Long Silences are normal and indicative and symptomatic

It remains true and bears retelling that not-writing is destructive to my mental health, and also what I tend to do when my mental health is tenuous.

But the difficulty of self-expression has been amplified by the myriad of ways I've been humbled and forced to re-learn my lenses over the last year.  Oliver/Sir O was diagnosed with Autism, anxiety, ADHD, a written expression learning disability, an executive functioning deficit, and classified as 2E last fall.  It was not an unexpected diagnosis, but it knocked the wind out of me and forced me into wildly unfamiliar territory in aggressive and unexpected ways.  I've been having to reimagine everything I've known about how minds work to make room for the neurodivergent ways my children interact with the world.  I've had to become aware of and name the herculean effort I put in daily to co-regulate with each of my children and their lagging skills with self-regulation.  It's been massive.

Then, just as I was beginning to be able to tell which direction wa
s up, the pandemic and all of it's attendant drama, discord, and carpet yanking happened.  I have had so many aspects of my view of and relationship with my own reality shaken and stolen away that the sheer volume of paradigm reconfiguring I've had to do is staggering.  My brain cannot keep up, and I keep emotionally forgetting what I cognitively already know and have processed.  On a much less traumatic scale it's like that moment when you wake up in the morning and have to re-remember that someone has died, only for scores of less earth-shattering adjustments.  I never quite have all of my feet under me.

I've been struggling to sleep.  My brain starts racing around 10 pm, and usually my heart starts to race too.  Lately it's been vivid sensory memories from my time in London in 2002.  Mostly really good memories, but they feel so immediate, like I'm actively living them, and the melancholy of how far gone and away they are (and how impossible they'd be to recreate in a pandemic) makes them really acutely emotional, melancholy, even tragic. I weep from midnight on until I finally collapse.

It's hard for me (and everyone else) to navigate next steps forward.  Goal setting and relationship maintaining and healthy recreating are so impossible to navigate in a world of infinite high-stakes unknowns.  Not knowing what the next school year will look like, not knowing what the economy might even remotely look like, not knowing whose careers will be affected in what ways, not knowing what social activities will be safely available or when...... nobody can plan their life the way humans need in order to stay sane.  And all this on top of the most dramatic civil unrest of my lifetime, when the stakes of so many things seem insanely high, dramatic, unstable, and tragic.

I remember, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when I was really struggling, finding helpful metaphors in the language of deep festering wounds being opened up to heal properly.  Lots of things (power imbalances) that we (the privileged) pretended were overcome in the 80s have been forced into the bright light to be reckoned with and hopefully dealt with more thoroughly and honestly this time.  I don't know that we will altogether succeed this time either, but hopefully progress will be made. Hopefully the arc of history will lean toward justice and will treat us with some mercy.

I haven't had much luck finding my place or my voice in the current BLM moment.  Most white influencers I follow are tripping over themselves trying to find appropriate and sensitive content to post, mostly finding and sharing black influencer accounts and resharing their content.  I haven't got a business or professional identity to keep afloat right now, so it feels more safe and authentic to just literally mute myself, rather than to post about how I'm muting myself and then still posting others' content.  But it also feels odd/off to be silent in a moment when "silence is complicit" is au courant.  But I'm listening and watching and doing my best to start conversations with kids for whom all conversations are hard to have.  I'm sitting in deep deep discomfort with every facet of every previous self. I hope it is constructive, it's certainly painful.

Sir O outside his comfort zone

Sir O finished up the Let's Play Music 3-year program a week ago and performed in a little recital.
One of many, many epic mom fails I've managed recently shows up in the beginning of this video, as I completely spaced preparing an introduction for him to memorize for this song he composed.   So his already uncomfortable moment in front of a crowd is made infinitely more uncomfortable by not being prepared with anything to say.  I think he's forgiven me, but I haven't forgiven myself yet.



Anyway, despite his perennial reticence, I think this experience has actually given him a lot of confidence, not to mention a stellar music theory base. I'm super impressed with it, and the rest of my boys will be starting in the Fall with their first year.  So really, I must be impressed to be willing to undergo getting 3 kids to practice on a regular basis.  Torture.

wings of lightning

(he's been perfecting his cartwheel)

We have come to the shockingly obvious conclusion that Sir O is an introvert.
Which is, of course, an oversimplification.  Because introversion and extroversion are not clean binaries.  But the Captain can be called an extrovert pretty safely, and Sir O is definitely on the other end of a spectrum or two.
As a rule, this kid thrives on quiet alone time.  And sleep, and routine.
He requires repetitive prior notice to handle change well.
And even when I try to anticipate all the parts of bumping up against real life that might make him moody, sometimes I still get blindsided.


He's been begging to get his own room, in hopes of getting more sleep on school nights, and if and when we can, we will probably comply.  School mornings are a little bit brutal around here.  I generally tiptoe into the boys' room, pull Sir O's clothes for the day out into the hallway, and then start trying to gently wake him up.  I'll rub his back until he's stirring, and then I either start to dress him in his bed, or if I want his brothers to stay asleep, I'll carry him out in the hall and lay him on the floor to dress him.

Yes, he's almost 8, and his mother dresses him on school days.  Because he's either floppy and fighting to not be awake, or he wakes up grumpy and fights me tooth and claw.  It's the only way to get him out the door on time.  I'm realizing I won't be strong enough to carry and wrangle him much longer.  He's been growth-spurting like crazy and he seems so much a man-child that I get regular pits in my stomach over it.  His hands are nearly as big as mine, and our socks are the same size. He's only 1 foot and 1 inch shorter than me, and he is growing and I am not.

This morning was a floppy morning.  There was not a great deal of resistance as I carried his long and lithe body out into the hallway.  His legs are getting to be forever long, and his top central incisors are finally coming in - (they fell out in October, didn't they?) and he seems to be right in between two awkward stages, in a short lived burst of pleasant proportions.  This enormous body, sprouting length like a butterfly stretching out of its chrysalis, bearing only faint traces of the supple babyness that used to be so familiar.  I don't have to bend my mind very far to feel for that moment in the future when this boy will outgrow me.  His arms will stretch farther than mine, I'll have to look up to demand evasive eye-contact.  They physical reality of having your body's creation outgrow you is uncanny.

Immediately upon consigning himself to not-going-back-to-bed, Sir O always bounds into his sister's room.  Usually she's awake, or stirring, and Sir O has claimed a stewardship over being Bunny's first-thing every morning.  He's fiercely invested in her, and becomes half of a parent sometimes.  Every single school day there's indignation over being forced to eat breakfast instead of play with her.  It's maddening and perfect all at the same time.

By the time the neighbor kids come to pick him up and walk to school with him, we've usually managed everything but brushing teeth, so they wait, in an unfortunately normative comfort, while he brushes and I finish preening him.  Then he and his hurricane head out the door, and I think about him and his day too little before he's back again in the afternoon.  There are just so many squeaky wheels.

When Sir O gets home from having spent 7 hours surrounded by so many bodies, he is again unpredictable and often moody.  I've learned better than to take him personally, and usually if I can provide an after school snack, I manage to win at a game of dodgeball with Sir O's outbursts.  School lunch is too short and too social to allow him to get much eating done, so his growing body is always ravished.

Then, when I can manage it, I try to give him some time to be alone.  When I do it right, he'll jump into an elaborate color-by-numbers or a library book, or ride his bike.  When I'm sloppy he sneaks into my craft room and makes expensive messes. After some quiet time he's a totally different person, and we're better able to negotiate him.



Staring down Spring Break, and Summer Vacation after that, I'm looking forward to letting him sleep in a bit and skipping our morning wrestling matches, and I'm glad he'll have enough sleep and quiet self-directed time to be a much less Mr. Hyde version of himself, but I also worry about the destruction and messes.  And everything's compounded when I have homework sitting on the front burner of my brain. Grad school mom brings both pros and cons for the family as a whole - being constantly distracted by unfinished homework is a solid con.

And this is what it looks like, to me, as two imperfect people navigate life in the same space, one feeling responsible for the other.  Motherhood is so perpetually foreign. It's one of the most universal experiences on earth, but nobody has yet managed to avoid drowning in it. There's no way to teach via language the experiences that require a body and all its separate minds in all its connected senses.  Motherhood is the wheel that is reinvented every single time.  Unanticipatable aches in unknown parts of one's own soul, and bumping up against unfamiliar borders of one's own capacities.  No one could ever think about it very hard and feel confident they had done anything "right."

stretch marks

Why yes, I did just accidentally go a month without blogging one word.
It's lunacy - my life.
But it's nice to be able to say I haven't blogged for a month because I've been too busy doing things.  In the past when I've gone a month or two with mostly radio silence it's been because I've been essentially depressed and overcome with unhealthy apathy.
So sure, the effect of my absence is the same either way, but I prefer a more buoyant excuse.



The month of November ... the blur... I have no temporal details for you just now.

But things floating to the top of my brain include:

We are becoming genuinely concerned about Sir O's intense anti-social habits.  It is becoming apparent that the kid sets himself up to get picked on; he makes enemies easily.  He's intensely defensive and likes to lord over people when he can get away with it.  He also goes to ridiculous legths to avoid dealing with new people or new experiences.  Altogether not a super-loveable pile of characteristics.  Lucky for him we love him anyway, but I can't take away the social awkwardness he faces.

Conversely, my 3 other kids make friends wherever they go.  The Captain, despite his physical awkwardness, is often the center of socialness because he's so dang delightful.  And Bunny flirts with most strangers (though only from the safety of her parent's arms.)

Bunny also plays with her tongue all day long.  And on her it's darling.  But her brothers have started copying her, and a 3,5,or 7 year old blowing excessive raspberries at you is not cute.  It's just rude.

Mr Renn has been picking up a lot of slack for me this holiday season.  He's taken ownership of all of our holiday baking, gingerbread building, neighborhood gifts, and contributions to family parties.  In other words, he is a lifesaver.

I've realized that despite my proclivity for it, I have a rather pathetic collection of holiday decorations (for every/any holiday).  I may never arrive at that place where I feel I can give myself permission to spend time or money toward that end.  Over the years thousands of items have been put in carts, only to be removed before purchase.

Mr Renn claims we can start looking into buying a house of our own in earnest come February.  You cannot grasp the weight of this promise - but I'm posting it here to hold him accountable.  10 years of "I don't want to bother with that until it's our own house/I don't want to have to move that" have taken a toll.

Sir O has developed an intensely irritating habit of discarding and losing expensive articles of clothing.  He never loses the cheap stuff, only the newer and most expensive things.  If I had a dollar for every time that kid has lost or destroyed an article of clothing the first time he wore it - I'd have at least $50.

My first grad school finals are December 17th, and I am a mess until then.

I am not getting nearly enough sleep to function properly.  Hence my sluggish responses and reflexes.  And yes - this blatantly affects my performance in class. Vicious cycle.

Our gentleman began potty training and then quickly lost interest.  Time for plan D.

Bunny is standing often, and her brothers are the best cheering section a girl could ask for.  But when they cheer too loudly she realizes she's standing and quickly gets herself back down.  She's only taken 1 step, and she's still mad at me for tricking her into that one.

She's also terribly fond of playing peekaboo, and while her favorite is to hide in the curtains, she'll also hide her eyes with the backs of her hands, and make a squished up face that is beyond charming.

She still loves her dad more than anything or anyone in all the world.

I bought Sir O some sketchbooks, and I love what he comes up with.  Today in church we got 5 pages of clone trooper helmets.  We've also gotten a lot of dinosaurs, volcanoes, trucks, tall buildings, and mountainsides (with either a U or a Y emblazoned on them).

Our Gentleman's tongue thrust shows no sign of letting up.  I watch him talk and all I see is his tongue hanging out.  Speech therapy forever more, because that's how we love to spend all that extra time of ours....

Our Christmas cards are running late this year.  Hopefully they will arrive this week and we can create a super-sonic assembly line to get them back out in the mail without eating up too much study time.

Because yes, finals at Christmas time is utterly brutal for moms who are students.  I cannot speak for moms who are teachers or professors, but in a great many households Christmas is a production put on by mom behind the scenes.  When mom's time, focus, and energy is at a crazy premium, things get hairy.  Let's just say we're going to be flexible with celebrating St. Nicholas day this year.  Like - almost a week late flexible.  Same goes for St. Lucia.  I am giving myself a year off, and hopefully next year Bunny will be old enough to be the center of that celebration.

I only bought 2 new Christmas albums this year.  So far that's a record low.  But when you have over 1200 Christmas songs on your playlist, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify new additions.  Still really loving Joshua James, Sleeping At Last, Sufjan Stevens and Bebo Norman.

So, there's some catchup of the random-crap variety.  I hope I don't prove this spotty for the entirety of grad school, I still want to document life outside of film responses.  But you know, I'm dropping balls all over this place.  I'll try not to leave this one lolling on the floor for too long at a time.

P.S. the tooth is gone.

I screw a lot of things up as a parent, but at least I got those photos while the getting was good.

In passing

Sir O came bounding home from school today, more amicable than usual.  That window of time when he transitions back to being at home after school is tricky.  More often than not he is like a 4 foot hurricane. But today he was rather smiley.



And I realized how fleeting a thing this wonky smile of his is.  I felt compelled to make a record of it. That second front tooth is ready to bust out of there, and he'll be singing "All I want for Christmas is my..."



Charming, no?  His 1st grade teachers tell me he's the most self-aware student they've ever had.  I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that means, but I suspect it's half the result of his innate personality, and half the result of having me for his mother.

First Day, First Grade, First Freak Out

So friends, today was Sir O's first day of first grade.



I'm getting to be a professional at being Sir O's mother, so I was anticipating a bit of drama.   But somehow I always screw this up and I never (ever) anticipate the right flavor of drama.  Sir O keeps throwing combinations at me that I'd never have seen coming.  Like some milkshake flavor I would never have dreamed up.  I think this morning was something like a mint marshmallow pineapple peanut butter when I was only expecting something the marshmallow and the peanut butter parts.

Sir O is always painfully anxious about new and unfamiliar experiences.  He's a kid that likes to wallow well inside of his comfort zone.  I was frustrated that the meet-your teacher open house was only the day before school started, and I probably ought to have inquired about a chance to take him in sooner (and at a time that the place wouldn't be swarming with other kids and their younger siblings), but somehow my plate was always full enough that I never did get that done.  We attended the open house yesterday and he seemed at least halfway positive about it, if you ignore the part where he refused to set foot in his first classroom without being carried.



His teachers (he has two, half day English, half day Spanish) seem enormously sweet, he has an awesome class pet/turtle named Mr. Hobbes.  He already knows about half of the kids in his class, he just hasn't seen them since May.  I helped him last night to build the most fun and healthy lunch to pack that I could muster.  Those are dinosaur sandwiches with Nori scales down their backs, come on, give me points.



I failed, however, to wake up before the crack of dawn this morning.  I foolishly thought I could manage to get everyone presentable and get Sir O to school early enough to get settled without waking myself up before 5am.  Sir O decided to have a panic attack about what pants/shorts to wear.  The other boys refused to get dressed.  Bunny took longer than usual to nurse.  Nobody was willing to eat breakfast.  And then the neighbors across the street started walking to school, without parents.  And Sir O immediately decided he needed to join them.  Except I hadn't taken his picture yet and was planning to take him to school and help him find his classroom on the first day.  He was not happy with me.  He fought me with all his recalcitrance.  So I finally said "fine," and he started to go.  But his friends were out of sight, and at some point he remembered how anxious he is.  So he turned around and headed back home.  Luckily I had already thrown all the kids in the car and was planning to at least follow him and make sure he entered the school appropriately.  I threw him and his scooter in and snagged one of the only parking spots left in front of the school.  Then the panic set in at full-strength and he again refused to actually enter his classroom.  I took his backpack and scooter to the coatroom, essentially carried him to his desk, and tried really hard to find encouraging things to say.  He was having none of it.



So I left him.  All brutally introverted and hating life.  When he gets like that my presence usually aggravates things.  I know his teacher will not have time to coax him out of his moodiness, there are just too many other kids in his class.  I wrote a note on his information sheet saying he'd probably take at least 2 weeks to warm up to school again.  I'm just a bit worried that by the time he warms up to 1st grade his teachers will have already pegged him as an ornery unpleasant kid and not have eyes to see the sweetness and vulnerability underneath.  They are, after all, very outnumbered human beings with limited amount of emotional energy to spend on their classrooms of diverse personalities.





So I'm bracing myself today, and attempting to batten down the hatches for the hurricane that will hit when Sir O gets home from school.  I have no idea what flavor of hurricane to expect, but I can pretty accurately predict it will consume everything in its path.   I will do my best to be a soft place to land, but I anticipate today will go down in the annals as a rough day.

Seven seems so long

In the middle of last week Sir O had a birthday.  His birthdays will always seem like a big pit-of-stomach big deal to me.  As much as they measure his little man life, they also measure the years since the mother in me was born.  It's the sort of an event, that rebirth, that is difficult to reflect upon without feeling incredulous and running a zeitgeist gamut of emotions.  Motherhood is a kiln, for sure.

But, back to Sir O.

Despite this being his birth-month and him feeling entitled to lots of attention from everyone everywhere, he is going through a rather awkward phase.  The recalcitrant side of his personality has been winning ground lately, and it all tallies up to make him rather anti-social.  He tends not to be the child of mine that people look forward to seeing.  He is terribly slow to warm up to people and things and ideas, and when he decides that he likes something (or someone) he clings to it with a nearly obscene zeal.  He is loyal and stubborn and very often less than pleasant.  He is endlessly exhausting for his mother.

There is still a mountain of lovable traits in him, he just seems to be passing through a low point on the pendulum.  It has been a rough summer with relatively little structure imposed by anyone besides me.  And the troubles that arise when I'm the only one imposing structure are precisely the reason that he's not a candidate for homeschooling right now.  So summer has often felt like one long standoff between he and I.  I don't recommend it to anyone.


He's crazy in love with baby Bunny.  (He also thinks he's old enough to get her out of her bed and carry her around the house, which has led to her rolling off a sofa or two).  He's bossy but willing to engage with his brothers and they tolerate him well, so while there is sibling contention in my home, it's not a constant theme.  The only thing that is constant is Sir O's immediate negative response to pretty much anything that comes out of my mouth.  The kid does NOT like to be told what to do (or prompted, or persuaded, or bribed).  If I knew where to turn for one I'd say we need an intervention for some oppositional defiance.  It's not a violent problem, but it sure is an energy suck around here this summer.

But he's pretty brilliant at problem solving with Legos, he has figure out the code to unlock my iphone a number of times this summer.  He won't read if I suggest it, but I do sometimes find him holed away with a book.  He is constantly trying to snack.  He will seriously come up to me and tell me he is hungry 2 minutes after a meal ends while I'm still cleaning up the kitchen.  He seems morally opposed to meals but would snack until the cows come home if I were to stock the house with snack food (I won't, for just that reason).  He predictably leaves freezer doors ajar and never EVER remembers where he put his shoes.  He has told me he is bored approximately 3 millions times this week, and then proceeded to reject every suggestion under the sun for passing the time.



So, first grade is barrelling down the track and I can tell he's both nervous and excited.  He'll do so much better with the structure and variety of a school day, and I think he's looking forward to seeing some of his old classmates.  But he's also anxious up to his eyeballs about unpredictable things.  He gets hung up on the quirkiest issues.  He insists on dressing himself and looks borderline homeless most of the time.  He refuses to wear most of the clothes I buy him and instead is still wearing a bunch of holey 5T stuff.  I don't know where he'd have learned it, but toward me (and only me, I'm pretty sure) he's an emotional bully.

I love him to the ends of the earth, but there's a lot of mystery inside this little crazy man I made.  He often refuses to speak English, and will only grunt and point until someone guesses his hangup.  As someone who's always been highly verbal and cooperative, he mystifies me to no end.





He spends so much time and energy being anxious, afraid, angry or reluctant.  It makes me tired and a little bit sad.  I had always envisioned having relatively pleasant children.  Other people were going to fawn over them and life was going to be peachy.  (And truly, it works out pretty well with the other 3).  I think a fair amount of parenting is learning to love the child you have, and not spend energy trying to turn your child into someone they are not in order to fulfill your own visions.

Sir O is quirky and often funny.  He can be curious and smart.  He's loyal.  He has the ability to anticipate needs in his siblings.  He loves responsibility (as long as I'm not the one conferring it), and he dances like you'd expect a totally crazy person to.

7 trips around the sun.  I'm still figuring out who he is.  And since I'm still figuring out who I am as well, this could take a while.

 

Sir O's latest, last camera dump

The camera we bought Sir O years ago is on its way out.  It no longer accepts a memory card and the internal memory will only hold about 50 photos.  It takes Sir O about 6 seconds to take 50 photos.  The solution? I don't know, we shall see.

In the meantime here's some photos he took during June.  I love getting a glimpse at his perspective.  Things like this help when one's children are mysteries to one's self.

Summertime Blues

Have I mentioned how this Summer is eating me alive?  If I ever in all my childhood told my mother I was bored, I repent most fervently now.  (Though I don't think I did that much, I was a fairly self-contained low-key child.) God, in all of His good-humor, thought I needed to learn about boredom.  So He sent me Sir O, the bellicose.

Sheesh.  A little overkill, wasn't that?



But despite the admitted inevitable futility of our attempts, we keep coming up with things to do.  I am the queen of arts of crafts - all of which are rejected after one or two rounds.  We fit in outings when we're feeling brave or can borrow an extra pair of supervisory hands.

I find I am so much more than outnumbered these days.  I'm like an ant in a tsunami half of the time.  And the other half I am playing catch-up, trying to remind everyone inside the house that everyone outside of the house is holding me accountable for their shenanigans, even and especially when I have no control over them.

This is Sir O at my little sister's final/Senior Ballet recital.  I've been trying to take him on dates to  get him used to the idea of behaving himself in public.  He seems to mistake the purpose of these outings to be an exercise in stressing his mother out.  I'm going to be stubborn and keep trying.

Oh, the messes at my house.  My kids are gross, I'm just going to say it.  I am the only thing standing between them and a major cockroach infestation.  Luckily, from what I can tell most kids are gross, and would happily live in total squalor.  There are a great many moms run as ragged as me.

Ah Bunny, the squishiness.  Just stay this way forever and ever, okay?

The Captain has decided I need more learning curve than just the anxiety and belligerence of Sir O.  His apraxia has been pushing lots of buttons lately.  The list just keeps growing of seemingly small things that are going to be "issues", possibly forever more.  Piled all together they begin to look formidable.  I need to sit down and process that in a post soonish.

as for my passive aggressive posting habits

I have a very good reason for disappearing lately.  I have been uncomfortably busy trying to pull off large and intimidating things.  If things go well, which they very well might, I'll be able to let you in on it soon.

But while I've been even more on my toes than usual, life has kept on. And regretfully life has not included pulling out the "real" camera.  Every one of these is an instagram.  Sigh, and soldier on.

Bunny continues to catch my heart in my chest several times every day.  Almost 5 months old and I'm still pinching myself every single day that I have a daughter and that she is a delight.









The boys, collectively, have their own brand of delight.  It's a bit harder for me to stay on board with in a moment-to-moment way, but they still regularly make me happy with their particular quirks.







And, in an effort to make his mother feel old, Sir O has been losing teeth about as rampantly as I've been losing my post-partum hair.



As a sort of parenting bonus - Sir O has a mortal fear of the tooth fairy.  So she doesn't visit at our house.  We just ceremoniously pack teeth up in a pouch I bought on etsy, and call it good.

In other news - my settee made the rounds and came back to me - not as I'd envisioned (or instructed), but still a nice little addition to the front room. There is apparently a quota of irony I must meet regarding my expectations every month or so.  This catches me up.



My baby sister brought the world to tears with her thoughtful portrayal of Mary, as the lead in A Family Portrait, a suppositional story about the family of Christ.  I am so proud of this girl.

And, my little brother got married this past weekend.  I shopped the cooler and pulled together a bouquet for them the day before.  Koch roses, spray roses, waxflower, and stock, with salal and some myrtle. After a really brutal year, we are all rooting for him to have some happy days ahead.





That accounts for some of what we've been up to.  Just add cleaning the bathroom, preparing meals nobody wants to eat, doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen floor an infinite number of times (each) and you've got a pretty good picture of my present tense.