cafemama ... lovably behind schedule and out-of-date.
I have so many weighty matters to discuss (and those not-so-weighty) that I have fallen behind in describing them. Please bear with me as I catch up in the quiet moments I steal away.
fireworks and strawberry wine . july 04 . 2008
It is late, late on the night of the fourth of July, and the family is biking fast through the southeast Portland streets, through shared roads and narrow side streets. Monroe sleeps in the BoBike seat up front as Truman grips my waist from behind, and everywhere through the hazy muggy night, the blinking of red taillights competes with sparks from illicit neighborhood firecrackers. We can smell the scent of gunpowder and explosions, we are sprinting uphill, I am breathing heavily and urging my three-year-old quietly to 'hold on tight Tru!'
I am looking for Jonathan and Everett, they raced up Clinton to the cheers of the other bikers as they passed young, fit solo riders with the tagalong. Everywhere, down every street, I can see the blink-blink-blink of bikes' red lights, they swarm out from downtown this summer Friday night, in my imagination they envelop the sounds of cars and fireworks with their quiet whirring. We are part of something bigger, a bike culture, an unknowable force that is simple, sensible, a better way.
I sprint up a hill. 'Hold on tight Truman!' I say again. Quiet. Affirming. Stay close to me.
We get home, shooing chickens into their coop, locking up bikes, unbuckling helmets, we spill into the dark house, spreading our quiet in the strangely loud neighborhood streets. Open windows in apartments across the way prove that uncouth parties will gasp across the midnight line; there is the sound of little cars driven too fast, a beer bottle breaking, sirens several streets away.
But I am making strawberry wine. All the chaos is forgotten, I lift the kitchen towel and peer into the dark blue crock I found a few days ago at the Goodwill Bins and inhale the heady scent. The honey/water mixture (1:4, about two gallons) has mellowed into wildflower sweetness, and the strawberries are softening, the yeasts breaking them down into alcohol slow, slow, slowly.
Though we are still battling the devils of alcoholism, though we are still occasionally banging heads over preservative-packed ice cream bars, Jonathan and I have found this intersection of sustainable, traditional cuisine and chemistry and sweet fruity intoxication, we have found strawberry wine.
We have read that traditional cultures have always made fermented beverages; I have skimmed the list of possible ingredients, my eyes widening as I imagined wines made of honey and water mixed with everything under the sun, cherries and calendula and honey melon sage and currants and raspberries and plums. We have eyed our fast-growing grape vines, apprising the harvest in two years, imagining a cellar filled with bubbling of all sorts. Three kinds of grapes are only the beginning.
To make the strawberry wine, you need a crock and a big jar of raw honey, you need organic strawberries and good water. I used almost two gallons of water and a half-gallon of honey, and nearly two quarts of strawberries, but you could use any amount as long as you keep the ratios right (1 part honey to 4 parts water; one quart of fruit or so per gallon of liquid).
Truman is delighted by this not-yet-alcoholic strawberry wine, figuring out how to tilt the crock to expose the spout and pour himself a glass. "Srawberry wee-ine!" he says, delighted, over and over until I give in. "Srawberreee wee-ine!"
It is a sweet experiment, reconnecting as a family over strawberries picked by hand, wild fermentation, ancient methods, new loves. It is hopeful, it is patriotic, through strawberry wine we are creating a culture of our very own, capturing the organisms from the air, stirring them together with the quirkiest of family traditions, the best local ingredients, the very air and water of our home. How do we know that this is not the most important moment of our life, the most vital thing we will ever do? Isn't every moment, every action from now on key in the creation of a better, older, more simple, richer, new way of living?
We are making strawberry wine, and we are changing the world.
paying the bills
the me who matters now . june 28 . 2008
I have changed utterly.
And I have not changed at all; at once I am more richly myself and more different than I ever imagined possible. I am now the sort of person who sprouts whole grains and offers entire canisters of white sugar to her little sister. I am the sort of person who wishes she could work less, travel less, eat home more. I am the sort of person who truly dislikes shopping, unless it's at a farmer's market.
Where once my dreams were full of the achievements to which I could over-subscribe, I am now in search of shedding things, activities, board memberships, keeping only those that make my heart hum quietly, that give my children a richer life. I do not want to work long hours, start a restaurant, earn venture capital funding. I do not want to franchise anything.
What I want to do is to live a life that is good, to be more present, to create small bits of beauty, and to tell my story. And so I have re-written my about me page to reflect who I am, no more résumé, just a tale of what I want to do here. Thank you for reading my blog; I tell you more than I should; I appreciate you more than you could possibly imagine.
love it forward, of mantras and madness . may 25 . 2008
Though I have healed over from my anger, I have calmed myself and found the grace to read Trains and Mama's Home two times each, to hug and cuddle and say a heartfelt bedtime prayer, it takes hours to find that quiet space in my brain.
And it's quiet that I need, that I long for, only in quiet can I translate the madness that fills my brain into something more useful. To find beauty (or, in its absence, usefulness) in the trials that fill my day. I sit for a long time in the mostly-dark, feeding Monroe and eating cookie after hippy walnutty cookie. In the bedroom where Jonathan is sleeping, vintage Talking Heads plays on NPR, and as I read a portion from Momfulness, crying a little (from my emotional state or the words, I'm not sure), I am finding my new mantra.
It's something like, "give the love I need" or maybe "be the nurture." To put it in movie-speak, "love it forward." Tonight, I've been more than angry, for the nth day in a row Jonathan has failed to put my needs on his priority list. I had lunch in the oven, this amazing lasagne I'd made entirely from scratch, rolling and cutting the pasta yesterday while Truman "hepped," picking kale and thyme and sage out of the garden, squishing that fantastic Sweet Briar Farms hot Italian sausage out of its casing (the sausage I'd bought just for him, I'd have picked the sweet stuff for the boys), sprinkling with the mineral-rich sea salt I knew would be our family's savior. It had been in the oven, warmed up from last night, for three hours when he'd finally called, I'd eaten my fill and turned it off. I'd rehearsed the speech again I'd given the night before, and that morning too, about how my way of giving love to my family was this food, how when he missed that opportunity, when he bought ice cream from Plaid Pantry for Everett, it was like rejecting me over and over.
There had been a death, for once, a Really Good Reason. It was someone I barely knew, and not a blood relative, but a close-to-the-family, a name I knew how to spell. I forgave him for a while, but then he didn't come right home as he promised and when he did, he'd obviously given it to his family's way of dealing with all occasions big and small: use whatever-it-was as an excuse to drown themselves in alcohol. More hours later when he arrived in the driveway, Everett was frantic with anger because I'd flatly refused his hope to go swimming (with three drunk adults, I don't think so), it was a spiral of terribleness.
This doesn't feel anything like recovery, I thought angrily, and how can he do this to me, and when is anyone going to ever have anything left for MY needs? It was petulant and bitter and altogether unattractive. When I finally had brought Everett back to himself, I talked to him quietly, wondered if he had any idea why he'd said those terrible things when I knew he didn't mean them.
"I just get so ANGRY," he said, and I knew that this was me, reflected. I thought of Jonathan, and why it is that he behaves as he does, why he fails so at anticipating my needs, why he never seems to know love in any other guise than the trite, the kisses and the baubles and the saying-so. I had asked him this morning, how had he ever seen love in his family? and it was a rhetorical question, in his family, love was duty, guilt, whiskey, making up with uncomfortable humor the next day. There was no nurture, no family meal into which hours of care and love was poured liberally. There were food stamps, and the children were rewarded with their ability to bring mom back the maximum change possible with candy -- you couldn't buy alcohol with the garishly-colored bucks, of course. There were meals cooked, perhaps, for the latest awful, abusive step-dad; there was the random and outrageous outpouring of love-as-material-things. There was shared humor at others' expense. There was church, with its decorum and rituals and its useful avoidance of all things true. In church, no one was a drunk, no one was a bad mother, no one was bitterly finding the worst in everything. In church, everyone was singing the same hymns and therefore must be heaven-bound.
When I finally come to my realization, my new place, my custom mantra, I do not know what it is that has brought me here. Oddly, despite nine months, a year?, with Everett's emotional struggles, six months of Jonathan recovery roller coaster, an army full of friends and child care and professional therapy with advice and care, in the end it is simple and quiet and entirely in the course of things. Give the love I need, I need to give it to them, I need to not ask for my own back first. I finish cleaning the kitchen and the living room and the front porch and the closet, it is not recognizable from a few days ago, what was chaos is ... presentable.
Every day, in ways quiet and flawed and incomplete, I am working to be the love I need, I am working to set an example of order and loving attention and praising the good part of our lives. In between my own emotional storms, I am believing the best of my husband and children, I am reminding them of the wonderful love they have, I am taking an extra 10 minutes to read Narnia or lie on the floor giggling or to look into someone's eyes and listen.
Be the love I need. Say it over and over, and maybe someday, it will be truly complete and completely true.
paying the bills
in my garden, the laborers are plenty, but the harvest is few . may 20 . 2008
It is May, and it is hot. After months of unusual spring coolness, it is HOT, and it makes me feel as if it should be July already -- I'm a born Portlander, conditioned to only expect heat for two months of the year. It should be harvest time.
But instead of harvesting, I'm still planting, setting out some of my tiny tomato starts (far healthier than I imagined they'd be, what with my half-dozen inexpert mistakes, the foremost of which was leaving them where the chickens could climb on them), pushing carrot seeds into a box prepared in February, trying to salvage peas ravaged by my mama chicken, who likes pea shoots too. I'm proud of my little red winter kale plants, so delicious the boys and I can eat them right out of the garden; and my chervil, planted from seed with only one false start and beginning to thrive (in a just-getting-going way). Amazingly, yesterday, I discovered that (despite my fears and certainty) I did NOT lose the two packets of 'Purple Passion' asparagus seeds I planted in March. I thought the shoots must have been eaten by Gilda when suddenly one day I went out and saw a dozen or more miniature asparagus seedlings, first dark lavendar, then brightly, brilliantly green. The boys and I protected them with little galvanized metal plant ID tags, carefully scraping out the cast-of-thousands-of-weeds which had been taking lusty enjoyment in my "ultra-fertile strip" meant to nurture the baby asparagi.
There are tiny lettuces, too, and blossoms billowing on my blueberries. I am struck by the delicate gorgeous blueberry flowers, all different and uniquely lovely, I tell myself that if I was prone to grand, wasteful luxuries I would demand enormous bouquets of blueberry blossoms and dark dark lilacs. The raspberries near the boys' sandbox are so bountiful I must tie them back from overwhelming the dumptrucks and tractors. Despite my fears about the late cold snap and the beating one of our grapes took last summer, three different grape vines (Steuben, Muller-Thurgau, ) are now sending out brave, glad leaves where once were little dormant nubs. Strawberry plants, whose leaves are shiny and huge and green, are blooming in their odd spots around my haphazard garden. There is watercress pushing up its fat flat leaves in a damp spot I'm creating. The eggplant and cayenne pepper plants Everett insisted upon aren't entirely dying. My artichokes are doing what the spiny plants throughout Portland are doing, too, erupting into dinosaur-like volcanoes of prickly leaves. I can't wait.
I should have planted broccoli raab, collard greens, early lettuce and peas, more kale, overwintering vegetables, I should be harvesting green garlic and baby leeks and little tender beets and salads galore. But I did not have it together this spring, overwhelmed by a needy hungry baby and an unwell husband and a job that was suffering from my chaotic mind, too many weekends put off by rain or cold or tantrums. Or maybe it was just a lack of confidence in myself.
Now that the sun is rampant and the evenings are long, my children bounce happily through the garden at dinnertime, we skip through the evenings without dinner, content to drink buckets of water and dig in the dirt. Truman, always underfoot, wants to "hep hep hep HEP!" He sprinkles a few cups full of "complete organic fertilizer" on the half of the little box I've planned for carrot succession planting. Everett, ever the literalist, puts exactly two carrot seeds in each depression I've made. I am amazed when he has plenty left at the end of his rows. When he is not looking, I madly push pea seeds and sunflower seeds into soil that I've just pinched free of weeds, sprinkle dozens more watercress seeds in my little wet spot, cast lettuce seeds and two kinds of kale and broccoli raab and soon I am not remembering where or what I've planted, I am just bouncing like a beach ball throughout my carefully considered garden plot, sprinkling organic fertilizer and seeds and little fistfuls of soil all through.
When Truman sees me carry a precious little tomato seedling ("Principe Borghese," or at least I think so, the little tags were moved around by an unknown child's hand) over to the biggest garden box, he "heps" me, pulling little seedlings out by their ears. I wince, and take a deep breath, involving him in another project while I tenderly push the manhandled baby tomatoes into the dirt. I decide to plant these close together, expecting little in the way of survival. Whatever the outcome, I tended these little plants for weeks and I will at least give them a go of it out here in the wild.
I feel so inexpert. Until I see the mint, the thyme, the lavendar, the sage. Where I lack in love and tenderness with the peas and beets, I clearly have a way with sturdy perennial herbs. I grew this sage from seeds, I carried these thyme plants home from the farmer's market, this mint and lavendar was walked home from the organic foods market a few blocks away. This may be simple stuff, but it is authentically grown and cared for by me (and the great God who brought the rain and the sun). I do not care if these are the easiest things to grow in the world, this apple mint, this chocolate mint, I have done it and now it is time to reap the rewards.
I pick sprigs with a welling of joy in my chest, I can almost not breathe for the expansiveness of it all. Huge sprigs of chocolate mint, spicy and distinctive with their darkness. Soft, sparkly apple mint, with its fuzzy underleaf stubble. There is so much thyme (I've planted, now, four kinds of it) that I can almost hear it laughing at me, at my doubt for its survival last fall, laughing like Aslan laughs in The Magician's Nephew when he is creating Narnia, with its lush mane shaking in merriment.
I take my bounty inside and I put on the tea kettle. In a carafe I have two fat triangular "PG Tips" tea bags, the British black tea of choice to which I've become addicted. When the water boils, I pour it over the tea bags and wait until it's caramel colored and rich, five minutes or so. I remove the bags and plunge in my herbs, whose character changes instantly, they become magnificent benefactors of flavor, ancient and authentic. After another five or 10 minutes of steeping, I pour the hot water into my big pottery pitcher, fill it the rest of the way with cold water, and do not wait for it to cool, I drink it barely warm in a glass and it is harvest time in my kitchen on this hot day in May.
paying the bills
mamas for hillary unite . may 09 . 2008
I 'came out' for Hillary on MOMocrats this week. There are a million of detailed wonky reasons to vote for either Obama or Hillary, and both have said a couple of bonehead things. I don't want to get into that. I'm voting for Hillary, first, because she connects with me on a couple of vital policy issues -- her commitment to health insurance for everyone, her focus on better family leave, and her (little-talked-about) belief in the importance of local, seasonal eating. The second reason is that she's a mama, and the feminist in me gets all teary-eyed every time I think about having a woman as President.
This video Mother's Day card done by Chelsea (and, I'd wager, the Clinton campaign) had me crying, too, and it hit me where the wallet was -- I up and sent off a bit of my economic stimulus check to the campaign. Consider it my Mother's Day present to myself.
I've largely left my stroller-toting days behind me; I'm busy rocking my mamabikeorama. But I do strollers from time to time, and tomorrow I'm doing them for Hillary. Oh, it's a bit silly, but it's the sort of silly that occasionally gets me all teary-eyed again. Tomorrow, May 10th, at 10:30 a.m. at the Dishman Community Center at 77 NE Knott Street in Portland, mamas with strollers will be meeting for a Mother's Day rally and ballot-mailing event for Hillary. I hope, if you're a mama for Hillary, you'll come too. (I'm looking at the flyer now, and obscenely cool people will be there. Sophie B. Hawkins, Erika Alexander from The Cosby Show, Ellen Malcolm, and Betty Roberts, among others.)
I love the idea of making your family's spending count. Instead of Mother's Day brunches at chain restaurants or flowers flown in from halfway around the world or diamonds mined by cartels and sold in malls, why not have breakfast at the farmer's market? Lilacs from the back yard? Donations to your favorite candidate or non-profit? (Cafe au Play and Growing Gardens are two great ones here in Portland.) (And I'd just like to point out that I wouldn't refuse a nice peony plant for Mother's Day.)
Whatever you believe in, this mama's day, vote for it.
the adventures of the mamabikeorama . may 03 . 2008
This is not the first time I have ridden up this hill. No, not at all. But it is the first time like this.
I grew up in the neighborhood around this long, steady hill on Harrison Street, and it is probably 30 years since I first rode a bicycle without training wheels, and 20-some since I first rode this hill all the way from bottom to top. I find myself wondering if it was just as hard then; how much better shape am I, today, than I was at 13?
For today I am pushing a whale of a bike, along with two children weighing in at more than 60 pounds combined. I've christened it the "mamabikeorama," and it is the very opposite of cool. Or perhaps it is the redefined essence of cool; what someone described as "the minivan of the future," and someone else described as "sweet."
This bike is both, at once.
I have built it (or had it built) like this: an Electra Townie 8, a lovely bike with internal gears and the "step through" that allows me to steady myself quickly when faced with traffic; an Xtracycle "hitchless trailer", an extension with a riding board that turns my bike into a "longie" and allows Truman and Everett both to ride behind; and a BoBike Mini seat on the front in the handlebars for Monroe. The setup was conceived and built by Martina and Todd at Clever Cycles, the American nexus of family bike knowledge. I do not say this lightly.
"Sweet ride!" "Awesome bike!" "That is a machine!" These are the things that other people on bicycles (and other bike people) say when they see me on the bike with the boys. Today alone I have given at least six parents an effusive show-and-tell. Everyone is on board with my subversive stimulus plan to buy bikes with our government checks. I have convinced two other families to buy the setup; a few more are leaning my way. I consider asking for a commission.
There are things said by others, though, the non-bikers, whose reactions range from perplexed to scandalized. "Get those children baptized!" says a woman walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood (for the record, I have them all wearing helmets. And they were all baptized). "Your baby's asleep and I think he's hurt!" says a woman on a corner downtown (for the record, when he's hurt, he cries). If people standing on sidewalks and cross streets don't watch us go by with a smile, I widen my eyes, then narrow them, darkly suspecting them of driving a gas-guzzler with roll bars.
But most do watch with a smile, or a wave, or a whistle, or an exclamation. And lots, and lots, of questions. I did hours of research before picking this setup, choosing a step-through bike so I could mount and dismount easily; it's super-wobbly with two or three boys aboard, and the last thing I want to do is have my bike fall over (several times) with Monroe atop it. I decided to put Monroe in front because it balances my load and keeps him really near me; when he falls asleep (which he does, a lot, in the seat!) I can manoeuver my arm so his forehead rests on my left wrist (luckily he falls asleep to the left most times). When this happens, I just bike a bit slower and make sure I'm going over the bumps gently.
I do plan to get a BoBike Maxi for Truman on the back (they were out of them when I had my wad of cash), but he's able to ride holding on to my waist without much trouble, or holding on to his brother's waist if Everett rides too. He's not 100% confident riding that way, but we've now been more than 20 miles around town, up and down hills, over bridges, through traffic in several neighborhoods, over curbs and bumps and grassy patches, and a couple of times went really too fast without a single scare. Everett either doesn't hold on at all, or holds onto the board, and we never get into the sort of riding that might make a kid fall off. It's pretty safe as long as I don't ride like a solo biker. (I'm a bit of a shredder when alone on my mountain bike.)
The mamabikeorama is also a beautiful bike for cargo. I'm able to stuff the Xtracycle pockets full of all kinds of things; today, I toted $100 of farmer's market goodies all around town, plus water bottles for the boys, an extra coat or two, diapers, my knitting bag, and a couple of rags meant for wiping off wet seats. My dream is to make my own cargo bags with some pretty canvas or oilcloth, but that'll be a while. I imagine it would be pretty easy to fit a bunch more groceries on board if I wanted to.
And then there are the hills. I'm stubborn, and I've been able to get up almost every hill no matter how many boys I had aboard -- though of course it's far easier with two than three, no matter which two I have on the bike. The setup was meant as a way to ride Truman and Monroe while Everett rode the tagalong behind his dad's bike, with only occasional bicycle-built-for-four trips. Yesterday, I did walk up a bit of one hill, but it was near the end of a seven-plus-mile ride with lots of punishing uphills. I made both Everett and Truman walk that block. "Up... heeill!" was a word Truman learned yesterday. So proud.
And of course, the hill on Harrison Street. It's over a half-mile up, and I could see the admiring looks from bikers whizzing down as I steadily, stubbornly pushed my way in first gear up one block, then another, then another. Monroe was asleep, again, and Truman was quiet, tired from a very early morning, holding onto my waist and occasionally leaning into my back to rest. It was a focused, quiet, hard, hard hill and I wondered what the 13-year-old me would think of this.
"Sweet bike," I think she'd say softly, imagining how fast and strong she would push her children up that hill one day. "It's a beautiful ride."
paying the bills
go on a car diet with me, won't you? . april 18 . 2008
"Is anyone else on a car diet?" I wondered today. I'd been contacted by a network producer, researching a show (now I've totally given away all the great network ideas! Sorry!).
As it turns out, many of my nearest and dearest (and farthest, too) are on car diets. The trend is so new: you don't know its name.
Like Meg in A Wrinkle In Time, I am a Namer. A car diet is giving up all, or part of, your driving habit. Let's face facts: You're addicted to fossil fuels. You know you are powerless... heck, you're not powerless. You're just used to it. You've been conditioned to except that you need a car. To get to work. To take your children to school. To go on errands. To Buy Things. Because that's what we do, here in the ol' U S of A. We buy.
While I'm Naming, I'm going to call that the Old Way. Here's the New Deal: Give it up. Give it up a little, or give it up whole hog. Got two cars? Park one, and combine trips, stop going to Costco for Sunday afternoon family time. If you are a two-commuter family, pick one commuter who could ride a bike or take the bus, train, subway or shuttle to work. If you're ready to go a little farther (a Car Fast? Car Starvation?), do like me, let the insurance lapse, let the tags expire, let the tire slowly flatten. (Or you could sell your car, but it won't be as picturesque, and then you'll just be enabling. No one likes an enabler.)
Seems impossible? It's not. It may be hard, but I believe with every deepest part of me that things that are hard, are good. Digging in the dirt. Making a souffle. Parenting a child. Going without a car.
Maybe we have it easy; I work from home, Jonathan has yet to acquire that one career that's right for him (and in fact, we're hoping to get him a pickup truck; he wants to be a tree guy). But we have three children and my firm belief is there is no emergency that necessitates a car. What would be the emergency? If someone's hurt badly, there is an ambulance. I can't think of anything that's desperate enough to qualify other than mortal wounds. It's all about recasting the idea of an emergency, and unpacking your expectations -- of yourself, as much as of your life. You always imagined, didn't you, that you would spend your childrens' grade school and high school years in an idyllic string of classes and performances. Music, sports, art, theater. They'd have it all!
But maybe that's really not the way of life our children need in this manic world. Maybe they need something slower, something way closer to home, something with far fewer expectations. That's what my children need, and that's what I'm giving to them.
A mom I met recently said something like, "I drive so much more now that I don't work! Of course, we have to get the children to preschool, and I just can't imagine waiting 20 minutes for a bus..." and my answer to that wasn't helpful but it was basically, "make conscious decisions about where you're going to preschool and grade school." And she wasn't going to do it, but the reality is that I took Everett out of preschool largely because I didn't like driving across town, and Truman will go to the MESD preschool at Grout. We'll walk.
Give yourself permission to be late to school once in a while. Give yourself the authority to say "no" to that activity. Change the way you think about preschool (according to the way I read the studies, children whose parents are involved and who spend a lot of time with books and imaginative play, and without TV, don't need preschool -- at all). Change your expectations for grocery shopping and activities. Figure out a way to stay closer to home, to do a little less, to live more fully. And if you're like me, soon the very thought of getting in a car will make your stomach churn and your head swim. You'll beg to be let off of driving duty. You'll plead with your spouse. You'll hide the keys. You'll save money and help the planet and one day someone will look admiringly at you and ask, "how did your back get to be so muscular?"
It's a little known perk of going car-free: a strong back. Your soul will change too, but that's harder to see when you're bending over to pick up a cloth bag of groceries.
Won't you go on a car diet with me?
Here are some images, if you'd like to join the car diet. Pick one, add it to your blog, make it your own. Or Name your own car diet. What does it mean to you?
Update: Several people have asked me about the bike in the photo at the top of this post. It's a bakfiets, a Dutch cargo bike with a box in the front for hauling children, adults, or other sorts of carry-ables. They're imported into the U.S. and sold by Clever Cycles in Portland. They're quite expensive; $2,999 today and the price will go up in the next shipment due to the dollar's decline. The one in the photo was a loaner (not even loaned to me!) that Truman was just checking out there, with Milo. Bakfiets are lovely but I've decided, not for me. What I hear: they are relatively easy to steer, but pushing them uphill is a serious challenge. Lots more info at the Bakfiets blog, managed by the awesome Portlander who just a week ago opened 'Cafe Velo', a Bakfiets-powered coffee kiosk at the Portland Farmer's Market.
paying the bills
how i parent now . march 27 . 2008
I keep starting to upload this post, and then, I do something wrong, we are upheaved by circumstances of impatience or emotion or disappointment. And then, hypocrisy trumps hope and I wait. Today, I will upload it anyway, and you will know that it is an aspirational parenting style, that I fail more than I succeed, that achievement is still a bit beyond my grasp.
I think it was Byron who wrote, "change everything, but your loves." And in that way, everything has changed.
I was not the parent -- we were not the parents -- needed by our children. I fought against change in my lifestyle, in generally-accepted ideas about children's schedules and things that were too hard, Jonathan fought against turning off the TV, making meals from scratch, departing from his own upbringing. When we should have made bedtime routines, we watched 'bedtime shows'; when we should have been firm and calm and loving, we were alternatively angry, screeching, permissive, dismissive, argumentative. It did not feel right, but we were hopeless, we did not know how to set the upended relationships back on their feet.
It was a gathering of ideas, a growing collection of concepts, a swarm of skills garnered from a dozen places. But in the end it was a philosophy of parenting born of a few unifying ideas: firstly, that children (like plants and chickens and all sorts of growing things) know best what they want, and that you should trust their desires. And secondly, that zen is paramount.
Zen in a child's life can look so many ways. For us, it looks like a dozen galvanized metal 'skrin' bins from IKEA, each on a shelf with its own category of toys. On the bottom we have 'little cars and trucks and airplanes', next to 'little animals and people', with 'trains and tracks' in a big bin on the shelf above. Puzzles, wooden blocks, board games and play food all have bins; Legos are in big glass jars according to theme; coloring books are in a special metal bin on the bookshelf. Nothing is labeled, yet Truman can put every errant toy away without assistance. It is order that he craves as his brother craves attention. It is obvious that, in this, we have done right.
For us, zen looks like an early bedtime, with two books each for Truman and Everett, a single bed to share, a mattress on the floor, with blankets and a stuffed dragon and two soft kitties, with me cleaning up their room every night as they are lying down. Melatonin helps, for us it is the stuff of quietude, if you had seen the screaming running jumping bedtimes of yesteryear, you would know how radical a change it is. A routine: dinner, books, a prayer, goodnight. I fought so hard -- why?? -- against the concept of scheduling my life, being a slave to a bedtime, I didn't want to have to do the hard work of constancy, endless repetition, always being there. But now that I am here, in this place, it is so much easier to say 'no,' to miss meetings that are at 7 p.m., to sit down on the couch with the baby at 8 p.m. and know that he is all there is now.
Zen looks like acceptance of many, many things. For breakfast and dinner, most days, Everett eats bread, and honey ("like Frances!" he says). I make the bread with organic stone-ground whole wheat flour and Northwest-grown oats and the honey is local and opaque with unknown minerals and I do not beg him, or order him, to eat whatever I am eating. Because one thing that zen looks like, in our family, is very few choices. The freezer is not stocked with chicken nuggets and corn dogs; there is no candy and chips stash any more. Roasted chicken, lentil soup, or bread and honey, like peasants. We accept that sometimes we are called terrible names by our eldest offspring; we accept that sometimes, there is screaming. If we are doing it right, we calmly and quietly wait until it stops, and if it doesn't, we turn away from Everett and toward the quiet child.
Zen looks like very little TV. This part is hard for Jonathan. It's how he was raised, from a tiny child -- the TV was on 24 hours a day. He understands with his mind, but not with his heart. So I rule the TV with an iron remote control during waking hours, the rare show or two from PBS Kids, nothing else. It's unusual now if the boys watch more than an hour's worth in a day; for us, a huge lifestyle change.
Zen takes on the form of help, and four days a week now is a nanny, a wonderfully patient woman who understands Jonathan's sense of humor and bakes bread, too. We cannot quite afford her (we cannot at all pay her true value), but the benefit from another adult paying attention is without question.
Zen looks like presence, zen looks like me turning my computer off at 4 p.m. and devoting myself to the children 'til bedtime, zen looks like putting down my knitting to read a book or really look at something Everett is doing. Zen looks like listening while Everett spells words from the newspaper; zen looks like playing Chinese checkers when I really want to blog, or sew, or clean the kitchen floor. Zen looks like singing "The Wheels on the Bus" again, and again, and again.
Zen looks like a new couch, one on which we can all fit, pretty carpet tiles that prevent slivers, a hanging chair, a little table with a chair for each of the boys. Zen looks like a reading nook, books and drawers and organization. Zen looks like a place for everything, everything in its place. Zen looks like a lot of work, work that is still being done.
Most of all, zen is me, taking a deep breath and selecting from a store of tools. Instead of "why are you doing this to me?!?" (a personal fave), I reach for "let's try a different way of dealing with that. A calmer way." Instead of, "I'll get you that toy if you'll be good!" I try the "as soon as you are helpful with your brothers, I'll play a game with you." Instead of ordering a child to stop an unwanted behavior (and then getting louder, and louder, when the stopping doesn't happen), I intervene quietly and physically, leading Truman back to the kitchen with the gallon of milk he's just brought out; running upstairs to gently take away the loud toy. My ideal parent gives experiences, not things, although my ideal parent is admittedly quite a reach, still.
Of all the parenting lessons I've learned, of all the ways I've changed, I think the most radical (to Jonathan, at least, and in many ways to myself) is to accept the way children are. Children do not often behave in convenient ways. This does not mean that these children are bad, or even doomed for a life of time-outs and detention. If Everett and Truman want to jump on the bed? Instead of screaming for them to stop, I put a mattress on the floor and let them go crazy. If they want to use a yoga mat as a sled down the stairs? I put a few extra pillows at the bottom and remove the breakables. If they want to live on milk, bread and honey? I offer them alternatives, and keep the house stocked with fresh bread. If they want to go outside in the rain? I put on my hat, I put extra socks on Monroe, and out we go.
I keep hearing from the wisest of people that children do not act out because they are awful children; they act out because they have suffered some loss. For Everett, who is very emotionally dependent on his father, there is immeasurable suffering from Jonathan's many months away in the Army and his struggle with alcohol. Truman acts out because his body doesn't yet make sense to him, he's a little out of sorts, he doesn't always know where the edges are. He holds hands too tight; he squeezes the chicks too hard; he oversteps, overleaps, overexerts. When he needs more, I give him more, even if it is the middle of the night and he is screaming and he just needs me to hold him with all I have, he needs to touch something with every part of his body so that he knows he is safe.
While I must remind you that we are not perfect, we are not there yet, we have done away with punishment, favoring "natural consequences" (next time, I won't want to take you to the coffee shop if you're going to demand a treat in that awful way!) and prevention (often, we just don't go to the coffee shop). I have slowed my frenetic pace. I have decided that I do not, after all, have to do everything just because it's there.
The ways we have changed go on and on. We almost never shop with the boys, except at the farmer's market or quick trips to Limbo (the neighborhood organic market) or Pastaworks (where we get our meat, cheese and butter). We accept that children need to crawl in bed with us at 2, or 4, or 6 a.m. We greatly restrict our list of babysitters. We do not pack our weekends and evenings with meals out, playdates, excursions, events. We have embraced the excellence of home.
I will not pretend that it has been an easy or natural thing for me, I will not tell you that I am the pinnacle of parent achievement. No, oh no, this woman has not yet gotten a handle on the enormous grace it takes to live with four gorgeous, vibrant, slightly broken boys. She has moments of sheer madness. But she is on the path, she is headed toward enlightenment. Stumbling forward full of hope, acceptance, without blame or resentment, toward a more complete and unquestioning love of these precious children. This is how we parent now.
paying the bills
buy this knitting book . march 15 . 2008
I've been waiting two years for this day.
Today, Larissa and Martin marked the official release of their book, Knitalong. And while I found myself eager to celebrate the release and hold my very own copy of the book in my hands, while I was thrilled to become an Official Published Knitting Designer (and, let's not forget, photographer! A baker's dozen of my photographs are sprinkled through the book), most of all, I just wanted to knit.
I might have imagined, given the vast number of hours I spent knitting samples of my own project, and joining in knitalong after knitalong for socks and blankets and hats, oh my, that I might have tired of knitting the projects in the book. But no! I confess to wondering if I still had the notes from the Doppio gauntlets, or Barn-raising quilt, as I was dying to start both of those projects right this instant over the past few days.
Now that the book is in my hands and on my shelves, now that I've signed my pattern at least five times (it felt good!), I still haven't started either of those projects. No. But I'm wondering if I shouldn't start another pinwheel blanket? Or maybe a French Press Cozy is in order? And what yarn was used, again, in that Travelling Scarf? Anyone want to knit one with me?
about everett . brilliant and disturbed . february 12 . 2008
Here is how I thought it would go.
Everett would be six, or seven, and he would have shown such remarkable talents in reading and math that the teachers would pull me aside after class. "Have you had his IQ tested?" they'd ask. "Not yet," I'd say, suppressing a smile of pride. "I already know he's a genius. He takes after us!" It would be decided that he should be tested immediately, and when the results were given, there would be whispers in the hall, special classes, extra challenges for the Smart One.
That's not exactly how it happened. I suppose I knew that second day of school -- no, I knew years ago, deep down somewhere, that it wouldn't happen like that at all. But the second day of school, that phone call, yes, then I knew without a doubt that I would not be suppressing smiles of pride over Everett in these halls.
Some things are immutable, of course, an intellect doesn't just vanish in the blink of eye. And so in the course of time, tests were administered and scored, little round bubbles were filled in by heartsick parents and teachers who where whispering things quite different from my dreams of years past. Many educators juggled their schedules to meet in a classroom somewhere in southeast Portland, the classroom that was alike and yet very, very different from what I hoped for. I sat in a little kindergarten-sized chair with my baby in a sling and my anxious five-year-old behind me and I was handed a stack of papers. Everyone had notebooks and file folders in front of them. The report was many pages long.
Though the tests were administered in November, it wasn't until February, sitting once again on these tiny chairs, that I would be presented with the report, paragraph upon paragraph of the findings of this woman who barely knew Everett at all, the one with the tight lips that always seemed to feel guilt along with every smile. She pointed out the numbers on page three, and I scanned them, 132, 118, 127. The average was 129; Everett's IQ. She looked scandalously pleased, as if she herself had produced this child. "It's one of the highest I've ever seen," she said, as everyone nodded around the table, affirming in mumbles, "smart, yes, we know he's very smart." "No. No! It IS the highest... I've ever seen."
The special ed teacher from Grout, who reminds me most of all of a witch in a fairy tale, one who you suspect is a good witch but you can never be quite certain due to her general flightiness, seemed woozy, especially when presented with such stratospheric intelligence scores. Her area was not smart children, how should she know what to do with him? She had never even met the child, as she kept muttering in a voice that lept from alarm to quiet shrieks. Whenever possible she declaimed any responsibility in this process.
Everett's "general ed" teacher, who had after all only taught him for 20-some school days, and here we were at nearly 100, alternated between anxious and exhausted, occasionally making some comment that could have been tape playback from our meetings last October. I couldn't help but look at her with narrowed eyes when attention was focused elsewhere, wondering darkly if she had ever co-slept with her children, thinking to myself that she really needed just one more year of maternity leave. I can't say my generosity of spirit with any of the staff members of Grout was plentiful.
We muddled through the report, Jonathan at one end of the table and I at the other, listening to everyone have her say. It all seemed both empty and full of cascading import at once, though I knew that nothing I said or did today would impact my son's future. I could only soak it up, use these details, these judgments, to pass my own judgment in my quiet, thundering way, to judge the teachers and administrators and schools and systems, to judge society, to wonder what should be done differently.
Here it was, in the end: the labels. There are a few possibilities for children in the special ed track. One, not special ed, was obviously discarded long ago, in October, by all involved. Another one, "learning disabled," was clearly not Everett's issue; even when he went through punishingly awful outbursts, he still finished his work; here he was almost reading, doing math near-perfect, drawing beautifully, participating in class, understanding the calendar and the clock. Another was also rejected as false, "mental retardation." What's left is "Emotional Disturbance" and "Other Health Impaired" (usually, ADHD, but also for children diagnosed with serious non-learning mental diseases, such as bipolar disorder).
It came down to this, then: "emotional disturbance" or "other health impaired." Suddenly I became aware that two of the Grout staff were pulling for Everett to be diagnosed with ADHD; they were pointing to indicators in his tests. I wanted to cry, laugh, point out how backward and 1990s this all was, how could they possibly jump to this when the world was going the other way? Instead, I firmly said that Meg (his developmental pediatrician) was sure Everett was suffering from anxiety, that she had seen nothing to indicated attention disorders. This wasn't enough, it seemed, they all doubted the worthfulness of the Prozac -- he'd been on the drug for nearly two months, and he'd behaved beautifully the whole time. They wondered if she wasn't missing something. "You should bring these results up with her!" they said brightly. I agreed to, dully, meaning never to mention them at all.
One label is enough. Of course it was going to be emotional disturbance, and while it feels so screamingly extreme, it's also rather true, and I felt the weight of my part in his troubling present. I had not been the parent Everett needed, not always, not enough, not quite. What I was, what I thought I could be, was busy and relevant and exuberant and good at so many things, but not present, not ordered, not calm. I gave him too much, I gave him nothing.
We went around the kindergarten table in our uncomfortable chairs, signing the eligibility form, all agreeing. There were so many of us, this judgment required so much buy-in, that we ran out of signature lines, the fairytale witch had to scratch her signature below mine in the margin, muttering in her high-pitched voice that she'd never even met him! and we took our children and went home, Jonathan nervously offering inappropriate things to everyone, that he would go on field trips with the special ed class, that he would come to help out at Grout, that he would raise money for things. I strapped Monroe into the sling, I grabbed the hands of my children and I walked out, as fast as I could, away.
paying the bills
an urban homesteader knits . tales of dishcloths and sprouts . february 11 . 2008
I'm not sure what was the genesis of it all. I often call giving up my car my "gateway sacrifice,", so maybe it was that. Maybe it was the BBC, night after night as I struggled for sleep amongst breastfeeding babies and pregnancy aches, telling me in the agonizingly calm voices about species disappearing in Portugal, about glaciers melting to nothing in Iceland. Maybe it's part of the process of becoming myself, that process that seemed so simple and straightforward at 19 (because I was already myself, duh!), and now... and now...
Who am I? Surely, I am cafe mama, mother of three boys, finance blogger chick, I have written more biographies and "profiles" than most people twice my age. I am writer, photographer, keeper of chickens. Blogger of pregnancies, knitter of hats, sewer of slings, baker of bread, maker of messes.
Perhaps I just need a movement. Harriet Fasenfest can help. She calls herself an "urban homesteader," and that feels about right (one of my IM status messages is "farm in the city," so perhaps her movement has been mine, all along). What is an urban homesteader? Someone who's decided to opt out of as much industrialization as possible, as Harriet says, "living in distinct opposition to the status quo of mainstream economics. I am declaring my opposition by creating different systems within my home and hoping that in joining forces with others, we can speak as a movement against reckless corporate policy and painfully dysfunctional global economic systems." Making breakfast from locally-sourced organic foods, keeping chickens, sewing clothes, growing your own black beans and tomatoes and garlic. Eating seasonally; getting to know your butcher; milking a goat. Knitting dishcloths.
Harriet came over for tea last week, and she inspired me in so many things. She wants it to be a political movement; it's for us to reject breakfast cereal, snack foods made in China, long commutes, 60-hour work weeks, isolation. It's for us to share freezers (and maybe even houses), backyard gardens, canned tomatoes, raw milk. It's for us to connect in new ways; to really work together; to look neighbors in the eye again.
I don't have time to get this movement started properly; I have a five-year-old who's been (this just in!) officially described as "emotionally disturbed" by Portland Public Schools, an almost-three-year-old who's finally putting two words together, a baby who's already learning to crawl, a full-time job. But I have time to make mozzarella, and knit a dishcloth for Larissa.
Knitting dishcloths is perfect for an urban homesteader. What could be a better use of your time in the drear of a February afternoon? While your oatmeal bread is rising, tonight, find some number 7 needles and a skein of cream-colored cotton yarn and knit a little dishcloth [pdf pattern for a dishcloth I'm calling "Astrid"]. Maybe Larissa doesn't know it, yet, but her art project could just be the symbol of urban homesteaders everywhere. For you, knitting a dishcloth could be gateway sacrifice, the start of so much more.
Or maybe you'll just knit a dishcloth. Either way: find your own magic in the everyday.
peek into the past . prayers for births . june 26 . 2007
finding strength and love enough
