Synchronicity & PoMoSco

Do you believe in synchronicity? I don't, not really. I mean, I like Sting as much as anybody, but I mostly believe that our brains choose to recognize patterns.

But recently, I couldn't help but notice a bit of synchronicity in my life, and I figured it was my brain telling me something. First, I read an article about how if you want to do anything well, you have to practice it.

Then I went and observed another teacher's class, and they were discussing the Anna Pavlova quote, "God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius." Of course, it was a Spanish class conducted entirely in Spanish, but it wasn't that hard to figure out if you know "trabajo." I decided to look it up later to see if I'd translated correctly, and I had.

A few days later, someone posted a link to an article on a blog called "Writing about writing." It was teased with "Do I have to write every day?" I was hoping the answer was no, but it wasn't. It linked to another blog entry about earning your "-er" as a writer, which as you might guess, means you have to do some writing.

So when the Found Poetry Review contacted me to ask if I'd like to participate in a challenge for poetry month, posting a poem a day in April, I said yes. The site goes live tomorrow. 

It's called PoMoSco for "Poetry Month Scouts," and we participate in challenges to earn badges.

The focus is "found" poetry, which might be a bit misleading. To "find" poetry sounds to me like you stumble across some in, say, a book of poetry at the library and go "yeah, this is good." But in fact, it really is a very creative process. In most cases, you "find" something like a bank of words and use those to create your poem. It's limiting, but it's limiting in the way that writing in form has always been for me. If you need a danged iamb, you're going to hunt for the right word until you find one. If it's a haiku and you have too many syllables, you have to cut one of them motherfuckers out, even if it's the exact right word. With found poetry, the restriction is that you are stuck with the word bank, sometimes in a restrictive order as well.

Anyway, I'm having fun. I've done about seven already, and I'm trying to keep myself a week ahead of the tasks (for when I inevitably fall behind later).

I decided a while back that if I'm to call myself a writer, I need to publish some stuff. So far, that hasn't resulted in any actual work towards that end, but this may change that. The last time I did one of these challenges (two years ago), a number of the other people who did the challenges went on to use their collected poems from the challenge to produce a chapbook. I didn't even bother trying. But this time, I think I have a neat idea (all of my "sources" are parenting-related), so maybe I'll see what I can do with the collection. I'm having fun so far taking the books and articles about parenting and making other things out of them. A lot of them, though, if you look through the parenting lens, have something dark and off-kilter to say.

Wish me luck on the first goal of simply completing the project!

Raw nerve

At the farmer's market on Sunday, I was holding the hand of the big kid and had the little one strapped to my chest. I ran into a friend, a stay-at-home-mom, who said, "You look like a real mom!"

And it hurt my feelings, because I immediately jumped to all the negative possible meanings of that -- a real mom as opposed to a working mom, which is what I must look like on weekdays. A real mom as opposed to a fake mom, someone who leaves my kid with another caregiver.

Then on a "moms" board on Facebook, someone asked what they could do for their kid who couldn't sleep. I recommended melatonin, which has worked well for Z. Another mom mentioned a study that showed that melatonin might disrupt sleep cycles. I jumped back with a list of all the things we'd tried first, something like, "WELL AFTER TRYING BLACKOUT CURTAINS, A WHITE NOISE MACHINE, LAVENDER OIL, GENTLE MASSAGE, BATHS, AND HYPNOSIS, WE JUST NEED HER TO GET SOME GODDAMN SLEEP!!!!!!" (It was potentially slightly less hysterical than that, but that's the basic idea.)  And I was in fight mode. I was ready for it. After all, our pediatrician had been the one to recommend the melatonin. BRING IT, SISTER!

Instead of bringing it, she apologized, saying she wasn't trying to impugn anyone's parenting, and she was sure I was doing what was best for our family. Which made me realize, of course, that I was the crazy one.

I am taking things too seriously and too personally right at the moment. My "I'm a good mom" nerve is a little raw.

I've been sick for almost a month straight. A cold turned into a sinus infection turned into a persistent cough. I've had pinkeye twice in that time. I'm in a bit of a clumsy phase (my current specialty seems to be closing screen doors on the back of my heel and achilles tendon). I'm under-rested and overweight. I'm not getting done the things I want to.

Every night goes a little like tonight did. I got a lot done -- a couple errands, put dinner on the table, the big one got bathed, supervised homework, I took out the garbage, fed the cats, scooped the cat litter, made coffee for the morning, tidied the kitchen a bit, and got the kids both to bed. And then I sat down to rest for a few minutes, thinking I still had time to decide whether I would use my free time tonight to give the kitchen a more intensive cleaning or whether I'd use it to wax my brows and file my nails.

And then the baby woke up and cried and needed a change and some comfort and here we are. It's bedtime, and the kitchen is dirty and my brows are a brow, singular.

I guess I could use the few minutes it took to write this to have done either job, but at a certain point in the evening I just run out of motivation. So if you're wondering why I have a raw nerve, that is why. I'm trying my best to recognize it and deal with it and realize that it's me, not you. And not my friend at the farmer's market, and not the nice lady with the study on the internet.

Sometimes shit just be like that.

I'm a real Pollyanna. Tomorrow I'll find a reason why a persistent cough is a joy to behold. Tonight I'm going to pout a little. With self-awareness.

This won't make you feel old at all!

There's a video out right now called "Teens React to Beck." The link says something like, "This will make you feel really old." Here's the big secret: most of the teens don't know who Beck is.

And... I don't give a shit. It doesn't make me feel old at all. Beck had some hit songs when I was in college, and I liked them, and I have about three of his albums, but some artists just don't really flow into the next generation of music and radio. Perfect example: Ricky Nelson. People my age who consider themselves to be fans of the music of their parents' era probably mean what we now consider to be classic rock: the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin... But if you traveled back to like 1972, basically everyone knew and listened to Rick Nelson and his hit "Garden Party." I had to research the year and the song, because I have no damn idea, despite being a bit of a "classic rock" enthusiast. It was popular in its time, but it faded. Shit happens. And artists, no matter how talented, do sometimes get lost in the shuffle of time.

So the fact that "Loser" and "Devil's Haircut" don't really get played anywhere anymore doesn't chafe at all. It is okay. They were part of my life, and I'm pleased and nostalgic when I do hear them.

And it really doesn't matter that Beck is still actively recording. Glen Campbell just released a song in 2014, and it was poignant because of the subject matter, but I am going to raise my hand and solemnly swear that unless I go and look it up, I cannot name another of his songs, or even, quite honestly, tell you what genre of music he performed. Country? Pop? Folk? My impression is that he's an artist that people of my parents' generation know, and yet I know nothing about him other than his name. Okay, now I've looked him up: I have heard of "Wichita Lineman" and "Rhinestone Cowboy," and could probably sing about 7 notes' worth of the latter.

And this is only semi-related, but isn't radio a funny thing? It's so genre-specific that it sort of tricks you into thinking that people listen exclusively to one genre. But I know for sure that my students, whether avowed K-pop fans or rap listeners, know Taylor Swift and Katy Perry and have favorites and can probably sing along. And although I listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails in high school, you can bet your ass I still knew a good chunk of the words to songs by Kriss Kross, Arrested Development, Crystal Waters, Dee-Lite, TLC, etc. You'd be hard-pressed to find a peer of mine who doesn't know a good portion of something like "Gin and Juice" or "OPP," no matter how into grunge (or whatever) they were.

In my parents' collection when I was growing up were some Beatles, some Bee-Gees, some Linda Ronstadt, some Donovan, some Barbara Streisand, some of a little sampling of a lot of things. I think most of us like music from a wider genre than we are given credit for. My lovely husband, for example, is well known for his love of metal, but he is also a pretty big fan of the Smiths, and if a Joao Gilberto bossa-nova comes up on our communal 8-person playlist, it's almost certainly his. So I may not know what genre Glen Campbell was, but it also doesn't matter: he was a popular artist of his time, and that meant that probably a lot of people liked him. Yay for music. Yay for crossing boundaries. Yay for not feeling old.

Just popping in and, well... maybe more I guess.

Tidbits:

Lochlan loves the bath, and will sit (assisted) and splash his arms for as long as I will let him.

He has flown right past the "tasting" stage of learning to eat and loves and wants food. He has now had rice, broccoli, sweet potato, banana, avocado, oatmeal, lentils, and probably a thing or two I've forgotten.

He loves looking at a picture of his sister on Grandma's phone, and when asked today to "kiss sister," he leaned forward, mouth agape, and gummed the phone. It was sweet, if drooly. I was glad it was not my phone.

Now that the weather is nicer, we've been able to play in the backyard and go to the park more, which is honestly a blessing, because Z is much more pleasant when she's been able to burn off some energy.

I'm at the busiest time of the year at work, and I'm just, you know, keeping swimming. It would be delightful if I could also be well-rested for that, but it's not in the cards just now (L gets very hungry around 1am, and we get up to feed him). I would also love to return to the gym, which gives me energy, but it's going to mean even less sleep, so I have to figure that out. And in the meantime, the clean, unfolded laundry is growing tentacles. I have watched about 3/4 of The Grand Budapest Hotel in 15 minute increments. It is what it is.

The girl... I don't mean to keep you hanging. The truth is that we're starting to be pretty sure she's on the VERY high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. I know it sounds strange (it did to us, too), but when we started putting together YEARS of quirks and odd behavior patterns and social issues and strange speech and vocal habits... well, a few of us are starting to wonder how we didn't see it earlier. There's no diagnosis yet. I have a FAT packet of papers from Kaiser that I'm only midway through filling out. But there are some of the most classic signs of ASD that we noticed and commented on, but it still never clicked. She can be sweet, and intermittently affectionate, but she really has to be induced to give kisses, and she never wanted to sit on our laps to cuddle. She doesn't make eye contact well. She sometimes repeats her own words under her breath. She struggles to read cues about when other people are tired of playing, or when she's hurt someone. She doesn't like to brush her hair or care much about grooming. She has obsessions with things like Harry Potter (needs to listen to the same audio OVER and OVER). There's a lot... pages of things we read on sites about Asperger's Syndrome and particularly how it presents in girls.

Anyway, I'm conflicted in some ways -- will a diagnosis really help anything? If she's so high-functioning, will she even qualify for any services that will help her? Will it cause future teachers to pre-judge her and treat her differently? Why didn't we figure it out earlier? Have we been fucking her up for seven years? (One of the first videos I watched about vocal "stims" instructed, "Don't tell them not to do it!" and we've been going "quit making that gosh dang NOISE" fifteen times a day for her whole life.)

But most of my feelings are a lot like relief. We have an answer! We can name it, so we can address it. I mean, she's my darling little sweetie love whom I am crazy about, but that hasn't stopped me from endlessly researching Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Sensory Processing Disorder, and doing Google searches like "Bipolar disorder in children" and "Is my child a sociopath?" I know that's kind of grim, but we have known for a LONG time that there was something off about her, something wrong that we couldn't put our fingers on. Even the ADHD diagnosis didn't seem like quite it. I took her a few times in for sessions with a therapist, who mostly gave me parenting tips and said, "She's just at the extreme end of ADHD."

Anyway, baby's crying, so I have to go. Hope that somewhat clears up the mystery. I suspect there will be more, much more, to come on that subject.

Best,
CM