Category: Parenting

Santa Cruz Public Library’s Summer Reading Program is back up and running again this year. Part of the way that the library gets funding for this is by proving active interest in it, i.e. kids signing up and doing it!

Signing up is easy: Either go to your branch or to the library website, and get your child a registration number. Then get a reading log at your branch and start to read! At the end of the program, your child turns in the log and gets dollars that can be spent at local stores.

Most of the stores accept two or three dollars. My kids like to go for the gold: Here’s an article I wrote about the owner of Atlantis Fantasyworld and why he allows kids to spend all 20 of their reading dollars in his store!

Your kids can also write book reviews on the library website. It’s pretty cool to see their name in lights on the official website after they write one.

So sign up and support your library. And have fun, too.

Do your children love each other totally and unconditionally? Do they support and love each other through thick and thin?

Go away.

My children fight. My children can fight about anything. My children will fight about anything. Really. The least consequential thing they ever fought about, well, I can’t even remember it. It was that inconsequential.

A few minutes ago, another mom at my son’s school dropped him off after a play practice. As we moms stood in the front hall, my son walked up to my daughter, who was playing with her baby stroller. He tried to wrest the stroller from her hands, fully knowing what was going to happen.

No, “hi, how are ya?” No, “what did you do today?”

Just immediate confrontation and goading. He knew what was going to happen. He strode into our house, and almost before he’d said hello to me, he made it happen.

The other mom and I watched in stunned silence.

Finally, I said, “Isn’t it amazing? He walks in and the first thing he needs to do is provoke her!”

She answered, “It’s just like that with my kids.”

Note: Both of her kids go to my son’s school. This school is noted for its wonderful program of emotional awareness. At school, anytime any child does something to provoke another child, it’s like Nonviolent Communication 101.

“Joey, let’s talk about how taking all Joanie’s pencils made her feel.”

And there’s a class meeting. And everyone has to work out everything.

I know all this, because some days my son comes home exasperated, and when I ask what happened that day, he says, “We had to have another stooooooooooopid class meeting!”

So this is one thing you can’t pin on homeschooling! Once we’ve been homeschooling a while, don’t tell me that my kids fight so much because they need time away from each other. They get that. And when they’re together again, they fight.

It makes me wonder whether anything we consciously do makes any difference. I know that their fighting has deep, deep roots. It has something to do with me and their father, the house they’re growing up in and the air in it, the food we feed them, the books they read, and possibly what color their bed covers are.

I’m not quite to the point of believing that it has anything to do with their birthdates, but if believing that sort of thing comforts you, please go ahead and believe.

But really, given the complexity of this, is there much point in trying? Can we fix all that complexity with family meetings and “I feel” statements?

If you’re someone who thrives on optimistic affirmations, here’s yours: Yes!! What we do can affect our children! We can make a conscious effort to change. We can be better. We will be better. We do not have to fall into the trap of all humanity past. We have free will, and we will exercise it!

OK, now all of you, please go away.

For the rest of us, here’s what I can say. I really hope that my attempts to educate my children in how to get along will bear fruit one of these days. But I can’t promise it. This big house is not big enough for these two big personalities. Sometimes sending them to their rooms does not seem quite enough.

Where is my Cone of Silence?

Where is my Narnia in the wardrobe?

Where is my divorce… that is, divorcing the kids from each other?

(Got my husband worrying there for a second…)

I realized, when she was still quite small and I’d been trying to put an end to this fighting, that sometimes the best remedy is this one: I am upstairs in my office. I can hear their voices rise and fall as they play a new game from the Educational Resource Center. Sometimes it rises to a scream. But if I can stand it long enough, the voices fall again. They’re still playing the game.

No Cone of Silence needed, they’re still brother and sister.

And that is my ultimate piece of wisdom for them: No matter what you do, no matter how hard you fight, you’re stuck with each other. You are brother and sister, and you’ll just have to figure that out. You may think that the gods are laughing at the gameboard they set up, putting the two of you in the same house. But there you have it.

This is your life, kids. Get used to it.

Are you exhausted yet?

I am always exhausted at this time of year. Not only are my two children always at two different schools, both of which I want to commit to totally and both of which I need to neglect in different amounts, but both of my children play instruments, and thus have recitals, and my son’s school has their enormous year-end performance, which involves a lot of hard w0rk from the kids and lots of chauffeur work from us parents, and I sing in a choral group which always performs this time of year (come hear us: Ariose Singers!)…

…and not only that, but the gardens are going full-tilt — the one at home which is shaded by redwoods but for which I always have high hopes, and the one at my parents’ sunny farm, which is planted full of our hopeful little plants that need our care and attention. The weather has [finally!] gotten warm, and I’m ready for lying on the grass and watching for hawks and eagles, bringing the kids to the pool and hanging in the hot tub, and getting up not knowing what we’re going to do today.

No such luck.

Despite having made it through my son’s fifth grade graduation today, I’m not there yet. I still have to get through the next week, though I feel like we’re definitely riding that wave, and will end up successfully lying in the warm sand that awaits us. Why does the end of school have to be so much like birthing a baby? You’ve done all the work and looked at all the progress reports (i.e. ultrasounds) and you’re coasting to a finish, and then the last two weeks come.

Were there ever two longer weeks? When I was pregnant with my daughter, those weeks were made longer by the scheduling of a c-section. The midwife was concerned, sent me to the OB, who said, “Oh, boy, there’s no way I can turn this baby,” and we were off to scheduling a c-section.

I thought, wonderful! I don’t have to go through that again!

All of you who have lovely, uplifting, inspiring stories about your first birth? Shut up. Mine was grindingly awful. It took days. It nearly took my son’s life. It nearly took my sanity. So when the idea of a c-section was mentioned…

Well, my daughter had other plans. When I went in for my pre-op appointment, the OB said, “Hm, well, I do believe you’re in luck! This baby has turned!”

Luck. Two more weeks of being swollen up like Violet Beauregarde. I gritted my teeth, and I Waited.

So why does the end of school feel like this? Perhaps it has its roots in my childhood, when school seemed so passé once the weather came in. We lived in the blustery North, and we didn’t get good weather often. If we were lucky, we got a good month in the transition between Spring and Summer and we got a glorious month before the frost hit in the fall. Otherwise, it was nasty cold, slushy ugly, or stinky hot.

But instead of being out in the glory of those few days of wonder before the cicadas started their long, slow, mournful tune of summer heat, we sat in school. We all knew how it was going to work out: We knew who were the smart kids getting the good grades. We knew who won at football. We knew what the science teacher had wanted to teach us that year and how many times Billy would get sent to the office. We were kept busy with making Mother’s Day gifts and then Father’s Day gifts and thank you cards for all those great things we did. But we knew it was just busy work.

And so we wait. Oh, yes, I do love these ceremonies. I was moved to tears twice during the one today, and I’m sure the one at my daughter’s school will do something similar. But really, can’t we just get on with the other part? The part where we get up in the morning not knowing what to do? The part where the beach beckons and the woods beckon and we eat ice cream at Marianne’s and I let the kids get really, really bored and then they put aside their differences and make stop motion animation for a whole day while their cousin is visiting?

We’ll get there, but first, we have to endure all this solemnizing. All this making things all tied up in pretty packages.

Which we then neglect on the porch. Which get tattered by the elements, forgotten in the bushes. Which then sprout… who knows what? The magic of summer is that we don’t know. It’s not something we have to plan. It’s just something we have to wait for.

Like that baby, taking her own, sweet time… that is summer.