact that she’s an elderly marshmallow with fur, and pretty much incapable of aggression to humans. In her nearly 14 years of life, I’ve only ever heard her growl at a person three times. She just doesn’t have it in her.
Aurora is not the least bit intimidated. Big dogs don’t bother her. She thinks Fang, the bull mastiff down the dock, is fabulous. Big? No problem. Little dogs are another story entirely. Miniature poodles, wiener dogs, anything smaller than her, is cause for complete shrieking terror.
I have no idea why.
So when we went to Santa Barbara, I was slightly worried about my friend’s small dog, Chloe. She’s gorgeous and friendly and fluffy and all things delightful in a small dog. You would think that would be OK with Aurora. But not so much. The first two days of our visit were shrieking terror every time the dog got let in. Laura didn’t want to terrorize Aurora, so she was mostly keeping her out, but I didn’t want to torture the dog, so I kept wanting her in. Every time, the shriek, the clinging to the leg. “Mama! Dog! DOOOOOOOG!!!!!!!” and I’d tell her it was OK, I’d pet Chloe right in front of her, let her know it was no big deal. She remained unconvinced.
Until, y’know, we stopped making a deal out of it. I came out of the kitchen to see this:
And now? Now, we are not afraid.
ElementalMom on August 29 2010
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ElementalMom on August 28 2010
Haleema, Aurora and Kestrel’s milk sibling, is growing up. Just like they are. It’s kind of odd to contemplate; even though Haleema is older than Aurora, in my brain, she’s still that baby.
This is sort of a double gutpunch. I just posted about freaking out about Aurora growing up, and this just makes it that much bigger. *All* the babies are growing up.
It also is a reminder that I have got to stay in contact with Haleema’s family. In the years to come, I think that having a milk sibling will matter to them. I think it’s important for the kids to have that as a point of contact, not so much because they need contact, but because they need context. Having a milk sibling is part of the culture of nurture I’ve talked about before. Even as it was happening, Kestrel recognized how important it was that he share “his” milk with another baby. That’s the sharing of food in the most profound way possible, from someone so little.
I’m still hugely grateful for the opportunity to have shared something so important. And it’s an honor to be able to keep tabs on her life. Thanks, D & T.
ElementalMom on August 26 2010
This beautiful piece was forwarded to me by the amazing Val. It was written by a friend of hers, Frankie Condon. I hope you enjoy it.
Mostly I don’t get nostalgic. Maybe it’s that I have enough not-so-nice memories of times past that I’d rather poke holes in myself with a pickle fork than go back in time. Or maybe it’s that I am plenty happy in the present. Maybe both. In any case, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking wistfully about the past. Except recently.
Dan, Lucy, and Grace were all born in the spring. Mike and I sometimes jokingly refer to the time between March 26 and April 21 as lambing season. Dan just turned fourteen and on Wednesday Grace will move into double digits: she’ll be ten. In a few more weeks, Lucy will turn twelve. During the last couple of days I have been remembering their births; well, more accurately, I’ve been remembering our labors. And remembering labor has got me remembering our midwife’s presence and support during the labors of all three kids.
Here’s what I remember:
For those of you who don’t know, there’s this stage in labor when women get really angry or short-tempered. In fact, one of the ways you can read where a woman is in her labor — how close she is to birthing — is by taking notice of her emotional state. In any case, when Dan and I were laboring together during his birth, I hit the grumpy stage. And I remember looking over at our midwife, who was sitting by my bed, leaning forward, very very still. I remember thinking, “What the BLEEP is she doing? Why isn’t she helping me?” And then I had this realization that she was helping. She was listening to me. I mean, she was listening to me so deeply — to my body, to the sounds of my labor, to my feelings. She was absolutely, without reservation, tuned in. And that, I realized, was exactly the help I needed. I could labor on my own with that kind of attunement to sustain me. That realization was so powerful. To be listened to in that way was an extraordinary gift.
When I was pregnant with Lucy, Mike and I asked Dan what we should name the new baby. He thought about it for a while and said with great conviction, “Spoon Cake!” We laughed and asked him why and he said, “Because that baby’s going to come out of your tummy like cake on a spoon!” We laughed some more, but the odd thing was that he was right. Lucy’s birth was hard work, but towards the end of the labor things got very quiet and very calm and very smooth (especially after the midwife kicked the nasty, loud nurse out of the room). I remember this moment when I turned to Pam and said, “I think I”m going to push now.” Pam, who was sitting by my bed again said quietly (and I think she was laughing a little), “Okay.” And I did. She let me lead and she trusted me to know when the time was right. There was nothing forced in her treatment of me, nothing pressured, no sense of hurry…just an exceptionally mindful presence beside and with me. And that presence was an extraordinary gift.
Grace’s labor was the hardest. Not surprisingly, if you know Grace, she was all cattywumpus in there — facing backward and just generally bucking tradition. That labor seemed to go on and on and on; while labors with Dan and Lucy were hard work, there was no denying that Grace’s was painful. At some point, Pam turned to Mike and me and asked us what we wanted to do. I was pretty out of it, but I thought at the time that she was asking us if we wanted intervention. Mike and I had talked a lot over the years about wanting to do things naturally, about my desire to have joyful labors rather than fear- and pain-filled ones. We’d talked about how, if I got into trouble, the question would come. We knew that if the baby or I were really in trouble, we’d be able to tell by the way the question was posed to us (or whether a question was posed at all). So, we just kept going the way we had been, with the hard work and the pain. And Pam stayed with us. She respected our choice and supported us when, I know, lots of other medical professionals wouldn’t have. Grace was born in her caul (a sign of spiritual significance, of good luck, and often, legend would have it, a sign of future greatness). Only one in a thousand babies are born in their cauls (mostly premature babies) and often doctors puncture the caul before the baby is born. Pam didn’t. And I remember — rather dimly from my exhausted fog — listening to her talk with Mike about what it might mean that Grace was born in hers. Pam stayed with us when we made the choice to take the hard road on principle rather than the easy one for expediency’s sake. She respected my right to make choices about my body and my life. Moreover, she was peaceful and calm during a difficult time and willing to let Grace come into the world within the protective membrane of her caul without trying to fix or correct what was, I really think, meant to be.
I hate watching movies and tv shows that include scenes of women giving birth. I think they’re so bogus, so stereotyped; they play so coldly into the hands of interventionist (sexist and patriarchal) western medical traditions. I am feeling nostalgic for my babies and, while I have no desire to have more of them, I’m remembering with great fondness and with a deep sense of wonderment, our labors and the deep matter you really can learn from midwives. There are ways of being with and for others in the world that I think I wouldn’t be able to conceive of were it not for Pam. I think I learned the power of attunement, of deep listening from her. I think I learned to trust the instincts of my friends, my loved ones, and my students and to be willing to follow when the time is right. And I think I learned that not everything that is happening needs to be controlled or fixed. Sometimes people need to choose the harder way and when they do, I want to go with them as friend and ally rather than trying to make things easier.
Today and for the next month at least, I’ve decided, I’m celebrating midwives and the amazing, empowering work they do for women who choose labors liberated from the lies and excesses of western medicine, who treasure the right to choose when, where, and how our bodies will be treated, and who hope for labors and births that are spiritually enriching experiences and not merely clinical ones. We haven’t seen Pam for almost 10 years, and yet we remember very, very well and, I really think, somewhere in their bones, Dan, Lucy, and Grace remember too.
ElementalMom on August 24 2010
One of the good news/bad news things about living on a boat is that you’re really close to your neighbors. Often, this is cause for happy. Sometimes, not so much.
I was sitting on the stern of my boat, chatting with two of my neighbors from another dock, when the two little girls (9 and 11, I think) who live part-time in the boat just across from us, and two little boys (10 and 12) who live here full-time, walked up the dock, and around the corner to get into the girls’ boat to play. Rowan saw them, and hopped off our boat to ask if he could play too.
The oldest boy put his hand on Rowan’s chest, and said quite clearly, “Not now. Maybe some other time.”
I watched my son crumple. He turned around, walked the few steps back to our boat trying hard not to let the other kids see his face, and made it just back to our boat before the sobs erupted. My neighbors both visibly cringed, and Rowan dissolved into my arms, sobbing with his whole body.
His first experience with intentional cruelty.
Now, my instinct was to walk over there and throw the kid in the water. Not a neighborly move. I sat very still while I tried to calm down, and asked my neighbors what they thought. They were pretty much as upset as I was; they both know and like my son. And as (un)luck would have it, the twelve year old’s mother walked down the dock not ten minutes later, wanting to rant about what a terrible day she’d had. I mentioned to her what had happened, and she left.
I got busy taking care of Rowan at that point. But a few minutes later, the twelve year old was at my boat. I came out. He said “Sorry” in the most perfunctory, sullen tone you could imagine. I proceeded to ask if he knew what he was apologizing for, and he proceeded to rewrite history. It was a great story, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with what I’d seen happen. I stopped him. “I was sitting right there. Our two neighbors were too. Don’t try to spin a story, because it won’t work. How about you just own up to what you did?” He literally balled his fists up at his side, shot me a hateful look. I said “Do you have something to say to me?”, he snarled “NO!” and took off back down the dock.
Five minutes later, his mother is back at my boat, screaming at me, because he’s only twelve, he’s only a boy, I had no right to yell at him (?!?), etc etc. More revisionist history from the boy, I’m assuming. Anyway, we talked, and I realized where the problem came from, because the mother was utterly incapable of coming up with a solution to the problem, that in the future would not result in my child being crushed. I finally crashlanded the conversation, and she wandered off. Heartsick, I went back to the front of our boat, where my son was literally huddling with his fingers in his ears trying not to hear the other kids playing on the boat just across the dock.
When Jason got home from work, we talked about it. He congratulated me on not throwing the kid in the water, and wondered where I found my willpower. We discussed strategies going forward. I went and talked to one of the neighbors who’d been there for a reality check. She was still disgusted, so at least I knew it wasn’t all me being unreasonable Mama Bear.
As serendipity would have it, the following morning, I ran into the father of the two girls. I know it sounds kind of odd that I didn’t go to his boat, but there’s a certain politic that says that you don’t go attack someone else in their boat. It’s kind of weird and intrusive. If you find someone out on the dock, that’s more neutral territory, and people 100% of the time react better than when you bring a fight right to their home.
I told him what had happened, and he physically cringed. He confirmed that he’d known nothing whatsoever of what had been done, that it had all come from the twelve year old. I asked him for a clarification of his boat rules, and he told me that his girls love playing with my kids, and that in fact, just to help smooth things over, why didn’t they play today?
And friends, today was glorious. The girls came to our boat, and many movies were watched, many games of tag were played, much watermelon was devoured. And maybe it’s the difference between preteen girls and preteen boys, but Aurora was absolutely included in the play, with the two older girls very conscientiously putting her PFD on whenever the game was going to move up onto the deck.
I saw the two boys when I went up to the washhouse to do a load of laundry. They were playing some game that involved trying to hit each other as hard as possible. I let out a cheery “Hello” that, oddly enough, was returned. I decided to head out onto a limb, and offered that they could come play too, if they’d like. They both got quite interested in their toes, and said that they had chores to do. Which was sad; I think it would have gone a long way towards teaching them about kindness and inclusivity had they been allowed to come play. But apparently doing laundry was more important.
While I had hoped that Rowan would be more insulated from that kind of cliquishness and cruelty by being homeschooled, it’s turned out that it happened at the perfect time. One of the discussions we had while sitting out on the boat hiding from the world was about a time another little boy, who’s just a bit younger than Rowan, was playing with us, and Rowan made him cry, and did not understand what he’d done. Now? He gets it. And feels awful about it.
Sometimes, you must experience a thing before you can generate genuine empathy for a thing. As my pal Angela put it, Rowan has now been inoculated against cruelty. He’ll think twice about how he acts, from the memory of the pain inflicted on him. I am hoping that it was a strong enough dose that it will carry him forward as a better person in the world, more apt to look out for, and take care with, the feelings of others, especially those smaller than him.
And while Rowan is only eight and can’t yet wrap his head around some of the more complicated nuances here, he’s also making a start in thinking about why someone would behave that way, which is the root of compassion. I couldn’t be more delighted, and it’s kind of making up for the horrible ache of watching my child get hurt and not being able to stop it in time because I truly did not see it coming.
But if it ever happens again, expect some splashing. I’m not that enlightened.
ElementalMom on August 22 2010
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ElementalMom on August 22 2010
This creation blew me away. He spent two days on it — days he was supposed to be sorting the rest of the legos, but apparently, it was far too fascinating to build with them instead.
There’s an insane amount of detail going on here.
He’s arranged the areas in the habitat by theme. It’s kind of Prince of Persia-ish on the top…
Random travelers in the Atrium…
… it’s Star Wars in the interior…
Even while I was trying to take pictures, he was adjusting stuff. Because, y’know, it wasn’t utterly perfect.
There’s also some pretty cool infrastructure.
Check out the ramp, which folds up…
For the time being, Kestrel’s keeping his creations small and concise.
ElementalMom on August 20 2010
Today, I packed up all the diapers, to send them to my sister in law Ria, and her new baby Arianna.
Aurora has been accident-free for ages now, and last week, decided that it was time for big girl panties. In fact, when we went to the beach and she got damp, necessitating a change of clothes, I found I only had trainers in the bag, and Aurora’s comment was “Aw man! Diapers!” like it was somehow unfair regression to put her in those.
It’s probably stupid to be sentimental about diapers. But these are special. My friend Robin made them. And because we do EC, they don’t get worn hard. These diapers were worn by her two kids, all three of my kids, one of Ksenia’s kids, and now, onto Arianna. These are some seriously durable dipes. They have a lot of history.
And now, I’m done with babies, and they’re moving along. I made Ria promise that when Arianna was done with them, they wouldn’t get goodwilled, but instead be passed directly to someone they love, who will pass them again as long as they hold out.
I literally cried as I was putting them into the bag. I mean, yeah, I love the dynamic of the three children I have. And the thought of being pregnant again gives me the skeeves. I’m just totally not interested in going that route.
And yet… my baby isn’t a baby any more and I’m done with babies. And that is harder to face than I thought it was going to be.
It makes you look back. Rowan is becoming a fine young man. Kestrel, the essence of camaraderie. And Aurora is setting up the milestones and knocking em down without much fuss at all. And it’s that quality about her that makes me hang on, I think, to every last one of them.
There is no “back” with my kids. It’s all forward, fullspeed. And while I love it and admire it and am proud beyond belief of all three of them, closing up the baby shop behind Aurora as she blasts through growing up is so incredibly much harder on me than I ever imagined. I sort of thought I’d be dying for the day that they were all utterly independent of me. And yet, here it is right in front of me, and I’m not handling it that well.
I remember when Rowan was tiny, and I fantasized about one full night’s sleep without anyone needing to nurse or potty or thrash around. And now, Rowan sleeps in his own bed, straight through the night, like it’s no big deal. Sometimes, I sneak in after he’s asleep, and just listen to him breathe, like I used to when he was a newborn.
It’s a powerful reminder to savor every last moment with them, even the ones that seem so hard when they’re happening in seemingly endless succession. There’s a line that goes around the mommy groups that says “The days are long, but the years are short.” I expected that to happen later. I was not expecting it to ambush me in the form of cute little diapers. The years are getting shorter all the time.
ElementalMom on August 18 2010
If you’ve never read The Automatic Earth, please, go now. In this time of, frankly, economic insanity, Stoneleigh and Ilargi dispense hard wisdom. I find their stuff hard to plow through; economics is not my field. But plow through it, I think, we all must. I stumbled on this video, a tribute to them, and I think this says it all.
ElementalMom on August 16 2010
So yesterday, a friend of mine and I took my kids out for ice cream. There was a family there, mom, dad, brand new (I’m guessing 4 months or less), in a baby bucket. Midway through our eating, the baby starts crying. Instantly, all three of my kids start squirming uncomfortably. Aurora kept looking at me and and the baby, mumbling “Baby crying! Baby crying!” like it was my job to stop it. The crying continued, and my kids are looking more and more unhappy. Finally, Rowan leans across the table, and kind of loudly, says “Mama, those people need to pick their baby up!!!” The woman, amused, reaches in, picks up the baby… and pops a pacifier into its mouth. It sucks a little, and then starts crying again, but quieter, because it’s around the pacifier. Rowan, outraged, says again, quieter to me this time, “doesn’t she know her baby is hungry? Why isn’t she feeding her baby?” I tell him that different people parent in different ways, and while that’s not the way we do it, I was really proud of him for not only reading the baby, but for responding.
And that says to me that one of the most important aspects of early unschooling, to me, the idea of learning nurture while watching it happen with his younger siblings, worked fabulously. I wrote about it a while back, here. For me, one of the most powerful arguments against sending my kids to preschool or daycare or whatever was that I wanted them to learn how to interact as a family, and you do that by doing it.
“Nurture” isn’t anything that’s ever listed in a “is unschooling working” list. It’s always about them doing math or going to college. And while those are totally valid definitions, I think that being able to function as a nurturer is right up there in critical importance.
ElementalMom on August 15 2010
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ElementalMom on August 12 2010
Remember those six crates of legos that Steven brought Rowan for his birthday? Remember the plan for sleeping on them? Not so much. After a great deal of discussion, not a little of it in the form of parental profanity when yet another piece got stepped on, we decided that a massive sorting effort was called for.
Jason took charge (probably because helping Rowan sort legos was way more fun than working on the fiberglass, the window, or sorting his own tools). He put a tarp down on one of the trampolines, and proceeded to dump out a few crates.
The boxes on the left are getting sorted into, and the ones with the closed lids are the ones (ulp) still to be sorted.
Papa holds forth on How It Should Be Done.
The Prince of Legos
As usual, Kestrel finds a different way to do it…
Aurora tries to take in the subtleties of the sorting process.
I went out to take Jason a cup of coffee a few minutes ago. They’d sorted almost a full crate, so progress, but they were all discussing some arcane point of lego theology. It was an animated discussion, so I set the coffee down, and walked away, smiling.
ElementalMom on August 10 2010
…was fabulous.
I was introduced to Berkeley Opera back in February, through the auspices of my friend Jennie, and her dad Jeremy Knight, who does set design for them. As I’ve mentioned before, I really dig the idea of minimalist sets. They open up avenues of creativity I wouldn’t have expected… or, Jeremy does, I’m not entirely sure which.
So it was with great glee that I accepted yet another invitation to attend a production. I’d seen one after Don Giovanni, “The Tender Earth” by Aaron Copland, but it was quite frankly dismal, so I not only brushed it off, but didn’t blog it either. But this? This was an opportunity for a solid Wagner, “The Legend of the Ring“.
The full Der Ring des Nibelungen is 18 hours long. I’ve never seen a full production; heck, I’ve never seen the option to attend a full production. I think that for most modern audiences, 18 hours of Wagner is really more sweeping crescendos that one person could/should endure.
Once again, I went in expecting small-town opera, and once again I was blown away. I could have listened to Christine Springer, the dramatic soprano that played Brünnhilde, all week, and then some. Wotan, played by Richard Paul Fink, was solid, but not as intimidating as I like to see in the role. While his voice was lovely, he didn’t dominate physically as a good Norse god should (and that’s not a height thing; I’ve seen some Wotans show amazing physical presence). Siegmund rocked the house, played by Jay Hunter Morris, while Sieglinde was pretty much a loss, probably aided and abetted by the rotten costumes she got squashed into.
In fact, the costume design is pretty much my only constant disappointment with Berkeley Opera. The designer can’t decide if she’s looking for modernist or traditionalist, and it often looks like the singers are wearing their rehearsal duds.
The orchestra, once again, was lovely. The more polished and synthesized commercial music gets, the more I enjoy authentic on-the-spot music, and a real orchestra just makes me happy. Berkeley’s does not fail to please.
The other thing that I love about Berkeley Opera is that they include a great deal of youth participation. The young man running the projections and the supertitles is a high school student, and there were several groups of teens helping with stage wrangling, costume changes, etc. I think that getting kids exposed to participatory theater is critical to the survival of culture as a whole, and I commend Berkeley Opera for engaging in this way.
I can’t wait for next season; Xerxes, a Carmen adaptation, and Caliban Dreams, which is a Tempest adaptation. It’s going to be fabulous.
