Well, I'm on vacation, which is the main reason for the post -- I feel relaxed enough to sit down and write without thinking about how I need to fold laundry instead.
But it's a good time to reflect, as well. My uncle's memorial was today, and I am deeply sad that I'll never get to go "jam" with him again, but I also have enjoyed seeing the new babies in the family, learning of more on the way, and getting to hug and talk with and even laugh with my aunts and uncles and cousins.
I have one uncle -- my OTHER favorite uncle -- who really wears his heart on his sleeve. I mean, none of us are stoic, exactly (my dad tries real hard), but if there was a myth or a sci-fi story about the figure whom the town relied on to express all their emotions, this would be my uncle M. And there's a certain extent to which it makes everyone nervous or uncomfortable -- even me! I cracked a dark joke to him the other night ("I thought I would be the first to go." "So did we! There was money on it.") to cheer him up. But you know, a couple years ago I heard a song, by 90s One-hit wonder Lisa Loeb, of all people, in which she sang, "Feel what you feel." And I burst into tears in the car! I remember thinking how nice it was to be told to just go ahead and feel your feelings, not feel guilty or bad or busy or whatever else. Since then I've been trying to "feel what I feel," and let others, too. It's okay for Uncle M to feel what he feels, even if they are big, messy feelings. He lost a brother, a good man. Grief is the right feeling for right now.
Sigh. Anyway.
The kids have both changed a lot this year. This time last year I was just deciding whether to enroll Lochlan in early kindergarten. I talked and thought about it and decided I would not. I was worried about his ability to focus, his complete lack of interest in learning to read, his kind of shaky motor skills... I made the decision just about one year ago. And it's not as though I didn't question it! Two friends whose kids are both a couple months younger than Lochlan decided to do early kinder, and I wondered whether I was holding him back. But we've spent another year with a deeply caring preschool teacher, another year of short days, another year of long hours playing with Grandma, and a lot of those skills I was worried about are falling into place naturally.
He almost certainly also has ADHD. He can focus for HOURS on things he's interested in. In fact, he's pretty advanced at playing Legos*, and he will sit and play chess with me (a beginner version with a lot of assistance) for 40 minutes, easy. But if I ask him to get his shoes on and he sees a dinosaur toy on the way (or hell, *thinks* of a Pokemon), it's toast. There's no way he'll remember he was getting shoes. I'll ask him to put pants on, he'll want to talk about dinosaur facts, I'll ask him to put pants on, he'll go to his room and say, "Oh! My carnotaurus!" "What are we doing right now, Lochlan?" "I don't know, what?" "Pants." "Oh yeah! Pants!"
He has his rotten moments, like any kid, probably, but he's the most empathetic, kindest kid I've ever met. Last night, he wanted to pass on his turn rather than taking my king, because he was worried I'd feel bad if I lost. Tonight, he thought I looked sad, and he followed me to give me a sip of his milkshake.
Azadeh has changed a lot, too. She's become... easier. Mostly. I mean, pre-teenage-hood has hit, and sometimes her mood swings are a lot for her (or anyone in a 5 mile radius) to handle, but she's also more willing to clean her room a little, or get ready for school, or do the little things we ask. We got a cat the weekend after Thanksgiving, and although she never showed much interest in our existing cat, she's really enamored of the kitten, Hetty. She always wants the kitten to sit in her lap, gives her toys, looks for things the cat might like in the store, and asks whether she's doing things right, like encouraging the cat to be gentle. She even guides Lochlan (sometimes not so gently) in how to treat the cat. I think she sits still more often just so the cat will sit with her!
She still has a tendency to be negative about most things, but she's been more enthusiastic about things too, like which middle school she'll go to, or learning to bake. Tonight I asked if she'd help with dinner, and she said sure. Then I TRICKED her -- I told her how to cut the onion, the celery, the carrots. I told her when to add the noodles... And all the while I pretended to be busy with other things. Oh, I stirred, added salt, and did a few other small things, but basically she made the whole soup. I even made her taste it for seasoning and test the noodles for doneness. At the end I told her she had made the soup, and she was surprised and proud. Later, she apologized to the rest of us for the big pieces of vegetables, and I said I liked it, that it was "rustic." She asked what that meant, so I said they were hearty and not fussy. She said, "Thanks for making 'you're bad at chopping' sound like a compliment.'" I could tell she was really tickled, though (and the soup was good!).
I'm not really ready for any kind of year-end review, but I'll be glad to put 2019 to rest. If I have a resolution, it's going to be that instead of fretting about every political thing that comes my way, I'm going to focus my energy as much as possible on ONE useful thing, and I think that thing is going to be voter registration. I may even do a voter registration drive with the students. Heck, they can get service hours.
All right, take care. Do good. Feel what you feel. Tell people you love them so they know, just in case.
*He can put the Legos together from sets for kids older than him, and although I help by sorting out the pieces he needs next, he does the building. He can even put them together with the piece he's building oriented differently than the one illustrated in the instruction book (which I cannot!). It makes me think he must have pretty decent spatial skills. The only thing is, if it has wheels, he wants to put the wheels on RIGHTAWAY. Like, he'll put the wheels on five or six steps early. I don't know why -- he's just ready for wheels!
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Happy Thanksgiving
I am thankful, as always, for life, health, shelter, food, and all the things we can take for granted but many people can't.
I'm thankful for my wife's transition and that she's here with us today.
I am thankful for my two unique, creative, loving, special goofballs, one of whom crawled into bed with us this morning while the other made cocoa for them both. (Granted, the thumping this involved sounded like the drum intro to "In the Air Tonight," but it was a nice gesture.)
I'm thankful for my good friends and colleagues. I have been better about asking for support lately, and it has improved my life.
I am extra-thankful that my bestest friends are all on these really stable, happy, upward trajectories: jobs, homes, babies, partners, art...
And I am super-thankful that I've been making a concerted effort to spend some time with my friends, and they have spent the effort back, and I feel less isolated.
I am very thankful for my family, my parents, step-parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and warm, loving sisters and brothers in-law. This has been a trying couple years -- my grandmother passed, and then my uncle. I saw a photo yesterday with my great-grandma, paternal grandparents, and uncle on his wedding day to my aunt, and it jolted me -- all these people I loved are dead. But at the same time, I'm so grateful for the years I had with them, for the clear, strong, positive memories I have with them, and for all they contributed to my life.
Especially as my friends (and younger cousins!) are losing their parents, I'm deeply grateful to have good parents in good health who live nearby and are loving, involved grandparents. I realize that there are at least four variables in that last sentence that not everyone has.
Under "miscellaneous," I am thankful for having moved the living room furniture in such a way that we all hang out in the same room. I am thankful that my garden mostly works. I am thankful for my cat Mina and for the new kitty we are getting on Sunday! I am thankful for both kids' good schools and caring teachers. I am thankful for my own students, their senses of humor, and their willingness to learn with me. I am thankful for my neighbors and my neighborhood.
And although we are living in American in 2019, and there is not much to be grateful for in the political world, I'm intensely grateful for all the people who are working to do *good.* In my own circle of friends are people working to help the homeless, undocumented immigrants, underprivileged kids, and so many more with so many organizations. As I write this, multiple of my neighbors and friends are running past my house on a charity 5k to feed the hungry.
There is good in the world, there is good in the world, there is good in the world, and I am thankful.
I'm thankful for my wife's transition and that she's here with us today.
I am thankful for my two unique, creative, loving, special goofballs, one of whom crawled into bed with us this morning while the other made cocoa for them both. (Granted, the thumping this involved sounded like the drum intro to "In the Air Tonight," but it was a nice gesture.)
I'm thankful for my good friends and colleagues. I have been better about asking for support lately, and it has improved my life.
I am extra-thankful that my bestest friends are all on these really stable, happy, upward trajectories: jobs, homes, babies, partners, art...
And I am super-thankful that I've been making a concerted effort to spend some time with my friends, and they have spent the effort back, and I feel less isolated.
I am very thankful for my family, my parents, step-parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and warm, loving sisters and brothers in-law. This has been a trying couple years -- my grandmother passed, and then my uncle. I saw a photo yesterday with my great-grandma, paternal grandparents, and uncle on his wedding day to my aunt, and it jolted me -- all these people I loved are dead. But at the same time, I'm so grateful for the years I had with them, for the clear, strong, positive memories I have with them, and for all they contributed to my life.
Especially as my friends (and younger cousins!) are losing their parents, I'm deeply grateful to have good parents in good health who live nearby and are loving, involved grandparents. I realize that there are at least four variables in that last sentence that not everyone has.
Under "miscellaneous," I am thankful for having moved the living room furniture in such a way that we all hang out in the same room. I am thankful that my garden mostly works. I am thankful for my cat Mina and for the new kitty we are getting on Sunday! I am thankful for both kids' good schools and caring teachers. I am thankful for my own students, their senses of humor, and their willingness to learn with me. I am thankful for my neighbors and my neighborhood.
And although we are living in American in 2019, and there is not much to be grateful for in the political world, I'm intensely grateful for all the people who are working to do *good.* In my own circle of friends are people working to help the homeless, undocumented immigrants, underprivileged kids, and so many more with so many organizations. As I write this, multiple of my neighbors and friends are running past my house on a charity 5k to feed the hungry.
There is good in the world, there is good in the world, there is good in the world, and I am thankful.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Uncle Eric
My uncle died today.
It was a surprise, not only because I didn't know he'd been having health problems -- Grandma was always my news source -- but also because he was my youngest uncle, the baby of the family.
Even though he was in his 60s, just by virtue of being the youngest, he always seemed young to me. When we would go out golfing when I was a kid (and oh, the memories I have of those early mornings with my dad and uncles), my dad was almost 40, rapidly graying, and a teacher. Eric was still in his twenties, which made him seem hip, young and carefree.
We always had funny nicknames for each other in the family, and he reveled in calling me "Kara Bear-a Ware-a Snare-a MacNamara," but as I got older, he never failed to call me by my full first and middle name. If I picked up the phone and heard a slightly nasally "Kara Ellen!" I knew it was him. (My other favorite uncle often uses both, too, but it has a lower, descending tone.)
But you see that exclamation point? That's because Eric said everything in an exclamation point.
"Kara Ellen! Did you tell you Dan and I are going to go see Tool?!" "Kara Ellen! Jules and I are doing Easter at our place!" (I haven't been to Easter at their place in 20 years, but he ALWAYS called to invite me.)
He absolutely loved music. Even some of my earliest memories are of him giving my dad record albums for Christmas -- I remember in particular being fascinated by the cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
He saw concerts as often as most people see movies, finding excuses to take his business partners as a schmooze or his kids as a bonding experience.
At my Grandma's wake at his house, he had the record player going.
I think I've made it plain that I'm close to my family, and I have a large family that is nevertheless surprisingly close-knit. My grandparents and aunts and uncles babysat me, and then they hired me for my first babysitting jobs. We went to everyone's birthdays and had all the holiday meals together. My dad and his brothers spent decades meeting most Sundays for golf or cards. Many of them still come to both my kids' birthday parties, even though they are only great- aunts and uncles, which is admittedly pretty distant.
But Eric loved music, and I was in a band and played the bass somewhat capably. He used to have some guys over to his place to jam, including an old dude he loved named Denny. He enclosed a little sun porch on the side of his house and kept the music stuff in there. So when my band broke up, he called right away and asked if I wanted to jam. I did.
I was no good compared to some of the guys he got in there, but they made room for people with varying abilities, and they often got pretty high, so the music sounded okay to them. About once a month (sometimes more often) for some years, I went over to his place, or to one of the other guys' houses, and we made some music. Often times it was terrible music and great fun. I loved playing Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath." Sometimes we'd just dink around, and once or twice I got on the mic and started saying goofy stuff. Eric absolutely lost it laughing to one improv I did called "Grandma's Big Back Porch." He liked to record everything -- every session from beginning to end. (I still have dozens of CDs labeled things like "Copious Notes: More Vicodin for the Drummer. F'ed out" and "Muscle Tone" and "Burn on Contact.") So EVERYONE heard the Big Back Porch song. (Full disclosure: he even played it at Grandma's wake.)
A lot of times, we'd take a break, and the other guys would go out to smoke. I'd start to head off, too, but he'd play a quiet guitar part to something like "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd, and I'd stay to sing with him.
He also loved to go to "Old Farts," a music festival somewhere in the Deep South that he always wanted me to go to with him.
His enthusiasm extended to his kids, and I often heard about Dan's sports or school achievements, or Melissa's creative endeavors. He was incredibly proud of them no matter what they did, really. They've grown up to be very decent people, too, and I'm sorry that neither of them -- should they have kids -- will get to see the light in his eyes that would have been there for his grandchildren. (Important note: he does have two other kids who are both older and with whom he has recently reconnected. They seem like decent people too, and it's sad that their sort of budding relationship with him ends here. I don't mean to leave them out.)
Anyway, he was surprisingly young, he was full of boundless enthusiasm, energy, and love, and there's a lot we'll all be missing without him.
Rest In Peace, Uncle Eric, and may the strains of Tool guide you to your rest.
It was a surprise, not only because I didn't know he'd been having health problems -- Grandma was always my news source -- but also because he was my youngest uncle, the baby of the family.
Even though he was in his 60s, just by virtue of being the youngest, he always seemed young to me. When we would go out golfing when I was a kid (and oh, the memories I have of those early mornings with my dad and uncles), my dad was almost 40, rapidly graying, and a teacher. Eric was still in his twenties, which made him seem hip, young and carefree.
We always had funny nicknames for each other in the family, and he reveled in calling me "Kara Bear-a Ware-a Snare-a MacNamara," but as I got older, he never failed to call me by my full first and middle name. If I picked up the phone and heard a slightly nasally "Kara Ellen!" I knew it was him. (My other favorite uncle often uses both, too, but it has a lower, descending tone.)
But you see that exclamation point? That's because Eric said everything in an exclamation point.
"Kara Ellen! Did you tell you Dan and I are going to go see Tool?!" "Kara Ellen! Jules and I are doing Easter at our place!" (I haven't been to Easter at their place in 20 years, but he ALWAYS called to invite me.)
He absolutely loved music. Even some of my earliest memories are of him giving my dad record albums for Christmas -- I remember in particular being fascinated by the cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
He saw concerts as often as most people see movies, finding excuses to take his business partners as a schmooze or his kids as a bonding experience.
At my Grandma's wake at his house, he had the record player going.
I think I've made it plain that I'm close to my family, and I have a large family that is nevertheless surprisingly close-knit. My grandparents and aunts and uncles babysat me, and then they hired me for my first babysitting jobs. We went to everyone's birthdays and had all the holiday meals together. My dad and his brothers spent decades meeting most Sundays for golf or cards. Many of them still come to both my kids' birthday parties, even though they are only great- aunts and uncles, which is admittedly pretty distant.
But Eric loved music, and I was in a band and played the bass somewhat capably. He used to have some guys over to his place to jam, including an old dude he loved named Denny. He enclosed a little sun porch on the side of his house and kept the music stuff in there. So when my band broke up, he called right away and asked if I wanted to jam. I did.
I was no good compared to some of the guys he got in there, but they made room for people with varying abilities, and they often got pretty high, so the music sounded okay to them. About once a month (sometimes more often) for some years, I went over to his place, or to one of the other guys' houses, and we made some music. Often times it was terrible music and great fun. I loved playing Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath." Sometimes we'd just dink around, and once or twice I got on the mic and started saying goofy stuff. Eric absolutely lost it laughing to one improv I did called "Grandma's Big Back Porch." He liked to record everything -- every session from beginning to end. (I still have dozens of CDs labeled things like "Copious Notes: More Vicodin for the Drummer. F'ed out" and "Muscle Tone" and "Burn on Contact.") So EVERYONE heard the Big Back Porch song. (Full disclosure: he even played it at Grandma's wake.)
A lot of times, we'd take a break, and the other guys would go out to smoke. I'd start to head off, too, but he'd play a quiet guitar part to something like "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd, and I'd stay to sing with him.
He also loved to go to "Old Farts," a music festival somewhere in the Deep South that he always wanted me to go to with him.
His enthusiasm extended to his kids, and I often heard about Dan's sports or school achievements, or Melissa's creative endeavors. He was incredibly proud of them no matter what they did, really. They've grown up to be very decent people, too, and I'm sorry that neither of them -- should they have kids -- will get to see the light in his eyes that would have been there for his grandchildren. (Important note: he does have two other kids who are both older and with whom he has recently reconnected. They seem like decent people too, and it's sad that their sort of budding relationship with him ends here. I don't mean to leave them out.)
Anyway, he was surprisingly young, he was full of boundless enthusiasm, energy, and love, and there's a lot we'll all be missing without him.
Rest In Peace, Uncle Eric, and may the strains of Tool guide you to your rest.
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Good news
Okay, I have to be upfront and say that as Az gets older, I feel like there's so much I still want to share about her and her journey, but also that she needs and deserves privacy.
I'm not sure how I'm going to balance those, but I think ultimately I will have to come down on the side of her needs, not mine.
So without going into any great detail, I will say we've been making some changes and trying new things, and that we've had some pretty positive early results.
For example, we went to Hamilton last week (it was amazing). And often in the past, if I did some big, grand exciting thing that I was hoping Az would love, we would find at the end that she was entirely focused on the one thing that hadn't gone her way. She'd declare that she had a terrible time, because despite getting do to everything she wanted at the fair and getting a cotton candy, she hadn't also gotten a frozen slushy. It was so hard to be a parent and go through that cycle every time of "this is gonna be so great! -- Oh, this seems like a minor setback. -- Ugh, why do I even do anything for her when I can never make her happy?"
But anyway, Hamilton was terrific, and we both thought so, and someone even traded her seats for a better view (for reasons I won't go into, but it was kind of dumb of them!), and afterwords she got three cast members to sign her program. She looked SO HAPPY all day. And there was nothing, not the slightest thing, that brought her down. Even though traffic was awful and we pulled off in Pinole to eat dinner. She was just... cool. Easygoing. She just rolled with everything.
And there have been some other developments that, in any other household, would probably be nothing noteworthy, but in my case, I immediately called my mom to share the good news.
First, I gave Az a bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch, and I said I loved her (I tell her all the time). She answered, "thanks for the food. I love you."
I played it cool until I got out the door, but she NEVER EVER EVER tells me she loves me, and she almost never says thank you about anything.
Later the same day, after Lochlan had already chosen a dessert, Azadeh asked if we could try the new gelato place that opened up down the street. So the two of us snuck out and got some gelato. And friends, she is weird about food. She hoards it, hides it, sneaks it, and sometimes eats like she's been in prison, guarding it. Mom and I used to get a small dessert sometimes when we'd go out to dinner, and we'd get three spoons, and she'd be SO greedy and weird about us even tasting it that we sort of gave up on the endeavor.
She NEVER voluntarily offers tastes of food. But I guess a lot of our "nevers" are getting disproven today, because last night she scooped up a bite of the "afternoon tea" flavor and handed it to me to try. Again, I had to act like it was all normal and cool, but you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Anyway, I KNOW, okay, that saying thank you, saying "I love you," offering bites of food, and enjoying enjoyable events are probably not noteworthy in a household with a neurotypical kid, but I don't have that household, so I'm celebrating -- hell, I'm walking on air!
I'm not sure how I'm going to balance those, but I think ultimately I will have to come down on the side of her needs, not mine.
So without going into any great detail, I will say we've been making some changes and trying new things, and that we've had some pretty positive early results.
For example, we went to Hamilton last week (it was amazing). And often in the past, if I did some big, grand exciting thing that I was hoping Az would love, we would find at the end that she was entirely focused on the one thing that hadn't gone her way. She'd declare that she had a terrible time, because despite getting do to everything she wanted at the fair and getting a cotton candy, she hadn't also gotten a frozen slushy. It was so hard to be a parent and go through that cycle every time of "this is gonna be so great! -- Oh, this seems like a minor setback. -- Ugh, why do I even do anything for her when I can never make her happy?"
But anyway, Hamilton was terrific, and we both thought so, and someone even traded her seats for a better view (for reasons I won't go into, but it was kind of dumb of them!), and afterwords she got three cast members to sign her program. She looked SO HAPPY all day. And there was nothing, not the slightest thing, that brought her down. Even though traffic was awful and we pulled off in Pinole to eat dinner. She was just... cool. Easygoing. She just rolled with everything.
And there have been some other developments that, in any other household, would probably be nothing noteworthy, but in my case, I immediately called my mom to share the good news.
First, I gave Az a bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch, and I said I loved her (I tell her all the time). She answered, "thanks for the food. I love you."
I played it cool until I got out the door, but she NEVER EVER EVER tells me she loves me, and she almost never says thank you about anything.
Later the same day, after Lochlan had already chosen a dessert, Azadeh asked if we could try the new gelato place that opened up down the street. So the two of us snuck out and got some gelato. And friends, she is weird about food. She hoards it, hides it, sneaks it, and sometimes eats like she's been in prison, guarding it. Mom and I used to get a small dessert sometimes when we'd go out to dinner, and we'd get three spoons, and she'd be SO greedy and weird about us even tasting it that we sort of gave up on the endeavor.
She NEVER voluntarily offers tastes of food. But I guess a lot of our "nevers" are getting disproven today, because last night she scooped up a bite of the "afternoon tea" flavor and handed it to me to try. Again, I had to act like it was all normal and cool, but you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Anyway, I KNOW, okay, that saying thank you, saying "I love you," offering bites of food, and enjoying enjoyable events are probably not noteworthy in a household with a neurotypical kid, but I don't have that household, so I'm celebrating -- hell, I'm walking on air!
Thursday, August 01, 2019
Bodega Bay
I should probably proofread and edit, but it's bedtime.
I took the kids camping this week. I always intend to do a couple day trips nearby, but unless we do a big week-long thing with family a 6-10 hour drive away, it seems we rarely manage and the school year sneaks up on us before my summer bucket list is crossed off.
I love Bodega Bay, and I found a 2-day mid-week spot despite my last-minute planning. It was perfect -- just a few sites away from the tall sandy hill Az had spent so much time running up and down last time (and even closer to the bathroom).
I love Bodega Bay, and I found a 2-day mid-week spot despite my last-minute planning. It was perfect -- just a few sites away from the tall sandy hill Az had spent so much time running up and down last time (and even closer to the bathroom).
It was in the 60s during the day -- sunny on Tuesday, but overcast yesterday, and cold at night. I kept it simple: the one-burner stove, no camp kitchen, and low-prep meals.
The kids did a lot of running around playing, both at the campsite and at the hill, which I could mostly see from my camp chair by the fire. When I wasn’t stoking fires or washing dishes or making meals, I mostly read the book I’d brought, “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
***
I bought it because I’m teaching that new class next semester, and one of the ideas I feel like I need to know more about is “indigenous knowledge.” I had been turning the idea over in my mind a lot. Can I expand the meaning of indigenous to include students like my own, many of whose parents or grandparents are refugees, but who maintain strong cultural ties and practices? Can indigenous knowledge move with you to a foreign land?
So when we were in Oregon, I saw this book and its subtitle (Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants) and figured I’d better pick it up. I didn’t entirely expect it to be a thrill ride, but I never mind learning new things, even if the text is a little dry.
The text isn’t dry. I’ve been absolutely absorbed in it. The woman in charge of my recent training introduced us to the idea of “headlining” as a summary strategy, so here goes:
Indigenous Botanist Urges Readers to Recognize Earth’s Gifts, Reciprocate: Essays on cattail goo, mothering, ethical trappers, and mountains of algae.
It’s lovely, and it’s sad, and there is some crossover with The Sixth Extinction, which I also recently read. We have really fucked things up, my friends. But also, there is so much that is so beautiful, and I am grateful for it. It felt especially apropos to be reading the book with my feet in the dirt, my back to a blackberry patch that housed one family of quail and another of turkeys (at least).
Indigenous Botanist Urges Readers to Recognize Earth’s Gifts, Reciprocate: Essays on cattail goo, mothering, ethical trappers, and mountains of algae.
It’s lovely, and it’s sad, and there is some crossover with The Sixth Extinction, which I also recently read. We have really fucked things up, my friends. But also, there is so much that is so beautiful, and I am grateful for it. It felt especially apropos to be reading the book with my feet in the dirt, my back to a blackberry patch that housed one family of quail and another of turkeys (at least).
And not only apropos, but synchronicitous, as many things were this week. The night before we left for the trip, when I had been thinking of waking up on Grandma’s birthday, Lochlan reminded me that his stuffed duck was special because it was from Granny Vida. I heard the fluttering of a scrubjay in the bishop pine above me just before the sputtering of the fire, and the rhyming onomatopoeia delighted me. I stopped on the side of the road to pick a little fennel, then not a mile later, saw another woman doing the same.
As I read about a school field trip which ended in the spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace,” my eyes welled up. The song is important to me because it was played at my Grandpa’s funeral some 20 years ago. But singing on school field trips, that too is something I love and miss, as we haven’t been able to take my kids on our usual Yosemite or Point Reyes trips in a few years. The kids don’t all know the same campfire songs or folk songs we grew up with, but they can all sing the songs from Spanish class together, or listen to us old teachers sing Beatles songs and, inevitably, The Cat Came Back.
And as I sat there, tears deciding whether they would fall or subside, wool socks growing almost too warm with my feet pressed against the fire ring, the night growing imperceptibly darker, a guitar sounded and voices rose up together to sing, “Peaceful, Easy Feeling.” The kids were already in bed, and tomorrow morning would be Grandma’s 92nd birthday, the second without her.
As I read about a school field trip which ended in the spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace,” my eyes welled up. The song is important to me because it was played at my Grandpa’s funeral some 20 years ago. But singing on school field trips, that too is something I love and miss, as we haven’t been able to take my kids on our usual Yosemite or Point Reyes trips in a few years. The kids don’t all know the same campfire songs or folk songs we grew up with, but they can all sing the songs from Spanish class together, or listen to us old teachers sing Beatles songs and, inevitably, The Cat Came Back.
And as I sat there, tears deciding whether they would fall or subside, wool socks growing almost too warm with my feet pressed against the fire ring, the night growing imperceptibly darker, a guitar sounded and voices rose up together to sing, “Peaceful, Easy Feeling.” The kids were already in bed, and tomorrow morning would be Grandma’s 92nd birthday, the second without her.
***
Grandma got into geneaology when you still had to use family bibles and Mormon libraries, and she went full-tilt into it, joining associations, creating ahnentafel charts that had to have the daisy-wheel printer paper edge torn off, and going to meetings and conventions. She bought a computer. When she found a great-great-grandmother born in Indian territory, she floated the idea that maybe we had some indigenous ancestry. Who knew, right?
I’m not only sure now, that we did not, but moreso that it wouldn’t matter if we did. If this mythical great-great-great-grandma Cherokee princess (aren’t they all?) existed, we aren’t enrolled in a tribe, we weren’t brought up with those customs. They aren’t ours for the taking.
But there’s another part to it. If you played cowboys and Indians when you were a kid, you might have wanted to be the good guys -- the cowboys, obviously, with their white hats, vs. the sneaky, arrow-shooting savages who said “how” and spoke broken English.
I’m not only sure now, that we did not, but moreso that it wouldn’t matter if we did. If this mythical great-great-great-grandma Cherokee princess (aren’t they all?) existed, we aren’t enrolled in a tribe, we weren’t brought up with those customs. They aren’t ours for the taking.
But there’s another part to it. If you played cowboys and Indians when you were a kid, you might have wanted to be the good guys -- the cowboys, obviously, with their white hats, vs. the sneaky, arrow-shooting savages who said “how” and spoke broken English.
As most of us grow up, though, we idealize indigenous culture, realize, however shallowly and narrowly, that we mostly destroyed something pretty beautiful. So we smudge sage and get tattoos of dreamcatchers. (Because, boy almighty, aren’t colonizers something else?)
But it isn’t those tokens of culture that we harmed -- it was people, and our shared humanity. We collided with another group of humans and very nearly wiped them out, like a big rig hitting a motorcycle.
But it isn’t those tokens of culture that we harmed -- it was people, and our shared humanity. We collided with another group of humans and very nearly wiped them out, like a big rig hitting a motorcycle.
***
Yesterday on the beach I saw something white and smooth. I thought it was an interesting rock, or maybe a shell. I tried to pick it up and it was held fairly fast by the sand. Unusual. I pulled a little harder, brushed some sand away, and thought it was connected by a series of roots. Was it a strange plant? Was it a rock or shell tangled in a plant? It wasn’t until it came free in my hand that I realized it was in fact a bird skull. I had likely ripped it from its vertebrae. The skull itself was clean and dry, so it wasn’t particularly gross. I took a few pictures of it for a friend and left it on the beach.
A short time later, I saw a mole crab upside-down, dead, I assumed noticeable for its bright orange eggs and for appearing to be intact instead of gull-eaten. I took a picture, flipped it over, and took another. Lochlan crouched by me and gave it a gentle poke as I put my camera away. “I think it moved, Mom!” I doubted it, but let him poke it again to show me. It bounced back slightly from the pressure, and I prepared to break the bad news, but then it wiggled its legs to make a run for it. A wave came in.
I’m not a spiritual person, but I respect the seriousness of Earth (I almost wrote gravity) and of life and death. But I also think it’s beautiful that energy doesn’t die, just changes.
A short time later, I saw a mole crab upside-down, dead, I assumed noticeable for its bright orange eggs and for appearing to be intact instead of gull-eaten. I took a picture, flipped it over, and took another. Lochlan crouched by me and gave it a gentle poke as I put my camera away. “I think it moved, Mom!” I doubted it, but let him poke it again to show me. It bounced back slightly from the pressure, and I prepared to break the bad news, but then it wiggled its legs to make a run for it. A wave came in.
I’m not a spiritual person, but I respect the seriousness of Earth (I almost wrote gravity) and of life and death. But I also think it’s beautiful that energy doesn’t die, just changes.
***
Today we went to a beach that was much more foreboding. We parked high on a cliff, and the parking lot itself was eroding, the emptiness encroaching past the guard rails so that several times I had to tell Lochlan to look down instead of out to sea.
I took my sandals off to walk on the sand, which was much coarser. I almost immediately spied another skull, this one a fish with surprising broad teeth on top. I turned around and saw human skulls carved into the sedimentary cliffs all around.
Azadeh went running from the surf. Lochlan and I climbed to get a better view. The rocks abraded my feet. We sat and looked for pinnipeds, and we saw only sea birds, but Az called out, “A seal! Or maybe a selkie!” I smiled. She can be sarcastic and mean and surly, but there is still magic for her, and I am glad.
I took my sandals off to walk on the sand, which was much coarser. I almost immediately spied another skull, this one a fish with surprising broad teeth on top. I turned around and saw human skulls carved into the sedimentary cliffs all around.
Azadeh went running from the surf. Lochlan and I climbed to get a better view. The rocks abraded my feet. We sat and looked for pinnipeds, and we saw only sea birds, but Az called out, “A seal! Or maybe a selkie!” I smiled. She can be sarcastic and mean and surly, but there is still magic for her, and I am glad.
It doesn’t matter that today is Grandma’s birthday. There’s nothing left to celebrate or to mourn. It is a normal day now. No cake.
But I’m thinking about her. I had cause to think about my college Psychology of Death and Dying class. Grief, the professor had explained, can be intensified both by how close you are to someone emotionally and how close you are to them physically. Do you see them often? Live in the same town?
I feel stupid, even, for mourning her like I do. She was ninety. She wanted to go. Many people don’t know their grandmothers at all, don’t spend the kind of time with them that I did, don’t have their until they’re in their 40s. She lived close to me, was loving to me, accepted me even when she didn’t understand me. I was so lucky, but also, Jesus Christ, I know what I lost.
***
But I’m thinking about her. I had cause to think about my college Psychology of Death and Dying class. Grief, the professor had explained, can be intensified both by how close you are to someone emotionally and how close you are to them physically. Do you see them often? Live in the same town?
I feel stupid, even, for mourning her like I do. She was ninety. She wanted to go. Many people don’t know their grandmothers at all, don’t spend the kind of time with them that I did, don’t have their until they’re in their 40s. She lived close to me, was loving to me, accepted me even when she didn’t understand me. I was so lucky, but also, Jesus Christ, I know what I lost.
***
I am wearing my homemade shirt with the floating otter family that says, “families belong together.” I worry that someone will say something mean to me, in front of my kids. Getting water for dishes at the campsite, or at a Starbucks in Petaluma. I can’t believe the sentiment has become partisan, but it has. Lochlan wants me to make him the same shirt, and I still have the screen and can easily make more. But what will the other preschool parents think? I can’t emblazon a political statement on my sweet baby and send him into the world, can I? He just likes the otters.
He slept last night with his head on my mattress. Azadeh was in the next tent, but close enough that I could hear her breathing, ask if she was okay when she rustled uncomfortably. Families do belong together. I can’t imagine being separated from these two. Hell, I’m going to break apart when they move out as they’re supposed to when they’re grown. But now? Lochlan still needs my help with the button on his pants! I can’t imagine them being taken from me and held in a cell like a dog kennel. These children are so soft.
We broke down a couple years ago and hired a housekeeper -- the woman who worked for my grandmother, in fact, who had an opening when Grandma moved into the senior aparments. She sent me a message a few weeks ago saying there was a family emergency and she had to go to Mexico. She filled my mom in on more of the details, which are not mine to share, but they are a reminder to me of just why people are fleeing to try to find a better life in the first place. This story has a grandmother, too, terrified for her grandbaby. How do you leave your extended family? How do you stay under the threat of violence?
He slept last night with his head on my mattress. Azadeh was in the next tent, but close enough that I could hear her breathing, ask if she was okay when she rustled uncomfortably. Families do belong together. I can’t imagine being separated from these two. Hell, I’m going to break apart when they move out as they’re supposed to when they’re grown. But now? Lochlan still needs my help with the button on his pants! I can’t imagine them being taken from me and held in a cell like a dog kennel. These children are so soft.
We broke down a couple years ago and hired a housekeeper -- the woman who worked for my grandmother, in fact, who had an opening when Grandma moved into the senior aparments. She sent me a message a few weeks ago saying there was a family emergency and she had to go to Mexico. She filled my mom in on more of the details, which are not mine to share, but they are a reminder to me of just why people are fleeing to try to find a better life in the first place. This story has a grandmother, too, terrified for her grandbaby. How do you leave your extended family? How do you stay under the threat of violence?
***
The drive home is unusually long due to road work and accidents. I have a lot of time to think, and I am thinking about the book, about how to reciprocate the earth’s gifts. Solar panels? A bee waterer? Planting wildflowers? I imagine building the herb spiral I’ve been thinking of, getting into my garden and just losing myself in a brick-by-brick maze of pollinator plants, doing what I can from a very small sphere of influence.
We pass a trio of weeping willows, a tree Lochlan has been hoping to see for weeks. It hangs low to the ground, I’ll say, and he’ll point out an oak whose branches nearly sweep the ground. No, not quite. But here they are, and I point them out quickly. But Lochlan is fast asleep. I hope he is dreaming of selkies.
I think I have to think bigger than my bricks and pollen. I think to give back to the Earth I have to recognize that one of its gifts is us, people. Our shared humanity. Our grandmothers. So I have to keep giving the world, its people included, my kindness. I have to do right by them, even if that kindness sometimes looks like marching outside my Congressperson’s office.
One of the worst slowdowns today was at the Yolo Causeway. No surprise there. I check my rear-view frequently for motorcycles splitting lanes, so I saw the red flashing lights long before I heard the siren. I moved slightly right to let the fire truck pass in the shoulder, then two CHP cars. Only the fast lane was closed off, but after I merged and saw six vehicles and two motorcycles pulled over, I got a sick feeling. Bikers had been zipping through between us for hours, often at two or three times the rate of the cars, and the cars are oblivious. Shit, the car in front of me had heard the sirens and started to move *into* the shoulder.
As I passed, I saw that the paramedics were helping a woman who was sitting up on the shoulder, and I felt tears well up again, this time of relief. It is too easy to be careless, to fail to look out for those more vulnerable. And we owe each other better.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Theory of Knowledge
I'm in Lake Tahoe at a training for a class I'll be teaching for the first time in August.
I have to say... I really didn't know a lot about the class. I mean, I had read the stuff in my own subject area, and I had seen a few classes from the other ToK classes on campus, but it's hard to understand the whole course.
Over the last two days, I've shared on Facebook a couple of the WTF-ier kinds of things we are talking about in the training. My parents have both asked -- jokingly, I think-- for a translation.
So what am I doing? Giving them one! Here, now. Of course, my main purpose in writing this is to cement the knowledge for my own sake, and I promise I don't care if you read this or not.
If there was an over-arching question in ToK, it would be "How do we know what we know?"
And everything else sort of circles around that. Do you know how to swim in the same way you know that climate change is happening? Of course not: one of them is personal to you, and one of them you know because you trust the experts. There is knowledge that you know because you have personally perceived it with your senses ("It's dark out") and knowledge that you know because we share it as a culture ("Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn").
ToK talks about the Areas of Knowledge (the disciplines, basically) and the Ways of Knowing (things like Reason, Language, Sense Perception, Memory, Imagination, and Faith).
Personally, I struggled a little with things like imagination and faith being ways of knowing, but we talked about how imagination can do things like *lead* to knowledge (for example, when a scientist imagines how something might work, or a writer imagines a world) and that some ways of knowing things tend to be more trustworthy than others (someone who *knows* there is a God knows it because of faith. We might not share in that knowledge, or we might disagree about that knowledge, or we might question the validity of that knowledge, but it is still how that person knows that thing).
What we will be teaching the students to do, by and large, is take specific examples of real life situations (in fact, we call them RLS) and create "second-order" questions about them. Like, if we saw the picture of the father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande this week and wondered things like, "is it ethical to share that photo" or "what could have been done to prevent this tragedy" or "whose responsibility is this," we might think about how the questions that photo prompted could be made a little more general/abstract and applied to other areas of knowledge.
My group today used that very example, and we initially asked the question, "Is it important to share this photo to create an emotional reaction in order to create change?" But that's still specific to this particular situation, so we generalized more: "To what extent is our perception driven by emotion?"
Why this question worked well was that you could apply it to other areas -- you could ask it about having an emotional response to a piece of art, or whether emotions color our opinions of new scientific discoveries (and we gave specific examples, like how people were disinclined to accept that Pluto was no longer a planet because they were attached to it). Another group had chosen the same photo, but their knowledge question was, "How can we be sure our perceptions are accurate?" (It might have been a better question to ask, "to what extent can we be sure our perceptions are accurate.) And whereas we applied our knowledge question to Pluto and a poem, they brought up "deep fake" videos.
So far, what I like about it is that it is asking them to think very critically. They might ask how we know that the history text is right. They might ask which of two interpretations of literature is more valid. They might ask whether science is trustworthy when we so frequently see changes in scientific understanding. And we're asking them to wrestle with the answers to those questions, too.
Here's what I think will be challenging for the kids and for me: it is a little fuzzy and squishy and anything-goes. Like, a kid who wants to talk about the Illuminati could certainly talk about how he comes to that knowledge in part via faith and imagination. I mean... it wouldn't be a GOOD presentation, and you could massage it to make it better (preferably if the kid could actually thoughtfully critique his own goofball ideas), but it does seem to invite some of that fuzzy thinking.
And frankly, I was paying serious attention and thinking really hard, and so I was catching some of the mistakes my colleagues in the class were making, and it occurred to me that if these grown-ups with college degrees were fucking it up, my kids were going to struggle for sure.
My dad asked his question as a "shop guy," and I think what I've learned here is that we could totally take a "shop" situation and make it into a ToK topic of study. Like, some schools have gotten rid of shop. That makes me wonder whether people really value vocational education, or whether there's still a place for people who work with their hands as the job market changes. A knowledge question might be, "to what extent can we use existing knowledge to predict future changes?" See, the question is inspired by wondering whether we'll need shop guys in the future, but you could also ask it about science or literature or history.
Anyway, as I said, this was mainly an exercise for myself, so thanks for sticking with me, if you did!
My optional homework-- which I did NOT opt to do -- was to build a course outline, and that is something I actually SHOULD do. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get to that. Good night. Take care.
I have to say... I really didn't know a lot about the class. I mean, I had read the stuff in my own subject area, and I had seen a few classes from the other ToK classes on campus, but it's hard to understand the whole course.
Over the last two days, I've shared on Facebook a couple of the WTF-ier kinds of things we are talking about in the training. My parents have both asked -- jokingly, I think-- for a translation.
So what am I doing? Giving them one! Here, now. Of course, my main purpose in writing this is to cement the knowledge for my own sake, and I promise I don't care if you read this or not.
If there was an over-arching question in ToK, it would be "How do we know what we know?"
And everything else sort of circles around that. Do you know how to swim in the same way you know that climate change is happening? Of course not: one of them is personal to you, and one of them you know because you trust the experts. There is knowledge that you know because you have personally perceived it with your senses ("It's dark out") and knowledge that you know because we share it as a culture ("Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn").
ToK talks about the Areas of Knowledge (the disciplines, basically) and the Ways of Knowing (things like Reason, Language, Sense Perception, Memory, Imagination, and Faith).
Personally, I struggled a little with things like imagination and faith being ways of knowing, but we talked about how imagination can do things like *lead* to knowledge (for example, when a scientist imagines how something might work, or a writer imagines a world) and that some ways of knowing things tend to be more trustworthy than others (someone who *knows* there is a God knows it because of faith. We might not share in that knowledge, or we might disagree about that knowledge, or we might question the validity of that knowledge, but it is still how that person knows that thing).
What we will be teaching the students to do, by and large, is take specific examples of real life situations (in fact, we call them RLS) and create "second-order" questions about them. Like, if we saw the picture of the father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande this week and wondered things like, "is it ethical to share that photo" or "what could have been done to prevent this tragedy" or "whose responsibility is this," we might think about how the questions that photo prompted could be made a little more general/abstract and applied to other areas of knowledge.
My group today used that very example, and we initially asked the question, "Is it important to share this photo to create an emotional reaction in order to create change?" But that's still specific to this particular situation, so we generalized more: "To what extent is our perception driven by emotion?"
Why this question worked well was that you could apply it to other areas -- you could ask it about having an emotional response to a piece of art, or whether emotions color our opinions of new scientific discoveries (and we gave specific examples, like how people were disinclined to accept that Pluto was no longer a planet because they were attached to it). Another group had chosen the same photo, but their knowledge question was, "How can we be sure our perceptions are accurate?" (It might have been a better question to ask, "to what extent can we be sure our perceptions are accurate.) And whereas we applied our knowledge question to Pluto and a poem, they brought up "deep fake" videos.
So far, what I like about it is that it is asking them to think very critically. They might ask how we know that the history text is right. They might ask which of two interpretations of literature is more valid. They might ask whether science is trustworthy when we so frequently see changes in scientific understanding. And we're asking them to wrestle with the answers to those questions, too.
Here's what I think will be challenging for the kids and for me: it is a little fuzzy and squishy and anything-goes. Like, a kid who wants to talk about the Illuminati could certainly talk about how he comes to that knowledge in part via faith and imagination. I mean... it wouldn't be a GOOD presentation, and you could massage it to make it better (preferably if the kid could actually thoughtfully critique his own goofball ideas), but it does seem to invite some of that fuzzy thinking.
And frankly, I was paying serious attention and thinking really hard, and so I was catching some of the mistakes my colleagues in the class were making, and it occurred to me that if these grown-ups with college degrees were fucking it up, my kids were going to struggle for sure.
My dad asked his question as a "shop guy," and I think what I've learned here is that we could totally take a "shop" situation and make it into a ToK topic of study. Like, some schools have gotten rid of shop. That makes me wonder whether people really value vocational education, or whether there's still a place for people who work with their hands as the job market changes. A knowledge question might be, "to what extent can we use existing knowledge to predict future changes?" See, the question is inspired by wondering whether we'll need shop guys in the future, but you could also ask it about science or literature or history.
Anyway, as I said, this was mainly an exercise for myself, so thanks for sticking with me, if you did!
My optional homework-- which I did NOT opt to do -- was to build a course outline, and that is something I actually SHOULD do. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get to that. Good night. Take care.
Saturday, June 01, 2019
Short one
Hello! I could probably talk about a lot of things right now. There's a lot on my mind, especially politically and culturally. But I want to pop in with some body talk again.
I've lost 40 pounds, and I haven't reached a plateau*, per se, but it has slowed down a bit. I think there are two factors -- last weekend was a holiday weekend with visitors and barbecues, and also I've been ramping up my workouts to include more weight training, so I think I'm building muscle.
One of the things I like best about my body is my legs. I don't know if it's genetically pre-determined or that I did so much ballet when I was younger, but I have great fucking legs. Even when I'm fat, to be honest. Sure, my thighs get a little flabby, but everything's shaped hella nice, including my ass. Whatever, I'm allowed to have good ass self-esteem.
But working out again (while I've only recently added in the weight training, including leg machines, I started doing squats every day in late December) has been amazingly effective at adding muscle. Like, my thighs are RIDICULOUS right now. Rock solid muscle mass. Defined, even. I'm not sure I'm of a miniskirt age any longer, but trust me, I would look good in one.
I'd still like to lose around 50 more, but I'm not being obsessive about it, and I'm happy with the pace I'm going. I generally take at least one weekend day off of going to the gym, because it's hard to fit it in. But also, because I think it's mentally healthy to give myself a break. I could be super-strict about the Weight Watchers points and never go "over," but you know what? A little frozen yogurt with the kids is a nice treat. A Chipotle burrito isn't as tasty without cheese. So I'm being thoughtful about healthy eating, but balanced too.
The thing that's been weirdest about it all is how many people comment on my weight loss! Former students have said things in the hall. The school counselor said, "You're shrinking!" yesterday. The teacher next door said, "You're losing weight, huh?" I mean, these are all compliments, and I appreciate them, I guess, but it's also WEIRD to note how many people take notice of my body and comment on it. This does not happen, by the way, when you are fat and just stay fat.
Tonight my love and I are going to the Pride gala, and I bought a FANCY dress. It's a 14W, and I don't expect to be able to wear it again, partly because we don't get invited to fancy things that often, and partly because I don't expect to be in W sizes for much longer (I'm about a 16 now, which you can get pretty much off the rack). So I'm looking forward to one dazzling evening in it, and then selling it to Crossroads. Maybe there'll be a good picture and I'll share it here.
* I just opened and re-read my LAST post about my weight loss, on April 20th, and I mentioned that I had reached a plateau then, too, but I've also lost ten pounds since then, so maybe my idea of a plateau is just my self-confidence fucking with me.
I've lost 40 pounds, and I haven't reached a plateau*, per se, but it has slowed down a bit. I think there are two factors -- last weekend was a holiday weekend with visitors and barbecues, and also I've been ramping up my workouts to include more weight training, so I think I'm building muscle.
One of the things I like best about my body is my legs. I don't know if it's genetically pre-determined or that I did so much ballet when I was younger, but I have great fucking legs. Even when I'm fat, to be honest. Sure, my thighs get a little flabby, but everything's shaped hella nice, including my ass. Whatever, I'm allowed to have good ass self-esteem.
But working out again (while I've only recently added in the weight training, including leg machines, I started doing squats every day in late December) has been amazingly effective at adding muscle. Like, my thighs are RIDICULOUS right now. Rock solid muscle mass. Defined, even. I'm not sure I'm of a miniskirt age any longer, but trust me, I would look good in one.
I'd still like to lose around 50 more, but I'm not being obsessive about it, and I'm happy with the pace I'm going. I generally take at least one weekend day off of going to the gym, because it's hard to fit it in. But also, because I think it's mentally healthy to give myself a break. I could be super-strict about the Weight Watchers points and never go "over," but you know what? A little frozen yogurt with the kids is a nice treat. A Chipotle burrito isn't as tasty without cheese. So I'm being thoughtful about healthy eating, but balanced too.
The thing that's been weirdest about it all is how many people comment on my weight loss! Former students have said things in the hall. The school counselor said, "You're shrinking!" yesterday. The teacher next door said, "You're losing weight, huh?" I mean, these are all compliments, and I appreciate them, I guess, but it's also WEIRD to note how many people take notice of my body and comment on it. This does not happen, by the way, when you are fat and just stay fat.
Tonight my love and I are going to the Pride gala, and I bought a FANCY dress. It's a 14W, and I don't expect to be able to wear it again, partly because we don't get invited to fancy things that often, and partly because I don't expect to be in W sizes for much longer (I'm about a 16 now, which you can get pretty much off the rack). So I'm looking forward to one dazzling evening in it, and then selling it to Crossroads. Maybe there'll be a good picture and I'll share it here.
* I just opened and re-read my LAST post about my weight loss, on April 20th, and I mentioned that I had reached a plateau then, too, but I've also lost ten pounds since then, so maybe my idea of a plateau is just my self-confidence fucking with me.
Saturday, April 20, 2019
All kinds of stuff, like pre-teens, body image, and E.Q.
So my darling 11 year old is moody and crabby and isolates herself in her room a lot. Never sure where the pre-teen boundary meets the autism boundary. She can be a real challenge sometimes, and she drives us all nuts a lot.
Just this morning, I had suggested she wash her hair. It's, like... WAY too long between showers for her. I said she looked like Professor Snape. I meant it as a funny tease; I thought she'd appreciate the Harry Potter reference. She took it as a straight-up insult (and I can see why she would -- I admit I was wrong, and I did apologize). So then it escalated, she yelled (we were trying to stay cool), Ánt got irritated and jumped in to back me up on the showers-are-good point, and by the time we were halfway to our destination, she was calling us all kinds of names. During her tirade, she said it didn't matter that she was insulting us because it didn't hurt our feelings. We were like robots. I lost my cool and said that it DID in fact hurt my feelings, and it made me feel terrible that my kid thinks I'm an idiot and calls me names all the time. "So you do make me feel terrible: is that what you wanted? Does it make you feel better?" "No. Now I feel bad, too." "Well," I said, "that's not what I wanted either."
Yesterday I took her to the trampoline place and arranged for her best friend to meet us. We had lunch, Icees, 2 hours of jumping, I doled out quarters for video games and dispenser machines... I thought it was a lot of fun. But she started complaining as we left: I got her a small Icee instead of a large. I didn't get salt on her pretzel. We should have arranged to have dinner with her friend's family that evening, too.
I tried to get her to see the bright side (after all, I'd just spent like $75 trying to give her a special afternoon), and I tallied up some of the good things. She yelled and stormed off.
I try really hard to be patient and understanding, but I fail a LOT, and I was definitely thinking in my head, "Well see if I take you to do anything fun again, then, you ungrateful brat." But almost before I could finish my sentence, Lochlan said -- 80s sitcom catchphrase-style -- "That's our Az!"
It really sort of upended my thinking about it. That is our Az. She always complains at the end of having a good time. And she seemed like she had a good time in the moment. Maybe that's enough. Maybe I just need to roll with her difficult transitions.
This week, I took her to the teen center she just aged into. When I came back, she was playing D&D with what I'd guess (and know -- I know one of the moms) were a bunch of other autistic kids. She wasn't ready to go, so I let her stay longer. I'm glad she had a good time.
It's been hard to get her to go to dance and karate. I know she's over scheduled and keep trying to talk her out of some of her commitments, but she really wanted to do both. Finally I decided we'd quit dance -- karate is 2 days a week and dance is one, and she was choosing not to go to dance pretty often. But then she started balking harder at karate. I finally asked what was going on, and she admitted she felt like she'd been left behind when she took the long break, and that the kids she'd started with were ahead of her. So I scheduled a private lesson with the sensei and told him what she really needed was both a refresher and a confidence-builder. I noticed in class that day, he was addressing her a lot, encouraging her to participate in things she was shying away from.
~*~*~*~*~*
I've mentioned this before, I think, but raising a (mostly*) neurotypical kid is kind of weird after raising an autistic kid for so long. Like, Lochlan does things that, as soon as he does them, you think, "Oh! That feature should come standard, I guess." Like today -- Ant banged her knee and said "ow." Lochlan asked what happened, then said, sympathetically, "I bet that really hurt." Yo, in 11 years, I'm not sure Azadeh has expressed empathy in that way, let alone usually even asking us what's wrong or even noticing that we're hurt!
We were reading about dinosaurs at bedtime, and I asked if he ever looks at the picture I had commissioned for him of a mama dinosaur bathing her baby dino. He said he does -- he likes to stand up and look at it. I said, "I love that picture." He replied, "I know it means a lot to you." And I was just BLOWN AWAY. Again, the combination of realizing I am a human person with feelings and then actually knowing what those feelings are and being able to express them in words -- like, wow!
*I say mostly neurotypical because Lochlan definitely has some quirks. Like, he hates loud noises, prefers soft pants and lightweight pajamas, has poor fine and gross motor skills, is obsessive about dinosaurs and animals, talks in a high-pitched voice about 80% of the time, and picks up idioms and catchphrases from TV shows so adeptly that it almost reminds me of echolalia. But other than that...
~*~*~*~*~*~*
The other day Az and I spent a lot of time alone together, and as we were eating lunch, she told me that she sometimes had body image issues and thinks she's fat. If you saw my last post, you can easily tell that she's not. In fact, she's a little underweight. I didn't just go, "ohmygosh you totally AREN'T," though. Instead, I (told her she wasn't and then) asked her to talk to her counselor about it the next day. I also explained body dysmorphia -- our inability to see our bodies as they are, but to focus on perceived flaws (usually this is called Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is when you're also obsessed with it, but I just mean sort of less-serious than that).
And I know because I definitely have a touch of that. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about a gal who was sort of body-shaming women who were fat, because she herself had kids and a job and was super-fit. And I gave a lot of reasons why one might have chosen other things to celebrate. I still believe that, really: like, would I rather have a conversation with the cut-abs mom or with Roxane Gay (a super-smart author who is also overweight)? Like, duh.
I am also in the process of losing weight. I've been heavier and thinner in my adult life, but mostly heavier. And there are many reasons for that, but the most basic one is that I don't love to exercise and I do love eating food.
You may know of the movement called Health at Any Size. It's a lovely idea, and I support them 100%. They believe that just because you are overweight does not mean you are unhealthy. There's been a fat acceptance movement where heavier people are reclaiming, loving, dressing and showing off their bodies in ways that disregard society's expectations. I am HERE FOR THAT.
But I also think there's an important word in health at any size -- health. And at my weight last year, I wasn't that healthy. I earned myself a CPAP machine. I had plantar fasciitis. I noticed a very early sign of diabetes. I wasn't comfortable.
And to forgive myself for my bad habits, a little, it WAS honestly hard to get to the gym when Azadeh wasn't sleeping -- no way was I going to get up at 5 if I'd already been up all night and she finally shut up and went to sleep at 3:30. And it's hard to get to the gym in the evening when your little one is clingy and needy, and your partner loses patience quickly.
But... Azadeh is sleeping better. And Lochlan is a little less clingy. And Ánt loves herself so much better now and has a lot more patience with the kids. I got a little of my time back, and I started going to the gym. Every weekday.
Just before the new year I re-joined Weight Watchers. It has always worked for me if I really kept track and followed the plan. The problem was when I'd quit.
It's actually really easy to explain: on the plan, I would eat zero-points foods and get an extra workout in to "earn" the french fries with dinner. Off the plan, I would eat and exercise more moderately, then think, "Hey, if I can eat french fries while on the plan, they can't be that bad!" And then have a margarita and a cookie, too.
Anyway, back on topic: it has been working really well. I've dropped a little over 30 pounds, and even though I'm sort of at a plateau right now, I am still making good choices and I know I'll get through it. I'd really like to lose about 60 more, to be honest, but it gets harder as you go along. They give you fewer points every time you hit certain marks, which means they kind of ease you into it. Anyway, we'll see where it goes. I honestly think that if I'm going to stay healthy and be there for the kids for a long time, I'm going to need to do this tracking/calculating thing forever.
But back to the body image thing! I've always had a hard time seeing myself. When I was a teenager, I was sure I was fat. Hefty. Ridiculous. My stomach was big. I look back at old photos now and go, "WHAT THE FUCK, younger me? You were a knockout!"
Anyway, between being fine and thinking I was fat and being fat and thinking I was fine, I sort of messed up my self-image at some point, and I have NO IDEA how I look anymore.
Like, sometimes I catch a glimpse in the mirror and think, "Ooh, get it, girl!" and then later the same day think, "GODZILLA ATTACKS!" I can look at a woman I know is morbidly obese, Oprah Winfrey in the 80s, say, and think, "Yep, I look exactly like that." And then look at Oprah in the 90s and think, "Well, with a shaper?" So I mean this very honestly: if you put together a line-up of slightly chubby women to made-for-TV-special "I have to wear a King size bedsheet" women and asked me to place myself in line by weight, I would have literally no idea where I go. I still can't really see myself as I am.
But I'm glad that I'm sticking to it, I'm proud of the work I've put in, and whatever my body looks like, my pants fit better, I'm moving more freely, and my feet don't hurt (as much). I even had to buy a couple pairs of what I'm calling "interim pants": cheapies from Old Navy because a lot of my old pants are way too big now. And I look pretty cute in my interim pants. I think.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Anyway, that was a long one, probably because I check in so rarely and have so much to say! Or perhaps I'm avoiding the other work I should be doing. It's probably that.
Take care. Thanks for reading.
Just this morning, I had suggested she wash her hair. It's, like... WAY too long between showers for her. I said she looked like Professor Snape. I meant it as a funny tease; I thought she'd appreciate the Harry Potter reference. She took it as a straight-up insult (and I can see why she would -- I admit I was wrong, and I did apologize). So then it escalated, she yelled (we were trying to stay cool), Ánt got irritated and jumped in to back me up on the showers-are-good point, and by the time we were halfway to our destination, she was calling us all kinds of names. During her tirade, she said it didn't matter that she was insulting us because it didn't hurt our feelings. We were like robots. I lost my cool and said that it DID in fact hurt my feelings, and it made me feel terrible that my kid thinks I'm an idiot and calls me names all the time. "So you do make me feel terrible: is that what you wanted? Does it make you feel better?" "No. Now I feel bad, too." "Well," I said, "that's not what I wanted either."
Yesterday I took her to the trampoline place and arranged for her best friend to meet us. We had lunch, Icees, 2 hours of jumping, I doled out quarters for video games and dispenser machines... I thought it was a lot of fun. But she started complaining as we left: I got her a small Icee instead of a large. I didn't get salt on her pretzel. We should have arranged to have dinner with her friend's family that evening, too.
I tried to get her to see the bright side (after all, I'd just spent like $75 trying to give her a special afternoon), and I tallied up some of the good things. She yelled and stormed off.
I try really hard to be patient and understanding, but I fail a LOT, and I was definitely thinking in my head, "Well see if I take you to do anything fun again, then, you ungrateful brat." But almost before I could finish my sentence, Lochlan said -- 80s sitcom catchphrase-style -- "That's our Az!"
It really sort of upended my thinking about it. That is our Az. She always complains at the end of having a good time. And she seemed like she had a good time in the moment. Maybe that's enough. Maybe I just need to roll with her difficult transitions.
This week, I took her to the teen center she just aged into. When I came back, she was playing D&D with what I'd guess (and know -- I know one of the moms) were a bunch of other autistic kids. She wasn't ready to go, so I let her stay longer. I'm glad she had a good time.
It's been hard to get her to go to dance and karate. I know she's over scheduled and keep trying to talk her out of some of her commitments, but she really wanted to do both. Finally I decided we'd quit dance -- karate is 2 days a week and dance is one, and she was choosing not to go to dance pretty often. But then she started balking harder at karate. I finally asked what was going on, and she admitted she felt like she'd been left behind when she took the long break, and that the kids she'd started with were ahead of her. So I scheduled a private lesson with the sensei and told him what she really needed was both a refresher and a confidence-builder. I noticed in class that day, he was addressing her a lot, encouraging her to participate in things she was shying away from.
~*~*~*~*~*
I've mentioned this before, I think, but raising a (mostly*) neurotypical kid is kind of weird after raising an autistic kid for so long. Like, Lochlan does things that, as soon as he does them, you think, "Oh! That feature should come standard, I guess." Like today -- Ant banged her knee and said "ow." Lochlan asked what happened, then said, sympathetically, "I bet that really hurt." Yo, in 11 years, I'm not sure Azadeh has expressed empathy in that way, let alone usually even asking us what's wrong or even noticing that we're hurt!
We were reading about dinosaurs at bedtime, and I asked if he ever looks at the picture I had commissioned for him of a mama dinosaur bathing her baby dino. He said he does -- he likes to stand up and look at it. I said, "I love that picture." He replied, "I know it means a lot to you." And I was just BLOWN AWAY. Again, the combination of realizing I am a human person with feelings and then actually knowing what those feelings are and being able to express them in words -- like, wow!
*I say mostly neurotypical because Lochlan definitely has some quirks. Like, he hates loud noises, prefers soft pants and lightweight pajamas, has poor fine and gross motor skills, is obsessive about dinosaurs and animals, talks in a high-pitched voice about 80% of the time, and picks up idioms and catchphrases from TV shows so adeptly that it almost reminds me of echolalia. But other than that...
~*~*~*~*~*~*
The other day Az and I spent a lot of time alone together, and as we were eating lunch, she told me that she sometimes had body image issues and thinks she's fat. If you saw my last post, you can easily tell that she's not. In fact, she's a little underweight. I didn't just go, "ohmygosh you totally AREN'T," though. Instead, I (told her she wasn't and then) asked her to talk to her counselor about it the next day. I also explained body dysmorphia -- our inability to see our bodies as they are, but to focus on perceived flaws (usually this is called Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is when you're also obsessed with it, but I just mean sort of less-serious than that).
And I know because I definitely have a touch of that. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about a gal who was sort of body-shaming women who were fat, because she herself had kids and a job and was super-fit. And I gave a lot of reasons why one might have chosen other things to celebrate. I still believe that, really: like, would I rather have a conversation with the cut-abs mom or with Roxane Gay (a super-smart author who is also overweight)? Like, duh.
I am also in the process of losing weight. I've been heavier and thinner in my adult life, but mostly heavier. And there are many reasons for that, but the most basic one is that I don't love to exercise and I do love eating food.
You may know of the movement called Health at Any Size. It's a lovely idea, and I support them 100%. They believe that just because you are overweight does not mean you are unhealthy. There's been a fat acceptance movement where heavier people are reclaiming, loving, dressing and showing off their bodies in ways that disregard society's expectations. I am HERE FOR THAT.
But I also think there's an important word in health at any size -- health. And at my weight last year, I wasn't that healthy. I earned myself a CPAP machine. I had plantar fasciitis. I noticed a very early sign of diabetes. I wasn't comfortable.
And to forgive myself for my bad habits, a little, it WAS honestly hard to get to the gym when Azadeh wasn't sleeping -- no way was I going to get up at 5 if I'd already been up all night and she finally shut up and went to sleep at 3:30. And it's hard to get to the gym in the evening when your little one is clingy and needy, and your partner loses patience quickly.
But... Azadeh is sleeping better. And Lochlan is a little less clingy. And Ánt loves herself so much better now and has a lot more patience with the kids. I got a little of my time back, and I started going to the gym. Every weekday.
Just before the new year I re-joined Weight Watchers. It has always worked for me if I really kept track and followed the plan. The problem was when I'd quit.
It's actually really easy to explain: on the plan, I would eat zero-points foods and get an extra workout in to "earn" the french fries with dinner. Off the plan, I would eat and exercise more moderately, then think, "Hey, if I can eat french fries while on the plan, they can't be that bad!" And then have a margarita and a cookie, too.
Anyway, back on topic: it has been working really well. I've dropped a little over 30 pounds, and even though I'm sort of at a plateau right now, I am still making good choices and I know I'll get through it. I'd really like to lose about 60 more, to be honest, but it gets harder as you go along. They give you fewer points every time you hit certain marks, which means they kind of ease you into it. Anyway, we'll see where it goes. I honestly think that if I'm going to stay healthy and be there for the kids for a long time, I'm going to need to do this tracking/calculating thing forever.
But back to the body image thing! I've always had a hard time seeing myself. When I was a teenager, I was sure I was fat. Hefty. Ridiculous. My stomach was big. I look back at old photos now and go, "WHAT THE FUCK, younger me? You were a knockout!"
Anyway, between being fine and thinking I was fat and being fat and thinking I was fine, I sort of messed up my self-image at some point, and I have NO IDEA how I look anymore.
Like, sometimes I catch a glimpse in the mirror and think, "Ooh, get it, girl!" and then later the same day think, "GODZILLA ATTACKS!" I can look at a woman I know is morbidly obese, Oprah Winfrey in the 80s, say, and think, "Yep, I look exactly like that." And then look at Oprah in the 90s and think, "Well, with a shaper?" So I mean this very honestly: if you put together a line-up of slightly chubby women to made-for-TV-special "I have to wear a King size bedsheet" women and asked me to place myself in line by weight, I would have literally no idea where I go. I still can't really see myself as I am.
But I'm glad that I'm sticking to it, I'm proud of the work I've put in, and whatever my body looks like, my pants fit better, I'm moving more freely, and my feet don't hurt (as much). I even had to buy a couple pairs of what I'm calling "interim pants": cheapies from Old Navy because a lot of my old pants are way too big now. And I look pretty cute in my interim pants. I think.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Anyway, that was a long one, probably because I check in so rarely and have so much to say! Or perhaps I'm avoiding the other work I should be doing. It's probably that.
Take care. Thanks for reading.
Monday, March 25, 2019
33 pictures of my sweetheart as she turns 11.
This child is creative, funny, temperamental, difficult, smart, curious, daring, athletic, selfish, powerful, proud, passionate, mercurial, anxious, confident, and growing, changing and maturing every day. I love her with all my heart and she scares the shit out of me. 
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