Unhurried

Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled. –Harry R. Lewis

A little over two years ago when I had just gone back to work—back to work as in a salaried, scheduled, signed-on-the-dotted-line position in a school—I arrived home to find my favorite parenting magazine in the mailbox.  Anticipating a cup of coffee and some gentle mental stimulation, I carried the issue of Wondertime into our apartment and dropped it on the kitchen table.  One of the titles on the cover caught my eye and my heart sank:

The Unhurried Child

I am not exaggerating when I say that it took more than a year for me to open the pages of the magazine and confront that article.  I carried the issue back and forth to the gym for a few months but never took it out of the bag.  With the best intentions, I tossed it into my carry-on bag every time I flew, into my backpack for every weekend away, into my tote every time I headed to a coffee shop for an hour or two of reading time.  I moved it around the apartment, from the pile of reading material on the coffee table to the decorative piles and baskets of magazines and books on various other pieces of furniture. 

I wanted to read that article, I really did. I was certain that the ideas contained within would fit with my hopes and goals for our family.  But when it came to actually opening the pages and moving my eyes over the words, of absorbing the ideas and challenges found in The Unhurried Child, I was a complete coward. 

I was like an addict, unwilling and incapable of looking myself in the mirror.  Somehow I knew that opening up to those pages would put me face-to-face with the questions that would have been eating at my heart if I had not been so adept at forcing them back down below the surface. 

Was I living a hurried life and raising a hurried child? 

Probably.  When I finally read the article, Catherine Newman’s description of our practice of hurrying children through the day, through even their leisure time, hit close to home.  While I have never felt like we were overly scheduled, having more than two commitments a day when you have young children sets anyone up for those moments of hurrying and nagging, of interrupting the child’s play and process, of valuing the clock and its numbers over almost all else.

I knew that this reading would force me to evaluate my choices.  And it did.  It was a more gentle push than I expected (Thank you for that, Catherine). This reading and a series of events and longings and discussions and other readings have lead me to the place I am in this year, a place of working with intention at limiting our obligations and providing more time for WJ and for our family that is free from the pressing need to move on to the next thing.

But it is not easy and I am often weak.  I am sitting here looking at a pile of registration forms for extracurricular activities for the winter sessions and I am overwhelmed. It seems very easy to make the wrong decisions.  I know that I do not want to break our commitment to going slow but the possibility of missing out on something sits like a miniature me in a red devil unitard on my left shoulder.  And I am fretting.

What would WJ really enjoy doing with the time we have?  How much is too much for a five-year-old?  How much is too much for our family?  Which of these activities are ones that will feed a passion growing in our child?  Which will meet the needs he has, strengthen those places where he needs to grow?

Piano, drama, soccer, karate, dance, swimming…  I’ll let you know what we decide.  I am hoping with a great hope that our choices will be made with slow and unhurried in mind.

How do you decide?  What guidelines do you keep when choosing activities for yourselves and your children?

Shortbread

There is time today for baking.  My mother’s shortbread recipe, which is not really hers but Mrs. Brennan’s.  Shortbread has always meant Christmas in my childhood home.  As we light the second candle of Advent this week, it is a good time for making preparations, for making shortbread.

WJ and I made a batch of shortbread a few months ago, even though it was not Christmas or Advent, because I had left a stick of butter on the counter for over a week and it was beginning to haunt me.  My mother always says that shortbread is better if the butter is a little rancid, which makes most of my contemporaries cringe.  When that butter on the counter caught my eye, however, I knew its fate was a small batch of Scottish cookies.

WJ climbed onto a stool next to me as I cut cookies that day. “How did you learn to make shortbread?” he asked, stretching the word “learn” magically into two syllables for emphasis.  “I learned to from my mother,” I replied.

“And did she learn how to make shortbread from her mother?” he asked.

I explained to him that this was a complicated question.  My grandmother did make shortbread but really Mrs. Brennan had taught both my mother and my grandmother.  Mrs. Brennan, I told WJ, was a wonderful friend.  She and her big Scottish family lived in the basement of the house my grandmother rented when my mother was young.  It is a brilliant story of women supporting each other, of strangers becoming family, of a community finding room for those just arrived.

As the beater turns the butter and sugar today into fluffy goodness and as I slice the sheet of delicate dough into the most perfect diamonds I can manage, I am thinking about this season of waiting, of watching my mother make shortbread, of the work of preparing both heart and home.

I am thinking about the stories we tell in this time, the stories I hope WJ will feel a part of and find a place in. 

Each night in Advent before he lights the candles at our table, WJ prays the last sentence of our mediation for the season.  Teach us to live as children of God.  At quiet time he gathers the nativity set together and carries it off into his room to tell the story of Mary and Joseph and a baby quietly to himself again and again.

 Those months ago, after pulling lightly browned cookies from the oven and sharing them together, WJ said to me, “Maybe someday I will have a child and when I make shortbread my child will ask me, How did you learn to make shortbread?  And I will tell him, I learned it from my mother and she learned it from her mother, and she learned from a woman from Scotland who lived in their basement.

I hope so. I hope so. May all of these stories be yours.

*This post is part of SteadyMom's 30 Minute Blog Challenge (26 minutes!) and is also linked to Chatting at the Sky's Tuesday Unwrapped.

Mummy and his Mommy

Just as there is a trend toward high tech today, there is another trend toward high touch – homemade and wholesome.

–Meryl Gardner

I recognize that my desire to make WJ’s Halloween costumes is a little silly.  But my mom made ours. 

I remember watching the other kids come to school in store-bought costumes, the plastic suits reminiscent of doctor’s office dressing gowns and the shiny plastic masks with scratchy elastic, eyeholes the size of peas, and pinholes for air at the nostrils and mouth.  I remember watching them walk through the piles of leaves in little bunches of superheroes and watching them climb onto the bus like a living listing of the Saturday morning cartoons.  I remember watching them and being so jealous. 

From my grown-up mommy vantage point, however, I am finding that a homemade Halloween costume is so much more fun and possibly holds a measure of nourishment I did not fully comprehend as a child.  I like this idea of “high touch.”  It must be genetic.

Last Friday night, our family set about the task of creating WJ’s requested mummy suit.  We needed the costume for a party on Saturday morning so it was not the relaxed, taking things slow kind of moment I would have preferred.  But we did have fun. 

Everyone helped.  WJ helped me rip a white sheet into long strips.  Dave was on duty with the pulling off of loose strings.

And I was armed with my hot glue gun.  I can knit but am not exactly a whiz with a needle and thread.  In hindsight, I am not sure exactly why I felt it was prudent to wrap and hot-glue the white cloth to WJ’s costume while he was actually wearing it, but at the time it seemed very important and I only burned him a few times. 

Was WJ pleased with his costume?  Yes, he did not seem to mind that it was “high touch” instead of high tech.  For now anyway.  Ask me again this time next year.

Do you have any "high touch" traditions in your family?

Family game night

I have a lot of goals for this year of slowing down but at the heart of it all, I am finding, is a desire to enjoy my family.  Sometimes it feels impossible to squeeze in family time, but it doesn’t take much, just a few moments spent together having fun, to boost my energy and attitude. I think we all would agree as well that there is little more important than this in the life of a young child.

We have discovered in recent weeks that a quick card game or board game played right after dinner, before bath and bed for WJ, is an easy way to have a family moment of slowness.  It is especially nice from my point of view on a Sunday evening to stretch out the togetherness of our meal and put off for a few more minutes the shuffle of getting ready for the new week.

Our current favorite is UNO. UNO is a perfect preschooler game, easy to adapt it for various levels of ability.  WJ is five but we have been playing UNO together for at least a year.  In the beginning, we removed all of the “special action” cards like Draw Two, Skip, and Reverse.  He was then able to focus only on matching numbers and colors. 

Holding and managing the cards in his hand is still difficult for WJ, so we taught him how to spread the cards out on the table.  As his opponents, Dave and I can see what he has in his hand but that is fine for now.  We are not exactly trying to grind him into dust when we play, not just yet.

As WJ gets older, he is beginning to develop an understanding of strategy, so we have started to introduce those special action cards back into the game.  He loves to be able to change the color for his advantage or make one of us Draw Four.  We don’t enforce the “say UNO or draw 400 new cards” rule yet.  That will come next.

Last week, WJ slipped away while helping to clear the dinner table and Captain Hook returned in his place to join us for the evening’s match.  As you can see, it is difficult to pick up cards with your hook. Of course, this suction cup clip is not actually a prirate's hook.  It is actually, according to WJ, a toy breastpump left here by one of his Two Best Friends. But that is a story for another day.

I challenge you to fit something playful into your weekend.  Let me know how it goes.

The gondola

“One of the important keys in understanding the remarkable smoothness of a Five-year-old is that he has an almost uncanny ability to judge what he can and cannot do… With tremendous accuracy he judges what things are and what are not within his ability, and he tries only what he is sure of.”

-Louise Bates Ames, Your Five-Year-Old

I have been reading my book about 5 year-olds and was struck by this statement.  What a lovely quality, to know yourself and live in this truth.

Normally, I would say that the years of my life have brought me to a place where others might describe me with these same words.  I know myself and live comfortably within my limitations.  As I was reading this statement and thinking about WJ, I found a deep pleasure in knowing that this time in his childhood would be characterized by such peace.  I was thinking about how I would need to be certain to trust him in these coming months as he declared his limitations.  I had noticed already a new bravery in some instances and also his matter-of-fact rationale for passing over an opportunity.

But then we saw the gondolas and I forgot to trust him, and even worse, I forgot to trust myself.

We had set out for one last summer getaway out at a discounted off-season ski resort.  Everything was perfect.  As we batted around ideas for our final morning, sipping hot coffee out in the Adirondack chairs and enjoying the cool morning and the view of the mountain, Dave noticed that the gondola lift was running.  It was carrying mountain bikers up the hill to their treacherous trails.  Dave had read that one could purchase a ticket to ride on the gondola lift.  For fun. 

I know myself.  I know that there is no way such a ride would be fun. Nevertheless, we wandered over to the bottom of the hill to investigate.  I think maybe I thought that we would find it was only for the bikers.  Or maybe that there would be an exorbitant fee that would offend the frugal sensibilities of my Dutch husband.

But I think mostly I was just trying very hard to honor my husband, to respect his ideas for our plans, to participate in one of the things that he finds enjoyable.  There are wonderful benefits reaped from our opposites-attract kind of relationship.  But sometimes it just gets us in trouble.

Looking up the mountain at the gondola cars waggling up and down on the limp wires, I mumbled that I didn’t think I could do that.  And WJ echoed.  No.  Not fun.  Not for us.  But Dave was talking to the operator, who had lifted his eyes begrudgingly from a book, and had taken out his wallet.  Four dollars for all three of us.  What a bargain. Dave was stepping on.

WJ and I followed aboard.  The doors closed.  There were no seats and no window panes.  The floor was a grill and the green whizzed by underneath.  I held on with both hands and Dave lifted WJ up so that he could have a better view.  Dave asked me something, something like, “Isn’t this fun?”

I began to chuckle but it turned immediately into the hysterical laughing of an up-too-late junior high sleepover.  I couldn’t stop; I gasped for breath; tears streamed down my cheeks.  The laughing lasted only a moment, though.  It quickly changed to outright sobbing.  I called out the name of the Lord, and not in vain, as the gondola car swayed. 

WJ was worried too.  I tried to comfort him.  “We are almost at the top!” I exclaimed with false composure, “When we get to the top we will be halfway finished!” 

“But going down is more scary!” he replied.

As if he had to tell me.

When WJ began to sob too, I pulled myself together.  “Do you think there is a way to walk down?” I asked Dave hopefully.  Maybe, was his reply.  As the gondola slowed into the station at the top of the mountain, Dave called out to the teenagers supervising to learn that we could probably walk down.  Probably was enough.  We stepped off of the ride.

It took forty-five minutes to climb down from the top of the mountain to the valley resort.  It was a steep, rocky fire road, littered and overgrown.  Have I mentioned yet that WJ was wearing Crocs?  It felt like we were searching unprepared through the wilderness for help after abandoning a broken car.  Our hike felt somehow desperate. 

But my feet were on the ground and I became myself again.

Slowly WJ became himself again too.  He spotted a frog and chased it.  Then a moth and a very fuzzy caterpillar.  In one of the happier moments of the walk, he took my hand and said, “I wish I could be like Daddy.  I wish I could like the gondola ride.”

I wish that too. 

Sometimes a five-year-old knows himself and his abilities but, for the love of the one he admires, he pretends as best he can to be someone braver.  It can happen to you when you are thirty-six as well.  Sometimes you can pretend hard enough.  But sometimes you have to walk back down the mountain.